by John Bromley
“Those people are not the enemy,” he said, “they’re the reason we are here.”
The women ran up to the men and stopped a few feet away from them. All the men—the troops, Gary, Chambers, Buck, Peter—were speechless, as none of them had ever seen even a picture of a woman before. Even Jim, Mike and Sam found their hearts beating somewhat faster than normal.
Mike was the first to recover. Holding the infant in his arms out for the women to see, he said, “Am I right in thinking that this little person belongs to one of you?”
“My baby!!” came a shriek from one of the women in the back. (The cry so unnerved one of the soldiers that he almost raised his weapon at her, but a stern glance from Jim told him not to.) She ran up to Mike and took the child from him, cradled him in her arms, and walked back and forth saying over and over “My baby… my baby” to the child, and “thank you…thank you” to Mike. Strangely enough, Mike found that the look of pure joy on her face made him feel better than just about anything else he’d ever seen.
One by one, the other babies that Jim had recovered from the conveyor were presented, and all of them were reunited with deliriously happy women. Peter was holding one of the babies, not quite certain how to do it, and he held it out as if anxious to be rid of it. The child’s mother came up to him and impulsively hugged him in thanks before taking the baby from his arms. She then spent a few minutes showing an extremely embarrassed Peter the correct way to hold an infant, which brought smiles from the other men and made poor Peter feel even more self-conscious.
Jim watched this exchange between men and women with a great deal of satisfaction. He felt that all the life-and-death situations he had endured for the past week had been worth it, just for the chance of being here for this moment. Still, he felt a little apprehensive, but wasn’t quite sure why. Then he noticed a woman standing slightly apart from the rest, not rushing forward to claim a child. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and her face just captivated him. He had never seen another like it. It had angles like his and Mike’s, but they were… softer, not so pronounced. He found himself thinking that Angela on video had looked very… what? Intriguing, fascinating, a pleasure to look at, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand. But now, here in front of him, Angela in person was even more… what was the word? Not “handsome”, exactly; something… better. Beautiful. Where had that come from, he wondered. No matter—it fit, perfectly. Suddenly his mind filled with adjectives. She was beautiful, lovely, a vision. Stimulating? Yes, oddly enough, but in a strange, totally new, very… enjoyable way. He smiled at her, and she at him, and for some unknown reason, that gesture made him happier than he’d been in years.
“We cannot thank you enough for all you’ve done for us today,” a female voice was saying. “You cannot imagine how painful it is to be separated from a child that you have given birth to, and what you have done… well, there are just no words to express our gratitude. If there’s anything we can do for you, please feel free to ask.”
“Well, Cynthia,” Jim said, surprising the speaker by using her correct name, “there is one thing you can do.” Stepping forward and addressing the group of women, he said, “My name is Jim Parker, and I’d like to know… which one of you is my mother?”
CHAPTER 27
The troops present all heard Jim's question, but only Mike, Buck and Sam understood its significance. Even though they did not understand it, the soldiers could sense that it was a very important question, at least to the colonel, and they waited quietly for the very important answer. Jim himself expected one of two possible answers; either that “she is in another part of the Ghetto, and it will take some time to bring her here,” or, “she has died.” He was flabbergasted when neither of these answers was given; instead, the group of women, some now holding babies, simply parted and an older woman came forward. She looked at him for what seemed like a long time, studying him, and then wrapped her arms around him and hugged him.
“My son... my son,” she said softly.
“How... can you be sure?” he had to ask. “They don't keep records—”
“I found out where you were sent after you... left here, and I’ve followed your career over the years.”
“How could you do that from... in here?”
“Well... I had a lot of help.”
“And who might that ‘help’ have come from, I wonder?” Jim smiled as he looked at Sam, who was kicking a pebble, studiously looking at his shoes, then the pebble, and generally doing a very bad job of pretending not to hear what was being said.
“Even without his help,” the woman continued, “I would have recognized you. A mother always knows her children. You have the same mole on your chin that my baby had, and I’ll bet you have a red birthmark on the back of your left thigh.”
Jim was stunned. His uniform pants covered his leg, of course, but... she was right.
This time, he initiated the hug, and she gladly responded.
“You are my mother. I didn’t know... I never thought...” and he started to cry with joy.
Eventually they parted, and Angela invited all the troops, and any women who wished to come, over to the large “Second White House” building for refreshments, information, and in the case of the wounded soldier, medical attention. Some of the women begged off, needing to tend to their restored infants, but Mike was glad to see that Cynthia was among those joining them, and even more pleased when she decided to walk beside him.
He tried to strike up a conversation with her, usually something easy for him to do, and faltered. “This building seems a lot… larger than most of the others. Do you live here?” was the best he could do.
“Yes,” she replied hesitantly, “Angela and I are… assigned here.”
The subject of her living arrangement seemed somehow distressing to her, so Mike tried a different approach. “How was it that all the mothers of these children we recovered just happened to be right up here by this station?”
Strangely, Cynthia seemed more inclined to discuss this subject.
“Angela and I hold… I guess you could call them ‘counseling sessions’ for women who have just had to give up their babies. It’s an extremely stressful situation. Imagine if, when you were a boy, your father had been told that he had to send you away. How would that make him feel, do you think? It’s even worse for a woman—take my word for it. We get them to talk about it, mostly. We’re not experts in the field by any means, since neither of us has ever had a child, yet, but we seem to be doing something right, since they keep coming to us.”
Mike listened to this explanation, which made sense to him, but couldn’t understand why he still felt so nervous. He didn’t feel that way when he and Jim were “playing possum” with the assassins in the field, nor when they entered the unmarked building. Even the gunfights with Peter’s “teammates” in the tunnel didn’t make him feel like this. He could talk to colonels and generals without a problem, but just asking a simple question of this person… this incredibly attractive woman… was making it difficult to think, let alone talk.
‘Attractive’ doesn’t quite cut it, he thought. She’s more than that. Definitely gotta work on my vocabulary.
On the walk down the pathway, Jim was joined by General Chambers. Here in the Ghetto, he no longer felt a need to hold a gun on his superior officer. After all, what was he going to do?
“How long have you known about these… people?” he asked. His voice had a quality of confused amazement which, Jim was sure, he found very uncomfortable.
“We’ve known of their existence for about a week, General,” Jim explained. “I received geo-caching coordinates, from Sam as it turned out, and we followed them to this place. Along the way, he provided information about how all this came to be.”
“How did he learn about it?”
“It’s a pretty good guess that he’s been here before,” Jim answered, nodding toward Chambers’ left, and when they looked that way, they saw Sam walking between two o
f the older women, laughing and talking with them as though they were catching up on “old times.” “He’s a pretty secretive guy, as you’ve probably noticed. Knowing what he knows, I guess he’d have to be, but I’m with you—I’d really like to know more of his story.”
They walked in silence for several seconds before Chambers said, “You should have told me about this sooner.”
“Believe it or not, we did it this way for your own protection. Knowing anything about these women—that’s what they’re called, by the way—is a capital crime. Our involvement started when I foolishly had Lt. Jansen snoop around in Phoenix. The Secret Service—the ‘SS’, as we prefer—found out what he was doing and for whom he was doing it before they killed him. Then, just on the off chance I might know something I shouldn’t, their men have been tracking us down all week, trying to kill us.
“I thought, General, that in this instance, the less you knew, the better off you were.”
“But… how could I have possibly known?” Chambers asked. “As far as I could tell, you had refused a direct order from me without explanation, and had incited—”
“But, now that you do know,” Jim interrupted, “you are under the same death sentence as we are. As all of us are. Think about that, while you listen to what the women tell you.”
They walked on as Chambers tried to digest the gravity of the situation.
“The way I see it,” Jim commented as they reached their destination, “we have two choices. We can let them carry out our sentences and die quietly, or…”
“Are you suggesting that we foment insurrection against the government? Against the President?” the general asked.
“I was going to say, the other choice was to make a run for it, but I actually like your idea better, General,” Jim replied. He was pleased to see that the concept of overthrowing Thompson and his ‘Gestapo’ had spontaneously occurred to Chambers, without him having to spell it out.
The soldiers and Chambers spent the next hour or so listening as Angela and Cynthia, speaking without notes, gave a condensed version of what Jim and Mike had learned over the previous week. They heard about the military’s CBW virus and its effects, how the government responded to it, how then-Vice-President Kenneth Thompson took advantage of the situation to make himself dictator, and how the women came to be imprisoned behind the Wall. They heard about all the efforts, including Treatment, designed to erase the memory of women from men’s minds. The soldiers, to a man, responded the same way Buck had done when he learned some of this from Jim—they were outraged that something so heinous could have happened in their country, the one they were sworn to protect, and then could have been covered up so completely.
“How do you know,” Jim asked, when Angela paused to take a sip of water, “that all this is true? I’m pretty sure none of you were alive seven hundred years ago when all these events happened.”
The brunette looked at Jim and could immediately tell that he did not personally doubt the validity of her story, but was asking for the sake of his men.
“The story has been handed down among females through the generations,” Angela responded. “Women who were there to see it, and somehow managed to live through it, have passed the history on to their daughters. For instance, Officer Judy McMillen, the policewoman who bashed her colleague’s head against the door frame, was my great-great, a-lot-of-times-great grandmother.”
“And about twenty generations ago,” added Cynthia, “my ancestor was the personal secretary to a certain Vice-President, until he engineered the resignation of his one-time running mate, made himself dictator, and legislated her out of a job. She worked with him long enough to get to know the real Kenneth Thompson.”
“History has portrayed Thompson as the Father of the Nation—“ Chambers started to say, but Angela interrupted him.
“He was a monster, and there is no other way to put it. Yes, I realize that this opinion puts me in the minority—among people out there, anyway. I know most men today consider Kenneth Thompson the First something of a saint, more like Abraham Lincoln than Hitler—but only because they’ve been told to believe it by his descendants. If they knew this whole story, they might want to reconsider.”
“There was one other thing, which you military men would probably consider a major mistake” Cynthia added. “When they rounded all the women up and loaded them onto those special trains to be brought here, the President’s men did not search the women’s belongings very thoroughly. They were allowed to bring anything they wanted into this place, except for weapons and communications equipment, of course. So, many of the women sacrificed some of their precious storage space for items, like video and paper records, to document the atrocities committed against them, so that proof of these crimes would live on as long as possible. You have seen some of these items on the videos we created for you, Colonel.”
“You have more?”
“Oh yes… many more,” Angela responded. “For their own safety, they are not kept in any one place within this compound, but are scattered among hundreds of women, and guarded like the priceless family heirlooms that they are.” Her voice changed and became a little less business-like. “Perhaps later, when there’s more time, I could… show you some of them.”
“I’d like that… very much,” Jim replied sincerely. Perhaps it was fortunate that he knew none of the pleasant things a man and a woman can do together, or he might have been lost in thought for the next several hours. Even so, he couldn’t help thinking how he would like to do anything, as long as it involved spending more time with her.
All right… enough, he finally told himself regretfully. Back to business now; we’ll think about that later.
“We have another question,” Jim said, “this time for Sam.” Swenson turned around and faced Jim.
“The general and I were wondering about your story. How did you find out about this place?”
Sam thought for a moment, seemingly censoring his past. He decided that he needed these men to trust him, and therefore it was time to “let it all hang out.”
“First of all,” he began, “my real name is Sam Swenson, for those of you who might have heard different,” with a nod to Chambers. “About twenty years ago, I happened to meet the last President—”
“I may not have known you too long,” Jim interrupted with a laugh, “but from what I’ve seen, things don’t just ‘happen’ with you.”
“Well, this time it did,” Sam continued. “In some ways, I’m glad it did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten to know these wonderful ladies. Anyway, I was at this function—don’t remember now what it was—keeping my eye on certain people for this client of mine. See, I used to do a little investigative stuff—was pretty good at it, too.”
“I’ll just bet you were,” Jim interrupted again.
“So I'm there—and I swear I didn’t know he was going to be there—and who should I bump into, literally, but President Henry Thompson himself. So, we’re talking about this and that, shooting the shit, and because I knew certain things about certain people, he got it into his head that I was a rich boy. Well, I didn’t see any reason to disabuse him of that idea, so I let him think I was. Besides, it ain’t healthy to disagree with a Thompson. Anyway, before the night was over, he told me I was welcome to come along with him on his next ‘visit up North’, as he put it, as his personal guest. I’m thinking, hey, free road trip, a little R&R, so I said yeah, sure, fine, whatever. I’m serious about this, he says to me, and you’ll be getting something in the mail very soon. Well, he was right, because about three days later I get this letter—”
“Who was it from?” Jim couldn’t help asking.
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” was the irritated reply. Sam obviously had the story rehearsed in his mind, and didn’t appreciate any interruptions.
“This letter tells me I’m supposed to be at this certain location the next day,” Sam continued his narrative, “and when I show up, I’m picked up by the Presid
ential limousine, and Thompson himself is in the back seat with me. His driver and another guy are in front, and we’re all dressed up real spiffy. I had pulled out the best suit I owned, like the letter said I should, but I still looked like a slob next to these boys.
“So, we drove along until we came to that building out front—the one we all just went through to get into this Ghetto here.”
Jim and Mike had exchanged humorous glances a moment earlier, trying to imagine Sam in a suit, but now they made eye contact again, as they thought of images they had seen the night before. Other cars. Other well-dressed men. Going into “the building out front”—and not coming out again.
“We went in, and everybody was saying, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. President,’ and ‘Did you have a nice trip, Mr. President,’ and ‘Can I get anything for you, sir’—just falling all over themselves, like people are expected to do with those Thompson boys. The one I really found interesting was the guy who said, ‘Welcome back, sir’, so I knew Thompson had been here before. Then we went down that hall, and had a really nice meal in that dining room, and after that we all went down into that tunnel we just came through, and rode a train like the one down there now, and came up into the Ghetto. At this point, he hands me an electronic card and heads off, right to this ‘Second White House’, as they call it.”
“Did he tell you anything, when he gave you that card?”
“He sure did. He told me that card was a ‘free pass’, and with it I could go into any house I wanted, show the card, and the woman inside would, as he put it, ‘have sex’ with me.
The men all looked at each other, puzzled.
“It's like the ‘artificial insemination’ process Angela explained earlier,” Sam said impatiently, “when she was talking about the creation of babies. This does the same thing, but there’s nothing ‘artificial’ about this ‘having sex’ business. This is real, up close, man-to-woman human contact. Think ‘sperm-meets-egg’ without the middleman.”
