In the meantime, life went on, including mowing the lawn, and Larkin was doing that when his next-door neighbor Jim Huddleston pulled into the driveway separating their yards. The door on the Huddleston garage started rolling up, but Huddleston stopped his car in the driveway and got out.
Huddleston waved and looked like he wanted to talk, so Larkin cut the engine on the lawn mower. Huddleston’s wife Beth hated that lawn mower, claiming that it was not only noisy but produced an incredible amount of pollution. Larkin had tried to explain to her more than once that he kept the engine tuned up so it worked efficiently, but she drove one of those tiny electric cars, so there really wasn’t any reasoning with her. He hoped Huddleston wasn’t about to scold him for using the mower. That seemed unlikely. Huddleston tolerated his wife’s opinions but had never come across as passionately devoted to them.
“How long have you been out here mowing, Patrick?” Huddleston asked as he walked over.
Maybe he was wrong, Larkin thought. Maybe his neighbor was going to gripe at him after all.
“Fifteen, twenty minutes is all,” Larkin said. “I’m almost done.”
“Then you haven’t heard.” Huddleston scrubbed a hand over his face and looked tired. “I’d just left one of the stores when there was a news bulletin on the radio.”
Huddleston owned a regional chain of pizza restaurants, one of which was close by and was the “store” he referred to, Larkin knew. He was about Larkin’s age, with a brush of sandy hair and the still handsome face of an aging frat boy. Larkin liked him well enough. They’d been to barbecues at each other’s houses, drank beer together, gone to the same Super Bowl parties. It was a typical suburban friendship, more of a casual but extensive acquaintance than anything else.
“News bulletins these days are never good,” Larkin said.
“There’s been another terror attack. Somebody crashed a light plane filled with explosives into the stands at a college football game in Michigan.”
Larkin took a deep breath as his jaw tightened. “Good Lord,” he said. “I’m sure there were fatalities.”
“More than a hundred so far, they said on the radio. Could go as high as a thousand, people are speculating.”
“What the hell is wrong with those bastards?” Larkin burst out. “What are they trying to accomplish?”
“They’re trying to scare us,” Huddleston said. “And they’re succeeding. Any time, anywhere I’m around a crowd these days, I worry that something’s going to happen. Whether it’s a crazy terrorist or a kid who’s had his mind messed up by ADHD drugs and video games, it seems there’s always somebody out there who wants to hurt innocent people.”
“Yeah, it sure seems like it,” Larkin said. “But hell, you can’t just curl up in a little bubble and stay there. You’ve got to keep on living your life.”
“I know. But then you think about the Russians and the North Koreans and the Iranians, and you never know what they’re going to do, and I tell you, it just . . .” Huddleston shook his head, unable to find the words. “Sometimes I just want to give up and go crawl in a hole, that’s all.”
The irony of what they had both just said hit Larkin hard. Was that what he and Susan were doing by their involvement with the Hercules Project? Giving up and crawling into a hole?
No, he told himself. It wasn’t the same thing at all. The project was a last-ditch option, never to be used unless the shit really did hit the fan. It wasn’t like they would be going down there just in case something happened. Disaster would have to be imminent.
The place wasn’t a damn resort, after all.
But when he looked at Huddleston, a thought suddenly hit him. He hadn’t said one word to the man about the Hercules Project. Huddleston probably didn’t even know about it. Graham Moultrie had mentioned that he was relying on word of mouth to inform people, because he wanted to have some control over who applied for residence there. As Moultrie had pointed out, there had to be balance as far as skills and occupations went in order for the community to function.
Huddleston was a good guy, though, competent and dedicated enough to be quite successful in the difficult restaurant business, and his wife Beth, though annoying in some of her opinions, was an experienced elementary school teacher. They were going to need teachers in the Hercules Project, Larkin recalled Moultrie saying, and probably Huddleston would be good at whatever job they gave him. He could always cook pizza, if nothing else, Larkin thought.
All that went through his mind in a second while Huddleston was still standing there shaking his head gloomily over the latest terrible news. Larkin reached out, put a hand on his neighbor’s shoulder, and said, “Listen, Jim, there’s a place I want to tell you about . . .”
Chapter 12
October 5
“What a horrible thing,” Beth Huddleston said with an expression of revulsion on her face. “Jim, you can’t be serious about actually taking part in such madness.”
“I don’t think it’s a bad idea,” Huddleston said. “Patrick explained everything to me in detail. Surely it wouldn’t hurt just to go take a look.”
Beth glared over at Larkin, who was sitting in a recliner across the living room from where the Huddlestons sat on a sofa, and said, “I think even considering such a cruel, callous thing coarsens our culture and harms the country’s collective consciousness.”
Larkin managed not to grimace, both at what Beth said and the way she said it, but he had to work at controlling the reaction. He’d had plenty of practice, though. He was, after all, white, straight, middle-aged, and retired military, to boot, which meant he was to blame for everything bad that happened anywhere in the world . . . at least in the eyes of some people.
“Look, it’s like having insurance,” Huddleston said to his wife, unknowingly echoing one of the arguments Graham Moultrie had used. “You don’t think having insurance is bad, do you?”
“It’s a manifestation of white privilege, but I suppose it could be considered a necessary evil.”
“And you’ve got to admit, with the way things are going—climate change, pollution, and all that—the world could be in for some rough times.”
Huddleston knew the right buttons to push, Larkin thought. Bringing up terrorism and rogue nations overseas wouldn’t do any good, because that would just prompt Beth to launch into a tirade about how all that was the fault of the United States and how the rest of the world would leave us alone if we would just leave them alone . . . while continuing to funnel billions of dollars of aid and outright payoffs to them, of course.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to make sure that we survive, do you?” Huddleston went on.
“I suppose not.” Beth frowned. “But what about everyone else? How many people can this . . . shelter . . . hold?”
Huddleston looked at Larkin, who wished the guy had left him out of this discussion. Huddleston had insisted that Larkin come into the house with him, though, and help him talk to Beth. If it was a good cause—and Larkin truly believed that the Hercules Project was—then he supposed he had to try.
“The project is designed to support approximately four hundred people,” he said.
“Four hundred?” Beth stared at him, as obviously aghast as if he’d just taken a dump on their carpet. “Four hundred? What about all the millions of other people in this area?”
“Well, Beth, they won’t all fit in there.”
Her glare darkened even more. “Are you making fun of me, Patrick?”
“No, not at all,” he said. “It’s just a simple fact. The room for people and supplies is limited, and so is the capacity of all the equipment necessary to make those quarters livable. You’re talking about physics and math. You can’t make numbers stretch any farther than they do.”
“So everybody else except your select few can just die, is that it?”
“Nobody knows what’s going to happen. People just want to have a place to keep themselves and their families safe. That’s just
human nature.”
Beth sniffed contemptuously. “Animal nature is more like it. And people should be trying to rise above that, not pander to it.” She looked at her husband and shook her head. “No, Jim, absolutely not. We won’t have any part of this, and honestly, I’m a little offended that you would even bring it up. I had a higher opinion of you than that.”
Well, that was pretty cold, Larkin thought. Huddleston looked like he might be used to it, though. He shrugged and said, “We can talk about it later—”
“No, we can’t.” Beth stood up. “I’m not talking about such a disgusting thing ever again.”
She stalked out of the living room, casting a glance at Larkin as she went out that told him very plainly he fell into that “disgusting thing” category.
It was good that he didn’t give a crap how Beth Huddleston felt about him, or he might have been offended.
“I’m sorry, Patrick,” Huddleston said. “I should have kept you out of it. She didn’t have to be so . . . so . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” Larkin said, as much to save his neighbor from having to come up with an accurate word to describe his wife as any other reason. “Beth just has strong opinions, that’s all. Nothing wrong with that.”
“It’s nice of you to see it that way. I was hoping I could appeal to her logic. You actually can convince her to change her mind if you can point out logical reasons for it.”
Larkin couldn’t recall Beth ever changing her mind, or even modifying an opinion slightly, about anything, but he didn’t see any reason to mention that. He just stood up and said, “Hey, you gave it a try. That’s all you can do, right?”
“Maybe.” Huddleston frowned. “Maybe not. I’ll work on her.”
“Well, good luck.” Let the guy take that however he wanted to.
“In the meantime, I can go out there and have a look at the place myself, right?”
“I don’t see any harm in that.” As long as Beth doesn’t’t find out about it, Larkin added to himself.
“There are still units available?”
“I’m pretty sure there are. The project’s getting pretty close to being finished, though. You’d have to come up with a big chunk of change in fairly short order, I think.”
Huddleston waved a hand. “Not a problem.” He laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in the sound. “Not compared to some I’ll have.”
* * *
Huddleston had his own problems. So did Larkin. The world might be falling apart, but he still had a book due. He retreated to his office every morning and afternoon to get some pages done, and the manuscript slowly progressed toward completion. It was a little difficult writing about super-competent characters who never seemed to have any trouble solving their problems when most of the time he looked at what was going on in the news and felt utterly helpless to change anything . . . but that was the nature of the game. Dramatic license, he told himself.
The death toll from the attack on the football game in Michigan leveled off at 937. Of course, there were still people in the hospitals who’d been critically injured and might still die. Some of the survivors were maimed for life, and it was unlikely that anyone who’d been in the stadium on that fateful Saturday afternoon would ever be the same. Larkin knew that if he’d been there, any time he heard an airplane he would start looking for cover. He supposed people who had been in Manhattan on 9/11 were the same way.
Nine-eleven seemed relegated to the dim, distant past now. Kids who hadn’t even been born then were adults. The attack that had seemed so horrifying, so beyond belief, was now only noteworthy because those who hated the United States hadn’t been able to achieve anything of quite the same magnitude again, although the mall bombing in Florida didn’t lag that far behind. It hadn’t been as visually spectacular, though.
But the hatred, the vicious lust to deal out death and suffering to innocent people . . . that was just commonplace now. People were still shaken when there was a new attack, like the one in Michigan, but then they shrugged their shoulders and asked what did anybody expect when the country had thrown itself wide open to welcome such killers, and then they went on about their business.
The New Normal. Larkin shuddered every time he heard that phrase, but he didn’t doubt its truth.
He was surprised to answer the doorbell one afternoon and find Jim Huddleston standing there. Huddleston looked excited and scared at the same time.
“I did it,” he said without waiting for Larkin to say hello or invite him in.
“Did what?”
“Got a place for Beth and me at the Hercules Project.”
Larkin couldn’t stop his eyebrows from climbing pretty high. He said, “Really? I thought Beth was completely opposed to the idea.”
“She doesn’t know.”
You poor, dumb son of a bitch, Larkin thought. But he said, “Come on in and have a beer.”
When they were sitting on stools beside the kitchen island with beers in hand, Huddleston said, “I went out there and had a good look around the place, like I told you I was going to.”
Larkin nodded and said, “Yeah, sure.” He hadn’t given the Huddlestons much thought, since he’d had his own work on his mind.
“That guy Moultrie is really impressive. Definitely smart and dedicated to what he’s trying to do.”
“And he has a good-looking wife.”
Huddleston laughed. “Well, yeah. But that’s not enough to make me plunk down a hundred and sixty grand.”
“You got one of the silo apartments?”
“That’s right. Silo A, Apartment Three.”
“That’s right below us,” Larkin said. He wasn’t sure he wanted Beth to be that close by, but hey, he told himself, they were next-door neighbors now, so things wouldn’t really change that much. “You didn’t tell your wife?”
Huddleston took a long drink from the bottle, as if fortifying himself, and said, “I’ll tell her tonight when she gets home from school. She won’t like it, but damn it, Patrick, this is important. Especially after what the North Koreans did today.”
Larkin frowned. “I’ve been in my office, working. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The attack on South Korea.”
Larkin looked blank and shook his head.
Huddleston took a deep breath and said, “Seoul has been nuked.”
Larkin rocked back on his stool like he’d been punched.
“And they’ve warned us to stay out of it,” Huddleston went on. “They claim they have missiles armed with nuclear warheads that can reach the West Coast. There’s no proof of that, but—”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. There hasn’t been any official response yet, but the Russians have told us to butt out . . . So I imagine that’s what we’ll do.”
Larkin figured as much, too, given the timidity that seemed to run from top to bottom in the administration. Still, if anything was going to shake Washington out of its lethargy, it seemed like an actual nuclear attack might be the thing to do it . . .
Something penetrated his consciousness as he was thinking that, something that made him frown and lift his head. He frowned and said, “You hear that?”
Huddleston said, “No, I . . . Wait a minute. I do hear something. Is that . . . the tornado sirens?”
Larkin turned his head to look out the kitchen window, saw the bright fall sunshine spilling over everything, telling him there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and said with a hollow note in his voice, “No. Not tornadoes.”
Chapter 13
Jill was working on a prescription when one of the clerks came over to her and said quietly, “People are saying the North Koreans dropped a nuclear bomb on the South Koreans.”
Jill’s hand jerked a little, causing some of the pills she was counting to scatter across the counter in front of her. “What?”
“It’s true,” the clerk said. “Well, I don’t know if what they’re saying is true, but they’re re
ally saying it.”
Jill swallowed hard. Eighty years had passed since anyone had dropped a nuclear bomb in anger. Her parents hadn’t been born the last time it had happened. Her grandparents had barely been teenagers. It had happened countless times in fiction, but in reality it was the stuff of history.
As Jill’s heart slugged in her chest, she wanted her kids. She felt an instinctive need to put her arms around Bailey and Chris and draw them to her. She thought about Trevor, too, mere seconds after that, but the kids came first.
“What are we going to do?” the clerk asked, her voice a nervous whisper.
“We can’t do anything,” Jill said. “Even if it’s true, it happened on the other side of the world.”
“The fallout—”
“The fallout from one blast won’t get this far. It might have some effect on Hawaii. And of course, Japan, Taiwan, the other countries over there, I don’t know what will happen in them.” Jill stiffened her back. “But right here, right now, we have people waiting on their prescriptions, Mandy, so we’re going to go ahead and fill them.”
Despite the fact that what she really wanted to do, more than anything else, was to run out of the store, jump in her car, and head for the kids’ schools.
“Oh,” the clerk said. “Okay. It’s just . . . the whole thing makes me scared.”
“Me, too,” Jill said. “Me, too.”
It was about five minutes later when a man ran into the store shouting that the storm warning sirens were going off. Jill knew good and well, though, that no storms were in the forecast for today.
* * *
Trevor was hunched forward in his chair, squinting at the monitor. Bad for the back, bad for the eyes. He knew that. Occupational hazard, he sometimes told Jill.
A little chime announced that he had gotten an email just as the notification sound came from his phone. He hesitated for a second, unsure which to look at first, then went with the phone. There was a text from Jill. When he tapped it, at first he couldn’t quite comprehend the words he was reading.
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