Inception of Chaos: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Story Read online

  The couple inside, whom the report named Tyrese, wife Karen, were screaming at each other loudly enough that David heard them the moment he opened his car door to step out. But when he got halfway to the chipped and fading front door, the shouting stopped.

  Orien, his face a mask of professionalism, said, “Oh goody, they know we’re here.”

  David nodded. If they decided to get violent, they’d now have more time to prepare for the arriving officers. He doubted it would come to that, but then again, every call they serviced had that potential.

  Right on cue, the door opened when Orien stepped onto the cracked cement patio.

  David, a few feet behind Orien, scanned the man in the door visually in only an instant, habitually cataloging relevant details: Adult black male, light complexion; white tank top, black athletic shorts, blue Nike high-top shoes; black hair, cut almost to the scalp; approximate age, early thirties. Most importantly, he had empty hands—but he kept clenching and opening them. It meant he was pumping adrenaline, ready to fight.

  David kept a sharp eye on Tyrese. He always tried to use first names when possible, especially in tense situations like Domestic calls.

  The man’s knee buckled, but he quickly recovered. “Hey, officers. Sirs. What, uh, why are you here?”

  David hooked his thumbs lightly into the front of his duty belt, a non-threatening posture that nonetheless kept his weapon within inches of his hands.

  Orien’s voice was utterly friendly, if professional. “Good morning, sir. I’m Officer Parker, Denver P-D. Are you Tyrese Chapman?”

  “Yeah. I don’t got any warrants, though.” Tyrese continued flexing his hands.

  “No, sir. Is your wife home? May we see her?”

  David stepped onto the patio to position himself to Orien’s right and noticed two things immediately. First, the man’s pupils were dilated—either methamphetamines or his agitated state could explain that, but the subject had a clear complexion and looked healthy, like he worked out. Probably not meth, then…

  Second, he reeked of alcohol, just like nine out of ten subjects on these domestic disturbance calls.

  Tyrese stepped to one side, opening the door farther. “Karen. The cops want to talk to you. What’d you do this time?”

  Karen came to the door, and she looked just like the ID picture that had shown on the computer. Very dark complexion. Straight black hair with a red streak in front. Quite attractive. But David was looking for something else—any marks on her. He saw none.

  She said, “I’m Karen. How can I help you?”

  “Ma’am, good evening,” Orien said. “We received a report of an altercation here. In fact, you were both clearly audible from the patrol car, when we arrived. Are you all right?”

  She looked at her husband with pursed lips and narrowed eyes. “Now look what you done, starting all that mess. You’re going to jail, Tyrese.” She looked at Orien and said, “Ain’t that right, officer?” She didn’t give Orien a chance to reply, though, before she shouted at her husband, “That’s what you get for startin’ shit. I told you, I ain’t leaving the damn house over some shit that ain’t even happened yet.”

  Orien held up one hand—his left, opposite his sidearm—and said, “Miss, may I speak with you outside, alone?”

  Her expression went from angry to nervous in an instant. “Yeah. Why?”

  Orien didn’t reply until she came outside and had unceremoniously slammed the door in her husband’s face.

  Once Orien was alone with her and David, he asked in a quiet, even tone, “Karen, please be honest. Are you hurt? Has he struck you?”

  Her eyes went wide in surprise. “What? No, of course not. That man is hard as rocks, but he ain’t never laid one hand on me. He knows I’d cut the best part of him off, if he ever did.”

  David fought the urge to smile. Rich or poor, people said the craziest things when they were mad. Detectives dealt with the ones who actually did what they’d threatened, but he still got to find it amusing, as a field officer.

  Orien said, “Okay. How much has he had to drink today?”

  “Not much, really. He just…”

  Orien shook his head as her voice trailed away. “I’m not a judge, ma’am. I only ask because we need to know what we’re dealing with. I smell the alcohol on him. That’s not from one or two beers, is it?”

  She flatlined her lips, jaw clenched and eyes cast downward, grabbing one elbow with her other hand. After a few seconds of silence, she shook her head ever so slightly. “No.”

  “Okay. How much has he had to drink today?” Orien asked again.

  “He finished a twelve-pack. Usually, it’s just six, but today he said it didn’t matter no more because the sun flares or whatever will kill us all. I told him I don’t want to hear that nonsense, and he about lost his damn mind, started throwing crap against the wall, talking about how this won’t do us any good, that won’t help us, and on and on.”

  “Where did he want you to go with him?”

  “He wants us both to leave the city. He says it won’t be safe no more, once the flares do their thing. He’s a damn fool. And now, I have to go buy more dishes. Asshole.”

  The door slammed open. Tyrese stormed out onto the patio and tried to approach Karen with one hand up, his index finger pointing at her, but Orien stepped between the two.

  It was a foolish move on Orien’s part, but that was why rookies worked with experienced officers. David made a mental note to discuss it with his partner later, but for the moment, he merely circled a few feet to one side, to better flank the man if he got violent. Drunks were unpredictable, but thankfully, Tyrese stopped short before touching Orien.

  Instead, he shouted at Karen, “That’s a damn lie. I never threw no dishes. You dropped that crap when you put back what I packed in the car. We’re gonna need plates, out there.” He waved his hand off to one side, indicating everything outside of Denver.

  “Sir,” David said, trying to make his voice soft and reassuring, “there are solar flares all the time.”

  “That’s what I told the fool,” Karen said, her weak moment gone without a trace. Her expression had become hard as stone.

  Tyrese rounded on her, though he didn’t attempt to get closer with Orien standing between them. “You’re stupid. You don’t know nothing about it. There was that one, like a hundred years ago, the one that blew out all them telegrams.”

  “Telegraphs, dumbass.” She crossed her arms, one foot extended forward, head tilted as she looked at him like he was a complete fool.

  Though David tended to agree with her on that point, taunting the drunk was not calming the situation. “Ma’am—”

  Tyrese shouted, “This one will be bigger! The government is lying. I been on the web—all the real news sites is full of people in the government talking about that coverup.”

  Orien squared his shoulders and stepped toward Tyrese. When the man backed up a step, Orien took another step, too, until Tyrese was nearly at the patio’s edge—and out of striking distance from Karen. Another risky tactic, though it’d worked.

  “What the hell? Back it up. What’re you doing?”

  David already knew, though. Experience and his gut feeling both told him the couple would be arguing at full volume until Tyrese passed out, which could take hours, and in the meantime, they’d keep getting the police called on them. Or one would take a swing at the other. Either way, David did not want to keep dealing with this for his whole shift, and apparently, neither did Orien.

  Orien replied, “Sir, you’re under arrest for disturbing the peace, as well as violating ordinances regarding domestic violence—”

  “I never hit that bitch!”

  “Sir, when you threw her dishes at the wall—”

  “It ain’t violence if you don’t whip a bitch’s ass! You can’t do this to me. Please, officer,” Tyrese begged, “I can’t go to jail. I was just tryin’ to save my wife from what’s coming. What would you do, if you knew the truth?”


  David fought down a momentary urge to grin. The DA’s office would drop those charges like a hot rock as soon as they got the paperwork, but that wouldn’t happen until the next day, when he and Orien were long gone, off shift.

  Tyrese didn’t struggle as Orien cuffed him—with textbook-perfect technique, David noted—but Karen reacted before the cuffs even clinked shut. She began to pace in little circles, talking to herself, though the only word David could make out was “bullshit,” seemingly every other word.

  David put himself between her and his partner, who had Tyrese to deal with, though the small patio’s size left her closer than he’d have preferred. He started to back up, but that could have put him in Orien’s way, so instead, he “bladed” his position. It left him standing sideways to her, his left hand between her and his weapon hand.

  She seemed to recognize his tense stance, though. Her eyes flared wide for half a second, then she backed up a step and stopped pacing. She watched with narrowed eyes as Orien escorted her husband toward the squad car.

  Tyrese begged all the way to the car, but didn’t resist, thank goodness. If he had taken a swing, or even struggled too hard, he’d have caught real charges, not the trumped-up excuse Orien had used to take him to the drunk tank to dry out for the night.

  David kept his eyes riveted on her until Tyrese was safely stuffed into the back of the car. Domestic situations often turned ugly at this point, the spouse becoming violent to protect her man even if she’d been the one to call the police in the first place.

  “Ma’am, stay on the porch.” Years of experience had given David the kind of authoritative tone that made most people stop in their tracks for a moment, giving subjects the time they needed for their brain to catch up to their instincts. Karen was one of those people. She froze in place and stared him in the eyes.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, once Orien gave the all-clear. “Your husband isn’t likely to be formally charged, but police officers are not at liberty to choose which laws we enforce. The D-A and judges have that liberty, and in my experience, they’ll let him out tomorrow when he sobers up. He’ll need a ride home, though. If you don’t leave him, be ready to pick him up in the morning.”

  Every time he gave that well-rehearsed speech, now, his deep voice had a sing-song quality to it that people generally found mesmerizing. Orien called it “magic.” David just called it “verbal judo”—skills learned from so many years working in the field.

  David turned back onto West Colefax, heading to the station to book their inebriated passenger. They’d managed to clear that latest domestic disturbance call without the passenger’s wife, Karen, getting herself arrested—and without Tyrese doing something stupid to “catch a case” when they cuffed him.

  In the back, Tyrese was well behaved, though in his drunken state, he continually thanked David and Orien for not arresting his wife. It quickly got annoying, especially since she hadn’t done anything to warrant getting arrested with him.

  David considered shutting the sliding portal in the plexiglass divider between the front and rear seats, but Tyrese didn’t seem to be any threat at the moment, and David wanted to hear any problems back there without having to take his eyes off the road to continually check on the prisoner.

  Leaving the little portal open, however, didn’t mean he had to keep listening to Tyrese’s inane babble of apologies and thanks, so he said to Orien, “My ex called yesterday.”

  Orien raised an eyebrow. “Oh? I didn’t think you two were talking. It’s been what, three months since the breakup?”

  David shrugged. “Four. And we don’t talk, but she called out of the blue to ask if I’d been watching the news on the solar activity.”

  Ha, let their “guest” chew on that…

  Orien scoffed. “This again? I didn’t take her for the tinfoil-hat type.”

  “Yeah, she’s usually not, but she bought into the fringe hysteria and wanted to warn me to be careful, stock up on food, that sort of thing.”

  Orien let out a long breath.

  Tyrese took the bait. He leaned forward and said through the little portal in the partition, “You should listen to her, man. Uh, sir. The media ain’t telling it right.”

  “Really? And how should they be telling it? Wait, I don’t want to know—”

  “They should be asking, not telling. Like, why they movin’ all them congress weasels out of D.C. if nothing’s wrong? They all been moving to that underground city in Pennsylvania.”

  David shook his head. “Precautionary, only.”

  “Oh yeah? So why’s the Army on alert?”

  Orien laughed out loud, but when David glared, he caught himself. In a more serious tone, Orien said, “Who said the Army is on alert?”

  Tyrese leaned forward. “My cousin’s in the Reserves, and he said they all got put on alert, so’s they can get called up with a day’s notice. They gotta stay close to home, and keep their bags ready.”

  Although it would have been easy enough to find out if that were true, David had no intention of wasting his time.

  Orien took the bait, though. “How’s a little solar activity supposed to end the world?”

  Tyrese laughed. “Seriously? This ain’t gonna be no damn solar flares. This gon’ be a C-M-E. Coronal Mash… Mass Ejection. The sun’s gonna reach out with a big ol’ arm and smack the hell outta the planet. Shoot, you as ig’nant as my wife.”

  David frowned. The idea was ridiculous. The government had already made a statement. The world’s best scientists had concluded that the worst possible outcome would be a few dropped cell phone calls, maybe some interference with FM radio stations. Dropping a call and fuzzy radio wasn’t the end of the world.

  “Man,” Tyrese continued, “the world is gonna end. The power will go first, then people will lose their damn minds. It’s gonna get ugly, and that’s just if the C-M-E don’t fry us like a trout in a frying pan.”

  “Enough. Be quiet,” David snarled as he slid the partition portal shut harder than necessary. His own sudden vehemence startled him, and he drove on in silence.

  Orien’s eyebrows rose. He waited a minute before asking, “You okay, sergeant?”

  “I’m so tired of hearing about this garbage. Seriously, alerts for the Army? The government hiding in big bunkers? Next, it’ll be an alien conspiracy.”

  “Mm.” Orien was quiet for half a minute, but as they approached the police station, he turned to look directly at David. “Actually, my girlfriend is an Air Force mechanic. She’s in the Reserves, and what El Drunko back there said is true. She got notice to stay on active standby, or whatever they call it. She has to stay where they can get in touch with her, and be ready to go where they tell her with as little as twelve hours’ notice.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I thought it was just her and her unit. You know, to help us civilians fix anything that gets fried by a solar flare. But I guess it’s not just her.”

  David pulled into the station parking lot with an unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach. The busy-work of booking the prisoner was a relief—knowing the man would be out when he sobered up, with no charges filed, no worse for wear. David welcomed the distraction.

  3

  Thursday, May 28th

  Christine checked her side mirror, waited until she spotted a clearing, and although her exit was still a couple miles ahead, she darted into the right-hand lane while she had the chance.

  Mary, her passenger, gripped slender fingers onto the handle above her door in a death-grip.

  Christine pursed her lips. Those theatrics were distracting. “Relax. I always make sure I have a safe distance ahead and behind, do I not?”

  Mary let go of the handle, smoothed her dress down around infuriatingly slender legs that lacked noticeable cellulite—the benefit of good genes and of being seven years Christine’s junior—and let out her breath. “Sorry. Back when my ex and I were running around doing stupid things, he got loaded on black without tell
ing me and drove when we went to the store for beer. He did the dope-nod and crossed into oncoming traffic… Nasty crash. I get tense, even coming up to a stoplight, now. Not your fault.”

  “The what nod?”

  Mary laughed. “Dope nod. So high on heroin—black—that they fall asleep, can’t keep their eyes open.”

  “Oh.” Christine checked her mirror, then looked for the off-ramp sign. Two miles, a few exits down. Usually, “rush hour” here was pretty light, for a major city—one had to slow down, not crawl inch-by-inch. Today, though, leaving Denver and heading into Aurora was a traffic snarl.

  She didn’t take her eyes off the road as she replied, “Sounds bad. This was before your recovery, right? Thankfully, Denver has great hospitals.”

  “Yeah, great hospitals. For now.” Mary’s tone had soured noticeably. “The news says the flares won’t be anything to worry about, y’know? But this morning, one guy on TV finally suggested stocking up on three days’ food and water. Just in case.”

  Christine laughed, a high-pitched melody.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Oh, come on,” Christine replied. “You know the media sensationalizes everything. If one power line goes down, they’ll be calling it the Sunpocalypse.”

  Mary got quiet, then, and Christine regretted laughing. Mary was a good person, but from what Christine knew—which surely wasn’t even half the full story—she’d been through more in her thirty-one years than any two lifetimes deserved.

  Not knowing what to say, though, Christine drove on in silence—very slowly. Traffic had begun stopping and starting, worse than merely crawling.

  As they hit the off-ramp fifteen minutes later, though, Mary broke the silence. “I’m not convinced it’s a big fuss over nothing. I don’t usually pay attention to fringe news online, but they’re all saying the government is covering up how bad it’ll get.”