Kiss My Apocalips Ch. 07

We left the black truck plugged in, and I noted that the green pickup still had three-quarters of a tank. We'd have to carry all the munitions up to storage facilities upstairs, but I thought that perhaps we'd better keep some of them on the main floor of the barn to augment the few in the security cell. We'd discuss it more in the coming days.

After pitching in and getting the animals bedded down for the night, we did much the same thing as we'd done the day before, wandering back to the lodge through the garden, picking our salad as we went. Dinner was already in the oven, a beef pot roast, and it smelled great. I sent a text to Mr. G telling him I wanted to do a conference call in an hour, and I got an immediate positive response. After dinner, we moved back to one of the offices that looked as if it could hold us all, and I initiated the call through a vid screen dock for my watch.

"Great picture strength, Jacob," my teacher commented immediately.

"We have a nice setup here, sir," I told him. "I can't wait to show you around our new place. Can I invite you all for dinner tomorrow? There's plenty of room if you'd like to spend the night."

He and his brother exchanged glances and nodded. "I think we'll take you up on your kind offer. How do we go about getting there?"

"The sheriff knows the way, if you'd like to bring him along. He's the one who told us it was here. And please, bring your lovely wife along, as well."

The prof was anxious to add information. "There has been quite a bit of action going on around a new communications network we've built. I'll send you a link through text. I believe we're going to be able to achieve our goals, thanks to that document your lady friend provided me. I've passed it along, exactly as-is. In this new world, it just might become one of the most important scientific papers in all of history. I'd like to discuss it further, but I suppose it could wait."

"Yes, sir. Let's wait and talk about it tomorrow. If you come mid-day, we could have our little meeting and then dedicate the rest of the afternoon and evening to simply relaxing. I just want to confirm that you'll all be in a single vehicle."

"Um ... yes. I'm sure we'll all fit in the sheriff's big touring car just fine. I'll call and make the arrangements now. If he can't make it, I'll text you back right away. We look forward to seeing you all. Goodbye."

I disconnected, then looked around at the others. "I want you all in that meeting," I told them. "I value your input."

"Sorry, lover," Wanda told me, rubbing the back of my neck affectionately. "There is absolutely nothing I could add to a discussion like that. I'll let you tactical types hash out all the details. I'll do whatever you guys say, but I consider myself a foot soldier in this war."

"Same with me," Sofia chimed in. "Just point toward a hill and yell 'Charge!' and I'll be the first one up; but leave me out of the chain of command."

I pointed to Hannah. "You I need. There will be pointed questions about this facility that will need answering." I turned to Doriana. "And I would really like you by my side for this. Will you join us tomorrow when the time comes?"

"It would be my honor," she said, smiling gratefully.

I looked out the nearest window. It was getting pretty late in the day. "Let's all go out on the back porch. I want to see the sunset."

"We still have half an hour!" Wanda declared. "Hannah and I will meet you out there."

"Better take a few blankets," Hannah warned. "It gets cold fast when the sun goes down."

And so, we made our way through the security room and out onto the wooden porch. The bench swing would easily hold three, so I pulled up three wooden rocking chairs and put them on the same end of the covered area, facing the mountains. Sofia pointed toward a rabbit on the grass, and we were surprised that Rocko didn't notice the thing. He seemed much more interested in a possible belly-rub, and cozied up to Sadie. Doriana brought out a stack of throw blankets from the Great Room. There was a narrow band of clouds, way off in the distance, but it still ought to be a spectacular sight. Just as I was about to go in looking for the other two gals, they showed up with two big bowls of popcorn. They must have poured a stick of butter over the stuff, because it tasted great.

Wanda sat in my lap while I rocked in one of the chairs, and she cuddled into me as we watched the sun approach the horizon. Two more rabbits joined the one on the lawn, and finally, Rocko saw them, brayed shrilly, and bounded off; but he kept tripping over his own ears and falling. The rabbits, sensing this, just stood there, watching, until he got closer; and then they bounded off and ducked under the fence. There was a long, slim horizontal line of pure gold as the sun seemed to touch something between two of the mountains, and I hugged Wanda closer.

"There's your ocean," I told her.

She perked up. "Really? That's the Pacific Ocean?"

"Yep. We can drive there in less than half an hour."

"Can we go swimming there?"

"Too cold!" Sofia and I said simultaneously. We laughed. "This time of year, it's about fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit," I told her. "And it only gets colder from here on out until late spring."

"I'm still going wading!" she declared.

It was a great sunset; one I think I'll never forget. Wanda got more and more affectionate, and I took her to bed early, where our lovemaking was slow and sensuous.

But that meant we were up early the next day, and we resolved to help Hannah complete her morning rounds. Wanda was fascinated with the milking machine, which yielded two gallons in about forty minutes. The calf was being weaned, and seemed content to gnaw on a mouthful of hay, like its mother. It was a female, and Hannah said we needed to either find a new home for it, or slaughter it for veal; an idea that Wanda refused us to even consider. I said I was sure we'd find a new home for it in Acton. The cow would continue to produce milk for another year, she said; and then we'd have to artificially inseminate her again.

There were four small hogs. I wasn't really sure why; especially if Wanda refused to let us harvest them for meat. Hannah suggested we breed them for trade in Acton. And holy mackerel, we had a lot of chickens! Well, what Wanda didn't know wouldn't hurt her. I suspected a fresh chicken dinner might be somewhere in our distant future; but for now, there was plenty of chicken meat frozen in the basement of the lodge.

Back at the lodge, we found oatmeal and toast for breakfast. Hannah had plans for a batch of apple butter in the coming weeks, and maybe some apple or pear jelly; so, we talked about that for awhile. Sadie found some kind of journal that was written by one of the original owners, and she shared some of its content. Apparently, the entire philosophy of the mountaintop lodge was that any attacker would be after the property, not the people in it. It wouldn't make any sense for someone to bomb the place into rubble, since the only thing left would be rubble. If THEY were doing the attacking, they'd be after the produce, the livestock, the foodstuffs, the weapons and the vast storerooms of parts and supplies.Maybe the women. The concept of someone attacking the place for the sole purpose of killing one of the residents had never dawned on anyone. The result was a defensive plan aimed at an attacking ground force.

She'd found a manual for the drones near the bunkers. As I suspected, they were sitting atop charging stations so that they could be pressed into action immediately. The doors were electrically controlled and hydraulically operated. The drones were intended to hover over their intended target and drop bombs that were armed by a small propeller in the back spinning up after deployment. They had contact fuses. There were six grenade-size bombs in each, and when they had all been deployed, the drones were programmed to return to the lawn behind the barn. There were four drones in each launching box, and four boxes total, one in front of each bunker.

I took a walkie talkie and went down to one of the side bunkers, then watched as Sadie and Doriana activated one of the installations and raised the lid on the container. From my perspective, I couldn't see the contents. Still, since Hannah had never worked with these devices, it was nice to know they worked (at least up to this point in our little test).

"We're tracking a vehicle coming up the driveway, Jacob," Doriana's voice told me. "It's the sheriff's big touring car. You'd better come back up here. We're forming a welcoming committee."

"On my way."

I followed the pathway back through the garden and got to the lodge just as the four of them were getting out and stretching, looking all around them.

"Ain't it everything I told you it was?" the sheriff was saying in his overly-loud voice. Then he surprised us all by yelling: "Hannah!" as the dark-haired lady walked down the front steps. It made sense that she was the last to join the welcome party, since she had been inside opening and closing the main gate.

"Hello, Justin," she said, nodding to him.

"You two know each other?" I asked incredulously.

"Justin was here as a guest, about six months ago," she said. I couldn't read her expression.

"How the goddamn hell are you still here?" he asked loudly, as he limped heavily on his cane right up to her and gave her a kiss on the lips. She looked startled by the act, but didn't seem to object.

"Justin Hardcase?" I asked incredulously.

"My friends call me JJ," he told me pointedly. "You can call me Sheriff." He guffawed at his own comment.

The prof handed a six-pack of root beer to Sadie, who looked overjoyed by the gift.

"What a wonderful place!" Mrs. G told me, and gave me a kiss on the cheek, which I accepted bashfully. I shook hands with the professor, and then with my teacher. The girls introduced Hannah to each of them, and then hustled my teacher's wife away in the center of the female group, chatting as they went. I showed them around the lower floor, then I helped them carry their bags up to the top level and into the rooms Hannah had assigned them.

Back downstairs, we found sandwiches laid out, and we filled paper plates and wandered outside to eat while the ladies sat around the table and gossiped about this and that. I answered as many questions as I could about the garden and the big barn on the other side; but half the queries would have to wait until Hannah could tackle them.

When the meal was deemed complete, I took everybody into one of the office spaces that had a conference table in the center, and I went in to get the three women whowould also attend our big meeting. Wanda took Mrs. G and Sofia and started walking through the garden toward the barn. I sat between Sadie and Doriana, while the sheriff made it a point to sit next to Hannah. The brothers sat at the other end of the table.

"Yoshihara made it," the professor said, opening. "And he's in the U.S."

"Oh my gosh!" Sadie said, clearly impressed. "That's wonderful news!" She turned toward me. "Doctor Yoshihara is one of the foremost experts in Quantum Engineering," she explained. "He can confirm the science behind what I heard when Doctor Hyphen took me out on that date. He can also lend his opinion about howthe whole processmight have been implemented."

"Our email attachments from your transcribed comments have been making the rounds," the doc continued. "So far, it's been shared more than a thousand times between academics and other serious internet users; and there have been several 'translations,' not just between languages, but attempts to simplify it, so that the general public can understand what was done, and by whom. Your phrase 'The Evil Doctor Hyphen' is catching on all over the world; and that, if nothing else, is going to drive Barrington-Smythe absolutely crazy."

"Do you think she's in danger?" I asked him.

"Yes, I do. Keep in mind that he probably believes that his entire purpose in life is to observe the reactions to the things he's perpetrated. You can't be a successful observer if you are personally engaged in the actions around you. And by distributing the document you sent us, we have placed him front and center in the minds of all the people in this new universe. You have essentially ruined his primary goal in life: that of being an outside observer."

"I want you to know how terrible I feel about that," Sadie replied with a smirk.

"But we are finding some gaps in our security here," Doriana commented. "If he comes, he'll be coming after an individual; not after our resources. And we're not just trying to protect one person; there are half a dozen of us here."

I shook my head. "If we determine he's coming, we'll either all run or we'll limit our people to just the two of us. I might be able to protect us if our exposure is narrow enough."

"Don't even think about it, lover," Doriana countered. "You should know better than that. We'd never leave you. Where you go, we all go."

"How's he ever going to find us, anyway?" I asked everyone. "It's not like anyone knows we're here."

Mr. G shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Well ... I'm afraid that there's a very good chance he knows already. One of the tech guys who has been keeping our phones working noticed what he believes to be a tracing program that's been implanted into the coding for all our communication devices. Hyphen can't disrupt the internet or comm links that already exist, but he probably has the tech in place to know who's talking to whom. I ran a test from a secure computer to see if I could get a location identification tag from your last call, and I got the lat/long of this facility. The previous owners didn't seem to value the privacy of their electronic footprint."

"Not part of their philosophy," I grumbled. "The girls and I have already had this conversation." I looked around. "So, we have to assume that our adversary knows where we are. Now, we have to determine several things: What is the danger? Who of us is most at risk? Where are we the safest? And, if that's somewhere else, where do we go and when?"

"What we really need is some intel on what the threat is," Doriana said thoughtfully. "Was our Evil Doctor ever in the military?"

"No, but he could probably afford to pay for a mercenary army, all by himself," the doc said. "His family made its fortune in weapons manufacture and export, first in England and then in the southwestern U.S. The man was worth well over a billion dollars, and he could undoubtedly afford anything he wants.

"What, and how, do you pay someone after an apocalypse?" my science teacher asked.

"He would have figured that out before he triggered The Event," his brother answered. He thought a moment. "But, quite frankly, I don't know."

"How many people are left?" Sadie asked. "Less than one percent, I assume."

"From what I can determine from geographical samplings, computer analysis indicates almost exactly zero point two five percent," the professor answered.

"Yep. That makes sense," Sadie said, nodding. "I can almost guarantee you that we were not the only new manifestation. He undoubtedly ran numerous trials; point-five, point-seven-five, one; probably all the way up to two or three percent. The overriding question would be: did he build on successive models, or did he change them for each iteration? Because if we ... if I ... am present in each model, it could easily foul his entire project, depending on if I'm rescued in the other worlds like I was in this one."

"Oh, I feel so sorry for him!" Doriana said facetiously.

The haptic alarm on my watch suddenly went off. Knowing that Sofia or Wanda would only call in an emergency, I answered it immediately. "What's wrong?"

"You guys need to get out here! Outside! Pronto! Right now!" Wanda declared.

We all stood simultaneously, but Doriana led the way back out to the Great Room and then across the front porch and out onto the front lawn. From the porch, I could see Wanda, Sofia and Mrs. G out in the garden, and they were all looking up into the sky and pointing. I can remember thinking that it would be just great if an alien armada decided to pick right now to land in our garden. But then, walking down the front steps myself, I heard it: the sound of a single-engine light airplane off in the distance, getting nearer.

"Over there!" Doriana said, pointing toward our left; and I saw the craft coming toward us. It was a sleek, very distinctive low-wing plane with a T-tail. It obviously had retractable landing gear, and it streaked past us at very low level, right over the middle of the garden area. Mrs. G was waving her arms at it, and as it sped away, it rocked its wings left and right, then banked sharply to the left and climbed.

Hannah was suddenly beside me with another shotgun. Where did she get these things? I put out my right hand and held the barrel lightly. "I don't think a shotgun would do much good at this distance," I told her. "And anyway, we should try to understand what it is they want before we start blasting."

It was making another approach at us from the same direction, but this time a thousand feet or so above us, and it was travelling much slower. I could see that its flaps were partially extended behind the wings; which, in my understanding, allowed it to travel slower without stalling. When it was just about overhead, it yawed a little to the left, and then we saw something falling from the left side of the thing. The turbo engine revved and the plane shot forward and began climbing while its flaps retracted. The falling object sprouted a white parachute over itself and floated gently downward. Wanda was jumping and running toward whatever it was, though she had to detour around various plants and their supports.

I took the walkway out across the planting area, the others following, and after Wanda had retrieved the object, she rushed to give it to me. The parachute was a clip-on affair, and evidently manufactured for situations such as this. It was attached to a fanny-pack. On a whim, before I checked it, I unsnapped the latch and wrapped the pack around Wanda's waist. It fit almost perfectly; so, obviously, it was a woman's accessory. I unzipped it and took out a funny-looking phone and a hand-written note on white paper. I handed the phone to Doriana and unfolded the note.

"Privyetik, my friends. We have used to work for Evil Doctor Hyphen. I love that name. We have come to seek asylum and offer services as your new Air Force. We think you need one. Doctor Hyphen Security Force coming to you now. 30 peoples that will probably attack you in three days. If okay with you, we will drive to your house on mountain tomorrow morning. If that okeedokee, please call on phone. Das vaydania. Dmitri"

"What kind of phone is this?" Doriana asked.

I took it from her and studied it. It had no activation key and no holo display, but it did seem to have a hinge on one side; so, I gingerly unfolded it to reveal a push-button keypad with only numbers. Fascinated, I pushed the green "call" button at the bottom.

"Alloalloallo," a man answered. There was a lot of background noise. "I assume you read my little note. Juanita, she help me write. You probably not believe, but English not my first language. So. You call. So, it okay we come. Right? We just want you not shoot us."

"I am intrigued to hear what you have to tell us, Dmitri. If you drive up here in one vehicle, we promise to welcome you. What time do you think you might arrive?"

"We find place with JP, yes? I see Florence Municipal on chart. Maybe dat. If so, we leave at dawn and see you soon after dat. Okay?"

"Okay, Dmitri. We look forward to meeting you. Just call again if you need to speak to us. Bye."