‘He’s… Barb. The Air… Guard picked him… ago… and later… for now…’
‘Barney? You’re breaking up. I can’t hear more than two words in five. Did you say Kip was fine? Is he okay?’
The phone beeped in her ear, the connection lost.
Barbara Kipper slammed the handset down in its cradle. It had taken her nearly an hour, trawling around in hellacious traffic, to find a payphone that actually worked. Twice she’d been stopped by soldiers who informed her, politely enough, that a curfew was in place and she’d need to get home. But Barb knew that, given the traffic, home wasn’t going to be that easy to reach, and she needed to talk to Kip. Only for a moment. Just to make sure he was safe.
She was convinced the phone companies let their booths fall into disrepair to force everyone to buy a cell. Not that cell phones were worth anything today. The network was obviously melting down. She only got through to Barney Tench on her eighth attempt, and even then the interference had been so bad it was hardly worth it.
But Kip was okay, wasn’t he? Barney had said that. The National Guard had picked him up somehow and were flying him back, right? Or driving. Or whatever. But he would be back ‘later’. She realised she was shaking and close to tears.
‘Are you all right, lady? Are you done with the phone? I really need to call my mom, is all. She’s in San Francisco this week, visiting her pop. And, you know, I really need to call her now.’
Barb came out of her trance with a start. The young man in front of her, a boy really, had almost pushed his way into the booth. He was dressed in some sort of uniform. A Wendy’s employee, she realised, and his eyes were large and fearful, darting over her shoulder to lock on the phone as if it were a life jacket in high seas.
‘Can I just get in, ma’am? And use the phone? You made your call and…’
‘It’s okay. I’m sorry,’ said Barb. ‘Let me get out of your way’
He waited until she was half out of the cramped space before pushing in past her. On any other day it would’ve set off all of her New York alarms, made her think she was being mugged. But the kid only had eyes for the phone.
‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘With your mom.’
He muttered ‘Thanks’ and began feeding coins into the slot.
She hurried back to the car, where Suzie was sitting up in the front seat, keeping an eye on her. Barb had parked outside a bar and grill near the corner of Northeast 106th and 4th Street, far enough away from the Bellevue Square mall to have avoided the traffic snarl that had frozen the streets for a few blocks around there. But, even so, the road network here was peaked out also. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to be at their desk and thousands of people had poured onto the streets in their cars, all hoping to get home or to their kids or partners. Maybe it was the dumbass curfew too, she thought acidly. No one wanted to get stuck away from home today. The sun flared off windscreens in hundreds of small supernovae, horns blared and thousands more people on foot picked their way through the slow-moving traffic, all of them looking to be somewhere else. It was like 9/11 except in the ‘burbs.
Barbara climbed back into the Honda and strapped in, keying the ignition and searching the radio band for a reasonable voice. The national stations were offline, and many of the locals had thrown open their switchboards to a rising cacophony of nutjobs and crazies.
‘Mommy, did you get my treat?’ asked Suzie.
Barb squeezed her eyes shut. She’d promised Suzie a small chocolate bar or a piece of candy if she’d sat quietly through her mother’s increasingly anxious search for a working public phone. And of course, in the rush and the worry, she’d completely forgotten. The sharp, rising inflection in Suzie’s voice, which was quavering towards meltdown, meant she couldn’t put it off.
‘I’m sorry, sweetie. Mommy forgot. But, I’ve… uh… I’ve got some gum here. Would you like some gum?’ She fished a packet of Double Bubble out of the coins and scrunched-up petrol receipts in the cup holder.
‘But Mommy, I’m not allowed to have gum. You know that I-’
‘Today, you can have gum,’ Barb said, more brusquely than she’d wanted to. ‘Here, knock yourself out.’
She tossed back the packet and immediately regretted it. Suzie was always a little more sensitive to Barb than to Kip – admittedly, because Barb tended to have a sharper tongue. The little girl’s lower lip was trembling and the glassy sheen in her eyes warned of imminent tears. A tension headache began drilling in behind Barbara’s temples.
‘… estimates of the dead or missing run into the hundreds of millions,’ declared a sombre voice on the radio. ‘A joint statement from the Governor’s office and the commander of Fort Lewis advises people in the metro area to stay off the roads, keeping them clear for emergency service vehicles and military transport. The curfew will be enforce-’
Barb flicked off the radio with some irritation. It couldn’t have been helping Suzie’s mood.
‘I want Daddy,’ she sobbed, as the tears finally came. ‘I want Daddy home. I don’t want him eaten.’
‘It’s all right, darling. It’s all right.’
But the collapse had begun and within seconds her daughter was a heaving, squalling ball of misery in the back of the car.
Where the fuck are you, Kip?
‘Goddamn. That mother’s gotta be twenty miles high.’
‘Higher, sir,’ the airman informed him. ‘Seems to fold over somewhere up in the mesosphere.’
James Kipper nodded but said nothing. Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and confirm the fact, as his granddad used to say. Pops Kipper was full of such quips for all occasions like that. He used to keep a dictionary of quotations on the kitchen table at his place, ready to deploy somebody else’s wit at a moment’s notice.
Christ knows what he’d have said about this, thought Kip, as they banked down and away to the west to begin their long approach to Seattle. The C-130 wasn’t designed for scenic flights, but even through its small, grimy windows he was afforded a scarifying view of the energy wave that ran in both directions right out to the very edge of the world, and over it. He was the only passenger in the plane, a service laid on especially for him by the military at the city’s request. The loadmaster – that’s what they were called, he was sure – stayed glued to the window nearest his perch at the rear ramp, jamming his head up hard against the Plexiglas to keep an eye on the phenomenon as their course change took it out of direct view. It was far enough away from Seattle that you couldn’t see it from the ground, they told him, which Kip thought of as a small mercy. The city would’ve been a nuthouse if you could – probably was anyway, he reflected. The flight crew, after exhausting the possibilities of speculation and conspiracy theory when the vast, shimmering wall had first hove into view, were restricting themselves to terse monosyllables as they prepped the craft for descent and approach.
‘I reckon it came from space,’ said the airman, a native of New Orleans, to judge by his accent. ‘Something like a black hole that brushed up against us.’ He was young, with a smattering of pimples on his fleshy pink jowls.
‘Black holes don’t really brush up against anything,’ replied Kipper. They suck in whole planets and crush them to a singularity.’ He’d seen that on the Discovery Channel once. It made him feel better to have something to say.
‘A singu-what now, sir?’ asked the airman.
‘A singularity,’ Kipper repeated. ‘It’s, uh, where energy and matter get crushed down into a single state that is so small it’s almost not even there.’
‘Shit,’ said the young man. ‘Well, I guess that ain’t no singularity out there.’
‘Nope,’ agreed Kipper. ‘Guess not.’
‘Do you know what we’re gonna do about it, sir, to turn it off?’
Kipper could see from the strain around the boy’s eyes that he was really asking another question. How are we gonna make this better? Or perhaps: How are we going to get our world back?
‘Son,’ said Kipper, who felt old enough to call the airman that, ‘you and I are going to do our jobs. And somebody, somewhere else, is gonna see to punching the lights out on this motherfucker.’
‘So you think it can be turned off, sir?’
The need in the boy’s voice was almost painful. Kipper tried for a nonchalant shrug.
‘I’m an engineer. I was always taught that if something can be turned on, it can be turned off,’ he said.
But he didn’t believe that for a second. Not after seeing the thing with his own eyes.
By the time the C-130 he’d transferred to on some no-name airstrip out in the boonies touched down at Sea-Tac, Kipper had almost forgotten the crash back in the Cascades. As the young Guardsman who’d strapped him into the Blackhawk back in the mountains had explained, there were almost certainly no people on that flight anyway – they’d been ‘disappeared’. The phrase gave him a twitchy feeling. It was redolent of the bad old days in Chile, where he’d done some contract work for Arthur Andersen on a power station project back in the ‘80s. People by their thousands got ‘disappeared’ there. As frightening as that had been, however, it was also comprehensible: a bunch of assholes, looking like they’d been tricked out as opera villains in military drag, had simply decided to murder anyone who looked sideways at them. What he’d seen today, as soon as the chopper lifted clear of the deep valley in which he’d been trekking, was entirely incomprehensible. The brooding mass of the Cascades still blocked from view a good deal of what the guardsmen were calling ‘the Wave’, but the goddamn thing was reared up so high he could still see it anyway, soaring off towards space, somewhere beyond the skyline of the ranges. That was bad enough, but what they’d told him about the effect of this ‘Wave’ had drilled a cold, dead finger bone into his heart. Hundreds of millions of people, gone. Whole cities – close enough to the whole country – empty. Ships ploughing into ports and exploding. Cars just veering off the road, uncontrolled, crashing into each other because nobody was behind the wheel. Planes falling out of the sky, like he’d seen with his very own eyes earlier that day. It had been happening all over. Still was, in fact. The Oregon Air National Guard had jets up right now, waiting for half-a-dozen flights whose tracks were due to take them over Seattle. They’d been authorised to shoot the planes down well short of the city.
Kipper caught himself obsessively twisting and wrenching one of the straps on his backpack as he tried to imagine what had happened, what bizarre correlation of physical forces might have done such a thing. He couldn’t think of a single explanation. He was a civil engineer, a good one, just quietly, but he maintained a professional interest in related fields, and indeed in most of the hard sciences. As a young boy he’d wanted to be an astronaut (who doesn’t?), but he wasn’t one for uniforms and taking orders and sucking up a lot of chickenshit nonsense. So he’d refused to go down the path his old man had been pushing him towards – a career in the air force. He loved building things, not blowing them up. He’d never quite got the bug out of his system though, and a lot of his down time consisted of reading the sort of scientific journals to which he might have contributed had he pulled on a space suit for real, instead of just in his dreams.
But nothing he’d ever read, learned or seen in his private or professional experience went one inch towards explaining what the hell had happened while he’d been off on his precious fucking nature walk.
Kipper shook himself out of his thoughts. The plane had touched down on a patch of concrete apron north of the control tower, affording him a good view of both runways and the terminal complex. He could see right away that things weren’t normal. There was an unusually large number of planes on the ground, and none taking off. In one glance he could make out the liveries of half-a-dozen stranded carriers. Midwest. Jetblue. Frontier. China Airlines. They all had flights parked by terminals they wouldn’t normally have used. A bunch of 737s and MD80s from Alaskan Airlines had huddled together, a bit like an old wagon train, down near the fire station, while a collection of jumbos and long-haulers from overseas had laagered up at the southern end of the airport. As his transport rumbled along the tarmac, a United Airlines Airbus aborted a landing with a scream of turbines and a building roar while it heaved itself back into the sky again. Kipper craned out of the cabin to see if he could spot whatever had gone wrong, but the Guardsmen were already popping harnesses and hurrying him out of the aircraft.
‘This way, sir,’ a woman in a Nomex flight suit yelled at him, pressing a firm hand on his shoulder. ‘Follow me.’
Kipper did as he was told, crouching slightly for no good reason. It just seemed appropriate. The airport was a thunderbowl of screaming engines, jet exhaust and speeding vehicles, all of it controlled in some vague chaotic way by hundreds of scurrying, shouting men and women in coveralls and headphones. There were a lot more military uniforms than he was used to seeing, as well. The engineer allowed himself to be led across to a waiting Ford pick-up with city markings, where Barney Tench, a huge shambolic figure in khaki drill pants and a faded blue shirt, was waiting for him, looking worried.
Tench came forward, holding out his hand and shaking his head. ‘Man, am I glad to see you, buddy,’ he called out over the background roar. ‘Thought we might have lost you up there, Kip. We lost a lot of people. I think Locke’s gone, Owen too. Nobody can find the mayor either, but Nickells wasn’t scheduled to be out of town, so maybe he’ll turn up. It’s chaos, man. Fucking chaos.’
His friend sounded unbalanced – which was one of the more disturbing developments of the morning. Barney Tench was usually as phlegmatic as a stone statue. Nothing upset him. It was why Kipper had insisted on hauling him in all the way from Pittsburgh when he’d taken the city engineer’s job. There’d been some grumbling about Kip hiring an old college beer buddy, but that had fallen away once Barn settled in to the job. You couldn’t ask for a better right-hand man. Except that, at this moment, his strong right hand was trembling and pale.
Kipper threw his gear into the back of the pick-up, yelled his thanks to the aircrew, and climbed up into the driver‘s-side seat, motioning for Barney to follow suit.
‘Okay, Barn, gimme the keys. I’ll drive, you chill the fuck out and we’ll deal with this like we would any problem. Step by step. First, has anyone spoken to Barbara since you got my number off her? She’ll be freaking out, wanting to know I’m okay.’
Tench had the good grace to look guilty. ‘I’m sorry, Kip. We tried. It’s just been a hell of a morning. And I… well…’
‘Okay. Give me your cell. I’ll call her now.’
‘No point, man,’ Barney said, shaking his head. ‘The nets are jammed. Your sat phone might work, though.’
He took a small, calming breath. ‘Okay. Two minutes.’
Kipper hopped out again and hurried around to retrieve his phone from the backpack. The signal strength was good, and he was relieved to get a clear dial tone. The call to Barb’s phone stalled before it began, however. A recorded message told him that due to higher than normal demand, his call could not be connected. Kip grunted and tried their home phone number, an old-fashioned land line. It went though to voicemail on the fifth ring.
‘Hi honey, It’s me. They got me. I’m back safe. I have to go into the city. When you get home and get this message, stay there. Don’t go out again, okay? Things are gonna be crazy for a while. Love you. Love to Suzie, too.’
He hung up, hoping that would avoid a scene later on. If Barb wasn’t at home, it probably meant they were caught up in a traffic jam somewhere – hopefully not for too long. Some of the roads had looked like parking lots on the flight in. It was going to take him and Barney a while to drive into town.
‘Okay, let’s get going,’ he said, climbing back into the cabin.
They pulled away, with Kipper driving south, towards the main terminal building. As they approached, he could tell it was crowded, with thousands of people lining the big glass windows that looked out over the tarmac.
‘You got any idea what’s going on, Barn, beyond the headlines?’ he asked his friend.
‘Wish I did, Kip. This is like a horror movie. First I heard this morning was Ross Reynolds on KUOW saying he thought we’d been nuked or something. Communications went down. Civil Defense alarms went off. Chaos and fucking madness.’
‘But it wasn’t an attack?’ As he spoke, Kipper threaded past a knot of distressed-looking travellers, who were making their way towards a transit bus from a Horizon Air Dash 8. That done, he accelerated towards a vehicle exit up ahead.
‘You’ve seen that thing, haven’t you?’ said Tench, answering Kip’s question with one of his own. ‘Not unless we got attacked by the Death Star or the Go’auld or something. Right now the whole fucking world is just as weirded out as us.’
Kipper waved off a security guard who seemed intent on holding them up, and accelerated past, paying no respect at all to his frantically waved clipboard.
The council F-100 bounced up and down as they hit the outer road surface and Kip wrenched it around before gunning it towards the next exit. There appeared to be a couple of dozen soldiers on duty around this part of the airport, although what role they were playing he couldn’t tell. Mostly they seemed to be doing traffic control, barring any civilians from leaving the facility. That’s gonna end in tears, he thought. Seattle wasn’t the sort of town where folks took well to being dicked around by crew-cuts and camouflage. It was a righteous certainty that if he stuck his head outside right now, he’d hear some would-be grunge god caterwauling about fascists and nazis.
‘I’m sorry, Barney,’ said Kipper, breaking the silence. ‘I didn’t think – you got family back east.’
Tench breathed deeply and nodded. ‘Everyone has somebody. So do you.’
Kipper said nothing. His immediate family was here, thank Christ. But his dad was in Kansas City and he had a sister in New York. Their mother had died three years back. New York and KC, of course, were both behind the Wave.
He knew now why Barney had sounded so bad on the phone. There were some good folks on the city council, as well as a fair leavening of pinheads. But if Seattle was in the front line of a fight against something that had the power to zap a whole continent, they were all in deep, deep shit.