Doomsday

of sending more troops to the Middle East.”
” That has her scared?”
“She heard on the radio that gas and food will be rationed.
And that the Chinese or the Russians have a new biological weapon they’re threatening to use if we don’t recall our forces already deployed.”
“Which is it?” .
“What?”
“The Chinese or the Russians.” “She
couldn’t remember.”
Soren smothered a sigh. He liked his mother-in-law. She was a dear lady. But she’d had Toril late in life—at age forty—and now the old woman was pushing eighty and her faculties were impaired. Which was putting it delicately.
“Soren, I’ve heard gunfire.”
“Shots? Where?”
“Not far off. Freya is scared to go outside. Magni wants to, but I won’t let him. I have them both down in the basement.”
Toril paused. “Soren, what is going on? The news makes it sound like the country is falling apart.”
The worry in her voice was an icy fist around Soren’s heart.
“I’m on my way. Get down in the basement with the kids, bolt the door, and stay there until I get home.”
“How long will that be?” Toril asked anxiously.
“I wish I could say.” Soren had more he wanted to tell her but a dial tone filled his ear. He punched his home number and got another busy signal. Figuring that his wife was trying to call him, he hung up and waited. His phone didn’t beep. He let several minutes go by, then impatiently tried her again. Yet another busy signal.
Soren almost threw his phone out the window. When he needed it most, modern technology failed him. He supposed he should be grateful he had gotten through at all. He’d read about something called an EMP effect, and that if a nuclear weapon was detonated at high altitude over the center of the United States, an electromagnetic pulse would wipe out electronic equipment from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Soren prayed that wouldn’t happen. If the panic was bad now, he couldn’t imagine how bad it would become if every phone and computer in the country were suddenly useless.
The driver of the car in front of him applied its brakes. Soren did the same. Beyond the car was a long line of stalled vehicles.
A traffic jam, he speculated. He hated this. He needed to be with his family.
A secondary road paralleled 76 on his side of the highway.
Hardly any vehicles were using it. But to reach it, he’d have to go over a cement barrier, down an embankment, and up the other side. He thought of the money he had invested in having the pickup body jacked up and in buying the largest tires it could handle. Spinning the wheel, he nosed up to the barrier. Someone shouted and a horn blared but he ignored them. His front tires made contact, and he braked. Then, mentally crossing his fingers, he gunned the 367-horsepower Vortec Max 6.0L V8
engine. The front of his pickup leaped skyward, and for a few awful seconds he thought the truck would flip over. He bounced so hard, the seat belt dug into his gut. Then it was the rear end that tilted toward the sky, and a moment later he was roaring down the embankment. He slewed up onto the road and turned west.
“Honey, here I come,” Soren said out loud.
Phoenix
Shock riveted Professor Diana Trevor to the wing of her plane.
But only until Harry Pierce’s fingers closed on her throat and his other hand grabbed at her keys.
Diana reacted without thinking. She faked her hand down Pierce’s face, drawing blood with her nails. He shrieked and jerked his head back, and she kicked him where kicking a man always did the most good.
Gurgling and sputtering, Harry sat down hard on his backside on the tarmac and clutched himself.
“What the hell was that?” Diana snapped.
Red in the face and shuddering from pain, Harry rasped, “I told you I need to get to Kansas City.”
“And I told you that’s too far out of my way.” Diana turned to her cockpit. “If you’re still sitting there after I’ve turned her over, I’ll run right over you. I swear to God.”
The last she saw of him, he was hobbling stiff-legged toward the hangar.
Diana busied herself with the preflight checklist. She removed the control wheel lock and turned the master switch on.
She checked the fuel. She turned the lights on and off. She moved the flaps and the ailerons. She climbed back out of the cockpit, took off the rudder gust lock, and removed the tail tie-down. She didn’t have time to do a complete empennage check but she did go to the nose and made sure the air intakes were open.
Presently, Diana was strapped in and ready. She tried to raise the tower but no one responded. “What on earth is going on?”
she asked the empty air, then decided she wouldn’t wait around twiddling her thumbs.
What she was about to do was against all the rules, but Diana didn’t care. She needed to reach the compound, and she would do whatever it took to get there.
Another five minutes found her on the runway ready for takeoff. She slowly advanced the throttle and just as slowly pulled back on the yoke. Her nose climbed, her wheels lifted, and she was airborne.
She was tempted to circle the city, but every minute was crucial. The missiles might fly while she was in the air, and even if she wasn’t near an impact zone, an EMP or concussive ripple might knock her out of the air.
At seven thousand feet Diana leveled off. She listened to the radio for a while. It was confusion times ten. A near-hysterical announcer declared that the West Coast had been attacked, but he didn’t say where or by whom and the signal gave way to static. Another said that federal resources had been strained to the point of collapse. A parson on a religious station intoned that the end times were upon them.
Diana realized her palms were sweating and wiped them on her pants. She had a long flight ahead