There were hasty handshakes and good-byes all around. A sense of imminent death was in the air, but no one wanted to be the first to run, to show fear, and Jim found himself repeating, “We’ve done all we can, we’ve done all we can,” until finally it was just him and Harvey Coombs.
“Come on, Mr. Sandoval, time to close up shop.”
“You go ahead and make ready to cast off. I’ll be right behind you.”
“You know I can’t do that, sir. We don’t sail without you.”
“I have one more small errand to run, and it’s my eyes only. Don’t worry, Harvey, I’m not going to blow my brains out or anything. But I do need a few more minutes before I can get down to the dock.”
“Then I’ll accompany you.”
“You will not. Your business is running that boat, getting it safely out of here, and nothing can jeopardize that—not even me. So you worry about your job and let me worry about mine. That’s an executive order, Commander.”
“You’re out of your mind if you think I’m leaving you out here all alone.”
“I appreciate your concern, but you’re interfering with both our duties. Until I’m aboard that boat, I am not your responsibility.”
“I could take you under armed guard.”
“But you won’t.” Sandoval opened his coat, revealing a nickel-plated .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster.
Coombs shook his head. “Jesus Christ. I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.” He turned on his heel and left.
Sandoval called after him, “Thanks, Harv.”
There was a lull in the shooting, then an explosion that rattled the blinds.
Huh. Better hurry.
Instead, Jim dawdled, picking up a heavy pewter model of the proposed Hawaii-class boat and turning it over in his hands. It would’ve been a beautiful thing, a marvel for the ages, but it was a dream never to be realized. In spite of all they’d done to preserve its essence for posterity, Sandoval was poignantly aware that it would never be more than this shiny little paperweight—a trillion-dollar toy.
He thought of a book he had read as a child, about a carved toy canoe set afloat in a stream that made its way to the Great Lakes and finally out to sea. There was something terribly sad about it: The boy who made the canoe would never know how its journey ended, if it went a mile or a thousand miles—he just gave it the first push.
There was a radio telephone on the conference table, and Jim picked up the receiver. “I’m on my way, Mr. Velocek,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Sandoval pushed the model over with a bump and went to the door, turning off the lights as he left the room.
Walking downstairs and out the rear exit, he took a golf cart through deserted machine shops full of massive lathes, drills, and other steel-milling equipment. He found his Caddy in the east loading dock and gratefully sank into its deep upholstery one last time, reveling in its lush, amniotic suspension.
Jim could live in that car; he loved his things and hated to leave them. Having been born poor and come to wealth in his late teens, he never lost his deep need for material validation. In that way, both MoCo and the SPAM program reflected his packrat mentality: you
can
take it with you.
Having known both abject poverty and absolute luxury,
Sandoval liked to say,
I prefer luxury.
He started the engine and pulled onto the service road.
Outside, the shooting had stopped, and a muffled calm descended with the fog.
Isolated pockets, isolated pockets, isolated pockets …
Sandoval caught himself muttering and put a stop to it. Those words had been cropping up in his thoughts too often, like an insipid tune he couldn’t stop humming. He supposed it was some kind of post-traumatic stress thing, and wondered if worse was to come. Bitter-cold pragmatist though he was, he knew he hadn’t yet really faced THE END OF THE WORLD, any more than he had faced his daughter’s suicide, and he wondered if it was even possible to come to terms with such a thing. Short of dropping dead from grief, what could be an appropriate reaction? And he had to put up a brave front, lest his own horror demoralize his subordinates.
Most of the people at the plant had been rather sheltered from the terrible events of the past month. The remote point of land occupied by the submarine compound was not on any map and was screened from prying eyes by miles of restricted Navy property. It was a rare “isolated pocket”—a place the Maenad plague had not penetrated. Its convenient desolation was the sole reason for their survival, but it also created a false sense of security. Most of them had never even seen a so-called “Xombie.”
Well, now they would. Oh yes.
As he passed through the deserted inner checkpoint and turned away from the direction of the submarine pen, Sandoval was a bit surprised to see that Coombs had really taken him at his word—they had gone ahead to the boat and left him alone. That was easier than expected; maybe they were glad to get rid of him. But why should that be surprising? They had military duties to perform, a ship to make ready, a crucial mission to undertake. Jim Sandoval was ballast, deadweight. He was a civilian and, from their point of view, the worst kind of civilian: a civilian you had to kiss up to. By bailing out, he was probably doing them a favor.
How many other residual pockets of humanity were out there? Jim wondered. Hundreds? Thousands? The corporation had obviously benefited from isolation and dumb luck, and he knew of a few other such organized hideaways from the epidemic, but that was no indication of how many survivors there might be among the general population. The independents, the rogue elements. Because, ultimately, they would be the backbone of any new civilization.
Sandoval’s own experience had not been hopeful. He’d been in touch with Washington for the better part of January, discussing contingencies and implementing the Family-to-Work Plan, just so the illusion could be sustained that the company was keeping up its contractual commitments to the Navy, but after martial law was announced, it became harder and harder to get anyone on the horn. When he did, they urged him to “sit tight” and “hold the fort,” as if all he needed was a little bucking up.
The NavSea team on the factory premises, led by Commander Harvey Coombs, became a paranoid clique that transferred its base of operations to the boat and didn’t want to share whatever information was coming over the submarine’s communications array. But, apparently, they hadn’t had any better luck than Sandoval at calling in the cavalry because Coombs soon turned up, hat in hand, stressing the need for cooperation … especially in regard to the Plan. As keeper of the Plan, Jim Sandoval held all the cards and held them close to his vest. One thing that was clear to both of them was that their deadlines and employee morale issues were small potatoes in the larger scheme of things.
Jim counted as victories his ability to persuade the rank and file that a gutted nuclear submarine could be a godsend to them and their male offspring—a big steel safety net—as well as to finagle extra security and a sea convoy for routine supplies.
But in doing these things, he had the inescapable feeling that he was engaged in something shady, that the resources he was diverting to one neutered SSBN (or an SSGN, as the Navy had permitted him to call it, though the bellyful of guided cruise missiles it was supposed to carry would never be delivered) might be more desperately needed elsewhere. Who was he to decide who lived and who died? Even using the submarine’s S8G reactor to supply power to the local grid could be interpreted as a wasteful extravagance, lighting a few suburbs while the rest of human civilization went dark.
By mid-January, everything had really shut down. Sandoval received a last official instruction: to compile all the available records of the Agent X epidemic into one report, a sort of doomsday scrapbook, and preserve it for posterity as an essential part of the boat’s cargo. A message in a bottle. Everything had happened so fast, there was no other official record, no history. Anyone still alive was to participate in this final archive and add their own perspective on the disaster. Officially, it was called
The Maenad Project
. Jim dubbed it
The Apocalypticon
.
At first, Sandoval looked upon this ridiculous assignment as truly the last nail in the coffin—who exactly did they think was going to take time out from the struggle for survival to participate in this scavenger hunt? And who would be around to read it?
But during the long nights in limbo, he began to find the idea strangely compelling: that he was at the center of extraordinary events that deserved to be memorialized. It had never occurred to him that all this sad, ugly scrabble for crumbs could be shaped into something coherent … and even majestic. That it only required a historian who could do it justice, a writer who could really milk the situation for all the poetry and pathos it was worth. A writer who could immortalize
him
, James Sandoval, as a keeper of the flame of civilization. A prophet for a new age.
He thought of the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free … ” Yes! That was
exactly
the kind of writing this situation called for. Unfortunately, Sandoval knew, he wasn’t that writer. And unless by some extraordinary accident he found another Emma Lazarus with the requisite skills to enshrine in poetry or prose such an eternal testament to the unquenchable power of the human spirit, the project would have to languish. Sandoval had other things to worry about.
That was the beginning of the true “isolated pockets” phase of the plague, when all commerce, all movement, seemed to grind to a halt like film jamming in an old movie projector. Telephone, radio, satellite, and computer networks folded simultaneously, leaving an ominous silence that was all too easy to fill in with raging paranoia. Sandoval’s people were reduced to using shortwave radio over the submarine’s transmitter, but without functioning relays or a direct line to SOSUS, this was a feeble candle in the darkness.
Delegations of volunteer fact finders were sent out and never heard from again. They lost half the men this way, and nearly all the company vehicles. The tidbits of news they did hear were all bad:
Population centers worldwide were saturated with Maenad Cytosis and Xombie psychosis, cities rupturing outward like virus-infected cells to spread waves of raving maniacs across the remnants of civilization. Canada was being bombed. Long lists of expired “safe zones” were broadcast, but even while still operational, these were nothing but tracts of remote countryside where truckloads of uninfected females were dumped—huge, open-air refugee farms that resembled POW camps, surrounded by watchtowers and silver briars of razor ribbon. No warm school gymnasiums, cozy church basements, dry armories and civil defense shelters loaded with blankets and hot coffee and donuts. It was all mass hysteria and sudden death. Death at
best
.
Especially in those early days, Sandoval received all kinds of conflicting instructions from an assortment of increasingly incoherent provisional leaders—those who would talk to him at all—raving about EMP detonations, satellite warfare, alien invaders over Kansas, and the ever-popular Rapture. He knew one man in particular who was making great hay with the religious angle, a former media Mogul named Chace Dixon, who begged him for help he had no power to send. It had been days now since he last bothered tuning in.
In the end, the last acting NATO commander—some third-tier lieutenant in the French Navy—decided that humanity’s last, best chance was to set up a nautical sanctuary in Chesapeake Bay. This cockeyed optimist ordered every survivor to report to Norfolk, where he and his staff were supposedly following orders from the president of the United States—the
dead
president—to guard some kind of secret project called Xanadu.
It was all nuts. Yet even Sandoval wasn’t immune to these fantasies. He often pictured a simple, nautical existence for the dregs of mankind, coming ashore only when necessary to forage, the way old-time mariners approached uncharted coasts, maybe finding a tropical island somewhere to settle down. Live out your years on fish and coconuts. Swim every day and get a really deep tan. No bills to pay—in fact, forget all about the pain in the ass that was Western Civilization. It was more trouble than it was worth, anyway.
All very delightful, except that Sandoval knew there were precious few island havens. Islands were the first things to go because there was nowhere to run when your women came after you. Most of the islands he knew of were either embattled fortresses or Xombie-infested charnel houses. That such daydreams had taken the place of serious planning was perhaps the clearest possible indication of THE END OF THE WORLD.
Harvey Coombs himself had recommended going to Norfolk in search of whatever seaborne military forces still existed. Sandoval didn’t have the heart to tell him that their real mission was in the opposite direction.
The helicopter landing pad was at the extreme northern tip of the compound, a barren patch of dirt overlooking the upper reaches of Narragansett Bay. As Sandoval pulled up, the fog was so thick he could barely see the black Bell JetRanger. But the pilot saw his headlights and came running to meet the car.
“Can we fly in this?” Sandoval asked.