Hunting for the Lamb of God

Chapter One/Hunting for the Lamb of God

The Bright Light and the Big Swoosh

By

Jamey O'Donnell

Brian had just blasted through the gauntlet of soldiers on his way to the church tower and was now positioning himself to take out the sniper at the top where the church bell hung above him. Rocky was playing alongside Brian and was making his move to flank the sniper in order to distract him, giving Brian enough time to load his RPG to take the sniper out.

Two rounds pinging off the church bell was all it took to draw fire from the sniper, and according to plan, the sniper fired back, enabling Brian to fire the RPG.

BOOM! Direct hit!

It was no sooner that the tower and its inhabitant exploded into pieces, when suddenly the bunker shook violently for a split second, and everything, including the Call of Duty game they were playing on the X Box, went dark.

“Aw man...what the heck” muttered Brian.

The lights, monitor, X Box, fan.... everything had suddenly lost power and the two boys, along with Brian’s older brother Mark, were sitting in complete pitch-black darkness in the doomsday bunker their dad had built in the backyard five years ago.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was at approximately 1:16 PM EST on May 24, 2022, when the lower 48 of the United States, most of Northern Mexico, the southern half of Canada, along with Cuba, Belize, and the Caribbean islands saw the big bright light.

There were technically 3 bright lights that spanned from the East to West coasts, with the east appearing first, followed by the west, then lastly the center between the two.

It was at that moment that the world took a quantum leap backward and nothing would ever be the same. Three nuclear warheads had just exploded 200 miles into space, in the thermosphere, over the United States within minutes of each other.

The first thing people saw was the blinding light that overtook the sun and everything else in view, followed by a loud swooshing sound that carried a massive shock wave with it...enough to knock people to the ground that were outside at that moment.

These effects were the result of three nuclear explosions strategically positioned over the United States, designed to create a super electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and cripple the U.S.

Cars on the roads and highways immediately stopped dead in their tracks, all things that ran on electricity came to a screeching halt, computer screens went black, phone conversations ended, television and radio broadcasts stopped, and 3200 jet airliners began to fall from the sky over America, Canada, and Mexico.

Over 2000 satellites were immediately disabled, and because the International Space Station was close by in their orbit of the Earth, it also lost power.

In the blink of an eye, the Northwestern Hemisphere of Earth had been thrown back into the Stone Age...all at the hands of Iran, being directed by North Korea.

These two countries had been secretly working together for years to implement this exact plan at this exact moment in time, leading right up to the minute and hour of this day, and it went off seamlessly without a hitch.

North Korea constructed the warheads and Taepodong-2 ballistic missiles, whereas Iran made the rocket launchers designed to be launched from shipping containers loaded on freighters off the east and west coasts of America while still at sea.

The third missile and launcher would be assembled and launched from inside Mexico after being smuggled in. This would be the first and pivotal warhead to be put into position, being placed a full year prior to launch day.

All the construction for the container launchers had been completed by the end of 2020 and were ready to go. The constructed warheads/missiles were smuggled into Iran by submarine from North Korea, then moved to Tarragona, a small burg outside of Barcelona, Spain, where the containers were modified for the mission and then loaded on two separate freighters, along with 6 soldiers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard ...one inside the container with the missile and launcher, the other 5 as passengers. One would be needed to unlock the doors of the container for the launcher to extend outward to fire its missile, with the other five soldiers to provide cover should any of the ship’s crewmen to try to prevent the launch.

The freighters were modified to have the launchers electronically extend out past the doors once they were opened, enabling the missiles to position themselves upwards for launch.

For this to be pulled off successfully, the container loading operators at both ports had to place the containers on the very top. This meant they and the shipping manifest had to be part of the plan, which they were.

One freighter would travel to the Port Authority in New York, and the other would travel south to traverse the Panama Canal and head north to the Port of San Diego, with both freighters stopping short 50 miles of their destination in order to launch from sea.

Before any of this happened, the first missile/warhead and launcher had to be successfully smuggled into Mexico and assembled for launch...which it was, but this would prove to be much more involved than anticipated.

The launcher would be smuggled in first in pieces by way of boat, then loaded on a truck to be driven to San Fernando, then north to a hangar in Matamoros, where it would be constructed and prepared for launch. The pieces for the warhead and missile would be brought in by submarine, loaded on a boat, then loaded on a truck in the same location as the launcher, taking the same route to the launcher’s final destination.

Accompanying the warhead and missile were 2 scientists from North Korea. They would complete the assembly of the missile, and the attachment of the warhead to the missile.

The assembly operation was started in January of 2021 and was completed in 6 trips, ending in June of the same year.

As the Mexico operation was beginning, Joseph Biden became President of the United States. He signed Executive Orders ceasing construction of the border wall that had been in development during the previous administration. This combined with new policies that were perceived as a “Come In, We Are Open for Business” sign, created a vacuum of people that came from around the world, in record numbers, in hopes of crossing into the United States in search of a better life for them and their families.

In March and April of 2021 alone, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended over 180,000 illegal immigrants each month, completely exhausting all Border Patrol manpower and resources. Pulling them off the border and leaving gaping holes for cartel coyotes (human smugglers) to bring women into the U.S. to be sex trafficked and their mules to transport drugs.

This created chaos unlike anything ever seen in the history of the U.S./Mexico border and posed a perfect opportunity to conduct an operation such as this. If there was ever a time when the U.S. would be distracted from other events in the world, it was now, so North Korea and Iran struck while the iron was hot and began their operation that would conclude the following year.

Iran had been suffering under crippling sanctions imposed by the United States for years as punishment for their aggressive nuclear program. While these sanctions were devastating their economy and their people, Iran continued their plan to construct a nuclear weapon that could be launched and delivered by an intercontinental ballistic missile reaching anywhere in the world, namely the United States.

They also never ceased being the number one state sponsor of terrorism around the world, funding Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Islamic Jihad, along with Al Qaeda, and later ISIS.

In July of 2015, the Obama administration facilitated the release of 150 billion American dollars it had been holding in frozen assets since 1979 when Iran took of 50 American hostages. On top of that, Obama secretly flew 1.7 billion American dollars in cold hard cash, on pallets, to Tehran in the dead of night. The release was done as a good faith gesture as part of the Iran Nuclear Deal, which required Iran to halt their enrichment of uranium and give unfettered access to the United Nations to all of Iran’s nuclear sites.

The deal was doomed from the start with America and the world getting the short end of the deal. Iran never stopped enriching uranium fully, and full access to the nuclear sites was never given to the U.N.

Many condemned the deal, as it was common knowledge that a good portion of that money would be used for the continued funding of terrorism around the world, namely the groups previously mentioned whose sole mission was the destruction and elimination of the state of Israel, our fiercest ally in the Middle East, and of course, the United States.

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump became President of the United States, and one of the first things our new President did was pull America out of this flawed deal with Iran, reinstated the sanctions that were there previously, and added more crippling sanctions to those already existing.

The final nail in the coffin for Iran was the execution of their highest military officer in command, Qasem Soleimani, who was taken out by a targeted drone strike on January 3, 2020, in Baghdad, Iraq.

Soleimani was personally responsible for the deaths of over 600 U.S. servicemen during the Iraq war, so he was a high priority target.

Enter North Korea.

Since the days of North Korea’s former leader Kim Jong-Il, this country has embarked on an aggressive nuclear program as well, prompting an agreement signed in 1994 by then President

Clinton entitled the “Agreed Framework”, giving North Korea four billion dollars in energy aid in exchange for their halting their quest for nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula. Unfortunately, this agreement broke down in 2003 and they resumed their quest for nuclear proliferation. Many believe they never stopped.

Since that time, there have been massive sanctions placed on North Korea that have steadily increased up until now.

Fast forward to the death of Kim Jong-Il in December of 2011.

He was succeeded as Supreme Leader by his son, Kim Jong-Un, and like his father, he has ruled his country with an iron fist with little regard for his people, and also like his father, he believes that he and his country’s continued existence rely upon their possession of their own nuclear weapons program.

One of President Trump’s first priorities was to get North Korea back to the table to negotiate an agreement that would finally end their desire for nuclear weapons, and for a short time, it looked as though President Trump was making significant headway with the young leader…and just might achieve what past administrations had been unable to.

President Trump and Kim Jong-Un would meet a total of three times, the first being in June 2018 in Singapore, then again in Hanoi, Vietnam, and then finally at the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) between North and South Korea on June 30, 2019, where President Trump became the first President in history to step foot in North Korea by stepping over the DMZ line into that country. He was met by Kim Jong-Un there, where they shook hands and posed for pictures, then immediately crossed over to the South Korean side and had a meeting at The Freedom House.

Afterward, Trump escorted Kim Jong-Un back over to the North Korean side.

This was an ongoing process that had its setbacks for sure, but it was more than any President had been able or willing to accomplish.

Had Trump won re-election, who knows how far the process could have gone, but once Trump was defeated in November 2020, this changed the dynamic between North Korea and the United States, which led to the decision by both Iran and North Korea to move forward with their plan to once and for all destroy the United States and rid themselves of these economically crippling sanctions that had flatlined both countries for so long.

The relationship between these two countries did not begin here, but had been ongoing for years prior, beginning in the 1980’s.

Over the course of the last four decades, North Korea has been sending missiles to Iran via air transport with stops in China and Pakistan, (lending to the belief that those countries were aware of what North Korea was doing, which should come as no surprise since China was and is heavily dependent on Iranian oil and is also the final word over anything North Korea does).

The two countries came to the decision to strike almost immediately after the 2020 United States Presidential election, based upon its results and the overbearing sanctions, but also because America was at its weakest.

In the beginning of 2020, the world was hit with a deadly pandemic, a coronavirus engineered in a lab in Wuhan, China, but not known to come from there at the time of its release.

In the beginning, it was thought to have originated in a wet market in Wuhan, then spread across the world by its citizens traveling abroad. Soon it made its way to the U.S., and by 2021 there were over 33 million cases reported with almost 600 thousand deaths.

Worldwide there were 178 million cases reported with over 3.5 million deaths.

Covid 19, as it was named, devastated a thriving American economy as travel was shut down for months to China, Europe, The British Isles, and eventually South America.

The airline industry had almost come to a screeching halt as no one was flying.

Restaurants, hair salons, fitness gyms, any government deemed non-essential business was prohibited from doing business as usual, throwing the workforce out of work and onto unemployment benefits that were complimented by hefty money provided by the Federal government, paid for by several emergency stimulus packages passed by Congress that amounted to over 10 trillion dollars, increasing the national debt from 20 trillion to over 30 trillion dollars.

Combine that with the Biden administration slashing jobs by cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline and halting construction on the border wall, thereby eliminating America as the number one energy producer in the world, hyperinflation in virtually every goods bought and services performed in America, the immigration crisis at the border, and the attacks on Israel (sustaining over 4000 rocket attacks from Hamas in the Gaza Strip), America was at a tipping point and seemed to have no answers under the current administration.

If there was a bright point in this time, it would be the vaccines that were created for Covid 19 under the Trump administration in late 2020. By mid-2021, nearly half of the population in America had been inoculated, and the rest of the world was not far behind.

Things were beginning to open again with mask mandates being eased.

Had this not happened when it did, there is no telling how bad things would be in the world at the time of the attack.

In mid-2020, it started to become apparent that the Covid 19 virus did not originate in one of the wet markets in Wuhan, but instead escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology 10 miles from the suspected outdoor market, thus shifting the focus and blame onto China.

Up until this point, China, and the World Health Organization (WHO) had dismissed claims of this being the case, but further research and investigation showed that scientists in the lab were hospitalized with Covid like symptoms back in November of 2019, just before the virus started to spread. It was also discovered that this laboratory was in the process of specifically working with coronaviruses, and in essence, weaponizing them…putting China in the spotlight and leaving them exposed to hundreds of thousands of lawsuits from the American people alone, so…how upset would China be if something happened to the United States, thereby taking the focus off China, putting it elsewhere?

To believe that China knew nothing about the impending attack is really a stretch, even to the most China friendly skeptics. Regardless of how much they knew, they did nothing to stop the attack, even with the worldwide ramifications that taking the United States off the global stage would present to the world’s economy, and most likely leading to a worldwide economic collapse, but what it would do is elevate China to be the sole superpower in the world. This is something China was planning on achieving by the year 2050 anyway, so having knowledge of this and not trying to prevent it would only strengthen their position in the world and speed up their timeline.

The most amazing thing about this operation is how they were able to fly this under the radar of the free world. Had there not been the pandemic, combined with a new administration overwhelmed with the results of their new policies leading the United States, chances are more likely than not it would have been discovered, uncovered, and thwarted.

So, this is how the end of America as we know it took place on May 24, 2022.

Everything about the launches were pre-planned, right down to the second.

Both freighters outside of New York City and San Diego were in position, as was the missile launcher in Matamoros, Mexico.

The first missile launched was off the freighter outside of New York City, heading straight for the heavens. It was immediately picked up by the United States missile defense system and patriot missiles were deployed to intercept, but because the ICBM was heading straight out to space and had no land target, it was unable to be intercepted, as the defense missiles were chasing a missile that had a good head start to its destination.

Within seconds of the east coast launch, the ICBM off the coast of San Diego was also deployed into space with the same results as the first.

Within seconds of that, the final launch of the third missile took place in Mexico.

When all three missiles reached into the thermosphere at 200 miles above the earth, all three exploded within seconds of each other, creating a super electromagnetic pulse sent to the earth, frying every single power line, transformer, cell phone, battery, radio signal, automobile, airplane, computer, and appliance.

Everything immediately stopped.

Medical equipment, such as ventilators stopped ventilating.

Pacemakers stopped working, causing those who had them to fall dead in their tracks.

Elevators stopped between floors, trapping those inside.

Freezers keeping meats and medical supplies from thawing stopped freezing.

Phone conversations were abruptly interrupted by silence.

Surgeons in the middle of an operation were suddenly left in pitch blackness holding their scalpels in hand, not knowing what to do next.

Subway cars filled with people became dark, with only the flashlights from cell phones to provide light. The only electronic devices to survive the blasts were those shielded by being underground or in an encased concrete enclosure.

Stop lights ceased stopping cars.

Cars went dead on the highways, over 3200 jet airliners fell out of the sky, lights and air conditioning came to a halt, tv and radio stopped transmitting, and water stopped running.

Fail safe and fail secure locks went into effect, locking in prisoners in jails and prisons, locking bank vaults, and unlocking doors in public buildings, markets, theatres, and any other structure that relied on fail safe locks for their security.

The more urban the area, the harder it was hit.

Big cities and their suburbs across America immediately became a collection of death zones, but the rural areas of America suffered the same circumstances, only not as condensed.

Farmer’s tractors stopped in the fields, dairy farmers suddenly lost their milking machines, and maybe the only living things happy for this respite were the livestock about to be slaughtered.

Trains across America had stopped on the tracks and ships in the blast zone stopped at sea, leaving their precious cargo to float aimlessly.

Semi-trucks on the highway stopped rolling and their refrigerated goods stopped getting refrigerated.

Gas stations stopped pumping gas.

There were no police or ambulances to come to the aid of its people, and no way for them to reach you even if they could.

The Cavalry was not coming.

The President or the United States Congress would not be arriving to our aid.

From that moment on, there would be no government programs to rely on.

The only vehicles and buildings hardened to withstand an attack of this magnitude were in the military and those in Washington D.C., and those were few and far between across the 3000-mile expanse of this country, so depending on them to help you would be an act in futility and basically signing your own death warrant. Besides, even if they could reach you to help, what would they help you with?

It would take weeks, possibly months before the rest of the world could respond and come to our aid. As bad as it was for America and most of Canada, it was so much worse for Northern Mexico. For Cuba and the Caribbean Islands? A horrific disaster of biblical proportion. After all, we are talking about 550 million people in dire distress that were affected.

Unless you were a doomsday survivalist and planned for a situation exactly like this, the cold hard facts were that you would probably be dead in the not-too-distant future.

The horrible reality is that close to 90% of America would be dead within the year.

Diabetics would not have insulin to survive, many would die of thirst, cancer patients would not get their treatment, infections normally treated with antibiotics would result in many deaths, food would become extremely scarce in a matter of weeks, and diseases would go untreated.

Then there is the criminal element to consider.

Though America was one of the most humane societies in the world, it also had its fair share of evil incarnate in the form of mankind. Throughout the years, society had disintegrated into human beings that had lost all sense of goodness, or never had it to begin with.

Men walked the streets with no more regard for human life, or any life for that matter, than they would have for walking through the door of someone’s home and stealing their possessions.

These are men and women living their lives without God. Some of them may not knowingly embrace Satan, but they most certainly embrace his evil whether they realize it or not.

Many of them have help being this way due to their dependance on drugs…methamphetamine being the number one drug employed by this element.

Ironically, the most equipped to survive a nightmare such as this are the homeless, many of which are the very meth addicts described here.

They are used to living with next to nothing, dealing with whatever weather they find themselves in, living hand to mouth, taking what they need to survive, and victimizing anyone standing in their way of getting whatever it is that they want or need.

If there was a saving grace for the rest of society, it was the fail-secure locks keeping the prisoners in all the jails and prisons behind bars, saving all their potential victims from being savaged by these beasts upon their release into the world.

Since we are really talking about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, we must spend some time on pestilence.

With all the immediate deaths that would happen, there would be diseases run rampant upon what was left of society, infecting millions with no recourse or way to be treated.

What would happen with the dead? Would they be buried, moved, burned…or eaten?

All these scenarios would come into play.

Though it’s an overused adage, it had never been truer than during that time…only the strong would survive.

The world had become so reliant on things and people to take care of them, the population had collectively lost their ability to survive the way our ancestors were able to, braving the elements with no electricity or creature comforts, unlike the soft underbelly of today’s society.

Other than the occasional plane falling from the sky across America, the screams of people in disbelief of what was happening, or the occasional dog barking, the northwestern hemisphere became quiet.

Eerily quiet.

Church mouse quiet.

Depending on where you were at the time of the explosions, you either saw nothing, or if you were outside, you saw the bright light in the sky followed by the big swoosh of sound, then you felt a momentary shock wave that might have caused your feet to fail you.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Don’t move,” said Mark. Then there was light as he turned on the flashlight on his cell phone, illuminating the underground bunker that he, his little brother Brian, and Brian’s friend Rocky from across the street were in.

“Man, you gotta be shitting me. Circuit breaker must have broken or the power’s out in the neighborhood. Brian…go up top and check the breaker box,” said Mark.

As Brian whisked up the stairwell and opened the big lead-coated door to the outside, daylight splashed into the bunker, illuminating the inside and all of its contents.

“Wow, it was creepy down here when there wasn’t any light” exclaimed Rocky as Brian went up the stairs to open the steel door leading to the backyard outside.

“Hey, you guys…come out here!” yelled Brian down the stairs. “The telephone pole is on fire!”

Both boys ran up the stairs and out the door to look up and see the transformer Brian was talking about ablaze up top of the utility pole at the back corner of their backyard.

“Jesus…does it look different out here to you guys?” whispered Mark.

All 3 were craning their heads, with Brian and Rocky nodding in agreement.

The air had an electric blue tint to it, and the sky was brighter than usual.

“I guess this explains why the power went out,” said Mark.

Just then, Mark and Brian’s mom came out the back door of the house and yelled to the boys “I just tried to call the fire department, but the phone’s dead. My cell phone won’t work either.”

Mark walked over to her and said, “Let me see it Mom”.

She handed it over to him and it was black…dead as a doornail.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone and it was working fine, then he tried calling his mom’s phone, but got nothing. No sound, no busy signal, no “call can’t be completed as dialed” statement…not anything at all.

He then tried calling his dad in D.C.

Again, nothing.

Just as he was about make a comment, they all heard a strange sound from the sky and looked upward to see a big passenger jet about 15,000 feet in altitude to the northwest falling from the sky like a bird that had just been shot dead in flight.

“OH MY GOD!” screamed his mother in horror as she pointed up to the sky.

Within a few seconds, it dropped out of view behind the very tall willow tree at the side of the house and was followed by an enormous explosion that you could hear in the distance, maybe about 5 miles away.

“DID YOU SEE THAT?”, screamed Rocky.

Then you could see the plume of black smoke rising above the trees and filling the sky.

“What is happening?” said Mom, her words barely audible as she whispered in terror.

It was then that Rocky bolted through the side gate toward home across the street, yelling behind him that he is going to check on his sister and brother.

At this point, the boy’s mother Viv would have gotten her husband, who was most likely at work for the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., on the phone to update him on what had just happened, but without a working phone, that was impossible now.

“Let’s go in the house and turn on the TV. There should be something about that plane we just saw crash!” Brian suggested, so Viv walked in the house with Brian right behind her, leaving Mark in the backyard pondering.

Mark was trying to make sense of the burning transformer on the pole, the blue tint to the air surrounding him, the phones not working, and now the plane falling out of the sky…almost simultaneously.

“Power’s out in the house. TV isn’t working, nothing is working…not even the water. I can’t get it to turn on. Refrigerator is off too,” shouted Brian out the window to Mark.

Power is out too? This might be something serious. He was really wishing he could call his dad right now. He’d know what to do.

His dad was a prepper of sorts…someone that prepares for end of the earth kind of stuff; hence, the doomsday bunker in the backyard. Five years ago, his dad Bill really began to pay attention to that kind of stuff, shortly after he took that job in Washington working for the government. Suddenly one day Bill decided that they needed to be prepared in case something catastrophic were to happen, so after discussing it with Viv, he invested in a whole bunch of freeze-dried food; meals that had a shelf life of 25 years, and it was enough to feed the family for more than a year.

Mark was 17, so that made him only 12 at the time. He remembers the day the truck pulled up to the house and delivered all those boxes with different food dish labels on them because he, his dad, and the delivery driver spent close to an hour unloading the boxes out of the truck and stacking them along the back wall of the garage.

A couple days later a truck pulled up, this time with a driver and a helper with him, and they were there to deliver 500 cases of bottled water, stacked and shrink wrapped on pallets, and the only place to put them were in the garage. It was that day his mom and dad began parking their cars in the driveway and out on the street because there was no room for them in the garage, at least until the bunker was created.

A month later a crew showed up early in the morning, took down the section of fence alongside of the house, and drove a backhoe into the backyard, then proceeded to dig a giant hole 14 foot deep, 15 feet wide, and 30 feet long.

A room was created when the cement truck showed up a couple days later and poured cement into forms constructed using plywood and 2x4’s. When finished and cured, the room was approximately 14 feet wide, 20 feet long, with an 8-foot-high ceiling, and a very long, wide, and exceptionally steep stairwell.

The backhoe came back a few days later and filled the remainder of the hole on top of the room with the dirt he had pulled out originally, and a smaller little tractor showed up to remove the rest of the dirt from the backyard, which was then loaded it into a trailer, then hauled away from the house.

Next, Bill had a special door made for the entrance that had a lead coating, then he had an electrician run conduit into the bunker to provide electricity.

Throughout the remainder of that year, Bill and Mark finished the bunker themselves by painting, carpeting, and basically making it a home away from home for the boys.

When they had completed the finishing touches, the two of them assembled some metal shelving against the back wall, unloaded the cans of freeze-dried food out of the boxes that contained them, then toted them down the stairs, filling half of the shelving with the cans of food. Next, they carried 50 cases of the bottled water off one of the pallets in the garage and loaded the other half of the shelving with those, then stacked the other 450 cases of water all the way up to the ceiling against the back wall of the garage where the food had been, which is also when the cars could once again be parked inside.

The bunker was not made to live in but was merely a place to survive should the unthinkable happen: a disaster, such as a tornado, or something else they could not imagine.

They brought down an old couch and coffee table, a TV with an X Box, a boom box for music, some board games, and an electric heater for the wintertime.

After re-sodding over the dirt patch on top of the bunker, you would never know the bunker was there, except for the lead door that was painted green to match the grass.

Over the next 5 years, the bunker became a place for Mark, Brian, and their friends to hang out and play video games or watch TV in and was also a great place to beat the heat in the summer because it was naturally much cooler temperature-wise due to its subterranean nature.

The bunker was like an insurance policy that you never expect to use, but the peace of mind that came with having it made the expense of it all worthwhile to Bill.

One thing that Bill had stressed to the boys was keeping the bunker on the down low.

Should an emergency ever happen, and they needed to retreat to it, the last thing they needed was to have the neighborhood at its door trying to get inside. It was only big enough for the four members of the family, so better not to tell any of their friends of its existence.

Well, boys will be boys, and it did not take long for some of their friends to be invited into it by Bill’s sons, but for the most part, it remained pretty much a secret to the neighborhood, which is what Bill really wanted all along.

So, it remained that way through the next few years.

It never really occurred to anyone that this bunker would turn out to be a lifesaver for the family, but it was indeed.

There were other things in the bunker as well, such as a Faraday cage. A Faraday cage is a box or case made with wire mesh, metal sheets, or both, and its purpose is to shield anything kept inside it from electromagnetic waves, such as batteries, phones, computers, flashlights, radios…basically anything electrical.

The Faraday cage in the bunker possessed items that would come to be useful over the coming days, weeks, and months, and these items were worth more than their weight in gold.

“Mom…I’m going to drive over to see where that plane crashed and see if I can be any help. Maybe Brian wants to come with?” Mark queried as he winked at Brian.

“Yeah…I’ll go with you”, said Brian as he was already halfway out the front door.

“Ok boys. Be careful. I’m sure it’s going to be dangerous if you get too close to it if you find it, so DON’T GET TOO CLOSE!” Viv snapped back.

When Mark got out to his car parked on the street in front of the house, Brian was already sitting in the passenger seat. Brian liked riding with his older brother, and it never mattered where they were going, as long as the car was moving.

Mark got in behind the wheel, then turned to his brother and said, “Brian, what do you think you are going to see when we get there? A lot of dead bodies. That’s what. Are you ready for that?”

“I have no idea to be honest with you, but I’m sure whatever it is, I’ll be able to handle it. If anyone is still alive, they’re going to need help, and if I can help someone, I want to be able to be there to do that, so let’s go big brother”, said Brian.

Just as Mark was going to put the key in the ignition of his 2005 Honda Accord, he noticed a car in the middle of the street. The car had its hood open with a man leaned inside the engine compartment.

“Maybe our neighbor needs a jump. I’ll ask him when I pull up next to him”, Mark said under his breath.

Then he turned the key…nothing. No lights came on, the engine did not turn over, not even once. Nothing happened at all.

“What the heck? I just had this baby serviced last week and the last time I drove it was last night and it was running perfectly”, yelled Mark.

He tried it again. Again, nothing.

He looked up the street at the car in front of him stalled, looked at his hood, then noticed two more cars farther up his street…both seeming to be dealing with the same issues as the guy leaning over his engine compartment, and then it hit him like a ton of bricks.

WE’VE BEEN HIT!

This is exactly the thing his dad had been talking about all these years.

We’ve either been hit by a solar flare or something manmade, but this looks and feels like an EMP, at least how his dad had always described it, which meant that not only was he not driving anywhere, neither would anyone else be.

To think of it, he hadn’t heard an automobile since they came out of the bunker 20 minutes ago, or anything else.

He stopped Brian as he was getting ready to say something with a “shoosh” hand wave as he opened his car door to listen outside…and he heard nothing…nothing at all.

No cars, no planes, no sirens in the distance, nothing.

It wasn’t even this quiet at night, let alone at noontime during a workday.

He just stared out the window and really began to see what was happening on his street.

There were some people in their front yards just looking around, some other neighbors standing in the street talking to each other, with some of them making hand gestures toward the sky, but what became sobering was that Mark could not remember the last time he saw this many people outside their homes at this time during the week, figuring to himself that with most of his neighbors at work, these people he was seeing outside must have constituted just about every single person that was home.

That was kind of shocking to him, since the only time he would see this many of his neighbors outside would be on a weekend, with most of them mowing their lawns or washing their cars.

These people were just standing in disbelief, not knowing what to do or even think about what was happening.

“Come on man, let’s go in the house. We need to talk to mom”, Mark barked to Brian as he was already out of the car.

The two ran inside to find Viv in the kitchen over the stove heating some water.

Mark put his hand on his mom’s shoulder and asked, “Mom. Do you know what’s happening?”

Before she could answer, Mark continued, “Mom, I think this is more than the power going out. I couldn’t get my car to even turn over…no lights, nothing”

Then he noticed the flame burning under the pot of water under the stove.

“Dad always said that if we were hit by an EMP, the gas would continue to come through the line for some time after, right? Mark asked.

“Is that what you think has happened?”, she asked.

“The transformer is on fire, the air has a blue tint to it, the power lines are smoking, nothing electrical is working in the house, the car won’t start, there’s other cars stuck in the middle of the street, the phones aren’t working, and a jet fell out of the sky…isn’t this what Dad has been preparing us for all these years”? Mark answered.

“Lord Jesus. I need to get a hold of your father”, she said as she backed into a kitchen chair to sit down.