by Stasia Black
Gisela squared her shoulders and jutted out her chin. “I’m just as good as any of these guys at standing watch. And I know how to work one of these.” She held up a walkie, pushing the button on the side with her thumb. “All clear out here, over,” she said into it, the walkie on David’s waist crackling in response.
Eric could see Drea’s head was literally about to explode, she was so furious.
David spun around, finger to his lips. He shook his head, obviously exasperated, before turning back to his men and gesturing them to fan out on the first floor.
Gisela looked guilty for a moment, realizing too late that right then might not have been the best time to show off her short-wave radio skills. For Christ’s sake, if anyone was in the building, there was every chance that little stunt had just given them away.
It was a tense several minutes before David returned to the opening and waved them all through. “Clear in here.”
Eric let out the breath he was holding but Drea didn’t look any less relieved, nor did her glare for Gisela lessen. She pushed past her, their shoulders briefly knocking against each other.
Gisela rolled her eyes and jutted her chin out even further but it was clear to Eric how desperate for Drea’s approval she was.
He should know. He’d displayed a similar kind of defiance when he’d walked this same ground with his father all those years ago.
Eric followed Drea through the window, only having a brief moment to look around before David asked, “Which way?”
The lobby was as much a mess as the courtyard. Worse, because the linoleum and drywall had never been meant for the outside elements.
The floor to ceiling mural on the wall depicting the moon landing with the words declaring Historic Mission Control was barely even visible.
Eric hadn’t expected the pained nostalgia at seeing that. How many times had he walked past that wall growing up? He remembered how he’d gotten a little thrill when he’d finally gotten taller than the Neil Armstrong on the mural.
He swallowed and turned his back to the wall. “This way.”
There was the well-traveled staircase leading up to mission control—both the historic one tourists got to see and the one on the second floor where active missions were run well into the mid-21st century.
They weren’t interested in either of those, though. Well, they did need to take the stairs up to the second floor. But only so they could get across to the new building addition. Eric led and everyone followed. Up the stairs. Down the hallway that led past mission control.
He’d expected that they’d have to pull out the blow torch to get past the locked door at the end of that hallway, but—
“Looks like we aren’t the first ones here after all,” David murmured, his words barely audible.
He stepped in front of Eric and made hand signals. Two of his troops nodded and proceeded through the door, machine guns at the ready.
Eric stepped back, shielding Drea. David had been leaving guards stationed at each phase of entry. Two downstairs. Two more at the top of the stairs.
When he finally came back and gave the all clear, two more stayed at that door way. That meant there were only nine in the group that Eric led through the mazelike tunnel of hallways—the six of their clan plus Gisela, Franco, and another soldier, Wendall, who Eric had only met on the way here. Jonathan and David had brought a single pair of night vision goggles, but it was easier to switch on a couple of flashlights so everyone could see as they headed into the bowels of the building. He remembered how confused he’d felt the night his dad led him down this same path.
“Four rights, a left and a right,” his dad muttered under his breath.
Eric whispered the same as he navigated the halls and brought them to a section of cream-colored painted brick hallway that looked… exactly like every other bit of hallway.
“What exactly are we looking for?” asked Franco. “Looks like somebody looted this place of anything that might have been valuable a long time ago.” He gestured with his gun toward one of the many ransacked rooms they’d passed.
“They didn’t know what they were looking for,” Eric said. “Why do you think the internal walls of this building are made of brick? It was built well into the 21st century. Doesn’t that seem odd to anybody?”
“Well it does now that you point it out,” David said.
Eric nodded, feeling along the grooves of the bricks. It was somewhere in the middle here. Where had Dad touched? He closed his eyes and tried to remember. Dad had to bend over a little. Eric remembered wondering what the hell his dad was doing, squatting in a hallway to nowhere in the middle of the night.
Eric bent over slightly and continued running his fingers along the grooves of the bricks and—
Bingo.
He felt the button that his dad had pressed that night and he did the same. The reaction wasn’t immediate and he worried that in the intervening years since his dad had died they’d made electronic what had once been mechanical.
But nope, when he looked toward the corner of the hallway several feet away, the panel of false brick about two feet wide had slid partially aside, revealing a long metal lever.
Eric hurried over to it. As he’d first thought, the panel had only slid part of the way open. “Here, help me get it all the way open.”
He and David pushed the little two foot door open, fully exposing the lever. Good. It only made sense. This was the backup system. In case the electronics went completely down for whatever reason. Or in case of an EMP attack.
“You pull that and what?” Franco asked. “The curtain falls away and we find out we been in Oz this whole time?”
Eric rolled his eyes while David grabbed the lever with both hands, biceps bulging as he wrenched it downwards.
As he did, another panel of false bricks receded into the wall and then, the further he cranked, the panel slid to the side on a track and revealed a stairwell.
“There you go,” Eric said, holding out a hand. “Emergency entrance to the real Mission Control. At least the mission control where all the things that truly mattered were done.”
Eric could see some of the awe he himself had felt at first seeing the secret opening revealed reflected on the other’s faces, especially Gisela.
“This is awesome,” she whispered, eyes wide.
“You,” Drea snapped at Gisela, “Stay up here.” She looked to Eric. “You said in our briefings that there are two exits to the building from this point?”
Eric nodded. “The first is the way we came in. The second is to take this hallway, turn right, take a left, go down that hallway and you’ll see a hallway branching off about halfway down on the right, with a door. That’s the exit that goes down to the back parking lot. We parked the second van by the next building over to the east.”
“You hear that?” Drea took Gisela’s forearm. “Repeat back to me. Where are the exits?”
Gisela’s jaw locked but she repeated what Eric had said. Drea only looked minimally appeased.
“The first sign of danger and you get the hell out of here, do you hear me?” Drea admonished.
“Aw what about me, darlin’?” Franco asked. “Where’s my stern talking to?”
Drea ignored him, eyes only on Gisela.
“I got it,” Gisela waved Drea off. “I can do this. Now go take care of what you came here for.”
Drea didn’t nod or look any happier about the situation, but she did pull her Glock out of her hip holster and hand it to Gisela. “Remember, safety off, feet a little more than shoulder-width apart, and you did better with the left foot forward stance so—”
“I got it,” Gisela repeated, cheeks going pink as she looked around at the rest of us. Drea either didn’t see or didn’t care that she was embarrassing the girl. She just looked behind Eric. “Billy, Garrett, you two stay up here too.”
“No way,” Garrett said. “I go where you go.”
“Me too,” from Billy.
“All clear,
” came David’s distant call from halfway down the stairs.
Eric expected Drea to snap at Garrett and Billy but instead she reached and took each of their hand. “Please. Guys. I need you here as my eyes and ears. If something happens, we’ll be trapped down there. We’ll need you to be able to clear the way for us.”
Garrett’s eyes flashed, no doubt at the idea of anything happening to Drea. Eric would swear that guy’s DNA was half guard-dog. Which was fine by Eric. The more people looking after Drea, the better, as far as he was concerned. Especially with the lack of self-perseveration she’d been displaying lately.
So Garrett accepted the walkie Jonathan handed him and Billy stayed put beside him as Drea headed down the stairs, flashlight in hand. Eric and Jonathan followed on her heels. Down one flight. Then another. A third. And a fourth.
When Eric finally got to the bottom, there was only a small concrete landing and a door with— Holy crap, a little biometric scanner screen beside the door that was actually lit up.
Drea hurried forward to the scanner screen, placing her hand on the hand outline. It beeped and flashed with a red Invalid Entry sign on the little screen.
Drea’s head swung to look at Eric. “It even works. You were right. The EMP couldn’t penetrate this far underground. But what’s been powering it for all this time?”
Eric tucked his own flashlight under his arm as he walked closer to look at the screen. “Dad told me there’s a secondary generator for this place. Well, two generators. One that’s solar-powered and a second that’s powered by old-fashioned fossil-fuel. And it’s motion activated, so we just turned it on when we came down here.” Eric waved his hand around them.
“He’s right. The screen lit up as soon as we came down the stairs,” David confirmed. “All right, you two get back,” he said, gesturing Eric and Drea away while Franco pulled on a mask and readied his blow torch.
It took over an hour to get through the door. No one spoke much but Eric clearly wasn’t the only one feeling anxious. Drea’s foot had been tapping non-stop for the past half hour, not even slowing when Jonathan started massaging her shoulders. David wasn’t much better, jogging back up the stairs to walkie the others posted as sentries rather than doing it from downstairs.
They all knew it had to be far past sunrise by now and while they’d tried to park the vans under as much tree cover as they could—one right outside the front exit and the second a couple of buildings away, it was Texas. The trees were short and stubby and didn’t give coverage for jack shit.
Anyone looking this direction and paying attention would see two very out of place black vans parked where none had been the day before.
A loud CLANG had Eric’s attention swinging back to the landing and Drea popping to her feet. The door had fallen inwards with a great clatter.
“Watch where you step,” David hopped up onto the middle of the fallen door and held out a hand to steady Drea as she stepped up to join him. “That slag will burn through your shoe in seconds.”
Drea nodded and they made their way into the room. Eric followed, stepping as carefully as they had to avoid the metal where it was still sizzling orange. Jonathan came after him.
Eric swung his flashlight around the room, prepared for it to be as much of a mess as the rest of the building. For desks to be overturned and computers to be lying in pieces all over the floor.
But as he got inside and looked around, he saw everything was in pristine condition.
The room was filled with three rows of desks built in a large circle, stadium seating style. It looked much the same as it had the night his dad brought him here.
The only difference was that then, there had been the static hum of computers and in the center of the circle of desks, there’d been a lit-up 3D projection of the earth, about six feet in diameter, with hundreds of little satellites orbiting it.
Now though, the space was empty.
“All right. Let’s hurry it up,” David said, voice curt. “We’ve already been here too long.”
Eric walked over to the console that had once been his father’s. First row, second in from the aisle. Eric sat down and ran his hands over the crystalline screen and the little control orb resting in its cradle.
“Holy crap, look at this,” Drea said.
Eric glanced over at where Drea came out of a storage closet, she and Franco carrying a heavy-looking crate that they dropped on the nearest desk.
“What?”
Drea reached into the crate and pulled out something Eric thought was a laptop at first but no, it was too big and clunky for that.
“Mini solar panel power bases,” Drea said, excitement dripping from every word.
“Military grade,” said Franco. “The kind that gets ninety-eight percent efficiency. Plug into this baby and you’ll have power for hours.”
“But plug what into it?” Drea asked dramatically, jogging back into the closet and then coming back out. “How about these?”
She smiled wide, holding up two slim laptops along with several crystalline tablets. The highest of high tech. Holy shit. If those actually worked…
“There are at least ten tablets in here. Five more laptops. And two crates of ten solar power bases.”
“We might not have a city on a power grid, but we’ll have as much tech as Travis himself,” David said, a rare grin lighting his face. “More, maybe, and in better condition.” Then his eyes went calculating. “Now we just need San Antonio.”
Drea reached in her backpack and handed the satellite phone over to David. He took it, but looked to Jonathan who, during all of this, had been working at an open panel along the back wall.
“What’s the word, Jon?”
“Just gimme another second.”
And indeed, barely a second passed before the room lit up. Overhead lights. Console stations. Even the huge projection of the earth in the central circle between the desks came back to life, along with the hundreds of little differently colored orbiting satellites. Each color represented a different type of satellite. Blue for telecom satellites. Red for imagery and geospatial ones. Green for weather.
“All right, we’re in business,” Jonathan said, hurrying over to the closest console. Ever since the power had turned on, all the little navigation orbs had jumped to life, too, hovering about an inch off their bases. Jonathan touched the crystalline screen of the console tablet and then spun the orb, which had the globe in the center of the room turning on its axis as well.
Drea gasped and Eric had to admit, he felt short of breath at the show of technology, too. Sure once in a while they stored up enough energy to show a movie in the local theatre, but even that demanded so much coordination, planning, and energy resources, they only did it once a month if that. The casual display of energy usage before them was breath-taking.
If Jonathan was taken aback by it, though, he didn’t show it. He just swiped through screen after screen, zooming in on the globe until North America was front and center, then Texas.
“Can you do it?” David asked. “Are you in?”
Jonathan didn’t answer. His brows were lowered and his face was tense with concentration. He zoomed back out and the earth in the center of the desks grew smaller. Jonathan hit something on the tablet and all the red dots for the imagery satellites grew brighter. He twisted his wrist, rotating the ball and the earth zoomed out even further, instead providing a close up of one of the satellites itself.
Jonathan typed on a small keyboard that the tablet projected and then they all watched as the satellite twirled in position and began moving in the opposite direction it had initially been pointing.
“Holy shit,” Eric whispered. He’d always been aware of just how much a long shot this mission had been, ever since Drea told him her idea. It seemed impossible that they’d actually get here, find everything intact, find the generators still working, that the area would be safe enough from radiation fallout in the first place, that—
“Alpha Hawk here. Napolean
is a go.”
Eric looked up to find David barking orders into the sat phone.
“I repeat, Napolean is a go.” David nodded. “Black Hawk out.” He hung up the phone then turned to the other soldier, Wendall. “Let’s get all these supplies out to the vans.”
Wendall gave a curt nod and Eric helped him get the first crate upstairs.
“I’ll take it from here,” Billy said, reaching for the crate. Eric raised an eyebrow but Billy just pushed him aside and took over.
When Eric got back downstairs, David was stowing a tablet, laptop, and solar charge base in the backpack he’d brought.
“Are we not taking up the second crate?” Eric asked.
“No, Wendall can take the second crate up when he gets back,” David said. “I just like to be prepared.”
“I thought that was the boy scout’s motto,” Drea joked and David shot her a smile.
Eric just shook his head in astonishment. Could a woman really change overnight? It wasn’t that the kinder, gentler Drea in front of him had nothing in common with the hard-ass, perpetually angry woman he’d come to know so well. Underneath, Drea was still Drea. She was too authentic to ever be anything but. Eric didn’t even know how to describe the difference exactly. Except maybe to say that usually she held everyone at an arm’s distance and today, at least with their clan, she’d allowed them all into that inner circle she usually kept entirely private. She’d let them in. And it was so damn beautiful.
“Some day you’re gonna grow up, son,” his dad had said to him all those years ago, sitting in this very room. “And I want to make sure you’re the kind of man who has his priorities straight.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means this smart-ass attitude is only gonna get you so far. Which far as I can see, isn’t gonna be very far at all.”
Silence. He was seething about how stupid and out of touch his dad was and how, as soon as he got home, he’d message his friends so they could go meet up at Trevor’s house to get high and play Piper6, the newest FPS VR game to come out.
“Look here, son.” His dad brought his console to life and the globe in the center of the room began turning as his dad spun the little orb off to the side.