“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.