The group from the truck had all assembled and were being split into childless men, childless women, and family groups with children. Each was escorted to a different area of the camp. Jacob was shown to his spot: a bunk with a clean mattress, a blanket, and a foam pillow; he was led with the other men to the shower array in the back of the dorm. They all showered, silent and embarrassed, under the bored eye of a uniformed guard. He put his dirty clothing back on, since he had nothing else, but his shoes, which he’d wrapped in strips of cloth to hold them together, had stuck to the cloth and fallen to shreds when he took them off. The dorm was only about a quarter full, so all the new arrivals picked their bunks; Jacob picked a top bunk near one of the small windows. A bell rang and a guard came in a few minutes later to explain to the newbies that this meant supper.
Jacob followed the crowd to a cafeteria building and went through the line to get a tray of food that was more or less what he remembered getting for free lunch in his high school cafeteria. But it was hot, it was edible, and there was enough for a man Jacob’s size, so he dug in gratefully. He was clean and sheltered, safe and fed. When the lights-out bell rang at ten, he fell asleep like a child.
XLIII.
Love Strange
The expedition to Camp David, which was sixty-odd miles, had been nerve-racking for POTUS in his armored limousine. He snarled every time someone told him they'd heard nothing of his family. It was even more grueling for the Secret Service and Marine detail who trotted alongside on foot as the cars crawled along. Even so, they did everything feasible to make it easier and more comfortable for him, while still maintaining a thick cordon of protection. There was virtually a military division surrounding him.
Once they established the fundamentals of what was coming to be called the machine sickness, and what was more important, its results, Camp David was the analytically valid choice. The Camp was a bunker, and the petroleum supplies stocked there were undisturbed and (presumably) uncontaminated, enough to last three years. A procedure of couriers travelling by foot and bicycle was contrived, to carry communications between POTUS and Site R in Pennsylvania, where what endured of the military command structure was to be bunkered. Birdwell noted that POTUS withdrew into himself when this was discussed; his eyes constricted. He suspected that the billionaire was silently scheming to use this emergency to get his hands back on the reins of his multinational business empire at the first opportunity. In a way, Birdwell couldn't blame him; everyone was frantic with worry over the whereabouts of their loved ones and the status of their homes. He doubted that the man had fully grasped the scale of the dissolution confronting them, or the idea that corporations had essentially ceased to exist when electronic communications were lost.
Birdwell shook his head; there wasn’t much military left to command; the loss of communications and the inability to feed and supply military bases had left 90% of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines on their own, either in the US or overseas, wherever they happened to be. The communications they did receive were mostly updates detailing small groups of governmental workers, military and police mostly, who’d achieved momentary contact and were earnestly being advised to continue carrying out their previous missions. What those missions were was usually unknown to the officer giving instructions at the time of contact, but often there was paper hard-copy to scrutinize when they got a chance later, to try to figure out who and what was left, and make some sort of discernment. The protection-camps rescue plan was apparently implemented early on, as laid out during the early PATRIOT years after 9-11, and judging by the spotty reports they received, it was functioning surprisingly well, more or less as planned in most areas, siphoning the population out of the hellish cities into self-supporting protectee centers.
To say that the first weeks at the refuge were a shock would be an understatement. POTUS was preoccupied and irritable; he seemed stunned. He’d relied on delegating authority and there was no one to delegate to. All he could do is listen to interminable speculation; long days of dispute, uninformed theorizing over what had transpired, bored him almost senseless. He even raised his hand one day as though to strike one brave aide who told him straightforwardly that his family couldn’t be found. The machine sickness was still held to be part of a larger terrorist or international political plot, and this was plainly articulated in all the top-level communications, transported long distances by foot or bicycle, on coded slips of paper, to and from decoy hand-off sites by couriers who didn’t know one another and didn’t know what news they were bearing.
Finally, one day, the protective detail assigned to the First Lady finally made it through with her. POTUS stood at the window and watched the eight immense men herd his wife, once an elegant model but now more like a gaunt refugee, and his son and daughter into the building. He actually wept a few tears and rushed to the entry to embrace them. Staff looked on with mixed emotions: relief at the family's being reunited, hope that POTUS would be more emotionally stable now that they’d been found safe, and envy. All but one of the subordinates had been separated from their families on the day the machine sickness struck Washington; only a few of them had been able to re-establish connection, and that was via vague, heavily self-censored paper notes entrusted to the foot couriers.
They waited for their enemies’ nuclear bombs to drop, or for troop carriers to sail into their unprotected harbors, disgorging an invasion force on their helpless shores.
Slowly, they came to comprehend beyond any doubt that the affliction must be global. Not only were the US's nuclear warheads sitting useless in their silos, controlled by a tangle of newly uninsulated, shorted-out wires, but so were the warheads of every other nation. Aircraft and aircraft carriers, Humvees and tanks, Blackhawks and F-35s: all depended on plastics and petroleum fuel. There was a hushed moment of shocked distress when someone brought up the fate of submarine crews. The image of them dying in the dark in submerged coffins, alone, unknowing, wedged itself vividly into everyone’s mind, although surely the number dying in riots, plane crashes, structural collapses, and myriad other accidents worldwide was far, far greater.
The world’s supreme national military empire was just as helpless as everyone else. Its massive size and rigid structure was, in fact, proving to be a disadvantage. There might be numerous units out there acting semi-autonomously, but those units would trickle away as they starved or ran out of materiél, or else degenerate into gangs of marauding thugs as they failed to receive new orders.
The expensive, hierarchical, and complicated planning and development mechanisms the nation-states of the planet depended on were as incapacitated as a freshman at a frat party.
Unknown to them, everywhere on the planet, individuals: ten thousand, ten million—who could count?—were tinkering and fiddling, gabbing and suggesting, testing and experimenting, with new ways to make things function, to survive and thrive. Just as the airplane was invented by six or eight others at the same time as the Wright Brothers tinkered at Kitty Hawk, just as Antonio Meucci presented a working telephone decades before Alexander Graham Bell, ideas had life of their own and could not be held back, but found a way to trickle through the mesh of connections between the billions of nodes of light known as humans.
XLIV.
Don’t Shoot or I’ll Move
One of the men had the muzzle of his long gun touching the base of Jeremy’s cranium; the other two stood further back. Think fast, DD.
She stood, palmed her face with both hands, and let out a high-pitched gasp. She mimicked the sawtooth breathing of hyperventilation, imitating an asthmatic friend she’d once seen almost die from an attack. Jessica, brilliantly, picked up on it right away, and launched into a performance of her own. Pretending not to have seen the men, she turned her back on them and began to try to “calm” her mother. She put her hands over hers, on her cheeks, and looked into her eyes.
“Mom, what’s wrong? Mom? Mom!” Jessica deserved an Academy Award for her dissimulation. “Oh, no, it’s one
of her panic attacks! Jeremy, quick, her medication! Before she passes out again!” she called out, her eyes locked with DD's. DD risked a wink.
The middle man was colossal, beefy, and well over six feet tall, his tangled beard looped into a knot mid-chest. The two slighter men’s body language telegraphed that he was their leader.
Gabriela stood uncertainly, baffled and not twigging, while the two women went through their pantomime. Jessica swung around and covered the distance between her mom and Jeremy in a few galloping paces, then stopped short as she pretended to initially take in the situation.
Three things happened at once: Jessica let out an ear-splitting scream. DD lunged towards the five of them, her breathing miraculously restored to normal. And Jeremy slapped the rifle aimed at his ear away, spinning on one knee, seizing the barrel of the weapon, and shoving the stock of it up into his attacker’s face, all in one precipitate motion.
DD had her own handgun unholstered by the time she’d closed the space between herself and the menacing tableau. Jessica was inside the radius of the rifle barrel of one of the goons, so he dropped the unusable weapon and went for the semiauto in his pants, just as Jessica sprang on top of him with the paring knife she’d used to cut the apples. The knife penetrated his chest eight or ten times—oh, so quickly! —in a series of tiny, wet thumps. He managed to get his gun up and squeezed off a shot, which went wild, before he rapidly blanched and tumbled like a sack of potatoes. DD was approaching fast; the third thug was vacillating between firing at Jeremy, who was pressing his advantage by forcing his gigantic but off-balance opponent backwards using the stock of his own gun, and shooting DD. He swung the weapon towards her, but over-aimed and missed, and his hesitation allowed her to get a shot off before she sprinted straight at him. She saw him jerk as the shot smashed into him, and she squeezed the trigger four more times as she closed the distance. It barely registered that the last shot made no bang and recoil, just a click. He lifted the rifle again and DD saw, in a shock like a bolt of lightning, the concentric circles of the muzzle, quivering slightly, pointing right at her face, so close she could touch it. She dropped to her knees (she would never be sure, later, if it was quick thinking to get out of the line of fire, or outright terror making her knees buckle) and heard the rifle’s report at the same moment, deafening, and saw the rifle recoil high into the air as the brute lost control of his weapon and fell. Heart pounding, she ran up to him, still holding her revolver, leapt atop him, and bashed his heavily-tattooed face with the silver handgun, over and over, her cheeks pulling her mouth back into a rictus of fury as she heard the revolting cracks of breaking bones. Her tunnel visual focus shattered all at once, as Jeremy’s adversary scuffled backwards towards her; the monster had finally acquired the presence of mind to let go of his rifle; now he drew a curved machete from between his shoulder blades instead. Jeremy was manipulating the stolen rifle, trying to flip it around and bring it to bear on his attacker, but it was plain that he was going to be too slow to aim and fire the unfamiliar weapon.
DD found herself barely human. Her thighs became the haunches of a beast as she dove horizontally forward out of her crouch, caught Jeremy’s opponent behind his knees, and brought him crashing to the ground. All three of them bounded atop the one final man as he turned over, groping for his absent machete, which had gone flying as he fell. Jeremy stomped his face, Jessica kicked his ribs, and DD jumped up to seize his ankle and step on his knee, bending the joint sideways with a wet and appalling CRUNCH!
The three of them stood over their vanquished foes, panting, their hearts pounding in their ears. They swung around so they were back to back, observing the four would-be pillagers where they lay on the ground, alert for any sign of motion from them, or for any more confederates who might be lurking in the bushes.
Gradually, their breath slowed, and they began to feel their injuries. Jessica’s was the worst: her opponent’s handgun shot hadn’t gone wild after all, but somehow punctured the thick, heart-shaped muscle of her calf. Jeremy had skinned the thick callus from his left palm, leaving a wound like a bleeding burn. DD’s left pinkie finger stuck out sideways at a right angle, broken; when had that happened? She’d no clue. She realized there was blood running down her cheekbone and dripping on her right shoulder from a gash above her hairline, matching the healing one she’d gotten on the left temple from her captors.
And just like little Martha’s. She remembered the family and looked around for Gabriela, Martha, and the other two children. She saw no sign of them and stalked past the fire. Couldn’t blame her if she took the kids and ran. I wouldn’t have bet on us, against those hoodlums!
But Gabriela was lying under the brush pile they’d collected for kindling, sheltered with a blanket, arms spread like doves’ wings over the children, her hand clamped securely over the baby’s mouth. She saw DD padding towards her and scrambled out, holding the baby and permitting him to start to cry, which he did, lustily, forthwith. The girls came following, and Martha’s big sister boosted her to her hip.
Jeremy, Jessica, and DD allowed Gabriela to fuss over their injuries and bind their wounds. She cleaned and bound Jessica’s leg; the bullet had gone in one side and out the other and the bleeding wasn’t heavy. Comparatively. Her leg attended to, Jessica tottered over to stitch up her mother’s scalp.
“This is becoming a habit for you,” said Jeremy to Jessica, as Gabriela wrapped gauze around his skinned hand.
“A habit I’d like to break!” she observed wryly.
The children, seeing all the adults were present and accounted for, serenely crawled back into their bedrolls and fell back to sleep. The adults settled back down by the fire.
They glanced at each other.
“We did it!” exclaimed DD.
“We sure did,” agreed Jeremy. “You were a wildcat! I thought I was a goner when that fat bastard pulled that machete!”
“I don’t know what came over me!” mused DD. “Wildcat is a good description. I just felt like a feral creature!” She turned to Jessica. “And where did you learn to fight like that?” She asked.
Jessica smiled craftily and took a breath to answer.
“Never mind,” DD said. “That is something I don’t need to know.”
“That’s right, mom. You don’t,” her adult offspring agreed.
“Well, I don’t know where any of you learned to do all that,” Gabriela interjected, “but you were awesome beyond awesome. You are my heroes!” DD could see every hair of her head, vividly, and every thread of her fraying blouse.
“Is it just me,” DD asked, “or does everything seem that much better and brighter right now?”
“It’s not just you,” Jessica confirmed.
“Is this the first time you’ve survived a fight for your life?” Jeremy asked.
“Well, yes,” admitted DD. On the streets of her childhood and youth, she was the type who either faded and hid, or talked her way out of things.
“Kind of makes you feel really glad to be alive, doesn’t it?”
“Hell, yeah!” DD recalled the laser focus, emotional but calm, that had burst into her consciousness when she saw the rifle muzzle pointing directly at her.
“Wait till later. I’ll show you what really feels good about still being alive!”
DD leered at him.
“Mom! Gro-o-oss!” Jessica mimicked her own tone from back when she was a child and she saw her mother and father kissing.
DD shrugged, giving Jeremy a wicked side glance. He took her hand and they slipped off together.
XLV.
Sutokata
Juni’d never imagined anything like it. The home was beyond rustic. Every visible surface was wood: the floors were planking, the ceiling beams were exposed, with the planks of the floor above visible between them. The wall beams were also exposed, but between them stretched bookshelves, yards and yards of them. She’d entered, via a small mud room, into a chamber perhaps 40 by 25 feet, and every single wall was lined with b
ooks: paperbacks and hardcovers; biographies, history books, scriptures, coffee-table photograph books, how-to books, classics, erotica, best-sellers...
Noting her wide-eyed gaze, Snowbear smiled. “We have a lot of time to read in the winter.”
“Why’s that?” Asked Juni.
“We are a self-sustaining farm. In the winter, there’s not as much labor to do.” Juni considered this, her fatigue making her slow on the uptake.
“Oh. How do you…” just then a willowy, pale woman, with waist-length hair in the process of turning from blonde to white, walked in. She grinned, and crinkles warmed the corners of her unadorned eyes.
“Akisni, you remember Amit,” said Snowbear. They hugged. “And this is?”
“Juni.” She stepped forward and offered her hand to Akisni, noting the other woman's rustic bandanna kerchief, her magenta flannel shirt, rugged canvas cargo pants, and hiking boots. Her hand was callused but warm. Juni was suddenly aware of her own designer hoodie, her onyx elephant earrings, her makeup. She felt the city girl’s paradoxical emotion, of pride in her sophistication and embarrassment at her frippery.
“Are you all thirsty? Hungry?” Akisni asked. Suddenly Juni recognized she was both. The sound of running water and clattering dishes and pans from the other side of the great door at the other end of the room resolved itself in her awareness. “Follow me.” Juni was a little hesitant. She glanced at Amit, and he gestured with his open hand and followed the women into the kitchen, Snowbear bringing up the rear.
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 17