“Why don’t we share some of this food with you?”
“A guardsman killed my own ma. Happened last month.”
And then a deafening roar exploded from behind the pillar where Jake was hiding, and Denim Jacket’s face seemed to bend toward the center, even as his lips formed a perfect O, his eyes squinted in pain, and a fine spray of red erupted from his temple. His arm went down, the gun fell from his hand, and he crumpled to the concrete floor.
The other boys dropped their crude torches and scattered; for a second she thought it was just boys running away from their own mischief, like they had egged a house, or let the air out of someone’s tires, or left a burning bag of dog shit on somebody’s doorstep, because they ran like all boys run, flat out, and with the pump and effort of crazed terror. Glenda thought all this in a split second but then remembered it wasn’t boys playing mischief anymore—it was another sequence, another beat, another slice of goddamned life from the end of the world. She had killed a cop, and now her son had killed a child. Kids killing kids. That’s when you knew the Apocalypse had truly arrived.
Jake ventured from his pillar, and he looked scared and proud at the same time, and not at all like her son, but like a boy she didn’t even know. He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling under his T-shirt, and he walked toward them with an odd lurch, as if the strength had disappeared from his legs.
The torches lay scattered around Denim Jacket, casting wisps of black smoke, and Denim Jacket sprawled there, bleeding profusely from the head, the blood spreading and spreading until it finally reached the drain next to the generator and started trickling down.
“I told you I could shoot someone,” said Jake, looking at his sister.
Glenda could tell that Jake didn’t fully understand what he had done.
As for Hanna, she had gone catatonic and was just standing there with her limp hair in front of her face, trying to manage her wheeze while she stared with sightless eyes at the blood trickling down the drain.
Glenda looked at her son and saw he wanted her to say something, to give approval, but every muscle in her body was rigid, and it was like her mind was frozen.
She heard the kids yelling to each other on the next level, some spontaneous communication, perhaps a warning, but it was too echoey down here, and she couldn’t make out the precise words.
“Mom?” said Jake.
She nodded, but it was a dull and distracted nod.
“Mom, he had a gun pointed right at you.”
“I know.”
Jake broke down and cried.
She went to him, and took him in her arms like the child he was. And even when the generator clicked off because her car was full, she kept holding him because he couldn’t seem to get his sobbing under control. He didn’t cry often these days; she couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. But he was crying now. She heard his voice crack, and realized his voice was changing.
“Let’s get in,” she said. “We’re full.”
“Mom, are you happy I killed him?”
And in a voice that was as dead as Denim Jacket, she said, “Yes, Jake, I’m happy you killed him.”
She lifted Denim Jacket’s gun and brought it into the car with her.
They drove up to the ground-floor level and out to the gate. Cedarvale continued to burn. Where was Whit? And the remaining residents? Were they all dead now? Had Whit made it to Detroit?
She took some food out—four cans of Irish stew—stacked them on the curb next to the security kiosk, put Denim Jacket’s gun on top, and then drove off into the darkness. She wasn’t going to leave Buck and the others without a gun.
25
At Homestead, Neil studied the new downloads from the Department of Defense with misgiving. Only so many launch vehicles left, and according to his virus specs, dispersion would fall short by twenty-five percent if he didn’t come up with a solution. Secretary of Defense Sidower was indeed correct in his bleak assessment—except for what they had in the United States, and in U.S. bases abroad, launch infrastructure worldwide, particularly in terms of personnel, had been degraded to the point of zero capability.
Was there a solution?
He entered the parameters again, just in case he had made a mistake—lift requirements versus existing launch capabilities—and came up with the same dead-end numbers. But then he widened the data pool, and entered the parameters through a games-theory program Kafis had given him one summer at Marblehill, something the Pentagon computer geeks didn’t have, just to see what would happen. Outside, on the air base, the last of the sun was slowly disappearing.
“Analyze,” he told his waferscreen.
Sixty seconds later his waferscreen gave him an answer he hadn’t been expecting—the Moon.
He scrutinized the data. It turned out that AviOrbit had dozens of interlunar shuttles crated in various warehouses, some out of service for decades, but all possessing, to varying degrees, launch potential. His waferscreen told him that if these shuttles were refurbished, they could be transformed into crude missiles.
He sat back, glad that the Tarsalan software had taken into account this phantom resource. Was it possible, then? Could he win this chess game after all?
He entered further parameters about the virus itself. Because it was a virus, it could be grown and cultured in a lab. Unlike the toxin, it didn’t need an existing chemical production infrastructure. Checking lunar inventory, he saw that the Moon in fact had the basic building blocks for his virus, and could manufacture it in significant quantities. They even had Tarsalan blood in cold storage—there for emergency purposes should the Tarsalans ever need the Moon in a medical capacity—and could therefore also devise the Tarsalanspecific virions.
He breathed a sigh of relief. It could be done. And if it meant he had to pull another Luke Langstrom on the Moon, then that’s what he would do. Co-opt the Moon a second time. And truth be told, he was curious. His brother had come up with the flagella thing. But had he come up with anything since? It would be interesting to see exactly what his brother was doing.
He lifted his phone—
When a firefight erupted between the opposing factions an hour later, the secretary still hadn’t gotten back to him. The hole in the sky above the southeastern United States had now closed up entirely, and it was pelting rain vehemently.
The firefight, as usual, was at the other end of the base, but Neil and his family still followed their established protocol. Neil got on the floor. The girls crawled under their cots.
Louise didn’t follow the protocol this time. She kept rolling her paint roller, spreading yellow paint over the walls, as if she were sick of firefights.
“Louise, get on the floor.”
She continued to paint.
“Mom, a stray bullet could reach here,” warned Ashley. “Or the soldiers might come.”
“Sweetie, it’s all right. Colonel Bard never lets them get close to us. So let’s just continue with our lives.
I’m not going to let them bother us anymore. And I’m almost finished with this painting. I want to get it done. What do you think of the color? I think it really brightens up the place.”
Neil stared at his wife as she went back to painting. He heard more gunfire, but it was so distant he thought that maybe she was right—Colonel Bard would keep the breakaway airmen at the other end of the base forever. As he watched his wife work, he had to wonder if this frantic little woman who was painting the army barracks a sunny shade of autumn gold had become unhinged.
He got up from his hiding spot on the floor and lifted a paintbrush. He poured some paint into an empty ration container, walked to the window, and started painting the window frame.
