Stone Age (14 page)

Over Middle Illinois

Nothing went right with John & Steve Parkington’s flight.  Besides the amazing, but unnerving aurora displays, all their equipment was barely functional.  Their radio returned mostly static. The Garmin GPS with XM Weather was inoperable, displaying a fluttering green-red screen. Even the old VOR system, didn’t really work.  Only one piece of navigational equipment was functional. An old compass, providing the only bearing they felt comfortable following.  They were, however, blessed with minimal air traffic, due to the early hour and the problems grounding most planes.  For the last two hours, the airport closures and diversions caused their greatest concerns.  All were from the same problems they were experiencing; geomagnetic storms which laid waste to the satellites on which their equipment depended.  After being turned away from Denver Airport because of communications issues, they returned east to attempt landing at a regional outside of Lawrence, Kansas.  There, they were planning to refill and get more intel on the problems plaguing all pilots.  But they were diverted from there as well.  Finally, they hoped to make it to the private airport outside of Kansas City, since MCI was closed, but were once again diverted. 

Now, fuel was their chief problem.  Even with the extended tanks John had installed, they were on fumes. 

While John and Steve discussed their very limited options, someplace over a rural area west of Ottawa Illinois, their engine stopped, along with their radio, and all other instruments.  All the lights in the cockpit flashed once and then went out.  It was as if someone just unplugged an invisible power cord.

The cockpit of even a pressurized Cessna is loud, so much so that the pilot and co-pilot wear headphones to both hear the radio and to speak to each other via intercom.  The sudden
absence of engine noise was deafening.  Both John and Steve, almost in unison, tugged at one side of their headsets, exposing an ear to confirm what their now frozen propeller and all their other impulses screamed.  They were in trouble.  A whistling sound from the rushing air displaced by the plane’s fuselage and a forward sensation being communicated by their inner ears, were the only stimuli telling their senses they were still moving.  Otherwise, because the dark of early morning, only slightly illuminated by the green spectral display above, it appeared that they had stopped dead in the air.

“We are dead stick,” John announced. 

Steve heard his dad’s muffled voice, unable to see much of his face beside him. The blackness inside the cockpit was thick and unnerving.  He ripped off his headphones.

“- confirm.  Son, please confirm that you have no readings on your side?” John yelled louder.

“Dad, I have nothing.  You too?”

“Affirmative.  I have no electronics, but I have full controls.”

“How can we not have even lights?  Could our batteries die at the same time as the engine?”

“We have bigger issues.  We should be close to a small regional around here…”  Their eyes struggled to see through the blanket of darkness that covered them, looking for lights, any lights.  But they were in a rural and
somewhat rugged part of Illinois.  It seemed the lights were off below as well.

They glided past a
light and a
whoosh-whoosh
sound, just barely missing some structure… a
windmill
?  Then, in the distance was a clearing and a cluster of lights.

“There.” John pointed to a patch of lights
assembled together on the ground, a small town of probably a few hundred, and the faintly lit long line of a rural highway leading to it.  Steve craned forward to see it

“That’s a highway, not an airport,” hoping he was looking at the wrong lights.

“Flying beggars can’t be choosy.  That will have to do.” John pushed his invisible hands forward and turned the plane’s wheel counterclockwise, while his feet pushed the pedals to counter. The ailerons, flaps and rudder worked in harmony to bank the plane left and on a downward slope.

They could both feel their air speed dropping a couple of knots every few seconds.  Steve pushed the wheel forward more to keep their speed up at the expense of a quicker rate of decent. 

The new quiet and somber darkness around them lulled their senses into a false calmness that belied the real danger that waited below.  The Earth was going to come at them fast.  They passed a single light of a large house in the hills, but otherwise, it was dark below them.  The town’s fast approaching lights beckoned them from just below the cowling, growing in strength with each passing second, as their distance closed.

Then the town’s lights went out.  It was as if the blanket of darkness that followed them in the air was thrown over the town
as well covering all the lights below. 

Now panicked, John and Steve spun their heads wildly, searching for anything, glad they could not see the fear in each other’s faces. 

“How will we see the street now?” Steve asked feeling stupid for asking a question, he already knew the answer to.

“At this point, I’ll be happy to see anything,” John answered.

Breathing slowly, Steve tried to think like a pilot, considering what he would want to know, based on the forty or so hours he’d flown.  “What do you think our altitude is right now?” He finally asked.

“Around 1000?” John guessed, “Maybe less.”  He popped open his
window and the scary peace was broken by the cool 120 knot air rushing into their cockpit.

Steve understood without asking.  John was flying by his senses now, and he needed to hear as well as see anything he could to keep from going in nose first, or crashing into a structure or trees on the ground.

Their eyes appeared to be adjusting to the darkness. 
It was the auroras.
  They came to the same realization at once.    The ground was bathed in a bright green light, enough now that they could see the trees and the fast approaching ground

“I see a
road,” John announced triumphantly.  He banked the plane slightly, but then reality sunk in, with only two hundred feet of altitude, they were too far away to make it. 

“Steve, prepare for a crash landing.  At that last moment, you need to tuck forward.  You got that?”

John leveled the plane and searched for the cleanest line and a solid tree or structure to take some of their inertial energy away. He was thankful that he attended the workshop on crash landing at Oshkosh last year.  At least, with little fuel in their tanks, they wouldn’t burn.

“I hear you, Dad.  I’m not scared.”

There. 
He found his flight line between two tall oaks.  Every second a loud
whoosh
sound, announced a passing tree. 
Any second now
.

“
I love you, son.”

“Me too,” Steve’s voice rose in pitch,
unconsciously bracing for the impact the moment it happened.   

The intercom and then the pilot’s voice broke through the loud hum of the plane’s engines which were working hard, still pushing to keep them upward, “This is your captain speaking.  I’m sure you have already noticed the rare occurrence outside your windows.  For the same reasons we left O’Hare so late, if you look out now, you will probably never see an aurora display this far south in your lifetimes.”   Most of the passengers craned and contorted themselves to see the green ribbons of light spread out all over the horizon, so close they felt they could reach up and touch these heavenly objects.

“Soooo beautiful,” Stacy exclaimed, momentarily forgetting her fear
, which had been constant throughout their flight. 

The captain continued,
“Because of recent solar activity, we have the pleasure of -” 

The lights flickered and the intercom crackled, cutting off the captain mid-sentence.  Every head that had been craning to see the beautiful light show,
turned to regard the cockpit door, hoping their gaze would somehow pierce the door and yield some sort of confirmation that the plane’s captain was not as concerned as they were.  The engines started to stumble as did the plane’s lights, as if some unknown force was sucking up the plane’s energy.  It was the opposite.

All at once, the engines stopped and the lights were extinguished.  The passengers were bathed in silence and an eerie green darkness.  They held their
collective breaths, as if the plane would now float, using the combined air in their lungs. 

Stacy’s eyes, slightly illuminated by the green glow of the aurora outside, were filled with terror.  Her right hand reflexively reached, grabbed, and squeezed a vice-grip hold on a hand in the seat next to hers.  The silence, and the shock of the last few seconds was broken by a sheer wave of panic that washed over everyone from the front to the back of the plane like a tsunami.  “Oh, my God!” and “The engines!”
screamed out of the cabin’s green haze.  

“It will be alright,” Stacy’s friend said, calmly squeezing her hand and the hand of the boy sitting next to her. 

Someone yelled something unintelligible, followed by another, and then another,
now screeching the same declaration, “FIRE.” 

Stacy looked to her left and saw through two of the window seats that the wing on their side was on fire.

Then, everyone could feel it. Their inertia had given way to the greater force pulling on them, gravity.  They started to descend, first, a little, then a lot.  Within a few seconds, they were spiraling out of control, the planes electronic controls unyielding to the pilot and co-pilot’s physical exertion to keep the plane airborne. 

Stacy squeezed her friend’s hand so hard it was turning it blue.  She closed her eyes and starting praying the only prayer that came to mind,

“Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray my Lord my soul to keep

And If I die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Hell Breaks Loose

5:20 A.M.

Rocky Point, Mexico

Most sunrises on their beach, were similarly stunning, with almost imperceptible differences in the new day’s light, breezes, or the ocean waves.  This dawn was different, a foretelling already seen by many, but soon by everyone else.  The sky sported an extra deep hue of magenta, more common during cloudy mornings, and an unnatural shade of lime.  There were no clouds, but for the slight wispy red and green ropes; leftovers from the evening auroras.  These heavenly ethereal cords slowly dissipated as the sun stood its ground, as if to command them away, at least for now.

With that, a new day started.   It was to be a day no one on Earth would forget.

Max had been up for hours.  Troubled first by his dreams, vivid visions of death and destruction, then last night’s light show, both events seemingly predicting what was coming.  From what he understood, the CMEs that hit last night were pretty big, but not big enough to cause the destruction he had been most worried about, including their technology.  Unfortunately, that was the mission of their much bigger brothers, traveling on their heels.  They were due to hit the Earth at any moment.   Unlike solar flares, which carry excessive radiation, coronal mass ejections were large clouds of plasma that weren’t directly injurious to humans, but were deadly to just about everything electronic.  This one was supposed to be a doozy, potentially many times worse than the Carrington Event of 1859 was. 

Because he prepared for this for years, and last night giving Bill and Lisa their instructions, there was little he could do but wait. 

His lack of patience for the end of the world to hurry up and get here tickled his desire to find out how much damage the already arrived CMEs caused elsewhere.   While the world still had power, he wanted to watch some news.  He turned his TV on, which like his computer equipment, was connected to a set of twenty-five back up batteries, charged by the multiple solar roof panels, and shielded along with his office behind the bookshelf.  However, because both television and Internet were receiving their signals from satellite, Max doubted the reception would be good due to the electromagnetic waves from CMEs.  It showed nothing but static.

Okay, what next?
  He rolled over to another table further back in the warehouse, and blew the dust off an SSB receiver and fired it up.  Rotating the Kenwood’s dials clockwise, his forefinger and thumb eloquently seeking out any human voice, he could find almost no commercial or ham radio stations.  He expected this, since geomagnetic storms also adversely disrupted radio signals.  The only somewhat discernible station was a French news broadcast.  He was somewhat sure the alluring female voice said that Paris was burning, but his French was rusty and the signal was worse. 

He
searched his shelves for something, anything that was connected to the world. “Cell phone,” he yelped, remembering that he could connect via a Telecell data plan on his phone, which he never used because the cost seemed too expensive. It wasn’t a sense of frugality, but a sense of fairness that prevented him from using his data plan.  He did not want to support a company that milked the poor people of Mexico.  The end of the world was a worthy exception.  He stood up from his desk and reached for his iPhone, noticing then that the phone’s light was on as if a call, email or text had recently come through.  It was on the shelf above his desk so he hadn’t noticed it until now and he forgot he still had the mute switch on since El Gordo’s call a few hours ago.  More importantly, it occurred to him, he hadn’t checked it since he left the WIFI signal from his ranch.  He examined the screen and saw five messages:

>
Email (25h ago): Cicada Protocol – Open immediately

>
Email (24.5h ago): CMERI Bulletin – A Carrington Event is Coming!

>
Breaking News (8h ago):  Power out in New York – Fires reported

>
Worldwide Alert – Killer solar storm coming (16m ago)

>
Text (10m ago): Max my friend we are coming to kill you and your f…

He already read the first message on his computer, which heroically gave its own life to the Cicada cause.  He wan
ted to read the second, third and fourth items, but then saw the last message’s urgency and clicked on it.  The text read:

Max my friend we coming to kill you and your friends.  We leaving in few minutes.  They know you selling guns to Ochoa.  Run!  God b
e with you.  Pappa.

Ten minutes ago?
  He grabbed a .45 Glock, one of the many weapons resting atop his workbench.  Slipping the clip of the scabbard gloved to the pistol, over back of his pants, under his shirt, where the coolness of the weapon against his back provided comfort.  He grabbed an extra clip, shoving it into his back pocket while he ran down the hallway, sliding in his stocking feet. 
Shit. No time to grab my boots
.  Punching the door release with his palm, he shoved it open, pivoted and then just as quickly closed it.  Stopping for just a moment, thinking of one last thing he might have to do.  He grabbed an empty journal book from his bookshelf and walked over carefully to his little Mexican work desk, across from the bookcase, situated so he could do work and see the ocean.  Quickly, he scribbled something on the first page, closed it and placed it on top of a shelf just below the desk surface, making sure it was obvious to anyone who looked for it.  Finally, he dashed over the threshold of his patio, to reconnoiter hurriedly with Bill, Lisa, and Sally before Rodrigo’s men arrived.  He hit a wall of realization, momentarily stopping to assess and let his mind catch up with his eyes.  There were two major problems besides their being on a drug kingpin’s hit list.

First, his backyard, patio, and pool area were a mess.  Scattered among the debris of what was his tidy patio were the mostly dead carcasses of
many various ocean birds.  A pelican’s giant body, laid face down, with one colossal bloody wing sticking straight up and through what used to be the glass top of a metal patio table.  Blood, glass, and other organic matter pooled below its frame, a memorial to an event that puzzled him.  At least a dozen other dead birds lay scattered all over the patio, and another dozen or so in the pool, which had a rosy hue to it.  The body of a seagull, floated, its dying twitches causing slight undulations in the pool’s water.

Second problem was that his house and patio lights were out.  All should have been on right now even though it was daytime.  He flipped a switch confirming there was no power, except of course in his office, which was on a different circuit. 

These puzzles were for later.

He leapt into a run, mentally taking an s-shaped route around the debris. His footfalls muffled by their wet sock coverings, made
plat-ploof, plat-ploof
sounds as he negotiated around the obstacles, slipping slightly around each turn. Passing two stacked chairs overturned in a muddle of reddish water dripping into the pool, he heard buzzing, followed by something sharp biting his wet mop-like feet and right arm, like several pinpricks at once.  He bounded past the assault, rubbing his arm, uninterrupted.  Leaving wet footprints on the few dry areas of his pool decking.

A noise from the ocean drew his attention.  A scream from a kayaker held her paddle up with erect arms, her body convulsing, and her hair more rigid crowned a face locked in pain.
 Then it hit him,
electrical current
.

"Lisa, move away from the electrical box!" Screaming over their walls.  Lisa, turned towards the scream, her finger poised a foot from their outdoor breaker panel.
 A snake-like arch of current, inches away, ready to strike at its soon to be newly found ground source.  

"Get the fuck back," Max yelled this time.
  Lisa obliged, looking at their bushy haired friend as he cleared the coffee gate in one stride - a gold medalist making record time - running and yelling at her.  

A glint of light serenaded her eyes over Max's head.
 A growing whistle noise, like a train announced its arrival, coming quickly.  Its silver coat reflected the sun and the greenish sparkling clouds, fragments of yesterday eve.  It was a plane with a tail of black cords, trailing the corkscrewing fuselage. The whistle sound and fuselage were heralding what was now unmistakable.  

"The plane is going to crash," Lisa announced her realization, adding an exclamation mark with her extended right finger and arm, which followed the doomed aircraft’s trajectory until they both met the horizon.  Her arm and finger were defeated, unable to save the plane.
 A bright red-orange mushroom cloud rose in the distance.

Max, now at her wing, and Lisa silent.
 

Then the words poured out, "Oh God.
 That hit the port. That could be Darla and Danny. We need…"

Max grabbed her roughly and ushered her to the patio door. "Hey. That hur…"

"Where are Bill and Sally?" interrupting.

Crossing the threshold, he demanded, "Where?"
 

"Did you flip the switch?" Bill was walking towards them from the kitchen, providing half the answer.

"Where's Sally?" ignoring Bill’s question.

"I think..." Noticing his wife's tears, "What's wrong, honey?"

Shaking like a leaf fluttering on a tree in the wind, she was consumed by grief. “They’re all dead."  .    

"Who’s dead?" Bill asked, unsure what Lisa was talking about.

Frustrated, Max yelled, "Where the fuck is Sally?"  

Bill
went silent, and Lisa was still sobbing, arms crossed around her chest.  Both looked at their yelling friend.

"I'm here, Uncle Max.
 It just happened, didn't it?  We just got hit by a Carrington Flare again, didn't we?” Sally saw her mother’s anguish and rushed over to her, Bill already there. “Mom, what’s wrong?"

Max tried to get their attention back. “It doesn't matter now, just listen…”

“Oh God, Dar and Danny, everyone on that plane, the Kayaker, they’re all dead,” Lisa shrieked hysterically, sobbing now in Bill and Sally’s arms. 

“Lisa, that wasn’t Dar and Danny.  It was some other plane,” Max stated emphatically.

“How do you know?” Bill asked the question now on all their minds.

“It was coming from the wrong direction, and I don’t think their plane even made it up in the air.”

Another explosion interrupted. This one was much closer.

Bill, Lisa, and Sally stopped
listening, craning their heads around the limits of the back windows, attempting to add a visual answer to the illogical clues which was assaulting their senses.

“Please, I need your attention,” Max yelled.