Without warning

‘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.

Christ knows what he’d have said about this, thought Kip, as they banked down and away to the west to begin their long approach to Seattle. The C-130 wasn’t designed for scenic flights, but even through its small, grimy windows he was afforded a scarifying view of the energy wave that ran in both directions right out to the very edge of the world, and over it. He was the only passenger in the plane, a service laid on especially for him by the military at the city’s request. The loadmaster – that’s what they were called, he was sure – stayed glued to the window nearest his perch at the rear ramp, jamming his head up hard against the Plexiglas to keep an eye on the phenomenon as their course change took it out of direct view. It was far enough away from Seattle that you couldn’t see it from the ground, they told him, which Kip thought of as a small mercy. The city would’ve been a nuthouse if you could – probably was anyway, he reflected. The flight crew, after exhausting the possibilities of speculation and conspiracy theory when the vast, shimmering wall had first hove into view, were restricting themselves to terse monosyllables as they prepped the craft for descent and approach.

‘I reckon it came from space,’ said the airman, a native of New Orleans, to judge by his accent. ‘Something like a black hole that brushed up against us.’ He was young, with a smattering of pimples on his fleshy pink jowls.

‘Black holes don’t really brush up against anything,’ replied Kipper. They suck in whole planets and crush them to a singularity.’ He’d seen that on the Discovery Channel once. It made him feel better to have something to say.

‘A singu-what now, sir?’ asked the airman.

‘A singularity,’ Kipper repeated. ‘It’s, uh, where energy and matter get crushed down into a single state that is so small it’s almost not even there.’

‘Shit,’ said the young man. ‘Well, I guess that ain’t no singularity out there.’

‘Nope,’ agreed Kipper. ‘Guess not.’

‘Do you know what we’re gonna do about it, sir, to turn it off?’

Kipper could see from the strain around the boy’s eyes that he was really asking another question. How are we gonna make this better? Or perhaps: How are we going to get our world back?

‘Son,’ said Kipper, who felt old enough to call the airman that, ‘you and I are going to do our jobs. And somebody, somewhere else, is gonna see to punching the lights out on this motherfucker.’

‘So you think it can be turned off, sir?’

The need in the boy’s voice was almost painful. Kipper tried for a nonchalant shrug.

‘I’m an engineer. I was always taught that if something can be turned on, it can be turned off,’ he said.

But he didn’t believe that for a second. Not after seeing the thing with his own eyes.

* * * *

By the time the C-130 he’d transferred to on some no-name airstrip out in the boonies touched down at Sea- Tac, Kipper had almost forgotten the crash back in the Cascades. As the young Guardsman who’d strapped him into the Blackhawk back in the mountains had explained, there were almost certainly no people on that flight anyway – they’d been ‘disappeared’. The phrase gave him a twitchy feeling. It was redolent of the bad old days in Chile, where he’d done some contract work for Arthur Andersen on a power station project back in the ‘80s. People by their thousands got ‘disappeared’ there. As frightening as that had been, however, it was also comprehensible: a bunch of assholes, looking like they’d been tricked out as opera villains in military drag, had simply decided to murder anyone who looked sideways at them. What he’d seen today, as soon as the chopper lifted clear of the deep valley in which he’d been trekking, was entirely incomprehensible. The brooding mass of the Cascades still blocked from view a good deal of what the guardsmen were calling ‘the Wave’, but the goddamn thing was reared up so high he could still see it anyway, soaring off towards space, somewhere beyond the skyline of the ranges. That was bad enough, but what they’d told him about the effect of this ‘Wave’ had drilled a cold, dead finger bone into his heart. Hundreds of millions of people, gone. Whole cities – close enough to the whole country – empty. Ships