Chapter 38
The elementary school gymnasium smelled of sweat, antiseptic, and too many people sharing too little air. Charlotte stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame, scanning the faces on cots and sleeping bags for dark hair and a jawline she would know in any light.
A woman in a Red Cross vest approached with a clipboard. “Are you injured?”
“My family,” Charlotte said. “I’m looking for my daughter. Sixteen. Dark hair. Sophia Meyers. Or my parents, Liam and Evelyn Davis.”
“We’ve got a registry by the entrance. You can check, but most people came in without documentation. Everything was down. Phones, computers, the whole system.”
“The system?”
“The grid,” the woman said. “Everything. Lights, traffic signals, and cars. All of it died. One minute I’m helping a patient; the next, the monitors go dark, and the backup generators don’t kick in because whatever took out the main grid took them, too.”
“Where did people come from?” Charlotte asked. “The evacuees.”
“All over. Atlantic City first, then the shore towns. Then us. They’re saying it was the same pattern up and down the coast. First, the power goes, then the gas comes.”
“Gas?”
“You’ve seen it. The yellow stuff. It hit Atlantic City hardest because of the density, but it reached everywhere the wind carried it.
Some people are calling it a chemical. Others say it’s something new.
The military had warnings. That was why the alerts came, but they were too late and too vague. ”
Charlotte thanked her and moved to the community center on Ridge Road, where the wagon had been headed.
It was better organized than the school, with medical stations in separate rooms and volunteers moving with the efficiency of people who had been at this for days.
A man in his fifties wearing a sheriff’s department windbreaker coordinated the intake desk.
She approached him with the same question.
“Sophia Meyers. Sixteen. Or Liam and Evelyn Davis. They lived on?—”
“Maple Street,” the man finished. “East end, near the cul-de-sac.”
“You know them?”
“I know the area. I responded to the plane crash. I’m sorry. We pulled twelve bodies from that neighborhood. No one survived the direct impact.”
“The basement was intact,” Charlotte said.
“The basement was twenty feet from where the fuselage hit. The force alone… Look, the situation is bigger than one crash. It’s nationwide. You understand that, right? This wasn’t just Tuckerton.”
“I’ve heard things.”
“What you’ve heard doesn’t cover it. There were detonations at high altitudes over multiple cities.
The EMP pulses took down everything electronic from coast to coast—phones, cars, power grids, hospital equipment.
Then the chemical strikes followed. Sleeper agents with dispersal devices in population centers.
That’s the working theory, anyway. Nobody’s confirming anything because nobody’s in charge of confirming it. ”
“EMP,” Charlotte said.
“Electromagnetic pulse. It’s what happens when a nuclear device detonates at high altitude.
The radiation ionizes the atmosphere, creating a surge that fries anything with a circuit.
That’s why your phone died. That’s why the traffic lights went dark.
That’s why every car built in the last thirty years is sitting where it stopped. ”
“My family…”
The sheriff’s deputy checked his own handwritten list before he promised to ask around.
Charlotte moved on. The church on Spruce Street had been converted into a shelter, pews pushed against the walls to make room for cots.
A priest in a stained collar moved among families with the calm presence of someone no longer surprised by disaster.
Charlotte found him near the altar, distributing blankets from a cardboard box.
“Sophia Meyers,” she said. “Sixteen. Or?—”
“I know the names,” the priest said. “You’ve asked at the school and the community center. Word travels, even now.”
“Have you seen them?”
“What I can tell you is that the reports from the cities are beyond anything we’re experiencing here. New York, Boston, Philadelphia. The casualty estimates…well, they’re not estimates. They’re guesses, and the guesses keep growing.”
“Because of the gas.”
“Because of everything. The EMP killed the systems. The gas killed the people. In places with density, the two together created something I don’t have a word for.”
Charlotte sat on a pew. The wood was smooth under her hands, polished by generations of the worried and faithful. Her cough bent her forward until the priest placed a hand on her shoulder.
“You need medical attention,” he said.
“I need to find my family.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
She left the church and checked a park where tents stood between playground equipment, a makeshift camp for those who had arrived after the indoor shelters filled.
A nurse at the medical station listened to Charlotte’s lungs through an old stethoscope and prescribed rest, fluids, and more of the antibiotics she was already taking.
“Your infection is advanced,” the nurse said. “Without proper treatment?—”
“Have you seen a sixteen-year-old girl? Dark hair. Her name is Sophia.”
The nurse hadn’t, and neither had anyone else.
Charlotte moved through the tents, asking the same question until the words began to lose their shape in her mouth.
Her final stop was a distribution point outside the damaged post office where she had loaded her truck three mornings earlier.
A National Guardsman in fatigues handed out MREs from the back of a Humvee, old enough to have survived what killed the civilian vehicles.
“You’re the mail carrier,” he said. “Debbie mentioned you. She said you were out on your route when it happened.”
“Debbie’s alive?”
“She’s coordinating at the high school. Look, I need to be straight with you.
The situation is catastrophic. We’re talking about multiple high-altitude detonations over North America and allied territories.
The EMP component was phase one. The chemical strikes were phase two.
Casualty estimates for coastal regions are no longer just numbers; they’re categories. ”
“Categories?” Charlotte repeated.
“Unprecedented. Historic. Choose your adjective. The government’s response is fragmented. We’ve got elements of the National Guard, some FBI, and scattered military units with hardened communications. Nobody’s in overall command because the chain was built on systems that don’t exist anymore.”
Charlotte nodded. “My family? Sophia. Liam. Evelyn.”
The guardsman checked his clipboard. “I’m sorry. We’ve got registries from every shelter in the county. If they’re around, they’re not under those names.”
Charlotte stood on the sidewalk outside the post office where she had worked for twelve years and felt the last of the morning’s clarity harden into something colder.
The antibiotics sat in her stomach, and her lungs burned.
Nobody remembered seeing Sophia, Liam, or Evelyn.
The evidence assembled itself with the same precision that had characterized everything since the first alert chimed on Connie’s porch, but she had one place left to search.