The Phenomenon, page 3
The cop’s belts were sitting on the platform on the ground beside a bench. Sharon took both pistols, one a SIG Sauer P226, one a Glock 19, and all the clips, as well as their radios & Tasers, adding them to her pack. She went to head for the tunnel home, but hesitated. After a brief moment’s thought she used the gang member’s own bandana to tie a crude tourniquet just below the knee.
The access tunnel was exactly where the map said it would be. It was quick two blocks over to her apartment building, and she had a first floor unit, so it wasn't difficult to get in. However, she saw her neighbor Mrs. Brock collapsed in the foyer at the end of the hall. A better end then the one Sharon had imagined for her, at any rate. Mr. Brock was a rageaholic and a wife-beater. She unlocked her apartment and cleared it, making sure there was nobody else inside. She unpacked her backpack and grabbed her bug-out gear —a little something she kept packed with MREs, water, paper maps, extra phone, charger, batteries, cash, clothes, her own personal weaponry, and a small toolkit. The laser rangefinder was the most useful tool, though. She knew that though she was to avoid the surface, that any opening to sky could mean her death. Her apartment was not good enough. Too small, too easy to break into. Now it was a matter of finding someplace, close to surface for airflow and signal, where she might be able to hole up, gather more supplies, wait for the all clear, wait for this to blow over. She was not going to be so easy to kill or catch unawares.
Survival was always the first order of business — physical safety, shelter, food and water, some kind of weaponry. The checklist was instinctual now. She'd gone through it too many times to need to actually think it anymore. And it served her well. She grabbed everything critical to her survival, and left everything else. Nothing of sentimental value, nothing superfluous, everything that was taken was taken for good reason. She set her computer, her personal documents, pictures, old expired IDs, everything that could identify her, in the bath tub, sealed it up, and poured a gallon of sulfuric acid over it all. Then she grabbed up her bug-out gear, locked the apartment and walked away from her life, again.
It was easy enough to get back underground from there, and while she'd made contingency plans for lots of things, something that made it a death sentence to see the sky was not one of them. Nuclear winter, sure, but not this. She took a minute to assess the situation. She had half a dozen ways off the island pre-planned, two by land, sea, and air each, but all of them put her above ground. She pulled out her maps and started crossing off options. Half an hour later she had the basics of a plan. Since everything above-ground was a no-go, she had to look to connect with some authority that might have survived underground. It might take a couple days to get there on foot, taking the long way around as she had to.
~
Day 6
Sharon had to be quick and quiet. Open, shove, click-click, yank, and close. Open the hatch an inch or two. Shove the hand with the rangefinder around the corner, pointing straight up. Click it on. Click it off. Pull the hand back. Close the hatch. It was an exercise she'd done a dozen times a day for the last week, and it always managed to set her on edge. If the hatch opened to sky, she was pointing a laser straight up towards... whatever the hell they were. If it didn't, she risked being heard, seen, grabbed, by other, more desperate, less civilized denizens of the tunnels. The UN, 1PP, FBI Field Office, the Department of Homeland Security, and two military reservist compounds had all been complete washes, either nobody left alive, or nobody left alive she wanted anything to do with. So, she'd made a little camp in a run-off line of the old pneumatic transit system, someplace nobody went even before the end of the world. She figured, with the way most of the city was dead, she might very well be the last living soul on earth aware of its existence, which suited her fine. What didn't suit her was that it was so deep underground that she had to make her way to the surface to get signal to her phone to check for updates.
Have to keep checking, have to wait it out. She had enough food, but she had to know when she could get to surface, when she could get to her car. The old thing wasn't pretty, but it was tough, and it had a trunk with another set of bug-out bags. The tent might be useless, but the MREs wouldn't be. She knew that whatever was left of New York after this wouldn't be safe. Too many good people died in the first day, never getting the message, and in the days after... too many bad people making it by victimizing others. Savages. So she kept checking, even as the updates slowed and started repeating themselves. They'd been the same for the last few days now. Still, time to check again, just in case. So...
Open...
Shove...
Click...
Click...
Yank...
Close.
Freezing in place, listening, holding her breath. No sounds, no scurrying or shouting... good. Bringing the rangefinder close to her face to read the barely luminous display, she found it said 3.1 meters. Good, that's just the roof of another tunnel.
A sudden sound sent her heart tearing in two, into her throat and dropping through her stomach like a lead weight.
Knock knock.
It was sudden, terrifying, and hilarious. In a life or death situation, fearing rapists, murderers, possibly even cannibals, someone had seen her measure the range and then politely knocked on the hatch above her like they were delivering a pizza. If she wasn't on the edge of blacking out from the adrenaline she might have been in tears laughing at the absurdity of the situation. But, should she answer? Or run? Find some other path upwards? Sharon took hold of the handle to the hatch firmly in her right hand, her left, her dominant hand, tightly gripping the .45 she'd gotten from her first bug out bag, she readied herself to spring the hatch open and dive into the tunnel above, ready to roll, take aim, and fire if she had to.
With a silent count to three, she turned the handle and launched her entire body weight against the hatch and to the right, onto the ground, she heard a startled gasp and as she rolled into a crouching firing position, both hands on her weapon, her eyes down the barrel, lining up the iron sights... on a little girl. No more than ten years old. Dirty, starving. In what once must have been a frilly yellow nightgown. The girl clutched a dead flashlight in her hands, tears in her eyes as she gasped and shook with fear. As quickly as she'd snapped on target Sharon disengaged, putting the weapon on safe and holstering it as she stood, putting her hands up.
"I'm not going to hurt you honey, I thought you might've been..."
And then with a flash of white light and sudden pain on the back of the head, her world went dark.
CHAPTER 4
Day 1
Dr. Walthers made his way from classroom to classroom, from one end of the building to another. Whoever had designed the building had placed the stairs at opposite ends of the building on each floor, so on the first floor they were at the south end, on the second floor at the north, on the third floor back at the south. It would've been a huge inconvenience had his goal not been to visit each and every room before making his way up to the next floor. As he went, he pushed a cart, usually used to move large confections from room to room but repurposed by him as a shopping cart. It was covered with every bottle of alcohol he could find that was 70 proof or higher. It had to be at least 35% alcohol by volume in order to be an effective antiseptic. The cart also held towels, first aid kits, four butane food torches with a spare bottle of butane each, and half a dozen boxes filled with various plates and utensils — things he knew weren't in great supply in the bunker. He’d also grabbed a box cutter.
At the end of each floor and in the center were sets of dumbwaiters large enough for the carts to fit in, and as he completed each floor he made it a point to send the cart down to the ground floor for him to retrieve later. His ultimate goal, though, was far from this shopping trip. By his watch, he had twenty minutes to get back to the bunker before the 1-hour ETA was up. He figured that gave him just enough time to finish the fourth floor and set up the last connection for the bunker, which was up on the roof. There was a suite of sensors that were purposefully left disconnected in order to keep them in pristine condition, wrapped in plastic and in an aluminum lockbox on the roof. His job was to unlock the box, remove it, cut away the plastic, and plug in the all-weather plug that would feed it power from the bunker generators and simultaneously hook its sensors into the bunker external leads. He pocketed the box cutter and pushed the cart into the south dumbwaiter next to the stairs and sent it down to the ground before taking the stairs two at a time up to the fourth floor. He went to the first classroom and looked for a cart and the first aid kits, but the room was empty, as was the next, and the one after. To his surprise he realized that the fourth floor of the building was going completely unused this semester. Regardless, he had a task to accomplish, and so he moved at a light jog to the other end of the floor, where there was a ladder with a locked hatch leading to the roof. Taking his keys out of his pocket, he climbed the ladder and unlocked the hatch. Emerging onto the roof, he felt an uncommonly warm wind pushing against him, and heard a distant peal of thunder. Weather was moving in from the east, coming over Siesta Valley, or down the slopes of Mount Diablo, possibly from even further in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
He made his way across the roof, stepping over Frisbees and deflated balloons, the occasional bit of garbage, bottles, candy wrappers, condoms. Apparently, the student body had made their way up here a number of times. Luckily, the metal cover over the sensor package was intact, even if it did have graffiti all over it. Pulling out another key, he bent to the lock and inserted his key, only to find it didn't go in the whole way it should have. He jiggled the key in the lock several times before pulling the key out and activating a small LED flashlight he kept as a keychain. Looking down into the lock he could see where someone had jammed a piece of a hairpin into the lock and broke it off, apparently in an attempt to pick the lock.
Cursing, Walthers slammed the lock against the ground repeatedly, hoping to dislodge the obstruction, but each time he checked, all he found was that the heavy rubberized exterior of the lock was scratched, and the hairpin remained firmly lodged inside the keyhole. looking at his watch, he realized he had just seven minutes to get back downstairs and into the bunker. Getting up from his crouched place near the base of the metal tent over the package, he put his hand on its edge in order to push on it and assist his rise. For a brief moment, he was off balance as the metal gave way and tried to tip over. Looking down, he noticed that the clip where the metal was supposed to insert to hold it down besides the lock had been forcibly bent back and torn. The cover was held in place only by its own weight; the lock was superfluous. He threw the cover off and inspected the package underneath. It was pristine; the only thing that had been done was that the cover was filled with rotting garbage roughly a foot deep all around the package, but even so, the plastic wrap around it had kept it from getting contaminated.
He looked to his watch again. He had six minutes.
He quickly threw the cover aside and off the roof of the building before pulling out a box cutter and cutting away the plastic and sending it flying in the wind. The plug was tightly coiled and zip-tied to itself. A quick cut from the box cutter and the cord was free. The outlet was covered in some kind of brown sticky substance, like the residue left from a spilled soda, but it had a heavy rubber plug that was specifically in place to keep the actual holes clear, and they were.
He plugged in the package and checked his watch again. Five minutes. He ran across the roof to the hatch, and swung himself down onto the ladder, his eyes briefly looked up at the incoming weather system. There, he could see in the upper reaches of the gathering thunderhead, small, pinprick flashes of red light, almost like sparks, or fireflies, lighting up for a second and then slowly dying away. Thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. Whatever it was, it was coming. He stepped down the ladder and pulled the hatch closed above him.
As he ran down the fourth floor corridor, he could hear what sounded like hail impacting the roof, the walls, the windows...
Day 6
Emil watched the woman like a hawk. She'd come up from below like a demon, pointed a gun at his Sarya, and he'd bashed her across the back of the head with his bat like he had all the other predators who'd been hunting them. But this woman was different. For one, well, she was a woman. All the rest of them had been men. She was armed, but she didn't fire. Not that he could've taken the chance; others had played at being peaceful, too. Sarya was too important to take such risks. But now that he had her, what was he to do with her? With the men it was simple enough: stuff them in the hole they'd come from so the next predator to come that way would get the warning, but a woman? She'd be taken and raped, unconscious or dead. And Allah would never forgive such mercilessness on his part. No, for better or worse, she was his prisoner.
Her bag had been a treasure trove. Sarya had her first real meal in days, even if it was some kind of military ration, and the antibiotics and other medicines would surely come in handy if this went on for much longer.
Emil rubbed the back of his neck and felt the grime of two days without a shower there. He didn't like being this dirty, but the water pressure was kept by the water tank on top of his apartment building, and without electricity to power the pumps, it wasn't being replenished as it once was, and so he'd started rationing when they could run water, and his shower took second fiddle to his daughter’s needs.
He stood up straight, feeling the aches and pains in his back as he stretched his 5'10" frame. His dark hair was unkempt and slightly greasy. His skin, a deep olive, was starting to feel like he was covered in oil and sand... a decidedly unpleasant memory of his time in Qatar. It was true most of the US Ambassador to Qatar’s business was in, well, Qatar, but Emil’s employer was the former Governor of New York State, and he needed someone here at home to coordinate with the State Department. Six days ago Emil had been that person, a trusted ally of an important official, a respected leader in his Mosque, a proud husband. Now he was a widower, and he was pretty sure the US and his Mosque were gone too. Why Allah would send this scourge upon the world, he didn't know; why he or his daughter had been spared, he didn't know; why his wife hadn't, he didn't know. And despite the rage, and grief, and hopelessness that welled within him, he refused to direct it at his God. It was not his place to question. Islam, after all, meant obedience to Allah.
Sarya slept on top of the refrigerator. It was nearing fall, and the basement was cold at night. The old fridge worked well enough, but gave off a lot of heat, and that was where she was most comfortable. He took a sagging mattress set on an old hospital frame, no doubt once the property of a bedridden former tenant later appropriated by the new basement tenant.
This stinking basement had been his first and only refuge. It appeared and smelled to have been the unofficial sanctuary of the building’s notorious handyman Jon, who had apparently not made it back the evening before everything fell apart. It was under a block of well-off apartments, all with blinds. Most of them were unoccupied, summer homes of rich out-of-towners. His family was, Emil had thought, the only year round tenants. However, in the last six days he'd seen and heard activity in some of the units above, though it seemed with each passing day another one of them went quiet. He imagined them opening their drapes and welcoming the scourge Allah had sent upon the world rather than slowly starving in their own homes. He for one didn't give up hope. The keys left here in the basement went to every unit, and when things had gotten low on the second day, he'd risked leaving Sarya and going up to look for supplies. The units he entered were empty, but their kitchens were not. The power was still on, and the freezers were still working, and of course durable goods like dry beans and canned goods were still sitting in the cabinets.
Now of course he had a new problem. This woman. Could she perhaps be an ally, sent by Allah in his hour of greatest need? Or a test of his faith? As he contemplated his position, he felt a familiar buzzing in his pocket. His phone was having another damn alert. Hour by hour, always the same now. He thought about ignoring it again. But then, what if this was the all-clear? He pulled it out to check. At first he was sure it was a waste of time yet again, but as he finished the preliminary parts of the warning, he saw that there was new information at last.
Satellite mapping of the phenomenon has revealed that there are gaps and openings periodically in its coverage of the Earth. The next projected opening in the phenomenon is expected to be in the major New York Metropolitan area between 0920 and 1000 hours. Due to the phenomenon operating at various altitudes, viewing of the sky is still strongly warned against. This is expected to be the only opening in the phenomenon for some time; as such, it is recommended you do not try and evacuate. Make a very short scouting trip for necessary supplies or superior shelter.
Do not look at the sky. Do not make noise. Generate as little heat as possible. Move as slowly as possible to avoid accidental noise.
To personnel with ∆6 clearance: Blue 12 procedures are no longer in effect, Red 4 procedures now supersede all previous orders.
Suddenly, in the silence, Emil could make out explosions. Distant, but distinct. Someone, somewhere, was destroying something, something very large. He'd been in Manhattan during 9/11, had heard those sounds before. The sound of a large explosion followed by the collapse of a great structure. Somewhere, a building was coming down. He looked up at his daughter, still sleeping, and more earnestly than ever before, Emil prayed.
~
Day 7
Sharon found herself wandering in the dark. Echoes of images and horrors from the past emerging and then disappearing again along the edges of her consciousness.
Her father’s fat fingers and leering smile. The moonlight glinting off the knife that first time she was stabbed in the alleyway she called home when she was 14. The feel of terror, humiliation, and pain as the gang from the group home "claimed" her when she was 17. The flash from a mortar explosion in that god-forsaken desert when she was 22. But somewhere... elsewhere, distant... like drums, or a heartbeat. An echo... thoughts... not her own. The same voice that had been trying to get in for weeks, ever since... no. That was just coincidence. Obey... said the voice. "I'll resist!" she shouted. Surrender... "Fight!" Despair... "Hope!" She screamed back at the voice from the darkness with all her will.
The access tunnel was exactly where the map said it would be. It was quick two blocks over to her apartment building, and she had a first floor unit, so it wasn't difficult to get in. However, she saw her neighbor Mrs. Brock collapsed in the foyer at the end of the hall. A better end then the one Sharon had imagined for her, at any rate. Mr. Brock was a rageaholic and a wife-beater. She unlocked her apartment and cleared it, making sure there was nobody else inside. She unpacked her backpack and grabbed her bug-out gear —a little something she kept packed with MREs, water, paper maps, extra phone, charger, batteries, cash, clothes, her own personal weaponry, and a small toolkit. The laser rangefinder was the most useful tool, though. She knew that though she was to avoid the surface, that any opening to sky could mean her death. Her apartment was not good enough. Too small, too easy to break into. Now it was a matter of finding someplace, close to surface for airflow and signal, where she might be able to hole up, gather more supplies, wait for the all clear, wait for this to blow over. She was not going to be so easy to kill or catch unawares.
Survival was always the first order of business — physical safety, shelter, food and water, some kind of weaponry. The checklist was instinctual now. She'd gone through it too many times to need to actually think it anymore. And it served her well. She grabbed everything critical to her survival, and left everything else. Nothing of sentimental value, nothing superfluous, everything that was taken was taken for good reason. She set her computer, her personal documents, pictures, old expired IDs, everything that could identify her, in the bath tub, sealed it up, and poured a gallon of sulfuric acid over it all. Then she grabbed up her bug-out gear, locked the apartment and walked away from her life, again.
It was easy enough to get back underground from there, and while she'd made contingency plans for lots of things, something that made it a death sentence to see the sky was not one of them. Nuclear winter, sure, but not this. She took a minute to assess the situation. She had half a dozen ways off the island pre-planned, two by land, sea, and air each, but all of them put her above ground. She pulled out her maps and started crossing off options. Half an hour later she had the basics of a plan. Since everything above-ground was a no-go, she had to look to connect with some authority that might have survived underground. It might take a couple days to get there on foot, taking the long way around as she had to.
~
Day 6
Sharon had to be quick and quiet. Open, shove, click-click, yank, and close. Open the hatch an inch or two. Shove the hand with the rangefinder around the corner, pointing straight up. Click it on. Click it off. Pull the hand back. Close the hatch. It was an exercise she'd done a dozen times a day for the last week, and it always managed to set her on edge. If the hatch opened to sky, she was pointing a laser straight up towards... whatever the hell they were. If it didn't, she risked being heard, seen, grabbed, by other, more desperate, less civilized denizens of the tunnels. The UN, 1PP, FBI Field Office, the Department of Homeland Security, and two military reservist compounds had all been complete washes, either nobody left alive, or nobody left alive she wanted anything to do with. So, she'd made a little camp in a run-off line of the old pneumatic transit system, someplace nobody went even before the end of the world. She figured, with the way most of the city was dead, she might very well be the last living soul on earth aware of its existence, which suited her fine. What didn't suit her was that it was so deep underground that she had to make her way to the surface to get signal to her phone to check for updates.
Have to keep checking, have to wait it out. She had enough food, but she had to know when she could get to surface, when she could get to her car. The old thing wasn't pretty, but it was tough, and it had a trunk with another set of bug-out bags. The tent might be useless, but the MREs wouldn't be. She knew that whatever was left of New York after this wouldn't be safe. Too many good people died in the first day, never getting the message, and in the days after... too many bad people making it by victimizing others. Savages. So she kept checking, even as the updates slowed and started repeating themselves. They'd been the same for the last few days now. Still, time to check again, just in case. So...
Open...
Shove...
Click...
Click...
Yank...
Close.
Freezing in place, listening, holding her breath. No sounds, no scurrying or shouting... good. Bringing the rangefinder close to her face to read the barely luminous display, she found it said 3.1 meters. Good, that's just the roof of another tunnel.
A sudden sound sent her heart tearing in two, into her throat and dropping through her stomach like a lead weight.
Knock knock.
It was sudden, terrifying, and hilarious. In a life or death situation, fearing rapists, murderers, possibly even cannibals, someone had seen her measure the range and then politely knocked on the hatch above her like they were delivering a pizza. If she wasn't on the edge of blacking out from the adrenaline she might have been in tears laughing at the absurdity of the situation. But, should she answer? Or run? Find some other path upwards? Sharon took hold of the handle to the hatch firmly in her right hand, her left, her dominant hand, tightly gripping the .45 she'd gotten from her first bug out bag, she readied herself to spring the hatch open and dive into the tunnel above, ready to roll, take aim, and fire if she had to.
With a silent count to three, she turned the handle and launched her entire body weight against the hatch and to the right, onto the ground, she heard a startled gasp and as she rolled into a crouching firing position, both hands on her weapon, her eyes down the barrel, lining up the iron sights... on a little girl. No more than ten years old. Dirty, starving. In what once must have been a frilly yellow nightgown. The girl clutched a dead flashlight in her hands, tears in her eyes as she gasped and shook with fear. As quickly as she'd snapped on target Sharon disengaged, putting the weapon on safe and holstering it as she stood, putting her hands up.
"I'm not going to hurt you honey, I thought you might've been..."
And then with a flash of white light and sudden pain on the back of the head, her world went dark.
CHAPTER 4
Day 1
Dr. Walthers made his way from classroom to classroom, from one end of the building to another. Whoever had designed the building had placed the stairs at opposite ends of the building on each floor, so on the first floor they were at the south end, on the second floor at the north, on the third floor back at the south. It would've been a huge inconvenience had his goal not been to visit each and every room before making his way up to the next floor. As he went, he pushed a cart, usually used to move large confections from room to room but repurposed by him as a shopping cart. It was covered with every bottle of alcohol he could find that was 70 proof or higher. It had to be at least 35% alcohol by volume in order to be an effective antiseptic. The cart also held towels, first aid kits, four butane food torches with a spare bottle of butane each, and half a dozen boxes filled with various plates and utensils — things he knew weren't in great supply in the bunker. He’d also grabbed a box cutter.
At the end of each floor and in the center were sets of dumbwaiters large enough for the carts to fit in, and as he completed each floor he made it a point to send the cart down to the ground floor for him to retrieve later. His ultimate goal, though, was far from this shopping trip. By his watch, he had twenty minutes to get back to the bunker before the 1-hour ETA was up. He figured that gave him just enough time to finish the fourth floor and set up the last connection for the bunker, which was up on the roof. There was a suite of sensors that were purposefully left disconnected in order to keep them in pristine condition, wrapped in plastic and in an aluminum lockbox on the roof. His job was to unlock the box, remove it, cut away the plastic, and plug in the all-weather plug that would feed it power from the bunker generators and simultaneously hook its sensors into the bunker external leads. He pocketed the box cutter and pushed the cart into the south dumbwaiter next to the stairs and sent it down to the ground before taking the stairs two at a time up to the fourth floor. He went to the first classroom and looked for a cart and the first aid kits, but the room was empty, as was the next, and the one after. To his surprise he realized that the fourth floor of the building was going completely unused this semester. Regardless, he had a task to accomplish, and so he moved at a light jog to the other end of the floor, where there was a ladder with a locked hatch leading to the roof. Taking his keys out of his pocket, he climbed the ladder and unlocked the hatch. Emerging onto the roof, he felt an uncommonly warm wind pushing against him, and heard a distant peal of thunder. Weather was moving in from the east, coming over Siesta Valley, or down the slopes of Mount Diablo, possibly from even further in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
He made his way across the roof, stepping over Frisbees and deflated balloons, the occasional bit of garbage, bottles, candy wrappers, condoms. Apparently, the student body had made their way up here a number of times. Luckily, the metal cover over the sensor package was intact, even if it did have graffiti all over it. Pulling out another key, he bent to the lock and inserted his key, only to find it didn't go in the whole way it should have. He jiggled the key in the lock several times before pulling the key out and activating a small LED flashlight he kept as a keychain. Looking down into the lock he could see where someone had jammed a piece of a hairpin into the lock and broke it off, apparently in an attempt to pick the lock.
Cursing, Walthers slammed the lock against the ground repeatedly, hoping to dislodge the obstruction, but each time he checked, all he found was that the heavy rubberized exterior of the lock was scratched, and the hairpin remained firmly lodged inside the keyhole. looking at his watch, he realized he had just seven minutes to get back downstairs and into the bunker. Getting up from his crouched place near the base of the metal tent over the package, he put his hand on its edge in order to push on it and assist his rise. For a brief moment, he was off balance as the metal gave way and tried to tip over. Looking down, he noticed that the clip where the metal was supposed to insert to hold it down besides the lock had been forcibly bent back and torn. The cover was held in place only by its own weight; the lock was superfluous. He threw the cover off and inspected the package underneath. It was pristine; the only thing that had been done was that the cover was filled with rotting garbage roughly a foot deep all around the package, but even so, the plastic wrap around it had kept it from getting contaminated.
He looked to his watch again. He had six minutes.
He quickly threw the cover aside and off the roof of the building before pulling out a box cutter and cutting away the plastic and sending it flying in the wind. The plug was tightly coiled and zip-tied to itself. A quick cut from the box cutter and the cord was free. The outlet was covered in some kind of brown sticky substance, like the residue left from a spilled soda, but it had a heavy rubber plug that was specifically in place to keep the actual holes clear, and they were.
He plugged in the package and checked his watch again. Five minutes. He ran across the roof to the hatch, and swung himself down onto the ladder, his eyes briefly looked up at the incoming weather system. There, he could see in the upper reaches of the gathering thunderhead, small, pinprick flashes of red light, almost like sparks, or fireflies, lighting up for a second and then slowly dying away. Thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. Whatever it was, it was coming. He stepped down the ladder and pulled the hatch closed above him.
As he ran down the fourth floor corridor, he could hear what sounded like hail impacting the roof, the walls, the windows...
Day 6
Emil watched the woman like a hawk. She'd come up from below like a demon, pointed a gun at his Sarya, and he'd bashed her across the back of the head with his bat like he had all the other predators who'd been hunting them. But this woman was different. For one, well, she was a woman. All the rest of them had been men. She was armed, but she didn't fire. Not that he could've taken the chance; others had played at being peaceful, too. Sarya was too important to take such risks. But now that he had her, what was he to do with her? With the men it was simple enough: stuff them in the hole they'd come from so the next predator to come that way would get the warning, but a woman? She'd be taken and raped, unconscious or dead. And Allah would never forgive such mercilessness on his part. No, for better or worse, she was his prisoner.
Her bag had been a treasure trove. Sarya had her first real meal in days, even if it was some kind of military ration, and the antibiotics and other medicines would surely come in handy if this went on for much longer.
Emil rubbed the back of his neck and felt the grime of two days without a shower there. He didn't like being this dirty, but the water pressure was kept by the water tank on top of his apartment building, and without electricity to power the pumps, it wasn't being replenished as it once was, and so he'd started rationing when they could run water, and his shower took second fiddle to his daughter’s needs.
He stood up straight, feeling the aches and pains in his back as he stretched his 5'10" frame. His dark hair was unkempt and slightly greasy. His skin, a deep olive, was starting to feel like he was covered in oil and sand... a decidedly unpleasant memory of his time in Qatar. It was true most of the US Ambassador to Qatar’s business was in, well, Qatar, but Emil’s employer was the former Governor of New York State, and he needed someone here at home to coordinate with the State Department. Six days ago Emil had been that person, a trusted ally of an important official, a respected leader in his Mosque, a proud husband. Now he was a widower, and he was pretty sure the US and his Mosque were gone too. Why Allah would send this scourge upon the world, he didn't know; why he or his daughter had been spared, he didn't know; why his wife hadn't, he didn't know. And despite the rage, and grief, and hopelessness that welled within him, he refused to direct it at his God. It was not his place to question. Islam, after all, meant obedience to Allah.
Sarya slept on top of the refrigerator. It was nearing fall, and the basement was cold at night. The old fridge worked well enough, but gave off a lot of heat, and that was where she was most comfortable. He took a sagging mattress set on an old hospital frame, no doubt once the property of a bedridden former tenant later appropriated by the new basement tenant.
This stinking basement had been his first and only refuge. It appeared and smelled to have been the unofficial sanctuary of the building’s notorious handyman Jon, who had apparently not made it back the evening before everything fell apart. It was under a block of well-off apartments, all with blinds. Most of them were unoccupied, summer homes of rich out-of-towners. His family was, Emil had thought, the only year round tenants. However, in the last six days he'd seen and heard activity in some of the units above, though it seemed with each passing day another one of them went quiet. He imagined them opening their drapes and welcoming the scourge Allah had sent upon the world rather than slowly starving in their own homes. He for one didn't give up hope. The keys left here in the basement went to every unit, and when things had gotten low on the second day, he'd risked leaving Sarya and going up to look for supplies. The units he entered were empty, but their kitchens were not. The power was still on, and the freezers were still working, and of course durable goods like dry beans and canned goods were still sitting in the cabinets.
Now of course he had a new problem. This woman. Could she perhaps be an ally, sent by Allah in his hour of greatest need? Or a test of his faith? As he contemplated his position, he felt a familiar buzzing in his pocket. His phone was having another damn alert. Hour by hour, always the same now. He thought about ignoring it again. But then, what if this was the all-clear? He pulled it out to check. At first he was sure it was a waste of time yet again, but as he finished the preliminary parts of the warning, he saw that there was new information at last.
Satellite mapping of the phenomenon has revealed that there are gaps and openings periodically in its coverage of the Earth. The next projected opening in the phenomenon is expected to be in the major New York Metropolitan area between 0920 and 1000 hours. Due to the phenomenon operating at various altitudes, viewing of the sky is still strongly warned against. This is expected to be the only opening in the phenomenon for some time; as such, it is recommended you do not try and evacuate. Make a very short scouting trip for necessary supplies or superior shelter.
Do not look at the sky. Do not make noise. Generate as little heat as possible. Move as slowly as possible to avoid accidental noise.
To personnel with ∆6 clearance: Blue 12 procedures are no longer in effect, Red 4 procedures now supersede all previous orders.
Suddenly, in the silence, Emil could make out explosions. Distant, but distinct. Someone, somewhere, was destroying something, something very large. He'd been in Manhattan during 9/11, had heard those sounds before. The sound of a large explosion followed by the collapse of a great structure. Somewhere, a building was coming down. He looked up at his daughter, still sleeping, and more earnestly than ever before, Emil prayed.
~
Day 7
Sharon found herself wandering in the dark. Echoes of images and horrors from the past emerging and then disappearing again along the edges of her consciousness.
Her father’s fat fingers and leering smile. The moonlight glinting off the knife that first time she was stabbed in the alleyway she called home when she was 14. The feel of terror, humiliation, and pain as the gang from the group home "claimed" her when she was 17. The flash from a mortar explosion in that god-forsaken desert when she was 22. But somewhere... elsewhere, distant... like drums, or a heartbeat. An echo... thoughts... not her own. The same voice that had been trying to get in for weeks, ever since... no. That was just coincidence. Obey... said the voice. "I'll resist!" she shouted. Surrender... "Fight!" Despair... "Hope!" She screamed back at the voice from the darkness with all her will.
