Grant - 8 May 2021 - Day 1

  2021 was a weird year for the world, and America was no different. Political turmoil, global pandemic, unstable economy, you name it, it was happening. Some people were doing all right but the general public felt a sense of doom just under their skin, a feeling of ever increasing pressure as if the roof were about to cave in with every creak of an old house in a windstorm.

  For all the crazy shit that was happening, none of us could have predicted this.

  The second Sunday in May had started out treating me well enough, a sunny morning without a cloud in the sky, a light breeze and no forecast of rain. My old, suburban house was really coming along, powered by lofty dreams of one day moving out and having a nice little farm out in the countryside. Plenty of hours spent on Youtube learning about do-it-yourself projects with many, and I mean many, trips to Home Depot and Lowes over the course of the past two years combined with inhuman amounts of sweat and labor were really coming to fruition. Every bit of effort was spent into redoing and upgrading this small but homey dwelling.

  The basement was no longer a dark and dreary storage area, the new deck wasn’t a rotting piece of trash, and most of the electrical problems with the old house had been solved. And while I couldn’t afford my dream farmhouse in the countryside just yet, I was sort of making that dream right here. I was getting ‘do-it-yourself’ practice in. My personal ambitions were improving as I embarked on a personal journey of learning how to do home improvement shit on my own.

  My wallet was hurting but my life was getting better. It certainly looked better.

  I looked proudly at what I owned so far. The backyard had its own chicken coop with three chickens, the side gardens around the house had berry bushes, and the back deck had raised-bed gardens that neatly bordered its edge. My beautiful dirty blonde wife had handed me yet another list of things to accomplish this weekend as she too wanted to eventually move to a little farm, but she was out shopping for a baby sprinkle that we were bullied into.

  Don’t ask me what that is . . something to do with a baby.

  But it’s ok, I liked being outside talking to my three happy chickens as if they were companionable dogs while I worked in my shed that formed the biggest boundary for my hens' space to roam. The current project holding my attention was working on installing two more rain barrels on my property so that I could water my garden without my water bill shooting through the roof like it did last summer. What turned out to be more difficult was changing the gutter system to properly drain into the barrel without wrecking the thin metal and don’t get me started on the freaking diversion drain to sluice off the first couple inches of dirty water off the rooftop when the rain starts. No amount of glaring was going to fix my lack of impatience at my dull metal cutting shears not cutting straight. I sighed. This was taking a lot longer than I initially anticipated.

  Toby Keith’s rough voice played softly from the radio on my workbench, just loud enough to smooth over the gradually increasing volume of my chickens until they hit a pitch I’d never heard before. Thinking some animal, probably another raccoon or possum, had gotten in, I grabbed the nearest weapon of the display rack on the wall in the shed, my small sledgehammer, and hauled my slightly overweight ass to the coop. Working out and proper diet had taken a back seat to actually getting shit done around here. I still lifted weights but cardio had definitely fallen to the wayside.

  A weird yellow light caught my eye as I rounded the corner, solid yet wavering letters that had carved themselves into the window of the shed with the heat of someone actively welding. I blinked twice at the brightly glistening hallucination. I rubbed my eye again to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. It was so bright that the source of the light itself couldn’t have come from any other direction. The strange characters were in a language I’d never seen before but somehow they spoke to my mind even as they rearranged themselves into from obscure hieroglyphics into English right as I gave a healthy curse, “The fuck?!”

  Rubbing my eyes in disbelief, I stared harder at the words, reading them over and over even as my chickens frantic squawking grew louder and even more shrill. Finally looking over at Dixie Chick, Hen-essey, and Victoria Peckham, they suddenly stopped and turned to stare their beady little eyes at me. Without a sound and in the middle of the day, they all turned as one and bolted into their coop.

  “This is really beyond weird,” I muttered, taking an unconscious step back. Chickens are diurnal, meaning they’re up with the sun and they’re roosting when the sun goes away, it’s that simple. For chickens to do something like this is the equivalent to when dogs and cats go nuts right before an earthquake or a tsunami. It wasn’t natural.

  My phone started to heat up in my pocket, the screen quickly reaching a scorching temperature. Quickly pulling it out, I dropped it right as the screen was almost immediately too hot to the touch. As it landed screen side up in the grass, I could see the same flaming yellow letters in the screen right before it cracked in half. A series of loud pops went off, some from the shed but even more from the house. What made it odd was that it sounded like there were similar pops coming from the neighbors’ houses all around as well. As if someone had set off a Walmart’s worth of firecrackers all around town at the same time.

  Running back to the shed, I put on an old pair of work gloves and picked my phone up off the grass to examine it. The screen was cracked all the way through and the message was no longer there. The heat had also dissipated and I couldn’t turn it on.

  “Hey neighbor!” A quavery voice yelped. “Did you just see anything weird?” My next-door neighbor Mike popped his head just over my fence, presumably standing on a chair or small ladder as his head just barely cleared the fence. The man had the classic ‘teacher’ look, the former fitness of college years giving way to the softer, more rounded body shape. Dad-bod, but strong enough to pick up kids, push around a lawnmower and maybe slam in a fence post or two. If the man dedicated six months to a good diet and exercise, he’d make all the neighborhood moms swoon. His cheeks did hold a bit too much fat though. Poor guy.

  “Uh, not sure I want to admit what I just saw,” I answered, still staring at my phone like it was going to blow up. “But I’m not the institutional kind of crazy so I might just have to.” I turned to him. “Did your phone freak out and were there weird yellow, flaming letters on it? Maybe some kind of doomsday looking message?”

  “Yeah! Me too! It was on the windows of the house too and my glasses!” Mike had pulled his safety glasses off and was rubbing his eyes as he said that. “But it’s gone now. Do you know what it means? What’s even worse is that when I think about it, the words are kind of burned into my brain, I can’t unsee them, like that beautiful mind movie, perfect memory kind of thing. And I forget things all the time, that’s why I have a wife!” My neighbor was known for being the quiet dude, so his rambling showed me that he was really freaked out.

  “Same brother,” I joked trying to ease my own mind. Looking around, I took a shaky breath. “And what was that popping sound? Sounded like light bulbs exploding?”

  Mike’s messy mop of brown hair was still standing on end even though he was vigorously nodding. “I know right?! Oh crap! Gotta check on the wife!”

  Taking a deep breath, I chewed on the memory of the message one more time. “Your natural laws will be in turmoil,” I repeated to myself. Saying it a few times didn’t really help, instead, the pit in my stomach grew. “Hey!” I said louder. “I’m going to go through my house real quick and check on some things, you might wanna do the same.”

  As Mike opened his mouth to ask the inevitable question ‘like what’, I just kept on. “Check all your electronics and see if they turn on. Check your car and see if that turns on. Check lighters, check everything. Shit, if you have a gun, shoot at the dirt and see if it goes off! I’m going to do the same, meet me in the front in ten minutes.”

  “Did you see that?!”

  The door to the fence on the other side of my yard flew open as my wife Sandra burst through. “Honey! Did you see any of it!” Sandra crashed into my arms. “My car died right as I pulled onto our street and I almost crashed! All the powerlines shorted out! The car mirrors all had some crazy message on it about the end of the world and the other cars lining the road did too! It’s everywhere!”

  Mike’s eyes got huge as I looked back at him. Putting his glasses back on, he sprinted for his house yelling to his wife Isabella. I comforted Sandra. “I don’t know what’s going on babe but we’re gonna find out. First, check your phone. Can you turn it on?”

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  Tears filled her blue eyes as she looked at me. “It broke in the car! The screen cracked and it won’t turn on. Our families?! Are they going to be ok? Are they all right? Did you see the warning too? Natural laws in turmoil? The hell does that mean? Armaggeddon? War? Choose a power? What the hell does it mean?”

  I didn’t know what to say as I hugged her to my chest, stifling the flood of questions. Taking her by the hand after a moment, I led her inside our home and sat her on the couch, pouring both of us a stiff drink. She clutched the glass of Jack Daniels like a lifeline, her lips pale as she sipped at the strong liquor. After telling her that I had to use the restroom real quick, I ran upstairs to check the office. The attic that we cleaned out last winter was actually kind of nice, two large desks for both of us to work from home and a little coffee nook to keep us caffeinated all day.

  My work in IT allowed me to work from home as all of my stuff was project based and Sandra’s work was early child development so she kinda worked from home half the time. Opening my two work computers and her personal one, I saw that all of the screens were shattered. Even the mirror in the bathroom was shot through with weird cracks. Oddly curving loops that shouldn’t be possible and the strange words made for an alien looking reflective surface. Keeping my internal thoughts to myself, I checked everything. Flipping the switch in every room yielded no light, not even a crackling sputter of effort from the house’s electrical system.

  It was dead, completely dead. Everything was dead. That inaudible hum of electronics that permeated all of modernity suddenly wasn’t there anymore.

  A cannonball settled in my gut as I turned over the message in my mind for what seemed the thousandth time already. Choice? As in we can choose something to help us survive? War? What are we fighting against? Obviously something we’ve never seen before, I guess. Twenty millenia? Weren’t we cavemen back then? If we don’t choose . . . something . . . then death? And a warning . . . a warning with a timeframe of less than a day? Question after question resounded in my mind, a veritable drumbeat of anxiety, pressure, and plain the fuck creeped out.

  At this point, my personal weird-ometer was in overdrive.

  Nothing made sense.

  The power was out, and I couldn’t explain the freaking message with normal science or rational thought, which meant that something was fundamentally wrong. And if you have eliminated all of the obvious answers, then what is left must be the truth, no matter how strange and unlikely it might be. For the hell of it, I picked up a pencil from my desk and dropped it. As it hit the ground, I found the teeniest bit of comfort in the idea that gravity was still working.

  One major scientific discovery not overturned by fuckery.

  I doubted reality so much at that moment that I did look outside to make sure that the sun was still in the sky. Giving a minor sigh of relief, I turned my perfectly average intellect towards the present moment.

  Being a graduate of the public school system, I decided to put a few more scientific experiments to the test. Grabbing a desk ornament my wife got for my last birthday, the perpetual motion ball thing made with four steel balls suspended by wires, I verified that the laws of conservation of energy were still generally a thing. Gravity works, conservation of energy works, but electricity doesn’t. Or the electricity in my devices doesn’t. What other fundamental law of the universe is screwing around?

  Watching the light from the upstairs window play across my wife’s desk, I saw a lighter next to a candle. Figuring that I’d give it a try, a few steps and a flick of a button later and I had a small flame extending out from the lighter. “Okay.” I said. “Fire is still here. Gotcha.”

  I clapped my hands and slapped the wall to verify that sound didn’t undergo a fundamental change. Turning around, I looked at the mirror on top of the dresser. The corner of it was unblemished and my reflection did stare back at me. “So . . . minus the message, light also seems to be fairly normal.”

  [Fuck it.] I thought to myself, running down to the living room and grabbing my keys. My car had just gotten a new starter and battery last year after the inspection and this was well beyond the point of me being normally creeped out. Ignoring my wife as she yelled at me as I sprinted through the front door, I opened the door and jammed the key into the ignition, giving it a solid turn.

  Nothing. Not even a beep. The engine didn’t roll over, the freaking dashboard didn’t light up. Turning the key back and forth a couple times didn’t yield anything more.

  “God damn it!” I cursed, running back inside to grab the keys of my wife’s car. The chances of both of them being dead at the same time were infinitesimally small. I tried her car which was dead at the end of the street, returning with a panicked yet resigned look on my face just as my neighbor Mike ran out of his house with his keys.

  “Any luck?” He asked as I shook my head.

  “No. Damn it all, man. Both of them are dead.” I complained, looking around the suburban neighborhood. Normal looking two story houses sat too close together with small lawns separating them. Minivans, trucks, and small cars designed for cities sat in just about everyone’s driveway. The local PizzaHut delivery guy was standing next to his car with a confused look on his face, poking at his also cracked phone. “Go ahead, try yours!”

  The older Ford F150 didn’t even cough as Mike tried to start it. “I don’t believe it!” He yelled. “I just got a new battery a week ago and it’s been runnin’ like a dream! This is my baby!"

  “You got a gun?” I asked, fully confident that my neighbors, both Mike and his wife were public school teachers by the way, did not have one. Figures, most people don’t grow up with the right kind of education anymore. Mike shook his head no as his wife stepped out of the house with their three month old.

  “What? No! Why would we have a gun?” She exclaimed as she caught the tail end of the conversation, clutching little Ellen to her chest. “Do you have a gun?”

  “Several.” I snorted, keeping my southern upbringing to myself. “Anyways, the point is, stuff ain’t working right. Electricity, cars, electronics, it’s all gone kaput. Glass and plastic screens are cracked to the point of uselessness. Nothing in our house works. If you don’t believe me, go check for yourself.” I watched as Isabella reached in through the open doorway and hit the lightswitch that should’ve turned on the front porch light. Shrugging my shoulders, I gave my car a healthy kick to the tire. “The last test I can think of right now is do guns work? Does gunpowder go off if I pull a trigger?”

  Ignoring the bewildered looks on their faces, I went to gather my firearms. Being the son of a United States Marine and serving a few years in the Army as a glorified pencil-pusher, firearms were not alien to me. In fact, I had been looking to purchase an M1 Garand for my collection but the demand had gone through the roof lately making it just not worth the price. Taking a few minutes, I gathered my Glock 17 handgun for concealed carry, my .22 rifle that was perfect for small game, the AR15 my father gave me for Christmas a few years ago, and the .45 Judge revolver, and placed the firearms on the wooden picnic table on my deck in the backyard.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” my wife asked, holding the drink I’d made her with both hands. Her southern accent always comes out hard core when she's stressed.

  “Doing something probably a bit stupid, but if I’m wrong then we’re ok. I’m if right, then we’re all fucked.” I answered. “Beyond fucked.” I muttered, simultaneously dreading and anticipating the future. Running back inside, I grabbed an almost empty two-liter of Sprite from our dead fridge and poured out the last little bit in the sink, taking the time to think it through knowing that I’d have to explain this hypothesis to Sandra as I did it.

  “Grant, stop and think. You can’t do this! It’s against the law!” She admonished me shrilly, her panic written all over her face. Setting her drink down and standing in front of me with her hands on her hips, she stuck a finger in my ribs. “You can’t shoot a gun in the city. You’ve been shooting pests with a crossbow for the last two years so we don’t freak out the neighbors. At least that’s quiet!”

  Stepping past her, I loaded the .22 rifle after I set the empty two liter bottle on the table. “You stop and think,” I snapped, my patience wearing a bit thin. “You remember that documentary we watched a while ago where they all talked about a solar flare causing an EMP knocking out all electronics across the world? We can come back from that, but if this doesn't work then we aren't dealing with that. All electronics are dead. There’s a freaky message that is talking about the end of the world and nobody can give a good explanation for how it showed up on every flat, reflective surface we’ve seen. It mentioned something about ‘natural laws being in turmoil’. Maybe that was talking about how the world works, I mean, ‘natural philosophy’ is literally how the word ‘science’ used to be translated.”

  She huffed in disagreement but didn’t say anything to stop me. My wife was freaked out but she did love me enough to trust me. Even if she thought I was a step past the loony bin. Taking the .22 caliber rifle as it’s the quietest of my firearms, I held it pointing up in my left hand as I grabbed the two liter with my right.

  “Crazy or not, I need to know right now if I’m insane. I just have to know.” Digging a shallow hole in the dirt with my foot, I placed the empty two liter bottle butt side down in the dirt so that the spout was facing me at a slight angle. “This bottle will function as a crude silencer, and the smaller the caliber, the better it’ll work.” I explained, taking the weapon off safe and putting the barrel of the slim rifle halfway inside the bottle, pointed down at the ground away from me and my wife. Taking a deep breath, I squeezed the trigger.

  Click. “Fuck!” Nothing.

  “So what does that mean?” Sandra asked, her face scrunched in confusion.

  “Three more to go to make sure,” I said, my voice hollow. Pulling back on the lever, I discharged a round and loaded another, pointing the .22 in the same position and double checking that the safety was off.

  Click. Nothing.

  Cursing under my breath, I ran up the five steps to the deck and grabbed my trusty AR15 and the Judge revolver. Mechanically, both the AR15 and the Judge were about as reliable as it gets. The AR15 is the civilian version of the M4, a military rifle with a long history of kicking ass and the Judge is an oversized five shot revolver that would scare any home intruder off. It just looks intimidating. It’s big. The important concept to note about revolvers, you get what you pull, one squeeze of the trigger guarantees a hot bullet coming out of the other end. They are as dependable as any gun on the market because they’re mechanically simple.

  Reliable, that’s the word I was looking for.

  Rotating the selector switch of the AR-15 from safe to semi, I pointed it down just like I did with the .22 and squeezed, nothing. Making sure, I loaded and ‘fired’ ten rounds, none of which went off. Each pull of the charging handle discharged a defunct bullet and slammed home a new one. Putting the safety back on after getting nowhere, I slung the rifle and pulled the Judge.

  “If this doesn’t fire any rounds then I don’t know what to tell ya babe!” I yelled, squeezing the trigger.

  The silence was deafening.

  “FUCK!”