Without warning

‘Are you all right, lady? Are you done with the phone? I really need to call my mom, is all. She’s in San Francisco this week, visiting her pop. And, you know, I really need to call her now.’

Barb came out of her trance with a start. The young man in front of her, a boy really, had almost pushed his way into the booth. He was dressed in some sort of uniform. A Wendy’s employee, she realised, and his eyes were large and fearful, darting over her shoulder to lock on the phone as if it were a life jacket in high seas.

‘Can I just get in, ma’am? And use the phone? You made your call and…’

‘It’s okay. I’m sorry,’ said Barb. ‘Let me get out of your way’

He waited until she was half out of the cramped space before pushing in past her. On any other day it would’ve set off all of her New York alarms, made her think she was being mugged. But the kid only had eyes for the phone.

‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘With your mom.’

He muttered ‘Thanks’ and began feeding coins into the slot.

She hurried back to the car, where Suzie was sitting up in the front seat, keeping an eye on her. Barb had parked outside a bar and grill near the corner of Northeast 106th and 4th Street, far enough away from the Bellevue Square mall to have avoided the traffic snarl that had frozen the streets for a few blocks around there. But, even so, the road network here was peaked out also. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to be at their desk and thousands of people had poured onto the streets in their cars, all hoping to get home or to their kids or partners. Maybe it was the dumbass curfew too, she thought acidly. No one wanted to get stuck away from home today. The sun flared off windscreens in hundreds of small supernovae, horns blared and thousands more people on foot picked their way through the slow-moving traffic, all of them looking to be somewhere else. It was like 9/11 except in the ‘burbs.

Barbara climbed back into the Honda and strapped in, keying the ignition and searching the radio band for a reasonable voice. The national stations were offline, and many of the locals had thrown open their switchboards to a rising cacophony of nutjobs and crazies.

‘Mommy, did you get my treat?’ asked Suzie.

Barb squeezed her eyes shut. She’d promised Suzie a small chocolate bar or a piece of candy if she’d sat quietly through her mother’s increasingly anxious search for a working public phone. And of course, in the rush and the worry, she’d completely forgotten. The sharp, rising inflection in Suzie’s voice, which was quavering towards meltdown, meant she couldn’t put it off.

‘I’m sorry, sweetie. Mommy forgot. But, I’ve… uh… I’ve got some gum here. Would you like some gum?’ She fished a packet of Double Bubble out of the coins and scrunched-up petrol receipts in the cup holder.

‘But Mommy, I’m not allowed to have gum. You know that I-’

‘Today, you can have gum,’ Barb said, more brusquely than she’d wanted to. ‘Here, knock yourself out.’

She tossed back the packet and immediately regretted it. Suzie was always a little more sensitive to Barb than to Kip – admittedly, because Barb tended to have a sharper tongue. The little girl’s lower lip was trembling and the glassy sheen in her eyes warned of imminent tears. A tension headache began drilling in behind Barbara’s temples.

‘… estimates of the dead or missing run into the hundreds of millions,’ declared a sombre voice on the radio. ‘A joint statement from the Governor’s office and the commander of Fort Lewis advises people in the metro area to stay off the roads, keeping them clear for emergency service vehicles and military transport. The curfew will be enforce-’

Barb flicked off the radio with some irritation. It couldn’t have been helping Suzie’s mood.

‘I want Daddy,’ she sobbed, as the tears finally came. ‘I want Daddy home. I don’t want him eaten.’

‘It’s all right, darling. It’s all right.’

But the collapse had begun and within seconds her daughter was a heaving, squalling ball of misery in the back of the car.

Where the fuck are you, Kip?

* * * *

‘Goddamn. That mother’s gotta be twenty miles high.’

‘Higher, sir,’ the airman informed him. ‘Seems to fold over somewhere up in the mesosphere.’

James Kipper nodded but said nothing. Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and confirm the fact, as his granddad used to say. Pops Kipper was full of such quips for all occasions like that. He used to keep a dictionary of quotations on the kitchen table at his place, ready to deploy somebody else’s wit at a moment’s notice.