Sunburn (Book 1, The Events Trilogy) (3 page)

Mary thought it a little strange when they had to stop the Ford so Will could take away the camouflage bushes for his driveway. But instinctively she did not fear him. He was odd, but she was sure he was not dangerous, at least to her.

She was impressed by the house with its solar
electric system and even more so by the shelter built into the hillside. There seemed to be years’ worth of supplies in the various pantries. There was a large short wave radio and a small TV.

“The storm may not fry my radio and TV
in here but it won’t matter if nobody is able to broadcast a signal,” he said. We’ll be pretty much out of touch.”

“We might be able to get something on the short wave,” she said. “My Dad had one when I was little and we used to hear things from countries very far away. Maybe something
electric will survive, somewhere—“

She had said “we!”

“So, you will—“

“I believe you’re a good man, Will. We’ve only been out a few times but I thought that from the beginning.
I like you but I thought you weren’t going to ask me out again.”

“I’m kind of shy, sometimes,” he confessed. “I should say more what I feel but it’s hard for me.”

“Well, I’m glad you did this time and I accept your offer of shelter from this storm. I need to home and pack some things.”

“Sure, sure!
I’ll drive you back.”

5.

Hours passed and Samuel Fischer had not returned. Fred had had a lot of coffee, called home several times, looked at all the furniture in the model rooms, and was sitting in front with yet another coffee, when Samuel’s buggy appeared down the road. It took several minutes for him to actually arrive while Fred finished his coffee. Samuel tied his horse and put a feed bag over his head.

“Time for dinner,” he said as he went in, but his serious expression belied the feeble joke. They sat and he began immediately:

“If we agree, what might you bring with you tomorrow, besides your family?”

Fred caught his meaning.

“Well, among my personal items I have a hunting rifle, an old Remington 30-30. But I could buy more long guns the same day in Maryland if I need to. Do the Amish believe in firearms?”

“We have had our own hunting guns for many years. We hunt deer and other animals for food, and kill foxes and such that prey on our farm animals. The
ideas of “plain and simple” is important to our way of life. We have simple double-barreled 12 gauge shotguns, plain bolt action hunting weapons like your own, and some older Winchester and Spencer lever action rifles, which are also good for hunting. No pistols, no automatic weapons, nothing made to kill people.”

“I understand. I will buy and bring as many
plain long guns as I can buy tomorrow.”

“We will not charge you rent for the farm and buildings. They are old but in good
repair. The house has not been lived in for years but we will come and clean it tonight and make it ready for you. You must work as we do on your own land and on our communal projects. You are not required to attend our church but you must respect our customs. Do you agree to this?”

“Yes, Yes. Thank you!”

There was a pause before Fred said:

“It seems God has given your way of life
over ours a big vote of support. In a few days the world as I know it may vanish, perhaps forever, but your world will survive intact, at least for now. I thank you for saving my family and me. We will try not to disappoint you.”

Samuel sat in his rocker and watched Fred’s
Toyota sedan leave on the way back to Maryland. The meeting of the Elders had been long and contentious. What would they do with other English that came later? There were only two other vacant Amish farms in all of Lancaster County that they knew of—

Samuel knew the C
ommunity would need help to survive this Event.

“We are fifty miles from Harrisburg and even more from Philadelphia,” some Elders had argued. How will the English get here with no autos? They will not have many horses either.
Will they walk so far?”

“Starving people will
go a long way to eat,” Samuel had argued. “And they have bicycles.”

“The Bible says ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ they
argued. “Can we shoot the English like foxes when they invade our land?”

Samuel had taken a deep breath. “Actually,
the Bible doesn’t exactly say that—“

They looked at him
as if he had lost his mind.

“The Jew
Goodman explained it to me. After all, the Jews wrote the Bible in Hebrew, which Goodman can read. The actual text of the Fifth Commandment, according to him, reads in Hebrew,
lo tirtsah
, ‘Do not
murder
.’”

How they had stared
at him!

There followed a long discussion on whether there was a
real difference between killing and murder and if so, what was it exactly? Had the Amish been mistaken in their beliefs for hundreds of years? Could this Jew, Frederick Goodman, be believed about the storm, about the Bible--? And even so, would the Biblical dispensation from bloodguilt while defending one’s home be applicable in this situation? Or would it be ‘shedding of innocent blood,’ which crime the Bible made clear that it was preferable to die oneself rather than commit such a heinous offense. Did they even have enough weapons and ammunition to make any effective defense of their widespread lands in Lancaster County against crowds of desperate people?

6.

Baker Sheldon and the other five astronauts watched the CME event on their laptop screen and knew they were looking at their own deaths.

“It’s
absolutely immense,” the Russian, Grigory, was saying.

They were all well trained and knew that an Event of this
size and intensity would disable nearly everything electric on the International Space Station and at NASA and at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. There would be no rescue possible by tomorrow, if ever, and it would only be a question of whether the crew would die of cold or suffocate first as the oxygen pumps, heaters and carbon dioxide scrubbers failed.

They began to turn the solar arrays away from the Sun to try to save some of them
and to keep them from burning up the controllers. They patrolled the Station looking for things they could do to save equipment and maximize their chances, but they knew that although they could delay it, and that some of their gear might work for a while, there was no workable solution without resupply. Sheldon could not see a way out of this.

“I hope they take care of our people,” Sheldon said quietly
to no one in particular.

Dr. Rosen sat with Rabbi Levi Shapiro in the synagogue at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. She wore a plain black dress with long sleeves and a dark blue headscarf. They sat in a part of the synagogue usually reserved for men, but anyone could see she was not a tourist and when a younger man with the side curls of the Ultra-Orthodox approached to reproach her, she just looked sharply at him and he knew to just walk away.

Rabbi
Shapiro was a small man, almost as diminutive as she was, with a long flowing white beard, and bright blue eyes, which gave him a penetrating, almost hypnotic stare.

He smiled gently as he explained
the Universe to the illustrious scientist.

“God promised Noah not to destroy the world. He is keeping his promise. The event you describe which will happen tomorrow night will not
harm a single innocent creature. It will attack only Man at his most
chuzpahdik
, in his most arrogant aspects. And Man will destroy himself, or at least the worst parts of himself that are offensive to the Holy Name.”

“There will be so much chaos and destruction—“

“Only as much as we make for ourselves. As for the people here, we have candles, the ones we have lit for generations all over the world, before there was even a dream of electricity. We do not need laptops or Iphones to study Torah. God has presented each person with a very personal survival puzzle. But sometimes only the soul survives intact and the body perishes, if that is His will.”

7.

In the following 24 hour period, strange things happened, but often it was just as odd what did
not
happen. The United States did not power down the power grid it shared with Canada. The Senate wanted to hold emergency hearings, but of course there was no time for that. The cabinet argued until the Secretary of the Interior walked out in fury and frustration. However, on the advice of the Israelis, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan and the Gulf States all powered down their grids.

In Europe, the
parties of the Right blamed the Jews for the crisis, saying they wanted to benefit somehow from the troubles of others. The European Union did not believe the crisis would be that serious and, in any case, like the USA, they were too muddled in politics and red tape to take any definitive action in time. The worldwide media tended to downplay the event because they had no hard data on how bad it would be and didn’t want to be accused of causing panic. For every expert saying the Event would be catastrophic, another could be found to say it would be no worse than the Carrington Event of 1859.

But everyone was out late at night when the flare was due to arrive and bring the
aurora borealis
to the whole world. Whatever else it would be a hell of a show and there were huge gatherings in places noted for a great view of the heavens, like Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Sydney Harbor and San Francisco Bay. People brought food and drink and there were huge parties.

And
the Show did not disappoint.

Starting at
0133h, Greenwich Mean Time, the main body of the flare struck the earth and the sky over the Northern Hemisphere was filled with dancing lights. It was more intense than ever seen before and soon spread to most of the Southern Hemisphere as well. Only the region around the South Pole saw no light show and neither the Ross nor Scott Research Stations experienced any
aurora borealis
or indeed any electric disruption to their equipment.

As the hours passed, the show grew more intense, and in fact more ominous. The colors
deepened, so much so that the color red began to predominate so that it seemed the sky in some places seemed filled with blood.

T
he sky got redder and the people got drunker.

In Amazonas, the Oxbow People came out and stood on the riverbank watching the light show in fascination and terror. Both the sky and its reflection in the River were bloody. Some people fell on their faces and tried to cover themselves with the earth of the riverbank. Their Shaman, Billas, went with his ritual staff and, standing in the shallow water of the River said to them:

“This is
all my fault. I urged you to eat the fish-belly man and the Gods are now displeased with us. So much so that they have filled the heavens and our River with blood. To take away this blood guilt I will go to the next world to intercede for the People.”

And
clutching his staff, he dove into the River and allowed himself to be carried away downstream and into the next world.

The lights did NOT go out all over the world. On the contrary, as the air filled with huge amounts of static electricity, even the light bulbs that were not connected to any power source lit up, and at greater intensity then their listed wattage. Even bulbs stored on shelves burned extra brightly and all the windows all over the world lit up as though answering the heavenly summons to light. Hours or days later they burned out.

After a while, as the power grids
went down all over the planet, machinery that could not work just from static electricity in the air, ground to a halt. Planes in flight lost their computer control systems and those that could not glide to safe landings, crashed with great loss of life. Trains and cars stopped in their tracks as their electric power failed. The starter solenoids in auto engines, made to receive low current from the battery, received power surges that rendered them useless.

People’s hair began to stand out from their heads from the static charge in the air, giving a comical aspect to
everyone celebrating in the streets and on the beaches. Only wearing a hat was a cure for this clown hair. How they laughed at each other! The parties went on and on as the aurora became more red and the people became drunker, knowing they were seeing a once-in-a-lifetime event or even more than that, as the turning of the millennium had been, something without recent precedent in the cycle of life.

But the hangover outdid the party. Sometimes it took a while to see it. Those who woke up on the beach with the headache of a lifetime did not see the world as very much different, but if you were in your apartment you knew right away as the sun beat on your windows that would not open and there was no air conditioning, no TV, no coffee machine, unless you had one of those European coffee makers that didn’t need electricity. People were making coffee straining hot water though gauze if they could get a fire going somehow.

If you had a gas stove, it wouldn’t light
if the burner starter was electric. If you went to start your car, the motor would crank and crank but never catch because there was no juice getting past the solenoid to the spark plugs—and on and on as the world realized that the party was really, but
really
over.

Everywhere there was that sharp electric smell but especially in the power stations that had not powered down. But a few of those had major fires which burned merrily on since fire
trucks could not start their engines either and the fireman could not get to the fires.

On a personal level, casual touching, handshaking,
as well as social kissing in Europe and Latin America vanished quickly and became a casual wave and a “Hello,” since if you didn’t touch something grounded just before touching someone else, the static charge stored in your bodies would knock both of you over as of you had put a fork in a live outlet. It was sort of like that little spark that jumps from hand to hand on a really cold day, but a thousand times worse.

Stores tried to open but found that any employees that couldn’t walk to work
or didn’t have bicycles, were not coming that day or maybe never again. People who tried to get their money found the money machines dead and silent, and if they went to the actual bank to talk to a real person, they found few tellers and long lines at the windows. Some of the banks had been smart the day before and tried to print hard copy of all their customers and their balances in case the system went down, but the sheer size of the task had meant that the printers often hadn’t had time to print out so much data and customers with last names from “t” to “z” for example, might be out of luck.

Customers who
were on the list and who had ID could get their money and the teller would note the withdrawal in pen and ink on the paper list the way it had been done two hundred years before. Clumsy, but it worked. In some cases where the time locks to the vault were electric and not mechanical, the vaults could not be opened and the banks quickly ran out of cash. Messengers were sent on bicycles to the central banks or even eventually the Federal Reserve if there was a branch in town, but the central banks, even when they had it, refused to put a million dollars in cash into a messenger’s saddle bag. Only weeks later did horse drawn vehicles appear on the street to begin to transport money to and from the banks.

The financial net didn’t go down as quickly as the electric one had, but down it went with a bang! The only good news was that there was no stock, bond or commodities crash because none of the markets could open and nothing could be bought or sold.

Will and Mary had watched the show from his deck overlooking the Paw
Paw Valley. He had shut off the connection to the grid and tried to protect the solar voltaic system with layers of electrical tape. He and Mary had worked hard all that day trying to protect Will’s gear from everything the solar storm might bring.

In the morning
after the
aurora
, which they watched from chairs on the deck, sipping good Kentucky bourbon, five of the six solar panels were still okay but the system controllers were fried. Will took out the components and replaced the damaged wiring. The batteries were damaged too, so he bypassed them.

When he had reached for Mary to give her a friendly hug he found himself flat on his back a
n instant later. Had she given him a judo throw? What had happened? But she was down too and laughing.

After a moment he figured it out.
Static electricity. The air was still full of it and all the lights were on too brightly, even those switched off. They would be lucky to have any bulbs left after this.

As they were realizing this, millions of people were realizing that their apartments in tall buildings, or even not so tall ones, were no longer habitable. There were no elevators. How could anyone live in a 50 story walkup? Or even in a 20? In addition, most apartments were built for air conditioning and had no windows which could be opened to the outside. Before lunchtime, hundreds of thousands of apartments all over the world from New York to Shenzhen had become unbearably hot and stuffy. Even if the people could think of a place to go there was no way to call and see it was available, and no way to get there if it was, except to walk or ride a bicycle if you had one.

There was a lot of foot traffic in the streets the following day and a lot of bicycles. It looked like
the Peoples’ Republic of China before people had cars. The parks were full of people putting up tents as if there had been an earthquake. They had brought with them their supplies of canned goods which were guarded carefully. Meat, on the other hand, was about to spoil anyway and so impromptu barbecues were arranged using wheel hubs and other improvised grills. The beer was warm but what the hell! Everyone shared in the last splurge of first world plenty.