The three troopers pressed forward past where John was, and throughout it all, amazingly, the woman who had provoked it had remained standing, most likely so startled by the frightful onset of violence she had not yet even grasped how to react. Grace was lying prone over Laura, who was gasping for air and trying to crawl out from under her protection. Horrified, John saw that Laura was bleeding, blood leaking out of a wound in her back.
John drew back from his covering of Grace with his body. Her eyes were glazing, going out of focus. She had been hit in the head.
“Laura okay?” she whispered.
Crying, he could only nod. It would be like her to sacrifice all for a child she barely knew.
“She’s okay, sweetie,” John lied.
“Good. Tell my daddy…”
And then she was still.
It was near to painless and all so quick, unlike so many deaths he had witnessed, so many he had held while they were dying. All he could do was gather her into his arms and cry while Forrest knelt by his side, weapon protectively raised, and screamed for a medic. Kevin Malady went forward with the three troopers, reaching the security troops they had just engaged, all of them apparently down. One of them started to rise up, swinging his weapon around and cursing with rage, and Kevin put three more rounds into him.
Only now did the woman who had triggered all of this realize that her daughter was hit as well.
The medic came running up, still crouched low, knelt down by Grace’s side, put a finger to her carotid artery, snapped on a flashlight, and shined it into her eyes.
“I’m sorry, sir, she’s gone.” Without delaying even a second, the medic crawled over to Laura, felt the wound on her back, gently ran a hand underneath her, drawing it back to reveal she had an exit wound in her upper chest, and then frantically went to work. Even as she did so, she looked over at Maury.
“Where you hit?”
“Leg.”
“Where? Upper?”
“No, calf; might have broken my leg, though.”
She glanced at him as if evaluating his injury. “You’ll have to wait!” she cried and then focused her attention back on Laura.
Laura’s mother now started to react, sobbing, squatting down by her daughter, screaming, “All of you murdered her!”
John, still in shock, was still holding Grace, brushing her long, dark hair back from her battered face.
“Sir! Sir!”
He looked up. It was the medic.
“You got to get control of this. Start by getting this damn woman out of here.”
The young medic’s orders snapped him back. John forced himself to focus, to let go of the moment, try to think a minute, five minutes ahead as he was once trained to do, no matter how horrific the situation.
He looked forward. Kevin and the three troopers had pushed forward by fifty yards, Kevin shouting with his booming voice for everyone to stay calm, keep back, to get inside shelter and no one would be hurt. But then he looked back anxiously toward Grace, obviously wanting to go to her side.
One of the troopers was checking the four dead, kicking their weapons aside, picking up the light automatic carried by the one in civilian garb who had been killed and slinging that weapon over his shoulder.
Laura’s mother, hysterical, was trying to push the medic aside, but Forrest was already reacting, roughly grabbing her by the shoulder and shoving her back, half dragging her away.
John stood up, went to Forrest’s side, and pulled the woman to her feet. She was continuing to scream, an almost sure provocation for more chaos to ensue. He held on to her, pushing her toward her barrack house. The last thing needed now was for her to run off screaming that those with him had been responsible for the shooting of her child and not the other way around.
“You were the one that triggered her getting shot!” John shouted. “Now let my medic try to save her!”
Laura had left the Quonset hut door open, and John shoved the woman up the steps and inside. What he saw startled him. The quarters were spartan and yet comfortable—a bit of a strange mix of retro furniture that was obviously from the ’60s and looked like it had come off the set of The Brady Bunch, complete with the ubiquitous olive-green color so favored back then. A twenty-five-inch console television, once considered an indicator of the height of affluence, was in the room along with the usual recliner lounge chair, mixed in with standard government-issue gray desks, straight-back chairs, and a bookshelf that was half-empty.
The woman was beginning to sob. John looked at her without pity and glanced at Forrest.
“If she starts getting loud or tries to leave, you have my permission to punch her out,” John snapped.
She looked at him with open hatred but then fell silent.
M4 at the ready, John opened the door into the rear of the Quonset hut. There was a small kitchenette to his right, a sink, a two-burner range and fridge, and an unopened pack of MREs on the counter. To his left, a door half-open. Looking in, he saw there were twin bunk beds against one wall and a single standard military-issue bed against the other wall. A few toys were on the floor, a wooden-track train set, several dolls, and a model of a spaceship, obviously the children’s room.
Next to the kitchenette, there was a small but nevertheless complete bathroom with a shower, wash sink, and toilet. Curious, he turned on the hot water for the sink, and after about a minute of running cold, warm, hot water finally poured out, and the toilet most definitely flushed; there was even a roll of toilet paper beside it.
All of this filled him with a mix of rage but then strangely nostalgia as well for such simple comforts of a lost age that a few had managed to preserve down here.
He now noticed for the first time that it was all climate controlled. There was no heat running. It was cool, perhaps in the midsixties, but not uncomfortable. The entire cavern was at the same temperature and humidity as well from what must be a vast climate control system and sanitation support for the entire cavern. The energy demands must be prodigious, at least by the standards of the world after the Day.
At the far end of the room, there was one more door. There was perhaps a one-in-a-thousand risk, but still, after all the tragedy of the last few hours, he was not sure what to expect, so he flipped off the safety on his weapon, leveled it, and then popped the door open.
It was the master bedroom. She was indeed high-ranking. It was no two cots pushed together; there was actually a queen-size bed that took up more than half the floor space of the room but nevertheless looked damned comfortable when compared to the freezing cold nights with Makala when they would revert to zipping two heavy down sleeping bags together in order to be close and then snuggle together on their double bed. Jen’s room did have a king-size bed, but that had been her room and, in his heart, taboo to ever move into even though she had been dead for close to half a year. All of that gone in the fire just a week ago.
He glanced around the room. It was typical military construction from the ’40s and ’50s—particle walls, flimsy doors of half-inch plywood, standard government-issue fixtures, from toilet to light sockets… and all of it looked at that moment to be luxury all but undreamed of.
There was a flash memory from Orwell’s 1984 when the author had written that in a world of desperate scarcity, possession of a kilo of coffee or a few grams of real chocolate could define the ruling elite from the rest of the world and be worth fighting for and many willing to die for in order to possess.
A few pictures were pinned to the wall, apparently taken out of wallets. The woman out in the living room, perhaps five or six years back in a maternity ward bed, proudly holding newborn twins with a six- or seven-year-old girl horning in at the edge of the photograph at least appearing to look happy. From what had just transpired, he wondered if she truly had been happy at that moment.