Canada Under Attack: Where Shadows Walk

Part 2

How did we find out, you say? With the power grid gone and smart phones dead in the water? Well, being an engineer and all, it didn't take my dad long after getting home to cobble together a ham radio set from parts gathering dust up in the attic. Stored in a metal box within a box that was grounded, something my Dad called a 'Faraday cage' that he had built one day when he was bored, the parts were protected from the EMP when it hit. Once it was assembled and hooked up to an old car battery, it became our window to a world filled with chaos.

It was the ham radio that told us the EMP which hit Lethbridge, had hit the entire world too, effectively killing the world's power grid and sending Humanity into the cold dark. A few other ham radios, including some that worked for government sources, were beacons of information in that dark. But they were so few, and the messages they did manage to relay were grim.

Millions had died in what now was so obviously an attack; victims of vehicles suddenly losing power, or systems failing. Hell, there were planes falling out of the damn sky! As a first strike, it bloodied our noses but didn't really hurt us. I mean, a couple million people seems like a lot, but not when compared to eight billion.

What the EMP did do, however, was crush our ability to respond. There had been talk before the attack of sending up a shuttle to see if we could make contact, or firing missiles at it if they proved to be hostile. After the attack we couldn't do any of that. All we could hurl at that glowing ball of malevolence was harsh looks and salty language.

Now the radio told us yet more bad news.

The aliens had struck again. This time, it was some sort of shock ram dropped from orbit. One of the ham radio guys, an old-school conspiracy theorist who had been watching the Mothership through a homemade telescope rig, saw it when it first dropped off the ship. A massive, gravity-assisted projectile twice the size of the CN Tower in Toronto, and probably several times heavier was his guess.

While I didn't see the thing drop, I was smart enough to figure out how the ram used momentum, mass and the pull of gravity to accelerate it to several times the speed of sound. It must've then hammered into a critical fault line with the force of several nukes going off, triggering an enormous earthquake.

It was bad. I mean, not an extinction event like an asteroid hitting us or anything. But bad enough. That earthquake sent compression ripples through the tectonic plates, the massive chunks of rock the continents float on. Those, in turn, created equally massive tsunamis that smashed into every coastline across the globe.

Nothing survived them. The coastal cities like Washington, Vancouver, Los Angeles, New York, Rio de Janeiro were simply washed away. Even cities on waterways connected to the oceans were gone, like Montreal, and Ottawa. Secondary quakes then caused more rifts in the plates to form, along with the widening of existing faults. That in turn resulted in more damage as a good chunk of North America's west coast sunk into the boiling Pacific.

It took about a day for the second wave of attack to finish. In it's wake, the face of our entire planet was changed.

More than half of the surviving ham radio operators disappeared during that attack. Hearing all the dead air as he tried the various channels during a break from working on the generator, Dad got pretty grim. Both Cam and I were standing there as he slowly got up from his rig, which he had set up in the dining room, after hearing about the attack with the shock ram.

"Dad?" I asked, seeing the look on his face. He looked at me for a long moment and I could almost see the thoughts spinning behind his eyes. Then:

"Grab your bike, Liam. We're going to go get your mom."