Harvest Earth (2 page)

2    Madison

After the power went out it only took a few moments for the back-up generators to kick on. The monitor at Madison’s station flicked back to life nearly instantly, re-booting the startup protocol for the operating system that ran her machine. There was tension in the air as her superior officer barked orders.

“Get me sat-com’s back up now!” He shouts across the room, sweat is already accumulating on his collar. His voice echoes off of the walls of the large control room. Yet despite her supervisor’s yelling, Madison sits momentarily stunned at her station. She isn’t the only one. All around her men and women in Air Force uniforms sit in front of monitors that are coming back to life with perturbed and confounded expressions. Rows of screens blink on with iridescent lights, while the lights overhead have been dimmed, presumably to save power after the blackout. But the base isn’t supposed to ever lose power. Ever. Was this a drill? A test of some kind?

Madison looks under her console station at the long ream of cords that run underneath. Her eyes try to focus and track each one, making sure none are tangled or disconnected. Helpless, waiting for her station to start up its initialization processes and applications, Madison scans the rest of the room. It has erupted into a mix of controlled and orchestrated chaos.

Some people, like Madison just sit at their monitors, patiently waiting for their operating systems to finalize their reboot cycles. Others have jumped into action and are scurrying around between the rows of workstations. They hurriedly are checking outlets and connections. The large monitors that sit on the walls that overlook the control room are black except for a single sentence, “signal lost”. They are terrifying words written in a pixelated white font. It is a sharp contrast to the high resolution images that usually fill the screens.

“I need a medic!” The words ring out over the room and it is another call to action. Everyone rises from their chairs to see where help is needed. A crowd has formed around one work station. Madison stands on her toes to see what is happening. A man appears to have passed out, his head is tilted over the back of his chair and his tongue is flopping out of his mouth. Madison recognizes him but doesn’t know his name. She overhears that he has only just gotten back from leave, a week in a world outside the base. Madison can’t remember what that is like.

“Don’t touch that man!” It is her superior officer again. Everyone obeys and takes a step away. “It might be a blown electrical line. Stay back!” He barks this as he storms up the aisle toward the unconscious man. The coattails of his officer’s uniform sway ever so slightly as he walks. The commanding officer kneels down beside the incapacitated analyst and studies him from an arm’s length away.

The door to the large command hall then beeps as someone swipes their security badge. The large metal door swings open and a woman with several bars on her chest fills the doorway. “Somebody tell me what is going on!” She hollers with such a terrifying roar that it freezes everyone in the room.

There is not an airmen among them that doesn’t recognize the woman and the authority she represents. She is a Colonel, and she billows with power and her presence demands respect. Madison’s direct supervisor springs to his feet and salutes. “Sir.” He stammers, sweating even more profusely than previously.

“Captain!” The Colonel barks back. She starts taking strong deliberate steps into the room. The floor beneath her vibrates with importance with each footfall. “You want to tell me why my base just blew a fuse!” The Colonel’s voice is anything but cordial.

Madison’s superior attempts to respond, but just as the words are leaving his lips the Colonel notices the man who is unconscious. “What the hell happened to him?” She jeers.

“I don’t know, sir.” Madison’s supervisor replies, cringing with every word.

“Where’s medical?” She snaps back, making her way down the first row of monitors.

Madison’s superior looks to the man nearest to him, the one who had found the unconscious man to begin with. “We’ve been unable to reach anyone on comm’s, sir.” This man stutters, and his eyes dart back and forth nervously.

“Well you have legs don’t you?” The Colonel gestures to the man’s lower extremities as she passes by another row of monitors.

“Yes, sir.” The man says, springing into action, as if there were dogs on his heels, he bolts out the door.

The Colonel stands in the center of the control room, her hands on her wide hips, staring up at the monitors with their ominous message, “signal lost.” She spins around on her heel with perfect poise and glares at Madison’s direct superior. He is dabbing the sweat off his neck with the back of his hand.

“What do we know?” The Colonel scolds him loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.

The sweating man looks around for help. Everyone knows he is afraid to disappoint or be reprimanded for the honest response of, ‘I don’t know’. To his rescue, Madison’s computer then finishes its startup process. She hurriedly types in her access code and initializes her primary programs. What she finds is unnerving.

“Sir!” She shouts, raising her butt off of her chair just high enough to stand out from the other analysts at their computers. “It’s dark!”

“What is?” Madison’s comment was directed at her supervisor, her commanding officer, but it is the Colonel who responds. “What’s dark, airman?”

“Everything.” Madison replies, her inflection failing as the words leave her lips. “There are no comms, no signals, nothing. Everything is gone…sir.” The last word is barely a whisper.

Madison stares at her monitor dumbfounded. It shows a map of the United States and if she expands it, the world. Normally the outlines of countries and continents are brilliantly lit with little pixelated lights, signifying some form of communication being either sent or received. A love letter from a husband to his wife, a resignation letter from a disgruntled employee to his boss, or a provocative photo of a young girl sent to the subscriber of a scandalous internet site. All of it is transmitted electronically and all of it leave a trace. But now there is nothing. It is as if the entire world has gone mute.

“Sir, we can’t get a hold of anybody!” Another analyst chimes in from across the room. He has a receiver up to his ear. “It appears that all the lines, even the radio have been damaged. All local and federal channels are out.”

“How could this happen?” The Colonel isn’t shouting at anyone in particular any longer, just at the room in general. She is shouting at the ceiling, at the lifeless overhead screens, and at the buzzing keyboards. They all are frantically looking for something to hold onto.

No one responds. Everyone just looks nervously at one another and then back at their individual screens. Each person is an expert in their own field but now each feel woefully incompetent. Madison is fluent in six languages and can make out general phrases in many others. She is a linguistics expert. Her whole life has been spent learning how to understand what other people are trying to tell her. Only now the entire world seems to have gone suddenly silent. Madison feels a deep depression welling up inside of her. It is telling her that all of the studying, all of the hours of practice and self-study had been for nothing. What use was there for a linguist if there was no one left to speak to?

“All the sat’s are down.” The analyst next to her whispers. Madison peers over to him and sees him looking at her.

Madison often catches this particular analyst staring at her, but more often than not ignores it. Sometimes she even sneers back at him. His name is Dale, he has told her a few times even though Madison insists on calling him, Lieutenant Trevers. He had joined her unit not long after Madison had started and the two are about the same age. He worked on the same systems as she did, tracking electronic communications, only his specialty is in the languages of South Asia. He is thin, pale and wears terribly outdated horn-rimmed glasses. Madison often finds working next to him relentlessly tiresome. He is always trying to make conversation and confer with her on one thing or another. Oddly today, however, Madison finds her coworker comforting as he peers over her shoulder at her computer screen.

“The sats are down.” He repeats again, as he points at something on her monitor. It is a small alert window in the bottom lefthand corner. Madison opens it and another window pops up in the center of her screen. “Warning! All satellite communication lost.” The words are red and two exclamation points stand in the corners of the window for emphasis. Madison puzzles over the words.

By this time medics have arrived. They examine the analyst that had been found unconscious. They remove him from his station for fear of possible electrocution and another analyst has already taken his place. The whole room has grown alive with energy as people shout various ideas and theories to one another as new problems in each of the departments arise. Madison’s superior is jumping from station to station, conferring with each of the airman as he gathers information. He is making a checklist of issues in his head. The Colonel watches it all. She stands still and motionless in the center of the room, like the eye of a hurricane or the center of a top, while chaos whirls around her. Her very presence keeps everything from losing its equilibrium and toppling over.

“How is that possible?” Madison leans in to her coworker, still puzzling over the words on her screen. “How could
all
the satellites be down?”

“It means that whatever hit us, hit a hell of a lot more besides.” Lt. Trevers says, a southern twang seeping through. He returns his attention to his own monitor and starts fiddling with his keyboard. “It means that we’re not the only ones in the dark.”

3    Gabriel

As Gabriel creeps into the hallway he keeps his flashlight pointed ahead of him in one hand and places the other against the moist wall of the basement to help keep him oriented. He is grateful for the flashlight and its strong steady beam. It illuminates the basement floor, pointing out every crack in the cement and every puddle where stray water has accumulated. It has become a regular part of his toolkit, that flashlight. When he had first started working in the building he had inherited a more antique model, handed down by his predecessor after he was removed from the position. Gabriel had never found out why his predecessor has been fired, but assumed it was for asking for too much too often. More tools, more supplies, more time or more money. Gabriel had been sure not to make the same mistake.

Perhaps as a result, some of the people who worked above Gabriel had taken a liking to him. Last Christmas a woman who worked in what Gabriel thought was an accounting firm had gotten him a present. It was the flashlight, a newer model that shines so bright you can supposedly see it from twenty-thousand feet away. Gabriel had nothing to give the woman in exchange. Instead he promised to swing by and fix the woman’s office chair for her. He had remembered her saying how she hated the chair for the way it squeaked every time she sat down in it.  It was a project Gabriel had never gotten around to. The building manager was always giving him other projects and Gabriel never had the spare time. Gabriel made a promise that once the building was up and running again he would go see the woman and fix the chair for her.

By the time Gabriel is halfway down the basement hallway, pains of immense hunger hit him like a punch to the gut. Gabriel hadn’t noticed before, but suddenly he feels nauseated by the lack of food. His stomach feels empty. He tries to remember the last time he had eaten. It had been breakfast, eggs and toast. The “most important meal of the day”, Gabriel muses to himself. At least that’s what the Public Service Announcements had told him. His mouth is also dry as well, Gabriel notices. He smacks his lips and rolls his tongue around in his mouth, trying to pull out moisture. When had he last had a drink of water? Gabriel thought it had been recently. The government made sure everyone was well aware of the dangers of dehydration, especially since the past summer had been so warm. The hottest on record. Every hour there were advertisements on the radio and television reminding people to drink. Gabriel is sure that he had drank something but can’t remember when.

Beyond being hungry despite eating, thirsty despite drinking, and using the restroom in his only pair of overalls, Gabriel biggest concern is that he has fallen asleep without remembering it. Gabriel never slept at work, for the same reason that he never complained about having too much to do for too little pay. He needed his job.

The sound of a loud drip near Gabriel’s head just then startles him and a large droplet of water splashes against his hand. Gabriel’s whole body jumps before he is able to steady himself again against the wall. He feels the droplet pool in the crook of his wrist and debates taking a sip of it to calm his thirst. Ultimately he thinks better of it, the image of all the rust that runs through the pipes present in his head. He shakes the drop off and hears it burst as it hits the floor.

As the building lay sleeping, Gabriel reflects on how old the entire structure and all of its parts are. Everything in the basement seems to be rusted over, especially the boiler. Perhaps it had broken, Gabriel realizes. Perhaps it had leaked an invisible gas, one he could not smell, but one that had caused him to become drowsy without realizing it. He was all alone in the basement, trapped in a tight space, circulating his own breaths. It would have been easy to pass out and no one would have even bothered to look for him. Unless something broke most people didn’t even know that he existed.

Gabriel found himself in front of the elevator. He presses the “up” button and isn’t surprised when it doesn’t light up. At least it confirms what Gabriel suspected, that power to the whole building had gone out and not just to the basement level. The emergency stairway is through a door nearby.

Shining the flashlight on the steps, Gabriel makes his way spryly up a flight of stairs. The idea of getting out of the dark basement and knowing it is only a few steps away suddenly fills Gabriel with energy that overcomes what is becoming a crushing feeling of hunger. His stomach roars so violently when Gabriel makes it onto the first landing his whole body shivers. A side effect of the invisible gas, Gabriel tells himself, though he doesn’t know for sure.

He hesitates before pushing on the door that leads off the landing to the outside. A warning is posted to the inside of the door in bright red letters that read, “Warning! This is not an exit. Opening this door will sound an alarm.” Gabriel knows that the alarm was most likely disabled when the power went out but he hesitates anyway. As the same part of him that made him never ask a question of his superiors or never complain when he was asked to do something he wasn’t qualified for, makes him hesitate at opening the door for fear of calling attention to himself. Fear of disappointing those that had the power to take away the job he so desperately needed.

Gabriel flicks off his flashlight and pushes on the bar that extends across the door and feels the locking mechanism cave in. A stream of light from the outside pours in through the cracks as the hinges screech and the door opens. As Gabriel makes his way into the light he feels grateful when there is no blaring sound to accompany the light that fills the stairway. No alarm sounds.