The Enemy Within

Arthritis forced her to move slowly, and the smoke was a little thicker by the time she made it to the kitchen. She picked up the receiver and frowned. Nothing. No dial tone at all. Not even static. Just silence. She dialed 911 anyway, but there was no response.

“Oh, my Lord,” she breathed.

Dropping the useless telephone, she left the kitchen almost running, ignoring the pain shrieking through her joints. The smoke was thicker, and the front door seemed a hundred miles away.

Precisely at 1:00 P.M., eastern standard time, all of the switching computers for the Midwest Telephone company had suddenly ceased to make connections. Occupied with some internal, mysterious task, they were no longer taking any calls.

Inside a service area that spilled across two time zones, Midwest Telephone was relied on by 40 million Americans living in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana for telecommunications service.

1:05 EM, EST Detroit Officer Bob Calvin tried to phone his girlfriend from the fast-food joint he’d stopped at for his lunch break.

Calvin was of medium height, with a very dark complexion, only one shade removed from jet black. He kept his hair cut high and flat on the sides, emphasising his lean, narrow face. He was in his late twenties, a seven-year veteran of Detroit’s police force. Although smaller than some, he kept a lot of energy in his frame, and he could move fast and hard when necessary.

He had the 0800-to-1600-hours shift, driving a police car through one of Detroit’s tougher neighborhoods. Come the afternoon and graveyard shifts, they’d have two men in the car, but in the daytime one cop per vehicle was all the force could spare. Usually, he didn’t mind riding alone in this neighborhood. He’d grown up here. He’d even volunteered for this beat. Now, though, he’d been around long enough to know just how close it was to the edge.

Hell, the whole city was… Calvin realized the phone he was holding wasn’t working and hung up.

He left the restaurant and climbed back into his patrol car. He reached under the seat and pulled out a small cellular phone. Although they were expensive to use, many cops bought them as backups for the car radio, or to make personal calls when phones weren’t available like now.

He pressed the dial and 1 buttons and heard the phone dialing. But the message window displayed “no connection.” He tried again, with the same results. What exactly was going on?

He put the portable away, a scowl on his face. The bum phone meant another long explanation to Linda, he thought irritably. He enjoyed her company and her conversation, but she was not a patient woman. The dangerous aspects of his job also worried her, and she often needed to hear that he was still okay.

“All units on this frequency, all units,” the radio crackled as he settled himself and started the engine. “Repeat, all units. Landline phone service is out. No incoming or outgoing calls from Dispatch can be made. The problem may be citywide.”

“Wonderful,” Calvin muttered sarcastically. The city was on the verge of blowing up, and now the utilities were on the blink. At least that explained his problem.

He often missed having a partner not for backup, but just someone to keep him company and bitch to at times like this. He could share his worries with another cop, but not with Linda.

The nationwide, tit-for-tat wave of white racist and black supremacist terrorism was threatening to tear Detroit apart. He’d seen some of the confidential memos circulating through the department. Many in high places were increasingly worried by the prospect of major trouble between the city’s poor, black inner-city neighborhoods and its affluent, white suburban neighborhoods. Far too many of Detroit’s people were already choosing up sides. Plenty of “black spokesmen,” radicalised by the violence or radical to begin with, spoke of “taking the war back to the whites.” And too many of their white counterparts were talking the same kind of garbage. The ugly reality of a race war seemed to lie just around the corner.

Calvin shook his head. He’d broken up a lot of interracial arguments lately. Vandalism and other low-level crimes were way up, and gang activity was at an all-time high. He saw the murderous punks all the time now, in packs on the streets, just hanging or cruising from somewhere to nowhere, just looking for trouble. All they needed was a spark to set them off.

Even as he worried, a small corner of his mind relaxed, imagining the tack he could take with Linda. “I tried to call you, honey, but the phones were out.” Best excuse in the world.

But he knew that the solution for his small problem with his girlfriend had created a much bigger problem for the city as a whole. Well, with luck, the phone company would uncross their wires in short order and bring everything back online.