Without warning

He kept his eyes shielded from the driver by pretending to stare out the window at plastic barricades that were going up around the Governor’s mansion. What the hell were they in aid of? They wouldn’t stop the Wave if it came rushing at them from over the horizon, and the populace was more likely to storm a well-stocked 7-Eleven than the state legislature.

‘I’m okay,’ he grunted, when he had his voice back under control. ‘It’s just a message from my wife, that’s all. Our daughter is fine. She flew out of Chicago this morning, before this business hit.’ Ritchie wasn’t sure why he felt the need to say anything. Perhaps to make it seem real to himself. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d normally discuss with anyone outside of his family, let alone a driver from the car pool.

‘That’s great news, sir,’ said the young sailor behind the wheel, a new guy Ritchie had met only forty minutes ago. He sounded genuinely happy and Ritchie couldn’t help but wonder where the lad hailed from and whether he had family back Stateside himself.

‘Thank you, son,’ he said, as they pulled up at the edge of a crowded parking lot. ‘But a lot of people weren’t as lucky as me today.’

The lot was packed solid. Men and women in expensive-looking business wear hurried about with no apparent reason to their movements. He supposed that the civilian arm of government had gone over to emergency procedures as quickly and completely as the military. Until now, he’d been concerned only with the latter, but the Governor’s office had requested his presence at this meeting as a matter of the highest urgency and Ritchie had seen no alternative to attending. Apart from Olympia and Seattle, which were perilously close to the event horizon, and Alaska, which was sparsely populated and still largely undeveloped, Hawaii was pretty much all that was left of the United States. But while she could defend herself, given the concentration of military forces in the islands, Ritchie wasn’t sure she could feed herself for much more than a few days. And with a quarter of a million men and women to pull out of a war in the Middle East, he really didn’t need to be distracted by food riots in his own back yard.

‘Shall I park here, sir?’ his driver asked. ‘You don’t want to get jammed in, is all, Admiral.’

‘No,’ said Ritchie. ‘Good point. Take the car back out of here. Get yourself something to eat, and then park somewhere in the District, but not here. This place is a mess. I’ve got your number, I’ll call you when I need you.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

Ritchie was pleased to see that the sailor checked the charge on the car’s cell phone before answering. Just because he was young didn’t mean he was dumb.

‘I’m sorry, sailor. What’s your name? I didn’t catch it in the rush before.’

‘Seaman Horvath, sir.’

‘Okay. Good work, Horvath. Take a break. I suspect I’ll be a little while.’

* * * *

Stale sweat, fading perfume, and air re-breathed so many times it tasted sick and wrong. The contrast with his own headquarters couldn’t have been starker. Ritchie hit the corridors of the state capitol and ran headlong into mayhem. Spiralling turmoil seemed to be the general operating principle, the sort of witless hysteria you might expect on amateurs night at a Chechen bordello. Ritchie was buffeted by staffers and aides as they double-timed from office to office. A woman swerved to miss him, all elbows and high heels, and crashed into a copying machine that had apparently been pushed into the hallway. She spilled a couple of hundred loose-leaf pages over the carpet, cursing like a chief petty officer as she dropped to the floor to gather them up.

Hundreds of voices competed in the cramped space as people spoke over and past each other, all of them convinced their own particular order, request or fragmented rumour was the most important piece of that moment’s puzzle. The media were everywhere, wolf packs of TV and print reporters threading through the upheaval, firing up shoulder-mounted cameras and thrusting microphones into the face of anybody who seemed remotely responsible for anything. Ritchie gripped his briefcase a little harder and pushed forwards lest -

‘Admiral. Yo! Admiral, is the military taking over? Is there going to be martial law?’

And before he could dive into a side passage or broom closet, one of the packs had suddenly fallen on him. Bright white light seared the backs of his eyes, temporarily blinding him and forcing him to squint against the harsh glare.

‘Admiral, are you here to take over? Are you going to run the emergency response?’

Ritchie couldn’t see who was asking the damn fool questions, but he could sense a sudden press in the crowd around him as maybe a dozen or more reporters turned their attention towards the only symbol of authority in the immediate area: a man in a short-sleeve khaki Navy uniform sporting four stars on his collar. A jabbering crush of journalists surged towards him and, without thinking, he barked out an order.