The Gates_The Arrival Page 5

  At this point, it was better if he stayed in the woods, lived off the land and waited…but waited until what? When? Erik wasn’t even sure what was going on, just a frenetic call from Finn and some disturbing reports from the cable news.

  He dialed Harper again. She picked up on the first ring and from the sound of her voice, she had begun to realize the seriousness of the situation. Finally.

  “Erik?” She nearly screamed into the phone and Erik had to turn it away from him to protect his ear. “Oh my God! Erik!” Harper was nearly in tears. “I got Tara, she’s right here with me, we got water and batteries and…”

  “Harper!” Erik shouted back at her. “I need you to be quiet and listen to me. It’s not enough, I’m glad you got supplies, but listen to me.” He thought a moment and decided that three heads were better than two. “Put me on speaker, I want Tara to hear this too.” There was a pause and he could just make out Harper calling her friend over.

  “Okay,” Harper said, sounding like she was talking from the bottom of a large barrel.

  “Hi Erik!” Tara called from the same barrel. Calmer than his sister. Good. Leave it to Tara to keep her head in an emergency.

  Erik ignored the pleasantries. “I need you both to listen to me. This is only going to get worse.” There were muffled protests, but he talked over them. “Now that you have supplies to get you through this, you have a new problem.”

  “Great,” Harper snapped. “I was tired of the end of the world, I was hoping for something new to freak out over. Now what?”

  “There are people who are going to want this stuff.” Tara said flatly. Erik nodded before he realized she couldn’t see him.

  “Yeah. People with guns,” he added, wishing there’d been some way to arm them in this crisis, if only to protect themselves. Harper kind of knew how to shoot, at any rate. Their dad had seen to that on their camping trips as kids. He shook his head; no time to worry about that now. “You need to get somewhere safe. The general populace doesn’t know how bad this is yet; it’ll take some time for them to wake up and figure it out. You need to leave now, before the highways jam up and people start panicking.”

  “Leave?” Harper yelled, her voice rising in a tone bordering on the hysterical. “Where?”

  “Calm down.” Erik ordered. He heard some general mumbling and some motion. Tara came back on the phone.

  “Erik, this is Tara, Harper is…pretty upset. I’m having her sit down a moment. What did you have in mind?”

  “I got a call from Finn.” Erik started, and he heard a scream. “Harper!” His heart leapt and he froze in his tracks. He was a long way from his sister and yet his body had the insane urge to run to her rescue as if she was just next door.

  “It’s okay!” Tara yelled, but Erik wasn’t sure if she was telling him or his sister. “The power went out. It’s been doing that all day, Harper.” Erik could hear his sister in the background, but the sound was muffled, distorted. She sounded like she was fighting for breath, but it soon calmed and she kept repeating, “I’m okay, I’m okay…”

  “See?” Tara’s voice came through clearly again. “Power’s back on, everything is okay, Harper, let’s just find out what we want to do next, okay?” She was talking to her like she would a small child hiding from thunder. It seemed appropriate. Erik was increasingly glad he’d sent Harper to Tara.

  “Tara?” Erik said into the phone. “You have to get out of the city.”

  “I assumed as much,” Tara said. “I left most of the non-perishables in the car and we’ve already cooked up as much of the rest as we could. We don’t really have a smoker or a way to make jerky…”

  “I know, I know, it’s okay. Listen, I want you to take some directions down; get a pen and paper.”

  “Where are we heading?” Tara asked but he could hear her comply.

  “A place Finn told me about. It will be our rendezvous point. I’ll meet you there and so will Finn,” Erik added quietly, “if he can.”

  He gave her the instructions Finn had given him. “It’s just outside of a little place called Carlisle in Pennsylvania. Finn knows people there, survivalists.”

  “Do you think they’ll welcome new people?” Tara asked doubtfully. “I’ve heard they can be very…protective of their own.”

  “Well, you’ll be bringing in supplies.” Truth be told, Erik wasn’t altogether sure of this point himself, though Finn had seemed pretty certain when he’d brought it up. “You’re not exactly coming in begging. Also, you have a connection in Finn. He’s a mutual friend, use his name. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but things in DC are crazy even at the best of times and this is not the best of times.”

  “Tell me something then,” Tara asked, her voice dropping. She didn’t want Harper to hear this question, he realized, and was thankful to her for trying to keep his sister calm. “What’s the mood like there?”

  Erik sighed. “Right now, things feel…edgy. Everyone that’s in any way hooked into what’s going on is warning people in vague ways and it’s creating situations. There’s been some minor rioting in a few of the stores, but the press is playing it up to the power failures as a cause. Everyone seems on edge. There’s still nothing official, but I can see a lot of people taking last-minute vacations all of a sudden.”

  “‘Minor rioting.’ Ha. There’s nothing minor about being in the middle of a riot. All right…” Tara sighed, “be careful, okay? Here, hold on a minute.”

  Erik waited while the phone made more muffled noises and then he heard his sister. She sounded…small, as if the weight of all this suddenly hit her and she’d shrunken under the strain. “Hey doofus…” she tried to keep the tone light, but she was scared, and Erik could feel it over the phone.

  “Hey, peanut.” Erik’s tone softened automatically to meet hers. “You’re going to be okay.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “Yes.” Erik said, smiling for the first time since this whole mess had started. “Big brothers are still allowed to give orders to their little sisters.” He didn’t know what else to say. Tell her it was all going to work out? It wouldn’t. Tell her it was all an elaborate hoax? It wasn’t. The only things he could think to tell her would only make things worse and he didn’t need her panicking right now. She’d figure it out soon enough. But for now, their best chance at survival was a level head. Harper was…volatile…even under the best of circumstances. He cleared his throat and steered the conversation over to what was safe. “I’m still trying to get hold of Dad. He’s probably out on the lake. Probably locked his phone in the trunk again and forgot all about it.”

  “Of course.” Harper laughed a little. There might have been just a small touch of hysteria in that laugh, but it was a genuine laugh for all that. “Since he retired, that’s pretty much all he does.”

  “Don’t worry,” Erik tried to assure her, “I’ll get in touch with him. The cabin is a safe place for now. And eventually I’ll get him out to that place too.” So long as he stays put. Please let him stay put.

  “Are you going to be there?” Harper sounded like a frightened little girl. Erik fervently wished that he could be there to support her, to take away the fears.

  “Count on it,” he said with more conviction than he felt, knowing that she was going to have to grow up over the next few days, and that this coming of age was going to be a bitch.

  “Thank you,” Harper said, “thank you for looking out for me.”

  “Anytime, peanut.”

  And that’s a promise I’m going to keep.

  She said goodbye and Erik stood with a dead phone in his hand. He tried a fifth text to his father with the same results.

  Chapter Eight

  Finn

  “New York is having sporadic blackouts,” someone said into the room. The voice was calm, like he was reading the weather report. “It’s like a little kid discovering where the light switches are. On and off at random. Sometimes the power’s off for a second or two, sometimes it lasts sever
al minutes. It’s all…” Whoever was making the report stopped. “And…the power is out again.”

  LA had been out for over an hour. According to reports, Japan was in complete shutdown, nothing there was moving at all. Even the airports were re-routing flights elsewhere. Germany and Sweden were both running off solar, but that wasn’t enough to provide for everything they needed. If this kept up every plane in the world was going to end up grounded.

  It wasn’t a good thought.

  “The eastern seaboard is experiencing random brownouts,” someone else noted.

  London had been black for an hour. Had they really expected that it wouldn’t affect the United States? That they wouldn’t go down just as easily?

  “Any word on the cause of all this?” Finn asked the man beside him. He was another civilian contractor and the one most likely to talk to him. As the day progressed, the gap between the military and non-military had widened and the uneasy truce that governed the workplace relationships were beginning to crack.

  “Just heard that the president and some of the NATO leaders are threatening some middle eastern powers, claiming that this is all terrorism. They deny it, but no one can tell how much they’re affected…” He clamped his jaw shut and returned his attention to the monitor in front of him as someone in uniform walked by, darting an uneasy glance of apology in Finn’s general direction when the coast was clear.

  Finn wasn’t so shy. He nodded and smiled at the lieutenant, and received a look that only be described as a glower as he walked past. Finn sighed. So much for making friends and influencing people. He shouldn’t have wasted his money on that Carnegie course.

  “Right now, everyone is trying to figure out if this is really happening,” his civilian cohort murmured, his eyes still fastened on his screen.

  “Someone with complete access to the world’s power and completely without any sense of accountability? I can see why they would want to think that this is all a bad dream,” Finn said under his breath and pulled up logs from the day before when the world made sense and the servers under his control were still under his control.

  “I wish it was,” the man admitted, with a sad shake of his head. He wasn’t really working, Finn noticed. He was twisting his wedding ring around on his finger, trying not to let on that his hands were shaking.

  Finn glanced at his own hands, wondering that his were so steady.

  “New York is completely down now,” the first voice reported into the silence. “No power at all.”

  “There are reports of thousands of people stranded on the Metra out in Chicago,” someone else said, in a tone that sounded less official, more like gossip. “And they’re saying O’Hare is shut down now. No flights in or out of Chicago. Even Midway is closing.”

  “Confirmation?”

  “I’ve got it… All flights stopped,” came another voice from across the room. “They’ve declared a state of emergency for local area hospitals…”

  “Not just around Chicago. Everywhere. All hospitals going on alert. Generators top priority…”

  “Widespread looting…”

  “Reports of fires breaking out in Atlanta. Dallas…”

  Finn sat behind a glowing computer screen and listened as the horrors of the day rolled over the room. There wasn’t a man or woman in that room who didn’t have someone, or in all likelihood, several someones out there in the middle of that mess. Yet here they were, sacrificing those selfsame loved ones, leaving them to fend for themselves while they all sat and did their jobs.

  Finn played with the phone in his pocket. He’d called the only person he could. He’d tried to impress on that individual just all how serious this was. How this was not just a power glitch. Had he believed him?

  How many other people in the room had made quiet calls they weren’t supposed to? What rumors were floating around out there? Were they creating the very panic they were trying to avoid by making hurried phone calls, sending carefully worded texts when they thought no one was looking?

  Of course by this time, the fact that there were widespread problems was pretty evident. California was black. From Connecticut to North Carolina satellite imagery showed a great fluctuating darkness where millions of individual lights once burned. Phoenix was scheduled for a hundred-twenty degree plus heat the next day and there would be no air conditioning to combat it. Hospitals and nursing homes were losing patients as the life support systems failed and backup generators, not checked near often enough, sputtered and failed under a strain they were never meant for.

  The world was tearing itself apart and yet, Finn had a moment to spot something so innocuous and so ridiculous that he almost laughed. The young lieutenant that had glared at him for talking had gone to a superior and they were glancing at Finn and the man next to him. The officer, Finn thought it was a captain, nodded and looked around for someone else, starting a new conversation halfway across the room that involved several gestures that quite clearly said Finn and his cohorts were about to be ejected.

  Finn tore into the papers next to him. If the military was building up the walls between them and civilian advisors, he might not have access to the papers for long. He had to find the key, the trace that had to have been left behind when the hacker had gotten into the system. There had to be a footprint, something, a clue of who had done this or how. It was in there, he could feel it.

  “Hong Kong reports widespread looting and fires. There are no emergency personnel in place to combat either. They are asking the world for help.”

  “Sau Paulo, Rio, Buenos Aires, all have stopped reporting…”

  “Rome reports that troops have been called out to protect Vatican City, Madrid is completely silent…”

  The reports kept washing over him. Finn wasn’t even sure who they were reporting to anymore; they might have all been talking for the sake of trying to understand what they were seeing. Maybe reporting it like that made it more real for them. For some, maybe less. To Finn the sheer volume of names had created a certain unreality. The reports had become meaningless. He couldn’t even begin to grasp just how many people were in the dark.

  Night was falling across the United States. What would happen once the sun went down?

  He wiped sweat from his forehead and resisted the urge to tug at his tie which suddenly seemed to be strangling him. Telegraphing his nervousness was only going to get him booted off the floor and he couldn’t afford to disappear just yet. He popped a USB stick into a slot and copied the port reports and the data logs to it. He switched between windows so it still looked as though he was monitoring real-time data. Then palmed the stick and sat back in his seat, staring at the monitor.

  He had a bird’s eye view of the end of civilization.

  How can I be sitting here, safe and above the chaos when somewhere out there, someone did this?

  His stomach clenched. How long would he be sitting in this seat of privilege before they realized what he was up to? How long before they sent him away?

  “Mr. Lawrence,” a familiar voice behind him growled.

  Finn jumped and turned to see the general standing behind him, his hands behind his back. “Do you have that report for me?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Finn said quickly and dropped the USB stick into his pocket. “I…” he looked at his terminal, the words “COPY COMPLETE” showing just under the window on top of it. “I sent it to you, Sir, uh…your email.” He dove at the mouse and clicked the email window, maximizing it. He went to Sent Mail and pulled up the report.

  “That’s fine, Mr. Lawrence,” the general said, nodding. “I’ll read it later. Just tell me what, if anything, you found.”

  “Well, I didn’t find anything in the logs that would account for a breach. It’s like it was just there. I can’t explain it better than that.” He pointed to the stack of papers next to him. “But the answer is in here, I know that. I just…”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Lawrence.” The general waved off his explanation as though anything he said a
t this point was completely irrelevant. “At this point, it no longer matters how they did it. They’re making ransom demands. Preventing an attack no longer applies. They’re already in. Your part in this is over for the time being. The question now is getting control back.”

  He looked significantly at the captain that Finn had seen him talking to earlier and then glanced over to Robert.

  “Attention!” The general shouted. He had a voice that was trained to be heard over a battlefield and he used it to great advantage. For a moment, nothing moved. Further reports scrolled unnoticed down the monitors.

  “At this time, we would like to thank our civilian advisors and contractors. However, it is now a military matter of regaining control and keeping control. All non-military personnel are to leave this facility immediately, that they might make whatever personal arrangements are appropriate.” He looked down at Finn. “That includes you, Mr. Lawrence.”

  He’d been expecting it, but it still sent his blood boiling. It was important how they’d gotten in. There was something not right about the whole deal that needed to be solved. Why couldn’t anyone see that? “But…” Finn pointed to the papers, knowing the protest was useless, but needing to try all the same. “I know that the key is…”

  “It no longer matters, Mr. Lawrence,” the general interrupted him. He nodded once and Robert came up and took the pages from Finn’s grasp. “We thank you for your contributions, but it’s time to leave.” Though the words were civil, the tone was not. Finn watched the stack of papers get dropped into a bin marked RECYCLE. Within the hour they’d be so much confetti and ash.

  Knowing defeat when he saw it, Finn reached out and pressed the power button on his machine. The monitor powered down. The blank screen seemed to mock him.

  “I could have found the answer,” he said to the general through gritted teeth.

  “And now we will find the answers,” the general said. His stare was built of stone and his posture was iron.

  Finn stood up, noting that his civilian counterpart from the next station had already left. “I need to get my keys…” he said, nodding in the general direction of his desk.