The East Wing had been overtaken. Inside and out, hundreds of thousands of mammals-dogs, raccoons, rats, squirrels, possums-were streaming uphill into the iconic building, swarming like ants. The gunfire was constant now. As I ran alongside Alvarez I saw a luminous orange glow lighting up the sky to the northeast. I pointed to it.
"What's-"
"The Capitol's on fire" was all he said. We kept running.
Alvarez rushed me into a waiting truck. The marine guard at the east gate was down, blood running over his dress blues, his face chewed off. Alvarez glanced at him, raised his AA-12, and squeezed a lackadaisical stream of firepower in the direction of the handful of mold-spotted dogs still working on the body.
"God help us," Alvarez said, crossing himself.
"Help us?" I said. "God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, didn't he? I know I'm just a scientist, but it looks like we've pissed him off again."
An hour later, I was wheels-up in the air on an air force 737 back to New York.
With the White House overrun, a new plan had been hatched. The government was moving north. Extremely north. About as north as you could get, actually. The scientists and government were supposed to pack up and regroup at Thule Air Base in northern Greenland, 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
The only good thing to say about it was that we were coming to New York first to get the other scientists who had come to the meeting.
Great, I thought. That means I get to spend the apocalypse holed up in an igloo with Harvey Saltonstall. Then they told me Harvey had been mauled to death by dogs.
"Oh," I said.
They said family had to stay behind, but I was having none of it.
I found Leahy up near the plane's cockpit.
Reluctant to throw any of my weight around up until this point, I threw it now as hard as I could.</ol>
"You either have my wife and kid on the tarmac, Leahy, or you shitheels can go to Greenland and figure it out by yourselves."
When Chloe and Eli came through the airplane's door, I tackled them into a seat. We hugged each other and cried for about ten years. For a short, dark time I thought I might never see them again, but, luckily, for once I was wrong.
The plane kicked its heels and was airborne again. It began to rain when we were zipping over Canada, but the plane ascended to a higher altitude. As we broke above the clouds, a bright, luminous glow came into the cabin. High off to our right, a full moon was rising bright and clear in the cold, and the clouds skirted by beneath us like a river of silver silk.
That's when Eli saw something.
"Daddy! Look!"
He was sitting in my lap, pointing out the window.
Rising from a cloud to the east was some kind of mass. A kind of dark, moving cone, it looked like. A cloud? It was black, dense. Flapping. Alive.
We seemed to be flying toward it-or did it come toward us? At first I thought it was a cloud of birds. More birds in one place than ever imaginable. But then I realized they were bats. They were swarming in an upside-down pyramid, revolving incessantly, mindlessly flying around and around, chasing each other, endlessly moving up and up …
Bong!
"Seat belts!" was all I heard on the PA system. Then we flew into them.
I grabbed my wife and my son and held them to me as what sounded like the fist of God pounded on the plane. The bats flapped against the aircraft, spattered on the windows, were sucked into the engines, and shot out like bloody confetti, a vast black cloud of frantic scurrying and flapping. The starboard engine blew out a moment later, and in another moment we were descending. I closed my eyes and pressed my family to my heart as we plummeted, screaming, toward the earth.
Luckily-in a word-our pilot was an Iraq war vet, used to evasive maneuvers. We dropped several thousand feet in only a few seconds.
But after we came out of the bat tornado, the pilot got the engine working again somehow, and he turned the plane around and headed south and west. We were able to make an emergency landing in Syracuse.
Other planes weren't so fortunate, we learned. Three airliners were downed. Hundreds more gone. How many would die in this war before it was over? I thought as I huddled in Hancock International Airport's crowded terminal with my family. I didn't know. No one did.
Epilogue
THULE AIR BASE
QAANAAQ, GREENLAND
PART OF ME still believes that it's possible to turn the world around. I don't know how yet, but we will. The greatest known power in the universe is the resilience of man coupled with his intellect. He tinkers and tests and fights through to solutions.
How noble in reason, as Hamlet said. How infinite in faculty. In apprehension how like a god.
I know we will make it. Because from where I write this, I can see my son, Eli. As I look upon his innocent face, so like his mother's, there is only one thing, one feeling that lingers.
The love my mother and father gave me grows inside of him, day by day, and one day he will pass it on to his wife and child, and it will continue.
We will survive because, although we make a mess of things, we have the hope and faith and will to make things better for ourselves and for those we love.
Making things better is what we do.
Is it?
I don't know.
Maybe.
I am recording this from a bunker. It's November, the cold season, and temperatures here hover around minus ten degrees Fahrenheit.
It is dark outside now. It's almost always dark here in our new, frigid home. The wind makes the walls shudder. I hear its constant, whistling howl even in my dreams now. As if the earth itself is in mourning.
In the nearly twenty-four-hour darkness, sixty-mile-an-hour winds howl off the mountains onto the white desert of the ice cap. Almost no mammals live here, so we are blissfully safe in using our generators and radios. Lucky us.
No matter how bad it is, I put on my arctic suit and go outside once a day, to stare forlornly at the brutal horizon. I consider it a pilgrimage of sorts, a penance for my sins, for all our sins. It doesn't make me feel better, but I do it anyway. I guess I have finally found religion, in a way. I suppose the end of the world will do that.
There have been several suicides, mostly among Washington people-senators and representatives accustomed to soft living. There is no soft living now.
Communication with the continental US is sporadic. Supplies still seem to be coming in, but there are rumors of chaos back in the States. Lawless bands of people roam the streets, fighting animals and one another. For years, some in our country have advocated modern man's return to nature. It seems as though they have finally gotten their wish.</ol>
In the hours of isolation and boredom, I think about what has happened. Unlike many of my colleagues, I don't blame technology. Petroleum improved human life. So did cell phones. No one knew that the combination of the two would eventually lead to biological disaster. We screwed up. It happens.
But I dreamed that dream again last night. I dream it often.
The dream of the death spiral. The ants I saw once in Costa Rica. There was a circle in the sand. The squirming black whirlpool. Thousands and thousands of ants, all running together in an endless circle. Blindly, they follow each other, each one locked onto the pheromone trail of the ant in front of him. Running themselves in circles, circles. Running themselves to death. A closed loop. A snake biting its tail. A symbol of futility. Locked in their loop, the ants run around and around in circles-desperate, stupid, doomed.
THEY ARE SWORN TO PROTECT AND SERVE-NEW YORK'S RICH AND FAMOUS
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HENRY MUHLENBERG CLAMPED his hand down hard over Edie Coburn's mouth. She sank her teeth into the soft flesh of his palm and threw her head back, but he didn't let go. The last thing he needed was for some idiot to walk past her trailer and hear her screaming.
Her body convulsed. Once. Twice. Again. Again. She shuddered and went limp in his arms.
He eased his hand off her mouth.
"Get me a cigarette," she said. "They're on the counter."
Muhlenberg slid off the sofa and padded naked to the other side of the trailer. He was twenty-eight, a German wunderkind who made edgy films that critics loved and nobody went to see. Fed up with driving a ten-year-old Opel and living in a one-bedroom apartment in Frankfurt, he sold his soul for a Porsche 911, a house in the Hills, and a three-picture film deal.
The first picture had tanked, the second made six mil-a home run for an indie, but in big-studio speak a colossal failure. If this one didn't blow the roof off the multiplexes, he'd be back in Deutschland, shooting music videos for garage bands.
It was his final at-bat, and now that bitch Edie Coburn was screwing it up. He had come to her trailer to negotiate a truce between her and her asshole husband, Ian Stewart, who unfortunately was also her costar. Negotiate? More like grovel.
"Edie, please," he had said. "We've got a full crew and a hundred extras standing around with the meter running. It's costing the studio a thousand dollars for every minute you refuse to come out and shoot this scene."
"Ian should have thought of that before he started banging that brainless bundle of silicone and peroxide."
"You don't know that for a fact," he said. "The rumor about Ian and Devon is just that-a rumor. Probably started by some flack at the studio to get advance buzz about the movie."
"I don't know about Germany, Herr Muhlenberg, but here in New York, all rumors are true."
"Look, I'm not a marriage counselor," he said. "I know you and Ian have problems, but I also know you're a professional. What'll it take to get you into wardrobe and onto the set?"