William Weber - Zero Day

As solitary a profession as writing is, no author does it alone. A special thanks goes out to my editor RJ, to the amazing beta team for all your valuable feedback and to the readers who make all of this possible.

Before you begin this journey, there’s something you should know. Consider it a warning of sorts. This isn’t a story about Supermen or even Superwomen, the kind you’ve read about before, who consistently make head shots at a mile out and rack up body bags the way Imelda Marcos racked up high-heeled shoes. This is a story about regular folks placed in an unthinkable situation. The enormous stress they encounter as they are forced to navigate from one life-altering decision to another is something I pray none of us will ever have to experience. Some of the folks you’re about to meet are truly prepared. Some think they’re prepared. Some have no idea what’s about to hit them. This is the story of what happens when each of them is put to the test.

Nate Bauer came awake chilled to the bone. Next to him, his wife Amy slept soundly, her chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm. There had once been a time she had insisted on cranking the heat to ungodly levels before bed. But somewhere around her fourth month of pregnancy, that particular pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. She didn’t just like things cool now, she liked them downright cold.

But this wasn’t cold. This was freezing.

Nate slipped out of bed and hurried across the icy bedroom floor to the thermostat on the far wall. She must have twisted the knob all the way to the left when he hadn’t been looking. But when he got there he saw he had been wrong. The dial was at eighty degrees. The room should have been closer to a sauna than an ice box. His breath pluming out in white clouds, Nate headed for his cellphone, charging on the nightstand. As he passed the window, frosted over with frozen condensation, he skidded to a stop. A steep pile of snow had built up on the window ledge outside.

They had been warned about the coming storm. The forecasters had said the Midwest was about to get dumped on. There had even been a few inches of accumulation before heading to bed. Still, the sight before him now was something else. The snow that had fallen overnight had come in feet rather than inches, making it impossible to tell where the lawn ended and the road began. All of that was now a single, amorphous white blob.

Amy stirred and called him back to bed. Nate went, scooping up his phone with one hand as he pulled the blankets over him with the other.

“Everything all right?” she asked, squinting away the early morning light.

“The power’s gone out,” he replied, as calmly as he could.

She let out a long, tired sigh. “It’s probably the snow.”

Nate didn’t answer right away. He was checking his phone and quickly noticed two things. The first was that his battery level was at sixty-eight percent. It had been closer to forty percent when he’d gone to bed, which meant it hadn’t been charging long before the power had gone out. But the second thing worried him far more. There were five missed calls from his brother, Evan, an engineer at the local nuclear power plant. He normally gave Nate a heads-up whenever part of the grid went down, so hearing from him wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, except his calls had started at two-fifteen in the morning and kept coming every forty-five minutes till now. That was strange. Very strange.

Nate flicked the screen with his thumb, pulling up his texts. There too, he saw his brother had been trying to get a hold of him. As if in slow motion, his gaze passed over a terrifying message all in caps.

POWER OUT. SUSPECTED CYBER-ATTACK.

Evan’s message had erased all doubt. This was no ordinary power outage. The United States was under attack. But it was the sentence after that which sent long, skeletal fingers dancing up the back of Nate’s neck. And he understood in that instant the situation wasn’t only serious, their lives were in imminent danger.

Day 1

12 Hours Earlier

The snowstorm that would go down as the worst in over a century began life as little more than a light dusting.

Nate watched as one of those white flakes seesawed through the night sky and settled on the gas pump before him. The coming blizzard was forecast to cover a huge swath of the country in several inches of snow and Nate wanted to make sure his pickup was filled to the brim before that happened.

The sign on the edge of Byron, Illinois, boasted a population of three thousand, but Nate knew the real number was far lower than that. The economic downturn in the previous decade had driven many folks to the nearby city of Rockford, and in a few rare cases, it had even driven some to take their chances in Chicago.

Most of those who’d stuck it out were employed at the Byron nuclear power plant, situated a few miles south of town. It was one of three plants in the area that not only powered the Windy City, but much of the state. And in another life, the power plant was also where Nate had worked. Head of cyber-security, that was his job title—at least for a while it had been, until he had pissed off the wrong people and found himself left scrambling to feed his family. As far as he saw it, corporate greed had been at the heart of the problem. But why drudge up the past when all it does is leave you seething over the injustice of it?

A sudden blast of cold wind slapped him back to the present. Nate reached for his wallet, removed his Amex card and slid it into the terminal. Right away, the display flashed an angry error message at him. He removed the card and reseated it, only to find the same thing. Staring around, he saw he wasn’t alone. Others appeared to also be struggling. Like him, they too would soon be buried under a few feet of snow and were aiming to stock up.

“These things working or not?” he asked a man in a baseball cap standing next to a Subaru.

Subaru Guy shrugged. “Gotta pay inside, I guess.”

Nate did just that, heading inside to find a line much longer than he had anticipated. Bundled in people’s arms were candles, batteries, canned goods and in a few cases satchels of firewood.

This was the countryside, where folks were usually more prepared for the occasional act of God than their more urban counterparts. But even here, signs of complacency were showing themselves.

Nowadays, most everyone knew the average person’s home contained roughly three days’ worth of supplies. And that was assuming they hadn’t put off a trip to the grocery store in order to binge on the latest Netflix series. In that regard, Nate was something of an anomaly. Perhaps it was his background in security or the fact that he was now somewhere in his mid-thirties or maybe that his wife, Amy, was now eight and a half months pregnant with their first child. Any way you sliced it, three days’ worth of supplies was not nearly enough. Three weeks of food and water, on the other hand, made far more sense. Why not more? Well, as he saw it, only in the most dire circumstances would any emergency last longer than that. And if the worst happened, they could always stretch what they had left.

He’d tried convincing his younger brother, Evan, an engineer over at Byron Nuclear, to follow suit, but still hadn’t managed to get much through that thick titanium skull of his. Hard to understand why, given his brother and his sister-in-law, Lauren, had twin boys to feed. Maybe if the coming storm was as bad as the weather lady said it would be, Evan might just come to see the error of his ways.