Jacqueline Druga - What Tomorrow Brings

“He did. Right away,” Kit told them. “I was volunteering.”

“Where were you?” Mark asked. “I mean, they radioed the hospitals for us, the fire stations.”

Kit waved her hand. “I was in a basement bunker.”

“Well, we’re here,” Regis said. “We’re together. We not apart, we know each other is fine.”

Mark scoffed. “That remains to be seen. You aren’t losing your teeth.”

“Why are you two out of bed?” Kit asked. “The only way you are going to beat this is rest, take in lots of fluids, there’s a chance, but you have to rest and give your body a chance to heal.”

Regis shook his head. “They don’t know how much we got. They know it wasn’t enough to kill us right away, but it was enough.”

“No,” Kit argued. “I refuse to accept that.”

Mark breathed out heavily. “We can beat this. There is a chance, but honestly, Kit, I don’t want to spend that time laying in a bed waiting to find out if I will live, or die.”

“What choice do you have?” Kit asked.

Mark looked at Regis and then back to Kit. “We’re going to Spokane. There’s no report that it’s been hit. I want to see my son. I need to see my son.”

“I’ll go. Me and Zeke will go…”

Regis shook his head. “You can’t. Levels are low but still high enough to get sick. They’ll be better in a few days, but we don’t want to wait that few days.”

“This is insane. You aren’t well. I don’t understand,” Kit said. “It’s over a thousand miles away. You can’t walk. How are you going to get there?”

“We’re getting a helping hand,” Mark replied.

“Who?” Kit asked. “Who’s doing this for you?”

Regis pointed behind her. “Him.”

Kit turned around.

Their father was standing in the doorway.

Kit was frozen in her stance, eyes wide open. All she could do was mutter out an airy and confused, “Dad?”

Terrence wept.

Kira had taken her last breath.

She never opened her eyes, stirred, moaned or spoke. The last thing Terrence ever said to her that she heard was when he said he’d be right back and they would play.

He blamed his sickness, his vanity, had he not run upstairs to hide that he was ill he would have been on that garage level when Keith took the food.

He would have taken a bullet before Keith would have taken a step to get into his car.

All that was heartbreaking hindsight.

Through some sort of twisted fate, his daughter survived the bombs only to have her life cut short by greed.

Kira was one of millions of children who died. That didn’t help Terrence feel better. She was his daughter, his baby girl.

Terrence was reading her the book when it happened. Skipping words that were too grown up as if Kira heard them, maybe she did. He mentioned how Dennis had underlined words, and even said to Kira, “I wonder if he knew this was going to happen and this book was his warning.”

He flipped a page and that was when it happened.

Terrence didn’t notice she passed, he felt her go. He was holding her tiny hand in his hand while facing Kira when he felt the life slip from her. Her hand just stopped feeling the same.

He wanted to call out, but didn’t because he feared someone would come and move her. He wasn’t ready to let her go, not yet.

The last time he saw anyone was when Deana was in his curtained off section, and that was a while ago. His IV bag had run dry.

Soon enough someone would come, he wasn’t prepared for that.

A part of him believed his daughter’s death was a blessing, that she would be spared living in a savage world where people fought for every scrap of food, where war was the act that killed humanity. Another part of him was angry because death robbed her of the chance to make the world a better place through life.

Terrence just stared at his daughter. She looked peaceful and that pained him. It was that moment of losing his child that he fully understood why someone would take their own life. To escape a pain that was too hard to even fathom.

Deana had told him she never knew what hit her, he prayed that was the case.

He wasn’t ready for someone to come, he especially wasn’t ready when that person was Macy.

From the second she walked in, all he could think was, My God, she is so strong.

She presented strength. She whimpered once upon seeing Kira, then sniffed in hard, holding back the tears.

“Is she gone?” Mylena asked. “Is my sister dead?”

“Yes, baby, she is,” Macy answered. “She’s in a better place.”

“But she’s not with us.” Mylena said.

“No. No. No,” June, Terrence’s mother cried out painfully. “Not this baby. Not her. Oh my God.”

“Mama,” Macy whispered. “It’s okay. Look around. She really is in a better place than all of us.”

June covered her mouth, shook her head and nearly buckled to the floor. She was crushed and Terrence could see that.

He felt like a failure for being unable to save his daughter. His entire family was suffering in all ways imaginable, while he was facing the easy way out of pain.

He was dying, and with the pain his body felt both physically and emotionally, that death couldn’t come soon enough.

Kit wrestled with her inner reaction and how she should feel about her father’s sudden appearance. She wasn’t expecting it. Why would she? Her entire family believed he was dead. While, she was very glad that he was alive, she was angry because of all he put them through. Then again, the pain of his death in a way prepared her for more emotional hardships.

The first thing she thought was Deana, her sister lived in the same area, surely she knew her father was still alive.

“She didn’t. She couldn’t,” Dennis said. “The only one who knew was Sandra. I attempted to have Deana evacuated, but she didn’t go.”

“When they attempted to get her, did they tell her why?” Kit asked.

“More than likely.”

“Then she went to the hospital. She had to.”

“I tried to get your mother and Jillie evacuated, but when my men showed up they weren’t there. None of them.”

Kit looked oddly at them. “Where did they go?”

Dennis lifted his hands and shrugged “It was right after you all left. There was no news of anything yet. I don’t know where they would go at eleven at night.”

“You had to know for months,” Kit said. “I mean that was the reason behind giving me the book, right?”

“I gave all of you a copy of that book. As soon as I suspected it was on the horizon, I wanted to plant the seed. I should have told you, but I didn’t. I figured you kids would have read it long before that and called me. Only one person did.”

“Who?”

“Your mother. I didn’t confirm, or deny. She was always smart about that stuff. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, Kit.”

“What? Your death?”

He had explained the ‘why’ of his death, but she supposed it was more than just a matter of offensive psychological warfare and she was right.

“Everything. The war, my fake death. No one expected this war to expand onto American soil. It was localized, it was strategic. There were waves of attacks that no one knew about. When we saw the way it was escalating, we thought news of my death might make them underestimate us. There was reliable Intel that the full scale attack was coming. So we moved into the evacuation plan. We were very offensive in this war and it backfired. By the time we got what we could into the air, we were launching defensively. They had taken out so many of our silos.”

“Daddy, I am having a hard time believing that as Secretary of Defense you let it get to this point.”