Wrath & Righteousnes Episodes 01 to 05 (100 page)

The Honda coasted to the bottom of the off-ramp and rolled to a stop. Ammon sat forward in the backseat, staring at the instrument panel, which was completely dark. “How much gas did you have?” he asked.

“A little more than a quarter tank.”

“Try it again,” Sara said, her voice tight.

Luke turned the key. Nothing. Not a click. Not a sound. The engine didn’t turn.

“Could the gas gauge be wrong?” she wondered.

Ammon pushed himself farther forward. “You don’t have any headlights,” he said.

Luke turned the key again and again. Nothing. He sat back in exasperation.

“We’re not out of gas,” Ammon said. “If that was the problem, the battery would still turn the engine over. The battery would give us headlights. Maybe the alternator failed.”

Luke slapped the steering wheel in frustration. Sara fought to keep her stomach under control. Would they be able to find a mechanic? How much would it cost them? How long would it take?

Ammon looked around, then swallowed in sudden fear.

Something was wrong.

Really
wrong.

The darkness around them was complete.

The lights from the gas stations had gone out. The streetlights at the bottom of the off-ramp, all the lights in the parking lots, the entire countryside had grown dark. No twinkling lights in the fields. Nothing to the east or west. He looked around desperately.

The glow from the distant lights of Chicago had also disappeared.

It was as if the entire world had fallen dark.

A power outage? Maybe. But if it was, it was a huge one, spreading across the entire area.

He sat back and thought.

Why would a power outage have affected their car?

He stole a glance ahead, expecting to see a long line of car lights on the road before them, but the whole freeway was perfectly dark. Turning, he looked behind them, peering through the back window. He could make out the shadows of the other cars in the moonlight, but none of them were moving. They were all at a standstill.

No headlights. No movement. The radio had gone quiet.

His heart began to pump like a hammer in his head. He leaned over, grabbed the handle, and pushed the door back, listening in the blackness.

Nearly perfect silence. The only sound a gentle breeze.

It was as if the entire world had gone away.

He thought some more and then groaned. He remembered now the time he spent replacing the car’s electrical components after the first bombs dropped.

Sara turned in the seat to look at him. “What is it!” she demanded, her voice steady but thick with fear.

“Try your cell phone,” he commanded.

Sara pulled her cell phone from her purse and flipped it open. “It looks like my batteries are dead.”

“Try yours, Luke.”

He reached into his pocket. “I’ve got nothing.” He pushed and held the on switch. “That’s kind of weird,” he said.

Ammon didn’t answer. Instead, he climbed out of the backseat. His mother and brother followed, meeting him at the front of the car.

Perfect darkness. Perfect silence. Not a light in the distance. No sound of passing cars.

Ammon’s face turned pale in the red moonlight, and Sara moved toward him. “What is it?” she pleaded. “Do you know what has happened? Do you know what’s going on?”

Ammon slowly nodded. Luke reached out for his arm. “What is it, Ammon?” he whispered.

Ammon leaned against the bumper, then lifted his hands to his face. “We’re not going west,” he told them. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Luke turned and looked around him, taking in the total darkness. The night was so quiet it was eerie. He shuddered and hunched his shoulders. “What happened, Ammon?”

“An EMP,” Ammon answered slowly.

“EMP? What is that?”

Before Ammon could answer, they heard a voice calling out from the darkness. Behind them, forty or fifty yards down the freeway, a car door slammed and a woman’s voice called again, “Please, can someone help me?”

Her voice was high and panicked. She was clearly terrified.

Ammon hesitated, staring at the emptiness behind them, then turned to Luke. “Come on,” he said.

They started moving toward the voice that was sounding from the darkness. Sara grabbed Ammon’s arm as he moved away from her, slipping her fingers down to grasp his wrist. “Be careful,” she said, squeezing his arm. “You don’t who it is or what they want.”

Ammon turned toward her. “We’ll be fine, Mom.” He nodded to Luke and started walking. Luke followed him. Ammon stumbled, almost tripping over the shoulder in the road where the asphalt dropped away to meet the gravel, the darkness deep around him, cave-like and complete. “Hey,” he shouted. “Hey there, can you hear me?”

“Yes! Yes! I can hear you. Can you help me?”

The voice was not far away now, just ten or twenty yards. He slowed and waited. “I’m here,” he said. “There are two of us. Can we help you?”

A small black woman emerged from the darkness, a fragile shadow in the starlight. “My car has stopped.”

Ammon shrugged. “So has ours,” he answered carefully. “I’m sure everything’s going to be OK, though. Sometime soon, they’ll send some help.” He was lying now and he knew it and his voice cracked because he wasn’t any good at it. “Don’t worry; I’m sure everything will be just—”

“No,” the woman interrupted him. “Look around you. Everything has stopped. No cars. No lights. It’s like there’s nothing out there.” She gestured around her with her arms. “It isn’t right.” She was silent a long moment, then took a step toward him, looking at his face. “I don’t know what to do now. Please, I have two daughters.”

Ammon looked past the small woman, searching for her daughters, but there was no one there.

Mary Shaye Dupree reached out to him. “I was coming back from a special clinic down in Columbus when my car stopped.” She looked around. “I have a little girl. She is sick. I’ve got to get her home.”

Luke bit his lip as he moved to her side. “I’m sorry, but that’s going to be a little difficult right now. But I’m sure—”

“She’s got to have her medication. I only brought enough for two days. If I don’t get her home, if she doesn’t get her medication. . . .” her voice slowly trailed off.

Luke shifted on his feet, a heavy weight seeming to fall on him. Things were bad enough with just the three of them. What could they do for her? “Your daughter, is she OK?” he asked, sensing Mary’s anguish.

“No. No, she’s not. Please, can you help me?”

Ammon’s jaw tightened up as he turned to Luke. His brother stood back, unsure of what to do.

Mary watched them hopefully. Then, sensing their helplessness and indecision, she reached up, covered her mouth, and breathed deeply, her shoulders shivering with despair.

The missiles reached their target locations: two hundred eighty-five miles high and spread out evenly across the United States, the coordinates roughly corresponding to northern Idaho, the Four Corners, Detroit, and Nashville. Once the missiles had reached their preprogrammed coordinates, they exploded at almost exactly the same time.

Each of the missiles carried a fifty-kiloton warhead, the equivalent of fifty thousand tons of TNT, one hundred million pounds of explosive power.

Inconceivable heat and overpressure spread across the lower reaches of space from the growing fireballs. But the heat and radiation were not the purpose of the explosions, for they were not dangerous to human life, not at such a high altitude.

No, this attack wasn’t designed to kill Americans from either heat or an explosion. It was designed to kill Americans by starving them to death.

As the warheads exploded, an electromagnetic tsunami swept across North America. From the southern edge of Canada to central Mexico, extending as far south as the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, four crashing waves of electromagnetic power burst across the sky.

* * *

In addition to heat and overpressure, a nuclear explosion also generates a massive burst of electromagnetic energy known as an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. When such a surge of X rays and gamma rays are unleashed at the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, they interact with the Earth’s magnetic field, creating an enormous burst of highly charged electrons. The final result is an enormous pulse of energy.

The electromagnetic shock wave generated by the four simultaneous nuclear explosions was unimaginably intense, a hundred million times more powerful than any radio signal ever before created by man. This massive wave of energy raced toward the surface of the earth at the speed of light, destroying every unprotected electrical circuit in its path.

A thousandth of a second after the explosions, the destruction was complete.

* * *

Sometime in the spring of 2005, the United States government came to an incredible conclusion. Almost entirely unreported (which didn’t really matter for there was very little anyone could do about it anyway), the findings of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology, and homeland security were synopsized in the
Washington Post:

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland . . . is one of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its enemies—terrorist or otherwise. And it is probably the easiest. A single Scud missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at the appropriate altitude, would interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at the speed of light. Depending on the location and size of the blast, the effect would be to knock out already stressed power grids and other electrical systems across much or even all of the continental United States, for months if not years.

. . . [T]he loss of power would have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order.

. . . .

Those who survived . . . would find themselves transported back to the United States of the 1880s.

This threat may sound straight out of Hollywood, but it is very real. CIA Director Porter Goss recently testified before Congress about nuclear material missing from storage sites in Russia that may have found its way into terrorist hands . . . . Iran has surprised intelligence analysts by describing the mid-flight detonations of missiles fired from ships on the Caspian Sea as “successful” tests. North Korea exports missile technology around the world; Scuds can easily be purchased on the open market for about $100,000 apiece.

A terrorist organization might have trouble putting a nuclear warhead “on target” with a Scud, but it would be much easier to simply launch and detonate in the atmosphere. No need for the risk and difficulty of trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon over the border or hit a particular city. Just launch a cheap missile from a freighter in international waters—al Qaeda is believed to own about 80 such vessels—and make sure to get it a few miles in the air.

. . . .

Today few Americans can conceive of the possibility that terrorists could bring our society to its knees by destroying everything we rely on that runs on electricity. But this time we’ve been warned . . . .

([Senator] Jon Kyl, “Unready For This Attack,”
Washington Post
, April 16, 2005, A19,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57774-2005Apr15.html
)

* * *

Microseconds after the four warheads exploded, all across the United States, electrical conductors and generators were destroyed. Transmission lines were rendered useless. Computers and microchips were instantly burned through. In a fraction of a second, the United States of America was transplanted back to the preindustrial world.

Electronic banking as well as the financial information on 300 million Americans was instantly vaporized, disappearing in a puff of digital smoke. With a flash of unseen light, the United States became a cash-only world.

At the time of the explosions, there were a few more than three thousand four hundred civilian airliners in the sky. (Had the explosions occurred just a few hours earlier, at the height of the afternoon aviation rush, the number of airborne aircraft would have exceeded five thousand.) None of the electrical circuits inside these aircraft were designed to withstand an electromagnetic pulse. As a result, the flight controls, navigation equipment, GPS, radars, cockpit displays, and electronic engine controllers were rendered useless. Most of these aircraft crashed.

Thirty-two hundred aircraft. On average, one hundred fifty passengers apiece.

Six hundred forty thousand Americans dead.

But tens of millions of other deaths would follow, for the entire nation was now just a few months away from mass starvation, completely incapable of feeding itself. The ability to plant, harvest, or transport food, the ability to purify and provide clean water, the ability to provide for the most basic needs had been instantly stripped away.

And that was just the beginning.

Medical instruments, hospital power generators, electronic ignitions inside tractor-trailer trucks and family automobiles, controllers inside the diesel engines on locomotives, cell phones, televisions, refrigeration units, the infrastructure for handling power, fuel, energy, banking and finance, telecommunications, emergency services—all of it was gone.

Four simple warheads—none of them more sophisticated or any larger than those designed during WWII—were all it took to bring the greatest nation on earth to its knees.

Ed. Note: The WRATH & RIGHTEOUSNESS series is made up of ten epsiodes. Visit
www.mercuryink.com
for release dates and links to download the remaining episodes.