Grant smiled peacefully at her. “That’s a cool thought. That we’re all packed up for some hardened journey and we pull out onto a busy highway.”
“Life goes on,” Meredith added. “It finds away. There’s life out there beyond this base. What kind of life, I don’t know. But it’s there.”
Nora didn’t join in the fire conversation, she lay off to the side, reading by the light of a lantern and some of the campfire glow. Before her was an open notebook, along with the tabloids and magazines she grabbed from the PX.
John had moved across the lot where Malcolm worked on the ‘buggies’, probably being more of an annoyance than any help. Jason was quiet, he didn’t say much. Nora figured he was still processing. Everyone had to deal with things their own way and their own time frame.
She took to starting a journal. It was her way of dealing. Taking notes, writing thoughts. She slowly withdrew from paying attention to what was being said by the campfire until she reached the point that the silence finally caught her attention. She had been so engrossed, she didn’t notice everyone had fallen asleep.
Nora wasn’t tired. In fact she hadn’t slept much or well since she woke from stasis. She closed her journal, picked up the wristwatch, saw the time of three AM, and was going to call it a night, when she heard the clank of metal and Malcolm cursing out, “Oh, goddamn it.”
He was still at it.
Not that she could help, but Nora decided to see if he needed anything.
Malcolm had moved three of the buggies more to the center of the lot. Supplies were already loaded in them and she followed the light that came from the open garage door of the warehouse.
As she neared, John walked through the darkness, staggering some.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Yep. I finally have hit that level where I think I can sleep.” He lifted a bottle and dangled a cup from his other hand. “Since I didn’t want to take a chance on the expiration of the Go-Doze pills, this worked. Want a hefty night cap?”
“No. But thanks.”
“Suit yourself. I know you’re not sleeping either.”
“On second thought.” She said.
John stopped walking, he finished the few drops that remained in his glass and poured a healthy amount in the cup, handing it to Nora. “Enjoy. Night.”
“Night.” Nora watched him drunkenly walk away, sniffed the brown liquid and cocked back. It was strong and burned her nostrils. It was something she’d sip, and she did as she walked to the garage.
She stopped cold in the garage when she saw all the parts scattered on the floor.
“Come to help, watch, or ask a million questions?” Malcolm asked from his seat on the floor. He was surrounded by parts.
“All three. What… are these? Is this buggy broke?”
“It is now,” Malcolm said. “We only need three, so I figured the best way to learn this thing was to take it apart and put it back together. Only now…”
“You can’t get it back together?”
“Nope. I will though.”
“No doubt.” Nora said and joined him on the floor.
“Can’t sleep?” Malcolm asked.
Nora shook her head.
“Me either. I see John gave you some sleep aid.”
“Maybe you should try some.”
“Oh, I did.” Malcolm picked up a part and examined it. “A third of a bottle. I feel nothing.”
“That could be the reason you can’t get this back together.”
He laughed. “It might be. I saw you working on something.”
“Oh, just writing in a journal and reading and learning all I could from those magazines.”
“Anything interesting?”
Nora took a sip of her drink. “The explosion was a dirty bomb. Or so they say. Flattened six blocks of New York, contaminated most of the city.”
“So they say.”
“So they say,” Nora took another sip. “Malcolm, from what I read, no one is in New York. It was evacuated.”
He glanced beyond her to the camp. “Does Grant know? He’s from New York.”
“He has the same magazines, I do. So I don’t know if he read them or not.”
“Anything about the war?” Malcolm asked.
“Nothing. Then again, I grabbed gossip magazines. There was also nothing about the virus. Just the rag sheet where they predicted it.”
“So in that one month, from that last magazine, until our reset, everything went to shit.”
“Looks that way. Amy and Grant are so optimistic.” Nora looked back.
“What about you?”
“I want to say I’m realistic. But the love of my family puts me in the optimistic category. Jason, I think he is wrestling between fear and faith.”
“That’s good.” Malcolm lifted a tool and pointed it at her. “John isn’t optimistic, he’s being a realist. He’s not holding high hopes that his family made it. At least what he told me. He said, he’ll grieve when he knows.”
“What about you?” Nora asked.
“Me? I may not seem it but I’m crushed.” He squinted his eyes. “We all are and must face what we find. I just hope, if anything I find my oldest son.”
Nora furrowed her brow in confusion. “Why just him?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I want them all to be alive. But him… I was a young father when he was born. Too young and he and I butted heads all the time. Before I left for New York, we got in the biggest fight. He called me an Absentee Dad that I was never around. And I keep thinking how that kid had to feel when he heard I was killed and his last words to me were, ‘Why don’t you stay in New York, not like we’ll notice if we never see you again’. And in my anger, I told him that maybe I would. Stupid.” He tossed a small part, reached out and grabbed the cup from Nora’s hand and took a drink. “And on the other hand, a part of me is thinking, why bother? Why go look? That maybe it is for the best. I’m actually thinking of fixing this buggy and heading right to Champaign.”
“Why would you say that?”
“It’s selfish. But they mourned us, Nora. They lost us, grieved us, and got over us. If they are alive, they have nothing to lose if they never see us again. Us on the other hand, we have a lot less to lose if we never know.”
“If you really believed that you wouldn’t be working so hard to get our transportation going. You’re just scared like the rest of us. But come tomorrow, we’ll get up and we’ll go. We’ll all go. We’ll be more fearful than hopeful. But we’ll go, because not knowing is really not an option.” She exchanged glances, catching his unspoken words through expression that he was in agreement, and then Nora took her drink cup and finished off the nightcap.
NORA’S ENTRY
Day One AR (After Reset)
Suddenly I am cast into a surreal existence. Trying with all that I am to decipher if what I am experiencing is real or a dream. Perhaps I am still in a state of stasis or that explosion has me in limbo.
This is Day One. Not because it is the first day that we are awake, it isn’t, but rather, the first day that we emerged from our reset state.
We were reset, for how long, remains to be seen. I can’t think of that aspect of it, I did for a small amount of time and it can be insanity inducing. I decided to place my focus on my family. After witnessing the fall of civility on the base, my heart is completely and utterly broken. Jason mentioned that perhaps I was indeed supposed to be in stasis. That maybe, like Amy, I was going to be snatched away from my room in some late night, post explosion covert operation. Deep in my heart I know that not to be true. In my deepest wishes that my family received the inoculation, I know they didn’t. I was not supposed to be there. They all believed I was Summer Rosewood.