Covert Coffee (The Serena Wilcox Dystopian Trilogy Book 2)

Covert Coffee Chapter 4

4

Serena was back in Minnesota and boy could she feel it! The air was so dense with cold that her lungs hurt when she breathed.  Brisk, baby! Brr! She rubbed her hands together and felt herself grinning from ear to ear.

“This is freaking August,” Agent Estep complained. He bent his head against the wind that was ripping across the tarmac on a private runway near the International airport in Minneapolis-Saint Paul.

Beyond the tarmac, early morning light was barely coming up over the low horizon, a horizon foreign to those who had never seen a Northern skyline before. Serena described the Minnesotan sky as a low ceiling, like the skyline of a snow globe when tilted at an angle. The sky-ceiling felt claustrophobic to her, especially when compared to the higher clouds found nearly everywhere else in the nation. Chicken Little would have really thought that the sky was falling if he lived here, she thought.

And yet, instead of feeling the old dread about Earth-hugging clouds, dense air, and Canadian chill, she felt nearly giddy to be back on Minnesotan soil. While Serena had lived in many places throughout her forty-plus years, she had spent most of her adult life in the Twin Cities area and she now thought of it as home. Home. So good to be back.

“Where is the lab? We aren’t headed back to the Cannon Falls area,” said Serena.

“No, it’s been moved.”

“To?”

“Wisconsin.”

“Wisconsin!”

“Not far, thirty miles from here. Near Hudson. It’s an old Girl Scout camp, no longer used for scouting, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“The original building that housed the campers is still on site. You’ll be staying there.”

“I’m familiar with Hudson. I’ve been to the lakefront there with my family. Got some gyros, and sunburn because we forgot sunscreen. We went downtown later, very cute. It was all lit up and I couldn’t believe how populated it was, really hopping. We wanted to go to that Pier 51 restaurant, could smell the food and saw the outdoor dining was packed, but we didn’t make it there.”

Estep didn’t reply.

Serena gave up on conversation, and in the silence that followed, could hear a faint voice, a narration-sounding voice. She strained her eyes a little to study his ears. Ah, plugged in! It appeared Estep was listening to an audio book. Serena tried not to take it personally. If she were a young guy in his 20s, she wouldn’t find herself interesting either.

The rest of the trip passed by quickly. Serena was so tired that the silence was welcome. She allowed her thoughts to drift. What am I in for, and will I really be of any use to President Kinji? Will I even know what to do? And when will I see my family again?

She hadn’t felt homesick in a long time, because ever since she’d become a mother, she was seldom alone, even if away from home.  She had forgotten how miserable homesickness was. Whether one is a child at camp, a student at college, a soldier at war, or was a middle-aged mother-of-three sequestered off to a secret government computer lab, the heart felt the same – heavy, dark, empty. She wanted to cry, but she held herself together. Again, she questioned why she was the President’s best option, a question Estep had been pondering from the first mention of Serena’s involvement in Covert Coffee.

“Here we are,” said Estep. Serena noticed that he had recaptured his good humor, probably from having had a break from entertaining her in the quiet car. He had also received a text from his girlfriend, a fact that Serena had correctly assumed based on the goofy grin plastered on Estep’s face when he thought Serena wasn’t looking. This in-a-new-relationship repartee renewed the spring in his step, for which Serena felt his girlfriend deserved a medal. “You should find everything you need here.”