Solar Storm: Season 1 [Aftermath Episodes 1-5] Read online

  "Well, it was quiet…" he said loud enough for his neighbor to hear.

  "Shit—sorry, Cantrell. Didn't realize you were out here."

  Without pulling himself away from the telescope Jay replied, "Don't worry about it, Mac—I've been up for a while, anyway. Noise doesn't bother me at the telescope."

  Mac shined a flashlight over the fence. "I see you're breaking out the big gun this morning, eh? Whaddya see, whaddya say?"

  "Light is the only thing that distracts from a good observing session," Jay muttered as he stood and glared at the brush-like top of his neighbor’s gray head.

  The flashlight snapped off. "Right. We should all practice better light discipline from here on out. Sorry. But I gotta say, I'm surprised you weren't up to look at the sun."

  Jay glanced up into the already brightening sky at the faint, rust red star at which he’d aimed his telescope. Unlike the other stars that twinkled at night, Mars and the other planets remained steady beacons, making it obvious they were not stars, even to the novice observer.

  "Why would I want to look at the sun? It's kind of boring…"

  "Boring?" snorted Mac. He ran a gnarled hand through his close-cropped gray hair before he replied. "I thought for sure you of all people had heard—what with your daughter being an astronaut-in-training and all."

  "Astrophysicist," Jay corrected as he checked his watch. "Heard what?" It was almost time to pack up and get ready for work. It wasn't like the Bloomington Community Library required its head librarian to be there 24 hours a day, but Jay liked to set a good example. His strict attention to detail and his belief that working at the library was a job and not just a hobby for the semi-retired went a long way toward cementing his library’s reputation as the best in central Illinois.

  "You mean to tell me you don't know about the solar flare?" Mac whistled. "Heard it on the radio when I got up at oh-five-hundred.”

  “Enlighten me,” Jay said as he closed his astrophotography setup for the day.

  “Oh-dark-hundred today, some foreign geeks in lab coats—kinda looked like you—"

  "Ha ha."

  "—detected the largest solar flare ever recorded."

  "Yeah?" asked Jay, unimpressed.

  "X-72 they said. They guessed."

  "Guessed?" asked Jay as he closed the lid on his camera case.

  "It was off the charts. Pointed straight at us and fried the satellites they have up there watching the sun. I remember something about the sensors overload at X-28 or so, but once I heard them say 'overloaded' I stopped paying attention to numbers."

  Jay stared at Mars for a second before he turned his attention to Mac. "A solar flare?" He thought for a second about everything Leah had tried to teach him about astronomy. Most people figured it was his hobby she had adopted as an endearing bonding experience, when in fact, it had been the other way around. Leah had always been interested in astronomy and planets, but only in the last few years had Jay—realizing she was about to leave the nest—taken up telescopes to spend time with her under the stars.

  "Fuck yes," groused Mac, ignoring Jay's pained expression at such coarse language. "Playing hell with radio reception in Europe, I hear—they're thinking of rerouting planes over the North Pole because of increased radiation. I don't understand the details, but it sounds bad."

  “The media makes everything sound bad,” replied Jay as bent over the eyepiece. Mars remained square in the middle of the field of view.

  Before he'd upgraded to this new computerized telescope, he'd lost track of the number of times Mac had come over to chat and made him lose his target as the object drifted out of view. He wasn't a big fan of the fact he needed to have cords and batteries to make it work, which limited its use to around the house, but he didn't have to adjust every few seconds to keep Mars in sight, either.

  "…what's coming next is what bothers me."

  Jay sensed the tone of the conversation had shifted. "I'm sorry—what comes next?"

  Mac shook his head. "Cantrell, you're a librarian—don't you ever read any of your books? Can't you see what's going on?"

  Jay picked up on the warning signs in Mac's voice. Here comes another rant.

  "Well, I know solar flares can disrupt radios and satellites, that sort of thing."

  "I'm not worried about the damn flare."

  Jay nodded. "You're talking about a coronal mass ejection."

  The old man made a face. "And I'm the one that wasn't smart enough for college," Mac said.

  "Why are you worried about that? Even if it's headed for us, it has to have the right polarity to affect our magnetosphere. If—wait, did they say one was coming?"

  Mac was quiet for a moment. "No. In fact none of the news stories about the flare mentioned it at all."

  Jay smiled. "Well, there you go—nothing to worry about."

  Mac narrowed his eyes. There was just enough light now for Jay to see the creases on his face as the older man frowned. "We been friends a couple years now, right?"

  Jay nodded. He folded his arms across his chest to ward off the chill in the air. How the old man could stand there in cargo pants and an olive green T-shirt was beyond him.

  "Yes, ever since you—well, a couple years after we moved in…after Monica’s death."

  If Mac understood that he'd just opened a wound in his friend's heart, he made no obvious sign of acknowledging it. "That's right—and in all that time, haven't I told you about how the media covers up things on purpose?"

  "You're talking about conspiracies," observed Jay, barely containing an eye roll. "Yes, Mac, you mentioned it once or twice.”

  Or a thousand times…

  Out loud he said: “I hardly think that explains—"

  "That's exactly why they're not mentioning it," Mac said, leaning into the fence. His eyes, the only thing other than the top of his head visible over the fence, shifted toward the street. "I did a little research.”

  Oh boy, here it comes.

  “Every single time there's been a solar flare of X1 or higher, the media has gone bat shit crazy falling all over themselves to talk about coronal mass ejections and what would happen if one hit the planet. You know them, they love ratings and nothing gets better ratings than death and destruction.”

  “And nothing would cause more death and destruction then a big CME."

  “See? You do get it,” Mac said, his eyes round in feigned surprise.

  Jay looked at Mars. The planet's visible light paled in competition against the rising mid-winter sun.

  "Okay, okay," Jay said, watching his breath turn to vapor. "You're saying this is concerning? The silence from the media?"

  "You're damn right it's concerning.” Mac took a long look at Jay. He sighed. “I get it—you think I'm crazy too."

  "Mac…"

  A hand shot up. "That's fine—I don't have time to sit here and talk about it with you, anyway. I'm on a schedule."

  "Mac you're retired. You haven't had a schedule for years." Jay stretched to see over the fence into Mac's two-car garage. As usual, military surplus gear clogged the visible space: crates stamped with acronyms he didn't understand, assorted rusted equipment, and tools of every shape and size.

  Guilt washed over him. The poor old widower had no one to talk to, ostracized by the neighborhood for his crazy conspiracy theories, and here Jay was turning a cold shoulder when Mac just wanted to talk. Jay resolved to salvage the conversation if for nothing else than to ease his shame.

  “You going somewhere?" he called out.

  "No," snapped Mac. He pulled an about face as smartly as any Jay had ever seen and stood ramrod straight in the driveway. "Just a lot of things to get done around the house, that's all. There's going to be a lot for all of us to do soon, if I'm right. You need to see to your own preps, soldier.”

  "Like food and water?"

  Mac’s mood brightened. “How much water do you have in your house?"

  Not enough to satisfy you, I'll bet.

  "Uh…I thi
nk we have a case of bottled water somewhere…” Jay offered.

  "A case? Jay, we're talking the end of the world here…"

  Annnnnd I'm done. Jay glanced at his watch. “Look Mac, I should get going. Finals start next week, you know. There's probably a line of students waiting outside the library, desperate to get in and study."

  Mac laughed. "I may be just an old retired grunt, but I ain't stupid, Cantrell. Go on. Live the dream and dream the lie." He walked off muttering to himself with a wave over his shoulder. "Do me a favor?"

  "Yeah?" asked Jay.

  "Check your six out there. If you won't prepare, at least bring back some actionable intel. Keep your eyes open, Cantrell."

  Jay stood there and watched Mac stroll into his garage with the gait of a man in his prime and then lower the door. The door's rattling clang shattered what remained of the stillness of the newborn morning.

  He glanced toward the street and saw Mrs. Peabody peering out the front window of her robin's egg blue colonial. The blind snapped shut as soon as she realized he'd caught her watching.

  He sighed and turned back to packing his telescope. Meadowood was a nice enough subdivision on the outskirts of Bloomington, but sometimes things like having a conspiracy obsessed retiree living next door—who happened to be the local hermit—caused a little friction among the other neighbors.

  Josephine Peabody for instance, the self-appointed busybody of the neighborhood, always knew what people were doing and where they were going on her street. He grinned to himself as he unhooked the optical tube assembly from the telescope stand and placed it in its protective, foam-lined storage crate.

  Jay risked another glance down his driveway toward Mrs. Peabody's trim little two-story house across the road. The blinds pulled back again, but this time the lights were out. Now he couldn't tell if she was watching, but he knew. She always watched.

  Kate called her a racist bitch behind her back but never said anything to the old woman's face. He'd tried to explain she was from a different time, when people didn't believe mixed race couples were legal, let alone natural.

  Chuckling to himself about Meadowood's silver-haired watchdog, he packed up the rest of his telescope and lugged the pieces inside his crowded two-car garage to their storage area. As he wound up the extension cord that powered the telescope during observing sessions, he thought about his other, more troublesome neighbor.

  First Sergeant James Tecumseh MacKinnon, US Army (ret.) was somewhat of a pariah in the neighborhood. It had been almost 2 years after Jay and Leah had moved in, looking for a fresh start following Monica's lost struggle with cancer, before Mac grunted a reluctant hello. It took a few more months before Jay could coax out the somewhat sparse details of his new neighbor’s life. Mac had only opened up after he'd met Kate, herself a retired Air Force pilot.

  She'd been able to find out Mac had been in the army, a long-serving soldier through several conflicts starting with Desert Storm. He'd been put out to pasture as a first sergeant with a pension and full benefits after 25 years of faithful service. Tragically, his long-suffering wife Helen had died soon after in a car accident.

  According to the other neighbors, that was when Mac took a turn for the worse. He shut himself up in his house and refused to talk to anyone. The constant stream of delivery trucks at his front door led many to speculate he was up to no good, but as the weeks turned to months and the delivery trucks continued with no outward sign of anything happening in the house, neighbors relaxed. Rumors ran wild though, everything from Mac growing an arsenal of weapons and ammo to the old man running a secret meth lab.

  It only took one chance encounter at a local community meeting over a proposal to create a homeowner's association for Mac to convince everyone he was a nutcase. He'd snapped at the organizers, claiming an HOA was an affront to American liberty and that anyone who joined in would just become part of the greater scheme to repress freedom in the United States.

  Unfortunately, Jay had missed that meeting for one of Leah’s soccer games, but it had been an epic, 15 minute rant that left everyone in the neighborhood convinced Mac was crazy, a conspiracy nut, and above all, dangerous. After all, they'd reasoned amongst themselves, he had been in the army for a quarter of a century. Rumor had it his house was full of weapons illegally brought back from around the world.

  None of that bothered Jay or his daughter Leah and later, Kate. Jay grew up on his family’s farm on the other side of town—he was no stranger to firearms. He’d used shotguns during his adolescence to protect his father’s prize chickens from predation by the local coyote population. As he grew older, he'd adopted his mother's belief that all life was sacred—even if he didn't fully adopt her religion.

  As grizzled and crusty as he appeared, Mac fascinated Leah and Kate. Jay never understood it. His daughter took every chance she got to bake cookies or bring food on holidays and even invited Mac to their house for Thanksgiving dinner every single year without fail. Once Kate entered their lives, she added a second front to the effort.

  The third year after they moved in, Mac accepted one of Leah's hand-drawn invitations and arrived in his dress uniform, complete with a chest full of glittering medals and campaign ribbons. It'd been an enlightening evening talking about his career in the army, Leah’s plans for the future, and Jay's job at the library.

  Once Mac found out Jay was in charge of the local library, he made it a point to stop in at least once a week, say hello, and conduct research. Jay shook his head as he coiled up the extension cord and dropped it on his workbench. Mac was always ‘researching’ something—whether it be weapons or reloading or walking the Appalachian Trail—the man was a voracious reader.

  After Jay and Kate married, Mac was over all the time. He and Kate got along like they'd served together, clinking beers in the afternoon more times than Jay could remember.

  Jay never realized Mac was a survivalist until his daughter blurted it out loud at dinner one night. But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. It helped Jay understand the neighborhood’s decision to brand Mac crazy and someone to be avoided.

  As he came inside his house and removed his fogged glasses in the blast of warm air, Jay thought for a moment about the solar flare Mac mentioned. It was probably nothing, but he hadn't heard of too many recent X-class—or even M-class—flares. That much he knew from his daughter, who loved all aspects of astronomy, not just the ones she could see at night.

  He smiled as he shut the garage door, thinking of Leah, the future astrophysicist. Just imagining the amount of math she'd have to do in the next four years made his head hurt, but she reveled in it. She loved the night sky with a passion akin to what he felt for books.

  As he puttered around the kitchen preparing his brown paper bag lunch and a fresh pot of coffee, he flipped on the TV to catch the morning news and stood there blinking in surprise at the truth of Mac's words.

  The TV had been on for almost 15 minutes and no one, on any channel, had mentioned anything other than the curiosity of the large solar flare. Contrary to Mac’s statement though, the newsmen made it sound like the only people who would find it interesting were astronomers, but as journalists they felt obligated to report on the event anyway.

  The absence of any details on a possible CME bothered Jay more and more on his drive to work. He couldn't help himself and glanced at the pale sun over the course of the drive through the unending dormant cornfields to get into town. If there was something going on up there, he didn't know about it and thanks to the media, nor did anyone else.

  But Mac had been pretty convinced he knew.

  All morning, as Jay conducted the library's business and double-checked the night staff's re-cataloging and acquisitions requests, Mac's comments gnawed away in the back of his mind. He looked up solar flare information online and cursed at the sporadic lag that popped up all morning. It was like the internet was being forced through a narrow-necked bottle.

  After an hour, he could say in almost
every instance of a large reported X-class flare, the relevant articles invariably mentioned CME's, their possibility, and the consequences and impacts on human civilization should one hit. The large flare of August 2012 came up over and over again.

  But the one that happened this morning was an order of magnitude larger than even that one—they said so on the news.

  The question remained then: why wasn't anyone saying anything about the fact the damn thing was aimed at Earth?

  Jay glanced lanced at a series of articles about the 1859 Carrington event and shuddered. Aurora had been reported as far south as Cuba and telegraph stations all around the world had sparked and caught fire thanks to the overload of energy dumped into the primitive electrical grid of the day.

  He looked at his computer, his cell phone, the electric clock on his desk. If that happened today…

  Jay shook his head. No. He refused to give in to Mac’s paranoia and follow him down the rabbit-hole of thinking the government had issued gag orders to the press. Even if that did make a little sense—Jay could see how sending everyone into a panic about an impending CME impact wouldn't be the best thing for the country—but saying nothing might have even more disastrous consequences. He frowned.

  No, the government may bungle a great many things, but they're not that stupid.

  And yet he couldn't ignore the fact that he’d found nothing in the news on coronal mass ejections. He leaned back in his chair and tapped his lips with a well-chewed pencil. Something didn't add up. He heard Mac’s words in his mind again and closed his eyes.

  No. It's not a conspiracy. If they're not talking about it, then they think nothing's wrong or the effects will be minimal. That has to be it.

  He picked up his cell phone, intent on texting Leah to get her opinion when he saw the no signal blinking at the top of the screen. He put the phone down and sighed. Glancing at his desk he saw a memo printed before he came to work by his assistant. It was from the Mayor’s office of emergency operations and warned local agencies and public institutions of the possible radio impact the solar flare might have on the town. Interrupted radio and cell service was the first thing mentioned.