by Noah Mann
“I’m so sorry,” Grace said, her gaze shifting to Martin. “I didn’t know this was all going to happen.”
Was she sidestepping the question, or was the answer she might give something she could not give voice to? I instantly wondered if something had happened to my friend.
“Did something happen to Neil?” I pressed her.
As she hesitated for a moment, Schiavo came in, leaving her sergeant outside to manage the wondering crowd. She stood close to Martin, and he let his hand come up and rest against the small of her back, a simple show of caring, maybe all either would allow while she was in uniform.
Grace, I saw, noticed this gesture, this warmth between man and wife, and loss already plain in her eyes seemed to double on itself.
“Is Neil okay, Grace?” I asked again.
“He’s...not hurt. He’s doing what he thinks is right with the Unified Government.”
The conversation stuttered there as she uttered those unfamiliar words.
“The what?” Schiavo asked, the slightest abruptness in the delivery of her question.
Grace shifted a bit, pulling her infant tighter against her body and regarding the captain with sudden wariness.
“The Unified Government,” Grace repeated, taking in our puzzled reaction for a moment. “The new government. You don’t know about this?”
“No,” Martin said. “We don’t.”
“I didn’t know we needed a new government,” Schiavo said.
“Nothing was working,” Grace said, trying to explain. “You know that. They’ve got it working again. Neil promised me that. Neil promised...”
Her words trailed off there, as if the meaning that drove them was too tenuous to sustain. Too convenient in the face of what she knew, what she believed, in her heart, in her mind, and in her soul.
“We’re doing all right here, Grace,” Martin said. “Before you left we were on a good footing. It’s only gotten better.”
She looked to each of us, confused. Then her gaze shifted abruptly, cast downward to the new life held close against her breast.
“Grace,” I said.
She looked up at me, and for a moment all I could think that I was in the presence of someone lost on the outside, and broken within.
“Why is Neil’s voice on the signal?” I asked.
“It was an honor,” she answered, almost timidly. “That’s what he said. To give the command which would unite the country.”
Schiavo looked to Martin, and then to me.
“Unite by force,” the captain said.
Grace, though, took quiet, almost confused exception to that. She shook her head.
“No, that’s not it at all,” she protested, patting her baby gently on the back as he fussed while feeding. “That’s not true. I’m the proof of that. The three of us are.”
“What do you mean, Grace?” Martin asked.
“We’re a goodwill gesture,” she said. “To show you that no one wants conflict.”
“We’ve been shot at, Grace,” Schiavo said. “Our people, including Fletch here, have been shot at. Two people died because everyone is on edge about the threat facing us.”
“No,” Grace countered. “Neil told me everyone would be safe. That we’d all be okay.”
The promises she’d been given weren’t meshing with the reality we were sharing with her. That part of her which I’d sensed was broken seemed on the verge of shattering outright now. Scattering pieces of the woman, the mother, the survivor that she was to some foul wind which had swept over her.
“No,” she said once more with fading disbelief.
Soon after arriving on the Rushmore’s first trip to Bandon, Schiavo had told of factions vying to be the sole authority over the devastated nation. Now, it appeared, the enemy on our borders, presumably one of those entities, had a name. And even a motive, if the news Grace had brought to us was to be believed. We still needed more. Information about their numbers. Their supply line. Command structure. But we weren’t going to get that from Grace, I suspected. And not at that moment I knew as Mayor Allen and Commander Genesee returned to the living room, coming out of the hallway together, the look about them almost identical, hinting at something unexpected. Grace took note of their almost puzzled demeanor immediately as emerged from the emotional fog which had enveloped her.
“Is Krista all right?”
“She’s fine, Grace,” Mayor Allen said. “She’s showing Elaine her drawings. We just wanted to check something.”
“Check what?”
Genesee stepped past his older predecessor and crouched close to Grace.
“Can I just have a look?” Genesee asked, his hand reaching to the right sleeve of her loose sweater.
Grace nodded and Genesee slipped the garment upward until it was well above her elbow. He leaned a bit and checked the back side of her bicep, then looked up to his elderly colleague.
“The same,” Genesee said.
“Let me just have a peek at your boy here,” Mayor Allen said, easing the blanket covering the infant just a bit to perform the same check on the child.
When he was done, both he and Genesee looked to us. To me in particular.
“Krista, Grace, and the baby all have it,” Mayor Allen said.
“Have what?” Schiavo asked.
“What Fletch had,” Mayor Allen said.
“An implant,” Genesee specified.
Sixteen
“They said it would protect us,” Grace said. “Like a vaccination.”
We looked to one another, all thinking the same thing. It was Martin who voiced the obvious.
“Vaccination against what?”
“No one said,” Grace answered, looking to the hallway as Elaine joined us again.
“Krista’s still drawing,” my wife said. “Do they have it, too?”
Mayor Allen nodded. Elaine took my hand and stood close, her gaze angling up toward me. I felt it in her touch, what she was thinking. The fear suddenly welling—if it was meant to protect, we took it out of you.
“It will be all right,” I said, squeezing her hand gently.
I was expressing hope. As I had many times since the appearance of the blight. The sense of belief in the future, in a better future, had been instilled in me by my friend. My absent friend. Who was trying to look out for me from afar. That could be the only explanation for my being taken and implanted with the same thing meant to protect his family.
“He’s a good man,” Grace said, the sentiment rising without prompting. “You have to believe that.”
I did want to believe that. I always had. If there was some way to see through all my friend had done since leaving, to a place where his actions made sense, I simply could not. Not without some deeper understanding of his motives. His true intentions.
“Will you excuse us?” Schiavo said, looking to Elaine, Martin, and me as she nodded toward the exit.
* * *
The four of us left the medical men with Grace and her children and stepped out the front door.
“They’re planning a biological attack,” I said, quiet enough to keep my prediction unheard by those inside and the crowd lingering on the sidewalk.
“No,” Schiavo countered. “They’re preparing for one.”
“There’s a difference?” Elaine challenged her.
“We’d better hope so,” Schiavo said, looking to the people gawking at us from beyond the dirt patch where a lawn had once stretched lush from porch to picket fence.
“If this Unified Government thing is real, we’re stuck in the middle,” Martin said. “We’re the girl that two guys want to take to the prom.”
“The choice is still ours,” Elaine reminded him, and all of us
There was some boast in her words. Some determination. But also a truth for which we might pay a heavy price. And, because of which, difficult, even impossible, decisions would have to be made.
What Commander Genesee told us when he joined us on the porch a moment later m
ade that beyond clear.
“This may give us some options,” he said.
“This?” I asked. “You mean Grace coming back?”
“Options for what?” Elaine asked.
Genesee hesitated for an instant. As if he knew what he was about to suggest pushed some boundary, either medical or ethical.
As it turned out, it was both.
“If we hadn’t destroyed what we took out of you,” Genesee began, looking to me, “it might have been possible to make a diluted vaccine from what it contained. Enough to give everyone in town at least some defense against whatever we’re going to face.”
After those words, it was clear where his thought process had taken him. And where he was trying to lead us.
“Those implanted capsules use time release to dispense the contents over weeks,” Genesee said. “Maybe months. If we remove—”
“No.”
The answer was simple and abrupt, and it came from the one person whose opinion the Navy commander had no chance of changing.
“You’re not cutting them open,” Schiavo told the doctor. “Not a mother and her children. I won’t allow that.”
Genesee was up against the immovable object, and he knew that he was no irresistible force. But I could see in the man’s look, in the way his neck muscles drew suddenly taut, that he was unwilling, maybe unable, to simply accept such a decision without offering any counter to it.
“If we don’t, if what’s in them will offer protection, then you’re sentencing people to a fate we could avoid,” Genesee told his superior. “And that might be death. For some, for the sick, the old, the young, that may be a certainty.”
Schiavo let him finish. But she said no more. Used no words to chastise him or repeat her decision. She let what she’d said stand. If there was any other way to stoke the animus in Genesee right then, I could not imagine it. The Navy man who had never showed fondness for either his uniform, nor the chain of command it reflected, turned without uttering any further rebuttal and left the porch, moving down the walkway and abruptly through the crowd.
“Is what he’s suggesting possible?” Elaine wondered.
Schiavo’s gaze shifted to my wife, as if she was facing another challenge to what she’d decided. But in that instant of contact between them, the very real façade of command, of leadership, softened. With a man such as Genesee, unlike her troops, unlike any of us, Captain Angela Schiavo had to exert her authority. Whether there was some distrust of his superior because of personality, or because of gender, he had never given her the full measure of respect she deserved. His challenges toward her were mostly subtle, quiet, often internal, with only glimpses escaping for others to witness.
Here, on this day, he’d let more than a hint of his simmering disdain toward Schiavo show.
“I’m not agreeing with him,” Elaine said.
Schiavo nodded and drew a breath.
“I know.”
The moment, whatever it might have become, had defused itself. At least amongst us. How Genesee would react in any further conflicts was yet to be seen.
“Cap,” I said.
She looked to me, a tiredness about her. We’d returned to Bandon just hoping to live our lives. The garrison, led by Schiavo, had joined us, all wanting the same, I knew. But now we were facing another external threat, and it was wearing on her. Wearing on all of us. Exchanges like the one she’d just had with Genesee did nothing to lighten the burden she bore 24/7.
I was afraid what I was about to ask would only add to it.
“Do you even know who you’re getting your orders from?” I asked Schiavo.
“What do you mean?” Martin asked.
His interception of the question spoke to his protectiveness. He could not stand before her on any battlefield, but here he was seizing what might seem like yet another challenge directed at her.
“It’s all right,” Schiavo said, nodding to me. “I know what he means.”
“You get coded messages over a brief transmission a couple times a week,” I said.
The secure burst transmission relay, which bounced off a passing satellite at specific times, was not always reliable. Just over half of the communications sent were acknowledged, requiring a repeat transmission. The issue could be easily explained by the complex nature of the attempted communication, requiring many moving parts to all work without losing synchronization. In the real world, that was not possible.
And, when the actions of our own kind were thrown into the mix, simple issues led to fears of manipulation for purposes at odds with our own, and with the government we believed was working to bolster our survival.
“Do you have any way of knowing that it’s our side you’re talking to?”
Our side.
That term used to hold such clarity. Not anymore. Not since the blight, and certainly not since the residents of Bandon were forcibly relocated to Skagway in the government’s, in our government’s, attempt to assist our survival. That endeavor had gone horribly wrong. But, to me, it demonstrated that there were times when the actions of an ally and an adversary were difficult to distinguish.
I was beginning to wonder if our contact with the outside world should not be viewed with the same level of skepticism.
“Fletch,” Schiavo began, a calm confidence about her, “the people in the woods, they’re not who I’ve been talking to. I don’t know a lot about this situation, but I know that. Okay? You have to trust me.”
She was right, even if she was wrong. I did have to trust her. We all did.
Schiavo quieted and thought for a moment, then did something that I did not see coming. That none of us did, in particular her husband as she leaned in and gave him a very quick, but very deliberate kiss on the cheek. His gaze seized on her, and hers on him, as she eased away. In that moment, where I saw love, pure love, I felt an immense worry rise.
“I need to get a message out and find out just what the hell is going on,” Schiavo said.
She left us alone on the porch, Martin and Elaine standing with me. A few yards from us, the captain pushed through the crowd and climbed behind the wheel of a Humvee, speeding away, leaving her sergeant to deal with gathering of the curious and shocked.
I glanced behind, through the front doorway. Mayor Allen was sitting with Grace, Brandon in her arms and Krista on the floor, sitting at her mother’s feet. I stared at them for a moment, wanting to flush the fear that had risen with Schiavo’s very tender gesture from my thoughts.
But I couldn’t.
“Eric...”
I turned to my wife, who’d looked at me as Angela Schiavo had her husband on many occasions. During good times and bad. But those connections, those moments, I expected of her. She’d never held them back since we’d become one.
This was the first time I’d seen such a display from the captain while in uniform.
“What’s wrong?”
Her question hung there, with Martin wondering what she’d noticed. His own puzzled look mirrored Elaine’s. I could have lied, I knew. Held back what I felt. Maybe share it with Elaine when Martin was not around to hear what I had to share.
But I didn’t. Because neither of the people in my presence would hold back from me.
“She’s worried about something,” I said, gesturing with a nod toward the spot on the porch where Schiavo had stood.
To my surprise, Martin nodded without hesitation.
“Yes,” he said. “She is.”
“What?” Elaine asked.
For what might have been a tense, grim moment, Martin surprised me yet again with a subtle, true smile as he answered us.
“She’s worried about bringing a baby into all this.”
Part Two
Silence
Seventeen
The phone in our house rang at eight in the morning. I scrambled to it, thinking how odd it was that we’d willingly brought back a bit of the old world’s technology whose primary function was interrupting what might be happening at
any moment.
“I’ve got it,” I said as Elaine hurried out of the bathroom after her shower, towel pulled quickly around her.
I slowed a bit and let my gaze linger on her dripping beauty.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, scolding me mildly. “Answer it already.”
She darted into the bedroom and I continued on to answer the call, savoring the very ordinary, very natural moment for an instant before lifting the handset.
“Hello.”
“I’m sending a car for you.”
It was Schiavo. There was impatience, maybe frustration in her voice, but no urgency.
“All right,” I said. “Elaine was going over to help Grace for a while.”
“You can fill her in later,” Schiavo said.
That meant that something consequential had occurred. That it wasn’t earth shattering enough to warrant telling me immediately was good. That the captain had decided to hold the information close until we could be face to face was likely not.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, three of us stood with Private Westin in the communications center which had been set up in the garrison’s portion of the town hall, Schiavo next to her private, who was responsible for the devices which connected us, in a very limited way, with the outside world.
“So the radio is malfunctioning?” Mayor Allen asked, seeking clarification of what the young soldier had just told us.
“You don’t understand,” Westin said, looking to Mayor Allen, and then to me. “We’re sending. But there’s nothing receiving. There’s no carrier signal.”
Schiavo drew a breath and eyed the town’s leader.
“It’s like a dial tone on a phone,” Schiavo explained. “You pick up the handset and hear that, and you know the system is functioning.”
“There’s no signal from the satellite,” Mayor Allen said, hinting at an understanding.
“Maybe no satellite at all,” Westin suggested.
“Let’s not go there yet,” Schiavo said.
“It could be a simple malfunction,” I said. “Right?”
Schiavo nodded, though there was little conviction in the expression.
“Those things are built to be robust,” Westin told us. “You’d have to shoot it out of orbit.”
