[b]Day 1: September 12, 2024

Capital Building
Washington, DC[/b]

Speaker of the House Caroline Timms, from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was pulling out of one of the many parking garages near the Capitol building when the Pulse occurred. Normally, she would have been traveling in a heavy, medium armor SUV with a driver and a pair of Secret Service agents. But today she was heading home inconspicuously to speed the long weekend with her family. 

The unexplained electrical incident caused her 2025 model Prius to coast to a stop in the middle of an intersection, where it was slammed in the front passenger side by one larger vehicle as a second even larger one hit her simultaneously in the rear driver's side. The collisions caused her tiny Toyota to spin full around once before rolling slowly backwards down a slight but increasingly steeper incline until it came to a stop in the median's ditch. 

She remembered voices of people coming to her aid but no faces. Time passed as she was carefully removed from the crushed car and laid out on the ground. Caroline was only half aware of what was happening around her, her mind foggy from the trauma. What she [i]did[/i] realize was a lack of emergency vehicle sirens. People took turns tending to her, but without her glasses, all she could tell was that they were in turn male or female or both. 

"What's wrong with me?" she finally asked one of them. "I don't feel any pain. Am I paralyzed?"

One of the men helping her turned out was a medical student. He tested the reflexes in her limbs, finding her sense of touch fine. He told her, "I don't think you're hurt, ma'am. I think you're just in shock."

He turned out to be right. After a while, Caroline was able to get up and walk, though, there wasn't really anywhere to go. All of the cars surrounding her were dead. Hell, the entire city was dead. She asked a man in uniform, a DC police officer, "Were we attacked?"

"No one knows, ma'am," he told her honestly. "Do you need a hospital?"

She considered the offer, realizing that if she said yes, there was no way to get her there. She told him, "No, no, I'm fine. I'll, um ... I'll walk. I live just a couple of blocks away."

Caroline headed that way only a few steps before looking the other direction, toward the Capitol building. Maybe that was where she should be?