The other founders trickled in one at a time. Many had red eyes and chapped cheeks. There was none of the chatting, debating, and arguing that had marked their prior meetings in that room. Just the same funereal silence they’d held by the crypt doors.
A second pot was brewed. One of the engineers got the screens running, and they watched the TV feeds in silence. There was speculation among the talking heads that the presidential nomination was not quite the lock everyone had presumed. The excitement in the newsrooms was palpable and eerie. Tracy watched dead men discuss a future that did not exist.
Two minutes.
The talking heads fell silent, and the feeds switched from newsrooms to a stage outside Atlanta. The distant downtown towers gleamed in the background. On the stage, a young girl in a black dress held a microphone and took a deep breath, a little nervous as she began to sing.
The national anthem brought tears to Tracy’s eyes. She reminded herself to breathe. And not for the first time, she had an awful premonition that she was wrong, that the book was just a book, that John had believed in something that would not come to pass, and that she would soon be embarrassed in that room with all the people she’d convinced to join her. She would be another in a long line of failed messiahs. Her sister would look at her like she was crazy for the rest of her life. National headlines would mock the kooks in a mountain who had thought the world was going to end. And somehow all of this felt worse than ten billion dead.
It was a guilty thought, the panic that she might be wrong.
Large red numbers on the clock counted down. No part of her wanted to be right. Either way, her world was ending. When the clock struck all zeroes, Tracy would either be an outcast or a shut-in.
On the array of televisions, the same scene was shown from half a dozen angles, all the various news stations and networks tuned to that young girl in her black dress. One of the screens cut to the obligatory jets screaming in formation overhead. Another screen showed a group of senators and congressmen, hands on their goddamn patriotic chests. Tracy searched for John, thought she might see him there near the stage with his suit jacket that showed off his handsome shoulders but also that bulge by his ribs. There were five seconds on the clock. One of the founders started counting, whispering the numbers as they fell.
Three.
Two.
One.
A line of zeroes.
And nothing happened.
“They’re still breathing,” someone said.
Igor cursed and fumbled for that damned watch of his.
An eternity squeezed itself into a span of three seconds. No one moved.
“Holy shit,” someone said.
CNN’s feed spun sickeningly to the side, the cameraman whirling, and Tracy realized it was one of the reporters who had cursed. Another screen showed a bright flash, a brief glimpse of a mushroom cloud, and then that monitor went black.
The young girl was no longer singing. She had been replaced with station identifiers and shots of stunned newscasters who stared at their feeds in disbelief. More bright flashes erupted on the last monitor running, which showed a wide vista from some great distance. Three classic and terrifying mushroom clouds rose toward the heavens, shouldering the other clouds aside. And then that last screen succumbed as well, promising impotently to “Be right back.”
“Shut it off!” a reporter screamed. He waved at someone off-camera. “Shut it off—”
And then someone did. A switch flipped somewhere, in all those veins, and all the talking heads on all the screens bowed forward or tilted to the side. Blood flowed from the nose of the man who had just been waving. His jaw fell slack; his eyes focused on nothing—a quiet death.
The founders in the command room—no longer breathing—watched in silence. Hands clasped over mouths. Those who had harbored any doubts now believed. All was still. The only thing that moved on the screens was the thin red rivulets trickling from noses and ears. There was no one left alive to cut away, to change the view. And only those ten people huddled around the wire-webbed monitors were left to see.
“Kill it,” someone finally said, a terrible slip of the tongue.
Tracy watched as Dmitry fumbled with the controls for the panels. He accidentally changed channels on one of the sets, away from news and into the realm of reruns. There was a sitcom playing: a family around a dinner table, a joke just missed. A bark of canned laughter spilled from the speaker, the illusion that life was still transpiring out there as it always had. But it wasn’t just the laughter that was canned now. They all were. All of humanity. What little was left.
“Hey. Wake up.”
Dreams. Nothing more than dreams. A black ghost clawing away at her mother, a wicked witch burying her father and her sister. Tracy sat up in bed, sweating. She felt a hand settle on her shoulder.
“We have a problem,” someone said.
A heavy shadow, framed by the wan light spilling from the hallway.
“Anatoly?”
“Come,” he said. He lumbered out of her small room deep in the mountain. Tracy slid across that double bunk, a bed requisitioned for two, and tugged on the same pants and shirt she’d worn the day before.
The fog of horrible dreams mixed with the even worse images from their first day in the complex. Both swirled in her sleepy brain. Slicing through these was the fear in Anatoly’s voice. The normally unflappable Russian seemed petrified. Was it really only to last a single day, all their schemes to survive the end of the world? Was it a riot already? Orientation the day before had not gone well. Fights had broken out. A crowd had gathered at those four-foot-thick doors, which had been designed just as much to keep people in as to keep other dangers out.
Perhaps it was a leak. Air from the outside getting in. Tracy hurried down the hall barefoot, searching her lungs for some burn or itch, touching her upper lip and looking for a bleed. Her last thought as she caught up to Anatoly and they reached the command room together was that the cameras outside the crypt doors would be on, would reveal a lone man, inoculated to the sudden death but slowly dying anyway, banging feebly and begging to be let in—
“Everyone here?” Dmitry asked. The thin programmer scanned the room over his spectacles. There was no real leader among the founders. Tracy held some special status as the originator of the group, she who had found the Order. Anatoly was the man who had coordinated the lease and planning of the facility. But Dmitry was the brightest among them, the tinkerer, the one who had deactivated the machines in their blood. Of them all, he seemed to most enjoy the thought of being in charge. No one begrudged him that.
“What is this?” Patrice asked. She knotted her robe across her waist and crossed her arms against the chill in the room.
“The program,” Dmitry said. “It . . . has changed.”
Someone groaned. Tracy rubbed the sand from her eyes. The gathered braced for Dmitry’s usual technobabble, which was bad enough when wide awake.
“Five hundred years,” he said. He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked from face to face. “Not six months. Five hundred years.”
“Until what?” Sandra asked.
“Until we can go out,” Dmitry said. He pointed toward the door. “Until we can go out.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said. And it’s all in the book. It says six months. But the program unspooled yesterday. It’s dynamic code, a self-assembler, and now there’s a clock set to run for five hundred years.”
The room was quiet. The recycled air flowing through the overhead vent was the only sound.
“How are you reading this new program?” Igor asked. “Do you have those buggers in here?” He nodded toward the silver pod with all its tubes and wires.