(Wrath-06)-Smoke & Dust (2012)

  SMOKE AND DUST

  WRATH & RIGHTEOUSNESS

  [Episode Six]

  CHRIS STEWART

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used factiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locals or persona, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  “If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.”

  Thomas Fuller

  ONE

  Metro Blue Line, Twenty-One Miles Northwest of Washington, D.C.

  Sam Brighton stood in the aisle of the D.C. Metro, holding the overhead bar that ran down the middle of the car. Bono stood beside him, his head down, completely lost in thought. Every few minutes, Bono glanced at his watch.

  Sam watched him. “Dude, you really didn’t need to do this,” he said for the third or fourth time. “Go on. Go home to your family. They need you a lot more than I do.”

  Bono looked up and forced himself to smile. “This won’t take much time,” he said.

  “You’re crazy, man. Stupid of you to stay here when you could be on your way home to your wife.”

  Bono didn’t answer.

  The Metro train hummed along, sixty feet under the ground, heading to the northwestern suburbs. The two men were quiet. Sam read the advertisements above the seats. Wicked was scheduled at the Kennedy Center downtown. The Washington Wizards were playing at home for the weekend. Not anymore, he frowned to himself.

  Upon their return to the United States just a few hours before, the two men had been given seven days’ leave. Sam needed the time to try to find his family. Bono planned to hop the train up to Baltimore (the closest place he could find where he could still rent a car), then drive like a madman to his in-laws’ place in Memphis, where his wife had taken their little girl after the explosion in Washington, D.C. He glanced at his watch again and calculated in his mind. A three-hour train ride to Baltimore. A fifteen-hour drive from there. Eighteen hours to get to his family if he didn’t run into problems and if he could find the gas.

  Eighteen hours to get home, leaving a little less than six days to be together with his beautiful wife and the little girl who was the spitting image of her mom.

  Sam read his friend’s thoughts by the faraway look in his eye. “Listen, dude, I don’t need you to babysit me,” he said. “Go on. Your wife is waiting!”

  “She understands,” Bono said.

  “You’ve been gone for months! You’ve only got a few days to be with her. What are you doing here?”

  Bono lowered his head and didn’t answer.

  Sam tried a final time. “I really don’t need you—”

  Bono cut him off with a sudden lift of his eyes. “Listen, man, you don’t know anything about your family. You don’t know if they’re alive or if they’re dead. Now, do you really think I’m going to leave you here to do this alone? Do you think I could do that? Come on, give me a little credit. My wife’s OK. She’s alive, man, I know that, same for my little girl. You don’t know about your mom or your brothers. Do you really think I’m going to take off and leave until we know if they’re OK? I’m not like that.”

  Bono’s voice was firm, almost hard, and Sam knew it was time to back off.

  The two men rode in silence. The train was quiet and smooth, and it was easy for Sam to lower his head and lose himself in his thoughts.

  Half a minute passed.

  Bono kept his head low. “She understands,” he said again.

  Sam looked up but didn’t say anything.

  “My wife understands I have to help you.” Bono seemed to be talking to himself. “She wouldn’t leave you to do this alone. Neither one of us would.”

  Sam looked away and swallowed as he watched the passing subway tunnel’s cement walls and flashing blocks of yellow light.

  “Thanks, Bono,” he whispered after a minute had passed.

  “Sure thing, dude.”

  Sam glanced at the rows of multicolored plastic benches on his left and right. The subway car was clean and almost completely deserted. Most of the outlying Metro lines that ran around Washington, D.C. were still operating—only the lines that ran to or through what used to be downtown had been destroyed—but few people had the guts or a reason to ride the subway anymore. Sam shook his head, amazed at the fact that the Metro ran at all. Mussolini would have been proud: The downtown district was destroyed, a quarter of a million people had died, the government was hardly working, but the trains were running and were running on time. He laughed at what he considered a fairly pointless gesture of public relations, knowing it was a fabrication mostly for the benefit of the citizens who lived outside of Washington, D.C.

  Give us a few weeks and we’ll have everything back in order. Things will be the same soon. Just give us a little time. That was the government’s line.

  But no one was buying it.

  Everyone knew things would never be the same anymore.

  He shifted his eyes to the back of the Metro. A large black woman sat near the door, her dark eyes closed, her hands clutching a leather handbag. Sam could see a bulge from the inside of the handbag and guessed what it was—many of the people who dared to venture out now were armed—and he touched the 9 mm Glock® strapped under his military jacket. A black man stood on the other end of the Metro car, his dark suit a striking contrast to the dirty running shoes on his feet. Walking had become the norm for the survivors of Washington, D.C. and no one wanted to hike for miles in dress shoes.

  So it seemed that the people were adjusting—walking shoes or boots with suits, backpacks and briefcases with food and water instead of laptops and business reports, cash in their pockets, white masks across their faces to keep back the smoke and dust.

  The train rolled gently into a turn, the underground tunnel lights slipping by. Although the car was nearly empty, Sam was happy to stand; he’d been sitting for most of the past fifty hours, in military terminals, onboard crowded aircraft, inside military vans. The last thing he wanted to do was sit.

  Bono looked up and asked, “How far is it from the Metro station to your home?”

  “Couple of miles.” Sam nudged the military backpack at his feet. “Nothing but a brisk walk through the park.”

  An identical backpack rested against Bono’s knee. Sam and Bono were prepared for pretty much anything. They had food, water, guns
, passports, military orders, nightsticks, a change of clothes; they could get by on their own. At the next Metro stop they would hoist the backpacks, start out at a gentle jog, and be at Sam’s parents’ house within sixteen minutes. An eight-minute-a-mile pace, loaded with guns and backpacks. No problem for either one.

  Sam adjusted his combat fatigues. The camouflage design was tight, small and much greener than the pattern on the camouflage uniforms that the soldiers used to wear.

  The train pitched suddenly and the locomotive engine rolled back. The cars decelerated, and the men had to grab the handhold to brace themselves.

  The train continued slowing.

  Then the lights went out.

  It grew very quiet.

  Pitch dark spread around them as the train rolled to a complete stop.

  TWO

  East Side, Chicago, Illinois

  It was early evening and the sun had just set outside.

  Azadeh walked into the living room. She turned toward the television, but couldn’t figure out how to turn it on, the remote control far more complicated than anything she had ever worked before. She sat down and read through the remains of the newspaper, reading aloud to practice, pronouncing every word as carefully and correctly as she could. From time to time she came upon a word she didn’t know and pulled out an English-Farsi dictionary to look it up. Legislator. She didn’t know that one. She turned for her dictionary again . . . .

  The lights went out suddenly.

  She sat without moving at the kitchen table. The apartment was dark. Completely dark. No light bled in from the streetlights outside.

  She waited, unsure of what to do.

  Five minutes passed.

  She heard voices in the hallway. Angry voices. Shouting voices. Somewhere in the rooms above her, she heard the pounding of heavy footsteps running back and forth.

  Still no lights. The room was quiet.

  She stood up and moved toward the window that looked out on the city.

  She saw the brick-and-mortar wall before her. Standing to the side, she looked from the corner of the window past the brick wall to the city streets below.

  All she saw was utter darkness. No streetlights. No car lights. No light at all.

  Everything around her, as far as she could see, was an absolute black hole.

  THREE

  Metro Blue Line, Twenty-One Miles Northwest of Washington, D.C.

  The emergency lights kicked on, illuminating the Metro car in yellow light. Sixty feet underground, the electrical circuits on the train had been protected from the enormously powerful surge of deadly power that had just burst down from the upper atmosphere, leaving the Metro’s batteries and emergency lighting circuits intact to illuminate the cars.

  For a moment, no one moved. The train was still as stone. The black woman kept her seat, looking around in bewilderment. She clasped her bag even tighter, and Sam wondered briefly what precious thing she kept inside. The black man at the back of the Metro car turned toward them. Sam and Bono stood in place.

  Five, ten, twenty seconds of silence. Everyone expected the normal car lights to come up and the train to lurch forward and resume traveling again at any moment.

  A full minute of silence passed before Bono turned to Sam and asked, “How often does this happen?”

  Sam shook his head. “Never,” he answered quickly, nodding toward the emergency lights. “This isn’t a delay or traffic problem. This train shut down completely.”

  A recording started playing through the speakers over their heads. “We are experiencing a momentary delay. Please remain in your seats. DO NOT EXIT FROM THE TRAIN. We will be moving shortly. If necessary, there is an emergency telephone to the conductor at the back of the car.”

  The black man swore and thrust his hands into his pockets. Sam turned to him. “You from around here?” he asked.

  The man hesitated, then nodded.

  “You always ride the Metro?”

  “Every day until the big one.”

  “You ever had this thing shut down like this before?”

  The man shook his head.

  Sam turned to Bono, then moved toward the emergency telephone at the back of the car. Bono followed him and listened as he spoke. The conversation was very short.

  “What’s up?” Bono asked when Sam replaced the red handset.

  “Conductor says it’s just a momentary delay.”

  Bono shook his head and looked at the dim emergency lighting around him. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  Pushing by Sam, he picked up the phone receiver. No numbers or buttons to push, just a direct line to the conductor’s station at the front of the train. “This is Lieutenant Calton,” he said, his voice commanding, “United States Army Special Forces. You’ve got two soldiers back here on official leave and we need to know what’s going on.”

  Sam turned away and pulled out his cell phone. Flipping it open, he saw there was no signal. He turned to the black man, who had pulled out his phone too. “Can you usually get a signal here?”

  “Yeah,” the man grunted. “They put cell relays through most of the Metro tunnels. Some of the tunnels out in Maryland, you can’t get a signal, but here in Virginia you always could.”

  Sam looked at his cell phone again. Searching for signal flashed across his screen.

  Bono hung up the phone, moved toward him, and lowered his voice. “Conductor says they’ve lost all electrical power.”

  “On just this train?”

  “No. The entire grid.” Bono looked around. “The whole system has shut down.” He leaned a little closer. “He says he can’t get a hold of anyone upstairs—”

  Sam shook his head in rage. “Another nuclear detonation!”

  Bono caught Sam’s arm. “I don’t think so. It makes no sense to bomb a bunch of rubble. And we would have felt it, some kind of vibration, a noise, our ears would have popped from the surge of pressure through the tunnel. No, we would have had some indication if there’d been another detonation. This has to be something else.”

  Sam was moving to his backpack. Bono turned to the other people in the car. The black woman was standing now, her eyes dark and pleading. “Listen to me,” he started, “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what you should do. The conductor told me they have lost all power through the electrical grid. Right now, he can’t get in contact with anyone up top. You probably ought to just stay here. Someone is going to come along eventually. If they can’t get the train moving, they’ll send rescue units down.”

  The black man watched Sam hoist his backpack onto his back. “You’re telling us to stay here,” he countered, “yet I see you’re bugging out.”

  “I’m not telling you to do anything,” Bono answered. “I don’t know any more than you do, and I don’t have any authority to tell you what to do anyway. I’m just saying if I were you I’d probably stay here.”

  The man looked suspicious. “What aren’t you telling us?” he demanded.

  Sam slid Bono’s backpack across the floor, and he reached for it. “I’m being straight with you, buddy. I’ve got no reason to lie. And I’m not telling you what to do or even giving you advice. But think about the situation. We’re, what—three or four miles from the next station? We’re underground. It’s going to be dark. I don’t know what the track does up ahead. Does it narrow? Will another train come? If they restore power and we’re touching the third rail, are they going to find us smoking like a barbecue on the Fourth of July? You make your own decision. I’m just saying that if I were you I’d probably stick it out here.”

  Sam tightened his backpack and moved toward the door. Prying with his fingers, he forced one of the doors back. A warning chime sounded overhead. He held a flashlight in his hand.

  The man’s forehead creased into a scowl. “You say it’s too dangerous out there to make it on our own?”

  “I’m saying you should do whatever you think is best.”

  “But you’re going out there.”
<
br />   Bono shrugged. “We’re Special Forces.”

  The man stared, but didn’t answer.

  Bono didn’t need to say any more.

  * * *

  Sam held the flashlight, keeping the beam low enough to illuminate the way for both him and Bono, allowing them to move with only one light. They stood on a narrow, blackened, cement walkway that ran parallel to the tracks. They looked left and saw nothing but a black hole as the subway tunnel extended behind them. None of the other passengers had gotten out of the cars. They turned and walked toward the front of the train. The curb was narrow and the wall scraped Sam’s shoulders as he walked. He pointed the flashlight forward. The train extended into the dark, each car illuminated by the emergency lighting. Sam noticed that the boxy lights built into the walls of the cement subway had grown dark. A few of the passengers saw them and pointed as they walked by. Seven cars ahead, they reached the electric locomotive. The engineer sat in a small booth behind a thick window. Sam stopped beside the engineer’s station and the conductor pushed the window back. “Get back inside the cars. Help is on the way,” he said.

  “You’ve talked to someone?” Bono asked.

  The engineer hesitated. “Not yet. But it’s just a matter of time. And let me tell you something, boys, you don’t want to be in the tunnel when the trains start to run. You know how many idiots get killed like that every year?”

  Sam nodded down track. “How far to the next station?”

  “Farther than you can walk before the trains start running again.”

  “How far might that be, sir?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” the train driver shot back. “You go wandering off down the tracks and you screw it up for all of us. If we’ve got people on the tracks I have to report it. That means they shut the whole line down. Which means we’ll all have to sit here until Metro Security runs you two boneheads down and gets you off the tracks. Now go on, get back inside the car, and we’ll be out of here in no time.”