00:05:00
. . . and the sting of the wound slashes me, gouging deep into my stomach, oozing slowly inside . . . but it’s nothing to me . . .
. . . not compared to . . .
Her.
She doesn’t smell like perfume or roses.
She doesn’t smell like anything.
Her mysteries and magic and pheromones washed away—like my home, which was so far down in the dark until this very moment.
The hard, beautiful sight of her flooding back on me like a fast tide, overwhelming my senses all at once . . .
00:04:00
Toni.
Your face hovering above me, your real face.
The silken trace of your nose, the long black glass of your hair, eyes green and beaming.
I love you so much.
I’ve searched the whole world over to find you.
I suffered in the dark, I gave up everything—or would have—just to claw my way to this moment.
You are beautiful like no other woman is beautiful.
You are everything.
“Hello, darling,” she whispers.
And her voice is as clear as crystal.
My love, forever.
She stands above me, her white gown glowing in the dark.
Beautiful.
And her voice is real.
Not some hallucination, sniping at me from the brink of death. Not a lie oozing through my damaged mind, like the slow blood dripping from the wound in my guts. Real. My logical mind swims just outside of this, screaming at me to get up. I struggle with my legs.
She shoots me again.
00:03:00
My right knee explodes as the bullet tears in.
I go down.
“I’m so sorry, Elroy. I can’t let you do it.”
I realize it was her final bullet that took down Burke. I realize she was waiting, just in the shadows, to see if we could break this machine. I realize that she is going to kill me. I realize . . . somehow . . . in a place of utter hopelessness and despair . . . that it makes sense. I ask her if she became Jenison’s woman, if she was always Jenison’s woman, and she nods her head slowly.
“She’s my mother.”
00:02:00
And it all comes clear.
The photo in the nightclub.
Jenison telling me about her daughter.
Her daughter.
My wife.
Everything I ever was, I did it for her.
Everything we ever did, we did it together.
And she always belonged to Jenison.
Belonged to Resurrection.
“You were my life project,” she says. “My assignment. My love. You don’t understand how many of us there are, how deep it all goes. The power people like us represent. When you knew the truth, you came to destroy it.”
“I came . . . for you.”
“I know you did . . . but this . . . all of it, all around us . . . is what we were destined for. Since we were children. We were trained to guard the new future. To watch over all these people.”
I see the chamber behind her again, as she motions to it, her hand steady and unshaking. The stasis tubes. Thousands of men and women, waiting there, floating in their artificial wombs. Waiting for everything to be destroyed. So that they can make it all better again a million years from now.
My whole life was about building this.
“I was the first to volunteer. The first to go into wet sleep. And I was the first to come back when your attack began. My mother brought hundreds of us up from the tubes. There wasn’t time for more. She wanted me to run with her, but I wouldn’t go. She abandoned Resurrection, but I stayed. Because I knew you would come. And I knew if you saw my face you would finally understand.”
She looks back at the endless chamber.
All filled with dreamers.
“Elroy . . . they must be protected. They must live, and their children must live after them. Otherwise, we are not immortal creatures. Do you remember when I said that to you, all those years ago?”
Yes.
And I loved her for speaking to me that way.
Loved her for making me into what they wanted me to be.
For running where they wanted me to run.
Where she ran, always.
My whole life.
A project.
And I never even knew it—never knew I was destroying the world, never knew I was looking right into my wife’s face when I was looking at Jenison, even in that bottomless moment in the hotel lobby when my mind was almost gone.
“This is crazy,” I tell her, hardly finding my voice. “Please tell me you’re lying. Please tell me it’s not true . . .”
“I can’t tell you that,” she says to me, and her voice is cruel and strained, like some distant accusation that never quite reaches my ears. Insane and lost.
Just like me.
“Toni. Please. I love you.”
“I know,” she says to me, as she raises the gun again, right between my eyes this time. “I love you, too.”
00:01:00
The gun shakes in her grip.
Her mouth trembles, like an angel at the gates of Resurrection. Like an ordinary woman, my woman, staring into the eyes of her entire life. A life spent reporting to a mother I never knew. A life spent seducing and deceiving people, like David Hartman. A life filled with secrets.
Not a life at all.
A lie.
A cruel, endless lie.
00:00:30
She smiles at me sadly. And I can see that she is crying at the end of her lie. At the end of everything.
And she says:
“Oh, my love . . .”
00:00:20
The gunshot booms. I spin. Something hits me in the head—right where the bullet came years ago—and the sound of metal-on-metal gongs me into a place between worlds, crashing in my skull. I fall on the floor. Almost fall into oblivion. Struggle to see her through the ripples of pain and the burning of steel in my head.
I see her re-aim.
She aims carefully.
But the next bullet doesn’t go between my eyes—it doesn’t even come from her gun.
00:00:10
I see a beautiful red flower bloom in slow motion across her breast.
She teeters on her feet.
And Heather shoots her again, stumbling up on one knee.
I see the two of them face each other.
Both of them bleeding on their feet.
My one true love, times two.
00:00:05
My wife falls first, the gun still in her hand. Heather screams at me, but her voice is way down low. I have to type in the last number.
I have to do this or the whole world dies.
00:00:04
My fingers hover over the keyboard. A few seconds is an eternity to a guy like me. Heather careens and falls, choking on blood.
The numbers are gone now. They left me. I can’t find them.
I reach up and touch my head.
The dent in the plate, where her bullet came and went.
00:00:03
All over now. All of it gone. I look back into the dark canyons and I see nothing. My wife gave me everything, and now there’s . . .
Nothing . . .
00:00:02
My fingers fall.
I fall with them.
Like I’m in a dream.
The tears streaming down my face.
00:00:01
I lie on the floor, next to you, my love.
This is our last moment.
We are resurrected.
Now.
00:00:00
25
00000-25
AFTER THE APOCALYPSE
I’m sitting in the comfy chair, thinking about what almost happened.
Thinking about a lot of things.
How my wife came out of the dark to call my whole life a lie, and how another version of her stood up to save me from it. How we almost went d
own to Armageddon, the three of us. How I crawled to the surface again.
I try not to look back.
It wasn’t easy at first, but it got easier.
It’s been a long time now.
• • •
I could have died down there, and I was real lucky again. At first, I didn’t want to be. I woke up in the VA hospital and the colonel was there. He said I was a son of a bitch and that I should be arrested. Then he shook my hand and said I’d done my country a great service—that they could never truly repay me. He never even mentioned his boys in the cellblock—those guys I beat up trying to escape.
And I looked the colonel in the eye and told him I had no idea what he was talking about.
He told me the recall code had gone out with just a few seconds left on the clock. The men in our submarines never acted. Two of the W79s were damn near cut loose from one of the computerized silos in Kentucky, where a power surge prevented the numbers from getting through. A strike team stopped the missile launch manually, but the warhead still detonated because someone didn’t cut the right wire. There’s a crater nearly a mile wide in the middle of Lewisburg right where that happened.
A nuclear accident, they called it on TV.
Acceptable losses, the colonel called it to my face.
I thought maybe it was a miracle at first. That I had failed us in that final moment, and that something else had saved us—maybe Heather, before she went down. Then I remembered my fingers falling on the keyboard, just before I joined her, thinking I was dead. I remembered what my sensei once said about muscle memory. My fingers figuring out what they had to do, even though my mind was shot.
Not a miracle at all.
Goddamn.
The colonel said I could have anything I wanted as a reward—like I was the winner on a game show or something. And I told him I didn’t want to be a hero, didn’t want anyone to know what I had done. All I wanted was to have my wife back again. For real, this time. The way we were, before all this insanity. Before we both went crazy, and fell before separate gods. I wanted the lie back. I wanted my love back.
I wanted to know I’d never been a part of any of this.
I said all that to him, and he had no idea what to say to me. No idea how to repay me for what I’d done. So I cried some more. Cried myself to sleep again and hoped I’d never wake up.
But I always wake up.
Always the last man out.
It was supposed to be this way, I guess.
The bullet to my head was like a hit from a cannon. It kept me dizzy for weeks. It also took forever for my lungs to be rid of the fluid I was breathing when they pulled me out. My leg was the worst, though—held together with steel pins and braces for nearly three months. I almost lost it twice. I got real tired of doctors explaining how lucky I was. My brain was still there, most of it anyway. That was the miraculous thing, they said. I almost wish she’d taken it all, or at least the memories.
Funny thing is, I still can’t remember the numbers. She took the numbers and left me the memories. The lie of my entire life.
The apocalypse was mine, not the world’s.
Burke was right about the serious people they had on their damage-control teams. There were major media leaks about the battle—on cable and on the Internet—just like I thought there would be. And just like Burke said, they were pinched up tight within hours. The cover story about the so-called accident in Kentucky was used to spin it all. It became one of the biggest news stories of the last two centuries, in fact.
The kicker: nobody knew what it was really all about. Not even a little bit.
That wasn’t the hard part, they said.
The hard part was tracking down the bad guys in the aftermath. They told me that the key figures behind Resurrection were never apprehended. My wife was telling the truth, at least about that. She’d stayed behind with only a skeleton crew when they all ran. Jenison knew her people would lose, standing toe-to-toe with the entire United States military, even if we failed to abort the countdown . . . which also meant she was nothing but a coward in the end.
Someone who ran away from her own new world.
But Toni was also right about it being bigger than I could imagine.
These people had built a machine more immortal than anything they could have buried down in that hole. A machine grinding away just beneath our own reality, recruiting the young, making them work for the common good, even if they had no idea what the common good was. It took them decades to build their garden of Eden, and we were stealing the cash they needed to do it that whole time—me and my father.
My entire life I was asleep.
And I did it all for her.
While the world on the surface of civilian humanity mourned the dead people of Kentucky and righteous indignation broke out in the Senate about newer and more effective safety measures within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the colonel’s extraction teams found miles of sealed tunnels leading everywhere under the primary Resurrection bunker, a million places to run, all carved out of that mountain over a period of twenty years, by people who knew they would need methods of retreat eventually. They left behind more than two thousand men and women who’d been kidnapped from society, sealed inside miniature subterranean neighborhoods that looked like shopping malls. A few of them were true believers. Most of them weren’t. Some had tried to escape and failed, policed by the same young soldiers who died to defend the underground metroplex. I thought that was really funny. Kind of a last laugh on Jenison’s new world order—the children she’d hoped would father the next generation, who would all be scared into obedient submission by the image of my own crucifixion, burned forever on video.
None of them bought it. They were all just slaves.
Captured animals on an ark going nowhere.
I still wonder what might have been, had the bombs actually gone off. What that new world would have looked like. And what the next rebellion against Jenison’s insanity would have brought.
The more things change . . .
They found the wet sleep level, too, where I was, with the computers. Another fifteen hundred people there, preserved in dreaming liquid stasis. They might have remained there for decades, had they been allowed to. But they never found the guys who ran for the tunnels, not right then. All they found of the enemy were bodies. The official head count from our assault on the bunker was a hundred and seventeen. That’s how many men stayed behind to defend the end of the world. All of them teenagers. All of them soldiers. Every one of them dead because they believed in a lie their elders told them. Their elders who all ran.
Except my wife.
I like to think now that she stayed behind when her mother brought her up from wet sleep because she wanted to be with me in those final moments, not because she wanted to see me die. I like to think that it was seeing me that made her do what she did, in the end. Made her not pull the trigger to finish me off in that long moment, before she was blown away by her doppelganger.
She could have shot me dead.
I like to think she loved me, and because of that love, she didn’t kill me.
I like to think that.
And then the truth floods in, and those thoughts turn to madness.
And the madness turns to roses.
The smell of her, lingering like a punishing fog, deep in my mind.
The colonel’s name turned out to be Gerald Maxwell. A high-up member of the Special Forces brass who served for half a decade as an advisor to the CIA, during their investigation of Resurrection. He led the hunt for the men and women who escaped the bunker that day for almost six months. They still have military teams combing the world, searching for the other fortresses made by Resurrection. A lot of the smaller ones were found and blown back into the stone age—just like Maxwell said. No mercy was shown to the survivors, what few there were. Most of those guys were pawns.
A lot more are still out there.
Private depravos with cash to burn, still wait
ing for the sky to fall.
A few of the key conspirators were eventually found and arrested, living under assumed names, some of them in other countries. A few more stayed in the game, moving fast and cutting new deals with the underworld. None of it ended up on YouTube. None of it ever broke the surface of the real world as even a whisper. They did it all behind the scenes, beyond locked doors—and they cut off every loose end that could have led to the truth. I knew that meant they might come for me one day.
But the colonel just shook my hand and said I was a hero. Said I could have my life, once I left the hospital. Never say a word, kid. We’re counting on you.
Yeah, right.
I knew when I walked free, there would still be eyes on me. It was gonna take every skill set I had to make those eyes blind—to really slip through the cracks and go unnoticed in the wake of so much cloak and dagger. I would work it out. But I’d always be looking over my shoulder, even in my most private moments.
Then again, maybe I would need those guys one day.
I told the colonel that if they ever found Jayne Jenison, I wanted in on it. That I wanted to look her in the eye. Just something I had to do. He understood what I meant. I never heard from him again. I left them and never looked back, never asked for anything. That was the smart thing to do.
It’s been a year since the day of Resurrection.
A year is a very long time.
I’ve been very busy.
• • •
“People are strong,” said the woman who saved my life. “Stronger than we ever think. We’re both living proof.”
She said that to me on the day I first saw her again, in the hospital. That was six weeks into my recovery, when I couldn’t get out of bed for any reason, my leg trussed up in traction. She walked through the door on crutches and I smiled at her, wondering if I was seeing a ghost. And that was the first thing she said—that people were strong and we were living proof. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.
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