‘Aren’t you a little young to be a General?’ Elizabeth shut the door behind Logan and ushered him inside. It wasn’t safe to be out in the open, especially now that night was settling in, and they would be more active. She pushed the switches on her seven makeshift lights to turn them off. It was better to keep the lights as low as possible so that it would not attract unwanted attention.
That left just the candle light which was ample even though it did nothing to warm the open space. This lady was a cop. There was no doubt about it. She was as tough as nails. Even if Logan had left that rapist to it he would have guessed that she would have made it out intact. She still had her bolt upright posture, color in her face, and spunk in her attitude. She was fine.
Fine after a rape attempt. Only someone quite used to the evil in the world could come back from that emotionally. A picture of her in uniform, still dutifully placed on the fridge via a colorful magnet, confirmed that suspicion. Just her on the picture though. No partner. That was interesting.
She had pulled up her jeans and fastened them a notch tighter than they obviously would have been under normal circumstances. She had on a vest top but had since pulled on a thick blue overcoat. She put a hat on too, a silly woolly one, that made her look a lot younger than she was. She approached him by the fridge in her small kitchen.
‘What’s your story?’ She asked, pulling Logan’s gaze from the picture on the fridge. ‘Since you seem to have figured out mine…’ She smiled. She was one Hell of a tom boy. Logan would have put money on her not even owning an item of makeup. He sighed a long drawn out sigh. He wasn’t one for indulging people on the life story.
‘Until a month ago I was retired. Got called back to try and find a way to stop the virus and end a war that hadn’t yet begun. I work for a civilian agency, one that I used to command, called the WDC. Weaponised Disease Control.’ Lizzie recoiled instantly at that last sentence.
‘This thing is weaponised?’ She interrupted and spoke a lot louder than she should have. Logan raised his finger and placed it vertically over his lips. She blushed just a little and looked embarrassed that she had made such a silly mistake.
‘No.’ He continued. ‘That’s for sure. We thought it was at first but no. Nobody knows what it is.’ That cut the conversation for now. He cocked his head to look at her thin sides.
‘Looks like you haven’t eaten for days.’ He let his eyes sit on her curved hips a while. She looked malnourished and verged on getting ill. ‘Why did you stay here?’ He asked her but she didn‘t reply.
They moved into the living space and she sat down on the two seater black couch. It was big and comfy. Probably where Logan was going to end up spending the night. No chance could they travel now anyway. Not with the increased activity and the bitterly horrid cold.
This must be the worst winter in living memory. Not just a bad one. A biblically bad one. It was fitting though. A biblical plague and a biblical winter. Logan paced, arms folded over his warm jacket, over to the window. The curtains were closed but in addition she had nailed sheets over the glass. He pulled one gently aside and stood directly behind the small gap so that he could see out but nothing else could see in past his sizable frame.
The street below was empty. The snow still fell in volumes and all but the busses on the road had long since been buried. He stared as far as he could into the distance. He could make out a few of them. Not going anywhere, not aroused at all, just stood dormant in the freezing cold. That was how they needed to stay. The longer he peered the more chances he had of being spotted.
He sighed. ‘You don’t know the City is in quarantine then?’ Logan pulled the dark sheet back over so that it again covered every square inch of the glass. It was only single glazed and the frost had already formed on both sides. The sheet would help keep that out but it was going to be a long and cold night.
‘Quarantine?’ She sounded confused and almost a little dazed.
‘Yeah… You had no idea?’ She didn’t reply, just slumped back into the couch and looked visibly shaken. She had been expecting the cavalry any day now. She had been holding out for rescue. She felt stupid and it showed. She had done ok though to be fair to her. There were plenty of provisions in that room alone and she had obviously looted the other apartments for spare blankets and material that could be burned. Those items, like wood from broken down shelves and duvet covers pulled off abandoned beds, were stacked high in the corner behind the couch. She was resourceful and she was tough.
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’ Logan urged her and sat beside her unprompted. She looked uncomfortable about it at first but got over it quickly. She was single he bet. He came to that conclusion instantly as he saw her face drop when he sat next to her. The idea of a man sitting with her was clearly alien. He would have put money on his guess that she had been single for a long time too.
‘Don’t you have a radio? An emergency broadcast or anything?’ He asked and went to stand up once he realized that he had made her feel uncomfortable. She grabbed his arm to pull him back down and shook her head gently to let him know his company was welcome.
‘Just one but some pirate radio has jacked it. Must be some sorry ass hole or religious nut in the city I guess. I just figured if I held out here the authorities would have it under control once the National Guard came in…’ She tried to justify herself and sounded, above anything, apologetic.
Logan punched her delicately in the arm with a brave but friendly gesture.
‘It’s alright. I can’t imagine the chaos once the flu hit New York never mind what came after. And a woman in your position would have been in the thick of it I’m sure. Sometimes your duty to others makes any kind of self-preservation you have inside of you a late second place.’ He spoke that from experience and that fact was transparent. He was a General first but he was still a Doctor and his duty and honor had brought him back to active service without so much as a fuss.
The two of them had struck a good rapport in their short friendship. They understood each other from the get-go and that kind of relationship was hard to come by. She felt safe with Logan and he trusted her as a tough as nails inner city cop and knew that she could look after herself. Theirs was already a friendship even though they had only known each other for a very short time. Mutual respect and admiration made that immediate bond possible. A beeping noise interrupted any further conversation as the radio on Logan’s belt began to vibrate intrusively.
‘Hold on.’ He said to Elizabeth, stood up, and walked back to the doorway. There was a small kitchenette at that side of the living room. The place was clearly built for one which further confirmed his suspicions that she probably had no one of merit in her life. To add to that there were no pictures of other family members either, parents, or friends even for that matter.
‘The Boss is calling.’ He said more to himself than to her. Her eyes were fixated on the floor. The idea of being holed up in the biggest metropolis on Earth with no rescue hope to speak of had just hit her.
“Logan do you read me?”
“Yeah I hear you.”
“I’ve been trying to raise you for a while. I feared the worst.”
“No such luck boss, I’m still around.”
“Anything?”
“Nothing. Nothing unusual anyway. There are survivors though. You need to stop them from dropping any payload for as long as you can… And some religious, self-assured, self-righteous, pious doomsday prophet has apparently jacked the emergency frequency we set up.”
“That makes sense then. I had thought we might have had more people try to make it to the screening wall. There are still Doctors and soldiers waiting for evacuees. There have only been a few so far. Now we know why. Nobody knows we are here waiting for them. I’ll get on it; see if we can’t get control back.”
“I’ve met a survivor here, pretty close to my drop site, we need an exfiltration in the mornin
g but we will have to wait the night out here if you can do without me for a few hours.”
“I’ll try.”
“I need more time to study though. There aren’t as many here as I had thought. I don’t have anything to report.”
“Understood. Don’t sleep in. I can’t hold General Cygan’s finger off that button forever…”
He cut the radio signal. Abraham was an odd and often nervous man. He and Logan had become friends in a few short weeks. They both worked to a common goal and were very similar in some of their less obvious mannerisms.
Elizabeth had heard the whole thing, both sides of the conversation, and she had questions but saved them. She knew what a payload was. Was the military really resorting to dropping bombs in the City? She would try to get it out of him later but right then the rumbling in her stomach was her biggest priority. She also knew what an exfiltration meant.
Logan was going to drag her out of the city if he needed to and she would have to leave her little apartment fortress behind and the life she could no longer hold onto there in the city. This was probably going to be her last night in the apartment and if that meant she was leaving everything behind then she was going to break her strict rationing for the first time.
She walked right to the fridge that Logan was helping to prop up by leaning against one side of it, and pulled open the door. The power had been out a while but she had only been using it as more storage for canned goods. She pulled out a near stale loaf of bread and at least five cans of soup. She was going to burn every bit of combustible material to cook it and enjoy a warm night for a change. She had a determined look about her, a solid gaze, and an uncompromising pace.
She had cozy slippers on. Logan had just noticed them. They were designed to look like bear’s feet. She slipped and slid over her bare wood floor with each purposeful turn to look in that cupboard or the next. It was starting to look like she was preparing a feast.
‘Is this all going to be ok?’ She reminded herself to ask Logan who hadn’t said anything for a few minutes. He was still stood propping the fridge up and was happy just to watch her. He was used to eating all kinds of crap the Air Force put in its dried rations so anything practical would suffice. She had collected up a good few cans of soup and whatever canned meat she could find like spam and sausages or hot dogs. She was planning on shoving the lot in a big pan and cooking it all up and eating it along with every slice of bread not already full of mould spores.
‘Yeah. Looks…’ He paused and glanced over the cans. ‘Well, like Hell...’ He winked at her without moving. He was brave to wind her up. She didn’t look in the mood. She didn’t rise to it and took it as it was meant to be.
‘What’s the payload?’ She asked bravely. She paused from her can opening mission and stopped pouring everything she opened into the biggest pan she had. It rested on the floor for now until they built something to cook it on. Logan was hesitant to tell her. He didn’t know her too well yet and didn’t know if the added pressure would break her. He couldn’t bring himself to lie though. That must have been his Christian upbringing kicking in.
‘They were using napalm in Washington about the time when New York first went dark. That changed to Bunker Buster’s on Michigan just before the quarantine net went up and we wiped out the bridges here in New York.’
‘So that’s what those explosions were?’ She looked a little horrified and glared at him. She was about to blame him and accuse him of something but quickly thought about it. What would she have done in his shoes?
‘Yeah. But when I asked to drop into New York to try and secure any survivors they had changed their minds to nuclear. Hopefully Abe can change their minds or at least buy us some time.’ She was struck speechless. She had no idea things had gotten so bad.
She had holed herself up in that small apartment, fortified it and re-supplied it, in the confident belief that the authorities were on their way. They had just been slowed down by the snow. They had just encountered more resistance than they had thought and they had to wait for more ammo and medical shipments. Thats what she had told herself. No idea at all, not even had she entertained the notion, that the most powerful nation in the world, the most advanced science and the biggest and best democracy, could have been so woefully unprepared for what had happened.
That they would have had no idea how to fight it either with a combat initiative or with science and the power of the best and brightest minds. That they would be so clueless and left in the dark that they would resort to nuclear war to cover up their own ignorance.
He didn’t say anything after that. Just left her to process it all. She had started to cry a little. More like a sob. Just a sob to herself though nothing over the top or too dramatic. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe she did have some ties there. Or maybe she had just been hit with the reality that there was no way to turn back the clock on this one. That there might not be a resolution at the end of the day and that the world as she had known it would not recover for a very long time.
He sat down on the kitchen floor with her and started helping her to open cans with his own pocket knife. He hadn’t even asked if she was ok after nearly being raped in her own home by someone she might have even known. She must have opened the door to him after all… He needed to check out that pirate radio too.
That could give him some clues as to what the people of the city had been fed instead of his own emergency broadcast that urged all survivors to make for the containment wall.