I was sitting in the den at home - home home, Connecticut home. Not school home. So I was sitting in the den, watching the late night, post-SNL broadcast when it turned to dance. It wasn't just one kind of dance, either, but all dance. Not explicitly, of course, but it was aware of its span.

Anyone who's seen Dirty Dancing is familiar with that style of close dance, always in unison, usually in contact, never actually giving in to the powerful, sexual energy coursing through and around you and your partner, because, frankly, it's sexier. This was after a cabaret bit, before they switched to middle eastern and African dance (and eventually went onward to burlesque).

But I was watching the contact, the physical and mental, the awareness of what they were doing and just how close they were to each other, but what they would never do. They were two reporters for the segment, taught by the leads themselves (or perhaps the choreographers? Either way, those two could dance.) and obviously a little self conscious. They began with no idea of what they were doing and the woman remarked, when the male lead was behind her, that she was married.

Then they reached the "finale." The two stood at opposite ends of the stage and approached each other, touched, slipped into one anothers' hands while remaining outside the arms, at arms' length. Their bodies - their cores - found one another and they moved as they had been taught, his hand sliding sensuously down her arm and slipping to the small of her back, supporting her as she leaned over and whipped herself around.

And then they were face to back, his chest behind her, against her, their pelvises touching or, at least, very close. His arm was around her waist, his hand on her abdomen, on her belly, gently, barely touching it. It was as though he encompassed her, but wasn't truly in contact with her, yet her head was beside his as if she had leaned back into him, her face to the sky.

The leads looked on and I swore I saw in their faces, only for a moment, the realization flash in their minds of how they must look, of what it stirred in people to observe that and what must have been going through those dancers' minds.

People are sensuous. Is that how it goes? An object, an act, can be sensual because it evokes the senses, but the people themselves are sensuous because they have their senses provoked, drawn upon.

Yes. I think that's it. Humans are sensuous. People are humans. Your family and your friends are people. They feel both physically and emotionally, possibly spiritually as well.

Be aware of that. Please.

Day 14: All caught up

As he pulled the handle and opened the door, he felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find Don looking at him, eyes bubbling over with confusion and worry, but it was Megan who spoke.

“Jack… What do you think you’re going to do?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

The words stung. They were so matter of fact. I would expect that from a child, Megan, not you, they said with their tone. You should know.

“That doesn’t mean it’s right, Jack.”

Zach, now, joining in to keep him from making what they saw as a mistake. Could they see it any other way? He wondered. What if they were in the same position?

“Jack. Dawn would never forgive me. I could never forgive me.”

Back, full circle, to Don. Uncertainty in his mind for the first time, tumbling through his memories of the past week, the trials he – no, they – had been through and, after all of that, they wanted him to experience more hardship? More loss?

No. Not this time. He brushed Don’s hand from his shoulder and burst from the car, only to gag and fall backward as the hand caught the neck of his shirt and dragged him down. He slipped from it and started around the car, only to feel his stomach lurch forward as he was turned and slammed against the side of the van, neck held by his much larger elder. What had before been confusion had resolved into anger – furious, righteous anger.

“The hell, boy! You think it’ll do us any good to lose you, too? She’s gone and it hurts, and it should hurt! That’s how you know you still care, but charging in, thinking you’re invincible… When you get a break like this once, it doesn’t come again. Throwing it away, Jack? Really? That’s how you want this to end?”

Even with one arm, the man far outweighed him and, besides that, simply overpowered him. He could barely breathe, much less speak, but he grunted in protest. Eventually, when he started to physically scrabble at his neck in desperation, Don eased up enough for him to talk.

“She’s my mom and you… You’re dating her! You’re a heartless fuck is what you are! You think you’re tough, but most of all you think you’re smart, think you’re smart enough to take what you’re given when you’re given it, but that’s now how it works, Don!

“We all saw that when the bombs hit, that we have to take what we’re given and run with it until we get more, or else we’re just going to end where we started, but you’re going to throw her and me and Zach and Megan away! One day we’re going to be the ones who are too dangerous to help.”

They were both breathing hard, as though their scuffle had been physical, but the fire had siphoned from Don’s eyes and, it seemed if you looked at him, into Jack’s. The van tilted back to rest, centered on its frame, as Don backed off and Jack stood up. He was still wary of his elder, lids narrow around blue eyes.

“Are you gonna try to stop me again?”

Don shook his head. Jack turned back to the car, peeked in through the driver-side window.

“How ‘bout you two?”

Same.

“All right. Good.”

He pulled the pistol from his belt and checked the cartridge, made sure it was solidly in the handle of the gun and flicked off the safety.

“If I’m not back in five minutes, odds are I’m not coming back out. If that’s what happens… Follow Don’s lead. He’ll decide what you do.”

“You don’t want our help?”

He looked at her over his shoulder, then down at the ground.

“No. This is mine to do.”

He left before any of them could respond, ducked low beneath the window-frames and disappeared into the house.

They counted first the seconds, then the minutes as the house remained silent and stationary. Two passed, then three and four. It had soon been five minutes, but the three of them continued to sit in the van, watching the door. Cold sweat flooded their skin, pushing it out, making it clammy and soft. They didn’t have to wait for long.

Three flashes, punctuated by an equal number of loud cracks and a scream preceded Dawn, dashing from the house with Jack fast on her heels. One side of her face was covered in red and Jack’s shirt was stained with what could only be blood. Don threw open the passenger’s door as Megan and Zach opened the back and welcomed Dawn in, ushering her across them as Jack jumped into shotgun and fired two more shots at the doorway, bullets cracking the frame and scaring the suit back inside, only his hand and the gun therein peeking out.

“What’re you waiting for? Drive!”

Don hit the gas, launching the car from its standstill as inertia threw them back. They turned the corner as a black Lincoln burst from behind their row house, charging after them as they sought the highway.

The back door was unlocked. This should have been a blaring danger klaxon, but Jack went in regardless, gun at the ready out in front as he turned a corner into the kitchen. Two men in monkey suits stood alongside his mother, one on either side of the kitchen chair within which she sat. She was not tied down and they were facing away from him, but one of them had a gun to her head and both were watching the front door, waiting for someone to come in that way. He tightened his grip on the pistol and, just as he started to go in, whipped it around as he spun, bottom of the handle coming just short of a third agent’s chin, the man’s head snapping back. He fell into the wall and grunted, whistled sharply just as Jack swung again, but he ducked and came up behind the young man, caught his extended arm and pulled it out to the side, pushed on the joint of his shoulder and rolled it forward, spinning him around and slamming him into the floor.

He could feel footsteps vibrating through the hardwood, knew they were coming from the kitchen, and only hoped that the distance was short enough; he jerked his head up, driving the back of it into the base of the agent’s chin. He rolled the suddenly-limp form off of his back and stood up, rubbing the back of his head for the second time that day.

He came through the entryway while Jack was still picking up his gun. His leg moved quickly, and it was all Jack could do to throw himself out of the way as the ball of the agent’s foot arced in and grazed his cheek, rough sole scratching his flesh and spinning him to the ground. He held onto the gun, though, and had it aimed as he caught himself with his free hand and kept himself upright. The suit didn’t stop; he jerked to the side and pushed off from the wall, driving his momentum down at Jack away from the gun, but Jack never fired. He swiped to his side with the weapon, bringing it down on the back of the man’s head as he came in for the kill. Blood shot from a burst blood vessel on the back of his bald skull and the man fell unconscious. Or dead. Either way, Jack didn’t have much sympathy left for him.

He went around to the front of the kitchen quickly but quietly, catching the third agent with his back turned. The look on his mother’s face as he raised the pistol, fired into the suit’s head… He didn’t have time to worry about whether she approved, what she thought of him. The agent’s body fell without any manner of decorum, tumbling freely to the ground with only the external input of the kitchen table and the momentum imparted by the bullet to guide it. His mother stared at him, blood coating half of her face crimson awful, mouth open, scream silent in her throat. They would have heard the shot, they’d be coming through the front door in just a moment whywasshestillsittingthere!

“Go!”

She responded immediately, standing and running from the kitchen with him behind her, firing two wild shots at the men who came through the door after them, forcing them aside. The light greeted them harshly – outside felt so exposed as they made their mad dash to the car.

And now she was screaming. She was screaming and she wouldn’t stop and he couldn’t tell her to do it, his voice as hung as hers had been earlier. He wanted to yell it, “Quiet! Quiet! Shut up I was only doing what I had to do!” but he wasn’t sure it was true and… God, was he really? No, he did was he had to do to ensure her survival, to make sure she wouldn’t be used against him and… And he did love her. She was his mother; of course he loved her.

“Mom! Mom! Mom!”

He hadn’t meant to say the words so harshly, but his voice was hoarse, barely escaping his tongue and his lips, a desperate croak, but it cut her off for just a moment.

“Mom, I… I did what I had to do, okay? He had a gun to your head!”

She wasn’t shouting anymore, just breathing heavily as he cried, as he dropped his gun to the car floor and pressed his face into the headrest, gripped the shoulders of his seat as though they were all that anchored him to his world. He sobbed loudly, audibly, not understanding why it had happened, why she’d had to confront him why she’d seen him like… Like…

A monster! She had looked at him like he was a monster!

Massive update: Days 11, 12 and 13

Still, if they had taken down room numbers, there had to be some system for identifying which was which. They would just have to figure it out and, let’s be frank, how hard could that really be if their operation thus far was any indication? Except for the fact that they had led the survivors, unsuspecting in some lapse of judgment, to one place and brutally interrogated them for almost a week…

Jack’s head hit the keyboard, then again as he slammed his forehead into the desk in frustration. The key imprints would look hilarious in a few minutes, he was sure, but he just needed to feel something right then. Maybe it was memorized, mnemonic of some kind that they all had down. If that was the case, the list was really no help to them. Erring on the side of caution, Jack looked up Don’s and Zach’s information and printed it out. Maybe they could take a hostage and interrogate him for a change, get the system out that way. He wasn’t too hopeful.

Megan seemed to be looking to him expectantly as they jogged through the halls, taking turn after turn with the vicious energy of one with a purpose. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was a façade, that he was as lost as she was and really just wanted to get out, but felt obligated to run around in circles in hopes that they would stumble across Zach, Don, or any of the other survivors. Maybe one of the gas station attendants. Really, now that he thought about it, there hadn’t been any other survivors - none that he had met, anyway, as the lot of them hadn’t made any attempts to get in contact. They would have to be here, too, and that was a thought that drove him on, down hallways he couldn’t distinguish from each other and doors as non-descript as the walls in which they sat.

After a few minutes, however, it became apparent that this was not a viable solution. The halls were barren and every second wasted could be bringing them a step closer to capture, a step away from their escape. A step, a single step down a long expanse of tile, white and brilliant, wholly unremarkable and each indistinguishable from the next. How did anyone navigate this place?

Hell, who the fuck built this place? It made no sense in any way, shape or form. It was so non-descript that it became unique, uniquely devoid of distinguishing characteristics, so bland that it was exceptional! He didn’t even want to consider the type of depraved mind behind this kind of construction, he just wanted to… To… To hit something!

No. Not with Megan there. He couldn’t give away his lack of a plan, could he? She was depending on him. At least… He felt that way. He didn’t know if it was true, but… No, enough of playing the macho meat-head. Time to own up. He came to a stop and, in a moment, she, too, was still, head cocked to the side and eyebrows lowered. Quizzical. That was what the look was called.

“I…” beginning was the hardest part, “I… Have no idea where we are.”

She spat a curse at the floor, then looked at him.

“Well, that makes two of us.”

She ran a hand through her hair, twirled a lock of it around her finger and pulled it straight, then let it bounce back.

“Where do we go from here, Jack?”

He didn’t know. He couldn’t even vocalize an answer. He backed himself against the wall, sweat running from pores all over his body into week-old clothes, clothes too good for this crap, sweat from too much exertion, too much running… No. It wasn’t running. It was fleeing. They were on the lam - on the lam with only their wits, a gun and a security officer’s key card.

The key card! He looked at it, the gibberish printed on its face, and turned it over in his hand. There was more, but he took a moment and looked closer, observed the sequences of letters and numbers, seemingly so random, and… Gave up. No matter how long he looked at them, they weren’t going to resolve into anything and, if they did, the odds of it being useful were slim.

While he had been toying with their key, Megan had perused the data sheet, looking for any clues as to where they could find Don and her brother. The list was dense, filled with more information on the two of them than she would have thought possible. Looking at that last column, though, seeing that room number… She snatched the key card from Jack’s fingers, drawing a yelp of surprise and a raised eyebrow. She ignored him, staring intently at the card, the numbers and letters resolving before her into some sort of pattern almost…

“The Fibonacci sequence.”

Jack stared blankly at her.

“Fabo? The guy from those romance novels?”

She reached past him, smacked him on the back of the head.

“Fibonacci! Each number is the sum of the previous two in the sequence. One, one, two, three, five, eight, etcetera.”

She pointed to the card, ran her finger along the lines of numbers and letters.

“They’re representing it in hexadecimal. Base 16. ‘0’ through ‘F.’”

Jack scratched his head, convinced that, no matter how hard she tried to explain it, the concept would remain lost to him. If it could help them find the others, though, he was willing to trust her.

Who was he kidding? He was willing to trust her anyway.

“All right. So it’s the Fibo-whatsis sequence. What does that tell us, other than that our captors are lonely virgins?”

“Hey! Well, if it’s sequential, and these room numbers correspond to parts of the code on this card, it’s possible that the card can tell us what room we’re at.”

“And how,” he said, voice barely on the edge of calm, “can it do that?”

She turned to the door behind them, inserted the card and removed it quickly, held it up before the now-lit light above the card slot. It penetrated the card, the translucent slip, except for one, small section. A room number. They scribbled it down with a pen they found in the resulting lab and compared few rooms around it, getting an idea of the pattern, the layout of the complex. Zach and Don’s section was only a few halls away, after that, and another door. The grizzled manual laborer, Dawn’s boyfriend, looked up from his bed as the door slid open. Beneath him, beside the bed on the floor, was the body of another security officer, neck twisted almost fully around to face them. Don had bruises along his neck and his shirt was torn, lacerations all down his side, and his right arm was clearly broken, bent backward at the elbow.

“What happened?”

He grunted.

“I think that’s obvious. Most people like keeping their necks intact, but I was a little more insistent.”

“Ah.”

He lurched to his feet, arm cradled in its fellow, and lumbered over to them.

“Door closed before I could get out. Closed on my arm. Lucky I got it out when I did.”

“Do you need, like, a splint? Anything?”

“That would be ideal, yeah.”

They stopped off a few doors down and picked up Zach, who was literally twiddling his thumbs when they arrived, and, with him, brought Don to one of the labs where they were able to fashion a slightly-better-than-crude splint out of two sheets of plastic and a lot of medical tape. It would hold – at least until they were out of the complex. “Out” was becoming an increasingly difficult proposition. The greater number of people, not that they would have left without any one of them, meant that stealth would be impossible. They would have to depend on the good graces of their protector… Whomever that was.

“Seriously, who let you out?”
It was only the third time Zach had asked, but Jack was already tired of hearing it.

“I don’t know, okay? Neither of us does? There was a message carved into my desk.”

“And mine was painted onto the bulb of my lamp.”

“But, since it wasn’t either of you, we don’t know who helped us or even if we can depend on that aid going forward. It could just be a test or an elaborate trap.”
“Or it could be your mom.”

Don smacked Zach upside the head.

“Don’t talk about her that way, ‘less you want my foot so hard in your ass that shittin’ will take a dig crew and a crane.”

Zach swallowed and kept silent. The four explored the bowels of the facility with the urgency of a rat in a maze, their cheese at the end of the maze, their carrot dangling just out of reach.

But humans aren’t rats. Nor are they horses, limited to running forward, blindly chasing their goal. Humans are not limited to linear thought: they can move outside the maze, reach out and grab the carrot ahead, lay down and submit, but never actually give up.

Jack was versatile, as were Don, Megan and even, yes, Zach. If the rules said that they had to proceed from where they were to the exit, if there was even the smallest possibility that they were being siphoned further into a trap the closer they went to the end of their maze, then they would find another way.

No, not another way. A way beyond a way.

A memory from science class in middle school: the mouse in the maze, searching for its prize, stretched and caught the lip of a wall, drew itself onto the cardboard and strode along the top of the maze to the food. It had ruined the experiment, but it had been a surprising flash of insight from a mouse. If something with that little brainpower could do it, certainly they could, as well. It wouldn’t be physical, not necessarily, but they could do it.

The next room they entered—the number already low enough that they had to be getting close to the exit—was what had once been a security checkpoint, now oddly abandoned. Something stank and the four were aware, but they still didn’t have the physical tools they needed to break the game. There had to be something, anything they had forgotten or simply left behind, not realizing its potential effectiveness.

Guns were out. Besides, Jack already had one from the guard who’d found him. If they got into a firefight, especially in the big, open front bay, they would be lost for sure, anyway. Trained security versus four people, most of whom had never shot a gun, and Jack wasn’t sure video games counted. Metal detectors and guard booths with bulletproof windows… This gave them an idea.

The guards rushed into the security checkpoint, guns out and at the ready, called by the blaring alarm system. Unauthorized entry could be tragic, especially now, with the subjects all gathered under one roof. So much sensitive information milling around in one place… It was no wonder the lot of them was on edge, that their response was so immediate and intense. No less than a dozen poured through the doorway into the security checkpoint, only to find an empty room, devoid of the guards who were stationed there and the source of the disturbance. They spread out wordlessly, searching for anyone hiding behind the booths and, then, within them.

They started at the sound of the other door, the one leading deeper into the facility, sliding open. Their guns were ahead of them and pointing at a taller man, maybe about six feet in height, with his helmet on, visor obscuring his eyes. He looked reasonably familiar, though, with his recently-trimmed beard and confident stride. The ID badge he flashed put them at ease, their guns returning to the holsters from which they’d come.

“Report.”

The officer shifted a bit, his stoic face, frozen in a non-committal smile or frown, twitched, but none of them seemed to pay it mind.

“Sir, I was called into the subject pens, sir.”
“What set off the alarm?”
“Sir, that would be me, sir. I was in a hurry and… Er… I forgot to shut off the metal detector… Sir.”

“Are you aware, private, that you are a member of a very elite, very exclusive, very sensitive government operation?”

The security officer swallowed audibly, but didn’t otherwise move.

“You are an integral part of this operation, soldier, and if you are not able to perform your duties to an acceptable degree then I am authorized to shoot you where you stand do I make myself clear?”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“Good. I will not tolerate the same mistake twice, private.”

“Sir, no sir!”

“Everyone! Back to your posts!”

There were low-key snickers abound directed at the recently berated private as everyone cleared out of the security checkpoint and returned to their designated duties. The private, alone once more, took off his helmet and surveyed the guard room with his blue eyes. He opened the door to the cell block and motioned toward himself as he stepped into the room. He was joined in short order by Zach, Don and Megan.

“They suspect anything?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t think so, anyway. Doesn’t really matter, does it? If they want us, they’ve got us.”

Don shrugged.

“True enough. Shall we?”

The others nodded and proceeded to the door, Zach fidgeting with his uniform collar.

“Would you stop that?”
He continued to twist it first one way, then the other.

“Hey! Let’s see how comfortable you are when it’s your turn to wear a dead guy’s clothes!”

“If you don’t stop screwing around you’re going to find out what it’s like to be that dead guy firsthand!”

Don’s words drew the blood from Zach’s naturally pale face. Frightened, he looked like a sickly ghost. The older man smacked him on the back with his good hand, pushing him forward, and he and Megan followed Jack and Zach out into the base’s entryway.

It immediately became clear why the rest of the facility was empty. On the day they had arrived, it had been busy, sure, but the bustling workers had been spread out and engaged with other things. Now the cavernous interior garage felt almost claustrophobic with everyone was standing in one, large pack in the center. Thankfully, their attention was focused elsewhere, rather than on the newcomers.

They had thought to make out as two guards tasked with taking their prisoners—subjects—to an off-site facility, or just hoping that the uniforms would be enough to avoid any questions as to their intentions. That was now neither possible nor necessary. Four was too many to sneak by, though. Someone would see them. The two in guard gear, Zach and Jack, approached the throng as Megan and Don darted from vehicle to crate, objects left where they lay by laborers who had stopped mid-motion to attend… What kind of a meeting was this, anyway?

Jack tried to get a view over the heads of the crowd, but could see nothing other than row after row of helmets and hardhats. He could hear the voice, though, echoing back to him through the acoustically atrocious auditorium. It was harsh, stinging and, try as he might, he couldn’t make out what it was saying. They ducked their heads and squeezed forward through the crowd until the sound was legible and, far though they still were from the source of the voice, they could see that it was not in fact a person, but a speaker system with a satellite uplink.

The owner of the voice was, presumably, far far away.

“… These subjects are our last chance to right our wrongs. If even one among them has potentially seen… I do not think I need to continue this train of thought. You know what your responsibilities are. Fulfill them or, heavens help us, it will not be only my head on which the weight falls.”

Don and Megan had made it to the exit, but were fidgeting with a side door, a control panel beside it that was overloaded with unmarked buttons.

“Is there anything in this place that isn’t purposely obtuse?”

She spat a curse, but Don was growing impatient.

“We’ve been as careful as we can be, lass. At this point we need to do something or we won’t get the chance to even try.”

She nodded and hit a switch then, when nothing obvious happened, hit another.

And another.

The sound of steel protesting against the gears that moved it, the magnets that pulled it, rang through the entrance plaza, too loud and too obvious to be ignored. The voice barked an order, but neither she nor Don could hear it from where they stood. The door in front of them slid open and they burst through, the larger man’s splinted arm colliding with the surprised guard’s chin, knocking him back and down. As his body tumbled down the steep side of the mountain, Don and Megan turned to the tire-beaten path up to the government base and fully realized, for the first time, the magnitude of their predicament.

“It’s going to be a long way down.”

“Think… Think we should have grabbed a car?”

The answer to their question came careening out of the garage, crashing through tightly packed powder with a cold, wet, white spray. The driver window rolled down as the door locks clicked open. Jack’s face, visor up over his head, greeted them.

“Get in!”

The attention span of government employees, thought Jack, was woefully underrated. As it turned out, their security, military and engineering staffs were very good at sticking an objective through to its end. For example, this most recent distraction, the doors opening when they weren’t scheduled to do so and two of their subjects attempting to escape… This saw immediate repercussions.

Jack and Zach were left standing in the center of a rapidly emptying garage as the throng around them pulsed then split, spreading off to the various defensive stations where they would get likely extremely nasty accoutrements with which to detain or dismember the rogue subjects. The wayward youths needed a vehicle.

It was a Humvee. Standard, military-issue troop transport vehicle, if by troop transport one meant “four dudes and a chain-gun.” They happened to be three dudes and a dudette, but, somehow, Jack didn’t think the car would be too discriminating. It was American, after all. It also had a very large, very shiny chain-gun.

This made is very American.

All it would have needed to be the most American symbol of the military Jack had ever seen would be a tri-color paint job. Red, white and blue. With red and white stripes. And stars. And some blue.

They hopped in and immediately realized that, as with most petroleum powered coaches, this one required a key for ignition. Normally required a key. Zach had a screwdriver and a bobby pin. Jack had not known it was possible to hijack a military vehicle with a screwdriver and a bobby pin, but he wagered that, in the middle of an intense battle, if one needed to maneuver or retreat and didn’t want to idle, fast easy startup was an outright necessity.

The engine roared and the car shot forward, crates and empty boxes flying wild, scattering in the air and striking the ground in broken heaps of balsa and plywood. The few items left over in them cracked and shattered, non-descript supplies for an equally non-descript organization, and the car’s wheels screeched against the rough foundation of the entrance plaza before pushing them forward, soldiers scrambling out of the way as Jack whipped the wheel around and slammed the brake, the back of the Humvee swinging about to reorient the duo toward the exit. The gas pedal crushed the floor of the cabin, Jack’s foot leaden, his arms out straight and eyes alert as automatic gunfire opened up from all angles, barrels spitting rapid-fire death as their vehicle became a figurative blur, weaving behind support struts and shipping crates of corrugated steel. A shot cracked the rear windshield, three of its fellows following in quick succession and leaving a trail of expanding holes, each larger than the last as the whole of the glass lost integrity and shattered.

Jack jerked the wheel to the side, spinning away from the bead, and flipped the transmission into reverse, snaking back and forth in a seemingly random pattern, gunfire flying wild, bullets flailing impotently at the air where he and Zach had once been and, soon, simply providing a screen of reference for the Humvee’s path through the garage. He turned it once more as they reached the door, a rocket propelled grenade soaring by and exploding red-light brilliant in the sky above as they flew from the gate and crashed to a halt in the snow before Megan and Don. The other two refugees piled in and the car started back down the mountain. As it tore through forest and white-dusted dirt path alike, its occupants bouncing in their seats, the full enormity of the situation began to sink in. They were on the run. From the government.

“We’re on the run, guys. From the government.”

Leave it to Zach to vocalize what everyone was already thinking.

“That’s why we’re going to have to be careful. Plan ahead a little. Flying by the seats of our pants has only worked so far because we caught them unaware, or it seems like we did, but it’s very possible that, right now, they’re letting us do this.”

Don’s comment drew murmured assent and so he continued.

“Our next step, then, should be getting the people close to us out of harm’s way.”

Jack kept his eyes ahead, but his eyebrow twitched and his arms tensed up.

“You mean…”

“Dawn.”

“Mom.”

Don nodded.

“Yeah. Her first.”

“And then my sister.”

Zach and Megan jerked upright and stared wide-eyed at him, even Don betraying his surprise with a quick snort.

“Dawn I can understand, boy… Jack. But why your sister? Why drag her into this?”

The thrum of a rotor overhead betrayed the helicopter on their tail, soldiers keeping watch from its open sides with guns at the ready. Jack swerved off road and the Humvee tackled the sharp decline.

“If we don’t, they will.”

He spun the wheel to avoid a tree and shot off at an angle, gunfire melting the snow behind them.

“And if they do, they’ll use her against us.”

The Humvee bounded along, tires barely holding to the slick ground, their momentum tossing them to and fro in the air. Jack was absolutely depending on the legendary hardiness of the vehicle to keep them intact and alive.

“Who are they, though? Why do they have so much power? I thought you said our first priority was figuring this stuff out!”

His attention remained focused ahead, eyes fixated on the world beyond the windshield, so it was Zach’s voice that answered her question.

“They’re looking for a survivor. One of them saw… Something. The voice didn’t specify, but, apparently, it has something to do with something they did.”

He would recall later, in a moment of respite, how her face had blanched just then, how she had covered her mouth and turned her gaze out the window, head bobbing with the motion of the car beneath them as it attempted to evade pursuit. It would be then that he would ask her the question with the answer he most feared, but now, in the heat of the moment, the daring escape from captivity, he was otherwise occupied and his brain glossed over it, wrote it off as the trauma of the situation working overtime on her nerves.

They weathered the mountain, thankful for the trees and the snow both, obscuring them enough that the helicopter and its payload of personnel had proven incapable of hitting them with any urgent damage - dings and scratches and superficial bullet holes the limit of their success. But now they were on the open road in New Hampshire, without cover to hide behind and with a massive chopper on their tail.

“We’ve got to use the chain-gun.”

They’d been hoping to avoid it, but they all knew it would be impossible. Ahead, far in the distance – too far for them to go unscathed – was a tunnel. If they could get in there, they might be able to lose the helicopter. It was a risk to put someone on the gun, exposed like that, but it was definite, if they didn’t, that all of them would be killed and, hey, if Zach was volunteering…

“All right,” Jack tried to zig-zag, but the tires had already taken a lot and had trouble getting the necessary traction on the slick road, “but do you know how to work one?”

Zach was already halfway out of his seat and to the back of the Humvee.

“Does it make a difference?”

Guess not, thought Jack. A few seconds later, tense seconds of waiting for Zach to scream and fall in a heap of bullet holes and blood, the thrum of a heavy machine gun barrel spinning, spitting rapid bursts of molten lead, drowned out the distant sound of small arms fire. Jack looked over his shoulder for only a second, just long enough to see the chopper fall back, hear Zach’s sustained battle-cry – barely audible above the chain-gun’s clamor – and turned back ahead as they entered the tunnel, the guns stopped and silence, except for the bumping and jostling of their Humvee’s frame, overtook them.

He was relieved, for the first time in his living memory, to be in a tunnel. Of course, it wasn’t just your average, everyday overpass above them. No, the mountain would adequately protect them from the helicopter’s pursuit and the land vehicles would be too far behind them to prove any threat at all.

A few miles later, the tunnel coughed them up into the cold, New Hampshire sun and they rolled into the distance.

“Next stop, priceless antiques, fragile china, bullpens and Connecti- Ow!”

Zach rubbed the back of his head as Megan whistled and rolled her eyes to the sky.

The farther they went from New Hampshire, the safer they felt. Each minute they traveled opened up any number of paths they could take, making the inevitable manhunt that much more difficult for their pursuers. As they approached their destination, however, they knew that all of those paths would converge and, frankly, there was only one possible destination for them, anyway. They’d had to ditch the Humvee for something a smidgen more… Civilian. It turned out that most gas stations didn’t take kindly to military-equipped Humvees pulling into their pump lanes. Battle-damaged ones doubly so. Something about squeezing into the undersized Civic wrought a sense of déjà vu, but there was no energy in them for laughter. It was a long drive after an already long day, Don would need medical attention, eventually, and a more permanent splint. Connecticut couldn’t come soon enough.

They switched cars at the border, jacking a van from a used car lot – no one cares what happens to used car salesmen, after all – and were soon in downtown Stratford. Dawn was at the hospital.

She had to be.

But when they arrived, keeping Don in the car so that they wouldn’t be detained (his injury would have to wait until they had Jack’s sister), they were informed that she hadn’t been in for the past two days.

“What do you mean she hasn’t been coming into work?”

Jack was furious, and rightfully so. It wasn’t like his mom to leave the hospital behind. Even after the bombs had hit, she didn’t stop going into work, but… She had been in a bad state of mind. It was possible that their “summons” by the government, their disappearance, had been enough to break her.

He hoped it was just that and not the alternative. If they had already gotten to her…

No. No time to think about that. Had to keep moving, had to get out of there and back to the house.

He’d never driven so fast in his life. Even in the van, its engine protesting against his harsh treatment, he screamed down urban by-ways on his way to a destination he was no longer certain he wanted to reach, but he wasn’t going to give himself the luxury of thinking about it. Mulling it over wasn’t going to change the truth of the matter.

As he made the final turn onto their street, his heart sank into his stomach, a leaden weight, a pit sitting heavy on his conscience. He recognized the cars – Lincolns with tinted windows – and the outfits of the people out front. It was too late, but…

No. If they were still there, so was she. It was the only conclusion that made any sense and, if she was there – if it was even possible that she was there – he wasn’t going to run away. Not without her.

He drove down the block only slightly above the speed limit, normal behavior so as not to draw attention, and turned left at the next intersection, looping around to the back of their house.

Note: Not dead, not quitting

I just fell behind for a day and am waiting until I catch up to put up a massive block of text.

For those keeping score at home, I should have reached 21,667 by now. I'm at 20,558.

I'll catch up.

Day 10: Nothing witty to say. Except for this, if you consider self-reference hilarious

There was nothing for him in this direction. He would have to head back and look for something better, another way out or something to get the door open. He had just begun his trek back through the halls when he heard footsteps around the corner and snapped to the wall, gun out and safety off in an instant. He waited, listening, counting the steps and gauging their volume as they approached, wild and unmeasured, either in a hurry or…

Or not a member of the security detail. That glimmer of hope swelled within him, his guard breaking and allowing it through. He turned the corner as the steps grew loudest and threw an arm out, hand coiling around a thin neck and driving it around into the wall, trapping the attached woman against it.

“Megan?”

She looked like she was about to spit venom, her face red from exertion, anger or both.

“Err… Sorry.”

He flipped the safety back on and returned the gun to his waist, then let her go and back off. His head spun and his ear rung as her palm collided with his cheek.

“The fuck, Jack!”

“I said I was sorry! What more do you want from me?”

Her breathing, ragged and hurried, began to calm. She leaned backward, into he wall, and brushed her hair out of her eyes. It stuck to her forehead in defiance of her wishes. Her eyes were still seething, though, fire beneath he surface, deep within her pupils. Vengeful flames of “what the fuck were you thinking” and “if you ever do that again I will castrate you with a dull, rusty spoon.”

Jack did not want to be castrated. He just wanted to be home.

“Let’s go home, Megan. Let’s get out of here.”

“How?”

That was the operative question, the one he’d been afraid to ask because, as it stood, he didn’t have an answer. He’d hoped that whomever he found would have such an insight, but that was a moot point. He should have checked the guard more thoroughly. He had been rushed. He hadn’t had a chance.

“Dammit. I bet the guard had a key card or something, too. Identification, whatever. Something to get us out of here.”

Something besides anger flashed through Megan’s eyes. She slid a hand into her pocket and, when it appeared again, it held a thin, translucent card, apparently made of plastic. It had writing on it, but in unintelligible arrangements of what was presumably some sort of code, likely to be interpreted by a very specific computer. Perhaps that computer was at the entrance. He couldn’t help himself lunging forward again, hugging Megan tight as he mumbled “thank you” over and again into her ear. She laughed, a light, floaty sound, and pushed him off of her.

“Settle down a little, at least until we know if it works.”

They rushed back to the front of the square, the doorway out of the cellblock, and held the card up in front of a red light at its side, apparently a laser reader of some kind. Its lens spun and shifted, altering the shape and size of the opening and the light issued thereof, centering in on a small portion of the gibberish on the card. It had, apparently, found the segment it sought, because the light faded and the doors slid open, groaning in protest as they moved apart and allowed Jack and Megan to slip through. Here, though they had never, to their knowledge, seen the hallway before in their lives, they felt a sense of déjà vu, the cold grasp of unwelcome memory. Here, they realized, the doors before them led to only one type of room: The interrogation chambers.

They recoiled, not so much in fear as in disgust. It confirmed, for Jack, that his experience had not been a unique one and, for that, he was relieved, ashamed that he was relieved, and sorry that anyone else had been subjected to that terror. It was the least pleasant image of a naked Megan his mind had ever held and he was quick to block it, hoping that neither of them, or Don or Zach, would ever be exposed to that again.

No, he didn’t want to hope. He wanted to make sure. He wanted to make damn sure.

“Megan.”

She turned to face him, eyes barely restraining tears. Looking into that face, seeing those eyes and the lips beneath, vibrating, quaking in an attempt to keep her quiet, he was no longer sure what he was going to say, what he was able to say, but his mouth opened regardless and he felt the words leaving him, spoken, but as new to his ears as to hers.

“We’ll make them pay. We’ll fight them with every last breath in our bodies because, with them around, able to do this to anyone they choose, neither us nor any of our loved ones are safe. No one is safe. We can change that.”

He breathed, regained his composure, felt her staring at him.

“But to do that, first we need answers. We need to know who we’re dealing with, on what scale.”

She nodded, silent, then put her hand out. He took it and they shook, drawing strength from each other.

No, not drawing.

Pooling. Pushing it together for them to share, compounding their individual ability, their individual strength.

They needed to make a decision. They needed to make it fast, before the inevitable swarms of guards rushed in or the gas started pumping or… Jack didn’t know what it would be, but he was sure that here was some measure in place to keep them from escaping. Best not to find out what.

Left, down the hallway, off toward who-knew-what. They turned at the corner, walls so white they were almost blue wreaking havoc on his sense of direction, sending splitting pain to the center of his skull, a shooting numbness that was dull, but so confined that it was pointed when contrasted to the rest of his thoughts. He knew that, eventually, they would have to pick a door, and could tell that Megan was aware of that as well. She was growing impatient and, frankly, so was he, but there was so much potential that the next turn might provide a sign, an indication, anything that would distinguish the next hallway from the one it followed.

And there was risk. Risk that any door they entered could be a gateway into a trap, a hellish portal with no way out. But he was beginning to realize – had been realizing since the moment the bomb had hit – that life was nothing without risk. You took chances and, if you got burned, you recovered; if you hit the storm, you weathered it. Life, after all… Was it anything but risk?

He stopped, Megan taking a few steps past him before she caught herself and turned to face him, then looked over at the door between them. It was indistinguishable from any of the others along the wall, and it wasn’t so much a gut feeling. He just felt that he needed to do something, to take some kind of action or he was going to go insane. There were so many unanswered questions. Why was the government interested in them? Who within the government had taken them from their homes? Who had set them free? For that matter, when had the message been carved into his desk and where were the other survivors, Don and Zach included?

Too much on his mind to waste time running down empty hallways when the answers could be just beyond a door, any of the slabs of hydraulic-controlled metal lining the wall. He held out his hand, motioning with his fingers and Megan gave him the keycard, the ID card, whatever it was, it had worked before, maybe it would get them through now. There was no light, but the wall beside the door had a slot with an unlit bulb above it, recessed into the wall. He fed the card to the slot and waited, anticipating the blare of rejection and the return of their purloined card.

The slot did spit out their card, but the light above it lit up, a yellowish-green, and the door split down its center, the two halves quickly sliding into the walls on either side of the opening. Inside was a lab. At least, Jack assumed it was a lab, mostly because it possessed the varied accoutrements he associated with the labs at the hospital, computers and test tubes full of liquids of various colors and opacities. He avoided looking at the red ones in particular, not because blood disturbed him anymore, but the thought that said blood might have come from him while he wasn’t aware of its extraction… That was an unsettling thought. Violating. He shivered and continued in, deeper into what was, it turned out, a very shallow room. Megan stood in he doorway, keeping watch of the hallway, ready to inform him if anyone came into view, and to hold the door open. It would probably open again, from the inside, but that wasn’t a chance he wanted to take after the events in the cellblock.

A computer had been left on, screen alight with row after row of data, and Jack thanked whatever deity was concerned with him that the user had never set a screensaver or, for that matter, a password on his terminal. Between that and the universal mouse/keyboard combination, he was soon on his way to deciphering just what he was seeing.

Names. Names and birthdates, addresses and spouses. Siblings and schools and jobs, all in a neat chart that still managed to stagger him with its sheer density. He was sure he was in there, and Megan, too, but that meant that Don and Zach would be in the database. He hoped they had gotten out, but, if they hadn’t, the last column seemed like a list of room numbers, though that did little to help since, as far as he could tell, the rooms were unmarked.

Day 9: My knees hurt... Fuck you, mister chair

He stood in his boxers, their fabric clinging unbidden to his legs, drawn by the saline-saturated liquid pouring from his skin. He weighed his options, dignity versus demise, and the former came up a distant second. The trunks, too, were doffed into the pile of clothes, completing them. Steam issued from it, the rapidly drying mass of fabric, but Jack was still sweating. He started toward the lights, hoping to shatter enough to lower the temperature, but even a few steps closer intensified their effect dramatically.

Defeated, he lay down and waited for his body to run out of liquid, for the steam to start rising from him and reduce him to a dried husk. The voice returned, still pleasant, but unintelligible, scrambled by the warmth and the state of his brain. Then it barked something and the lights shut off, the heat was sucked out through holes in the walls where there had been lights before, and Jack was able to catch his breath, sit up and start his brain working again.

“So, Mr. Penn, are we feeling a bit more… Forthcoming?”

Jack glared up at the camera, but there was little fire left in his eyes. He nodded, then blinked as a glass of clear liquid was inserted through one of the new-formed vents. It was cold, with ice cubes, and had little odor.

“It’s water, Mr. Penn. Tap water, I’m afraid, but still water.”

He drank it so fast that his teeth rang afterward, the jarring cold setting them alight with blissful agony.

“Now, our first question. Where are you from?”

“Stamford, Connecticut. I’d lived there with my parents my whole life.”

“And your sister?”

“… Yeah.”

“Don’t lie to us, Mr. Penn, and most definitely do not try to keep anything from us. This is merely the litmus test before we ask the really hard questions, just so we know how far we can trust you.”

Jack recoiled, but remained silent. Just who were these people? The government, they claimed, but that did little to single out anything from the alphabet soup of shady, federal organizations. He found himself thinking of Agent Mulder, of the X-Files, always trying to find his proof, repeating his mantra, “The truth is out there.” The thought brought a smirk to his face.

The person behind the camera didn’t notice or, if he did notice, didn’t care. Another glass of water was offered through the wall and Jack took it, sipping at it slowly this time.

“Where were you when the bomb hit?”

The image of the refrigerator’s shelves, so distant now, flashed into his mind as he closed his eyes, aided by the ghost forever burned into his vision.

“Home. In the kitchen.”

“Home is-“

“You know where my home is. Was.”

He could almost hear a sharp intake of breath. Good. Throw them a little off-balance. Keep them on their toes. Make them uncomfortable so they slip up and reveal something, something they shouldn’t.

“What did you see, Mr. Penn?”

“The fridge. I was getting food – a snack – and something threw me forward, I hit my head,” he felt the scar, “and blacked out.”

“How long were you unconscious?”

“Don’t know.”

They asked him some more questions, but it was unclear what their purpose was. It was all clerical stuff, just where he’d gone and what he’d done to survive after the bomb hit, who he’d met. He kept his answers curt and to the point, revealing the bare minimum of information. He wasn’t hiding anything, nor did he even think he had anything to hide, but he still felt uncomfortable giving them the impression that he would be “easy.” It was something in the way they were conducting this whole operation, something that stank.

“One final question, for today.”
He groaned at the prospect of more sessions like this, but waited patiently, gathering up his clothes as he did and slipping back into them.

“Before the bomb hit Stamford, did you notice anything unusual?”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Yeah. We were out of grape jelly.”

The lights buzzed, energy flickering along their filaments as they began to warm up.

“Do not play games with us, Mr. Penn. Once more: Did you see anything strange?”

“No. I was looking at the refrigerator the whole time.”

“Very well, then. Until tomorrow.”

The speaker clicked, a minor measure of feedback as they switched off the microphone. Jack was left alone in the silent, empty room as the lights dimmed. The darkness wasn’t so unnerving as the silence, but he stood stoic nonetheless. Best to look as comfortable in his skin as possible.

Something sweet hit his nostrils and he began to feel faint and dizzy. He fell forward, blacking out just before he struck the ground.

The cell he awoke in was not the interrogation room. This was a relief. It was, in contrast, dark, but… Maybe cell had been a misnomer. It was a comfortable room, with a twin bed and a chair, with arms no less, at a simple desk. Yes, simplicity was the name of the game and, though it was dimly lit at the moment, there was a switch that could only, he assumed, go to the ceiling lamp overhead. The existing light, then, must have come from elsewhere, he thought. His attention was drawn to the desk, where a small light had been left on, neck angled so that the bulb bounced its light off the back of the desk and into the wall. It drew Jack’s eyes to the wood grain surface of the desk. Buried within the surface, through the laminate, was a message scratched so thin that it was no wonder the overseers hadn’t noticed it:

T – 5D 1900

Well, he assumed it was a message, but it didn’t make much sense just then. It could have been a production code or a model number, but those weren’t typically carved into the surface of the item in question and, if it was one of those, why had someone taken such pains to draw his attention to it? Unless it was all just a coincidence that the light had been left at that angle? He puzzled over it idly as he lay in bed later that night, the lights off and the irradiated hands of the clock glowering at him from across the room, over the door. He watched them tick and, before long, felt sleep overtake him.

The next few days were tiresome repetition, many of the same questions intermingled with only a few new ones. They might have been checking him, making sure his answers held up day after day, trying to catch him in a lie. After a grueling session of question and answer, he was knocked out and awoke in his room, a hot plate of food on his desk. He would eat, turn out the lights, then think as he drifted off.

On the fifth such day, after a particularly grueling interrogation, he lay awake with the lights on, wanting to clear his head and think, try to figure out what they were after. He didn’t notice that anything was amiss, at first. It was only when his bed shifted and creaked that he felt the rumbling, heard the muffled voices – urgent tones – beyond the door. He stood up and started over to the wall, hoping he could catch something if he put his ear to it, when the door slid open and a guard rushed in, grabbed him by the wrist and jerked him around so that his arm was pinned to his back.

“Move!”

He started walking, glancing at the clock as they approached the doorway. Seven in the evening.

7:00 PM.

1900 hours.

Five days. T – 5D. T-minus five days, 1900 hours.

Before he even realized what he was doing, he had already moved. His weight flew back, slamming the back of his skull into the guard’s face with an audible crunch of snapping cartilage. He could smell blood, not just running from the broken nose, but stirring around in his own head from the impact, but he maintained enough of his composure to drop when he felt his arm go free, spun around and grabbed both of the padded legs by the shins near the ankles, jerked them back and out from under their owner, who tumbled down, head bouncing off the corner of the bed’s frame.

He had a gun. Jack took it and slipped it into his waistband, grabbed the guard’s baton, and ran out into the hallway just as the door — apparently on a timed mechanism — slid shut behind him.

The hall was well-lit by long, fluorescent tubes along the ceiling. It was devoid of activity and, for that reason alone, already sent a chill down his spine. Had no one else been given such a message? He strode up and down the hallway for a bit, trying each of the doors, but none of them would open. It seemed that the facility, or at least this section of it, was on lockdown. Not wanting to waste his chance, Jack chose a direction and ran off down the hall, turned right at the first intersection and found himself staring at another, identical hallway. Inwardly, he ground. Outwardly, he set his face and proceeded down the corridor, marking the corner of each intersection with a small scratch in the paint as he went.

It was five minutes and a lot of walking before he realized that the hallways all formed a square broken up by rows of connected cells. He smacked his forehead, broke off a bitter laugh before it could get any momentum and strode up to the exit, only to be denied access to the door. Cursing, he spun around and slumped down against the wall, breathing a dejected sigh.

Writing potentially postponed over loss of chair

Typing while standing is not fun.

Also, my ass hurts.

EDIT: Solution found for typing. Ass still hurts.

Days 7 and 8, all at once and more than a little late

He was met with the thick rustling of ambient static. There were still a good number of kinks to be worked out in the phone system, but Megan’s voice came through clear and distinct enough.

“Just checking in, making sure nothing heavy’s fallen on you or Don.”

He smiled and scratched the back of his neck.

“Not yet. Give it a few hours, though. We’re just getting to the ‘delicate’ stuff, so the machines can’t really do the digging anymore. We’ve more or less gotta go in by hand.”

“You would go in by hand, wouldn’t ya?”

Jack chuckled as Zach’s distinct voice broke in through the receiver. He had a habit of doing that, much to Megan’s chagrin.

“Ew. That’s enough for me. I’ll see you and Don tonight. Have… Fun.”

The receiver clicked and Jack was left alone with his male counterpart.

“Seriously, if you’re down to the delicate stuff, how much longer before you hit the next site?”

“About a week. Probably. This is going to be a lot slower going than it was before, just ripping mounds of rubble apart. Now we’re being watch-dogged to make sure we don’t ‘desecrate’ the bodies.”

“Ugh. All right. Till tonight, then.”

“Yeah. Later.”

He hung up and yawned, body still reeling from the efforts of the day. There was still another half to go — the whole afternoon — but he was beyond questioning it. Life was reasonably good, perhaps better than it had been before the blast, even if his newfound purpose brought him into contact with terrors the likes of which most people would never have to witness, crushed skulls with grey-pink matter leaking out in all directions, squeezed through porous skin and micro-fractured skeleton…

Jack fell to his knees, his hand going to his mouth as he felt his breakfast fighting with his stomach, trying desperately to stay down as cold beads of sweat bled through his tank-top and pulled at his skin, making it clammy to the touch. It took a few minutes for him to regain his composure, after which he left the trailer and returned to the work site, just as the whistle blew once more to signal the end of their break.

The day’s work went quickly, the episode in the trailer left forgotten in the back of his mind, far away from the immediate task of clearing debris and tallying bodies, calculating damage and recalculating their estimates, trying to divine how long it would be before this one building, just one of a whole city, would be cleared and they could move onto the next.

It wasn’t the first one Jack had worked on and it showed in well in his manner and reflected negatively in his resolve. While he was more confident in his behavior and, thus, infinitely more efficient than the bumbling ass he had been at the start of the labor, he was growing rapidly disillusioned about his chosen course as it seemed that, no matter how much rubble they cleared away and how many bodies they sent the morgue, they were making only the most insignificant of dents in the sum damage.

The sun continued its celestial course and fell upon the Western horizon, pink and orange brilliance splitting the sky in lancing beams as the piercing whistle blew once more and the foreman yelled, freeing them of their obligations for the rest of the day. Don caught up with him as he was heading to their truck and slapped an envelope in his hands.

“Payday, kid. Can’t keep expecting me to collect for you, y’know? Gotta set up some kinda deposit system.”

Jack shook his head.

“There’s something comforting about having the money in hand, knowing that it exists and isn’t just a number in a system. Feels safer.”

“I guess I can sympathize. Anything certain is nice after what we went through, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The doors of Don’s pickup were disproportionately light, compared to the rest of the vehicle. They slammed shut after the two occupants had settled into their seats and turned the key, engine igniting with a raw roar. The frame shuddered beneath them and jerked as Don threw them into reverse, backing out of the destruction yard and out onto the open road, back toward Stratford.

One of the consequences of the destruction of such a major nexus of Western civilization was that, few survivors though there were, the remaining metropolises of the North-east had become noticeably more cramped with the influx of new residents who worked outside the destroyed areas, but lived within them. The cost of living, due to both this and the post-destruction economy dipping into the shitter, had taken such a sharp upward turn that it was common for entire families to share a one room apartment.

Thankfully, Jack’s sister was off at school. Her living situation was relatively unaffected, other than slightly more expensive gasoline that she wouldn’t stop bitching about. His mother, though, had lived with him and his father in Stamford, their house now a pile of cinders and wreckage. The obvious solution had, therefore, been to group together with the survivors her son had befriended and, between the five of them, rent a reasonably sized living quarter. This was made possible by the government’s refund program.

All right, so it was less of a refund program and more a result of mass blackmail on the part of the survivors and their loved ones. It was difficult for an already financially strapped government to deny their outcry and, before long, the survivors all had money in hand and Jack had taken to living in a three bedroom apartment with his mother, Don, Zach and Megan.

Their proximity had sparked several unexpected developments. Most notably, sleeping arrangements had taken an odd turn when Megan had found herself cast out of the room she shared with Jack’s mother when Don had revealed his softer side and Dawn had openly swooned. It was romantic to think of it now, but, at the time, there had been much grumbling and a little in the way of inappropriate pranks, justified by the new couple’s inappropriate and public displays of affection.

“Again,” thought Jack, “they aren’t inappropriate so much as they even exist at all.”

An involuntary shiver ran down his spine.

The drive home was punctuated by small talk, peppered with Don’s burlesque sense of humor. Stratford came up on the highway after less than an hour, another nigh-beneficial side effect of the attacks being the near-complete dissolution of speed limits on affected highways, and the duo pulled into a parking spot right out front of the large complex of which their modest home was only a minute fraction.

Okay, more like a fifth. Still, that’s less than half.

Dinner was waiting for them when they entered, delectable smells wafting into waiting nostrils and drawing them to the table where the other two young ones already sat, Dawn still up and throwing together the salad. As Jack sat down, Don walked over to her and slid his arms around her waist, pressed himself up against her and leaned in, kissing her on the nape of her neck. She giggled as his beard tickled her flesh and turned back to face him, gifting him with a quick peck on the cheek before swatting playfully at him until he made his way over to the table, where Jack had his head down in his arms, holding in gastro-intestinal horrors for the second time that day.

As soon as they were all sitting, their plates piled high with mashed potatoes au gratin and London broil, the news came on and their attention, other than their chewing mouths, was diverted to the small, kitchen television.

“Hello, Stratford.”

The original anchor had been replaced by a young, inoffensively attractive woman. Considering his nervous breakdown a few months prior, on the heels of the Nuclear Holocaust (or so the networks were calling it), the turn of events had not been especially surprising.

“Cleanup efforts continue in the North-Eastern United States, but the question on everyone’s mind is, ‘When can we start rebuilding?’ Reports have not been optimistic as, according to sources within the labor union, the workers have just now hit the delicate part of their jobs and, in tandem with union disputes over compensation for work in the irradiated areas, there are still entire sections of the North-East that have not even been touched yet.

“Less asked, but no less considered, is the equally pertinent question of, ‘Who has done this to us?’ Reports from the United States government have been limited and terse, referencing highly classified data tied up in at least four of the major intelligence agencies and a number of private defense contractors. We’re almost afraid to ask, but, is it possible our government could have known?

“For today’s sports…”

The click of the remote was far too audible in the suddenly silent room, the flash of the screen and the whine of the cathode ray tube powering down in the television. The last thing anyone wanted, least of all the four survivors, was to even consider that the United States government had had any sort of foreknowledge as to the events of their little Hell.

Still, if there was even the remotest possibility, wasn’t it worth considering? If it could bring potential closure or, even better, justice, would that be worth the potential damage it could do to both their spirits and country? These questions were left unvoiced for the rest of the dinner and, even later, as they were trekking off to bed, their silence continued.

The next day was Jack’s day off. He and Don had staggered their workdays so that there was always someone at the work site, in case anything important turned up. It was a languorous day of sitting in a room, reading a bad pulp novel about a nuclear apocalypse in small town USA and playing a portable game system. He was surprised mostly at himself and his newfound love of manual labor and a developing distaste for the electronic media that had, until so recently, all but ruled his life.

Megan and Zach returned a little after three in the afternoon, a long day at the local community college wearing them down to the point of monosyllabic questions and answers.

“How was your day?” he would ask one or the other.

“Fine,” said Zach.

“Ugh,” offered Megan, “Yours?”

“Boring.”

See? Two syllables for Jack.

They would then have a raunchy and nigh-incestuous threesome. Well, no, they wouldn’t, but the thought of kicking Zach out of the room and relieving Megan of her clothes was never far from Jack’s mind. It was usually while he was having these thoughts that her new boyfriend would call, as though he could determine from miles away the precise current of imagery running through Jack’s perverted noggin.

“Must be fucking prescient,” thought Jack.

The three hooked up a console to the kitchen television and tried to decipher the miniscule images – a hectic barrage of colors and lights that made sense only to those with a controller in hand and a wellspring of experience to draw on. Two rounds in, Jack, as he inevitably did these days, bowed out and left the two to their procrastination, grabbed a snack from their malnourished pantry and went back to the room he shared with Zach. He came back out, after another spot of reading, to use the refurbished-but-barely-functioning computer and check for any new information on the cleanup efforts, particularly in Stamford and Norwalk.

His mom arrived home, as she always did, just before six and they started on dinner. Another reason it was good for him to be home on separate days from Don was that, given over to their own devices for the majority of the day, the two laborers were liable to either destroy something or get into conversations that were far more awkward than Jack had any intention of ever continuing. That and, without the older man distracting him, Jack was more than happy to help her with dinner. Don came home to the four others already sitting at the table, food waiting to be served. He also bore an envelope and a gray complexion.

“Jack… Read.”

There was a single slip of thick copier paper in an equally thick security envelope. It summoned Don and him under the umbrella of “all fallout survivors” to northern New Hampshire, to where the government had relocated its base of operations. Under the precepts of martial law, such a request was less of a query and more of a demand. Cars would be provided to chauffeur them to the facility and, eventually, back from it to home.

Obviously, the cleanup crew already knew of it, seeing as they had received the letters to begin with, but why had it been sent there at all? Why not to their home? Regardless, it seemed as though the four of them had a bit more to do before their lives could return to normality.

Dinner was finished in relative silence, no one wishing to discuss the only thing on their minds. Dawn was close to tears during cleanup, uncertain intentions doing little to quell her fear, irrational as it may be, that she might be losing important people in her life once more.

Calls would be made in the morning to arrange for time off and, when she came back the next night, Jack’s mother would return to an empty home.

The cars were prompt - black Lincolns with tinted glass for windows, bulletproof as the reinforced sides of the car. They left after a brief, cold breakfast of whatever semi-nutritious bars they could find in the pantry. The seats were comfortable, but, at five in the morning after a night of nothing but constant thought and worrying, Jack was incapable of staying awake, startled to consciousness every so often by the occasional bump in the road, taking in small, isolated snippets of beautiful, barren countryside. The air grew colder and the heat in the car intensified to match it as they proceeded north.

At one point, Jack awoke to a manner of shouting, a voice only slightly muffled by the rolled up windows. The road was cordoned off by an array of orange and fluorescent yellow cones, like candy corn with gangrene, and a striped, mechanical arm, stretching straight across from what was either a tollbooth or a security checkpoint. The voice was coming from his right, but he paid it little mind until he heard something smash against the window, inches from his face, and felt the car rock with the impact. Spread across the window was the single most grotesque face Jack had ever seen, features angled and twisted, running together as though they’d melted into one another and, judging by the lumps and discoloration – the ashen flesh – they might have.

Armed men in uniform, but no uniform the young laborer recognized, came up from behind and dragged him away by his arms, but as he separated from the window, his flesh stretched and separated, a layer of it remaining behind and exposing the working muscles beneath as his shouts became screams, bloodcurdling outcries that pushed all thoughts of sleep or even rest from Jack’s mind. A club to the back of the head and he was out, the checkpoint was cleared and the vehicle continued on along with its fellows.

Another hour saw them at the gate of the facility; an underwhelming cube jutting from the side of the mountain, though given the size of the mountain itself, this could easily have just been perception. The doors slid open, massive, steel slabs driven slowly outward by slick hydraulics, and the cars slid smoothly into the gaping entryway, which slammed shut behind them with the whine of klaxons and the resonating clunk of two trains meeting head-to-head. Before Jack could truly process what he was seeing, the lights in the cavernous entryway blinked out and he was left in total darkness, just the driver, Zach and him.

That was when the sound started.

It was not a wholly unpleasant sound, at first. A bit grating, no nails on a chalkboard type of terrible, but it seemed like it should stop, something that should resolve at some point. But it didn’t, it wouldn’t and, soon enough, it had gone past irritating and straight to mind-breaking, dull, un-ending, repetitive. The raging roar of something deep within the bowels of the facility, or maybe a high-frequency whine right nearby. It was impossible to tell.

Jack tried covering his ears, but the gesture did him little good. He looked to Don, having similar trouble, and then to the chauffeur, sitting stoic in the front seat. He tapped the man’s shoulder, but to no response. He shook him, pulled hard, and the head rolled back, his sunglasses fell off and it grew apparent that he was unconscious. Soon, Jack saw his vision blur, images swimming before him until they faded entirely, dropping to black.

The light was bright, far too bright for his newly opened eyes. As his eyes adjusted, he found that he was alone. Don must have been taken to a different room or, he thought as he observed his surroundings, was more likely waiting his turn. Cop and courtroom dramas had conditioned him with a certain image of what an interrogation room would likely look like and this, most certainly, was not it. Either dreary or stark white, cast in complete shadow or light with a single table and two-way mirrors on one wall for observation.

Here there was just light. As his eyes took that in, he noticed the bulbs from which it issued. Fluorescent lines of blue-white interlaced with columns of incandescent spheres. It struck him to wonder at the purpose behind the disparity. The lack of a window did not escape his notice, either, though he could see a camera in the corner of the room, up in the ceiling. His malicious side hoped they’d forgotten to filter the image.

“Hello, Jack.”

The voice echoed, making it impossible to determine from whence it came. Presumably a speaker, or a vent of some kind, but he could see neither. A speaker could be hidden in a bulb or, if they were as devious as he suspected, in multiple such fixtures.

“Care to answer some questions?”

No, no he did not. He expressed this sentiment with a one-fingered gesture of defiance.

“Are you sure?”

Forthcoming he was not. Not at the moment, anyway.

“All right, then. Let us know if you change your mind.”

He waited, expecting a shock or the noise again. Maybe he would go unconscious from gas or something, anything to get him talking, but no such input came. No one entered the room and, by that point, his eyes had adjusted, and so he continued to wait.

He twiddled his thumbs and whistled quietly, more to himself than anything else. He felt tired and irritable, sweaty and clammy. Warm.

Definitely warm.

In fact, he could feel the sweat heating up. He could feel it between his shoulder and his side, in his armpit, stinging the flesh. He could feel it sticking to his clothes, his good shirt and equally good pants.

And then he could see it, the incandescent bulbs, lighting up row by row, growing in intensity as their dimmers were raised until they overpowered their fluorescent brothers. He could see the yellow-white light and feel the heat wafting from the bulbs filling the chamber, which suddenly felt far too small, a conveniently efficient sweatbox.

His shirt was the first to go, buttons flying as he ripped it free and flung it aside, a fluttering red flag. The undershirt next, a white wife-beater already stained yellow with sweat and stink, gone and in he pile with his shirt. Shoes and socks and pants, all discarded in due course, Jack struggling with the buckle of his belt in desperation as his body tried desperately to shed enough water to cool off.

Day 6 is going up early, tonight. I guess I was a little inspired?

Jack reached into his pocket and withdrew his cellular phone, flipped it open and turned it on. It powered up quickly and still possessed three bars of battery life, even with the device draining slowly over the last few days of disuse. It was just a matter of picking which number to call.

His father was out. This was obvious, as he’d buried the man himself.

His sister was still in school, or would be. She was halfway across the country. Even if she was unaffected, the line wasn’t equipped for long distance calls.

It would have to be his mother, then. He scrolled down to her entry and switched to the work phone, the number for the hospital and her specific extension. She worked further north near New Haven, so there was a distinct chance that she was alive as the damage seemed to peter out the further they moved in that direction. The bombs had clearly been held in reserve for the more populated cities closer to New York and in the Empire State itself.

The tones were familiar, the ringing — God, it was actually ringing! — cut short by the hospital’s automated answering system.

Language: One.

Do you know your party’s extension? One.

Enter extension: 8143.

Connecting… “Hello?”

“Mom!”

“Jack? God, honey, are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. Dad’s gone, though, and I don’t know about sis. Have you heard anything?”

“She’s fine. She called as soon as she found out. Jack, it’s all over the news. Everything from Connecticut to Maryland is gone, and California is on complete lockdown, expecting to be hit any minute. Where are you?”

“I’m somewhere around Stratford with some other survivors. We’re in a gas station. The landlines are all that are left out here.”

“Oh thank God. I’m… Well, I guess I’m relieved, but it’s hard to believe what’s happened! They still don’t know who did it, Jack.”

They assured each other that they would be all right, then hung up with the promise that he would head up to the hospital, if only so they could check him and his new friends for any symptoms of radiation poisoning. As he put the receiver back up, Jack breathed a sigh of absolute relief for the first time in a full week, his shoulders slumping as his body deflated in the most positive manner imaginable.

Thanks were offered and the gas station attendants were invited up to the Stratford area, an invitation that was extended to the Bridgeport branch in due course. They bid their goodbyes as Jack, Don, Zach and Megan squeezed back into their car and puttered off into the distance, over the horizon.

The drive was as uneventful as ever, but even a journey devoid of exciting circumstances can be offered levity by a positive end, so near in sight and distance, both. Jokes flew back and forth for, weary as they were, their spirits soared high as the blackened clouds and human ash, clashing with the somber reality of their situation.

But it wasn’t so widespread, it wasn’t so terrible as they had feared it might be and, for that, they were thankful. Only as the tall, unscathed monoliths of Stratford loomed high on the horizon did they allow the reality to hit them and voice the question they had held in thus far, the one that, until this moment, there had been no cause to answer.

“So, what are you guys going to do now that it’s over?”

Zach’s voice seemed to hang in the silence of the car, air suddenly thick with the weight of the future. It settled on their heads and rolled down to their shoulders, sunk in through the skin and filled their stomachs where it coiled in on itself and condensed into a dense pit. Don was the first to speak.

“There’s rebuilding to do. I’m not gonna let them do it without me, not out of laziness and certainly not out of pity.”

Megan nodded and Jack stared intently at the road, letting the older man’s words sink in, images of the hard manual labor ahead flashing through his brain, the bodies and the trucks in which they would be carted off, to be separated and identified later, their families piling into crowded morgues and crying on available shoulders, heads intertwined with others in similar states of distress and misery.

The hospital was a glorious sight, standing tall and brilliant before and even more so now that their minds parsed it with what they had seen. The juxtaposition was striking — its clean, sterile halls against the torn and ravaged cityscapes of south-western Connecticut. The reunion between mother and son was a sweet one, flavored with days on days of worry and trepidation that melted away in choked sobs and flowing tears, tight hugs and heartfelt words.

It was here that the survivors of the Stamford devastation were given warm rooms for the first time in a week and hot showers and baths, food that didn’t look like it had come from a can, or taste that way, and the requisite tests for latent radiation.

Cleared, clean and free.

It was as he sat in a bed in his own hospital room, television on and images of cartoons and dramas broken with updated reports of the carnage that he had encountered first hand, that the idea that had been swirling around in his brain, gaining both momentum and mass, fully gestated into a desire, a full-fledged want that he felt compelled to pursue. When his mom arrived, calmer since their nigh-hysteric reunion, he turned off the TV and rested the remote at his side, turning to look her in the eyes.

“Mom, I know what I want to do.”

She looked at him as though she dreaded the next words she knew he was going to say, but he felt the need to push forward regardless. This wasn’t about her desires. It was about his expectations and a burning, passionate drive within.

“I’m going to help with the rebuilding. I’ll sign up with one of the construction companies hired to do the work — Don can vouch for me — and-”

“Okay.”

“I’ll… Okay? It’s really okay?”

“Yes, Jack. It’s okay. I’d be proud of anyone who could do that, much less my son.”

He stared blankly at her, eyes tightly focused on her face for any betrayal of guilt, any iota of untruth or distrust hovering beneath the surface, but he could find nothing other than her motherly concern and, despite the duck-patterned hospital gown adorning his form, she seemed to be taking him seriously. His blue eyes wavered in their sockets, unwilling to blink until, finally, he snapped his head around and down, boring into the sheet in front of him with his eyes.

“… Thanks. Thank you, mom. I don’t know what else to say, but thank you.”

He felt her arms circle him, her cheek press against his as she hugged him tight, held him close.

“You don’t have to say anything else, sweetie. It’s your life and your decision. I’m glad you’ve made it.”

They sat alone for a bit longer, contemplating the weight of his decision in separate, tangential ways as seconds passed, a long moment that ended when his mother kissed his cheek and rose from the hospital bed, gave him one more hug, and departed to see if any of the other survivors needed anything.

He lay awake late, that night, thinking ahead to a future of hard, voluntary labor and the horrors he was likely to see therein. The corpses of people and the society within which they had lived, joined together in a final death embrace… But the thought no longer brought about the twisting and churning nausea he had associated with it for so long, just a silent and heavy weight of defeat and finality.

Well, he would just have to do something about it.

The sun was high, almost directly overhead in the late morning sky as it completed the first half of its arc and anticipated the descent. For a brief moment, Jack wondered if going downhill was any easier than going up for a 900,000 mile wide flaming orb of cosmic gas. He shook the thought from his head and hoisted the shovel from his side once more, rammed it into a crack between two slabs of concrete, and pushed down, leveraging his force against the tail of the shovel and forcing the head up and, with it, the concrete. Don stepped in and wrapped his fingers around it, lifting and pushing simultaneously until it had rotated off of the other block, revealing the crushed bundle of tattered clothing and decaying flesh within.

The shovel fell with a clatter as Jack wiped the sweat from his cheeks, arm scratching against fleshed out stubble. The stench had stopped bothering him weeks ago, but the sight never truly got old. Every time he thought he had seen it all, nature found a new and interesting way to demonstrate the full capacity of basic physical law for grotesque mutilation. This was not particularly bad, though – even if the deceased had been pressed as flat as a hotcake. The fluids and waste around him had solidified, meaning they were the first thing to go as he was exhumed from his prison and transported, by an extremely cautious crane operator, into the bed of a truck. Full, the top of the bed was covered with a tarp and the truck took off in the direction of the morgue. A shrill cry — the artificial shriek of a steel whistle — marked the end of the morning shift.

Jack worked the kinks from his arms and legs as he stood in the trailer they had co-opted. Formally outfitted as an office, it nonetheless made an excellent site for mid-day naps, rest, and a remarkable sick bay. Injured or otherwise incapacitated workers were welcome, though the beds were empty at the moment.

“Then again,” thought Jack, “that’s hardly a bad thing.”

He felt something shifting around in his pocket - a low-key buzzing that rattled his keys - and pulled his cell-phone out, checking the display. One of the first things they had done upon returning to Norwalk was to set up a makeshift cell tower, so that workers could easily communicate with each other and their families or other loved ones. “Home” flashed once, twice, three times on the outer screen before he flipped the phone open and put it to his ear.

“’Sup?”

Day... What're we up to now? Five?

A few days passed uneventfully. Jack’s experiences in Bridgeport were unique among the quartet. It seemed as though the closer one went to New York the worse the damage was, long patches of brazen, black ash coating the ground and stretching seemingly to infinity in the metropolis’ direction. Jack’s thoughts were taken up mostly by the day-to-day routine and he was happier that way, able to lose himself in menial tasks and physical labor.

They had begun to take turns cooking and his hitherto untapped talents had chosen then to peek through. It was limited by what they had, but a little innovation was certainly better than straight beans and franks and their ingenuity seemed boundless. That was the kitchen and it was, by far, the most expressive of the chores, its contemporaries including scavenging and construction, throwing together a small building in which they could cook in inclement weather.

That had been a bad night. The day preceding it had been nothing spectacular, but the first drops of rain had struck from clouds above, gray expanses in every direction, but they were indistinguishable from the dark streaks that the bombs had burned into the stratosphere in their wake.

Their missions out into the uncertain wilderness were temporarily put on hold so they could focus on stockpiling gasoline and ready-to-eat food for multiple day journeys. It seemed to be possible, eking out a life on the border of insanity, but that was before the generator ran out. Don’s resourcefulness came into play again. He dug down, deep beneath the earth, and found a buried power line, then rigged the generator up to it. The true significance of this event didn’t hit them until a full day later.

Jack was shaving, a luxury he had rediscovered only just recently. He was shaping his goatee, picking at the edges of the hirsute sculpture, when the door slammed open, the shock of it running through his arm and jarring his hand, ruining his work.

“People!”

He stared blankly at the redhead, blood dribbling down his chin from a small nick left unattended.

“Power means people! There must be a plant still up and running!”

Not that the younger man’s excitement was at all unwarranted, but Jack had already dealt with utility workers. Well, insofar as gas stations could be considered a utility. Also, he had now ruined his beard and cut himself shaving. Zach was chased from the domicile with all due haste, leaving a huffing and puffing Jack at the entrance with blood still running from his face. He grabbed a napkin, one of many from a value pack they had picked up during the previous day’s scavenging, and wiped his face off, dipped it in the washbasin and dabbed at the cut.

The breakfast circle snickered, much to Jack’s chagrin. He wondered how funny they would find it if it had been one of them instead, but the line of paper stuck to his chin made it difficult for anyone, even he himself, to take him seriously. Despite their jeering, he put together a stupendous feast, by wasteland standards, and their laughter quickly deflated into mild chuckles and, eventually, clandestine glances at the blemish.

“What’s the plan for today?”

Don swallowed half of a sausage, washed it down with a swig of water, and belched.

“We’re following the power line to the source. It’ll lead us to the power sub-station. Maybe from there we can figure out what areas are still standing.”

Jack nodded, feeling that it was a solid plan. At the worst they would merely justify their fears, but, maybe, just maybe, they would find something to anticipate. Something to give them hope.

The car felt more solid today. It might have been a sense of purpose, the thought that, at the end of the day’s trail there would be a definite conclusion of some kind, a definite result. All right, it was more likely the strain of fitting the four of them into his one car, but whatever it was, Jack was happy to have it with him, even if it made him sweat, the energy it gave him on the far end of nervous.

After an uneventful if cramped trip, they piled out of the car and onto the grounds of what, for all they knew, might have been Stamford’s last standing electrical sub-station. It was working but, judging from its appearance alone, this might not hold for long. Don had a voltmeter on him and was quick to put it to use, determining which lines carried a current and which were dead. After a few minutes, he scratched his head, stood up, stretched backward, and sighed.

“There’s only one. Gotta assume it leads to the main power plant.”

In light of this stunning revelation, the survivors packed themselves back into the car and drove off down the street. The lines were visible at first, depending from spaced out poles extending far out into the sky. Eventually, though, they dipped into the ground and disappeared from sight, hidden from view beneath layers of granite and concrete. Before long, the four were lost and in unfamiliar territory. Jack had lived his whole life in Stamford, but there were still parts of the city he had never seen – the industrial side, primarily.

Tired and weary, they stopped off at a gas station in hopes of finding a map. It was agreed that Don would go in search of the parchment, he having displayed a distinct aptitude for not screwing up in simple, though critical, situations. As he was exiting the car, Jack started and caught his arm, turning him around and pressing a napkin into his hand.

“Unfold it and wave it overhead. Just in case.”

Don nodded his thanks and finished his exit, moving with a measured stride and waving his makeshift flag in the air.

It happened so fast that none of them realized what had happened until he was already gone, grabbed by dark men in ragged clothes and thrown into the station office. Jack, Megan and Zach shared a look. The car’s doors burst open and the assembled survivors followed, scrambling out and rushing the building as the door closed, Zach’s fingers slipping between door and frame, ripping it open and piling in without even a glance, even a moment’s consideration as to what might lie within.

There was no time, not a moment given over to thought or planning, just the breaking sting of adrenaline in their veins as they followed him – Megan, then Jack picking up the rear – and filled the station’s office, already packed nearly to the gills with the men from before.

They had surrounded Don, obscuring him behind their varied frames, conjoined into one whole by the station their uniforms bespoke, the manner in which they carried themselves, and the weapons that they so carefully fingered, cautious and pessimistic as to their use. It would not be the first time any of them had fired and, certainly thought Jack, not the final hurrah. He recognized none of them from his prior experience with the gas station Gestapo, but his previous experience had left him optimistic.

“Hey… Uh… I think I spoke with your friends a few days ago. In Bridgeport? They told me to wave a flag or shine a light if I came by again. They… Uh…”

It was an inconvenient time to notice that none of them had given him a name.

“Shit. Um… Can’t you just take my word for it? We’ll pay you for the map…”

They continued to stare, unabashed and unabated. Their minds were closed to the newcomers and Don was silent, the barrel of a gun pressed into his chin keeping his mouth from moving. He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed visibly.

The standoff continued for a few more moments, wet moments, dripping with perspiration and tension. It was an attendant who first broke it, his hearty guffaw the basis of a chain reaction that overtook the others in seconds until they were all laughing and slapping their knees, guns slung along their backs once more.

“’Course we knew you were out an’ about! The Bridgeport branch told us ‘bout you after your little run-in with their boys.”

The atmosphere of dread diffused in an instant, the lot of them breathing deep sighs of relief or slumping back against glass freezer doors, leaning over counters.

“So, now that you’re here, wha’ do you want?”

Why they were here and what they were after was a quick story and, before long, they had their map and even detailed directions for how to get back to Stamford. It was only as they were on their way out the door that Zach stopped, feet dead in mid-motion, and turned around with a quizzical glance.

“Wait, if the others are in Bridgeport, how do you communicate?”

One of them cocked an eyebrow and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating a wall phone.

“The land lines are still up an’ runnin’.”

His mouth formed a perfect “o,” gaping wide and slack. The other three stared at him as realization dawned upon them.

“So… Can we, um, use your phone?”

The gas station Gestapo nodded their consent and ushered the four along, but it was only as they approached the phone that the damnable reality of the situation truly sunk in.

“Does… Does anyone actually know their relatives’ phone numbers?”

He was met with dull, shaking heads.