Veil of Anarchy: Kessler Effect, #2

"We are entering a new era of debris control…

an era that will be dominated

by a slowly increasing number of

random catastrophic collisions."

~Donald Kessler

"This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper."

~T.S. Eliot

Chapter 1

The first indication that the world had changed happened at 11:02 on a Tuesday morning in June. Tanda Lopez was sitting at her desk when the passenger train travelling from Marfa to Marathon collided with the freight train out of Fort Stockton. The explosion rattled the windows of the police station in their little town of Alpine. Birds startled from the trees. Car alarms blared throughout the town.

Tanda’s heart beat a double tap.

Makowski, Grant...you’re with me.

You got it, Chief.

They sped toward the site. It wasn’t a head-on collision, but it was bad enough. The Amtrak train had sideswiped the end of the freight train. It looked as if the timing of one or the other train had been off by less than a minute. They spent the next nine hours directing emergency triage. A few times she tried to call the station, but inexplicably the radios were out.

That should have been her second clue. Why would the radio system be down? There was no way it was related to the train crash. Yet, the chances of two separate events happening in their small rural town simultaneously were too unlikely to calculate.

I’m headed back into town, if you can spare me.

Dixie Peters nodded as she directed two of her fire personnel toward a hot spot. What do you think caused it?

I have no idea.

Why is no one else here? We should have received help from Fort Davis and Fort Stockton.

I don’t have any ideas about that either.

But it’s strange, right? Dixie swiped blonde hair out of her eyes.

Yeah. It’s strange.

It was more than strange. It was off.

The horror of sixty tons of passenger train smashing into three hundred tons of freight train had numbed Tanda’s normally sharp instincts. She wasn’t thinking about the radios. She was thinking about the wreckage, the debris, the bodies, and the cries for help. Those nine hours were among the longest in her life, or so she thought at the time.

She couldn’t have known what lay ahead.

She wouldn’t have wanted to know. A few more hours of ignorance, it turned out, might have been a good thing.

Tanda left Makowski and Grant to deal with the site clean-up and body bags. She headed back to headquarters as the sun dipped toward the horizon, casting shadows across the west Texas landscape. She drove toward the station, but her mind kept slipping back to the disaster behind her, to the people whose lives had so suddenly and tragically ended. Something else nagged at her and pulled her thoughts to the scene outside her police cruiser. Something else needed her attention, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint what that something was.

Driving down Fifth Street, she had the distinct impression that she’d stepped into the past.

Alpine was a small town—only six thousand folks. Their traffic lights consisted of flashing reds at the two busiest intersections. She slowed as she encountered the first signal that wasn’t working, and then the next. The entire system was down.

Few if any cars were on the road.

Stores were closed. That was par for the course at eight in the evening on a Tuesday. Small Texas towns still rolled up at five o’clock sharp.

So why were so many people out on foot? She’d expected the gawkers at the train wreck, and they’d had the usual group of those. This was different though. This had nothing to do with that. People were literally everywhere—sitting on park benches, standing outside of closed stores, even walking in the middle of the road.

Several times she had to tap her horn in order to alert a resident to move out of her lane. They barely acknowledged her as they trudged to the middle of the street—phones held high, attention glued to the devices in their hands.

There was a line at the town’s single ATM, which didn’t seem to be working. The windows on her cruiser were rolled down, and the temperature—even at sunset—hovered in the eighties. She could clearly hear the expletives hurled at the cash machine. Tempers were flaring and frustration was high.

Then she passed the Grocery Mart. Their only grocery store was run by Todd and Nona Jane. It had apparently closed early, a good two hours early. The only other time she could remember them closing before ten p.m. was on 9-11. That had been a Tuesday too. Tanda had been thirteen years old when the World Trade Center towers fell. It was when she’d first known that she wanted to be a police officer.

She could have stopped her cruiser, could have asked someone what was going on, but one glance at the expression on the faces of the folks she passed told her they didn’t know what was happening either. On that Tuesday, no one could have known or even guessed.

Tanda didn’t stop. She continued to headquarters instead. She had to park in the adjacent lot because theirs was full. She walked into a room packed with agitated residents huddled under the fluorescent lights. Some were shouting at each other, a few hollered at her, and the rest simply milled about.

Why?

Why were they here?

Conor Johnson was manning the front desk. He seemed to be the only officer in the building.

My office. Now.

He jumped up and sprinted after her.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, but since there was no way to call you, I just held the line. That’s what they taught us in training. Hold the line and⁠—

Wait. She shut the door, dropped into her chair and snagged a drink out of the small refrigerator she kept near her desk. Popping the tab of the Coke, she took the first gulp before she realized it was lukewarm. Their receptionist, Edna, had left a note on her desk.

Keme stopped by.

Wanted you to know he would check on your parents and your niece.

Why was her brother checking on their parents and his daughter?

She looked up, realized Conor was still waiting. Continue.

Comms are out.

Which ones?

All of them. Land lines work, but I tried contacting the station in Marathon and the call wouldn’t go through. Only local calls work, I guess. Cell phones aren’t working either.

All of our radios are out?

Yes.

She’d hoped only hers was out or that something around the wreckage had interrupted communications. She hadn’t even considered that the entire system was down. She made a motion with her hand for him to continue and guzzled the rest of the drink. It tasted terrible, but she suddenly needed both the caffeine and the sugar. She wished for something stronger, then pushed that thought away. The bottle of Jim Bean in the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet was for celebrations—not catastrophes.

Not for days when she had to help zip bodies into bags. Something told her whiskey wouldn’t help erase those images in her mind. Something else told her the worst was yet to come.

Televisions are out, satellite radio, internet…it’s all down. The electricity has gone out a few times, but it always comes back on.

That explained the warm soda. Anything else?

The rest…I didn’t leave my post, so I only know what folks are saying.

Which is?

Everything’s stopped working. I mean, like I said, electricity is working now— He glanced up at the overhead lights and hesitated as if praying that they’d stay on.

Conor?

Right. Uh…the ATM is out so we have a crowd over at the machine even though that’s obviously useless. A good third of the people in our lobby are lost tourists.

Lost?

GPS is out, and you know…they don’t have a map. Probably couldn’t read one even if they did.

Why is the Grocery Mart closed?

The single grocery store was a lifeline for their small community. The last thing they needed was panic buying. People in west Texas tended to over-prepare if they heard a storm was coming. Mention snow and ice, and the shelves in the bread aisle would empty in under an hour.

Mrs. Crowder stopped by to check on us and according to her, Todd closed the mart because they couldn’t take payments, plus apparently there was a run on what was stocked. A lot of panic buying.

Of course there was. Did people think a train wreck would keep the delivery trucks from arriving? What else was happening here?

Do we have anyone on it?

Rodriguez headed over to the store when we heard there’d been shots fired.

Tanda wanted to drop her head into her hands, but she didn’t. She simply stared at Conor. He was her newest recruit, a lanky five foot, ten inches, and definitely still damp behind the ears. He’d held his position though—held the line. Maybe he was going to make it as an officer after all.

Conor seemed to have run out of things to say.

Tanda reached for the mouse on her computer, jiggled it once, and clicked on the internet browser, but Conor shook his head.

Internet’s out. Remember?

Right. She leaned back in her chair, studied him, then turned her attention to the group of people still gathered past the glass wall of her office. Has the mayor issued a statement?

Not that I’ve heard, but she sent Ben Cason over with this.

Tanda tried not to grimace as she reached for the slip of paper. If there was one person she didn’t play well with, it was their newly elected mayor, Melinda Stone. Ben Cason was a close second.

My office. Eight o’clock.

Don’t be late.

Tomorrow?

Tonight.

I’m already late.

Cason was pretty adamant about your being there, though I told him I had no way to make you aware unless I left my post—which I wasn’t about to do.

Tanda nodded, chunked her soda can into the recycle bin, and stood. Can you stay?

Of course.

Need a break?

Maybe three minutes to use the… He nodded toward the restroom, apparently too embarrassed to say the word urinal.

She gestured that he was excused. Johnson was at the door before he asked the question she’d expected from the moment she’d walked in. How many casualties?

Eight dead, another two dozen injured.

Conor’s eyes widened. Where did you take them?

Critical cases went to our local medical center, but most of our docs are out of town for that conference in Dallas. Doc Fielder is doing the best he can. Anyone whose injuries allowed for transport were sent to Fort Stockton.

Their EMS showed up?

No. They didn’t.

Which was another thing that should have raised alert bells in her mind. As Dixie had pointed out, they should have had help by now. Why hadn’t any neighboring EMS units shown up? Fort Stockton was 50 percent bigger, largely owing to its being situated on Interstate 10. They had an EMS three times the size of Alpine’s, and they had a better staffed medical center.

Fort Stockton should have picked up the chatter over the radios—only the radios were out. It was probably too far away for them to have heard the actual crash, but surely someone would have told someone else. It was the way things worked in their remote section of west Texas.

But they hadn’t shown up. Alpine was left to handle the disaster on their own. They had only three ambulances, which had always been enough. Dr. Fielder had sent two to Fort Stockton, leaving one to ferry the injured to their own understaffed medical center. When the two that went to Stockton didn’t return, they’d resorted to using people’s vans and trucks.

Why hadn’t the EMS people returned?

Sweat broke out on her forehead, and it wasn’t from the heat. A wave of fear swept over her. She’d been with the department for ten years and had been promoted to chief three years ago.

She knew how to swallow past that fear.

Knew what was expected of her.

She needed to figure out what was happening. Then they could formulate a plan to deal with it.

Conor headed toward the men’s room, and Tanda walked back out to the reception desk. At only five foot, four inches, she couldn’t even see over the front row of people. But Tanda understood that presence was about more than height. She found the stepping stool that their receptionist used for filing in the top drawers, moved it in front of Conor’s station, and stepped onto it. She thought she might have to use her whistle, but raising her hand was enough. The crowd quieted, all eyes pinned on her.

If you’ve come here for answers, I don’t have them. Obviously, there’s been an event of some sort…

I heard it was aliens. Dylan Spencer was sitting on her worktable, his jean-clad butt right next to her coffee pot, NRA cap pulled low and a gun on his hip.

She didn’t call him on the gun because she knew that he had a permit to carry.

She didn’t tell him to get the hell out of her station because he was the local football hero, only four years out of high school, and that sort of thing held a lot of weight.

Let me know if you come across one, Dylan. I’ll come out myself and question him or her. Or it.

That earned her a few grunts of approval and one or two laughs.

The tension which threatened to permeate the room temporarily receded, then rushed back in.

Why’s everything not working? Is it because of the train wreck? Moses Carter had lived in Alpine longer than anyone she knew. The man had to be nearing the century mark.

Mr. Carter, I don’t see how those two things could be related, but I don’t have any other explanation either. We’re going to figure this out. When we do, I’ll let you know. Until then, I need everyone to go home.

But we can’t even call 9-1-1 if we need help. This from one of the elderly women who lived over in the sixty-five-and-up apartments.

Officer Johnson isn’t going anywhere. He’s going to stay right here. Fortunately, at that moment Conor appeared at his desk.

Tanda turned around in time to see him give everyone a small wave, then the group in front of her waved back.

If you have an emergency, you send someone here and Conor will take care of you.

She didn’t add that Conor had no way to call for an officer, let alone dispatch one.

These people looked frightened enough.

Those sorts of details could wait until daylight, when, with a little bit of luck, everything would be working again.

How are we supposed to get home? This from a skinny twenty-year-old wearing a University of Texas tee, who repeatedly combed his fingers through his scraggly goatee. No doubt he’d arrived in the sports car she’d seen parked in her spot. Our GPS doesn’t work, he added.

There are only two roads out of Alpine, sir. Sixty-seven goes east and west; 118 goes north and south. Where are you headed?

Austin.

That brought a few snickers from the locals.

Logan Wright raised his hand. He was standing at the back of the crowd, and Tanda wondered why he was there. Logan had grown up in Alpine, gone off to Texas A&M University to earn his veterinary degree, and come back home to open up their only animal clinic. He’d been practicing twenty years, and she’d never once seen him even slightly stumped. Not when someone had brought him a baby camel that needed vaccinating. Not even the time they’d found a seven-foot alligator living in a resident’s garage.

I can help anyone who needs directions.

Tanda nodded her thanks. Mr. Wright will meet you out in front of the building.

But we can’t even purchase gas, a middle-aged mom said.

Why is that, ma’am?

The station attendant said they couldn’t take our credit cards…something about the system being down.

Are they taking cash?

Well, yes, but…

Tanda interrupted her before she could list her problems one