“Current theory? Civil War II,” Kent said casually while licking tomato pulp from his fingers.
“It’s a horrifying thought,” Luna said soberly. “If it’s true, then it would follow that Portland isn’t the only battleground.”
“That’s what we’re afraid of,” I agreed. “But if the United States is busy trying to destroy itself, you’d think that other countries would step in to try to stop it.”
“Unless they don’t want to get attacked themselves,” Tori offered.
“Or unless they want us to wipe ourselves out,” Kent said. Jon suddenly sat bolt upright and looked at his watch. “It’s time!” he said and took off running into the dark. “Time for what?” Tori asked.
“For the last two days, we’ve been picking up a radio broadcast,” Luna explained. “It’s the voice of a woman, but the signal is very weak, so it’s hard to understand.”
“We heard it,” I said.
“The transmission lasts for two minutes and happens every other hour on the hour. Jon has been trying to decipher it.”
“I’d like to hear it again,” I said.
Luna grabbed the battery-powered lantern and headed after Jon. We followed her back down the hallway to the small office that held the ER’s radio.
Jon was inside, already having powered up the device. He was listening intently to the static while delicately moving his finger across the touchscreen, searching for a signal.
Kent asked, “Who do you think—”
“Shhh!” Jon snapped.
After hearing nothing for several seconds, I was ready to give up and go back to my sandwich… when the voice came through. “…survivors… beaten… attacked… you safe… north… thirty-six degrees… twenty seconds… west one hundred… thirty-one minutes… repel… invaders… strength… not hesitate…”
“It’s making me crazy,” Jon complained. “I have no idea what she’s saying.”
“It’s the same message every two hours,” Luna added. “We think it’s a recording.”
“Could it be somebody on a ham radio?” Tori asked.
“No,” Jon said quickly. “They’re broadcasting on an emergency frequency. It’s the one used by ambulances to communicate with hospitals.”
“So there could be other hospitals hearing this right now?” I asked.
“If they still exist,” Jon said. “And they’re smart enough to be listening.”
“It can’t be SYLO, or the Air Force,” I said. “Their equipment is, like, high tech.”
“We must be listening to other survivors,” Tori said. “This could be a call for help.”
“Then they’re calling the wrong people,” Kent said, scoffing. Tori grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down some of the disjointed words.
“Thirty-six degrees,” she said while writing furiously. “That could be a coordinate. But without the whole thing, there’s no way of knowing where it is.”
The woman’s voice abruptly stopped, leaving nothing but static coming from the speakers.
Jon glanced at his watch.
“Two minutes on the dot,” he announced. “She’ll be back in another two hours.”
“Somebody is trying to reach out,” Tori declared.
“Reach out to do what?” Olivia asked.
“I don’t know,” Tori said. “Maybe to find other survivors?”
“So why don’t we talk back?” Kent asked.
“I tried,” Jon explained. “There’s no response. It’s another reason why I think it’s a recording.”
“Well, this is all very interesting,” Kent said, sounding bored.
“But if we don’t know who it is, why they’re broadcasting, where they are, or what they want, why are we so interested?”
Tori said, “Because they may know why we’re at war.”
Jon powered down the radio, and the room went silent.
I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote something quickly. “Luna, don’t doctors have to study Latin?”
“A bit,” she replied. “I took more courses as an undergraduate, though. I thought it would help in medical school. It didn’t.”
“Do you have any idea what this says?” I asked.
“I’m not sure if I remember the exact spelling.”
I handed her the paper. On it I had written down the words that were scrawled like graffiti on the wreckage of the downed Air Force plane we discovered in the Old Port.
Luna held it closer to the lantern and read it aloud. “Sequentia yconomus libertate te ex inferis obendienter.”
“SYLO,” Tori said.
Luna frowned. “I’m not a Latin scholar by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Does it make any sense?” I asked.
“Sequentia could mean ‘sequence.’ Or something that follows. I’m not familiar with yconomus. Obendienter could be the root of the word ‘obedient.’”
“What about libertate te ex inferis?” I asked.
Luna gave me a dark look. She asked, “Do you really think this
phrase has something to do with SYLO?”
“Either that, or it’s an incredible coincidence that it’s a perfect acronym,” I said.
“Do you know what it means?” Tori asked.
Luna took a breath. She said, “Libertate means ‘to liberate or free something.’”
“What about te ex inferis?”
She handed the paper back to me. “I can only offer a loose translation, but to the best of my knowledge, libertate te ex inferis means ‘to liberate, or to save a person, from the gates of hell.’” Her words echoed through the empty hospital, or maybe they were echoing through my head. I finally got my thoughts together enough to say, “So we could be dealing with a deadly virus, or a powerful and lethal drug, or aliens, or a civil war, and now we’ve got to add the possibility of something biblical going on?” Luna shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I’m not a religious person. I don’t know what happens after death or why we’re all here, but after what happened to this city, to these people, I could be convinced that evil truly does exist, because there was definitely a devil at work here, and we have found ourselves standing at the gates of hell.”
THREE
I was beyond exhausted.
It was hard to believe that less than twenty-four hours had passed since we had gone to sleep on Pemberwick Island in a tent with a group of rebels led by Tori’s father.
So much had changed in a single day.
We decided to spend the night in the hospital and figure out what our next move would be in the morning. Luna gave us hospital scrubs to sleep in. My clothes were rank, but there was no way to wash and dry them. It didn’t matter. We could visit a deserted shop in Portland and take our pick of new clothes. Nobody would care.
The best part about the night was that we got to take showers. The hospital’s plumbing system still worked, for the time being, and I was looking forward to washing away the grime that had been building up since I took my last shower in the SYLO prison camp. The girls went first, then Kent went with Jon. I thought about bailing and going to sleep, but as tired as I was, I wasn’t going to pass up the chance at a shower, so when it was my turn I forced my sorry self to go.
There was a locker room next to the showers, so I dropped my new scrubs there, peeled off my old clothes, and dumped them in the trash. The only thing I didn’t toss were my cross-trainers. I didn’t want to lose those until I found new ones. I grabbed a towel from the stack near the door and headed for the shower.
The water was still warm. That wouldn’t last. Once it ran out, there would be no way to heat it again. There was no electricity and therefore no lights. Or heat. Or refrigeration. We didn’t have cell phones or radios or Internet or any of the other things we had always taken for granted. A hot shower was a luxury that wouldn’t be repeated until we reconnected with civilization.