B Farmer - Descent

I waited for Avery to gather his thoughts. “Before I delve too deeply, I want to also mention something worth noting.” He pointed to several flashlights and headlamps on the table. “This pile here works.” He pointed to another pile. “These do not.”

Jack was getting impatient. “You think you can just cut to the chase, bro?”

Avery went back to tapping. Jack was making him nervous. “Most of the ones still working are of the incandescent variety. I have one working LED flashlight. The others are non-functional. Just as with my test equipment, if it has ICs then it is probably dead right now.”

I’d like to think I’m a decently smart guy, but I didn’t understand what Avery was getting at. I think he assumed everyone knew as much as he did and would instantly make the connection he was making. The problem was, we didn’t. All I heard was gibberish. “Just tell me what all of this means.”

“I was not finished, William. The difference between the older incandescent and the newer LED lights is the incandescent lights do not have the sensitive components that LED lights have.”

I shook my head. I still didn’t know what he was talking about.

Jack was up on his feet and putting on his gloves. “Men, I think I’m going to go check on things at the Commons, throw up, and take a piss, but not necessarily in that order.”

“Jack, it wouldn’t hurt to have the Polar Bear gun around just in case,” I said.

“Will do,” he said, giving me a nod, before leaving.

Jack’s departure seemed to alleviate some of Avery’s anxiety. “Do you know what they call me here?”

I hesitated. “Well, I know some of the names—”

“The nickname.”

My first instinct was to think about the baby seal I saw being eaten the first day I stepped foot on the Patch. Even as stressed out as I was, thinking about Sam talk about “Ol’ Faux Mulder” made me laugh nearly every time he said it. “Yeah, I’m not completely sure, bud.”

“They call me Faux Mulder, but you know that.”

“Well, I knew something about you and the X-files, but I wasn’t for sure.”

He knew most people working on the Patch wouldn’t be receptive to some of the ideas he had about things, or at least I thought he knew. But at the beginning of the rotation, Avery would sit in the Commons and talk about his theories on aliens and who knows what all else. By about day three, a few guys had started making fun of him, causing him to spend most of his time alone in the COM shack.

“One scenario.” He paused several more seconds, contemplating his next words, before finally saying, “An EMP attack is the only scenario I can think of that could do the damage we are seeing. I have racked my brain trying to come up with an alternative, but I simply cannot. Everything I see leads me to that conclusion.”

“A what?”

“I knew you would react this way,” he said, rolling his eyes and flailing his arms towards the sky like a thirteen-year-old girl who had her cell phone taken away. “I suppose you think I am crazy like everybody else.”

“I’m not making fun of you, Avery. I frankly don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

He couldn’t believe I didn’t know what an EMP was. The fact of the matter was, I didn’t. I mean, I had heard of it, yes, but I’d also heard of nuclear fission as well, but I sure as hell didn’t know how to explain it or even casually understand it.

“You do not know?”

Exacerbated, I said, “No. I honestly don’t.”

Shaking his head in disbelief, he said, “EMP stands for Electromagnetic Pulse. It can be man-made or natural. Lightning, for example, is a form of EMP. An example of a man-made EMP would be a high-altitude nuclear explosion—”

I stopped him. I tried hard not to shake my head in disgust, but I failed miserably. “Not been too many lighting strikes here at the Patch lately. That only leaves the other option, right?”

“Can you think of any alternatives?”

“Not at the moment. But I’m just as inclined to believe snow pixies sabotaged our generators because global warming was melting their snow pixie homes as I am of someone nuking us. Besides, even if your theory was reasonable, and I can’t see how it is, we would’ve heard it or seen it.” I paused. I told myself not to say it, but I had too much bundled up frustration not to. “This is just more conspiracy shit. That’s all this is.”

If what I said had bothered him, he didn’t show it. “Depending on the altitude of the detonation, we might not have heard it. Besides, the Northern Lights have been extra vivid lately, which could be a telltale sign of magnetic field perturbation. When the US government detonated Starfish Prime in 1969, the effect X-ray and gamma rays had when interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field produced, to observers on the ground, an effect that looked almost exactly like the Northern Lights. I am not crazy, William. There is evidence here to justify my hypothesis.”

My eyes glazed over thinking about what he said. “I know you believe your… hypothesis. Just like Fox Mulder believed aliens were real. I think you are rationalizing here. This isn’t the X-Files.”

“Well, if you are using the X-Files to prove your point, you realize aliens were proved to be real during the series’ run. Fox ended up being vindicated. Besides, I am clearly able, much to yours and everyone else’s chagrin, to separate reality from fiction. I am dead serious.”

I had to get away from him before I said something I would regret. I breathed deeply before saying, “I’ll take everything you said into consideration. I need to go talk to everyone, and I’m pretty sure I can’t tell them we’ve been nuked.”

Avery was like a dam getting ready to explode if he couldn’t bleed off some of the pressure. “It would not have to be a nuclear blast. An EMP attack could be a ground-based attack. The United States military has working EMP weapons…”

I picked up my by then toasty mitts off the floor. I zipped and buttoned up my parka. I walked to the door and started to pull on the handle when I looked back at Avery and said, “If what you say is true, why are our batteries still working? I don’t want to hear about any of the other shit. Answer that specific question.”

I got the you’re a dumb ass stink eye for that one. Another thing I guess I should’ve known. “An EMP would not destroy our batteries. In fact, an EMP should have the effect of charging our batteries.”

I pulled my hood over my head. “Okay. I gotta go.”

“William,” Avery said, losing the stink eye, “If this was an EMP attack, it had to be in close proximity to damage the phones and smaller electronics.”

I thought about asking him to explain why the attack had to be so close but chose not to because of the potential colloquy I’d have to endure. Instead, I nodded, took a breath, and told Avery to meet at the commons in thirty minutes.

The wind and snow were ferocious. I nearly dropped my lamp when I was assaulted by a particularly strong gust. Visibility was as low as my spirits were. The look on Avery’s face as he made his case didn’t exactly bolster my emotional state. Normally, conspiracy-type things made Avery giddy with delight, but he wasn’t giddy. Hell, he was frightened, and that in of itself was scary to me. I couldn’t make myself buy the EMP nonsense, but I decided not to wall myself off from it should there be evidence to support it. Sure, an EMP attack was far-fetched as hell, but so was what was happening to us at the Patch.

“I was told you would be in here. Why aren’t you over at the commons with everyone else, Sam?”

He pulled at one side of his handlebar mustache before saying, “Son, ’ere is some pissed off and scared people over ’ere. ’At and it’s too damn crowded for my likin, ’specially with your boy Tit over ’ere. I got ’is here heater. I’ll be just fine.”