THE RED WAKE

Chapter 25

     “Good Lord,” Jimmy whispered.  “I think it’s hangin’ over most of the towns between Prairie City and Peoria.”  

     Jenny looked up at the tone of fear in her husband’s voice. There was terror in that swirling distortion in space. It’s eerie silence dredged icy fear, prickly and nauseating over her senses. In that moment, she needed him, needed desperately for him to hold her close. Staring at the black clouds on the horizon, she whispered his name into the chill wind. 

     “James Montague.”  

     But he continued to stare into the East, unable or unwilling to turn his gaze away from the distortion, until she finally pulled his head down to look at her. For a moment, he stood outlined in the greenish- red light thrown by the city-sized vortex in the sky.

     Lord, she thought. I can’t lose him. I’ve lost everything else. Please, not him too. 

     But for a moment, she didn’t recognize him. In the harsh light of the distortion, he looked like a different man than the one she knew and loved so dearly.  

     “Jimmy, let’s go in,” she said, banishing the impression with brusqueness. “Please, Jimmy,” she whispered. “I don’t want to see.” 

     He seemed to see her them. He took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded. And they went inside and shut the door.

     The next morning, after a night spent entwined like young newlyweds, Jimmy drove out toward Prarie City to try and get a handle on what had happened in the wake of the churning atmospheric disturbance. When he returned, three hours later, he went right into their bedroom and closed the door. When Jenny tried the door she found that he’d locked it, something he had never done in their half -century together. From the other side of the door, Jimmy quietly asked her to leave him be for a while. He was all right, he said. He just needed to be alone for a moment. He didn’t speak again for two hours. And later, when she tried the door again, she heard him crying like a newborn baby. Finally, after another hour, Jimmy let her in.  He took her by the arm and sat her down on the bed. And he told her of all the things he’d seen.  

     The next few days passed like a dream from which there was no waking. Jimmy never let Jenny out of his sight for more than a few minutes. At one point, Jenny realized that they were living like two people who knew their time together was limited. They made love like two twenty-year olds. They wept for their children and grandchildren. Their daughter, Sandra, a lawyer with the N.A.A.C.P, had been in DC when it was destroyed. Flights into and out of the area had been suspended even before the destruction of the capitol. Now, almost two months later, they’d heard nothing that permitted them the luxury of believing she had survived. 

     Their boy, Robbie, had a family out in Seattle. But there’d been all those reports that Seattle had fallen prey to the fires, riots and marauders even before the black spheres fell. Before the television stations went down, they’d seen one report that mentioned chemical weapons attacks by a crazy religious cult which had crippled the city.

     Secretly, as they lay together in the darkness of their small bedroom, barricaded against the marauders, Jenny clung to the hope that they might hear something. 

But in light of the things Jimmy had seen… 

     Jenny spent the next two days fretting over whatever had become of her children, while Jimmy sank lower and lower into the clutches of depression. The old married couple spoke of all these things and more. 

     And then they decided.

 *