“Is that a lot?” she asked, still angry at her interest level. However, she’d spent years in the mine back home, so she had a natural curiosity for rocks. She wanted to study geology in college to help further her understanding of the earth, and what was inside it. Her parents were also experts in earth studies, but looking into the abyss, the deep bore hole was unlike any mining activity Mom or Dad ever talked about during their tours.
“By far. The Soviets, whom I just mentioned, managed to get a thin shaft down about seven miles in their country before they ran out of money. NORAD must have taken their lessons and tried to drill down here in Colorado, but they didn’t get as far. It took a contract with one of my companies to get it done. Ours is ten feet wide, too. Plus, we took it a step farther; there are two elevator shafts next to most of it.” He pointed to the far side of the room. The elevator doors looked like they belonged in any office park, not deep inside a government bunker.
“So you have three shafts going down ten miles? This is your superweapon?”
He laughed. “The elevators don’t go straight through. We had to install waypoints—stops, if you will—since the technology doesn’t exist to get elevator cars straight through to a depth of sixteen thousand meters. Plus, you don’t want to be stuck waiting if it has to go ten miles before it reaches you, right?”
Tabby shrugged, clamming up again.
“Besides, the weapon part is along the walls down there. Don’t you see it?” He pointed down into the shaft. The walls weren’t smooth or rocky. Long vertical pipes hugged the curvature of the hole around most of the perimeter, running to points far below. Small LED lights blinked in various locations, as if there was energy flowing through them. As impressive as it was, it still didn’t seem like a weapon. It certainly wasn’t a weapon she could sabotage.
When she didn’t reply, he kept talking. “We drained a water aquifer by accident. People in nearby towns were furious, but we blamed it on a fracking company.” He snickered mischievously. “We tapped into it during drilling, and it drained to a larger void down the tube. Good thing for us. It saved us having to pump it out. It would have delayed us a long time.”
“That would have been a shame,” she taunted.
“Yes, I’m sure you mean it. But consider what we’ve built here, well, with NORAD’s help, of course. The shaft goes down ten miles. We have superconductors and cooling installed in the walls, giving us ten miles of heavily-shielded pathways for accelerated particles. The foundational elements of the universe.” Without warning, he spun around and leaned back against the railing. His golden outfit sparkled from the lights on the ceiling above. “Of course, outside the tube, it’s four hundred degrees Fahrenheit down at the bottom, so it gets difficult to keep it all cool, but my companies did their jobs in that regard. Now, a person could comfortably live down there.”
She brushed bangs out of her eyes after looking straight down. “If this is your weapon, tell me what happened to my dogs. How did…this—” She pointed to the pit. “—kill them?”
David pursed his lips, as if she’d disappointed him. “Is that all you worry about? Everyone else? Your friends. Your dogs. The country.”
“Just tell me,” she insisted.
“Fine. If your dogs were caught by one of our mobile units… Those machines have a lot less power, obviously, than our main gun here. They still tap into the base structure of the universe, but they don’t have the same granular control as—”
“Are they dead or not!”
He looked at her anew. “Probably not. They’ve most likely been punched into a parallel universe.”
“A parallel universe?” she said dismissively. “You expect me to believe that?”
David shrugged. “It’s all ones and zeros as far as I’m concerned. You arrange them in the right order, with enough power behind them, and you can send signals across the universe, you can open doorways between quantum-entangled particles, and you can send puppies into neighboring blocks of the multiverse. You can’t believe it because your people weren’t the ones to figure it out.”
She leaned hard against the railing, thinking. The dark tunnel of blinking lights below took on a new sinister appearance. It wasn’t simply a strange weapon. David and his army had invented technology far beyond the ability of the United States. So far ahead, they were able to defeat her country without anyone knowing about it. And there she was, in the maw of the super gun. “Your weapon can be destroyed,” she blurted out.
He waited a few seconds, as if she might say more, but then he chuckled softly. “Everything can be destroyed. The universe persists under the pain of entropy, as I’m sure they taught you in science class.”
She decided to antagonize him. “It’s just that you seemed invincible up until this point. I almost thought your weapon was designed by aliens or something. Now that I see it, though I have no idea what it is, I know one hand grenade down in the shaft can destroy all you’ve created here.”
“Do you have a hand grenade?” he asked with interest.
It drove her mad he didn’t seem to rise to her prodding. David seemed to see her as a child who needed everything spelled out for her, and in return, he displayed endless patience at how she didn’t catch on.
“No, I don’t have a grenade. You can see what I’ve got in this stupid unitard.” She pointed to the unforgivingly-tight blue covering.
“But you would blow it up if you could,” he said in a studious voice.
She nodded enthusiastically. “That’s my job. I’m an American. You killed my people. What did you think I would do? Marry you after you showed me this?”
His shoulders slumped, though it was difficult to say if he was putting on an act. “You misunderstand why I brought you here. I don’t need to explain what we’ve already done. I’m showing you what we’re going to do. America is gone. You have to accept it. Other than a couple of pinpricks in Texas and North Dakota, and two lousy ships fighting us off the coast of New York, your people don’t even exist in your homeland anymore. I’m trying to get you to see there is a way out for you. A way to make the best of a bad hand which has been dealt to you.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Let me and my friends go, and we’ll call it even.”
David sighed, finally giving her a moment of triumph over him. He leaned off the rail and headed for the same door they’d used earlier. “Come on, I want to show you what your alternative is…”
She followed, wondering what could be worse than a weapon designed to kill continents.
CHAPTER 6
Glendo, WY
Kyla woke up in the back seat of the truck after a nap. She expected the scenery to be different from what it had been since they left North Dakota, as that would prove they’d made some distance in the time she’d been asleep. However, the world outside was almost the same as it had been. Flat, grassy, and boring.
“There’s a town coming up I’d like to take a look at,” Ted said from the front seat. “It’s called Glendo. It looks like there’s a lake there, too. I see signs for fishing, camping, and motels.”
The clock on the dash said it was a little after three in the afternoon, but she was ready to call it a day. They’d been driving, often at over a hundred miles per hour, since they rolled out of bed. She was beat and was certain Uncle Ted was toast as well, though he’d never say it in front of his important friend in the front seat.
She smirked at her own thoughts. It sounded funny thinking of the president as her uncle’s girlfriend. Was there protocol for such things?
“Hey, Unk, if you and Emily are together-together, does that make you the First Boyfriend?”
He glared at her in the rearview mirror, though Emily laughed as she shifted in her seat to look back at her. “I like the way you think. There’s an office in the White House which could answer your question, but I don’t think they’re picking up their phones. I do, however, quite enjoy the thought of my boyfriend—”
“Friend,” Ted i
nterrupted, without conviction.
“My friend,” she repeated with heavy sarcasm, “being the First Friend, at the very least. That would make you the First Friend’s niece.”
They had a good laugh at Uncle Ted’s expense. Even Meechum thought the naming game was hilarious, which probably embarrassed him even more.
“All right. Here we go.” He pointed ahead to the little town. As he exited the highway, they remained wary for enemy forces wandering around, but the place was like everywhere else. Empty. It was also a postage-sized location, with three or four short streets, at most. They went through without stopping.
A few miles down a remote road, they found a large log cabin near a lake. It sat at the top of a rolling hill, tucked away inside a grove of tall pines, which was unusual for the grassland area. “This is it,” her uncle declared. “We have tree cover from those drones. We have the high ground on this flat terrain. And we have access to a large lake.”
He backed the truck up to the front door, presumably to make it easy to unload their gear. There were no vehicles parked there, which meant they wouldn’t be able to refill on gas, but it also suggested there wouldn’t be any bundles of clothes inside. That was good, too.
Uncle Ted still wouldn’t look at her. When the motor was off, he got out of the truck as if it was on fire.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” she asked the two ladies.
Emily glanced outside to make sure Uncle Ted was out of earshot, then she leaned her way. “Ted is a private man. I think he’s ripped to shreds about having the hots for his boss.”
“Well, he should get over it. He’s not going to do better than you, and I don’t just mean because the rest of the dating field has been wiped off the planet. You’re the freaking prez.”
Emily’s lips curled up in a wicked smile. “It is fun to tease him, isn’t it?”
Meechum chuckled. “I’ll leave you hens to it. I’m going to secure the premises. This is going to be the White House for tonight. Needs to be checked.” She took a rifle, leaving her and Emily alone.
The other woman stared at her for a drawn-out moment, then seemed to snap into action. “Come on. Let’s go see what this place has to offer for food.”
She hopped out, catching sight of her uncle going around the side of the wooden cabin. Emily went directly for the front door, following Meechum, so she tried to take her uncle’s advice and never leave anyone alone.
Kyla found him standing on the crest of a gentle hill leading down to the water about fifty yards away. The deep, clear blue of the reservoir contrasted harshly with the vibrant green grass on the far shore, maybe a mile away. “Hey, Unk. I didn’t mean anything back there.”
He looked over his shoulder for a second but went back to watching the scenery. “You’re a lot like your mother, you know. She loved gigging me about my girlfriends. Except for Priscilla. I should have known my marriage was doomed when your mother didn’t take a shine to her.”
“Nope, she didn’t like her one bit.”
He chuckled. “I always thought it was your mom being dramatic. Like maybe she consulted one of her crystal energy chandeliers and it told her to be indifferent to my wife. I couldn’t see she was trying to help, in her own special way.”
“I’m trying to help, too. Emily really is the total package. If you pass on her, I’m going to go out with her myself, just so I can get a fancy title.”
He glared at her.
“You know what I mean. She’s a catch!”
They stood there, side by side, for another few minutes. The scenery of the afternoon couldn’t have been nicer, at least for their part of Wyoming. The water surface danced with tiny waves. Wind blew through the pine boughs. It smelled like a Christmas tree lot. However, all at once, Uncle Ted patted his pants pockets as if he’d forgotten something.
“Dang it. I left my spare magazine in the truck. Will you hang out here for a sec? I also remembered a story about your mother you’re going to appreciate. Just wait, okay?”
She waved him off. They’d shared a million stories of Mom over the years, so she doubted it was anything new. However, if Mom was gone forever, she was willing to tolerate any repeat stories so they would burn into her memory. “I’ll be here.”
Uncle Ted walked away but stood by the corner of the cabin for a few extra seconds; she heard his footsteps in the crunchy pine needles when he finally strode away. A stunning blue jay squawked at her from up in a nearby pine, diverting her attention back to the big show Mother Nature had put on for them.
Minutes later, her uncle still hadn’t come back. It didn’t bother her at first, but after another brief wait, she started to think he’d forgotten about her. That wouldn’t be a surprise, given all the things going on, and with how tired he was, but loneliness made her want to rejoin the group.
She started around toward the front of the cabin, ready to give him grief for not coming back right away. When she arrived in the front yard, she stopped in her tracks. Her stomach rolled sideways, not wanting to be a party to the sight.
“What the…”
The truck was gone.
Glendo, WY
Ted’s conscience nagged him about how things had gone down. He’d shared a tender moment with Kyla while overlooking the beautiful lake, but he’d left her without saying good-bye. Now he and Emily were in the truck racing to get away from the person he loved the most in the world.
“Meechum knows what to do?” he asked.
“Yes,” Emily said sympathetically. “I made it clear her mission in all this was to make sure Kyla stays safe. I have to tell you, she made a compelling case why you should have been the one to stay behind and she should be the one to go with me to NORAD.”
Ted thought back to how he and Kyla had been standing behind the cabin, alone. If Meechum wanted to do it, she could have gone with Emily and snuck off. “Did you think about going with her, instead of me?” It had never crossed his mind to stay behind; he wondered what calculus whipped through her head to arrive at the conclusion she did.
“Well, when you talked to me back at the prairie dog town, I wasn’t sure leaving Kyla behind was the right thing to do. As we got near the cabin, though, and saw how remote it was, I began to wish I was the one who could stay…” Emily swished her hair as she gazed out her window.
“But,” he prodded.
“But apparently, my eyes are required to access the sensitive parts of the defense mainframe. It was either go with someone to the enemy base or send you with one of my eyes. I rather like being able to see with both of them.” She laughed with a nervous energy.
The truck sped through the tiny town of Glendo. In about thirty seconds, he had them back on the empty highway, heading south. It gave him time to digest her statement about picking who she would travel with.
“So, you selected me because of my fighting skills?” They’d been running and fighting for days, so that had to be the reason.
“Not exactly. I think Meechum could take you in a hand-to-hand cage match.”
He chuckled. “You might be right about that.” After a pause, he continued. “So…the reason you chose me was…” He was fishing for her to admit she liked him. Their various kisses notwithstanding, it still felt wrong to pursue his commander-in-chief.
“You have more experience in areas I think I’ll need during this mission. Your piloting skills could be critical when we need to cross a lot of ground. I’ve seen you with a rifle, so I know you’re solid there. Plus, you have a proven track record of keeping me alive. That counts for a lot.” She looked right at him, smiling.
Those were all fine reasons, but not the ones he’d hoped for. “You said I had a blind spot when it comes to you,” he began, watching the road, “and I guess I do. All the joking back when we were all together in the truck makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t really feel that way. Not when I’m alone with you.”
“Ted MacInnis. Is this your convoluted way of saying we’re going steady?”
&n
bsp; He shrugged. “If you really want to. I could take it or leave it.”
She sat frozen in her seat for so long he needed to peek over to her. When their eyes met, they both broke into laughter. Being alone with her removed all his inhibitions, as well as the “normal” social order of boss and subordinate. They were simply two people heading out into the apocalypse to do a job. He had to look to the road for a second, but when he returned to her face, he knew he couldn’t keep her hanging. “Yeah, I guess I could take it.”
Having a complicated girlfriend wasn’t exactly protocol for an Air Force lifer such as himself, but Ted accepted the necessity of letting his guard down for Emily. It wasn’t only a result of being attracted to her; he needed her on a more personal level. While she may have joked about ditching him and taking Meechum, he had thought about ditching all three of the women and going on his own. When it came down to it, he found he couldn’t. It wasn’t a journey he could do alone.
In the end, he hated leaving Kyla, but there was no question she would be a lot safer, and that was what he promised to his sister. The second they did their work at NORAD, he was going back to Glendo to collect her.
He looked in the rearview mirror. Kyla and the cabin were already miles behind.
I’m sorry, Kye. I couldn’t tell you to your face, but I think this is going to be a one-way trip.
NORAD Black Site Sierra 7, CO
Dwight had a terrible morning. After the white-haired man took the girl in blue away, he spent hours spilling his guts into the five-gallon bucket serving as his toilet. When he wasn’t tossing his cookies, he yelled for Poppy to come back, though she never did. It was almost a relief when a man dressed in black came and opened his door.
“David says it’s time for your sentencing.” The man spoke dryly, as if Dwight was far beneath him.
“Can we take a car? I’m not sure I can walk.” He sat hunched over on the plastic chair. His prison attire needed a visit to the laundromat.
Minus America Box Set | Books 1-5 Page 72