Cannibal Reign

Twenty-Eight

Three months had passed since the asteroid strike, and the skies had long since grown dim. The average temperature in the Hawaiian Islands now hovered at thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, and the ocean life had at last begun to die off. However, there were still fish in the sea to be caught, and the Navy had their hands full protecting the fishing vessels from pirate attack. Admiral Preston Longbottom drew a careful breath before making his response, reminding himself that the people of Hawaii had elected a government, and that a military must exist to serve that government.

“Madam President,” he said patiently, “I am not disagreeing with you, but you must understand that we need to patrol the Islands. There are still pirates in these waters.”

Ester Thorn, now the president of the United Hawaiian Islands, had reluctantly accepted the office six weeks earlier, and so far she was not terribly pleased with the progress they were making toward securing the future of the Islands. The population of 1.2 million was doing well in terms of cooperation with their newly elected government, but there was growing unease over the dwindling food supply, and the announcement that rations were to be cut again had not been well accepted.

“I don’t mean to be obstinate, Admiral,” Ester said, “but I’ve told you before that your men and their expertise are needed elsewhere. If the pirates attack the fishing boats, by all means blow them out of the water, but don’t waste time looking for them. You’ll never hunt them out of existence. We’re bringing half the vessels back into port and that’s my final decision.”

Longbottom sat back looking pissed. The idea of taking orders from an astronomer did not ride well with him at all, but the crotchety old bitch had been elected in a landslide. At least her vice president was Barry Hadrian, former twice-elected President of the United States and hugely popular in the Islands.

At first Hadrian had not approved of the idea of canning the old state government in favor of an entirely new federal government, but saw that it was inevitable—the vast majority of people in the Islands were demanding a fresh start. When he began to hear talk that the military element in the Islands was considering militarizing the government, he approached Ester and offered himself as her vice presidential candidate. With his support, the other three candidates, all of them lifelong politicians, didn’t have a prayer of being elected.

“I think what President Thorn is trying to say, Admiral,” Hadrian interjected, realizing that Longbottom was mostly trying to preserve the size of his force and thus maintain his importance, “is that we’re in dire straits as far as feeding the population is concerned, and that your engineers and other servicemen will be better utilized trying to solve those much more immediate problems.”

Dr. Harold Shipman, here in his new capacity as adviser, smiled at Ester. Neither of them had any illusions about who at the table had actually kept the Navy in check to this point.

“Yes, sir,” Longbottom said, still respectful to the former commander-in-chief.

“The wind farms are providing us with enough electricity to run our essential services,” Ester continued, “and the natural gas is keeping us warm. But we’re not moving fast enough on indoor farming. Which is where we must focus our efforts, gentlemen, until we have solved the problem. We’re not going out the way they did at Easter Island centuries ago by devouring one another.”

This had been one of Ester’s campaign promises, and she never passed up the chance to restate it, understanding how real the possibility was of the food running out. By now most shopping malls and grocery stores—most buildings with fluorescent lighting—were on the way to being converted into greenhouses. But Ester was well aware that once their fluorescent bulbs burnt out, there was no immediate way of replacing them. New technology had to be developed as soon as possible, using resources available within the Hawaiian Island chain.

“Admiral?” she said, having a sudden idea. “How difficult would it be to use the nuclear reactors aboard your aircraft carriers and submarines to power a new industrial center?”

Longbottom sat forward, casting a surprised glance at Hadrian. “What sort of industrial center?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s for you and your engineers to work out. I’ve already said many times that I don’t believe for a single moment there aren’t enough resources among these islands for us to sustain ourselves without the sun, but we need men of vision. There are civilian engineers here, but yours are the best and the brightest, and I’m convinced that if we’re to be saved by new technologies, your engineers will be the people who develop them. We still need the Navy, Admiral, but we need them to perform an entirely different mission now.”

Longbottom drew another breath and sat looking at the table. “Madam President,” he said at length, “I’m getting old and I’m afraid I haven’t a great deal of faith in new technology.”

“I was reading about Golda Meir last night,” Ester remarked. “For obvious reasons.”

Everyone chuckled, however dutifully.

“And she once said something that I find applicable to our situation. She said, ‘Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots… and diffidence falls short.’ Now, we all know that I don’t make a pimple on Golda’s backside, but I’m smart enough to know that she was right. Your men and women have an abundance of ability, Admiral, and they’ll work to solve our problems… but I need you on board.”

Longbottom sat thinking for a long moment, realizing that fighting against the tide would serve no one’s interest.

“Perhaps I’ve grown too fatalistic about the future,” he said slowly. “Perhaps there is a way. I don’t know. But I’ll put together a committee and—”

“No committees!” Ester said. “Committees are the old way of doing business and we don’t have the time. Gather your engineers and your mechanics, your avionics experts and every other expert you’ve got. Gather them in the hangar of one those floating airports you command out there and tell them I want them—what we want them to think about! And to start thinking right now! To work to save the life of the human race. And forget about bloody goddamn pirates!”

Hadrian sat smiling in his chair, happy to see that Ester had at last found her way with the Navy. “Does that sound like a great enough challenge for you, Admiral?”

The admiral looked at him, a slight grin coming to him. “Yes, sir, Mr. Vice President. But to be honest, I think I’d rather have to fight the cold war all over again.”

“This is a cold war,” Hadrian replied, “as cold as any of us can imagine. It snowed right here in Honolulu last week.”

“I know,” Longbottom said, looking grim. “Dirty, gray snow.”

“It’s a worthy fight,” Ester said. “And we owe it to our progeny to make it.”

“I’ll do my best, Madam President. You have my word.”

“That’s all anyone can ask for,” Ester said. “Thank you for being here today. I know that meeting with me was the last thing you felt like doing.”

“There’s something else that Golda Meir once said, Madam President.”

“Let me have it,” she said glumly.

“She said, ‘Being seventy is not a sin.’”

Ester allowed herself to smile at the man for the first time since meeting him. “So then you see, Admiral, why I trust her judgment.”

After the meeting adjourned, Ester sat alone in her office with Hadrian. “You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

“Not at all,” Hadrian replied. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you knew what I was trying to accomplish in there even before I did… and yet you let me twist.”

“You needed to find your own way with him, Ester. You gained some of his respect in there today. Had I done all your talking for you, he’d still be paying us lip service. Whereas now, I think he may actually be with us.”

“In other words, you weren’t entirely on board before this meeting either.”

“This was your sink or swim moment, Ester,” he said with a smile. “Every politician has one. Congratulations. You’ve made it to the edge.”

Ester shook her head. “Me a politician. I swear if I ever see that Chittenden boy again, I’ll crack him over the head with this cane.”

“Who’s Chittenden?”

“The astronomer who got me into this unholy mess,” she said. “If it weren’t for that boy, I’d be rocking in the bosom of my Lord right now instead of having chess matches with admirals.”

Hadrian smiled. “It may well be that the human race will one day owe this Chittenden a great debt of gratitude.”

“That hope lies with the Navy,” she said. “The Navy and a favorable wind.”

Twenty-Nine

The last three months had not been kind to Private Shannon Emory, who was now the property of a man the bikers called Brutus. He possessed her in virtually every sense that one human being could possess another. She fought savagely every time he came to take her, which was at least once a day, and he always laughed as he pinned her down and forced himself upon her. She had bitten him once on the neck early in her captivity, and he had beaten her for it, promising to bust out her teeth if she ever did it again. So Emory did not try to bite him after that, though she had vowed to bite off anything he put into her mouth, and he must have believed her because so far he had not yet attempted to do so.

She spent most of her days now locked in a motel room in Mesa, Arizona, where the temperature fluctuated between twenty and thirty degrees. There was no heat in the building, so she spent most of her time sitting on the bed wrapped in blankets. She was allowed to keep her uniform and boots, and had so far been fed decent food, but the selection grew poorer over the weeks, and for the past few days now she had been given nothing to eat but cans of creamed corn and lima beans.

She knew the Mongols had recruited more biker types to their cause and that their numbers were now close to a hundred. They were also taking prisoners for food, literally feeding upon the weak. In the early days, from her balcony on the tenth floor, she had watched the flammable parts of the city burned and the populace fleeing south. Few police remained behind, and those who did were quickly killed off by lawless mobs of men looking to rape and plunder away their final days on earth.

Civilized people had banded together and done rather well for the first month or so after the impact, until their food supplies gave out and they grew too weak to fight, either taking their own lives or being overrun by those willing to eat human flesh in order to survive. The males had been killed and eaten straight away, the females abducted and raped and finally eaten as well. Twice, even the biker motel had been attacked. But the Mongols were violent, Vikinglike warriors. They fought with everything from pistols and machine guns to axes and machetes, teaching even the local sociopaths to stay away.

A few small convoys of military vehicles had passed through town headed south, and the Mongols ambushed a couple of them, taking the ammunition and food. By the end of the second month, Mesa City had grown bitter cold and become more or less a ghost town, people only emerging at night to scavenge for food. Many of these people fell victim to Mongol traps and became food themselves. The Mongols too had begun to forage, sending groups of well-armed men into the suburbs each day to scavenge anything of use. They went systematically through each neighborhood, moving from house to house, discovering many families who had found ways to survive.

The door to the motel room opened and Emory prepared herself to fight yet again as Brutus stepped in and stood looking at her. He wore his long blond hair in a golden braid and kept his beard trimmed closer to his face than the rest of the gang, but he was every bit as grubby and smelly. He was tall and muscular, with blue, mean-looking eyes, like the archetypal Viking.

“Bad news,” he said.

She sat looking at him, hating him intensely. Often, she had considered throwing herself off the balcony, but had so far been unable to bring herself to take that final fall.

“There’s nothing left but dog food,” he said. “After that, you’ll have to eat man meat with the rest of us.”

“I’ll starve, thanks.”

“You’ll fucking eat or I’ll blowtorch your tits.”

He tossed a can of Alpo onto the bed, and she sat looking at it, thinking that the time had finally come to consider the balcony in a very serious way. It would be much easier to do if she were drunk, however.

“Is there any booze left?” she asked. “I’ll need something to take the fucking taste out of my mouth.”

He grunted and left the room.

She opened the can with her can opener and scooped half of the nasty smelling dog food into the toilet, using the bucket of water to flush it down and getting back into the bed, sticking her spoon into the can and setting it beside her on the blanket. She had fought as hard and as long as she could and hated to give up, but there was nothing ahead now but more and ever greater misery.

Brutus came back into the room with a pair of leg shackles in his hand, and she sprang from the bed like a frog from a hot pan, beating him easily to the sliding door, but he was on her before she could get it open, knocking her to the floor with his great, hairy forearm. She scrabbled to her feet and tried for the hallway, but he caught her collar and swung her around, slamming her hard against the wall, knocking her senseless.

He took hold of her ankle and dragged her across the room, where he used his booted foot to smash apart the heating unit, exposing the radiator pipe. Emory came to as he was shackling her to the pipe and kicked him in the face, knocking him over backward, but it was too late. She was caught fast to the radiator.

Brutus stood back up and wiped the blood from the corner of his eye, looking at it on his fingers. “This is the second time you’ve made me bleed.”

“Wait till next time!” she said acidly.

He stood on her free leg and began to unlace her boot.

Emory hammered away at him with her fists, but he ignored her as he finished stealing her boots and stepped away, tossing them into the hall.

“I’ll fucking kill you!” she swore. “You fucking piece of shit! You fucking biker trash motherfucker! Nothing but a bunch of fucking white trash biker fucks! Eating fucking people! You fucking animals!”

He took the blankets from the bed and tossed them over her. “Didn’t have to be like this. All you had to do was go along.”

“Fuck you!” she said from under the blanket. “I’m a fucking soldier! You’re nothing but a goddamn animal!”

Another Mongol came into the room, a winter parka worn over his colors. His name was Gig.

“Something you might find interesting,” Gig said, noticing Emory’s shape beneath the blanket. “We found the green Jeep… on the east side of town.”

“What’s the plate number?” Brutus demanded.

“OA 5599,” Gig said. “It’s him. I’ve got some men watching the house now. All the curtains are shut, but there’s tracks in the dust outside the back door. A dead body under the deck.”

Brutus had never gotten a good look at the man who killed his brother, but he would soon be pissing on his dead body. He looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. “Be dark soon. We’ll hit him after it gets late.”

“You’re all animals!” Emory said, still hidden beneath the blankets.

Brutus booted her in the head, not real hard but hard enough to hurt. “Get a house mouse in here to keep an eye on this bitch. I don’t want her offing herself.”

Thirty

The basement was cold, but Marty and Susan spent most of their time cuddled together beneath lots of blankets, so it wasn’t unpleasant. The only time the cold was a genuine bother was when they had to come out from the under the covers to go to the bathroom or to wash up. They usually kept a supply of food by the bed along with the camp stove, so they could keep warm while preparing their meals.

Their time together since the asteroid strike had been good, and they had made love many, many times over the past few months, more times than Marty had in all the rest of his life. By the sixth week Susan was pretty sure she had conceived, but she chose not tell Marty about it. The end was drawing near, and knowing that she was pregnant with his child would only make his job more difficult when the time came.

The food had begun to run low after the first couple of months, and she went to sleep each night hoping never to awaken again, but each morning she awoke to find him there in bed wrapped tightly around her. She did love him, though not in a passionate kind of way, and their lovemaking had been a wonderful way to pass the days and nights. Each Friday night they had even been able to watch a DVD on Marty’s laptop until the battery finally went completely dead.

Then one disappointing morning Susan awoke to find that Marty had left the house during the night, to scavenge around the neighborhood by flashlight in search of food and supplies, and in doing so managed to scare up enough food to get them through another week. It had been difficult for her to do, but she feigned happiness. She felt terrible because she knew how badly he wanted there to be a future for them, and she knew he was perfectly willing to live with her there in that basement for the rest of their lives if that was what it took.

“You do understand,” she had gently said the week before, “that there has to be an end to this, right?”

“I do,” he answered heavily. “But will you let me fight for us?”

“Of course,” she said, touching his pained face in the candlelight. “So long as you’ll keep your promise to me.”

“I will,” he said, actually meaning it, for by then he had seen things on his numerous forays into the neighborhood, sights that chilled him to his core. Partially butchered corpses, heads stuck on fence posts, and entire families gathered together in bedrooms, dead of murder-suicides. Soon he would be forced to venture too far from the house at night to risk leaving her alone and undefended.

The light had faded outside the glass block windows, and Marty got up to cover them so they could light a candle without the risk of the light showing outside. The nights were pitch-black now, and the slightest hint of light seemed visible for miles and miles, though distance was extremely hard to judge in that kind of darkness. He slipped in beneath the blankets and wrapped himself around her, placing his hand flat on her belly where he knew that his child lived.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“I haven’t told you about the time I went to Yosemite with my scout troop yet. Would you like to hear about it?”

“Absolutely,” she said, lacing her fingers through his on top of her belly and rolling to her side to face away from him, now realizing that he knew she was with child.

As she listened to him telling her of his trip to Yosemite, tears began to pour from her eyes, for she had sensed a change in him, a change in his tone of voice as he told the story, almost as if he were telling it to a little girl whom he loved very much, and she knew that he had chosen tonight.

Halfway through the story, he stopped and said, “Susan, will you marry me?”

She rolled over, wrapped herself around him and whispered, “Of course I’ll marry you!”

He squeezed her and she squeezed him back.

“I love you!” she said suddenly, feeling the emotion more intensely at that moment than she had imagined possible.

“You are my entire life,” he told her. “All that I ever was or could ever have been was meant for you.”

That was more than she could take, and she began to weep openly, kissing him and wriggling her pajama bottoms down for one last time. They made love by candlelight, their tears mixing together as they kissed and said their vows to one another. They agreed to name the child Purity.

Susan fell into a deep sleep a short time later, and he lay beside her running his fingers through her hair and watching her sleep peacefully in the soft yellow light of the candle. He did not know who had been watching the house all that day, but he knew with absolute certainty that they would never, ever harm his wife or desecrate her body.

“I love you, Susan,” he whispered, his throat tight as the tears ran down his face. “And I love Purity. I love you both more than any man has ever loved his family.”

He blew out the candle, and Joe’s pistol went off a second later.

He then got quickly out of the bed and opened the cans of Coleman fuel, pouring them all over the mattress and the counterpane, knowing his way in the darkness by now as well as any blind man knew his own bedroom. He ran up the stairs and opened the last of Joe’s gasoline, pouring it down the stairs. He flung more gasoline around the lower level of the house, then took a road flare from the kitchen counter, popping it alight and tossing it into the basement as he ran for the back door.

The basement erupted in a blast of white flame that shot up the stairs and quickly engulfed the entire lower level of the house. Marty dove from his back porch into the dirt and scrabbled to his feet, grabbing up the carbine and slinging it over his shoulder. He was quick to get out of the light of the flames engulfing the house, running through his neighbor’s backyard by the light of the fire. He ducked quickly into the second house over and made his way upstairs, where he took up a firing position in one of the windows, watching for those who had come to eat his family.

When he saw three men in biker colors crossing the street with shotguns over their shoulders, he became so furious with himself for not hiding the Jeep that he nearly jammed Joe’s .45 up under his own chin. Instead, he quickly unshouldered the carbine and took aim at the closest Mongol. He squeezed the trigger and the biker jerked as though he had been stung by a wasp, grabbing at his neck and falling to the ground. The other two men turned and ran back across the street, but Marty was pretty good with the carbine now. He shot them down before they were able to make it to cover.

Then something hit him between his shoulder blades, and as he fell over on the floor in agony, he saw a large figure standing over him with crowbar.

Brutus picked him up from the floor with one arm and held him against the wall by his throat. “Now I got you, motherfucker, and you’re gonna pay for killin’ my brother!” He slugged Marty in the stomach and threw him to the floor.

“I didn’t!” Marty gasped. “It was him… him!”

Brutus paused before dropping his boot against the back of Marty’s neck. “Him who, asshole?”

“Jeep guy,” he groaned. “Dead under my deck!”

Brutus remembered that Gig had mentioned a body under Marty’s deck, so he jerked him to his feet and threw him into a chair.

“What Jeep guy?”

“Him,” Marty choked, his gut feeling as though he’d been run over by a car. “He tried to take my house… my wife.”

“You’re tellin’ me you killed the fucker who owns that green Jeep?”

“Jeep sure ain’t mine, mister.” Marty was still gasping for air, holding his belly. “It’s got California plates. He was a Secret Service agent… followed my wife back from JPL… check his wallet if you don’t believe me. He was a total psycho!”

Brutus stood thinking it over. If Marty’s story was true, he didn’t exactly owe him any favors now that he had killed his three men in the street, but he might be willing to let him live… for a while.

“Okay, motherfucker,” he said, grabbing Marty’s coat and hauling him to his feet. “We’re gonna check your story out. If that cat ain’t Secret Service, you’re gonna wish I’d broke your goddamn neck!”

Five minutes later Marty was on his knees in the street in front of his burning house, his hands tied behind his back as Brutus and another biker stood examining Paulis’s Secret Service ID.

“Don’t make no sense,” Gig said. “I saw a broad with red hair at the rest stop getting out of the Jeep. She was telling the Army to shoot us.”

“That had to be my wife!” Marty blurted, conjuring his lie off the cuff. “He drove her back from Caltech. Look, I’m an astronomer. I’m the guy who took the story public. My wife worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Secret Service gave her a ride home the day before the asteroid hit. A few days later he came back and tried to take her for himself. She’s actually the one who shot him, not me.”

Brutus and the other biker stood looking at each other.

“This ID sorta proves he’s telling the truth,” Gig said. “It explains how that bastard was able to kill so many of our bros.”

“So where’s your old lady now?” Brutus demanded.

Marty started to cry, having blocked it from his conscious thought until that moment. “She’s down in the basement,” he sobbed. “Our baby… I shot her… just kill me already. Get it over with!”

“Put him in the truck,” Brutus said, strangely conflicted. “I’ll decide about him later.”

Thirty-One

Life belowground for Forrest and his flock had settled into a pleasant, if a little boring, routine within a few weeks of the impact. The children attended school with Andie for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon every day, and the mothers experimented with the food they were allotted to cook for each meal.

Mealtime, especially dinner, was everyone’s favorite because it was story time. They took turns telling stories about themselves or someone they knew. Sometimes the stories were funny and sometimes they were very sad, but it helped them get to know one another and to remember that they were human beings with histories and memories. And most importantly, it helped to pass the time.

At other times they read, watched movies, worked puzzles or played games, and everyone took turns riding the bicycle generators. The women also helped watch the monitors when the soldier assigned to Launch Control wanted to put his head down for a nap, or to step out and stretch his legs. In Forrest’s case it was usually to smoke a cigarette in the cargo bay.

A few of the women were even learning to knit from Maria Vasquez, a skill she had thought would be important for the children to eventually learn as well, having seen to it that a lot of yarn had made its way down into the silo. She had also begun teaching some of the other children to speak Spanish in the evenings.

Late night was the favorite time for the adults. After the children had been put to bed, they almost always played cards, and each of them was allowed either a small bar of chocolate or a shot of whiskey. Almost every mother had someone she shared with, so they could all have a little of each. It wasn’t much, but it was something to look forward to. Euchre and strip poker were favorite card games, but it was agreed that no one would strip past their underwear, the married women especially adamant.

There were a few other rare treats held in store, like extra bottles of wine, but Forrest held these items secret in the cargo bay—where none of the civilians were permitted for security reasons—and told them they would have to wait for Thanksgiving and Christmas to find out what they were.

One morning three months after impact, Danzig stepped into the cafeteria where Forrest and Veronica were working on a large jigsaw puzzle with some of the children. “You’d better come have a listen to this, Jack.”

“What’s up?” Forrest said, getting up from the table. Veronica followed them out of the room and down the hall toward Launch Control.

“Picked up an odd radio signal,” Danzig said. “In Morse code, all numbers.”

“An encrypted code, probably military.”

“Maybe, but Wayne says it’s a conversation.”

“That is odd.”

They stepped into Launch Control, where Michael and the rest of the men were standing around listening to the steady stream of electronic dots and dashes. Ulrich was sitting at the console scribbling down the numbers as fast as they were being transmitted.

“Hey, dude,” Forrest whispered into Danzig’s ear. “You’re getting a little ripe.”

Danzig smelled his pits. “It’s that crappy deodorant we bought. I’ll switch to antiperspirant.”

“What do we got, Stumpy?” Forrest said, putting a hand on Ulrich’s shoulder.

Ulrich waved at him to shut up, trying to keep up with the telegraphers. “It’s a conversation,” he said during a brief pause. “Two different hands, both experts.”

“Different hands?” Michael asked.

“All telegraphers have a different pace,” Kane explained. “Their own rhythm.”

“You mean he can tell the difference between who’s tapping?” Michael said. “It all sounds exactly the same.”

Ulrich shushed him as the transmission began again, and a couple of minutes later the conversation stopped completely. “Looks like that’s it for now,” he said, sitting back and looking at the stream of numbers on the pad. “They were deciphering during all those short pauses, so they’re probably using an agreed-upon text, but we don’t have the software to crack a code like that.”

“Can I see what you wrote down?” Melissa asked from where she stood in the doorway with Laddie.

“Sure, honey.” Ulrich reached between the men to hand her the pad.

“How did you find the signal?” Forrest asked.

“They’re using such a high frequency, I almost didn’t. It was an accident, really.”

“Could they hear us if we tried talking to them?” Michael asked.

“Not sure,” Ulrich said. “I’ve got no way of knowing how far away they are. But it doesn’t matter. We’re not breaking radio silence.”

“We’ll continue to monitor that frequency,” Forrest said. “You never know.”

Later that night Forrest was down in the electrical room preparing for his ride on one of the bicycle chargers when Veronica came in and shut the door, standing with her back against it.

“Come to take a spin?” he said.

She shook her head. “Missed you at cards tonight.”

“I felt like hanging out alone in the LC.”

“One of those nights?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

She pushed away from the door and walked over to him, putting her hands on his chest. “I’ve decided what I want.”

“Oh? And what’s Michael have to say about it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters!”

“Why? You said I needed to figure what I wanted… Now I have and you’re flipping the script on me.”

“Flipping the script?”

“Don’t dodge the question.”

“Much as I wish I felt otherwise, Veronica, I’ve got a lot of respect for the man. He’s a huge part of why we’ve been so successful to this point. His counseling sessions have probably averted two or three nervous breakdowns already, and I can’t believe how popular those stupid jigsaw puzzles are.”

She stood looking at him. “Jigsaw puzzles? I’m trying to give myself to you, and you’re talking about jigsaw puzzles?”

“I’m talking about respect, honor, integ— No, check that. One man’s integrity is another man’s bullshit excuse. Loyalty. The man’s earned my loyalty.”

“So loyalty’s what’s changed since three months ago when you jammed your tongue down my throat?”

He frowned. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“You know, you’re a real piece of work,” she said, stepping back. “You promised me, Jack. Remember? Remember all that bullshit about not repeating or breaking promises?”

“Unfortunately I do,” he said, lowering his gaze. “And I’m sorry.”

“So I don’t rate the same respect that Michael does. Or is it a guy thing? Bros before hos?”

He looked at her. “It sure as hell isn’t that.”

“You’re the only reason I’m even down here, Jack. And now I find out it’s been one big mind fuck.”

“Okay, stop! That’s taking it too far. I’ve never been anything but kind to you.”

“Until now. Until you made me feel like a complete fucking idiot.” She turned around, walked out of the room and shut the door behind her.

Forrest stood looking at the door. “An absolutely impossible situation,” he said in frustration, reaching for his shirt to fish out his pack of Camels.

Veronica came back in just as he was about to light up. She turned to close the door and stood with her back to him, as though she were unsure if she should speak.

He waited, suspecting that she was really going to let him have it this time.

“Do you know what?” she asked quietly.

“What?”

She turned around looking very serious. “You just got punked so fucking bad.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he said, the cigarette dangling from his lip.

“Michael and I split up, you dope! You haven’t heard? He wants to be with Karen.”

“I’m the last one to hear about everything down here, and it’s giving me a case of the red ass.”

“Oh, stop whining. You wanted to be in charge.” She came flouncing toward him and fell into his arms. “I’m yours at last,” she said dramatically. “Yours at last, Jack.”

He stood holding her with a stupid grin on his face, and took the cigarette from his lips. “You laid me lower than whale shit a second ago. That was cruel.”

“I couldn’t resist,” she said, smiling, gazing into his eyes. “I had to see how you’d react. And I’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t turned me away, by the way. I’d have kept you but I’d have been disappointed.”

“Kept me?”

“You’ve been mine since the day you set eyes on me, Jack Forrest, and don’t even try to deny it.”

“I seem to remember turning you away a minute ago,” he said, his lips only inches from hers now as he stared back into her soft brown eyes.

“And it killed you. I could see it on your face.”

“You’re the most beautiful goddamn woman I’ve ever seen,” he said, kissing her.

“I want you right now,” she said, suddenly wanton. “Right here!”

“But I need to go get—”

“I’ve come prepared,” she said with a grin, pulling a condom from her pocket.

They dropped their pants and Veronica turned around, taking hold of the handlebars on the bike.

“Take me now,” she whispered. “Hurry, before I fucking scream.”

He entered her from behind and she reached back with both hands, pulling him against her. “Oh, my God!” she whispered.

She began pushing back and forth. After a couple of minutes they were both breathing heavily, their rhythm growing clumsier with each stroke until Veronica gasped in climax, sinking toward the floor barely able to grip the handlebars. Forrest held her up the best he could, finishing only a few seconds behind her, groaning deeply, both of them dropping to the floor where they lay in one another’s arms on the cold concrete, their pants bunched up around their ankles.

“Holy shit,” she panted. “I almost passed out.”

He was holding handfuls of her hair, still breathing hard into her chest. “I never came so hard in my fucking life,” he chuckled. “It actually hurt. Fuck, that was a long time coming.”

“Again,” she said, laughing as she tried clumsily to get up. “We have to do it again.”

“Not here,” he said. “In the missile silo. I don’t want to be interrupted.”

“That seems to be the popular place,” she said, working her pants back up over her thighs. “Just don’t take me to your usual spot.”

“What usual spot?” he said, standing and pulling up his pants. “I haven’t been with anybody but my wife in twelve years.”

“Really?” She grabbed his face and kissed him. “I thought that you and Andie…”

“She’s never asked and I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to.”

“So how long has it been for you?”

“More than two years. Almost two and a half.”

“Oh, you poor baby,” she said, hurting for him. “Well, let’s get you caught up.”

They stopped at the door and had a long, tender kiss. “I’m so fucking glad you found me,” she said softly.

“It’s not fair,” he said. “The world’s dead and we’re down here feeling like this.”

“Isn’t it what you planned?”

“This? Hell, no. I didn’t think we’d survive the fucking impact!”

Thirty-Two

The next morning, Marty awoke in his own motel room beneath a pile of musty smelling blankets and lay staring at the ceiling. He had slept fitfully the night before, and he was feeling incredibly guilty for not having killed himself when he’d had the chance. That was an easy situation to remedy, however. The first chance he got, he would grab a gun, shoot a couple more bikers—if he could manage it safely this time—then kill himself.

He couldn’t get over how badly they had smelled the night before, all of them crammed into the Humvee together for the ride back into the city. He had also been able to smell what he was sure was human flesh cooking on the way up the stairwell.

He got out of bed, took his winter coat from the chair and pulled on his shoes, then went to the window, seeing the same gray world as the day before, dark and dim as before a heavy rain. There were spits of dirty snow in the air, and it was only late August. He considered jumping off the balcony but thought better of it. That was just too scary.

The door flew open and he spun around, half expecting someone to attack him.

“In the hall,” Gig told him.

Marty obeyed and stood in the hall waiting to see what the man wanted.

Brutus stepped from a room a few doors down, pulling a female soldier with dark red hair and stocking feet along behind him. The soldier’s hands were tied behind her back, and Marty recognized her immediately as the medic from the highway.

Brutus came up to him and said, “You can go. You killed the sorry fuck who killed my brother, and we made you kill your old lady. Makes us even.”

Marty wondered how in the hell that made them even. It was obvious from the look in Emory’s eyes that she recognized him, but she didn’t say anything or acknowledge him in any way. “Well, can I have my guns back? I won’t make it very far without them.”

“Gig, get him his shit when we get downstairs,” Brutus said, towing Emory toward the stairwell. “Then bring the truck around front… but don’t make it obvious.”

“Is something wrong?” Marty asked.

“There’s some shit comin’ down,” Brutus said. “So keep your mouth shut.”

They hurried him down ten flights of stairs to the lobby, where a couple of other bikers sat around in blue parkas, each of them with a biker chick in his lap for warmth.

“Hey, Brutus man, is that the dude who killed the Jeeper?”

“Yeah,” Brutus said, shoving Emory down in a chair. “Don’t get up, bitch!”

“What’s goin on, Brutus man? Somethin’ up?”

“I’m lettin’ this cat go,” Brutus said. “Gig’s gonna give his ass a ride outta town.”

Gig led Marty behind the counter and into an office where they kept the weapons.

“What’s goin’ on?” Marty asked again, seeing a number of machine guns on the table. He slung Joe’s carbine over his back and tucked his .45 into his belt.

“It’s time to ditch the rest of these dudes,” Gig said. “It’s gettin’ too hot here.”

“Oh,” Marty said. “Hey, suppose I can have one of these too?”

Gig thought it over for a second then shrugged and gave him an MP-5 submachine gun, showing him how to operate it. “Ain’t hard,” he said.

“No, seems easy enough,” Marty said, blasting Gig across the room. He grabbed some extra magazines and dashed back into the lobby where the other bikers were jumping up and grabbing for their weapons. He sprayed them with automatic fire and in short order had either killed or wounded each one, the house mice included.

Emory was already running toward him. “Cut me loose!”

He found a pair of scissors in a drawer behind the motel counter and cut the lace that was bound so tightly around her wrists that her hands were a deep crimson.

She flexed her fingers and took the MP-5. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” She ran to where Brutus was crawling on his belly toward a shotgun, hit through both lungs and his spleen, and stepped on his back, taking the hunting knife from his belt.

“Remember me?” she said, grabbing his golden braid and jerking his head back. “This is your last fuck!” She stabbed the knife into his anus and he let out a shriek. Then she gave the blade a twist and jerked it free, using it to scalp him before stomping on his head. She threw his scalp to the floor and whipped around in time to gun down three more bikers who came scrabbling into the lobby to see what the hell was going on.

“Ammo!” she called as they ran for the exit.

Marty gave her the extra machine gun magazines, and she jammed them into the cargo pockets of her trousers.

“What about your feet?” he asked as they burst through the doors and ran down the outside wall of the motel.

“I got worse shit to worry about,” she said, dumping the spent magazine from the weapon and inserting a new one. “Like how the fuck I’m gonna tell my kid I scalped its father.” She checked around the corner and pulled her head back.

“You mean he got you… ?”

“I’m pretty sure,” Emory said. “I’ve been puking every morning for a week.”

“Why were they in such a hurry to get out of here?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They were spooked about something, though. I think a lot of their people are still asleep. Let’s see if we can find a car with some gas.”

There was a loud blast, followed by a secondary explosion that took out the lobby of the motel. They spun on their heels to see an M60 tank at the end of the street, a cloud of smoke dissipating before it.

“All right!” Marty said. “We’re saved!”

She looked at him. “No, hon, we’re in twice the shit we were ten seconds ago.”

They took off down the block and hid inside a ransacked Starbucks as troops began surging toward the motel.

Emory crouched inside the door, watching the soldiers fanning out. “Is it true what he said upstairs about your girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” Marty said. “I was supposed to kill myself right after… but I decided to kill some of those guys first and that Brutus guy jumped me.”

“Don’t feel bad. She’d want you to live.”

“I don’t know…”

“Don’t be stupid. You only killed her to keep her from ending up like I did. Imagine how you’d feel if they’d taken her. She wasn’t tough enough to live through what I’ve been through… trust me.”

“We got married,” he said proudly.

“Really? Who’d you find to do that?”

“We did it ourselves.”

“Aw, that’s the sweetest thing,” she said, turning to look out the window. “Oh shit, get back! Those two are coming in here.” She dragged him behind the counter. “Stand here with your hands up. I’ll stay down until I hear what they’ve got to say.”

“But—”

She grabbed his carbine and dropped into a crouch.

The two soldiers came into the shop and stood looking at him with his hands in the air.

“Where’s the woman?” one of them asked, glancing around the shop. “The GI with long hair.”

“She’s my sister,” Marty said.

“I didn’t ask you who the fuck she was!” the soldier said. “I asked where.”

“She’s in the restroom.”

The first soldier went to the back of the shop and stepped into the ladies’ room.

Emory stood up and gave the second soldier a six round burst through the neck and face, missing his body armor entirely, then emptied the rest of the magazine through the ladies’ room door as the other soldier was scrambling back out.

“Quick!” she said. “Strip that one’s armor and ammo… and check his boot size!”

Marty ran to the ladies’ room and Emory went to the window to make sure no one else had heard the shots.

“These clowns are Air Force troops,” she said, checking the dead airman’s boot size and seeing that it was nine. “Boot size, Marty, on the bottom of the sole!”

“Eleven!”

“Guess nines will have to do,” she mumbled, stripping the dead airman of his boots, then his gloves, armor, combat harness, and weaponry. When she was set, she pulled on the helmet and ran to the back of the shop where Marty was still having trouble shaking the dead soldier out of his harness.

“You look like a monkey fucking a football,” she said, shoving him aside.

“How do you people wear all that shit?” he asked. “I’ve never seen so many buckles and zippers on one human being.”

“Shut up. It’s not that many. Go strip that other dude’s ACU. This guy’s a lot bigger than you.”

“What’s an ACU?”

“Army combat uniform. Come on, Marty, we don’t have all fucking day here!”

She had him suited up and looking like a proper soldier five minutes later, with the exception of his sneakers and the bloody mandarin collar. They slipped out the back of the coffee shop, leaving all the other weapons behind save for Joe’s Springfield Armory .45.

“Goddamn, it feels good to be back in harness!” she said, punching him in the shoulder. “Full battle rattle! Hooah, Marty?”

“Who what?”

She laughed and grabbed him around the neck with her arm as they walked north up the alley. “Thanks for saving my ass back there,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “You’re my fucking hero.”

“I’m tired of being a hero,” he said wearily.

“Here, hold on a second. I’d better make sure you know how to operate your weapon system before we hit the street again… this is an M-4 carbine. It shoots as smooth as that other gun you had, but it’s got better range and better penetration. Just look through the scope and put that red dot on whatever you want to hit. Got it?”

“Got it.”

She made sure he knew how to load the weapon and they started off again.

“Let’s make a pact,” she added. “Neither lets the other be taken alive. Hooah?”

“Who what? What is that?”

“It’s the Army battle cry. I say, ‘Hooah’? You say, ‘Hooah’! Got it?”

“Got it, yeah.”

“You’re a grunt now,” she said. “So let’s hear it.”

“Hooah!”

“Good. So we got a deal?”

“Hooah!” he said again.

“Fuckin’ A,” she said, slapping him on the back. “We’ll probably both be dead by dark, but what the fuck!”

They got to the end of the alley and Emory checked west then east, seeing troops crossing southward two blocks up.

She ducked back. “Okay, listen. Whenever we’re moving, it’s your job to cover our ass. And whenever we cross a street, we do it one at a time. First I cover you, then you cover me. Got it?”

“Hooah!”

“Don’t overdo it,” she said. “Now, get across the street and take cover at the corner, then cover me as I come across.”

Marty ran across the street and tripped over the curb, falling on the sidewalk. His weapon went off and shot a hole in a shop window on the opposite corner. He got up and ducked around the corner of the building, self-consciously watching up and down the street as Emory came across.

“Nice job, dumbass!” she said, belting him on the helmet. “Keep your finger off the goddamn trigger unless you’re gonna shoot!”

When they got to the next corner, they spotted a soldier in the second-story window of an apartment building waving them down.

Emory pushed back against Marty and pulled him down into a crouch.

“What’s he want?”

“He’s warning us to stay put,” she said. “He’s Army, but be ready to blow his ass outta that window.”

“How do you know he’s not Air Force?”

“Because his camo doesn’t match yours… it matches mine.” She double-checked to make sure the M-203 40mm grenade launcher on her carbine was ready to fire.

“Why don’t I get the one with the grenade launcher?”

“ ’Cuz you can’t even walk and chew gum at the same time.”

The soldier continued to signal for them to hold their position as he watched eastward down the street. A minute later he signaled for them to cross as a pair, and Emory dragged Marty across and into the lobby of the apartment building. They went up the stairs to the second floor, where the soldier met them in the hall.

“In here,” he said. “There’s bad joo-joo up the street.”

Emory saw the blue arrowhead of the Thirty-sixth Infantry Division on his shoulder. On her own shoulder she wore the red and yellow patch of the Arizona National Guard with two arrows crossed over a bayonet. He was a broad-shouldered man with handsome dark eyes, and his name tag identified him as Sullivan.

“You’re a long way from home, Sullivan.”

“Tell me about it,” the trooper said. “But Texas ain’t where you wanna be.”

“Did you desert or get run off?”

“Depends how you look at it. I wasn’t exactly down with the shit they were doin’.” He took a second to check out the window. There was a lot of gunfire coming from the direction of the motel now, building to a crescendo.

“So did Mexico attack us or the other way around?” she asked.

“It all went to shit too fast,” Sullivan said, turning back to them. “We’d just gotten into Nogales. We were trying to restore order there when somebody said the Mexicans were firing on us across the Rio Grande, but who the fuck knows? They didn’t have any tanks, so it was a pretty lopsided battle. Personally, I think we picked the fight.”

Sullivan recognized the camouflaged pattern of Marty’s uniform but didn’t recognize the unit. “How about you, Miller? The Air Force doesn’t issue boots anymore or what?”

Marty looked down at his sneakers. “Me?”

“No, the other Miller standing over there.”

Emory chuckled. “That’s Marty. He’s only just enlisted, actually. The real Miller was dishonorably discharged.”

“Explains the blood,” Sullivan said, checking briefly out the window again. “Closest most of those Air Force jerks down there ever got to combat before this was dragging a can of gasoline over to an airplane.”

“They’re all Air Force?”

“Yeah,” Sullivan said. “From Tinker AFB. They’ve been probing Mesa all week. Now they’re finally attacking some biker gang a few blocks over in that motel.”

“We just came from there,” Emory said. “You got any food to spare?”

“Got a case of MREs in the closet. I swiped it from the Air Force last night.”

Emory showed Marty how to use the chemical heater contained in the MRE pack to warm his food, using a little bit of water from the back of the commode. The heater was a plastic bag containing a simple combination of powdered, food-grade iron, magnesium, and salt. The added water started a chemical reaction that gave off enough heat to warm the ration to more than a hundred degrees.

“This doesn’t taste too bad,” Marty said.

“I don’t know what you’ve been eating these past few months,” she said, “but this shit’s fucking fantastic. That bastard made me eat a can of Alpo last night.”

“What bastard?” Sullivan asked.

“The Mongols had her,” Marty said.

“Who the fuck are they?”

“Those bikers you were talking about.”

“You were with those animals? They’ve been kidnapping people all over town. They’re eating them!”

“That’s a fact,” Emory said. “So what’s your plan?”

Sullivan shrugged. “Keep stealing from the Air Force as long as I can. It’s all about the food now.”

Emory looked at Marty. “What do you want to do?”

He shrugged dolefully. “I hadn’t really thought past getting you to safety.”

“Well, I’m safe now,” she said with a grin. “So what’s Marty want for himself?”

“Nothing. I’ll help you two steal from the Air Force. If anything ever happens, I can stay behind and cover your retreat.”

“No, Marty. You’re not a sacrificial lamb. You’re an intelligent guy. You have to have an idea or two rolling around in your head.”

“Well, I would like to see the impact crater before I die.”

“See what?” Sullivan blurted. “Are you nuts?”

“He’s an astronomer,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“See the fucking impact crater,” Sullivan said. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard yet.”

“It’s a hell of a lot less crazy than people eating people,” Marty said. “Which is all that you’ve got to look forward to—whether it’s eating or being eaten. And that crater’s going to make the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk.”

Sullivan looked at Emory. “Where did you find this dude?”

“Look, I’m just talking here,” Marty went on. “But there isn’t too much of a future in stealing from the Air Force. Why not see the greatest sight of all time?”

“All right, suppose we find a truck,” Sullivan said. “Something that can handle rough terrain. And suppose we swipe enough food from the Air Force to get us there. What are we gonna do after that? Sit down and starve?”

Marty shook his head, saying, “Everybody left alive is headed south. They think it’s going to be warmer down there, but it won’t be enough to make a difference. You were exactly right. It’s all about the food now… and the food is north.”

“You’re crazy.”

“No, I’m not,” Marty insisted. “Everyone’s dead up there. Killed by the blast wave or burned alive. But the canned food—at least a percentage of it—is still edible. Scorched and without labels, but edible, buried in the rubble, hidden in basements. You want food? Head north.”

“Bullshit,” Sullivan said. “You just want to see the crater.”

“No,” Emory said, “he’s serious.”

“And I’ve already got our transportation problem solved,” Marty added. “It’s even on the way.”

Thirty-Three

Early the next morning, Vasquez glanced up from his book, movement on one of the monitors having caught his eye. “Puta madre! Where did that ugly bastard come from?”

Danzig looked up from his Game and Wildlife magazine to see a burly looking man with a thick black beard and grubby parka wandering around in the kitchen above. He had a shotgun slung over his shoulder and he was rifling through the cupboards, tossing things about. This was the first sign of life they had seen aboveground since the impact three months earlier. “Better get Jack in here.”

Vasquez pressed the button for the P.A.: “Forrest to Launch Control. Forrest to the L.C.”

Danzig was busy checking the different camera feeds around the upper compound to see if there was anyone else wandering around up there. “Look at this shit.”

A different man in a camouflaged coat stood on the porch, holding a shotgun on two women and a third man. All three of the captives were equally disheveled and filthy, their hands tied behind their backs.

Forrest entered Launch Control tailed by Ulrich and Kane. Many of the others, Veronica and Michael among them, gathered outside the door waiting to learn what had put the urgency into Oscar Vasquez’s voice. In addition to being the first sign of life from above, it was also the first excitement there had been since the impact.

Forrest watched the burly man kicking around the kitchen without comment, waiting to see what was going to happen with the prisoners on the porch. The man in the kitchen checked the stove to find that the gas burners still worked and moved quickly out of the room.

Ulrich glanced at Forrest. “That was an oversight. I’ll go and remedy that right now.” He slipped out the opposite door and went to shut off the gas supply to the house.

“Stay with Black Beard,” Forrest said to Vasquez.

Vasquez changed feeds to show that Black Beard was now standing on the porch talking to the man in camouflage. The man in camouflage beckoned to their male captive, apparently ordering him into the house. The captive stepped back, shaking his head, and Black Beard stepped after him. The captive then dove over the porch railing and landed on his back, rolling to his feet as Black Beard ran down the stairs into the yard and tackled him, taking some sort of truncheon from beneath his parka and beating him with it until he stopped fighting. Then he hauled him to his feet by the hair, kicking him in the butt to get him moving toward the stairs.

Forrest noticed the man on the porch covertly snatching the pack of cigarettes he’d forgotten on the windowsill months earlier, jamming them into his pocket before Black Beard came back up the stairs. “Sumbitch took my smokes,” he muttered, stepping into the hall to brief the others on what was happening. “Okay, ladies, we’ve got a couple of scavengers upstairs, but they’re no threat to this installation. They haven’t found the blast door, and even if they do, there’s no possible way for them to open it.”

“What are they doing?” Veronica asked.

“Searching the house for food.”

“Can we see?”

Forrest looked at her, wishing she wouldn’t put him on the spot. “They’re pretty ragged and they’ve got a few prisoners. It might be a little disturbing. We’re taping everything and everybody will be able to view it later if they want to.”

He was fine about letting Veronica in to watch, but if he showed her any favoritism, it might cause hard feelings within the group and he didn’t need that. Things were going too well… or at least, as far as he knew.

“Why don’t you let Ronny in to act as our representative?” suggested Joann, the tall black woman. She had a strong personality and she knew the other women would probably not object to her suggestion. Besides, Veronica’s relationship with Forrest was easily now the worst kept secret in the silo.

Forrest agreed. “Mike, it may not be a bad idea for you to watch too.”

They went inside, and the first thing Veronica saw on the monitor was Black Beard using a steel baton to bash in the skull of his captive, who was now sprawled facedown on the kitchen floor with his hands still tied behind his back.

“Oh, my God!” she said, turning away.

Black Beard then picked the dead man up and laid him across the kitchen table on his belly, cutting his hands free and slitting his coat up the back with a large Bowie knife. He wasted no time slicing into the man’s lower back.

“Excuse me,” Veronica said, pulling open the door and leaving the room. The moment she came out, the other women could see that she had just witnessed something ghastly.

“What did you see?” Tonya wanted to know.

Veronica looked at the children now gathered about, leaning to whisper into Erin’s ear: “Cannibals.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Erin muttered. “Okay, kids, come on. Let’s get back to school before Andie comes looking for us.”

She took the kids back to class, and Veronica went on to tell the rest of the women in the hall what she had seen. Back in Launch Control the men were still watching as Black Beard stood carving out the dead man’s liver, dropping it black and greasy-looking onto the countertop, where he cut it into portions and set them aside. When he was finished, he retrieved the frying pan from the floor and put it on the stove, laying parts of the liver into it and turning on the gas.

“He’s about to get pissed,” Ulrich said.

The flame burned for almost a full minute before going out. Then Black Beard fiddled with the knobs, realizing there was no more gas in the line. He smashed the chairs into pieces and left the kitchen.

Kane looked across at Forrest. “Captain, I request permission to go up there and blow this asshole’s brains out.”

“I wish we could,” Forrest said, leaving it at that.

By now the man wearing the camouflage jacket had moved the women into the living room and made them sit on the couch, where they huddled together for warmth. They looked alike, sisters perhaps, appearing to be in their early thirties, but with the grime on their faces, it was hard to tell. Black Beard spoke with his comrade, then went back into the kitchen, where he began building a fire in the sink with wood from the broken chairs.

“Those two women aren’t for food, you know. What are we going to do if these assholes rape them on camera?”

“Feel bad for them,” Forrest said. “If we go up and kill those two assholes, we may as well kill the women too. We sure as hell can’t bring them down here. God knows how sick they might be.”

Black Beard got a fire going and stood holding the frying pan over the flames.

“That’s gotta smell like holy hell,” Danzig said, seeing the smoke rising up from the pan.

They all watched as Black Beard stood cooking up the liver, taking a piece for himself. When he was finished, he piled the pieces onto a plate and carried it into the living room, where he sat down on the couch beside the women. His comrade grabbed a handful of the meat and stood eating ravenously. Black Beard then offered a piece to one of the women and she took a bite.

“Oh, Christ, she’s eating it!”

“What do you expect her to do? If she doesn’t, that bastard will torture her. They want those women alive, dude.”

“Let’s go up there and waste these dudes, man!”

“Look, we all knew this kind of thing was going to happen,” Forrest said peremptorily. “So soldier up!”

“What do you think about this shit, Doc?”

“I don’t know,” Michael said in amazement. “Though I guess it is fascinating in a horrifying kind of way.”

“I wonder how long before those women end up as food.”

“Well, I can tell you this much,” Michael said. “One of those two men is likely to end up as food before either of the women.”

They watched as the meal was ghoulishly devoured.

Black Beard left the room and dragged the dead man out into the backyard, butchering him much the way one would butcher a game animal, dumping the intestines and other organs in a pile. He then spent the next couple of hours cooking up the rest of the dead man’s flesh on the grill, using the bag of charcoal from the back porch. As he cooked the meat, he dropped it into a black trash bag he had taken from beneath the sink. When he was finished he came back into the house and took a container of salt from the bottom cupboard and poured all of it into the meat bag, shaking it around.

“Who left that salt up there?”

“Must’ve been up there when we bought the place.”

“Oh, shit. Look!”

Black Beard was grabbing one of the women by her hair and dragging her from the room.

“That’s caveman foreplay.”

“You’re sick.”

“There’s no use letting it get to you, man.”

Black Beard took the woman upstairs into one of the bedrooms, pulled down her ski pants and pushed her forward onto the bed with her hands still tied, her pale bottom showing. She made no attempt to escape or to resist as he unbuckled his pants and knelt on the bed behind her. He pumped for two minutes and then it was over.

“ ’Least he didn’t beat her.”

“Check out your man, Doc. He’s making his move!”

The camouflage man was sneaking up the stairs with his shotgun lowered. Riveted, Michael stood watching as Vasquez switched the camera feed to keep up with the man now creeping into the bedroom. Black Beard saw him and grabbed for the shotgun lying beside him on the bed but he wasn’t fast enough. His comrade blasted him in the face at close range, and most of his head vanished from the beard up.

The gore-spattered woman rolled off the edge of the bed to avoid being hit by the body as it fell over onto the mattress.

“Hooah!” Danzig blurted, and everyone laughed, everyone except Michael, who was simply shocked.

The camouflaged man got the woman to her feet and pulled her pants up, taking her downstairs where he pulled her pants right back down, along with those of the other woman, and over the next half hour he smoked Forrest’s cigarettes and took turns at the women on the couch, seemingly in hillbilly heaven. When he was done, he divided the man meat up between four different trash bags, tying them together in pairs and draping them around the women’s necks. Once he had satisfied himself that his idea was superior to that of his dead associate, he put the meat bags on the floor and took a dog chain from his rucksack, chaining the women together at the neck and locking it with a combination padlock. The other end of the chain he used to bind their ankles together, locking it in the same fashion with a separate padlock.

“Ain’t takin’ any chances, is he?”

Next, the man unbound their wrists, presumably to restore the circulation to their hands. He then went up upstairs to take the shells from Black Beard’s shotgun, along with the Bowie knife, collapsible baton, and some other items from the dead man’s pockets too small to identify. Shoving Black Beard’s body onto the floor, he stripped the bloodstained blankets from the bed and went back downstairs, where he curled up on the couch and went to sleep, leaving the women to shiver on the floor. Within thirty minutes it was too dark to see what was happening in the house, and ten minutes after that it was too dark to see anything outside of the house. The time was six P.M.

“I guess that’s it for today,” Forrest said, looking grim.

“Come on, Captain,” Kane said. “I could slip in there and cut that dude’s throat so easy it wouldn’t even be a trick.”

“No,” Forrest said, “and I’ll show you why. Oscar, run it back to where they were feeding the women. Linus, call West in here.”

When Dr. West showed up, Forrest asked him to watch the woman seated on the end of the couch. “She how she’s hacking her ass off?”

West stood nodding. “She’s sicker than a dog. That could very easily be tuberculosis, which I would expect to see up there by now among so much starvation and deprivation, breathing all that crap in the air.”

“But the NBC suits would protect us from—”

“No,” Forrest said with finality. “We soldier up and soldier on. Hooah?”

“Hooah!”

A bit later Forrest found Veronica sitting with Erin and Taylor in the cafeteria. There were some children about and a couple of other women, but everybody was growing accustomed to the close quarters, learning to block out conversations that didn’t involve them in order to allow one another a sense of privacy.

“That sure took a while,” Veronica said. “Are they gone?”

He shook his head. “One of the cannibals killed the other and took the women for himself. Now they’re sleeping and it’s too dark to see anything. It’s total darkness up there at night now.”

“What if they don’t leave?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, shrugging. “They’re no threat to us.”

“Can we still see the tape?” Erin wanted to know.

“If you really want to, Erin, but it’s nothing but raw brutality from start to finish. I don’t think it’s anything you want in your dreams.”

“Believe me,” Veronica said. “I wish I’d never gone in there.”

“But we are allowed to see if we want to, right?” Erin was making sure.

“Yes, the Freedom of Information Act still applies. Should I go and have Oscar cue it up for you?”

“No,” she said with a pleasant smile. “I was merely making sure.”

“Christ, I’ve got the ACLU up my ass,” he said with a chuckle, glancing toward the counter to see that the coffeepot was empty once again. “I wonder who I have to fuck in this place to get a cup of coffee.”

“Is that your manly way of asking for someone to make you some coffee, King Jack?” Taylor asked.

“No,” he said affably. “It’s my way of finding out who I have to fuck in this place to get a cup of coffee.”

Taylor rolled her eyes and got up from the table.

“Taylor, he can make his own goddamn coffee,” Veronica said. “Sit back down.”

“No, I’ve indulged him all these years… it wouldn’t be fair to turn on him now.”

Forrest stuck his tongue out at Veronica.

“Keep it up,” she said, less than entirely pleased that Forrest held so much sway with these two women.

“Oooooh,” he kidded.

She got up and walked out of the cafeteria.

“Uh-oh,” Erin said.

“She’ll be fine,” he said with a wave. “She’s just upset about those maniacs upstairs—that, and I won’t kiss her ass in front of everyone.”

Erin shook her head. “You’ll never change.”

“What makes me such a bad guy?”

“You’re not a bad guy, but would it hurt for you to pretend to be a little vulnerable for her?”

“That’s what she’s pissed about? My lack of vulnerability? E, me walking around down here all weepy-eyed won’t exactly instill confidence.”

Taylor retook her seat. “Well, I don’t think that’s the issue, Jackie pie. The issue is that Veronica doesn’t know how completely full of shit you are when you do things like manipulate people into making your coffee. I do, so it doesn’t bother me. But she thinks that guy’s real, and she doesn’t know how to reconcile him with the one she cares for.”

“And,” Erin added, “I don’t think it helps that Michael so openly dotes on Karen now. Women like to be doted on, you do remember?”

“So does she want Mike back or what?”

Taylor looked at Erin. “I think his brain is made of clay.”

Erin laughed. “He’s playing the dullard.”

“Forget it,” he said. “How soon until that coffee’s ready?”

“I’ll give you some goddamn coffee,” Taylor said. “Go find that girl right now and tell her how much you need her.”

He sat looking at her.

“Go and tell her. Now.”

“Damn!” he said, getting up. “You two always think you can order me around.”

“I’ll keep the pot warm, honey.”

Forrest found Veronica sitting with Melissa, who was helping a couple of the children with their math homework. Laddie was playing ball with the kids and came over to sniff at his pants pocket, pawing at his leg. Andie had managed to establish a genuine curriculum, and she’d done it with the complete support of the other mothers, which made it a joy for her as a teacher. And giving the children homework to complete outside of class kept them from playing the video games nonstop, allowing the video games to evolve into a kind of reward system.

“You’ve done an excellent job,” Forrest had said to her weeks earlier. “I was worried it might be tough to keep them occupied once they’d played every video game a thousand times.”

“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” Andie had replied with a smile.

Forrest stepped up behind Veronica where she sat at the table, taking a dog treat from his pocket and giving it to Laddie. “Talk to you a minute?”

“I’m busy.”

“Taylor won’t give me any coffee.”

“I don’t blame her.”

“Are you guys in a fight?” Melissa asked, noting the tension.

“I think so,” Forrest said. “I’m not sure.”

“My mommy and daddy fight a lot too,” one of the children said. “That’s why mommy had to get a court order.”

Forrest laughed. “You gonna get a court order, V?”

“How would I do that? You’re the king.”

“Well, that’s what I’d like to talk to you about.”

She looked up at him over her shoulder. “What’s that mean?”

“We can talk about it later, I guess. Sorry I bothered you.”

She watched him leave the room, then went back to helping the kids with the puzzle.

“Why do you do that?” Melissa asked.

“Do what, honey?”

“Sit there when you really want to go after him.”

“One day you’ll know.”

“Seems like a waste of time to me. I’d just go see what he wanted.”

Veronica looked at her, then got up and followed after Forrest, catching him outside blast tunnel number two. “Step into my office?”

“Sure,” he said.

They stepped into the tunnel and shut the door.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked.

“Look, I’m sorry if I come off as not needing you. I need you very much. It’s just that I can’t walk around down here acting like Mr. Softy. Nice guys don’t instill any confidence. These people need to see me acting like nothing fazes me.”

“Nothing does faze you.”

“Well, so what, Veronica? I’ve seen untold amounts of heinous shit in my life. What fazes me is you. You faze me. I think about you all goddamn day. I’m so fucking grateful that Karen and Mike hit it off that I don’t even know how to tell you. I can’t even imagine being trapped down here without you now. But I can’t walk around down here like I’ve got Cupid’s dick stuck up my ass either.”

She smiled and used her thumb to squeeze the tears from her eyes. “Did T and E tell you to say that?”

“The Cupid part or the rest of it?”

“I know the disgusting shit is all you. The first part, the sweet part.”

“Of course they told me what to say. I’m too much of a goddamn man to think up mushy shit like that.”

She put her arms around him and they kissed.

The door at the far end opened and Tonya stepped into the tunnel from the missile silo, hesitating when she saw them.

“May as well come on out,” Forrest announced. “You’re busted.”

She came down the tunnel biting her lips between her teeth. “I was helping Marcus find the canned corn,” she said, averting her eyes.

Forrest laughed. “Well, the corn’s over in silo one.”

“Must be why we couldn’t find it,” she said, slipping past them and out of the tunnel.

Veronica slapped him on the shoulder. “That wasn’t nice!”

“She’s an adult. She doesn’t have to apologize for getting shagged. And I don’t have to pretend to the look the other way.”

A few seconds later the door opened again and Kane stepped into the tunnel, a grin spreading across his face. “Either of you see a cute little black chick pass this way?”

“She said she was looking for the canned corn,” Forrest said.

Kane laughed. “I told her to say we were looking for paper towels.”

“Well she cracked under the pressure.”

“You two are terrible,” Veronica said, still hanging against Forrest.

Kane laughed and stepped out of the tunnel, shutting the door after him.

“So are we okay?” Forrest asked. “Or do I need to grovel a little bit?”

She let go of him and pulled her hair behind her ears. “I’m sorry for walking off like I did. I’ve never been any good at… at arguing.”

“Don’t apologize. That’s not a bad thing.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “I should do a better job of expressing myself when I’m upset. It’s a childhood thing.”

He kissed her again. “You’re fine.”

“Did they do anything terrible to those women upstairs?”

“Yes, they did. And that’s as much you need to hear. Let’s go get me some coffee.”

“Do you think maybe we can go looking for that canned corn later on? I understand it might be missing.”

“On second thought,” he said, taking her hand, “why don’t we go see if we can find it right now?”

In the morning, Forrest arrived with Laddie in Launch Control for a look at the monitors, and the first thing he saw was the man in the camouflage jacket laying faceup on the living room floor with the Bowie knife sticking out of his neck. “What the hell happened?”

“Like that?” Ulrich asked, looking up from a Popular Science article on wind power. “That’s what we saw with first light. Those girls got loose and did his ass in. They took both shotguns and all four bags of meat. Even the blankets.”

“Well good for them,” Forrest said. “I was worried that guy was going to move in for a while. We’d have had to do something.”

“Which would have been stupid,” Ulrich remarked. “I’m glad they’re gone.”

“How’d they get those locks open, you wonder?”

“They’ve probably watched and memorized the combinations by now.”

“But how’d they work the combinations in the pitch-dark?”

“First, light must come inside the house before the monitors pick it up,” Ulrich said, bringing up the bathroom feed. “See the chain on the bathroom floor? They needed the mirror to work the combination at their necks. One would assume their antagonist was dead by then.”

“One would assume,” Forrest chuckled.

“We’ve got another birthday today, by the way. Maria two’s kid. She’s seven.”

Birthdays were good days because everybody got a cake for their birthday, and it cheered everyone up, especially the child of the day who got to play video games while everyone else was in class.

“I’ll be back,” Forrest said.

He took Laddie with him to the cargo bay where he kept the novelties, sorting through crates of odds and ends until he found a coloring book full of pictures of a sponge named Bob, along with a brand-new eight-pack of crayons. “It’s not exactly a GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip,” he said to the dog, “but everyone’s gotta get something on their birthday, right?”

Laddie grumbled and sniffed around in the box, finding a blue racquetball and trotting off toward the door with it.

“Hey, it ain’t your birthday. Come put that back!”

Thirty-Four

Marty and his two Army buddies finally made their way back to his house on foot. The Air Force was all over town now, and it took the three of them two days to get back to his house and avoid the armored vehicles. Twice during the day, they were spotted and forced to fight a running battle until they finally lost their pursuers. Now Sullivan stood looking over Joe’s four-door Jeep Rubicon in the beam of his red light, noting the bad dents left in the hood by meteorite impacts, the hole in the hard top.

“This is about the most aggressive tire tread you can get on a civilian vehicle,” he said. “Good call, Miller.”

But Marty wasn’t paying him much real attention. He was busy looking at the ruins of his home through the night vision device, thinking of his wife and child beneath the rubble, feeling that the weight of his despair might crush him. He wished Emory and Sullivan would take the Jeep and leave without him so he could sit down in the midst of the ruins and blow his brains out—and had he thought for even a moment that he might actually get to be with Susan again on the other side, he would have done exactly that. But he knew better, so he turned around and walked over to Sullivan in the darkness.

“I’d rather you didn’t call me Miller,” he said quietly. “I’d consider it a personal favor.”

“It was just a joke.”

“Anything but Miller,” Marty said. “I’ve got his blood all around my neck.”

Emory found a roll of duct tape in a garage across the street and used it to black out all of the brake lights and turn signals. She taped over the headlights so that only an inch-wide horizontal space was exposed across the center of each lamp.

Sullivan bumped Marty on the shoulder, and Marty turned around to see him standing there with a red, one-gallon gas can in his hand. “Strip that tunic a minute.”

Marty took it as an opportunity to practice stripping his gear, and handed over the mandarin-collared ACU jacket. Sullivan then asked him to hold the light while he poured gasoline on the collar of the jacket and scrubbed it against itself to get the blood out. He then squeezed the excess gasoline from the cloth and gave the jacket back.

“Better?”

Marty shrugged back into the jacket. At any other time in his life, the smell of gasoline on his clothing would have made him sick, but under the present circumstance it smelled wholly appropriate. “Thanks, Sully.”

“Sullivan… Sully was my dad.”

“Hooah,” Marty said.

They were on the road a short time later, searching for the best way to refuel the Jeep. By pure dumb luck they came across an abandoned eighteen-wheeled Shell tanker and filled up the Jeep, along with Joe’s two remaining fuel cans.

Sullivan drove and Marty rode shotgun. Emory sat in the backseat with her M-203 grenade launcher. Anyone attempting to chase them down would get the shock of their lives.

“This guy Joe,” Sullivan said, shifting into drive. “He was a good friend?”

“He was the best friend anybody could ever hope for,” Marty said.

“Well, he sure left you a fine set of wheels.”

It occurred to Marty then, for the very first time, that he and Joe had a great deal in common now. “It’s a good Jeep,” he said.

They drove back into town and Sullivan parked as close to the Air Force perimeter as he dared. “They’re keeping their supplies in what they consider to be their rear on their northern perimeter. We can keep to the side streets and walk right up to their supply column like I did the other night. They’ve still got night vision but they’re not keeping up a very good watch.”

“What if we swipe one of their chargers?” Marty asked. “Plug it into the cigarette lighter here in the Jeep? That way we could drive without headlights, right?”

“Let’s not get greedy,” Sullivan said.

“What’s one look like?” Marty said. “I’m wearing an Air Force uniform.”

“Whoa!” Emory said. “You can’t even walk the walk, Marty, much less talk the talk. And you’re wearing Adidas.”

“Who looks at anybody’s feet in the dark?” Marty argued.

“He’s a got a point,” Sullivan said. “And a charger would be a big advantage. Otherwise, these NVDs will be useless in a day or two.”

“He’s got a death wish is what he’s got,” Emory said.

“No, I don’t, Shannon. I really do want to see the crater.”

Emory reluctantly agreed, then they came up with a plan. They used the night vision devices attached to their helmets to cover the last two blocks, easily slipping through the Air Force perimeter undetected. They grabbed two cases of MREs apiece from the nearest deuce-and-a-half, each case containing twelve complete meals, and hurried back to the edge of the perimeter. There were a number of sentries posted, but they were either sleeping or busy talking, most of them in total darkness with NVDs in the up position on the front of their helmets. Apparently they were feeling invincible now that the Mongol threat had been smashed.

The trio stashed the food in a safe place and made their way back to the supply trucks, searching the cab of each for a charger. Not finding one, they were forced to penetrate deeper within the Air Force perimeter, finally taking cover behind a U-Haul truck near a well-lighted repair station where a number of airmen stood around talking and smoking cigarettes. A large green diesel-powered generator was running at the back of the repair bay, providing heat as well as light to a row of six fifty-three-foot Air Force trailers parked to the right of the garage.

“That’s a command car over there,” Sullivan said, pointing across the lot to an armored Humvee festooned with multiple radio antennae.

“If they don’t have one in there,” Emory said, “they don’t have one.”

“I’ll be back,” Marty said, and stepped boldly from behind the truck into the light before Emory could grab him.

“He does have a goddamn death wish!” Sullivan hissed, bringing his M-4 to bear, sighting on the group of nine airmen inside the bay.

“I told you,” she muttered, doing the same, her finger on the trigger of the M-203.

The airmen glanced in Marty’s direction as he strolled casually across the lot with the carbine slung over a shoulder, his hand in his pocket, waving lazily as he passed within a hundred feet of the open door. The wave was returned by a couple of the airmen who went right back to their bullshitting.

“Check that out,” Emory said.

“I’m still gonna jerk a half-hitch in his ass… if we survive this.”

Marty walked past the trailers and over to the command car, which sat out of view from the garage, cloaked in shadow. He opened the far-side door and got in, shutting the door and using his red light to have a look around. There was a charger on the deck between the seats, resting on top of a grenade-bearing vest containing a dozen 40mm grenades. In the backseat he saw a medical bag like the one Emory had worn over her shoulder the day he and Susan met her.

The grenade vest was confusing at first, but Marty was getting the hang of the military’s tricky contraptions, so he managed to shrug into it without much trouble. He tucked the charger away in his harness, shouldered the med kit, and got out of the Humvee.

He heard a woman’s muted cry and froze. A man laughed. Marty looked up at the windows of the trailers, and his skin tightened into gooseflesh as he realized what the trailers were being used for.

“No more,” he muttered, taking Joe’s .45 from its holster and stalking through the darkness to the closest trailer. He stepped onto the stairs and slowly opened the door.

“Get ready to run,” Sullivan said, watching Marty through his NVD.

“Go ahead, split,” Emory said. “I can’t leave him.”

“You’ve got a death wish too now?”

“No,” she said, resigned to her fate. “But I like the guy. He saved my ass.”

“Fuck all,” he muttered, sighting down the barrel of his M-4 and getting ready to do battle.

“Go on, Sullivan. You don’t need to stay here. You can make a good run without us. There’s enough food back there to last you a couple of months.”

“Can’t do it,” he said. “You might be my only chance of ever getting laid again.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “In that case, hon, you’d definitely better go. I’m playing for the other team.”

He took his eye from the scope just long enough to see if she was kidding. “Still,” he said. “I got a pretty good tongue. You might get desperate.”

“Hooah,” she said with a chuckle, and prepared herself to meet death standing up.

Marty stepped into the trailer with the pistol concealed behind his thigh to find an Air Force sergeant sitting at a desk reading Hustler magazine. The sergeant pulled himself out of his fantasy and set the magazine aside, having a look at his clipboard and frowning as he flipped to the next sheet of paper.

“You’re confused, Miller. You’re not up until tomorrow night.”

“No, I’m up right now,” Marty said, pointing the pistol into the sergeant’s face, seeing that his name was Priest.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Priest said, cautious but unafraid. “You got shit for brains? You can’t wait twenty-four hours? Put that fucking thing away before I report your ass to Moriarty.”

“How many men in the back?” Marty asked.

The sergeant gave him a queer look, noting the dark stain on the collar of Marty’s jacket. “Who the fuck are you, buddy?”

“Priest, I’m not your buddy. So unless you’d like to die with me, you’d better answer my question.”

“Six,” Priest said, his mouth suddenly dry. “Three broads to a side.”

Marty took a look around, now noticing the six rifles in a rack on the wall behind the desk. “Get the fuck out,” he said, stepping aside and waving the sergeant toward the door.

Priest kept his hands shoulder high as he came around the desk, and Marty belted him in the back of the head with the pistol as he passed.

Now, in every movie he had ever seen where a man got whacked in the back of the head with a gun, the guy always fell down; Priest did not fall down. What Priest did was grab the back of his head and spin around, swearing aloud and forcing Marty to belt him again, only this time on the top of the skull, which knocked Priest to his knees, but he still didn’t fall over. So Marty bashed him a third time, much harder, and the sergeant finally fell over, but he still wasn’t knocked out. He was, in fact, now sobbing like a child.

This put Marty in a serious quandary, mindless brutality not really being his field of expertise.

“Don’t hit me anymore,” the sergeant whimpered. “I can’t see. Jesus, you’ve blinded me!”

Marty was suddenly feeling so bad for the man that he nearly started crying himself. “Don’t fucking move!” he hissed.

“I won’t,” whimpered the severely injured man. “I swear!”

Marty went down the hall and opened the first door to find a man humping a woman in her mid-forties. She had blond hair and was staring off into deep space.

“What the fuck?” the naked man said, climbing off the cot from between the woman’s legs. “Get the fuck—”

Marty shot him in the throat and turned around, kicking open the door to the room directly across the hall, where another woman was being violated. He shot the man in his stomach and turned to face down the hall, shooting each of the three men to emerge from their rooms. The sixth man had obviously chosen to hide, so Marty walked over the bodies and opened the door to find him cowering on the bed with his hands over his head. He was a young airman, no older than nineteen. The woman he had been molesting, even younger than her tormentor, was obviously in a deep fog like the others.

Marty shot him in the head, nearly jumping out of his skin a second later to the sound of a thunderous explosion outside the trailer.

“Kill me,” the girl begged. “Please!”

Marty stepped forward, kissing his fingers and touching them to her forehead.

“Close your eyes,” he said gently, hearing the sounds of men clamoring out of the next trailer, followed by those of automatic rifle fire. The girl closed her eyes and he did the same as he held the barrel of the .45 near her temple and pulled the trigger. The slide locked back on the weapon as the last shell was ejected, and he turned from the room without looking at her, ejecting the spent magazine and slapping in a new one. He did not look into the other rooms he passed, holstering the pistol and unslinging his carbine as he made for the door, stepping over the sergeant’s now lifeless body where he still lay on the floor in front of the desk.

“What the fuck’s he doing in there?” Sullivan said as they stood waiting to find out what would happen.

Ninety seconds later three half-naked men came piling out of the adjacent trailer with rifles in hand. Apparently none of the airmen in the garage had been able to hear Marty’s shots over the generator, but the men next door had.

“The jig’s up!” Emory said. “I got the garage.”

Sullivan shot down the men coming from the trailer as Emory fired a grenade into the bay, hitting the generator and blowing the men in the garage to kingdom come. He shot more half-naked men as they came scrambling from the trailers, and he nearly shot Marty too as he came running across the lot with ever more men showing up out of the darkness.

“The fuel truck!” Sullivan shouted, banging Emory on the helmet and pointing far to the right of the trailers. “Burn it down!”

She fired a grenade and blew up the fuel truck, roasting a number of airmen as they were running past it.

Marty made it back unscathed and the three of them slipped away into the night, grabbing up the stashed MREs along the way.

“You stupid fuck!” Sullivan said later, tossing the cases of MREs onto the ground near the Jeep. “What the fuck was that about? Huh?”

“I couldn’t find a charger in the command car,” Marty lied. “So I decided to check the trailer.” He pulled the charger from inside his vest. “I got this med kit, and some more grenades for Shannon’s popgun too.”

“Never again!” Sullivan said, jamming his finger into Marty’s face. “Never again! And I want your goddamn word! You don’t have the right to play games with my life!”

“You’re right,” Marty said, chastened. “It won’t happen again. You’ve got my word.”

They put half the MREs inside the Jeep and lashed the other half to the roof with the fuel cans. At first light they decided to stop for some rest and parked the Jeep off the road beneath an overpass in the desert. Emory volunteered to keep first watch because she was too wired to sleep, and soon Sullivan was snoring away behind the wheel with the seat back. Marty sat with Emory on the hood of the Jeep for warmth.

“You should try and get some sleep,” she said.

“I’m too wound up.”

“I’m getting to know you. You lied earlier. Why’d you really go into that trailer?”

“I heard someone hurting a woman,” he said. “Are all military men fucking psycho?”

“No,” she said. “And not all those guys back there are psycho either, but if the good-natured guys are outnumbered, what are they going to do? They have to eat.”

“They could take off like Sullivan did.”

“And I’m sure plenty of them have, Marty. You’re talking about a lot of young guys with guns and no worthwhile leadership. It starts at the top. That’s what was wrong with our unit. We had a wife-beater for a C.O.”

“Think we can trust Sullivan?” Marty asked.

“He made a cute pass at me back there before your little show. I’m pretty sure he’s a gentleman.”

“Does he have a chance with you?”

“I dunno,” she said with a shrug. “Like he said, I might get desperate.”

“Can you do that? I mean… you know.”

She put her arm around his shoulder, pulling him closer. “It’s like this, Marty. There’s two kinds of lesbians. Those who like intercourse and those who don’t really care for it.”

“Which are you?”

“Well, I used to like it once in a while with the right guy. Now, I dunno. It’ll take time…”

“Plus you might be—”

“Oh, thanks for reminding me,” she said, letting go of him. “I’d actually managed to forget about that. With any luck, I’ll have a goddamn miscarriage.”

“And if we make it the whole nine months?”

“Well, you’re gonna have to deliver the goddamn thing.”

“Me? I don’t know shit about birthing babies.”

“There’s plenty of time for me to teach you all you need to know. Now, do me a favor and don’t bring it up again.”

They sat quietly for a while, then Emory slipped down from the hood and stood looking out across the dim morning expanse of Arizona. “Marty, I don’t know what I’ll do if it looks like him… I might kill it.”

“Nine months is a long time to grow attached, Shannon. Let’s wait and see how you feel by then.”

“What about you? Do you have any kids out there anywhere?”

He smiled sadly and shook his head.

An hour later Marty was dozing in the passenger seat of the Jeep when something woke him up. It was the sound of a rotary winged aircraft, the first aircraft he’d heard in the sky since the impact. Sullivan was still snoring, but Emory was nowhere to be seen. He walked out from beneath the bridge to see her come sliding down the embankment.

“Fuck me!” she shouted. “Gunship coming in along the highway, flying snake and nape!”

“Snake and what?”

“Nape of the earth, Marty. Get outta sight!”

They listened to the helicopter come thundering overhead and on up the highway to the north.

“They’re taking a serious risk,” Marty said. “There’s still too much particulate matter in the air. They’ll burn the turbines up.”

“Must be why they’re flying so low,” she said. “That and they gotta be looking for us.”

Sullivan had awoken to the sound of the rotors and joined them, watching after the helicopter. “Blackhawk, loaded with rockets. They’re definitely pissed.” He turned around and pointed at Marty. “This is on you, cowboy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well… forget it, we just gotta deal with it.”

An hour later the helicopter came back. By now its engines were smoking from sucking in so much dirt and ash, but it swung wide of the highway by a hundred yards for a look beneath the bridge, where Marty had gotten out of the Jeep and stood hidden behind a column. The door gunner immediately opened fire on the vehicle.

Sullivan stomped the accelerator and tore off in the direction of the helicopter. “Don’t miss, Shannon, or we’re fucking dead!” he shouted.

They had removed the hard top, and Emory was standing in the backseat braced against the roll bar. She opened fire on the door gunner even as machine-gun bullets were hitting the fender of the Jeep. The gunner fell back into the aircraft, and the helicopter swung around to face them directly. Sullivan swerved right against the direction of its turn, hoping to throw off the pilot’s aim. The first rocket struck the ground to their left and just behind them, leaving their fate in Emory’s hands.

Sullivan straightened the Jeep and she fired the M-203.

Even as the projectile was arcing toward the windscreen of the aircraft, Sullivan was swerving hard to port. The pilot overcorrected and the second rocket struck the ground to their right. A fragment hit Emory in the hip and she fell down in the back of the Jeep as her 40mm grenade detonated against the windscreen of the Blackhawk, killing both pilots.

The aircraft went into a violent spin, whirling around four times before smashing into the desert floor, breaking apart on impact and bursting into flames. Sullivan raced back toward the bridge where Marty stood waiting and locked up the brakes. The three of them raced to reattach the hardtop and quickly tied down the supplies, only to find the front left tire had gone flat. They changed it as quickly as they could, then Sullivan drove back up the embankment onto the highway.

Marty noticed Emory’s leg for the first time. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’s shrapnel. Come back here and help me.”

He climbed into the back with her and she gave him the curved hemostat she had taken from the medical bag, which was basically a pair of locking forceps normally used for clamping off a bleeding artery or vein.

“Use that to pull the shrapnel out,” she said, shrugging her trousers down over her rump to expose her bleeding right hip.

He took hold of the jagged piece of metal and tugged at it, causing Emory to wince. “It’s in there pretty tight,” he said.

“Don’t play with it, Marty. Pull it out!”

He clamped the hemostat onto the metal and gave it a jerk, but it held fast and Emory grabbed the roll bar, shouting in pain. “Fuck!”

“I’m sorry. It’s really in there, Shannon.”

“Need some help?” Sullivan asked.

“You just wanna play with my butt… keep driving.”

It was getting too dark to see inside the Jeep, so Marty took the red filter from his light and held it in his teeth while he examined the wound.

“You’re going to have to do a cut-down,” Emory said, digging in the bag for a scalpel.

“A what?”

“You’re gonna cut it out.”

“Oh, jeez!” He gripped the light in his teeth and pressed against the wound with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, holding the skin taut as he drew the razor-sharp blade along the ridge, drawing blood and exposing the blackish metal.

“Okay, good job, hon. Now pull that fucker outta me.”

Marty took hold of the metal with the hemostat and had it out with one tug. The piece of shrapnel was half the size of a trading card, cut corner to corner, slightly bent. He tossed it on the floor and Emory poured peroxide over the open wound. Then she took a packet of sutures from the bag and clamped the curved needle between a smaller pair of hemostats. “Sew me up.”

He sat looking at her.

“It doesn’t have to be pretty. Just keep it as straight as you can.”

Marty was sweating. “Can you turn the heat off, Sullivan?”

“It’s not on.”

“Come on,” Emory said. “It’s not that tough.”

It took him nearly twenty minutes, but Marty got the wound sewn closed and then Emory dressed it and pulled her trousers back up. By then it was total darkness once again, and Sullivan was driving with his night vision.

“Is there enough ambient light for those things to work out here?” Marty asked as he climbed into the passenger seat.

“Not real well,” Sullivan said. “I’ve switched to infrared.”

It was a bizarre feeling racing into total blackness, and Marty found it difficult to look out the windshield without feeling terrified they were going to hit something. “You’re sure you can see?”

“I can see.”

He plugged one of the other NVDs into the charger then closed his eyes and leaned his head back. A second later Emory was tugging at his arm.

“Come back here,” she said.

“Something wrong?” he asked, moving into the back again.

She lay over on the seat and put her head into his lap, taking his hand and setting it on her head. “Pet me. I don’t feel good.”

Marty began to run his fingertips through her hair.

“Somebody talk to me back there,” Sullivan said. “Keep me awake.”

Marty lifted his head again and drew a deeply disappointed breath, smiling blandly in the dark. He really needed to sleep, but he was apparently in too great a demand.

Thirty-Five

“Rats?” Ester said in disbelief. “I ask your engineers for new technological ideas and they come up with rats? Good lord!”

“It’s only a stop-gap, Madam President,” Admiral Longbottom tried to assure her. “And the little bastards will eat damn near anything, so breeding them won’t be difficult.”

“I can’t take rat meat to the people,” Ester said. “My God, Barry, tell the man!”

“Well, I think it may well be a matter of presentation,” replied Vice President Hadrian with the same calm demeanor that had served him so well as President. “If you present them today with some wounded black wharf rat as the answer to our future, they’ll throw bricks at you, and understandably so. But if you wait until the food has begun to run low and everyone is afraid… and then present them with an entire cash-crop of clean, white lab rats with pink eyes… you’re a hero.”

“Exactly right,” said Longbottom, grateful for Hadrian’s presence in the Islands.

“Nothing says we have to take the project public. But we are talking about avoiding starvation. And if we start a breeding program now with the lab rats we still have here on the island, we can have a good head start by the time the fish supply begins to run out.”

“Okay,” Ester said. “So where do you propose we raise these things?”

“Well, we can raise them on the hangar decks of our carriers,” Longbottom said, abhorring the idea but feeling the need to offer the concession. “That will keep the population off the island and out of sight. And there are ways the meat could be processed so that eating it won’t be such a distasteful idea.”

“It’s as bad an idea as Soylent Green,” Ester muttered. “Anyway, I don’t like the idea of using your ships. I’m sure another place can be found, one of the other islands may be perfect. What else do you have for us?”

“I saved the best news for last,” Longbottom said with a smile.

“Thank God,” Ester said.

“First, my engineers are confident that we can use the reactors aboard our nuclear vessels to supply electrical power to most of Honolulu for twelve hours a day,” the admiral began. “On a revolving schedule. It will take time to construct a new power grid but this is a work-ready project. And we won’t have to worry about replacing the atomic fuel for a couple years. And by then we should be running largely on tidal power.”

“Tidal power? That requires industry.”

“Which the Australians have agreed to help us with,” the admiral said. “They have been developing the technology for a number of years now.”

“What are they asking for in return?”

“Our friendship,” the admiral said. “Our future help with any problems they may have. Exchange of engineers and ideas. All of the above. Like you, they view this crisis as an opportunity to get it right.”

“But you still don’t see it that way, Admiral?”

Longbottom sat back. “I’ve done as you asked, and I will continue to do my best, but no, I don’t agree entirely with the steps we’re taking. I think we should be concentrating our efforts on the remaining oil platforms out to sea. The longer we wait, the more they deteriorate out there in the salty air.”

“Oil is the past,” Ester said. “There’s no future in it. We want the sky to clear, not to continue polluting it. I’ve promised the people a different way forward. It looks like you’re making an effort, Admiral, and I thank you for that.”

“We still need fuel for our vessels,” Longbottom said. “And I’m not sure how much oil the Australians can afford to share.”

Ester could sense that Longbottom was expecting a quid pro quo in exchange for his efforts, so she gave it to him, as she and Hadrian had previously agreed she would.

“Very well,” she said. “Reopen the closest platform.”

“Excellent,” he said. “I believe this to be a very wise choice.”

“How soon do you expect to see the first tidal turbines installed?” Hadrian asked, making sure the admiral knew that he would be expected to carry through.

“Within twelve months,” Longbottom replied. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

“And the new power grid will be constructed in such a manner that we will be able to hook the tidal generators right into it,” Ester said.

“Well, that will be more difficult,” the admiral said. “It would be better to wait until—”

“That wasn’t a question, Admiral. Nor was it a request. That was a statement. The new power grid is not going to be a jerry-rig. I want it purpose-built for future use with the tidal generators. And whatever ‘adaptations’ your people come up with will be to accommodate the nuclear reactors. Not the other way around. From now, we build with the future in mind. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Longbottom said, pissed because now his engineers would have to go back to the drawing board.

“And I would appreciate it if you would send daily reports to my office,” Hadrian added.

“Daily, sir?”

“Yes, daily.”

“Well, sir, you do realize that we may go for weeks at a time without any real changes in—”

“Daily reports,” Hadrian repeated. “And there had better be some kind of progress made on every one of them.” Then, offering the admiral some wiggle room, he added, “Even if it’s only the sketch of a new idea one of your engineers has put forward.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, I understand you also have security concerns,” Ester said, continuing their combined assault.

“Yes, well, on the issue of security, Madam President, we have located a site where a number of the pirates seem to be congregating on one of the lesser islands. I would like to know what, if anything, you’d like for me to do about this threat.”

Ester had heard these reports already, and though she knew the piracy problem was growing, she pretended not to be concerned. “What would you suggest, Admiral?”

“Cleaning them out, ma’am.”

“Then do whatever you deem necessary… so long as it doesn’t impede the Navy’s progress elsewhere.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Longbottom said, finally feeling some sense of accomplishment.

“Your list of responsibilities seems to be growing, doesn’t it, Admiral?”

“It does indeed,” Longbottom said.

“And to think you were worried about losing your importance,” Ester said with a chuckle. “Will there be anything else?”

“Not right now, Madam President, no.”

“I thank you again for your diligence,” she said. “And please pass my thanks down the chain of command.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

When the admiral was gone, Ester rose and went to the window, where she stood leaning on her cane. “Barry, how would you feel about being president again, of the Islands this time?”

“Excuse me?” Hadrian said.

“I’m tired,” she said, turning from the window. “And I wasn’t kidding about me not making a pimple on Golda Meir’s backside. I’m an astronomer, Barry. A novelty act. I wasn’t born to lead a society into the new era.”

“The Islanders love you, Ester. You’re gruff and tough, and that’s what they need in a leader right now.”

“But what if I die?” she said. “It’s better that you’re already in office by then. Andrew Johnson had a lot of trouble after Lincoln’s death. I think it would better for me to claim ill health and to step aside soon. We’ll tell the Islanders that I’m staying on as one of your advisers, and I’ll make regular appearances if they really feel they can’t live without me, but I worry I may cause more trouble in the long run by remaining in office.”

“The people elected you, Ester, and you agreed to take the job for six years. They believe in you. And if you’re really that worried about dying in office, I promise right now to do my best to make sure all of your visions come to fruition.”

“That’s the problem, Barry. This was never my vision. It’s the vision of some poor dead idealistic astronomer.”

“Don’t abandon these people now, Ester. There’s nothing that says a lawyer makes any better leader than an astronomer—and you’re learning. He didn’t show it, but giving the admiral permission to shell that pirate stronghold out of existence bought you a lot of capital with the Navy. Nothing makes a military man happier than getting to take military action.” He laughed. “He’s probably getting ready to sortie the entire fleet as we speak.”

Ester nodded grimly. “He may be, at that.”

“But after he takes this pirate stronghold down,” Hadrian cautioned, “pretend to lose interest in the pirates we have left. It’s too soon to tell, but we may need an enemy to help keep us unified. So we should allow these pirates time to recover a little bit before sending the admiral back out. It’s a fine balance you need to strike, Ester.”

“See?” she said, pointing at him with the tip of her cane. “That’s the type of political evil that would never occur to me.”

Hadrian grinned. “That’s what you’ve got me for, Ester.”

Thirty-Six

The biggest trouble for Marty and his friends during their trip had been traveling along I-25 north of the Arizona border. It was jammed with deserted, bumper-to-bumper, ash-coated traffic, all of it pointing south on both sides of the highway. Even in the Jeep they’d had trouble negotiating their way through the logjam of cars and over thousands of ash-coated, frozen bodies along the road.

“What killed them all?” Emory wondered.

“Pressure wave,” Marty said. “Those who weren’t killed outright likely suffocated in the vacuum.”

By the time they reached the outskirts of Denver, the cars were nothing but burnt frames and the bodies no more than grizzled skeletons.

“This is where the firestorm first began to lose its intensity,” Marty said. “Everything north of here is likely burnt to a crisp.”

They drove into downtown Denver and got out and stood looking at the scorched remains of the once fair city.

“It used to be such a clean town,” Emory said. “Now it’s an ashtray.”

“Smells like one too,” Sullivan said, hawking up a mouthful of phlegm and spitting it onto the street.

They drove into the suburbs, where it turned out that Marty had been largely correct about being able to forage canned food. They saw living people here and there, darting in and out of houses in ones and twos with sacks over their shoulders, all of them ragged and filthy-looking, wretches for the most part. No one came near the trio, however, and there seemed to be very little sense of danger. Still, they kept their eyes peeled. Some of the houses had mysteriously escaped the flames entirely, while others were completely incinerated. They stood talking in the drive of a brick home that had gone largely undamaged, their mouths covered with green triangular bandages against the ash blowing in the breeze.

“Traveling is going to get more difficult from here,” Marty said. “We’ll still find food but before long the highway’s likely to be covered with ejecta.”

“Won’t be any gas north of here,” Sullivan said. “Not with the cars all burned up.”

“But there will be in the underground tanks,” Marty said. “Beneath the gas stations.”

“How do you propose to get it out of the ground?”

“We can go to Home Depot or someplace like that,” Marty said. “All I need is some PVC pipe, some glue, and a few other things, and I can make a hand pump.”

Sullivan stood looking at Emory.

“We’ve got nothing better to do, John.”

“I disagree,” he said. “Okay, he was right about the food. But he’s wrong about heading any farther north. We should be scavenging all the food we can. We can hook a trailer to the Jeep, find a place south of here to hole up for the winter, a house near some trees with a big-ass fireplace in it.”

“He’s right, Shannon. That’s exactly what you guys should do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m pressing on,” Marty said. “I’ll find a four-wheel drive somewhere in Denver that didn’t burn up.”

“You’re nuts!” Sullivan said.

“I’ll be one less mouth to feed.”

“Um, no,” Emory said. “I don’t like that idea.”

“I’m not asking you guys to come with me,” he said. “But it’s the only thing left that makes any sense for me.”

“Then I’m coming with you,” she said. “John L?”

He shook his head. “No, Shannon. I’m sorry. That way is a total dead end and there’s nothing up there I care about. Not anymore.”

“I’ll be there,” she said, her eyes grinning over the bandage.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve only got so much faith to sustain me.”

“Well, if it’s a matter of faith,” she said, grabbing his belt and pulling him off toward the house.

“Shannon, what the fuck are you doing?” he said, trying to pry her hand loose, but not terribly hard.

She towed him through the door and into the kitchen, pushing him up against counter and reaching down with one hand to unbutton his trousers.

He stood looking at her, his arousal increasing. “Shannon… what are you doing?”

She freed his manhood and began to massage him. “Restoring your faith.”

“This isn’t going to—”

Sullivan drew a deep breath and slid his arm around her, quickly giving in to her touch. He took off her helmet and pulled the bandage down to put his nose into her hair, breathing her in. Even after so many weeks without bathing, there was still the unmistakable essence of a female.

“Goddamnit, that feels good,” he said with a sigh.

“I know what guys like,” she said, stroking him more vigorously until she got him groaning into her ear.

He gripped her tight against him. “Ohh… fuck!”

When he was finished shuddering, she stood back and took a handful of dust-covered paper towels from a roll hanging beneath the cupboard, grinning at him as she wiped her fingers clean. “Too bad you’re not coming along,” she said. “That’s as easy for me as shaking your hand.”

He finished buttoning his pants and stood looking at her. “You know it’s a one-way trip,” he said helplessly. “You have to know that?”

“Go ahead and consider that my thanks for what you’ve done for us.”

“Shannon, think about this. Seriously.”

“Already have.”

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, grabbing his carbine from the table and walking out of the house. Without saying a word, he walked past where Marty stood in the yard, got into the Jeep and shut the door.

“What’s his problem?” Marty asked as Emory came walking out with a self-satisfied smile on her face.

“He’s got a crush on a lesbian,” she said. “What about you? You need a crank before we go?”

“Stop it,” he said, turning away, but she grabbed his jacket.

“I’m a practical woman, Marty. You need one or not?”

“Not today,” he said quietly, embarrassed. “But thank you.”

She bumped him on the shoulder. “We’re buddies, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “We’re buddies.”

“Okay then. Me and you stick together.”

“Of course. What about Sullivan?”

“Sullivan… well, he’s sorta fucked,” she said with a laugh. “’Cuz I play dirty.”

Two days later Sullivan slowed the Jeep and came to a stop in the middle of a back-country road twenty-five miles north of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The boulder resting in the center of the road was over ten feet tall and twice as wide. “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered.

“See what I’ve been telling you guys!” Marty said, jumping excitedly out of the Jeep and running up to the monolith.

Emory and Sullivan got out and stood looking at the rock.

“That flew up in the sky and then came back down, right?” Emory said.

“Sure as hell did!” Marty answered, running around the side of it, trying to calculate the weight. “Definitely igneous rock,” he muttered. “Hey, either of you guys know the unit weight of granite? I’m not sure—no, wait—about a hundred pounds per cubic foot.”

They followed him around it and were shocked by what they saw in the distance.

“Now that’s a goddamn debris field!” Marty shouted.

For as far they could see to the north, the barren landscape was scattered with boulders, though not all were as big as the first one, and there were great gashes in the earth where they had come to land, inexorably altering the landscape with their presence alone.

“See those cars out there?” Marty said, pointing far off the highway where a dozen vehicles lay scattered like broken toys. “That’s where the blast wave threw them. Which means we can cross over to the interstate now. It should be mostly clear.” He turned and paced off the size of the boulder. “Finally, some numbers I can work with.”

Sullivan looked at Emory. “He doesn’t have his head on right.”

“Let him go,” she said. “He’s a got a thing for numbers.”

“Just look at it, Sue,” Marty was muttering. “Just look at it, honey!”

He came back over to them after nearly fifteen minutes of mumbling to himself and stood scratching his growing red beard.

Okay,” he said. “Judging from the size and estimated weight of this monster, speed and angle of attack, we shouldn’t be much more than five hundred miles from the point of impact.”

Sullivan looked at him disbelief. “You’re telling me the explosion threw this fucking thing five hundred miles?”

“That’s an estimate.”

“Well, shit, how close can we get to the crater before the road’s all blown away?”

“That won’t be the problem,” Marty said. “The road will be buried. But that’s what the Jeep is for.”

They were towing a trailer now loaded with fuel and food, so they were set for a long drive.

Emory smiled at Sullivan. “You have to admit, it’s kinda cool.”

He nodded grimly. “My parents were up in Montana.”

“Well, for what it’s worth,” Marty said, “they never knew a thing. It was instantaneous.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive,” Marty said. “That thing hit with a force equal to five or six teratons of TNT. That’s five or six trillion tons.”

“How did we even survive a blast like that?” Emory wondered.

“Shock cocoons,” Marty said. “Small areas of limited damage within a broader area of mass devastation. That’s how they explained those firemen surviving the World Trade Center falling on top of them. Shock cocoons even allowed for a few buildings to remain standing after the Hiroshima blast. There can be all sorts of reasons for their occurrence. In our case—meaning Arizona—I’m guessing the Rockies had a mitigating effect on the pressure wave no one ever anticipated. Maybe the Grand Canyon did too. We could probably study this impact for decades and still not know everything. You know, it’s kind of like finding a living Tyrannosaurus rex and realizing we were only half right about what they looked like… God, I wish Susan were here!”

“Well, can we get going, Mr. Scientist? We’re burning daylight.”

“Why not?” Marty said. “It’s only going to get more interesting.”

They crossed back to the interstate, and it turned out that Marty had been largely correct about that too. There were hundreds and hundreds of cars, but most of them had been blown well clear of the highway.

The trip to the Canadian border took another four days and nights of driving over rough and rocky terrain. The interstate was completely covered by the blanket of ejecta that fell from the sky after the impact, obscuring the landscape. Most of the highway signs had been leveled by the blast wave along with every other man-made structure north of the Wyoming border. They kept track of their progress by stopping to brush off—or in some cases to dig up—fallen or buried highway signs.

At last, Sullivan stopped the Jeep and they sat gaping at a massive hole in the earth extending well beyond the horizon north, east, and west, stretching like an empty ocean basin for as far as the eye could see. “Holy Christ,” he whispered, awestruck.

Marty and Emory got out. Neither said a word as they walked the thirty yards to the crater’s edge and stood looking nearly a mile down into the empty chasm blown in the earth’s crust, its sloped and rocky walls lined with the same colorful striations as the Grand Canyon. They saw no sign of a past civilization, heard no sound but the cold breeze in their ears.

There was a tremor in the earth then, and they hurried back from the edge as rocks broke away and tumbled down, hitting speeds of sixty mph before finally reaching the bottom far below, well out of view. The tremor did not last long, and when the earth stood still again they returned to the rim and watched the last of the tumbling rocks and boulders careening out of sight.

“This wound will take a very long time to heal,” he said quietly.

“Marty, what’s that?” Emory said, pointing roughly three-quarters of a mile around the rim at an orange dot.

Marty trotted back to the Jeep with her on his heels, grabbing his carbine and finding the orange splotch of color through his scope. “It’s a tent!”

“You’re kidding,” Sullivan said, getting out of the Jeep and raising a pair of high-powered binoculars. “Who the hell else would be stupid enough to… you’re right.”

Emory had her own carbine now and was glassing the site as well. “It’s an encampment, all right. Is that a truck of some kind in defilade to the right of the tent, dark green maybe?”

“I think so,” Sullivan said. “Let’s mount up and get a little closer. Everybody keep your fucking eyes peeled for an ambush.”

They drove to within four hundred yards of the encampment and Sullivan climbed up onto the roof with the binoculars.

“John, somebody could blow your ass right off there.”

“Not worried about me, are you, Shannon?”

She looked at Marty and rolled her eyes.

“Looks deserted,” Sullivan said. “There’s another tent. It’s green.”

Emory raised her weapon. “Let’s get over there before it starts getting dark.”

Marty drove the Jeep slowly along, with Emory and Sullivan walking twenty and thirty yards out in front to guard against ambush. When they drew within fifty yards of the encampment, Sullivan signaled Marty to halt and stay in the Jeep as he and Emory advanced into the site, weapons ready.

“Hear that?” Sullivan said.

“Yeah… sounds like gas.”

They looked around the corner of the tent and saw a small aluminum camp table with a Coleman stove resting on it, a large propane tank beneath it on the ground. A blue flame hissed beneath a red enameled coffeepot. Emory trained her weapon on what turned out to be a four-door, hybrid Chevrolet SUV. Sullivan advanced on the big orange tent and looked inside, seeing the limbless torsos of a man and a woman, their eyes open, staring sightless at the ceiling of the tent.

“Christ!” he said whipping around. “Look sharp, Shannon! We got bodies!”

Emory dropped into a crouch, never taking her eyes from the SUV. “I got movement, John! Around the truck! Moving to flank us on the left!”

Sullivan moved forward, unable to detect any movement on the uneven, rocky terrain. “I got nothin’.”

They advanced together on the truck, drawing close enough to read the words UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY stenciled in dirty white lettering on the door. “You gotta be shitting me,” he said.

“The government did not send them out here!” Emory said. “Did it?”

“Fuck if I know.” Sullivan crept carefully around the front of the SUV, finding a cleft in the earth on the other side. The fissure was as wide and as deep as a man, a trench running from the edge of the crater and winding off across the uneven landscape for what could have been miles.

Emory came around the back of the truck and looked down into the trench. “That’s what I saw. Somebody jumping in.”

Sullivan slid down into the ditch and poked around until he found a boot print then climbed back out. “Better get Marty in here.”

She turned and beckoned Marty into the camp. He drove up to the orange tent, killed the engine and got out. He walked over and lifted the lid from the coffeepot. “It’s boiled dry,” he said, turning off the flow of propane.

He and Emory had a closer look at the bodies inside the tent, finding their clothes in a pile in the corner.

“Must’ve taken their arms and legs for food,” she said.

“Doesn’t make sense,” Marty said. “There’s backpacking food over there by the stove in a box. Why eat the people?”

Sullivan threw back the flap and stepped inside. “Because you eat the perishable food first. The dehydrated shit will keep.”

Marty looked at him.

“People are perishable,” Sullivan said, pushing a digital video camera into his hands. “Found that in the other tent. How’s it work?”

They stepped out of the tent, and Marty sat on a rock fiddling with the camera while the other two rooted through the surveyors’ equipment, searching the truck and the immediate area near the encampment.

“Where are you going?” Emory called.

“To find their latrine,” Sullivan answered. “It’ll tell us how long they’ve been here.” Shortly, he found a small slit trench about four feet long dug behind a small boulder nearly forty yards away. Near the trench were three rolls of toilet paper in Ziploc bags and a small spade stuck in the ground. He used the spade to uncover the buried excrement, then went back to the encampment where Emory was sorting through the backpacking food.

“Find it?” she asked.

“Either those two were here for at least a week, or there’s some people missing… probably two or three.”

“There’s only two sleeping bags.”

“Well, there’s a lot of shit over there. Maybe somebody swiped the other sleeping bags.”

“Three!” Marty called, getting up from the rock and coming over to them. “There’s three missing and they’re down there.” He pointed into the crater. “They apparently died in an avalanche. Check this out.”

He played a video clip of two men and a woman preparing to descend the escarpment in full rock-climbing gear. They were happy and excited, all in their early thirties, one white male, one black, and a small Asian woman. The blond woman from the tent was in the video too, but she was not dressed for climbing, and the man with red hair was probably the person holding the camera.

The next clip showed them descending out of sight a hundred yards or so down the face.

After that, the clip showed an avalanche much worse than the one Marty and company had witnessed upon their arrival. The blonde was screaming in the background, and the man holding the camera kept saying, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” over and over again for nearly a minute until the avalanche ended. From the look of the video, it did not appear that anyone below could possibly have survived.

“Unbelievable,” Sullivan said. “Who in their right mind goes down there?”

Marty shrugged and tucked the camera into his pocket. “Maybe they figured there was nothing else left to do with their lives. They were rock hounds… and this is the ultimate experience for a rock hound.”

“And now it’s their grave,” Sullivan said. “So, okay, we camp here tonight. In the morning we’ll load this food back into their truck and head south. That hybrid will get better mileage than the Jeep. Anybody got a better idea?”

“Don’t forget our cannibalistic underground dweller,” Emory said.

“We sleep in shifts anyway,” Sullivan said. “Nothing’s changed.”

Thirty-Seven

It was pitch-black by eight o’clock that night, and Emory sat against a rock with one of the sleeping bags wrapped around her shoulders, unable to even see her hand in front of her face. They had pulled the SUV away from the fissure so they could see the trench unobstructed, and every ten minutes or so she would scan 360 degrees around the encampment through the NVD looking for movement or heat signatures.

A woman’s scream split the night, and Sullivan came instantly awake, grabbing the carbine resting across his belly. “Shannon!”

“Here!” she said to the darkness. “It wasn’t me.” She turned on her night vision device and got to her feet, scanning the trench line.

Sullivan pulled on his helmet and scanned through his own NVD. “How far? Could you tell?”

“Hundred yards maybe.”

“What’s going on?” Marty said in the inky blackness.

“Ruck up!” Emory told him. “A woman screamed out there.”

“Probably a trap,” Sullivan said, shrugging into his harness. He could see Marty fumbling around in the dark looking for his equipment, pulling a flashlight from his pocket. “If you turn that fucking thing on, I’ll stick it so far up your ass you’ll have light comin’ out your ears.”

“Well, how the hell else am I supposed to find my shit?”

“Try remembering where you put it!” Sullivan said, walking over and picking up Marty’s gear from behind him and shoving it into his arms. Then he grabbed Marty’s helmet from a rock and jammed it down on his head. “Try not to forget your dick.”

Emory smiled to herself. “He remembered his weapon, John. That’s the important thing.”

“Hark, his guardian angel speaks.”

She laughed. “We’ll walk the trench line above ground. Me and Marty on the right, you on the left.”

“I say Marty walks down in the trench.”

“Sully, fuck off… anybody seen my goddamn gloves?”

They covered roughly a hundred yards before Sullivan spotted anything telling down in the trench. His fist went up and the other two stopped in their tracks, crouching low to the ground. He peered carefully over the edge of the fissure for a better look, to see what appeared to be a human being lying on the bottom, zipped up in a mummy sleeping bag. Switching to infrared, he saw that it was indeed a trap.

The person in the mummy bag gave off a strong heat signature, so was alive, and there were additional heat signatures as well… two sets of footprints glowing eerily in his viewfinder even as they cooled away to nothing, leading away from the bag into a split in the wall of the trench.

“You two in the cave,” he called out, not knowing what else to call the little hidey-hole. “Come out with your hands up.”

No one answered and no one came out.

“What is it?” Emory asked.

“A goddamn ambush,” Sullivan answered. “I think it’s the girl from the video down there in the bag… Come out, for the last time!” he shouted.

He heard what sounded like someone beginning to dig in, so he aimed his M-203 and a fired a 40mm grenade into the opening, blowing it apart and showering the person in the mummy bag with dirt.

When the dust cleared, two blasted bodies lay mangled in the trench, their heat signatures already fading, and Emory slid over the edge, pulling Marty in with her. She knelt beside the mummy bag and Sullivan kept watch above.

“Get your light out, Marty.”

Marty shined his light on an Asian woman’s face as Emory unzipped the bag to reveal her badly battered and naked body. Emory began an examination.

“Multiple broken bones,” she called up. “Distended abdomen… internal bleeding.”

“She must have survived the avalanche somehow,” Marty muttered in amazement.

“Poor thing,” Emory said, zipping the dying woman back up to keep her warm. “John, there’s nothing I can do for her!”

Sullivan’s face appeared over the edge. “How long does she have?”

“An hour… maybe.”

The woman found her hand. “My friends…” she whispered. “Tammy… Ted?”

“I’m sorry, they’re gone.”

“Find the camera,” the woman whispered, trying to squeeze Emory’s hand. “There’s video of the crater… for future… future study.”

“We have it,” Marty said.

“Take it to our friends in Oklahoma… an Air Force bunker there. Tell them Yon gave it to you. They’re geo… geologists…”

“There are a lot of Air Force bases in Oklahoma.” Emory said. “Which one?”

“Altus,” said Yon. “They’re at Altus.” She lingered another ten minutes then died.

In the morning, they returned to the site and examined the remains of the man and woman Sullivan had blown up with the grenade. Each of them had a pistol and a knife. Another hundred yards down the trench they found a truly surprising sight: a reinforced concrete tunnel in the side of the crater wall.

“Where the hell does it go?” Marty wondered aloud.

“I’m guessing it leads to an old bunker,” Sullivan said, stepping carefully around the edge to enter the tunnel without sliding away down the steep wall of the crater. Emory and Marty followed, all of them switching on the flashlights attached to their carbines.

“What kind of bunker?” Marty asked.

“SACOM… Strategic Air Command. If this tunnel doesn’t lead to a missile silo, it should lead to a command bunker.”

They walked along a steel grating until they came to an open blast door, which in fact had been blasted right out of its casement by the asteroid impact. The door itself was now embedded in the concrete on the far side of a twenty-by-thirty-foot living space. The room was scattered with the charred remains of unidentifiable items and a few partial skeletons that lay among the ash.

“Blast wave,” Marty said. “This place imploded and they were incinerated instantly.”

They found another blast door, also blasted from its casement, and stepped into a perfectly round room filled with scorched and flattened electrical appliances. The remains of a concrete island were in the center of the room, with exposed plumbing sticking up through it.

“That was a sink,” Emory said. “This was a kitchen.” She pried open a smashed metal cabinet to find little more than ash and some melted glass jelly jars.

They checked the entire level and every room was the same. All of the doors were blasted from their casements, and the rooms were scattered with incinerated remnants of what had probably once been furniture and human beings. In all, they found between fifteen and twenty partial skeletons.

Sullivan kicked a scorched skull across the room. “Our two cannibals must have been living here when the rock hit.”

“But how did they survive?” Emory wondered. “All these people were cooked.”

Sullivan shined his light on Marty’s face. “What do you think, Mr. Shock Cocoon?”

Marty thought for a moment. “Where’s the missile silo?”

Sullivan pointed back the way they had come. “The silo was at the other end of that tunnel we came in through… vaporized on impact.”

“Well, so much for that idea,” Marty said. “Okay, so the blast wave was moving laterally through these tunnels, following the path of least resistance… which means if our two psychos from last night were in here at the time of impact… they must’ve been beneath this level. So we’re looking for a hatch in the floor, probably one that opens up.”

After another quick search of the facility, they located a round hatch in the center of the floor near the island in the kitchen. They hadn’t noticed it the first time because it was hidden beneath a piece of scorched sheet metal. Sullivan turned the round wheel and pulled the hatch upward to open it.

“And voilà,” Marty said, shining his light down a red steel ladder.

“Think you’re pretty smart, don’t ya?” Emory said, hitting him in the arm.

“Simple physics,” he replied. “Who’s first?”

“I volunteer you,” Sullivan said.

Marty shrugged and stepped forward, but Sullivan grabbed him and pushed him aside. “If you got killed, Princess would never let me hear the end of it.”

Emory smiled as he climbed down the ladder. “Careful, John.”

“Yeah yeah.” After twenty feet he stepped onto the floor at the bottom and shined his light down a short tunnel into intact living quarters. “Bingo!” he called up. “Cocoon Boy was right. It smells like ass down here, but it didn’t catch on fire.”

He found a battery-powered lamp on a table and switched it on, filling the room with light as the other two descended the ladder.

The twenty-by-twenty-foot living space was a proper mess and smelled of body odor and excrement. A quick look in the lavatory explained the sewer smell, and Sullivan shut the door. “There’s no water to flush with… they’ve been shitting in a bucket.”

Emory kicked around in the trash on the floor, many empty food cans and wrappers, scattered books and magazines. Sour smelling blankets and clothing.

“Only took ’em five months to turn into animals,” Sullivan muttered.

Emory picked something up from the floor. “Check this out.”

The men came to stand on either side of her as she flipped through a pamphlet advertising a company called Survival Estates. It showed the renovation process of a decommissioned minute man missile silo and advertised the sale of individual condos within the newly renovated complexes, all of them sharing a common kitchen area and living room.

Sullivan grabbed the pamphlet away from Emory. “Lemme see that fuckin’ thing.” He stood paging through it. “You gotta be kidding me. Listen to this: ‘Feel secure in the knowledge that no matter what happens to the world above, you and your family will be safe and sound in your own personal Survival Estate.’ Survival Estate!” He smirked and gave the pamphlet back. “Those sorry fuckers upstairs deserve a goddamn refund.”

Emory paged through the pamphlet, shaking her head. “Fucking twenty-twelvers. My God, how stupid. Get this… this little room right here… it cost them a hundred grand!”

Sullivan looked at Marty. “And I thought you were stupid.”

“Oh, it gets better,” she went on, turning the page. “‘We offer round-the-clock security, state of the art telecommunications, and guaranteed technical support in the event… in the event of any malfunction.’” She laughed and tossed the pamphlet aside.

Sullivan chuckled. “I wonder where the repair crew is.”

“I’m wondering something else,” Marty said.

They looked at him.

“Where are the missing arms and legs?”

“That’s right!” Emory looked at Sullivan. “The bodies in the tent.”

“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Sullivan said, heading for the ladder. “We must have missed another hatch someplace.”

Emory was following him closely up the ladder when she heard a pistol shot from above. Sullivan’s full weight crashed onto her and she nearly fell from the ladder with him as he dropped to the concrete below. The hatch slammed above them, and Marty jumped off the bottom rung, shining his light to see a stream of blood running down Sullivan’s face from beneath his helmet.

“He’s hit, Shannon!”

She scurried down the ladder. “Watch the hatch!” she told him, dragging Sullivan clear. “If it opens, shoot!”

She grabbed the lamp from the table, set it down beside Sullivan’s head and pulled off his helmet to get a look at the wound.

“Is he dead?”

“Not yet.” Her fingers trembled as she probed his matted hair. “John, can you hear me? John!”

She found the bullet wound, and to her utter surprise, the bullet had not penetrated his skull, but was lodged in the bone just above his hairline. “He’s gonna be out of action for a while… but he’ll live.”

“Thank God!”

“Thank Kevlar, Marty. His helmet slowed the bullet down.” She decided to leave the bullet where it was for the moment, knowing it would help stanch the flow of blood, and got to her feet. “Any ideas?”

Marty took off his own helmet and stood scratching his itching scalp. “We’re rats in a barrel… and the idea man is out cold.”

“Can they lock us down here?”

He shook his head. “It’s not that kind of hatch. It’s geared in a two-to-one ratio on this side. That means we only have to turn it half as hard as they do to unlock it. The trouble’s going to be fighting our way up out of here… and that’s your department.”

“We need a goddamn grenade,” she said.

“What about the launcher?”

“There’s no way to open the hatch wide enough to fire it without getting shot, and we don’t— Hold on a second!” She took a knee beside Sullivan and pulled a yellow-tipped high-explosive grenade from his harness, remembering something she had learned in basic training. “Something about a centrifugal fuse.”

“That’s what arms it?”

“Yeah, I think.”

“Is the launcher barrel rifled?”

“Yeah, the grenade has to spin in flight to be accurate.”

He knelt beside her and took the grenade, spinning it nose down on the concrete like a top. He did this many times, spinning it as fast as he could without bumping it against the floor. “That should do it.”

“Don’t drop it or you’ll blow us to shit.”

He put the grenade in his pocket and went to the ladder. “I’ll need you to open the hatch so I can throw this thing into the room.”

He climbed quietly up to the top, and Emory climbed up tight behind him, hooking into his harness with a carabiner so she would have both of her hands free to push the hatch up. Marty hooked an arm over the top rung to keep them both from falling and took the grenade from his pocket. “Okay,” he whispered.

She twisted the wheel to unlock the hatch, and though she could feel someone fighting her on the other side, Marty had been right about the gear ratio, so she was easily defeating the other person. She felt the gear come to the end of its turn and whispered into his ear, “I’m pushing up in three… two… one!”

She had to shove with all her strength to lift whoever was sitting on the hatch, and she felt a muscle pop in her shoulder as she strained against the weight, but the hatch lifted nearly six inches before there was another pistol shot. Marty felt a harmless tug at his body armor as he tossed the grenade through the gap before Emory dropped the hatch.

They heard the blast on the other side, and Emory was shoving the hatch upward even before the flash of fire completely dissipated, urging Marty to climb with her because they were still hooked together. They struggled up from the hole as one being and sprawled on the floor with their legs not quite out of the hatchway, drawing their pistols from their harnesses and trying not to choke on the stench of raw cordite. There were panicked voices coming toward them, flashlights dancing on the walls through the smoke as they opened fire on the tunnel way.

Someone screamed and a flashlight fell, shining back into the tunnel to reveal three more wretched looking souls in filthy clothing, one of them a woman, their eyes wild with hate, their gums bleeding with scurvy.

Emory and Marty shot them down without hesitation and quickly reloaded, laying in wait in the gathering silence for close to ten minutes before daring to speak.

“What do you think?” she whispered into his ear.

“I think we got ’em all this time… but who knows?”

They waited another minute before Emory set her weapon aside and unhooked the carabiner from his harness. “You stay put… I’ll go for the M-4s.”

She returned quickly and they searched the immediate area, finding six freshly killed bodies. “Wanna look for their hideout to make sure… or get the fuck outta here?”

“Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

She went below and used smelling salts to bring Sullivan into semiconsciousness. “I need you to help climb outta here!” she urged him, dragging him back and sitting him up at the foot of the ladder.

“What the fuck happened?” he moaned. “My head is splitting!”

“Just climb, John L.” She pulled him up by the lift strap on his harness and helped him get his foot onto the bottom rung. It took them some time to reach the top, but within thirty minutes they were all in the hybrid and rolling slowly south over the rocky terrain, the video camera locked up in the glove compartment.

Marty drove while Emory removed the bullet from Sullivan’s skull and applied a dressing. Sullivan was still only in and out of consciousness, severely concussed.

“So where we headed?” Marty asked, glancing at her in the mirror.

“Might as well head for Altus AFB down in Oklahoma,” she said, climbing into the front and grabbing the road atlas. “We can give that camera of Yon’s to her geologist friends and see what kind of setup they got, maybe stay with them… unless you got a better idea.”

“I’m all out of ideas.”

She studied the atlas as they bounced along. “Okay. We’ll find a highway and drop down to Interstate 80, then cut east across Nebraska and drop down through Kansas by way of Topeka. That’ll put us real close to Altus when we hit Oklahoma.”

“Kansas,” he groaned. “You ever been through Kansas?”

She chuckled and closed the atlas. “One good thing about Kansas, Marty… an asteroid strike could only be an improvement.”

Thirty-Eight

Major Benjamin Moriarty pushed back from the table and sat studying what was left of his decimated officer corps. He was down to four lieutenants now and a mere handful of noncoms, having been forced the day before to put Captains Winterfield, Scarborough, and Phelter—along with ten other enlisted men—before a firing squad after trying them all for sedition and attempted mutiny. The one positive result of the debacle was that the battle for the collective conscience of the men was finally decided, and those few hundred who remained in the ranks now understood that the weak must serve to bolster the strong in whatever capacity was required, and that morality was no longer anything more than a defunct and pointless luxury.

The meal had been meager. A potluck affair of heated vegetables poured from mostly label-less cans scavenged from in and around the city of Denver. The meat had been provided by Captain Winterfield, and it was only the third time the officers were driven to eat another human being. The regular ranks had been supplementing their diet with human flesh for the better part of a month now, but Moriarty and his staff were still in the process of learning that it was an acquired taste, to say the most.

“Lieutenant Ford,” he said quietly, picking at his teeth with a thin sliver of wire. “Direct the cooks to find another way to season the meat.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Captain Winterfield may have been a candyass, but there’s no reason he should taste like one.” His men chortled dutifully, all of them having difficulty with the sweet flavor of human flesh.

“Lieutenant Yoder,” Moriarty said, noting the bilious look of his most junior officer. “You look a little green around the gills, son.”

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s still a little hard for me. I’ll adjust, sir. Don’t worry.”

It was no secret that Yoder had been a friend of Captain Winterfield, and Moriarty had chosen Winterfield for their meal with precisely that in mind. “I’m sure you will, son. You’re a fine officer and I’m depending on you to set an equally fine example for the men.”

“Sir.”

“Now, if the rest of you will excuse us, Lieutenant Ford and I have some things to discuss before retreat.”

The small hotel dining room cleared, and Ford sat looking at Moriarty through a pair of sagging eyes. He was sallow and gaunt-looking and his gums had begun to recede with the onset of scurvy.

“Eat some more,” Moriarty said with a gesture toward the platter in the center of the table.

“I’m fine, sir. Thank you.”

“Eat! You’re dying before my eyes, damnit, and I need you strong!”

“I’ll only throw it up, Ben.”

“Should I have put you on trial as well?”

“You know very well that I support you,” Ford remarked wearily. “It’s not my fault that starvation and cannibalism disagree with me.”

Moriarty despised the smaller man’s weakness but he needed him too badly, knowing that Ford was the glue between him and the rest of his staff.

“Then I want you eating two cans of cat food a day from now on,” Moriarty said, realizing that he was playing right into the lieutenant’s hands, but there was nothing to be done about it. Waiting him out wasn’t working.

“Yes, sir,” Ford said, wanting to shout Hallelujah! but concealing his victory.

“You will, of course, be expected to eat the minimum amount of meat before the rest of the staff. If they find out I’m treating you special, we’ve got more trouble.”

“Yes, sir. Have you given any more thought to my suggestion, Ben? The one about those Green Berets back in Nebraska?”

“I’ve thought about them once or twice. It’s too much of a long shot. They’re not likely to be any better off by now than we are. We only took them two truckloads of MREs. They’re probably long dead.”

“I don’t think the MREs were the reason for our delivery,” Ford remarked.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what did they need a defense network computer for… unless they intended on still being alive to use it when the sky cleared up enough to communicate with our defense satellites?”

Moriarty stared at him, reasoning it out. “A silo could hold a great deal of food. If someone had had time enough to prepare.”

“And it would be just like the Pentagon to lay an egg that would hatch years later… all in the name of being the last nation left standing.”

“Fine,” Moriarty decided. “We’ll send a patrol of trusted men back to Tinker for the silo schematics. The original blueprints will still be on file. When they get back we can begin working our way east, scavenging whatever we can along the way. And we’ll need to quietly inquire as to whether there are any demolitions men in the ranks… because if that wiseass Green Beret captain is still alive, he sure as hell isn’t going to open the goddamn door and give us back our MREs.”

Thirty-Nine

“So what was the problem?” Forrest asked, learning that Danzig and Vasquez had successfully unclogged one of the facility’s three commodes.

“White mice,” Danzig said. “The women are flushing their tampons down the toilets, and this old plumbing won’t take it. They’ll snag in there and clog the whole fucking system, so you have to tell them to stop. Tell them to bag the damn things and we’ll keep them in the cargo bay.”

“Something else I should have thought of. Thanks. I’ll be sure and tell them.”

The children were all in class, so Forrest was able to catch a number of women together in the cafeteria. Some of them were talking, others reading. A couple were arguing. About what, he didn’t really care to know.

“Excuse me, ladies.”

They all looked at him, waiting to hear what sort of law he was going to lay down now.

“Yes?” Erin said patiently.

“We need to not flush our feminine products down the toilets anymore,” he said as tactfully as he knew how. “The plumbing down here is very old, so the pipes are rusty inside and if we get another clog and can’t get to it…”

“Won’t be good,” somebody said.

“Won’t be good, right. So we’ll put bags in the bathrooms and store the trash in the cargo bay.”

“Message received.”

He went back down the hall and into one of the two common rooms where Melissa was sitting on the floor with a pad of paper and a pencil. “Hey, kiddo. Where the hell is everyone?”

“Some are in silo one listening to music,” she answered, her attention on her work. “Some are in the other room watching an R movie they don’t want the kids to see. One or two are bike riding, I think. And Veronica and Uncle Michael are in Medical talking to the doctors. One of Uncle Michael’s fillings fell out or something.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to figure out this code those people are transmitting,” she said, flipping through the pages of numbers Ulrich had written down. The transmissions only occurred about three times a week for half an hour or so and not necessarily on the same nights.

“You know about cryptography?” he asked, surprised.

“No, just some basic stuff Wayne told me, but I’ve been thinking these people probably agree when to talk again before they sign off at night, so I’m looking for patterns of numbers that appear only on certain days. Maybe if I can learn their codes for the days of the week, I can use that information as part of a cipher. Only, I haven’t found anything that matches yet and it’s pissing me— Oops!” She looked up at him, covering her mouth. “That slipped.”

“You’re grounded. No leaving the silo for a week.”

She smiled, enjoying having him as even a pseudo authority figure in her life. “It’s driving me nuts.”

“You do know there are literally millions of different algorithms, right?”

“Yeah, but Wayne thinks this one is pretty basic, and I don’t have anything else interesting to work on down here. It’s killing me not having the Internet. I miss my physics chats.”

“Physics chat rooms… you’re kidding me.”

“No. Why, does that sound stupid?”

“Hell, no. I just never heard of it. I guess there used to be a chat room for everything.”

“I can’t believe it’s all gone.”

“I know,” he said sympathetically. “Hey, before I forget… we’ve been having some trouble with hygiene products in the—”

“I know. Don’t flush my tampons down the toilet. I heard you guys in the hall.”

“You did, huh?”

“I hear everything that goes on in the hall. I even heard… never mind.”

“Never mind what?”

She leaned forward, trying to see. “Is anyone out there?”

Forrest double-checked. “No, it’s fine. What’d you hear?”

“I heard Oscar and Maria two the other night. They were in the kitchen when everyone else was asleep.”

“No, honey, you got it mixed up. Oscar’s wife is Maria one.”

“I know that,” she said. “He was in there with Maria two.”

Forrest’s Oh, shit! light began to blink. “You’re positive? They look and sound a lot alike.”

“I’m positive. I saw her coming back to bed after… you know. He was working the late shift in Launch Control.”

Forrest crouched down beside her. “So who was in the LC when they were in the kitchen?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, but I don’t think anybody was.”

“When was this?”

“Few nights ago.”

“Don’t tell anyone else,” he said, standing up. “Let me know when you’ve cracked the code.”

Laddie suddenly came scrabbling around the corner into the room, soaking wet and full of suds, running and jumping all over Melissa and dripping water onto her pad.

“Laddie!” she shouted, holding the pad over her head.

“He’s down here!” Karen called down the hall as she came into the room laughing, her jeans wet from the waist down. “Sorry, honey. Somebody left the washroom door open.”

“That’s okay,” Melissa said, though it bothered her very much.

“I told you washing that dog’s more trouble than it’s worth,” Forrest said, chuckling.

Renee showed up and, with a great deal of effort, the two women wrangled Laddie out of the room and disappeared into the hall, laughing.

Forrest followed after them.

“Jack?” Melissa said.

He stopped. “Yeah?”

“Think you and Veronica will ever get married?”

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “Why do you ask?”

She shrugged. “Just wondering.”

On his way back to Launch Control, Maria Vasquez stopped him. “I want to ask you about something, Jack.”

“What’s on your mind?” he asked, preparing himself to lie for Oscar.

“Do you think for Halloween we could turn one of the silos into a haunted house for the kids? Nothing gory. Just spooks and ghosts, maybe some witches.”

“You know, I don’t see why not,” he said with relief. “We’ll have to be careful about the lighting, though. We don’t want anyone falling on those stairs.”

“Great. It’s something to do, you know? And the kids should get a kick out of it.”

“Sounds fine to me,” he said. He had already secretly planned a trick-or-treat for them, and was looking forward to it.

He found Ulrich in Launch Control with his feet up, reading one of his technical magazines. “Erin and Lynette were arguing about something in the cafeteria.” He took a chair.

“What about?”

“I didn’t pay attention.”

“That’s a good policy,” Ulrich said.

“I’ve been giving some thought to our future food concerns. Hydroponic tomatoes are only going to get us so far. What do you think about raising rats?”

“Rats?”

“Yeah. We find some rats, breed them in clean cages, and eat them. The damn things multiply faster than rabbits.”

“You ever eaten one?”

“Yeah, we ate a few back at Bragg during training. No big deal. Splash a little Tabasco on them and they taste like anything else. Look, meat’s meat. And West can show us how to raise them without a big health risk.”

“It’s a repugnant idea,” Ulrich said. “The women will never go for it, and Erin’s likely to freak the hell out.”

“By the time the food runs out, she won’t find the idea so disagreeable.”

“So what are you proposing? We catch a few and keep them as pets without telling anybody what they’re really for? These broads are smart, Jack. They’ll figure it out.”

“Well, it may not matter. So far it looks like we’ve done too good a job of killing them off down here.”

Ulrich frowned. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. We’ve seen a few rats gnawing on the dead guys upstairs. It’s only a matter of time before the bodies are gone and they find their way down here again.”

“Great, so problem solved,” Forrest said, getting up. “Put Oscar to work building some live bait traps.”

“I’ll put Linus on it. He’s better with his hands.”

“No, I want Oscar to do it. He apparently has too much fucking free time.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We’ll raise the little bastards in secret,” Forrest said, and disappeared into the hall.

Ulrich sat back and returned to his article. “And if I had wheels, I’d be a wagon.”

Late that night Forrest was sitting alone in the LC reading For Whom the Bell Tolls when Melissa came in and sat down at the console with her paper and pencil. He glanced at the clock to see that it was three A.M.

“Can’t sleep?”

“No. Do you think I could scan the radio frequencies?”

He looked at her and smiled. “That’s why you’re up late. Wayne won’t let you play with the radio.”

She ignored the remark. “I know the code talkers aren’t on now, but I want to see if anyone else might be talking.”

“Wayne runs a scan twice a day.”

“I know, but he’s not scanning now…”

“Use the bottom set,” he told her. “If you mess with his, he’ll know and he’ll skin us both.”

“But that’s the junky set,” she whined. “Wayne’s is digital and its got—”

“Yeah, I know, it’s got all the cool lights. I thought this wasn’t about playtime.”

“Well, digital is better and—”

“Digital is not better. It’s newer, and that’s not the same thing. You can’t fine-tune with digital the way you can with analog.”

“What’s that mean?”

“What do you mean ‘what’s that mean’? Aren’t you a computer whiz?”

“I’m a physics geek, not a computer geek. Big difference. Huge.”

“Okay, well, the dial on the analog set is a rheostat… it works like a dimmer switch, so you can fine-tune the frequencies—if you’re patient. With the digital set you’re either on the frequency or you’re off, no fine-tuning.”

“But what good’s a signal if it’s full of static?”

He closed his book, marking the page with his thumb, and sat looking at her. “Well, Wayne, what good is a clean frequency if there’s nobody on it?”

She grinned. “So then why does ‘Wayne’ use the new one if the old one is better?”

“Because he is a bonehead… because he is too impatient for fine-tuning… and because he has always trusted the latest technology even when it sucked.”

“O-kay,” she said sarcastically. “I-think-I-get-the-point.” She scooted over to the shelf in her chair and turned on the more simple looking analog set. “How long do I have to wait for this antique to warm up?”

He chuckled as he reopened the book. “It’s not that old, you little smartass. And remember to move the dial in tiny increments. Take your time.”

After a minute Melissa picked up on a faint signal…

“Mayday, Mayday. This is Genoine Five,” a scared sounding woman was saying. “Does anyone copy? Anyone at all? If you can hear me, please, we are in Birch Tree, Missouri. We need your help! We need food and medicine. Mayday, Mayday. This is Genoine Five. Does anyone copy? Anyone at all? If you can…”

“I found somebody!”

Forrest had already heard the transmission many times and did not even look up from the book. “It’s a trap, honey.”

She turned to look at him in confusion. “How do you know that?”

“Because no one’s listening at her end. She’s on a loop. Same message over and over. Which either means that everyone in Beech Tree is dead or it’s a trap.”

“She sounds scared to death.”

“I’m sure she is—or was when she made that tape. She’s likely dead by now.”

Melissa turned the volume down, a scared feeling in the pit of her stomach. “But why would she…”

He set the book aside, realizing this sort of thinking was entirely alien to her.

“You take a female prisoner,” he explained. “Someone like you or Veronica, maybe. You give her a microphone and a simple script and you tell her to sound scared—which won’t be too tough with a knife at her throat. Then you play the recording over the airwaves for every idiot predator with a radio to hear. After that you just have to hope whoever comes to Beech Tree looking for—”

“Birch Tree.”

“Thank you, Wayne. As I was saying… you just have to hope that whoever comes to town looking for the woman on the radio has a smaller gang than your gang. If they do, you kill them and take their stuff. If they don’t… well, you lay low and pray to Christ they leave town without finding your ass.”

“No way!” she said in mortified fascination. “For real?”

“For real.”

“You’ve done stuff like that, haven’t you?” she said, her eyes shining with an almost prurient enthusiasm. “Uncle Michael says you’re dangerous.”

He smiled, recalling a once younger version of himself. “Your uncle Michael says a lot of things.”

“He says that before the boogeyman goes to bed at night he probably checks under the bed for you.”

Forrest laughed. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Tell me something you’ve done!”

He shook his head, chuckling. “No. That’s not the kind of thing I need to be sharing with young ladies.”

She bristled. “So it’s not my age this time? It’s because I’m a girl.”

“Maybe I worded that wrong. Some things done during war can sound shameful out of context, and it’s not the kind of thing I prefer to talk about with anyone, man or woman.”

“Because I might get the wrong idea?”

“More because you might get the right idea. War is a bad, bad thing.”

“Uncle Michael says we’re in a war now.”

“Unfortunately, he’s right,” Forrest said, opening his book and sitting back in the chair.

Melissa sat back too, and watched him for a long moment before returning to the receiver and beginning once again to slowly turn the dial…

“Constantine, go ahead with your traffic… over.”

“Jawbreaker, we cannot make the rendezvous at this time. The entire mountain is on fire and we are cut off. Is there an alternative route that we can try?.… Over.”

“Negative, negative, Constantine. The mountain pass is your best bet. If you try going around to the north or south, you’ll be cut to pieces… over.”

“What about the tunnel?… Over.”

“Ambush central, Constantine. I’m afraid it’s up and over or not at all… over.”

A simple glance over her shoulder told Melissa that Forrest was no more shaken by this transmission than by the first. “Have you heard these guys already too?”

“We’ll try again after dark, Jawbreaker… over and out.”

Forrest glanced up from the book just long enough to reply, “We’ve heard Jawbreaker before, not the other guy.”

“So who’s Jawbreaker?”

“No one who can help us. Scan on, my child. Get it out of your system.”

So she turned the dial some more, picking up another, weaker transmission…

“… but my batteries won’t last long after my fuel runs out, eh. Plus I won’t be able to run my chain saw, and this cabin’s gonna get pretty damn cold.”

“Yeah, well, join the club, eh. We’ve only got enough firewood left out here for maybe a few weeks. The whole damn forest is burnt down…”

Melissa continued to turn the dial, eventually coming upon another conversation in progress…

“… so what I need to know is how to convert this old diesel motor over to vegetable oil. I’ve got a few thousand gallons of old fryer oil out back.”

“Well, first you have to install an auxiliary fuel tank with a heat exchanger in it. And it don’t sound much like you’ve got the necessary—”

Melissa didn’t care even a little bit about veggie oil cars so she moved on…

“… which is bullshit! You tell your friends over there I don’t care how much food you’ve got left. I’ve got twenty-five scarecrows on this bus and I’m coming across that goddamn bridge whether they like it not!”

“They’ll shoot you, Don! I’m not kidding, goddamnit!”

“Well, I’m comin’!”

Melissa waited almost five minutes to hear what happened next.

“You can forget them,” Forrest muttered. “They’re gone.”

She reluctantly turned the dial, realizing she had just heard someone’s last words, but another signal caught her attention before she had the chance to dwell…

“We have repelled repeated attacks. Our perimeter is holding. That’s not the problem. Our problem is food. We can’t survive much longer without you, and you can’t survive long-term without our power. We’re wasting time even debating this.”

The voice was female.

“Jack!”

“I’m listening,” he said, appearing interested for the first time.

“It’s not that simple,” a male voice replied. “You’re talking about us traveling three hundred miles through extremely dangerous territory. We need to wait. Let the lunatics starve off.”

Forrest set the book aside and moved toward the receiver for a closer look at the radio frequency.

“If I didn’t know better, Patrick, I’d say you were waiting for us to starve so you could take over the facility when you get here.”

“Valerie, shut up. We could do that anyway.”

“How long until your heating oil runs out?”

“Nine weeks. Maybe less.”

“Well, we won’t last nine weeks without your assistance. We’ve barely got a month before we start looking at our dogs in a whole new way.”

Patrick did not immediately respond.

“They’re gonna eat their dogs?” Melissa mumbled.

Forrest nodded as he marked the frequency on a pad. “It happens.”

“Val… I’m not the sole decider over here… I’ll talk to the council and see what they say. That’s all I can promise.”

“A friggin council,” Forrest muttered, tossing the pad onto the shelf.

“Well, you be sure to tell your stupid council this… you tell them that before the last of us shoots herself… we’ll disable every one of these goddamn mills! You hear me? There won’t be enough juice left out here to run a goddamn lightbulb!”

“Val, you could hardly disable all those mills. Just try to be patient. Please.”

“We can sure as hell destroy this facility… and don’t think we won’t! If you’re waiting for us to die off, there won’t be shit left when you get here!”

“Jesus Christ, Val! Will you please try to understand our situation? Nobody’s waiting for you to die off! We’ve got old people and children to consider here.”

“And we don’t?”

“You’re not the only ones who have been attacked, Val. How can we move two hundred people all that way and protect them?”

“I’m not suggesting you make the trip in a goddamn wagon train, Patrick. Groups of ten or twelve at time would do the job. Two trucks, moving fast, and you could—”

“I gotta go, Val. I’ll call you tomorrow at noon.”

“Don’t leave us hanging, Patrick. Please.”

“I’ll do what I can. I promise. Over and out.”

“Maybe we can join them!” Melissa said excitedly.

“Settle down there, young communicator,” Forrest said, shoving his chair back toward the console. “Grab me the en reel index from the top shelf over there.”

“What index?” she said, getting up and walking around the console to the far side of the round room.

“N.R.E.L.,” he said, pronouncing each letter separately. “National Renewable Energy Laboratories. It’s a map index.”

She found the index beneath some manuals and brought it over. It was about the size of a common road atlas, full of colorful maps denoting wind corridors along with the locations of transmission lines that carried power from the nation’s many wind farms to population centers.

“You guys thought of everything,” she said, setting the index down.

“Hardly,” he chuckled. “But we were thinking we might hook into a wind turbine someday. This index is as far as the plan ever got.”

“But if these people already know how to make them work and want our help… I wonder where they are.”

“They could be damn near anywhere,” he muttered, flipping through the index. “But it’s good to know somebody else is thinking long-term. They took a serious risk staying aboveground, though.”

“Maybe we should offer to go and help them,” she suggested again. “We could tell her to forget that Patrick guy.”

“Their main problem seems to be food,” he said. “We can’t solve that.”

“Shouldn’t we at least talk to her?”

“Way too soon,” he said, tracing his finger along a power route through Colorado.

“But they need help and if—”

“She sounds desperate, honey, and desperate people are potentially very dangerous—in any circumstance. Though you’re right, we haven’t heard anything like this before, so it’s worth keeping an ear on them.”

“There seem to be a lot more survivors out there than you guys have told us about.”

“And fewer every day,” he said, turning the page. “I wonder if they’re out in the San Gorgonio Pass.”

“That place is huge!” she said. “My dad drove us through there once. There’s like four thousand windmills out there.”

“And the land is barren for hundreds of miles,” he added thoughtfully. “Which would make an extended siege difficult at best. You’d have to hit them fast and hard.”

“Shouldn’t we tell the others about this? It’s a pretty big deal.”

“This is a case of what they don’t know won’t hurt them. So don’t go blabbing.”

“But—”

“I’m serious, Melissa. False hopes are bad news, and it’s way too soon to get excited about these people. We have to be careful with morale.”

Just then the floors and walls began to vibrate as if a train were rumbling beneath them. There was no real movement because of the shock dampeners that protected the installation, but the rumbling in the earth was unmistakable.

“Whoa,” Melissa said, instinctively placing her hand on the console, though there was no need to steady herself. “That isn’t just a tremor, is it?”

“Doesn’t feel like one.”

There had been a number of tremors since the asteroid impact, but none of them had caused so much vibration within the facility.

“Are we still safe?”

“We’re fine,” he said. “We’re nowhere near any of the known fault lines, and it would take a major shift to crack us open.”

A couple of minutes later Ulrich wandered sleepily into Launch Control in his bare feet. “That one woke damn near everybody up,” he said. “What have you two been doing?”

“It sounds like somebody’s forded up on a wind farm,” Forrest said, tapping the index. “I’m guessing San Gorgonio. My assistant here picked up some new traffic. We’ll need to make sure we’re listening tomorrow.”

Ulrich cocked an eyebrow at Melissa. “And who said you could use my radio?”

“I didn’t touch your crappy radio,” she said, crossing her arms. “Everybody knows analog’s better than digital.”

He looked at Forrest. “I guess I don’t have to ask where she got that.”

“Don’t look at me,” Forrest said. “I’m not the only one who thinks digital sucks.”

“Yeah, well I wasn’t talking about the bullshit opinion,” Ulrich said, turning for the door. “I was talking about the smartmouth.”

When he was gone, Melissa looked at Forrest. “I think I made him mad.”

He shrugged and went back to the index. “You may have.”

“But… but what if he doesn’t want to copy down the code for me anymore?”

He looked at her and smiled. “You should have thought of that before you got salty with him.”

“But I was…”

“But you were what?” he said with a chuckle.

“Well he was the one who… He’s always such a grouch. Can you fix it for me?”

He laughed and closed the index, picking up his book again. “Your mouth wrote the check, kiddo, not mine.”

“But he… he was the one who…”

He chuckled again as he refound his place in the novel. “You say that like it matters.”

Forty

Early the next day Maria Vasquez and a number of the other mothers were busying themselves with the work of turning silo one into a spook house. They were on the far side of the silo hanging a number of sheets and black trash bags to serve as curtains, cordoning off little hiding places for the witches and ghosts who would soon lie in wait for the unsuspecting children. Ulrich emerged from the tunnel and stood on the main deck watching them with his hands on his hips. He had already been recruited to dress up as a mummy, and though he felt a little stupid about it, he knew the party would be a great distraction for the children.

Melissa was in the silo as well, but she wasn’t helping with the Halloween project. She was busy up above with her deciphering project, which had so far yielded nothing in the way of cracking the code. She listened to Ulrich talking with the other women and eventually decided she had better walk down to the main deck and find out if she was on his shit list. The trip downstairs made her feel like when she was a little girl and got in trouble with her parents. Only it wasn’t her loving father waiting three decks below but a perpetually dour soldier who didn’t seem to have much in the way of a paternal instinct.

Ulrich glanced briefly in her direction as she came down the stairs, then went back to talking with Karen and Maria about where they might displace some of the food bundles until after the haunted silo project was finished. She walked over and stood listening, realizing now that Ulrich was definitely annoyed with her because, while his glance wasn’t disdainful, it hadn’t been exactly pleasant either.

“Very well, then,” he said. “Just so nothing falls over on anyone.”

“Amen,” Karen chuckled.

He turned to walk away without a word to Melissa, and she stood watching him go, debating whether it would even be worth the effort of trying to get back into his good graces. She asked herself whether it would matter if she didn’t need him to write out the Morse code transmissions for her. Deciding it would, she trotted after him. “Wayne?”

He stopped and turned to look at her. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“For smarting off to you last night.”

Only the slightest of perceptible grins came to his lips. “Realized you need me for the code?”

“Even if I didn’t, I still wouldn’t want you mad at me. I didn’t think before I spoke.”

He smiled, understanding she had only been trying to buddy up with Forrest, wishing that he had a better excuse to be pissed with her, disliking his own vulnerability. “I thought you might get Jack to smooth it over for you.”

“He said my mouth wrote the check.”

Ulrich laughed. “He did, huh?”

“He said I shouldn’t have gotten salty with you.”

He laughed some more. “Well, you know you’re wasting your time with that goddamn code, don’t you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to do, though. I never knew I could get so bored. I don’t know what it is… nobody else seems to be.”

Ulrich reflected that the more intelligent the creature, the more negative the effects of confinement. He recalled briefly his first and only visit to the zoo as a child, the gorillas in their cages with the saddest, most tragic expressions he had ever seen.

“Well, I appreciate the apology,” he said quietly. “But the truth is that you’ve got more than enough of the code now. You’re not going to find anything new by continuing to copy it down. Especially if they’re altering it.”

“Altering it?”

“They may change it from night to night. Just enough to throw off a code breaker.”

“Do you think they are?”

“There’s no way to tell if the changes are minor. Either way, you’re better off sticking with what you’ve got. Honestly.”

“You’re not just saying that?”

He shook his head. “If I was mad at you, I’d tell you. Ask Jack.”

“Were you before?”

“I was trying to be.”

She bit her lip, hesitating a moment, then, “How come you don’t let people get close to you?”

He stood looking at her, surprised she had asked. “Because people die.”

Forrest walked into Launch Control and sat on the edge of the console. “Excuse us, Linus.”

Danzig gave Vasquez a quick look and got up from his chair. “I guess I can use a break.” He pulled the door closed after him, and Forrest sat looking down on Vasquez.

“Look, Jack, before you read me the—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Forrest snapped.

Vasquez sat back in his chair, unprepared for Forrest’s anger.

“This isn’t a goddamn frat house! Who the fuck do you think you are, deserting your goddamn post?”

“Oh!” Vasquez said. “I… I’m sorry. You’re right. It won’t happen again. I mean I—”

“And who are you diddling besides Maria two?” Forrest quickly demanded, sensing that Vasquez had been expecting to get his ass chewed for an entirely different encounter.

Vasquez hesitated. “Um… Renee… and Joann.”

“Jesus Christ! And none of ’em minds about the others?”

Vasquez shrugged. “I don’t think they know.”

“You bet your sweet ass they don’t know!” Forrest flared. “Because the second one of ’em finds about the other two, they’re gonna tell your wife so goddamn fast you won’t know whether to shit or wind your watch!”

“I don’t think so,” Vasquez said innocently. “They ain’t like that. I mean… they know I ain’t gonna be around long… you know? And I think they like the thrill of doing something bad… seize the day and all that.”

“I’m gonna seize something,” Forrest told him, standing up from the console and shaking loose a cigarette, “and it won’t be your goddamn day. So who’s Linus screwing—and don’t tell me nobody! He skulked outta here looking guilty as shit.”

“Nobody, I swear. He just covers for me sometimes… like the other night with Maria two. I didn’t abandon my post, Captain. I’d never do that.”

Forrest at least took some comfort in that. “It stops now. Understood? If I find it’s still going on, I’ll tell Maria myself. Got it?”

Vasquez nodded. “But suppose they don’t agree?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

Vasquez shrugged again. “I’m just saying they look forward to it… you know?”

“End it, Oscar!”

“Yes, sir.”

Half an hour later Forrest’s voice announced calmly over the intercom: “Wayne and Melissa to the LC. Wayne and Melissa to the LC.”

When they arrived in Launch Control, Forrest and Vasquez were sitting in front of the receiver listening intently to a very panicked radio transmission.

“Kiddo, it sounds like your wind farm friends are getting zapped,” Forrest said, offering her a chair. “Along with Patrick and his gang.”

“Both? But how—”

“… and you’re sure you didn’t tell anyone where we are?” Patrick was demanding.

“Yes!” Valerie replied in a shout, with gunfire obvious in the background. “They’re hitting us too, goddamnit! I told you! None of our people ever even leave here. One of your people must have said something, one of your scavenging parties maybe. Patrick, you’ve been double-crossed!”

“No, he hasn’t,” Vasquez muttered, shaking his head. “Stupid pendejos!”

Melissa stood staring at the radio, almost as if she were watching the drama play out on television.

“No way!” Patrick insisted. “The leak has to be at your end! Can you escape on your own somehow?”

“Escape? We’re completely surrounded! They’ve got rocket launchers, Patrick. You’ve got to come help us!”

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Melissa said. “What did we miss?”

“I called you the second I turned it on,” Forrest said.

“I’m sorry, Val. We’ll be lucky to save ourselves. I’m hoping they’ll let us go once they see we’ve left the food behind. We’re pulling out right now. Gotta go. Good luck to you!”

“Patrick, no!… Patrick, are you there?… Patriiiick!… Patriiiiiiick!”

“Turn it off,” Ulrich said. “Turn it off, Oscar.”

“Patrii—”

“But… but what the hell happened?” Melissa demanded, clearly crestfallen, her eyes darting between the three men.

“They’ve obviously been talking back and forth in the blind for some time,” Forrest said sadly. “Broadcasting for anyone and everyone to listen in. They were naive.”

“But… what does that mean?”

“It means that someone’s been triangulating their individual signals,” Ulrich explained. “Someone with the resources, the muscle, and the patience to arrange a simultaneous assault.”

“And that’s why we don’t talk to anybody without a damn good reason,” Forrest said. “There are just enough people left alive out there to finish killing each other off.”

“That’s sick!” she said in disgust. “They weren’t hurting anybody! They were just… they were just trying to survive.”

“This is also why we don’t relate every contact to the other women,” Ulrich added, having already discussed the matter of Melissa monitoring the radio in great detail with Forrest earlier that morning, right down to the part about her smarting off, the two of them agreeing to wait and see whether she would apologize. “Too many of these disappointments would irreparably damage morale. So understand that you’ve been trusted with something very important here today.”

With effort, Melissa broke eye contact with him long enough for a glance at Forrest, who confirmed what Ulrich had said with a nod. “You guys knew this would happen,” she said quietly, looking at the floor.

“No,” Forrest said. “But now you see the trouble we could have been in had we joined in on their conversation last night. It’s possible we could have brought this same kind of hell down on ourselves—even though it’s likely the triangulation had already been done.”

“But not necessarily,” Vasquez warned.

“Those women are gonna be… they’ll be raped, won’t they?”

“Let us hope not,” Ulrich said quietly. “There are alternatives.”

She stood looking at the three men. “So I should keep this a secret?”

“What do you think?” Forrest asked.

“I think we’re just buying time down here,” she replied, suddenly feeling a new kind of heaviness.

“Do you want the others to start believing that? To start dwelling on it?”

She shook her head. “I won’t say anything. I don’t feel good. I think I’m gonna go take a nap.”

“Okay,” Forrest said. “I’m sorry, kiddo.”

“Yeah… me too.”

When she was gone Ulrich dropped down into a chair with a sigh, squeezing his temples between his forefinger and thumb. “So is the military hitting civilians now? Is that what we just heard?”

Forrest switched the set back on just long enough to make sure there was nothing more to hear and switched it off again. “I think we’d damn well better assume as much,” he said gravely. “And what’s that tell us… the military has finally degraded to the point of committing murder?”

“Men are men,” Vasquez said. “And men with guns aren’t going hungry if they don’t have to.”

“So you’d kill an innocent for his food—her food?”

“If she left me no choice,” Vasquez answered without batting an eye. “I’ve got a family to feed.”

“That’s too easy,” Forrest said. “Say it’s just you?”

“Maybe I’d split it with her, offer her a pact like we’ve made down here. Look, I’m not a murderer and I sure as hell ain’t no rapist… but a starving person doesn’t have any choice about food. Instinct will make him do what he has to do to get it.”

“That’s bullshit,” Forrest said. “Starvation isn’t rabies. Gandhi starved himself damned near to death more than once just to make a fucking point.”

“Well, I ain’t Gandhi either,” Vasquez said, and chuckled.

“What I’m saying is that giving up your dignity is a conscious choice,” Forrest said. “It’s a choice you make ahead of time. You decide that you’re either going to throw in the towel after a certain point or you’re going to be the last one standing no matter the cost.”

“I won’t argue that. But if the military hit that wind farm, the common grunt didn’t have that luxury.”

“Horseshit. No one hit that farm who didn’t want to. A man can step back and take stock of himself at any time.”

Vasquez sat forward in the chair. “That might be true for you, Captain. You’re a leader… not all of us are. Some of us are happy to follow, and not all followers are lucky about who they get as leaders. Personally… without you two dudes… I don’t know how I’d handle any of this.”

Forrest stood up and tousled the younger man’s hair on his way to the coffeepot. “Well, not all leaders are lucky about who they get to follow them either.”

Ulrich smiled at Vasquez, hiding his concern about what Forrest referred to as the “insulin habit.” He and Forrest had asked Vasquez and Danzig both to come in on the project precisely because they were followers. They were not blind devotees, but were highly skilled operatives who could be depended upon to follow orders in a paramilitary setting without a great deal of debate. Kane of course was his own story. He was their noncommissioned officer, the perfect blend of capable and aloof; that he agreed to join them had been as much a compliment as their having asked.

“You’re sure you didn’t talk to those people last night?” Ulrich said, shifting his attention to Forrest. “We don’t need a proper military outfit showing up outside our door.”

“Wayne… come on ”

“I just don’t want any surprises, Jack.”

“I was only on the air for a few seconds…” Forrest kept his face serious.

“What… ?”

“Long enough to broadcast our address five or six times.” Then Forrest smiled.

Ulrich shook his head, Vasquez grinning.

“Ask a stupid question,” Forrest said, sipping his coffee, “and ye shall receive a stupid answer.”

Forty-One

The Halloween party, especially Forrest’s surprise box of candy, was a big hit with the children. The next day, however, the mothers were a little less than thrilled about the candy, the first sweets the kids had eaten since coming to live in the silo nearly five months earlier. They had gotten into it first thing that morning and were now so hyper that Andie found herself completely unable to hold their attention during class.

After forty minutes of fruitless effort, she released them all back into the care of their mothers and went to find Forrest, cornering him below the main facility outside the entrance to the electrical room.

“Do you know what you’ve done giving out all that candy at once?”

“Other than putting you mothers on the spot?” he said, wiping the sweat from his face and neck with a towel.

“Yeah, other than that. There are thirteen kids upstairs running around like little maniacs on a sugar high. I had to dismiss class already.”

He stood looking at her, struggling to keep the smile from his face.

“What do they get for Christmas? A bag of cocaine?”

He snickered. “Maybe. You’ll have to wait and see.”

“Did you give any thought at all to the fact those kids haven’t had any sugar to speak of in almost five months?”

“I don’t believe you’re down here chewing my ass because I gave the kids Halloween candy.” He flipped the towel over his shoulder. “What’s really got you in a twist?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, crossing her arms in an effort to disguise a sudden insecurity. “Don’t try to change the subject.”

“Well, to answer your question. Yes. I did give it some thought. In fact, the mummy and I had ourselves quite a laugh about it last night as we were passing it out.”

“Well, that was irresponsible as hell.”

“Yes, it was, wasn’t it?” he said with a grin. “And yet I’ve succeeded in adding a little bit of harmless drama to all of your otherwise monotonous lives. Even to my own, it turns out.”

She bit the inside of her cheek, failing to hide a smile as she recognized his deviousness. “You’re a manipulator, Jack Forrest.”

“I’m a goddamn wizard, is what I am. This little Halloween stunt of mine will be good for days’ worth of conversation and playful recrimination—just like we’re having right now. And when it finally wears off, God willing, I’ll find something else irresponsible to do in order to keep you women distracted and away from one another’s throats. That is unless you decide to go upstairs and blow my goddamn cover.”

She laughed, shaking her head in perplexity. “How does Veronica manage you?”

“She doesn’t.”

“I don’t know whether to envy her or to feel sorry for her.”

“Oh, yes, you do.”

Her eyebrows soared. “Egotistical much?”

“Lady, I goddamn well better be. I’m trying to pull off the coup of the century down here and I need all the juice I can get.”

Andie could tell from his body language that all she had to do to seduce him was say something, anything, to prompt him. Anything that would absolve him of responsibility for something happening between them, however flimsy. Her body ached for a man, her chest constricting. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell him how badly she needed him. Was it pride? Or fear of offending Veronica and losing her friendship? In the end it probably came down to both.

“Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me,” she said quietly, feeling suddenly deflated. “I didn’t mean any—”

“You didn’t give any. This has been the most excitement I’ve had in weeks. Feel free to make up a reason to berate me anytime.”

Her jaw dropped but she didn’t say anything, knowing she was busted and that to deny it would only make her look silly.

“Bring a friend if you like,” he added, by way of being a smartass.

“Maybe I will,” she said, playfully contemptuous. “You’re definitely the man for this job, Jack.”

“We all do what we’re called to do.”

“Oh, that’s such bullshit,” she said laughing. “You wouldn’t be anywhere else and you know it.”

He entered Launch Control later that day—after hearing about his questionable judgment of the night before from at least three other mothers—and sat down beside Kane for a look at the monitors, already bored.

“Snowing a little bit, finally.”

Kane looked up from his worn copy of X-Box Magazine for a glance at the monitor. “Was only a matter of time.”

“How many times can you read the same magazine? Christ, we’ve got a few hundred books downstairs.”

“I’m reading up for the tournament.”

“What tournament?”

“Football tournament. Me, Linus, Oscar, and a bunch of the kids. Winner gets to eat the others’ desserts for a week.”

“You’re going to take food from the kids… and the women think I’m bad.”

Kane laughed. “You should hear the smack those kids are talkin’, man.”

“Any of ’em any good?”

“Oscar Junior can beat his dad six games outta ten. Beats me about half the time. We’ll give the others a handicap. It ain’t like we’re stealin’.”

They sat in silence then, Kane reading his magazine, Forrest tapping a pen on the counter.

After a full minute of tapping, Kane said, “Man, I got this. You don’t have to be in here. And by the way, Wayne said to tell you there’s a big pile of dog shit in tunnel two.”

“I saw it,” Forrest said, tossing the pen aside. “Stepped right over, in fact. He’s right, it’s pretty big.”

Kane sat staring at him.

“What?”

“Go find somethin’ to do, man.”

“Hey, Thanksgiving’s just around the corner, you know? It’s going fast.”

“You haven’t said nothin’ about the turkeys to nobody, have you?”

Forrest shook his head. “Seen those kids running around out there today?” He laughed. “It’s a friggin zoo.”

“Yeah, and Tonya’s not your biggest fan right now.”

Veronica poked her head into the room.

“Either of you guys know where Sean is? Melissa’s got a bad headache and there’s no aspirin left in the common area.”

“He’s not in medical?”

“Nope.”

Forrest had a look at his watch. “I’ll come unlock the cabinet,” he said, getting up. “He and Taylor might be on an afternoon tryst. Care if I leave you alone a minute, Marcus?”

Kane took a semiexasperated look around the room. “Jack, man, it ain’t like we’re sittin’ on missiles down here. Get him out of here, Ronny. He’s makin’ me nervous.”

Forrest got some aspirin from the medicine cabinet in Medical, then he and Veronica went to see Melissa in the second common room. The children were still rough-housing, screaming and laughing as they burned off the sugar, and Laddie was jumping around with them, chasing his ball and barking with excitement. A trio of mothers sat about, watching to make sure no one got hurt, a couple of them giving Forrest a collective you’re gonna get it look as he crossed into the room.

He offered them an innocent smile in return. “What’s got these little rascals so wound up today?”

“Like you don’t know,” Jenny said.

Veronica slapped him on the shoulder. “You’re asking for it.”

He went to the corner and knelt beside Melissa, who lay back on her bedroll looking very tired. “Got a headache, kiddo?”

“Uh-huh. Dolar en la cabesa,” she said, recalling the words from one of Maria Vasquez’s Spanish classes.

“As I recall, you weren’t feeling so hot yesterday either.”

“She’s working too hard on that cipher,” Veronica said, kneeling and sitting back on her heels. “Why don’t you take a little break, honey? Go back to it with fresh eyes in a week or two.”

“I will,” she said, taking the aspirins from her and sitting up to swallow them with some water. “But I feel like maybe I’m onto something. I’ve been assigning different letters and words to the sequences. Nothing fits yet, but the more I experiment with it, the more I feel a pattern. I can’t explain it, but it’s in there.”

She lay back down, massaging her neck with her hand. “I’m stiff today too.”

“Well, get some rest,” Veronica said, kissing her on the forehead. “Let someone know if you need anything.”

“Okay. I just need some sleep.”

Veronica walked with Forrest down the hall back toward Launch Control. “Think she’s really close to breaking that code?”

“I don’t know,” he said, scratching his head. “The chances are millions to one, but Wayne says it’s probably not a complicated code. So who knows? I just wish she wasn’t so obsessed with it. That’s almost all she’s been doing for the past couple of months. I saw her playing with the kids a few days ago but that’s been it.”

Taylor and Dr. West came around the corner laughing and holding hands.

“Hey, you two,” Taylor said happily.

“Hey,” Forrest said, extending them the rare courtesy of not teasing them about where they were coming from. “Sean, would you have a look at Melissa? She’s got a bad headache. I’m worried she’s been driving herself too hard with that damn code.”

“She’s still got that headache?” West said, surprised.

“And a stiff neck.”

“Was her neck stiff before?”

“I don’t know,” Forrest said. “We’re going to have to keep her busy with something else for a couple weeks.”

“I’ll think of something,” Veronica said. “Maybe we can start making Christmas decorations.”

“Speaking of that,” Forrest said, opening the door to Launch Control, “I’ve got an artificial tree in the cargo bay. Don’t tell anyone else, but I was thinking to set it up the day after Thanksgiving. Get all the juice we can out of the holiday.”

“Good idea,” West said. “I’ll look in on Melissa.”

“Talk to you guys later,” Forrest said, giving Veronica a kiss. “I’m supposed to be on duty.”

“No!” Kane called from inside the room. “Ronny, man, don’t let him back in here!”

Forty-Two

Dr. West at first believed Melissa’s headache was a symptom of the flu, which had been troubling enough, but after she began to run a fever on the third day, her complaints of a stiff neck made him think it might be something much more serious. So he asked for her and Michael’s permission to perform a painful spinal tap so he might look at her cerebral spinal fluid under a microscope.

Having brought along as much in the way medical equipment as was humanly practical, he was able to run some basic tests, and though he was unable to diagnose Melissa’s affliction with absolute certainty, the elevated number of white blood cells in her CSF gave him cause to believe she was suffering from bacterial meningitis, and he could have named a hundred diagnoses he would have preferred.

He stepped out of Medical into the corridor to talk with Michael and Forrest, leaving Veronica inside with Melissa, who lay in bed covered with blankets.

“So what is it, Sean?” Forrest asked, seemingly even more concerned than Michael.

“I think it’s serious,” West said. “I’m not absolutely certain but I believe she has bacterial meningitis. And if so she needs intravenous antibiotics; penicillin or vancomycin, possibly even cefotaxime—none of which I’ve got.”

“Wait, you told me you brought every antibiotic you thought we could possibly need.”

“In capsule form.”

“Why won’t those work?”

“Because you can’t pick away at an infection this big,” West said. “You have to hit a hammer blow, and pills won’t do that. I’ve got her on a broad spectrum of oral antibiotics now to try and slow the infection, but that’s not likely to save her.”

“So she could die?” Michael asked.

“In all likelihood she will die, and I want you both to prepare for that.”

“Now hold on a second!” Forrest said. “Four days ago she was chasing the kids and the dog up and down the tunnels. And now she’s in there dying? How does that happen?”

“Some of the children have been passing ear infections back and forth for the past couple of weeks,” West explained. “It’s possible that Melissa picked up a streptococcus infection from one of them and it spread to her cerebral spinal fluid via the ear. Unfortunately, meningitis is most commonly seen in people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four—which makes Melissa a prime candidate.”

“So are the children at risk or not?” Michael asked, worried about an epidemic.

“It’s possible, but they’ve all had their vaccinations, so we may get away with it. As a precaution, I’m going to put them all on penicillin for a week.”

“What’s she need?” Forrest said. “Write it all down exactly and I’ll go and get it.”

“What are you talking about?” Michael said. “You can’t go out there.”

“I can do any goddamn thing I want. Make me a list, Sean.”

“Jack, any intravenous antibiotics still out there aren’t likely to be any good by now. They need to be frozen in order to keep long-term, and even in that event they’re generally not kept longer than thirty days.”

“It’s twenty degrees out there,” Forrest said. “The whole world’s a freezer.”

“Jack…” West had known Forrest for a long time, and he knew the man just didn’t have any quit in him. “Even if you find some that are frozen, they may have thawed and refrozen by now. After five months it’s an extremely long shot you’re talking about.”

“Is it impossible, Sean? If I find some that are frozen, will you use them?”

“There would be very little to lose… so, yes, I would.”

Forrest and West went to Launch Control, where Vasquez was watching the monitors, and Forrest called for the rest of his men to join them there. After they gathered, West explained what he thought was wrong with Melissa and why. Forrest then told them that his intention was to go to the hospital in Lincoln to gather the items West needed to save her life.

“The entire run should take me less than twelve hours,” he concluded.

Not surprisingly, Ulrich was the first to speak out against the idea. “I think you need to consider this very seriously, Jack. As emotionally invested as you are—”

“I’m going, Wayne.”

Ulrich looked at the others, who, to his relief, didn’t seem overly keen on the idea of Forrest leaving the flock. “I think this is important enough that we need to take a vote,” he said regretfully. “There are too many other souls down here depending on you.”

Forrest stood looking at him. “You’re actually going to challenge me on this?”

“It’s not a challenge. This is the command structure we all agreed to. And you’re talking about doing exactly what we were all dead set against doing from the beginning.”

“You’re willing to let that girl die just to stand on fucking principle?”

“Oh, come on, Jack! Principle has nothing to do with this. Sean’s not even a hundred percent sure of the diagnosis, for Christ’s sake. And you want to go hunting for drugs that aren’t going to be any good anymore.”

“Then take your goddamn vote!”

“Hey, Jack,” Kane said gently. “We did all agree, man.”

Forrest looked at them, wanting badly to overrule them, but this was no longer the U.S. Army and he was no longer their captain. And he had agreed.

“So vote,” he said again.

“Before we do that,” Kane persisted, “we need to know if you’re gonna honor it. Or if you plan to take off in the middle of the night with our only Humvee.”

Forrest shook a cigarette from its pack and lit it right there in Launch Control, breaking his own rule. “You guys all know I’d never do that.”

“Okay,” Ulrich said. “What do you think, Oscar?”

“I think Wayne’s right,” Vasquez said. “I’m sorry, Jack. We haven’t even had to crack the hatch yet and you’re talking about lowering the lift elevator.”

“You should be more sympathetic than anyone,” Forrest argued, referring to Vasquez’s finite insulin supply.

“That’s not fair!” Ulrich said. “What about you, Linus? What’s your vote?”

“If there was a real chance of saving her, Captain”—for Danzig, old habits died hard—“I’d be with you, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to jeopardize the rest of the group. You’re too important down here.”

“Well, that’s it, then,” Ulrich said. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“No, that’s not it. I want a show of hands. Who says I stay? Get ’em up!”

Three hands went up, but Kane’s remained in his pockets.

“Marcus?” Ulrich said.

Kane stood for a moment looking at the floor. “I’m going with him,” he said finally.

“What?!”

“This is a one-man mission, Marcus.”

“Either I go, Jack, or you don’t get my vote.” Only a 4 to 1 vote could override one of Forrest’s decisions.

“You’re both out of your goddamn minds!” Ulrich rapped, realizing he’d lost.

“The vote’s three to two,” Forrest said. “I win. I’m going into the bay to prep the Humvee. We’ll take two cases of MREs and plenty of water. Marcus, get us two M-4s, six bandoliers of ammo, and a pair of .45s out of the armory.”

Kane looked at Ulrich and shrugged. “It was a fair vote, Wayne, and the girl deserves a chance. You on board or not?”

“I think it’s a crazy fucking idea, but I don’t have a choice. Know this: if you two die out there, I’m gonna put my prosthetic foot up both your asses!”

“You’re always gonna do something to somebody’s ass when you get pissed,” Forrest said. “Why is that?”

“I had a fucked-up childhood. What’s your excuse?”

An hour later Veronica caught Forrest just as he was about to open the blast door into the cargo bay. “You were going to leave without even telling me?” she asked, very pissed.

“I’d planned on being back before you knew I was gone,” he said with a grin. “Who’s sitting with Melissa?”

“Michael’s with her. Which is where you should be too. She’s only asked for you half a dozen times.”

“Tell her I’m running to the pharmacy.”

“You’re not funny,” she said. “You can’t save her, Jack, but you can at least give her some comfort while she’s still conscious. How am I supposed to tell her that you’ve gone on a goddamn suicide mission?”

“It’s not a suicide mission, for Christ’s sake. You sound like Wayne.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why aren’t you taking Laddie with you?”

The door opened at the other end and Andie came into the tunnel. “Excuse me just a moment,” she said to Veronica, moving past her to kiss Forrest on the cheek. “Be careful please?”

“Of course,” he said with a smile.

Andie touched Veronica on the arm and left them alone.

Forrest waited until the door was sealed, then said, “See? That’s how you’re supposed to send a man off to battle.”

“You know, this is all just one big adventure for you, isn’t it?”

“At least I don’t look at it as one big social experiment. How’s the dichotomy working out for you these days?”

That hurt her feelings, and she turned away so he wouldn’t see the tears forming.

“I honestly don’t know how Monica did this. How many times did you leave her waiting to hear that you’d been killed?”

“Too many. She was even waiting when Daniel was killed. I can’t undo the past, Veronica. And I won’t hide down here and let that girl die when I know she can be saved. Now turn around and give me a kiss so I can go.”

She turned around without opening her eyes, reaching to put her arms around him. She kissed him on the lips and turned away again, going to the door and slipping out of the tunnel, absolutely certain that she had spoken to him for the last time.

People were eating one another out there.

Andie was waiting outside the door for her, and the two of them hugged and went to Launch Control to watch the monitors.

“I’m ready when you are, Marcus,” Kane heard Forrest announce in his earpiece.

“Roger that,” he said. “Opening blast door number two.”

Standing at the top of stairwell, dressed head-to-toe in his NBC suit, complete with gas mask, he turned the lever and opened the door, accessing the security vestibule for the first time since the impact. He went in and Vasquez sealed the door behind him as he made his way to blast door number one.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m cracking door number one.”

“Roger that.”

Kane turned the wheel and pulled the lever to open the door, keeping his .45 at the ready as he stepped from the vestibule into the basement of the house. He pulled the door closed behind him and told Vasquez that it was clear for him to come and seal it.

Vasquez opened door number two and ran down the vestibule, pulling the lever to seal blast door one tight behind Kane and spinning the big red wheel. Then he left the vestibule and resealed blast door two, restoring complete integrity to the silo. “LC, we’re a hundred percent again,” he announced over the net.

“Roger,” Ulrich replied from Launch Control. “Marcus, we’ve still got zero movement above. You’re clear to enter the house.”

“Roger.” Kane ascended the stairs and opened the door into the house. The first thing he noticed was that the floor was covered with a thin film of grayish black dust not visible on the monitors. “I’m in the hall,” he said.

“We’ve got visual.”

“There’s a lot of ash in here,” he remarked, moving into the living room, where everything looked filthy now and the dead body was mostly eaten away. Outside, the day was gray and overcast, with a dark layer of continuous cloud looming much lower over the ground than he had expected.

Stepping out the back door, Kane scanned the landscape through the scope of his M-4, seeing nothing alive, not even a bird. The only movement was the ash and dust blowing about. The mutilated corpse of the dead man by the grill was frozen and covered in filth. The outside of the house was scorched, the tan vinyl siding twisted and melted by the heat of the grass fires as they had passed. Nothing had regrown and there was no real color anywhere.

He scanned 360 degrees around the house to make sure there were no threats on the horizon, then took a rake from the back porch and went to the garden. “It’s all clear up here, Jack.”

“Roger. I’m lowering the lift.”

Kane saw the garden begin to drop into the earth and stepped back as the sound of the hydraulic lift pervaded the breezy silence. Dirt fell over the edges of the opening as the deck descended fifteen feet to the bottom of the cargo bay. Kane stood looking down as Forrest drove the Humvee up onto the garden-covered deck, which was just big enough to hold a single Army six-by-six truck. Forrest then jumped out of the Humvee and hit a button on the wall.

“Raising the lift,” he announced, and ran to jump back onto the lift as it began to rise. It stopped at the top, locking into place, and he drove the Humvee out of the garden and across the yard to the gravel drive. “Lift up and locked.”

Ulrich acknowledged the transmission as Kane went to work with the rake, quickly smoothing away the tire tracks in the dirt and raking away the square depression in the soil outlining the edges of the lift. In a few hours’ time the wind would do the rest.

Forrest got out of the Humvee and waited for Kane to put the rake away. “Have you tried the air?” he asked.

“No.”

Forrest took the Geiger counter from inside the vehicle. “Background radiation is a tad elevated but still in the green. I’m going to try the air.”

“That’s not a good idea, Jack,” Ulrich said over the net.

“I’m not wearing this mask if I don’t have to.” He pulled the mask from his head and drew a shallow breath, the air smelling to him more like a dirty fireplace than anything else. “There’s a lot of particulate matter but I don’t think it’s volcanic. It’s not hurting my lungs.”

The two loaded up. Kane got behind the wheel and took off his mask, tossing it into Forrest’s lap. “Ready?”

“Definitely. Wayne, we’re going off the net, but leave the receiver on until we get back.”

“Roger that. Good luck.”

“Back before you know it.”

Kane put the Humvee in gear, drove down the hill and out through the fence, stopping at the road. “This is some fucked-up shit here,” he said, leaning into the wheel and looking out. “It’s high noon and look how dark it is. This sky’s never gonna clear up before we run out of food, man.”

“It has to,” Forrest said.

“How’s that?”

“Because if it don’t, we’re fucked.”

Kane grunted and stepped on the gas. “This is a dumb idea, Jack… just so you know.”

Forrest chuckled, lighting up a cigarette. “So why’d you vote with me?”

“Because you’re the best officer I ever had… and if this is gonna be your last mission, I’m gonna be on it.”

Forty-Three

Forrest and Kane had covered all five major medical centers in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, by late afternoon, and they hadn’t found a single frozen bag of intravenous antibiotic in any of the freezers. What they had found were dozens and dozens of dead patients who had been left behind to die.

“I’m sorry,” Kane said, getting in on the passenger side of the Humvee. “It was worth the try, Jack.”

“I’ll drop you back at the silo,” Forrest said, hitting the starter.

“Drop me what?”

“I’m pressing on to Topeka.”

“I knew you’d pull this shit,” Kane said. “Lemme drive.”

Forrest watched the highway as they rode, eyeballing various abandoned cars and trucks, remembering Iraq and Afghanistan, where such vehicles were once as likely to explode when you passed as not. Here, though, he was more concerned about an ambush.

There was almost nothing else to see on the ride south to Topeka, only a few buildings and no sign that anyone had passed that way in the last four months. Even the abandoned vehicles looked decades old, covered in grime, some of them burned to the frame, tires melted into the asphalt.

“McCarthy sure as hell got this part right,” Forrest muttered.

“Who’s McCarthy?”

“He wrote a novel years back about postapocalyptic America. His world was postnuclear rather than postmeteor, but this is almost exactly what he described. He won the Pulitzer for it.”

Kane had never been much of a reader, having always preferred to play sports in his free time. “That’s why I never liked to read, Jack. Who’d want to know about this shit sooner than you had to?”

An hour later he said, “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“Over there to the left, way out. I think I saw a flashlight.”

“You think or you’re sure?” Forrest said, craning his neck to see into the blackness.

“Can’t be sure,” Kane said, not daring to take his eyes from the highway, his speed no faster than forty-five miles an hour. The headlights of the Humvee did not penetrate far enough into the murk for him to be sure they wouldn’t hit some kind of obstruction or debris in the road. Spits of snow had begun to fall as well, adding to the miasma.

“Remember the eighty-four-mile marker,” Forrest said. “On the way back we’ll want to keep our eyes peeled.”

Thirty miles farther on they were approaching the outskirts of Topeka. Along the highway, they began to see signs of past military action, civilian cars armored with welded boilerplate, riddled with .50 cal machine-gun fire, some blown apart—probably by javelin antitank missiles. They passed an M60 tank that had thrown a tread while running over a pickup truck but was otherwise undamaged. They drove slowly through a shattered roadblock, seeing scores of dead bodies strewn about in the dust, all of them strangely mummified now, freeze-dried in the arid cold.

“I’m not sorry we missed this,” Kane said. “They slaughtered these people.”

“Looks like somebody didn’t want them getting into the city,” Forrest surmised. “I’m guessing it was the Forty-fifth I.D.”

A mile farther ahead a pair of large spotlights unexpectedly snapped on in the pitch-black, blinding them both. Kane slammed on the brakes and grabbed for his carbine, but Forrest caught his arm. “It’s gotta be the Forty-fifth. Give ’em a chance to look us over.”

Both men shaded their eyes and waited as a group of soldiers surrounded the Humvee, shouting for them to show their hands.

“Hold your fire!” Forrest was shouting at them. “We’re with the Eighty-second!”

“Exit the vehicle!” someone shouted. “Hands in the air!”

Both men exited and stood with their hands up, still squinting against the intense light.

“Hold your fire, guys,” Forrest said. “Take it easy. We’re on your side.”

“Move it!” a soldier said, prodding him forward with the muzzle of an M-16.

They were marched through an opening in a barricade of cars stacked two high, then across an open lot into a Texaco station with blacked-out windows. The inside of the makeshift command post was well lit with military lanterns, and the shelves were empty, all of them jammed up against the walls out of the way.

A black sergeant with a bald head sat in an easy chair behind the counter smoking a cigar. His uniform tag said that his name was Lee, the patch on his shoulder the dingy gold thunderbird of the Forty-fifth Infantry Division, a division reactivated a few years before the asteroid had ever been spotted.

“These men were trying to get into the city,” one of the soldiers said.

Lee stood up and came around the counter to Kane, the cigar caught in the corner of his mouth. They were of equal size and height. “You two smell good enough to fuck,” he said, puffing at the cigar. “Where the hell you comin’ from?”

“I’m afraid that’s classified information, Sergeant,” Forrest said.

Lee turned to look him over. “That’s a term that’s lost most of its meaning around here, Captain.”

“The fact remains. Who’s your commanding officer?”

“These guys are Special Forces,” one of the soldiers said, pointing out the patches on their left shoulders. “They must’ve been in the rear with the gear all this time.”

“That so?” Lee asked. “You two a couple of REMFs?” This was an unofficial, pejorative military acronym standing for Rear Echelon Mother Fucker.

“Sergeant, I’ve already told you that’s classified information. I won’t tell you again. Now who’s your C.O.… or are you all that’s left after that battle out there?”

Lee stood chewing the cigar. “Colonel Short still commands.”

“Then I’ll need to speak with him,” Forrest said. “In the meantime, Sergeant, I’ll be holding you personally responsible for our vehicle and equipment.”

Lee glanced at his men and smirked. “Responsible to who, Captain?”

Forrest knew all too well there wasn’t much left to intimidate with in terms of a military hierarchy, but if he lost the initiative, they were screwed. He was only now getting a good look at the two men covering them, and they were but mere shadows of the soldiers they had once been, filthy and unshaven, dark circles beneath their eyes. Lee was shaven and better kempt, but he was obviously equally exhausted. “To your C.O. Who the hell else?”

“Got any ID?” Lee asked.

“Just our tags,” Forrest said. “Left our AGO cards back at Bragg.”

“Lemme see.”

Both men took their dog tags from beneath their jackets for the sergeant to read.

“Okay,” Lee said, believing they were at least who they said they were. “Turn your pistols over to my men until after you’ve met with the colonel.”

Kane and Forrest took their .45s from their holsters and surrendered them.

“Don’t lose them,” Forrest said.

“I’ll take these cats to the colonel myself,” Lee said. “Tell Sergeant Behan he’s in charge till I get back.”

Sergeant Stacker Lee then grabbed a flashlight from the counter and led them out the back door to a waiting black Cadillac Escalade. He gave the keys to Forrest and told him to drive. “I’ll sit in the back. Just follow my directions.”

Colonel Eugene Short’s quarters were a mile off the highway in a very nice home at the edge of what had once been a wealthy neighborhood. There were four men on guard outside the house wearing night vision devices on their helmets and four more on guard inside. There were more lanterns lighting the inside of the home where Short was sitting down to a meal of heated green beans and canned potatoes. A generator hummed somewhere beneath the floor but there was no electric light to be seen.

“These men were taken into custody at the northern barricade, sir. They’re Special Forces with the Eighty-second and claim to be on a classified mission.”

Short was a graying man of fifty-two with drifting, watery blue eyes. He was clean shaven and wore a semiclean digitally camouflaged uniform bearing the eagle insignia of a full colonel with the Forty-fifth Division. “A classified mission?” he said dubiously. “I find that rather difficult to believe.”

“That’s what they claim, sir. They’re also very clean and smell of soap and aftershave.”

Short stood from the dining table and came over to Forrest and Kane, both of whom stood rigidly at attention.

“At ease, gentlemen,” the colonel said, looking them over. “You boys are well fed sons of bitches, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Forrest said.

“How is that?”

“I’m afraid I’m not exactly at liberty to say, Colonel. But we’re obviously traveling with a well equipped and sizable force.”

Short took a humorous glance at Sergeant Lee. “Did that sound like a veiled threat to you, Sergeant?”

“It did, sir.”

“It was no kind of threat at all, sir. I was merely attempting to answer the colonel’s question without exceeding my mission parameters.”

“Take a seat at the table, gentlemen.” Short then ordered his personal guards out of the room, leaving the four of them alone as he reclaimed his chair. “You’re both Green Berets,” he said, forking a potato into his mouth.

“Yes, sir.”

“See how the green beanies are, Sergeant? They take themselves too seriously… even now.”

“Yes, sir,” Lee said.

“Captain Forrest,” the colonel went on, “would it be safe for me to assume that a detachment of the Eighty-second Airborne has made its way here all the way from North Carolina for purposes unknown?”

“That much would be safe to assume, sir, yes.”

“And you came across on Interstate 40?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see,” Short said, forking another potato into his mouth and chewing it completely before swallowing, savoring it to the last. “Well, Captain, would you care to hear how I know that story to be complete bullshit?”

Neither Forrest nor Kane made a reply to the colonel’s query.

“Of course you would,” the colonel went on. “Well, on the night the meteor hit, there were some pretty massive earthquakes around these parts… which caused the engineers working over at the Parkersburg nuclear power plant to panic and abandon ship without bothering to power down the reactor. So the core melted down and burned right through the bottom of the plant—China syndrome. Only it never quite made it to China. It hit groundwater and sent a huge cloud of radioactive steam into the air, killing everybody within a fifty-mile-wide corridor east of the plant for a hundred miles. It’s a dead zone now, and Interstate 40 runs right through it.” He paused long enough to eat a forkful of beans, then said, “What do you have to say to that, Captain?”

Forrest thought it over a moment and smiled. “Actually, Colonel, it wasn’t a meteor that hit us. It was an asteroid.”

The colonel smiled back. “Indeed it was. Captain, why don’t you tell me what the hell you’re really up to so I can decide whether or not to let you continue on your way? Otherwise, I’m going to lock you both up and throw away the key for insulting my intelligence.”

Forrest knew there was little choice now but to offer at least a version of the truth. “We’re living a couple hundred miles north of here, Colonel, in an abandoned missile silo with twenty civilians, mostly women and children. At half rations, we’ve got maybe enough food left for two months—we’re down to mostly flour and rice now. The reason Kane and I are here is that my niece has contracted meningitis, and we’re on our way to the hospital to find the antibiotics our doctor needs to save her life.”

“Why even bother? So she can eat hardtack and rice for another two months?”

“We’re not giving up until the end, Colonel.”

“And you’re worried I’ll lead my division north to rape your women and steal your flour and rice. Is that it, Captain?”

“It’s a realistic concern, Colonel, yes.”

“Well, you’re in luck, Captain. I don’t condone rape and neither does Sergeant Lee. As for your rations… even if you’ve lied by half, which I suspect you have, it’s not enough food for me to bother with.” He finished off his potatoes and directed his attention to Lee. “Sergeant, do you see any reason why we shouldn’t allow these men to continue on their way? They’re obviously not capable of causing us much trouble.”

“No, sir.”

“Then pick three men and escort them over to the hospital so they can gather whatever it is they’re looking for,” the colonel ordered. “After that, return them to the barricade and see them safely on their way with their possessions returned to them.”

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel rose to his feet and everyone else followed suit.

“You’re dismissed,” the colonel said.

Both Kane and Forrest snapped him a smart salute and turned an about face, following Sergeant Lee out of the room.

“The hospital’s outside our containment zone,” Lee explained as he drove them himself deeper into town in the Cadillac. There were soldiers with lanterns and flashlights here and there along the way, all of them armed to the teeth, most of them smoking cigarettes.

“We’ve got enough food left for maybe a couple months ourselves,” he went on. “After that we plan to commit mass suicide. That’s why you’ll see a grenade around most everybody’s neck. It’s a sign of solidarity against cannibalism.”

“So you’ve seen them too?” Kane said.

“We’ve seen plenty of ’em, and we kill ’em whenever we find ’em. Fuckin’ wild animals. It ain’t no way to survive. You gotta know when it’s time to hang it up. Our original plan was we’d all get drunk together before pulling the pins, but then we drank up all the booze.” He laughed. “So I guess we’re goin’ out sober. It’s too bad.”

“How’s the morale otherwise?”

“We’ve only had a few suicides,” Lee said. “But we’ve had some desertions lately, about twenty. We ain’t sure what that’s about. The colonel’s not keeping anybody who doesn’t want to stay. It just leaves more food for the rest of us. Last week ten dudes asked him for a truck and some fuel for a run to the coast. Couple of ’em said they knew how to sail and wanted to try for Australia. Colonel told ’em, ‘Good luck.’”

“What the hell’s in Australia?” Kane said.

“Beats me, bro. Don’t matter no way. I know them dudes, and they ain’t sailin’ to no motherfuckin’ Australia. Them dudes are gonna drown.”

“How many men do you have left?” Forrest asked.

“Around a thousand.”

“No women?”

“We had some females in the brigade originally, but the colonel ordered them all out with the last airlift to Texas. I think he knew how bad things were going to get here. They’d have gotten raped for sure, man. We got too many young hooligans in this outfit.”

“So what’s going on down in Texas?”

“Got no idea. We haven’t heard from them in months.”

“And you chose not to share your food with the civilians here? That’s what the battle was over? Food?”

“We distributed plenty of food,” Lee said, steering through town on the way to his billet. “That was our primary mission, but the civvies here got carried away. Redneck bastards started showing up at the distribution centers with guns and shooting our men. After that the colonel pulled us into this defensive perimeter and we tried to dispense the food that way. But then local warlords took over outside and started stealing food from those without guns, forming private armies… like fucking Somalia, man. At first they traded food for women, and when they finally had all the women, they let everybody else starve.

“After that, the warlords started killing each other off, and that’s when the colonel decided to quit distributing food altogether… which only forced the warlords into an alliance. Then they attacked us at different places around the perimeter, and they killed a few of us, but we wiped ’em out in the end. What you saw on the road in was nothing. On the city’s east side the bodies are piled up knee high for a quarter mile. Things have been pretty quiet out there ever since. The human race has had it, man.”

“No word from D.C.?” Forrest asked.

“The last word we got from anybody was months ago,” Lee said. “By shortwave—the satellite signals can’t penetrate that shit in the sky. We were told the President was dead and that we were all effectively on our own.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nobody said, but the colonel thinks there was a coup.”

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Forrest muttered.

“This is my billet,” Lee said, shifting into park in front of a house lit up like Mardi Gras.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Kane asked.

“My place is party central. We’ve got more gas than food now, so we run the generator all night long. We don’t have any booze left, like I was telling you, so the guys watch a lot of dirty movies, have circle jerks, play video games. All pretty juvenile shit, but what else is left?”

“We got some gamers too, but we ain’t had no circle jerk yet.”

Lee chuckled sardonically. “We got a lotta kids in this outfit. You two wait out here while I get my men. I don’t need ever’body inside knowing about you guys. It could cause trouble.”

Ten minutes later an armored Humvee pulled up behind the Escalade and Lee got out, calling for Forrest and Kane to get in. Their weapons had been retrieved from the barricade and were returned to them, and they were each given a Kevlar helmet with a NVD attached.

“It gets dark as fuck outside the containment zone,” Lee said. “There’s a moon tonight, though, so the NVDs will light it up good. Inside the hospital we’ll have to switch to infrared. These are my homies: Grip, Clean, and Shodo.”

Everyone shook hands in the cramped space of the Humvee. All of Lee’s “homies” were black men in their thirties, and Forrest was glad he hadn’t brought along any of the young hooligans he had mentioned.

At the southern checkpoint, they passed out of the containment zone after giving almost no explanation at all. It seemed that Lee was something of an institution within the brigade and that whatever he said was taken as gospel. Forrest began to wonder how much control Colonel Short actually had over his men, now suspecting that he was little more than a figurehead, which did make sense under the circumstances. In fact, he was surprised to see as much military order as he did. They drove past a parking lot strewn with bodies, fallen one upon the other as if on an ancient battlefield.

Forrest noticed in the red light of the interior that Grip had a pair of very large hands, and it occurred to him that this must have been the origin of his nickname. There was nothing about Clean or Shodo, however, to explain theirs. Clean certainly wasn’t at all clean. Two miles from the checkpoint, they pulled up to the emergency entrance of the hospital and piled out, taking time to have a good look around with their night division devices. Nothing moved in the blackish green, and only the sound of the icy wind pervaded.

“So what’s it like livin’ underground?” Shodo asked as they stepped through the shattered glass door into the emergency ward.

“It’s quiet,” Kane said, not wanting to make it sound too inviting.

“I bet,” Shodo said. “How many other GIs you got?”

“Ten,” Forrest lied.

“All green beanies?”

“That’s right.”

“You all got any women down there?”

“Bro,” Lee said, “what I tell you back at the crib?”

“Stacker, man, I’m just curious. Can’t a brother at least fantasize a little bit? Shit.”

“Get on point,” Lee ordered. “Find the fuckin’ pharmacy.”

They moved in a tight cover formation through the hospital, following the signs on the walls. They were forced to switch over to infrared once they were away from the windows because of the almost total lack of ambient light, which made it impossible to read the signs without having to use the flashlights on their weapons.

“Anybody else smell that?” Kane asked as they made their way up an open staircase to the second floor.

“Yeah,” Forrest answered.

“Smell what?” Lee said.

It occurred to Forrest that breathing the filthy air over an extended period of time must have desensitized the others’ olfactory systems.

“Smells like burnt meat,” Kane said.

The others froze in place.

“I don’t smell nothin’,” Grip said.

“Me either,” said Clean.

“I think I do,” said Shodo.

“Keep movin’,” Lee ordered. “How fresh does it smell, Kane?”

“I don’t know. It’s not real strong, but I didn’t smell it down on the first floor.”

They found the pharmacy and Lee’s men covered the halls while he and the two Green Berets used their flashlights to search inside. Forrest found a freezer with a padlock on it and bashed it off with the butt of the carbine, pulling the door open to shine his light inside. There were all sorts of frozen drug solutions, but he didn’t find any of the names that West had written down for him.

“Jack, got another freezer back here.” Kane bashed the lock and Forrest shone his light to find that the freezer contained nothing but antibiotics, including those he was looking for.

“Thank Christ,” he muttered, grabbing one of the bags and giving it a shake. The solution wasn’t frozen, but it was slushy and icy cold. “How many should we take, Marcus?”

“How many can you fit in the fuckin’ ruck, man?”

Forrest packed his rucksack tight. “We’re good to go, Sergeant!”

During their egress, the odor of burnt meat became strong enough that Lee and his men were able to smell it very well now.

“Fuck, that’s human!” Shodo said, all of them having smelled it before.

“Human?” Kane said.

“Grip, get on point!” Lee ordered in a hushed tone. “Find the source!”

“Guys, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” Forrest cautioned. “We don’t know the layout of the building.”

“Captain, you and your man cover the rear,” Lee ordered, ignoring the warning.

Forrest and Kane had little choice but to comply, both of them relieved that they had grabbed grenades at Lee’s behest.

“Cafeteria’s just ahead,” Grip whispered. “Keep it tight.”

All of them could see the heat plume at the end of the hall in their infrared view finders, and they switched over to night vision, realizing there would be ambient light now. They made their way into the cafeteria, which was a proper mess with tables dumped over and chairs scattered about. The vending machines had long been smashed open and raided. The acrid odor of frying meat was mixed with the stench of rotting human flesh, and both Forrest and Kane felt the hair rise on the back of their necks as they shuffled backward along the wall, covering the rear.

Grip could hear the sizzling of meat now as he peered around the corner into the kitchen, seeing a dark hooded figure cooking by candlelight over a Coleman camp stove. He also saw the severed arm and leg of a human being on the counter, most of the flesh gone from both, leaving bare bone, the hand and foot still in tact. Another figure entered the kitchen from the opposite side and spotted Grip peeking around the corner.

“Look out!” he shouted, and the cook jerked his head in Grip’s direction, pulling a pistol from his pocket.

Grip fired his carbine and killed the cook but missed the second man, who ducked quickly back out of the kitchen.

“Move!” Lee said, ordering the men forward. “Captain, cover this doorway!”

They cleared the kitchen and had a look around, the eerie blue flame still burning beneath the frying pan, smoke beginning to fill the kitchen. Kane felt his stomach twist at the smell of what he now knew was burning human flesh, and he knocked the pan from the stove to the floor.

“Oh, fuck!” Clean said. “Look at this shit, Sarge!” He grabbed a handful of dog tags hanging from a hook over the counter and held them up for Lee to see.

“Read me the names!” Lee ordered.

“Preston, Sipe, Leskavonski—shit, Sarge, these are our men!”

“They didn’t fuckin’ desert!” Shodo said. “They got eaten by fuckin’ cannibals!”

“Ever’body chill the fuck out!” Lee ordered, peering around the corner after the man who had escaped. The hallway was about fifty feet long with a turn to the left at the far end.

Kane squatted beside the dead man and picked up the .38 revolver, kicking the body viciously in the head to be sure he wasn’t playing possum. The dead man was grimy as hell with a thick black beard, and he stunk to high heaven of sweat and shit.

“These people have definitely gone wild,” he said to Forrest.

“Sergeant, we need to get the hell out of here,” Forrest warned.

“Not before we kill these motherfuckers. We helped you get what you needed, now you help us do what we need done.”

“I advise you to go back and gather a company of men first. You’ve got no idea the size of the force you’re going up against or how well equipped they might be. There’s a pile of fresh bones in this sink over here big enough to suggest they’re feeding a lot of people.”

“And suppose they’ve still got some of our men alive in this shit hole,” Lee said. “How long you think they gonna stay that way?”

“Getting killed won’t help them.”

“We’re taking them down. You with us or not?”

Forrest and Kane exchanged glances. Again they didn’t have much choice. The six of them carefully made their way down the hall and around the corner. Someone screamed deep within the hospital in the darkness. It was a bloodcurdling cry.

“I’m on point!” Lee said, shouldering his way to the front.

They moved smartly along, clearing any open rooms they passed. There was a flurry of movement at a four-way intersection up ahead and shots were fired. Lee and Grip both returned fire and someone screamed. The six soldiers moved quickly to secure the intersection, where a man lay against the wall wailing in pain, shot through the stomach. He stunk as badly as the cook and lashed out with a knife, trying to hook Shodo behind the knee.

Shodo brought the stock of his M-16 down on the man’s head and caved it in. “Fuck you, motherfucker!”

“In here!” Clean called from a nearby room.

The others had a look inside, where one of their missing men was chained to a bed with his throat recently cut.

“Son of a bitch!” Lee swore. “See? Goddamnit!”

“They only got shotguns and revolvers,” Clean said, dumping the shells from the cannibal’s .357 and flinging the pistol back in the direction they had come. “Let’s clean these fuckers out.”

Forrest realized that these soldiers had nothing to lose by pressing forward, but he and Kane certainly did. Farther along, a cluster of people burst from a room and dashed across the hall. Lee and his men gave chase.

“Sergeant!” Forrest shouted, but it was no use. He and Kane ran after them, covering the rear as they ran across a large conference room in pursuit of the fleeing figures. The double doors at the far side slammed shut before they could reach them, and the sound of crashing vending machines could be heard on the other side, effectively barricading the doors closed.

“It’s a trap!” Kane shouted, turning on his heel to dash back to the entrance. But these doors were also slammed shut before he could reach them, and again the vending machines outside were knocked over to barricade them.

“Goddamnit!” Kane shouted, whirling on Stacker Lee. “See what the fuck you did, motherfucker!”

There were sounds of maniacal laughter in the halls outside, whooping and hollering beyond both sets of doors, and a hail of bullets came through, forcing the soldiers to the floor and up against the walls.

“Now what?” Clean griped.

“I guess this wasn’t such a good idea,” said Shodo.

“No shit!” Kane remarked.

“Hey, fuck you!” Lee said. “Goddamn green beanie motherfucker! You dudes been livin’ underground suckin’ on cold beer and eatin’ pussy for the last twelve months! Who the fuck are you to tell us jack shit?”

“Cool it!” Forrest ordered. “We have to think our way out of this.”

They heard the sound of breaking glass in the center of the room and switched on their flashlights to see a dozen mason jars come dropping through a hole in the ceiling, shattering against the floor and releasing thick clouds of white gas.

“Fuck is that?!” Grip shouted, scooting away along the wall.

“Chlorine gas!” Forrest said.

“Where the fuck they get that shit?”

“Bleach and toilet bowl cleaner,” Forrest said, gathering the shemagh from about his neck and tying it over his nose and mouth. Lee’s men followed suit by tying green triangular bandages over their faces, and more jars fell through holes scattered all across the ceiling, shattering against the floor to fill the room with the poisonous gas.

Laughter came down through the holes in the ceiling, and more shots were fired through the doors to keep their heads down.

The soldiers started choking and their eyes burned.

“What the fuck are we gonna do?” Lee said. “We don’t have much time.”

“I have a suggestion,” said Kane.

“I’m all ears, man.”

“Turn command of this little goat fuck over to my captain so he can get us the fuck outta here!”

“What about it?” Lee said tersely. “You want command of the coal train?”

“Sure,” Forrest said, grinning beneath the shemagh. “Why not?”

“What you got in mind?”

“First,” Forrest said, “we need a fresh air supply. Stick a grenade in that fire extinguisher encasement and blow it outta there. There’ll be fresh air inside the wall we can take turns at.”

Grip wasted no time sliding over to the empty fire extinguisher box and sticking a grenade inside. “Fire in the hole!”

The grenade exploded and blew the metal encasement open wide enough for them to take turns sticking their heads inside the cinder-block wall for gulps of fresh air.

“Now we blow a hole in that far wall so we can flank these motherfuckers.”

“Fuck you gonna use for explosives?” Lee demanded. “Grenades won’t do shit to a brick wall!”

“O ye of little faith, Sergeant. Everybody fork over a concussion grenade. Hurry it up! Marcus, tape them together.”

Kane took a roll of electrical tape from his cargo pocket and began taping the six grenades together.

“Sergeant, get that jacket off and ball it up,” Forrest ordered as he removed the lanyard from his .45.

Lee stripped his combat harness and shrugged quickly out of his body armor. He then took off his jacket and gave it to Forrest, who used his electrical tape to wad the jacket into a ball as Lee shrugged back into his armor and harness.

“Now we’ll go knock the cover off that air vent in the far wall.”

The two each took a gulp of fresh air from the hole and moved quickly through the cloud of gas across to the wall Forrest had indicated. Lee used the butt of his carbine to bash the cover from the vent.

“Jam your jacket down inside the wall as far as you can!” Forrest said, choking against the fumes. He then ran the lanyard through the pins of the concussion grenades, lowering them down into the shaft to rest upon the jacket. “Take cover behind that table!”

Lee ran to where the other men had overturned a table and jumped behind it as Forrest jerked the lanyard, pulling all six pins from the grenades at virtually the same time and running for cover.

Four seconds later the grenades exploded in a massive thunderclap, blasting a four-foot hole in the double layered cinder-block wall.

“Move!” Forrest shouted, leaping over the table and sprinting toward the opening with Kane hot on his heels. The two Green Berets reached the opening a full two strides ahead of the others and ran down the hall to the far corner, catching six cannibals stunned and unprepared, machine-gunning them on the move and trampling their bodies underfoot. They continued making their way through the hospital at flank speed by flashlight.

Lee’s men caught up and together they fought a running battle back toward the emergency ward.

“Hold up!” Shodo said. “I hear somethin’.”

The men stopped and everyone stood listening. They heard the hushed tones of crying children somewhere behind them and around the corner and made their way to a private room where they found fifteen or so ragged women and children huddled together. They were as filthy and sickly looking as the men they had seen, and one of the women took a shot at them with a 9mm pistol, hitting Lee in the chest on his breastplate.

They ducked back out of the doorway and stood looking at one another.

“They sure as shit ain’t lookin’ to be rescued!” Grip said.

“Fuck you!” a woman screamed from inside. “Bastards!”

Down the far hall they could hear the cannibal men gathering, realizing that a group of their women and children had been found.

Lee took a concussion grenade from his harness.

“No!” Kane said.

“Fuck ’em! You think those motherfuckers see you as anything more than food?”

“We can keep moving,” Forrest said. “You gave me command, remember?”

“Tactical command, Captain.” Lee pulled the pin on the grenade, tossing it into the room, and they all ducked away covering their ears. The concussion from the blast blew out the windows of the room, and a great pressure wave blasted past them down the hall like rolling thunder. No one in the room could have lived.

“Goddamnit!” Kane screamed. “You didn’t have to fuckin’ do that!”

“It’s done!” Lee retorted. “Now what are your orders, Captain?”

“We get the fuck downstairs and find an exit! Shodo, you got point!”

On their way across the lower lobby a shower of Molotov cocktails rained down around them and Shodo was completely consumed by fire, screaming and flailing in a futile attempt to beat out the flames. Forrest shouldered his carbine and shot him dead before any of Lee’s men could react, whirling about to spray the balcony above them and driving back the firebombers.

“Forget the emergency ward!” he ordered. “The Humvee’s fucked anyhow.”

They burst out the main entrance onto the sidewalk to see that the Humvee was indeed burning fifty yards away.

“Looks like we hoof it,” Forrest said. “I trust you remember the way, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir! Grip, on point! I’ll bring up the rear!”

Using their night vision, they ran the two miles all the way back to the checkpoint, where they were nearly machine-gunned by their own troops before they could identify themselves.

“Check fire!” Lee screamed from behind a truck. “Check fire!”

“Identify yourselves!”

“Stacker Lee, you dumb motherfuckers! Stacker-fuckin’-Lee!”

It took a minute but they were eventually permitted to advance, and Lee wasted no time telling the men at the checkpoint what had taken place at the hospital. A great fury swept through the men upon hearing that twenty of their comrades had been abducted and eaten. Two full companies of men were quickly assembled.

“At first light we go back there and clean those motherfuckers out,” Lee said, gathering a fresh supply of grenades. “Care to lead us, Captain?”

Forrest looked at Kane. “We should be on our way.”

Kane agreed.

“In that case, I’ll drive you to the barricade,” Lee said.

At the barricade he told them to keep their helmets, NVDs, and body armor, and complied with Kane’s request for three more sets of NVDs.

Forrest reached into the back of their Humvee and grabbed a bottle of Tequila from a barracks bag, offering it to Stacker Lee. “For that final circle jerk, Sergeant.”

Lee smiled a white, toothy smile and accepted the bottle with relish. “And this time I’ll save it.”

The soldiers all saluted one another, and Forrest and Kane mounted up.

“My guys took the liberty of gassing it up for you,” Lee said, shutting Forrest’s door for him. They shook hands through the window. “Godspeed, Captain. Sorry I was such a prick.”

“Live forever, Sergeant.”

Kane started the engine and wheeled the Humvee around, roaring through the gate, headed north.

Both men were so exhausted from the fight that neither of them remembered to be alert at the eighty-four-mile marker—until a Molotov cocktail flew out of the darkness and exploded in flames against the windshield.

“Son of a bitch!” Kane shouted, cutting the wheel hard to the left and narrowly missing a car that had been rolled onto the center of the highway. He could barely see where he was going through the flames and ended up swerving into the center median and up a concrete highway barrier, perfectly high-centering the vehicle. “Cocksucker!” he swore, realizing they were stuck fast.

“Dismount!” Forrest said, grabbing his carbine and helmet.

They took cover behind the barrier as shots rang out and bullets began pinging off the Humvee. Forrest could see a number of men across the highway in his night vision and opened fire, killing four with four quick shots. The firing from across the road stopped and the attackers disappeared from their view.

“Guess you saw a flashlight after all,” he said.

They could hear hushed voices on three sides.

“They’re moving to outflank us.”

“We’re already outflanked,” Forrest remarked. “Soon to be surrounded.”

As if to verify that fact, a shotgun slug struck Forrest dead-center in the back panel of his boron carbide body armor, knocking him into the concrete barrier as if he’d been mule-kicked.

Kane whipped around and returned fire, driving the shooter back under cover. “Jack!”

Forrest got to his knees and grabbed his carbine, blinking his eyes to clear his vision. “I’m okay,” he groaned. “Christ, that hurt.”

“We need to get out of the light of the headlights,” Kane said, and they both moved farther down the barrier.

More shots rang out.

Kane grabbed his lower leg. “Shit, I took one!” He and Forrest backed in tight between the barrier and the large steel shovel of a backhoe.

Forrest lifted his head for a look around, switching to infrared. Men were scurrying about in the dark, but there were too many abandoned vehicles to get a shot. They were protected on three sides now from direct fire, but that protection worked both ways, potentially allowing their attackers to creep up unseen and lob a Molotov cocktail directly onto their position. “How many you think we’re up against?”

“Feels like about twenty,” Kane said. “Give or take.”

“Well, let’s pick a direction and break out before they tighten the noose.”

Another shot rang out, but it was far away and nothing hit near their position. Then they heard another shot from the opposite side of the highway, equally far off, and this time one of the attackers screamed.

“Fuck is that?” Kane said.

“Got me.”

They took the chance to raise their heads for a look around, seeing that some of their assailants were now entirely exposed, having taken cover from whoever else was firing. Forrest and Kane fired and killed five more men.

Their attackers began to fire wildly into the night, panicking in the darkness and shouting to one another that they were surrounded. Their firing subsided after a minute, and Forrest could now see that someone was picking their attackers off with apparent impunity, probably from a hundred or more yards away and likely from an elevated position.

“That’s gotta be the Forty-fifth!” he said.

The five or six remaining attackers suddenly broke from cover and ran south through the cars in attempt to escape, but the snipers didn’t seem inclined to let them go, continuing to fire until they had killed every one of them.

Forrest and Kane kept low as they crept back toward the Humvee, using their infrared to scan the low bluffs east and west of the highway.

“Got one to the west,” Kane said. “Moving carefully this way. It’s a GI.”

“Got one to the east too,” Forrest replied. “Has to be the Forty-fifth.”

The two men stood near the Humvee and waited for the troopers to approach from opposite sides of the highway.

“It’s probably Lee and one of his men,” Kane said. “What if they want to join us?”

Forrest took a moment to slap a fresh mag into his weapon. “I’d say they’ve earned it, wouldn’t you?”

Forty-Four

Emory slowed her pace, waiting for Marty to approach the troopers first, prepared to gun them both down if they gave him any shit. Sullivan was not with them. He had a concussion from being shot in the head and was too sick to be tromping around the countryside, so he lay sleeping in the back of the SUV parked half a mile north of their present position.

Emory and Marty had spotted the group of twenty-five road agents earlier in the day and taken cover in the hills around the highway with the intention of picking them off during the night after they were bedded down. The party had stood across their path south, and there was no other way through to Topeka without a long backtrack. Emory had been about to open fire on the snoozing band of marauders when Forrest’s Humvee had first gone racing down the highway and stirred them all back up again.

Afterward the bandits stayed awake, taking up positions covering the highway, waiting to see if another Army truck might come by.

After watching the troopers kill six or seven of the bandits on their own, Emory and Marty, keeping in contact now via a pair of USGS walkie-talkies, decided to use the unknown men as a force multiplier and opened fire themselves, eventually killing off the remaining bandits and making the decision to expose themselves.

Marty flipped up his NVD as he walked into the area illuminated by the headlights of the Humvee, noting at once that both troopers were clean shaven. His carbine was slung over his shoulder, but he kept Joe’s .45 gripped in his hand as he approached.

“Is either one of you hit?” he asked, trying to sound like a professional soldier.

“My partner is,” Forrest said, his own .45 in hand and ready to blow Marty’s brains out if he so much as twitched.

“My partner’s a medic,” Marty said.

“So am I,” Kane said, watching Emory through his NVD, realizing she was intentionally hanging back.

“We appreciate you saving our butts,” Forrest said. “You’re with the Air Force?”

“Not anymore,” Marty said, trying to keep his voice as deep as possible. “The Air Force isn’t what it used to be.”

“You can tell your partner it’s safe to come in,” Kane said over his shoulder, not wanting to take his eyes off Emory. “We won’t shoot if you won’t.”

“My partner’s with the Arizona Guard,” Marty said, not yet having enough information to trust them. “Who are you guys with?”

With a speed that seemed inhuman to Marty, Forrest had disarmed him, screwed the barrel of his .45 into his ear and used him as a shield.

Kane was already gone from Emory’s view, having taken cover behind the wheel hub of the Humvee.

“Tell your partner to drop his weapon!” Forrest ordered.

Emory shouldered the carbine as she dropped to her knee, sighting on Forrest’s head, though not steady enough at fifty yards to be sure she wouldn’t kill Marty instead. The speed and skill with which Forrest had moved told her they had come up against a highly trained pair of soldiers.

“Let him go!” she shouted. “Or I’ll fire a grenade and kill all three of you!”

Kane quickly sought cover behind a different vehicle. “I got a clear shot, Jack.”

Marty drew a breath to scream a warning, but Forrest choked off his air, pulling him closer to ground.

“Now listen up!” Forrest shouted. “We don’t want to kill either of you. Just sling your weapon out there and I’ll let your man go. This doesn’t have to end bloody.”

Emory wasn’t sure what to do, realizing that Kane must have taken up a different firing position by now.

“How do I know you won’t shoot?” she shouted, wanting badly to actually trust another soldier for a change.

“My partner’s had you in his sights for ten seconds now and you’re not dead! That proof enough?”

She rose slowly and lowered the carbine, waiting for the shots that would kill her and Marty both, but the men did not fire and Marty was released as promised.

“Relax now,” Forrest said to Marty. “No sudden moves.”

Marty stood in place as Emory came forward. Her carbine was slung, but she was ready to bring it up in a hurry, her finger on the trigger of the grenade launcher.

“She’s got her finger on the M-203, Jack.”

“That’s fair,” Forrest said. “Everybody be cool. It’s a dangerous world we’re living in.”

Emory stepped up opposite the concrete barrier.

“Sorry about that,” Forrest said, seeing her in the lights of the Humvee now. “But your partner seemed to be stalling. I couldn’t take the chance.”

“We just saved your asses,” she said. “Why would we want to kill you?”

“Good question. Hard to trust anybody these days.”

“That’s a fucking understatement,” she said, her eyes looking for Kane.

“Come on in, Marcus.”

Kane stepped out of the darkness. “Thanks for not makin’ me shoot you. I’ve never killed a woman and I wasn’t lookin’ to start.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Marty wasn’t saying much, still too pissed at himself and embarrassed over having been so easily overpowered and nearly getting Emory killed.

“I’m Shannon. That’s my partner, Marty. He’s an astronomer.”

Forrest looked Marty over and offered his hand. “I’m Jack Forrest.”

“Marty Chittenden.”

“Look, I don’t mean to be rude,” Forrest said, “but we’re trying to save a life, so we have to get this rig unstuck and be on our way.”

“We’ll give you a hand,” Emory said.

While Kane saw to the bullet hole in his calf, Forrest and Emory drew the cable from the winch on the front bumper backward under the Humvee and hooked it into a loop of rebar sticking out of the concrete barrier, enabling the winch to pull the vehicle backward. After a few feet the rear wheels had enough traction to pull the Humvee the rest of the way clear. The whole procedure took less than ten minutes.

“Give us a lift to our truck?” Emory asked. “It’s only half a mile north.”

“Mount up,” Forrest said, squinting against the snow that had begun to fall much more rapidly since their truce.

“Is there anything south of here we need to worry about?” Emory asked from the backseat, wanting badly to know what these men were up to and where they were headed, sensing their reluctance to share much information.

“Stay away from Topeka,” Forrest warned from the passenger seat. “It’s full of restless young soldiers who haven’t seen a woman in a while.”

“Great,” Marty said gloomily. “As if we haven’t seen enough of those.”

“You guys said you’re trying to save a life,” Emory said. “What’s that about?”

“A friend of ours is sick. We went to Topeka for some meds.”

“We’ve got a sick friend too,” she said. “He’s up here in the truck with a bad concussion.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Forrest said.

Emory could smell the aftershave on these two, so she knew damn well they were living high on the hog someplace and that they were looking to ditch her and Marty as soon as possible. A feeling of desperation welled up inside of her as Kane pulled up alongside their SUV.

“Thanks again for saving our asses,” Forrest said, offering Emory his hand.

“And now you’re gonna ditch us?” she said, taking his hand.

“It’s not like that. You guys were obviously headed somewhere and we’re—”

“We’re headed toward a long shot,” she said, keeping hold of his hand. “And you two smell like an ad in GQ, so don’t tell me you’ve got it tough. Look at us. Our luck’s about to run out. Don’t you think we’ve earned a break?”

She let go of his hand and gave him a moment to think it over.

“What do you think, Marcus?”

“I think Wayne’s gonna pitch a bitch, but if we’re gonna do this, let’s do it.”

Forrest helped them move Sullivan into the back of the Humvee and they were on their way. “What happened to him anyhow?”

“Shot in the head,” Emory answered. “But his Kevlar saved his bacon.”

“Our doc can take a look at him.”

They got back to the silo without any more trouble and Kane pulled the Humvee up to the front porch of the house. Marty and Forrest helped Sullivan inside. He was conscious off and on. Emory saw the mostly eaten body on the living room floor in the beam of her flashlight as they took Sullivan upstairs and laid him down on the bed across the hall from where Black Beard had been killed.

“We’ll get the gas and water turned back on for you,” Forrest said. “The furnace too. That way you’ll have hot water to wash with.”

“This isn’t where you live?” she asked.

“No, we live underground.”

“Wait, this is an old missile installation, isn’t it?” She exchanged glances with Marty.

“As a matter of fact, it is. Why?”

“Survival Estates?”

Forrest looked at Kane and laughed. “No, honey. We’re not twenty-twelvers. We didn’t buy this place until after we knew about the asteroid. How did you hear about Survival Estates?”

Emory and Marty told them the story about the crater and the wiped-out missile installation, then Forrest and Kane went below, promising to send up hot chow.

The first thing Ulrich said when he stepped into the cargo bay to greet them was: “Who the fuck’s upstairs, Jack?”

“How’s Melissa?”

“Unconscious but hanging in. Who are they?”

“They saved our goddamn lives,” Forrest said, handing over the rucksack full of antibiotics. “Get these to West right away. Marcus and I have to clean up before we come in. And have somebody cook up a pot of something hot to eat.”

Over the next few hours, Emory and Marty were fed and showered in the house above and given clean clothes to wear before being taken below, where they were asked to shower again and undergo a physical examination.

Sullivan was initially kept in the cargo bay wrapped in a thick arctic sleeping bag until Emory and West were able to give him a sponge bath. West suggested that after a few days of warmth and bed rest he would probably be much improved. For the time being he was given the cot in Launch Control, where he would be safe from the hustle and bustle of everyday life in the silo.

Forrest finally stepped into Medical, and Veronica got up from the chair beside Melissa’s bed, hugging him. She could have cried with joy at the sight of him, but with Michael present she maintained her composure.

Michael shook Forrest’s hand and thanked him. By then Kane had related the details of their adventure, and the story had spread throughout the tiny population.

“How is she?” Forrest asked, seeing the bags of fluid now hooked up to Melissa’s arms.

“Sean says we should know within twelve hours whether or not the drugs are helping,” Michael said.

“They will,” Forrest said, willing the antibiotics to be effective.

“I’ll give you two some time,” Michael said, turning to go.

“Stay put,” Forrest said. “I have to go debrief our guests before Wayne gives them the Gestapo treatment.” He found Marty and Emory in Launch Control with Ulrich and Kane. Emory was sitting beside Sullivan’s cot, running her fingers through his hair as he slept. “How are you doing? Better?”

“It’s unbelievable down here,” she said quietly, ready to crawl out of her own skin. She was so used to being on the edge twenty-four hours a day that she was having trouble decompressing.

“You knew about the asteroid months in advance?” Marty said from a chair near the wall. “How?”

“A friend of mine at the Pentagon.”

“And who are all these people?”

“Some are family and friends, the rest were chosen at random. See you in the hall for a minute, Wayne?”

Ulrich got up from his chair and stepped out with him.

“Recognize the look in their eyes?” Forrest asked.

“They don’t know what to do now that there’s nothing to fight. Better have Mike talk to them before we try any sort of debrief.”

“We’ll let ’em sleep in there with their man. They’re not gonna want to split up for a while.”

“You two fucking near bought it, didn’t you?” Ulrich said.

“Twice. But it’s over now.”

“This makes three more mouths to feed, you know.”

“I do. After you crunch the numbers, let me know how many days I’ve knocked off our lives, and I’ll see what I can do to make up for it.”

“Oscar and Linus bagged a rat while you were gone. It’s in the cargo bay under a tarp. It’s a female. Now they need to figure out what to build the cages out of.”

“How long can we keep it a secret do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Ulrich said, “but if you hear Erin screaming like her hair’s on fire, you’ll know one of the little bastards got in here.”

It was late in the afternoon of the following day that Veronica found Forrest sleeping on the floor in the electrical room. “Jack,” she said softly, kneeling to touch his arm.

He opened his eyes and for a moment didn’t know where he was. “Yeah?”

“Melissa’s awake,” she said with a smile. “She asked for you first thing.”

Forrest sat up in a flash, throwing back the sleeping bag and pulling on his boots. “What’s Sean say?”

“He thinks maybe she’s out of the woods.”

“See?” he said, suddenly pissed. “Fucking Wayne would have had us watch her die!”

“Hey,” she said gently. “I think that’s entirely the wrong way to look at this.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said, still frazzled from the mission. He got to his feet and kissed her, slipping quickly out of the room and up to Medical.

Melissa was obviously still very weak, but her face lit up the moment he came into the room.

“Hey!” he said softly, taking her hand and kissing her forehead.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“I’ve been right here,” he said with a smile. “What are you talking about?”

She shook her head. “You went somewhere.”

“I’ll tell you all about it later. How are you feeling?”

“Better. My head doesn’t hurt so bad.”

“Excellent,” he said with a glance at West. “I’m going to talk with Sean a minute, okay?”

“Are you coming back?” she asked, trying to hold his hand tighter.

“Yeah.”

“Promise?”

“Right after I talk with Sean, honey. I swear to God.”

Forrest took West down the hall. “No bullshit, Sean. How is she?”

“I think the worst is behind her. The antibiotics seem to be doing their job.”

“Could she relapse?”

“Of course,” West said. “But she shouldn’t, Jack. That’s all I can tell you.”

To West’s surprise, Forrest gave him a hug then slipped back into the room.

Forty-Five

It had taken a couple of days, but after Sullivan improved to the point where he could sit up and coax Marty and Emory out of Launch Control, the two slowly began to adjust to life in the silo. Sullivan had served overseas, and he understood the impact of post-traumatic stress, realizing that his friends needed to socialize themselves. Michael spoke with them briefly, but they hadn’t been in the mood to open up.

Emory took a liking to Veronica and so tagged around with her for a day before venturing about on her own.

Marty borrowed a laptop from Ulrich and downloaded the photos and videos of the crater for everyone in the complex to view. No one could believe the size of the crater, which looked far larger than a city in the panoramic shots, stretching well beyond the horizon. He had done the geometry and estimated the crater at fifty miles across, as wide as Lake Erie, and his tale of their fight with the cannibals living in a missile complex similar to their own had chilled all of the women to the bone.

This morning Emory was having breakfast in the cafeteria at a table with Erin and Tonya.

“When are you due?” Erin asked, hoping to engage the dour-looking soldier in a conversation about something feminine.

“Probably April sometime,” Emory replied. “I’m not sure.”

“It’s kind of exciting knowing there’s a baby on the way.”

“I guess it’s nice somebody’s excited about it. I’d like to abort the little bastard.”

Tonya politely excused herself a moment or two later and moved to another table.

“Doesn’t it get on your nerves living on top of each other down here?” Emory said quietly.

“It took a little getting used to,” Erin said. “But you learn to block things out.”

“Are any of these kids yours?”

“No, Wayne and I… well, we never got around to it, and now…” She shrugged.

“Want mine?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you want mine? Like I told you, I don’t want it. I was hoping I’d start to feel something for it but I haven’t, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to.”

“It’s too soon for you to know how you’re going to feel,” Erin said, deciding quickly she’d better not let her maternal feelings loose.

“No, it’s not. I’ve been watching these mothers down here, trying to picture myself doing what they’re doing. It’s not me. I’m a soldier and sooner or later I’m going to have to fight again.”

“Well, we can talk about it later. There’s plenty of time to—”

“I’m going to talk about it with every woman down here. So if you want it, you might want to speak up pretty quick. Some of these girls seem to love being mothers.”

“Okay,” Erin said, casting caution to the wind. “But I want to know the very second you change your mind. The very second, Shannon.”

Emory looked up from her bowl of oatmeal with raisins. “I won’t change my mind. So congratulations, you’re a mom.”

Erin sat looking at her. “Excuse me for a minute?” she said at length.

“Sure.”

Erin went to find her husband, locating him in silo number two where he was taking inventory.

“What’s wrong?” Ulrich asked, never having seen such an odd look in her eyes.

She covered her face with both hands, looking at him over the tips of her fingers.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“Shannon just gave us her baby,” she blurted, scared to death that he was going be angry with her for not consulting with him. “I’m sorry, honey, but she was going to ask the others and I—”

“Come here,” he said, setting the clipboard aside and putting his arms out for her to walk into them.

“You’re not pissed?”

“No,” he said, stroking her. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m a little overwhelmed, Wayne. I didn’t even give it any thought. I was so afraid she’d give it to one of the others if I waited.”

“Are you sorry you accepted?”

“No, I’m ecstatic, but I’m scared. I even feel guilty, almost like I’m stealing her baby. I don’t know how to explain it. She asked me point-blank, honey. She said she doesn’t feel anything for it and doesn’t want it.”

“Then you’ve done something good. You’ve got nothing to feel bad about.”

Later, Ulrich found Forrest in the cargo bay talking with Danzig and Vasquez about their rat breeding project. “Can we have a minute, gentlemen?”

Danzig and Vasquez were quick to quit the cargo bay, plainly seeing that Ulrich had a very definite something on his mind.

Forrest started to grin.

“Apparently you’ve already heard?”

Forrest shook his head. “But I know that look.”

“Well, thanks to you, asshole, Erin’s adopting a goddamn baby.”

Forrest burst out laughing.

“It’s not funny!”

“The hell it’s not! Serves you right, you prick. You goddamn near killed Melissa.”

“Oh, I knew sooner or later I’d have to hear about that!” Ulrich rejoined.

“Bullshit, Wayne. The only reason I’m saying anything now is because you’re in here giving me shit about Erin wanting Shannon’s baby.”

“My vote on that fucked-up mission was the right vote! You got lucky, Jack!”

“You’re goddamn right I did! And because of it she’s alive! You think I’m gonna apologize for that? Fuck you, Stumpy. Erin deserves a baby. You’re the selfish motherfucker who told her no all those years. You think I was itching to have a kid before Daniel was born? Fuck, no. But at least I tried to give Monica what she wanted.”

“Oh, so now I’m a selfish husband.”

“You’re a selfish prick, Wayne! You always have been. It’s why I’m the only friend you’ve got.”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you,” Forrest said. “I wouldn’t have you any other way myself, but Erin deserves a little bundle of joy for the time she’s put in.”

“Shit,” Ulrich said, turning away. He walked over and took a long look at the burn marks on the hood of the Humvee. “You two fuckers had the time of your lives out there, didn’t you?”

“Jealous?”

Ulrich turned back around. “A little.”

“Well, now your mission is to make sure Shannon eats right.”

“That girl doesn’t know who she’s gotten herself involved with,” Ulrich said. “Erin’s going to be the bane of her existence for the next six months.”

By that night Melissa was sitting up in bed and drinking chicken broth through a straw. Dr. West had also given in to her pleading and allowed Laddie to lay in bed with her. Forrest came in to sit with her so Michael could take a break.

“Where have you been all day?” she asked him as he sat down on the edge of the bed and started petting his dog.

“Well, I’ve been doing my thing, you know. Checking on everybody and seeing to our new members. Cleaning up dog crap. All the usual stuff.”

She chuckled. “Wayne cleans up all the dog crap.”

“To hear him tell it, yeah.”

“What are you guys doing in the cargo bay?”

“Nothing, why?”

“Whatever,” she said. “You guys always lie to me and think I don’t know.”

“Okay, smarty pants. If I tell you, it stays between us. Nobody else. Not even Veronica. Agreed?”

She nodded, thrilled to be privy to something so secret that not even Veronica knew about it, thinking it had to do with Christmas, which everyone was looking forward to with great anticipation.

“We’re breeding rats.”

“Ew!” she said in disgust.

“You wanted to know.”

“What for?”

“For in case the food runs out before we think of something else.”

“I guess it kinda makes sense,” she said after thinking it over. “Can you get me my papers? They’re in the room under my bedroll.”

“Not until you’re well again. You work yourself too hard and you need sleep.”

“You and Veronica are ganging up on me with Uncle Michael. Can’t I just have one page?”

“Not until you’re well. Doctor’s orders.”

“Then tell me about your trip.”

“Can’t.”

“Oh, God. Why not?”

“Because it was gory and I’m not telling you about gory stuff.”

“Did you have to kick some caveman ass?” she asked with a titter.

“That’s a good way to put it,” he said, smiling.

“Dr. West says you saved my life.”

“Dr. West saved your life. All Kane and I did was make a run to the pharmacy.”

“I knew you’d make a good dad. See? That’s why I picked you.”

“Hey,” he said softly. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t say stuff like that.”

“I didn’t agree to anything.” She yawned and hunkered down into the bedding, turning over onto her side to face the wall. “Dad, will you scratch my back till I fall asleep?”

He covered his eyes with one hand and began gently scratching her back with the other.

“I love you,” she said quietly.

Forrest’s face contorted as the memories of Daniel and Monica came flooding back to him in a vivid wave, and the tears ran down his cheeks from beneath his fingers. “Please,” he whispered. “Stop.”

She turned back over. “Is this why you won’t sit with me?”

He nodded, his eyes still covered by his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t ever say it again. I promise.”

He opened his eyes, gathered her into his arms and wept openly. “I just miss them.”

“I miss my family too,” she said, beginning to cry too. “Can’t we be a family now?”

“Yes,” he whispered. “Of course.”

When Michael looked in on them an hour later, Forrest was asleep against the wall and Melissa lay nestled in the crook of his arm with Laddie stretched across the foot of the bed. He smiled, turned out the light and closed the door.

Forty-Six

Thanksgiving came and went without a great deal of excitement, but it was an okay day for everyone, and by that time the three newcomers had begun to assimilate fairly well. Emory and Sullivan even began sharing a shift in Launch Control, and this allowed Forrest and his men to enjoy shorter shifts of their own. Marty enjoyed talking physics with Melissa, who knew a surprising amount about quantum field theory for a person her age, and though Marty was no physicist, he was able to enhance her understanding of fermions and the latest theories at the time of the impact.

Now it was Christmas Eve, and the look on the children’s faces when two different Santas came Ho-ho-hoing into the main room—one black and one white, each wearing a pair of Blues Brothers sunglasses and carrying a red bag over his shoulder—was one of utter astonishment. Most of the children had been worried that Santa Claus was dead, but suddenly here he was, and he had brought a friend with him. A couple of the kids looked suspiciously back and forth at their mothers, wondering if it was a trick, but they only smiled.

Karen squeezed Michael’s hand, whispering, “Look, Terri thinks they’re real.”

Michael grinned, pointing discreetly at Joann’s daughter. “Look at the discernment on Beyonce’s face. She’s not buying it for a second.”

The Santas began to call the children’s names in deep voices, handing out packages wrapped in Christmas paper. The kids tore excitedly into their gifts, delighted to learn after only a few moments that both of the Santas had something for each one of them.

After the children’s names were called, the Santas began to call the mothers’ names one at a time, and each mother had to sit in Santa’s lap before she was given her gift.

Melissa’s name was the last to be called, and she was given a brand new laptop computer that had never even been taken out of the box. Her eyes lit up when she opened the box, and even Ulrich was stunned by what he saw.

“Did you know she was getting that?” he asked, leaning into Michael’s ear.

“No,” Michael said, impressed. “Didn’t you?”

The laptop was no run-of-the-mill civilian model. It was mounted in an army green, titanium, rubberized casing just over two inches thick when closed. There was the subdued image of an apple in the lower left-hand corner of the lid.

“No,” Ulrich said dryly. “That’s a Delta-OSS… a military prototype worth a couple of hundred grand. It was designed to interface with any U.S. military satellite system.”

“Where the hell did it come from?”

“Jack must have asked Jerry to send it along with that shipment of MREs. There were only a dozen or so of the damn things ever made.”

“Will it decipher that code Melissa’s been working on?”

Ulrich shook his head. “That kind of software wouldn’t have been standard. Ninety-eight percent of what that thing can do, we haven’t any use for. Not so long as the satellite signals are smothered by the atmosphere. I’m sure Jack’s got the sat receiver down here somewhere.”

“That’s why he’s giving it to her,” Michael said. “For the future.”

After the presents were given out and the kids had coerced the Santas into eating six or seven Christmas cookies apiece and drinking two big glasses of lukewarm reconstituted milk, it was time for the St. Nicks to be off. They Ho-ho-hoed their way into the hall heading for the cargo bay, where presumably they would find their reindeer patiently waiting to fly them back to the North Pole.

The children were put to bed a few hours later, and the adults were treated to a few bottles of wine. They played Christmas music and sat around happily talking in the light of the tree. The married couples cuddled together about the room, and though the single mothers found themselves feeling more than a little envious, everyone very much enjoyed the spirit of the evening, wishing that every day could be Christmas.

They all fell asleep in turn, but six A.M. came around quickly and the cooks got themselves up to start preparing Christmas dinner. The children didn’t sleep long beyond that, and soon there were some cranky disagreements over who was and wasn’t allowed to touch someone else’s toys. Those entanglements were cut short, however, by a rare break in protocol when Forrest personally made it clear to the kids that the Santas had not given them their new toys to fight over and that they were expected to share.

After that there was harmony in Toyland.

“You should lay down the law more often,” Taylor said, kidding him in the kitchen.

“Oh, no,” he said, cocking an eyebrow as Lynette shooed Laddie from the kitchen with an apron. “The Grinch only comes out at Christmas.”

Marty sat talking quietly with Emory at the back of the cafeteria. “Did you talk to John about my idea?” he asked.

She ran her finger around the inside of a foil tuna packet, being sure to get every last morsel. “He doesn’t want to go,” she said, licking the finger. “He says he likes taking a hot shower every day.”

“But there’s no future down here, Shannon. They’re postponing the inevitable.”

“Have you seen how much food they’ve got down here? We’re set for another year at least, and in case you haven’t noticed… I’m getting fat.”

“I’m not saying we should leave before the baby’s born, I’m—” He looked up as Sullivan stepped into the room.

The soldier stood behind Emory and began to massage her shoulders. This was an unspoken arrangement between them; he massaged her neck and shoulders at least once a day, and she made sure she found the opportunity to help him with his needs a couple of times a week. Emory knew that he had fallen in love with her, but he didn’t gush, and when he did say something romantic it was always during one of their intimate moments under the main stairwell between the blast doors.

To her profound surprise, he bent down and kissed the nape of her neck.

“What was that for?” she said, feeling her face flush.

He shrugged and continued to massage her shoulders as though nothing had happened, winking at Marty. “So you want to split, huh?”

Marty took a Christmas cookie from the plate in the center of the table. “Eventually, I think we should, yeah.”

“For what?”

“To find those geologists at Altus Air Force Base. Keep things moving forward.”

“What things forward to where?” Sullivan said, irritated. “We don’t even know if there’s anybody alive up there, and even if there is, it’s snowing like a bastard now.”

“They’ve got two Army trucks in the cargo bay. We can ask them to give us one.”

Sullivan let that pass, shifting his attention to Emory. With the progression of her pregnancy, he was finding her ever more attractive. Unable to help himself, he kissed the nape of her neck a second time, and she whipped her head around, hissing through a mouthful of cookie, “Quit it!”

He chuckled as he sat down beside her. “No one was looking.”

She glared the way only a woman can. “You’re gonna piss me off.”

He rolled his eyes and took a cookie for himself. “I can’t help it. It’s Christmas… and you’re gorgeous.”

She looked at Marty. “Will you please remind him that I’m gay? He seems to have forgotten.”

Marty grinned. “It is Christmas. ”

“So fucking what? That’s doesn’t mean I’m—” Ulrich walked up and she stopped talking.

“See you a minute, Marty? I’ve got another question about those crater photos.”

“Sure.” Marty got up and followed him into the other room.

Emory made sure no one was paying attention to them, then said to Sullivan, “What’s with you lately? You’re getting all… sappy.”

“I’m in love with you.”

She gaped at him, unable to believe he had actually said the words.

“Or didn’t you know that?”

She took another bite of cookie and turned around. “John, you’re gonna ruin this.”

“I don’t want to ruin anything,” he said. “I just want you to know how I feel… that’s all.”

She looked at him. “Then tell me so we can get it behind us.”

“I love you and I want you to keep the baby so we can raise it together.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away again. “You know that’s impossible.”

“Yes, I do,” he said quietly, touching her hair with affection. “But I wanted you to know my mind.”

She put her hand on his leg, said, “Thank you,” then got up and left the room.

Forty-Seven

Forrest had given the men the night off, but even he was asleep in Launch Control with his head on his arms when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He sat up and opened his eyes to see Andie, Joann, and Maria two.

“I said you could bring a friend,” he remarked with a tired chuckle, noting the tentative look on Andie’s face. “What I am in trouble for now?”

Andie looked at the other two. Then Maria two turned and looked at Joann.

“Okay, I guess it’s me,” Joann said. “So… Jack… we have a little bit of a problem.”

“What sort of a problem?” he asked, reaching for his cigarettes. “I think Christmas went pretty well, don’t you?”

“It’s got nothing to do with Christmas. It has to do with the fact you cut us off… or rather you told Oscar to. We had a perfectly good thing going with him until you butted in. Now we’re climbing the goddamn walls down here, and it’s not fair. It wasn’t any of your business.”

This took Forrest by surprise, and he glanced at Andie, who leaned back against the door.

“Andie’s here because she’s got a separate issue,” Joann said.

“Oh? Why isn’t Renee in here too?”

Joann and Maria two looked at each other, obviously confused by the question.

“So you guys didn’t know about her,” he said, sitting forward and lighting up. “Look, ladies, I wasn’t making a moral judgment, and normally this kind of thing wouldn’t be any of my business, but Oscar was exercising piss-poor judgment. The last thing I need down here is a civil war… married women against the single ones. See what I’m saying?”

“And you thought cutting us off was the way to avoid that?”

Now Forrest saw what Vasquez had meant when he had said, Suppose they don’t agree? It seemed not even an apocalypse could prevent romantic intrigue. “I’m not exactly sure I know how to respond to that, Joann. Are you saying you have an unalienable right to another woman’s husband just because the world has ended?”

Joann looked at Maria two for help.

Maria two said, “We’re saying we have needs like anybody else, Jack… and Maria takes sleeping pills every night, so she sleeps like a log. That’s what we’re saying.”

“Sometimes you have to make concessions,” Joann added, crossing her long arms. “For the sake of keeping the peace.”

“It’s a small thing,” Maria two went on. “We’re very careful and Maria isn’t going to find out.”

“Turns out you’re not so careful, actually,” he said testily, unable to believe he was having such a conversation with two women in the midst of such circumstances. “But let’s get past that for a second… you’re not ashamed of yourselves at all? You don’t feel… bad?”

“A man wouldn’t be ashamed,” Joann persisted. “Would you be a bit surprised by this if we were men? I don’t think so.”

Forrest looked each woman in the eyes. “You’re naive to think nobody will tell Maria… and when they do, I’ll have a huge brushfire to put out down here.”

Andie finally spoke up. “Nobody’s going to tell her, Jack. It’s terrible to say, but the wife is always the last to find out when she’s being cheated on… none of the other married women will want to risk their own husbands taking Oscar’s place.”

“So you’re telling me,” Forrest said, not quite exasperated, “that you ladies can’t maintain any more self-control than this? With an entire planet dying above you, you can’t be satisfied that your children are safe and that you’ve got food to eat.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Joann rejoined, “getting laid four times a week!”

He straightened up in the chair, self-conscious that they knew the exact number.

“You don’t think we pay attention?” Joann went on. “You think everybody’s happy as pigs in shit down here because nobody fights? Nobody fights because we found a balance… that is until you came along and fucked it up.”

He sat forward and crushed out the cigarette in the brass cannon shell, exhaling a stream of smoke, feeling disappointed in them. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Lift the embargo,” Joann said. “Turn a blind eye. Let Oscar have some fun before he runs out of insulin… trust us.”

Forrest eyed Andie. “And you?”

She shrugged. “You know what I want.”

“So this is an ultimatum,” he said. “Either I acquiesce… or you start letting your tempers fly down here. Is that about right?”

“It won’t be out of spite,” Maria two said in earnest. “We’re only human. It may not sound like it, Jack, but we’re asking for your help.”

“All you need to do is stay out of it,” Joann said, trying to make it all sound so simple.

Andie finally stepped away from the door. “You can’t control every single thing that happens down here, Jack. The tighter you squeeze, the more things will slip through your fingers.”

Forrest understood this concept as one of the primary principles of command, but he had never been in charge of a group of women before, nor had he envisioned what seemed to him such an unlikely scenario. “Fine,” he said at length. “But you girls had better go out of your way to make sure Maria never finds out, and you’d damn well better be there for her when Oscar dies. Understood?” He was applying his military bearing now, and he was glad to see that they were responding in the appropriate manner, both of them straightening up under his gaze and nodding their compliance. “And I will expect to hear all of the appropriate mea culpas in the event that you’re caught.”

Both women looked at the floor, nodding once more.

“Very well, ladies. Good night.”

They thanked him quietly and left him alone with Andie.

“Okay,” he said to her, “so what am I supposed to do for you now? Take my pants off?”

Andie’s eyes flooded with tears and she turned for the door.

Forrest got up and caught her arm. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “That was uncalled for.”

She turned into him and rested her forehead against his chest. “It was cruel.”

“It’s my way of pouting,” he said, lifting her chin. “I’m feeling pretty damn unappreciated at the moment.”

She looked at him, loving the feel of being so close to him in private. “I need something only you can give me, Jack. I’m losing my mind down here.”

“Why not Oscar?” he suggested dryly. “He’s apparently in great demand.”

“I’m not attracted to that disloyal little son of a bitch. I’m attracted to you.”

“Yet, what you’re suggesting would make me a disloyal son of a bitch.”

“You’re not married. And I’m lonely enough for that to be a big enough difference.”

They made love carefully and quietly, and when they were finished Andie no longer looked nor felt like she was about to crawl out of her skin. She lay on top of him listening to the beat of his heart.

“Can I ask you a silly question?” she said quietly.

“Sure,” he said, stroking her hair, his mind on fifty other things.

“Do you love her?”

“Yes,” he said. “I love her completely.”

She got up from the cot and began to dress. “Thank you very much, Jack.”

He reached for her hand. “Please don’t thank me. You’re a wonderful woman, and you deserve an awful lot more than anyone down here can give you.”

Late the next morning, Veronica unexpectedly joined him in the shower, pulling the curtain closed. “So how did it go last night?”

“What’s that mean?” He was not at all surprised that she knew something had occurred. Probably everyone in the complex knew something had occurred, everyone except for Oscar’s wife, of course, which was only because she took pills in order to sleep, the stress of knowing that her husband had less than eighteen months to live having turned her into an insomniac.

“If you’re going to play stupid,” Veronica said, “we’re going to have a fight.”

“Fine. I let Andie seduce me.”

“And how was it?” she asked calmly, reaching for the soap.

“She’s a very lonely person,” he said stiffly, not at all sure what to expect from her.

“Or was,” she said, turning the soap in her hands. “She looks like a whole new woman today.”

“I haven’t seen her.”

She let the soap drop and slipped her arms around him. “Did I make a mistake?”

“What are you talking about?” he said, resting his hands on her shoulders.

“Last night was my idea,” she confessed, trembling slightly. “I knew things were coming to a head… and I knew that… I knew that concessions had to be made… even by me… and it all seemed so logical last night with it being Christmas and… and now I’m worried I made a huge mistake.”

Forrest remembered his warning to her about being too objective. He held her face in his hands. “A mistake how?”

“There’s a light in Andie’s eyes this morning. So it must have been magical between you. It was, right? You made a connection?”

He couldn’t help smiling. “A connection? Honey, if there’s a light in Andie’s eyes today, good for her, but—” He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Jesus Christ, you’re the only magic in this place. Why did you ever send her in there with them?”

“Because it was only a matter of time before something happened between you, and I wanted it to be on my terms, not hers… and sure as hell not yours.”

He moved her hair away from her face with his fingers. “I’d like to think you’re wrong about that… but who knows? She does flatter me.”

“So what now?” She shifted her weight to one leg, searching his eyes with hers.

“What do you mean, ‘what now’?” he asked, puzzled. “Veronica, as far as I’m concerned it never happened.”

She smiled and her eyes filled with tears. “If that’s true… then I made the right choice.”

“I love you.”

She pressed against him and began to cry, relieved that he was still hers alone.

Forty-Eight

It was early April now, and with the temperature hovering just below forty degrees on the island of Oahu, it was still too cold to even think about growing any kind of food outdoors. Light meters used to measure the amount of sunlight penetrating the cloud layer were indicating a slight increase, which was a hopeful sign, but at the present rate of improvement it would still be years before there would be much actual sunlight. Local meteorologists and other members of the scientific community were still debating whether the rate of improvement would begin to increase exponentially as time passed.

Ester Thorn stood bundled in a coat on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln anchored in Pearl Harbor. With her were Vice President Hadrian and Admiral Longbottom. The admiral had invited them to review the progress made toward converting the aircraft carrier into a power plant for the city of Honolulu. The pier was now replete with transformers and power lines, hooking the carrier into the previously existing lines running along Hawaiian Highway 1 into the city.

Much of the island population had been moved into the capital, because running power all across the island was not going to be practical for some time yet. Personal homes remained private property, but all other structures had become the property of the state in order to provide housing for those moving into the city. No one had to pay for room or board, but everyone had to do their part, however small.

As it turned out, very few people were unwilling to pitch in around the island. In fact, during the early months there were more volunteers than jobs. So a massive recycling program was begun, sending people to scour the islands for anything that might be useful. Scientists and visionaries alike were teaming up in an effort to create new technologies before the clock ran out.

“It’s coming along,” Ester muttered.

“Yes, ma’am,” Longbottom replied.

“But this doesn’t exactly look permanent to me,” she said.

“No, ma’am. It’s not. This is a temporary setup. If you’ll look west to Ford Island, you’ll see where preparations are being made for the permanent installation of a proper power station. Right now the power is being run directly from the carrier into town, which isn’t as efficient as we need it to be. Once we’re able to run the power through a series of transformers we’ll be able to begin storing some of it.”

“And that power station will be ready to accept power from the tidal generators?” Ester asked.

“Yes, ma’am. The Australian engineer has already selected a nearby location to begin installing the first few turbines. Which brings me to another subject.”

“Oil, Admiral?”

“Yes, ma’am. The Aussies are asking us to bring a second drilling platform online. They’re willing to supply everything needed to get it up and running again if we’re willing to do the actual work. They have no one to spare with the know-how and they’re struggling with a serious power shortage.”

“They need the extra oil to run their mining operations. Yes. I’ve heard.”

“And if they’re going to continue the manufacture of the tidal turbines…”

“Yes, yes,” Ester said. “What do you think, Barry? Is it time to restart another drilling platform?”

“I think we should restart it,” Hadrian said. “But then we should show the Aussies how to run it themselves and turn it over to them entirely. Let their navy protect it. Our fleet is already busy enough here in the Islands.”

“And piracy does continue to be an ongoing problem,” Longbottom said. “I’m sure you’ve heard that another settlement was attacked last night on the island of Lanai.”

Ester cast a glance at Hadrian, the two of them having privately discussed the matter already. “Yes, I’ve heard. At some point, Admiral, these settlers are going to have to learn to defend themselves to a certain extent. We can’t keep a ship lying off the coast of every settlement. It spreads your fleet too thinly and burns too much fuel. Perhaps we could garrison a Marine detachment in each of the settlements. That would give your troops something to do, would it not?”

Longbottom stood thinking it over. “We might try it. I’ll speak with the Marine commandant, General Flohr, and see what he thinks.”

“Please do,” she said. “With no more real wars left to fight, Admiral, it’s going to be difficult to keep them busy. And we don’t need a bunch of bored young men with weapons just sitting around.”

“No, ma’am,” the admiral said dryly, noting the veiled smile on Hadrian’s face.

Forty-Nine

With two and a half months to go before hitting the one-year mark, the silo’s food and fuel stores stood at just over half of what they had started with—not counting the truckloads of MREs—so Forrest was pleased with their planning. There were hydroponic tomato plants growing in virtually every available space, and the twenty rats they had bred were all healthy and living in separate cages in order to keep them from reproducing before it was time.

Since agreeing to look the other way concerning Vasquez’s midnight trysts with his three girlfriends, the women seemed to be getting along even better than before. Nonetheless, Forrest didn’t believe for a moment that Maria Vasquez was the fool everyone else seemed to believe she was.

It was seven in the morning and he was in the middle of getting a shave when every alarm in the installation began to wail. He wiped his face with a towel and ducked quickly out of the shower room, running through the halls to Launch Control. “Whatta we got?”

“Serious fucking trouble,” Ulrich said, all the monitors cycling through the many camera feeds. “Multiple targets.”

Forrest took one look at the monitors and killed the claxon, grabbing the mike for the P.A. system. “All combat personnel to the LC,” he announced. “All combat personnel to the LC. This is not a drill, repeat this is not a drill. Civilian population will move to secure quarters in an orderly fashion… Keep calm, people. I don’t want anyone hurt.”

Emory was the first one to enter the LC, zipping her ACU jacket over her belly.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m com—”

“No way,” Forrest said. “You could have that kid at any minute.”

“Don’t shoulder me aside, Jack.”

“Then… take a seat and help Wayne,” he said, unlocking the weapons cabinet and strapping on his .45. “Wayne, I want all extra ammo transferred from the cargo bay to blast tunnel number two. Make it happen.”

“I’m already on it, Captain!” Vasquez said, crossing through the LC.

Ulrich tapped one of the screens, getting Emory’s attention. “This monitor is yours. I want you watching everything that goes on inside the house. Keep moving from room to room. I’ll be watching these other two to keep up with what’s going on outside.”

“Oh, shit!” she said, seeing three slovenly soldiers entering the house through the front door. “It’s the Air Force.”

Forrest exchanged glances with Ulrich. “What about ’em, Shannon?”

“We’ve already butted heads with these guys,” she said. “They were real bad news back in September. God knows what they’re like now. I wonder how they found this place.”

Sullivan and Marty arrived dressed in their combat gear, ready to perform whatever task was asked of them. Michael and the other doctors had come too. All of them were understandably disturbed by what they saw on the monitors.

“It’s that asshole, Moriarty,” Ulrich grated. “He’s back for his fucking MREs, Jack. See what getting greedy got us?”

“We don’t know it’s him, and if it is, we’ll deal with him.”

“Oh, it’s him all right,” said Marty. “I’d bet on it.”

“What do you know about him?”

“I heard that name when I had my run-in with them,” Marty said. “And it sounded like he was some kind of hard-ass. These people are rapists, Jack.”

“They can’t get in here, can they?” Michael asked.

“That depends,” Forrest said, concentrating on the monitors as he watched the motley outfit deploying around the grounds and into the house. He was trying to get a head count.

“Depends on what?” Michael said. “You said nobody could get down here.”

“These assholes are military,” Ulrich said. “If they’ve got the right shit, they can blow their way in.”

“Oh, great!”

“Mike, if you’re going to start, you’ll have to leave,” Forrest said. “Looks like about a hundred men. I count ten transports, five trailers… couple Humvees. Three fuel trucks.”

“If that’s all they’ve got left,” Emory said, “they’ve lost a hell of a lot of people.”

“Yeah, well, eating your own can have that effect.”

“Is it time we started thinking about the Broken Arrow?” Ulrich said.

“No,” Forrest said, still studying the monitors. “We can only dance that dance once. I’d rather give up the number one blast door first. But keep an eye on those assholes by the trucks. Tell me if they unload any ordnance.”

“What’s a Broken Arrow?” Michael wanted to know.

“Sean, Price,” Forrest said, ignoring the question. “Would you see to the women and children? I’ll keep you appraised.”

“Let us know if you need us to pick up a rifle,” West said.

“We’re a long way from having to arm the medical staff, Sean. Sullivan, you and Marty help Oscar and Linus in the loading bay. They’ll need help prepping the vehicles for emergency evac.”

“Sir!” Sullivan said, turning on his heel and taking Marty with him.

“Before you go, gentlemen… what you see in the bay is to remain top secret, is that understood?”

“Sir!”

“Okay, Major Moriarty,” Forrest said, turning back to the monitors. “What’s on your mind?”

“See these cases here?” Ulrich said, tapping the monitor where a pair of airmen were unloading some large green cases from the back of a deuce-and-a-half. “Those are M-92s, shaped demolition charges. They can use them to blow the blast doors out of their casements.”

“I wasn’t counting on us going up against professional demolitions people.”

“Well, you invited their asses, Jack. Makes it tough to avoid.”

“Hey, Wayne, do me a favor and pop the top on an ice-cold bottle of shut-the-fuck-up, will ya?”

Emory snickered.

“Okay, pregnant warrior,” Forrest said, moving around behind her chair and putting his hands on her shoulders as he watched the screens. “How were these assholes disposed when you went up against them before?”

“They had an attack chopper, but we shot that down,” she said, drawing a look from Ulrich. “Seriously… and they had at least one tank and plenty of small arms. That’s all we really saw in terms of armament, and this is only a fraction of the transport they had.”

“Discipline?”

She shrugged. “Lax at best.”

“All right. Then we can assume it hasn’t gotten any better.”

“Maybe if we offer them some soap and razor blades they’ll go away,” Michael remarked.

“Wouldn’t count on that,” chuckled Emory.

“What’s this here?” Forrest said, touching the monitor. “Looks like a cage built over the back of this deuce-and-a-half? Are those men locked inside?”

“They’re livestock,” she said.

“Jesus,” Michael muttered, folding his arms and watching Forrest very closely.

When Kane finally entered Launch Control, Forrest looked expectantly in his direction. “We set?”

“All set,” Kane said, wiping his hands with an oily rag.

“Looks like we’d better be,” Forrest said. “These pricks here are unloading shaped charges.”

Kane shrugged it off. “They’ll only get the number one door. We’ll still have numbers two and three after that.”

“How do you know they’ll only get one door?” Michael wanted to know.

“Would you knowingly walk into a goddamn blast furnace?”

“Blast furnace?”

“We got our own dragon lives in this cave,” Kane said. “You didn’t know that?”

“Um, guys?” Emory said, looking into her lap. “I think my water just broke.”

“What water?” Ulrich turned around. “Oh, that water!”

Forrest looked at Emory and laughed. “You can tell it’s Wayne’s kid, with the shitty timing.”

“Hey, fuck you, Jack. It’s not ‘my kid.’”

“It will be pretty fucking soon,” Emory said, taking Michael’s hand as she stood up from the chair. “Good luck with the battle, guys.”

Michael walked her down the hall to Medical.

Sean West was in the process of packing an emergency med kit in case they were forced to evacuate the facility when he looked up to see that Emory’s fatigue pants were wet. “Stress of the moment?” he said with a smile.

“Musta been,” she said. “I started having contractions the second I stood up.”

“Help her onto the bed, Michael. And go find Price, will you?”

“Get Erin too,” Emory called. “And be sure to tell Marty!” She took off her jacket and lay on her side while West went about preparing a semisterile environment. “Hey, Doc, do you have any of those silver suicide things?”

He turned around. “How do you know about those?”

“I don’t think anything’s a secret down here, Doc.”

A shadow crossed his brow. “What do you want one for?”

“Well, if those bastards get in here anytime soon, I won’t be any good for fighting or evacuating.”

“I’ll be taking care of you. Don’t worry.”

“No offense, Doc, but I’ve seen things go to shit way too fast in this current reality. I’d feel a lot better if I had one of those things in my jacket pocket right here by the bed.”

He stood looking at her, knowing she was right about the fluidity of battle. He opened a cabinet, took a titanium vial not much larger than a tube of chapstick from a steel box, walked over and put it into her jacket pocket. “Once this siege has lifted, I want it back. They’re too dangerous to have floating around down here with the kids.”

“No problem.”

Erin arrived and sat down on the edge of the bed with Emory, taking her hand. “How do you feel, honey?”

“Pissed. I’m supposed to be getting ready for a fight, but I’m in here having a fuckin’ kid.”

“Do you still feel like you want me to—”

“Erin, don’t even try getting out of this!”

Erin kissed her hand, suddenly overcome by emotion. “There’s no greater gift one woman can give another.”

“Bullshit,” Emory said, already bored with Erin’s sentimentality. “I can think of a few things right off the bat.”

“Like what?” Erin asked.

“Some good head, for one thing.”

West laughed out loud.

“You’re terrible!” Erin said. “You sound like Wayne.”

“Must be why he and I get along so good.”

Back in Launch Control, Forrest and the others stood watching as Moriarty walked into the house with a meter-long plastic tube under his arm, strolling into the kitchen like General Patton as he removed his gloves. They recognized him even with the beard as he faced the tiny fiber-optic camera hidden in the smoke detector on the kitchen wall. The fact that the kitchen table was stained dark with blood didn’t seem to bother him as he pulled a rolled-up blueprint from the tube and rolled it out on the table.

“Oh, that’s just fucking great!” Ulrich said, sitting back in the chair.

“What is that?” Michael asked.

“It’s a schematic of this facility,” Forrest said quietly. “The Air Force must have still had it on file locally.”

“That means we’re in big trouble, right? Won’t they go right to the lift elevator and blow their way through?”

“No,” Forrest said. “And if even they do, they’ve still got a pair of blast doors to get through—if they get past us in the cargo bay.”

Ulrich turned around in the chair and looked up at him. “Would you care to tell me what makes you so fucking sure he won’t go straight to the lift elevator?”

Forrest took a moment to light up a cigarette with his brass Zippo before replying. “Why would he look for something he doesn’t know about?”

“He’s got the goddamn schematic right there on the table, Jack!”

“He has the original schematic,” Forrest said. “See, I do my research, Stumpy. Only two Titan installations were given lift elevators. This one and another one clear the fuck up in North Dakota some place. And our lift elevator wasn’t added to this installation until two years after it went online. Hence… jerkoff up there knows nothing about it.”

Fifty

Moriarty stood looking over the schematic, scratching at himself as Lieutenant Ford came into the kitchen with a couple of men. “This house obviously wasn’t part of the original plan, lieutenant. So the main blast door must be located beneath it. You two, go down and check the basement.”

Ford waited until the men were gone. “Are you worried about a booby trap?”

“Better safe than sorry,” Moriarty said with a shrug, again digging at his crotch.

The men returned unharmed and said the entrance to the silo was indeed located in the basement and that it was sealed shut.

“Told you,” Moriarty said quietly, rolling up the schematic. “It’s sealed, which means our Green Beret friends are still down there eating our food. Mark my words, Lieutenant. Before this is over, I am personally going to feed that smartass Captain Forrest his fucking liver.

“Sergeant Yoshinaka!” he said, stepping into the living room. “Are you ready to blow the doors off this beast?”

“They’re bringing up the charges now, Major,” answered a Japanese-American male with three dingy blue chevrons on his arms.

“And you’re sure you can do this?”

“These shaped charges were designed for exactly this kind of work, Major. Don’t worry. Three big bangs and this place is ours.”

“You’d better know what you’re talking about,” Moriarty said. “Because those six wretches out in that truck are the last of the livestock. After them, we’ll have to eat the women, and that won’t go over well with the men.”

“I still think we should send a foraging patrol ahead into Lincoln,” Ford said.

“No,” Moriarty said. “We can’t afford to risk losing any more men. Find the air shafts. There are two of them on the west side of the compound. Pour diesel oil down them and light them up. It’s time to let these jokers know we’re here.”

Moriarty and his remaining men had spent the last three months in North Platte rooting out the survivors there and scraping by on whatever scraps they could find, but the cities were becoming less fruitful as the months passed due to competitor armies, and their own force had been considerably worn down by attrition through combat, disease, and starvation. They were down to a hundred men, which was a large force to feed but not large enough so they could afford too many more firefights with rival groups. They were also starting to run low on ammunition.

Moriarty placed a great deal of hope in this installation and what they might gain by taking it. If he didn’t find a way to feed and reequip his men within the next couple of weeks, they would soon cease to exist as an effective fighting force. He followed Sergeant Yoshinaka and his men into the basement and watched them attaching the linear-shaped charges of composition C-4 to the concrete casement around blast door number one.

The charges were each three feet long with an aluminum V-shaped liner. The opening of the V would be placed against the concrete, which upon detonation would project a superheated explosion in one continuous, bladelike jet deep into the concrete, searing through the steel locking pins within the casement and breaching the underground fortress’s first line of defense.

Lieutenant Ford came down the stairs knocking the dirty snow from his boots against a support pole in the center of the room. “We just lit up the air shafts,” he said, batting the snow from his trouser legs. “And the exhaust fans kicked right on, so they’re definitely down there!”

“And they’re shitting their pants,” Moriarty said with a smile. “All this time they’ve been down there thinking they had life by the ass. But it’s like General Patton once said, Lieutenant: ‘Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.’”

When Yoshinaka was finished setting the charges, the three of them went upstairs and outside into the hip-deep snow where thick black smoke poured out of both ventilator shafts. Crouching in the back of one of the trucks, Yoshinaka attached the wires to the detonator.

“Ready, Major?”

“Blow that fucker, Sergeant.”

“Fire in the hole!” Yoshinaka shouted, and pressed the button.

They felt a shock tremor beneath their feet, and a deep boom came from inside the house. The windows did not blow out, however, since Yoshinaka had instructed his men to leave the front and back doors open to neutralize the pressure wave.

“Is that it?” Moriarty asked, having expected an earth-shattering kaboom.

“That’s it,” Yoshinaka said, hopping down from the truck.

“First squad!” Moriarty shouted. “Move up!”

Twelve men with rifles went running into the house, and Moriarty followed, waiting for them to make sure the enemy wasn’t coming out to fight.

Even with the dust still settling in the basement, he could plainly see that the steel door had been effectively blasted loose of the concrete casement. A number of men grabbed hold of the door and with gut-wrenching effort managed to pull it over onto the basement floor, where it landed very hard against the cement.

Moriarty shined his flashlight down the tunnel to blast door number two. “Beyond that door, gentlemen, is a stairwell leading down three stories. And that’s where we’ll find the door to the main complex.”

“Think maybe they got some women in there, Major?” asked one of the men.

“They’re stupid if they don’t, son,” Moriarty said, clapping the twenty-year-old on the shoulder. “Now clear the room and two of you go lug another case of charges down here.”

“What sort of defense you think they’ve lined up in there?” Yoshinaka wondered.

“They can line up whatever they want,” Moriarty said arrogantly. “Once we put the damn flamethrower to work in their tunnels, they’ll be screaming to capitulate. Trust me, Sergeant. This is shock and awe at its finest. We’ll go through these assholes like shit through a goose.”

Two men returned with a case of explosives and carried it down the tunnel to the second door.

“I’ll be outside with Lieutenant Ford,” Moriarty called down the tunnel. “All this dust is choking me.”

“Won’t be long,” Yoshinaka called back, going right to work unwrapping the explosives. He handed a flashlight to one of the men. “Hold this light, Sims, so I can see what the hell I’m doing here.”

The soldier beside Sims stood ready to fire should someone attempt to open the blast door from the other side. None of them noticed the small fiber-optic camera watching them through a tiny hole in the concrete above the door, but after a few seconds Sims heard a strange hissing sound in the ceiling right above his head.

“What’s that noise, Sarge?”

Yoshinaka looked up. “I don’t— Run!”

The three men dashed for the exit, but they didn’t make it. Six jets of flaming, pressurized gasoline shot down from six recessed holes in the ceiling, engulfing the entire tunnel in a scorching pyroclastic cloud of roiling black-orange flame, burning lava-hot to fry the meat from their bones. The charges exploded a few seconds later, the blast expelling the burning bodies from the tunnel.

“What the fuck was that?” Ford gasped outside on the porch, looking to Moriarty for the answer.

“Christ, Yoshinaka must have blown himself up!”

They took three men into the house, cautiously shining their lights down the basement stairs to see that it was filled with black smoke, smelling the stench of broiled flesh mixing with the smell of burnt gasoline.

“That’s the end of Yoshinaka,” Ford said grimly. “At least we’ve still got Edelstein to set the charges.”

“How did he fuck up?” Moriarty wondered. “C-4 is extremely stable.”

“Maybe somebody inside opened the door and tossed in a grenade.”

“No, that’s not cordite you smell,” Moriarty said. “That’s burnt gasoline. Something’s not fucking right here.”

They waited an hour for the smoke to clear, and then five of them went down into the basement with their flashlights and pistols in hand, seeing the three mutilated bodies piled against the far wall.

Moriarty shined his light down the tunnel and saw that the blast door was still intact. “Zeek, get in there and check that door. See if it’s been damaged at all.”

The young airman walked cautiously down the tunnel to the door and gave it a kick, but the hatch was as solid as a mountain. “It’s undamaged,” he called back. “Didn’t even scratch it!”

When Zeek was halfway back, the jets of flame blasted down into the tunnel again, engulfing him in another roiling ball of orange flame.

“Holy Jesus!” Moriarty screamed, dancing backward to escape the intense heat.

Ford jumped away too, but not before his left arm and back caught fire. He screamed and flailed around like a madman until Moriarty and the other airman managed to knock him down, using their jackets to beat out the flames. But by then Ford had suffered third-degree burns to both his back and shoulder.

“Medic!” Moriarty screamed up the stairs. “Somebody get the medic down here!”

They hauled the screaming Ford out into the snow and laid him down. The icy cold helped to deaden the pain, but it wouldn’t do much to prevent the inevitable infection the man was going to contract.

“Don’t let them eat me!” Ford was howling, clutching at Moriarty’s jacket, his face black and burned. “Don’t let the men eat me, Ben! Please!”

“Nobody’s going to eat you,” Moriarty said. “Morphine! Get this man some goddamn morphine!”

The medic shot him up with a dose of morphine, and they carried him off moaning to one of the trucks. “He won’t survive for very long with those burns,” the medic told Moriarty. “How much more morphine do you want me to waste on him?”

“Spread the word around,” Moriarty said quietly. “Let the men decide. If it sounds like they want to let him die, bleed him out. Be less of a mess for the butcher that way.

“Sergeant Jeffries!” he shouted, turning around. “Congratulations. You’re a mustang lieutenant.”

“Thank you, sir!” said a broad-shouldered man of twenty-five.

“Put two men on guard inside at the basement door then meet me in the command trailer. Do not let them go into the basement!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Edelstein, come with me. We have a puzzle to solve, you and I.” They went to the command trailer, where Moriarty dropped into a chair. The interior of the trailer was warm because they still had fuel for their generators, but it smelled like a pigsty. A bevy of malnourished women sat huddled together at the back of the trailer on the floor with their hands shackled behind their backs.

Moriarty told Edelstein exactly what had taken place in the basement. “So tell me this,” he said. “How do they know when to squeeze the trigger on us?”

Edelstein lifted his eyebrows. “That’s a good question.”

“That’s the key question,” Moriarty said. “Because if we can’t disable those flame throwers we’re never getting in.” He smashed his fist against the table. “Bastards think they’re pretty smart. Probably down there laughing their asses off.”

“Cameras,” Edelstein said suddenly. “Maybe they’re watching us.”

The obviousness of the idea hit Moriarty like a truck. “Son of a bitch!” he hissed. “I never even considered that possibility. My brain must be addled.”

“It’s the lack of nutrition,” Edelstein said. “It’s affecting us all, Major.”

“Get out there and tell the men to tear that house apart. If they do find cameras, I don’t want them destroyed. I want them covered with tape. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

When Edelstein was gone, Moriarty walked to the back of the trailer, squatting to look the women over, his face pitiless and his eyes flat like those of a reptile. “Now which one of you ladies wants to improve my mood?”

Fifty-One

No one heard a sound within the complex when blast door number one was blown out of its casement, but there was a subtle trembling that quivered through the facility, making everyone within the civilian population aware that they had taken damage. Forrest immediately went on the air to announce that blast door number one had been breached but that the situation was in hand and not to worry. A short time later they barbecued the demolitions team and watched the monitor as the blast blew the tunnel clean. They waited patiently for the enemy to come back down, and when they were certain no more than one man was reentering the tunnel, they barbecued him as well.

“They won’t likely be back for a while.” Forrest fired up a smoke.

“We should sneak into the house now,” Vasquez said. “Take a few of them out and retreat back inside.”

“There’s no need to expose ourselves. We still hold every advantage.”

Kane stepped into the room and offered Forrest a cup of coffee. “Baby’s comin’ pretty soon,” he told Ulrich. “Erin asked me to send you in.”

“Yeah, that’s just what Shannon wants,” Ulrich said. “Me in there staring at her snatch. Message received but I’ll take a pass. Thanks.”

“What’s up with the ventilators?” Forrest asked, sipping his coffee.

“We’re fine so far,” Kane said. “The nonreturn valves we installed worked just like they were supposed to, but we can’t draw fresh air until that damn fuel burns off. And they’ll probably just pour more down.”

“Which means we’ve got as much air as we’re going to get until this is over,” Forrest muttered. He turned to the dozens of tomato plants resting on the shelves against the wall. “Breathe, you little bastards.”

Michael chuckled sardonically. “Has anyone got any idea how many plants it would take to—”

“Three hundred plants per person,” Ulrich said. “Roughly. And we’ve got about fifty total.”

“So how long do we have before we start to suffocate down here?”

“It’s tough to quantify,” Ulrich said. “But for the sake of argument, let’s say about four days.”

“Hey, guys,” Vasquez said, sitting up in his chair to point at one of the monitors. “I think maybe they’re looking for our cameras.”

“Well, that didn’t take long,” Ulrich said.

“Shit, they’ve got the one in the living room.”

The view on the monitor seemed to swing wildly about the living room as the airman pulled the fiber-optic wire from the smoke detector.

“The only camera that matters now is the one in the tunnel,” Forrest said. “And they need Superman to get at that one.”

“I don’t know,” Ulrich said, watching the enemy fan out through the house. “I don’t like the idea not being able to see what they’re up to.”

“There goes the kitchen cam,” Vasquez said. “Front porch too.”

“The aboveground cameras were always a bonus,” Forrest said.

“There go the bedroom cams.”

“Besides, we’ve still got the camera on the antenna array if we get into a pinch.”

“Which is a onetime deal,” Ulrich said. “They’ll snuff that motherfucker the second we extend it.”

Forrest leaned forward to use the P.A., calling Danzig into Launch Control.

“Linus,” he said upon Danzig’s arrival. “It looks like we’re going to need someone on guard in the cargo bay from now on. We’re about to go blind down here. Work out a schedule with Sullivan and Marty, will you? Put those two on the same shift. Kane, you take a shift too. I don’t think any of us are going to be getting any sleep for a while.”

“Okay, honey, you’re doing fine,” West said, his hands resting on Emory’s knees. “I can see the baby’s head now. You’re crowning beautifully.”

“Shit!” Emory gasped, gripping the edges of the mattress. “It feels like I’m shitting a bowling ball!”

Erin smiled, wiping the sweat from Emory’s forehead with a damp cloth. “You’re doing great.”

Marty stood in the doorway watching.

“Get in here and hold my hand, Marty. What the fuck, I’m dying in here!”

Marty crossed to the bed and took her hand.

“Okay,” West said. “With this next contraction I need you to push for me, Shannon.”

The contraction came and Emory pushed as hard as she could, screaming at the top of her voice.

“Good girl!” West said. “Almost there. One more time, honey.”

Emory waited and pushed one last time, feeling the baby squirt free of her body and groaning aloud.

“It’s a girl!” Erin said, beginning to cry. “It’s a girl, Shannon!”

“Thank God that’s fucking over!” Emory said, her voice trembling.

“Almost,” West said with chuckle, handing the baby to Dr. Wilmington so he could tie off and cut the umbilical. The infant began to cry a few seconds later, and after a short while the afterbirth was delivered, allowing West to clean Emory up. Dr. Wilmington cleaned the baby girl and swaddled her in a green cotton Army towel, carrying her over to rest her on Emory’s chest. But Emory closed her eyes and turned her head as if some foul-smelling food had been placed before her.

“Marty, who does she look like?”

“You,” he said softly, looking adoringly at the infant. “She looks like you.”

Emory turned her head slowly and looked at her daughter, at last lifting her arms to touch her. “Hey, you little shithead.”

Erin’s face was covered with tears.

“Pick her up,” Emory told her. “She’s yours now.”

“Shannon, are you sure you don’t want her?” Erin said, suddenly sad for the infant. “She’s your daughter, honey. Your flesh and blood.”

“I like her,” Shannon said, holding her gently. “She’s cool. But she’s yours. I don’t want to be a mother. Tell her, Marty.”

“She’s given this a lot of thought,” Marty said quietly. “It’s for the best, Erin.”

“You’ll need to nurse her for as long as possible,” West said. “In this environment, she’ll need every advantage she can get.”

Emory sat against the pillow with the baby in her arms, looking dolefully at him.

“I’m serious, Shannon. It’s really very important. We don’t have any baby formula down here, and powdered milk isn’t going to do at all. Not to mention she needs the immunities only you can give her.”

“All right,” Emory said reluctantly. “You can go now, Marty. I don’t need you staring at my tits.” She bared one of her breasts, and West helped her cradle the baby and position the nipple in her mouth. The infant took to the nipple at once and began to suckle like a hungry puppy.

“That’s a small mercy,” West said with a glance at Erin. “They don’t always take to it this fast.”

“Hey, that feels pretty good,” Emory said with a grin. “It’s been a while. Maybe this won’t be so bad.”

Erin couldn’t help laughing. “Shannon, really.”

“Well that’s it,” Ulrich said, rising from his chair as the last outside camera was discovered on the roof of the house and wrapped around with tape. “They’ve blinded us.”

“I wonder why they taped them off instead of destroying them,” Michael said.

“This way they can communicate with us later on,” Forrest said, drinking from another cup of coffee. “Threaten us with imminent destruction.” He looked at his watch. “Be dark soon. We can raise the antenna just before sunup, maybe get a quick look at first light and then lower it again before they spot it. It’s far enough away, they may not notice.”

“I’ve got an idea I like better,” Kane said.

“Which is?”

“Call Broken Arrow about 0400 then go up and finish the job by hand. We’re bound to catch a lot of ’em asleep in the house.”

“That’s what Broken Arrow is?” Michael said. “Engaging them hand-to-hand?”

“Partly,” Forrest said. “But I don’t like it yet. Those trailers are out of range. We can’t risk a protracted firefight.”

“But how soon before we’re in a use-it-or-lose-it situation?” Ulrich said. “We won’t know where they’re snooping around up there now. What if they find the lift?”

“I’m not too worried,” Forrest said. “Tactically speaking, Moriarty’s already fucked up.” He set the coffee cup down and shook another cigarette loose. “He could have played this like they didn’t know about the cameras. They could have pretended to prepare for something he didn’t really intend to do… make us prepare for something that was never going to happen. But this idiot’s no tactician. He’s a fucking supply officer, and he doesn’t scare me. So no Broken Arrow except as a last resort… unless you’d like to call for another vote there, Wayne.”

“Jack,” Ulrich said, pausing before stepping into the hall. “Go fuck yourself.”

Fifty-Two

“What if we flood the basement?” suggested a member of Moriarty’s staff. “Flood the tunnel and set the charges underwater.”

Moriarty sat looking at the man, glancing at Edelstein before sitting forward in his chair. “That’s a pretty good idea, Howard—except for the fact we’ve got no water and no goddamn scuba gear.” He pointed at the door. “Get the hell out of here, you moron!”

Howard stood from his chair, saluted and left the trailer.

Moriarty looked at the other four. “The next one of you who comes up with an idea like that, just shoot yourself and save me the trouble. Flood the goddamn basement!”

One of the cooks came in later and set a mess tray of blackish meat on the table. “I put a lot of cayenne on it this time. I think it’s better.”

Moriarty picked up a piece of the meat and took a bite. “A little spicy but not bad. Who is this?”

“It’s Lieutenant Ford, sir.”

“Poor fucker,” Moriarty said, licking his fingers. “He was a good man.”

“Have you come up with a way of getting into the complex?” the cook asked.

“No.”

“Too bad we don’t have any way of getting that Cat out here,” the cook said, turning for the door.

“What Cat?” Moriarty said.

“There was a D-8 along the highway on the way here. We could dig right down to the main complex with it. Blow our way in.”

Moriarty looked at Edelstein. “Would that work?”

“The concrete shell is six feet thick,” Edelstein said. “It would take a while, but with the explosives we have and a couple of jackhammers… yeah, I think it would work. It’s worth a try.”

“That’s it, then,” Moriarty said, getting to his feet. “Take a company of men and go get that goddamn bulldozer!”

Fifty-Three

It was late and Melissa sat in the hall with Laddie asleep beside her on the deck, her laptop against her knees as she stared at a simple cipher on the computer screen.

A B C D E F

G H I J K L

M N O P Q R

S T U V W Y

1-1 (Line 1, first letter) = A

4-6 (Line 4, sixth letter) = Y

etc.

The first numeral of a set denoted which line to reference, and the second numeral denoted which specific letter within that line to reference. This was the rudimentary alphabetic cipher Ulrich had shown her months earlier when she first expressed an interest in trying to decipher the code they were now listening in on as many as four nights a week. She had since tried dozens of variations on it, most recently:

A   B   C   D

E F  G H  I J  K L

M N O P Q R S T U V W Y

She always attempted to match them against the same string of code that one of the telegraphers signed on with at the beginning of each transmission:

And always came up with nothing but gibberish.

One of her notable problems—among many others—was the numeral 9. No matter how she arranged the letters, she couldn’t come up with a workable alphabetical value for the numeral 9. She asked Ulrich about it, but he hadn’t been very helpful. He told her the 9s could have any one of a million different values—or even be complete gibberish to throw off a cryptologist.

She was frustrated with Ulrich, firmly believing that if he would just help her, they could crack the code.

“Okay, listen,” he said to her late one night in Launch Control when she had resumed work on the code at the console. “Do you know the Lord’s Prayer? ‘Yea, though I walk’… and all that.”

“That’s not the Lord’s Prayer,” she said, laughing. “That’s the Twenty-third Psalm. The Lord’s Prayer is ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven…’”

“Whatever. Go get a Bible and copy it down, a line at a time.”

“Which one? The Lord’s Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm?”

He looked at her and narrowed his eyes, not having the patience with her that Forrest had. “‘Yea, though I walk…’”

“Jeez!” she said with another laugh. “You’d better learn to have some patience if you’re gonna be a dad, Wayne.”

“Go get the Bible, kid.”

“I don’t need it,” she said, lifting her pencil.

“And always number the lines,” he told her. “That will make it easier for you to reference them as you’re deciphering.”

“Got it.” She wrote out the Psalm from memory.

“Okay, so now what?” she said, showing him the paper.

Ulrich took the paper and wrote a quick string of code at the bottom of the page:

“Now decipher that,” he said. “And keep in mind, the blank spaces are arbitrary. They hold no value of their own. I could just as easily have written it without the spaces, but I’m making it ridiculously easy for you.”

It was immediately apparent to Melissa that he had used the line number for the first value of each letter and then just counted spaces for the second value, coming up with:

“Ha ha,” she said. “I’m telling Erin.”

“You probably will,” he said with a chuckle. “Look, kid, the point I’m making is they don’t have to use a simple alphabetic cipher. They could use anything. Any agreed-upon text just like this one here. And the letters in the code they’re using don’t have to be limited to double-digit values. They could apply to page number, paragraph number, line number, word number, and finally letter number if they wanted to—which would give each single letter in the message a value of five digits. So… do you see how many possibilities exist just within that single string of code you keep going over? There could be as many as thirty-two letters in it or as few as sixteen—just from that one example.”

“But that would take time to translate, and you said they’re talking fast.”

“That’s true,” he admitted. “But if they’re only using a few pages of the text—which would be logical—they could easily have it memorized by now. So, while I do believe it’s a simple code in terms of numerical values, it could still be impossible for a person to crack without a computer program.”

“But not necessarily…”

“No, not necessarily, but the trouble is we have no way of knowing. So why waste thousands of hours trying to crack a code only to find out that it’s impossible? Especially when we already know that it probably is impossible.”

“But what if these people might be able to help us?”

“Honey, whoever they are, they are in no more of a position to help us than we are to help them. Believe me. And there’s a very good chance of them being hostile, so we couldn’t risk breaking radio silence before we at least knew what the hell they’ve been talking about all these months.”

Melissa had not been even slightly deterred by Ulrich’s discouraging opinion of her chances. In fact, she only grew that much more determined. She saw a definite pattern within the code, even if only in her mind’s eye. She just couldn’t quantify it yet, and she continued to be very frustrated with herself, knowing that with a little more mathematical skill she could crack the damn thing and maybe—just maybe—find them some help before they were forced to eat rat meat in order stay alive… or worse, starve.

Forrest stepped around the open blast door and crouched beside her, petting Laddie, who came instantly awake. “I’d feel better if you two were in the common area with the others. The kids are asleep now.”

“I can’t concentrate with everyone around,” she said, her eyes fixed on the screen. “I’m close, Dad. I can feel it.”

Melissa had taken to calling him Dad a bit more often now, and it pulled at his heart every time. Veronica had remarked in private that she thought Melissa might have used the moniker to manipulate him in certain instances, which spawned their first genuine argument. She had only meant to imply that all girls manipulated their fathers to a certain degree, but Forrest accused her of being jealous.

“How dare you accuse me of being jealous of a sixteen-year-old girl!”

“She’s never made a single unreasonable request, Veronica. There isn’t even anything down here unreasonable to ask for, for Christ’s sake.”

“Never mind,” she had said. “You’re obviously too sensitive where Melissa’s concerned. I won’t bring her up again.”

After that they hadn’t spoken for an entire day.

“I’d like you to move into the common area anyway,” he said to Melissa now. “This tunnel’s supposed to be sealed in case there’s an emergency.”

“Can’t I—”

“What did I say?” he said, speaking crossly with her for the first time.

She looked up from her work, a hurt expression in her eyes, and closed the computer, gathering her papers together. He offered her his hand and helped her to her feet. Laddie got up with her and stretched.

Forrest sealed the door and they moved into the common area, allowing Laddie to trot deftly ahead of them through the sleeping children. On his way to Melissa’s bedroll near the wall, the dog stopped to sniff a couple of the kids, then curled up on his own bed made from folded blankets. Melissa put the computer into its box, unzipped her bag, and sat down to untie her shoes.

“You don’t have to go to bed,” he said quietly.

“I’m tired,” she said, without looking up at him, pulling the flap of the bag over her legs. “Good night.”

“Good night,” he said, and turned to walk away.

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry for making you mad.”

“You didn’t make me mad. I love you.”

“Love you too,” she said, and turned over to go to sleep.

Laddie got back up and followed Forrest into in the cafeteria, where Veronica was sitting up with Erin and the infant, whom thus far didn’t seem to have a name. Erin had just brought the babe from her feeding in Medical, and now the child was sound asleep, swaddled in Erin’s arms. Laddie sniffed at the infant and sat wagging his tail.

“No, she’s not yours yet,” Erin said with a smile. “You’ll have to wait a couple of years.”

There was no one sleeping in the cafeteria because the complex was on a war footing. All civilians were to remain in one of the two conjoined common areas at all times except for while preparing food in the kitchen to be served in the common areas.

“So, E, are you an official mom now or what?” Forrest asked, taking a seat beside Veronica.

“Shannon says so.”

“You don’t seem exactly thrilled.”

“Oh, I am,” she said. “It just doesn’t feel real yet, you know? With Shannon nursing her every couple of hours and those maniacs trying to get in. I feel more like a nanny, I guess.”

“Give her to Karen, then,” he said. “I know she’d love to have her.”

“Over my cold dead body, Jack Forrest.”

He laughed. “You sure sound like a mother to me.”

“You never pass up the chance to get a rise out of me, do you?”

“Nope.” He gave a Veronica a kiss. “How’s my girl?”

“Worried,” Veronica said.

“Don’t be. That’s my job.”

“Yet you never do.”

“That’s because it’s much more productive to act.”

“Well, Wayne’s worried,” Erin said. “He says not, but I know him. He’s as worried as I’ve ever seen him, in fact.”

“He’s just a pussy.”

Veronica slapped him on the arm.

“He’s called Wayne lots worse, V. Believe me. And vice versa. You’d think they hated each other the way they talk to one another. It’s disgusting.”

“I do hate him,” Forrest said, pretending to shake a cigarette from his pack, watching for Erin’s reaction.

“You even try smoking around this baby…”

He tucked the cigarettes back into his trouser pocket and gave Veronica a wink.

“What’s going on in the cargo bay?” Erin asked. “Wayne won’t tell me.”

“We’re just making sure nobody cuts through the lift elevator.”

“No, before all this,” Veronica said. “All five of you have been spending more time in there than normal lately.”

“Don’t think we haven’t noticed, Jack.”

“I can describe it in two words,” he said with a smile. “‘Top Secret.’”

Erin rolled her eyes. “At least Wayne has guts enough to say it’s none of our business.”

When Erin left, Forrest said quietly, “You were right about Melissa.”

“What do you mean?”

“A couple weeks ago when you said she manipulates me once in a while.”

“Oh, well…”

“It’s not really a big deal, though.”

She put her arm around him and kissed his neck. “I never tried to imply that it was. She’s a teenage girl. Every woman down here was like that at her age.”

“Well, I’d rather think of her as completely innocent.”

She laughed and kissed him again. “You and every man who’s ever had a daughter.”

Fifty-Four

“Major, you’d better come see this!” Sergeant Jeffries said, shaking Moriarty awake.

Moriarty let go of the woman he was using for warmth and rolled over onto his back. “What’s happened, Sergeant?”

“The men have found something I think you should see right away, sir. Something in the snow.”

Moriarty swung his feet over the edge of the cot and put them on the floor. He slapped the woman’s backside and told her to get up and put on his boots for him. After she tied his laces he stood up, cuffed her hands behind her back, and told her to go lay down. A few minutes later he was tromping off after Jeffries through the deep snow with his hands in his coat pockets. On the far side of the compound a dozen men stood in a circle with flashlights, shining them on the snow.

“What are they looking at?” Moriarty asked.

“It’s weird, sir. You need to see it for yourself.”

Moriarty marched up and stood looking at the snow. At first he didn’t see what they were talking about. He was looking for a specific item, like a frozen arm sticking out of the snow, but after a moment he saw what they had found… a slight depression in the snow shaped like a nearly perfect rectangle, about the length and width of an Army six-by-six truck.

“I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “You men get some shovels and be ready to dig, but nobody is to step into that area until ordered to do so. Sergeant Jeffries, get the complex blueprints and a compass and meet me in the house! We may not need that goddamn bulldozer after all.”

A short time later Moriarty and his staff were gathered around the kitchen table by the light of six army lanterns. “Okay,” he said, using the compass to orient the blueprints in the way one would orient a map. “You will notice, gentlemen, there is nothing in these plans to indicate anything located beneath the depression in the snow. Which is because whatever is located there was not added to this installation until after it was commissioned. Does anyone care to take a guess at what it might be?”

“A vent?” Jefferies suggested.

“Even better,” Moriarty replied. “It’s a hydraulic lift elevator, and below that lift elevator is a cargo bay. A cargo bay that is very likely full of supply, supply that will be ours the very moment we blast our way through the left deck. But what is even better, gentlemen, is that we will once again have unfettered access to a blast door. Now, this blast door will likely be larger and slightly thicker than the one we have already dealt with, but we will still be able to blast our way through it. Isn’t that right, Corporal Edelstein?”

“Yes, sir!”

“But why is there a depression in the snow?” one of the other men asked.

“Heat,” Moriarty said. “There’s obviously just enough heat below the deck to cause a slight melt close to the ground, which has dropped the surface level of the snow.

“Now, advise the men to dig slowly and very, very carefully. I’m guessing these cagey bastards have covered the deck with dirt, so when they reach dirt, the men are to put the shovels aside and dig with their hands. And no one—I repeat—no one is to step on that deck in anything other than stocking feet. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Major.”

“Very good, gentlemen. Let’s move with a purpose.”

The room cleared and Moriarty stood looking out the kitchen window with Jeffries at his side. He checked his watch. “Still two hours before first light,” he muttered. “We need to do this right, Sergeant. Get some men moving around down in the basement with flashlights. Make it look like they’re up to something. It doesn’t matter what. Just so they have the attention of those bastards below. Keep it mysterious.”

“Yes, sir,” Jeffries said. “What about the ’dozer, sir?”

“We’ll talk with Edelstein about that. Six feet of concrete is a lot to blast through. And assaulting through an opening like that won’t be easy.”

“What if we wait until the ’dozer gets here, and we let them see us digging on the far side of the compound,” Jeffries suggested, “to make it look like we’re digging down to the access tunnel for the number two silo? Wouldn’t that draw their attention even farther away from the cargo bay? And with the camera angle being what it is, they won’t be able to see us working on the lift elevator.”

“But they will wonder why we’re letting them watch.”

“We can show them a note. Tell them to surrender or else. They’ll think we’re letting them see in order to prove we can back up our threat.”

“So the question becomes when to hit them,” Moriarty said.

“I think a couple of hours after first light, sir. Give them time to see us and concentrate their defenses on the far side.”

“All right. We’ll start digging as soon as the ’dozer gets here, and exactly two hours later we’ll blow a hole in the lift deck. If there are no defenses in the bay, we’ll send two men down by rope to see if there is power to the lift. In the event the bay is defended, we’ll rain grenades down on them until there’s nothing left but ground chuck.”

Fifty-Five

Forrest was sitting on the john when the alarms began to sound once again. “Jesus Christ!” he said, pulling a length of paper from the roll and hurriedly wiping his ass. “Every fucking time!”

“Forrest to the LC immediately!” Kane’s voice called over the P.A. “Forrest to the LC!”

Forrest sprinted down the hall into Launch Control. “What the fuck is it now?”

“Look!” Kane said, pointing at the monitor. On the screen, a large a D-8 Cat track hoe was digging into the earth on the far side of the compound. Given the depth of the hole, the Cat hadn’t made more than a few passes.

Ulrich arrived and took one look at the monitor. “Broken Arrow, Jack!”

Forrest was already on his way to the fuse box. He unlocked it quickly and threw one of two red switches.

Ulrich watched the monitor, hoping to see the ground erupt in a series of heavy explosions. “Nothing!” he shouted, kicking the waste can across the room. “They’ve already torn up the fucking grid! Goddamnit, Jack, I told you!”

Michael stood in the doorway in his pajamas looking very confused. “What was supposed to happen?”

“We mined the upper compound with TNT,” Kane answered. “Everything you’re seeing on the monitor right now should have been blown to shit when Jack threw that switch, but that ’dozer has torn up the grid.”

“Jack, blow the goddamn house!” Ulrich said, seeing that Forrest was relocking the fuse box. “Once they see the ground was mined they’ll check the house sure as shit.”

“Not necessarily,” Forrest said, moving back to the monitor. “And if we blow the house, we lose this camera feed.” He shook a smoke from the pack and fired it up, drawing deeply as he stood thinking.

“At least we’d kill these assholes here,” Kane said, bringing up the tunnel feed to point out the flashlights moving around in the darkness deep within the basement. “It’s tough to tell what they’re doing, but they have to be working on some sort of a countermeasure for the flamethrowers.”

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Ulrich said. “What’s it going to be, Jack? Use it or lose it, goddamnit.”

“We need to see what they’re doing up there, Wayne. The house stays intact.”

If he was completely honest about it, Ulrich was glad this particular call wasn’t up to him; he was truly at a loss to judge the best move under the present circumstances.

“For now,” Forrest said, “we form a human chain all the way to silo number two. We have to transfer every bit of food out of there before we’re cut off from it. They’re digging down to the access tunnel to blow their way in. Once the silo is empty, we’ll use the remainder of the TNT to booby-trap it and the tunnel. Wayne, you’re in charge of the relocation. Kane and I will remain here in the LC. Who’s on duty in the cargo bay?”

“Sullivan and Marty.”

“Get them out and seal it. There’s still a shit-ton of supply left in number two silo, and we’ll need every swinging dick to move it.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Ulrich said.

Forrest picked up the P.A. “Attention everybody. Our friends upstairs are using a bulldozer to dig down to the number two access tunnel. So we need all of you to pitch in and help move our supplies out of number two silo and into the number one blast tunnel. Everyone stay calm and listen to Wayne. We’re going to be okay.”

He set the mike down and stood smoking as he watched the Cat plowing through the dirt.

“That last part might be the first lie you’ve told them,” Kane said.

“I know it.”

“Those assholes don’t have nothin’ to do but excavate,” Kane went on. “Pretty soon we’ll be robbing Peter to pay Paul down here, and we only got four days of air to do that. Even less with everybody workin’ their asses off shufflin’ shit around.”

“I know.”

“We’re gonna have to go up there and give those motherfuckers somethin’ else to—”

“I know it, Marcus, goddamnit!” Forrest stood watching the machine make yet another pass, his mind working to process the entirety of the situation.

“Jack, let me put together an assault team… me, Sullivan, and Vasquez. We’ll take out those assholes in the basement and clear the house in nothing flat.”

Forrest ignored him, trying to gain a sense of how long it would be before the machine unearthed the access tunnel. He estimated it would probably take less than an hour, despite the obvious inexperience of the man operating the ’dozer.

“We need to disable that fucking Cat,” he said finally. “That solves our problem.”

“Shannon’s M-203 will do the trick,” Kane replied. “I can hit it easily from the upstairs window.”

“Get Sullivan ready to back you up,” Forrest said. “I don’t want a family man going out there unless it becomes imperative. You two will have to be very fast, Marcus.”

“Don’t you fuckin’ worry about that,” Kane said, grabbing for the P.A. to call Sullivan.

“Wait!” Forrest said, having a sudden thought. “Why the fuck are they showing us what they’re up to?”

“To scare us.”

“But they’re giving us time to prepare,” Forrest said. “Hold on a second. This shit isn’t right. Check the rest of the feeds.”

Kane checked through half of the camera feeds before finding that the kitchen camera had been uncovered. All they could see, however, was a close-up shot of a paper plate. Written on the paper plate was a short note: SURRENDOR NOW OR YOU ALL DIE!

Forrest shook his head. “Fuckin’ idiots misspelled ‘surrender.’”

He took the up P.A. “Mike to the LC. Mike, come to the LC.”

“What the hell can he do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing but I’m having a brain lock.”

When Michael returned he was dressed in his street clothes. “What do you need, Jack?”

“Put me inside this asshole’s head,” Forrest said, pointing to the note on the screen.

“Well, he needs a dictionary. Other than that, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I mean why is he showing me what he’s up to?” Forrest said. “The fucking asshole has met me. He knows I’d never surrender. So why is he bothering to ask? A taunt I could understand. But a ridiculous demand? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Okay, I see what you mean,” Michael said. “But I’m not sure there’s any way to know what he’s thinking by this point. I mean, I’ve never interviewed anyone who’s been driven to cannibalism before. His entire psychological profile has been…”

“Been what?”

“Well, I was about to say that it’s been altered, but no, that wouldn’t be right. It’s been synthesized. Who he is now is who he’s always been… just with all the fat boiled off, nothing left to inhibit his true… psychopathic nature. He would have to be psychopathic in order to retain command over so many men under these conditions.”

“So what’s it mean?”

“I think it means he’s deliberately coming after us to kill us. He’s not one bit interested in our surrender… no matter how he spells it. Is that what you’re looking for?”

“That’s it,” Forrest said. “Take care of our girls, okay?”

Michael smiled. “You got it.”

Michael left the room and Forrest went back to watching the monitors. He counted the total number of men he could see and came up with only six, not counting however many men were goofing off in the basement with the flashlights, which couldn’t have been more than four or five. That left around ninety men unaccounted for.

“Bullshit,” he said at length, drawing deeply from his cigarette. “This cocksucker’s up to something, Marcus. Something we can’t see. Where are we most vulnerable?”

The answer hit them both at the same time.

“Fuck, the lift!”

Forrest grabbed the P.A. again. “All hands under arms to Launch Control now! All hands to Launch Control! Civilian personnel are to seal themselves inside the common area immediately—no exceptions!”

Kane was already up and shrugging into his body armor.

“We need to get to the cargo bay, Jack!”

“Forget it,” Forrest said, grabbing for his own armor. “Unless I’m wrong, they’re already inside. We’re going to lose the first blast door.”

“But we don’t have a countermeasure for the cargo tunnel.”

“We’re the countermeasure, my friend. You and me.”

“Suits me fine, Captain.”

The rest of the combat personnel were arriving in Launch Control and suiting up for battle, including Emory, whom Forrest was not about to argue with under such dire circumstances.

“Shannon, I want you armed and sitting right here manning the goddamn console. You and West will be the last line of defense. Doc, does Price have the box of cyanide capsules?”

“He’s got them,” West said, accepting a carbine from Ulrich. “He and Mike are both sealed in with the women and children and they know what needs to be done if we lose the complex.”

“Okay, people, here’s the deal,” Forrest said, unlocking the fuse box again. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure we’ve already lost the cargo bay, and if I’m right, we’ll be losing the first cargo door very soon. Marcus and I plan to be in the tunnel when they blow that door. We’ll hit them hard the second they make the breach. Under no circumstances is anyone to open the second cargo door to try and help us!

“Wayne, the five of you will wait at the top of the stairs inside the main entrance until Shannon flips this switch and blows up the fucking house. At that time you five will enter the main tunnel with Sean sealing it behind you. Sean, you will then haul ass back down here with Shannon.

“Wayne and his assault force will make their way into whatever is left of the house, killing every motherfucker they encounter while en route to the lift elevator from above. Once you’ve secured the opening to the cargo bay, Marcus and I will meet you in the middle.”

“We’ll all be dead before that rendezvous ever takes place,” Ulrich said, strapping into his harness.

“Men,” Forrest said, pulling his helmet on over his head, “those assholes up there are half starved to death. That makes us stronger, faster, sharper, and one fuck of a lot meaner than they are. Hooah?”

“Hooah!”

“Move fast, Stumpy! Take maximum advantage of their confusion after Shannon blows the house.”

Fifty-Six

Moriarty stood in the center of the lift elevator looking down through the hole they had blown in the deck as he waited for it to touch down. He then stepped into the cargo bay with twenty-five of his best men and stood looking around.

“They’re raising rats down here, Major,” said the man who had slid down the rope to lower the elevator for the rest of the team.

Moriarty stood grinning. His plan had worked perfectly. They had taken the cargo bay without firing a shot, and they were about to blow the first blast door with their enemy still entirely unaware of their presence. The fact that the plan had actually been Jeffries’s was irrelevant.

“Goddamn textbook!” he said, clapping Edelstein on the back. “Get that fucking door blown, Corporal. Christ Jesus, I think we’ll be running through their fucking halls before they even know we’re in. Get that goddamn flamethrower ready, Bishop!”

Edelstein and his men went quickly to work setting the linear charges in the shape of a man-door in the center of the much larger three-ton blast door.

“Major!” an airman shouted from across the sixty-by-sixty-foot square bay. “These two trucks are loaded up with MREs!”

“Nobody touches the food until after we’ve secured this installation!” Moriarty ordered. “Is that clear?”

Suddenly, there was a thunderous explosion outside the lift opening. One of their men standing near the edge lost his balance and fell in, snapping his knee when he hit the deck.

“What the fuck was that?” Moriarty demanded.

“Holy fuck!” the injured man screamed, holding his knee. “They blew up the fucking house!”

“Christ, they’re probably attacking!” Moriarty said in fear. “Everyone back on the lift!”

Twenty-five men piled back onto the lift as the twenty-sixth ran to hit the up button.

Nothing happened.

“Major, they’ve cut the fucking power! We’re fucking trapped!”

Moriarty’s men fell into instant panic as the sound of automatic rifle fire began to erupt outside the opening and another man fell to the deck, shot through the head.

“Blow that fucking door open!” Moriarty screamed at Edelstein. “We’re rats in a goddamn barrel down here!”

Edelstein and his men went back to setting the charges, finishing quickly. “Everybody take cover!”

The men took cover behind the trucks as Edelstein ran backward, reeling out the wire for the detonator. He quickly twisted the wire ends around the leads then shouted, “Fire in the hole!” giving the small handle a twist.

The charges blew with a loud bang and the men surged forward to pry the chunk from the center of the door with crowbars. It fell forward onto the concrete, and everyone stood well clear of the opening as Moriarty shined his flashlight carefully inside the tunnel, all of them fearing another horrifying pyrotechnic countermeasure.

This tunnel was of an entirely different construction than the main entrance, made of steel walls and a steel ceiling, supported by I-beam framing every forty-eight inches for its entire length of thirty-two feet. The flooring was made of steel grating, and the walkway itself was suspended from no less than twenty steel-spring shock absorbers, ostensibly to allow the tunnel to survive a near-hit from a nuclear weapon. There were no holes in the ceiling or the walls, and there was nothing in the tunnel except some rubble blown inward by the blast.

“Get to work men,” Moriarty said, casting an upward glance at the dim opening in the ceiling, half expecting to see it encircled by enemy riflemen.

As Edelstein and his team hurried down the tunnel with the case of charges, two badly battered Green Berets stood up from beneath the steel grating with blood running from their eyes and ears. They opened fire at near point-blank range, aiming for the necks and faces of the four-man demolition team and killing them instantly.

Both Forrest and Kane then pulled the pins on a pair of grenades each and tossed them down the tunnel after Moriarty’s men, who were scrambling for cover with no idea what kind of force they had so suddenly and unexpectedly come up against. The grenades exploded as they bounced clear of the opening, and six of Moriarty’s men were killed or badly wounded, the quadruple explosion badly disorienting and rattling the remainder even as they fled.

Forrest and Kane pulled themselves up from the hole in the floor and shuffled to the end of the passage. Neither bothered to speak; it would be days before either would be able to hear at all. They switched on their infrared night vision as they took cover inside the partial doorway, easily seeing many of the men who were relying on the poor light for cover.

They began to fire, hitting Moriarty’s men in their exposed legs and arms, shattering bone and picking them apart. There was a lot of return fire but none of it was accurate enough to do much good, as most of Moriarty’s men had grown lax about recharging their NVDs. Kane took a hit in his left shoulder and Forrest took a direct hit on his boron carbide chest plate, but both men remained cool, calm, and collected, choosing their targets before squeezing off each three-round burst.

Moriarty lay on the concrete behind a small generator with his arms wrapped over the top of his helmet, his knees pulled tight to his chest in order to make himself as small a target as possible. He was now deadly certain he had fallen into some kind of Special Forces trap and that his middling force was heavily outgunned.

There wasn’t much of anywhere for his men to hide other than behind the wheels of the three vehicles, but with them pushing and shoving one another in an effort to get the best cover, they were like ducks in a shooting gallery. Men were dropping their weapons and screaming in capitulation even as they were being shot apart—but no one was listening.

A few moments later the loading dock fell silent, and Moriarty slowly reached to open the flap on his holster, drawing the pistol and pulling his knees beneath him to sneak a peek over the top of the generator.

Forrest was standing there with his M-4 shouldered and ready to fire. “Major Moriarty, I presume?”

Moriarty dropped the weapon, and Kane delivered him a butt-stroke to the side of his head, sending him sprawling across the concrete.

Fifty-Seven

Ulrich listened for the shock wave to strike the blast door, signaling that Emory had blown up the house. Counting to five, he pulled the lever and swung the door wide, running the twenty-foot length of the tunnel through the smoke and dust until he came out the other end into the dim light of the basement, where three dead airmen lay on the floor with their lungs crushed. A murky sky was visible at the top of the steel staircase, telling Ulrich the house had blown up, out and away—just as he had intended when he set the charges.

He and the other four men—Danzig, Vasquez, Sullivan, and Marty—stormed up the stairs and opened immediate fire on the stunned crowd of nearly thirty men gathered at the opening over the cargo bay, firing from prone positions on the flooring of the house. They shot the airmen down with near impunity as the airmen struggled through the deep snow in a vain attempt to seek cover. The few who tried to return fire were the first to be eliminated, one toppling over backward into the hole.

Sullivan banged Marty on the shoulder, signaling him to help reduce the men on their left flank who were taking up firing positions within the row of trucks and trailers. Marty sprayed them with grazing fire as Sullivan fired a 40mm grenade into the side of a small diesel tanker, killing five in the explosion and flushing many more from the cover of the trucks on either side of the inferno.

Ulrich and the others had eliminated the airmen near the lift elevator and were now adding to the fire directed at the trucks, where there were thirty or so Air Force men left to be dealt with.

Sullivan fired another grenade into the side of the explosives truck, killing or injuring another ten.

“Take cover!” Ulrich shouted, smacking Danzig on the shoulder and pointing toward what used to be the back porch, where the brick foundation of the house would provide them decent cover. “We’re too exposed!”

Danzig was crawling backward when he saw Vasquez’s head drop face first onto the deck, a round having struck him to the left of his nose and blowing out the back of his head. Danzig grabbed for his friend’s ankle, but Sullivan knocked his arm away and shoved him toward cover.

“He’s gone!”

Ulrich grabbed Marty’s collar and practically dragged him as Marty continued to pour fire onto the enemy, deftly switching out the empty magazine and continuing to fire like a veteran soldier. The two of them toppled off the back porch into the lee of the foundation.

Sullivan fired a grenade and blew up another truck, glancing behind him to his right as he was loading another round, seeing the Humvee ascending from below the earth. He swung the weapon around and was about to fire when Kane’s dark face emerged from the gunner’s opening in the roof.

The Humvee raced off the deck and swung wide around the compound to the west, outflanking the enemy position. Kane fired into their exposed flanks as Forrest sped through the snow, and within a few seconds the remaining airmen were throwing down their weapons and putting their hands into the air.

“Let’s move!” Ulrich shouted, jumping onto the porch and then charging across the floor to the front stairs.

The airmen were walking out to meet them with their hands raised, all of them shaggy and filthy and utterly demoralized.

“Hands on your heads!” Danzig screamed, kicking one of them viciously in the groin. “Down on your fucking knees!”

Soon there were eleven airmen down on their knees in the snow with their hands on top of their heads. Sullivan stalked the row of trucks, shooting the wounded where they lay. Forrest and Kane checked inside each of the trailers for supplies and holdouts, but all they found were two sickly women who had somehow managed to survive the hail of bullets. The truck with the cage on the back of it was in flames, the five men inside, who had been on the menu, now terribly overcooked.

“There’s only six of you?” asked a young airman in abject disbelief.

“There were seven of us!” Danzig said, stomping pugnaciously forward to deliver a rifle butt to his face, knocking him over backward into the snow.

“Linus!” Forrest shouted. “Enough!”

“Sir!”

“Weapons and ammo!” Forrest was shouting much more loudly than necessary, his ears no longer bleeding but still ringing like church bells. “We leave nothing of value up here. Kane! Get on the Cat and push that dirt back into the hole.” He used hand signals to explain himself and marched off through the snow. He climbed the stairs onto the foundation of the house, knelt beside Oscar Vasquez and turned him gently over onto his back, stripping him of his weapons and ammo. He took the dog tags from around Oscar’s neck and put them into his pocket, rooting through his pockets for anything his wife Maria might want.

Danzig came up onto the foundation and began to remove Oscar’s boots.

Forrest stared at him.

“We wear the same size, Captain.” Danzig got his first look at the ruptured blood vessels in Forrest’s eyes, pointing to his own boots so Forrest would know what he was saying.

“Won’t be any more boot factories for a while, will there?” Forrest said in a loud voice.

“No, sir.”

“What do you want done for him, Linus? We can’t let Maria see him with his face shot apart.”

“Let’s build him a big fire, sir,” Danzig said, gesturing with his hands.

“Good idea!” Forrest said, offering him Oscar’s dog tags. “It was better this way, Linus. Diabetic coma’s no way for a soldier to die.”

“Yes, sir. I have a request, sir.”

“A what?”

“Request!” Danzig said in a raised voice.

“What is it?”

Danzig pointed at the men still on their knees in the snow, making a shooting gesture with his thumb and forefinger. “I want to do the executions.”

Forrest nodded and returned his attention to Vasquez.

Danzig walked off through the snow and took a 9mm pistol from the pile of captured weapons, shooting each airman in the back of the head one at a time. None of the condemned men bothered to plead for their lives until Danzig came to the last one.

“I never touched any of those women!” the man pleaded over his shoulder. “Ask them! I never touched any of them. Ever!”

“I believe you,” Danzig said, squeezing the trigger and watching his body fall over into the gray snow.

Afterward, Forrest’s men built a large funeral pyre from the debris of the house. It was growing dark by the time they lay Oscar’s body in the center of it, dousing it with gasoline and setting it ablaze.

Kane was only just finishing with the landscaping when Forrest walked over and climbed up onto the machine with him. “We have to find a patch to weld over that hole in the lift deck!” Forrest shouted. “Any suggestions?”

Kane backed off on the throttle and sat thinking. His eyes and ears had stopped bleeding as well but both men looked a mess.

“I can cut a patch from the hood of one of the trucks,” he said loudly. “It’s not as tough as boiler plate but it’s better than nothing.”

“We’ll work until we’re finished,” Forrest said, patting him on the shoulder with a grin. “And this time we’ll cover the lift deck with three feet of dirt!”

It was ten at night before they finished clearing the bodies from the cargo bay and patching the hole in the lift. Dr. West came into the cargo bay to look over the two women, taking Forrest and Ulrich aside.

“They’re sick,” he said slowly enough for Forrest to make him out, not wanting the women to overhear him. “I don’t think it’s anything communicable,” he said directly to Ulrich, “but I’ve given them TB tests to make sure it’s not tuberculosis. We’ll know in three days. Until then, at the very least, they should remain quarantined here in the bay. With some penicillin and hot food, they should be ready to join us inside within a week or two.”

He then turned to Forrest and made an OK with his fingers.

“Okay, Sean,” Forrest tried to say more quietly. “Thanks. Now would you mind going inside? We’ve got some dark business to take care of out here, and I don’t think your oath allows for you to be present.”

“Sure,” West said, glancing across the bay to where Major Benjamin Moriarty sat shackled to the fender of a truck before withdrawing to the tunnel.

When West was gone, Forrest walked over and freed Moriarty long enough to cuff his hands behind his back with Sullivan and Kane looking on. Then he shoved Moriarty across the bay toward the two women.

“It’s up to you, ladies,” he said, keeping a firm grip on the handcuffs. “What sort of justice do you want?”

One of the women backed away, afraid of Moriarty even now, but the other held her ground. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean tell me what you want done and I’ll do it.”

Moriarty turned to look him in the eyes and smirked, so Forrest smashed in his front teeth with the frame of his .45, dropping him straight to his knees. “So what’ll it be, ladies?”

“Just shoot him,” the woman said quietly. “He’s not worth another minute of time.”

Forrest looked to Ulrich to see what she had said, and Ulrich drew a finger across his throat. He then hauled the battered major to his feet and shoved him over to the lift, knocking him back to his knees. Kane stepped onto the lift beside him, carrying a lantern, and Danzig pressed the up button to send them to ground level.

The lift locked into position at ground level and Moriarty looked up at them. “Fuck you bo—”

Forrest shot him through the mouth and he fell over dead, his spinal column severed. He dragged the body through the snow and threw it onto the pile as Kane climbed back up onto the Cat. Soon the lift was buried beneath three feet of landscaping, and the ’dozer was blown up with a stick of TNT. Both men then went into the basement, where Danzig stood waiting for them, carbine in hand, and the three of them entered the silo, sealing the blast door behind them.

The siege was over.

When Veronica and Melissa got their first look at Forrest, they both gasped and started to cry as they wrapped themselves around him.

“Shhh,” he said softly, holding them tight in each arm. “It’s not permanent.”

Veronica looked over Forrest’s shoulder at Dr. West, who stood against the wall in the corridor. “Is he lying, Sean?”

West shook his head. “He’ll likely have some hearing loss, but he looks a lot worse than he is. It was just the pressure wave.”

Forrest saw Maria Vasquez coming into the hall and he freed himself from Veronica and Melissa and went to her, folding her into his arms as she cried. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her ear. “It’s my fault.”

She looked up at him and shook her head. “It’s what he wanted,” she said carefully, making sure he could read her lips. “And he had a good last year…”