In Situ (29 page)

“You’re a very lucky girl Alexandra Moss,” she could hear her father saying as she was drifting off.
Yes, I am, Simon. Yes, I am.

She crossed her fingers and slipped off to sleep.

At 1735 hours on the day of the blast Batter had quietly escaped the ARC through one of the emergency exits and had climbed the nearly fifty flights of stairs to return to the surface.
There was no going back. He had locked himself out, purposely.

Batter pushed up a cover and emerged somewhere, he figured, on runway
03R/21L. He sat with his feet hanging in the manhole and looked up at the sky, trying to catch his breath. The sun was just setting and the sky in the east was already growing dark. He looked at his watch—1809 hours—still 8 minutes to go. Batter fished a cigar, a short glass and a bottle of bourbon out of a small paper bag he had brought with him. He fired up the cigar, poured the bourbon straight up, and watched the horizon as the final rays of the sun disappeared. As the last of the sunlight dropped below the mountains, he looked for the mysterious green flash of sunset that everyone had reported seeing at some time in their life, and was surprised when he actually thought he might have finally spotted it for himself.

It is a profound and amazing thing, he mused,
to be fully aware of the last time you will ever do something. He could remember firsts, lots of them-his first kiss, his first love, his first day at the academy, and now, even his first damn green flash-but not a lot of lasts. Batter regretted that he hadn’t paid more attention to those, because they suddenly seemed much more important. One ‘last’ he would never forget was the last time he saw Dr. Alexandra Moss and her very unlikely trio of companions as they climbed aboard the Chinook.

Batter took a couple of long puffs from his cigar and blew the smoke out into the desert air
. He watched as the grey wisps rapidly faded and disappeared altogether, then raised his glass skyward. “Here’s to you guys. Hope you make it,” he said, realizing as he uttered the words that he meant them more sincerely than any statement he had ever made before in his life. Batter took a long sip of the bourbon—it was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted. He laughed. “Fuck protocol and the horse it rode in on,” he said to the oncoming night.

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he might have seen a star falling.
“Interesting.”

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