Chaos Rising Read online

“Something’s wrong!” Lincoln wrenched the steering wheel. “The dashboard isn’t working! The wheel is stuck—”

  Something huge smashed into the back of their car.

  2

  A terrible wrenching sound filled the car. Metal scraped against metal. Jessa screamed.

  The Audi surged forward, punched by whatever car or truck had rammed into it from behind.

  “I can’t stop!” Lincoln slammed his foot against the brakes. Nothing happened. “Nothing works!”

  The Audi bore down on the white SUV directly ahead of them. Liam had only an instant to brace himself against the side and the back of the front seat before impact.

  They crashed into the SUV. His head struck the back of the seat. Whiplash burned his neck.

  He blinked hard, raised his head. Pain radiated down his spine. He groaned, instinctively feeling his ribs and his skull, searching for fractures or open wounds. Nothing.

  Things came back into focus slowly. The tan leather seats. His go-bag flung to the floor. Gray daylight streaming through the rear windows.

  The windshield was cracked. Steam poured from the smashed hood. He could just make out the crumpled rear of the white SUV through the billowing cloud of steam. Twisting around in his seat, he saw the vehicle that had struck them—a huge black Chevy Suburban had crushed their trunk. The Audi was likely totaled.

  Liam forced himself to focus on Lincoln and Jessa. Their airbags hadn’t deployed. Either the vehicle hadn’t been going fast enough, or something had malfunctioned.

  He leaned forward. “Lincoln? Jessa?”

  Lincoln responded with a groan of his own. He raised his head and looked around. “Jessa? Jessa, you okay?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Lincoln leaned over the console, touched her shoulder. A small cut sliced across his forehead, blood dripping down the side of his temple. His face was tight with panic. “Babe?”

  Jessa moved. She coughed and lifted her head. Her hands flew to her belly. She prodded her stomach, then sank back against the seat in relief.

  A long red line streaked her neck from the seat belt, but she didn’t seem to feel it. Her only concern was the baby.

  “He’s okay,” she whispered. “I just felt him.”

  “And you?” Liam asked.

  “Yeah…just…shaken up. I don’t…what happened?”

  Outside the windows, none of the other vehicles were moving.

  The traffic light on the pole ahead had gone dark.

  “I don’t know! Everything just—stopped.” Lincoln pounded the steering wheel angrily. “It’s only three years old. I don’t get it. How could the dashboard screen, the brakes, and the power steering all fail at once?”

  “We should get out,” Liam said slowly. He lifted his go-bag off the floor and plunked it on the seat beside him. It felt like he was moving through molasses. “Something’s wrong.”

  “I just crashed the car with my pregnant wife inside it!” Lincoln spat. “I know something’s wrong, damn it! It’s the stupid car.”

  Liam shoved open the rear passenger door, unbuckled his seat belt, and eased gingerly to his feet. The freezing cold bit at him. Aches and pains made themselves known across his back and shoulders. He felt like some giant hand had tossed him across the room.

  Sounds of screaming and shouting echoed in the crisp air. Dozens of cars had crashed. Those that hadn’t were trapped between the various pileups of five, seven, and ten or more cars. Drivers were either still in their cars, shell-shocked or injured, or standing next to their vehicles, shouting at the other drivers.

  On the sidewalks, pedestrians had stopped walking. They stood in groups and clusters, mouths gaping, staring and pointing at the various accidents. Some had their phones out and were waving them around or shaking them. A few looked like they were trying to call 911.

  Liam scanned both sides of the road. Tall buildings towered above them, crowded in on both sides. He felt closed in, cut off.

  Anxiety twisted in his gut. “Doesn’t look like the buildings on either side of the street have power. No lights.”

  “Local power outage. Must be.” Lincoln climbed out of the car and turned in a slow circle, his eyes widening as he took in the carnage.

  “Not to cars.”

  “It’s because the traffic lights went out.”

  The intersection of Jackson and Wacker behind them was packed with crashed vehicles. Ahead of them, several cars had drifted onto the sidewalk in order to avoid hitting the vehicle ahead of them, narrowly missing pedestrians.

  Traffic was at a standstill. No one was moving.

  “Traffic lights wouldn’t cause all this,” Liam said.

  “I see working cars.” Lincoln’s voice was high and tight, like he was desperately trying to convince himself more than anyone else. He was jumpy, his eyes darting from one thing to the next. “Look at that guy in his classic pimped out Pontiac Firebird Trans Am screaming at everyone else to move out of his way. As if they can with all the other cars blocking the road.”

  The Firebird’s engine was still running, but the wreck of cars ahead and behind prevented him from moving. A few other older model cars appeared to be working. They might as well have stalled too, for all the good it would do them.

  A group of Asian tourists bundled in brightly colored hats and scarves on the corner were lifting their phones toward the sky, like that would help them get a better signal. Others frowned at their phones, tapping the screens in confusion.

  “I can’t get through!” a woman on the opposite side of the street shouted. She dropped her armload of shopping bags and jabbed at her phone. “Someone needs to call 911!”

  “I can’t get through either,” said a middle-aged man in a tweed coat standing beside his stalled Mercedes. A C-shaped cut marred his clean-shaven cheek. He shook his phone like that would help. “My phone won’t even power up. The system’s overloaded or something. Maybe this power outage happened all over the city.”

  A Hispanic woman in her sixties wearing a shiny purple coat stumbled out of the white SUV they’d hit. She braced both hands against the hood, leaned forward, and vomited.

  “I need to see if she’s okay,” Jessa said as she opened the front passenger door. She was in doctor mode, already scanning the street to see who else needed medical attention.

  A mother and father hunched over a young boy slumped on the curb, blood coursing down the side of his head. A hipster sat in the middle of the road amid shattered glass, groaning and clutching a leg bent at an unnatural, horrible angle.

  “You need to take care of yourself,” Lincoln said. “Stay inside the car until we figure out what to do. It’s warmer. You have to think of the baby.”

  She ignored him and pulled at her seatbelt. “I can’t get out. My seatbelt is locked or something…I’m stuck.”

  “Just a sec, honey.” Lincoln didn’t move. He took out his phone, his hands shaking. “I’ll call for an ambulance.”

  “Good idea,” Jessa said calmly. “There could be internal injuries or concussions. Just because we feel okay doesn’t mean we are.”

  “Where’s the nearest hospital? There’s no way an ambulance is getting through the streets like this.”

  “Mercy is a few miles south of us on Michigan Ave,” Jessa said. “Rush is a few miles west. Northwestern is directly north off Michigan Avenue two miles, maybe a bit more. I want Northwestern. Take me to Prentice on East Superior. I’ll get the best care there.”

  “We may need to walk,” Liam said.

  “I can walk,” Jessa said. “I just have to get out of this damn car.”

  He pulled out his own phone. The screen was frozen, filled with weird zigzagging lines and squiggles in strange colors.

  Lincoln glared down at his phone. “Damn it! Nothing’s working. Must be the blackout is affecting the towers.”

  “It’s not the towers. Or it’s not only the towers. It’s bigger than that.”

  Liam cocked his head and listened. No horns.
No rumbling machinery. No growl of engines. The racket of confused and fearful voices were the only sounds.

  The mechanical din of the city had gone silent.

  The dull sense of dread swirling in his stomach grew stronger. This wasn’t an isolated event. It sounded like the entire city had gone dark all at once. But it wasn’t just the electricity. If cars and phones were affected, too…

  “An EMP,” he said slowly.

  “A what?” Jessa asked as she struggled with her seat belt.

  “An electromagnetic pulse. From a high-altitude nuclear explosion or a coronal mass ejection from the sun. Must be an EMP though, not a CME. Cars would probably still be working if it was a solar flare. And phones.”

  “No way.” Lincoln shook his head fiercely, his mouth pressed into a thin line. He glared daggers at Liam. “This isn’t one of your paranoid fantasies. This is real life! Get a grip!”

  “Look around you!” Liam snapped.

  He’d always believed in being prepared. Growing up in a chaotic household meant he’d learned early that no one was coming to save him—not even his own parents. He needed to be able to save himself.

  If his obsessive research had taught him one thing, it was that people liked to think they were right, but people didn’t know what they didn’t know. Some people thought an EMP would destroy every electronic device in the country, no matter how small. Other people believed an EMP would only take out the electrical grid, and maybe only regionally.

  In reality, not even nuclear physicists and scientific experts knew what would happen for sure.

  “We just need to be calm and figure this out.” But Lincoln’s words belied his actions. He was shaking, his hands clenching and unclenching his fists at his sides. His eyes bulged. “Everything will be fine. This is just a local power outage and some fender-benders. It’s under control. Everything’s under control.”

  But nothing was under control. All he needed to do was look around to see that. And things would only get worse.

  Liam had felt uncomfortable without his pistol before. Now everything had changed. He needed to be prepared for anything. He strode around to the rear of their vehicle, the rear end smashed and crumpled.

  There was no getting into the trunk by popping it open the usual way. The electronic key likely wouldn’t work, anyway. Not much else was working.

  A spiderweb of cracks crisscrossed the rear window. He took his tactical pen/glass breaker out of his everyday carry case, wedged himself between the crashed Suburban and their vehicle to get as close to the trunk as he could with the big grille of the Suburban still smashed into the left side of the Audi, and used it to punch through the weakened glass.

  Gummy shards rained into the trunk compartment as the rest of the rear windshield collapsed. With his gloved hands, he brushed enough glass out of the way on the right side to reach in and unlock his suitcase. He dropped the steel pen into his pocket and fumbled for the gun case.

  He pulled out the gun and holster and left the case. He had extra magazines in his go-bag. He grabbed his tactical knife and sheath and attached them to his belt, where they belonged.

  Someone screamed—a loud, piercing shriek that cut through the confused din like a knife through butter.

  Liam whirled toward the sound, his heart jolting in his chest.

  A teenage boy with a mohawk and rings in his ears pointed above Liam’s head at something behind him, something in the sky.

  3

  Liam spun around, yanked himself free of the rear window, and shielded his eyes with his free hand. Shards of glass stuck to his coat and gloves. He didn’t bother to brush them off.

  The fog swirled like a gray haze, blurring the sky visible between the tall buildings into an indistinct haze. The clouds above them were thick, heavy, and dark, signaling another looming snowstorm.

  But it wasn’t the clouds that captured his attention.

  Looking west along Jackson Blvd, Sears Tower loomed ahead, and to the left, another huge but less familiar skyscraper. The river was just beyond, out of sight. Several shorter office and residential buildings blocked the horizon line.

  In the wide square of sky, a plane soared silently overhead, the nose angled downward. It was hard to tell how far away it was, but it couldn’t have been more than a half-mile. Maybe less.

  It was flying close and low—so low, it looked like it was barely skimming the tops of the skyscrapers.

  People screamed and ducked. There was no time to react or respond in any other way. Liam crouched behind the rear of the car, gun in hand, adrenaline shooting through his system.

  The plane nose-dived. With a crack like thunder, the huge aircraft smashed into Union Station. The cacophonous boom shattered the air.

  The explosion engulfed the aircraft in a flaming ball of fire that swelled into the street. Debris and ash mushroomed. Black smoke billowed above the buildings and poured into the sky.

  “What was that?” someone cried.

  “What’s going on?” a woman shouted.

  “A plane just crashed,” said a man several feet to Liam’s left. His Honda Pilot had bumped into the blue Altima ahead of him, barely denting the bumper. His car was just as stalled as all the others. “Holy hell. This thing must be affecting everything with electronics.”

  Liam straightened. “That’s my guess.”

  “Did all the planes stop working, too?” Jessa asked from inside the car. She’d left the door open despite Lincoln’s instructions.

  “Must be,” the guy said, his voice trembling, his expression stricken. “Their electronic systems must be fried—altimeters, communications, their instrument displays gone completely dark. Damn. That plane must have lost all power and gone into a stall.”

  The man ran a shaky hand through his thinning hair. He was a black guy in his mid-fifties, wearing a puffy orange coat, jeans, and a Chicago Bears scarf wound around his neck. “There are back-up systems. Depending on the plane, they should have the ability to lower a ram-air turbine to give them limited system power. But if their screen processors are fried, they’d have to use their stand-by instruments, but with newer planes, even those are connected to glass screens—new tech—so they’d be fried, too.”

  He turned to Liam with a heavy sigh. “Name’s David Jenkins. I’m a pilot for Delta. It’s my day off.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Jessa said politely. “It looked like it was flying right over our heads.”

  “Perception and angle account for what people think they’re seeing. Happens all the time.” David adjusted his glasses and rubbed his hands together like he could stop their trembling. “That was too close for comfort. There are probably dozens—hundreds—of planes in holding patterns right now, desperate to land.”

  “Are more planes going to start falling from the sky, then?” Jessa asked, fear in her voice. “Aren’t there around five thousand planes in the air over the United States alone at any given time?”

  “Could be,” David said. “Newer planes are ‘fly by wire’ systems, with most of the control of the aircraft done by computer. Some of the older models will be able to maintain some functions. They won’t just tailspin and pancake into the ground. All aircraft should be controllable with complete electrical failure. Doesn’t mean everything works like it’s supposed to when the crap hits the fan, though.

  “They’re made to be stable, so they can glide down—or at least try. Most pilots will go for a remote airfield or try a military one away from major cities if they can. If they’ve got somewhere to land and clear line of sight, some of ‘em will get down safely.”

  “But not all of them,” Jessa said.

  The man’s gaze flicked to the smoke-filled sky. “Clearly.”

  Liam had read conflicting information about planes. Much of it depended on the strength of the EMP, which was still a very large unknown. Military aircraft were hardened against an EMP attack, but civilian aircraft weren’t.

  Truth was, no one knew what would happen with absolu
te certainty.

  “Where’s Lincoln?” Jessa asked. “He was just right here.”

  If they were walking to the nearest hospital, they needed protection. Liam turned back to the trunk, reached through the shattered window and dug through his carefully organized suitcase. He slipped three more preloaded magazines into his coat pockets.

  He jacked a magazine into his Glock, chambered a round, took out the magazine and thumbed in another round. One in the chamber, seventeen in the magazine. Eighteen shots.

  David watched him curiously but said nothing. He wasn’t stupid. He knew everything had changed in a heartbeat. But like everyone else, he wasn’t yet sure how.

  Liam holstered his pistol and tucked his coat over it. It was concealed but close at hand if need be. He knew enough about human nature to realize it wouldn’t be long until panic set in.

  He, Lincoln, and Jessa needed to be long gone by then.

  “Lincoln!” he said. “Time to go.”

  Lincoln didn’t answer.

  “There’s another one!” a tourist shouted from the sidewalk.

  Several people gasped and pointed. Liam whirled around.

  A second plane emerged through the thick clouds to the west. It hung suspended in the sky, so close Liam imagined he could see the panicked passengers staring out the windows.

  “Damn it!” Liam’s heartbeat quickened. “It looks huge.”

  David craned his neck to look up. “These big aircraft are sixty feet tall, with wingspans of two hundred feet and just as long. Top speed up to five hundred and twelve knots—that’s close to six hundred miles per hour, though it’s probably only going four hundred now. We’re still talking a payload close to six hundred thousand pounds.”

  “Looks like it’s headed straight for us. That another perception warp?”

  David shook his head, his mouth twisting, eyes going big and round behind his glasses. He took a step backward, then another. He bumped into the Altima. “That isn’t a perception warp.”

  Liam went still. “What?”

  “He must be trying to land in Lake Michigan,” David said, his voice rising in barely restrained panic. “But he’s not gonna make it. Holy hell. He’s aiming right for us!”