Paths

by David DeSimone

  That Mary survived opened the possibility that others might have also survived the gamma ray burst, only to die from later zombie attacks - including perhaps MRI technicians Tray and Rita. It also provided the final piece of the puzzle Eva was contemplating. She lowered the rifle and told Drew not to go near the babies. He obliged and raised his hands in a surrendering gesture. He stepped around the two dead women and came up to her.

  “The MRI room is directly below us,” she said. “When the explosion happened the magnetic pulse or whatever it was that exposed us to some kind of protective energy field…”

  She paused, then continued, “Whatever blasted out of the MRI wasn’t only confined to the room it was in. It spread out into surrounding rooms including this one.”

  Drew acknowledged with a single nod.

  He pointed to Nurse Mary. “That explains why she hadn’t been turned.”

  His mouth fell open as he was overcome by a sense of wonder.

  Pointing to Nurse Mary, Eva added, “She was protecting,” made a sweeping gesture across a row of incubators, “them.”

  He couldn’t speak, was only able to marvel over their miraculous find.

  “Drew, she was protecting the babies.”

  Finally, he moved past Eva and approached one of the incubators.

  Perched on a metal post over the clear plastic canopy like a sentry lookout was an electronic monitoring device taking digital readouts of vitals, temperature and fluid levels. Wires and intravenous lines ran down from the monitor through access holes at the top of the incubator and finally attached via electrode pads to the child lying peacefully inside, the intravenous line connecting by way of small intravenous needle inserted into the top of the newborn’s hand.

  She was impossibly small about the length of Drew’s forearm. He wondered how someone could be so tiny and still be alive. He also wondered how he and Eva could possibly keep the baby, along with the other premature babies, alive. They were not doctors or nurses or knew anything about neonatal care.

  Then that sense of purpose struck him again, a feeling of certainty that he and his wife were here for a reason. Now it was clear, at least to Drew, that if the Fairwoods and the newborns somehow survived this long, while the rest of the world perished, then they were meant to stay alive and thrive.

  Together.

  Lost in thought he didn’t notice Eva touching his shoulder.

  She leaned forward, looked down to see what he saw.

  The newborn was wrapped in a white blanket. Pink bunnies matching her pink skin smiled up at them in diagonal patterns, rising slightly, sinking. Rising. Sinking. Tiny lungs rapidly taking in and expelling air.

  Delicate, but alive and unharmed.

  Across the top of the incubator was a nameplate. Serena Mitchell.

  Eva stepped back, moved to the next incubator. Drew followed.

  Another impossibly tiny bundle of joy. Nameplate: Our Little Jasper.

  They went to the next incubator. Nameplate: Marlon Williams.

  Next. Rosalie Cruz.

  Stevie Chao.

  Tommy Newman.

  Katie Briar.

  Cherry Wang.

  Chandra Kashmiri.

  Sinclair Woods - Our Little Miracle.

  Row upon row of incubators along the walls and another row parallel to that.

  Ten out of twenty incubators were occupied by newborns clinging to life in a room, warm and stuffy, smelling of death but cradling new life, cradling the last of humanity.

  Here was a chance to start over.

  Here was their garden.

  Eva turned to Drew, her throat feeling tight, mouth cottony. She cleared her throat, swallowed. When at last she was able to speak, the words came out as a dry whisper.

  “I think we’ve just found our family.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  1

  THURSDAY 5:04 P.M.

  Ana Concepcion had a lot of baggage to carry from the 10th floor of InterLang, Inc. located on West 43rd Street. Walking to Grand Central Station, she’ll be taking the 5 train to 180th Street in Parkchester, The Bronx, walk half a mile to her Beach Avenue apartment, climb two flights of stairs and finally collapse, gasping for air on the living room sofa. For the past six months or so, this routine had steadily grown more and more laborious until it had become nearly unbearable.

  With twins, a boy and a girl, in the third trimester, Ana’s belly looked like the Houston Astrodome, and felt as heavy as a microwave oven.

  Tomorrow was Friday. Next Friday will be her last day before maternity leave.

  Just one week to go.

  She could not wait.

  Already, she had gotten parting gifts from colleagues. Everything in pairs; little shoes, sweatshirts - one pink, one blue - saying Babies Rule on the front, teething keys and two squeaky, yellow rubber duckies.

  With one week left, she expected more paired gifts to come. There might even be a little surprise baby shower. Her mother, Juliana, had already thrown a shower three weeks ago, and Ana had been barraged with gifts and warm wishes from close friends and family. With double the gifts came the need for doubling the storage. She purchased a 20 gallon tote to handle the huge load of books, toys and other baby stuff, while clothes and shoes filled the closet and drawer spaces. By next week, she may have to buy another 20-gallon tote.

  Twins. Dios mío!

  When Ana first found out she was not only pregnant but with twins, she had nearly fainted. She worried obsessively, lost sleep, had palpitations that made it hard to breathe, her head spinning with fears that she wasn’t ready, that she would fail as a mother. Or that she would deliver stillborns or die from blood loss.

  The anxiety was terrible, confining, like being trapped in a tight place with no escape.

  But as the weeks passed and her belly gradually expanded, when elastic-band skirts replaced form-fitting jeans, and maternity blouses replaced seamless cami shirts, her fears and anxieties faded away. In time, she accepted her pregnancy, even embraced it with surprising excitement.

  Her husband Hector was a good man and although she understood that nothing in life was guaranteed, Hector proved time and again over their three years of marriage to be a committed and doting husband. There was little doubt or reason to believe he might not make a good father.

  Nevertheless, she prayed.

  It was all in God’s hands.

  2

  Ana had earned a degree in Sociology from Lehman College. She had dreams of someday counseling runaway teens. The plan was to go to night school and earn a Master’s degree and then start her own practice. She was 22 then and had one summer of internship experience at an assisted living facility.

  Ana found InterLang through a job-hunting site and took an opening in the Payroll Department as a way to make money while looking for paid social work.

  With few interviews, no second callbacks and a sudden realization that she just didn’t have the drive to persevere, Ana had fully gravitated into InterLang and all the trappings of security it offered; a steady 9 to 5 job, full benefits, nice weekly paychecks, a cubicle with a big window overlooking 43rd street.

  She never turned back.

  InterLang, or Inter-Agency Language services, was a government agency created to provide language interpreting services to federal agents such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Whenever agents needed to communicate with suspected terrorists, human traffickers, counterfeiters, money launderers, drug dealers, and other non-English speaking bad guys, they referred to an InterLang language specialist, or linguist. Spanish was an exception, since there was no shortage of people who understood it. Some of the agents themselves were Latinos.

  However, when a Spanish-speaking agent wasn’t available, Ana was among a handful of Latino staff that would be randomly selected to fill in as interpreter.

  There were the usual gripes coursing through the gossip circuit - being underpaid, overtaxed, overworked, policy changes for vacation time, changes in software,
changes in security authentication, password resets - but nobody ever complained of having interpreter duty.

  And why would they? Who wouldn’t want to get away from their desk for a while?

  For Ana it meant a break from the grind of inputting weekly timesheets, updating employee information, creating reports, memos, emails and phone calls.

  Still, upper management had their asses covered. Every InterLang job application under descriptions of responsibilities has this little disclaimer: To assist with other duties as assigned by the supervisor.

  “Other duties” of course included interpreter duty. This meant that the selected person report to the 2nd floor interrogation room where nervous suspects, police and feds awaited his or her arrival so that the clumsy process of translating questions and answers could begin.

  Most of the time the work would proceed and end without many surprises. Ana had done it enough that it had become fairly routine.

  Exceptions did occur, like what happened last year, when an anonymous tip from a woman led to the arrest of four Bolivian terrorists calling themselves the Bolivian Fighters of Islam, or BOLFIS.

  BOLFIS had no association with other Islamic terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda. They were rogue and being rogue gave them the advantage of working under the radar. They never made cellphone calls or sent text messages to one another and used the deep web to conduct nefarious transactions such as purchasing work visas, downloading instructions to make plastic explosives or exchanging information in message boards, all anonymously through peer-to-peer software.

  The leader, a fanatic from the slums of Sucre known only as Komini, had snuck into the U.S. through Canada. He used deep web discussion forums to convince other Bolivians living in and around the New York Metropolitan area that he was a holy warrior looking for others like him to spread the word of Allah - essentially looking for recruits.

  Komini’s almost nonexistent electronic footprint allowed he and his crew to plan and prepare a terrorist plot right under the noses of the National Security Agency, the FBI, CIA and the New York City Police Department.

  The plan was diabolical, ingenious in its simplicity: To blow a hole straight through the bottom of the East River and a subway tunnel thus flood New York City.

  Instead of attempting to drill holes into the ceiling of the tunnel’s interior, Komini’s idea was to do it from the riverbed.

  One of his cohorts, Vic DeValle, owned a successful chain of laundry shops and used his money to purchase a 30-foot boat with twin engines and a canvas top. Nothing too conspicuous there. Just a couple of guys spending evenings out boating, fishing…

  Drilling.

  How was this possible? The answer: DeValle’s resources. Along with the boat, he also supplied scuba gear and an auger, waterproofed and modified to run underwater on a car battery. The canvas top of the boat obscured the auger from view by helicopter.

  Sonar and landmarks along the coastlines of Manhattan and Brooklyn were used to plot the exact drilling location.

  Conducted in the cloak of night, they each worked in half hour shifts, or as long as their oxygen tanks could hold breathable air. Fighting the East River’s notoriously strong currents, replacing the battery every so often, and limiting the time in the water to one hour per night, so as not to arouse suspicion by river patrols or civilian boaters, had stretched the work out over a period of three weeks.

  When work was completed, five holes in all, each two feet in diameter and fifteen feet deep, formed a tight circle at the bottom of the riverbed. The last phase was to fill the holes with the homemade plastic explosives. Komini and his men were in his Queens apartment when the NYPD raided his home.

  Had Komini succeeded, the destruction to the city, its subway system and power grid, would have been catastrophic.

  The force of the explosions would create fault lines between each of the five holes making up the circle, and the weight of the East River would cause the riverbed inside circle to collapse.

  A giant whirlpool would form and flush everything around it down into the arteries of the city. Subway tunnels under Manhattan and Brooklyn would rapidly fill with saltwater driven by the uninterrupted force of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Thousands of commuters would be trapped inside trains and drowned, if not battered to death or killed by a wall of rushing water first.

  Power lines would be torn from transformer boxes and ruined by the briny saltwater.

  Sublevel facilities and basement apartments would be submerged.

  From Battery Park to the Upper East and West sides, the streets of Manhattan, and perhaps most of Central Park would be under several feet of water - or so Komini had hoped for.

  The anonymous tipper turned out to be DeValle’s own wife, Edith. She had overheard several conversations between her husband, Komini and the others about their terrible plan, and over time the strain of conscience had worn her out. She couldn’t keep it a secret. She saw something. She said something.

  Finding the FBI’s number on the web, she made the call just before her husband arrived home from the last night of digging.

  Vic DeValle never saw it coming. Edith was his wife after all and mother to his two children. She was expected to respect and honor him, feed his family, do as she was told, and, as expected of all women, to never mingle in the affairs of men.

  Seemed Edith had priorities of her own. Sorry Vic.

  To Ana’s surprise, there was nothing in the papers, the Internet or on television about it. The feds and the NYPD had been successful in suppressing it.

  Weeks following the interrogation of which Ana had been the interpreter, she met up with one of the FBI agents present, a tall, handsome man with sandy-brown hair named Beau Maxwell.

  She liked Special Agent Maxwell and couldn’t help responding to his good looks and charm. His crooked smile never failed to made her pulse accelerate and the room temperature rise by twenty degrees. He was a man who beamed with self-confidence.

  Born to upper middle-class parents, provided for with a college fund and scholarships, captain of the lacrosse team, he made Dean’s List three out of four years at Yale. At Quantico, Beau finished second in his class.

  His intelligence work helped the Marines take down three Al Qaeda hideouts in Kabul and a key ISIS stronghold along the southeastern border between Syria and Iraq. His contributions won him a Distinguished Service Medal and a promotion to Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Criminal Investigative Division, New York City; a choice job for anyone on the fast track to Deputy Director, and possibly Director.

  With leading man looks, stunning accomplishments, Maxwell never found the need to brag. Proof, as they say, was in the pudding, and women were drawn to him. Back in the day, you’d need a pedometer to count the different women going in and out of his bedroom.

  One notable exception was a girl named Eva Dwyer, older sister to his then girlfriend Candace. She was sophisticated, smart, and hot - hotter in his mind than his own girlfriend - not to mention the fact that nailing the older sister in younger sis’s dorm was so goddamned exciting. So it was no wonder that he was genuinely surprised when Eva vehemently rejected his come-on. Bitch!

  This led to a hideous breakup with Candace and the creation of abstract art decorating the hood of his Beemer, compliments of her house key.

  And now here he was, standing across from one hot tamale and giving him googly eyes that he was so familiar with. But Ana was married and he knew her husband, Hector. Nice guy, though Maxwell couldn’t understand what she saw in him. The man was short, had a mustache that gave a vague resemblance to Borat and had a shitty job (repairman for an apartment building? Oh, please!) He either had buckets of money stashed away that nobody knew about, except of course Ana, or the man was packing an elephant’s trunk under those blue work pants. Or maybe it was a Daddy thing. Hector was only a few years older than Ana, but without any fashion sense or style he looked older.

  Whatever the reason, Hector Concepcion should count every second w
ith his wife a blessing, for some miracles require another miracle to keep.

  Maxwell himself was single, still liking the chase, but supposed he knew why people married. Marriage offered the illusion of security, safety, confidence. Life was supposed to be easier, too. Unlike the Divine Beau Maxwell, for most mere mortals finding the right mate is hard work and oftentimes depressing.

  But Ana being married wasn’t the reason (not entirely at least) why Maxwell refrained from acting on behalf of his penis.

  It was his job that held him back.

  He loved the FBI. If anything, it was this institution that he was married to, and like any marriage, Special Agent Beau Maxwell had to be faithful.

  Even though Ana looked innocent enough with her big brown eyes and a smile that could light up a stadium, thick raven black hair that he ached to run his fingers through, she was a fellow employee. One misconstrued touch, a word, a phrase that may be a bit too suggestive, could land him in a lawyer’s office and a sexual harassment suit faster than he could say war on terror. And so he just kept it friendly with her.

  The interview had been intense with surprisingly little shouting but lots of cold stares and threats of the death penalty. One of the suspects kept staring at Ana’s breasts as if he’d never seen a pair before. She could almost feel his eyes pressing against her skin like invisible fingers, making her wish for a metal breastplate.

  Days later she asked Maxwell about the fate of the Bolivian terrorists, finding it odd that she hadn’t heard anything on the news.

  “We handled it,” Maxwell said.

  “Why wasn’t it on the news?”

  “Can’t really say.”

  “What, did you take them out back and shoot them?” She meant it as a joke. When he didn’t laugh, she felt uneasy.