“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 . . .”
Book Three
Fifty-Eight
Eighteen months after the impact, Ester Thorn and Harold Shipman were visiting a former shopping mall in Honolulu. It was now a facility for growing hydroponic rice. The horticulturalist giving the tour was a brunette in her late twenties named Sandra Hayes, and it was plain to both Ester and Shipman that she was very proud of the facility she had helped to create.
“And the best part,” Sandra was saying with great alacrity, “is that we’ll be able to harvest three crops a year.”
“Three?” Ester said, stopping to lean against her cane. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” Sandra said, smiling brightly. “And there’s no reason we can’t duplicate this facility all through the Islands. You don’t need a giant building like this either. Any building can be converted in this same way, and not just for growing rice. The volcanic soils in these islands are excellent.”
“What about the lighting?” Ester asked. “Most of these bulbs were made specifically for growing food indoors, were they not?”
“Lighting continues to be the one problem,” Sandra said, turning glum for the first time. “We only have a limited number of them on the island, and though regular fluorescent bulbs can be used, there are still only so many of them available. So unless we can find a way to manufacture lighting domestically . . . we will eventually have to return to the mainland and see if there are any department stores still standing.”
Ester turned to Shipman. “We’re still up against it, Harold.”
“One step at a time, Ester,” Shipman said calmly. “We’ve made an awful lot of progress in a year and a half and these indoor facilities have already begun to contribute.”
He turned to Sandra, asking, “Have you worked with the mushroom farmers at all, Miss Hayes?”
“No,” she said. “I know Bobbi Pouha from the university in Manoa, but we haven’t really been in contact since the big push for indoor farming last year. I know that she’s very good. She knows her shrooms, that’s for sure.”
Shipman chuckled. “I understand they’ve had a couple of setbacks. I was wondering if you knew anything about that.”
“I believe those were mostly climate-related,” Sandra said. “And I think they’ve got things straightened out. Fungus can be tricky.”
“I don’t know how anyone can eat it myself,” Ester said. “But I’m glad it’s going to be available. We’re only
a month ahead of our food demand.”
“I honestly think we’re going to be okay,” Sandra said. “At least for the next couple of years . . . and who knows? We may have sunlight by then. The sky has begun to clear some, even though most of us still need a light meter to tell.”
“Thank you very much for the tour,” Ester said. “I’m going on the closed circuit television in a couple of days, so I need to collect all the good news I can.”
“You’re very welcome,” Sandra said. “Please come back.”
During the drive back to the motel where Ester lived on the top floor, she sat staring out the window at the dead palms along the road, the brown landscape. Hawaii had been pretty lucky in terms of snow. Not a great deal of it had fallen, and what little had accumulated melted once the temperature rose into the forties during the second summer. They were heading into their second winter now and the average temperature was closer to thirty-five.
“The Navy has been after me about an expedition to the mainland,” she said with a sigh.
“You’re still opposed to the idea?” Shipman asked.
“They’re asking to disconnect one of the carriers from the power grid, the idea being that they can fit more men aboard and bring back more supplies. Which I’m not entirely opposed to, but it would mean asking Honolulu to cut back even further on its power consumption, and people have become somewhat spoiled these past six months. Not to mention that the crew would need to take a large portion of the dry goods we have in reserve.”
“But the general public isn’t aware of that reserve. The Navy’s kept it under lock and key belowdecks. What does Hadrian think about the idea?”
“He’s not opposed to it,” she said. “But he’s suggested sending a destroyer first to reconnoiter the shoreline, dispatching shore parties all up and down the California coast.”
“What about Boxer?” Shipman asked.
“Who?”
“Not who,” Shipman chuckled, “it’s a what—the USS Boxer. It’s a small aircraft carrier meant for helicopters and amphibious landing craft. And it’s not nuclear powered.”
“Which must be why the Navy hasn’t suggested it,” Ester said, perturbed. “That Longbottom is trying to hoard his fuel for the big war he thinks he’s going to have someday with God knows who. Well, that’s what we’ll do, then. We’ll send the Boxer and one destroyer escort . . . Oh, and the volcanologists are already after me to send an expedition to find the impact crater. Have you heard this insanity?”
Shipman smiled. “Yes.”
“Like we have the time and the resources to mount such a frivolous expedition.”
Shipman chuckled. “Is this the same Ester Thorn who got so angry with the government thirty years ago for refusing to allocate more money to keep an eye on the Great Beyond?”
“Oh, shut up, Harold. It’s not even remotely the same.”
“How can you say that? You’re a scientist.”
“The U.S. government had more than enough money to fund such a project, and it would have directly benefited mankind—which was exactly what I told them!”
“Well, I can’t argue that point,” he said, glancing at the dead countryside.
“Allowing them to mount an expedition like that now wouldn’t be any different than sending them to the gallows.”
“Well, you know geologists, Ester.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “And I understand their desires, but they’re just going to have to wait until we’ve gotten these islands more than a couple of weeks ahead of our food consumption. I wonder what old Longbottom’s going to say when I tell him to send the Boxer out. You know, Harold, I need a liaison to the Navy who I can trust, someone to tell me about things like the Boxer so I know what types of resources we truly have.”
“That person may be tough to find,” Shipman said. “Longbottom has a pretty tight rein on most everyone who knows anything about their internal affairs.”
Fifty-Nine
With the siege a distant memory, the silo population was preparing to celebrate their second Christmas belowground. Forrest and Kane had both recovered from their injuries with minimal hearing loss, and Emory’s baby was quickening nicely, still nursing regularly at her breast. Erin was unquestionably the baby’s mother, however; Emory behaved as little more than nursemaid to the child, and was already being referred to as Aunt Shannon.
The installation remained secure. The antenna array was raised every morning so the men could watch the countryside with the robotic camera, and lowered each night after dark. Thus far there had been no further signs of life aboveground. It did not snow a great deal over the summer, but no more than half the snow had melted, and flurries began to fly again with the coming of autumn.
The rat population now stood at thirty-five mating pairs and, amazingly enough, was still a secret kept among the men, Melissa and Emory the sole exceptions. The food stores were holding out better than Forrest had any right to expect, but he knew that by late March they would have to begin incorporating rat meat into their diets if they were to stretch the rest of the food through the summer—which meant it was time to start letting the rats breed at will, and they still hadn’t figured out what to use for cages. So far they had partitioned off four empty fifty-gallon fuel drums cut down the middle, but the little critters were escape artists, so Danzig and Kane had an almost full-time job just keeping them wrangled. Fortunately, the loss of the bay’s first blast door provided an excuse for keeping a man on duty within the cargo bay at all times without raising suspicion.
Ulrich tossed his pen down and sat back from the console with a brief glance at the monitors. “No matter how I crunch these numbers, Jack, we’re down to rat meat and the occasional tomato by the first of September. And we still don’t know what the fuck we’re going to do for breeding cages. The little sons of bitches can chew through damn near anything.”
“Okay. So maybe we need to forget the rats altogether,” Forrest said, thinking they might need to make a break for it before the food ran completely out. “Those figures of yours don’t include the MREs, do they?”
“You ordered me not to, so no, but each truckload only buys us an extra month at one MRE per day per person, which isn’t exactly a feast.”
“So, come the first of September we load into the trucks and roll south with the MREs.”
“South to where?”
“Maybe Altus Air Force Base.” Forrest grinned. “Marty seems to think it’s teeming with geologists.”
“That’s a pretty huge maybe, Jack, and we’ll only have a month to find a safe haven.”
The door opened and Erin came in carrying Emory Marie Ulrich, named after her birth mother Shannon Marie Emory, though everyone called her Emmy. Laddie got up from where he lay on the floor near Forrest’s chair and sat watching as she offered the infant to her husband.
“Would you hold Emmy for a little bit, honey? I need to eat.”
Ulrich sat up straight in the chair and put out his arms. “You mean with all those women out there you can’t find anybody else to hold her?”
“Everyone else is eating lunch,” she said. “It’s not going to hurt you. You are her father, right?”
Ulrich accepted the baby with a nod, and Erin smiled, kissed him on the lips and left the room. “That’s a buncha bullshit,” he grumbled. “Those broads fight over this baby.”
“She wants the kid to know you’re her father,” Forrest said, scratchi
ng the dog behind his ears. “What’s wrong with that? You’re supposed to be doing this for your wife. Remember?”
“Oh, shut up,” Ulrich said, holding the baby delicately, almost as if he were afraid of hurting her. “Pretty thing, though, ain’t she? I can’t believe Shannon still doesn’t want her.”
“She’s got reason enough,” Forrest said. “Marty told me she went through some pretty heinous shit. Maybe not as bad as Liddy and Natalie, but bad enough.”
The two women they had freed from Moriarty—Liddy and Natalie—were neighbors before the asteroid, and their families had been captured together in a basement by Moriarty’s men. Both women saw their husbands and children killed and eaten over a period of weeks, and if not for their mutual support of one another, Forrest was certain they would have killed themselves by now. Even after eight months of safety belowground, they rarely left one another’s side, as if still afraid of being violated. Michael doubted they would ever completely assimilate, both women still suffering from severe post-traumatic shock and horrible nightmares.
The baby began to fuss, so Ulrich stood from the chair and took her for a walk in the halls, talking softly to her and hoping that one of the other women would offer to take her off of his hands, but none of them did, and he began to suspect a conspiracy. There was no sense in trying to find out for sure, however. The women had grown thick as thieves over the last eighteen months.
He found Melissa in one of the blast tunnels, one of her favorite haunts, where she sat reading a book. He had not seen her working on the code for a few months now and was glad she had finally given it up.
“Good book?”
“It’s okay,” she said with a shrug, leaning against the steel bulkhead, knees drawn up. “Nothing great. I’m reading the ones that look boring first.”
“Good plan. Hey, wanna hold the baby for a while?”
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