Resurrection America

by Jeff Gunhus

  She clutched her chest, gasping for air, trying to remember all the symptoms of a heart attack. The rational part of her brain tried to reassert itself, calling the reaction for what it was, a textbook example of a panic attack. That realization brought a little comfort that she wasn’t about to drop dead on the floor in cardiac arrest, but she still couldn’t catch her breath, and her body shook from the overload of adrenaline.

  With Rick captured, it fell onto Cassie’s shoulders to keep moving forward and figure out how to stop whatever madness Keefer had planned. But she’d thought the task ahead of them was nearly impossible when she and Rick were working together. By herself? It was absolutely suicide.

  She felt her resolve give out. What would it accomplish to throw her life away? All the people in the mine would still die. Keefer would be left unchecked. The only difference between her following the drones down the tunnel and turning around and running back to the exit was in one scenario she was dead and in the other she was alive.

  Maybe filled with guilt, but alive.

  Cassie turned and faced the exit. She could be out of the tunnel in five minutes. Then she could try to salvage the Blazer. If it was too wrapped in the fencing, she would just hike into the woods. Work her way back toward the town where she could hide out in one of the houses on the outskirts. Just wait it out.

  She took a few steps toward the exit. The decision felt good. She started to walk and she felt almost giddy with the decision. It felt so right. She wouldn’t needlessly throw her life away. Maybe she could find a radio or something to warn people. If there was even the slightest chance of her being able to stop Keefer, then she would try. But it wasn’t possible. Not by herself.

  Then again, she’d heard Rick tell Keefer that she was dead. The fact that the drones weren’t tasked with a thorough search of the tunnel all the way back to the entrance indicated he believed the lie. Being dead had its benefits. It meant they wouldn’t be looking for her so she could escape the tunnel more easily. But it also meant that she had the element of surprise if she continued toward the lab.

  With surprise on her side, and if the soldiers were in the same kind of frenzied activity as she’d seen in the town, then maybe … just maybe …

  She stopped again, hands clenched at her side. A wave of guilt washed over her and she shuddered. She closed her eyes and pictured the hundreds of people lying motionless in Town Square. She saw the trailer where the soldiers had put all the little kids, babies even, dozens of them. If she walked out of the mine, she knew those faces would be there every time she closed her eyes for the rest of her life.

  She thought of Rick. If the roles were reversed, would he hesitate to go forward? To try, no matter how small the chance was for success? He’d run up the tunnel to draw the drones away from her. Rick had given her a chance and there she was ready to squander it.

  As in so many stressful times in her life, it was her father’s voice that came to her. Clarence Baker had been a physics professor at MIT, a giant in his field. He’d nurtured his daughter’s own genius, careful to push rather than shove her toward excellence. A proper man, Cassie could only remember hearing him swear twice in his life in front of her. The first was the day she’d defended her doctoral thesis at Harvard at the age of twenty-two. Her father knew that science and academia remained a male-dominated world. He knew the people on the board were the old guard who still thought women didn’t belong in science. He’d waited silently with her in the hallway before they called her in. But before she stood to leave, he’d taken her hand and looked her in the eye. She’d expected the same soft encouragement he always delivered, but there was fire in his eyes this time. He squeezed her hand and said, “Show these assholes that Cassie Baker doesn’t take fuck all from anyone.” After that, the dissertation board didn’t stand a chance.

  The only other time her father said those words to her was from his bed in St. Luke’s hospital, the day before he died from cancer. But they were words she’d repeated to herself a thousand times in her head. They were the touchstone she used her entire adult life. And she heard them now.

  Stick these assholes.

  Show them that Cassie Baker doesn’t take fuck all from anyone.

  Before she could let doubt creep back into her mind, she turned and ran deeper into the tunnel, toward where Rick had disappeared, going as fast as she dared until her hand trailing the wall felt raw from the friction.

  45

  Rick felt the eyes of his armed guard boring into him. The two men walking on either side of him clearly didn’t like him. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was an outsider that had successfully breached their security, or because he’d killed one of their own. He figured it was probably a little of both. And, frankly, he didn’t give a shit.

  He sized up his options. This wasn’t like the movies. There was no way he could suddenly throw an elbow into the guy’s face on his left and kick the guy on his right in the groin, take one of their weapons and shoot his way to freedom. Not that he didn’t fantasize about doing exactly that, even imagining how it might be done and evaluating his chances of survival.

  He gave himself a fifty-fifty shot if he engaged them, pretty good odds considering he put his overall odds of surviving the next few hours at zero. The real problem wasn’t the men. It was the armed drones flying in front of him, casting three laser-targeting beams, red dots that danced on his chest as he walked. He was targeted for execution if he made an aggressive move. That brought his chances down to nothing.

  The soldiers had explained the drone was back on full auto, dialed into the highest setting. I wouldn’t sneeze if I were you, man, one had cautioned him. I’ve seen a drone blow off a man’s head halfway through a sneeze. God bless you does nothing to fix a hole in your head. The men had chuckled at the story, typical dark humor for soldiers, then shoved him forward.

  The emergency tunnel ended at an enormous freight elevator. The metal gate slid open and they followed the drone into the space, large enough for fifty or sixty men at a time. It made sense. If there was ever a need to use the emergency exit, there would be a lot of workers who needed to get out in a hurry. Transporting them ten at a time wouldn’t work.

  He searched outside the elevator for any sign of Cassie following. Nothing. He was glad she wasn’t foolish enough to get too close, but he hoped she wasn’t lying back in the tunnel immobilized with fear. It was an unexpected plus to have them think she was dead and have her inside the security perimeter. He just hoped she held it together and that she was the computer genius everyone thought she was.

  The elevator ride was short and went downward. He wasn’t surprised as he knew the lab was on one of the deeper levels of the mine, but he’d assumed a rescue shaft would have been near the lowest part of the mine. But it was likely that the cheapest solution had governed the decision of where to dig the exit, not worker safety. He filed the knowledge away on the off chance there was a return trip in his future. He doubted there would be.

  The doors opened into a brightly lit area with level, painted floors and twelve-foot-high ceilings. Unlike the rough-cut rock he’d been surrounded by in the access tunnel, the rock walls here were smooth, giving them a finished look like they were in a warehouse topside. Empty trailers, the ones he’d seen carrying the bodies out of Resurrection, were stacked for storage against the far wall. The space to his left had rows of standing shelves. He was relieved that it was a storage area. At least it gave Cassie a chance if she took the elevator to this level. There were bound to be cameras around, but it was better than the doors opening into a room full of soldiers.

  His guard shoved him forward and he marched past the trailers, his head craning each time they passed an opening, trying to see what was going on. All he saw were other trailers, all of them empty.

  “Where are all the people?” he asked his guards. “What have you done with them?”

  The guard smirked at his buddy. “What do you think we did with ’em? We ate ’em. Civilians
taste great, don’t they, Jack?”

  The other soldier followed along.

  “The old ones are a little tough, nothing a little sauce doesn’t fix. Now the young ones, they’re tastiest.”

  Rick ignored the comments. It wasn’t worth engaging and he didn’t intend to give them the pleasure of seeing him flustered.

  “That’s enough. Let’s go,” came Keefer’s voice out of the drone hovering in front of them.

  The soldiers each grabbed an arm and quickened their steps. Just to make them mad, Rick slowed down a little, forcing them to work at it. It was a petty victory, but he’d take what he could get. The slower pace gave him more time to take stock of his surroundings.

  He’d been to this area before; it was one of the sections of the underground complex he’d seen back when he’d visited Cassie in the Genysis lab. The walls were painted a slate grey and were ground so smoothly that it looked like they were in an office hallway. An occasional glistening streak in the wall, where groundwater seeped from the rock, was the only telltale sign they were deep underground. Cassie had told him that the complex contained clean rooms for experiments and many large airtight, pressurized areas with complete temperature and humidity controls, but those were all back in the restricted area. The place was what Rick imagined inside of a space station might look like, more than a mine.

  A different set of guards stood in front of a double-set of metal doors. The soldiers transferred custody of their prisoner without comment then marched away. His new guards waved at a camera above the door. There was a click and the soldier pushed the door open.

  As he walked in, Rick was reminded of the mission control rooms he’d seen in the old movies when the United States had a space program that involved astronauts and exploration, not just orbital weapons and surveillance satellites. There were three curved rows of seats, set up on tiers, all facing a bank of television screens.

  The odd thing was that the room was empty and the screen only had two words in giant print floating around it like a screensaver.

  Operation Resurrection.

  “Rick,” Keefer said, entering from the door at the bottom of the room. “You are nothing if not surprising.”

  “Where are they?” Rick said. “Dahlia and Charlie. I want to see them.”

  Keefer waved a hand toward the bank of screens. Someone Rick couldn’t see reacted to the signal and the display changed. The screen divided into halves, a grainy image of Dahlia on the left and a clear image of Charlie on the right.

  Rick stepped closer. At first glance they both seemed dead. Their eyes were open, staring straight ahead, and their mouths were parted. Charlie’s tongue was visible, pressed against his teeth. But their legs and arms made small movements. Dahlia’s hands opened and closed into fists.

  “They’re fine,” Keefer said. “Charlie was a little harder to find than his mother, but we used the camera footage from the town to make sure. That sheriff’s badge on his shirt was helpful though. Did we get it right?”

  “You know you did,” Rick said, his voice choking up. “Are they still drugged?”

  “They’re coming out of it along with everyone else. It’ll be another hour, but I’ve had them separated from the main group. Pending the outcome of our meeting.”

  Rick didn’t reply. He just looked at Dahlia’s and Charlie’s faces. Their brows were furrowed as though they were having nightmares. He knew at that moment that he would do anything Keefer asked to save them.

  “I want to see them,” Rick said.

  “Of course you do. But we have to have an understanding first,” Keefer said. “My men think I should just kill you and be done with it. That you can never be trusted. Maybe they’re right.” He walked up the center aisle toward Rick. “Let’s be honest with each other. I ordered you killed back in town, so I’m not too far from agreeing with them. It’s just luck, good or bad depending on your point of view, that put you in this position right now.”

  “What do you want from me?” Rick asked, his eye still fixated on the screen.

  Keefer walked toward the screens and waved to the technician. The image changed back to the floating screensaver that said Operation Resurrection. Rick stepped toward the screen.

  “Where’d they go? Put them back up,” he said.

  Keefer smiled. “They won’t be harmed. I promise.”

  “What do you want?” he asked. “What do I have to do?”

  “Just listen to the case I’m making to the American people. That’s all,” Keefer said.

  “And you’ll let them go?”

  “Let’s see how things go,” Keefer said. Rick nodded, and Keefer took a deep breath and seemed to collect his thoughts for a second. He pointed to the screens above him. “I’m giving a speech in a little over an hour from now. An important one that’s going to go out to a lot of people. Maybe the most important speech in human history. I know what you’re thinking, but that’s not an exaggeration. In it, I’m going to explain what we’ve done and why we’ve done it. There are going to be a lot of people who will never agree with our actions. They will be secretly thankful in their hearts, but their psychological conditioning won’t allow them to admit it. But people like you, people who’ve seen the terrors of the world up close and know the true barbarism of our enemies, these are the people I hope to truly convert over to our cause. These are the people I want to reach in this speech.”

  Rick knew he had a part to play if he wanted to save Dahlia and Charlie. He couldn’t pretend to agree with Keefer right away. The man wanted a foil, someone he had to convince. Rick decided to play it straight. “And you want to convince me you’re not a raging manic? Sorry, pal, that ship has sailed.”

  “You’re missing the point. This is bigger than me, Rick. This is bigger than all of us.”

  “Operation Resurrection?” Rick said, nodding to the screen.

  “Exactly,” Keefer said.

  “And what is it that you’re resurrecting?”

  “The United States of America. Back to her rightful place as the essential nation, the one true superpower to lead the world.” He raised a hand to the screens at the front of the room and they instantly filled with images of destruction from around the world. Armed militants marching through urban streets. Crops set on fire. Ritual beheadings of hundreds of people in a sports stadium. Surveillance camera shots of terrorist bombs exploding in shopping malls. Oceans of protesting people demanding jobs in front of factories. Airfield tarmacs covered with coffins draped with American flags.

  “We’re all familiar with these images, easily culled from the nightly news,” Keefer said. Rick had the feeling the man had started his prepared text. “But together they tell a story.” The images continued to change with new versions of the same horrific scenes, a combination of still shots and video. “This is what the world has become. Lawless. Primitive. Barbaric. The Jihadi movement and the response by our civilization against it has led to so much of the pain we’ve experienced as a people.” The images focused on the acts of terrorism in the United States. The anthrax attack at the Ravens’ stadium in Baltimore, the nuclear bomb set off in Washington, DC, the mass shootings in New York, Chicago and Seattle. The images seemed endless.

  “These savages brought their hatred of freedom and liberty into our midst, and how did our leaders respond?” Keefer said, his voice rising like a Sunday preacher. The screen went dark. “They did nothing. Yes, they made speeches. Attended the funerals. Even wept on camera to show that they cared. But it did nothing to make us safer. While these politicians stacked up failure after failure, our other enemies grew stronger still.”

  The images started again. This time images of the massive super cities in China and India. Videos of parade routes of soldiers and military equipment that stretched out as far as the eye could see. A sky covered with so many unmanned drone warplanes that it looked like a plague of locusts.

  “Enemy militaries grew around the world while our own was whittled down to nothing through l
osses in battle. Our weakened economy made us cut military funding as we watched China increase hers twenty-fold. Without our nuclear deterrent, there is no doubt we would suffer the same fate as other Pacific Rim countries and would be just another trophy won during this Chinese century.”

  Keefer spat these last words. This may have been rehearsal, but the emotion was real. Keefer’s voice had a quivering anger in it. He pointed to the screen and the image changed to an American flag beautifully waving in a breeze.

  “They say America’s time is over. That a nation of only three hundred million people cannot hope to have the impact they once had on a world of eight billion souls. Not when the Jihadis are so strong. Not when two of our rival nations have over a billion in population each. They say our time is over. That we ought to go quietly and allow the greatest nation on earth to be relegated to the trash bin of history. This is something men of conscience cannot allow. We are too important. And the path laid out for humanity if our democracy were to fail is dark and brutal.

  “We don’t have to imagine it. We can see it all around the world every day. I am here today to promise you that this is not how America will end. In fact, I’m here to tell you that we will not only survive, but that by tomorrow, we will reclaim our position as the lone superpower in the world. Yes, there will be sacrifice, and there will be many who disagree with my actions. But before you condemn what we’ve done, ask yourself this one question.” Keefer pointed at Rick. “Do you want your children, do you want Charlie, to grow up in a failed country, barely clinging to its survival, with just a matter of time before an invasion? Or will you wake up every day thanking God that someone made the hard decision on your behalf to make America great again? The hard decision to destroy the other seven and a half billion people so that our countrymen could enjoy the security and prosperity they deserve?”