Livestock sales were up. Even some people who lived in the suburbs bought a couple of head of cattle. Their thinking was they’d let them graze in their back yards until the freeze came. Then they’d butcher them and let the freeze keep the meat fresh until they could thaw it and cook it over an open fire.
Never mind that few of them had ever butchered a cow, or any other animal for that matter. Never mind that the cattle’s’ moos were announcing to their neighbors “Hey, this house will have 800 pounds of beef after the freeze comes.”
And those neighbors who couldn’t afford their own meat supply readied their weapons instead.
Mark and Bryan had purchased their livestock two weeks before the girls had their interview. Their cattle, pigs and chickens were safely buttoned up and enjoying their new home in Bay 17.
Religious leaders all over the country were appealing for calm, and telling people to pray. Their coffers were overflowing, as people who hadn’t been to church in years were filing in, begging to be saved, and trying to buy their way into heaven.
One enterprising drug company very quickly marketed a self-administered “Euthanasia Pack.” It consisted of two preloaded hypodermic needles. The first contained a large dose of sodium thiopental, would put an individual into a deep sleep within a minute or so.
The second needle, filled with potassium chloride, would stop the heart within five minutes.
The company heavily advertised the product as a painless way of achieving death without suffering. They gave specific details on how it was to be administered. One by one, say goodbye to your loved ones. Then put them to sleep, and kill them. Then kill yourself as well.
The disclaimer, of course, said not to use the method until the meteorite actually hit, and all hope was lost. They wanted to relieve themselves of all lawsuits in case Hannah and Sarah were lying.
They also didn’t tell the consumer that this was basically the same method some states used to execute condemned murderers. Because that would have cast a bad light on the product.
People never follow warning labels, though. They can’t even follow instructions on a bottle of aspirin. So who realistically would have thought they’d do in this case either? Bodies were piling up in morgues all over the country when believers killed themselves and their loved ones in great numbers.
Others sat in running cars in their garages and gassed themselves to death, or blew their brains out with handguns.
Police began noticing an odd occurrence. They would respond to a suicide call and find a body on the floor, brains on the wall, and no weapon. Neighborhood thugs were hearing the shots and beating them to the scenes. By the time the police got there, the suicide weapon was already on the street corner, being sold at an exorbitant cost. To someone who wanted desperately to protect his family, or to do the same thing.
Believers were converging on Washington by the hundreds of thousands. Congress wasn’t in session, but that didn’t deter them from picketing the capitol grounds. And it was impossible to get a car within ten blocks of the White House. The President had tripled the amount of Secret Service agents on the White House grounds, and had equipped them with fully automatic machine guns, in the event the grounds were overrun.
The President and Vice President could only get to and from the White House by Air Force Two, the official helicopter, and usually in the hours of darkness.
And it wasn’t just the United States that was going crazy. It was the whole world.
-35-
The other camp, the non-believers, were going on with their lives as usual. Or as usual as they could, with half the population buying everything in sight and resorting to stealing from their neighbors.
Non-believers shook their heads, called their neighbors crazy, and swore allegiance to the United States government. Of course they would tell the truth if the meteorite was really going to hit, they maintained. What on earth could the government possibly have to gain by keeping such a secret?
Washington slowly began to regain a semblance of normalcy. The crowds gradually thinned out as the protestors realized that if the world were going to end, they’d be better off spending their remaining months with their families instead of carrying a picket sign.
And if it wasn’t, they were just wasting their valuable time.
And a mile and a half away from the White House, on the other side of the Potomac, nobody really noticed the steady stream of trucks coming and going from a large food distribution warehouse.
It wasn’t really a food distribution warehouse, of course. It looked like one. But inside this building was an entrance to a tunnel, which connected with another tunnel, which connected to an underground bunker which had been hidden under tourists’ feet for decades.
The bunker was actually built during the cold war, when hysteric Americans were convinced that the USSR was ready and willing to launch a nuclear war at any time. It was designed to absorb a direct hit from a nuclear blast. The blast doors were made of reinforced concrete that was eight feet thick.
The initial purpose of the bunker was to get government officials underground and safe so that they were alive to retaliate. Originally it was barely big enough to hold the President and his staff, the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Originally, the family members of all would have perished.
But over the course of fifty years, the bunker had been expanded, a little at a time. Now it would accommodate thousands of people, for a much longer period of time. It had its own hospital, living quarters, gymnasiums and shopping centers.
The bunker was perhaps the worst kept secret in Washington. Locals had heard rumors about it for many years, and most just took it for granted that it was there. They just didn’t know what it looked like. And they never would. The government surely would never share the information with anyone.
For many years the bunker was stocked and ready to go. But not for more than a few months. Saris 7 changed all that. For many months now, the trucks kept coming. They were doing the same thing Mark and Hannah were doing in Texas. But it would take a lot more supplies to shelter four thousand people than for forty.
Officially, Washington continued to deny anything was going to happen. They knew the chances of diverting the meteorite were slim to none. So they weren’t even going to try.
They had taken control of every observatory in the country to prevent any scientists not under government control from verifying the existence of Saris 7. They continued to maintain that their own scientists were in these observatories trying to find Saris 7, and so far they were unable to do so.
At the same time, their trusted scientists were bought off- sworn to privacy in exchange for seats in the bunker for themselves and their families. And threatened with all kinds of ugly things if they didn’t cooperate.
The other great governments of the world, of course, were on the same sheet of music. China was the first to discover Saris 7, almost five years earlier. They waited a year to share the information, because they weren’t sure what to do with it.
Now all of the key players- the Russians, the Brits, the Israelis, the Chinese, the Germans and the South Koreans, were on board. And they all agreed that their citizens were better off not knowing.
President Sanders believed they had a tight lid on Saris 7, until he got blindsided. Not from any of his trusted staff, or the government scientists who were supposed to prove Saris 7 was a hoax.
No, he was blindsided by a handful of people he’d never heard of before, whose collective voice was more convincing than his would ever be.
-36-
Steve Weed was a mousy kind of guy. Not unlike the Milton character in the movie Office Space, Steve fit everybody’s definition of a computer geek. Right down to the pocket protector he wore in the left pocket of his shirt.
Steve always wore short-sleeved dress shirts with two pockets. One side for his pens, the other for his cigarettes and lighter. Button up shirts with two breast pockets were hard to find, so he always
bought them at the same men’s store. And he always bought in quantities, in case the store suddenly stopped carrying them.
Steve lived by himself, and had never really had a girlfriend. Most of his friends were other computer geeks, and his sport of choice was Field of Honor, which he played for hours at a time with his gamer buddies.
Steve was many things. A gamer, a computer geek. Some would say a nerd.
One thing he wasn’t was a highly visible activist.
So when Steve walked in to CNN world headquarters in Atlanta, the security desk automatically assumed he was there to fix somebody’s computer.
And when Steve asked to speak to someone in the Headline News department, no one really took him seriously. That is, until he produced his EDI employee badge.
That got their attention.
Steve was suddenly fawned over. Interns brought him coffee and donuts and lunch was ordered from a local deli.
The makeup people did what they could, but Steve wasn’t a handsome guy. They covered up some blemishes, trimmed his hair and sprayed it into place, and suggested he remove his glasses. They said it was to cut down the glare from the studio lights. Actually it was because they greatly enhanced his nerdiness.
And so it was that the world finally got the confirmation it needed.
At 2:55 p.m. that Tuesday afternoon, CNN blasted a “Breaking News” banner across the top of the screen for all of its worldwide affiliates.
And Steve’s face was instantly broadcast around the world. To the 220 million people who were tuning in at the time, he confirmed everything that Hannah and Sarah had said. And he went one step further. He said it was common knowledge at EDI that the government knew Saris 7 wasn’t a hoax. And that they were taking steps to protect themselves, but had no plans to protect the citizens.
As soon as the news broke, Velma Greer, another EDI analyst, walked into NBC studios in New York. She told the reception desk who she was, and that she was ready to go on the air to confirm Steve’s story, and those of Hannah and Sarah.
Pete D’Ambrosio was already sitting in the news director’s office at the ABC Nightly News office.
It was a one-two-three punch. They were tired of waiting for the government to quit playing games. And by coming out together, they planned to force the government’s hand.
-37-
Still, the White House claimed it was a hoax. Every day or two, the President’s Press Secretary would hold a press conference, claiming that since these five people worked together, it wasn’t inconceivable that they were working in concert to play what amounted to a very elaborate practical joke.
The President himself, on the rare occasions when the press could get him to say anything, would tell the American people how sad it was that these people so desperate for attention would pull such a cruel trick.
The citizenry of the United States, and the rest of the world, didn’t know what to think. They were hoping against hope that it wasn’t true, but were finding religion just in case. They were laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing was, while stocking up on food and water. They were saying the government would never deceive them, while digging big holes in their back yards that they could use to hide provisions from their neighbors.
This went on for about two weeks.
Then an Englishman named Bernard Holmes walked into the office of Der Spiegel in Hamburg, Germany with a story to tell.
Mr. Holmes showed credentials to prove that he held a high level position with the British Ministry of Defence. For two years, he said, he’d been helping with secret plans to shelter key members of the Parliament when Saris 7 hit.
He provided details that only one on the inside would have known. That the government had taken over an abandoned Royal Air Force Base, RAF Bentwaters, and had turned it into an underground fortress and shelter over a two year period.
Holmes was outraged, because for all of the time he had worked on the project, he had been promised a place in the shelter for himself and his wife, and their two children.
But Holmes had stumbled upon a highly classified document that his supervisor had very stupidly left sitting on a desk. It was an access list of those who would be allowed sanctuary within the new shelter. Holmes had picked it up and discovered that his name, and the names of his family, had been wiped off the list.
So that the royals could add four more of their distant relatives.
Holmes was outraged, and frightened. It isn’t often a man has the opportunity to stumble across his own death warrant. And that, essentially, was what it represented.
And the ultimate insult was that they didn’t even have the courtesy or courage to tell him about it. They were using him, to build their damn shelter, and then they were going to leave him out in the cold.
Der Spiegel published his account the next day, after much hype on German television, and sold more papers in one day than in the whole previous week put together.
The day after Der Spiegel broke the story, it was picked up on every media outlet in the world. It was no longer just an American hoax. Either it was a worldwide prank, or it was real.
The next day, two days after Holmes gave his account, an Israeli cabinet member named Shimon Nariv came forward to confirm the existence of Saris 7. He had been in the know from the beginning, he said to reporters. He had helped plan for the continuation of government in Israel. He had witnessed the vicious infighting, when trying to decide who would be blessed with a ticket to survival and who wouldn’t.
Nariv himself had a place in the shelter. He was a single orphan, and had no family to take with him. But many of his friends had families who would die.
He had been struggling with his conscience for quite some time. He was appalled that the most powerful governments of the world couldn’t put their heads together and come up with a way to divert Saris 7. Granted, their efforts would most likely fail. More appalling, he said, was that they wouldn’t even try.
Nariv maintained that he was coming forward because it wasn’t fair that the vast majority of the world would perish, while the elite and powerful were taking steps to protect themselves.
Then Nariv said “I am no longer one of them. I am one of the people. And if I can not choose to live with honor, then I do not choose to live at all.”
Nariv then took out a small pistol and, in front of a shocked group of journalists, shot himself in the head.
Word of Nariv’s disclosure and death made its way back to the White House within minutes, and full panic mode set in.
Within an hour, the White House announced that President Sanders himself would speak on the topic of Saris 7 in a news conference the following morning.
And while the White House huddled long into the night, trying to find the right words to say, the rest of the world waited.
-38-
Hannah sat at her PC inside the mine’s schoolhouse. She’d been up since 3 a.m., unable to sleep because no matter how many times she turned and changed position, she just couldn’t get comfortable.
She was at one now with the baby inside of her. Every time he moved, she felt it. She knew exactly where his little feet were, because she could feel them pressing against the inside of her abdomen every time he stretched his little legs. She found herself holding her stomach a lot these days, and smiling for no reason.
Mark doted on her constantly. Told her how gorgeous she was, how radiant and glowing. He told her he’d always heard that a woman was most beautiful when she was with child, and now he believed it.
And she believed him. On her worst days, like today, when she was hard at work and running on three hours’ sleep, it would have been easy to doubt him. To say that he was just using pretty words to make her feel better.
But she could see the love in his eyes, and she knew he’d never lie to her. In his eyes, she really was most beautiful now that her pregnancy had started to show. Even though she and everyone else thought she was a total mess, Mark still considered her his beauty queen.
Actually, they called the baby Markie knowing full well that it could just as easily be a girl. But they both wanted a boy first. Mark because he wanted an older son who would protect his siblings in the years ahead. Hannah because she wanted to replicate the man she so loved.
And even though they had no confirmation from a doctor, and couldn’t get such confirmation now that Hannah was restricted to the mine, they just took it for granted that she was carrying a boy.
Mark said “Baby, would you think I’m nuts if I told you that I find you incredibly sexy now that you’re pregnant?”
“I’ve always thought you were nuts, sailor.”
Then, she noticed that he wasn’t smiling.
“You mean you’re serious?”
“Oh, I’m definitely serious. And you’re definitely hot. Now more than ever.”
“Maybe we should get you some glasses before we seal the mine. I think your vision is going.”
Mark kissed her. Gently at first, then with more passion.
“When you were taking your midwife classes, did they happen to say how long we could… you know, before the baby was born?”
Hannah was having fun with him now.
“How long we could what? Play Scrabble, drive bumper cars, what?”
“I’m serious, baby. I don’t know where he is inside of you, and I don’t want to, you know, put a dent in his head or something.”
She smiled that smile that won his heart every time.
“First of all, sailor boy, you shouldn’t flatter yourself. Secondly, I think we can play that particular game of Scrabble almost right up until the baby is born.”
“Good!” Mark breathed a sigh of relief.
“Seriously, baby, I’ll let you know if there ever comes a time when we shouldn’t.”
He kissed her again.
“Have I ever told you how much I love you?”
Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon Page 12
