Second Contact, page 47
part #2 of Not Alone Series
“Once again, the pursuit of highly promising solutions is going to require extreme discretion to ensure the maximum possible chance of success. Several solutions are being pursued in tandem and the mood in Buenos Aires today, other than understandable frustration with John Cole’s irresponsible politicking, has been one of increasing optimism. The level of discretion required in the earliest stages of project development is such that I myself am not fully aware of every detail, but what I am fully aware of is that the greatest minds on our planet are working together around the clock to safeguard its future.
“United by urgency in the face of a common threat, humanity will prevail. In the meantime, I wish to make it clear that local and federal law enforcement agencies will stamp down firmly on any instances of opportunistic looting which may arise in the coming hours and days. Any other actions which threaten to destabilise communities will be equally firmly dealt with, as will instances of exploitative price gouging and the unreasonable hoarding of essential goods. Should current levels of uncertainty persist, broader rationing procedures for essential goods will be explored and, if necessary, they will be put in place.
“Procedures are already in place to manage emergency scenarios on the ground, and my many friends at the GSC ensure me that preparations are very much underway with a view to enacting the kind of defensive procedures required to safeguard our planet.
“To close, it’s impossible not to draw some parallels between our current situation and that which we faced a year ago when I relayed the verified discovery of an altogether different truth. Many reacted poorly to that announcement, only for their hysteria to be proven needless and foolish through the clarifying lens of hindsight. Given the unprecedented human and economic resources being devoted to this new challenge, I encourage each and every one of you to exercise foresight and to trust in yourselves; to trust in ourselves; and to trust above all else that humanity, united, will prevail.”
President Slater raised her chin very slightly and forced a thin smile.
“May God bless America.”
C plus 18
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
If a tree fell in the woods and no one was around to hear it, Dan McCarthy didn’t know for sure whether it really would make a sound.
But within minutes of President Slater’s outright admission that a killer comet was hurtling towards Earth, he knew for sure that no one had listened to anything else she said.
Dan was by now back in his own house following a phone call from Henry to check that everyone was safe and indoors. The exhausting stress of the last few weeks sometimes made Dan forget that Henry didn’t know anything; nothing about the hoax, nothing about the plaque, and — until Cole’s leak and Slater’s public confirmation — nothing about the comet.
It quickly became clear that Henry — along with Walter Byrd, who had crossed the street to join him as soon as the news broke — was more concerned with the short-term security of his family and their property than he was with the long-term security of their planet. The McCarthys’ particularly quiet residential section of a generally quiet town was just about the last place in the world where disorder was likely to kick off, but the two salt-of-the-Earth old timers’ fiercely self-sufficient natures ensured that they wanted to be ready to deal with anything that might come their way.
They weren’t nearly as attuned to the prospect of the shit hitting the fan as their good friend Phil Norris, the full-on prepper who owned New Kergrillin’ and the rest of the drive-in lot, but some of Phil’s philosophies had certainly rubbed off on them over the years. On the back of how much Henry’s boys had done for Phil’s business interests, Phil had more than once promised to let them share in his stash should the need ever arise. Henry knew that Phil was the kind of man who would sooner die than go back on his word, but he dearly hoped it would never be necessary for any of them to dip into the emergency supplies.
As soon as Dan walked through the door, Henry suggested that everyone should stay together in one place. Everyone was there when he said this — Tara and Timo as well as the old trio of Emma, Dan and Clark — and they all agreed. Rooster, who had less say in the matter, looked more than happy with the temporary move as he explored every accessible corner of the house.
Although Birchwood remained peaceful, no one was overly surprised by how quickly things went to hell elsewhere; the looting was immediate and the rioting close behind. Both were widespread and both overpowered law enforcement officers by virtue of the sheer scale of the disorder.
Reporting on incoming footage from coast to coast, certain news anchors chose their words carefully when trying to make the point that many of those who had taken to the streets didn’t look like so-called “typical looters”, and it was certainly true that gentrified and suburban areas which were typically insulated from such disorder had no such luck on this occasion. Some commentators on social media were quick to point out that this was because, for once, the issue behind the disorder affected everyone equally rather than falling primarily on those in often-stigmatised low-income neighbourhoods.
Social media itself became a news story as the night wore on and several high-traffic sites buckled under a sudden surge of users, falling offline for longer than anyone could remember and certainly for far longer than had been the case following the DS-1 launch disaster. This sparked conspiratorial thoughts in many people’s minds that President Slater’s government may have pulled the plug on them in an attempt to stop coordinated disorder, a well-used and conceptually proven tactic in less open democracies around the world. But these theories couldn’t be broadly shared until the sites returned, by which point they were obviously moot, so the outages didn’t cause any real problems beyond heightening the helplessness and fear felt by millions of Americans.
Even when there was no one in the basement to see it, Dan’s trend-ticker scrolled through a variety of messages ranging in tone from despairing to conspiratorial.
Some commentators, chiefly Joe Crabbe, floated a conspiracy theory based on the point that a threat like Comet Conte-Abate was just what the ill-defined “powers that be” had always wanted: a huge problem which demanded a huge solution, and one which would inevitably involve the consolidation of more and more wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
Crabbe’s words were reported on several networks and appealed not only to citizens who distrusted their government, often for very valid reasons, but also to the broader mass of people who were desperate to grab hold of any coherent theory that justified some hope that a comet wasn’t on its way to destroy their world.
Dan knew that Crabbe’s ideas were ridiculous and quite possibly dangerous, but unlike some media commentators he would forever argue that tolerating stupid and dangerous ideas was an important thing to do. Having been on the other side of this kind of thing when dismissed by almost everyone as an attention-seeking lunatic in the immediate aftermath of the IDA leak, Dan was only too aware of the dangers of letting some pedestaled authority subjectively decide which views merited discussion and which should be shut down as dangerous.
As the night wore on, an unsettlingly nihilistic tone became an increasingly common element among the most shared social media posts. And rather than quickly die off, the looting got progressively worse as more and more people from all social strata began to realise that things were never going to be the same again; that tomorrow’s deliveries probably weren’t coming, and that the shelves quite possibly weren’t going to be restocked.
While a degree of looting had been seen in the hours after DS-1’s failed launch a year earlier, the scale was simply incomparable.
Live footage from some inner-city areas showed instances of communities policing themselves to some extent, with a small number of individuals forcibly dissuaded from taking more from the ransacked stores than others saw as justifiable. To the disappointment of some reporters who had been instructed to get footage to fit certain narratives, no one was opportunistically grabbing luxury or electronic goods from their shelves. Instead, the core staples of food, bottled water, batteries and hygiene products were the order of the day.
News of the night’s first confirmed looting-related fatality came from outside a high-end grocery store in Beverly Hills, but few doubted that others had come before and would soon come to light.
“What we’re seeing tonight is a far cry from the mass protests of recent weeks,” an on-site Blitz News reporter incisively observed. “These scenes are more akin to an every-man-for-himself post-apocalyptic melee. Or perhaps pre-apocalyptic is the more appropriate term.”
“Seems like the time for puns,” Walter Byrd sighed from the kitchen chair he had placed behind Dan’s couch.
“These fuckers in the newsrooms want to make it worse,” Henry grunted in reply. “They don’t care how bad this is going to get, as long as it brings in the ratings. And that goddamn John Cole…” he said, turning specifically to Dan. “See, this kind of shit is exactly why I said I can see where Walker was coming from with his cover-up. I never said I agreed with him, but sometimes there’s a reason why some things have to be kept under wraps: the world can’t handle them.”
Dan walked away, biting his tongue and trying not to shake his head too much. On more than a few occasions since picking up Walker’s godforsaken folder on Winchester Street, he had experienced physically unsettling stress and anxiety of a kind he had never known before. It had often felt like his stomach was spinning, like something inside his head was physically swaying like a canoe in a rough tide, and like the ground under his feet was pulsing. But tonight it was different; tonight it was stronger — more of an all-consuming, skin-crawling unease.
He walked through the kitchen and out of the back door. He didn’t look up at the stars and he didn’t look down at the ground. His eyes were open but he wasn’t really looking anywhere until he heard the door open again behind him and turned to see Emma, alone, walking out to join him.
“Do you know what I was just thinking?” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper.
Emma silently shook her head.
“If there was a button I could push to fast-forward time and just end everything right now, I almost feel like I would push it.”
“Dan, I never want to hear you say anything like that ever again.”
“I did say almost…”
Emma’s expression was firm. “And I said never.”
She walked back inside without another word, leaving Dan alone again under the stars.
Tonight, he didn’t feel like they were shining down on him; tonight, he felt like they were taunting him.
His eyes were naturally drawn towards Il Diavolo’s hiding place, from which it would all too quickly emerge. They then scanned the rest of the sky, as familiar as the back of his hand. He knew where the comet was, but that wasn’t what was getting to him.
Fear was gone. In its place, anger reigned supreme.
Dan pinched the back of his neck, digging into the scar with his fingernails in the vain hope that it might work both ways and somehow facilitate contact with the indefensibly absent Messengers.
Nothing.
It was difficult for Dan McCarthy to feel anything but abandoned, so he took a few more deep breaths of the fresh night air and walked back inside to be with the only people he could still count on.
Clark was in the kitchen when Dan stepped inside, walking the other way to check on him. “You okay, man? Is that blood on your hand?”
Dan looked down and wiped a small amount of blood from his fingertips and then from his neck. His T-shirt was black, at least, so he didn’t think anyone else would notice.
“Did you feel something?” Clark asked, his eyebrows and tone both rising in hopeful excitement.
Dan shook his head and finally spoke the words he’d been trying to avoid accepting for so long: “They’re not coming back.”
TUESDAY
C plus 19
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Dan McCarthy lay quietly in his bed, uneasily listening to news anchors surveying the damage from an unprecedented night of chaos as Emma Ford lay just as quietly by his side. The general story was the same across the country: police forces had simply been overwhelmed by the sheer number of looters, a problem compounded by the geographical spread of the disorder which made it physically impossible for law enforcement agencies to keep on top of everything.
Tough militarised crackdowns had worked in some places where looting had descended into full-on rioting and arson, but on a nationwide scale President Slater’s promise of swift and effective responses to all instances of looting had been proven ill-founded.
Dan sat up straight to see the pictures more clearly when he heard that a news helicopter was flying over one particularly badly hit area. “It’s not so much that police have retaken these streets,” the reporter said, “but more like the people have given them up and gone home.”
Although Birchwood itself had stayed peaceful, it had been a long and difficult night for everyone. No one argued with Henry’s suggestion that they should all stay safely under one roof for the night, and it was agreed that Tara would have the couch and Timo the armchair, while Henry and Clark slept in their own bedrooms and Emma joined Dan in the basement.
It had been well into the early hours when Emma turned off the living room TV and told everyone that whatever tomorrow was going to bring, they had to be awake and alert enough to deal with it. Dan agreed and joined her in the basement to try to catch a few hours of sleep. But although the others hadn’t protested, it took only a few minutes for them to turn the TV back on.
Ultimately, only Dan and Emma had gone to bed at all.
Like millions of Americans, the others had been helplessly glued to their seats as the world they knew not-so-slowly crumbled all around them.
Now, as the main breakfast hour on the news stations drew to a close, Dan flicked from ACN to Blitz News and stayed there for the promise of “expert analysis” on the potential societal effects of the comet beyond the much-reported looting of the previous night.
Before that analysis began, the newsreader read a joint statement from Louisa Conte and Francesco Abate in which the two media-shy individuals officially credited with discovering the comet broke their public silence to simultaneously hit out at John Cole’s irresponsibility and call for calm.
Blitz then took a quick look at some of the more out-there theories which had gained a lot of social media attention overnight. A particularly popular one, a tamer variant of which Tara and Clark had briefly toyed with, posited that the comet might in fact be a misidentified alien mothership carrying hostile forces who would launch an unstoppable ground invasion upon its arrival on Earth. The natural counterpoint that any hostile race capable of travelling that kind of distance would surely have some kind of cloaking mechanism, however rudimentary, was met with the response that the mothership might in fact have been disguised as a comet to misdirect humanity’s attention and defensive resources ahead of the surprise invasion.
More serious online discussions had focused on a very simple and familiar question: why weren’t the Messengers helping? Although the details differed slightly, with the general public’s belief that the Messengers were friendly being based on the harmless content of the first three plaques, Dan’s fuller knowledge of the Messengers left him wondering exactly the same thing.
As he thought about this, Dan found his mind likening the situation to a human cameraman who might encounter an antelope being killed by a lion and choose to stay out of it. But the metaphor didn’t hold up for more than a few seconds; after all, the metaphorical cameraman in this case had already established his willingness to intervene by firing a warning shot into the air to give the antelope some kind of chance. Why would he help at all if he wasn’t going to help decisively?
No… Dan thought. It’s worse than that. They destroyed DS-1, our best chance of saving ourselves from something like Il Diavolo, and they still won’t help! This is more like the cameraman breaking the antelope’s legs, then firing a shot to warn it about a lion it can’t run away from. And all the while, he just sits there and watches.
Amid the fear in Dan’s soul — or perhaps above that fear, to be more precise — anger was well and truly building.
At last, after another commercial break, Blitz News finally got around to the long-promised analysis of the comet’s broad societal effects. For all the station’s faults, Blitz was normally good at this kind of thing; and as soon as the commercials ended and the studio returned to his screen, Dan could tell that the upcoming segment would be well put-together. He recognised the popular scientist Penny Holmes and thought that the other guest looked vaguely familiar. When the host introduced her as a retail analyst and pointed out that she had been on the station in a similar capacity at the peak of the previous year’s alien hysteria, Dan remembered it all.
Back then the retail analyst had acknowledged that shelves had been cleared of many essential goods while reassuring everyone that there would be no ongoing problems with the just-in-time delivery networks that so many stores and by extension citizens depended upon for their very survival.
Today, her reply to a question on this topic was far less optimistic: “Well, right now the stores aren’t open and the truck-drivers aren’t showing up for work. And as for sales of products last night… yes, I’d imagine that ammunition and everything else you’d expect to go quickly has indeed gone quickly. I imagine this, rather than know it, because this morning we can’t lean on the systems which normally give us live data on buying trends and sales spikes… because looting isn’t buying, and what use is all of that fancy sales-tracking software when no one is paying for anything?”
