Eliot Strange and the Prince of the Apocalypse

3) This is How it Ends

In terms of ending life on earth, a tsunami or a meteoroid strike can be quite effective, and certainly devastating, but to strike sheer terror in the hearts of any teenager, there is nothing like an EMP, or electromagnetic pulse. Without getting too technical, let's just say an EMP is a burst of energy (think lightning strike) that can knock out anything electronic. While lights going out and cell phones not charging might not seem so terrifying, think in terms of permanent and instantaneous. Now, that is scary. 

"EMP" was trending world-wide as a topic of interest to naysayers and doomsday predictors when the lights really did go out. Why? Because an EMP was a favorite choice of novel and television writers for ending the world in a way that was more real than zombies, and thus far more frightening because, hey, it could really happen.

 And it did.

The EMP was off the coast of Maine and knocked out all of the power grid in the Northern United States and parts of Canada permanently and south, like my town of Mount Airy, North Carolina, for weeks. It was a man-made way to create disorder quickly and efficiently. People without power soon became desperate and desperation became eventual starvation and migration and civil war, which was really the EMP's purpose all along, though we didn't know it then.

The Electromagnetic Pulse was not the whole plan. If the EMP was the only weapon, we maybe could have recovered, but it was not. The EMP was only a small part of a plan. We learned in those first days that California and western Nevada were on fire. Two hundred fires were set on the day of the EMP. Only two of the fire starters had been caught, and they were not talking. They both hanged themselves before the FBI arrived and only left a scrawled-in-blood word on the wall - Revolution.

In reality, it all started months before the day of the EMP and the fires. There were signs that shouted out that they were signs, but they seemed like disconnected acts of random terror. Signs like: school and other mass shootings; an internet virus that shut down the stock exchange for two days causing a fall in the market that lasted for months; a bomb in the One World Trade Center; a fire in recently renovated St. Patrick's Cathedral that left nothing but some smoking pews; a peace march for gun control that turned violent and left hundreds dead by, ironically, gunfire; a rumor of a another world wide virus that would shut the country down again for the third time; an attempt on the life of the president and two senator assassinations - these were all just a few of the events prior to the EMP that were a hint of what was happening. They seemed unconnected but did their job well. People were on edge. They were scared and anxious. We were looking over our shoulders and jumping at backfire from a motorcycle.

For a kid still in school, the scariest events happening were the school shootings. The FBI were calling the shootings "copycat", especially after incidents two and three were at the same school. There was talk on the news of a conspiracy. Was there a group of radical maniacs targeting schools to scare people, or to disrupt democracy, or even to force the debate on gun-control? Were they trying to control the outcome of the upcoming elections? Was the FBI keeping it all secret and trying not to cause panic? There was talk, but nothing linked the killers, other than their lone shooter profile and their seemingly complete lack of interactions with other people.

Conspiracy theories were rampant with one that even said that aliens were on earth and destroying humans one school at a time. A stupid theory for sure, but people wanted answers and someone to blame, and aliens made as much sense as complete strangers attacking children with military-like precision.

One of my teachers said we were living in an historic, chaotic time that he called "crazy times", but he also said it was not as bad as the second pandemic. "You guys are too young to remember, but when the capitol was attacked for the second time, dozens died, including four United States Senators and four National Guardsmen." I think he thought he was comforting us by telling us how bad the old days were, but when he mentioned a possible return to remote learning if this kept up, he scared the shit out of us. 

The news about the school shootings grew worse with each incident. After the initial shock that school grounds were becoming target practice for insane men, and once a woman, intent on killing as many people as they could before they turned the gun on themselves, people became numb to the news. At first, children were taken out of public schools and placed in private schools or charter schools. Parents thought they would be safer, but the fourth attack - a car bomb that destroyed Surrey Charter School in downtown Des Moines and killed thirty three and wounded sixty seven - stopped the exodus. Parents then tried home schools, but after a shooter entered Safe Haven Home School in a small town in North Dakota and killed everyone there and two of the neighbors who ran to help, parents kept their kids where they were and demanded more security.

More security did not help. The last three shooters were school employees, one a recently hired security guard. The shooters became more creative with their methods of destruction. These atrocities - we didn't talk about - because they gave us all nightmares.

We were so dumb, we didn't even know the chaos before the EMP was part of a plan - a plan by a group of well-organized, covert homegrown terrorists who wanted to start the second American Revolution. The terrorists called themselves - The One Nation Army.