Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon (15 page)

     Hannah added “Right. And once we’re in here we can slowly wean them off of their prescription meds and onto the natural ones. And cross our fingers and pray a lot that they’ll be effective.”

     Sarah added her view. “I’ve been doing a lot of research on diets and how different foods relate to health. There are some things we can do to help, like putting diabetics on certain diets, and people with high blood pressure on other diets. It’ll be a pain in the butt for the kitchen staff, but it should help them live longer.

     “When the thaw comes, it’ll come gradually. It won’t come all at once. It’ll be like, one summer it’s warm enough to melt the ice and snow for twenty days. Then it’ll get cold again. The next summer it might be warm enough to melt the ice and snow for forty days.”

     Everyone looked at her with puzzled looks.

     So she continued. “What I’m saying is that after two or three years we might be able to get a vehicle out and get drugs from one of the local pharmacies. It would be treacherous driving, of course. Even if it was forty degrees outside the third summer, it wouldn’t melt everything all at once. So there would still be a lot
of ice and snow. Maybe the Hummer could make it to Junction and back.

     “And I wouldn’t even suggest we try unles
s the medicine is desperately needed.”

     Sarah and Bryan finished their lunch and went back to their previous tasks. Hannah took Mark’s hand and said “You stay here a minute, sailor. I want to talk.”

     “Oh, I like the sound of that. Would you like to meet up in one of the RVs? We can ‘talk’ a lot better in there.”

     “Settle down, dirty boy. I mean really talk.”

     Mark looked crestfallen. She kissed him on the cheek to cheer him up a bit.

     “This morning when I got up you were already gone. I told you I wanted to sleep in because
I was exhausted. But really it was because I missed my period three weeks ago. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. So I took a home pregnancy test after you were gone.

     “And I’m pregnant.”

     Hannah eyed him warily. She knew that under normal circumstances, he’d be ecstatic. But these circumstances were anything but normal. And she honestly didn’t know how he’d take the news.

     She needn’t have worried. He whooped and
hollered so loudly that Bryan and Sarah thought something was wrong and came running back through the mine. They found Mark holding Hannah and spinning her gently around in circles. Both of them were laughing and smiling and had tears on their faces.

    
Bryan was confused and dumbfounded. But Sarah ran to them and hugged them both. Only one thing could cause this kind of behavior. And she needed no explanation to know what it was.

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SEP 23, 2015      4 MONTHS UNTIL IMPACT

     The group had decided it was time to go public. Sarah met Hannah at the CBS affiliate in San Antonio and the two of them sat in Sarah’s car for a few minutes to talk and calm their nerves.

     Sarah said “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing? What if they come after us?”

     “Yes, it has to be done. Most of the world will perish anyway. But if we give them time to prepare, some others will survive. We owe it to them to at least give them a chance.”

     “Do you think anyone will believe us?”

     “I don’t know. I hope so.”

     “I think I felt the baby kick this morning. I worry sometimes about how
all this will affect him. Emotionally, I mean, later in life, from spending his early years in the mine. Not feeling the warmth of sunshine on his face, or the coolness of a summer breeze. Never having the chance to chase a butterfly, or listen to a bird sing.”

     “The birds survived the first extinction, sweetie. They went
into caves and lived off of worms and insects. They’ll likely survive again, but it may take decades for them to repopulate. Maybe he’ll be lucky enough to experience birds in his lifetime.”

    “And yes, he’ll miss those things. But it won’t be forever. The sun will shine again, and he’ll feel those summer breezes. And in the meantime he’ll be surrounded by all the love in the world.

     “Besides, it’s impossible to miss something you’ve never known. And imagine the look on his little face the first time you take him out into the sunshine. Imagine him playing in grass for the first time, and looking up at the stars. His will be a world of wonder that knows no bounds. And you’ll be able to experience and enjoy all of that with him.”

     “Are you going to be okay?”

     Hannah answered “Yes. Are you ready?”

     Sarah emptied her coffee cup and put it down, then opened her car door. “Let’s do this.” She said.

     “Good morning, may I help you?”

     “Hello, My name is Hannah Snyder, and this is my friend Sarah Spear. We’d like to speak with your news producer if that’s possible.”

     “That would be Mr. Hensley. May I ask what it’s in reference to?”

     “Tell him we have a scoop that will put your station on every television in the world.”

     Sarah looked at Hannah and said “That should get his attention.”

     The pair sat in the lobby for a couple of minutes. The receptionist offered them coffee and a donut. They took the coffee but passed on the sweets. They were already jittery enough.

     “Good morning. I’m Jason Hensley. Won’t you come back to my office?”

     They gave Hensley a brief history and showed him the reports that Hannah had printed out on that Saturday so long ago. He was a bit skeptical at first, but seemed to be unable to punch holes in their story. He called his news anchor into his office and they shared their story with him as well.

     The two men were unsure what t
o make of these two women. They needed some kind of additional verification before going on air with the story.

     “Here. This may help.” Hannah produced her employee badge for EDI, the NASA contractor they had worked for.

     Sarah was dumbfounded. “How do you still have that? They took mine away.”

     Hannah laughed and said “Oh, they took mine too. This is the original that I thought I’d lost. They made me another one, and then I found this one in the car between the seats.”

     Hensley asked them to wait while he went to another office. He found a number for EDI in San Angelo and called the number.

     “Hello, can I speak to someone in Human Resources please?”

     “Human Resources, this is Sandy. May I help you?”

     “Yes, I’m trying to get ahold of one of your employees, a Miss Hannah Jelinovic.
” He looked at Hannah’s employee badge and spelled the last name for her.

     There was a brief pause. Then
Sandy said “I’m sorry, but she is no longer employed by this company. May I ask your name?”

     “
I am Jason Hensley. I’m with the CBS affiliate in San Antonio. How about a Sarah Spear?”

     There was another pause. This one was a little bit longer than the first. Then “please hold.”

     Hensley’s gut told him there was a lot of scrambling going on at the other end of the phone.

     It was a full two minutes before someone came on the other end of the line.

     “This is Harvey Unwin. May I help you?”

     Hensley could sense the desperation in Unwin’s voice. It told him everything he needed to know, and he knew that ever
y word Hannah and Sarah had told him was true. He hung up the phone and thought of his wife and children, and suddenly felt very queasy.

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     That day at the television studio, everything changed. Not just for Hannah and Sarah, but for the whole world.

     The girls finished a taped interview around two
o’clock. At around the same time, the station’s satellite truck arrived at the EDI office in San Angelo. Sure, they could have asked their counterpart in San Angelo to do a remote for them. But Hensley wanted the scoop. It would be the biggest television scoop since television was invented. And he didn’t want to share it with anyone.

     EDI, of course, had no comment. The crew had to do their segment in
the public street in front of the EDI building. But the company’s silence spoke volumes, and supported the girls’ claims of a cover up. And it strengthened their piece.

     The interview and the
San Angelo remote were sent electronically to CBS News headquarters in Manhattan. They ran it as their lead story on the evening news. The word was out. The world now knew about it, and there was no going back.

     An hour after the story aired on CBS, CNN broke into its regular programming with a breaking news announcement. Many other networks followed suit
.

     The
ten o’clock news on every television station in America led with the story that night.

     The suicide rate that night was
four times what it was on the same night the previous year.

     The White House scheduled a news conference for 8 a.m. the following day. The press room was standing room only, and dozens of reporters with press credentials were turned away. The crowd started gathering by the hundreds on both sides of the White House. Some carried signs. Others
just watched and waited to see what the official White House stance was. A dozen or so members of a gospel choir sang hymns.

     At the appointed hour, President Rick Sanders’ press secretary, John Tull, entered the room and read from a prepared statement.

     “Yesterday, the CBS Evening News broadcast an interview with two women from San Angelo, Texas. The women claimed that a large meteorite is on a collision course with earth, and will impact in the middle of January.

     “
The President wants to reassure the American people that this is not the case. There is no evidence that any meteorite will impact the earth in January or any other date in the foreseeable future.

     “We have been in contact with EDI
Technology in San Angelo. The two women in question, Hannah R. Jelinovic and Sarah Anna Spear, are two disgruntled former employees who were terminated for their poor work habits. EDI has verified that there is no danger from an impact, and that the whole affair is an elaborate hoax dreamed up by the women.

     “As an additional precaution, we have asked the Department of Defense to take control of every observatory in the
United States. We will have government scientists scanning the heavens in the weeks ahead, just to make sure that there is nothing out there on a collision course with earth.

     “The President encourages the nation to go about their business, and to put this unfortunate event out of their minds.”

     Tull finished the statement and took questions, but the only answers he had weren’t really answers. He merely requoted information from the prepared statement.

     In the mine, of course, the group of four was following all of this. Hannah cried, and Mark held her close.

     Sarah was angry.

     “This is bullshit! How can they lie, knowing that their lies will needlessly cause the deaths of millions of people? Why not tell the truth, and give them all a chance to live?”

     Mark said “Because they’re doing what’s most convenient for them, that’s why. They know they have a safe place to go. They don’t want to have to answer to everybody else, or to actually have to try to come up with a way to protect everyone else. It’s typical government crap.”

     Four FBI agents entered the lobby of the KNSA TV in
San Antonio while the news conference was going on. They demanded to see Jason Hensley, then grilled him unmercifully for an hour to determine his role in the “hoax.”

     But Hensley wasn’t a man who was easily intimidated. He’d been a young reporter during the Watergate days, and he knew quite well that
Washington lied and deceived the public on a regular basis.

     “This is no hoax.” He told the agents. “I saw the terror in those women’s eyes. They believe this with all their hearts,
and they were both employed with a company that deals with the type of information they claim. And from what I can see, they have nothing to gain from fabricating this. Rather, they both told me that they knew people out there would try to destroy their reputations.

     “Nothing you can say to me, gentlemen, will convince me that everything they
said wasn’t true. And if I were you, I’d be asking some questions of the federal government. You, and your families, are in the same boat as everyone else. Why don’t you go ask the President why he’s covering this up, and why he isn’t scrambling to get the rest of the population into some kind of long-term shelters?”

     If Hensley
’s words got through to the agents, they weren’t showing it.

     “We’ve been to the residences of both women, and can’t seem to find them. Do you know where we can lo
cate them?”

     “No, I honestly don’t. They said they were going into hiding, and I asked them not to tell me where. I didn’t want to know. And they probably wouldn’t have told me anyway.

     “Those girls are scared. They were warned by the people at EDI that you’d be coming after them for sharing this information with the public. I asked them to tell the people they’re with to contact me if you find them and take them into custody. Because if that happens, I want you to know that it’ll be all over the news. We’ll be demanding to know why two good Americans were imprisoned for blowing the whistle on the biggest government cover up in American history.

     “We have no interest in arresting them. We just want to interview them to find out if there’s an inkling of truth in what they claim.”

     Hensley laughed out loud, and said “Yeah. My ass!”

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     The group’s routine was another thing that changed dramatically that day. The girls went to ground in the mine, and busied themselves with the hundreds of small details that still needed to be done.

    
Bryan cut a trap door into the floor of the elementary kids’ school house and glued a small rug to the top of it. If anyone came close to the mine, the girls would crawl through the trap door and into the small crawlspace beneath the school house, replacing the cover behind them.

    Mark tapped into the coax cable for the I-10 camera on top of Salt Mountain. He added two additional cameras. One pointed east on highway 83, and the other pointed west.

     Any time either of the men
was in a vehicle nearing the mine, they would use their cell phones and make a “hang up” call to the mine’s landline. This would signal the girls to sit at the security console to make sure they weren’t being followed. If they were being followed, the men would have received another hang up call to alert them. Then they’d simply drive past the mine and try to lose their tails.

     That never happened, though. None of them knew exactly why, but they speculated that since the cat was out of the bag, throwing the girls in prison would serve no purpose. Except, maybe, to inflame the situation and support the appearance of a cover
up.

     The only problem they had with federal agents was four days after the interview aired, when Mark finally got around to moving the four chest freezers of Papa John’s pizza from the house in
San Angelo to the mine.

     Mark showed up at the ho
use with his Explorer, twenty two cheap styrofoam beer coolers, and twenty two chunks of dry ice.

     Sitting in front of the house was a black Crown
Victoria with no wheel covers. It may have well have had a big sign on it that said “Look at me, I’m an undercover car!”

     Mark
pulled into the garage and two men in black suits rang his doorbell.

     To Mark, they looked like the men in the movie “
Blues Brothers.” Except their suits weren’t as stylish.

     “We’re with the FBI,” the taller of the two men said.  “We’d like to talk to Hannah Jelinovic about who else at EDI was involved in the cover up. Are you Mr. Jelinovic?”