It took a half hour to clear out the back as best he could, and by the time he was done he felt shaky and weak. From the bag of camping equipment he grabbed two small plastic bowls and shook out what little remained of the trail mix evenly between the two. He returned to the front of the truck and took a small bottle of water from his bug out bag, set it down with one of the bowls in the foot well beside the unconscious girl, and then finally dragged his exhausted body back into the driver’s seat. He reclined it as much as he dared, poured some trail mix into his mouth and leaned back, closing his eyes.

  He was asleep before he’d even finished chewing.

  ΅

  :::12:::

  ABI AWOKE TO snoring.

  For a moment she struggled to remember the events of the day. It all seemed foggy, as if it had been a dream, but as her mind caught up the reality hit her like a lead weight.

  She reached up to touch the cut on her head and panicked as she felt the catheter tug at her arm. What the hell? Where am I? She looked around, and after a moment the image resolved into something she could make sense out of. She was in the back seat of a car. Above her an empty IV bag swung from a hook, the tubing leading into her arm. The catheter wasn’t taped down, and the needle shifted painfully beneath her skin as she moved. She bit her lip and slid it out, holding firmly on her arm after the needle emerged and the blood started to bead on her skin.

  “Ow ow ow, oh shit,” she whispered to herself, pulling herself up in the seat.

  In the driver’s seat a man lay snoring, his mouth hanging open and a bowl resting in his lap. Abi didn’t recognize him, but a faint memory started to come back. She remembered passing out at the edge of the forest. She faintly remembered opening her eyes and seeing a car or truck approaching, but she didn’t have the energy to get up off the ground. She’d passed out again, and the next thing she remembered was the sound of an engine and a man’s voice.

  She turned and checked the label on the IV bag. 0.9% sodium chloride injection, USP. Looked like regular saline, and there didn’t seem to be any signs of tampering. Her heart stopped racing so fast as she began to understand that this probably wasn’t some kind of abduction. Whoever this guy may be he’d given her medical care. He might not be a friend, but he more than likely wasn’t an enemy.

  She quietly opened the side door of the truck and climbed out, grabbing the water and bowl of trail mix as soon as she saw them. Her throat was parched, and she finished the bottle in just a few gulps before a dizzy spell hit her. Shouldn’t have stood up so fast, Abi.

  She tipped the bowl of trail mix into her mouth in one, almost choking in her rush to eat. When was my last meal? Lunchtime yesterday? The trail mix was awful, the cheap unbranded stuff that tasted like it was bulked out with sawdust and the crushed dreams of poor people, but she didn’t care. Food was food, and she knew that if she didn’t get something in her stomach she’d puke fresh air.

  “I left some clothes out for you at the back of the truck if you wanna change.”

  Abi almost jumped out of her skin. She’d been too focused on chewing the gritty trail mix to notice that the snoring had stopped and the guy had opened his eyes. She saw from the look in his eyes that he’d noticed her shock. His voice settled into the kind of tone you’d use with a skittish dog.

  “I found you passed out by the tracks. Looks like you took quite a whack to the head,” he said, pulling himself slowly upright and holding his hand out the window. “I’m Jim. Jim Shepherd.” He nodded his head back in the direction of the wreck a half mile up the track. “ Were you on one of those trains?”

  Abi nodded cautiously and took his hand, shaking for a moment before cautiously pulling back. “Yeah, I was. But... before. I got off before the crash. I’m Abigail Ross. Abi.”

  “Well it’s nice to meet you, Abigail Ross. Is it safe for me to get out of the truck without you clocking me in the head? My knees are killing me.”

  “Yeah, sure.” She felt herself relax a little. He seemed normal enough. “Sorry, I’m a little on edge. Just... just trying to get a grip on things.”

  Shepherd climbed out of the truck and stretched. “Like I said, I laid out some clothes for you at the back of the truck if you want to get out of… you know, that. They’ll be a little big, but they’re better than nothing.”

  For the first time Abi looked down at her body, and she almost didn’t recognize herself. Her skirt was torn almost to the waist, and her white blouse was covered in dark red dried blood from the shoulder all the way down to her elbow, with splashes covering everywhere else. She looked like a damned Jackson Pollock painting that had been dragged through a hedge. Twice.

  Shepherd stepped to the front of the truck and lit a cigarette as Abi limped her way to the back, finding a neatly stacked pile of clothes and a pair of sneakers three sized too big resting on the floor beside a pile of packaged food and a couple of water bottles. Checking first that Shepherd couldn’t see her she slipped the ruined skirt down her legs, quickly stepping in to a pair of gray sweatpants with a drawstring waist. They were clearly made for a man about four inches taller and much broader – Shepherd’s size, she guessed – but they fit well enough for now. The shirt was another matter altogether, though. It fit her like a muumuu, draping almost down to her knees and the sleeves hanging beyond her fingertips, but with a little strategic rolling and some clever knotting of the excess material around the waist she managed to make it look at least halfway normal.

  Abi tried to run her fingers through her hair, but they got stuck about an inch in. It felt as if every strand of hair had been plastered to her scalp. She took a fearful look at her reflection in the window and recoiled at the sight. Dried blood covered the right side of her face, and beneath her eyes were the kind of dark, puffy rings women go through painful, expensive surgery to erase.

  Abi had never been all that concerned about her appearance, but the blood was freaking her out a little. The thought of going through the rest of the warm day with this sticky, tacky film covering her face and hair left her with the shivers, so she unscrewed the cap of one of the enormous water bottles and began to clean herself. She felt the fog clear from her mind the moment the cool water hit her.

  “Woah woah woah, what the hell are you doing?!”

  Abi looked up with surprise as Shepherd ran to the back of the Jeep and snatched the bottle from Abi’s hands. She’d been standing beneath it, clumsily upending it over her head, and as he grabbed it from her she was confused by the expression on his face. He stared aghast at the half empty bottle, and then at the water soaking into the ground at her feet.

  “What? I’m just trying to wash the blood out of my hair. What’s the problem?” She wiped the water from the face with her sleeve, throwing her blond hair back to keep it out of her eyes.

  Shepherd grabbed the cap from the floor and screwed it back on tight. “We have to conserve this stuff. God knows when we’ll be able to get clean water again. Hell, you just blew through two days of emergency drinking water with a quick rinse. Jesus.”

  Abi’s brow knitted in confusion. “What are you talking about? Why do you need an emergency water supply?”

  Shepherd’s mouth dropped open. For a few seconds he was struck dumb. From the look of her, standing beside a crashed train, her clothes torn and bloody, he’d just assumed…

  “Hold up. Are you telling me you don’t know what’s happening?”

  ΅

  :::13:::

  ABI SAT IN the shade of the Jeep holding a Camel between her trembling fingers. She could barely take any of this in. If she hadn’t seen it first hand she would have assumed this Shepherd guy was just crazy, but this explained everything she’d seen. It explained the fried transformers on the power lines by the rail track. It explained why the emergency brakes had kicked in on the train, and why the antique steam locomotive following on the track behind it hadn’t been able to stop in time. When the power went down the train must have lost its radio, as well as the signal lights beside the tracks. The engine driver probably hadn’t even realized the Amtrak train was blocking the track until it was too late.

  Finally it explained why hours had passed since the train had crashed, and still the area wasn’t swarming with emergency service vehicles. It explained why there weren’t any news choppers buzzing over what must be the biggest train crash Virginia had seen in years.

  She listened as Shepherd told her about what he’d seen. The cars fried on the roads. The power out in the town. Her eyes grew wide as he described how the drunk had fired on his Jeep. She walked over to the of the side of the truck to double check that he wasn’t feeding her some bullshit story, but sure enough the bullet holes were right there, exactly as he’d described.

  As Shepherd finished his story Abi felt a memory trigger. It was something important... something she’d read long ago.

  Finally she remembered. She turned to Shepherd.

  “I think I know what’s going on.”

  ΅

  :::14:::

  SHEPHERD PACED BACK and forth beside the Jeep, and for the first time since meeting Abi he felt out of his depth. An hour ago he’d been a hero coming to the rescue of this defenseless young woman, but now he felt like a kid in school as she took charge of the situation.

  “I work in D.C. for the I&A, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. You ever heard of us?”

  Shepherd shook his head. He hadn’t kept up to speed with the dozens of intelligence agencies that had popped up in the years since 9/11. As far as he could tell they all seemed to do almost the exact same job, some vague security related tasks that required billions of dollars each year.

  “I’m not surprised. We’re not exactly what you’d call a front line agency. We’re part of the Department of Homeland Security, and in terms of the intelligence community we’re pretty much the equivalent of the bossy mom who tries to run every PTA meeting. We’re pencil pushers, and it’s our job to make sure that our intelligence agencies are properly integrated with one another; that they can share information quickly and efficiently. Basically we manage the collection, analysis and fusion of intelligence throughout the DHS, and if that isn’t enough to send you to sleep nothing will.”

  Shepherd cocked his head curiously. “So you’re, what, some kind of spy?”

  Abi laughed out loud, tickled by the suggestion. “Only if your definition of ‘spy’ is about as broad as you can get without writing your own dictionary. No, my job title is Assistant Deputy Administrator for Inter-Departmental Communications. I sit in a little windowless office in a sub-basement of a building in D.C. surrounded by stacks of intelligence briefings nobody will ever read. I’m what you get when someone graduates in political science but doesn’t want to climb the ladder by blowing a congressman or taking a job with a lobbying group.”

  She flipped open her pack of Camels, then decided against it. Who knew when she’d find her next pack? “My job is to read through intelligence reports, security analyses and anything else even remotely related to counter-terrorism, and to look for ways to streamline the process of intelligence sharing between the DHS and other intelligence agencies. It’s total scut work, and about as exciting as flipping burgers at McDonalds, but since most of the intelligence I work with is classified top secret every once in a while I get to see some really crazy shit.”

  Shepherd was obviously impressed. “You have top secret security clearance? Wow.”

  Abi waved her hand dismissively. “It’s not a big deal. There are more than eight hundred thousand Americans with top secret clearance, both in the public and private sector. Trust me, it isn’t all that special. You probably know at least a couple of people who have clearance without even realizing it. Anyway, we’re getting off track here.”

  Shepherd nodded, falling silent and allowing her to speak.

  “This is all way before my time, but in the early Nineties there was a massive brain drain after the Soviet Union collapsed. Thousands of scientists suddenly found their research programs canceled without warning. Thousands more were unable to apply for funding in the chaos as Russia struggled to reform itself, and as a result almost all of them started to look overseas for opportunities. And we’re not talking about just a few guys here. The Soviets had invested heavily for decades in weapons technology, space exploration and a hundred other fields with practical security applications. Their scientific community was enormous and their skills were almost as great as our own – they were even ahead of us in some fields – so when the money dried up it was an absolute disaster for them.

  “A lot of them came to the US, and many more went to Israel and around Europe. These were first class scientists, some of the best in the world, and western countries tossed out visas like candy to grab as many as possible. We hoovered up thousands, not only because we wanted them working for us but more importantly because we didn’t want them working for anyone else. Better have them on the inside pissing out, know what I mean?

  “We managed to secure most of them, but a few got offers from… well, let’s just say less conventional parties. A few went to Iran. A few more were hoovered up by Saddam, Gaddafi and the Saudis, and in the mid-Nineties we heard that a small group had been taken on by North Korea. Unfortunately for us most of them were nuclear weapons experts. These were the guys who helped get the Korean nuclear program off the ground.”

  Abi paused for a moment, struggling to remember half-remembered details.

  “A few years ago an intelligence report landed on my desk. I can’t quite remember the ins and outs, but I remember it scaring the crap out of me. It was from a think tank that spent its time gaming out unlikely threats: theoretical weapons, emerging enemies, treacherous allies, that sort of thing, and the report argued that we we’d spent the last decade focusing on the wrong threat when we talked about North Korea.

  “See, for years we’ve been worried about their nuclear program. They’ve been developing miniaturized warheads and ICBMs with ever longer ranges, and in the west we’ve always been terrified that they’ll eventually decide to take out a city. We’ve been working on the assumption that our next Pearl Harbor would come in the form of a Korean long range Hwasong missile tipped with a megaton bomb.”

  She shook her head.

  “Here’s the thing few people in the west really understand about North Korea: Kim Jong-un isn’t crazy.”

  Shepherd gave her a skeptical look. “Come on, you can’t claim that guy doesn’t have a screw loose. You only have to look at his hair to know he's a psycho.”

  “No. He may look like a maniac, but you should trust me when I tell you that he only plays one on TV. That guy knows exactly what he’s doing. The whole crazy Blofeld act is designed to keep us in a state of suspended terror. He wants us to be fearful of his unpredictability, because he knows that pretty much every dictator the west believes it can ‘handle’ ends his days being dragged behind a truck by his own people. All those unhinged threats of raining fire on the west keep him strong. They keep his generals happy, who in turn keep the people in line, but he knows better than anyone that if he ever actually launched an ICBM at us he’d be hiding in a bunker by sundown, and his little tinpot kingdom would glow in the dark for centuries.

  “No, he’s always known that an all out nuclear strike would spell the end for him and his country, but he also knows that he can’t carry on like this for years without any results. He can’t keep pumping money into his nuclear program forever, building bigger bombs and better missiles. Eventually he has to put his money where his mouth is and actually use this stuff, because the alternative is that everyone in the west would realize he’s nothing but a blowhard, and the result of that would be… well, his body being dragged behind a truck by his own people.”

  Abi chuckled humorlessly.

  “Yeah, being a dictator isn’t as fun as it looks. It’s about as safe as working as a lion tamer, standing in the cage trying to convince animals that could easily tear your throat out that you’re the boss. Anyway, I’m getting off track again. Back to the report.

  “The guys Kim Jong-il poached from the Soviets back in the Nineties weren’t just regular nuclear weapons specialists. There were plenty of those in the USSR back in the day, but Kim wasn’t interested in taking just anybody who had the skills to design a nuke. No, he went after these particular guys with a laser focus, for one reason and one reason alone: they were specialists in the EMP effects of nuclear weapons.”

  Shepherd interrupted. “But don’t all nukes have an EMP effect?”

  “Yes, but the effect varies massively from bomb to bomb. There are some multi-megaton warheads that are so well shielded they hardly create any electromagnetic pulse at all, and others that are barely powerful enough to take out a town but can generate a pulse so strong that they could knock out a power grid for hundreds of miles. I’ve no idea about the specifics of the technology, but I know that the Koreans were only ever really interested in the latter.

  “The intelligence report argued that the Koreans never gave a damn about developing the kind of massive nukes we have at our disposal. They never wanted the kind of firepower that could level a city, because they knew they’d never have the opportunity to use one without mutually assured destruction. Even their long range missile tests over the last decade or so were mostly just for show. We all cheered when one of their ICBMs spiraled off course and blew up hundreds of miles from its target, but the Koreans didn’t care. The report suggested that they hadn’t even bothered to develop a reliable guidance system. They didn’t need one, because the point of these regular tests was just to keep us distracted. To keep us worrying that their technology was improving; that they were just a couple of years away from finally developing a missile that could reach us, and a warhead that would fit on the end of it.

 

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