John Barnes - Directive 51

Finally he raised his head. “Look, um… here’s the thing—”

“Oh, my god, you’ve found another gigantic Amazon woman, but you don’t think you can lift us both at the same time.”

He laughed, but then he said, “Heather, if worse comes to worst, we might only have a week—and I’ll treasure every second of it and try not to be sad—but look, Beautiful, I’m dependent on a lot more gadgets besides the wheelchair. Some of them are implanted and they have surface contacts.”

“I know, babe, I’ve stroked a few of them.”

“Jesus, yeah, you can’t imagine how amazing it is to be rubbed around that little circular plastic spot over my kidneys, the place where my skin grows up to it itches all the time—”

“Well, say so.” She pressed around it.

“I just did. And that feels good—yeah, right where the skin merges into the plastic.” He sighed happily, but then he went on. “See, Heather—if one of my plastic parts starts to decay, or if nanoswarm gets into my body, I won’t last very long. My immune system is pretty fucked up anyway, actually, that’s what destroyed some of the natural equipment, and I don’t think I’m going to develop immunity to any of Daybreak’s little pranks.”

“I’ll wipe you down as much as you need with antiseptic, peroxide, whatever we need. I hope my cats weren’t—”

“Naw. Clean as people, basically, or cleaner. I love cats and as long as the Daybreak biotes don’t breach my seals, I’m fine. And if I have to give up being touched by people to stay alive, I’m taking the next outbound to the other side.”

She shuddered. “You sound way too serious.”

“Well, look, my point is, if I have to leave the party too early, I want to remember how good you smell, because… well, look… this is going to sound ridiculous, I mean we’ve really only been together forty-eight hours—”

“If you’re about to tell me you’re in love with me, you’d better hurry up before I beat you to it.” She disentangled him for just a moment, adjusted her position, and pulled him back to her so that they were face-to-face. “The whole situation makes me feel so dumb. I enjoyed all the times we went out in the last few months, and all those other times we just talked for the hell of it. I kept thinking I should drop you the big hint about sex. I liked that you called after every date, I liked catching you for coffee now and then, I liked the way every so often you’d e-mail me something that made me smile or just phone and we’d talk for an hour and a half, and… crap, Lenny, I just thought we had a lot of time. So if we only have a week, yeah, we should probably get around to saying—”

“I love you.” He smiled. “I wanted to get that in before the world ends.”

“Hey, I love you too. The end of the world can make a person think that maybe there need to be a few less nights eating out of the fridge and talking to the cats. And you’ve made me nervous. Teach me how to clean you, ’kay?”

Heather had just finished rubbing Lenny down with sanitizing wipes, when her phone chimed. The screen said it was Arnie.

“Hey, lovebirds,” Arnie said. “I think Cam was scared to call you again.”

“We were just doing a few specially vile, filthy acts, hoping he’d call,” Heather said. “What’s up?”

“The Acting President is about to go on all channels and apparently give a speech that Cameron Nguyen-Peters, and Secretary Weisbrod, and as far as I can tell everybody, have just spent two hours begging him not to give. Nguyen-Peters called me to tell me he’d like all of ‘the extended team’—that’s what he’s calling us—to catch it and send any observations or thoughts we might have to him, pronto. He asked me to call you, and, yeah, I think he’s afraid of violating your privacy.”

“And you aren’t.”

“Hell, boss, if I wasn’t afraid my car would turn to green smelly Jell-O halfway there, I’d come over, sit on Lenny’s couch, eat Doritos, and comment on the action.” A shriek from the background told Heather that Allison was somewhere around too.

“That won’t be necessary tonight, but we’ll keep you on the list in case we ever sell tickets. Thanks for the heads-up, Arnie.” To Lenny, she said, “The end of the world is not going to leave us alone.”

Chris Manckiewicz wasn’t sure how he felt about being the only electronic media with functioning gear at the White House. He had to wonder how many people would ever see it, considering the problems between the availability of working transmitters, televisions, routers, links, and generators.

He stayed simple, keeping the center camera in focus and occasionally cutting to the left or right plan angle camera for visual variety. Since his computer was still working and the battery was still up, having gotten a recharge at Rusty’s house from her windmill-driven charger, he could do the little bit of editing, and the occasional small shifts of focus, with his left hand and a tenth of his mind.

His other hand was scrawling in a steno pad, against the imminent inevitable death of his computer and iScribe. He honestly didn’t see how the old-time guys did this by hand with no electronic backup.

He had always liked making up ledes that were too truthful to run, and he had a great one for this speech:

In a speech that resembled nothing so much as your creepy uncle trying to lure you down to the basement with toys and ice cream for a special game of “keeping secrets,” Acting President Shaunsen today attempted to bribe the public while revealing he had no idea what is going on.

Shaunsen’s emergency plan suspiciously resembled the budget bill last year that Pendano had killed with arm-twisting in the Senate and threats of veto, calling it “a thousand too many giveaways.” Every big plum was introduced with, “and for all you good people in….” Chris began counting them in his steno pad; at least thirty cities and counties were mentioned in a speech that clocked at less than an hour. He drew an arrow to remind himself that this would be somewhere in his story for the Advertiser-Gazette .

It creeped Chris out. Shaunsen didn’t appear to realize that there was any danger. The Vice President was ash and bone, the President was rumored to be mad, and the Acting President was giving everyone a happy-days-are-here-again, Republican’s-nightmare version of the New Deal. Shaunsen finished out by assuring everyone that a vote for Pendano would result in “getting you the good Democratic president you all deserve. So as the young people say, no biggie, just chill.”

Christ, that was out-of-date when I was in grade school—but then, so was Shaunsen.

The net was up enough for him to file the video; Anne replied that it would be showing immediately on six stations between the Atlantic and the Ohio River, and they’d be able to relay it to a few others in the next few days.

Chris dropped the rags soaked in household ammonia into his gear bag, shouldered it up, and set out for dinner and bed as his counterpart might have in Jefferson’s day—on foot. A three-mile walk would just about give him time to settle on an angle and a lede.

Jason thought, That was one long day . Beth seemed to be better; they’d found a spring pump and some apparently uninfected plastic bottles at the BLM trailhead after crossing to this side of the mountains, and risked an afternoon nap a little way up a slope of sun-warmed scree, out of sight of the trail. Sleep and water helped both of them; they made good time on the little county road west to the crossroads with US 285.