“If it’s as powerful as you say it is, the heat will vaporize everything.”
“Then someone has to stay.”
Adam had to remind himself to breathe; the only thing he was aware of was a ripping sensation in his chest, as though someone had reached in and torn his heart straight out.
“You kept me going when I’d given up,” Adam said behind a curtain of tears. “And now I’m supposed to leave you here to die?”
She took his face in her hands.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what you’re going to do. This way, I don’t have to die of Huntington’s, and I can save you and Rachel. You won’t have to watch me fall apart a little bit at a time. You won’t have to watch me suffer. And I know you wouldn’t do what had to be done.”
“I would, I would, I promise.”
“No, sweetie, you wouldn’t,” she said. “And I wouldn’t want you to.”
He held a clenched fist to his lips as Sarah turned to Rachel. For a brief, terrible moment, he found himself wishing he’d died in the plague, thinking about detonating the bomb himself so he wouldn’t have to feel the pain of losing Sarah. But that wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair to Rachel.
“You get your dad out of here now, okay?” Sarah said.
Rachel nodded.
“Dad, he kept a truck parked in the back of this building,” Rachel said. “He always kept a spare key in a little box in the wheel well.”
Rachel stepped forward and hugged Sarah hard.
“I’m sorry we won’t get to know each other,” Sarah said. “I think I would’ve liked that.”
“Me too,” Rachel said, her words coming on a canvas of light sobs.
“Let’s get his body over to the computer,” Adam said.
Adam slid his arms under Chadwick’s armpits and slid him across the room. There was nothing graceful about it; he dragged him like a side of beef. All he cared about was getting his thumb near the sensor. He’d bite the asshole’s thumb off if he had to. It took about a minute, leaving them precious few.
Sarah tottered over, a bit more alert now, her hand holding her shoulder. Adam pressed Chadwick’s stiff finger against the sensor, and the computer beeped loudly. A screen titled Security Protocols popped up, sporting a series of icons. The icon in the bottom lower screen was tagged Fail-Safe.
“You’d better go,” Sarah said.
“God, I fucking hate this,” Adam said. “I love you so much.”
“I know. Now go.”
“Dad.”
Adam looked up toward the sound of the forceful summons, a bit amazed it had come from his little girl. From his chicken wing. He’d missed so much of her life. He vowed he would spend the rest of his days making sure he didn’t miss anymore of it. He owed that to her. And to Sarah.
He turned back to Sarah and wrapped her tightly in his arms. He kissed her hard.
“Remember how much I love you,” she said. “Now get the hell out of here. You’ve got five minutes.”
“Dad. It’s time to go,” Rachel said. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but her face was hard and full of resolve. She’d accepted Sarah’s gift, and she’d be damned if she was going to blow it.
“I love you,” Adam said as he felt Rachel’s hand take his. Then she was pulling him, back through the anteroom of Level 4 and into the stairwell. Simply being outside that horrible place galvanized him, and now they were both hauling ass up the stairs. Their footfalls echoed through the silent stairwell.
The Citadel was a dead place now.
Up four flights of stairs and then through the empty control room. Tears blurred his vision as he thought about Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, down there, with that red fail-safe trigger, the holocaust that would consume her and bring a storm of fire and ash on this place, this terrible place. And after that storm had passed, Sarah Wells would be gone from this earth forever, an earth that might be a bit better because of what she had done.
They ran and ran, back down the corridor, past the encased newspapers of a world that no longer existed, down the hall and out into the cold New Year’s morning. Being out there now, that’s what drove it home that Sarah was gone now, and he froze there in the doorway.
“Dad!” Rachel screamed. “We have to go. Or it was all for nothing!”
They snaked their way around the building, where they found the Suburban waiting for them. The keys were right where Rachel promised.
“I’ll drive,” Rachel barked.
She climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car. Adam got in the passenger seat, and they drove away.
“Thank you for coming after me.”
“Thank Sarah and Charlotte.”
#
So, Sarah thought.
This is what it’s like to die.
She stood at the terminal, her finger hovering over the icon, watching the clock wind down toward zero. She wanted to give Adam and Rachel as much time as she could.
1:03
It would be like no death that she had ever envisioned.
Since her diagnosis, death had consumed her every waking thought, the obsession itself a virus that had infected her. And when she’d survived the plague, she couldn’t think of a crueler fate to have befallen her. To be left alone in a world of the dead while her Huntington’s took its goddamn sweet time. That was, at least, until she met Adam. For a short time, at least, he had protected her from her own darkest thoughts. He had inoculated her with love.
0:48
She wasn’t afraid of dying. You think about something often enough, and it becomes familiar. It becomes the cranky neighbor next door that freaked you out at first, but that you eventually got used to, even when he stumbled in to your living room drunk and naked and claiming he thought he was in his own house. She wasn’t looking forward to it exactly, any more than you looked forward to the drunk neighbor’s antics. But she wasn’t afraid. She wished she’d had more time with Adam. She wished she’d had time to get to know Rachel. And Adam had been right. There was a certain demented beauty to this post-plague world, where you’d been able to think clearly for one goddamned second without worrying about e-mail or Facebook or this new political scandal or that potential carcinogen in your pantry.
OK, she told herself. Enough pontificating.
Time to go.
:10
She held her breath and pressed the Fail-Safe icon, waiting for the flash of light, the boom, whatever it was that would be her last sensation in this mortal coil. But nothing happened.
A single window popped up on the dark screen.
ERROR
Oh no.
:07
She tapped the X in the corner of the window, which returned her to the screen of icons.
Now she was pissed, a bolt of anger spiking through her. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. They were entitled to this happy ending, as shitty as it was. She tapped the icon again.
:03
This had better work. This had better work. This had better goddamn-
A bright, terrible light filled the room.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Adam told her to turn east at the main highway. She drove a mile, and then stopped at a forty-five degree angle in the middle of the lonely road. Her father sat in the back seat, looking west toward the Citadel, awaiting the fiery holocaust that would mean the end of this brave woman. He’d barely said a word since they’d pulled away from the lab. But he was here. That was something she was still trying to wrap her head around. It seemed to be an improbability of the highest order.
She looked at the outline of the walls, distant and shadowy now, the residue of a bad dream. How often had she dreamed about being clear of them? It was the oddest sensation. Being outside the walls was making her jittery, as though she’d downed one too many cups of coffee. She’d become used to them over the long weeks and months; it had become a shell from the world beyond, a way not to deal with the thing that had happened. But now she was here, outside, free of the Cit
adel forever. Snow continued to fall on this virgin morning of the new year, jaundiced in the harsh glow of the Suburban’s headlights.
“How did you find me?” she asked. The question popped loose like a fart, but the truth was, she had to know. She didn’t like uncertainties, loose ends. She liked closed systems, where everything matched up.
“Nadia,” he said, shifting slightly in his seat. “We met her on the road. She saw a picture I had of you.”
“How is she?”
“She’s safe,” Adam said.
“You had my picture?”
“Yeah.”
He had my picture.
She wondered what their relationship would have been like if the plague had never happened. If she were being honest with herself, and what the hell was the point of lying to yourself anymore, their relationship hadn’t been going anywhere fast. She wasn’t quite at the stage where she addressed her father by his first name, but on the continuum from Dad to Adam, she figured she’d been closer to the latter. They were always pleasant, to a fault, splashing around in the shallow end of the relationship pool, where no real damage could be done. She’d felt no real connection to him, and only when the world was literally ending around them had she thought to call him. Absence had not made the heart grow fonder. Absence wiped away connection like a pencil eraser, leaving nothing but a faint residue behind.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said.
“What?”
“I blew it. From the moment your mom and I split up, I blew it. I should’ve been there for you. I should’ve been where you were. You ended up here, in this place, because of stupid, selfish decisions I made twenty years ago. If I’d been nearby, like any good father with a lick of sense, you wouldn’t have had to go through that.”
“But then you would’ve missed out on your exciting cross-country adventure.”
He laughed at that. A definite chuckle.
“And I wouldn’t have met the women I met,” she said. “And Chadwick would’ve gotten away with his little plan.”
It was hard to argue with her logic. They’d have survived, and Chadwick would be here, building his empire a little bit at a time.
“When did they take you?” he asked.
“Mid-September, I think,” she said. “I was headed toward St. Louis.”
“You heard about that too?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t feel bad. There was nothing there.”
“I couldn’t get your message out of my head,” she said. “I kept thinking there was a chance you were still alive. And until I knew one way or the other, there was no reason to stop. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do.”
“On your own for a month,” Adam said, mostly to himself. “Hey, I’m sorry about your mom and Jerry.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Hey, thanks for the flowers.”
“What?”
“You sent me flowers.”
“I forgot all about that.”
“I got them the day I first heard the news about the flu outbreak back east.”
Silence descended on the passenger cabin once more. One way or another, whatever time they had left was running out. Because if Sarah couldn’t detonate the bomb, another bomb was ready to take its place. An invisible bomb that could take them all down. The waiting became a rapidly expanding balloon, the stress fracturing the thin membrane keeping them sane.
They didn’t have to wait much longer.
A pinprick of light told them it was happening. Like a supernova, the tiny dot of crimson inflated exponentially into a star of fire, followed by the sonic boom of the explosion. No words were exchanged, but they both got out of the car at the same time. Rachel shielded her eyes; even from this distance, the explosion had hastened an early if temporary dawn. Despite the deep chill, the blast wave blew its warm breath across the plains as it turned the Citadel into a memory. Maybe they should come back here one day and put up a sign, she thought. To remind the world what could happen in secret labs when no one was paying attention.
The fireball continued through its lifecycle, narrowing at the throat, expanding at the top into the familiar mushroom cloud shape. It lit up the night, the air filled with the strange sound of snowflakes hissing as they were extinguished by the gigantic blaze. They watched until the fire began to recede, having gorged itself on its fuel supply and now quickly running out of gas.
Rachel glanced over at her father, his face illuminated by the orange glow of the blaze. Tears cut through the grime caked on his face.
#
Fifteen minutes later, they were back in the truck, making their way east toward the farm. Adam was driving, puttering along at less than fifteen miles an hour. Snow had begun to sweep across the blacktop, making it difficult to distinguish between highway and the rough terrain of the plains. The sparse road signs and billboards served as lane markers, but even then, he drifted onto the shoulder a couple of times and then had to pray the four-wheel drive had the oomph to get them back on the road. The whole drive, he was consumed by the image of the fireball erupting in the snow-laden sky.
She had done it.
Part of him was glad for her. Nothing had scared her more than the prospect of a slow death by Huntington’s. And the idea that he would watch her die, a process that could’ve taken months or years, was too horrible to contemplate. Especially in a world where access to modern medicine was limited at best. That was the mature part of him, and it had been a small one at that. No, the selfish side of him, the greedy chief executive officer of Adam Fisher, Incorporated, was sick with grief because the woman he’d searched for his whole life had been delivered to him tied in a bow of cataclysm and then taken away from him just as cruelly.
What had been the point of all this then?
What had been the point of heaping pain upon pain, sorrow upon sorrow?
He felt Rachel take his hand in her own.
“Dad, I’m sorry about your friend.”
He squeezed her hand.
“You would’ve liked her, I think.”
He chewed on that for a moment.
“Or not. Hell, maybe you would’ve fought like cats and dogs. But I would’ve been okay with that. Because it would’ve meant that I had both of you around.”
“How did you meet her?”
Adam told her, starting with the fox, continuing through Freddie and Caroline to meeting Nadia in Kansas to Evergreen and Freddie’s betrayal, and finally through Sarah’s sacrificial plan to find the camp. He told her about Sarah’s confession about Huntington’s and he saved the best part of the story, their wedding, for the end. His words came in a flood, the discussion with his daughter watering a part of him that had been left dry long ago. It began filling a hole inside him, one that he’d barely been aware was there, one that may have remained empty if the plague had never happened.
That was a hell of a thing to wrap his mind around.
These great and pure things that had filled his life in the past few months. This reunion with Rachel, his relationship with Sarah. They’d only been possible in the face of humanity’s near-extinction.
When he was done, he felt a little better.
They made it to the farm a little after four in the morning. Adam carefully navigated the narrow road servicing the main house, his heart in his throat as he scanned the scene for the vehicles carrying Charlotte and the other women. Then he saw it. Lanterns bobbing about in the dark. As he got closer, the outlines of the other survivors began to take shape in the dim light cast by the lanterns.
“They made it,” Rachel said excitedly. “They made it.”
A smile stole across Adam’s face.
“Welcome home, Rachel.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Spring.
Adam stepped outside the guesthouse he shared with three other men, his back aching but otherwise not feeling too bad. It had been one thing to be a forty-two-year old man in the world before the plague; it was another thing entirely for that man to be thru
st into a pre-Industrial Revolution world. They’d spent the day before sowing the fields with the early-season vegetables, the seeds harvested from the stores of farms around the area. A check of the local almanacs had given them the data on when to plant what, and they were following the intelligence they’d uncovered to the letter. None of the survivors were farmers, and so it was a lot of trial and error. But it was something they had to get right if they had any hope of establishing a permanent settlement here in northern Kansas.
Adam sat on the old weather-beaten rocking chair and looked out over the farm. It was early, the sun just poking over the horizon. The air was sticky with humidity, promising the first real warm day that year. The feel of the thick air on his skin reminded him of those terrible days when Medusa had carved its initials into the world. It was Sunday, and the farm was quiet, the sole day off from working in the fields that the group had agreed upon.
He missed Sarah terribly. Once the rush of finding Rachel had passed, her death had hit him hard. Someone organized a memorial service for all those who had died at the Citadel, including Mike Stills, whose crazy-ass sacrifice had proven perhaps more important than anything Adam himself had done. The service was nice, those lost memorialized by wooden crosses at a sunny end of the farm.
The winter had been long and harsh. Temperatures struggled to climb out of the thirties for most of January and February, and each thick, gray front that moved in brought with it the threat of heavy snow. Most of the time, the clouds brought with them flurries or no moisture at all, but a few times, they found themselves socked in with a heavy snowfall. It was during this time that everyone wished they’d never spoken a bad word about meteorologists in the pre-plague world because a somewhat accurate forecast, it turned out, was far better than no forecast at all.
The cold-weather months had been spent living day to day, foraging for food and clean water. There was no shortage of cold-weather gear or woodstoves, so the low temperatures had not been much of a problem. Two residents, both on the north side of sixty, had died during the winter. One succumbed to a massive heart attack, or at least, that had been Adam’s guess. A second had developed pneumonia and had not responded to treatment.
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