Ferret remembered little after that. Something in his addled brain told him to run, so he did. He wandered south in a daze, fleeing the inferno with nothing but his coat and hat. The numbing cold drove him to seek shelter in the nearby town. The dumpster behind the lumberyard would be good enough. He could stay in it until he figured out what to do next. And there was always enough scrap wood to make a fire if it got that cold. He would avoid the guard dogs and scrounge for food at night. Ferret was clever that way, but he was confused and lost. He walked for hours, maybe days. He didn’t know how many. He was cold, tired, and hungry. He wasn’t going to make it to town. He had no idea where town was anymore, and he didn’t much care.
A black beast appeared out of the fog on the road behind him and growled. Ferret stopped, hoping it would go away, but it kept coming closer. He crossed the road, and the beast became them, the Army. What had happened was no accident. It was no test. They had blown up his house on purpose. They wanted him dead. They had missed, and now they’d come back to finish the job. Ferret took off for the woods. He heard a shout from behind, then a shot, then nothing.
The Speechwriter
Cameron was twenty-three, and if asked about his graduation from Georgetown less than a year ago, he would say it was due only to the vagaries of rounding. It wasn’t that he was stupid or lazy. He was a student of great potential, but he put little or no effort into anything that didn’t interest him, and for Cameron, anything was nearly everything, including getting passing grades. The one exception was his writing, and into that he put all his energies.
He had been out celebrating with friends one night after graduation, and on a trip to the restroom he found himself standing in a stall next to none other than the President of the United States. With two Secret Service agents standing guard outside and another watching from over by the sink, Cameron and the president went about their business, staring at the wall, never looking at each other until Cameron finally said, “I thought your speech last night on proliferation was a little heavy-handed, like General Patton had written it. You’ll never get anywhere with rhetoric like that, Mr. President.”
“And I suppose you could do better?”
“I could do better using words of three syllables or less.”
Few can claim that their first successful job interview was held in a men’s room stall, fewer still that in less than five minutes they matriculated from unemployed college graduate to the youngest speechwriter for the most powerful leader on Earth, but that’s what Cameron did. And now, when the president spoke in the name of freedom and dignity, it was Cameron speaking, maybe not entirely his thoughts, but certainly his words. And whenever the president talked about democracy and the rights of all people to live in peace, that was Cameron, too.
The president was spending Christmas at home that year. That meant the White House staff could observe the holiday with their families or accept his generous offer of a week’s stay at the Camp David retreat. The barracks and all facilities would be kept open and available for their use, and they could indulge themselves in amenities normally reserved for guests and foreign dignitaries. Of course, the Marine detachment would remain on duty to make sure it didn’t become too merry a Christmas.
Cameron had chosen to spend his holiday at Camp David, but not for the parties. He loved the presidential retreat, loved his walks in the woods, loved the quiet and the atmosphere, but, above all, he loved the time it gave him to write about important things, things he thought the president might want to hear when they took up business again.
On 12|21|12 at 12:21:12 p.m. he was alone with his thoughts as usual and looking out the window. Cameron had always been a loner. Every time he went home his parents asked him if he was seeing anyone, but he never was. Whenever his friends asked him to go out, he almost never did. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the opportunity for a relationship. He’d had plenty of opportunities, just never the inclination.
A blinding flash filled the sky, and the room jolted as if tossed into the air, throwing Cameron against the wall. Lights flickered, then came back on. The backup generators kicked in. It could be but one thing — a nuclear attack — and that was the initial shock wave emanating from Washington. Only one country had the capability of delivering such a strike on the capital, but why now after such successful disarmament talks? And why no warning? Was it a dirty bomb — a nuclear weapon brought into the country in pieces and assembled by terrorists at ground zero? They had been briefed on that. The yield would have to be enormous to reach into the mountains seventy miles away. Could a terrorist build such a large bomb? The shelter was on the other side of the Camp David compound under the barracks. Cameron stopped thinking and ran.
Into the cold afternoon and through the compound, past quiet buildings and across the main road where a black SUV sat with its door open, he ran. Panic urged him on faster. Everyone else was already in the shelter. If they followed procedures, and they always did, they would close and lock the blast doors. They wouldn’t wait for stragglers. They wouldn’t wait for him. Camp David was a beautiful rustic retreat nestled in the pristine forests of Maryland, the perfect place to think and write, but in minutes it would all be gone in a nuclear firestorm and him with it if he didn’t get inside.
Into the barracks, down the stairs, into the red dusk of the steel and concrete shelter — Cameron closed and locked the doors behind him. He was inside. He was safe. He was alone. There were no orders being issued by cooler heads, no panicked cries, no despair, no footsteps running on the metal walkway to the elevator, and no one pounding frantically on the doors to get in. He switched on the outside monitor. The barracks were empty.
The thought of going back for the others who hadn’t the sense to run for cover crossed Cameron’s mind, as did the futility of adding another glowing dead body to the radioactive pile. Instead, he broke the rules. He unlocked the steel-reinforced doors before descending into the safety of the solid rock of the Appalachian Mountains.
Cameron hated elevators. He hated confined spaces, but he hated the alternative more. The elevator let him off at its only stop — the nuclear strike-hardened shelter three hundred feet below the surface. Built to be self-sustaining for up to a year, it had its own power and underground water source, and there was enough food for a hundred people for a year or, in his case, one person for a hundred years. No one else had made it. No one.
The command center was a square concrete room where dozens of computers registered information about the compound and all in-house systems. He waited there for that inevitable moment when the screens would flash with a light so bright it would blind him, but that moment never came.
Hours passed. The external monitors showed no radiation, no anomalies, nothing. All security systems and cameras throughout the compound and on the perimeter seemed to be working. The only odd thing was the one thing they weren’t registering — everyone else.
He tried to contact the Marine captain of the guard, the Secret Service, the FBI, the Pentagon, the CIA, the president. He tried his parents and even his old college roommate. Camp David was connected to every major capital in the world. The lines were open, but no one was answering. This was no surprise nuclear attack. Cameron’s life was his words, but he had no words for this.