Tim Washburn: Powerless

Daniel turns away, but stops when Sam says, “Did you call everyone?”

“I’m in the process.”

“Make sure they understand the urgency.”

“Yes, sir.” Daniel hesitates. “Dr. Blake, how long do you think before it hits here?”

Sam rakes his hand through his thinning hair. “Maybe twenty hours, if we’re lucky. But it’ll be a crapshoot without that satellite.”

Rural Oklahoma

Zeke jackknifes up in bed, gasping for breath as the horrifying images slowly fade from his mind. He leans up on his elbow to check the time. The glowing red numerals indicate it’s either very late or very early. The air from the ceiling fan produces a rash of goose bumps across his sweat-drenched skin.

Zeke collapses back on the mattress and stares at the ever-circling ceiling fan, the blurring blades just visible in the faint moonlight leaking through the curtainless window. Next to the bed, Lexi whines. He reaches a hand down to comfort her. Her body is also trembling as he spiders his fingers through her curly black-and-white coat. It’s as if she experienced the same dream. But do border collies have nightmares?

The dreams/nightmares aren’t unusual, and though the frequency has diminished over time, their intensity hasn’t. He wipes his other hand across his damp face while struggling to vanquish the remaining remnants of the dream. Tonight’s episode is one of two recurring nightmares that crowd his unconscious thoughts. In this one the night is bitterly cold as he leans against the frigid metal interior of the rumbling Humvee as it travels along another of the treeless ridgelines that dot Afghanistan’s northern border. He’s not alone—four members of his squad are with him. With every nervous exhale their breath creates a thin fog within the confines of the lightly armored truck.

This movie in his mind almost always ends at the same moment: when the IED explodes beneath their vehicle and the screams of agony overwhelm the concussion of the explosion.

The second recurring nightmare is more recent, but no less terrifying.

The night sounds drift through the window. Coyotes howl in the distance, and the buzzing of what sounds like thousands of insects floats in on the faint breeze. Another night in rural Oklahoma. No honking horns or the laughter of people departing a bar or traffic noise, just the sounds of nature’s nightlife. They wash over him until he fades into a restless sleep. A faint warmness on his cheek. He opens his eyes to see the sun hovering on the horizon, casting a slash of light on the far wall, turning a right angle where it meets the floor before spreading across the bed.

Zeke pushes the covers off and pads barefoot into the kitchen, cracking the back door so Lexi can escape to do her business. He throws on a pot of coffee.

He rubs his face with both hands, feeling as if he hadn’t slept at all.

While the coffee brews, he shuffles across the hand-hewn wood floor and switches on the old thirteen-inch television. The ancient tubes warm and the grainy image of a newsreader on the set of the Today show fades onto the screen. Zeke turns back for a cup of coffee, half listening to the story playing behind him: “Residents in Alaska, Canada, and the northern portion of the U.S. were in for a treat during the night, with an unprecedented display of the aurora borealis. Scientists say the unusually high level of activity on the sun’s surface will produce numerous solar flares, which will continue to light up the night skies. They emphasize, however, that there are no concerns about the sun’s current volatility. That’s good to hear. Matt, any unusual lights out on the plaza?”

He tunes out the rest of the chatter, and instead of letting Lexi in when she scratches at the door, Zeke joins her outside. He takes a seat in one of the four handmade chairs occupying the recently completed wooden deck. The attached house is a rustic one-bedroom, one-bathroom log cabin built from wood harvested from the eighty acres his parents inherited from Zeke’s grandfather. Five of which acres his parents carved out for him when his life shattered for the second time.

The ringing of the old phone he salvaged from the barn interrupts his solitude. He pushes out of the Adirondack chair and hurries into the house. He already knows the identity of the caller. The only person who ever calls. He picks up on the fourth ring.

“Good morning, Mom.”

“Zeke, would you like to join your father and me for breakfast?”

He sighs, struggling with their attempts to heal him. “Sure, Mom. Be right up.”

He slips into the bedroom, pulls on a pair of well-worn jeans, and slides a flannel shirt carefully over his scarred shoulder. He walks through the kitchen and whistles for Lexi at the back door. It’s only about a quarter mile of gravel road to his parents’ home—far enough away for privacy yet still close enough if there’s trouble. There hasn’t been any since moving down, but today will prove different.

NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center

Wednesday, September 29, 7:38 A.M.

All the scientists have trickled in and the control room is humming with a mix of concerned voices. Twenty people crammed into a room made for ten. Down the hall, Sam Blake sits in his office, the phone to his ear as he discusses the situation with other experts at NASA and the Air Force Weather headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Everyone is aware of the massive solar eruption as well as the pressing need to discover the ensuing path of the storm, but not one knows how the hell to go about it with the devastating loss of their eye in the sky.

Sam glances up at the knock on his door to see Kaylee leaning against the doorframe. Six years out of Cornell with a Ph.D. in space plasma physics, Kaylee just celebrated her thirty-first birthday. She is tall and lean. Her unnaturally dark black hair sports an asymmetrical cut streaked with purple highlights, and her pale skin is stained with tattoos. Today, she’s dressed in skinny jeans that hug the contours of her long legs, and she’s topped off with another of her vintage T-shirts, this one featuring Led Zeppelin—a band that last toured when her parents were still romping around an elementary school playground. Despite the crisis, Sam smiles and waves her in.

Kaylee sits in a chair facing the desk and begins pumping her right leg up and down. Sam raises a finger in the air, answers one final question, and hangs up the phone. “What do you have?”

“NASA is clueless. According to their techies, ACE suddenly went dark. I mean, duh, you don’t need to be an astronaut to uncover that little clue. But they’ve tried a reboot, a resend, and a dozen other re-somethings, all to no avail. They can’t determine if the preliminary effects of the coronal mass ejection knocked it off-line or what.”

Sam leans back in his chair, twirling his rectangular wire-rimmed glasses between his thumb and forefinger. “We are screwed.”

“Tell me about it. What are we going to do, Sam?”

“I don’t know. But we need to come up with some type of plan and do it quickly.”

“How quick?”

Sam leans forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the cluttered desk. “No way to really know without that satellite. Remember studying the 1859 Carrington event?”

“Of course. The sizzling telegraph wires and the flash in the sky.”

“And how long did it take for the telegraph wires to sizzle after the flash?”

Kaylee places a black-lacquered nail to her dark red lips. “Something like seventeen hours, wasn’t it?”

“Correct. Seventeen hours and we’re already an hour into this event. But I don’t believe it will take that long for this storm to arrive.”