James Patterson: Toys

7-4 DAY

I will not forget this moment for as long as I live, which, in truth, might not be that long anyway. I pop the ominous disc labeled “7–4 Day” into the player and sit back on the dusty, threadbare couch in my parents’ cluttered fallout shelter at our beloved lake house in the north country.

I figure that something titled “7–4 Day” can’t be good news.

And it isn’t.

Wham! — no slow reveal, no fade-in. There are just bodies everywhere. Human beings are slumped in car seats, collapsed on sidewalks, lying on the floor in front of the counter at a once popular fast-food restaurant called McDonald’s.

Next comes a classroom in which high school students and their teacher are just lying, pale and bloated, at their desks.

A construction worker is dead in a cherry-picker, and it is possible that his eyes have actually popped from his face.

A postman is sprawled on a porch, the mail still held dutifully in his hands.

A towheaded girl is dead on her bicycle at the bottom of a roadside culvert-and this finally brings tears to my eyes.

It’s as if some master switch has been thrown, turning off their hearts and brains just as they went about their daily lives.

Not everyone’s dead though.

In one indelible scene, elevator doors are pried open and a screaming, traumatized businesswoman emerges-at least seven corpses of business types are visible behind her.

There is some hope at least.

A few hundred survivors are gathered at midfield in a baseball stadium, possibly in New Chicago. The camera pans around. Horrible! The pitcher is dead on the mound, his face buried in dust. There are uniformed bodies at the bases, in the outfield, in the dugouts. The stands are filled with fifty thousand forever-silent fans.

I’m light-headed and ill as I sit on my parents’ couch and watch all this. I’ve been forgetting to breathe, actually; my skin is clammy and cold.

Now I view a snapped-off flagpole displayed against an urban skyline-a skyline of blackened, broken, and smoking buildings. They’re like teeth in a jawbone that somebody has pulled from a funeral pyre.

I’m beginning to suspect that this footage must have been staged-but who could have made such a clever and horrifying film? How had they been able to pull off this hoax with such authenticity? And for what possible reason?

Now there’s street-level, hand-shot footage showing thousands of people coursing over bridges and along highways. They’re carrying coolers, water bottles, blankets, small children, the infirm. There are furtive close-ups of military patrol vehicles at intervals along the way. Checkpoints. Tall, broad-shouldered government soldiers with mirror-faced helmets and automatic weapons attempt to bring order to this incomprehensible chaos.

The film’s final scenes are of earthmoving machines and the enormous trenches they’ve made. These trenches are as wide and deep as strip mines. Bulldozers are standing by to help refill them, their scoops loaded with the uncountable dead.

The video ends and I sit in the dark, lost in shock, horror, and total confusion.

Is it some sick joke? A staged holocaust? Am I supposed to believe that some hideous plague has been hidden from history? When did it happen? Why have I never seen anything like it before? Why has no one ever seen or heard about this?

There are no answers to my questions. How could there be? What I have just witnessed simply isn’t possible.

Suddenly there are hands on my shoulder, and I leap up from the couch, fists clenched, crashing into an end table and knocking a coffee cup to the concrete floor. There is the sound of breaking glass, and my heart nearly explodes.

“Hays! It’s just me. Dad. Hays, it’s me! Down, boy.”

Of course, it was just my father putting his hands on my shoulders, meaning to comfort me. Still, I can’t quite give him a pass for this. It is his shelter, and his damned film, and his hands.

“ What- what was that?” I demand to know. “Tell me. Please? Explain it.”

“That film?” he says. “That, Hays, is the truth. That’s what really happened on 7–4 Day. They almost killed off the entire human race. What you learned in grade school, everything you read at university, is just a cruel hoax.”

Forty — eight hours earlier-a mere two days before I watched the 7–4 Day film at my parents’ house.

When I arrived at President Hughes Jacklin’s inauguration party that night in the year 2061, I was flying high, happier and more self-satisfied than I had ever been. I couldn’t have dreamed I would end up losing everything I cared about-my home, my job, my two darling daughters, Chloe and April, and my beautiful wife, Lizbeth, who was there by my side.

In the catastrophic whirlwind of those next horrible days, it would seem as if my world had been turned upside down and any part of my personality that wasn’t securely bolted in place had fallen into the void. And what was left was what I guess you’d call the essential Hays Baker-well, if you brought the old me and the new me to a party, I guarantee nobody would accuse us of a family resemblance.

Lizbeth and I arrived at the presidential estate at around eight thirty, delivered in high style by our artificially intelligent Daimler SX-5500 limo. This wasn’t our usual car, of course.

A cheery, top-of-the-line iJeeves butler helped us out onto the resplendent, putting-green-short grass of the front lawn. We promptly began to gawk at our surroundings-like a couple of tourists, I suppose. Hell, like lowly humans given an unlikely glimpse of the good life.

Even now, I remember that the warm night air was sweet with the fragrance of thousands of roses, gardenias, and other genetically enhanced flowering plants in the president’s gardens, all programmed to bloom tonight. What a botanical miracle it was, though a bit show-offy, I’d say.

“This is absolutely incredible, Hays. Dazzling, inspiring, ” Lizbeth gushed, her gorgeous eyes shining with excitement. “We really do run the world, don’t we?”

By “we,” Lizbeth wasn’t talking about just herself and me. She was speaking of our broader identity as ruling Elites, the upper echelon of civilized society for the past two decades.

Most Elites were attractive, of course, but Lizbeth, with her violet hair set off by ivory skin and an almost decadent silver silk gown, well, she sparkled like a diamond dropped into a pile of wood chips.

“You’re going to knock them dead, Jinxie,” I said, winking. “As always.”

“Flattery,” she said, winking back, “will get you everywhere.”

Jinxie was my favorite nickname for her. It stemmed from the fact that she’d come into this world on a Friday the thirteenth, but there wasn’t a single thing unlucky about her-or our life together, for that matter.