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Los Angeles, CA
Once Rick was certain the three cars weren’t coming back, he resumed his walk in the direction of what he hoped was the eastern edge of the city. As he went along, he starting mulling over the events of the day, piecing together the clues of what he had learned. While an EMP—an
electromagnetic pulse—had been high on his list of possibilities, the sight of the relatively modern vehicles and the lights in windows of various buildings made it clear that was not the answer. Whatever had caused Rick’s phone and car to self-destruct and caused planes to fall out of the sky couldn’t have been a terrorist attack either, since the scale was far too large and the circumstances had been wrong.
The more Rick thought about the order of the events that had occurred, the more worried he became. Dozens of vehicles all sitting in the road wouldn’t start leaking gasoline all at once. And a phone shouldn’t just explode in his pocket. Plus planes don’t normally fall from the sky—at least not multiple planes at the same time.
“It was an attack.” Rick spoke out loud to himself as he walked along. “But not an ordinary one. It targeted computer control systems. Vehicles started leaking gasoline, phones shorted out the batteries, the planes were probably diverted intentionally and caused to crash as well. Who would have that sort of ability, though? Russians? Chinese?” Rick stroked his chin and shook his head. He had worked on vehicle control and communication systems for long enough to know that there were always weaknesses in computer systems, no matter how well designed they were. “But what’s the connection to them all? Those three cars driving by were only a decade or two old; they would have had computer systems in them. So why weren’t they destroyed?”
The answer hit Rick like a bolt of lightning from the smoke-filled sky. “The systems that were destroyed were all interlinked!” He stopped in the middle of the street and ran his hands through his hair as he drew the connections in his mind. “The government’s mandate for all newer vehicles to talk to each other necessitates that they have a connection to the Internet. Phones and planes, well of course they would be connected. But if this is something that’s wreaking havoc using Internet connectivity, then…” Rick trailed off as he realized the implications. “This isn’t something that’s confined to the city, is it?”
Rick’s question went unanswered by the empty street, and he slowly started walking again, shaking his head in disbelief. “This has to be some sort of terrorist attack; a series of complex viruses designed to infiltrate key networks and wreak havoc across the country. But…how? How could it possibly be done?”
Rick’s theory brought him more questions than answers, and after a while he began to doubt himself. He second-guessed, came up with alternate theories and tried to find any other explanation that made an ounce of sense. The more he thought about it, though, the more he became convinced that he was onto something, even if the details weren’t necessarily accurate.
Lost in his own thoughts for another hour, Rick didn’t notice the city beginning to change around him. He was traveling out of the mixed residential area and into a more commercial one, filled with small shops that crowded in and on top of each other. The shops, unlike the apartments from earlier, were all dark, with no signs of life or light anywhere. Many of the buildings had their windows and doors broken as a result of looting that had occurred hours earlier.
A distant shout snapped Rick out of his thoughts and he looked ahead, seeing two figures stopped in the road that each carried a small light source. Rick’s first thought was of the people he had seen in the three vehicles earlier and he started to turn to run down a side street when one of the figures shouted again, loud enough for Rick to hear him.
“Hey, man! Long time no see!” The voice belonged to Jack who, along with Samantha, had just crossed over onto the street that Rick was on, having taken a different exit off the overpass earlier in the evening. Rick smiled at the voice and picked up his pace, heading toward the figures as he shouted back.
“I thought you two were staying for the night!”
“Nah, man, they had some bad vibes coming in there. Figured we’d take a cue from you and get out of dodge!”
As Rick drew closer to Jack and Samantha, a distant noise began to draw rapidly nearer, causing him to freeze in his tracks. After a few seconds of careful listening, his smile dropped as he realized it was the roar of vehicle engines drawing rapidly closer. Still too far from Jack and Samantha to make it to them before the cars reappeared, Rick cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted as loud as he could. “Hide! Quick!”
Jack put a hand up to his ear and shook his head, signaling that he couldn’t hear Rick. Jack and Samantha turned and watched as the three vehicles roared by on a cross-street in front of them, then screeched to a halt as the drivers and passengers of the vehicles spotted the couple standing in the road.
“Run!” Rick was crouched down next to a burned-out car, still a few hundred feet away, watching as he whispered under his breath. “For God’s sake, run!” Two figures stepped out of each vehicle, six in total, and walked up to Jack and Samantha. The biggest of the six was talking to them, but Rick couldn’t hear the conversation due to the distance, the thrum of the engines and the bass from the music inside the vehicles. From what he could see, though, it wasn’t a pretty picture. Chains hung from two of the men’s hands, while another held what appeared to be a baseball bat or a large piece of wood. The man who Rick presumed was the leader stood in front, waving something around in his hand that Rick couldn’t make out, but assumed was a gun.
Rick stayed still for several seconds as he tried to decide what to do. Without a weapon, he would be useless to help defend Jack and Samantha from the unknown men if the situation started to deteriorate. On the other hand, though, he couldn’t just sit still and do nothing. Although it made him nervous, Rick started to stand up and began jogging toward the lights and sound down the road, hoping that he could somehow intervene before things turned violent.
“Maybe they’re just giving them directions…” Rick muttered to himself. “Maybe I’m misreading this. Maybe—”
A pair of successive gunshots rang out, putting an end to Rick’s thoughts on the matter. He stopped in his tracks and watched as Jack and Samantha slowly toppled to the ground, their legs crumpling beneath them as the man who had been talking to them shot them both point blank in their heads. He motioned to his associates who dove on the bodies like vultures, tearing off clothes, jewelry and any other valuables that they could lay their hands on. As his cronies worked, the leader walked around the dead pair slowly, scanning the street as he looked for any other signs of life. Rick lunged to the side and fell to the ground, rolling until he stopped up against the side of a burned out vehicle. He laid still for a long minute, watching the leader stalk around until Jack and Samantha’s bodies had been stripped bare. The six then piled back into their cars and drove off, tires screeching as the passengers of the vehicles shouted with demented joy.
Rick slowly rose to his feet and ran down the street to where he had seen Jack and Samantha fall. The street was dark enough that he nearly tripped over their bodies when he got to them, and he pulled out his penlight and held it over their faces as he choked back bile. The man who had shot them had wasted no time, as they both had bloody holes in the center of their foreheads. Their bodies had been stripped down to their undergarments, and their limbs lay at odd angles against the rough asphalt. Rick stepped back from the bodies and shoved his light back into his pocket before covering his face with his hands and shaking his head.
He hadn’t known Jack and Samantha at all, but they had seemed like decent enough people who—like him—were stranded due to a disaster that no one could have predicted. To be shot in cold blood for nothing more than the clothes on their backs felt more wrong to Rick than he could put into thoughts or words. He felt the feelings of shock start to overcome him again and he sat down on the sidewalk nearby, staring at the couple’s bodies and shaking his head slowly in disbelief. “Thirty seconds more,” he whispered to himself, “and I’d be lying there with them.”
Rick sat by the side of the road until the first rays of dawn’s early light peeked over the horizon. His mind was filled with a swirling kaleidoscope of thoughts that ranged from worrying about his family to imagining
how he could have changed the situation with Jack and Samantha. Every time he tried to focus on a thought, his mind wandered, refusing to focus on any particular topic for more than a few seconds.
He watched the black sky turn shades of blue and pink and orange for several minutes, then closed his eyes to wipe away the tears that were gathering. He stood up slowly and spent time scouring the nearby shops, searching until he found a large tablecloth in the back of one of the restaurants. He laid the tablecloth out over Jack and Samantha’s bodies, tucking the edges underneath them so that the cloth wouldn’t blow away. The gesture felt trite and meaningless, but the idea of simply walking away from them felt even more so. Once he had finished, he turned and headed to the east, not knowing what to think anymore.
Chapter 10
Ellisville, VA
A few minutes after leaving the grocery store, as they were starting to turn back onto the gravel road, Mark suddenly remembered what his mother had asked him to do earlier when they were distracted by the fighting in the grocery store parking lot. He felt under the front seats of the truck until he came upon an old roll of paper towels, then tore a few of them off and handed them to his mother.
Dianne gratefully accepted the wad of paper towels and pressed them against her forehead, gritting her teeth and drawing in a sharp breath of air as the pain from above her eye reverberated across her entire head. With her left hand on the wheel and her right hand holding the paper towels to her eye, she drove slowly along the gravel road, glad to see that the amount of foot traffic had lessened. There were only a few people out and about still, but they didn’t approach the truck, being more concerned with the power going out and trying to find friends and loved ones who hadn’t returned home yet.
As the truck started hitting the bumpy portion of the road, Dianne lowered the paper towels and held them out to Mark. “Hold this against my head there, would you?” He accepted the wad of paper towels with a slight grimace, then pressed them up against her forehead as he leaned across the seat.
“Do you think dad’s okay?” Mark whispered to his mother as Jacob and Josie sat quietly in the back, staring out their windows at the passing trees.
