“Yeah, we’re wondering,” Mark finally replies.
Alec stops and whirls around, quick as a striking snake. At first Mark thinks his answer came out wrong, sarcastically, and the man might punch his lights out. But instead the tough old man just holds up a finger.
“We have one hour, tops, to get out of these rat tunnels. You hear me? One hour.” He turns back around and starts marching again.
“Wait, what?” Mark asks as they hurry to keep pace. “What do you mean? Why? Isn’t it a bad idea to go up there until … well, I don’t know.”
“Sun flares.”
He says the two words like he needs to say nothing else. Like the others should instantly know everything going on in his mind.
“Sun flares?” Trina repeats. “That’s what you think happened up there?”
“Pretty sure, my lovely lady. Pretty sure.”
Mark’s bad feelings about it all have escalated exponentially upon the news. If it’s not an isolated incident, if it’s truly something as global as sun flares, then the little hope he held out for his family is gone. “How do you know?”
He hears the quaver in his voice. Alec answers with no shaking in his whatsoever.
“Because there were too many people from too many places describing the same thing before I got away from the masses. And supposedly the news agencies put out warnings right before they struck. It’s sun flares, all right. Extreme heat and radiation. Double whammy. It was something the world thought it was trained and prepared for. The world was wrong, in my humble judgment.”
All three of them fall silent. Alec keeps moving, Mark and Trina keep following. They turn corners, enter different tunnels, steer clear of other people when they get close. All the while, Mark’s heart is sinking further and further into a dark place. He doesn’t know how to handle something like this. He refuses to believe his family is gone and swears to himself that he won’t rest until he finds them safe and sound. Finally Alec stops in the middle of a long passageway that looks much like all the others.
“I have a few other friends in here,” he says. “Left them to go look for food, learn some things. I’ve worked with Lana for years and years. We were contractors for the defense department—she’s a former soldier, like me. Army nurse. The others are strays we picked up. You two max us out—we can’t take one more or we’ll never make it.”
“Make it where?” Mark asks.
“To the world above,” Alec replies, the last thing Mark expected to hear. “Back into the city, as hellacious as it may be. As long as we stay inside for a while, we should be okay. But we have to get up there before the waters flood this place and kill us all.”
Mark woke up and rolled onto his side, his eyes fully open, his breathing heavy. And he hadn’t even dreamed about the bad part. He didn’t want to remember any of it. He didn’t want to relive the terror of that day.
Please, he thought. Please, no. Please. Not tonight. I can’t.
He didn’t even know who he was talking to. Was he talking to his own brain? Maybe he’d caught the disease from the Toad and was beginning to go crazy.
He flopped onto his back, stared up at the branches and the stars above. There wasn’t even the slightest hint of dawn creeping into the sky. It was dark, dark, dark. He wanted it to be morning, wanted to be done with the threat of dreams for at least a few hours. Maybe he could keep himself awake somehow. He sat up, looked around. But he couldn’t see much, only the outlines of trees and the shapes of his friends lying around him on the ground.
He considered waking up Trina. She’d understand that he needed company. He wouldn’t even have to tell her about his dream. But she seemed so peaceful at the moment, breathing softly. With a quiet groan to himself he gave up on the idea, knowing he’d feel too guilty about depriving her of valuable sleep. Not only did they have a lot of walking to do the next day, she had the added burden of looking after little Deedee.
Mark flopped back down, shifted around until he got comfortable. He didn’t want to dream. The raging waters, the screams of people drowning. The frantic, unbearable fear of fleeing it all. Even awake he could see that room beneath New York City where they’d first met Lana and the others. Alec’s weathered face as he explained to them that after surviving such massive sun flares, their biggest and most immediate worry now was the surge of a tsunami. The flares must have been devastating, inflicting catastrophic damage worldwide and unleashing the heat of hell itself.
Which meant a quick melting of the polar ice caps. Which meant sea levels rising at an alarming and apocalyptic rate. Which meant that the island of Manhattan would be a dozen feet underwater within a few hours. He explained all this to them while they huddled in a room far underground, where the water would seek out and drown everything in its path.