by Noah Mann
“Sit,” one of our captors said as his partner pulled out two chairs.
Schiavo and I lowered ourselves into the seats and looked across at the dark-haired woman as the men who’d brought us to her withdrew into the shadows.
“My name is Lana,” she said.
Lana...
No more than that. And delivered in a crisp feminine voice, accented by time or lineage in some faraway land.
“Where did you take Sergeant Hart?” Schiavo demanded.
“Colonel Schiavo, relax,” Lana said. “There is nothing to worry about. Nothing.”
“Then tell me where he is,” she pressed.
Lana studied Schiavo for a few seconds, sizing up the woman as though contemplating a rival.
“You don’t have to do that anymore,” Lana said.
“What?”
“Lead,” Lana answered.
“We were brought to you,” I said, interjecting myself into the exchange. “What do you want from us?”
Now she considered me, though her expression belied that there was no feeling on her part that I was anything approaching an equal.
“You made your way out to my ship,” Lana said. “I wasn’t going to be rude.”
“Your ship?” I challenged her.
Once more she focused on me, a hint of displeasure at the flash of insolence I’d expressed toward her.
“Please be mindful of the fact that I could have ordered you shot down,” Lana said. “Shot you right out of the air when you first found us. Or when you came back. Or blown your cute little boat out of the water when it came alongside.”
“If you park a ship like this near us and announce your presence, you have to expect a visit,” I said. “You weren’t that hard to find.”
Her shoulders shrugged slightly, not agreeing or disagreeing with my statement.
“For you, maybe,” she said, her gaze shifting between Schiavo and me. “For others, the few that there are, I’m not so sure. There’s something...special about you. About Bandon. You’re...”
She had difficulty dredging whatever word she sought from her lexicon.
“Resilient,” I said.
“Defiant,” Schiavo added.
Lana considered that, then shook her head.
“It’s more than that. You’re all so...precious.”
Schiavo and I glanced at each other, then looked back to Lana, who seemed to be stifling a chuckle.
“You all still believe,” the woman said, a quiet exasperation filling her now.
“In ourselves? We absolutely do,” I said.
Behind us a door opened and a young man, no older than Carter Laws appeared, walking past us and around the table with a tray in hand. From it he set a plate of food and a glass of red wine in front of Lana before withdrawing, not a word or a look exchanged between them. The door closed again with a heavy metallic clunk a few seconds later.
“Thank you, Nicholas,” she thanked the servant in his absence. “Dinner time.”
She began to eat, cutting into one of the juiciest steaks I’d seen in ages. Between bites she drank from the rich burgundy beverage in her glass.
“It’s a shame you can’t taste any of this,” she said as she continued feasting.
“What about them?” I asked, chancing a glance behind into the shadows where her guards had withdrawn.
“I wouldn’t do that,” she admonished, pausing with a forked piece of meat near her lips.
In that darkness behind Schiavo and me I heard a hushed rustle. The sound of a weapon being raised. Our hockey-masked captors were apparently deadly serious about their duties.
“Fletch...”
Schiavo’s soft warning drew my attention back toward Lana.
“Where was I before this delicious repast was delivered?” she asked, drinking and thinking for a moment. “Right...belief.”
She almost spat the word as us, putting the fork and knife down next to the unfinished steak, keeping the glass in hand as she considered us with a harsh, almost hateful pity.
“Believing got us all to where we are,” she said. “Believing in God, in government, in humanity.”
“So you believe in nothing,” Schiavo said.
“Of course I do,” Lana said. “I believe in the end.”
“The end of what?” Schiavo asked.
“Us,” Lana answered, sipping her wine again.
I understood right then. Understood what she was, if not who she was. An apocalypse freak. One who’d likely reveled in the appearance of the blight, and who’d marveled gleefully at the devastation it had wrought.
“Your accent,” I said. “You’re not American.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “I am not.”
“Where are you from?” I pressed.
“It’s that vague European manner about me, isn’t it?” she asked, not expecting, nor waiting for, any reply. “The edged tone and the subtle lilt in my voice.”
I thought for a moment on what she’d said, and how she’d said it. The subdued accent was hard to pin down, but, when taken with what she’d revealed and what we’d all learned about the origins of the blight, a realization rose quickly.
“You’re Polish,” I said.
She smiled.
“You’re very observant,” she said. “Or is it intuitive? Did you guess, or did you know?”
“You were there,” I said, sidestepping her counter questioning. “When it started, you were there.”
“More than that,” she replied, coyly withholding further explanation.
“How so?” Schiavo asked, joining the almost genial probing.
“I was just a girl who took a walk in a potato field near Warsaw and emptied a vial,” she said.
“You,” Schiavo said, the accusation almost breathless.
“You worked with Borgier,” I said.
Borgier. The French Foreign Legion officer who’d developed a cult of personality. Who’d groomed a cadre of soldiers and followers who worshipped him. He’d bankrolled and protected the Iraqi scientist who’d developed the blight, and its human equivalent, BA-412. That he was actually an American named Gray Jensen was no secret.
“He thought I did,” Lana said. “I suppose we both had our motives. His mistake was believing that he could gain power through the chaos that would come.”
“And you?” Schiavo asked.
“We had hopes,” Lana said, then sipped from her glass, the deep burgundy wine disappearing past her lips. “Misplaced as they were.”
“Hopes?” I asked, almost past caring what the woman had to say.
She finished what remained of the wine and put the delicate glass down, staring at me for a moment with a grin that reeked of disdain. And pity.
“What?” I pressed her.
“Four Twelve,” she said.
Four Twelve...
How many times had I heard that number? That term. And what it represented. Where one had wiped out all plant life on the planet, the other would have done the same to what was left of the human population.
Those simple arrangement of digits and letters tied me inexorably to my friend. To Neil. He, though, had apparently hidden the only sample of that virus somewhere without telling a soul how to find it.
Not even me.
“We couldn’t obtain it,” Lana said, hinting at disappointment for the first time since we’d been face to face with her.
“You wanted to release it,” I said. “The blight was only the appetizer to you.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Lana said, almost dismissive, as if the exchange between us had run its course from curiosity to tedium. “A handful scattered here and there. Twenty in Australia, a hundred across the whole of Russia.”
“We have estimates that there are millions left,” I told her.
Lana shook her head.
“Your estimates are wrong,” she said. “Fewer than twenty thousand living, breathing human beings are left.”
That number would
have comprised a medium-sized town in the old world. Now, she was saying that was it.
“You have no way of knowing who’s alive and where,” I said.
“Do you know what I did before all this?” Lana asked. “What I did when I met Borgier? I was director of the United Nations Permanent Committee on Population and Sustainability.”
A U.N. bureaucrat. How appropriate, I thought. A functionary with apocalyptic ideals embedded within a world body that, prior to the blight, had become an institution riddled by corruption and fecklessness.
“Borgier had many contacts with people in positions of power,” Lana said. “So, yes, I used his openness to authority to my own ends.”
She’d played the role of some double agent for her own purposes. Siding with Borgier to gain access to the blight. She might have even urged him to deploy it, and volunteered to be the one to release its hell upon the world. All this to curry his favor in hopes of acquiring the even more devastating BA-412 virus.
“If you’re throwing out your involvement with the United Nations to sound legitimate,” Schiavo began, “don’t bother.”
“An exclusive club of the global elite who pulled strings for the benefit of a very few,” Lana said, nailing what many had come to believe about the once promising organization. “I can confirm that is quite true.”
“Is that damning praise?” Schiavo challenged her.
“No,” Lana answered. “It’s just that you might want to know that I was as surprised as you when the whole damn thing actually began to function as it had been intended once the world started to crumble. These petty men, and most of them were men, they coalesced around finding some way to recover from the blight. And one thing necessary to that goal was determining exactly where the survivors were.”
“A census,” I said.
“Exactly,” Lana confirmed. “We worked on that even as the numbers still working at the United Nations dwindled. As staff and those they served succumbed, to famine or the bouts of violence that swept every capital. Every major city.”
“Every minor city, as well,” I remined her.
“Which made a survey by ground impossible,” she said. “Most was done by air, through satellite imagery, or government knowledge. One place, through all this, its name kept coming up—Bandon. This quaint little town on the American west coast where people were actually making it. Where the population was increasing. Everywhere else, it was the reverse. Where everywhere else death was the norm, life came to your town. It flourished. Even when obstacle after obstacle came your way.”
She regarded that fact for a moment with subtle wonder.
“You became known among what passed for world leaders,” Lana said. “Praise was lavished on you from afar. Supplies were sent to assist you.”
She picked up the empty wine glass and tipped it over, a few drops of the beverage dripping out.
“That’s all over now, thankfully,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Schiavo asked.
Lana smiled, withholding for effect.
“You said over,” Schiavo pressed. “What’s over?”
The woman stood from where she’d sat, just stood, not moving, the table with her mostly finished meal between us. It seemed to me a statement, the posture she took. She was free to rise. We were not. The shotguns pointed at our backs from the shadows enforced that.
“Your delivery service has been terminated,” Lana said, still smiling.
“The Rushmore,” I said. “You sank it.”
She chuckled now, mostly to herself.
“That’s funny?” I challenged her.
“Your limited imagination is,” she told me.
“Enlighten us,” Schiavo said, more than a hint of a challenge in her words.
“You think that you’re alive because of the Rushmore?” Lana asked, part incredulous, and part angry. “You really believe that some resupply chain has kept you going?”
“It hasn’t hurt,” I said.
She shook her head at my quip.
“You’re alive, all of you, because of all of you,” she said, as if leveling a heinous charge against us. “You’re thriving. You’re growing. You’re the seed that humanity regenerates from.”
She settled back into her chair, her expression gone slack.
“And that can’t be allowed to happen.”
Her motives, and the end game associated with them, were beginning to come into focus. And she was now more than happy to let us in on what the future held. What our future, or lack thereof, held.
“Two ships were loaded with the movable weapons from the strategic stockpile of the United States of America,” Lana explained. “Two carriers. The Eisenhower and the Vinson. The powers that be at the time didn’t want any of these bombs and spare warheads just lying around for the taking once everything went to hell. The ICBMS and the subs were secure enough, they figured. But the things that could be loaded on a truck, or van, or an aircraft...that spooked them.”
“So they put them on a pair of carriers to sail around until things calmed down,” I said. “That’s what you’re saying?”
She stood again, moving this time, walking around the table to a place where she leaned against its edge, closest to me.
“Yes,” she confirmed.
“And you gained control,” I said. “Just like that.”
She savored my doubt for a moment. It seemed to nourish her sense of superiority. She knew things, and we didn’t. Parceling out morsels was her power play.
Along with having control of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
“Eric, how many people do you think sailed on this ship when it began its final mission? It would normally have over five thousand, but how many were present for this most momentous voyage?”
“I have no idea,” I told her.
“Seventy-three,” Lana said, cocking her head a bit to appraise my appreciation of that number. “A skeleton crew. And among those, Eric, how many do you think had it in their heads that the cause was already lost? That we’d finally gotten what was coming to us as a species after what we’d done to each other, and to this beautiful planet?”
Like minds, I thought. That was what she was talking about. It was how she, and her ilk, had taken control of the Vinson and, if she was being truthful, the strategic weaponry it held.
“Seven,” Lana said, answering her own question. “Ten percent of the crew. I wasn’t aboard then, but it must have been a beautiful thing to witness those brave sailors dispatch their brethren. The other vessel was similarly taken.”
At that moment, it would have been most appropriate to blurt out ‘You’re mad!’ But, other than the dramatics of doing so, there was no point. Whether she was insane didn’t matter. She’d staked out an insane position, adopting the ideology that the human presence on earth had become caustic.
“I came aboard over a year ago,” Lana said. “Just off the eastern coast of South America. That was when we began our preparations. Which you saw on your way in. We built our own little utopia in the bowels of this ship to sustain us until our final victory. The Eisenhower was prepared in the same way.”
“Your utopia is dying,” Schiavo said.
“Everything does,” Lana agreed.
“Like all those people we found at the end of ropes?” I asked.
Lana drew a breath, considering something, it seemed, then she stepped away from where she’d come and returned to her place on the opposite side of the table. She did not sit, though.
“Have Nicholas come back in,” she said past us.
The door opened, and thirty seconds later closed again. The young man who’d served her approached and stood facing Lana.
“Nicholas, are you ready?” she asked him.
The bottom suddenly fell out of my stomach.
No...
“I am,” Nicholas told her.
“Are you sure?” she probed. “You choose the time.”
“This is my time,” he assured her.
> Lana smiled and nodded and reached behind her back, retrieving a compact, stainless steel pistol. She held it out and Nicholas took it.
“Don’t,” Schiavo said, sensing exactly what I was.
The young man looked at the weapon, then ensured that a round was chambered. He thumbed the safety off and took two steps back from Lana before tipping his head back, opening his mouth, and slipping the barrel in.
Both Schiavo and I let our gazes settle on the tabletop as the young man pulled the trigger. The thud of his body hitting the floor announced that he had joined the others who’d ended their lives aboard the Vinson.
“There,” Lana said.
Schiavo and I looked up.
“That’s barbaric,” Schiavo said. “He was almost a child.”
“He was ready to go,” Lana said, sitting again. “Soon the rest of us will join him and the others.”
“The others,” Schiavo said. “Like the ones dead at the end of ropes? Or blown up by their own hand?”
“Or gunned down by you?” Lana prompted, smiling.
“You sent them after us knowing they’d lose,” Schiavo said. “They were just fodder.”
We stared at her, knowing exactly what the grand plan was now. What her grand plan was now.
I also realized what she’d already done.
“The Eisenhower sailed to Hawaii,” I said. “Didn’t it?”
Westin had reported that some burst of energy had been detected at a great distance. Hawaii, the distribution point of our supplies, lay far from Bandon in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Or it had.
“You didn’t just sink the Rushmore,” I said. “You blew up the islands.”
“A few dozen megatons will do that,” Lana said.
The purpose of what we’d experienced also began to fall into place.
“You had to keep us from talking to Hawaii,” I said.
Schiavo let out a shallow breath, the realization hitting her as well.
“If they report the arrival of a carrier, and then we lose contact, your presence would draw a response,” Schiavo theorized.
“We couldn’t have you spot us and do some kamikaze run with an explosive-filled plane,” Lana said. “Sinking us a hundred miles off shore would be such a waste. But...”