She could no longer avoid acknowledging her worst suspicions, because they had just become tragically clear: The grid’s down. After all our warnings.
Much of the work she did every day — often involving developing counterespionage measures against Chinese hackers — was meant to avert this very crisis: not just losing the grid, but all the devastation its loss would entail. It was unfolding before her very eyes.
The crushed nose of the Norfolk Southern locomotive pointed toward the ongoing tragedy, as if it were content to merely peer into the abyss. But not for long: The engine car broke through the demolished railing and also began to fall.
Lana saw a mother with an infant race out from under the engine car’s shadow. But a man tangled in a seat belt made it only halfway out of his big pickup before he was crushed to death.
Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom.
Cars on both trains slammed down from the elevated tracks in a perversely syncopated series of terrifying crashes.
Lana heard a lone scream, horrific and piercing — followed quickly by scores of others.
Then the explosions began.
CHAPTER 2
A tanker car, filled with ethanol, blew up with such force that shock waves shook the Prius as if it were made of lint. As the flash widened — engulfing the vehicles closest to the tracks — Lana looked ahead, frantic to get moving. But nothing in front of her budged. She turned back and saw boiling flames, several hundred feet away, heading toward her and gobbling up cars. Then she witnessed a series of violent explosions as their fuel tanks blew up, adding to the pandemonium.
She opened the door to run when two things happened at once: The outside air hit her like a huge broiler oven, forcing her back inside, and the blue Yukon in front of her started to speed away.
She drove as close to the big SUV as she dared, wishing she could see past its high profile but grateful to be moving at all — and acutely aware of the explosions that were chasing her.
Another quick glance in her rearview showed that fireballs were now reaching where she had been idling only moments ago — and they were still mushrooming outward.
“Don’t stop!” she screamed when the Yukon’s brake lights came on, but the driver must have been tail gating as closely as possible, just like Lana, because the red lights blinked off a half second later.
Too fearful to look back, she continued to ride that bumper as tightly as she could, feeling the temperature in the car rise. Sweat dripped down her brow and burned her eyes, and she smelled smoke. But when she did look back, she saw that she’d widened the gap between herself and the burgeoning hell storm.
In Lana’s side-view mirror, flames shot from the tops of mature cherry trees that had turned into tinder during the long hot summer. Cinders rose into the air, fiery seeds spreading the conflagration to a nearby park.
Up ahead, she spotted the first intersection after the overpass. She had driven through it countless times, but this morning it looked scary and surreal. The stoplight was dark, but somehow traffic just kept moving forward, which seemed like a miracle: that drivers — no doubt panicky themselves — were letting the cars in the most immediate danger pass through the intersection.
But it wasn’t a miracle. It was heroism. Young adults in satiny blue robes had linked arms and stationed themselves in front of the cross traffic on both sides of the four-way to keep the passage open for those escaping the disaster. A bus, the same bright blue color as the robes, had pulled up on a curb, CAPITOL BAPTIST CHURCH CHOIR painted on its side.
Lana filled with gratitude, not just for herself, but for the people in even greater peril behind her. Those kids out there were lifesavers of the first order.
She also spotted dozens of people running toward the flames and ongoing explosions, some carrying first aid kits, others bottled water; many bore nothing more than their considerable courage.
Lana wanted to join them, but not with cars still behind her trying to flee the deadly train wreck.
After driving about a mile she spied a place to pull over. She rushed to her trunk and pulled out her running gear, which she typically kept stored away till lunchtime. In less than two minutes she changed into her cross-trainers, running shorts, and a sleeveless top, leaving her heels, hose, and blouse strewn on the passenger seat.
She raced off to see what she could do. She had no special training, though she might be able to administer CPR, having taken two classes when Emma was an infant. Mostly, she was able-bodied and thought she could, at the very least, help the injured away from the smoke and flames.
But the open intersection where the young choir members had saved the lives of so many motorists had turned into gridlock. A couple of hundred yards beyond it, the fire still burned the cars and bodies trapped in the hungriest flames. The park near the tall cherry trees was also fully aflame; dark plumes rose from the plastic playground gear and soccer field stands.
A whole new set of sirens rent the air, but she could not see fire trucks, ambulances, or police cars; access had been cut off by the chockablock cars, most of them now abandoned. People were running off, arms full of belongings.
The sirens grew so loud that Lana might not have noticed a young woman’s cries for help if the teen hadn’t been waving her arms frantically; the satiny blue fabric caught Lana’s eye. A choir member, she realized. The girl looked just two or three years older than Emma. She was clearly distraught, huddling over a supine figure.
Lana hurried to her, finding the young woman cradling the head of a man wearing an identical robe. He was bleeding from his leg and hands. But his eyes were open, and he was conscious enough to notice her.
Crouching, Lana asked the girl how badly he was hurt.
“Real bad,” she said. “I’ve got to get him out of here, but I need help getting him up.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t. What happened to him?”
“We had to stop those cars,” the girl said, “but some of them wouldn’t, so we made them stop by forming a chain, but they kept bumping us, and then one of them hit Shawn pretty hard and then just ran him over and took off. Then a bunch of other cars started coming through. I barely got him out of the way. They would have killed him,” she added in disbelief.
Lana looked around. No help anywhere. “All right, let’s move him, if you think he can walk. I’ve got a car.”
“Shawn.” The girl leaned close to him. “We’re going to try to get you out of here.”
Smoke swept over them. He looked around, clearly worried. So was Lana. The fire was creeping closer.
“What’s your name?” Lana asked the young woman.
“Tanesa.”
“Okay, Tanesa, you take one arm and I’ll take the other. And let’s be careful of his hands.”
Shawn was lean, thankfully, but Lana and Tanesa still struggled to help him up. Once standing, though, he was able to put all his weight on his left foot. That’s when Lana noticed that he was missing his right shoe and that his anklebone was sticking out of that foot.
“How close is your car?” Shawn asked in a shaky voice.
“Not far.” Not true, but Lana wanted to give him hope.
She kept lying as he hopped along between them, an arm over each of their shoulders. Smoke billowed past them every few seconds. All of them coughed, Shawn most painfully of all; every movement made him grimace.
But Lana peppered him with lots of question, doing all she could to keep him from falling into shock. She learned that their prize-winning choir had just returned from a tour of rural churches in the Carolinas. He was an alto, Tanesa a soprano. Lana was already thinking of nominating them for community service awards, holding a fund-raiser — doing something to recognize their extraordinary courage.