Bono didn’t answer.
The Metro train hummed along, sixty feet under the ground, heading to the northwestern suburbs. The two men were quiet. Sam read the advertisements above the seats. Wicked was scheduled at the Kennedy Center downtown. The Washington Wizards were playing at home for the weekend. Not anymore, he frowned to himself.
Upon their return to the United States just a few hours before, the two men had been given two weeks’ leave. Sam needed the time to try to find his family. Bono planned to hop the train up to Baltimore (the closest place he could find where he could still rent a car), then drive like a madman to his in-laws’ place in Memphis, where his wife had taken their little girl after the explosion in D.C. He glanced at his watch again and calculated in his mind. A three-hour train ride to Baltimore. A fifteen-hour drive from there. Eighteen hours to get to his family, if he didn’t run into problems and if he could find the gas.
Eighteen hours to get home, leaving a little less than twelve days to be together with his beautiful wife and the little girl who was the spitting image of her mom.
Sam read his friend’s thoughts by the faraway look in his eye. “Listen, dude, I don’t need you to baby-sit me,” he said. “Go on. Your wife is waiting!”
“She understands,” Bono said.
“You’ve been gone for months! You’ve only got a few days to be with her. What are you doing here!”
Bono lowered his head and didn’t answer.
Sam tried a final time. “I really don’t need you—”
Bono cut him off with a sudden lift of his eyes. “Listen, man, you don’t know anything about your family. You don’t know if they’re alive or if they’re dead. Now, do you really think I’m going to leave you here to do this alone? Do you think I could do that? Come on, give me a little credit. My wife’s okay. She’s alive, man, I know that, same for my little girl. You don’t know about your mom or your brothers. Do you really think I’m going to take off and leave until we know if they’re okay? I’m not like that.”
Bono’s voice was firm, almost hard, and Sam knew it was time to back off.
The two men rode in silence. The train was quiet and smooth and it was easy for Sam to lower his head and lose himself in his thoughts.
Half a minute passed.
Bono kept his head low. “She understands,” he said again.
Sam looked up but didn’t say anything.
“My wife understands I have to help you.” Bono seemed to be talking to himself. “She wouldn’t leave you to do this alone. Neither one of us would.”
Sam looked away and swallowed as he watched the passing subway tunnel’s cement walls and flashing blocks of yellow light.
“Thanks, Bono,” he whispered after a minute had passed.
“Sure thing, dude.”
Sam glanced at the rows of multicolored plastic benches on his left and right. The subway car was clean and almost completely deserted. Most of the outlying Metro lines that ran around D.C. were still operating—only the lines that ran to or through what used to be downtown had been destroyed—but few people had the guts or a reason to ride the subway anymore. Sam shook his head, amazed at the fact that the Metro ran at all. Mussolini would have been proud: The downtown district was destroyed, a quarter of a million people had died, the government was hardly working, but the trains were running and were running on time. He laughed at what he considered a fairly pointless gesture of public relations, knowing it was a fabrication mostly for the benefit of the citizens who lived outside of D.C.
Give us a few weeks and we’ll have everything back in order. Things will be the same soon. Just give us a little time. That was the government line.
But no one was buying it.
Everyone knew things would never be the same.
He shifted his eyes to the back of the Metro. A large black woman sat near the door, her dark eyes closed, her hands clutching a leather handbag. Sam could see a bulge from the inside of the handbag and guessed what it was—many of the people who dared to venture out now were armed—and he touched the 9mm Glock strapped under his military jacket. A black man stood on the other end of the Metro car, his dark suit a striking contrast to the dirty running shoes on his feet. Walking had become the norm for the survivors of D.C. and no one wanted to hike for miles in dress shoes.
So it seemed that the people were adjusting—walking shoes or boots with suits, backpacks and briefcases with food and water instead of laptops and business reports, cash in their pockets, white masks across their faces to keep back the smoke and dust.
The train rolled gently into a turn, the underground tunnel lights slipping by. Although the car was nearly empty, Sam was happy to stand; he’d been sitting for most of the past fifty hours, in military terminals, on board crowded aircraft, inside military vans. The last thing he wanted to do was sit.
Bono looked up and asked, “How far is it from the Metro station to your home?”
“Couple miles.” Sam nudged the military backpack at his feet. “Nothing but a brisk walk through the park.”
An identical backpack rested against Bono’s knee. Sam and the lieutenant were prepared for pretty much anything. They had food, water, guns, passports, military orders, nightsticks, a change of clothes; they could get by on their own. At the next Metro stop they would hoist the backpacks, start out at a gentle jog, and be at Sam’s parents’ house within sixteen minutes. An eight-minute-a-mile pace, loaded with guns and packs. No problem for either one.
Sam adjusted his combat fatigues. The camouflage design was tight and small and much greener than the pattern on the camouflage uniforms that the soldiers used to wear. He reached up and fingered the single lieutenant’s bar on the right lapel of his jacket.
Bono watched him. “How’s it feel?” he asked.
“About the same,” Sam shrugged.
“But it isn’t the same, Sam. You’re an officer. You’re the leader. Your men will be watching and following you.”
“I’ll do the best I can, Bono.”
“I know you will. Which is why I pushed for the battlefield commission. The men already follow you.”
Sam pulled again on the lieutenant’s bar.
“Your dad would have been proud.”
Sam nodded slowly. “Roger that,” he said.
“Your mom’s going to be proud too. When we find her and your brothers, they’re going to freak. Lieutenant Samuel Brighton. She’s going to think that’s cool.”
Sam pressed his lips together and nodded. “I think you’re right,” he said.
The train pitched suddenly and the locomotive engine rolled back. The cars decelerated, and the men had to grab the handhold to brace themselves.
The train continued slowing.
Then the lights went out.
It grew very quiet.
Pitch dark spread around them as the train rolled to a complete stop.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The emergency lights kicked on, illuminating the Metro car in yellow light. Sixty feet underground, the electrical circuits on the train had been protected from the enormously powerful surge of deadly power that
had just burst down from the upper atmosphere, leaving the Metro’s batteries and emergency lighting circuits intact to illuminate the cars.
For a moment, no one moved. The train was still as stone. The woman kept her seat, looking around in bewilderment. She clasped her bag even tighter, and Sam wondered briefly what precious thing she kept inside. The black man at the back of the Metro car turned toward them. Sam and Bono stood in place.
Five . . . ten . . . twenty seconds of silence. Everyone expected the normal car lights to come up and the train to lurch forward and resume traveling again at any moment.
A full minute of silence passed before Bono turned to Sam and asked, “How often does this happen?”
Sam shook his head. “Never,” he answered quickly, nodding toward the emergency lights. “This isn’t a delay or traffic problem. This train shut completely down.”
The black man swore and thrust his hands into his pockets. Sam turned to him. “You from around here?” he asked.
The man hesitated, then nodded.
“You always ride the Metro?”
“Every day until the big one.”
“You ever had this thing shut down like this before?”
The man shook his head.
Sam turned to Bono, then moved toward the emergency telephone at the back of the car. Bono followed him and listened as he spoke. The conversation was very short.
“What’s up?” Bono asked when Sam replaced the red handset.
“Conductor says it’s just a momentary delay.”
Bono shook his head and looked at the dim emergency lighting around him. “I don’t think so,” he said.
Pushing by Sam, he picked up the phone receiver. No numbers or buttons to push, just a direct line to the conductor’s station at the front of the train. “This is Lieutenant Calton,” he said, his voice commanding, “United States Army Special Forces. You’ve got two soldiers back here on official leave and we need to know what’s going on.”
Sam turned away and pulled out his cell phone. Flipping it open, he saw there was no signal. He turned to the black man, who had pulled out his phone too. “Can you usually get a signal here?”
“Yeah,” the man grunted. “They put cell relays through most of the Metro tunnels. Some of the tunnels out in Maryland, you can’t get a signal, but here in Virginia you always could.”
Sam looked at his cell phone again. Searching for signal flashed across his screen.
Bono hung up the phone, moved toward him, and lowered his voice. “Conductor says they’ve lost all electrical power.”
“On just this train?”
“No. The entire grid.” Bono looked around. “The whole system has shut down.” He leaned a little closer. “He says he can’t get a hold of anyone upstairs . . .”
Sam shook his head in rage. “Another nuclear detonation!”
Bono caught his arm. “I don’t think so. It makes no sense to bomb a bunch of rubble. And we would have felt it, some kind of vibration, a noise, our ears would have popped from the surge of pressure through the tunnel. No, we would have had some indication if there’d been another detonation. This has to be something else.”
Sam was moving to his backpack. Bono turned to the other people in the car. The black woman was standing now, her eyes dark and pleading. “Listen to me,” he started, “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what you should do. The conductor told me they have lost all power through the electrical grid. Right now, he can’t get in contact with anyone up top. You probably ought to just stay here. Someone is going to come along eventually. If they can’t get the train moving, they’ll send rescue units down.”
The black man watched Sam hoist his pack onto his back. “You’re telling us to stay here,” he countered, “yet I see you’re bugging out.”
“I’m not telling you to do anything,” Bono answered. “I don’t know any more than you do, and I don’t have any authority to tell you what to do anyway. I’m just saying if I were you I’d probably stay.”
The man looked suspicious. “What aren’t you telling us!” he demanded.
Sam slid Bono’s pack across the floor, and he reached for it. “I’m straight up with you, buddy. I’ve got no reason to lie. And I’m not telling you what to do or even giving you advice. But think about the situation. We’re, what . . . three or four miles from the next station? We’re underground. It’s going to be dark. I don’t know what the track does up ahead. Does it narrow? Will another train come? If they restore power and we’re touching the third rail, are they going to find us smoking like a barbecue on the Fourth of July? You make your own decision; I’m just saying that if I were you I’d probably stick it out here.”
Sam tightened his pack and moved toward the door. Prying with his fingers, he forced one of the doors back. A warning chime started sounding overhead. He held a flashlight in his hand.
The man’s forehead creased into a scowl. “You say it’s too dangerous out there to make it on our own?”
“I’m saying you should do whatever you think is best.”
“But you’re going out there.”
Bono shrugged. “We’re Army Special Forces.”
The man stared, but didn’t answer.
Bono didn’t need to say any more.
* * *
Sam held the flashlight, keeping the beam low enough to illuminate the way for both him and Bono, allowing them to move with only one light. They stood on a narrow, blackened, cement walkway that ran parallel to the heavy tracks. They looked left and saw nothing but a black hole as the subway tunnel extended behind them. None of the other passengers had gotten out of the cars. They turned and started walking toward the front of the train. The curb was narrow and the wall scraped Sam’s shoulders as he walked. He pointed the flashlight forward. The train extended into the dark, each car illuminated by the emergency lighting. Sam noticed that the boxy lights built into the walls of the cement subway had grown dark. A few of the passengers saw them and pointed as they walked by. Seven cars ahead, they reached the electric locomotive. The engineer sat in a small booth behind a thick window. Sam stopped beside the engineer’s station and the conductor pushed the window back. “Get back inside the cars. Help is on the way,” he said.
“You’ve talked to someone?” Bono asked.
The engineer hesitated. “Not yet. But it’s just a matter of time. And let me tell you something, boys, you don’t want to be in the tunnel when the trains start to run. You know how many idiots get killed like that every year?”
Sam nodded down-track. “How far to the next station?”
“Farther than you can walk before the trains start running again.”
“How far might that be, sir?”
“Don’t be stupid,” the train driver shot back. “You go wandering off down the tracks and you screw it up for all of us. If we’ve got people on the tracks I have to report it. That means they shut the whole line down. Which means we’ll all have to sit here until Metro Security runs you two boneheads down and gets you off the tracks. Now go on, get back inside the car, and we’ll be out of here in no time.”
“You really think so?” Bono asked him.
The driver hesitated. “Of course I do.”
“I think you’re kidding yourself,” Bono answered. “I think you know we’re in deep do-do here. I think you know we’re going to have to find our own way out. You just haven’t quite come to grips with that yet. But think about it, sir. No communications with anyone upstairs. No power of any kind anywhere on the grid. Your entire system shut down. This isn’t a matter of changing a circuit breaker and getting back on our way.”
The engineer grunted but didn’t say anything.
“How far to the station?” Sam asked again.
The driver thought, then answered slowly. “Three miles. Maybe a little more. Hope I don’t run you over as I go speeding by.”
“We do too. Now good luck to you, sir.”
The soldiers turned, tightened the chest straps on their backpacks, and started running. Sam held the single light and they stayed close together, sharing the narrow beam as they ran.
Their breathing was heavy but evenly paced as they settled into stride. Sam checked his watch, estimating the time until they emerged at the station.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Interstate 65
Fourteen Miles Southeast of Chicago
Sara moved through the deep darkness toward the black woman and put her arm around her shoulders. The silver beads at the tips of her tightly braided hair glistened in the moonlight. Ammon and Luke stood back, relieved
to have their mother there. “My name is Sara Brighton,” Sara said, holding Mary’s arm. “Can you tell me who you are?”
The black woman stiffened under Sara’s touch, glanced toward her quickly, but kept her head low. Her guard instinctively up, she took a suspicious step back, aware of Sara’s pale skin shining in the dim light. Her mother, a good Christian woman, had taught her from the time she was old enough to walk that all were God’s children and she had no room to judge. But a lifetime of hard conditioning and bad experiences had also taught her to be careful when it came to people not of her race.
Then she thought of her sick daughter, and her fear of the strangers was quickly swallowed up. “My name is Mary Dupree,” she answered softly.
Ammon stepped forward and shook hands, introducing himself with a smile, feeling the weak tremble in Mary’s fingers. Luke waved a hello.
Mary studied them: Luke in his baggy shorts, sandals, and T-shirt; Ammon in Levi’s, hiking boots, and dark jacket. Nice-looking boys, she thought, but not city kids, that was certain.
“I was down in Columbus,” she explained as she turned back to Sara. “I have a little girl. She’s very sick.”
“Sick? You mean like with the flu or something?”
“No, ma’am.” Mary stopped and cleared her throat. “I wish that’s all it was. You don’t know what I would give . . .” Her voice was very quiet now. “No, ma’am,” she repeated, straightening her back, “my baby’s suffering with cancer. We were down at a special clinic for her last treatment, but the doctors wouldn’t even do it. They said that it was too . . .” She stopped once again, looking off. “Too late,” she concluded.
Sara listened, understanding, her mouth hanging open in shock. Ammon turned to Luke and gritted his teeth in sympathy, unsure of what to say.
“Where’s your daughter now?” Sara asked.
Mary pointed behind her. “Back in my car.”
“And your husband? Is he with you?”
“My husband passed away ten years ago last Tuesday.”
Sara noted Mary’s immediate remembrance of the date. She now knew from experience what that meant. “I’m sorry,” she answered quickly before turning to Ammon and Luke. “Guys, we need to help Mrs. Dupree, don’t you think?”
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