Yes, it was a whole lot of information that he might not need. Yes, it might be dangerous to be telling him so much about us. But I needed help, and I was willing to use whatever I needed to get it. The guilt about our daughter might just be the thing that tipped the scales in terms of him giving us the aid we required.
In the military, one of the first things we’d been taught was the value of the exchange of information. I give you something you want, and you reciprocate. As it turned out, Marlon worked along those same lines.
He was nodding, his eyes narrowed as he thought through what I’d said. “There’s more. I didn’t tell you everything about the EMP back there because I didn’t want to frighten Angie when she’s already in such an unstable position. This EMP, from everything I heard before the lines went dead… John, it wasn’t just an EMP. It was… is a solar storm as well. There was a short broadcast on emergency band radio, TV, and cell phones before it hit, and I heard more from my friends.”
I went cold. A solar storm? “I thought those took a while to get to Earth. And sun activity is monitored. We’d have advance notice.”
“We should have. Everyone who was watching the sun as it happened thought we’d have at least fifteen hours or more before it hit. But this was totally different. A bigger, faster blast wave than anything on record by far. Much bigger than the Carrington Event.”
“What’s that?”
“Huge solar storm in 1859. It fried the telegraph system in the U.S. and Europe, started a bunch of fires. They’ve known for years that we were due for another such event, but no one thought it would be this big. This one was unprecedented, a cluster of super flares followed by two CMEs. The huge solar event of 2012 could have been close to this bad, but it missed us. This one hit us dead on.”
I closed my eyes, too shocked to continue for a moment. Sarah. She was alone and didn’t know what was going on. Yes, she was with friends—friends that I trusted—but that didn’t mean she was safe.
“What about the nuclear EMP?” I finally asked.
He bit his lip. “That’s where it gets tricky. As far as I can tell, they happened at the exact same time. My best guess is that someone knew exactly when that solar storm was going to hit and did everything they could to hide it from the rest of the world, then detonated the nuclear EMP at exactly the right time to make what would already have been a catastrophic event even worse—and probably global.”
I let out a deep sigh, my mind frozen for a moment on the horror of it all. Then I took the next step. “But who? And why?”
He shook his head slowly. “I have the same questions. And if you’ve been high enough in the military, you know just as much as I do about the answers.”
Terrific. No problem. As if we didn’t already have enough to think about.
12
We ate dinner like nothing had happened, feasting on a truly impressive spread of spaghetti, meatballs, and garlic bread, all of which Marlon had cooked on one of the many stoves in his kitchen.
“Got one that runs on electric and one that runs on gas,” he told me as he fired it up. “That way I have all my bases covered. Run out of gas? Use the electric one. Experience something that is both a solar storm and an EMP attack rolled into one and lose all access to electricity? Use the gas one. Presto.”
He cracked a smile at me, and I had to laugh at the macabre humor. We hadn’t told Angie about it—she had enough to deal with just in terms of trying to rest and heal—but we both moved with extra speed for the rest of the day, and I didn’t have to ask him to know that we both had the same thoughts: We had to get out of here before Randall showed up with his goons, we had to get to town where there would be more people to help us defend ourselves, and we had to do it without using anything that required any sort of electric current.
“Don’t suppose you have a really old car sitting around?” I’d asked him at one point. “Like one that functions on pure mechanical power, no computer or electronics included.”
He’d shaken his head regretfully. “I have a gas stove in case of emergencies, but I never thought I’d be facing anything like what we’ve seen. My vehicles are high-tech. All the goodies. All the comms devices. There’s no way they’ll work now.”
I’d stared at him for a long moment, wondering, because that was another piece of the mystery. What the hell was a self-proclaimed vet—sentenced to the wilds by some history as a doctor that he wasn’t willing to share—doing with high-tech vehicles that included things like comms?
What civilian called them comms?
But he’d started talking about dinner, then, and I’d put the mystery away for later. Yes, I thought he knew more than he was telling us. Yes, I thought he was more than he was telling us. But I was hoping that it would work out to our advantage—and as long as that happened, I didn’t much care who or what he’d been in a previous life.
If he could get Angie and me back to town, and back to Sarah, that was all I cared about. If he was some part of the intelligence community or military Special Ops, maybe it meant he had better tools than I did at the moment.
After dinner, Marlon showed us to yet another room—clean this time, and heretofore unused, as far as I knew—and told us to get to sleep.
“You need rest and recovery, young lady, and tonight is going to be your only opportunity for that, I’m afraid,” he said in a doctorly tone. Then he turned his eyes to me and they grew hard. Serious. “We leave in the morning. First thing, if we can manage it. I have some things I need to do first, but I won’t be long. I want to get out of here before any trouble finds us.”
I nodded once, completely in agreement with him, and he disappeared down the hall toward what I assumed was his own room in this gigantic house in the middle of nowhere, designed to support more than just one person.
13
The next morning, Marlon rose before the sun, as was his custom. He’d trained himself over long, hard years of service to know exactly when the sun was going to rise, even in his sleep, and to rouse himself an hour earlier.
It had come in handy when he’d been in the field, and had to hide—or move before someone found him. And though he’d told himself time after time that he no longer needed to do it, it was a habit that he couldn’t seem to break.
He came to his feet suddenly in the darkness, the remnants of a dream drifting through his head, and he snatched at those wisps, trying to figure out what it was that had brought him so suddenly alert.
Then he remembered. Randall. His wife. The toxin in her system that shouldn’t have been there. Randall’s furious cries about Marlon himself having caused her death.
The knife glinting in the sunlight. The promise that he would be back.
He started moving toward his dresser, letting his mind work through the problem as he moved. Little wonder if he’d come awake the way he had, with his brain reminding him of that situation. Little wonder if he’d awoken with his muscles already tensed and ready to propel him forward.
He’d told the truth when he told John and Angie that he knew Randall. And he’d told the truth when he said that they needed to get out of here quickly. This house was many things, but it did not have adequate defense for what Randall and his cousins would bring. It wouldn’t give them the safety they needed. Only the presence of more people would do that. And if John and Angie were truly from Ellis Woods, where the population already knew of Randall—and how dangerous he was—it would make them even safer.
The mayor there knew what Randall had done in the past. He would spot Randall from a mile away. More than that if Angie was truly his niece.