A Single Light

by Tosca Lee

  5:35 A.M.

  * * *

  The sun is just breaking free of the horizon as I emerge from the silo for the last time, my hair whipping up around me from the rotors of the helicopter already spinning so fast that it looks like they’re moving in slow motion.

  I glance at Chase, who used to tell a story about a stranded man, a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter, each sent by God to save a drowning man.

  I mouth the words: Who’s the helicopter now?

  He chuckles, and I know the sound is throaty and warm, though I can’t hear it. But mostly he looks relieved and also strangely more alive than an hour ago. I think: he misses this. And wonder again what happens when the lights come back on and the Wynter Roth born of fear and desperation with the so-called bad habit of blowing things up (that might just be an anger problem or further evidence of other, latent issues) goes away.

  I know nothing about the military, the “SOCOM,” “Force Recon,” and “Camp Lejeune” being bandied about as Chase and the others explain some connection between them that Ashley understands but that is lost on me altogether. I know nothing about a lot of things in the outside world I’ve been a part of less than ninety days as an adult. I don’t count the months in the silo—a place and kind of life in which I was far more in my element.

  So I feel woefully inadequate and awkward at best as one of the Marines introduces the others, including a Navy medic, and they each shake my hand.

  I cut a glance to Chase, wondering if I salute or something.

  “Thank you for your service,” I finally say.

  “Thank you for yours. I have two kids. So thank you,” the captain, Jon “Preying” Yantiss, says. He searches my eyes as he says it, like he’s looking for something in them. No longer an operator in uniform, but someone’s son, husband, and father.

  I nod. Because I at least know something about going to extraordinary lengths to protect the ones I love.

  “I’m fine,” I said when Doc asked to look me over.

  “That weapon clean?” he asked, up-nodding my rifle.

  “It’s clean,” Chase says.

  I had only two conditions before we left. One, that Chase come with me. They’ve already called in the second team to find Kestral and the girls and make sure they arrive at the Enclave safely, which was the other.

  The chopper’s loud, and all I can think about is how easily those rotors can dice a head, a hand, or a wayward tree. Yantiss is in the pilot’s seat as Staff Sergeant Jonas hands me a helmet and ushers me into the CH-53E Super Stallion, buckling me in like a kid.

  I’m self-conscious, having never been so fussed over in my life, like some package secured for delivery.

  The helicopter’s inside is industrial and raw, like the innards of an alien dragonfly. My hand is sweaty as Chase takes it. I’m nervous; I’ve never flown—in anything. But as we lift into the air, I feel like I am floating as the country sections below fall away into a green and brown patchwork.

  Nervous, too, because we’re stopping in Chicago.

  “We’ll meet our plane at O’Hare,” Corporal Nance, “Nancy,” said before we left.

  “I thought there weren’t any more flights?” I’d said, confused. Not once in the last two days have I seen an aircraft cross the sky. And none those last days before we entered the silo in December.

  “Not commercial ones,” he’d said. “Only military. This one’s bringing aid into Chicago, and taking us out.”

  I haven’t been in the city for fifteen years—since Mom packed Jackie and me up in the middle of the night and loaded us in the old Buick parked behind our building. We drove till morning, sleeping for a while in the car at an Iowa rest stop. Eating the last hamburger—or any meat—I’ve had since at a Denny’s in Ames.

  I haven’t been back to Naperville, either, since the night Jackie showed up at Julie’s and gave me the samples, telling me to get them to Ashley. The same night Ken told us to flee the city. I’d called out that I loved her as she ran away. Can still hear the sound of her heels on the pavement.

  Chase studies our clasped hands and strokes my knuckles. He’s already clarified with Ashley—twice—to make sure that what’s required of me isn’t more blood than I can part with and live.

  A thought I wouldn’t relish, but would do if I had to—as he would, too.

  Because there’s no choice when it comes to the right thing.

  He points and I look out. Can see I-80 winding beneath us and—there! North Platte. I recognize the wreckage of cars on the cloverleaf exit. The charred mark where the Store-More’s C Block and half of D used to be.

  Chase turns to tell Nance the story as I study Ashley. He stares out, chin in his palm. And I wonder if he’s reliving the moment he last saw me driving his car on the interstate below as he got knocked out or jabbed with a needle. It happened right about here.

  No such drama this time. No drama at all. To the point that the four—technically five—man Marine squad seems like overkill.

  Until I remember that as far as the rest of the world knows, I’m the “only” one with the antigens key to our next cold war with Russia.

  In which case I’d treat me as a nonrenewable resource, too.

  “In-flight meal?” Doc says, offering Chase and then me an MRE, which I start to refuse until I see the words veggie burger on the label beneath the ever-appealing “Meal 12.”

  “You’re vegetarian?” I say, taking it. He strikes me as more of a kill-and-grill-it type.

  “Ma’am, I’m from Oklahoma. Where the vegetarian option is chicken,” he says wryly.

  “You know this disease started with bacon, don’t you?”

  “I can still say with all honesty it’ll be a cold day in Hell before I eat one of those.”

  I smile slightly as he chuckles.

  “I brought that for you,” he says.

  “What else do you know about me?” I say, opening it.

  He reaches into a pack and holds out a bottle of hand sanitizer.

  “That’s scary,” I murmur, and pull off my gloves to accept a pump.

  8:49 A.M.

  * * *

  I doze and wake over Iowa. Am shocked at the ruin of the city below, interrupting the interstate that used to run through it—and even more so when I realize it has to be Des Moines.

  The city was burning the night I returned to the Enclave at last to rescue Truly.

  I search for the Enclave north of the splatter in the patchwork that is Ames, but can’t make out the walls past a line of trees on the horizon.

  I wonder who’s gotten sick there. If I know anyone else who’s died. How the storeroom’s holding up. How Ara is, and her baby, Magnus’s son. How Kestral left to go get them.

  Most of all, I hope Truly and Lauren are safe. That Julie’s alive, and that they know I love and didn’t abandon them.

  I wave as we fly overhead, and pretend that they see me.

  10:09 A.M.

  * * *

  When I see Lake Michigan in the distance, I am as awed as I was the day Ken and Julie took the family to Indiana Dunes. How can an ocean be any bigger than that blue water stretching to the horizon?

  I smell the smoke before I see the plumes feeding the haze that hovers over the city. Stare down on blocks with no usable roads, the pavement covered in trash, cars, and rubble. Buildings singed black or boarded up and pieced together into slums.

  Smoke and garbage—the twin hallmarks of destruction—everywhere.

  I look out toward the skyline, which is the same, except this is the Chicago of nightmares.

  Chase sits in somber silence.

  He’s seen war zones before.

  I remember thinking what a major undertaking it would be to repair the Sidney med center. What it would take, and how many people, to clean up an entire town, wash it clean of the stink of decay and despair to something habitable again.

  I also remember thinking that when the lights came back on in the North Platte hospital and the disea
se died out, the building might need to be demolished. That there was no rehabilitating a place so permeated with the reek of madness and death inside it, like furniture in a house fire.

  Now, looking out, I think: it’s impossible. There is no fixing or cleaning it up. No way to put it back to even South Side standards. Only thing to do is demolish it with a bulldozer the size of the hand of God.

  What had that old woman said on her porch in North Platte?

  The end of the world. When everything dies after all the good is gone. So it can start over pure.

  I’d thought it a terrible, deranged thing to say. But now I finally understand.

  We bank toward O’Hare. I can see the colossal airport from here, the giant runways crisscrossed like an ancient code etched into the ground.

  Jonas leans over and points. “There’s our plane.”

  I crane to see it. It’s gray and huge—nothing like the sleek-bodied Southwest Airlines planes I used to watch come in so low sometimes it looked like they’d take off the top of a house—and impossibly graceful as it swoops northwest to meet us.

  And then I catch my breath.

  A cloud of red parachutes drifts out of its back bay like a giant bouquet of balloons. They catch the air and glide toward the ground. I watch them in wonder, can’t help but think of Charlotte’s Web, which I read to Truly, and the spider babies who fly away on the breeze.

  “What are they dropping?” I ask.

  “Food and water,” Jonas says.

  They fall in yards and snag in trees, landing on rooftops and highways.

  As we come in I hear a pop. A crackling burst sounds from below. It reminds me of the ammo going off as we left the sheriff’s office. Movement on the tollway, which is littered with cars: people like ants, dashing toward something from both directions, shooting one another over it.

  A red parachute.

  One of the ant people drops, lies flat in the middle of the lane. Unmoving as the others grab the box and run away. He doesn’t get up, and no one comes back, leaving him like one more abandoned car on the expressway.

  “A man just died,” I say, to no one in particular.

  It’s not Charlotte’s Web. It’s The Hunger Games.

  As we get closer, I can see the fence, the soldiers, and Humvees around the airport’s perimeter, holding it like a fortress.

  The cargo plane comes in toward a massive runway, and we float down toward a pad near the other end.

  Something’s wrong. The plane tilts. It’s coming in too fast, starting to roll almost lazily to the side.

  Chase shouts and Jonas yells something to Yantiss. We abruptly reverse, pulling up as the plane’s wing catches the tarmac.

  The aircraft bounces like a toy, and I scream as it comes cartwheeling right for us, billowing black smoke. Chase throws his arms around me as far as his harness will allow.

  Something punches our tail. Sends us spinning up and away from the airport like a flying top.

  Sky. Ground. Smoke. Sun. Flickering like a film reel interspersed with the grimaces of the men across from me. I don’t scream; I can’t catch my breath.

  “Hold on to your harness!” Chase says, and pushes my head forward. I do, eyes squeezed shut, as he pushes back in his seat.

  The Stallion skips, fighting to stay upright. Skids to the tarmac, colliding with the earth.

  Growing up in a doomsday cult, I’d been prepared, any day, to die. I had looked forward to crossing that threshold, even, eager to get on with what waited on the other side. My only fear was about the pain—how much it would hurt to crack my mortal shell and leave it behind.

  But this moment—the last of my life—all I can think is: I’m ready.

  Yesterday I would have felt cheated of all our plans—for the future we’ve been waiting to begin. The life we might have had.

  The ocean I’ve dreamt of seeing.

  I’ll see it still, I’m certain. With Chase and Otto, Jackie, Mom, and Noah. And it will be more beautiful because of them.

  But this life—in this world—is too hard. Too filled with sorrow.

  And too far gone. The lights that made it worth saving blinking out like stars.

  There’s only one thing I would regret not doing.

  “I love you!” I say, the words ripped from my mouth by the sound of the rotors biting into cement.

  I reach for his hand, his fumbling as it finds mine.

  I love you. I say it in my heart, trusting he can hear it over the crash of breaking steel.

  • • •

  THE QUIET IS like a vacuum. The way a voice sounds in a padded room.

  No barking dogs. No air-conditioning unit kicking in.

  You’re not aware of your limbs because you have none. You feel no hunger because you need no food.

  And see no color because you have no eyes.

  But you see with your entire being as you remember the secret name God called you and that you answered to.

  Before you forgot everything.

  I wait for it.

  The “Oh, yes, I remember!”

  For the name that fits like a favorite pair of jeans.

  I’m patient.

  I can wait all unending day.

  10:26 A.M.

  * * *

  The quiet is wrong. Too silent and not silent enough.

  Filled with tension like humidity, sticky with fear.

  And smoke like a bloody tang.

  Someone slaps my cheeks. “Hey, look at me.”

  Doc.

  I pry open my eyes to find Chase leaning at an odd angle, firing his rifle out the door beside me.

  Who’s he firing at? The airport is under military control.

  I reach for my harness, fumble with the latch. Across the cabin, unsteadily gets to his feet and staggers. The back of the chopper is open, Jonas and Nance crouched on opposite sides of the cargo bay, rifles trained down the ramp.

  A metal boom sounds outside. A door crashes back on its hinges.

  “Can you stand?” Doc asks, kneeling in front of me. I nod and shove up as he stands and grabs me under the arm.

  And then promptly sit back, hard. Bend over and puke on his shoes.

  “Sorry,” I cough, as another wave of nausea hits me. Lean to the side and vomit again.

  He looks down. “Yup. Never eating a veggie burger.”

  • • •

  TURNS OUT WE’RE not on the tarmac or even at O’Hare, but on top of a twenty-story building half a mile away, where the Stallion crashed into a safety wall after spinning out of control.

  Shots burst at random intervals like the last popcorn kernels in a microwave bag as Chase, Jonas, and Nance run beside and behind me to the rooftop door and down the stairs to where Ashley and Doc wait below.

  Yantiss comes last of all.

  It feels weird after the last two days to have what amounts to a cadre of bodyguards. Who don’t care about the fact I hate being treated like I’m fragile because the mission isn’t about me.

  I wait with Chase, Doc, and Ashley in the stairwell of what’s apparently a hotel as the others scout options. The plan is to hole up till dark. But first: get away from the $100 million chopper drawing attention.

  “At least with the drop,” Doc says, “everyone’s too preoccupied Easter egg hunting to come after our food and gear.”

  “People do that even when they see that you’re armed?”

  Doc snorts. “I saw a lady attack a Marine with nothing but a rock for the crackers in his MRE.”

  A few minutes later Nance comes racing up the stairs, the light on his helmet shining in our eyes.

  “Let’s go.”

  They clear the service stairs all the way down to the basement, where we emerge into a hallway littered with metal carts and broken plates. Pass through a kitchen strewn with rotting garbage, out back to a delivery dock that somehow still smells faintly of all the cigarettes that have been smoked here, even with the haze in the air.

  Shouts issue from somewhere
around front in some foreign language. An answering shout from above. They’re already on the roof.

  We hug the back wall all the way down the concrete ramp to a parking garage, stopping and starting, Jonas and Nance pulling me into a crouch and then dragging me back up when it’s time to run.

  12:21 P.M.

  * * *

  I’ve forgotten how to sleep.

  Set up in a classroom of some kind of technical college as the operators take turns keeping watch, we have nothing to do while we wait. For dark. For a plane. A vaccine. Electricity.

  The delusion that life will return to normal.

  But it won’t—even with all those things. Not after seeing what we’ve seen. Or, in Ashley’s case, living through whatever it is that holds him hostage behind his own eyes. Sucking him back to whatever memory is drowning him like a whirlpool.

  I was terse with him when he showed up. Worried about Truly and what his arrival at the silo meant. But as far as I can tell, he’s also protected her.

  “What happened to you in Russia?” I ask quietly while Chase is talking to Jonas, who recognized him as Cutter Buck, the MMA fighter Chase used to be.

  Ashley glances up, hesitates a minute, as though waiting for the echo of my words, not having heard them in the maelstrom of his own thoughts.

  He tilts his head and, after a minute, says, “I spent weeks in the dark, alone. Not knowing what day or time it was. Not having anyone to talk to. Sleeping. Going crazy.

  “Things came back to me—things I thought I’d forgotten from the past, had been able to avoid thinking much about, too busy with life. Until I wasn’t in prison alone, but locked up with all my demons. And let me tell you: it was crowded.”

  When I don’t say anything, he says, “That sounds crazy, doesn’t it.”

  “No,” I say.

  God knows I’ve spent plenty of days and nights locked in a cell myself under far better circumstances.

  “You think a lot when you think you’re about to die,” he says. “It’s like you want to make some kind of accounting of your life and what you did and whether any of it mattered. But all I could think about was every regret I had. The things I wish I’d said to my dad before he died. The things I did say, which should never be any son’s last words to a father.” He pauses, scratching a fingernail at the carpet.