“Chris!”
We turn back to the jet.
Two children—a boy and a girl—peek out from the doorway. The girl is about twelve, and her curly hair is pulled into a puff that sits at the back of her head, held back with a pink scarf. The boy is younger, maybe six, and clutches a stuffed green dog to his chest.
“Des!” the kid—Chris—shouts back. “Get back inside until I tell you to come out.”
“It’s okay,” Jamie says. He slings the rifle over his shoulder and shows Chris his hands. I follow his lead and holster my gun. “We’re not gonna hurt anyone.”
Chris looks unsure, and I already clocked the lack of gun on his part. I turn back to the kids and give a friendly wave. Neither of them returns it.
“Well,” Chris says. “I got some bad news.” He motions for us to follow him as he heads for the jet.
Jamie and I follow, keeping our distance. Chris lunges up the stairs two at a time and hands his backpack to the girl, saying something to her that we can’t hear. She disappears into the plane as Jamie and I come to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. I cast a quick glance at Jamie, gauging how he feels about this, but he seems calm.
“I’m Chris. My little sister’s Desiree, and my brother’s Keith.” He tugs at the stuffed dog Keith holds to his chest as Desiree emerges from the jet cabin, a massive navy-blue binder in her arms.We give him our names and he nods.
He takes the heavy binder from Desiree and comes halfway down the stairs.
“Assuming you two were expecting a bit more than...” Chris glances around the empty airport, then back at us. “Us, I guess.”
“Kind of,” I say. “I mean, it’s nice to see other people....” Especially other people who aren’t armed and seem friendly. It’s also weirdly nice to see someone our age.
Chris holds out the binder to us. “You should take a look at this.”
I take the binder and a laminated paper falls out. Jamie bends down to pick it up and I open the binder. The pages inside look like they’re wrinkled from being out in the elements, but the computer printouts are still readable. The three rings holding them together are bent and scratched. I flip to the first page, which reads:TOP SECRET CLASSIFIED—SUPPLEMENTAL MATL DECEMBER 16th INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING.
Jamie shows me the laminated paper and hope slowly drains from my body like blood from an open wound. It’s hope I didn’t know existed until it was already on its way out.
The letterhead has the presidential seal at the top, and under it, it saysTHE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON. The letter is dated December 17.
“Where did you get this?” Jamie asks.
Chris nods toward the dead body by the stair car. “Him. He was Benjamin Wilson. Poor dude was in over his head. Well, guess we all kinda were, huh?”
Jamie glances over the letter. “He was an intern?”
“That’s a hardwas,” Chris says pointedly. “Things changed pretty quickly in the White House toward the end, so who knows what his official title was when he got sick. Anyway, he was the last one alive and knew people would come out here—people like us—hoping to find some help from the EU.”
“Who killed him?” I ask, nervous. Maybe it was this kid after all and he didn’t like what Benjamin Wilson had to say.
“Killed himself. Got sick and decided to try to do something right before he died.”
I flip through the intelligence briefing in the binder. There’s an official-looking Morse code printout on a US Navy letterhead,which I can’t understand. But the page after translates it.
No aid available.
Quarantine failed.
Second wave worse.
Closing down.
Jamie sighs and reads a passage from the letter aloud for me. “‘We got word from leaders in The Hague that there’s been a resurgence of the virus. There is no help coming. Signals in Japan, Russia, India, and Brazil have gone dead. South Africa stopped responding in October. UAE and Iran reached out in November, but nothing since. We’re on our own.’”
The rest of the pages in the binder are previous briefings, including all the things they hid from us. They knew in July how high the mortality rate was—99.99 percent, which, why not round it up to aneven 100 percent, guys? They didn’t tell us that until August when we had all but figured it out for ourselves. There’s a study on DNA and infection rate that’s way over my head. And in the last briefing document in bold:Estimated world casualties ~73-86% of pop.
I close the binder. I don’t need to see any more.
