“And yes, he’ll miss those things. But it won’t be forever. The sun will shine again, and he’ll feel those summer breezes. And in the meantime he’ll be surrounded by all the love in the world.
“Besides, it’s impossible to miss something you’ve never known. And imagine the look on his little face the first time you take him out into the sunshine. Imagine him playing in grass for the first time, and looking up at the stars. His will be a world of wonder that knows no bounds. And you’ll be able to experience and enjoy all of that with him.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
Hannah answered “Yes. Are you ready?”
Sarah emptied her coffee cup and put it down, then opened her car door. “Let’s do this.” She said.
“Good morning, may I help you?”
“Hello, My name is Hannah Snyder, and this is my friend Sarah Spear. We’d like to speak with your news producer if that’s possible.”
“That would be Mr. Hensley. May I ask what it’s in reference to?”
“Tell him we have a scoop that will put your station on every television in the world.”
Sarah looked at Hannah and said “That should get his attention.”
The pair sat in the lobby for a couple of minutes. The receptionist offered them coffee and a donut. They took the coffee but passed on the sweets. They were already jittery enough.
“Good morning. I’m Jason Hensley. Won’t you come back to my office?”
They gave Hensley a brief history and showed him the reports that Hannah had printed out on that Saturday so long ago. He was a bit skeptical at first, but seemed to be unable to punch holes in their story. He called his news anchor into his office and they shared their story with him as well.
The two men were unsure what to make of these two women. They needed some kind of additional verification before going on air with the story.
“Here. This may help.” Hannah produced her employee badge for EDI, the NASA contractor they had worked for.
Sarah was dumbfounded. “How do you still have that? They took mine away.”
Hannah laughed and said “Oh, they took mine too. This is the original that I thought I’d lost. They made me another one, and then I found this one in the car between the seats.”
Hensley asked them to wait while he went to another office. He found a number for EDI in San Angelo and called the number.
“Hello, can I speak to someone in Human Resources please?”
“Human Resources, this is Sandy. May I help you?”
“Yes, I’m trying to get ahold of one of your employees, a Miss Hannah Jelinovic.” He looked at Hannah’s employee badge and spelled the last name for her.
There was a brief pause. Then Sandy said “I’m sorry, but she is no longer employed by this company. May I ask your name?”
“I am Jason Hensley. I’m with the CBS affiliate in San Antonio. How about a Sarah Spear?”
There was another pause. This one was a little bit longer than the first. Then “please hold.”
Hensley’s gut told him there was a lot of scrambling going on at the other end of the phone.
It was a full two minutes before someone came on the other end of the line.
“This is Harvey Unwin. May I help you?”
Hensley could sense the desperation in Unwin’s voice. It told him everything he needed to know, and he knew that every word Hannah and Sarah had told him was true. He hung up the phone and thought of his wife and children, and suddenly felt very queasy.
-32-
That day at the television studio, everything changed. Not just for Hannah and Sarah, but for the whole world.
The girls finished a taped interview around two o’clock. At around the same time, the station’s satellite truck arrived at the EDI office in San Angelo. Sure, they could have asked their counterpart in San Angelo to do a remote for them. But Hensley wanted the scoop. It would be the biggest television scoop since television was invented. And he didn’t want to share it with anyone.
EDI, of course, had no comment. The crew had to do their segment in the public street in front of the EDI building. But the company’s silence spoke volumes, and supported the girls’ claims of a cover up. And it strengthened their piece.
The interview and the San Angelo remote were sent electronically to CBS News headquarters in Manhattan. They ran it as their lead story on the evening news. The word was out. The world now knew about it, and there was no going back.
An hour after the story aired on CBS, CNN broke into its regular programming with a breaking news announcement. Many other networks followed suit.
The ten o’clock news on every television station in America led with the story that night.
The suicide rate that night was four times what it was on the same night the previous year.
The White House scheduled a news conference for 8 a.m. the following day. The press room was standing room only, and dozens of reporters with press credentials were turned away. The crowd started gathering by the hundreds on both sides of the White House. Some carried signs. Others just watched and waited to see what the official White House stance was. A dozen or so members of a gospel choir sang hymns.
At the appointed hour, President Rick Sanders’ press secretary, John Tull, entered the room and read from a prepared statement.
“Yesterday, the CBS Evening News broadcast an interview with two women from San Angelo, Texas. The women claimed that a large meteorite is on a collision course with earth, and will impact in the middle of January.
“The President wants to reassure the American people that this is not the case. There is no evidence that any meteorite will impact the earth in January or any other date in the foreseeable future.
“We have been in contact with EDI Technology in San Angelo. The two women in question, Hannah R. Jelinovic and Sarah Anna Spear, are two disgruntled former employees who were terminated for their poor work habits. EDI has verified that there is no danger from an impact, and that the whole affair is an elaborate hoax dreamed up by the women.
“As an additional precaution, we have asked the Department of Defense to take control of every observatory in the United States. We will have government scientists scanning the heavens in the weeks ahead, just to make sure that there is nothing out there on a collision course with earth.
“The President encourages the nation to go about their business, and to put this unfortunate event out of their minds.”
Tull finished the statement and took questions, but the only answers he had weren’t really answers. He merely requoted information from the prepared statement.
In the mine, of course, the group of four was following all of this. Hannah cried, and Mark held her close.
Sarah was angry.
“This is bullshit! How can they lie, knowing that their lies will needlessly cause the deaths of millions of people? Why not tell the truth, and give them all a chance to live?”
Mark said “Because they’re doing what’s most convenient for them, that’s why. They know they have a safe place to go. They don’t want to have to answer to everybody else, or to actually have to try to come up with a way to protect everyone else. It’s typical government crap.”
Four FBI agents entered the lobby of the KNSA TV in San Antonio while the news conference was going on. They demanded to see Jason Hensley, then grilled him unmercifully for an hour to determine his role in the “hoax.”
But Hensley wasn’t a man who was easily intimidated. He’d been a young reporter during the Watergate days, and he knew quite well that Washington lied and deceived the public on a regular basis.
“This is no hoax.” He told the agents. “I saw the terror in those women’s eyes. They believe this with all their hearts, and they were both employed with a company that deals with the type of information they claim. And from what I can see, they have nothing to gain from fabricating this. Rather, they both told me that they knew people out there would try to destroy their reputations.
If Hensley’s words got through to the agents, they weren’t showing it.
“We’ve been to the residences of both women, and can’t seem to find them. Do you know where we can locate them?”
“No, I honestly don’t. They said they were going into hiding, and I asked them not to tell me where. I didn’t want to know. And they probably wouldn’t have told me anyway.
“Those girls are scared. They were warned by the people at EDI that you’d be coming after them for sharing this information with the public. I asked them to tell the people they’re with to contact me if you find them and take them into custody. Because if that happens, I want you to know that it’ll be all over the news. We’ll be demanding to know why two good Americans were imprisoned for blowing the whistle on the biggest government cover up in American history.
“We have no interest in arresting them. We just want to interview them to find out if there’s an inkling of truth in what they claim.”
Hensley laughed out loud, and said “Yeah. My ass!”
-33-
The group’s routine was another thing that changed dramatically that day. The girls went to ground in the mine, and busied themselves with the hundreds of small details that still needed to be done.
Bryan cut a trap door into the floor of the elementary kids’ school house and glued a small rug to the top of it. If anyone came close to the mine, the girls would crawl through the trap door and into the small crawlspace beneath the school house, replacing the cover behind them.
Mark tapped into the coax cable for the I-10 camera on top of Salt Mountain. He added two additional cameras. One pointed east on highway 83, and the other pointed west.
Any time either of the men was in a vehicle nearing the mine, they would use their cell phones and make a “hang up” call to the mine’s landline. This would signal the girls to sit at the security console to make sure they weren’t being followed. If they were being followed, the men would have received another hang up call to alert them. Then they’d simply drive past the mine and try to lose their tails.
That never happened, though. None of them knew exactly why, but they speculated that since the cat was out of the bag, throwing the girls in prison would serve no purpose. Except, maybe, to inflame the situation and support the appearance of a cover up.
The only problem they had with federal agents was four days after the interview aired, when Mark finally got around to moving the four chest freezers of Papa John’s pizza from the house in San Angelo to the mine.
Mark showed up at the house with his Explorer, twenty two cheap styrofoam beer coolers, and twenty two chunks of dry ice.
Sitting in front of the house was a black Crown Victoria with no wheel covers. It may have well have had a big sign on it that said “Look at me, I’m an undercover car!”
Mark pulled into the garage and two men in black suits rang his doorbell.
To Mark, they looked like the men in the movie “Blues Brothers.” Except their suits weren’t as stylish.
“We’re with the FBI,” the taller of the two men said. “We’d like to talk to Hannah Jelinovic about who else at EDI was involved in the cover up. Are you Mr. Jelinovic?”
If these guys were really FBI, they must have come from the dumb squad.
“No, I’m Mark Snyder. I’m her husband, and her last name is Snyder now. At least I guess I’m still her husband. I haven’t seen her in weeks, ever since she packed some of her things and took off with that guy on the back of his motorcycle.
“I heard a rumor from some friends that she was going to have our marriage annulled and marry the Harley guy. But I don’t know for sure if she’s done that yet.”
“Do you mind if we come in?”
Mark stepped aside to allow them entry.
“You can go ahead and search the place if you want. You’ll see that all of her clothes and makeup and stuff is gone.
“I gave the clothes to Goodwill. I threw the rest of her crap away. I say good riddance to her. She couldn’t cook anything except spaghetti anyway.”
“Odd that you still have her photographs on your wall.”
“Yeah, well, she is a hot chick. I’ll throw that pic away someday, but sometimes I actually miss her, and then I like to remember the good times. But she’s somebody else’s problem now.”
“How much did she tell you about this… meteorite thing?”
“I didn’t know crap about it. She never told me. I found out the same time everybody else did, when I saw her face on TV. And she was long gone with motorcycle and pony-tail boy by then. All of our friends started calling me, and I told them I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“But I’ll tell you one thing. When that meteorite hits, if it gets real cold outside like they say it’s going to? Well, I’m changing the locks on my door. When she gets cold and tries to come back, I’m not letting her in. She can go snuggle with that jerk and his motorcycle to stay warm.”
“Sarah Spear. Do you know her well? Do you know where we can find her?”
“All I know about Sarah Spear is that she used to tramp around with Hannah a lot when we were dating. A lot of nights when I was working late, they’d be hitting the bars. I heard that Sarah had a thing for motorcycle gangs. I think that’s how Hannah met up with the dude she ran off with. I think he was friends with one of the guys Sarah picked up at a biker bar. At least that’s the way I heard it.”
“Did Sarah ever come over here?”
“Oh, yeah, she came by a few times. She and Hannah would do tequila and Jack Daniels shots and watch stupid romance movies on TV. A couple of times we had to take Sarah home drunk, and she’d have to find a ride back here to get her car the next day.”
“When was the last time you saw Sarah?”
“Well, let’s see… I think it was the week before I saw the two of them on TV.”
“Why do you think they did the television interview?”
“Oh, I don’t know. If you ask me, they’re both a little bit nuts. Especially when they get to drinking. Maybe it was a prank, or maybe a dare. Maybe they just wanted the attention.”
The men took Mark up on his offer to look around, and verified that all of Hannah’s things were gone. They thanked him for his help and left.
Mark patted himself on the back and thought he deserved an academy award for his performance. He was tempted to use the house phone to call Hannah and tell her about it but resisted the urge. Just in case it was bugged.
Instead, he went to the garage and took the rear seats out of his Explorer and left them on the garage floor.
He took the coolers, filled them almost to the top with frozen pizza slices, Big Macs, burrito supremes, and an assortment of Subway sandwiches that the pair had collected over the previous few months.
He put the dry ice into a bag and beat it against the garage floor to break it into small pieces. Then he sprinkled the pieces onto the top of each cooler to keep the food frozen for the fifty minutes or so it would take him to get to the mine.
He was always careful when going to the mine, ever since the girls went public. But on this day he was extra cautious. He went a different route than usual and kept a constant eye on every car he passed, looking for Blues Brothers clones or unmarked cars.
He also pulled over on four different occasions to look skyward for helicopters.
Back at the mine, he delighted in telling the others about his performance. The group shared a nervous laughter, but deep done inside, each of them started to worry a bit.
-34-
Across the country, Americans broke into two distinct camps.
The first believed the girls, and started trying their very best to prepare for the very worst. They started stockpiling food and water. Stores started to run out of things like canned goods and pasta.
The sale of chest freezers went through the roof. Appliance stores started keeping waiting lists of people who wanted to buy them, and when a truckload came in, they made phone calls. The freezers went straight from the truck to waiting customers, and by the end of the day, most of the customers had the freezers full of supermarket meats.
The same held true for portable generators and heaters of all types.
The secondary markets went into high gear. People who didn’t believe Hannah and Sarah saw an opportunity to make an incredible amount of money. They cleaned out their bank accounts and bought everything they could, then sold it at three or four times the cost.
And the believers, as they became known, didn’t mind paying that much. They were convinced that after January 15th, money would be worthless anyway. So they cleaned out their savings accounts, took out second mortgages on their houses. Cashed in their equities, and ran up their credit cards. And if they had to pay a thousand dollars for a two hundred dollar generator, then so what?
At least they’d be warm and have lights while their neighbors were freezing to death.
Gun sales in the United States quadrupled in the week after the girls’ big announcement. 9 mm ammunition, the most popular ammunition used for self-defense weapons, became almost impossible to get.
Although illegal in most states, a black market ammunition trade sprang up as a cottage industry. Pushers who two weeks before were selling rock cocaine on street corners were now selling 9 mm bullets for five dollars apiece.
And people were buying them. When someone is breaking into your home to steal your food and water, five dollars is a small price to pay to save your life.
Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon Page 11