The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide to New New England & Beyond

Swim

The water was still warm, this late into the fall. Emily waded out into the breaking waves. She had scouted this beach to be sure she could swim without encountering underwater hazards like the remnants of old buildings. The tide was going out. It felt so good to be free of her troublesome life in this god awful town.

She was a strong swimmer. As a teen, she trained relentlessly with her coach, a man named Bobby Takeuchi who won gold in the freestyle during the second to last Olympics. Bobby was old then, but a powerful athlete and a wonderful mentor. Many hours in the pool were spent working on technique. If there had still been an Olympics, Bobby said Emily would have been a natural competitor.

Beginning with an easy breaststroke, she made her way over the tops of the breakers into the rolling ocean. She heard the first of the explosions behind her, knowing it was from the center of the courthouse. Most of her clothes were left on the dock, along with her scant jewelry. No one would look for a body. She was not that important.

Carefully set fires had driven the people out of the targeted structures. There should be few undesired casualties. New Atlantic didn't have a fire department. Buckets of sand and water were all that were available to those who wanted to put out the flames. Strategic standers-by would have encouraged the people to flee from the smoke. Hopefully, there would be no heroics.

A second boom sounded over the water. That would be the courthouse in the east wing. There would be fires burning all over town soon. People standing in the muddy streets watching their homes fill with smoke. The casinos, the shops, and the church would be fully ablaze before she had made it past the southern point to her right. The ocean was peacefully indifferent. It felt so good to swim again.

She wanted to check in with her son but knew she couldn't. She had had her suspicions about Barnabas' attack on Reverside, but didn't fathom the scope of it. When the Interconnected went dark, her co-conspirators were shocked. Luckily, all their plans were in place, long gathered explosives were ready and well hidden, incendiaries had been planted, and detonators could be triggered by close proximity. Still, the implications of the blackout were alarming.

The bombs themselves were gifts from Tuckahoe tribe. They were painstakingly printed to replicate chairs and tables found in the courthouse, church, and casinos in New Atlantic. These had been replaced skillfully by the team over the course of a year. The explosives themselves were a latticework of unstable carbon compounds woven throughout the furniture, keyed to blow apart at a specific voltage. The detonators were incorporated deep inside the structure and could only be triggered by a specific code delivered by one of the augmented members of her team. She had been told these items could catch fire and burn to ash without giving away their true purpose and without exploding. The technology was beyond her comprehension, but she trusted the super-mods who had created them.

The incendiary elements were smaller, and similar, but were designed to ignite rather than concuss. These were disguised as bowls, platters, pictures and other stationary objects which would avoid notice. The team members who delivered all of these to their staging locations were servants and waitstaff who could move objects without notice. Preparation had been uneventful. Emily had no doubts about the complete destruction of New Atlantic.

The difficult part of the plan was convincing the unaugmented members of New Atlantic the fires and explosions were the work of sabotage by a rival family. Stories had been planted in advance about the rivalry between the Yoniver and the Reynolds families. The arrival of Gladys Reynolds to New Atlantic had been the fortuitous trigger they needed to link the attack to another Neo-Feudal enclave. This would make the next step far easier.

Members of Livings-town and Trenton were already making their way to New Atlantic to help with the rebuilding of the town. With any luck, given the advances in technology, and improvements to the lifestyle which awaited them, the majority of the inhabitants would choose to join the Interconnected, and the shoreline of the Jersey would form a crucial link between the tribes of the Northeast and the Delaware.