He took another series of deep breaths, trying to steady his stomach against the horrible outcome of puking in his miniature prison. He tried not to think about it. He was getting colder now, and he tightened his arms across his body, wrapped them round himself and wondered where his leather jacket was. The inside of the box was dank, and he caught the faint odor of the sweat The Chill had brought to his flesh. Finally he relaxed.
He tried for The Vibes hoping they could tell him where he was, where he was going. But he couldn’t find them, so he squeezed himself tighter and turned his thoughts toward Josh. Josh had saved him once. He wouldn’t let him down now.
Davey wondered if he made The Chill hard enough, pushed for it super hard, whether maybe he could grab Josh’s mind and tell him where he was. Except even if he could, he wouldn’t know what to say. He was in a box heading … somewhere. That was all. And just thinking about The Chill brought the pounding back to his head.
He tried for The Vibes again but only flashes of the ones he’d felt before came — some the horrible ones that had made him tell Josh something awful was coming. Again he saw destruction, death, darkness. Everything had been blown away. There were craters instead of buildings and flesh pools where people had been standing. The whole world seemed hot, smoldering, steam-baked.
Davey wanted to sleep but couldn’t. He found himself rubbing a sore spot on his right arm, where he figured the dart had jabbed home. The drug it carried had worn off, and now he was doomed to spend the rest of the journey awake.
Josh … Come and save me, Josh! …
Davey knew Bane couldn’t hear the words, but saying them in his head made him feel better and took his mind off the black box which enclosed him.
I know you’ll come, Josh. I know you will….
The Sixth Day:
Isolation
Chapter Twenty-four
The second showing in twelve hours of The Road Warrior was just about over in the meeting room of Bunker 17. Since the installation’s two shifts seldom corresponded with traditional “daylight” time, one showing had been held at midnight and the second began at noon Saturday.
Maj. Christian Teare had watched them both.
“Now that, Cap,” he told Heath who was sitting next to him as the credits rolled by, “was a real movie. Wish like hell we could get more like it. Enough blood and guts for ya?”
“Plenty.”
“Hey, Cap, you ever think much about what it would be like if it all came true like in the movie? You know, the world’s over and all that’s left are scattered pockets of people who might be better off as fertilizer for a garden somewhere.”
“I try not to, Major.”
“So do I but sometimes you rightly can’t help it.” Teare tugged at his bushy beard. “And you know what gets my gourd the most? A couple things really. First, that we’re the ones who’ll be right in the middle of a shootin’ war and second that, well”—Teare groped for words—“… that more’n likely we’re gonna watch the world end seventy feet under all the shit that’s goin’ down. Give me a machine gun and a belt with a million rounds and I’d be an awful lot happier.” Teare paused and Heath hoped he was finished. He wasn’t. “Hey, Cap, you ever think ’bout how the final big one’ll start?”
Heath had started to answer when all the lights in the compound switched to yellow, signaling a rise to the second highest level of alert status.
“What the fuck? …”
“A drill, Major?” Heath asked hopefully.
“Not on my authorization it ain’t. Who’s duty officer on the con?”
Heath consulted his ever-present clipboard. “Parkinson.”
They were in the corridor now, moving fast.
“Old Willie B.?” Teare exclaimed. “Shit, that dumb fuck probably misread the code. I’ll have his ass for this, Cap. You don’t fuck with the dynamite we’re packin’ here.”
Teare and Heath hurried through the circular corridors that would continue to be bathed in yellow light for the next two minutes, after which only status boards located in all Bunker 17 rooms would maintain the color. Around them, installation personnel scurried to their Yellow Flag positions, all somehow conscious that this wasn’t a standard drill. It was quite unlikely that a Red Flag alert would come unless Yellow was triggered first and now that unthinkable progression had begun, breaking the malaise and routine of the base.
“This better be good,” Teare told Heath.
“As long as it’s not real,” the captain muttered in return.
Command Central was located halfway across the installation from the Disco for security reasons. Once the launch sequence began, the missiles could either be fired or aborted from here in the event that the Disco was hit and the computers channeled the switch in time. Teare stuck his ID into the Com-center slot, waited for the green light code, then pulled it out. The door slid open.
Command Central was far more mundane in appearance than its name indicated. Besides a series of computer lights and gauges coating the walls monitoring every function of the installation, the only piece of equipment of note was a single ordinary console right in the center. The console was connected on-line to NORAD headquarters, and in the event of an emergency the only orders to be regarded were the ones that came over it. A joint numerical-alphabetical sequence flashed across the screen every fifteen minutes, usually decoding into something akin to maintenance of standard procedure.
Willie B. Parkinson sat behind the console punching in his third confirmation request code. Parkinson’s con duty had forced him to miss both showings of The Road Warrior but he had quickly forgotten his disappointment when the latest sequence had been decoded.
“It’s Yellow Flag for sure, Major,” he told Teare as the major crept behind him to check the board. “I don’t believe it but it is.”
“What you believe, Willie B., don’t mean shit here. Let me double-check.”
Parkinson shrugged and gave up his seat to Teare, whose rapid check confirmed Parkinson’s original reading.
“Jesus H. Christ… It’s Yellow Flag all right, Cap. Somethin’ must really be cookin’ up top.”
The SAFE Interceptor, a device no bigger than a shoe box hidden within the Com-center console, was now in control of the base.
“It could be a drill,” Heath groped.
“Not without informin’ the base commander first, it ain’t. Such things just ain’t done.”
“Then what are we facing here?”
“Well Cap, in the en-tire history of NORAD and its predecessors, a genuine Yellow Flag has only occurred three times. The first was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the second was back in nineteen seventy-two when someone in the Mideast farted and Nixon smelled shit, and the third was in nineteen seventy-nine when somebody in Washington inserted the wrong message tape and damn near started World War III.”
“I guess this makes four,” Heath lamented.
Christian Teare frowned, looking more like a hairy bear than usual. “Somethin’ don’t smell right to me.” Then, “Let’s head down to the Disco and see how things are shakin’.”
“We’re still a long way from the launch order, right, Major?” Heath asked as their pace picked up to a trot.
“Need Red Flag for that, Cap, and now that can only be triggered through the SAFE system. We can get confirmation a million times but if those red lights start flashin’, there ain’t no way in hell we can shut them off. That means we got our launch order. Direct to Command Central through the Interceptor. In effect, Cap, they shut me out like a screen does flies. I can’t even issue an override order.”