Greg came out in uniform; he could always be dressed in less than a minute. “My guess is they saw that hippie chick that nobody knows very well going in and out in the middle of the night, and decided there’s a terrorist here. I just need to have a little talk with them.” He looked her up and down for a moment and said, “You’re perfect.”
“I am?”
“Nobody’s going to believe you’re a terrorist in a Winnie the Pooh sweat suit with baby-puke stains. You’ll see. Come on.”
When he opened the door and stepped out, holding her hand, she saw one old guy in the back pointing the rifle, and thought,
No, don’t, please listen—
Greg looked over the crowd. “Let me introduce myself. Captain Greg Redmond, U.S. Air Force. I fly an A-10 out of Davis-Monthan. Anybody here want to take a look at my service ID?”
The guy with the rifle lowered it; the crowd didn’t seem to know what to do.
“Anybody?”
Mr. Loud Baseball Bat set the bat down, looked at Greg’s ID carefully, and said, “It’s Air Force, and it’s him.”
“All right,” Greg said, “So we’ve established who I am. This is my wife, Kai-Anne, and the mother of our three children, who some of you have probably seen around the neighborhood. Most of you know it’s not easy being an Air Force wife, I guess, with all the moving and me being away a lot, and even harder being a mother of some little ones.
“Now, I’m just guessing, but I think you might be standing out on my lawn because somebody on the television, or the Internet, or something, said to watch out for people who were coming and going in the middle of the night before last, when our country was attacked. So I thought I’d just tell you all that Kai-Anne was picking me up from the base, because they let me come home for the night, after I was out flying all day because of that whole situation with Air Force Two. And because we’re all pretty worried about our country today, you were concerned that she might have been involved with this Daybreak thing, or maybe with the murder of our Vice President and you came here about that.”
By now all the bats were drooping, the handguns were holstered, and the rifles and shotguns pointed safely at the ground.
Greg nodded politely. “Well, what you have found is one tired Air Force pilot who wants some more sleep, and one Air Force wife with too much to do, who happens to have dreads and a couple tattoos. By the way, her husband likes all those. And three little kids sleeping. That’s all.
“If you’d called the police, they could have come out and looked and made sure it was okay, without all this disturbance for everyone. So I’m betting you’ll hear of other houses where people came and went late last night, because there’s always people that need medicine in the middle of the night, or people who pull a night shift, or even I guess guys sneaking back in after an affair.”
“How would you feel about
that
, Kai-Anne?” a voice called from the crowd.
“Anything I wanted done to him, I’d do myself,” she said.
There was a nervous, stuttering laugh, and people began to drift away. In a few minutes, the crowd was gone; a couple of older men came forward to thank Greg for his service and assure him they “didn’t mean nothing.”
“Did you recognize any of them?” Greg asked, when they were standing alone on the porch. “Remind me why we moved here.”
“You wanted to be somewhere safe for the kids, and I wanted to be someplace quiet, away from the base, where nobody would bother us or pay attention to how we lived.”
He started to laugh, and hugged her. Maybe life wasn’t all that bad, anyway.
ABOUT 45 MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC . 11:45 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
For the moment, DRET turned out to be Heather’s Daybreak Working Group, including Arnie and Steve from Deep Black, plus Graham, minus Lenny and Agent Reynolds, plus a promised staff of as many as they needed as fast as they could hire them. They were all queuing up for lunch as Heather arrived. “The crew at your checkpoints looks pretty nervous,” Heather said to Cameron. “Have you had incidents?”
“I woke up once during the night when a drunk got obstreperous at a guard post outside, because he wanted to know why we had lights and he didn’t, and he’d apparently never heard of a Coleman lantern.”
“So you’re sleeping here now?”
“As much as I can persuade people,
everyone
will be soon,” Cam said. “You and Lenny would be very welcome, Graham moved in this afternoon, Crittenden and his wife will be here before tonight, and I think I’ve got Arnie and Allison talked into it. Jim Browder is insisting on hanging on to his big house way out past the Beltway for three reasons—one, he can’t get over the fact that it’s the house he always dreamed of; two, his wife would never leave it; and three, he’s an idiot.”
“No kidding. But we all are. I think Lenny will want to stay in his apartment until the power fails. And I won’t leave till he does. It’s not easy to adjust to the new conditions, is it?”
“I guess not. I’ll be a lot happier if this facility can serve as a dorm for the emergency management team. There’s a lot of unused space at St. Elizabeth’s right now, with the offices that have left and DHS not yet fully moved in, so we have the room. And it’s relatively easy to protect the grounds.”
“You’re expecting trouble?”
“Should I stop expecting trouble right now, when so much of it just arrived?” Cam permitted himself one of his little, tight-lipped smiles. “Every time we did a simulation or a game-out of any widespread, multiple-path emergency, the Red team always hit us with an assassination, or a kidnapping, or general bad stuff happening to the critical personnel in Blue. And when Red didn’t do that, the refs did—‘the physicist you need is trapped on a collapsing bridge,’ that kind of thing.
“I don’t want to lose anybody. So if you can, see if you can talk your guy into moving down here; I wish we could give him accommodations as good as he has up in Chevy Chase, but he’s going to be losing those within a week anyway no matter what, and we might as well move him while we’re still fairly sure of having some motor vehicles running.”
“Makes sense. I just don’t want to think about trying to persuade Lenny to accept being dependent at all—he’ll hate that so much.”
“Don’t we all?” Cameron asked. “All the—”
His phone rang; he spoke for just a moment and then said, “More mess. The meeting will start late because I’ve got to run to another one; I’ll be back with you in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, enjoy lunch and have brilliant thoughts that solve all our problems.” He trotted away.
Since she was last in line, Heather sweet-talked the lady and got two sandwiches to take home for Lenny.
ABOUT THREE MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:55 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
Cameron Nguyen-Peters slipped into the small room and said, “I have just a few minutes but I’m told this is urgent?”
“We think so,” the tall man with narrow shoulders and thick glasses said. “I’m Dan Tyrel, your NOAA liaison. Weather forecasting. This just came in from Navy radiofax; they’ve been loaning us computers and satellite links from the Atlantic fleet, so we can still do some weather forecasting.”
He held up a piece of paper; Cameron looked and saw an immense white pinwheel in the Gulf of Alaska. “Big storm, that’s all I see there.”
“That’s the first major winter storm. We’ve been in Indian summer the last couple weeks. When that comes across it will bring high winds, blowing snow, the works,” Tyrel, the NOAA liaison, said. “A little early this year but not unusually so.”
“We’ve put an alert out on KP-1 and Radio Blue and Gold,” the short black man beside him said. “I’m Waters, your Agriculture liaison, and I bet you didn’t know you needed one.”
Cam nodded. “Well, now that you mention it, it’s obvious. How bad a storm are we looking at here, and what will it do to us?”
Tyrel said, “Snow in the Rockies and maybe the Great Plains, freezing rain in the Great Plains and the Upper Midwest, and cold and very wet wherever the main track exits the continent, on the average that’s the Chesapeake Bay area, but it could exit as far north as Maine or as far south as Georgia.”
Waters jumped in. “With snow over frozen ground, and the farm machinery not running, winter wheat will be a problem; some of it won’t get planted even though we have seed, unless we can maybe get some of the urban refugees out there planting with pointed sticks in the next thaw. The feedlots are so dense that pigs and cattle can probably keep each other alive just from body heat, if they can find enough food for them. Poultry factory systems have to be heated in cold weather, so we’re losing a lot of chickens and turkeys in the Midwest in another day or two. We can put word out for pre-emptive slaughter but they may not have workers to do it, and we don’t have the facilities to can or preserve most of the meat.
“The biggest impact is on range cattle, and that’s huge, because the ranchers in the Mountain States were one of our best hopes of feeding everyone in the next few years. A mild wet winter, that would have helped immensely. As it is—well, there’s just not time to bring all the cattle and sheep in. No way. And we’re going to lose some ranchers, besides some cattle; some of them will get caught out in that, trying to save their stock, and when they do, we lose a skill and knowledge base that took decades to build.”
“How many more storms like this, this year?” Cameron asked.
“Maybe as few as three, maybe as many as nine, winter storms come in on that track every year,” Tyrel said. “Some that just give everyone a cold, snowy day, some that are bad like this, now and then one as bad as the Blizzard of ’86.”
“I don’t even remember that one.”
“
18
86,” Waters said. “Destroyed the cattle industry for a decade afterward, put an end to the cowboy era. We lived through the one in 1978 because we had helicopters and snowmobiles.”
“What are the odds of anything that bad?”
“This storm, not at all.” Tyrel shrugged. “Not even close for size. The next one or the one after that, god alone knows.”
Cameron stared into space.
From now on, I’m going to appreciate every bite of every steak.
“And we don’t have anything that can help?”
Waters said, “The carriers don’t have hay and the planes don’t dare touch down on land, so we can see how bad it is but not help.”
“How long before this hits?”
“Idaho and Montana by Friday,” Tyrel said. “The East Coast, maybe as soon as Sunday, maybe as late as Wednesday. You’ll need to have everyone indoors by then.”
Cam shook his head. “I don’t know if we could do
that
if we had three to five
months
. Is there anything about this that’s positive?”
“It’s almost certain that no storm after this will kill nearly as many cattle, or sheep, or ranchers for that matter,” Waters said. “But that’s because you can only kill something once.”
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ON US 285. SOUTH OF ANTONITO. COLORADO. 10:15 A.M. MST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
The sun through the windows of the old Cadillac was warm and pleasant, and Jason and Beth awoke slowly, stretching and yawning, pushing the piled coats and sweaters off themselves. Jason said, “Good thing we slept long as we did—it’s actually warm in here. Look at that, the sun’s halfway up the sky, must be ten o’clock.”
“Well, babe, I was totally tired. A gang rape and a twenty-mile walk is like, exhausting.” She glanced at him, and said, “Hey. Don’t
you
start being all sensitive about it.”
“I just figure you’re in some weird kind of denial about things. They also killed all our friends.”
“And broke my wrist,” she said. “I was hanging on to the shed door trying to keep them from dragging me out, and one of them whacked it with a rock. So you think I should just sit down and cry?”
“Just seems . . . I don’t know, weird . . . I mean—”
“Jason, babe, I promise that as soon as I stop needing to be on top of shit, I will break down all
over
the fucking place. In fact I pretty much guarantee it. In
fact
right now I am doing my fucking level best to not just lose everything and cry the rest of the day curled up in this old car.
In fact
you’re
not
helping me get through this shit, and
in fucking fact
I wish you’d play along and help me out.
’Kay
babe?”
“Totally,” Jason said. “Sorry if I—”
“Apology accepted. Now, as my asshole Uncle Billy always said, open an extra large can of shut the fuck up. What’s for breakfast?”
“Let’s see if I can improv us something hot,” he said. “If I can build a fire quick, there’s aluminum foil in our friend’s groceries, and we could just dump some veggies and meat into packages of that and cook ’em Boy Scout style.”
“Okay, you
gotta
make that happen,” she said. “Because my mouth just started watering, thinking about it.”
Jason was proud of himself; he was able to solve the problem in about ten minutes all told. He began by pulling a respectable heap of deadwood out of the dry wash about fifty yards away from the pullout. Then he went back into the guy’s emergency kit, and sure enough, there was a gas siphon and a set of pull flares. He siphoned about a cup of gasoline into an empty Bud can and sprinkled that over his heap of dry wood; then he pulled the tab on a flare and shoved it into the pile. The dry wood, aided by the gasoline, caught at once.
While the fire burned down to a bed of coals, he dumped the formerly frozen vegetables in heaps on a long strip of the aluminum foil, added three slices of lunchmeat and some plaztatic petroleum cheese-like substance onto each heap, ran down the whole line with ketchup, mustard, pepper, and a dribbling can of beer (all the seasonings there were), and finally tore and folded the foil to enclose each heap and form a cookable package. The packages went directly onto the fire.
“That’s three times what we can eat,” Beth said.