Michael Bunker - WICK

At the moment, Peter was one of the few people in the entire world to know that everything had changed. For everyone. Forever.

Tuesday Afternoon — Election Day

The etiology of disaster’s onset and the projection of its effects are never easy things to pin down, but history does provide examples for our consideration. On March 4, 1918, in a small town in Kansas, a cook at an army training camp called in sick. Within a week, over 500 men in the camp had contracted the illness, and the virus had spread all the way to Queens, New York. Within a year, approximately fifty million people worldwide had died of what came to be known as the Spanish Flu. Up to 30% of the world’s population contracted the disease. Coupled with the concurrent devastation visited upon the world in the four short years of World War One, wherein sixteen million people died and another twenty million were seriously wounded, you can see how quickly things changed in the four short years between 1914 and 1918. The lesson for us is that history can turn on a dime. All the sophisticated machinery of modern civilization is no match for the wild rampage of nature and the brutality of human ingenuity.

While this may seem like an extreme example—as if a wartime virus is worse than the collapse of the electrical grid upon which modern society is built—consider the fact that when the lights go out, there is no medical equipment for use in treating disease. There is no transportation to get food or people or supplies from one place to another. There is no telephone to call the police when the criminals show up at your door. There is no Internet, no security alarms, no heating or air-conditioning to tame the elements. In a grid-down situation, and especially if that situation is caused by a massive electromagnetic pulse, there is no gasoline, and there are no automobiles to need that gasoline. There is no refrigeration to cool food in the concrete jungles that house most of the world’s population. When this disaster occurs, there will only be darkness, and stillness, and whatever you hold in your hands, head, and heart to face down the long night.

The EMP strike over Ohio on Election Day in America was the crime of this and perhaps any century, and it would lead—eventually—to over 300 million deaths just in the United States, and many billions of deaths all over the world, but no one knew that yet.

At the very beginning, it was like the call coming in to the kitchen staff saying that a cook won’t be in that day. It was like a woman who was involved in a car wreck and broke her neck, but she didn’t know it yet. An hour later, she was talking to a cop, and she turned her head to point out to him exactly where the collision occurred, and the cop heard the snap, and her head fell to the side, and the body fell limp to the ground.

There is a delay between the moment when a trigger is pulled, and the moment when a target is struck. That interim—that delay, however long it lasts—is when the world continues to move and decide based on the old reality and on facts that are now immaterial. It is in that interim that decisions are often made that will eventually determine who lives and who dies.

No one had yet figured out what had happened, although people knew from the fires and the smoke and the already eerie noise of the gnashing of teeth in the stillness, that something had gone terribly wrong. But no one yet had recognized its permanency.

Still, in that moment, a few kept their heads.

Veronica D’Arcy was sitting in her kitchen in her warm house in Harlem, writing in her journal, when the lights went out.

She’d been thinking a great deal lately of her late husband John, a gem of a man, gone too soon due to a heroic attempt to save a woman who’d fallen on the tracks from a subway platform years ago. The woman was saved, but her husband had not survived, leaving Veronica to raise their son by herself.

In the way that thoughts sometimes seem to tumble or intermingle like towels in a dryer, or how one thought brings us inexorably to another, Veronica’s thoughts about her husband, and heroism, and the life of responsibility, led her to recall the man named Clay Richter who’d recently stayed at her house for a night. Apparently, Clay had lost his whole family in an automobile accident. The simple, sweet man had touched her life through an act of kindness towards her son, and now, as she sat thinking about Clay and his escape from the city and his search for liberty and peace, she began thinking about family and the loss of it and the need to protect her own.

Her son, Stephen, was in their living room working on a laptop. He was staying home from school for yet another day, as all New York students were. The compounded troubles from several successive natural and unnatural disasters were taking a toll on the city. First there was the hurricane, then the blizzard, and now there was increasing civil disorder resulting from the canceling of the national elections.

Veronica herself hadn’t been able to return to work since Sandy hit. She was a landscape designer at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and with everything going on post-hurricane, there’d been no need for her to go to work. She’d been told to stay home, and now she and Stephen had been inside for days on end. She thought about it and then counted on her fingers. It was exactly a week ago Tuesday that Clay Richter had helped her son and had stayed the night in the guest room. It seemed longer to her.

She’d grown up in the house of a man who believed in preparation, like his father before him had, a vestigial leftover from colonial-days thinking in Trinidad, when life was uncertain and one had to always be ready to take whatever steps were necessary to maintain it. An aware mind and a preparedness mentality were some of the values that had attracted her to John, who was a survivalist in his own right.

She and Stephen had been protected from the civil unrest raging outside by her foresight in planning for emergencies. They had a generator, and they had always stockpiled food, and had acquired over the years, through self-education, the means to protect themselves from the kind of madness that had increasingly gripped the city. Still, she was getting antsy to get out of the house, and Stephen, too, was looking for diversion.

He was in the living room when the lights flashed and blinked out and the power died. He’d been watching on the laptop at that moment as a daredevil jumped out of a weather balloon and plunged over twenty-four miles toward the earth.

I wonder if he lived, is what Stephen thought as the computer and the room went dark. Strange, he thought. I wonder why the computer didn’t keep running on battery power?

The click of the lights and whirr of the winding-down machinery had been the first signs that there was trouble. Then Veronica heard an explosion down the street, followed by numerous collisions and grindings and blasts. Thinking about the laptop, and why the thing had just instantly shut down, Stephen had been the first to ask why the sounds of cars in the streets had stopped if only the electricity had shut down. Just as Veronica was about to answer, they heard a whistling grow above their heads.

Veronica ran to the door with Stephen just a foot behind her, and they stuck their heads out the door and saw in the space above their street an airplane crossing through the blue sky. It was spooky the way the craft simply hung in the air without the sound of engines whining as it made its descent. It was all Doppler Effect of gravity and the atmosphere pushing against the hunk of metal in the sky. The plane turned in a slow, lazy arc and settled into a pocket of air, which made the whooshing noise they’d heard as wind rushed around its wings.