We went outside and I said, “Where’s the car?”
And Dad said the car wasn’t working. No cars were working. The streets were littered with stalled-out cars and buses and motorcycles and trucks, smashups and clusters of wrecks on every block, cars folded around light poles and sticking out of buildings. A lot of people were trapped when the EMP hit; the automatic locks on the doors didn’t work, and they had to break out of their own cars or sit there and wait for someone to rescue them. The injured people who could still move crawled onto the roadside and sidewalks to wait for the paramedics, but no paramedics came because the ambulances and the fire trucks and the cop cars didn’t work, either. Everything that ran on batteries or electricity or had an engine died at eleven A.M.
Dad walked as he talked, keeping a tight grip on my wrist, like he was afraid something might swoop down out of the sky and snatch me away.
“Nothing’s working. No electricity, no phones, no plumbing…”
“We saw a plane crash.”
He nodded. “I’m sure they all did. Anything and everything in the sky when it hit. Fighter jets, helicopters, troop transports…”
“When what hit?”
“EMP,” he said. “Electromagnetic pulse. Generate one large enough and you knock out the entire grid. Power. Communications. Transportation. Anything that flies or drives is zapped out.”
It was a mile and a half from my school to our house. The longest mile and a half I’ve ever walked. It felt as if a curtain had fallen over everything, a curtain painted to look exactly like what it was hiding. There were glimpses, though, little peeks behind the curtain that told you something had gone very wrong. Like all the people standing on their front porches holding their dead phones, looking up at the sky, or bending over the open hoods of their cars, fiddling with wires, because that’s what you do when your car dies—you fiddle with wires.
“But it’s okay,” he said, squeezing my wrist. “It’s okay. There’s a good chance our backup systems weren’t crippled, and I’m sure the government has a contingency plan, protected bases, that sort of thing.”
“And how does pulling our plug fit into their plan to help us along in the next stage of our evolution, Dad?”
I regretted the words the instant I said them. But I was freaking out. He didn’t take it the wrong way. He looked at me and smiled reassuringly and said, “Everything’s going to be okay,” because that’s what I wanted him to say and it’s what he wanted to say and that’s what you do when the curtain is falling—you give the line that the audience wants to hear.
7
AROUND NOON on my mission to keep my promise, I stop for a water break and a Slim Jim. Every time I eat a Slim Jim or a can of sardines or anything prepackaged, I think, Well, there’s one less of that in the world. Whittling away the evidence of our having been here one bite at a time.
One of these days, I’ve decided, I’m going to work up the nerve to catch a chicken and wring its delicious neck. I would kill for a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled across someone eating a cheeseburger, I would kill them for it.
There are plenty of cows around. I could shoot one and carve it up with my bowie knife. I’m pretty sure I’d have no problem slaughtering a cow. The hard part would be cooking it. Having a fire, even in daylight, was the surest way to invite them to the cookout.
A shadow shoots across the grass a dozen yards in front of me. I jerk my head back, knocking it hard against the side of a Honda Civic I was leaning against while I enjoyed my snack. It wasn’t a drone. It was a bird, a seagull of all things, skimming along with barely a flick of its outstretched wings. A shiver of revulsion goes down my spine. I hate birds. I didn’t before the Arrival. I didn’t after the 1st Wave. I didn’t after the 2nd Wave, which really didn’t affect me that much.
But after the 3rd Wave, I hated them. It wasn’t their fault, I knew that. It was like a man in front of a firing squad hating the bullets, but I couldn’t help it.
Birds suck.
8
AFTER THREE DAYS on the road, I’ve determined that cars are pack animals.
They prowl in groups. They die in clumps. Clumps of smashups. Clumps of stalls. They glimmer in the distance like jewels. And suddenly the clumps stop. The road is empty for miles. There’s just me and the asphalt river cutting through a defile of half-naked trees, their leaves crinkled and clinging desperately to their dark branches. There’s the road and the naked sky and the tall, brown grass and me.
These empty stretches are the worst. Cars provide cover. And shelter. I sleep in the undamaged ones (I haven’t found a locked one yet). If you can call it sleep. Stale, stuffy air; you can’t crack the windows, and leaving the door open is out of the question. The gnaw of hunger. And the night thoughts. Alone, alone, alone.
And the baddest of the bad night thoughts:
I’m no alien drone designer, but if I were going to make one, I’d make sure that its detection device was sensitive enough to pick up a body’s heat signature through a car roof. It never failed: The moment I started to drift off, I imagined all four doors flying open and dozens of hands reaching for me, hands attached to arms attached to whatever they are. And then I’m up, fumbling with my M16, peeking over the backseat, then doing a 360, feeling trapped and more than a little blind behind the fogged-up windows.
Dawn comes. I wait for the morning fog to burn off, then sip some water, brush my teeth, double-check my weapons, inventory my supplies, and hit the road again. Look up, look down, look all around. Don’t pause at the exits. Water’s fine for now. No way am I going anywhere near a town unless I have to.
For a lot of reasons.
You know how you can tell when you’re getting close to one? The smell. You can smell a town from miles away.
It smells like smoke. And raw sewage. And death.
In the city it’s hard to take two steps without stumbling over a corpse. Funny thing: People die in clumps, too.
I begin to smell Cincinnati about a mile before spotting the exit sign. A thick column of smoke rises lazily toward the cloudless sky.
Cincinnati is burning.
I’m not surprised. After the 3rd Wave, the second most common thing you found in cities, after the bodies, were fires. A single lightning strike could take out ten city blocks. There was no one left to put the fires out.