Light of Dawn

by Vannetta Chapman

  “All right.”

  They walked over to a clearing where workmen had apparently made seats out of the stumps of trees—trees that had probably been downed to make room for the HAB. Max wished for a legal pad to keep track of his growing list of questions. What was this place? Why was it here? Was what they were seeing the explanation for what Stu had heard about? Did it explain the trucks and construction and road crews?

  But there was no road here, only the clearing and the domelike structure.

  They each took a seat on the tree stumps. The March wind was light but pleasant. It was a perfect spring day, other than the fact that Max felt like he’d landed inside an Agatha Christie novel. All that was missing was the dead body.

  Evidence of a campfire sat in the middle of the circle. Everyone took a seat, Paige’s group on one side, Gabe’s on the other. Together they made a motley group of twelve.

  “As I said, I’m Paige Wakefield, the pilot and commander of this group.” She pointed around the group. “That’s Otis Marley, our physician.”

  Otis gave a small wave.

  “Carol Donnally is our mechanical engineer.” Carol was blond, petite, and didn’t look old enough to have a college degree. She had a bracelet tattoo on her wrist inscribed with a guy’s name.

  “Kwan Lee is our aerospace engineer.”

  “And the old man of the group at thirty-eight.” Kwan bowed his head slightly.

  “Janet Barnum is our psychologist.”

  Janet studied them behind designer glasses. She wore her long hair twisted into a knot with a pencil stabbed through it.

  Max glanced at Shelby and knew that she was trying to piece this together as hard as he was. A pilot, physician, mechanical engineer, aerospace engineer, and psychologist. What could these five people possibly have been doing in that HAB for a year?

  Paige sat down and waited. Max made the introductions on their side, keeping it to first names and no descriptions. Then he locked eyes with Gabe.

  As though by silent agreement, Gabe broke the news. “On June 10, a solar flare knocked out the electrical grid.”

  There was silence for a good ten seconds. They were educated people. A thousand possibilities and probabilities would be spinning through their minds as they processed Gabe’s information.

  Paige recovered first. “How much of it?”

  “All of it.”

  Everyone began hurtling questions at once. Gabe glanced at Max and shrugged. There was no easy way to do this.

  “But…are you sure? Wait. That’s a stupid question.” Otis ran his hand through hair badly in need of a cut. “So you’re saying the power is down, and that sections of it aren’t operable even after nine months?”

  “It’s all down.”

  “All…over Texas?”

  “According to the limited data we’ve managed to receive…all over the world.” Gabe laced his fingers together, his elbows propped on his knees. “This is going to be hard for you to hear. Most of the urban centers across the country collapsed in the first few weeks. The Texas government put up a fight, backed by the Texas National Guard, but they lost Austin and have retreated to Corpus Christi. We think the federal government is still in existence, but our governor hasn’t heard from them in months. Some cities…”

  Gabe pulled in a deep breath, stared at the ground a moment, and Max realized how hard this must be for him. There were things that they didn’t dwell on, that they avoided talking about. Now they were having to relive the last year in all its horrific entirety.

  “We have it on good authority that some cities have been nuked. We do not have confirmation of that. What we do know is that there have been mass casualties from illness, starvation, and violence.”

  He stopped and waited.

  And then Paige’s group all started talking at once.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Carter couldn’t imagine being slammed with end-of-the-world news all at once. Of course, it wasn’t the end of the world, but for Paige and Otis’s group, it must feel like it.

  Paige held up a hand for quiet, and everyone settled down, which told Carter they were used to following her orders.

  “Why should we believe you?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  She turned to Carol, the mechanical engineer. “What they’re saying…would we have seen it in the HAB?”

  “We only saw what they wanted us to see.”

  “Who is they?” Max asked.

  Carter didn’t think she would answer, but Paige said, “NASA. We were here on a special mission—” She broke off, staring at the HAB and then at her hands, trying to piece together what had happened, trying to come to terms with their new reality.

  “That’s a biodome. It’s a Mars habitation unit. You were here to, like…practice.” Carter couldn’t resist. It was so cool that he was sitting in front of an actual habitation unit, a Mars simulation facility. He’d only read about such things and seen a few in movies.

  “Yeah, it is. Our mission began on March nineteenth…”

  “A year ago yesterday.” Bianca shook her head in disbelief.

  Lanh leaned forward, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You were in that thing for a year?”

  “Yes. We didn’t step out of it until yesterday. Normally, there would be people to greet us when the mission ended. People from our research team, news reporters, maybe even family members.”

  Carter tried to imagine the disappointment they must have felt, but he couldn’t. Everyone in his group, everyone he knew, had learned to live with disappointment in the last nine months. It had become a way of life, but these people were optimistic a few hours ago, thinking there had been a simple glitch in their schedule. They couldn’t have imagined how the world had changed.

  “No one contacted you?” Shelby asked, and then she pressed her palm against her forehead. “Stupid question. How would they have called you? Of course they didn’t.”

  “But you knew.” Bianca turned to Gabe. “I mean, the government knew. That’s what you told us back in Austin, right?”

  “Our task group knew. The entire military didn’t, and you have to imagine what those hours preceding the flare were like. It was complete chaos, with people scrambling to back up data and take systems off-line before they fried.” He nodded toward Paige. “It’s entirely possible that NASA forgot about you.”

  “Forgot about us?” Kwan asked. “This would not happen. My family would be here. They would come looking for me.”

  “Except the exact location was a secret,” Otis reminded him.

  “And there isn’t any transportation to speak of. Some of the cars work, but it’s hard to find fuel.” Carter regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. These people didn’t need any more bad news. But then again, they’d already been shielded from it for too long.

  Paige jumped up and began pacing back and forth. “They would not forget us. My crew gave up a year of their life to sit inside that sophisticated tent so they could study us like lab rats.”

  She threw an accusing look at Janet.

  “Hey. I was in there too. I was forgotten too. Don’t blame me.”

  Paige was on a roll now. “Why did we do it? So they could read our vitals and our journals and our video logs. So they could assess whether crew members would kill each other if they were forced to live together in a tight space for a year. So we could see if it’s even possible…psychologically…to send a person to Mars. Now you’re telling me that while we were in there, the entire world has—”

  She stopped, unable to find a word to encompass what she’d learned.

  “Changed,” Shelby said. “The entire world has changed.”

  “What about our families?” Otis asked.

  Carter noticed that Carol stared at her wrist and ran her finger over the tattoo while blinking back tears.

  He suddenly felt bad—that gut-wrenching type of remorse you experienced when someone else was hurting but you couldn’t do a thing to
help them.

  “They might be fine,” Patrick said. “Lots of folks managed to escape the cities. As for rural towns…there has been trouble, but we’ve also learned to pull together.”

  Kwan Lee jumped up. “I need to check something.” Without another word, he hurried into the HAB.

  Gabe nodded toward the man’s receding back. “Aerospace engineer, right?”

  “Yeah.” Paige glared at the HAB. “He’s sort of our diagnostician.”

  The group continued to pepper Gabe with questions.

  After five minutes, Kwan came back out, holding a notebook in his hand, which he dropped into Paige’s lap. “There. June 10, just like he said. We lost all power for the night…”

  “We thought it was a test,” Carol said. “We assumed NASA was putting us through the wringer.”

  “But it was real.” Kwan walked slowly back to where he’d been sitting.

  “You climbed to the top of the HAB and replaced the solar cells.” Otis ran a hand up and over the top of his head. “I thought you’d fall, and then I’d be setting broken bones. That was the worst thing I could imagine happening to us.”

  “Why didn’t it fry everything?” Patrick asked. “Not just solar cells, but all of your circuitry boards—they should have been toast. Everything out here was.”

  “This thing is like a giant Faraday cage. It’s built to withstand solar storms from space. The better question is, why did those solar cells fry? They weren’t supposed to.”

  “You replaced them.” Paige was reading through the logbook, turning the page, and then closing it. “You replaced them, and we thought it was a test.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Gabe assured her. “How could you if no one told you? There were plenty of people in high positions who were caught unaware. Some because they didn’t want to believe what they were being told. Others because they had incomplete information. You had incomplete information. How could you have come to the right conclusion?”

  Which seemed to sum things up.

  Paige stood and said, “We need a few minutes. Time to digest this and…decide what we do next.”

  “Fair enough,” Gabe said. “But it’ll be dark in a couple of hours. We either need to leave now or camp here for the night. We try not to travel after dark.”

  “Because?”

  And Carter knew in that moment that they still didn’t understand what the world was like now. How could they? He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

  Gabe’s voice, when he answered, was softer—gentle almost. “Because it’s not safe.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  They spent what remained of the afternoon repacking their vehicles so that they could fit five extra passengers. Paige’s group shut down the HAB and pulled what they needed into go bags. Dinner was MREs—some from the HAB and others from Gabe’s supply—shared between the groups so they at least had some variety while eating around the campfire.

  As they ate, Paige’s group would occasionally throw out a question.

  What was Austin like?

  Where were they going to look for the federal government?

  Did they know anyone personally who had died?

  Shelby glanced at Carter, saw a sadness creep into his eyes.

  But then someone else asked what they’d eaten, which led to stories of squirrel stew and fried nutria. Soon everyone was proclaiming what they wouldn’t eat and what tasted like chicken.

  Paige didn’t participate much in the discussion, and Shelby felt herself wondering what she was worrying about most. Did she have children? A husband? Elderly parents? The commander stood, excused herself, and walked away from the group.

  “I’m going to talk to her.”

  “Maybe you should give her some time,” Max said.

  “Yeah. The problem is, we don’t have time…none of us do. They’ve pulled their stuff together, but I don’t think she’s convinced they should go with us.”

  “They could try to walk south.”

  “To NASA? How far do you think that is?”

  Max scraped one last spoonful of spaghetti out of his MRE. “Four, maybe five hundred miles, depending if they went through Houston or around it.”

  “They have no idea what it’s like out there.”

  “Probably not.”

  “So we have to convince them. I don’t know where they need to go, but they do not need to be on the open road walking across the state of Texas.”

  “What are you going to say to her?”

  “I don’t know. I have a feeling that the rest of the group will follow her lead. One thing is for certain. She’s going to have to make a decision by sunrise.”

  She gave Max’s shoulder a squeeze and then followed Paige to the banks of the Red River. The bridge—the thing they’d been looking for high and low, far and wide—gleamed in the moonlight. It was imperative that the location be secret so that the group wouldn’t be bothered by news columnists or bloggers or conspiracy theorists. Land had been purchased years before, but they needed a back way in. Most of the supplies had come from manufacturing centers in the north. They didn’t want to go through Wichita Falls or any town that size or larger. So the persons in charge of this project had built a bridge in the middle of nowhere, with a dirt road stretching out from both ends, installed a fence and security cameras around the perimeter, tucked their guinea pigs into the HAB unit, and walked away.

  Shelby had a hard time conceiving a secret government project big enough to move the HAB unit, all of its high-tech equipment, and everything five people would need to survive for a year. But she couldn’t deny the fact of the giant dome behind her, the group of five, or the bridge gleaming in the moonlight. As bizarre as this situation was, she wasn’t dreaming it. Shelby stared at the bridge a minute, and then she walked toward Paige, picking her way carefully across the overgrown bank.

  “If you want to be alone, I’ll go.”

  She thought Paige would take her up on that, but then she motioned to the rock next to where she was sitting. “Suit yourself.”

  They sat in the quiet for a moment.

  Shelby said, “I can’t imagine how they built that bridge without anyone knowing.”

  “The government can do a lot of things in secret if they set their mind to it.”

  “Apparently.”

  “There’s no telling how many secret bridges have been built, or underground shelters, or domes…” She turned to study Shelby in the moonlight. “We might not have been the only Mars HAB.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Other mission teams might have started earlier than us, or later. They might step out of their dome in a week or a month and, like us, have no idea they’re walking into a completely different world.”

  Shelby considered that a minute and tried to imagine it in light of all she’d seen since that fateful day in June. “In some ways, you’re right, of course. It is a different world, but in other ways, a lot of things are the same.”

  “Like what?”

  “There are still good people and bad people.” Shelby told her briefly about Hugo and his crew, and then about Mary Jane and Stu.

  “If you hadn’t helped them, you wouldn’t have stumbled upon us.”

  “That’s true. We’d be driving to New Mexico instead, looking for a route around the Red River.”

  “And if we hadn’t walked up to the gate as your boyfriend…”

  Shelby thought about correcting her but let it slide.

  “Was driving away, if he hadn’t looked up and seen us, if he hadn’t stopped…”

  “Don’t spend too much time on the what-ifs. That can make you crazy.”

  “Sounds like you speak from experience.”

  “I do.” Shelby started to explain about Carter but decided it wouldn’t help the woman sitting in front of her one bit. “Look. You’re a pilot, and I’m a novelist. Well, I was a novelist before this happened. So we’re two very different people, but
in other ways I think we must be a lot alike.”

  “Such as?”

  “I suspect there’s someone back home you’re worried about.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “And I imagine you’d do anything to get to them, to make sure they’re okay.”

  “That’s true. But the thing is, those people back there sitting around the fire are my crew. I have an allegiance to them too. My world has tilted, and I’m being pulled in two opposite directions.”

  Shelby took in a deep breath, glanced again at the bridge, and then crossed her arms. “You sort of learn to live with that feeling. Our group is very…tight, but we aren’t always able to be together. Gabe had to leave for a while, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t think I’d miss him.”

  Shelby laughed at that memory, of her worries over what he’d buried in Max’s backyard, of her insistence he wasn’t who he seemed to be. Well, she’d been right, but she hadn’t considered that maybe what—no, who—he actually was might be even better than she’d imagined.

  “Patrick stayed back in Austin. He stayed there because he sacrificed himself for my son, for Carter. I thought having to leave him would tear my heart in two. I thought the agony I felt would never mend, but it did. And when he came back? Well, that was a joy I can’t begin to describe.”

  “But some didn’t come back, right?”

  Shelby thought of Kaitlyn, Bianca’s parents, her neighbor who had been killed in the first week by a carjacker. “Yeah, some didn’t come back.”

  They sat together in silence, the moon rising over the bridge that would take them to Oklahoma, which would lead them to Kansas and maybe the federal government. Ultimately, it was the road that would lead them home, one way or the other. And they’d found it because they’d transported Mary Jo to her son, because they’d helped fulfill a dying woman’s last wish. Fate or luck or God’s hand? Shelby wasn’t sure, but she was willing to start believing in the latter.

  She stood and turned to go, but then she turned back, walked over to Paige, and said what had been on her heart since she’d left the campfire.