***
Vinny Nguyen drove the old jeep through the West Virginia nighttime, northwestward toward Pittsburg, Cleveland, and eventually Canada, he hoped. He should meet up there with the rest of the community, who had filtered out of the bunker over the last week.
Vinny had dug his way through the last few feet of soft dirt after he had triggered the explosions that sealed Jenkins and his people in, and then wirelessly activated the modern electronic valves that flooded the complex with contaminated fluid. He smiled as he thought about the trap he had lain, and the flawless way his systems functioned.
At least he died happy as blackest night turned to atomic day.
-27-
The video went viral less than an hour after the nuclear explosions. Despite the best efforts of the National Security Agency, US Cyber Command and every other arm of the government, it was posted and reposted to servers all over the world, to social networking pages, to websites and just simply e-mailed to people everywhere.
In the video, Daniel Markis’ face looked at the camera, calm and composed. He smiled briefly, looked down at his script, and then spoke in a strong, confident voice.
Hello, my fellow homo sapiens. I’m Daniel J. Markis, and I’m here to tell you about a better world.
But before that world arrives, there will be some problems. Your own governments and leaders will try to suppress this video and the knowledge in it. But it won’t work. Information wants to be free.
Then they will try to suppress the miracles. But that won’t work either. The miracles have already been sent to too many places.
You will have heard scattered reports by now of miraculous cures of terminal illnesses, in Central America and Mexico, in Los Angeles, in the US State of Georgia, in Bermuda and many other places. But the miracles are right next door to you now.
Over one thousand packages have been sent by private service to hospitals in a thousand cities around the world. The greatest number were sent to places where poverty and disease is rampant – to places like Calcutta and Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro and Cairo and Cape Town, as well as the great centers of civilization like New York and London and Paris and Moscow and Beijing.
Each package contains a simple bottle of a miracle solution. Less than one milliliter of this liquid will cure anyone injected with it of almost any known disease. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just give that tiny amount to any patient, any person, with a terminal illness, anyone who volunteers. As far as I have been able to tell, it has almost a one hundred percent success rate.
If you run out of the cure, then there is an easy solution. Anyone who has been cured already can pass the cure on through blood or saliva or any other bodily fluid. Once you are confident of its power, all you have to do is pass it on.
If anyone tries to hoard the cure, don’t worry. Don’t do violence. Just seek someone out that has been cured, they can pass it on to you. Share a drink, or a mint. Kiss them if you feel like it. If you are a medical professional, use a syringe or a swab or an inoculation gun. It doesn’t matter. And if it doesn’t work, try it again. Because miracles really do happen.
Good night, good luck, and welcome to a better world.
-28-
Daniel woke up from the nightmare again, the nightmare where he could see the food behind the glass but couldn’t reach it. He stumbled over to the bathroom faucet, drinking cup after cup of water. His dinner was long gone and he couldn’t convince them that he needed more calories. Or maybe they wanted to study him in this state of starvation. He looked in the mirror, seeing a concentration camp victim already.
They came in from time to time in their hazmat suits and took blood or saliva swabs. They did biopsies of his liver and other organs with painful needles; they cut him and watched him heal. Each time he spoke to them, calling them by name if he could, trying to make them see him as human. Eventually they put a leather gag in his mouth.
The promised tortures hadn’t yet materialized; he suspected Jenkins had bigger fish to fry. Daniel just had to make it through day to day.
They had been kind enough, if that was the word, to re-break his bones and straighten him out. They used no anesthetic and they recorded the whole procedure, hooking him up to electrodes and machines. At least they fed him then.
Daniel lay back down, but had a hard time sleeping. Because he was awake, through the thick walls he heard the rattle of bullets ricocheting like marbles in a bathtub, the muffled thuds, the thump of something hitting his locked door, the yelling and screaming faint through the soundproofing. He sat up in bed, waiting for whatever came.
The door swung open abruptly, revealing a tall, thin figure, backlit so Daniel couldn’t see his face, but he knew the posture and the man’s way of moving.
“Have you come to kill me, Skull?”
The cadaverous avenger stepped into the room but left the light off. An MP5 submachine-gun with a long suppressor rested in his hand.
“I ought to. It’s your fault Zeke is dead.”
“How do you figure?”
“If you’d just have gone with them, if you’d never run and asked for Zeke’s help, none of this would have happened.”
“It’s because of me he was alive at all. I put him back together on a Kandahar mountainside, and I killed fourteen Taliban at close range doing it. Maybe ten other guys in the world could have done that, and I paid for it later. I didn’t kill him, Skull. But if it eases your pain, then shoot me now. I’m ready.”
“I’m not going to shoot you. I’d have done that back in the cave if I was going to. Do you have a death wish? Why are you even here? You could have just sent the stuff around the world and escaped. Why did you get yourself captured?”
“Because it seemed like the right thing to do.”
Skull snorted in disbelief.
“Okay, how’s this. Maybe I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. Maybe I wanted to distract them from the real plan, let them think they’d won. Maybe I wanted to provoke them to rash action, which I did. Maybe I deserve to be punished. I did murder Jenkins, and I brought on the death of a couple hundred thousand Angelinos. Maybe the people that have been experimenting on me need to see the truth, despite the lies. Or maybe the world needs a martyr, a symbol to rally around.”
“You really are full of yourself, aren’t you? God damn you and your martyrdom and your symbolism and your sainthood,” Skull snarled. “What’s with people like you? You don’t live in the real world.”
“I live in the world of ideas, because that’s what changes the world.”
“Oh, you make me sick. Get up and come with me. I’m not going to let them win even if you want them to.”
Daniel smiled gently. “The old me would tell you to go to hell, take that weapon from you and do what I promised the last time you had me at gunpoint. The new me…just says no. I’m not coming with you. The new me isn’t afraid anymore. It doesn’t mean I’m a saint. It just means I consider myself already dead, so you can’t scare me. Nobody can. And that scares you.”
Skull cursed him then, words to wound and hurt, but Daniel was beyond the sticks and stones. He wished he could help Skull. He wished Skull would accept the gift, and surrender all that pain and hate and anger. But for some people, that pain and hate and anger is who they are, is all they are, and they can’t give that up.