Protocol One

by Jacqueline Druga

  The reporters really weren’t that big of a deal. The worst they had behaved was when Gwen’s affair was discovered and they wanted to know what I thought. How ridiculous. Gil didn’t pull a Hillary Clinton. He left her, campaign trail or not. White House aspirations be damned. He left her.

  Best move he ever made.

  People loved him.

  I still loved him. Not like the reporters believed. But I did. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be playing his crazy game of scavenger hunt shopping.

  The current list of items would take me several hours of shopping because I just couldn’t go to one store and buy thirty rolls of foil. So I went to different stores in different towns. I was positive people thought I was a nut job.

  Foil, toilet paper, zip lock bags. Good thing the reporters didn’t know what I bought or else they’d be thinking I was a hemp dealer supplying poor people that made their own pipes.

  One time I lied at the store and said I was buying alcohol for my niece’s wedding because I had to order twenty gallons of vodka.

  Oddly enough, a special delivery man picked up those boxes.

  I had purchased so much stuff over the previous six months, that I lost track. It was almost like my job.

  Often I wondered why Gil just didn’t have someone order directly from the distributor. But I guess it would have been odd. Thirty rolls of aluminum foil a week over the course of six months would hardly be noticed, but some private citizen ordering seven hundred might send up a flag. Why, I didn’t know.

  My last stop of the day was Glicks Grocery. Six rolls of foil, two canisters of salt, and four bags of bleach tablets.

  Macy was working the register. She was always pleasant enough but was that nosy cashier who tried to guess what you were making for dinner by what was purchased.

  I knew she was going to say it.

  She did.

  “More foil?” She shook her head with a smile. “Never seen anyone buy so much foil. If you aren’t careful people are gonna think you’re doing some sort of drug ring.”

  Damn Gil, I thought. We eluded the press long enough on my weird purchases. If they got hold of it, then what?

  Quickly and figuring if I didn’t know better why would she, I covered. “Actually, to be honest, a friend of mine is a scientist and he’s using it for some sort of space thing.”

  Her hand paused over bagging the item. I thought she was going to call me out on my tale. Instead she said. “For real?”

  “Yep.”

  She leaned over to me after looking around. “Is he one of them guys?”

  I lowered my voice. “What guys?”

  “The smart ones that they are asking for help.” She pointed.

  I didn’t look to where she pointed. Not knowing what she was talking about and not wanting to find out more, I simply said, “Yes.”

  “I knew it. Someone was going to do it.” Then Macy started speaking quickly as she scanned each item and bagging them after. “Is he making one of them space kites to try to fly it off course? You know land it there and let the solar winds take it? I saw it in a movie once, and thought it was brilliant, but who am I? I’m not a scientist, your friend is.”

  “True.”

  “For a while, I was searching the net and I couldn’t find anything legitimate about it. You telling me this is the first legitimate verification I heard of. But then again, if it was made legitimate, things would be crazy.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Not like it’s a secret, people know. I guess if the government claims they leaked it through one source or another it can’t be said they are covering it up.”

  At that point I gave up. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Again, she pointed, only this time I took note. She was pointing to the rack of tabloid magazines, then asked. ‘Do you have your Customer Appreciation card?' in a complete change of subject.

  My eyes were immediately drawn to the headline on the black and white always over the top and sensationalized tabloid called ‘World Inquisitor’. For some reason it didn’t make me laugh or scoff. It sent a scary feeling through me and I didn’t know why. I grabbed the magazine and handed it to Macy.

  “This is a good one,” she rang it up and placed it in the bag. “Seventy-three, twenty-two.”

  I handed her the card.

  5 – Blissful Ignorance

  I sat in my car parked just outside of Glicks reading that tabloid as if it were the Holy Gospel. Instead of laughing at the ridiculous possibility of it being the truth, it burrowed deep in my mind. What was causing my actual belief? Nothing about it should have. I mean, bigger than the ‘killer comet’ story was the headline piece about the President secretly hiding his alien child. It was the most outlandish tabloid out there and yet, there I was reading it.

  The worst of the worst, the one people buy to laugh at.

  The article talked about Dempsey’s Comet, or D114 as NASA called it, was a comet twelve miles wide. It was twice the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. It told how for decades they knew it was coming and the governments of the world decided, since there was nothing that could be done, they were hiding it.

  Claude Fleishman, German astronomer was getting the word out. The comet was going to hit first week of September and it would strike Alaska. The picture of him did look like something from 1950’s and sitting there flipping through the tabloid, I realized how insanly I was acting at that moment.

  Surely something that toted ‘Bigfoot made me his love slave’ wouldn’t be the sole reliable source of a doomsday event.

  What made me react so intensely?

  It was then I realized it was because Gil was being so secretive about why I was shopping and what I was preparing for. His lack of quick quizzes made me think it was something we covered before or something there was no preparing for.

  Why wouldn’t he tell me?

  It didn’t bother me before. In fact, I never took him seriously and believed him to be overly cautious. This time though was so different, why hadn’t I noticed?

  I had to be overreacting and I had to put my trust in Gil. He would tell me, eventually. Maybe the notion of what he was preparing for was so outlandish he was embarrassed to tell me about it.

  I told myself to only do the crossword puzzle and word search in that tabloid and no more. It wasn’t worth my time and energy. Yes, there was something Gil was worried about that was brewing on the horizon, but it certainly wasn’t the news bomb dropped by the tabloids.

  I set the magazine on the passenger seat. I had bigger things on my mind. Like getting the items home and put away in the garage. I had all weekend and I would ship them out Monday. There was a pizza out there with my name on it and Friday Night Fights was on pay per view.

  As I started the car and reached for the gear shift, my phone rang.

  It was Gil.

  “I thought you had a speech,” I answered.

  “Are you still out shopping?”

  “Unfortunately, what do you need?” I asked. “More foil?”

  “No, no, we have enough foil. I need you to go to three different hardware stores and get three, five gallon gas cans at each of them.”

  “Okay,” I said the word. “And those are gonna be odd to ship.”

  “You aren’t shipping them. In time you’ll be filling them and using them. But don’t fill them yet.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” I said with some sarcasm. “Gil, listen. I am grateful for all that you are doing and you’re preparing me for something, I …”

  “Anna, I have to go.”

  “Listen, Gil, I need to know …”

  “I really have to go, Anna.”

  Click.

  “And he hangs up.” Shaking my head, I tossed the phone to the seat. “Go get gas cans, fill them later, to go God knows where. But, apparently I’m driving there.” I said to myself, put the car in reverse and instead of getting that pizza, I went back out shopping.

  6 – Knowledge

 
; Five gallon gas cans were bulky enough, but fitting nine of them into a mid size car was next to impossible. Let alone one already containing an obscene amount of aluminum foil.

  I couldn’t see out my back window and was glad the reporters were gone when I arrived back home. Surely they would see the gas cans and come to the conclusion I was some sort of pyromaniac.

  To be on the safe side, I parked the car in the garage figuring I’d get Jackson to unload it later.

  “Finally,” Jackson said, when I walked in. “You were gone forever.”

  “Blame your father. He sent me out again.”

  “Man, Dad is really amping things up. Pizza is on the counter. Still hot, it just got here.”

  “Thanks.” I walked to the kitchen. “And the stuff Dad has me getting isn’t the normal stuff like batteries, water and so forth. It’s odd stuff.”

  “Except for the dehydrating.” Jackson said. “He always asks you to do that.”

  “Yeah, well, the dehydrating is me. I figured I’d get a jump on it before he asked.” I opened the box and grabbed a slice of pizza. “I need a drink.” I went to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer. “Hey, Jack, why would you father need marijuana?”

  Jackson laughed loudly, almost sounding as if he choked. “What?”

  I took a sip of my beer. “Weed, marijuana, you know. You mentioned hemp when I said about the foil.”

  “Mom, it’s not weed. You’re buying foil for survival. The first thing that came to my mind was HEMP.”

  “The drug.”

  “Not, hemp. H, E, M, P. It stands for High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse. An EMP. You know, knocks out all power. Kills all electronics. A HEMP is bigger. It can knock out a country. Aluminum foil, theoretically can protect electronics. Knowing that Dad is always thinking of what next big thing can hit, I just logically went with that.”

  “Why didn’t I?”

  “Mom, you thought I meant a drug when I said HEMP.”

  Immediately, pizza and beer in hand, I raced from the kitchen.

  “Where you going? The fights are coming on.”

  “I’ll watch the replay. I have research to do.” I went to my room which was right down the hall, set my dinner on the nightstand and grabbed my laptop.

  I opened the internet browser. Jackson hit it on the head. It had to be an EMP, but if so, why was I shipping the foil out? Why was I getting gas cans for my car?

  I started to research HEMP and the use of aluminum foil. Sure enough, Jackson was correct. It theoretically was a safeguard. Part of a safe guard, there were other steps. But from the amount of foil I had purchased, there were a lot of electronics Gil planned on covering.

  I did about an hour of research on what would cause them and how they occurred. Typically they would come from a high altitude burst of a nuclear weapon. The sun could even be responsible, but on a huge scale? I started to go to the next step of my research, knowing if I stayed on line much longer, my EMP would take me to the sun, which would in turn take me to videos and I’d end up watching something completely off the spectrum of my original research.

  But that didn’t happen. The sun led my curiosity to that supermarket tabloid and for the hell of it, I looked up Dempsey’s Comet.

  Sure enough it came up. But like Macy had said not a single story was from a reliable source.

  Doomsday comet set to hit earth.

  NASA and other countries secretly prepare.

  Russia and United States fail to deflect the comet from its course …

  It was that story, the one about an attempt to change the trajectory of the comet that caught my attention.

  That story on a site called Prepper something or other stated that six months earlier the top secret attempt failed. Six months.

  It had been six months since Gil started me shopping. With each passing month, the items grew stranger and orders grew larger.

  The initiative in the United States was led by the Vice President. And a ‘source’ close to the Vice President stated that the VP was already making survival plans for his own family.

  His family included Gil’s ex-wife.

  While all of it was wild tales spread on the internet by typical conspiracy sites, it made sense to me that Gil would know since he was married to Gwen at the time of the failed attempt.

  The laundering of survival supplies was his way of assuring it didn’t go back to him because he was probably sworn to secrecy.

  My mind raced. I was as bad as the conspiracy sites. Again, I pondered my state of sanity. Was I really making conclusions based on a supermarket tabloid, the word of a nosy clerk and the sensationalism of internet blogging?

  Stop.

  I was buying foil. That was a fact. The EMP theory was a good solid guess. I went back to that and while I was at it, I added the word ‘comet’.

  Sure enough, one of the effects of a comet impact was an immediate EMP ripple effect that would circle the globe.

  I guzzled my beer. For the first time, it dawned on me that whatever Gil planned for had to be huge. It was much bigger than a earthquake bug out bag.

  Beep.

  The alert from my phone caused me to jump and I looked to see a text message from Gil.

  ‘Why is there a story on MNN that you claim I am the love of your life?’ he wrote.

  Thinking, ‘what’? I replied, ‘Maybe if you didn’t call me eighteen million times a day’. And then I went directly to the MNN website.

  I groaned when I saw the story.

  Jenner’s Wife Claims She Still Loves Him. Can they rekindle the romance just in time for the White House?’

  “Seriously?” I said out loud. “And look at some of these comments.” I couldn’t believe what people wrote. That I was looking for a meal ticket and that I only wanted him back because of the power. I wanted to comment as well. But I didn’t.

  I simply sent another message to Gil. ‘That reporter took what I said out of context’

  Beep.

  ‘Stop talking to the press. And I need to make sure it is clear the only connection we have is our son. Period. We have no lost love. I cannot have you connected to me.’

  I felt a little insulted. ‘Sorry if I kill your image.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know why.’

  I spoke to my phone as if he could hear me, “Really, Gil? I know why? No, I don’t. Tell me why.”

  And then I typed. ‘Is there a killer comet headed to earth?’

  I waited for the beep. I waited for another ‘don’t be ridiculous’ message. Instead I got nothing. No reply. Just silence.

  Gil didn’t respond to my later texts and any attempt I made to call him went directly to voice mail.

  I was left alone with my beer, laptop and raging imagination. The combination wasn’t a good one.

  7 – The Messenger

  June 28

  I barely slept. It was worse than when I was waiting for the season finale of one of my shows, dreading the death of a favorite character. Saying I was neurotic was an understatement.

  Maybe it was because Gil didn’t give me any helpful survival tips or quizzes. He only gave me a shopping list.

  But this felt right. For the first time I had a sense of urgency and doom about something. Then again, it could have been from the lack of sleep. I spent the night learning ways to survive a comet impact.

  In reality, there was no way to survive a twelve mile comet slamming into earth. One could try, but post impact would be nearly impossible. I had no way of knowing how to prepare, what to buy and even if I did stock up, I could very well be sitting at ground zero. In that case, I was dust.

  Nowhere in my research did I find that aluminum and cardboard were essential to building a comet proof shelter.

  In an odd occurrence, I heard only once from Gil. A text message.

  ‘Shopping is done. Distance must be drawn. Do not text or call. Delete please.’

  Was he kidding me? There was something about that text that made me angry and scared
. Never had Gil been so mysterious and never had Gil cut off contact.

  It was as if he left me hanging. Like I uncovered the secret and because I knew, I was out.

  My neurotic thoughts were fueled.

  I found myself turning on the news to see if they showed him, to look at his face and see if there were any signs of concern.

  Nothing.

  Gil had on his candidate smile.

  By evening, I drew the line. I decided I was going to go see a movie. I invited Jackson, who declined because he had to finish his project and really wasn’t in the mood to watch the type of movies I liked.

  That was fine, I’d go alone. I was used to it. I definitely would pick a movie no young people went to. There was nothing worse than that feeling of teenagers staring at you, the odd older chick who pathetically was alone in a movie theater on Saturday night.

  I finished the dishes, slapped on a light dose of makeup and had just changed my clothes when Jackson knocked on my bedroom door.

  “Come in.” I called out.

  Jackson opened the door. “Nice try, Mom. But you have to venture out on your own some time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Tony is here.”

  “Who?”

  “Ha, ha. Tony.” Jackson pointed back. “Your date, the one you tried to get me to tag along on. He’s in the living room waiting.”

  “I don’t have a date. Oh my God.” Immediately, I yanked Jackson into the room and locked the door. “Oh my God. Your dad is a presidential candidate. It’s an assassin!”

  “Mom.” Jackson laughed. “He doesn’t look like a killer.”

  “Would you let him in if he did?” I moved left to right in a panic and then raced to my closet. “He’s here to kill us. Call 911!”

  “Mom …”

  “Never mind, just be ready.” I reached up and grabbed my gun case from the top of my closet. I fiddled with the lock on the case.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Being brave.” The gun case popped open.