Sunburn (Book 1, The Events Trilogy) (4 page)

8
.

Meanwhile, in third world countries, not too much had changed. Most people had never had access to electricity or the internet, and they still didn’t have it. Their bicycles, burros and oxen still worked just fine, even better now that the streets were free of cars and buses. In the vast rice cultivation areas of China and Southeast Asia, peoples’ new lamps and radios didn’t work anymore, so they dusted off their lanterns and easily returned to the endless cycles of the seasons, birth and death—the things that were never interrupted.

In his hillside hideaway, Will’s TV and radio now had power from the solar panels but no signal from anywhere. Actually, even had there been a signal he never could have heard it, so full was the ether with howling and screaming from the magnetic fields of the flare clashing with those of the earth.

“I think we may be the Last O
nes,” he said softly after a week.

Mary was not so keen about playing Eve to his Adam, even though they were already intimate and very much enjoying each other’s company. She wondered how long it could last in this isolation which she was beginning to find oppre
ssive. No one else to talk to, no TV shows, nothing to do but look at the people-less Paw Paw Valley and watch the deer at the salt lick. They were getting used to her now too, and she could watch from a few meters as the little family of the two-prong male that Will called “Buck”, climbed the hill carefully to the pan where Will would leave some hard corn niblets and a bowl of water next to the salt. There were plenty of books to read in the house and shelter and they were both getting more and more into that habit.

During the third week she was watch
ing the deer at the salt lick when suddenly their ears twitched; they looked down the hill and took off running along the driveway. Looking down the hill, Mary could see a dark shape moving in the bushes. She began to walk quickly toward the stairway to the deck. Halfway up she turned to look and saw a medium sized black bear ambling up toward the salt lick. She continued up and crossed the deck to the sliding glass door to the kitchen.

“Oh, Will
!” she called. “I think we have a visitor!”

Will came down from the bedroom with the Mossberg shotgun
open under his arm.

“
A visitor?” he growled.

“Look there.”

The bear was busily sniffing and licking the salt. He looked up at them through the glass door.

“Oh,” he laughed. “That’s just Walter. He comes by now and again.”

“He’s not dangerous?”

“Walter? No, black bears aren’t that aggressive. Now, a grizzly
or a brown bear will kill and eat a deer if he can catch one and attack a person if you startle him, but these small black bears aren’t dangerous to people.”

They went out on the deck. She had her arm around Will’s waist and he around her shoulders. They watched as Walter made a mess of the deer feeder.

“Why ‘Walter?’” She asked.

“Why not?”

9
.

As Mary and Will discovered each other through love, the rest of the Western World was rediscovering the art of conversation. Coffee shops which a month ago had been full of people ignoring each other, silently texting on their phones or typing e-mails into their notebook computers, were haltingly trying to actually speak to each other. The coffee shops and other restaurants were using kerosene lamps for light and making their coffee the old fashioned way, but they were in business.

A way of life, of wit and lively talk was slowly and painfully being rediscovered. There was no choice but for married couples to talk to each other now. There was no more TV, no internet,
no modern distractions. If you wanted to see a sporting event you had to walk or bike to the field, buy a ticket and physically watch the game, without an earphone stuck in your ear for commentary.

Some people discovered that their mates were actually smart and witty if given half a chance, but far more people discovered that
conversation for them was a lost art and sat staring at each other and at the silent TV screen as if waiting to be rescued.

Separations and divorces were
being planned. And the canned food and crackers were running out—

The astronauts had struggled for a week after the Event began to try to stay alive.

Five of the seven solar arrays were still generating electricity but their controllers were fried and there was only one spare that had not been fatally damaged as well.
Grigory had made a space walk to get two of the arrays wired to one replacement controller and that had worked for six days. After the last controller failed the temperature in the station began to drop precipitously as the carbon dioxide rose to toxic levels as the scrubbers failed too.

In the end Baker Sheldon and Grigory had embraced and even kissed, huddled together with their four comrades from
other parts of the world, threw a switch and let the vacuum of space flood into the cabin. They were all flash frozen in thirteen seconds and the International Space Station continued its melancholy orbit of the darkened earth below, accompanied by the silent fleet of dead satellites from all nations.

The strange thing was that Fred Goodman
and his family were actually enjoying their new life among the Amish. At least after a month they could say that. They were helping with the harvest as it was now into September, and pruning fruit trees. The work was healthy and not at all stressful. They were spared the most difficult aspects of Amish life, the constant rush to daily prayer and the domineering supervision of the Bishop and the deacons, who wielded considerable power in community life.

The Amish were a little in awe of them and gave them room as a family that a single individual would never have gotten. They were taught
good farming techniques, which they learned rapidly and participated in group work in the harvest and construction of outbuildings, but they were otherwise left alone.

Fred had left the
twenty-five shotguns and rifles with their ammunition he had bought in two different Maryland gun stores the day of his arrival in the community storehouse near the church. They had all watched the
aurora borealis
from the open space by the church that night and from the power of it the Community knew that God was speaking and making big changes in the world. It was not so clear why he was doing so or how it would go for Amish people.

10.

Dr. Claire Boucher was a second year resident at the Lancaster General Hospital about a dozen miles west of Intercourse and the Amish furniture store. She had been training to be a radiologist, working with x-rays, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging machines, but all that was history now. There was still no electricity in the hospital, and they were caring for patients by lamplight. They were luck that it was an older hospital and the windows could be opened and were actually high and gave good light to surgeons doing emergency operations. There was no refrigeration, but they had pills and some drugs in solution that could be stored at room temperature. He greater difference, Claire had seen immediately was in the relationship to her patients. Whereas before she could diagnose quickly with internal organ scans of various kinds, now she had to spend time talking to patients, listening, examining carefully with her hands and probing fingers, the way it had been done in the 19
th
century.

There were some lab tests available, those that could be done on site because there was still no reliable way to send material to labs in Harrisburg the way it had been done before.
There were still no phones or computers working, everything was done person to person. They had thought to hire messengers but there was no way to make it known that they needed help. It was all barely controlled chaos.

Big wagons drawn by Clydesdale horses were starting to appear, full of non-perishable food items for the bigger grocery chains. They were accompanied by mounted police as they arrived. They no longer went to Philadelphia and other big cities as they had been attacked by foot rioters there and even the police protection had not saved the food from being stolen.

“Have you noticed,” she asked her colleague Bill Burton who had been a resident in internal medicine, and now like the rest of the doctors, did everything. “—that there are no more stray dogs in the street?”

“I had. Also, I let my cat
out a few days ago as I always do and haven’t seen her since—“

“Oh, so you think—“

“I can’t be sure, but people are hungry. My wife and I have a dog too, a black lab. A real sweetheart. I asked my wife jokingly if she could ever eat our dog if we got hungry enough.”

“Oh, and she took it seriously?”

“Well, she said she would prefer to trade dogs with our next door neighbor. Then we would be eating their dog, whom nobody likes, and they our lab.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Claire said. “I still have a lot of crackers and canned tuna left. I guess I’ll wait
before I start eating people’s pets.”

“I saw that wagon arrive a few days ago at the market. But by the time I got in line and
it was my turn there was nothing left to buy—“

“They should restrict quantities.”

“They did, but even so, there were just too many people and only one wagon. I heard some guys talking who wanted to kill one of those big draft horses and eat him.”

“How stupid!
  If they eat the horses there won’t be any more food deliveries!”

“Try telling that to those drunken mo
rons. Unfortunately there is no shortage of whisky and warm beer.”

Fred
Goodman was pretty sure the Amish boy had appendicitis. He and his family had been having a simple dinner after a long day of hard work in the fields, when the boy’s father had knocked on their door and asked Fred to come to the meeting room. When he arrived he found the young man stretched out in obvious pain on a wooden bench. The Bishop and several of the elders were there too. All looked very concerned.

The Amish healer was there too.

The healer, Martin Linden turned to him.

“I think it’s the boy’s appendix. If that’s true he will need surgery. We used to take
people to the Lancaster General Hospital ten miles to the west,  but now after all that’s happened, I’m not sure what we should do. Is there still a hospital there?”

“Well, there’s no way to check now except to go and see. May I?” he asked indicating the patient.

The boy let him palpate the area gently. When he pushed in over the lower right of the abdomen and let it spring back, the boy cried out.

“From what I know, not being a doctor of course, that’s a key test for a hot appendix.  I agree we should take him to the hospital.”

They hitched up a wagon and Bishop Samuel and the father were going to go with the boy in the wagon bed.

“I think you may need someone riding shotgun,” Fred offered.

“Sorry?” Samuel said, not familiar with the expression.

“You need someone with a gun next to the driver
. To protect the horses,” he clarified.

“
Someone would steal our horses?” the boy’s father sounded shocked.

“Depends how desperate they are. If just a little desperate they might take them to sell for food. If things are worse than that, they will take them and eat them on the spot.”

The boy’s father said something in German to Samuel and turned away.

“We will stop by your ho
use so you can get your shotgun,” Samuel said. “Many people in our community could never bring themselves to use violence against another person, even to protect their families or property. It’s too deep within us.”

“I understand. I’ll ride shotgun then.”

11.

No one knew what was happening anywhere. The first week after the Event, North Korea had invaded South Korea. No one’s nuclear arsenals were reliable in this environment, and tanks and planes no longer worked, but AK-47 assault rifles still worked just fine and the North Koreans had plenty of those and soldiers to carry them into battle. What they no longer had was food for all these soldiers since there were no more trucks coming from China and their own collective agriculture was a long term disaster.

South Korea sent a message to Washington asking for help against the North, but the message went by three mast schooner from Pusan and would take a month to the Panama Canal and several weeks more to Washington DC if the locks at the Canal were operating. If they were not, it was another two-month journey around the Horn and the whole length of South America to just ask for help. How any help could get to them from the USA in these circumstances was dubious, but the South Koreans hoped that by the time their message was received the Event would have abated somewhat and some things might begin to work again.

Almost immediately, Rachel Rosen and her country were under siege from groups who had never depended much on technology and now were anxious to take advantage of the fact that Israel’s vaunted technical superiority over its enemies was completely gone. Normally, the call for Israeli mobilization would have been sent by radio and TV for the IDF reserve forces to muster and pick up their gear at their predetermined meeting points. But the troops were smart and as it became clear that no communications networks existed any more, the half million man Israeli reserve,
Shlav Bet
, went by foot and bicycle to their meeting points.

No Arab governments were interested in
prosecuting the war, in fact most had no way to even know about it, but their proxy armies like Hezbollah, Hamas and various fragments of other organizations decided that this was the heaven sent moment to take down a confused Israel, bereft of her Air Force, and all the technical paraphernalia of modern warfare. Governments everywhere were back to the basics of survival like everyone else.

The leaders of Hamas went to Beirut from Gaza City by sailboat to attend a joint meeting with the senior leadership of Hezbollah. They sat in a circle around a big bowl of food and each dipped in with pita bread held in his right hand, as was traditional.

At the end of the meal the leader of Hezbollah summed up: “Allah in his wisdom and mercy has destroyed the power of the infidel USA throughout the world. They may never regain even a fraction of their former power and influence in this area. He has left Israel to us to deal with and leveled the playing field so their advanced weapons systems no longer can help them, Now we will see how God is Great!”

They all stood up and cheered.

Units of Hezbollah and Hamas fighters attacked from Gaza and from Lebanon and even a few across the Jordan River. What their leadership hadn’t realized was Israel’s continuing advantage in being able to work along “interior lines.” As a small country they could move men by foot and bicycle easily from place to place to cover their borders. Their Galil assault rifles worked as well as the enemy’s AK-47’s, even if their vaunted Israeli Merkava tanks could only sit silently in their staging areas.

Rachel could hear
distant gunfire in the great silence that pervaded the world in the absence of machines. It was far away and stayed far away and she was glad because it was the only way she could gauge who was winning. The IDF had closed the borders and the great fence built years before to keep out terrorists with bombs now served as a barrier that could be defended along interior lines by infantry who had to move as they would have in the nineteenth century, on foot, with the “cavalry” now on bicycles.

Jerusalem became a
flashpoint again as people struggled with Molotov cocktails, fists and rifles for its ancient stones.

Everywhere hunger had the power to force neighbor to attack neighbor but surprisingly, this was the exception rather than the rule. After a certain point people became quite passive as their caloric intake dropped below 1,000 calories per day and their energy was sapped even by the simplest tasks.  As was seen in previous long term disasters like the siege of Leningrad or the Warsaw Ghetto, starvation led to passivity and lingering death rather than violence.

The City of Leningrad was under siege by Nazi forces from 1941 to 1944. A thousand people a day died from cold and hunger. The stress broke up families and many people just went inside their homes, got into bed and died quietly by themselves.

A
lthough the Event maintained its grip on the planet, the levels of static electricity in the air were dropping and peoples’ hair no longer stood completely on end. If you put gasoline into a car with a repaired electrical system, it would now run, but if you wanted to refuel, it was necessary to find a gas station open and to haul gas up from their in-ground tanks with a bucket and a rope. Electric gas pumps were still useless. Police departments had managed to fix a few of their patrol cars and in some places prevented the gas stations from furnishing gas to private cars to avoid giving criminals an advantage over a prostrate and vulnerable population.