by A N Sandra
“Whoever BJ is, he needs someone to help him with auto financing,” Brooke scoffed. “We paid it off when we changed the title. He owed way too much.”
“That’s BJ,” Joshua admitted. “No one ever thought he should be a business major. He does drywall and blows things up for fun.”
“Just because he’s not cut out to be a business major doesn’t mean he couldn’t take a couple of Khan courses.” Brooke laughed. Then her face turned sober. “If he’s good at demolition he really needs to keep it on the down low. They’ll take him for a crew…”
“BJ takes care of himself,” Joshua assured her. “I wonder what he thought when the truck payment just came off his auto bill pay, but whatever.”
“Do you want to drive? Brooke asked as Court came up with a suitcase rolling along the cement floor. Joshua jumped for the keys she dangled.
The good fortune to be sprung from the underground would have been fantastic enough, but to be going to Las Vegas in his cousin’s truck on a sunny late fall day was unbelievable. Goodbye motor pool and Candlebox, hello glamour!
“Funny how long you can drive now and not see any sign that people even live around here,” Joshua finally said after two hours.
“People don’t live around here,” Brooke shrugged. “Urban Relocation didn’t have that much to do in this area.”
“Did it change that fast?” Joshua wondered. “It changed so fast in Shasta County in the last three years that outside Blythe and McArthur and Redding it’s almost totally different. But that was mostly tearing out little farms.”
“Oh, yeah, it changed fast here,” Court said. “Just wait. They’re going to take out Shasta Dam after New Year’s, but before the EMP’s go off. That is going to be some big change.”
“Everyone will know it’s really the end then,” Joshua reflected.
“No, they won’t,” Brooke said bitterly. “My parents spoke nothing but truth about the Hollisters and all it got them was a deadly accident. No one believed them; they were like Cassandra. There are mountains of evidence for everything they said, but none of their liberal friends came to their funerals because supposedly my parents were conspiracy nut jobs. By April they’re sure going to know.”
Brooke was deeply chagrined to find that the thought of coming vindication was intoxicating. Of course, none of her parents’ former friends and colleagues (and because they had been professors their coworkers had been their friends) would experience all their electronic devices failing them instantly and think of the dead activists who had tried to warn them. They would get sick soon after the EMP went off, maybe within hours, and they would be too busy trying to relieve their symptoms while they were busy dying to think, “I was warned. I didn’t listen.”
“Las Vegas in thirty miles!” Court breathed deeply.
“This is probably our last encounter with luxury,” Brooke warned.
“I’m going to make sure that we have really nice houses when we come up out of our bunkers,” Court said. “Wherever we live, we’re going to do it right.”
“I don’t think Curtis cares about living life with swag,” Joshua said.
“Have you ever seen Curtis’s sleeping quarters?” Court asked.
“No.”
“The problem isn’t that Curtis doesn’t appreciate swag, it’s that he doesn’t see why he should share the swag with anyone else.”
“Ahhh,” Joshua said. One more little reason to distrust Curtis as a leader. He could remember Father Ruiz saying once that any man who wants those under him to be content with situations he would not be content with was not much of a leader. A good leader seeks to elevate others to their own understanding and privilege.
Chapter 24
December 27th, Hollister Enclave, ME
Doctor Justin drove his own car up Coastal Route 1 on his way to the Hollister Compound. A driver would have infringed on the romantic mood he was trying to work himself into. He had everything a man in his position could want. His seductee’s favorite Chinese food from her favorite restaurant, a pair of earrings formerly owned by a Pakistani princess in a custom velvet box as a belated Christmas gift, and his best sexy playlist on his phone. If that didn’t get Molly Hollister in bed in an hour, he didn’t know what he’d do. He was pretty sure everything he was doing was overkill anyway. Molly had made it very clear that she intended to be with him when he was ready, but it had taken him longer to get ready than he would have liked. There were some bugs to work out with the vaccine his assistants were making in North Carolina and he had stayed put in Manhattan to work things out with them long distance.
Doctor Justin had gone to great lengths to prove to Molly that he was on a marriage track with the courtship he was pursuing. That meant not jumping into bed with her right away, but making the event especially memorable.
If eighty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry from Sotheby's wasn’t good enough to show Molly he meant to marry her, he didn’t know what would be. Mentally, he planned the next three days they’d spend in bed, and how he’d get the plans the Hollister Foundation had for the world out of her in tender moments. They’d lie in each other’s arms making plans for the future and she’d spill everything to him. He wouldn’t really know what he was going to do until he heard what she said, but it wouldn’t be good. How would he make plans for the future that was coming? Mass human destruction was certain. Stopping it would make him an unsurpassed hero.
Arriving at the Hollister Enclave, Doctor Justin found it easy to persuade the lone security guard to let him by. Molly had probably given notice that if he turned up he was welcome in. To keep up with the pretense that the house was empty, Doctor Justin parked in the servant’s garage and made his way in the back door to the mansion built more than a hundred years before by a wealthy steel go-getter. The smell of the back porch filled his nostrils. The smell of a country back porch is the same anywhere, the smell of home. The kitchen made him laugh. Molly had attempted to do dishes but did not understand how to use the dishwasher or the large drying rack next to the sink, so the kitchen was in humorous disarray. Molly had spread the clean dishes over the counters at odd angles to dry, and draped the dishtowels over the rack to dry them.
Listening carefully, Doctor Justin couldn’t hear any music or the television, so he set out to explore the house, determined to surprise Molly if he could. First he set down the box with all the Chinese takeout containers on a huge butcher block in the center of the kitchen, then he put the bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. He patted his pockets. One to make sure the ivory box was safe, and one to check the earrings he was going to give Molly.
“Look who’s here.” Molly stood in the kitchen doorway in yoga pants and a snug pink tee.
“I couldn’t stay away,” Doctor Justin admitted truthfully. “I knew you were coming back sometime… but I couldn’t wait anymore.”
“Waiting is overrated,” Molly said softly. Her smile was actually lovely in that moment instead of merely catlike. “I smell Soe Chang’s.”
“I brought the duck you like, and the—”
But Molly had already fallen on it, ready to enjoy the food she hadn’t had for weeks. In fact, she adored Soe Chang’s so much that she usually got take out just to avoid making sure they fired someone to keep up with her reputation. Their duck sausage was her favorite though, and she ate two big helpings that she washed down with the Dom Pérignon Doctor Justin had provided. They ate on two tall stools right at the butcher block, laughing and slurping and enjoying every morsel.
“This is probably the best meal of my life,” Molly said when she finally pushed the containers back across the butcher block to keep herself from another helping. “I’ve been eating protein bars and weird stuff for days.”
“I would say that you should just come back to the land of the living, but I’d like to enjoy some time with you here first,” Doctor Justin said. He caressed her hand. “I saw something and thought of you… a small token…”
He knew she’d se
en the earrings before. Their appearance at auction had been huge news in top circles. His assistant, Sarah, had spent hours acquiring them for a special woman, although he’d thought the woman would be Sadie at the time. The intoxicating feeling that came from making a woman so happy filled Doctor Justin completely and soon the two of them were in Molly’s bedroom thrashing about blissfully.
Hours passed with only the chime of the grandfather clock in the hall to mark that time was still moving forward. Molly was relieved to learn that pleasing Doctor Justin wasn’t hard at all. He let her know what he wanted easily without making her feel awkward or dirty. He had an amazing way about him, and Molly knew that no other man would ever measure up to him again. She’d already known that she had to have him, but the intimacy they shared clinched that determination. He was more than the most desired bachelor in Manhattan; he was the only man good enough for Molly Hollister.
The two of them sat by the fire in the early morning. Snow drifted down over the rugged coastal landscape, and the sound of sea birds crying in the gentle storm with the waves crashing on snow covered rocks made the fire even cozier. They drank Louis XIII cognac from small snifters with their robes tucked around them while the snuggled.
“I could get used to this,” Doctor Justin warned jokingly.
“Good,” Molly said lightly. In a joking tone she continued, “You don’t have a choice.”
“There is no choice,” Doctor Justin bantered gently, as if he were a man enslaved with lovesickness instead of fear. He knew it was true, at least to a point. Molly was a Hollister, they were running the world, and the choice was to play along with that and figure out how to circumvent it, or die.
They frolicked in the Maine winter wonderland for the next two days before Molly finally came clean about the future as she could see it. The two of them were at the butcher block eating fantastic sandwiches the guard had brought them and washing them down with a large amount of chardonnay. Doctor Justin asked as casually as he could about how far the Hollisters intended to take Urban Relocation in the next few years.
“The world really isn’t sustainable the way it is,” Molly had told him. “We have to restore as much of nature as we can.”
“How much is that?”
Molly had had a lot of wine, good sex, and the ivory box in Doctor Justin’s robe pocket all put her at ease.
“We’re changing the world back to the way it was meant to be.” Molly shrugged. “There are too many people, they aren’t teachable. They don’t want to live better or take better care of things. That’s what we’re dealing with. The masses yearning to be free are really yearning to be free to trash everything. Hollister Youth Foundation has done a lot of good work in America. There are big areas of the Midwest that look the same as they did a hundred years ago. The affiliates we have in other countries have done even more. Africa is largely depopulated…”
Doctor Justin contained himself and didn’t shudder. What he had learned from Daniel on the Dark Web was that Africa had been reduced to a few major population centers. The virus had been tested there and contained with fire, and huge parts had been restored to wilderness.
“So many almost extinct animals have been cloned and reintroduced to native habitat. There are hundreds of white rhinos and thousands of elephants—”
“That sounds amazing.” Doctor Justin leaned into her with great enthusiasm. “We should go on safari… on our honeymoon!”
Molly shivered with pleasure at the broad hint of a coming proposal. She had felt completely entitled to it, but she was thrilled at him putting it out there without her having to fish for signs of how serious he was.
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to go outside the US or Canada for a bit. Mexico is probably fine too,” she added. “When we set off EMPs so that people can’t communicate while things go down, there might be unintended consequences.”
“Things go down?” Doctor Justin asked softly.
“We just can’t have so many people on the planet.” Molly looked up at him with her deep-set eyes. “There’s a virus coming… and EMPs will go off so that people can’t go communicate with the internet or drive into the country to get away. Then Global Forces will burn the cities, and let natural habitat take over where they were. Think of all the ugly cities built on gorgeous beaches and rivers. Our children will see those places the way they were meant to be seen. The world is going to be renewed.”
“Oh, wow,” was all Doctor Justin could say. It was mostly what he knew already. After removing the vaccination chips that killed the lab workers who examined them, after seeing Blaine Hollister shooting people, human beings, at his Manhattan tower, Doctor Justin had known that the Dark Web information Daniel was finding was not conspiracy theory. Hearing it laid out by a small woman over white wine was still jarring.
“I know it seems like extreme measures, but it’s the only way to make things right again.” Molly was so childlike in her belief that her family was entitled to decimate the planet, and Doctor Justin found that to be the most disturbing part. She was like a wholesome LDS missionary riding her bike around with her friends, convinced of her inherent holiness.
“We should get rid of these cumbersome clothes and get back in bed,” Doctor Justin suggested. He needed to forget what Molly had just told him. Mindless sex would help him calm his racing heart and clear his head. He needed to quit thinking as soon as possible. Quit. Thinking.
“You are a machine!” Molly sighed in deep contentment as her lover got up.
“I am a machine who needs a shower before breakfast,” Doctor Justin told her, exhausted. “Then I’m going to need to sleep after breakfast.”
Molly was glad he wasn’t planning to rush back to the city. He hadn’t been at work in days. His phone had buzzed so much that he had locked it in her father’s safe with theatrical gestures. The beauty of Molly’s pretend death was that no one was looking for him at her family’s estates.
The water was running in the bathroom and Molly’s own phone buzzed from the nightstand drawer. It was Lee Reeves. Crap. At least it was a good time to take a call, so Molly picked it up.
“Please tell me you know where they are,” she hissed into the phone.
“No,” Lee answered with his maddening honesty. Why couldn’t he just tell her what she wanted to hear? “There was an incident with your boyfriend caught on a security tape at Hollister Towers. The lower level where no one belongs—”
Molly thought she might actually explode from frustration. “Are you telling me that you’ve been wasting time spying on my boyfriend while we still don’t know where Maddy and Tilly are?”
“We’re doing everything we can about Maddy and Tilly,” Lee said calmly. “Your boyfriend has a highly encrypted phone. It’s not even registered to him but now that he’s at your house on a Hollister Network we can watch it. Most of the calls he’s dodging are work related, but other encrypted phones keep calling him from North Carolina. Any idea why?”
“He’s a famous doctor, it could be anyone at all—”
“The calls are coming from a private island on the outer banks. It belongs to Lloyd Simpson.”
Fireworks went off in Molly’s brain. She could remember the beach pictures Sugar would post from her grandparents’ private island and how various girls in their class would do anything for an invitation to go there.
“Sugar Simpson’s grandfather?”
“I don’t know all Lloyd’s extended family,” Lee answered. “But I know there are encrypted texts coming from three different well-protected phones from that location—”
Molly dropped her own phone on the nightstand, and it bounced to the floor. Doctor Justin was still showering. As if watching from outside her body, Molly saw herself going to her father’s office and taking a gun from his safe. She checked to make sure it was loaded and walked back to her bathroom with a fury so hot she felt as if her veins were pumping molten lava instead of blood. Molly didn’t know that her father and top Hollister Security were usin
g human targets recently; she had never participated in that. But she had spent plenty of hours at the shooting range practicing on plastic targets and was a fantastic shot.
“Bye, baby,” Molly told Doctor Justin, pulling open the shower door. He turned to look at her. In a split second his smile froze as he saw the handgun she had pointed at him.
“Sugar?” Molly accused him in disbelief. “You’ve been running around with Sugar?”
“No!” Doctor Justin cried. Without thinking, he jumped toward Molly to disarm her, but Molly was well trained in self-defense. Most billionaire women are much more badass than Catwoman, no matter how delicate they might appear. Molly pulled the trigger while Doctor Justin was still mostly in the shower. With rapid instincts she pushed him back into the shower right away so that all his blood went down the shower drain in a dark red spiral.
In a vengeful rage Molly began to gather Doctor Justin’s personal effects for a bonfire. There was a fire pit in the backyard that was almost never used, and Molly intended to destroy all evidence that Doctor Justin had ever been in her family vacation home. She’d get Lee to fix whatever he needed to later, to ensure that no one knew Molly was still alive and had killed America’s favorite doctor. As she tossed his robe into the pile of his things her hand brushed something hard in the pocket. Almost without thinking she picked the robe back up and pulled out a small ivory box.
“He had it,” Molly hissed, her rage building to such a level that she couldn’t find any relief in the fact that she could replace the box back in her father’s Manhattan safe. She’d get a disguise and put it back herself so that no one could mess the job up. Then she was going to North Carolina to deal with Sugar Simpson in a very satisfying way.
Chapter 25
Ancient Times