Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

“I don’t believe it,” Remy said. He glanced around the room as if seeing it for the first time. April’s husband was an accountant, was used to columns of numbers in black and white. He was also a survivalist, was used to sorting out the truth on his own. He didn’t learn simply by being told. Igor had warned that it would take some people weeks before they believed.

“We are positive,” Tracy said. This was a lie; she had her own doubts. She wouldn’t be completely sure until the countdown clock hit zero. But there was no use infecting others with her slender hopes. “I realize this is hard to hear. It’s hard even for me to grasp. But the war we were bracing for isn’t going to come with clouds of fire and armies marching. It’s going to be swifter and far worse than that.”

“Did you do this?” her father asked, voice shaking with age. Even with his encroaching, occasional senility, he knew that Tracy worked for bad agencies full of bad people. There were classified things she had confided to him years ago that he had been willing to shoulder for her. They would likely be the very last things his dementia claimed, little islands of disappointment left in a dark and stormy sea.

“No, Dad, I didn’t do this. But I am the reason we have this place, a nice place to be together and wait it out.”

She flashed back to that night in Milan, to the first time she’d laid eyes on the book with the word Order embossed on its cover. It was the same night she made John forget about his wife for a brief moment, the night when all those years of flirtations came to fruition: the bottle of wine, the dancing, that dress—the one she’d gotten in trouble for expensing to her company card. And in his room, after they made love, and hungering for more danger, she had gone to the dresser where she knew his gun would be tucked away, and she’d found that book instead.

If John had stayed in bed, she wouldn’t have thought anything more of it. The book was full of the dry text that only lawyers who had become politicians could craft. Emergency procedures. An ops manual of some sort. But the way John had lurched out of bed, it was as if Tracy had let his wife into the room. She remembered the way his hands trembled against her as he asked her to put it away, to come back to bed, like she’d grabbed something far more dangerous than a gun, something cocked and loaded with something much worse than bullets.

After he’d gone to sleep, Tracy had sat on the edge of the bathtub, the book open on the toilet lid, and had turned every page with her phone set to record. Even as she scanned, she saw enough to be afraid.

Enough to know.

“I’m sorry,” she told her father, unable to stomach the disappointment on his face.

“When—?” April asked.

Tracy turned to her sister, the schoolteacher, who knew only that Tracy worked for the government, who had no idea about all the classified blood on her hands. April was four years older, would always be older than Tracy in all the ways that didn’t matter and in none of the ways that did.

“In a few hours,” Tracy said. “It’ll all be over in a few hours.”

“And will we feel anything?” April rubbed her forearm. “What about everyone out there? Everyone we know. They’ll just—?”

Remy sat beside his wife and wrapped his arms around her. The air around Tracy grew cold. Even more empty.

“ We were supposed to be out there when it happened, too,” Tracy said. “The four of us. Remember that. We’ll talk more later. I have to get to a meeting—”

“A meeting?” April asked. “A meeting? To do what? Decide the rest of our lives? Decide who lives and who dies? What kind of meeting?”

And now Remy was no longer embracing his wife. He was restraining her.

“How dare you?” April screamed at Tracy. Their father shivered on the bed, tried to say something, to reach out to his daughters and tell them not to fight. Tracy retreated toward the door. She was wrong about the hysteria, about it not coming. There was just some delay. And as she slipped into the hall and shut the small room on her sister’s screaming, she heard that she’d been wrong about the beating on the door as well.

Saving a person seemed simple. But saving them against their will was not. Tracy realized this as she navigated the corridors toward the command room, her sister’s screams still with her. She could hear muffled sobs and distant shouting from other rooms as she passed—more people learning the truth. Tracy had thought that preserving a life would absolve all other sins, but the sin of not consulting with that life first was perhaps the only exception. She recalled an ancient argument she’d had with her mother when she was a teenager, remembered yelling at her mom and saying she wished she’d never been born. And she’d meant it. What right did someone else have to make that decision for her? Her mom had always expected her to be grateful simply for having been brought into the world.

Now Tracy had made the same mistake.

She left the apartment wing, those two thousand rooms dug laterally and tacked on to a complex built long ago, and she entered the wide corridors at the heart of the original bunker. The facility had been designed to house fifteen hundred people for five years. The founders had invited more than three times that number, but they wouldn’t need to stay as long. The biggest job had been cleaning out and refilling the water and diesel tanks.

The entire place was a buried relic from a different time, a time capsule for a different threat, built for a different end-of-the-world scenario. The facility had been abandoned years ago. It had become a tourist attraction. And then it had fallen into disrepair. The founders chose the location after considering several options. Igor and Anatoly used their research credentials and leased the space under the auspices of searching for neutrinos, some kind of impossible-to-find subatomic particles. But it was a much different and invisible threat they actually set out to find: the machines that polluted the air and swam through every vein.

Tracy used her key to unlock the cluttered command room. A round table dominated the center of the space. A doughnut of monitors ringed the ceiling above, tangles of wires drooping from them and running off to equipment the engineers had set up. In one corner, a gleaming steel pod stood like some part of an alien ship. It had been built according to stolen plans, was thought at first to be necessary for clearing the small machines from their bloodstreams, but it ended up being some sort of cryo device, a side project the Atlanta team had undertaken. The only machine Tracy knew how to operate in that room was the coffeemaker. She started a pot and watched the countdown clock overhead tick toward Armageddon.

The other founders trickled in one at a time. Many had red eyes and chapped cheeks. There was none of the chatting, debating, and arguing that had marked their prior meetings in that room. Just the same funereal silence they’d held by the crypt doors.

A second pot was brewed. One of the engineers got the screens running, and they watched the TV feeds in silence. There was speculation among the talking heads that the presidential nomination was not quite the lock everyone had presumed. The excitement in the newsrooms was palpable and eerie. Tracy watched dead men discuss a future that did not exist.

Two minutes.

The talking heads fell silent, and the feeds switched from newsrooms to a stage outside Atlanta. The distant downtown towers gleamed in the background. On the stage, a young girl in a black dress held a microphone and took a deep breath, a little nervous as she began to sing.