The Eighth Day

by Tom Avitabile

  ∞§∞

  She drove as dusk turned into darkness. When Martha got sight of the highway sign for the Waukesha Gap, new thoughts filled her brain. Her eyes fluttered momentarily, causing her to refocus on the dirt road and a farm stand just ahead. Making a left-hand turn onto the service road, she thought, big juicy strawberries will make an excellent jam. She followed the bumpy and dusty road for eight miles.

  This was an access road for the railroad’s right-of-way maintenance crews. Ahead of her, lit by her headlights, she could barely make out the two big metal cabinets that sat on concrete footings alongside the track. As soon as these cabinets came clearly into view, new thoughts filled her head. There is a little baby in the big cabinet crying for its mother. She shut the engine off but left the lights on as she retrieved the jumper cables, crowbar, and a big old flashlight and made her way toward the control boxes. Her nose twitched from the pungent odor of creosote, a petroleum derivative with which the wooden rail ties were saturated. Not remembering how she knew this, she recalled that this tarlike goo was meant to dissuade termites and mushrooms from making homes in the vital wooden cross members.

  Using all her effort, she managed to pry open the small hasp lock on the bigger panel. She then placed the crowbar on top of the smaller cabinet along with the Luger. After positioning the flashlight on the ground, the tiltable head pointing up at the box, she opened the cabinet. For a brief moment, she was befuddled by a wave of fear washing over her. Then, as quickly as it came upon her, it was gone. With the confidence of a veteran track-and-signals railroad man, she traced the circuitry, her hand hovering just above the copper-clad contacts and relays. She identified her first contact point and clamped one end of the jumper cable to it. She attached the other end of the cable a foot to the right and about four feet lower, which sent sparks flying. A solenoid began to clank as relays flipped.

  Three hundred feet down the track, a switch machine cycled through its positions, first sliding the rails left with a metallic clunk, then slamming right back to the original position. Lights on a signal bridge above the switch followed suit, going from green to red and back to green. The lights on the dwarf signal beside the track alternated in an “L” configuration, first one over the other, indicating straight through, then side by side: turnout to the left. At this point the switch machine threw the rails left again, but this time the signal did not turn red. It stayed green. As the rumble of an approaching train echoed through the valley, Martha walked precariously down the track along the sloping loose-gravel roadbed to a point in front of the signal bridge. The dwarf signal displayed two lights, one on top of the other, indicating that the switch was set for straight ahead. She made sure the light was set on green and turned her back to the white fog created by the glow of the oncoming train’s headlight. As she walked back to the control boxes, two tracer-like bands of light raced toward her, the reflection of the train’s powerful headlight, first seen off the stropped-steel 155-pound main line rails, as the locomotive came around the bend and into view.

  Having completed her task, a slight shaking overcame her body. She felt conflicted over the thing she knew she must do next. With a sense of dread welling up from somewhere deep within her, she turned and approached the cabinets again. She watched in stunned silence as her hand extended out into the night, on its own, reaching for something. The flashlight on the ground in front of her shone in her eyes, which darted to and fro. This degraded her night vision so much that, as she reached for the Luger, she smashed her head right into the crowbar she didn’t see. The old woman staggered, falling to the ground in the gap between the control cabinets.

  Unconscious, with a deep gash in her forehead, her last thought was of her husband Walter, who died twenty years ago.

  ∞§∞

  Train 7210, its consist made of only tank cars, was high-balling through the flat valley at sixty miles per hour. The lead engine, running short hood forward, being a General Electric C40-8W, was known on the road as a Dash 8 Diesel. It was coupled with four other Dash 8s, which gave her a combined pull of 20,000 horsepower, enough to pull the eighty cars across the country. Two additional locomotives, older Dash 7s, were hitched to the rear of the train and served as helpers in a push-pull arrangement that generated an additional 2,250 horsepower each, enough power to climb up and over the Waukesha Gap. Jim Crowley, a third-generation railroad man, was at the controls. One of his last living actions would be to ease his grip on the brake handle when coming around a banked-curve section of track at full speed. He did this secure in the fact that the signal at the Waukesha interlock was “clean and green.” The vertical lights of the dwarf signal indicated the switch was set for the straight. At seventy miles per hour, the two miles of arrow straight track ahead gave him just under two minutes to bend over and get his thermos to cut the chill of the night with some hot coffee. But before he was able to grab the thermos, his cab jerked suddenly, veering hard left as his engine raced over the thrown switch meant to be taken at five miles per hour.

  He was already dead from his head slamming into the throttle pedestal before his body crumpled to the floor. The half-ton wheels of the engine ripped through the frogs and railroad ties that made up the track-and-switch roadbed. Pandrol clips, which long ago replaced spikes, popped and sprung from the cleats below the rail. The massive force of the millions-plus tons of tank cars coupled behind it pushed the engine like a plow into the dirt as the other engines began to jackknife. With the pneumatic brake lines leading from the engines to the rest of the train severed, the cars had no way of slowing down and proceeded to derail and collapse, spilling their liquid contents out onto the countryside. The ruptured tanks were ignited by the sparks flying from the grinding metal, setting off a hundred fires in the vegetation and bramble along the right of way. The faster conduction of sound through the steel rails made each cry of bending steel and groan of folding iron sound as if it were a spring twanging underwater—the kind of pre-echo that one usually only hears in monster movies. It took a full minute for all the cars to come to a moaning, squeaky halt or to randomly explode. When they finally stopped, a quarter mile of devastation and destruction lay strewn about the woods of Waukesha Gap.

  Amazingly, Martha had fallen between the two concrete footings, and the engines and cars piled up away from where she lay. Rescue workers were astonished and confused when they found her there three hours later.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Options

  BILL ENTERED HIS OFFICE and there on his desk was a huge, enormous gift basket. He pulled the card.

  “Mr. Hiccock?”

  Bill turned as he finished reading the card, “Yes.”

  “Joan Duma, from the Office of Protocol.”

  “Hello, Ms. Duma. What can I do for you? Would you like a dried fruit or nut, I seem to have a ton of them?”

  “Actually that’s why I am here.”

  He smiled as he read the signatures, Shelly and Mario Singorelli. “I’m sorry, I am not following you.”

  “White House protocol forbids any member of the administration from receiving gifts without full disclosure and receipt of value authorized.”

  “Wow.” Then Bill got deadly serious. “You’re talking forms to fill out, right?”

  “Actually it’s more like a small booklet with addendums to the GAO, IRS, and eventually the Mitchell presidential museum.”

  “Okay. So what’s the alternative?”

  “Alternative?”

  “Come on, Ms. Duma, all a terrorist would have to do is send spiced hams or fruitcakes to every member of government, every day. The whole thing would grind to a halt in forms and rigmarole.”

  “I don’t think I like your tone, Mr. Hiccock.”

  “Sorry. What’s my option? How do I get out of this nightmare?”

  “Well, you could donate the basket to a food bank or to the homeless.”

  “Done. They’ll be eating dried apricots and almonds by this afternoon.”

  “Good.
And, I assure you, we in protocol would never be party to any terrorist action.”

  “You don’t laugh a lot, do you, Ms. Duma?”

  ∞§∞

  “Seventeen events in two weeks,” Wallace Tate, the Director of the FBI said. “No credible group claiming responsibility. No rhyme or reason to the targets, no escalation. Seemingly isolated incidents.” A fifty-five-year-old, well-tanned, and taut-skinned former Boston police chief, he was a political survivor of two administration changeovers. Where former directors administrated their way through their tenures, Tate ruled over his bureau with a dictatorial style not seen since the iron-fist days of J. Edgar Hoover. The combination of his police training and his executive acumen made him a field agent’s worst nightmare: a boss who might be in your face or looking over your shoulder at any time.

  Ray Reynolds, Press Secretary Spence, and Hiccock listened intently to the report.

  “What about the terrorists?” Reynolds asked.

  “Wrong handle, Ray,” the director said. “Terrorists have a cause, a common belief that binds them. All these acts were carried out by people posing as homegrown U.S. citizens.” He inserted a CD into his laptop and punched the pad. He preferred to use a laptop when he made these White House briefings. It was HASP and password protected and if someone tried to monkey with it, a program shredded everything on the hard drive, insuring FBI secrets wouldn’t be compromised. A screen came up containing Professor Holm’s uncomplimentary driver’s license photo, next to which appeared a black-and-white security video made virtually unwatchable by a blizzard of static.

  “Prior to this mangled security tape, which provided enough evidence to prove him guilty in the destruction of the Intellichip building, this man’s most violent behavior was slamming the side of his computer when it locked up on him.”

  He hit the touch pad, bringing up Martha Krummel’s photo. A picture of a smoldering freight train pileup was displayed in an adjacent box on the screen.

  “Martha Krummel, a grandmother, derailed an eighty-car train. As far as we have learned, the only thing that seemed to make her angry was the weeds in her garden.”

  Displayed next on the screen was Doris Polk. “This woman was a secretary and taught Sunday school. After she opened two valves as if she were a trained technician, the entire Mason Chemical Plant dissolved into liquid muck.”

  Her photograph was replaced by that of a young boy. “This Boy Scout merit badge holder started a fire that destroyed the corporate office of the number two accounting firm in the country. On his FaceBook page he said he wanted to be president someday.”

  Tate clicked repeatedly now, his point made. “And thirteen others, every single one of them exhibiting no known ties or sympathies to any group, real or imagined; just average citizens.”

  “You said imagined?” Hiccock questioned.

  “Mr. Hitchcock, I don’t have the time …”

  “It’s Hiccock,” Ray Reynolds said. “I asked Bill to attend because he was there when Intellichip blew. Ever since, he has been weeding through any science issues and advising us on policy.”

  “Very well,” Tate nodded to Ray stiffly. “Field agent reports have indicated …”

  “Excuse me,” Bill interrupted again, “a moment ago you said ‘imagined.’ I would still like to know what that means in this context.”

  Suffering fools was not the director’s strong suit, and he sized up this science whiz as being nothing short of a nuisance. “We have teams at Quantico that stay up all night thinking up the wildest scenarios, and this one’s got them stymied.”

  “Okay, but this level of devastation isn’t something you learn on the Discovery Channel or in a YouTube video. In every case these people knew something intimate about the means of destruction.”

  “We know that,” the director said. “We utilize cutting-edge modern police procedure and we show nothing, nothing in common.”

  “Except one thing.” All heads turned to Hiccock. “They’re all dead.”

  There was a perceptible smirk on the director’s face as he punched the pad once more and Martha Krummel’s photograph reappeared. “Except her.”

  “Are we talking suicide terrorists now?” Reynolds asked. “How do they get these people to do this?”

  “Because these perpetrators all have squeaky clean backgrounds, we believe they are deep-cover moles. Agent provocateurs lying quietly until they are called on to act.”

  “How could you possibly reach that conclusion?” Hiccock said agitatedly.

  The director closed his eyes for a second and swallowed deeply. “Deep cover. We have recognized and prepared for the possibility for years. The Russians were constantly getting caught trying to plant moles in the United States. In fact, they even had an American town built in Russia where they would train their agents to live in our society without raising suspicions.”

  “Does the Office of Homeland Security concur with your scenario?” Ray asked, prompting a confident nod from the director. “Then that’s good enough for me. Let’s go see the president immediately and inform him of your investigation’s focus. Hiccock, you can go back to your office.”

  Hiccock was about to say something but held his tongue.

  “Ray, I’ll get started on background so when, and if, the boss decides to share this we’ll be ready,” Spence said. She left, followed by the two men.

  Hiccock just sat there stewing, an argument raging in his head.

  ∞§∞

  The President’s Council on Physical Fitness would have to rewrite its bylaws if it saw what the president of the United States was doing in the White House gym. James Mitchell, a younger-looking man than his fifty-eight years, was working out on the rowing machine. A cigarette dangled from his mouth as he strained on the oars while receiving the report from Tate and Reynolds. The man’s own doctors had of course warned him about his smoking, but he had been a fighter pilot and an ace in both Vietnam and the first Gulf War. He was shot down deep in Indian Country in the former and managed to evade the enemy, in their own backyard, for a month, ultimately returning to America a true hero. A little thing like a cigarette wasn’t going to land him in Arlington National Cemetery.

  James Mitchell was probably the most surprised man in America on election night. Although he had been the popular favorite early in the campaign, he was nearly ground up in the political machinery. The party bigwigs thrust their will on America and limited the field of who could become president to two—and Mitchell wasn’t one of them. The millions of dollars in each party’s war chest were bequeathed to the two prep school boys who were groomed for presidential service since they were still shitting in their diapers.

  Failing to get his party’s nomination meant he was boxed out of the big money and the essential television time those dollars bought. He and Reynolds revised their goal to achieving a decent enough double-digit independent turnout in this election to possibly pave the way for another run in four years. Mitchell’s little fledgling campaign turned to grassroots town meetings and tried to make the most of the Internet, including a personal blog he hammered out every day between campaign stops. But gaining a ten to eleven percent foothold into the next election wasn’t the way it played out. Because a fourth candidate, a Democrat from way out left, siphoned off enough votes that when the counting was over, the scrappy little fighter pilot with no money became President elect of the United States.

  The big three networks spent all of election night reporting that the vote was too close to call between the Democrat and Republican, with Mitchell not even breaking into his vaunted double digits. Their prognostications came back to bite them in their collective rear ends, when the actual vote tally came up in Mitchell’s favor.

  A karmic retribution of sorts ensued as the whole affair sent tremors throughout the media elite who earlier cast their “big vote” pronouncing Mitchell’s campaign as “dead on arrival” in Iowa. The first shock was felt in cable where many a verbose and traditionally aligned pund
it found himself now out of favor and out of work. A new political reality swept its way onto the deeply rooted, bipartisan American scene on President Mitchell’s independent coattails.

  The cable news channels reengineered themselves, practically overnight, as the suits in those cable network’s executive offices unceremoniously jettisoned the established, venerated pillars of the conservative and liberal status quo. They immediately embraced anyone who ever hesitated long enough to utter, “um” when asked, “Are you a liberal or conservative?” Big salaries and signing bonuses soon followed. This newly hatched brood of “indies,” realizing that their newfound wealth and fame were directly connected to James Mitchell’s success, cut him slack, running interference on his behalf whenever some righty or lefty tried to convince the American people that being politically ambidextrous was some kind of deep character flaw.

  In this volatile environment, the entrenched broadcast networks and newspapers, which had long since plastered their political leanings across their front pages in 90-point type and evening lead stories, had but one recourse—attack. They argued that, since Mitchell’s name never registered on any of their beloved exit polls, the election had to be fixed. This accusation was easy to prosecute, because in any national election millions of ballots were cast and some voter irregularity was to be expected. The networks jumped all over these even though, statistically speaking, the numbers were miniscule making the allegations insignificant enough to be practically a myth. But good myths sell papers and commercial airtime.

  For the first six months of his administration, reporters investigated every ward and precinct. The news corporations dispatched them with an implied warning: “Do not come back empty-handed.” Every allegation or actual fact of irregularity was scrutinized and reported with an intensity that in and of itself screamed “scandal.” Even inconsequential screw-up’s that normally would never pass muster with a small town paper’s editor were now suddenly being served up nationally as potential “smoking guns.”