“Tom? What’s wrong?”
“No time. Sophie, listen to me.” He sobbed, it was unmistakable this time. A heavy breath, another. Tom had never called her while he was away for work with the NSA, especially when he was assigned to NORAD. “Sophie, pull over.”
“I’m up the slope on 119. I can’t pull over yet, it’s raining.” She winced, unable to focus. So what if it was raining? If someone had died, if there was some kind of emergency, what did Tom care? “Are you calling from Petersen?”
Whenever Sophie was nervous, she chattered. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. “I almost didn’t pick up.” Her teeth tugged softly at her upper lip as she went silent, looking on ahead for a pull-off.
“God damn it, Soph. Pull the fuck off and listen to me.”
Sophie blinked away disbelief. Tom never swore, to anyone, and especially not to her. She pulled off just past the tiny Athanasiou Valley Airport, an unlikely jewel of windswept field and wildflower, poised within the cradle of its gray-misted meadow.
She stopped the Hummer, leaving the engine running. She turned up the heater, shivering, willing herself not to speak. But still, she could not stop talking. Tom was frightening her with his labored breathing, his hushed yet urgent voice.
“Tom, what is it? Is grandma okay? Did Lacie call you? What’s happening?”
“Don’t talk.” He was whispering now. Why? She raised the volume, and she could hear the click of rushing footsteps echoing around wherever Tom was standing. Where was he?
“Listen to me,” he went on, his voice hissing in a frantic swirl of shivery words as he tried to keep calm and get it all out at once, “listentomenowSoph they’re going to black, to black out all the comms really quick here, they think they already did them all but I, I got one flip channel three and they won’t notice it yet because they’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off, they…”
He was forced to take a breath. An hysterical breath, like a wounded diver gasping for air as he breached the ocean’s surface once again.
“Tom, what—”
“No! Listen!” His voice raised and cracked, some other man’s voice could be heard in response. Then another voice, stern and unmistakable with the authority of command. Angry. Air Force people were looking for Tom, and Tom was hiding?
Sophie almost cried out as a wave of slush spattered up against her side windows. Someone went flying by on 119 in a Jeep, waving wildly at her out the window. What? An emergency? The Jeep honked and swerved a little, then sped up and went around the curve out of sight.
“Listen,” Tom was saying. “I’m inside-inside.” That didn’t mean Petersen. Tom wasn’t at the Air Force base. He was in NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. There were no simple phone lines into there. He was somewhere deep under Cheyenne Mountain, in the war bunkers where the vast computerized early warning system protected the entire nation’s skies.
She found herself whispering in a faltering voice, “Tom, oh, no. No. Oh, no.” But Tom did not stop talking.
“Don’t ask questions, honey. Just do what I tell you. I got one last call into Mitch, okay? He’s at the place. Our date. You remember it? He’s going to help you.”
Sophie’s mind was racing. Tom hated his older brother. Mitch was something of a hippie with a heart of gold, an anti-military, anti-everything Renaissance man with a wiry beard, gaunt frame, an infectious laugh and far more goodwill than common sense. But somehow, Mitch had made a career for himself inside government, “subverting it from the core” as he liked to put it. He had even served for years with the Department of Energy cleanup of Rocky Flats, and the plutonium contamination there.
But he never did speak to Tom since their father had died, except through Sophie. Mitch and Tom were too different, too passionate, and too alike.
“—all right?”
Sophie began to chatter again. Her thoughts were flowing in violent channels of here and elsewhere, riptide and whirlpool, she had missed something important Tom was saying. “No, no Tom, I didn’t—”
“Promise me!” He sounded desperate, tottering near some precipice of mind.
“I — I promise.”
“Good. Mitch, Mitch picked up Lacie from grandma’s, he knows what’s going to happen. She’s safe.”
What?
“Tom, slow down. Mitch picked up our daughter? What place are they in?”
“Listen to me!”
“What’s happening?”
“She’s safe. Get to the shelter as fast as you can. Call Mitch on the way as soon as you lock and seal, do you understand me? He’s waiting for you to call. He’s going to help you, Sophie. He’s going to make… to make sure you get through this. For Lacie. For me.”
Get to the shelter.
Sophie had had nightmares about those very words. Like a dream.
Those words had been spoken in a variety of ridiculous and nonsensical settings which had all seemed tangible, credible and outright terrifying whenever she was asleep and adrift over the many wastelands of her imagining. The words, the nightmares. Spoken in one horror-world under a rising plague, the Ebola virus spiraling out of control and devouring humanity in its thoughtless and bloody coils, Get to the shelter. Spoken in an imaginary nation filled with endless tornadoes and spinning houses rising up in gargantuan airy columns like something from out of the Wizard of Oz, Get to the shelter. Spoken in a nation on the brink of war, riots, black of midnight, emergency klaxons howling, the nuclear missiles arcing their way through the crystalline night like fireflies…
Get to the shelter.
Sophie began to cry.
“Tom, tell me it isn’t true. Tell me. This isn’t happening.”
“Oh, Sophie. My love.”
“Please!”
“I’m so sorry.”
There was nothing she could say.
“You!” On the line, someone else was speaking over Tom and his ragged breathing. Someone else Sophie could hear, because they were shouting at her husband. “Put it down!”
The phone buzzed with an angry whine as Tom dropped the receiver at his end.
“Get on the floor!” the voice barked. Then a sound, a scuffle, a bang of someone’s knee or elbow hitting something metal, a fall. Something like a wastebasket spiraling across a concrete floor. Muffled curses, clicked-off safeties. And Tom’s voice again, this time deafening as he yelled into the phone inches away from his face.
“Sophie, I love you! Get in! Lock it down!”
And then a single gunshot, coiled echoes of angry metal, the squeal as the iPhone’s speaker overloaded into a cascade of feedback and bristling, wasp-like beats of churning static.
Echoes then, and nothing.
Sophie screamed, her hands clawing up against her throat, her head rebounding against the wheel and then against the driver’s window. “Tom!”
Labored breathing on the line. Someone else. Not Tom. A voice: “Who is this?”
“Oh my God, Tom!”
“Listen.” Whoever he was, the voice of Tom’s killer was like venom dripping down the line. But he was frightened, his breath and the electric air of his frantic hiss was pulsing with adrenaline from the kill. “Listen very carefully, Mrs. St.-Germain. You tell anyone any of what you heard, and we will execute you for treason. We will kill your daughter before your eyes. Right in fucking front of you. Do you understand me?”