The Defiant: Grid Down Read online

  “I wish I had seen you bash that guy’s head in!” Matt exclaimed.

  “Can we talk about something else?” Bryn asked. She didn’t like to relive things with others because she would do it enough on her own.

  “So where are the police?” Sophie asked.

  “They’re in the same situation we are,” Matt answered.

  “So no one is coming to help? What about the government?” Sophie asked.

  “No one is coming is what I understand. I ran into a guy at the store who was going on about how terrorists attacked the country,” Matt said.

  “This is an attack?”

  “Makes sense to me,” Bryn said.

  “If it’s an EMP, then it only makes sense that a terrorist did it,” Matt said.

  “I don’t understand how this could happen, none of this, how can this happen?”

  “Is that a serious question?” Bryn pointedly asked.

  “Don’t be like that. How can this happen?” Sophie pressed.

  “The fuck nuts in DC can’t wipe their own asses. You honestly think they even give a shit much less planned for something like this?” Bryn challenged.

  “I have to agree with Bryn on this,” Matt said.

  “Matt, so you think the power’s not coming back on…at all?” Sophie asked.

  “I don’t know what really happened, but this looks like an EMP to me.”

  “What are we going to do?” Sophie asked.

  “Getting more food is important,” Bryn answered.

  “We should go to Mom’s house,” Sophie said.

  “We’re not going to Mom’s.”

  “Why not? I bet she has food.”

  “You think she has food? You’re crazy for even thinking that. You were just over there last week. She had less in her fridge than we had.”

  “Where does your Mom live?”

  “La Jolla,” Sophie said.

  “You’re a native San Diegan? Wow, it’s like seeing a chupacabra, I didn’t know you guys existed,” Matt joked.

  Sophie chuckled and said, “You’re funny for a dork.”

  “Ha, is that a compliment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you just called me a dork,” Matt said, somewhat amused and astonished.

  “Seriously, you don’t know you’re a dork?” Bryn quipped.

  “Is that my cue to go?”

  “No, don’t go, I’m sorry,” Sophie said.

  “No wait, hold on. Matt, you don’t think wearing R2-D2 and Darth Vader shirts make you a dork?” Bryn continued.

  “Star Wars is cool!” Matt said defensively.

  “It might have been a fun movie and cool when you’re ten years old, but you’re a grown man wearing superhero and Star Wars T-shirts!” Bryn blasted.

  “I guess I’m a dork, then.”

  “I think dorks are cute,” Sophie added, again slurring her speech.

  “So what was your childhood like?” Matt asked Bryn directly.

  Bryn, not wanting to answer the question, stood up and walked into the kitchen, leaving Sophie to give her two cents. Her mouth was a bit parched, so she turned on the spigot. Nothing came out but a strange hollow echo, like the pipes were moaning. “Shit,” she bellowed and put down her cup. She opened the refrigerator to see if there was anything close to water. Nothing.

  Walking back into the living room, she asked, “Did anyone grab water?”

  Matt and Sophie looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “Not smart. We’ll need to go back out tomorrow,” Bryn lamented.

  “Just drink from the sink, little princess,” Sophie joked.

  “I tried. There’s nothing coming out.”

  “Oh, that’s not good. There’s always the toilet,” Sophie said and began to laugh loudly.

  Matt followed suit with a boisterous laugh and added, “Yeah, get on all fours like my old dog and start lapping away.”

  “Idiots, the both of you,” Bryn snapped. She unlocked the door to go outside, as she remembered she had a half a bottle of water in her car.

  Matt and Sophie kept joking, but she wasn’t listening anymore. She closed the door and slowly proceeded towards her car in the darkness. She paused just at the top of the stairs to allow her eyes to properly adjust. It was so strange not to have any artificial light to guide her. Comfortable to make it, she put her foot out, but a voice from the darkness stopped her.

  “Watch that first step.”

  “Who’s there?” Bryn asked, looking to her left, but only seeing the black of night.

  “Your guardian angel,” the male voice joked.

  “No, really, who is that?” she again asked.

  “Colin Somerville, your neighbor from apartment 213.”

  “Never heard of you. Wait, are you the old man who lives…”

  “Old man? Ouch! I’m only fifty-six,” Colin said.

  Bryn still couldn’t see him and wondered how he saw her.

  With a few clicks of his lighter, the glow from the flame showed Bryn the man behind the voice. It was the ‘old man’ she was referring to. They knew of each other, but that was as far as their knowledge of each other went.

  Colin was a retired Master Chief in the Navy. He was a big man physically, standing over six foot three inches, and had big muscular arms that hung from his massive torso like two branches from the trunk of an old tree. His bald head was covered with a perfectly folded bill ball cap that read, Vietnam Veteran. He was from a small bayou town in Louisiana and had joined the Navy instead of going to jail. The judge at the time gave him two options, go to jail for a breaking and entering charge or join the military; he opted for the military route. That was 1972, and within nine months of that decision he was in the jungles of Vietnam working as a Corpsman. The regimented lifestyle of the Navy agreed with him, so he stayed for twenty-eight years. Leaving his home and mother was tough, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She saw the Navy as a second chance for him. All she saw for his life if he stayed was jail. He had gotten in with the wrong crowd at a young age, and as a black male in the South, she just knew he needed to get out.

  Colin inhaled deeply as the flame rose and fell with each breath in; when it was perfectly lit, he pulled it away and blew the smoke on the cherry tip. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I’m Bryn from 207.”

  “Nice to meet you, Bryn. Funny it takes the lights going out for us to finally meet. Guess we can’t hide in our homes anymore,” Colin commented.

  “Yeah, um, I need to go get something. Have a good one,” Bryn said and slowly walked down the stairs.

  “You too, have a good one.”

  Bryn carefully walked down the stairs, all the while thinking about her brief encounter. What Colin said was true. She had seen him before but not until then had she ever shared a word except to say hello. She then openly wondered what new people she’d meet now that her life had definitely taken a turn.

  Darkness fell upon the city. It blanketed the towers of downtown and the hills to the east. The sky twinkled with thousands of stars and the Milky Way sliced through the center. This was a sky many had never seen before in San Diego. The hazy luminance from the city was no longer there to block out the natural beauty. And while many took time and enjoyed the uniqueness of the event, others began to plot and scheme how they could exploit the situation for their own gain.

  Chapter Two

  “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Viktor E. Frankl

  Two Thousand Feet Above Southern California

  The planning and preparation for the mission to get Captain Dupree’s family took longer than they had initially planned. What had started as Dupree’s personal mission had morphed into an MEU-wide rescue for all the officers’ and senior non-commissioned officers’ families. In order to facilitate such a large-scale operation, they needed great coordination. Not an impossible task; it just required more time.

  Vincent’s
mission hadn’t changed. He and his team were to grab Mrs. Dupree and their two young children, a boy and girl, aged six and eight.

  The CH-53E Super Stallion with Vincent and his team lifted off the rear flight deck at zero five thirty.

  One man absent from the team was Lance Corporal Berg. As the team was headed to the assembly area, he slipped and fell down the ladder well, injuring his leg and making his ability to go impossible. For Vincent this was a loss, but overcoming and adapting was something the Marines did.

  Vincent looked at his men, a somber but determined look on their faces. Going into situations like this wasn’t new for them. They had just completed several months of combat in Afghanistan in support of another Marine Infantry Battalion.

  This mission should be easy, they told him, but the second he heard that, he knew it could be their curse.

  The cool fresh air mixed with the helicopter’s fumes, a smell he had become accustomed to. The heavy rhythmic thumping from the rotor often lulled some Marines to sleep. For him this never occurred; his mind was always processing and visualizing the mission at hand. He would run through every scenario possible and play out exactly how he needed it to go down. Sleep was something for those who didn’t have responsibility.

  Vincent looked over his shoulder and noticed they had banked and now were heading south.

  “Sergeant Vincent, this is First Lieutenant Prince. We’re ten mikes out,” the pilot said in Vincent’s headset.

  “Roger that,” Vincent replied. He lifted up his hands showing ten fingers and motioned to his Marines. This was their sign they were ten minutes away.

  Behind Vincent was a small window; he turned to look out. As they flew past familiar landmarks, Vincent reminisced briefly about the world before. One thing that was obvious was the lack of artificial light. The city and suburbs were dark, and as they flew over Interstate 5, he saw thousands of stalled and abandoned cars.

  Prince lowered the helicopter, signaling their final approach.

  Their altitude was low enough for Vincent to see a small group of people gathered in a cul-de-sac. He saw they were pointing at them and making hand and arm gestures. Vincent looked more intently and saw they had rifles. Really focusing on them, he noticed two of them had the rifles on their shoulders. Streaks of flashes erupted from the muzzles, confirming these men were shooting at them.

  The helicopter banked hard away from the group and headed east.

  Loud panging on the lower fuselage rang out. Marines looked around at each other, nervous that they were under fire.

  The helicopter suddenly went higher; Prince was attempting to pull away.

  A minute went by with no panging or diversionary maneuvers. Vincent let out a heavy breath and said, “Damn, that was nerve-racking.”

  “That was nothing,” Prince replied.

  Vincent had forgotten he was wearing the headset and that everything he said the pilot, co-pilot and crew chief heard.

  “I’m sure, but being a passenger can make you a bit more anxious.”

  “We’re fine. We’ll have you on the ground in five mikes,” Prince said.

  The helicopter banked back south and again began its descent when without notice it shuddered and dropped, causing a feeling of weightlessness.

  To Vincent it felt like the helicopter had lost power as they kept falling.

  With a grinding jolt, the propeller turbine came to life again, stopping their fall but only for a moment before he heard the engine cease again.

  Several Marines cried out in fear they were going down.

  The jolting had pushed a couple Marines off the webbing and onto the floor.

  One was Private First Class Temple, a young nineteen-year-old Marine from Biloxi, Mississippi. Vincent liked him a lot; it was probably because he could see himself in Temple.

  Vincent unbuckled and went to his aid. “Here, grab my arm.”

  Black smoke entered the helicopter from outside.

  Seeing this distressed the men more.

  Vincent found it almost impossible to balance himself as the helicopter continued its uncontrolled fall. The decision to help Temple, while brave, was not a wise decision, Vincent suddenly thought.

  The helicopter jerked hard and began to spin, throwing Vincent to the floor hard. He rolled across the floor and slammed into the webbing. He reached out and grabbed it to hold himself.

  The helicopter was now on its side. He looked up and could see the ground closing fast through the open window

  More shuddering and the engine fired up again. The helicopter stabilized but was not far off the ground. He crawled up onto the webbing and looked out the window. They couldn’t be more than two hundred feet from the ground. A fear gripped him like none he’d ever experienced. He thought that after all the combat and being so close to home that this was how he would die, and to add insult to injury it was at the hands of Americans.

  Two minutes passed and it seemed like the worst was over. The helicopter was stable and they were flying although low to the ground, but smoke was still billowing into the fuselage.

  Vincent thought it safe to get back in his seat when suddenly an explosion rocked the rear of the helicopter. It blew off the rear section, including the lift ramp, vaporizing the crew chief in the fiery blast.

  The explosion caused catastrophic damage to the tail section by shearing off the rear stabilizing prop. There was nothing that could save the helicopter as gravity took over.

  Violently it began to spin.

  Vincent desperately tried to hold on to the webbing, but the force of the spin threw him towards the rear and out of the helicopter.

  As he tumbled through the emptiness, he saw the intense blue of the sky, then the tans, browns and greens of the ground. A strange thought came to mind as he fell, ‘Is this going to hurt?’ With intense anticipation he closed his eyes and prayed.

  San Diego, CA

  Bryn tried to block out Matt’s loud snoring, but with every labored breath he took, it sounded like a freight train was barreling down on her. In frustration she got out of her bed and walked into the living room. There on the floor, Matt was sprawled out, his head propped up by a small pillow from the couch and his jacket as a blanket. Sophie was on the couch, passed out and apparently deaf to Matt’s trumpeting nose. Not able to deal with his snoring and seeing the bright sun of the late morning coming through the blinds, she walked over and kicked him.

  “Get up or turn over, but stop fucking snoring,” Bryn said.

  Matt shot up, his eyes wide open. He sniffled and wiped his face quickly then focused on Bryn, “What is it? Is everything okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay; your snoring is too loud.”

  Bryn walked into the kitchen, where she found the bottle of water from her car. She drank the rest and put it down. Today, they’d have to go find water and more food if they could. “Get up. Come on, we need to go get some water,” she said and tossed the empty plastic bottle at Sophie. It hit her, but she didn’t move.

  “She’s out. I’ve never seen girls drink like you two,” Matt commented, standing up and stretching.

  “Where should we go?” Bryn asked, ignoring his comment.

  “Best Buy,” Matt answered.

  “Best Buy?”

  “Yeah, they have food, snack food, but there’s water, cases of it.”

  Bryn hadn’t thought about that, but she did remember that they had coolers and a full aisle of junk food near the checkout counters.

  “I even have a way in,” he said, holding up a large key.

  It took them over an hour to finally leave the apartment, and when they did, they found their neighbors still doing pretty much what they had done the day before. Many were sitting around talking about the rumors of a massive terrorist attack and the possibility that the lights would be out for some time. They heard that a few of their neighbors had left to go to other relatives nearby, and others had gone out looking for help and supplies. The main thing that Bryn noticed was there wa
s no coordinated effort. Like people had become in the modern world, many were fragmented and looked out only for themselves, not unlike what she was doing. It wasn’t a natural reaction to only look out for oneself, she hadn’t created a bond with anyone, and her childhood told her that she couldn’t trust anyone. Just having Matt close was unlike her.

  Leaning on the railing overlooking the parking lot was Colin, this time no cigar but a bottle of water. He smiled and nodded at them as they passed.

  As usual, ‘the three amigos’, as Bryn called them, were smoking and talking at the bottom of the stairwell. They made immature comments and again tried to flirt with Sophie, who today didn’t respond.

  “I need to go get something,” Matt said and jogged away towards his apartment.

  Bryn and Sophie found the shopping carts where they had left them last night. With nothing working, this was their only means of transporting anything.

  Pulling the pepper spray from her pocket, Bryn shook it. “Damn.”

  “What is it?”

  “Not much left, I need to find something else.”

  “Maybe we should carry a bat or a stick, something like that,” Sophie commented.

  “We need a gun,” Bryn stated.

  “A gun?” Sophie asked, shocked to hear Bryn mention it.

  “Yes, I wish I had a gun.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sophie said.

  “You’re right. It’s not a good idea, it’s a great idea. I wonder where I can get one.” She then turned and looked up at Colin.

  He was still there, leaning against the railing, and nodded.

  To Bryn he seemed so calm, like none of this bothered him. She wondered to herself how he could be so at ease.

  Matt ran up, huffing and puffing. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “What did you get?” Bryn asked, curious.

  “This,” he responded, holding up what looked like a short black metal pipe.

  “What is that?” Sophie asked.

  “An ASP,” he answered, then with a quick downward motion, the baton expanded in length. He held it up, waving it back and forth like a light saber, proud of his weapon.

  “Nice, that will come in handy. I like you more and more, Mateo,” Bryn said with a grin on her face.