= = =
From the outside, it looked like the UN building jumped. The massive crowd, waving around like cilia, stopped when the building let out a groan and a shockwave rolled down the road, knocking people down and bursting fire hydrants.
All of the windows of the UN building blew out, showering the police force outside with glass, severing the head of one unlucky officer.
Already tense, the crowd turned to madness. The old and the young got trampled under foot as the millions in the street stampeded away from the explosion, their mouths bent open, spit flying, their eyes rolling like cattle on their way to slaughter.
Inside the UN building, President Michaels vanished in fire, metal and cement. The floor shot up like a champagne cork taking two thirds of the world’s leaders with it. The spine of the Chinese President pushed up through the base of his skull when his seat instantly accelerated from zero to six hundred miles per hour.
Raimey heard an indecipherable scream in his comm before the explosion. Bomb, Raimey thought, before the shockwave ripped through his body and turned his world to black.
= = =
Darkness to light, like he’s swimming to the surface from the depths of the sea.
I need air.
Raimey hears screams around him. They’re distant, muffled. He hears sirens and opens his eyes. In front of him, a dead man stares directly at him, his eyes wide in surprise.
He’s missing the top of his head.
Sure enough, Raimey’s right. The top of his head looks like a bowl. No mouth-to-mouth for this guy.
He’s got no body.
Another good observation. The head bowl is just that. A political advisor now better used to serve someone corn flakes.
Raimey breathes. It’s hot and gritty. He coughs and hacks. He tries to raise his hands, but they aren’t working. He feels them, but they won’t go in front of his face. He tries to stand, but his legs aren’t listening either.
Shock, he thinks. I’m in shock.
Screams and moans fill the air. The room is a giant sinkhole. Bodies are strewn about in weird places, pinned at odd angles. Across the chasm, one body hangs upside down, like it’s auditioning to be a chandelier.
Fire and black smoke.
He tries to get up again, but no go. This is the worst he’s gotten it. This is bad.
Tiffany.
Vanessa.
He sees them. They are hovering in the center of what is now a black hole, wavering back and forth from the heat and fire. Tiffany has her hand on Vanessa’s shoulder, comforting her.
I got to stay alive.
Dark spots pepper his eyes.
I got to live.
Like an old friend, the darkness embraces John Raimey and pulls him down.
= = =
Tiffany and Vanessa sat on a bullet train to New York. Tiffany still hadn’t wrapped her head around what had happened. Both she and Vanessa had been Mindlinked into the rally. They had watched the newscast, they had watched the Presidents and Prime Ministers show up. It almost felt like a pageant. At one point, Vanessa squealed when a camera swept past and they saw John looking out over the crowd.
Then the bomb went off. The cameras shuddered from the concussive blast. Some broke off their mounts and dangled over the crowd as the tops of heads stampeded past. Others turned to snow.
Five minutes later, they were out the door heading to the subway station that would get them to the interstate railway. Tiffany threw her and Vanessa’s clothes into a bag. Vanessa wanted to bring a stuffed doll—her woobie—and Tiffany made damn sure it came along. Now they had nine hours of silence.
Please God let him be ok. Please let him be fine.
She saw the building explode. She understood that men who get thrown from a bomb blast, just to dust themselves off for another battle, only existed in movies. That’s not the way it worked.
Her stomach was lead. There was no acid, no tightness, just a pit that squeezed like a hand around her heart.
John’s dead.
She saw a reflection in the window. Vanessa was playing with her doll. They were “walking” down the street talking about what was going on in each store. Tiffany burst into tears.
“Is it ok for me to play?” her daughter asked. Vanessa, so insightful and mature, even at ten.
“Yes, dear. Of course.”
“Dad’s okay.”
“You think?” Tiffany snorted back the tears.
“He’s the strongest dad in the world, isn’t he?”
Tiffany laughed and the tears came back. John never missed a chance to flex for them. He was such a knob. Such a beautiful, goofy, idiot.
“He’s pretty strong.”
“The strongest.” Vanessa paused. “Do you want to play with us?”
Tiffany didn’t. She was tired and she was sad and she was torn apart by her daughter’s innocence. But she played anyway. Vanessa took Tiffany to a land where the doll was a princess and they were on their way to a castle. She watched her daughter play and couldn’t help but see John.
I don’t want to be a widow.
Another tear, but the last for now. She watched her daughter create a world around her that didn’t exist. As she gave life to a piece of sewn cloth stuffed with foam. For a child, the world is what they make it. For an adult, the world becomes a lesson in contrition as each dream fails to pan out. John. Her family. Tiffany stared down the barrel of her new reality.
God, I miss him already.
= = =
WarDon was alone in the Oval Office. After the bomb, he had numbly made his way there past the sobbing advisors, screaming secretaries, and frantic Secret Service agents. He could still hear the chaos as the organization pitched and rolled in the aftershock of the bomb. But here it was almost peaceful. Except for his thoughts.
Pink Flamingo.
For over a decade now, WarDon recorded his meetings. For online meetings he used a simple program called “Mirror” that recorded the video and audio from his perspective. For in-person meetings he kept a digital recorder in his pocket that he used software to transcribe later. He had had the recorder in his pocket the day he and Evan were in the Oval Office three months prior.
Pink Flamingo.
He was afraid to say the words aloud. When he had listened back to the tape to make sure he understood exactly what Evan was saying, for a second he thought the memory card had corrupted.
But twice, Evan said ‘Pink’ and he—in a voice without inflection—responded ‘Flamingo.’ And he knew without any doubt, what had happened: the King Sleeper.
He used me.
Right after the bombing, Evan had answered the hard line in the Virginia based bunker.
“What the hell happened?! Is the President okay?” Evan had said. He was a bad actor.
“You brainwashed me,” WarDon replied.
“What are you talking about?”
“Pink Fla-!” WarDon stopped himself.
A chill came over the line.
“You can say it,” Evan said. “Now that you know the trigger, it won’t work. It only can affect you if you’re unaware and susceptible.” His fake shock was gone.
“How could you?” WarDon growled.
“You wouldn’t have gone through with it,” Evan said.
“YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT I WOULDN’T HAVE!” WarDon roared. “This is done! You are done! You got it? You’re going to be a prime candidate for butt fucking when you go to prison.”
WarDon heard Evan breathing hard on the other line. “Do you know your mom uses the Mindlink? So does your wife, she’s on right now. Your two sons average ten hours a day. Same with their wives and Billy.”
Billy was Donald’s grandson. WarDon’s face bent in horror. “What are you saying?”
“The Core is up, the King Sleeper is online. I’m just letting you know what your family is up to.”
“I’ll stop you,” WarDon said. “This is breach of national security, you have gone too far.”
“How?”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN HOW? I’M THE SECRETARY OF GODDAMN DEFENSE!”
“Who would you tell?” Evan said. His voice was eerily calm. He was unafraid. “You saw what I can do. Who can you reach that I cannot? Who can you persuade that I can’t dissuade when they and their family’s lives are at stake? No one. There’s no one.” He let that sink in. “If you do anything that affects my operation, your family is gone. Do you believe that I can do that?”
The phone was barely on WarDon’s ear. His eyes were glazed in disbelief. “Yes.”
“Do you believe that I WOULD do that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I will kill everything you love to save the world, Donald. Don’t test me.”
Evan hung up. WarDon had stared at the phone, his mind devoid of any recourse. The line went dead and after a few minutes he set it down, missing the cradle, and headed to where he was now.
He had raided the President’s liquor cabinet. Wouldn’t need it now. He pulled out a very old bottle of scotch that the President brought out for special occasions, and filled a tumbler to the top.
A one-finger pour was to calm the nerves. Two fingers, you had a bad day. Three fingers, you got fucked over and you were stewing. Four fingers, you did the fucking and you wanted to forget.
This was his fifth four-finger pour. Five times four. What does twenty fingers mean? WarDon thought to himself. He swirled the glass and watched the caramel-colored viscous drug twirl around like a ball bearing. The ice had thinned, whitening the middle. For some reason it reminded him of a galaxy.
President Michaels is dead. Two thirds of the world’s leaders are dead.
He thought about his wife. He pictured her leaned back in the family room with a Mindlink on her head. She loved the news.
The lights were off and the sun was setting. Most of the room was in shadows. Except Abe. A sliver of light rested on his face. Another rested on Don’s, exposing one red, wet eye and casting the other in complete darkness.
WarDon raised the glass to the painting and then emptied its contents down his throat. He put the glass down gently on a side table that came with Harry S. Truman when he assumed office.
The atomic bomb. Who thought there’d be anything worse?
He went up to good ‘ol’ Abe. He put his left hand to the painting’s lips like he was shushing him, like he was telling the sixteenth President to keep what was about to be said between the two of them.
“Would you have guessed that the sheep was really a wolf? And it . . .” WarDon searched for the right words. “That not only did it want to eat the sheep, it wanted to eat the shepherd too?
“I put him in charge of a top secret online weapon that no one knows about and he runs a bionic division that has now perfected the implant needed to create a giant, invincible army. And if I tell anyone, my family dies.”
And Evan would do it, a scaly voice in the back of WarDon’s head said. He would do it.
“He had the boy’s parents killed without hesitation,” WarDon muttered. WarDon reached for the glass and then remembered it was empty.
Abe didn’t know what to say. He just stared at him. WarDon kept his left hand to Lincoln’s lips. WarDon didn’t need Abe’s insight. Let’s face it, just to get him up to speed on computers would take a year. WarDon saw the checkmate; he knew Evan’s end goal.
“This will end with no nations,” WarDon said quietly. WarDon took the pistol out of his right holster and pressed it to his temple.
When the gunshot went off, the chaos outside the Oval Office stopped and the Secret Service rushed in, guns drawn. They found WarDon slumped against the base of the Lincoln portrait. His knees buckled against the wall when the round went through his brain, but they kept him up like broken stilts. It wasn’t a clean shot. Blood pumped out of his head wound. The right side of his face was a bloody socket. The first Secret Service man got to him and looked at his good eye. That eye rolled toward him and kept going to white.
“Ihm srry,” the General said. “Ihm s srry.”
WarDon fell to the ground dead.
= = =
A milky light swung back and forth across John’s vision.
Where am I?
He heard a faraway voice. And then it was right in his ear. “John Raimey, can you hear me? Can you see me?”
The blurry man turned to people Raimey couldn’t see.
“His pupils are reacting!”
Another man leaned in and it looked like he was holding two scrub brushes.
Defibrillator.
The man with the light pushed the paddle man away.
“He’s up. His heart’s beating.”
Is this real? Raimey asked himself. He didn’t know where he was. His memories were like still photographs piled together in a box. A static photo of a friend. Him, he thinks it’s him, with two women, one his age, the other younger. Bloody anarchy in a building that had been blown apart.
The man above him, the man with the light, pulled his mask aside. Raimey saw worried eyes and a frown.
“John Raimey, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said in his head, but it came out as a painful grunt.
“We are taking you into surgery right now. You have sustained heavy trauma to your limbs. We need to stop the bleeding. Do you understand?”
Raimey’s eyes quivered. He nodded.
“I’m putting an oxygen mask over your face now. It will put you to sleep. Do you understand?”
Raimey nodded again. Anything to stop the pain. His arms and legs were on fire.
“It’s good to have you alive, soldier.” The doctor put the mask over Raimey’s face and immediately he drifted away. The last thing Raimey thought before he went out was that the doctor’s words did not match his expression.
= = =
They got to New York. Tiffany pulled Vanessa off the train and they went to a kiosk with a digital map of the subway system. She searched for the hospital and it printed out the trains she had to take to get there.
More trains. More fucking trains. They got on the first subway.
The subway train rose to the surface momentarily and Tiffany saw a few electric cars whizzing around silently on the street. She wished she had one now. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t a lack of energy that killed the electric car. It was the lack of petroleum to make plastics.
The subway cars were choked with people. She and Vanessa squeezed through the passengers, adding to the frustration of going train-to-train to get to the hospital. Everyone smelled like they hadn’t showered. It wasn’t full on body odor, more like fruit that was about to turn, sweet and pungent, perfume wafting over an undercurrent of funk. It made Tiffany want to gag.
The hospital was an angry beehive of scrubbed-in doctors and nurses. Ten hours after the bombing and it still sounded like a trading floor. Outside, ambulances inched forward in gridlock.
Tiffany shielded Vanessa’s eyes, but through the cracks in her fingers, she saw bodies without limbs and cuts in flesh that went well past the bone. They made it to the front desk.
“My husband, John Raimey, is he here?”
The receptionist wore a communication Mindlink—a phone—on her head. The young woman’s eyes were wide and glassy from stress. Tiffany clapped her hands in front of the girl’s face and the girl finally noticed her.
“I’m looking for my husband. This is where they’re bringing the UN victims, right?”
“Yes. If you could just take a seat.” The woman was on autopilot.
“I really need to know if he—” Tiffany said.
“If you’d sit down, we can . . .”
Tiffany slammed her fists on the desk. Vanessa was so startled that she dropped her doll. Doctors and nurses within twenty feet snapped out of their shell-shocked daze.
“I’M NOT SITTING AROUND WHILE HE DIES. WHERE IS MY HUSBAND?! WHERE IS HE?! JOHN RAIMEY. HE WAS GUARDING THE PRESIDENT! WHERE IS HE?!”
“Ma’am?” a male voice said to Tiffany’s right. She turned to se
e a young doctor in blood-covered blue scrubs.
“I just got here from Chicago. I’m looking for—”
“John Raimey. I heard. I stabilized him when he came in. We stopped most of the bleeding. They took him up to surgery.”
Hope bloomed in Tiffany.
“He’s alive?”
“Yes, but he’s badly hurt. But I think he’ll make it.”
The doctor turned to the receptionist. “Get them visitor badges and send them to the fifth floor waiting room.”
The doctor looked at the war zone that was his floor. “I need to get back to this. He should still be in surgery but he’ll be out soon.”
“What’s your name?” Tiffany asked.
“Dr. Marshall,” he said and added a quick smile that contrasted with his exhausted eyes.
Tiffany hugged him, ignoring the meaty scrubs. “Thank you.”
= = =
They sat in the fifth floor waiting room. It had been two hours since Dr. Marshall had directed them to the surgery wing. The receptionist here had been professionally polite but a dearth of information. John was in surgery, that’s what the woman knew and that’s all she knew. The cafeteria was open till 11:00 p.m. and the vending machine was near the bathrooms around the corner.
Tiffany was out of fight. She was so tired she could barely walk. She dragged herself over to where Vanessa sat and collapsed into a chair. Vanessa schooched over into Tiffany’s arms and fell asleep instantly. Tiffany drifted off slowly, a mashup of the present and the past playing in her head.
= = =
Tiffany had met John in the cereal aisle of a Chicago supermarket fifteen years earlier. Tiffany was comparing Honey Nut Cheerios to Mueslix. It was late in the evening and the store was quiet. Not thinking, her cart was in the middle of the aisle while she weighed her decision. Her boyfriend at the time, a fuck buddy really, had bailed on her. So she had nothing to do and she was out of cereal, milk, and ice cream. Awesome Friday night.
“Excuse me, miss,” a deep voice said. She turned to a large black man. He had a scar that curled down the right side of his face in a fishhook, just skirting his eye. Shrapnel from an improvised explosive device, she later learned, but the scar added mystery. He had sharp eyes that were downcast, not quite looking directly at her, like most people do out of fear of rejection. Her cart was blocking his.
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