Seven Unholy Days (7 page)

“I see. Let me point out the fact that this email was sent to the President’s personal emailbox, which has an address that changes daily and is accessible only to a minute number of high-level officials. There’s obviously a well-placed agent in the system. Is there anything you can tell me that might help? This sonofabitch is obviously not through with us.”

“The sabotage is sophisticated, very pro. Breaking it is doable but it’s taking some time. We were just about to manually engage a grid when the fax came in.”

“Exactly what does that mean?”

“We’re going to bypass the automated systems and manually switch this area back on.”

“In other words, you’re about to circumvent the Decree of Darkness.”

“I suppose we are. In light of this email, I’ll defer to your judgment on whether to proceed.”

“I want the President to make that call, Mr. Decker. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve talked to him.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Director. I’ll await your call.”

“Oh, and Mr. Decker?”

“Yes sir.”

“Agent Rowe is one of our best agents. I trust he and his team are being helpful to you?”

“Yes sir.” I looked at Rowe before continuing. “Agent Rowe and his team have been extremely helpful to us here.”

“Good. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Goodbye sir.” I hung the phone up and Rowe wiped the sweat off his red face with the sleeve of his once-crisp-but-now-soggy white button-down. He had pulled the suit jacket off sometime between eighty-five and ninety degrees on the thermometer at the front of the room.

“Look, Decker—”

“Mr. Decker, Mr. Tarkleton is back on the blue line for you,” the secretary said.

Great. “Call me Matt, okay?” There was no need to rub his nose in it, especially since I wanted to stay in their loop as much as possible.

“Okay, Matt,” Rowe said.

I too the call.
“Hello, Tark.”

“Everybody’s ready here. How long before you engage the grid?”

“We’ve had a complication here.”

“Do not tell me that, Matthew. I’ve told the hospital power is coming.”

“We were getting ready to engage when a fax came in from the White House. “ I read it to him.

“Sweet Jesus,” he said. “I understand the bind you’re in, Matthew. Just remember real lives are at stake right now.”

“Tark, I’ll do what I can.”

10

3:36 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

             
Our internal network was working perfectly. It allowed Great American Electric and all four of the control centers to communicate in the absence of external power or networks. Two-way satellite links and a sophisticated private tunnel on the Internet made it work.

“What’s your name?” I said to Metal Face.

“Neo, dude. As in The Matrix.”

How clever. “Fine. Neo, how about you and your crew work these email headers and see if you can nail down a source?”

“Sorry, dude. I don’t take orders from fascists.”

“Game over,” one of his contemporaries said with a cackle.

“Bitchin’ truth,” said another.

“Agent Rowe,” I said loudly without taking my eyes off Neo. “I seem to be having a bit of trouble with your team. Would you please explain to your flaming friend that I’m about two seconds from pulling his arm off and shoving it up his na
rrow ass?”

“Decker calls the computer shots. What he says, you do. Is that clear?” Rowe had become oddly cooperative since my chat with his boss.

“Lighten up, dude. Just yanking your chain; no need to get bent,” Neo said.

“Work the emails.” I slapped the printouts down in front of him. They murmured but went to work. I knew they wouldn’t find a source but their depth of penetration would show me what they could do, and the project would also keep them out of my way.

             
“Guys, the Emergency Broadcast System is coming online in a couple of minutes,” Rowe said. He headed to the lounge, with me, Stocky, and Skinny close behind. Neo and his gang stood to follow. “Stay on the emails,” I said.

Fox had the EBS crisis contract this year and their lead a
nchor was on the screen as we crowded into the room. “Before we begin our coverage, we have a request to pass on to everyone watching, or listening, since the audio feed is also available via radio. The vast majority of your fellow Americans do not have access to these broadcasts. Please spread the word to your neighbors as best you can. We’re all in this together and we appreciate your cooperation.

“We’re telling you what we know, as we know it. The Uni
ted States is at this moment without electrical power. To say the least, this is unprecedented. Power outages in the past, even the worst ones, were confined to cities or occasionally a geographic region, but we’ve never seen anything of this magnitude. Yesterday, three Southern states lost power at the same time. We have no official confirmation that this national failure is related to what happened down South, but we assume there’s a connection.

“We will be covering the situation continuously. Since we are now operating under the auspices of the Emergency Broa
dcast System, there will be no commercial breaks. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Association, has asked us to make it clear that steps are being taken to restore power as quickly as possible—”

The intercom announced a call for me from the FBI Director. “Yes sir ... yes sir, we’re still ready to go here ... yes, there is a risk to the system with a manual override, but I think we can make it work ... understood ... goodbye sir ...

“We have permission from the President to proceed with the override of this first grid. If we can make it work without damaging the system, we’re to draft detailed instructions and distribute them to the other centers. He wants the power back on and damn the threats of consequences.”

I called Tark and gave him the news. Two minutes later we were rolling the countdown yet again. “Abdul, on my mark, five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... mark!” We simultaneously keyed in the final override codes. The command sequence scrolled across the monitors, ordering a series of twenty massive primary switches positioned throughout a seventy-five-mile r
adius to close their circuits. One by one they reported their status back to the system:

PRSW12 COMMAND EXECUTED—CIRCUIT CLOSED

PRSW07 COMMAND
EXECUTED—CIRCUIT CLOSED

PRSW16 COMMAND EXECUTED—CIRCUIT CLOSED

…

On the big screen, Mississippi was still dark. Then I saw a flicker of green, followed by another, and another. It was working; the sectors were coming back online. When Yellow Creek’s sector went hot I heard the throaty air conditioning units rumble into life and a welcome dose of cool air followed shortly. I found the nearest vent and stood directly under it as a smattering of applause broke out among the crackers. They may not like me but they couldn’t help admiring our work.

“Nice job, gentlemen,” Rowe said with a smile on his face.

Stocky grunted, walked into an adjacent office he had commandeered, and slammed the door. I looked through the window as he flopped into a chair. He saw me watching and quickly closed the blinds, glaring at me until his beady eyes vanished behind the slats.

11

8:22 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

HART COMPLEX

             
Abraham Hart and Dane Christian stood outside the bunker-in-a-barn, gazing west as the orange sun settled into the horizon on a canvas of painted clouds. After all the fine work he and Riff had done for Hart, Dane expected at least a token remark of consolation to acknowledge the loss of his only brother. He did not get one.

Instead, he was again chastised for bringing a witness to the complex. After that, Hart had simply stopped talking and stared at him with those ice-blue eyes as they stood there in the middle of frigging nowhere.

Even though they were supposed to be on the same team, Dane was wondering more and more if there was really anybody at all on the Hart team other than Hart. When he hired them a couple of years before, Hart had been friendly, charismatic. He understood how Hart attracted his gaggle of brainwashed believers. Over the past months, however, he became more and more distant, obsessed with the most intricate details, increasingly harsh to paid workers. The charm was now shown only to the volunteers. Riff had called them the worker ants.

After staring at the sunset for five minutes or so, Hart closed his eyes and began to speak again, face still turned toward the sun. “You are certain the Central device is ready?”

“I installed it myself.”

“You have established communication with it from here?”

“I have. We picked up that grid override in Central the moment it happened. In fact, we knew about it before it happened. I left an audio monitor in place. We’re listening to every word that’s said in that control room. Trust me, Mr. Hart, everything’s ready.”

“I should hope so. But I trust no one. In my life, I have found no human being worthy of my trust. Not one.” He again stopped talking for several minutes before continuing. “In fact, I have found very few even worthy of salvation from utter d
estruction. This world cries out for a new era.”

Despite the warmth of the summer sun, his voice chilled Dane to the bone. And then for some stupid, bizarre, irritating, nonsensical reason, the image of the teenagers in the truck in Mississippi flashed through his mind, laughing, screaming, full of life. Just like he and Riff did in another lifetime when they were teenagers in an old Ford, circling the town square, revving the engine at every guy they met, Riff always on the lookout for the next girlfriend. Baby brother could always get the babes. Now baby brother was buried in an unmarked Mississippi grave.

Hart turned and headed toward the bunker. He stopped and turned back toward Dane. “Oh, Mr. Christian, I have decided the woman you brought with you will make an excellent concubine. Have her delivered to my quarters by this evening. Be certain that she is dressed in white.”

Dane stood gazing into the peaceful sky long after Hart had gone inside, trying to recall the exact point in his life when his humanity totally disappeared. He could not remember, and swallowed four pills of some sort to ease the pain.

He swore he could feel the tumor growing now, pushing his brain out of the way to make more room for its deadly mass. Soon it would push too far. Would there be even one person to remember him as anything other than a monster?

8:36 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

HART COMPLEX, PRIVATE CHAMBERS

“You are a lovely lady. Always do as I say and you will live comfortably in my service. You will naturally enjoy the time we spend together, but you are never to let that show. You are a servant to deliver pleasure to me and to eventually bear my children. Is that clear?”

Jana’s life over the last day or so had been, to put it mildly, unsettling. She had found a dead man in her house, been ki
dnapped, watched the planting of a bomb near home, hauled across the country to God knows where, and now here she was in this black underground room with this freak laying out what, a job description for resident whore? As revolting as the thought was of actually fulfilling the duties, playing along seemed the safest way to proceed at the moment. If she could figure out what made him tick perhaps she could exploit a weakness. She smiled and nodded in response to his question.

“You know, you remind me of my mother. She was an American woman, blond like you ... ” Jana watched Hart as he stopped speaking in mid-sentence and stared into thin air. After five minutes or so, he said, “Yes, I think Mother would like you.”

Maybe Mom was the key. “Where is she now?”

“That, my dear, is a fascinating question.” He stood up and paced the room several times, finally coming to a stop standing in front of Jana while she sat on a long black sofa, his face alight with enthusiasm. “While I cannot be absolutely certain, there is a better than average chance that at this very moment my naked mother is lying face down on a raft of thorny brambles, floating on a lake of fire within the sulfurous scarps of hell. If that be the case, it naturally follows that she is being sodomized by a horde of beak-faced demons.”

Jana swallowed hard and forced herself to act as if it was the most logical thing she had ever heard. “Naturally.” Whatever Mom was the key to, needed to stay locked tight.

Hart smiled and sat down next to Jana. She swallowed hard and clasped her hands together.

“What about your father, is he alive?” she said.

“Come.” He stood up and extended his hand. She took it, all the while fighting the almost irresistible urge to puke all over the crazy bastard.

“Why, thank you.” Jana followed Hart through a maze of dimly lit black corridors and eventually arrived in a room the size of a walk-in closet. He flicked a switch and the room was bathed in the otherworldly glow from black lights hidden behind valances where the walls met the ceiling. He pushed a button and a panel opened up in one of the walls, revealing a cubbyhole about a foot cubed, also lit with black lights. In the center of the cube was a glass display jar filled with clear liquid. In the liquid was a pair of eyeballs. Jana felt a lump well up in her throat as her stomach roiled and her mind spun. “Is that ... I mean, are those ... ”

“Yes, my precious. Dear old Dad.”

Jana, being a natural conversationalist, instinctively said, “May I ask why you keep his eyes?” The moment the words left her lips, she wondered if she had made a mistake.

Hart looked at Jana, then the eyes, then back to her, his e
xpression betraying nothing. This went on for two or three minutes before he finally said, “Come with me.”

After turning off the lights and locking the door, he walked farther down the dim corridor and into another dark room. He flipped a switch and Jana froze in mid-stride.