Ryan reached into the blackness and edged forward slowly, groping for the railing. He could pop one of the chemlights in the backpack to light the way down, but he wanted to save those for a real emergency. Walking down one flight of stairs while clinging to a railing didn’t qualify. His hand found the smooth metallic railing, and he took the stairs carefully. Less than a minute later, he emerged from Warren Towers and stepped onto the glass-covered sidewalk. The fires in most of the trees and bushes had been extinguished by the blast, but a few continued to burn, casting a hazy glow over Commonwealth Avenue.
Burning ash, pulsing like orange fireflies, floated down the street—carried west by a warm breeze. A lone police siren wailed in the distance. Ryan walked into the eastbound lanes of Commonwealth, checking for traffic out of sheer habit, but he’d be surprised to see any cars. All signs indicated that the power outage had been caused by some kind of power surge, and he still couldn’t find a single light on the horizon. He continued east on the deserted road until the southern sky appeared behind Warren Towers. Ryan stared at the sky in awe.
Definitely not an ICBM.
An ugly column of uneven gray and white smoke streaked diagonally across the sky above the four-story buildings set back from Commonwealth Avenue, terminating high above Boston. He detected a faint difference between the distant, shadowy buildings and the lowest points of the sky. He checked his watch. Only eighteen minutes had elapsed. The sun would be up in thirty-five minutes.
Staring at the trajectory of the contrail over southern Massachusetts, he roughly calculated that it must have landed in the Atlantic somewhere just beyond Boston. A chilling thought hit him. His family was on a sailboat off the Maine coast.
Shit.
Ryan took the smartphone out of his pocket and pressed the home button. The device activated, but couldn’t locate a signal, further evidence that the grid had been taken down by some kind of electrical phenomenon. But did that make any sense? If this whole mess had been caused by a rogue asteroid or meteorite, there should be no EMP—maybe. He tried the phone one more time, hoping it just needed a few moments to locate a signal. “No Service.” He really hoped his family was safe.
Warren Towers disgorged a steady flow of panicked and injured coeds onto Commonwealth Avenue, quickly blocking the eastbound side of the road and spreading laterally. The lone siren had faded. He glanced at his phone one more time, just in case the initial cell tower failure had been a temporary glitch. “No Service.”
He assessed the dense crowd approaching from the center of the dormitory complex and decided to head in the opposite direction. He’d been one of very few students wearing a backpack during the exodus and the only student carrying a bucket of dehydrated food. The crowd was more confused than hostile, but it wouldn’t take much to bridge the gap. If one enterprising and unscrupulous individual recognized the opportunity represented by Ryan’s gear, the situation could be turned against him. His best strategy was to avoid crowds.
“Are you getting a signal?” yelled someone behind him.
Ryan turned to face two guys supporting a blonde female student. She wore a pair of running shorts and a loose fitting T-shirt. In the dim monochromatic light cast by a dying tree fire, her ankle looked severely swollen. A two-inch vertical cut above her right eyebrow bled down her face.
“We need to get an ambulance. She’s really messed up.”
“I can’t get a signal,” said Ryan, approaching them, “and I don’t think help is coming. I heard one siren, and that’s it.”
“Shit. Her ankle is smashed, dude.”
“Looks like it’s broken,” said Ryan, kneeling in front of her leg. “I assume you can’t put any weight on this?”
She shook her head and grimaced.
“You need to get her to a hospital. I can patch up her head, put a compression wrap on her ankle—but that’s about it,” said Ryan.
“Where’s the nearest hospital?” asked one of the students.
“On the other side of the turnpike,” said Ryan, pointing south. “Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They should be able to fix her up.”
Ryan led them to a small park next to Warren Towers, where they could avoid the prying eyes of several hundred desperate students. He carried a limited medical kit with enough basic supplies to treat three people for relatively minor injuries. Attracting a crowd might end badly. Treating the girl carried enough risk, but it was the right thing to do for now.
“How far is the hospital?”
“Less than a mile. You need to go west to St. Mary’s Street and take that south over the turnpike. You’ll keep going south. I don’t know the streets. What’s her name?”
“Elsie. I think she’s from Denmark. You don’t think we can flag down a car or something to take her?”
“I haven’t seen a single car. If we got hit by an EMP or solar flare, you might not see one all morning.”
“This is un-fucking-real,” said the student. “I need to get back into my room.”
“You’ll be better off at the hospital. Set Elsie down on this bench,” he said, stealing a peek at the crowd.
The ground-level structure blocked most of his view of the crowd, which was good for now. He dropped his backpack while they set her down, and removed the kit. Basic was an understatement for a disaster scenario like this. He could easily go through most of the gauze pads just treating the cut on her head.
“Is this good?” one of them said, standing next to the bench.
“Perfect. Do me a favor and keep an eye on the crowd back there or any people approaching us. This isn’t a big kit,” said Ryan.
“Got it. Are you an off-duty EMT or something?”
“No. I showed up here with the rest of you.”
“Where did you get all of this stuff?” said the other student.
“My parents are a little paranoid. Elsie? How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Dizzy and my leg hurts,” she croaked in a faint Scandinavian accent.
“Swedish?”
“Ja.”
“My parents took us on a tour of Scandinavia. Stockholm first, then we drove along the coast to Helsingborg, crossing over to Denmark. We stopped in Iceland on the way back. One of our best trips.”
“I love Iceland. We travel there every other year,” she said.
“Elsie, I’m going to give you some ibuprofen to help with the pain, but—”
“It’s not going to help,” she interrupted.
“Exactly. Better than nothing, though. I need to disinfect your wounds, which will hurt. I can’t do much for your leg. Good to go?”
“Good to go,” she said, extending a thumb.
A few minutes later, Ryan packed up the kit and donned the backpack. Elsie sat up on the bench with three butterfly bandages on her lower forehead and a clean face. He checked the compression wrap around her ankle one more time before replacing her sock and shoe.
“That should keep everything under control until you get her to Brigham,” he said.
“I don’t know if we should go. I have shit in my room, and—”
“Do you have any food in your room?” said Ryan.
The guys shrugged. “Some chips.”
“Guess what? The cafeteria is closed. Permanently. The stores are closed. Permanently. This is a major deal. Relief efforts will naturally focus on the hospitals. You want to be at a hospital, not here. Warren Towers is an empty shell. Eventually, you’ll have to leave. You safely deliver her to the hospital and find a way to help out. Get in at the ground level of volunteers. You’ll get a hot meal, water and a roof over your head, which is more than anyone around here will be able to say in two days.”