Chapter 19
The bunker Hayward referred to was exactly that: a bunker, underground, heavily fortified.
Hayward and I watched from behind the driver’s seat as Mary drove us through a series of three immense, heavily reinforced metal doors.
The first door opened, we passed through, and it closed.
We sat for a minute, then the second door opened, and the process repeated.
“SOP,” Hayward said as we waited for the third door to open.
“The old ROC government built these facilities during the height of the war. They’re fully self-contained, with geo-therm and long-life fission plants, water reclamation, the whole bit.
They have blast doors for bunker busters and nukes and the rest. Also, for security checks. ”
“Pain in the plowin’ ass when you want to get home,” Mary said from the driver’s seat.
“You’ll love ’em when the Legion comes knocking,” Hayward said.
“Roger that, ma’am.”
“How many of these things do you guys have?” I asked.
“Bunkers, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“CMC occupies four in the greater California region. We think the Legion has three. Some others got locked up tight during the NAW, and no one can get them back open again. Those inside are long dead by now.”
“Sorry, but CMC? You said that before.”
Mary leaned back to look at Hayward. They both laughed, although it felt strained, forced.
“Right,” Hayward said. “CMC: California Marine Corps. That’d be us. Okay, here we go.”
The third and final door parted, the rumble of enormous gears making the interior of the car tremble.
Mary started the vehicle forward. Beyond the door was a cavernous bay, holding row after row of ground and air vehicles in various states of disrepair.
Some I recognized as tanks, or at least an evolution of what I remembered from war movies and TV shows.
Others were armored, six-wheeled “cars” like the one in which we rode.
Still others were sleek, angular aircraft.
Men and women walked back and forth among the vehicles. Others operated cranes or small service carts. Many of the vehicles looked cannibalized, the workers gutting them for parts to use in other vehicles.
“How long have you been fighting?” I asked.
“It’s not the kind of thing that starts or stops.” When Hayward saw my expression, she smiled. “We’re the CMC. This is what we do.”
“Hurrah,” Foster said. It reminded me of war movies—back in my time—where the soldiers said “oo-rah,” only the inflection was different. Like a combination of hoorah and hurray.
“We’re here,” Mary said. She pulled the armored car around and backed us into an empty slot between two vehicles identical to our own.
“Come on,” Hayward said. “I’ll take you to him.”
Hayward led me down a series of cramped, narrow corridors.
Away from the large vehicle bay, the rest of the bunker had low ceilings and submarine-like confines.
We often stood aside to allow other people—mostly soldiers—to pass.
Sometimes they saluted Hayward, and sometimes she saluted them.
Everyone, to my eyes, looked tired, haggard. Baggy eyes. Hollowed cheeks. Haunted.
They all looked at me. Second, third glances, with murmurs after they passed.
“Why are only half the lights on?” I asked. “Conserve power?”
“We have sags of power from the reactor. What we don’t have are lightbulbs.
These last a long time, but not forever.
” Her tone was businesslike. I wondered, as I followed her, if I was losing her.
Losing a convert to my cause. A cause I didn’t understand.
“The Word” I’d never told anyone to live by.
We took a rattling elevator down several stories. The elevator car was little more than a wire-caged platform with steel cables attached to it, and I struggled to remain calm as the car jerked and shuddered its way deeper into the mountain.
“What’s Lyle to you?” I asked Hayward as we descended, more to keep my mind off the shaking carriage than anything else.
She looked startled as she glanced over at me. “What?”
“Is he a military leader, or something?”
“Oh.” Hayward, at parade rest, turned her head forward again. “I would guess he’d prefer to be known as an intellectual leader. But yes, he’s in command of this bunker.”
“I see.” I didn’t, not really, but it also felt like she didn’t want to answer questions.
The elevator left us at stairs leading down several twisting flights. We took them, me trailing behind Hayward. The stairs ended at a nondescript gray metal door.
Hayward stopped before the door. “This is where I leave you.” Her eyes fell on mine and shied away. “I…”
“Thank you,” I said. “Without you, I’d be dead, most likely.”
“Probably.”
We stood there for another long moment.
“I, uh,” I said. “Look. I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For not being the person you—for not living up to your expectations. Not being the messiah.”
She stared at me, her eyes narrowing and her lips parting enough for me to see a hint of white teeth.
The freckles across her cheeks and nose stood out in the dim light of the corridor.
She was close enough that, for a heartbeat, something in the shape of her eyes reminded me of Amy.
She looked, for a moment, like she wanted to hug me.
There was something in the set of her shoulders, the way she shifted her weight.
Then she held out her hand. We shook. She held my eyes.
“You didn’t disappoint me. You’re different than I expected.
More human. More real. But not disappointing.
” She turned and walked away, her boots echoing on the metal stairs.
I waited until the sound of her footfalls vanished. Then I took a breath, rubbed my face, and knocked on the door.
It unlocked under my first knock, a bolt clicking within the frame.
“Come,” a man said from within.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The room was large, with a high ceiling.
The walls were paneled wood, with hundreds of books on shoulder-high shelves.
The space was warm and well lit. All these details came to me automatically, filed away by some distant part of my brain.
My attention went to the center of the room.
There, a frail elderly man sat in a technologically advanced wheelchair.
The wheelchair sat next to reading table, complete with a glowing lamp.
The man, bald and wearing glasses, looked up from a book. A blanket covered his legs.
The old man’s face peeled into a smile. His eyes, behind the lenses of his eyewear, crinkled. “Dad.” His voice was strong and deep.
“Lyle?”
The skeletal man nodded, his head wobbling with the movement as though too heavy for his neck. “It’s so very good to see you.” He closed the book. “Please, Dad, come in. Come closer.”
I’d shrunk back against the door. I felt a hard pang of guilt. This was my son. No matter how old or how different he looked. I made myself step into the warm room. A desk sat near the rear wall. Behind the desk was a closed door.
The walk across the fading carpet felt like forever.
Lyle’s eyes never left me. When I reached his wheelchair, I grasped his hands.
His skin was papery, dry, and cold. Like Amy’s had been at the café, just a day before.
He trembled when our hands met, his entire body shaking, his head wobbling again. Tears rolled down lined cheeks.
“Forty-five years,” he said. He took a shuddering breath. “A long time. A long time.”
I knelt and hugged him. His thin arms wrapped around my back, and I held him as tight as I dared. He wept, silently, his heart thumping hard in his chest.
We pulled back. I stared into his wet eyes. “What’s happened, Lyle?”
He smiled, the expression pulling the skin back across his skull. “You mean to me? I got old. Or do you mean to the world?”
“The Word? The Legion?”
His smile faltered. “Please, bring a chair, and get some tea from the pot on the desk. We’ll talk.”
I held his eyes for a long moment. I stood and found a wooden chair near the desk. I dragged it in front of Lyle’s wheelchair. There was an ancient electric teakettle and two porcelain mugs on the desk. “Do you want some?”
“Please.”
I poured tea into both cups. It came out steaming and black, almost coffee-dark, and smelled of bergamot.
“Earl Grey,” Lyle said as I handed him his cup. His voice was gravelly, raw. “Near the last of it.”
I sat in the chair facing Lyle. We each took sips of the hot tea, Lyle with the slow and careful movements of the old—or the sick.
Lyle gave me a long, searching look. “Where to even begin. The world’s changed in so many ways.
And yet it’s the same. People fight. They fall in love.
They kill each other over religion, and they overcome the greatest of adversities.
They break countries apart and make new ones again, always saying, ‘This time will be different, this time will be better.’ They drop nerve gas into the centers of crowded cities, then spend billions to save the last dolphins from extinction. They are, as always, contradictions.”
“What’s the Word?”
Lyle shook his head, a shadow of a smile on his lips. “It’s your Word. The Word of God, as dictated by the man chosen by Him to travel forward through time to spread that Word.”
I stared at him, saw the mischievous glint in his eyes. “You wrote it.”
“I did.”
“You don’t actually believe all that.”
He held my gaze for a long moment, not saying anything, his expression inscrutable. Then he laughed. It was a dry, hacking thing that turned into a cough. “Of course not.” He took a sip of the tea, wetting his lips. “But I don’t need to believe it. It’s others who do. They need it, for you.”
“You turned me into a religious icon.”
“You were already becoming one. Remember? Those people in the quad at Berkeley? I helped it along, gave it legitimacy. I gave it a Bible. Gave them a Bible.”
“God, Lyle, why?”