“I try, Norman.” She pointed back to the radio. “Have you raised anybody on it?”
“First forty-eight hours, not a thing. Sizzle and pop, that was it. Once the surges eased off in the magnetosphere, though, I started to get some decent signals, mostly down in the lower ranges, three to ten hertz. Just this morning I picked up the long-gig waves and I was really getting somewhere, but then go figure, I started feeling sick, nauseated and dizzy, so I went out to the couch to lie down for a few.”
“Which you will never do again.”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Problem is,” Noman continued, gesturing to the radio, “all I’m hearing is anecdotal. Everybody’s out there telling their horror stories, but good numbers are hard to come by. I’ve got a general global picture, but it’ll be days before I can really sort it out.”
“What countries are out so far?”
“It’s easier to say which ones still have power.” He picked up a yellow legal pad, crammed with notes, and pulled his reading glasses off the top of his head. “Parts of Colombia, Brazil, Uganda, Kenya, the Maldives, Indonesia.”
“Anything that’s near the equator.”
“Highest marks.”
“They never lost power?”
“Zero interruption. As the magnetic surge rippled south and north from the poles, it diminished. Lost its disruptive ability. It spared the entire equatorial band. But everything south and north of that, in both hemispheres? Infrastructure is almost completely gone. And the dominoes are still falling.”
Aubrey contemplated that. “What do you think is next for—”
Norman shook his head in furious agitation, the way he’d used to do with a student who wasn’t fully grasping his point. “Don’t blow past this, Aubrey. Take a moment and think about it. The United States, Canada, Scandinavia, England, France, Germany, Russia, most of China, Japan, I don’t know, name any other wealthy first-world country—we’re back in the Stone Age. Or, hell, give us some credit, the Bronze Age. And that’s where we’re going to stay for a year. Or more. But the Congo? Somalia? S?o Tomé and Príncipe? Fucking Kiribati? They are up and running, like nothing ever happened.” An incredulous smile spread across the professor’s face. He reached out and grabbed hold of Aubrey’s wrist, the fire of intellectual excitement burning in his eyes. “And do you know what else, Aubrey? Do you know what they’re up to in all these downtrodden places that have had the shit kicked out of them for a thousand years or so, by all of the assholes that are now in the dark? Do you know what they’re doing in these poverty-stricken countries that are suddenly the kings of the fucking world?”
Aubrey didn’t.
“They’re organizing relief efforts.” Norman shook his head again, tossed his notepad on the desk, and sat back from the console. “Offering to fly in contractors to increase their food production capabilities, so they can start to feed the rest of us. They’re giving free leases on land, tax-exempt status, and unlimited power draws for any nation or corporation that wants to base humanitarian work there. And the stuff produced won’t even be for them, mind you. It’s all for export. They don’t want anything in return. They just want to help.”
He drew the back of his hand across his eyes. “I think it’s the most touching goddamn thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Aubrey nodded, her mind racing ahead. “Money and power won’t matter.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that.”
“Everything will be about food.”
She stood up, recapturing the line of thought she’d started an hour earlier on her front steps, while she stared at the pothead across the street.
“Food.”
Norman smiled. “Look at you go.”
“Shut up, I’m thinking.”
“About time.”
15.
Outside Jericho
As of 8 a.m. on April 18, four days after onset of the event, the power had been out for eighty-six hours and the United States Army was not riding in on a white horse to save the day.
Thom didn’t understand why. “It’s a question of jurisdiction?”
“It’s a question of priority,” Divya Singh responded. Her image was on the big screen in the communication room of the silo complex, a two-hundred-square-foot underground Faraday cage with signal continuity that was exceeded only by certain military-grade bunkers.
Thom sat in his ergonomic desk chair, his hair wet and a bib around his neck while he soaked up valuable time that Dr. Singh did not have to offer. He’d been insisting on a briefing for two days, and Dr. Singh had consented only after Thom had Lisa call and offer a one-time $10 million grant to fund the research project of Dr. Singh’s choosing. In exchange, she would continue to advise him “on an ad hoc basis during and in the immediate aftermath of the crisis.” Dr. Singh had grudgingly agreed, and now here she was, bought and paid for. She stared resentfully into her laptop’s screen from the living room of what looked like a rustic mountain cabin. A lamp burned in the background behind her. Wherever she was, she still had power.