“Okay.” I nodded to myself. “Okay. Hang on, Ange.”
I reach across her lap and opened the glove box, rummaging for my phone. The moment it was in my hands, I clicked the button on the side to wake it up.
Nothing happened.
“What?”
The phone was a brick. Completely lifeless. Plugging it into the charger in the dashboard did nothing. Of course, I realized. Without the truck, there was nothing to charge the damn phone.
I yanked Angie’s phone out, desperate now, but got the same result.
Something was very seriously wrong, here. First the truck, and now the phones?
“This is—” I shook my head, staring at the black abyss of Angie’s phone screen and forcing my brain into action. What could cause this? What was going on?
Even more importantly, how could I fix it? How could I get Angie to warmth? It was getting cold in the truck now, courtesy of the open doors, and I could see her lips starting to turn blue.
“John.” Angie’s voice was a thin wisp of sound. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“The truck is dead,” I said, my voice deadpan. “The truck’s dead, the phones are dead, everything is dead.”
“How?” she whispered. “What the hell could have… was it an EMP? Could that have affected the truck?”
An EMP. I frowned, searching my memory. An electromagnetic pulse. A weapon with one very specific—and very dangerous—goaclass="underline" to short out anything electronic.
But that didn’t make any sense. We were in Michigan, for God’s sake. It wasn’t like there was anything important up here. Hell, half of the state was wilderness. Why would anyone have used an EMP here?
Then I remembered the yellow sky. That contrail across the horizon.
“Yes,” I whispered. “This truck’s internal systems are all controlled by the onboard computer. If that goes out, the truck can’t start. And an EMP would explain the phones. But not the animals going crazy.”
Because animals were weird and had a better idea of what was going on in the world around them. But I didn’t think they would react to electromagnetic pulses.
Which left the truly terrifying idea that it was something else. Something that we might not know about yet.
“I don’t think it was an EMP. That wouldn’t explain the animals acting so weird.”
“Then what?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied. “Something else. Maybe something worse.”
“John,” Angie gasped. Her hand suddenly gripped my leg, fear giving her strength. “Sarah!”
Sarah. Angie’s five-year-old daughter. She’d stayed with a friend of the family while we went on this small honeymoon trip. In the three years since I had started dating Angie, Sarah had become every bit my daughter. I cared about her like my own flesh and blood. And whatever had happened, it would be threatening her, too.
“I know,” I said. “If the lights are off in Ellis Woods too, a lot of people are gonna be cold, hungry, and scared. Sarah could be in real danger.”
“We have to get home,” Angie said. “We have to get back to her.”
“It’s okay.” I opened the door, my thoughts whirring through my next potential move. “It’s gonna be okay. Just give me one second.”
I stepped out of the truck and closed the door behind me. Then I started pacing.
I’d been in a lot of difficult situations before, even life-threatening ones. But none of my training or experiences had prepared me for this. I had a wife who was broken and bleeding in a truck that wouldn’t start and phones that didn’t seem to be working. I had a little girl miles away from us in a town that might, if my suspicions were correct, have no power.
No heat. No light. In the middle of a Michigan winter.
I was out of my element here. I wasn’t a true outdoorsman; that was Angie’s department. I was a soldier. That was what I’d been trained for, and that was what I had done for the majority of my adult life. But right now I was a soldier without an enemy to fight, and all of my survival skills had been learned among the sunbaked rocks of Afghanistan.
They were skills that didn’t translate to northern Michigan.
I saw my duffel bag then and stumbled toward it, digging through until I found my dog tags. Standing, I put them over my head and clutched at the tokens, already feeling more like myself.
Right. We had to have a plan. I had to figure out what we were going to do—and I had to do it quickly. I didn’t have time to stand around feeling sorry for myself or my lack of experience in Michigan. In the snow. In the wilds.
Angie didn’t have time.
We weren’t completely without resources, I realized. We’d been planning to camp out here for a couple nights and had brought warm clothes, shelter, and food with us. What we didn’t have was a way to contact anyone, or a way to go for help. And if things were as bad as I suspected they might be, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
If that had been an EMP—or something even worse—then society had its own problems right then. No one was going to come looking for us. No one was even going to be able to receive our call for help.
We were going to have to figure this out on our own. And that, I was able to do. That, I had been trained for.
3
I reeled my thoughts in as a fresh flare of pain from the wound in my side reminded me that Angie wasn’t the only one who’d taken damage. But mine were only flesh wounds. A quick, deep breath told me that none of my ribs were broken—bruised, maybe, but not broken—and that my lungs were both working just fine.
I needed to get Angie’s leg bandaged. Needed to figure out how to get that bleeding stopped—and whether I could. A part of me was screaming that the bear had hit a major artery in her leg and that she was going to bleed out regardless, but I put that thought to the back of my mind and turned my focus to more useful things. Get her bandaged, get her warm. I searched through the scattered remnants of our camping gear until I found the large first aid kit we’d brought with us. I also grabbed a thermal blanket from our cold weather supplies, then returned to the truck.
“Okay, honey.” I draped the thermal blanket over her shivering body, leaving her injured leg exposed. “We need to try and get this bandaged up. I need to see whether that bear hit anything major, and get it to stop bleeding. You ready for this?”
I didn’t think so. One could never be ready for this sort of thing. But she didn’t have a choice. Not if she wanted to live. She groaned and lifted her head up a bit, but I could see her eyes growing heavy. The cold and the loss of blood were getting to her.
“You gotta try to stay awake, Ange.”
I found some scissors in the first aid kit and began to cut away the material of her pant leg, careful to stay away from the open wound. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle, thank God, and I took that to mean that we didn’t have a ruptured artery in there. The ragged gashes in the flesh of her thigh were deep, though, her skin around them puckered to an angry red. I could see splinters of the bone inside—but that, too, was something to think about later.
Get her bandaged. Get her warm.
I knew from my field experience that there was nothing I could do to close those wounds, and given the state of the bone, that was going to be a surgical procedure. The best I could do was to wrap it up and try to keep her stable. I grabbed an absorbent pad, a roll of gauze, and a role of medical tape from the kit.
“John,” she said as I worked on her leg. “We have to get moving.”
“Just be still.” I shushed her, leaning in to rest a tender kiss against her forehead.
“No, John,” she rasped. “We have to get moving. We have to get to Sarah.”
“Look at your leg. You can’t walk out of here. I could probably carry you for a little way, but not all the way back to Ellis Woods.”