Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (17 page)

M. T. Reiten lives and writes in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he also works as a research scientist at the lab bearing the same name. Before grad school, he served in the U.S. Army and had tours in Bosnia and Afghanistan. M.T.'s stories have appeared in
Writers of the Future XXI
,
All the Rage this Year
(Phobos Books), and
Jim Baen's Universe
. He and his wife have welcomed a beautiful baby girl to their home and are trying to achieve a new equilibrium. Although M.T. spent an inordinate amount of time in Witmer Hall at the University of North Dakota as an undergraduate, he doesn't wish the apocalypse on the building or any of its former occupants and must emphasize this is a work of fiction. Thus the characters are neither real nor purely imaginary, which means they're complex (math joke).

“T
his has to be a mistake,” I said, flipping the light switch.

Nothing happened. The tiny flame from a single candle barely cut the darkness in the large office space.

“Mistakes that don't go away become facts.” Kirk Vandermeer turned the thick Acer laptop on his desk, revealing the black display. He stabbed the power button several times for my benefit. “It's not just a blown transformer in a substation, Jason.”

His office was on the third floor of Witmer Hall, the physics and math building at UND. Minutes earlier I had experienced a blinding flash of light and an intense pain. I had thought it was a migraine, but as quickly as it hit, it was gone. I had groped through the dark stairwells from my lab in the basement. My flashlight had stopped working—I assumed just old batteries—so I couldn't check the breakers in the complete blackness of the mechanical room.

No one was around on the first or second floors. Not too surprising for after-hours during spring break. When he went home at six, the physics department head, Dr. Murali Rao, kicked out the few faculty and students who hadn't taken vacation. He had forgotten about me in the Radon Monitoring Facility, trying to catch up on the backlog of test kits. Candlelight shone from Kirk's office when I reached the third floor. Kirk would have deliberately hidden from Dr. Rao, so he could keep working undisturbed.

Now Kirk pointed out the window toward Columbia Road. I bent to peer through the half-closed blinds. The traffic signals and streetlamps were off and the vehicles were motionless dark lumps. Stopped on the railroad overpass behind the industrial tech building. Stopped on University Avenue. Stopped in the parking lot outside the Memorial Union.

“Nothing is working.” Kirk, again at his desk, held out the phone handset. Silence.

“Sweet. Just what we need,” I said.

Grand Forks had just survived the flood of 'ninety-seven, billed the flood of the century during a slow national news period. The town had been evacuated as the Red River overflowed. The whole Valley region was flat as a pool table. The highest point between Grand Forks and Fargo was the Buxton overpass on I-29. So the north flowing river ran into impassable ice in Canada and had consumed the town with nowhere else to go. A year later and we were still recovering.

“Wonder how long this will take to fix?”

Kirk shrugged. Kirk Vandermeer was a wiry, short guy. At five-four, he stood about a head below me, but he was always hunched over something—his desk, lab equipment, or his coffeepot—making him seem shorter. His ever-present narrow leather tie constantly dangled into things. I would have thought a Texan would wear a bolo and cowboy boots, not secondhand eighties fashion.

But what did I know about fashion? I still wore sweats, though my main exercise had been physical therapy since I blew out my knee early freshman year. No NFL contracts in my future. But as grad students in the physics department, no one cared how we looked, and my sweats were comfortable.

“EMP?” I asked.

Electromagnetic pulses could knock out the power grid and electronics, just like in Moore's
Dark Knight
graphic novel.

“Something hitting the Air Base?”

Grand Forks had always been ground zero, due to the SAC base and Minuteman missile silos scattered throughout the farmland.

“That could do it.” Kirk smoothed his thin moustache with a finger as he thought.

“For computers, certainly, but . . .”

“My dissertation!” I had made backups to the point of paranoia, 3.5 inch floppies at my apartment, in my car, multiples in the drawers of my desk, labeled with dates and revision numbers.

“Wait.” Kirk stopped me before I could run toward my dark office in a panic. “If it's zapped, you can't fix it. If it's safe, you can't work without a computer.”

I took a deep breath and ran my hands across my smooth scalp. I shaved my head since I started balding during my junior year in high school. Passing for thirty when I was seventeen made me popular with friends who wanted me to buy them beer, but it had been hard on my nonexistent love life. Acing my ACTs didn't help either even though I made the all-state defensive line.

“Whoa. This is crazy. What do we do?”

“I want to check my car to test your EMP theory,” Kirk said.

We grabbed our coats and took the north stairway to the loading dock entrance. The weather had warmed from the previous week when it had dropped into the negative teens. Still it was crisp enough outside to wear my hood up.

Kirk had “borrowed” a staff parking tag from his advisor who had gone on sabbatical, so he had snagged primo parking nearby. His car, backed into the spot, was a 'seventy-two Plymouth Duster, baby blue and rust speckled with balding tires. Kirk opened the hood for me and climbed behind the wheel.

“Let me know what happens,” he called after cranking down the window. He turned the ignition.

Exactly nothing happened. No turn over. No clicking. No faint flicker of dome light inside.

“Didn't think this old heap had computers,” I said.

“It doesn't. The battery is dead, too. Strange.” Kirk climbed out and stared with me into the oily blackness of the engine compartment.

He shivered. “Let's try a push start.”

I looked around the mostly empty parking area. My eyes had adjusted to the faint moonlight. The worst we could hit was the Dumpster or the half-melted snow mound at the far end.

“I guess. You want me to push?”

“Well, I could push you, but all that will accomplish is give me a hernia.” He hopped into the car with a derisive snort.

“I wouldn't want you to strain your milk,” I grumbled as I leaned onto the trunk and heaved against the cold metal.

The Duster rolled forward, refrozen ice crunching beneath the tires. Kirk popped the clutch, but the car didn't even buck. It just slowed to a squeaky stop.

“What? You have it in fifth?” I asked.

“Only have three gears. It's like the pistons fell out of the engine.” Kirk rubbed his moustache with a knuckle.

As he thought, I pulled back my hood and listened. As dead as campus normally was in the evenings during breaks, an eerie silence permeated the night. No distant rush of traffic heading to Columbia Mall. No crash of freight trains from the nearby tracks. No blasting music from the frats along University Avenue.

“We might as well stay put,” Kirk said, warming his hands in his armpits.

Three years up north and he still hadn't acclimated to the cold.

“Let the confusion die down.”

“What confusion?”

“You'll see.”

Kirk got out of the Duster and opened the trunk after fiddling with the lock. He retrieved a large black case that looked like a soft-sided golf bag and slung it over his shoulder.

“Blackouts do strange things to normal folks.”

“An excuse to play some D&D on a work night, huh?”

“Don't have enough candles for that,” Kirk said as we abandoned his car to return to the warmth of Witmer Hall.

We stopped at the double glass doors at the west entrance and searched for the right keys.

“Hold it right there!” came a command from behind us.

The campus officer's uniform looked bulky with his jacket and a bulletproof vest beneath and his voice was hoarse from heavy breathing. He wore a white bicycle helmet perched on his large round head. He dumped the mountain bike he was straddling into the dirt-laden snow next to the sidewalk. Probably hadn't exercised this much since he joined the university police force.

“This is my lab,” Kirk said, pointing to the third floor.

“Me, too,” I added.

“No one is allowed into evacuated buildings until physical plant gives the go ahead,” the campus officer said. He sounded young to be a cop and had an odd, clipped accent. “Too many hazards. Can't allow looting.”

“Looting?” I asked.

Kirk pointed at the black bag slung over his shoulder. “I'm bringing things inside. That's the opposite of looting, so it should be okay.”

“No, not okay.”

The officer reached for the walkie-talkie microphone on his shoulder and pressed the button, but nothing happened aside from a plastic click. Must have been reflex.

“I can't check if you're authorized with dispatch, so you can't proceed. It's a public safety issue. You'll have to leave the area immediately.”

“I've got keys to prove we're allowed.”

I held out my wad of brass-colored do-not-duplicate keys that would make any custodian proud and jingled them as if I was trying to entertain a baby. Perhaps that wasn't the smartest move. Short police officers didn't like big guys like me.

The officer's hand dropped to rest on the butt of his sidearm.

“I am delivering a final warning. Depart the premises.”

“Don't you have better things to do?”

Kirk must have thought he was being reasonable and fair. But he really sounded pissed and condescending, which was why he got low teaching evals from his students. It had taken me a few months to get used to him.

“I have to get my stuff. It's in there.”

“Show me what's in the rifle case.”

Kirk sighed and set the black bag down. He blew on his hands. “It's not a rifle case. It's just my exercise equipment—”

“Open the goddamn case!” The frustrated officer drew his pistol.

I stepped backward with my hands in the air. I thought that was what you were supposed to do. I'd never had a cop point a gun at me. Which was exactly what happened when I suddenly moved. The automatic was leveled at my chest.

Kirk unzipped his case, exposing a handful of smooth sticks.

“See?”

“Dump it on the ground!” the officer ordered.

The gun was trained on Kirk now.

“I'm not dumping anything.” Kirk crouched and carefully shook the bag.

The sticks slipped out, but then one of them separated with a gentle click of metal on wood. A shiny length of blade awash in moonlight appeared on the pavement. It was a real Japanese katana—the first time I had seen it—with wooden practice swords sprawled around it. Kirk reached for it. I believe he meant to keep it from getting scratched on the sidewalk.

The recognizable metallic clack of a pistol hammer slamming home made me wince. But there was no bang. We all stared at the gun pointed at Kirk.

“You were going to shoot me!” Kirk sounded offended.

The officer worked the slide as he backed away. The unfired round flipped out. The slide snicked forward. Click. Click. Click. The officer repeatedly squeezed the trigger.

Kirk growled and the katana was in his hand, free of its scabbard like a magic trick, as he rose from his knees. In a single fluid motion, the tip of the blade stopped at the officer's throat.

“You wanted to kill me!”

The officer whimpered with the three-foot length of steel, presumably razor sharp, threatening his neck. His left hand had begun to reach to his belt, but now he seemed frozen. What did he have to counter a sword? A telescoping baton or pepper spray?

“Kirk?” I asked, trying to appear calm. “What are you doing?”

Kirk stood in a deep stance. A martial arts movie pose with arms extended. His back was perfectly military straight. Breath steamed from flared nostrils.

“Self-defense.”

“I don't think that works against cops.” I eased forward. “Let's not make another mistake tonight. Okay?”

“Drop the gun,” Kirk snarled. “Then the belt.”

The officer thought about being a hero. I'd seen the same wild animal look countless nights around two in the morning outside bars. However, never with a really, really big knife involved in the decision-making process. The officer dropped the gun and the equipment belt at his ankles.

Kirk withdrew the blade and held it high, ready to strike. “Leave.”

The campus officer snatched the bike and pedaled away.

“You're in deep shit,” I said. “He'll be back.”

Indignant, Kirk said, “He was going to shoot me.” He scooped up the pistol and belt.

“And we're both in deep shit, my friend.”

The cop didn't come back, but we barricaded the doors with scrounged chains and padlocks and piled classroom desks anyway. We hoped we could explain to the authorities when the lights came on.

*   *   *

D
AY
1
W
ITMER
H
ALL
, UND, G
RAND
F
ORKS
ND

The lights didn't come back on, but the sun did rise in the east. The steam radiator beneath the window had lost pressure during the night, the popping and creaks faded, and the building had grown chilly.

I had retrieved my sleeping bag, kept for overnight data collection, from my lab. I sat with my back against the wall in Kirk's office facing the door. My stomach had been in knots all night and I jerked awake at every imagined sound. Kirk sat nearby with his sword across his lap and the cop's gun on the desk.

“I saw you wearing those black skirts in the gym a while ago. I thought you did aikido, like Steven Seagal. What are you doing with that sword? On campus?”

“I practice iaido,” Kirk said.

He didn't sound worried at all, explaining as if it was a lecture question I had almost understood, but not quite.

“Same black
hakama
as aikidoka, but deeper roots. Basically fast draw with a katana.”

“Still shouldn't have pulled that on the cop,” I said.

“He was an incompetent ass.” Kirk gently tossed a large caliber shell at me.

I caught the heavy round and peered at it. The brass casing had a dented primer. “You're lucky it was a dud.”