Doug went back to his car and tried turning the key again, to no avail. He tested the radio. Still nothing. “I don’t believe this.”
Deni found a Kleenex and blew her nose. “This is just great! Are we going to have to stay in this creepy place with planes crashing all around us? I want to go home.”
He turned to the backseat and saw a Walkman one of the kids had left there. He grabbed it, shoved the headphones on, and tried to get a station.
All he got was silence.
“Nothing?” Deni asked.
“Nothing.”
“Maybe it’s all the metal in the garage, blocking the radio waves.”
He got back out of the car, took it to the edge of the garage, and tried again. Still nothing.
Slowly, he removed the headphones as the stark realization took hold of him. Everything was dead. Electricity, phones, cars, radio waves . . . even planes in midflight.
As he got back into his useless car, Doug Branning felt the world spinning out of control.
And he was powerless to stop it.
three
“Oh, no! Tell me this isn’t happening.” A brand-new car wasn’t supposed to die in rush hour traffic. But one minute Kay Branning was sitting in line at the red light, cranking up the air conditioner so her kids would stop complaining, and the next minute the engine had cut off and stubbornly refused to start again.
Panicked, she turned the key, but nothing happened. Soon the light would change, and people lined up for miles behind her would start honking their horns if she didn’t get out of the way.
“Come on, Mom!” Jeff, her sixteen-year-old jock who’d just pitched a no-hitter, banged on the dashboard. “I’ve got a date tonight and I have to get a shower!”
“Calm down.” Kay tried to think. Maybe the air conditioner and radio were putting too much strain on the battery. She cut them all off.
The car still wouldn’t start.
“I didn’t even want to come to this stupid game,” Beth, her twelve-year-old, cried. “Dad and Deni are going to be home before we are. Why did you even make me come?”
Kay ground her teeth. “Because it’s your brother’s game, and we support each other in this family!”
“Don’t do me any favors, Beth,” Jeff said. “I didn’t need you there, pouting like a four-year-old.”
“Why don’t you shut up?” Beth snapped.
“Mom, I told you to buy the Tahoe,” Jeff went on, unscathed. “But no, you had to have the Expedition.”
“I’m dying of thirst.” This whimper came from the backseat, as Kay’s nine-year-old stood up and leaned over the seat in front of him. “It’s hot. Can’t you turn the air conditioner on?”
“No, Logan, I can’t.”
“The car’s dead,” Beth said. “As in, no power.” As she spoke, she grabbed the Game Boy that he’d laid on the seat.
“Give that back!” he shouted. “Mom!”
Kay gave up trying to start the car. She popped the hood and opened her door to get out.
“What are you doing?” Jeff asked.
“Looking under the hood.”
He started to laugh. “For what? Do you even know what you’re looking for?”
“No, but if you do, why don’t you get out and help me?”
“That’s right, genius,” Logan snapped. “Go help her.”
Kay looked at the line behind her, hoping they’d be patient with her. Maybe someone who knew cars would come to her aid.
But no one was focused on her. Others were getting out of their own cars, popping their own hoods. An eerie silence hovered over them—no engines running, no horns beeping, no radios playing. Just the sound of the hot breeze sweeping through the trees.
And she smelled something burning, but there was no sign of a fire or smoke anywhere.
“What is this?” Kay whispered.
Jeff got out and looked around, his eyes as big as quarters. “Way cool. They’re all dead. Everybody’s car died at the same time.”
Beth got out of the car, and Logan climbed up to the front. “Everybody’s?” he said. “Why?”
Kay shook her head. “I have no idea, but I’m calling your father.” She grabbed her cell phone out of the car, flipped it open . . .
But it was dead, too. “It’s not working, either.”
“What?” Jeff took her phone. “Let me see.”
Kay went to the man standing at the pickup in front of her. He, too, was trying his cell phone.
“Excuse me, do you have any idea what’s going on?”
“None,” he said. “The cars are dead, my cell phone doesn’t work, my PDA won’t come on, even my watch has stopped.”
Kay looked down at her own watch. The digital readout was blank. “What in the world would knock out our cars and our watches?”
Jeff came around the car. “There’s a store at the Exxon station on the next block. Why don’t we walk there and see what we can find out?”
Kay turned back to her Expedition. “I can’t abandon the car here. I have to move it when it starts again.”
“Then I’ll go by myself.”
Kay couldn’t explain the feeling of uneasiness weighing on her. “Okay, but be careful.”
“Why?” Jeff chuckled. “Not like I’m gonna get hit by a car.”
“Use the pay phone to call your dad. He and Deni should have landed by now. Maybe he knows something.”
She watched as Jeff trudged off in his baseball uniform and dirty cleats.
“Mom, it’s hot!”
“Then get out of the car, Logan.”
“It’s hotter out there.”
Kay was already starting to sweat. “What would you like me to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Unless you have a solution, stop whining.” She looked down the street at all the cars stalled in rush hour traffic and told herself to calm down. There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. Something had happened to cause it, and soon they would know what it was and how to fix it.
People came out of the insurance office next to them, and a woman hurried toward her. “What’s going on with the cars?”
“They’re all dead,” Kay said. “No reason. They just stopped running at the same time.”
The woman looked stunned. “And all our power went out.”
“Really?”
“Has to be an electromagnetic pulse.” The man from in front of her seemed to be thinking aloud. “That would knock out everything electronic.”
“But what would cause something like that?”
“An e-bomb, maybe.”
“A bomb?” Kay caught her breath and looked out over the sky. “Then we could be under attack?” She searched for a sign of smoke indicating a bomb had hit somewhere. The sky was a radiant blue, and there was no sign that anything catastrophic had happened. She looked back at her Expedition, and saw Beth walking up the street to talk to a friend three cars up.
“Beth, come back!”
Her daughter turned around.
“Don’t go anywhere. Stay right here with me.”
“Why?”
She couldn’t tell her that she feared something worse might be about to happen, that there could be radiation in the air, or toxins, or bombs about to drop . . . “Just do what I tell you.”
Logan picked that moment to come out of the car. She grabbed his arm and shoved him back in. “Get back in the car!”
“But you said to get out! It’s hot in there!”
“Do it!” she shouted. “Now!”
Both kids muttered as they got back in. Kay stood there a moment, trying to get a grip on herself. Why was she yelling at them? It didn’t make any sense.
None of this did. All she knew was that she was scared. She just didn’t know of what.
four
Sweat trickled down Doug’s neck and soaked into the collar of his button-down shirt as he sat with Deni inside the airport. They’d gone back inside after realizing the car wasn’t tak
ing them anywhere. As they’d come in, they’d seen firefighters running to the scene on foot. Through the glass, he saw the planes still on fire, caught the smell of burning metal and fuel working its way into the terminal. The firefighters worked at the wreckage with handheld fire extinguishers in a desperate attempt to quench the flames and pull survivors from the planes.
There was more activity at the second plane than the first. There hadn’t been an explosion on that one, and even though the plane had spun and tumbled after landing, it looked like there could be survivors. The emergency crews worked quickly, as if anticipating an explosion, and finally got the doors open.
Deni erupted out of her seat and rushed to the window. “Dad, look! Someone’s alive.”
Doug joined her, watching as they carried out a man in uniform. “It’s one of the pilots.”
They placed the man on a gurney, but where would they take him? They couldn’t put him in an ambulance and whisk him to the hospital. Doug wished he were a doctor and could treat him on the spot. He prayed that there was one out there already, someone who knew exactly what needed to be done.
Doug watched, breath held, as a few others came out of the wreckage, some walking, others carried.
Deni reached for his hand as she kept her gaze glued to the site. He didn’t know when she had last done that before today. Ten years? Twelve? At twenty-two, Deni was fiercely independent. He closed his hand around hers, offering shallow reassurance. The crew started bringing the survivors in the door close to Doug and Deni, and the cluster of people at the window moved to get a look.
They waited until the pilot was carried in, and Doug tried to see if he was conscious. A man ran alongside the gurney, keeping pressure on the pilot’s bleeding head wound. He saw the pilot bring a bloody hand to his face. The man was conscious.
Another passenger walked in behind him, smudges from smoke marring the skin around her nose and mouth. Coughing, she limped through the crowd.
Deni let go of Doug’s hand and threw herself at the woman. “Ma’am, did your plane get shot down?”
Doug grabbed Deni’s arm, wishing she had waited for someone who wasn’t injured.
The woman coughed, then answered in a raspy voice. “I don’t know what happened. All I know is that the lights shut off in the plane, and we started dropping. No announcement, no nothing. Next thing we know we’re rolling across the runway.”
Deni turned back to Doug. “That pilot is awake, Dad. I bet he knows what happened.”
Doug nodded. “Let’s follow and see if we can find anybody who spoke to him.”
They followed the gurney up the concourse and to the small Crown Room. Doug caught up with one of the disheveled crew members who’d helped get the pilot out.
“Excuse me, did the pilot say what happened?”
The man’s eyes darted from the victims to the window. “He’s as much in the dark as we are. Said his power just shut off, and nothing worked. Not even the radio. All four engines died. He had to glide the plane to the nearest airport and land it manually. If it had been a bigger, newer plane, they’d have fallen like a lawn dart—just like the first plane. It’s a miracle there were any survivors.”
Doug stared after the man as he disappeared into the Crown Room, running the words through his mind. Plane engines dying midair, cars stalling, electricity failing . . .
“Dad, I’m scared. Planes don’t just fall out of the sky.”
He swallowed and rubbed his jaw. It was war. Had to be. Someone had attacked them, just like on 9/11. Maybe it was a nuclear attack in the atmosphere, powerful enough to knock out everything electronic, but not to destroy the buildings and cities . . . or people.
He supposed he should be grateful there was no more human fallout. But what if their safety was just an illusion? What if the bomb, if there was one, had somehow released deadly bacteria or viruses or toxins that would wipe out the whole region in a matter of hours? If not that, then radiation could be rippling on the air right now, slowly working on the cells of their bodies . . .
“Dad, I want to go home.” Panic rippled on Deni’s voice.
The same panic lodged itself in his throat. He took a deep breath, and tried to draw his thoughts back. Get a grip, man. Deni needs strength from you, not paranoia.
He didn’t have enough information to form any solid conclusions. It wasn’t necessarily a nuclear or atomic attack. It could be just a weird weather front, like all those hurricanes in Florida last year, or the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka. Some kind of unexpected electrical force that flashed through the sky. Or something else none of them had even thought of.
He had to stay calm. “Yeah, I think we need to go home. Doesn’t look like the power’s coming back on in the next few hours.”
Her lips quivered. “But how will we get there?”
He crossed the floor to the other side of the building, looking out the window to the parking lot. People were hiking up the road that circled the terminals. “We’ll have to walk.” He looked down at the four-inch heels on his daughter’s feet. How on earth did she walk in those things? “Deni, don’t you have some tennis shoes in your bag?”
“No, I didn’t anticipate having to hoof it for forty miles.”
He ignored the petulance in her tone. “It’s not forty. It’s more like sixteen. But you still won’t make it in heels.”
“So what do we do? Just stay here?”
No, that wasn’t an option. They had to get home. He wanted to be with his family, make sure everything was all right.
“Tell you what,” he said. “There’s a Wal-Mart a few miles away. Let’s walk there and buy a bicycle and some more comfortable shoes.”
Her eyes lit up. “Okay, let’s hurry before other people get the same idea. But what about our bags? We won’t be able to carry them on bikes.”
“We’ll leave them in the car. Come back for them in your mom’s car.”
“Okay.” She pranced along in her designer pants and silk blouse. “But I need to get some stuff out of my suitcase.”
“Deni, we’ll have to travel light.”
“I know. Just a few necessities.” They reached his car, and he opened the trunk and watched, irritated, as she opened her suitcase and pulled out her Chanel makeup pouch, and the 5x7 framed portrait of her fiancé, Craig, who lived in D.C. He’d made a big deal yesterday of giving her a “special gift,” and Deni got all excited trying to guess what it was. When she finally opened the package and saw that it was an 8x10 of Craig, Doug felt like slugging him and saying, You think that’s a prize, bud? A lousy picture of you? It’s about as exciting as that pitiful excuse of a diamond you gave her.
Doug suspected since she’d come home with that one-carat rock that it was cubic zirconia. He supposed, with Craig’s position in Senator Crawford’s office, the kid could afford the real thing. But Craig Martin didn’t strike him as the type who would spring for a diamond that size. For himself, maybe, but not for Deni.
He bit his tongue as Deni pulled that picture out of her suitcase, like it was her most cherished possession. Next came her flat iron.
“Deni, until the power comes back on, you can’t even use that.”
“But what if it’s on at home?”
Doug shook his head. “You can’t carry all that stuff on a bike.”
She started to argue, then sighed. “I guess you’re right.” She jabbed the flat iron under the wadded clothes and put the picture back. “Okay, there.”
He slammed the trunk shut. “Let’s go.”
Deni walked next to him at a fast clip, her heels clicking on the asphalt. They crossed the garage and stepped out into the sunlight. It was only five thirty p.m., and the sun blazed down with merciless heat. His shirt would be soaked by the time they reached Wal-Mart.
Already, dozens of people walked ahead of them, winding their way out of the airport maze. Unless something changed, hundreds of others would follow them soon.
As they made their way around Messer Airport High
way, they saw cars stalled in the middle of the road. Some were abandoned, though most still had people sitting on hoods or milling around them in the street. The atmosphere seemed almost festive.
He looked over at Deni, wondering how her feet were holding up. She walked with her head held high, that slight air of superiority floating around her as she clomped through the people, her purse swinging from her shoulder.