Washington State

The lower reaches of the Cascades never failed to impress James Kipper. Dropping his backpack for a five-minute rest and a drink of water, he rewarded himself for the morning’s trek with a moment staring down the long, deeply wooded valley up which he had climbed. Snow lay in patches along the well-beaten trail, and dropped in wet clumps from the sagging branches of fir and pine that covered the gentle slopes below him in a dense green carpet. He loved it out here. Nature was so powerful, the hand of man so light, you could have been hundreds of years removed from the twenty-first century. The brisk but unseasonably sunny morning had made hiking up the remote valley a rare pleasure for the senses. The air was fragrant with sap and the rich brown mulch of earth warmed by sun for the first time in months. A breeze, just strong enough to set the treetops swaying, carried the natural white noise of a nearby stream, running heavy with an early melt. As he stood at the edge of a small plateau he could imagine the landscape below dotted with castles and mounted knights. He was the father of a little girl just lately in school; knights and castles and fairy tales were seldom far from his mind these days.

Kipper sucked in a draft of air so clean and cold it hurt all the way down into his chest. But it hurt good. The temperature hadn’t snuck much past the mid-fifties, but he was well dressed for the hike, and could even feel sweat trickling down the inside of his arms. Another mouthful of icy spring water added pleasantly to the discordant sensations of feeling both hot and cold. His breath plumed out in front of him, and his stomach rumbled, reminding the engineer that it had been four hours since his last substantial meal, a bowl of pork sausages and beans cooked over the coals at his campsite a few miles farther downrange. Kipper unzipped his Gore-Tex jacket and fished around inside for the protein bar he’d stored in one of the many pockets before setting out that morning. It would be satisfyingly warm and chewy by now.

He frowned at the buzzing in one of the pockets. A second later the trilling of his satellite phone punched him back into the real world. The phone was a concession to his wife, Barb. Three days a year he was allowed to run around in the woods by himself, but as a former New Yorker, Barb had “issues” with his “nature-boy shtick” and insisted that if he was going to go commune with the elves he should at least take a sat phone and GPS locator beacon with him. “So we can find your body before the coyotes and buzzards are finished with it,” she said.

He took out the heavy lump of hated technology, scowling at the small screen as he realized it wasn’t even her on the line. The number looked to be someone at City Hall.

Well, now I’m really pissed, he thought. Only his wife and the park rangers were supposed to have this number, and true to her promise Barb had never actually used it. But apparently she’d gone and given it to some pinhead at work.

Unless of course it’s telemarketers. Please God, don’t let it be telemarketers.

He was simultaneously dreading and relishing the prospect as he answered. If this was some asshole in New Delhi trying to sell him a time-share apartment…

“Kipper. You there?”

The chief engineer of the Seattle City Council closed his eyes and exhaled.

“Hey, Barney. This better be good, man.”

Whoever had decided they had something worth interrupting his precious hiking holiday had chosen the messenger well. Barney Tench was his closest friend and probably the only person who could call him right now, safe in the knowledge that he would survive the encounter.

“It ain’t good, Jimmy,” said Tench, and for the first time Kipper noticed the tremor in his friend’s voice. Was he scared?

When he spoke again he sounded like he’d just survived a train wreck. Like he was terrified.

“It’s fucked, man. Totally fucked. You gotta get back here right now. I know it’s your break and all, but we need you, right now.”

Kipper shivered as a single bead of sweat trickled down his spine before hitting a patch of thermal underwear and being absorbed.

“What’s up, Barn? Just tell me what’s going on.”

Tench groaned.

“That’s it, Jimmy. Nobody knows. Could be a war. Could be a fucking comet strike. We don’t know.”

“A what?”

His surroundings were completely forgotten now. All of James Kipper’s attention was focused down the invisible connection to his friend and colleague back in the city. A friend who seemed to have lost his marbles.

“What d’you mean a comet or a war, Barney? What’s going on?”

“The whole country is gone, Jimmy. All of it, ‘cept us. And Alaska I guess. Even Canada’s gone. Most of it, anyway, in the east.”

The ice water he’d just swallowed was sitting very heavily in his stomach, as though he’d gulped down a gallon of the stuff instead of just a mouthful. That might have been anger. He was beginning to suspect that this was some sort of prank. Tench was famous for them. When they’d been rooming together in college he’d fabricated an entire gala ball at the Grand Hyatt, convincing a couple of college babes to hand out “free,” “strictly limited” tickets on campuses all over town. Tench and Kipper had got as drunk as lords sitting in the lobby bar, dressed in rented tuxedos, watching hundreds of students waving their bogus ball tickets in the face of a bewildered hotel manager. Barney Tench was more than capable of fucking with someone’s head for a laugh. Especially Kipper’s.

“Gone where, Barney?” he growled. “You’re not making any sense.”

“Just gone, Jimmy. Just fucking gone.” His voice was scaling higher with every word he said. “Turn on your locator beacon. There’s a National Guard chopper headed your way soon. They’re gonna pick you up and transfer you to a plane somewhere. A C-130 or something, they said. One of them big fat ones. It’ll get you straight in here. Council’s called an emergency meeting. All heads of department. Governor’s office is sending a team, although nobody can find Gary Locke. His schedule had him in transit today. In the air,” he added, as though that explained everything.

“Barney, is my family safe?” asked Kipper.

“They’re fine, buddy, they’re fine. Barb gave me your number. Look, I gotta go. The guard can fill you in. I got a thousand calls to make now that I found you. Just fire up that beacon, sit your ass down, and wait.”

“Bar …”

But the line cut out.

“What the fuck was that about?” he muttered. Shaking his head, Kipper knelt in front of his pack and popped the snap lock on the pocket containing his personal locator beacon, a lightweight ACR Terrafix unit. He powered up the little yellow device and couldn’t help searching the skies, even though he knew his ride was probably still an hour away. Assuming it came at all, and Barney wasn’t now roaring with laughter, about to fall backward off his chair. Who knew?

Subzero air torrents high above him stretched a few scraps of cloud into long white ribbons, streaming away toward the coast. He caught sight of a giant hawk as it dived into the valley, wings folded back.

“Someone’s about to get eaten,” he thought aloud.

Then he noticed the contrail, maybe twenty miles farther north. The sky was crisscrossed with contrails during the colder months, great white arcs of vapor trailing the jetliners as they headed for Seattle, or the Pacific and the long haul to Japan or down to Honolulu. There seemed to be fewer than usual, just this one actually, and he had never seen a plane tracking that low over the Cascades before. His unease at the weird call from Barney tightened into alarm as he watched the slow arc of the aircraft and realized it wasn’t going to clear the mountains toward which it was headed.

“No,” he whispered, aware that he almost never spoke aloud on his hiking trips, and that he was positively yapping his head off today. “No, don’t.”

His mouth was dry, and he drank from his canteen without thinking. The cold water hit his clenched stomach like acid, and for a second he thought he might vomit. That faraway plane, a thin tube of metal enfolding—what? a hundred, two hundred souls?—slowly, gracefully, inexorably speared itself into the side of a mountain, impacting just over the snow line, freeing great blossoming petals of dirty yellow flame to roll away into the morning air.

“Ah shit.”

Kipper shook his head, and took a few steps toward the small, roiling ball of fire before he stopped himself. He would never make it, and anyway he had to stay here and wait for the chopper. He apparently had his own disaster to deal with.

Still, he had to do something.

He keyed 911 into his sat phone, glancing down momentarily to check that he’d gotten the numbers right. He could at least call this in. Maybe someone had survived. A ridiculous thought, which he recognized as such as soon as he’d had it. But he couldn’t just stand by with his thumb in his ass, taking in the view, could he?

“Nine-one-one, which service do you require?”

The dispatcher sounded harried, and just as freaked out as Barney had been. But then, Kipper thought, that was probably her normal state of being.

“This is James Kipper, chief engineer, Seattle City Council. I’ve just seen a passenger plane crash. A big jet.”

The dispatcher’s voice seemed nearly mechanical, washed free of human affect by the multiple layers of impossibly complicated technology required to allow Kipper to speak to her from the side of this mountain in the middle of nowhere.

“Sir, what is your location and the location of the incident?”

As Kipper told her that he was in the lower reaches of the Cascades, and read his location off the GPS beacon, the soft rumble of the titanic explosion finally reached him.

“Sir, please repeat. Are you outside the metro area?”

“Yes, damn it. I just watched this plane go down in the mountains. It was flying out of the east and it got too low and …”

“Are you outside the Seattle metro area, sir?”

“Yes, I …”

“Your call has been logged sir, but we cannot dispatch anyone right now. Please hang up and leave the line free for genuine emergency calls.”

And with that he was cut off.

“What the fuck?” he said, loud enough to startle a flight of birds from a nearby tree. A mass of snow, disturbed by their takeoff, fell to the ground with a soft, wet crunch. Twenty miles to the north a pillar of dark smoke climbed away into the hard blue sky. A secondary explosion bloomed silently in the heart of the maelstrom on the face of the granite peak. Kipper was still staring at the phone in disbelief when the sound reached him.

Seattle, Washington

The parking lot of the supermarket on Broadway East could be a challenge at the best of times. Barbara’s little Honda had picked up three mystery scratches and dents there over the past six months. But today it felt like genuine hell. With one hand she was trying to steer a heavily laden cart sporting at least two malfunctioning wheels, while carrying a sobbing child on her other arm and attempting to redial Kipper’s number on her cell phone. The Safeway parking lot was full of hysterics and loons, some of them normal people who’d gone over the edge, but also some full-time nutbars who’d turned up with sandwich boards urging everyone to “REPENT” as the “HOUR OF DOOM” was “AT HAND!!!!” The signs looked quite professional, as though they’d been prepared much earlier for just this occasion. Barb had taken a small measure of childish joy from clipping one of the Jesus freaks with the corner of her fast-moving, barely controlled metal shopping cart.

She was less pleased with the long scrape she gouged out of the paintwork as she stumbled and lost her grip on the cart just as they made it to the car.

“Shit!”

Suzie, who at six years old was way too big to be carried, one-armed or otherwise, for more than a few steps, struggled to clamber deeper into Barbara Kipper’s embrace. “I’m scared, Mommy,” she cried.

Struggling with her daughter, Barbara lost her grip on the cell phone, a cheap flip-top model, which fell to the asphalt and broke into two.

“Oh shit! Oh … I’m sorry, sweetheart. Mommy’s sorry. Just hop down, okay, and …”

Suzie, who had buried her face in Barbara’s neck, shook her head and wailed, “Noooo.”

“Suffer the little children unto him, good lady …”

Barb spun around to find that one of the nuts had followed her through the heaving crush of the parking lot and was holding aloft a small branch of some sort, waving it as if to bless her.

“Suffer the little …”

“I’ll fucking suffer you to get the hell away from me, you goddamned freak. You’re scaring the bejesus out of my daughter.”

She fixed him with such a baleful stare that he actually seemed to recoil, but Barbara, who was normally so conscious of others’ feelings, felt not the least bit contrite. This place was a madhouse. It was as though people had gone berserk or something when the first news came through, and these holy fucking lunatics were only making it worse. She managed somehow to lower a clinging Suzie to the ground while digging her keys out and thumbing the car’s electronic lock. It opened with a reassuring bleep-bloop, lessening her fears that whatever had happened, it might have put the zap on all the electrics. Some bearded panic merchant had jumped up onto a checkout in the store to announce that an electromagnetic “event” had taken out all the circuits, everywhere. Unfortunately for him the automatic conveyor belt on which he was standing was entirely functional and jerked forward, pulling his feet out from under him. The last Barb had seen of him he was lying on the floor of Safeway with a badly broken ankle.

His theatrics, the almost instant viral panic that had seemed to flash through everyone, a couple of fender benders in the parking lot, followed by the inevitable blare of horns, the trilling of alarms, and the increasingly ugly screams of abuse … it had all been enough to upset Suzie so badly she was shivering, begging to know where Daddy was, and whether it was “mine eleven” happening again. Barbara Kipper soothed her as best she could while pushing the child into the backseat, where her stuffed panda, Poofy Bear, might at least provide some comfort.

She popped the hatch and transferred the shopping bags as quickly as possible, with no idea how she was going to get them away from here. The lot was a gridlocked nightmare, with people increasingly desperate to get away, backing and crunching into each other, while more turned up every minute, presumably to panic-buy a year’s worth of discount Pop-Tarts and boxed mac-‘n’-cheese, the specials of the day.

A short distance away two men were squaring up for a fight. An actual fight. One was huge, enormously obese, while the other looked tall and fit. God only knew what they were pissed at each other about. Maybe the big guy got the last of the Pop-Tarts. They circled each other, feinting and throwing out air punches, and then, much to her surprise, the thinner of the two bent over and charged the other guy like a rhino, head-butting him in the gut. They went down in a tangle as police or maybe ambulance sirens seemed to be closing in from somewhere nearby.

Barbara shook her head in disgust and threw the last of her groceries into the hatch.

Having unloaded the cart, she didn’t dare push it back to the collection bay for fear of leaving Suzie alone for even a moment. She could have killed Kipper at that point. He would choose this of all weeks to disappear into the mountains.

As soon as she voiced the thought in her mind, her heart lurched forward.

Disappeared.

No, he wasn’t gone too. He was fine. He’d left a hiking plan with her and the park rangers, and as soon as she’d called them they said there was no way he would have been anywhere near the edge of this … effect… event… whatever it was. It was on the far side of the mountains. They said he’d be cool. Barney said the same thing.

She began shaking anyway, an uncontrolled shudder that seized her whole body as dizziness threatened to steal her legs from under her. Biting down on a knuckle until she drew blood helped focus her mind away from the terror that wanted to swamp her. The pain was something sharp and real, something on which to focus. And as soon as she did, Barb was embarrassed that she’d let herself get so frantic. She gathered up the broken pieces of her cell phone and tossed them into the front passenger seat before moving around to the driver’s door. She was going to hit the shopping cart if she backed out, but she really didn’t care. Getting Suzie away from here was more important.

“Is Daddy all right, Mommy? Is he okay?” her daughter asked as soon as Barb had the door closed. It shut out some of the chaos and madness but meant that Suzie could see without any distractions just how disturbed her mother was.

“He’s fine, sweetheart,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “His friends from work are phoning him and sending a helicopter just for him. To bring him home. He’ll be back later, don’t worry.”

“But what if he got eaten, Mommy? I heard a man in the store say everyone was eaten. Everyone.”

“Daddy is fine,” she repeated as calmly as possible, even as her head reeled with the insanity of it all. “And nobody was eaten, Suzie. I don’t know what’s happened, but nobody was eaten. That’s just silly talk. Now strap yourself in, sweetie. This is going to be very dangerous.”

The young girl snapped her seat belt to show that she’d already done so, and Barb apologized for not noticing. She keyed the ignition, which worked perfectly, and slowly but resolutely backed out of her parking space, pushing the cart aside with the rear bumper. A few more scrapes and scratches then. The view out of the back window was bedlam, with people swarming and vehicles everywhere. Barb gritted her teeth and kept moving, even as she butted up against other shoppers who didn’t move out of her way. Some hammered on the window, one guy punching it so hard it cracked, causing Suzie to squeal in fear. But Barbara Kipper refused to stop, believing that to do so would see them trapped. She was only making a walking pace, but kept going. Not for the first time was she grateful for driving a small car in this parking lot. While SUVs and sedans soon got themselves jammed together, almost like broken teeth on a zipper, she was able to thread, very slowly and determinedly, through the crowd, until she made it to a small hedge line at the edge of the lot and gunned the little Honda right on through it. The car didn’t like it much, and the scratching of branches on the paintwork was hideous. She almost certainly knocked the wheels out of alignment mounting the curb, but she was suddenly able to press the accelerator and break free onto Harvard Avenue. They bounced and hit the road with a terrible, metallic crunch. But at least they were out.

As they drove away in heavy traffic, Barb was certain she heard the pop of gunfire.

She couldn’t help but keep looking at the phone, wondering if Barney had got through to Kip.