“There are times when we need to be good citizens and help others out. But in moments when it is life and death, we should take care of our own. Do you see what I’m saying?” She paused and saw in his eyes that he was doing the best he could to follow. “There is something terribly wrong here, son. I’m not sure what it is, but I have an idea. Now is not the time to question and fret. Just move your feet and keep your head down. We have to make our way to safety.”
Stephen nodded and tried to keep pace as they wound their way through the city. They passed through the crowds and around the puddling of slushy ice water that was beginning to pour into the streets from the numerous fires that sprang up around them. They headed as straight as they could manage past the infernal turbulence that was the city, toward the safety of the bunker in the bridge.
By evening, they had reached it.
From a distance, one could hear the faraway strums of the guitars slowing growing. The distinctive clattering echo of the twang-twicka-twang was matched by the chunky percussion. As the man on the bicycle came closer to the small group of people gathered by the entrance of a parking lot on the Lincoln Highway in Trenton, New Jersey, the group looked up and heard the wailing urgency of the opening lines of a U2 song.
Although they had only moments before been wondering aloud when this waking nightmare would end, when the government would get its act together and deliver food, where the police were in all of this, they happily stopped their grousing for a moment and watched as the bearded, red-haired specter rode up into their midst, and asked if they knew where he could buy some balloons.
“Balloons?!” asked one of the loudest complainers in the group, incredulously. “Have you flipped your gourd, bro? What in the world do you want balloons for? You should be worrying about finding a new coat to replace that nasty thing you’re wearing. And food… you should be worrying about food. And safety. You do know that we’re in the middle of a national emergency, right?”
Looking at the man, they thought they’d sized him up. Perhaps he was a lunatic, flittering along the highway on a bicycle in the snow, heading who knows where. Maybe he didn’t even know, they thought. The red bearded man just smiled and did nothing to dispel this notion.
“Oh, it’s ok,” he said. “I’m not worried about safety. I know how to make myself invisible. But I need some balloons. I’m going to build a rocket ship and float on out of here.” He reached down and turned down his boom box just as U2 was singing about a place where the streets have no name, as if in answer to where he was going. He changed the subject off of himself. “How bad is it out here, anyway?”
They stood together for a moment and talked about the conditions around them, how the grocery stores had been stripped bare since the blizzard, and how the streets had become dangerous in the last few days, and not only at night. One trucker who’d just driven up from Mississippi before the storm told him how he’d run out of gas and his rig had been stranded for a week.
“Yes, well that’s a shame,” the red-haired man said. “It surely is. You know…,” the red bearded man nodded, as if they should know, “…when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he worked by candlelight until it was done.” The red-haired man looked at the crowd of faces around him to see if anyone understood his meaning, but he was met with only blank stares until someone in the gathered group told them all to hush. A woman waved her hand to silence the crowd. She was picking up some news on her radio. The news had interrupted their broadcast to go to live coverage of a man who was going to jump from outer space and parachute back to earth.
“What kind of thing is that to do while the world is going to hell?” someone asked.
“Shhh… quiet!” someone said. “I want to hear this!”
The crowd sat and listened as the radio announcer relayed the sequence of events and watched as a few remaining cars went weaving through the broken down traffic along the highway. The daredevil was plunging towards the ground, and they were all listening in stony silence when there was a loud explosion from a transformer down the street, and the cars and the radio and the red-haired man’s boombox stopped simultaneously, leaving the crowd waiting for a finish to the song that never came.
A groan went up among them. “Oh, what now?!” But the red-haired man did not ask this question. He seemed to know what was coming next, or maybe he just did not care, which to the observer looked like the same thing. He unstrapped the bungees that held his boombox to the handlebars of his bicycle and tossed the hunk of now useless plastic onto a pile of trash stacked near the road and mounted his bicycle and wished the crowd well.
He pushed off from the curb and headed up the highway with his bicycle, leaving the crowd open-mouthed as they watched him slowly pedal through the stalled cars and the snow and pedestrians, weaving slowly in and out until his image grew increasingly smaller in the distance.
And then, true to his word, he disappeared.
Mikail’s guards were now his captors. He had not been “officially” arrested yet. The cease-fire agreement supposedly allowed him twenty-four hours, until midday on Wednesday, to cede control of Warwick and to surrender to the coalition force that now had supremacy in the village. The coalition had neither great leadership nor any concrete plans for how to move forward or deal with the burgeoning crisis. What they had were the Russian Special Forces soldiers, and for now that would be enough.
In Warwick, there was a broad array of emotions; anger, regret, horror, sadness, even hope. This stew of feelings led the people to be weary from the day’s sudden and terrible events, and to hunger for a moment of rest. The coalition held, and the Spetznaz were able, for a time, to maintain an uneasy peace. People stopped battling one another and began to pick through the shattered homes and damaged storefronts. Bodies were being washed and prepared for burial, crimes were being catalogued, and some arrests were being made. There were apologies, accusations, and the promise of recriminations. The prison in Warwick once again held the unhappy losers in a long, grand, and sad social experiment.
“You will be held responsible for the actions of Vladimir and his team,” a coalition ‘advisor’ warned Mikail, as if his control over Vladimir had been anything more than nominal to begin with.
“I cannot be held responsible for the actions of people who have long since gone off on their own and who fail to obey me,” Mikail responded. He was being untruthful. While Vladimir certainly had a mind of his own, the young man was not entirely “off on his own.” Whatever were his private motivations, he was still ostensibly working for Mikail as his team made their way through town, searching for Vasily and the way out.
Just before noon, someone turned on the radio, and the guarded—along with the guards—listened to the world melt down in real time. After a quick rundown of the condition of America, including woefully rapid and undetailed reports of riots, economic collapse, stores being stripped to the very shelf lining, fuel shortages, nuclear plant shut downs, and impotent government responses, the news cut to the story of a German man jumping from a balloon in space.
Mikail was only half-listening to the broadcast, but he snapped to full attention when the radio buzzed and then zapped and then fell silent while simultaneously the lighting failed and the rumble of the generators gave way to a preternatural silence. A smile crossed Mikail’s face just as another messenger came through the door of the gymnasium with a message from Vladimir.