End Days Super Boxset (214 page)

Jenkins turned and exited the holding cell without saying another word. The lights shut off and the room went pitch black. Mason dropped his head while pondering his fate. His body was so damaged and full of pain that he didn’t think he had anything left in him.

The people Mason was fighting represented forces so powerful in their ambition that it made no difference how smart or resourceful Mason or others like him might be. They would see to it that their plans came into fruition, despite how many lives they had to destroy.

Having just been informed of Mason’s confinement, Jack left the White House and rushed down the corridors of the nearby underground bunker to try to see him. His hands were full, dealing with the nearing Presidential address and other responsibilities of a deputy secretary. He had to call in a favor from a guard he knew to gain entrance to Mason’s cell. When he found his old acquaintance, Jack wasn’t sure what to say.

“What the hell happened to you?”

Mason looked up. “Are we alone?”

“What?”

“Are they listening to us?”

“Who?” Jack asked. “Listen, I have a lot of shit going on right now. I don’t know what you got yourself into, but now is not the time.”

“Now is the only time,” Mason said. “It’s too late for me. I want to give you something, and I want you to show it to the President before he delivers his address.”

“I don’t have time for this, Mason.”

“Just listen to me, you dense asshole!” Mason shouted. “Give me one minute, and I’ll give you something that will change the course of everything.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“Get these cuffs off me, and I’ll show you,” Mason said.

After some arguing, Jack finally called the guard outside the room to remove the handcuffs from Mason. Once freed, Mason stood up and stuck his finger down his throat, like a true spy. “This isn’t going to be pretty, but it’s necessary. I’m going to give you something and you have to promise me that you’ll show it to the President and the President only.”

“What in the hell are you doing?” Jack asked, disgusted.

Mason ignored him and knelt on the floor, hunched over as he gagged and vomited the USB drive out of his system, painful as it was. Jack nearly ran out of the room in disgust, but he soon realized there might be some validity in what Mason was telling him.

Washington D.C. 4:55 a.m. Monday, October 5, 2020

The road to D.C. was long and arduous, but they eventually made it by the early hours of the morning. It was breathtaking to see a vibrant city at work, though checkpoints had been established at several key places and the ocean of traffic leading into the city inched along only intermittently. Terrance breathed in the fresh air and tried to take in the kinetic stimuli of the city.

The old van had made it despite Terrance’s doubts. They’d had to stop and siphon fuel at every opportunity, because most of it had already been stolen. Throughout the journey, they saw wanton destruction everywhere they drove: South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Desolation in all directions, and there seemed no place safe enough to stop and rest.

D.C. was different. It was their light at the end of a tunnel, and despite the large influx of people into the city, Terrance and Mark were relieved to see that they had made it to somewhere civilized. Everyone else in the back of the van was sleeping. Mark and Terrance had taken turns at the wheel, and their arrival felt like a remarkable cornerstone in their journey. They took a moment to observe the bustling city with awe. Capitol Hill was only a few miles away, and Mark could see the Washington Monument in view.

“We did right by coming here,” Terrance said confidently.

Mark glanced at the nearby military checkpoint. “Where are we going to stay? What are we going to do?”

Terrance looked ahead, easing on the brake pedal as five lanes of traffic, once again, came to a halt. “We got friends here,” he said. “Old friends of ours, Phillip and Ellen. They’ll take us in. You and Janice are welcome to stay with us.”

“I appreciate that,” Mark said. “I really do.”

“No problem, buddy.”

Mark looked around again. The sky was getting lighter as the moon began to fade. There were stationary spotlights everywhere, moving in unison. Helicopters buzzed overhead in droves. The sidewalks were clogged with people walking in both directions. Sirens blared, taxis weaved in and out of traffic, and news vans were parked everywhere. Mark had been to D.C. before, and he knew it to be a very busy place, but he had never seen it so overwhelmed. After being cut off for weeks, it was jarring to find themselves among millions of others in a blitzkrieg of sensory overload.

Mark looked back and smiled at the sleeping passengers. He then turned to Terrance. “James would have hated it here, that’s for sure.”

“You got that right,” Terrance answered.

Traffic moved forward when he suddenly took a hard right down an empty back street along a line of old buildings. The sudden shift shook Janice and Christina awake and further confused Mark. Terrance then pulled the van to the side of the road into the parking lot of a closed convenience store.

“What are we doing here?” Mark asked.

“I need a break,” Terrance answered. He shut the engine off as Christina leaned forward to look out the front window. They were parked near a small lake as the sun slowly rose over the horizon. No one else was around. Janice yawned from the back and rubbed her eyes. Terrance swung open his door and stepped outside. He let out a big groan of relief as he stretched.

Mark soon followed as Christina gently nudged Tobias and the others awake. Janice crawled out and took in the fresh air. Once everyone was out of the van, they looked out toward the lake as the sun continued to rise, its light reflected in the calm ripples. An Osprey swooped into the water, only concerned with its morning feeding ritual. Tobias, Richie, and Paula stretched and looked around in a daze, curious that there were no other people there.

Terrance stared into the lake with his arm around Christina as she rested her head on his chest. “So far so good,” he said.

Mark and Janice paced around the parking lot together to get the blood flowing through their legs. Tobias and Richie were busy talking over each other about all their different plans in the city. They talked of hotel rooms, electronics, watching TV, swimming, and anything else they could think of. They felt connected again. They felt alive.

“Guess the downside is that we’ll have to go back to school eventually,” Richie said.

“What about Gabby?” Tobias asked, catching his brother off-guard.

Richie suddenly looked at the ground, nearly ashamed. “Yeah, I guess I should give her a call.”

Tobias hit him on the back, startling him. “I’ll race you to the nearest McDonalds!”

He bolted off as Richie ran off after him. They scaled past the van and onto the deserted street. Terrance whipped around like a hawk and shouted to the boys. “Don’t go runnin’ off. Get on back here!” He separated from Christina and Paula and marched off to retrieve them as they darted around like boys in a playground.

Mark and Janice walked toward the pier overlooking the lake.

“We need to get in contact with our folks,” Janice said, “make sure they’re OK.”

“Yes, definitely,” Mark said.

“It’s going to be hard though. I mean, how are we going to track down everyone we know to make sure they’re OK?”

Mark took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and tilted his head up. “We simply go down the list, one at a time. Terrance invited us to stay with their friends in D.C.”

“That’s nice of them,” Janice said.

“Very nice indeed,” Mark added.

From the street, Terrance gave up trying to catch up with his boys. They’d be back, he thought. He leaned into the van and turned the ignition key, activating the battery. He was relieved to see it still worked. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him. He had retrieved something from their second trip to Atlanta, something that he had forgotten the first time. He walked to the back of the old, rusty van and opened the back double-doors. They squeaked horribly, as did everything else, and Terrance pulled his rucksack out and placed it on the ground.

“So tell me what’s on your mind, sweetheart,” Christina said to Paula. Her daughter had been in some type of comatose trance over the past week, ever since they entered Camp Liberty. She couldn’t figure it out, and it worried her.

“I miss James,” Paula said.

Christina paused and gave her a knowing look of understanding. “We all do, Paula. We all do.”

Terrance whistled and waved for everyone to gather around him near the back of the van. In his arms, he held up a bright red wind-up emergency radio like it was the Heisman trophy. With the van stereo long out of commission ages before the EMP strikes, the emergency radio represented their personal window into the connected world. Terrance cranked the handle and proceeded to turn the dial while holding the radio in the air for a signal. He could hear pops of static, followed by some voices.

“I got something!” he shouted. “Come here, quick.”

Tobias and Richie rolled their eyes and strolled over apathetically. Their minds were focused on tablets, cell phones, and computers while their father was getting excited over a windup radio. Though whatever had him excited appeared to be important. “Listen!” Terrance said. “I think it’s a news report.”

Everyone gathered around as Terrance continued moving the radio around the air. He finally picked up the signal of what seemed to be an urgent news broadcast. The reporter spoke a mile a minute about some “big development” that had just occurred. Something, he said, that would change the world forever. Terrance leaned against the back of the van. “Now quiet. And listen,” he said.

The announcer continued.
“Moments ago, the President delivered an urgent address to the American people in what has been called one of the most shattering speeches in recent history. In this speech, President Redgrave not only acknowledged the long road ahead to restoring the nation’s power grid, he also addressed those responsible for launching the devastating and unprecedented high altitude electromagnetic pulse attacks across the nation. The stunning address was made directly from the Oval Office, and while there are still an estimated two hundred million citizens without power and no means to hear the speech, the President urged state governments to pass his words down to everyone affected by this unspeakable crippling of our nation’s infrastructure.”

Terrance turned the small radio up as loud as it would go, while Mark and Janice looked at each other in heightened anticipation. Even Tobias and Richie looked interested, if not captivated, by what they were hearing on the radio.

“I repeat, the speech ended only moments ago. The President placed blame for the attacks directly on two of the most powerful countries in the world: Russia and China. His speech is being called a rousing call to rebuild by some and a delusional conspiracy theory by others. But enough paraphrasing, we’re going to replay the brief speech before we engage in further analysis. Here’s President Redgrave, live from the Oval Office only moments ago.”

The group readied themselves as the broadcast switched to a repeat of the Presidential address.

“My fellow Americans, I deliver this message today not to promise any immediate answers or overnight fixes. I wish today to give you the entire picture, the unfiltered truth, and the main consequences that lie ahead. I promise to tell you as much as I can within the limits of national security and ongoing investigations. I want to first offer my most sincere gratitude to our law enforcement personnel, our emergency responders, our hospitals, doctors, and nurses, and, of course, our men and women in the Unites States military. This country couldn’t even begin to make the repairs necessary without your assistance.”

The President took a deep breath, then continued.

“I’ve done a lot of soul searching the past six hours, and in the meantime demanded an investigation into an apparent conspiracy within my own Presidential Cabinet, a scheme to lie, manipulate, and cause further destruction to the United States of America.”

The President nervously sighed again.

“At 12:30 a.m. Eastern time, I was alerted by my Chief of Staff about information that proves beyond a reasonable doubt who was responsible for the EMP strikes. It is one thing to indict a foreign nation about the attacks on our homeland, it’s an entirely different thing to discover that the attacks were done in willing concert with officials in my administration. The former director of the NSA, Mr. Scott Jenkins, is one of those infiltrators.

“The information that has been presented to me is both shocking and treacherous and I can no longer, in good faith, let this go on. It’s clear that I’ve made several errors of judgment, and appointed cabinet positions which allowed for these terrible strikes to occur.”

Janice looked at Mark, then Christina. Mark spoke bluntly. “What the hell is he talking about?”

The President continued.
“I know that this is the last thing to tell a nation in crisis. That much I understand.”

“Your damn right,” Mark said to the radio
.

“But I unfortunately have only gotten a glimpse into how deep this treachery lies, within my own administration and that of Washington as a whole. I’m appointing an independent counsel to investigate the alleged conspiracy and those associated with plans to aid our enemies in the destruction of this country. They will all face swift justice—from aides, to Senators and Congressmen, to every single official in my administration. I’ve also urged Vice President Daniels to assist the counsel with their investigation as we proceed with caution over the next few days.”