‘Anybody?’ asked Musso, not really expecting an answer.
The silence might have become unbearable had it not been broken by a young ensign, who coughed nervously at the edge of the huddle. ‘Excuse me, General,’ she said.
Musso bit down on an irrational urge to snap at her, instead keeping his voice as level and non-threatening as he could. ‘Yes, Ms…?’
‘Oschin, sir. I thought you might need to look at these. I’ve streamed vision from eighteen webcams onto a couple of monitors at my workstation. These cams are all in high-volume public areas, General. Grand Central in New York, Daley Plaza in Chicago, that sort of thing…’
Ensign Oschin, who was obviously uncomfortable addressing such a high-powered group, seemed to run down like a wind-up toy at that point. Musso noticed a couple of army officers glaring at her for having interrupted the big kids at play.
‘Go on, Ensign,’ he reassured her, giving the army jerk-offs a cold, hard glare. ‘What’s your point?’
Oschin stood a full inch taller. ‘They’re live feeds, sir, from all over the country. And there’s nobody in them. Anywhere.’
That information fell like a lead weight into a dark, bottomless well, tumbling down out of sight. No one spoke as Musso held Oschin’s gaze, seeing the fear gnawing away at her carefully arranged professional mask. He could taste a trace of bile at the back of his throat and he was unable to stop his thoughts straying to his family back home in Galveston. The boys would both be in school, and Marlene would be up to her elbows in blue rinse at the salon. He allowed himself the indulgence of a quick, wordless prayer on their behalf.
‘Can you patch it through onto the main displays?’ he asked.
‘Aye sir.’
‘Then do so, please, as quickly as you can.’
Oschin, a small bird-like woman, spun around and retreated to the safety of her workstation, whipping her fingers across the keyboard in a blur. Other sysops, who’d been less successful in their own endeavours to raise anyone Stateside, snuck peeks over their shoulders at the results of her work as two large Sony flat panels hanging from the ceiling suddenly filled with multiple windows displaying scenes from across the US. Oschin appeared at the map table again with a laser pointer. She laid the red dot on the first window in the upper left-hand quadrant of the nearest screen.
‘With your permission, General?’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota. Local time 1320 hours. You’re looking at the main food court.’
It was empty. A small fire burned in one concession stand and it looked as though sprinklers may have tripped, but the image quality wasn’t clear enough to be certain. It reminded Musso of an old zombie flick he’d watched as a kid.
‘Disneyland, California. Local time 1120 hours. You’re looking at the concourse just inside the main entrance. Then you have Space Mountain in Tomorrowland. And finally Mickey’s Toontown.’
Again, the pictures were poor in quality, but no less disturbing because of it. Not a soul moved anywhere in them. A breeze pushed litter around the main concourse, where some sort of golf buggy had run up on a gutter and tipped over. The young officer, her voice wavering, laid the red dot on a couple of piles of smoking rags. ‘I think they may have been clothes, sir.’
Nobody replied, possibly because they all felt as sick in the gut as Musso. Oschin waited a second, then made her way through the rest of the image windows. Crown Center in Kansas City. Half-a-dozen cams from UCLA’s Berkeley campus. A mortgage brokers’ convention in Toledo. The main strip in Vegas – which looked like Satan’s wrecker’s yard, with cars all piled into each other and burning fiercely. Venice Beach. JFK Airport. The Strand in Galveston…
Musso arranged his features into a blank facade for that one. He’d already recognised the scene before Oschin had explained what they were looking at. Down in his meat, right down in the oldest animal parts of his being, he knew his family were gone.
Oblivious to the personal import of what she’d just shown them, Ensign Oschin carried on, cycling through a list of public gathering places that should have been teeming with people. All of them abandoned or empty, or… what?
‘It’s the Rapture,’ whispered an army major standing directly across the table from Musso. He was one of the two who’d unsettled Oschin a few minutes ago. ‘The end of days.’
Musso spoke up loudly and aggressively, smacking down on the first sign of anyone in this command unravelling. ‘Major, if it was the Rapture, don’t you think
Chastened and not a little put out, the major, whose name-tag read
Musso wished, for once in his life, that someone was giving him orders as opposed to the other way around. This was one football he didn’t want to run with. He didn’t know what to make of the video streaming out of his homeland. After 9/11 he didn’t think anything could surprise him again. He’d been ready for the day he flicked on the television and saw mushroom clouds blooming over an American city. But this… this was bullshit.
The distinct popping sound of gunfire in the middle distance crackled out of a set of speakers. Then came the screams.
‘George,’ growled Musso.
