Michael Bunker - WICK

But they made it, and, in reality, the whole escapade went off without a hitch. They poked their heads up into the clear cold air outside the fences of Warwick, and they saw neither soldiers nor gangs. The first sprint into the deeper forest was accomplished purely on adrenaline, a pounding heart terror that embraced and squeezed the mind. After the four of them were clear of the open and lightly treed area, they moved slower and more circumspectly. They used branches to try to obscure their direction, and several times they doubled back in order to hide their intended path.

They didn’t know how successful they’d been, and wouldn’t know for some time, but they did make it to the water plant, and, once there, they did a thorough reconnaissance of the plant before digging in for a stay that they figured to last four or five days.

“I say we stay until Friday,” Peter said. “By Friday, we’ll know more about if the EMP has actually taken place, and what its ramifications are.”

“You’re the leader, Peter,” Cole said, as he walked around the sheet-metal covered work shed that they’d chosen as their temporary home.

“Yes, Peter,” Natasha said, nodding. “We’re with you, so you tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.”

“Ok, then,” Peter said, “we’ll need to gather up some wood for a fire. This place is ventilated up near the roof, and it’ll be cold at night, but we can use several different tricks to stay warm. The EMP, if it is coming, hasn’t happened yet, so our main threats, if they come, will come from Warwick. After the EMP, it won’t get any worse immediately, so we shouldn’t have to worry about strangers hiking through the woods quite yet.”

“Well, Peter,” Cole said, scratching his head, “if what you are saying is accurate, and I have no reason to believe that it isn’t, then why don’t we head out on our walk now? Wouldn’t that give us a few more days lead time before things get bad?”

“Not really, Cole,” Peter said. “The EMP is supposed to happen today. That means all sorts of things can happen, including planes dropping out of the sky, explosions from power lines and transformers, fires, and all sorts of things that remain unknown to us. In addition, the violence could break out almost immediately when the EMP hits—not here, but out there—and it will grow over several days. We’re hoping that the biggest brunt of the effects—after people realize that they are in big, big trouble—will happen in the first three days. After that, it won’t be much better, but at least we will be able to watch where we are, where we are going, and what is ahead of us. If we go now, we could find ourselves in the middle of trouble in unknown territory when the match strikes the fuse. I just think we should wait and then make our way once we have more information.”

“Like we said, Peter, you’re in charge,” Cole responded with a smile. In his smile, he hinted at the smallest bit of doubt.

Peter opened up his pack and pulled out one of the radios he brought from the house. He left Clay’s radio in the ammo can, just in case, but he wanted to listen awhile, to hear what life was like outside, and gather whatever intelligence they could while they still had the opportunity.

Lang, Natasha, and Cole crowded around Peter as he tuned the radio, and before long he found a station that was on the air. The newswoman went through a litany of stories about the recent “troubles.” There were reports of riots and looting in the cities, places like Boston, and Philadelphia, but most of it was less dire than the Warwickians had heard from inside the village. Lang reminded them that one of the last things Lev Volkhov had told him was that they shouldn’t believe anything they hear, especially from the “authorities.” Governments will lie about the extent of unrest and violence, if only to keep that violence from spreading to as-yet unaffected areas.

It seemed from the news broadcast that the authorities were trying to make the recent troubles and turmoil out to be purely economic. As of this morning, the reports said, the stock market had crashed in a magnitude unseen in history. Despite what seemed to be obvious attempts to minimize the extent of the disruptions, the reporter mentioned riots and street disturbances in most of the big cities of America, civic unrest and citizen complaints about delays in food relief efforts, and they were now speaking openly of an event they were calling “The Crash.” The fact that many of the riots had preceded the stock market collapse seemed all but forgotten, and the fact that Election Day was postponed in the northeast was not even mentioned. You would think that something so monumental might be in the news on that first Tuesday in November. But if you thought that, you would be wrong.

If a mission to Mars had landed on that undiscovered planet and the astronauts had descended onto its barren rocky surface only to find that their radios were tuned to a broadcast from Olympus Mons, the effect wouldn’t have been any stranger than it was on the four Warwickians who sat and listened to the details of a news broadcast from a place they had only known through reputation. They crowded around the small radio there in the water plant and listened to a report about some crazy German who was about to jump out of a capsule that hung from a parachute on the edge of space. Apparently, with all that was happening in the world, somebody, somewhere, someone of great importance, had decided that a man perhaps jumping to his death for notoriety was newsworthy, while the society crumbling around them was not.

The reporter breathlessly turned away from the description of the day’s and week’s events, of the tales of hunger and societal breakdown, of the scrambling of the governmental elites to contain the situation, to speak of a daredevil, a Mr. Klaus von Baron, who at that very moment was stepping onto a platform and seeing the wide world float through space beneath his feet. The reporter described it all. Millions of people were watching the event all over the world on YouTube, the newswoman reported. After completing what the reporter called “his egress checks,” Klaus von Baron stepped off the platform and threw himself toward the ground, and the reporting paused as he began his awesome free-fall.

There were gasps and oohs and aahs coming from the newsroom as the newswoman described the event. “Klaus von Baron has begun to spin slightly. From the deck of his capsule we can see that he is disappearing into the haze of atmosphere and distance. There is, of course, a fear that he might go into an uncontrollable flat spin that could cause him to pass out.” The reporter relayed these facts as though the audience perfectly understood the machinations of velocity and turbulence, but it was necessary to say them anyway, just as a record for the times. The audience was informed that von Baron had a special parachute that would automatically activate if the g-forces came to be too much and he lost consciousness.

The four sat and listened. The reporter was openly speculating about whether or not von Baron was going to break the sound barrier, when the four Warwickians, listening around the radio, heard a loud pop, and the radio went dead.

Simultaneously they heard an intense, buzzing hum, and from the doorway of the water plant they saw an old transformer atop a power pole, one that was no longer even operating, blow completely off the pole. As it did so, they heard a frightening explosion from the power junction box about twenty feet inside the building. It suddenly burst into flames.

Peter knew immediately what had happened. Somewhere, up in the atmosphere, and probably not too far away, a “super-EMP” warhead had detonated sending a wave of supercharged electrons piling up on one another until they had burst outward, like when the sound barrier is shattered. The resulting massive wave of electromagnetic energy had spread throughout the atmosphere and imploded the grid of electric energy, and with it the comforts and hopes and aspirations of the world’s long climb to what modern man recognized as civilization .