From a minute after eight o’clock, David Niece found he had no heat, no water, no refrigeration and no public method of communication. He thought he’d heard the sound of thunder. But when he went outside, the stars twinkled through a sky that was dark and clear.
Nobody was allowed to build on the hills outside Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania anymore, but the house had been in his family since 1928 — his only neighbor out of sight, isolated by trees and distance. The house was above the frost line, but his little gas generator out back started on the first pull. He plugged in the three thick yellow extension cords that ran through a hole drilled in the house’s side. He heard the well pump turn on. He’d lost power before. He could run whatever he really needed to. He had a cord-and-a-half of wood stacked up for the winter.
But it was the fact that all the radio and TV stations his satellite dish usually pulled in were off the air that really worried him. From his porch above the Delaware Water Gap, David watched a stream of westbound cars fill Interstate 80.
He got into his old El Camino and drove down the hill. Maybe he could find out what the hell was going on.
At the mini-mart, people jammed the aisles. Just inside the front doors, David kept out of the way, watched and listened.
Contorted faces, a desperation he’d never seen before, pulling hot dog buns and candy and soda and water randomly, fast as they could empty the shelves.
“Goddammit! I had those marshmallows first!” yelled a big walrus.
“You sonofabitch! You took ’em right out of my kid’s hand!” a tough little guy screamed back.
Fists flew. Nobody — not even the store manager seemed to care.
And David pieced it together.
“My brother was just in New York, day before yesterday!”
“Anybody who was downtown is toast!”
“Shut up! My sister lives in Battery Park!”
“Sorry!”
“Anybody know who did it?”
He got back into his car and raced up the hill. Shit! An atom bomb! In New York!
At the top of his house was an attic stairway. At the top of the stairs he threw open a white door that bore a small sign.
TOP OF THE WORLD, it said.
He sat down and plugged in a black power cord he never kept connected — in case of lightning strikes — to the yellow extension cord on the floor nearby. He flipped on a speaker and began transmitting over his ham radio.
Even on weekends, with the exception of three unemployed derelicts who closed down the town’s only bar every night, the people of Marysville, Ohio — population 12,336 — went to bed early.
“Ben! Wake up!” Susan Coupe shook her husband violently. “Ben!”
“Huh?” answered Ben Coupe. “What time is it?” Susan had the light on.
“Nine o’clock. Somebody’s at the door!”
Their doorbell hadn’t worked in three years, but Ben heard the pounding echo through the old house.
He blinked, squinted, pain shooting down his left arm as he reached for and missed a terrycloth robe hanging over a chair alongside the bed. A shoulder diagnosed with bursitis had bothered him for the last two years.
He slid his bare feet to the floor and pulled the robe on.
BOOM! BOOM! The pounding came louder this time.
He flipped on the stairway light and headed down. “Hold on, hold on! I’m coming!”
Ben opened the front door to find Cheryl — Susan’s sister — and her live-in boyfriend Matt standing on the porch, wearing winter coats over pajamas and slippers, eyes wide with terror.
“Oh, my God!” Cheryl blurted as they ran forward. “Matt was up listening to that damned CB again — ”
“Good thing too!”
“Shut up, Matt!” Cheryl screamed.
“What is it, Cheryl?” Susan asked coming into the living room behind Ben.
“Suze!” she yanked the front of her sister’s bathrobe, “The phones are out! New York City’s been bombed!”
“What!” Ben said. “New York? Is the whole country under attack? Who — ”
Without thinking, Susan lifted the phone. A dial tone hummed back. “Ours is working.”
At 8:33, Des Moines, Iowa time, the telephone rang in the apartment of Kim Martin and her two daughters. It was Kim’s brother, Brian, calling from Canadian — a town halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo, north Texas.
“New York?” she said. “He called you from Ohio? That’s a pretty close friend for an old college buddy. Did he say who did it?”
“Ben knows we do some nuclear warhead work down here,” Brian explained. “He wanted to find out what I thought. The Amarillo television stations aren’t on the air and my satellite dish isn’t working. I can get one radio station, that’s it. The President hasn’t said anything yet — but look, Kimmie — I’m on my way out the door right now. I’ve only got a few bucks. I’m gonna hit the cash machine.”
Kim ran with the portable phone to the kitchen for a look in her purse. “Shit!” she yelped. “I’ve only got a twenty, Brian.”
“Girls!” she yelled. “Get your coats! You can wear your pj’s underneath. Girls! We have to go somewhere in the car for a few minutes! Now!”
By the time Kim reached her usual ATM, there were already a dozen people in line. When she was one person from the machine, a dark-haired man came walking back toward her counting, and the person directly in front began swearing out the longest string of cuss words she’d ever heard, then turned and ran after the dark-haired man.
A message flashed in the ATM window:
CASH DEPLETED
PLEASE TRY ANOTHER LOCATION
That night, Kim and her daughters drove to three more cash machines.
There was no line at any of them. The first two were empty. She ran nervously from the last machine. It looked like someone had taken a crowbar to it.
In the middle of ten thousand acres northeast of Burlington, Kansas, the head night engineer at Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant studied a series of computer readouts. Those two rods on the Number Three Bundle look pretty solid. His systems were operating near maximum output. Good thing too with this New Yor —
He looked up to see a U.S. Army colonel and four soldiers file in through the main control room door.
Colonel Devers Broadmore introduced himself, then announced, “By Presidential Executive Order 16-176, all active nuclear power plants are to be immediately shut down. It is our task to see such procedures as necessary are implemented efficiently and safely carried out.”
The engineer frowned at the colonel. “Shutdown? What!”
“That’s right, gentlemen.”
“But I don’t understand. Why us? Way out here? Some of the plants back East maybe. But us? We’re near peak load. If we — ”
“Immediate shutdown, sir!” Colonel Broadmore’s face remained impassive. “Right now!”
The chief engineer hesitated. He thought of his own house twenty miles away — his wife, his family. Though none of the soldiers were raising weapons, he picked up on a sense of increasing tension in the muscles, the tendons of the hands that held them. The engineer’s jaw muscle worked. He took a deep breath, then stepped to the main console. To the shock of everyone on the plant’s night crew, he entered into the computer a series of commands.
Deep within the thick-wall concrete containment dome next door, motors whirred. An ear-deafening hissSSSS grew. Control rods of boron, cadmium and silver pushed downward, absorbing neutrons. The nuclear core’s temperature dropped. Steam reverted to water, losing its ability to produce motive force. Generators slowed.
On the U.S. grid, the sudden gigantic power deficit forced switching engineers to make sudden choices. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, the wave of blackouts rippled outward into Kansas. Lights in ten — twenty — fifty thousand homes went dark as they were taken off the grid. Refrigerators stopped cooling. Hot water heaters stopped heating. Furnaces shut down.
At the Palo Verde plant west of Phoenix, River Bend north of New Orleans — at sixty-three other generating plants across the United States — the procedure was repeated.
Eleven million homes went dark.
In Marysville, Ohio, in the middle of their third phone call, the lights at Ben and Susan Coupe’s house went out. In Des Moines, Iowa, the display on the fourth cash machine Kim Martin tried simply went dead.
It didn’t return her card.
