KARACHI, PAKISTAN
The world seemed to catch fire around them.
Gorman and Maryam rushed out of the bungalow as the chemical plant next door vanished behind a towering sheet of flames licking the night sky.
Nearly blinded by the inferno just over a block away, Gorman followed Maryam outside as the bungalow collapsed, trapping Lari and Manish. The heat grew intolerable and the floor trembled from the shock wave.
“Don’t look back!” he shouted, perspiration filming his face—and hers—from the skyrocketing temperature as he grabbed her hand and ran away.
They covered almost one quarter of a mile in a couple of minutes before finding a bike shop amidst people screaming and crying. Some were frozen in apparent shock while staring at the incoming wall of fire.
Without breaking stride Gorman grabbed a trash can, threw it through the front window, and jumped in, followed by Maryam.
They found the tallest two bikes and were out of there in under a minute, riding as fast as they could. They were both strong and, if they were being honest, both scared of being fried in place. However, no way were they going to cover the distance they needed, given the size of the explosions. Just behind them, massive refineries and chemical plants vanished in an inferno that got dangerously close to the colossal holding tanks used to service the oil supertankers.
He pedaled as fast as he could side by side with Maryam, maneuvering in near-darkness around people yelling and running in every direction, other bicycles, and hundreds of abandoned mopeds, cars, and trucks—their electronics fried by the EMP.
It was chaos on a grand scale.
Gorman did the math and guessed that if those storage tanks went off, the blast would swallow at least a third of the city.
So after a mile they started looking for a way to get below ground.
Karachi was dead, no lights, no vehicles, and hordes stampeding in every direction under the flickering glow of flames consuming this neighborhood. Almost no one, except the two of them, seemed to realize what was coming next.
The firestorm obscured the first of dozens of holding tanks lining the southern end of the port. The moment one went off, it would trigger an apocalyptic chain reaction.
“We need a large building!” she screamed.
“Or a deep basement!” he added, wading through the mob of panicked locals.
They maneuvered through several back alleys and down another crowded avenue. And that’s when Maryam pointed at a building site.
A large downtown station of the Karachi subway system was under construction. A billboard indicated it would include a large multilevel shopping center, market, office space, and parking garage. But most importantly, it would connect to the existing line between the Jinnah Airport and the Karachi Expo Center. It had a twenty-floor façade of steel and concrete and what he hoped would be multiple levels below. Being the middle of the night, there were no workers in sight, and because of the EMP, it was shrouded in darkness.
They ditched the bikes, climbed over the construction fence, and sprinted across a thousand feet separating them from the rising building.
Halfway there, they heard a noise behind them.
“We’ve got company,” Gorman said, pointing behind him. Some people had apparently realized what they were trying to do and had brought down a section of the fence. Dozens now raced through, past mounds of construction supplies and equipment, presumably also seeking shelter.
Gorman and Maryam pressed on, reaching the station nearly out of breath.
He looked back at the port area, now completely covered in flames that appeared to be at least five stories high. Towering fire forked skyward. Above it hovered clouds of burning ashes.
“Come!” he screamed, tugging her as a river of people stampeded through the breach in the fence toward the construction site in full panic. “We don’t have much time!”
They moved inside as fast as possible, using feel, though their eyes began to adjust to the darkness.
“There!” he said, pointing beyond piles of bricks, sand, and equipment. A wide set of stairs headed down into darkness, hopefully to the underground system.
Taking the steps quickly but carefully, they reached the lowest level under the dim glow of a handful of emergency lights that apparently had been deep enough below ground that they weren’t affected by the EMP. The place reminded Gorman of a New York subway platform, running for nearly five hundred feet alongside a train track.
They raced to the north corner, past crates packed with white subway tiles and stacked bags of cement, finally settling beneath a massive steel beam in case the building above them collapsed.
Sitting down on the floor facing each other, they took a moment to catch their breath as they heard the commotion of people a few floors above—
Blinding clouds of dust and an eardrum-breaking noise that consumed their world followed the blast, incomprehensible in its shocking power. Dust rained from the ceiling, from the sides, and even radiated from below, as everything was made from concrete.
The massive explosion that started in the harbor traveled to Gorman and Maryam in all the waves of energy: light, acoustic, overpressure, and heat—a complex tsunami, building in power as it washed over the construction site.
The vibration, powerful and deep, reverberated down to the basement, shaking the foundation with such force, Gorman feared his teeth would come loose from his gums.
The concrete-and-steel cavity trembled as the energy from the blast permeated through the construction site. Flashes of light pulsated down the stairs as the explosion exhaled through it like a massive windpipe, shooting fire and burning debris to the middle of the platform.
“Bill!”
He jumped over Maryam, shielding her, as the world collapsed around them.