Doomsday

5. Aerial Roulette

To Dr. Diana Trevor, the seconds it took to disengage the autopilot were eternities of dread. The plane bearing down on her was an older Beechcraft. She couldn’t imagine why the other pilot didn’t realize their peril. She went to dive out of danger when the other plane sheered off, passing uncomfortably close to her wing. She tried to call it on the radio. Angry, she watched it dwindle in the distance until it was a speck in the sky.

Diana returned to the routine of her flight. She had a long way to go. Her flight plan called for stops at small private airfields where she was less likely to run into the problems she foresaw for the larger public fields once panic set in. She’d worked it out in meticulous detail and was confident she would reach Minnesota, barring the unforeseen.

The reports on the airwaves painted a disturbing image. The attack on the task force had shattered any complacency people felt about the onset of the conflict in the Middle East. For more than a century there had been minor wars and terrorist attacks and political upheavals; this time it was all or nothing, the war to end all others. On Diana flew.

Eventually Arizona was behind her. She made it across Colorado. Each stop was routine. She stayed well away from large cities like Colorado Springs and Denver.

The news reports grew more and more alarming. Panic was spreading. People were beginning to realize that things they took for granted wouldn’t necessarily be available. Simple things, such as where their next meal was coming from. The illusion of security was being shattered. Diana had long wondered why so many of her fellow citizens took so much for granted. They assumed that filling their bellies would always be easy, that the corner grocery would always be open and their favorite fast-food orders or restaurants would always have food for the buying. They assumed they could always get fuel for their vehicles. They assumed the police would always be a phone call away, ready to serve and protect. Now they were learning the depths of their delusions. Civilization was a house of cards. Knock away one card and the entire house came undone, collapsing in on itself of its own pretensions. That was her opinion, anyway, and it was a view Kurt Carpenter shared. Diana made it to Nebraska. Flying over the state stirred memories of her childhood. She had been born and raised in Elkhorn, outside Omaha. Her childhood had been apple pie and Sunday school. Her parents had been surprised when she announced that she intended to enlist in the navy after high school. They didn’t understand her desire to see something of the world.

Her hitch had opened her eyes. She had served onboard a destroyer that called at various Pacific ports. Some— Australia, for instance—were a lot like home. Others—

Southeast Asia—showed her how wretched human existence could be. She saw people living in abject misery. People so malnourished, they were literally skin and bone. She saw children swim in water contaminated by human feces. She saw bodies left to rot.

Diana had realized a great truth. Life owed no one a living. Life owed no one their next meal, or a roof over their head, or even the clothes on their back. Life owed them nothing but life. The rest was up to them to procure any way they could.

So-called basic human rights were not part of the natural order. A person wasn’t born with the inherent right to free speech. A man-made document made that possible. The “right” was as flimsy as the paper it was written on.

After her navy stint, Diana had used the GI Bill to attend college. She had majored in psychology because the human mind fascinated her. Not so much how it worked as the delusions it fostered. Its capacity to deceive itself was boundless.

Diana had become interested in how the mind and its beliefs affected personality. That had led her to her research on dominance, which, in turn, led Kurt Carpenter to her. And here she was, on her way to his compound, hoping to ride out the end of the world in one of the few places on earth designed to do just that.

Diana smiled, thinking of how nice it would be to see Kurt again. She reached for her thermos. And her plane died.

The Boena bucked as if hit by a gust of wind. The electronics blipped out and the props stopped spinning. Far to the west, a strange luminosity lit the sky. There was no sound other than the shear of wind as the Boena dipped and began to lose altitude.

Diana fought down a spike of fear. She knew what to do in a situation like this. She still had control, limited control, but there was every chance she could bring the plane in for a safe landing. She was over western Nebraska, somewhere in the vicinity of North Platte. The country below was mostly farmland. Nebraska had never suffered from a lack of flat ground, so she should be able to find a spot to set down. Flying a plane without power was a lot like driving a car without power. It took concentration and strength and iron nerves.

Diana banked slightly and peered out of the cockpit. She needed a field or a road or highway. Patchwork squares of farmland grew in size. A green patch became com and a yellow patch became oats. A ribbon of brown was a dusty country road.

She decided to try for the road. A straight stretch looked long enough. There were no cars or trucks. Provided she didn’t hit a rut or pothole, she should be able to bring in her bird. Her angle of descent was just right. She aligned the plane with the middle of the road and braced for the bump of her wheels setting down. She was so intent on the road that she didn’t pay much attention to the fences on each side.

She landed perfectly. She was moving fast, but she had plenty of space. Already she was thinking of what she would do when she got out. Too late, she saw a dip that ran the width of the road. The nose dropped, there was a shriek of mangled metal, the plane bounced, and then it slowed and went into a spin.

Diana had fleeting glimpses of sky and field and road. The Boena hit the fence and she heard metallic twangs that reminded her of guitar strings being plucked. A pole loomed, and she shrank into her seat and covered her head with her arms. The impact jarred her. Her tail rose and she thought the plane would flip over, but it crashed back down.

Then all was still.

Diana lowered her arms. The plane was in a ditch. The broken pole lay over a partly crumpled wing. Strands of wire were tangled everywhere. But she was alive. She unstrapped herself and climbed out, then stood on the wing and sniffed. She didn’t smell fuel.

The blue sky mocked her. She turned in a circle. All she saw was farmland. Not a building anywhere. To the north were low hills.

Diana tried the radio, but it wouldn’t work. Nothing would. EMP effect, was her guess. She got her backpack and her bottle of water and out of habit reached for her laptop. Without power it was a piece of junk. She wouldn’t lose anything essential, though; it was all backed up on disc, and the discs were in her pack.

The ground felt spongy after so much flying. Diana hopped up and down a few times, then headed north along the road. She didn’t look back. Her past was behind her in more ways than one. She hadn’t gone far when movement in a belt of trees between fields alerted her to wildlife. She expected deer, but instead saw two coyotes staring back at her.

Usually, coyotes weren’t dangerous. But Diana shrugged out of her backpack. At the top was the last item she had packed: mace. She hefted it, thinking it was too bad it had been in her backpack when Harold Pierce had come at her. She would have loved to spray him smack in the eyes. Diana looked up. The coyotes were gone. She stuck the mace in her front pocket, slid her shoulders into her back-pack, and set off down the road, seeking a sign of habitation. It was a gorgeous sunny day. The temperature was pushing ninety-five but she didn’t mind the heat. She never had. It was cold that got to her.

She admired the fine blue of the sky and the puffy white of the clouds, and reflected on the irony that on the other side of the world, at that very moment, the sky was choked with radioactive dust. Diana wondered how far the EMP effect teached. She wondered, too, with rising concern, how she was going to get from Nebraska to Minnesota before the deadline.

Kurt Carpenter had a timetable. Those he selected had exactly one hundred hours from the moment the first nukes detonated on U.S. soil to reach the compound. And that was the best-case scenario. As Carpenter had put it to her, “I can’t jeopardize the welfare of the majority for the sake of a few. Our only hope of weathering the worst of it is to hunker in out bunkers and stay there until the radiation levels drop.”

A hundred hours was a lot of time. Diana could make it to Minnesota by car, provided she could get her hands on one. But they looked to be scarce in this particular part of the heartland. Diana had hiked for about ten minutes when the growl of an engine reached her. She questioned how that could be with the EMP effect. Then she remembered. The pulse fried electronic systems in use. Those not being used—a car that wasn’t running, for instance—weren’t affected. She moved to the side of the road and waited.

The source of the growl came over a low rise ahead of her. It was a pickup, an antique popular in her great-grandfather’s day, spewing as much smoke as noise. Clunking and rattling, it bore down on her at a turtle crawl. Then gears ground and the pickup leaped toward her like an old tiger eager to sink its fangs into fresh prey.

Diana smiled and waved.

In a swirl of dust and a belch of exhaust, the pickup came to a stop next to her. The driver had to be in his sixties if he was a day. He wore a grimy T-shirt with holes in it and jeans so thin it was a wonder his leg hairs didn’t poke through.

He grinned, revealing yellow teeth, where he had teeth. He also had a lazy eye that tended to drift. “How do, girlie? Was it you in that plane I saw come down from my barn?”

“Afraid so,” Diana confirmed. “Any chance you can give me a lift to the next town?” The old man snickered. “Dearie, that would take an hour or better. And the radio’s been saying as how we should stick close to home on account of the invasion.”

“What invasion?”

“Haven’t you heard? There’s talk the Chinese army is pushing down from Canada and the Russians are set to land in Philadelphia.”

“That’s preposterous.”

The old man reached across and pushed the passenger door open. It creaked on long-neglected hinges.

“Come to my place and you can hear it yourself.”

The man was nice enough, and it would be stupid of her to stay there when he was offering her a lift. She shrugged out of her backpack, placed it on the floor, and climbed in. The door creaked even louder when she slammed it.

“Hang on.” The old man worked the gearshift, turning the pickup around. “I’m Amos Stiggims, by the way. I’m a farmer like my pappy before me and his pappy before him.”

“I have an uncle who farms a little. He raises organic vegetables mostly.”

“You don’t say.” Stiggims managed to grind through first and second gear as he chugged to the top of the rise. “I’ve never had much truck with those organic types. They look down their noses at me because I use what chemicals the law allows.” He ground third, too. “They’re like that uppity so-and-so on the television.”

“Who?”

“You know. He’s on late night. Always poking fun at folks like me. It’s white trash this and white trash that. Somebody ought to shove a shotgun up his ass and pull the trigger.” Stiggims cackled at the prospect.

Diana studied him without being obvious. He seemed harmless enough, just an old crank who hadn’t come to terms with the outside world. But to be diplomatic, she sought to get on his good side by saying,

“Topical humor doesn’t do much for me, either.”

Stiggims glanced at her sharply. “What kind of humor?”

“Topical. You know. About the news and the day’s events.”

Stiggims muttered something that sounded to Diana like “One of those.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, nothing, girlie.”

In the distance, well back from the road, sat a farm-house, a barn, and outbuildings. Even that far off, Diana could tell they were like their owner and his truck: well past their prime. If she hadn’t known better, she’d think they were built during the days of the Pony Express. Suddenly she sat up. “Mr. Stiggims, do you own a cell phone?”

“A what?”

“A cellular phone. I don’t see any telephone lines to your property. Or maybe they bury the cable out here. Is that it?”

“Oh. The telephone. Sure, that’s it. They bury the lines on account of the fierce thunderstorms and tornados we get. The winds are always knocking down trees and stuff.” A dirt track linked the road to the farmhouse. The pickup raised clouds of dust the whole length of it. As they braked,

Diana saw that she had given the buildings too much credit. Almost anywhere else, they would be condemned.

“Here we are. Come on in and make your call.” Stiggims hopped out and started around the truck. Diana had to jiggle the door handle a few times to get it to work. She climbed down and turned to get her back-pack, saying, “I really appreciate this. The last thing I want is to be stranded. I need to get out of here as soon as possible.”

“That’s a pity,” Amos Stiggims said. “What is?”

It was then that Diana saw the tire iron.