head home, knowing I’d failed.
Ben slapped me on the back. “You gave it a good shot, Greg. Even if there’s no one else out there we’re going to stick together. We can live on the food in the bunker for years. There’s enough gas there to
…”
His voice faded. Way, way to the north, just on the edge of visibility, a spark flickered on the horizon, then slowly faded.
Ben breathed out. “Oh, my…”
Zak turned to the south. “Greg, Michaela, look.”
Tony grabbed my arm. “And over there, behind you.”
Slowly, without fuss, without sound, skyrockets burst one after another on the far horizons. The nearest couldn’t have been any less than fifty miles away. But that didn’t matter. They were there. They were fired by human hands. And as dozens of rockets rose upward to burst in the sky on that Fourth of July night I knew without question that I was witnessing one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.
And that can’t be a bad way to bring this account of what happened to me to an end, can it?
So just keep smiling. Keep hanging on in there. Because together we’re going to make it.
