She smiled and used her thumb to squeeze the tears from her eyes. “Did T and E tell you to say that?”
“The Cupid part or the rest of it?”
“I know the disgusting shit is all you. The first part, the sweet part.”
“Of course they told me what to say. I’m too much of a goddamn man to think up mushy shit like that.”
She put her arms around him and they kissed.
The door at the far end opened and Tonya stepped into the tunnel from the missile silo, hesitating when she saw them.
“May as well come on out,” Forrest announced. “You’re busted.”
She came down the tunnel biting her lips between her teeth. “I was helping Marcus find the canned corn,” she said, averting her eyes.
Forrest laughed. “Well, the corn’s over in silo one.”
“Must be why we couldn’t find it,” she said, slipping past them and out of the tunnel.
Veronica slapped him on the shoulder. “That wasn’t nice!”
“She’s an adult. She doesn’t have to apologize for getting shagged. And I don’t have to pretend to the look the other way.”
A few seconds later the door opened again and Kane stepped into the tunnel, a grin spreading across his face. “Either of you see a cute little black chick pass this way?”
“She said she was looking for the canned corn,” Forrest said.
Kane laughed. “I told her to say we were looking for paper towels.”
“Well she cracked under the pressure.”
“You two are terrible,” Veronica said, still hanging against Forrest.
Kane laughed and stepped out of the tunnel, shutting the door after him.
“So are we okay?” Forrest asked. “Or do I need to grovel a little bit?”
She let go of him and pulled her hair behind her ears. “I’m sorry for walking off like I did. I’ve never been any good at… at arguing.”
“Don’t apologize. That’s not a bad thing.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “I should do a better job of expressing myself when I’m upset. It’s a childhood thing.”
He kissed her again. “You’re fine.”
“Did they do anything terrible to those women upstairs?”
“Yes, they did. And that’s as much you need to hear. Let’s go get me some coffee.”
“Do you think maybe we can go looking for that canned corn later on? I understand it might be missing.”
“On second thought,” he said, taking her hand, “why don’t we go see if we can find it right now?”
In the morning, Forrest arrived with Laddie in Launch Control for a look at the monitors, and the first thing he saw was the man in the camouflage jacket laying faceup on the living room floor with the Bowie knife sticking out of his neck. “What the hell happened?”
“Like that?” Ulrich asked, looking up from a Popular Science article on wind power. “That’s what we saw with first light. Those girls got loose and did his ass in. They took both shotguns and all four bags of meat. Even the blankets.”
“Well good for them,” Forrest said. “I was worried that guy was going to move in for a while. We’d have had to do something.”
“Which would have been stupid,” Ulrich remarked. “I’m glad they’re gone.”
“How’d they get those locks open, you wonder?”
“They’ve probably watched and memorized the combinations by now.”
“But how’d they work the combinations in the pitch-dark?”
“First, light must come inside the house before the monitors pick it up,” Ulrich said, bringing up the bathroom feed. “See the chain on the bathroom floor? They needed the mirror to work the combination at their necks. One would assume their antagonist was dead by then.”
“One would assume,” Forrest chuckled.
“We’ve got another birthday today, by the way. Maria two’s kid. She’s seven.”
Birthdays were good days because everybody got a cake for their birthday, and it cheered everyone up, especially the child of the day who got to play video games while everyone else was in class.
“I’ll be back,” Forrest said.
He took Laddie with him to the cargo bay where he kept the novelties, sorting through crates of odds and ends until he found a coloring book full of pictures of a sponge named Bob, along with a brand-new eight-pack of crayons. “It’s not exactly a GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip,” he said to the dog, “but everyone’s gotta get something on their birthday, right?”
Laddie grumbled and sniffed around in the box, finding a blue racquetball and trotting off toward the door with it.
“Hey, it ain’t your birthday. Come put that back!”
Thirty-Four
Marty and his two Army buddies finally made their way back to his house on foot. The Air Force was all over town now, and it took the three of them two days to get back to his house and avoid the armored vehicles. Twice during the day, they were spotted and forced to fight a running battle until they finally lost their pursuers. Now Sullivan stood looking over Joe’s four-door Jeep Rubicon in the beam of his red light, noting the bad dents left in the hood by meteorite impacts, the hole in the hard top.
“This is about the most aggressive tire tread you can get on a civilian vehicle,” he said. “Good call, Miller.”
But Marty wasn’t paying him much real attention. He was busy looking at the ruins of his home through the night vision device, thinking of his wife and child beneath the rubble, feeling that the weight of his despair might crush him. He wished Emory and Sullivan would take the Jeep and leave without him so he could sit down in the midst of the ruins and blow his brains out—and had he thought for even a moment that he might actually get to be with Susan again on the other side, he would have done exactly that. But he knew better, so he turned around and walked over to Sullivan in the darkness.
“I’d rather you didn’t call me Miller,” he said quietly. “I’d consider it a personal favor.”
“It was just a joke.”
“Anything but Miller,” Marty said. “I’ve got his blood all around my neck.”
Emory found a roll of duct tape in a garage across the street and used it to black out all of the brake lights and turn signals. She taped over the headlights so that only an inch-wide horizontal space was exposed across the center of each lamp.
Sullivan bumped Marty on the shoulder, and Marty turned around to see him standing there with a red, one-gallon gas can in his hand. “Strip that tunic a minute.”
Marty took it as an opportunity to practice stripping his gear, and handed over the mandarin-collared ACU jacket. Sullivan then asked him to hold the light while he poured gasoline on the collar of the jacket and scrubbed it against itself to get the blood out. He then squeezed the excess gasoline from the cloth and gave the jacket back.
“Better?”
Marty shrugged back into the jacket. At any other time in his life, the smell of gasoline on his clothing would have made him sick, but under the present circumstance it smelled wholly appropriate. “Thanks, Sully.”
“Sullivan… Sully was my dad.”
“Hooah,” Marty said.
They were on the road a short time later, searching for the best way to refuel the Jeep. By pure dumb luck they came across an abandoned eighteen-wheeled Shell tanker and filled up the Jeep, along with Joe’s two remaining fuel cans.
Sullivan drove and Marty rode shotgun. Emory sat in the backseat with her M-203 grenade launcher. Anyone attempting to chase them down would get the shock of their lives.
“This guy Joe,” Sullivan said, shifting into drive. “He was a good friend?”