breast pocket.
“Just down here.” She peered into the darkness. “Jake? Hanna? Come on.” She saw movement in the shadows along the stone fence. She turned to Fernandes. “My daughter’s really sick. I hope you have medicine.”
Fernandes nodded. “We have all kinds. Let’s get them across the lawn… before the Tarsalans come.”
New anxiety shot through her chest like a lightning bolt. “It’s bad?”
“We have five dead. Six including your sister-in-law.”
“My sister-in-law?”
Fernandes nodded. “It’s just three airmen left, Dr. Thorndike, and his three girls.”
“Louise is dead?”
“One of the VMs got her a few days ago.”
Her children appeared out of the shadows.
“Kids, Aunt Louise is dead. Just so you know.”
“What?” said Jake. “Really? What happened?”
Fernandes was looking at the gun in Jake’s hand. He then turned to Glenda. “He know how to shoot? I mean, really shoot?”
But Glenda was too upset about Louise to respond.
“I’m getting better,” said Jake.
“Ever handle a Montclair?” asked Fernandes.
“A Montclair? What’s that?”
Fernandes’s face sank. “Come on. Let’s get everybody inside.”
Fernandes hustled them across the lawn.
The lawn was brown and had the texture of a piecrust, the sod seeming to have come loose in a single piece from the underlying soil, as if the lawn’s root system had died at the same time,
She just felt shocked. How was Neil handling it? How were the girls handling it?
Fernandes led them under the great stone portico and up the steps. They went through the front door, and…there they all were, Neil and the girls, waiting for them, just like any other Marblehill visit, only this one was so different.
Neil was smiling in the oddest way. “Welcome to Marblehill.”
His face was lit by a light that was hanging on a hook, a bare bulb in a cage, the kind mechanics used to look under cars. The greeting came out in a stiff, formal way, and the man standing before her didn’t sound like Neil at all.
“Neil, I’m sorry about Louise. This fellow…” She glanced inquisitively at the airman. “Fernandes, is it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Fernandes told me.”
Neil raised his hands—no need to make any fuss. “We’re all right, Glenda. We’re just glad you made it here okay. We were starting to wonder.”
And that smile. Something wasn’t right about that smile.
The cousins got to know each other again. They had something to eat—military-issue stew, just add water —and her nieces came and clung to her off and on through the next several hours, especially Morgan, who mistakenly called her mommy a number of times.
She got to know the two other airmen: Captain Leonard Aft, who was nominally in charge, and Lieutenant Yuri Rostov, who was always wearing a pair of headphones and seemed to be the technical man; he had a constantly abstracted look in his eyes.
They had a rest. Hanna got her medicine. Her coughing got better and she breathed, for the first time in several days, without a wheeze.
Later on, Glenda stood guard duty with Neil in his study on the second floor. He still had that odd smile on his face, the squeeze of the curve so tight that his lips were white. Light-gathering goggles sat hinged in the up position above his eyes on a strap, and he kept scanning the grounds out front, his face lit by the dim glow of the communications apparatus on the floor next to him. He had lost weight. Not that he was gaunt, but his customary paunch was gone, his clothes were too baggy for his frame, and the usual fullness around his jaw had melted away like wax around a candle.
Now that his face was thin, Glenda couldn’t help seeing the resemblance to Gerry: the way his brow crowned around his eyes in a somewhat falconlike mold, the same generous nose, and a similar rounded protuberance to his chin. Her heart ached for Gerry.
And, as if Neil had read her mind, he said, “I’m sorry about Ger. I’m sorry he’s stuck up there.”
She looked away. Tears came to her eyes. “It’s a bit much.”
He reached out and put his hand on her arm. “Don’t worry, Glenda. I’ve got everything organized.
We’ve got listening posts reaching a mile in every direction. We’ve got infrared cameras the size of your thumb up in trees. We’re tracking each new landing and plotting it on a map. We’ve cataloged their movements and fed the results into a computer, and we’re coming to a real understanding of how they think, at least from a tactical and guerrilla standpoint. We’ve also made a fallback position in the cave.”
She dried her tears. “I forgot about the cave.”
“We’ve fortified the first chamber, and provisioned the second. We’ve got fresh water in there. Enough to last a month. Medicine, too. Not to mention food. We go out on patrol regularly. We search the area.
And we spray the house every day for bugs. Unfortunately, before we started spraying, the Tarsalans sent in bugs and found out we had food. But don’t worry about the Tarsalans. They haven’t mounted a strike in the last three days. We think they’re starting to tire. As for the cave, everything’s buried under rocks so they don’t know it’s there. And we go up there to spray, too.”
And still that smile, the lid on something that was simmering deep inside her brother-in-law.
She glanced out the front window. “I’m sorry about Louise.”
He didn’t say anything. She turned back to him. In the light of the communications apparatus, she saw that his face had turned red. She moved closer and put her arm around him.
“I’m okay…. I’m okay,” he said.
“No… you’re not.”
He took a deep breath. The smile disappeared from his face. “Maybe not.” And then he bowed his head, as if in shame, and closed his eyes. “I failed her, Glenda.”
“You didn’t fail her.”
“And I failed the kids.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I finally realize what a big fool I’ve been all these years.”
“You’re not a fool. For God’s sake, Neil.”
After that, they lapsed into silence for a long time. She must have dozed. And Neil must have thought she was asleep—even when she opened her eyes around a quarter to eleven.
His shoulders heaved and he wept silently. The pain bristled off him like heat from a furnace. Her throat tightened with anguish and her own eyes filled with tears. God. What were they going to do? Here was the end of time. And Neil, once the world’s hero, was nothing but a broken man who cried alone in the dark when he thought no one was watching.
36
Day now followed day. The sad, dark month of October crept slowly toward its close. Glenda occasionally tried to reach Gerry on her fone, but with the shroud constantly thickening, her signal never got through, and she didn’t even get the message from AT&T Interlunar about service being down anymore.
