John could only nod as he struggled to absorb all that what she said implied.
“What about the other children in the school who didn’t go with you?” Grace asked.
“I don’t know. We were told they were safe, but we never saw any of them again.” There was a pause. “You’re from the outside?” she asked plaintively. “My best friend, Halle, didn’t go with us. Are they safe? I wanted to send an e-mail to my friends that didn’t go, but I was told only official things can go out on e-mail, but someday soon I can see them again.”
With that, John turned away, unable to hide his pain, his rage. It was not the girl’s fault. The kid was terrified by this encounter. It was not her fault, but as he looked back at her, he could see his Jennifer standing there.
Forrest, with a firm hand on John’s shoulder, led him back out into the middle of the street that went the entire length of the deep underground cavern.
“Do you know what this means?” John snarled. “Do you know what this means?”
Forrest, features emotionless, could only nod.
“They knew. At least some of the damn bastards knew. They got theirs out at ten in the morning of that day and hid them here before the shit hit the fan. They knew!”
He shouted out the last words. Several of Bob’s troopers who had lingered behind to secure the entryway tunnel were standing close by, and he could see in their eyes, their features, that the truth was dawning on them as well. One of them was crying, cursing foully about his own wife and newborn son, an unrelenting stream of obscenities, a comrade holding him tightly, telling him to let it go.
John was feeling the same rage.
On the Day, it had been like any other day but for one great difference: it was Jennifer’s twelfth birthday. After teaching his early afternoon class on such a beautiful warm spring day with half of his students dreamily looking out the window, he had gone down to the village and at a favorite store purchased twelve Beanie Babies for his daughter and raced home to be there before she arrived. Jen, dear now-gone Jen, his first wife’s mother and such a beloved grandmother to Jennifer, had arrived as well to greet their birthday girl.
The rest of that final afternoon of peace had unfolded without incident. Jennifer and a friend had gone up into the neighbor’s orchard to play with the family’s two golden retrievers while he grilled up some burgers and hot dogs for dinner. Then Bob Scales, the same Bob Scales who just an hour ago had led the assault on this facility, had called from the Pentagon to wish Jennifer a happy birthday.
They had then chatted. There was no warning, no Bob sending some sort of coded message that the shit was about to hit the fan and to get ready. Just a friendly chat until suddenly it was obvious even Bob was being caught off guard. Some shouts of panic in the background from Bob’s end, his suddenly saying, “Something’s up. Got a problem here. I gotta…” and then the line went dead.
The war, the Day, had begun for John and the rest of the nation as all power just went off, the sound of traffic on the interstate drifting into silence, a few minutes later a puff of smoke rising from a distant ridgetop, to be learned later it was a commercial jet that had gone in, killing all aboard, one of a couple of thousand jets going down across America.
All of it coming to a stop … at just after four in the afternoon … hours after young Laura said that she had been evacuated to safety.
And yet now, at this moment, after two and a half years of struggling to survive, to reluctantly rising to being essentially an emergency dictator of his town, of having to personally execute a thieving drug addict only days after it started, to carrying his dying father-in-law out of a dying nursing home where the dead were literally decaying on the beds where they had been left to die because no one could help them … to all the starving, the death, the fending off lone marauders that devolved into wandering gangs of hundreds who would actually kill someone so they could feast upon them … and then to hold his twelve-year-old daughter as she died for want of a single vial of insulin, while down here, a select few were hidden away before it had even started and had lived comfortably since?
“Laura!”
He turned to look up Main Street. A woman who appeared to be in her late thirties or early forties, well dressed in a clean white blouse and jeans, figure healthy and definitely not starving, was running toward them.
“Mommy!”
Laura broke free from Grace’s protective embrace, leaped down the steps of the Quonset porch, and ran toward the woman, who slowed, grabbed the frightened girl by the shoulders, and pushed Laura protectively behind her. She looked toward Grace, who had been following behind Laura.
“Back off and leave my child alone,” the woman snapped, and then she half-turned to look at Laura. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
Laura was sobbing too hard to answer.
The woman turned back to face Grace.
“She’s all right. No, we didn’t harm her, ma’am.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Grace Freeman.”
“Listen, damn you, you keep your hands off my child. You’re armed; you are dangerous. You stop where you are and get the hell out of here now!”
Grace looked over at John, obviously confused. John stepped toward the woman. “Miss Freeman is with me,” he announced. “She is no threat to your child.”
She glared at John with an icy, dismissive gaze. “And who the hell are you?”
Her sanctimonious, superior tone was to John like sandpaper grating on an open wound, reminiscent of so many like her going back to childhood, the rich kids who lived up in Short Hills, the wealthy community that adjoined where he lived for several years in a working-class neighborhood. Their parents were the power brokers of firms in New York while his father was putting his ass on the line in the skies over Vietnam. The wives and daughters of haughty generals, unlike men like Bob Scales who truly came from the salt of the earth himself. To college professors one had to bow to in order to have any hope of getting a passing grade with their all-so-superior attitude, cramming their political views down his throat. She was of that ilk, and that attitude would not have survived a week if she had been trapped in the world up on the surface.
He took a deep breath and tried to control his own rage. “I am Colonel John Matherson, State of Carolina, and this young lady is a lieutenant under my command and will be treated with respect.”
“I don’t give a damn where you’re from. I’m ordering you to clear out now and stay away from my children, or you will face charges, Mr. Mather.”
“That is Colonel John Matherson,” Forrest retorted.
“Do you even know who I am?” she shouted.
John tried to extend his hands in a calming gesture, but she overreacted, as if he were drawing a weapon.