"Oh, joy." She handed him the bag. "Mother said if I married you I was in for a rough ride. But bicycling through the rain in December?"
"Fleeing the FBI. Sort of strains your sense of humor, doesn't it."
It wasn't too bad, though. The rain was a cool mist, and they only had to go a mile, to the Oaks substation.
They left the bicycles unlocked, trusting that it wouldn't take long for thieves to remove that particular bit of evidence of their flight, and walked into the venerable, not to say crumbling, mall.
It had seen better days, most of them more than a half century before. A whole block of stores had been demolished, their walls knocked down, to make space for a huge flea market, and that drew more customers than the low-rent purveyors of cheap imported clothing and sexual paraphernalia.
There was a weird youth subculture that had taken over one part—the beatniks, who dressed in century-old fashion and smoked incessantly while listening to century-old music. Rory liked the sound of it as they walked by, but it made Norman cringe. They had to go through there to get to the ATMs.
They thumbed two machines to get the maximum from different accounts, four thousand dollars each. The machines didn't hold any denomination larger than one hundred, though, so they wound up with a conspicuously large wad of bills.
Rory looked around. "Uh-oh." She turned back to the machine. "There's a guy staring at us. From the cafe."
Norm glanced sideways. "Yeah, I see him in Nick's sometimes. Always writing in that notebook."
"Yeah. Now that you mention it."
The historian
They don't look like the kind of people who come down to the Oaks, he thought, familiar from somewhere. The Greek restaurant. He drank off the rest of his strong sweet coffee while it was still warm. He snapped his fingers twice to get the waitress's attention—a very local custom—and shook a pseudo-Camel out of its package. He lit it with a wooden match and got a sudden rush of THC. Real tobacco must have been something.
He had been staring for a half hour at the image of .the Gainesville Sunfor 24 November 1963, the last time a president had been assassinated. Maybe getting back to work would cut through the feelings of despair and helplessness. He had gotten up to the year before the year he was born.
He tried to ignore the old-fashioned but seductive Dave Brubeck chordings and rhythms, and toggled through the two old newspaper articles that were relevant to this part:
Local government found itself in a condition beyond chaos when, in the fall of 2022, the mayor, two city commissioners, and the entire county commission wound up in jail for violating a cluster of real-estate laws, mostly about zoning and eminent domain— but really about bribery on a stunning scale. The result of their machinations, the Alachua/Archer monorail, changed Gainesville irreversibly, in ways that not everybody agreed were bad.
City revenues declined as industries moved north to Alachua and south to Archer, for cheap real estate and tax relief. But the net result was to give the city back to the university, making it again the college town it had been for most of the twentieth century.
There was a short but intense crime wave in 2023, which led to a five-year suspension of the fraternity system at UF, when it was discovered that four of the fraternities had aligned themselves with individual street gangs. They would pinpoint lucrative robbing sites and then help the boys hide and "fence" the stolen goods. In exchange, they took a percentage of the ill-gotten gains, and bought alcohol for the boys (at the time, the drinking age in Florida was twenty-one), as well as illegal ammunition, which is what led to the discovery. The federal program of "tagging" ammunition had begun secretly, and the so-called Gunfight at the Gainesville Garage was one of the first times it had been used as evidence.
Two policemen and five members of a gang called the Hairballs died in the altercation, and the gang's ammunition was traced to a member of the Kappa Kappa Psi fraternity, who, under interrogation, detailed the depth and breadth of the fraternity's involvement with the gang, and implicated the three other fraternities ...
in December
An unprecedented heat wave scorched Australia and New Zealand, thousands of people and millions of cattle and sheep dying in the heat and drought. Canada and Alaska and northern Europe all suffered protracted blizzard conditions, which took hundreds of lives.
The war in Europe entered into an uneasy truce, the peace talks moving from Warsaw to sunny Rome, as troops on various borders scraped ice and snow off their war machines, and then went back to huddle around fires. The peace was partly due to logistics—no one was really prepared to fight in an unrelenting blizzard—and partly due to apocalyptic suspense as the calendar counted down to the Coming.
Preachers and priests and even a cautious pope saw a connection between the hellish weather and the Coming. The aliens had not denied a connection with God and Jesus, and there were appropriate prophecies in the Bible, as well as a lesser authority, Nostradamus. In his prophetic quatrains, the farthest in the future where he had predicted a specific year was 2055, the year the aliens were going to land. Writing in 1555, he said:
For five hundred years more one will take notice of him
Who was the ornament of his time:
Then suddenly a great revelation will be made,
Which will make the people of that century well pleased.
One "ornament of his time" was Nostradamus's contemporary Thomas More ("for five hundred years more ..."), who wrote Utopia.To some, this was proof positive that the aliens were going to bring about a heaven on earth. Of course that word "more" doesn't appear in the French— "De cinq cents ans plus compte l'on tiendre"—but the people who write for the tabloids probably didn't know about that, and certainly didn't care.
A musical group that had renamed itself 55 Alive went to the top of the charts with a convoluted song, "We're Coming," that used all of the words of the Nostradamos message recombined into a message of hope, which could be interpreted in either secular or religious terms.
The survival stores came back, and merchants who didn't overstock for the two-week wonder made a quick and large profit. It did take a pessimistic kind of optimism, or vice versa, to assume that the aliens would leave humanity alone, but humanity would turn on itself.
The United States launched its killer satellite in a state of total secrecy, which lasted less than a day. An international coalition of scientists and engineers came forth with absolute proof that the deed had been done. They demanded that the weapon be destroyed in place. President Davis called their documents "a bucket of bullshit," saying it was just a weather satellite, and God knows we could use a few.
A gallup showed that 62 percent of French citizens considered the launch an act of war. In America, only 18 percent believed the president was telling the truth, but 32 percent "stood behind his actions."
During the month of December, the leading cause of death in the United States was suicide.