by A N Sandra
“That’s ridiculous!” Danica shot up out of her chair in anger. “You’re scaring the children!”
“The children aren’t scared,” Ben pointed out calmly. He kept his hand on Danica. “They’re listening carefully.”
“You are trying to make us into crazy conspiracy people!” Danica fumed. “Like Pentecostals! We’re not like that!”
“No, we’re not wackos,” Bud told Danica softly, the way he spoke to a piece of equipment he was coaxing to work. “We’re listening now.”
“It can’t be that easy, they can’t just kill the world off like that!” Danica insisted.
“Oh, we don’t know their whole plan, but we know enough to understand it’s probably doable,” Natalie told her. “The virus will go off at different times for whole groups of people. The Hollisters will set off EMP’s over the cities where it’s happening, so no one knows what’s happened at all. They are starting with coastal cities that aren’t safe already, like Sao Paulo. People will believe natural disasters happened there, since no word will go out from them. The Hollisters will play footage for news that shows what they want seen.”
“Whole cities can’t be killed!” Danica protested.
“Do you remember Hiroshima?” Jase asked her kindly. “The world is smaller now, even though more people live on the planet. Almost all media is controlled by the Hollister family in one way or another. People in the most remote villages have smart phones and internet service. The Hollister Foundation has already chipped so many of those places. You wouldn’t believe the numbers that I have from two days ago, much less the numbers that are current as we are speaking. In most African cities a person is well rewarded for getting a chip.”
“If we don’t get chipped we won’t get sick,” Danica said hopefully. “Supposing that what you are saying is true.”
“No, once the virus is activated inside its victim, it becomes airborne like a common cold. And anyone can catch a common cold by being sneezed on from as far away as fifteen feet. In populated areas it will circulate rapidly. The Hollister Foundation moving people to cities is to make sure that even unchipped people catch the virus. The other most important reason is that it will make it easy for Global Forces to burn the cities, contain the fires, and revert those areas to their natural state as soon as possible. Also, they are rounding up people already good at living on the fringe of society, people who would be good at getting by without the structure society provides.”
“But Susan works for Urban Relocation,” Danica said, as though Susan didn’t share equal status with Satan as far as the Henderson family was concerned.
“Exactly,” Twilight said. “Exactly.”
“I understand that you want to deny what’s happening around you,” Jase said kindly to Danica. “I’ve read so many books by holocaust survivors I couldn’t even count them. In every book, there were a lot of warnings that things weren’t right, but victims could not bring themselves to believe the obvious. Anne Frank’s parents believed what was about to happen and hid their family. And Anne and her sister died in spite of her parents’ best protective precautions. There are no guarantees. We came here today because the moving letter your husband wrote your daughter says that your family is worth saving.”
Danica looked slightly mollified at that.
“I was touched by Bud’s letter,” Natalie smiled. “I recognized someone worth saving for the next world. When I did a little digging about your family and realized that you managed to avoid Urban Relocation with very quick planning, I knew I wanted to give your family a chance.”
“But if the world goes down in a blaze of disease and fire, it won’t be very easy to survive,” Bud said thoughtfully. He looked at his youngest two children. “I know that we know how to hunt and fish and garden, but life would be very different without the structure that comes from society. Do you want to live like that?”
“Yes!” Twilight and Josh exclaimed at the same second. Their words were perfectly in sync. Bud and Danica both smiled at them just a little, then at each other.
“There are a lot of things I don’t believe about what you’re saying.” Danica took a deep breath. “No mother wants her children to die. I don’t want anyone else’s children to die. I don’t want them getting shots of who knows what from who knows who.”
“If you don’t get the vaccination, sooner or later, you will die of the virus. If you are in a large population center when your chip goes off—”
“I’m not chipped yet!”
“But you will be. You want to access your finances. The Global Bank has your retirement account and your savings. You will get the chip. History says you won’t be able to help yourself. Even among Global Forces the vaccination that they have for the virus is not going to be as strong as they think it is. Our lab mockups show a twenty-seven percent failure rate. The vaccine we are giving you should have less than a five percent failure.”
Natalie looked right at Danica. “Our lab can produce eight thousand vaccinations every three weeks. We have another lab in Europe with some associates who are doing the same. We are vaccinating people in rural areas who hopefully won’t be burned with the large population centers once the virus has hit. Lots of the people we have vaccinated think they are getting a flu shot from Blue Cross.”
Danica still looked skeptical, but Bud, Ben, Twilight, and Joshua did believe Natalie. They got shots right in front of her until finally she held out her own arm. The shot went in the muscle, not a vein, so it hurt more than an ordinary shot and they all held in their annoyance at it.
Natalie discretely left Bud more shots, for his other children and a few others.
“I just have these left,” Natalie handed him a thermal container that looked shockingly like Twilight’s lunch box.
He couldn’t think about Brock or Joyce getting sick and dying. He just hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Somehow, he would have to trick Joyce, Brock, BJ, Bryan, Michael, Rachel, Jael and Caleb. Thinking of Katy and Janice made his blood turn cold, but Natalie had just told him she had given him the rest of the batch and both his mother and mother-in-law always put others first.
“Keep them refrigerated at the temp on the label. Do you know how to give a shot?”
Bud nodded. Danica hadn’t wanted a new dog after Bon Jovi, her border collie had passed away, but Bud had given Bon Jovi shots for years.
“I know there are going to be other people you want to save,” Natalie told him as she left. “There are so many people to save, and so little time. I have another batch of vaccine almost done, and I’m going to the east coast to try to get to different groups of people there. When things get bad… cut out the chips of your loved ones with chips, keep them isolated, and hope for the best. Christina Harris is working on solutions.”
“Why couldn’t she have prevented this?” Bud wanted to know.
“Oh, she tried to let the world know.” Natalie shook her blue hair in frustration. “She contacted world leaders before she disappeared. She met with a few and vaccinated them. She contacted every major news outlet, but they are all Hollister owned. The bloodbath that happened to every media person who tried to report this….” Natalie shook a little thinking of the people she knew had been contacted by Joel Harris and Todd Wilson and were now dead.
“And it just came to nothing?” Bud found that so hard to believe. “It’s not like the Hollisters themselves are great people. I understand the Hollister Foundation seems to be doing good things for people… But Blaine Hollister is clearly a bad guy.”
“So, you would think that it would be easy to believe the worst about him, right?” Natalie added to his thought. “But people don’t want to think the worst is coming. They normalize things. Danica is far from the only person I’ve had this disagreement with.”
“Aren’t you worried the Hollisters will catch up to you?”
“If they catch Jase and I… we’re going to die. But we’re going to die if we don’t have other people left when the virus hits.
We’ve vaccinated about twenty thousand people all together. We can do more, probably twice that many more if we aren’t caught, and Jase is an amazing hacker and keeps us from getting caught. I’ve given up hoping we can stop this from happening, but we might be able to save enough people who aren’t Hollisters and Global Forces to start over with. Plus, the Hollisters and the Global Forces don’t have a vax nearly as good as the one you got today. They got sloppy toward the end of their process and used math that they wanted instead of the math they should have used.”
Bud didn’t know what to say to anything she said. Since finding his ivory box (he now thought of it as his) the small corner of the world he inhabited had changed tremendously. It had been changing long before that, but somehow the box had awakened his intellect to be sensitive to it.
“Be careful,” Bud said, humbled by knowledge he didn’t feel smart enough to know what to do with.
“I am,” Natalie said quite seriously. “You, sir, are the one who needs to be careful now. I’m going to give you some information that won’t make much sense unless you need it, but there are other people laying the groundwork for survival. If you don’t want to stay here but want to be with other vaccinated people, there are ways to join them. I’ve vaccinated more than three thousand people in California. Several hundred of them are working together farther south.”
Bud took the paper she gave him that was covered with some internet gibberish without really examining it. The thought of the population of California being reduced to three thousand people was incomprehensible. There had been more people in his section at the last Giants game he attended with Michael.
“Thanks,” was all he could think of to say. He hoped there was no grand conspiracy, that Natalie was a crazy woman who led their whole family into a big cosmic joke. If she wasn’t wrong, she was saving their lives and “thanks” wouldn’t be enough.
CHAPTER 11
June 21, Interior Alaska Homestead
Insects were singing, and birds were calling and the wind made the trees in the distance rustle slightly. Helena lay still in her sleeping bag with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds of nature as the morning sun fell on her face. She could hear the outside world, and it sounded worth being a part of.
After the disappointing homecoming the night before, Helena had been too tired to set up her tent. She had flung her sleeping bag as close to the campfire as she dared and climbed in while the others went to their tents.
“Would you like some coffee?” Duane asked, almost out of nowhere.
“How did you know I was awake?” Helena opened her eyes with a smile.
“You looked very sweet lying there, but I could tell you were awake even with your eyes closed. Is that creepy, to watch someone sleep?”
“Yes, it’s creepy, but if you bring that person coffee, they won’t care. Especially if that someone is me.” Helena sat up and reached for the coffee with her eyes still half closed.
“There’s no cable TV, there’s no internet. The most entertaining thing we can do here is watch each other sleep,” Duane joked.
“O.M.G, Kona coffee,” Helena purred. “Soooo good.”
“I can make some scrambled eggs if you like,” Duane said. “We haven’t really been cooking as a group since we’ve been working our butts off trying to get this place going. I’m a pretty good camp cook from my years in Boy Scouts, though.”
“I would take the scrambled eggs,” Helena said. She took a small sip of coffee. “Are they real eggs from real chickens?”
“Huh?”
“We’ve been eating powdered eggs. I think they come from rubber chickens,” Helena frowned.
“No rubber chickens here. Let me finish this cup of coffee, and I’ll get on the scrambled eggs,” Duane said. “I’m so glad you guys are here safe, I can’t even tell you. Things were pretty tense for the last couple of days. We got a lot done to keep ourselves busy, but it wasn’t good.”
“So, you guys have been working really hard, huh? What have you gotten done? What are we supposed to do to help?” Helena said, taking her second sip of Kona Coffee and shivering with pleasure while filling with nervous energy. Duane was just being friendly, but she had no experience with unrelated males his age this close to her at all. He was a college boy.
“We’re building a storage building right now,” Duane said. “It will hold our stored food. There will be a communal room there and the other end will be a secure barn for the goats and chickens. Since we need to keep the animals safe that has to be first. You should see the wolves, bears, and wildcats, all trying to catch the chickens and goats. We brought enough food to last all of us three years, and hopefully the worst-case scenario is only two and a half years, but most fresh food that we eat we are going to need to get ourselves, so we have some goats for milk and chickens for eggs.”
“Holy Mary! Lourdes is going to be so happy I can’t even tell you,” Helena said. “Goats and chickens? Wow. Do we have a twenty-mule team?”
“I wish. We spent most of last week starting the garden. We ploughed up the valley soil with a small gas cultivator. My back will never be the same. I wish we had even one mule.”
“Sounds like you’re the mule,” Helena observed.
“You’re here now,” Duane chuckled softly. “You’ll have your own share of hard work, too.”
They were more awake, sipping coffee while looking over the meadow. It was quite large, Helena guessed it to be the size of five football fields, covered with soft green grasses and wildflowers. Tents and the frame of the storage building were in the distance. It was nothing like Texas, but the beauty of the meadow charmed them. There was a certain electricity in the air that calmed tense nerves. A large black bird flew by with something hanging from its mouth that might be a large worm, or even the tail of a large rodent.
“The early bird gets the worm,” she commented.
“In our case, the early bird gets the Kona coffee I make in the French press. Everyone else will drink instant coffee when they get up.”
“I’m glad you noticed I was awake.” Helena cherished her coffee. “By the way, your mom was awesome on the trail. Peter loved her. I honestly think he understands that we just gave up our whole life and he’s good with it because your mom made the last week such a great adventure for him.”
“My mom is the best,” Duane agreed. “But I don’t think we really understand everything we’re giving up yet. This is a lot to process.”
“Of all the possible outcomes of Mom’s research, it never occurred to me that we would have to hide from the Hollister Foundation in the Alaskan wilderness.”
“We aren’t just hiding. We have new identities. For us to be able to rejoin society, if somehow, we managed to alert enough people to stop this, we’ll have to be other people.”
“I was really looking forward to being a spoiled trust fund heiress without a care in the world,” Helena sighed. “I was going to go to college first, but that was my end game.”
“Oh, those days are long gone,” Duane looked slightly ill just thinking about it. “I spent my whole youth getting into MIT, and I only got to go last year. All those credits will be in my old name. I’ll have to start college over, if I’m lucky enough to get to go at all.”
“I’m so sorry,” Helena said. She wondered what would happen to her own future. Long, lazy days studying in Madrid were probably not going to happen for her.
“Our new identities are all religious nuts, you know,” Duane said.
“No one has explained much to me yet,” Helena told him. “Your mom was too busy keeping us alive on the trail, and Tawna was too busy feeling sorry for herself.”
“To get identities of real people, my father borrowed the identities of three missionary families who are missing and presumed dead in the Congo. If life resumes after Project Plan B has run its course or been prevented, we will come out of seclusion with the story that we’ve been living close to the land waiting for the apocalypse. Which is comi
ng. When it’s mostly over we’ll have a great excuse for surviving without chips.
“Wow,” Helena marveled. “This is so complicated. How did they plan this in months?”
“They are the smartest people in the world,” Duane smiled bitterly.
“Lot of good it did them,” Helena scoffed.
The sun was hot on Helena’s neck as she took a turn with the cultivator, breaking up virgin soil to expand the garden. In some ways using the cultivator was fun, breaking apart the dirt, and moving rocks. Doing work with value that was measured so simply by physical progress was not something she had done since she was small and had helped Maria cook.
“I have blisters on my hands,” Helena noticed after an hour of work that had hurt her back and feet and made her dirty. “That’s kind of cool.”
She thought of the Frat Pack at school, a beautiful group of seniors who were all dating fraternity guys. None of them would ever have a blister from cultivating a garden. All of them were flawless in appearance. Go trekking in the Alaskan wilderness, yes, they might, but they would never have a blister from hard work. They would go to college next year though, if the Hollisters didn’t melt down the world, and in three years Helena wasn’t sure if she would.
“I never wanted to be a Frat Pack girl, but I kind of wanted to look like one,” Helena sighed. Suddenly she realized she had not put sunscreen on the back of her neck and it was starting to feel uncomfortable. “Now I’m a redneck. A Texan redneck in the middle of nowhere Alaska.”
“Want a break?” Duane approached with an easy smile at Helena’s obvious discomfort. “An hour is a long time at this job.”
“It is,” Helena said. “I have blisters.” She held up her dirty hands with ragged broken nails proudly.
