CHAPTER 25
One month after invasion...
St. Michael Illinois...
“Did you make it the way I like, Jennygirl?”
It was a question that James Montague had put to his wife every Wednesday for the last fifty-one years of their lives together. And Jeanette Mckennit Montague smiled as she replied in the same way she always had.
“Shut up and eat your lunch.”
Before…back before the world went to Hell, they would always laugh. It had been their little game, their way of reconnecting over the years, through all the good times and the bad. But today… well today was different.
It was the morning of their fifty-second anniversary.
It was the day they had chosen to die.
Jenny felt the wind run through her hair as she turned away from the man she’d spent the last five decades of her life learning to understand.
She knew that he shouldn’t be at the wheel. But driving was one of the simple pleasures that life had left to Jimmy Montague. They’d taken his license away a while back. His reflexes had grown dull over the years, his eyesight weaker than it had been. That one had hit Jimmy hard. He was a proud, independent man. As they’d grown old together, he’d prided himself on his ability to get around. Mobility had always been important to Jimmy. To him, the ability to provide transportation for them had come to represent a kind of freedom. It was the grandest, most eloquent gesture of rebellion against the authority of old age that Jimmy could mount. Hell, many of their friends had lost their driving privileges years ago.
He always drove the Daimler when they visited their friends in places as far away as Ohio. And until his seventy-second birthday, he’d insisted on driving to visit their daughter Sandra in Maryland. That was the year he’d crossed over the divider and sailed along, happy as a clam, directly into oncoming traffic. There had been a really bad moment when Jenny thought they were going to die, and take a goodly number of the surrounding drivers with them as well. Jimmy had managed to swerve off onto the shoulder just as a Greyhound bus thundered by, its horn blaring as it passed them on the right. The huge bus would have knocked them into another area code. At least that’s what Jenny would say to Sandra when they finally reached her daughter’s apartment in the suburbs outside DC.
That bus nearly socked us into another area code.
After that, Jenny had insisted that she would not travel with Jimmy again if they didn’t fly. Being a proud man, Jimmy swore he’d never ride in another goddamn Greyhound bus. He lost his license that same year. He was seventy-five years old. The list of his ailments was growing. Arthritis curled his hands around the wheel of his beloved Daimler like claws. And the aching in his hands had only gotten worse recently. He’d lost some weight these last few weeks, nearly fifteen pounds. And he was coughing more and more. She’d feared he was dying from emphysema, before all the mess began. Their doctor had set her mind at ease about that one. But Jimmy gave up his three smokes a day routine just the same.
Still, his cough was getting worse. Jenny feared an infection, however she had no way to confirm her suspicions. Their doctor, a nice Chinese boy named Lim, had shot up his own offices during the craziness. He had killed three patients before the police were able to get to him. Lim had forced them to kill him, right there in the front office of his own practice. The other folks they had seen recently had either tried to break in to steal something or were busy trying to survive. Jimmy kept his shotgun close at all times in any event.
This morning, she’d made his favorite; meatloaf with a side of mashed potatoes and her best cherry pie. She hadn’t been able to keep the ice cream he’d scrounged from the shop. It had been all she could do to keep the stoves running on juice from the emergency generator out back. This meal had used up the last of their stores. They both knew that they were too old to run around looking for food, especially if they had to hide from monsters while they were doing it.
Nope, she thought.
Old Mother Earth, it seemed, had performed a perfect cartwheel straight into the latrine.
As they stopped for lunch at the side of the highway, surrounded by fields of gently waving wheat, Jenny thought of the home they’d left behind them, back in St. Michael. Jimmy had always been fond of telling their customers that they were dining in the ‘Birthplace of Wyatt Earp,” though that was really a couple of towns over in Cameron. But their customers didn’t seem to mind.
The waving sea of grain all around them reminded her of the day they’d made their decision. The “Heartland” hadn’t been hit by as concentrated an assault as say Chicago or New York. By comparison, relatively few of the obsidian spheres had fallen across America’s Breadbasket.
But the Changes had come just the same.
*
A week earlier, Jenny was wiping down the kitchen counters while Jimmy was up at the restaurant trying to restart the old generator. Suddenly the kitchen had seemed to go dark as a shadow fell across the house.
“Jenny! Come out here, real quick!”
The excitement in his voice brought Jenny’s heart into her throat. She dropped her rag and made her way outside, ignoring the nagging pain in her bad hip. They had converted the old barn in the spring of 1989, after the government had shut down the farm. Jimmy was a decent fry cook and Jenny had always known her way around the kitchen. She’d always wanted to open up a restaurant. So they’d used up a chunk of their savings to make the changes. J&J’s had gone into business exactly one year later. People from all over the region had walked through the converted doors of the old barn when word had gotten out about Jenny’s cherry pie. And even Jimmy had developed a reputation as a more than serviceable short- order man. Western Illinois University was only a few minutes to the south. And they got a lot of traffic from the students. The locals all loved the place, and, on Friday nights they even had dancing, although in the last few years, Jenny hadn’t much cared for the music the college kids played on the jukebox that Jimmy had put in himself. But the business thrived, and they’d never looked back.
As Jenny rounded the southeast corner of the diner, she saw Jimmy standing there with his hat in his hand. He pointed into the distance, out over one of the neighboring fields. But she’d had no need for him to show her what was happening out there. At first she thought she was seeing a mushroom cloud, like photos of the one that blossomed after they dropped the bomb on those poor folks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the only thing that her mind could compare to what she was seeing.
It was huge, miles across in diameter. A massive distortion, like a hole in space, rotating above the plains just to the south. The distortion was luminous; brightly lit by lurid green and red flashes of light which emanated from somewhere within in its interior. The sky surrounding the distortion was black as midnight in Hell. Living on the plains of the rural Midwest, Jimmy and Jenny Montague had seen plenty of tornadoes. Jenny had once seen a twister lift a tractor and fling it one hundred yards into a neighbor’s cornfield. But the huge disruption in the air pulsed with the force of a million tornadoes. Jenny could sense its raw, malefic power even from where she stood. She reached out and clutched Jimmy’s callused brown hand in hers, marveling at how her skin tingled at the contact. It felt as if she were receiving mild electric shocks all over her body. It wasn’t a painful sensation, only disquieting.
“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.
*
Jimmy got up early the next morning to wash the Daimler. She was a beautiful car; a white 1956 Conquest ‘New Drophead’ Roadster with a royal- blue, leather interior trimmed in white. Big whitewall tires capped off the roadster’s good looks. Jimmy had first seen her at a county fair back in the early eighties. He’d been smitten at first sight. He’d waited; pacing back and forth in front of the car until the fair was over. The owner of the Daimler had approached Jimmy, warily suspicious of the tall, thin old black man in the aging white suit and wingtips that stared at him so excitedly.
Nevertheless Jimmy immediately offered the man cash for the car. When the owner (who was actually a fugitive from justice named Clyde Warren) saw that he stood to make some quick cash, he’d quickly doubled his original estimate of the worth of the car. Warren had no idea what the car was worth anyway. It had belonged to a friend who was currently behind bars on a murder rap up in Harmon.
But Jimmy had been shrewd enough to recognize Warren’s game. He’d kept his head and managed to pull Warren down to a more reasonable price. The two men shook hands, and the car had gone to Jimmy on the spot. Over the next ten years, Jimmy had painstakingly restored “Sadie” to her classic beauty. When money had begun to roll in from the diner, the restoration accelerated.
He called her to the garage as she was cleaning out the kitchen pantry. Moving stiffly, (her bad hip had been plaguing her unmercifully since the day of the distortion) she went out to see what had gotten him so excited.
This time Jimmy was smiling, standing by the old shed where they used to keep the cars. Sadie was there; shining like newly minted silver coins in the bright morning air. Jenny gasped at the sight. Jimmy had buffed and waxed the Daimler to a high gloss. Her whitewalls seemed to catch the sunlight and reflect it back into Jenny’s eyes. She had never looked so beautiful.
Jimmy opened the door and climbed in, grinning from ear to ear like a teenager heading off to the “submarine races” up at Lake Argyle.
“Shall we, Milady?” he said, putting on his best “William Marshall.”
Marshall was the wonderful actor who’d starred in “Blacula,” one of Robbie’s favorite old horror pictures that she and Jimmy had secretly enjoyed as well. Jenny loved Marshall’s rich, deep voice, and Jimmy did a fair imitation of the actor. She returned his smile as she climbed in to the roadster, trying to match his enthusiasm. They drove to the place where they’d met fifty-one years ago. But as they rode in silence to the lake, Jenny’s heart shattered a little more with each and every mile.
*
Later, as Jimmy was out back closing up the sheds and the shop for the last time, Jenny prepared their farewell picnic. When he returned, stoop- shouldered and looking older than she’d ever seen him, Jenny did her best to wipe away the traces of her tears. She was still hesitant about their ‘decision.’
What if the kids are trying to reach us? she thought. What if one of them or both of them made it out somehow? They could be making their way toward us right now. What will they think if they come home and we’re not even here…?
She was driving herself crazy.
“Fool, I’d know it if my own children were dead, wouldn’t I?” she asked herself angrily. But she didn’t know. Couldn’t know. As she took the meatloaf out of the oven and set it down on the counter, some of the gravy spattered, burning her wrist. It was a minor burn. She’d certainly had worse in her life, but the emotion came anyway.
“It’s not… fair!”
She pounded the counter in her rage and grief. Pain from her aching joints rocketed up her arms and into her shoulders and she didn’t care. Indeed, she had come to need the pain. She welcomed the surge of white heat that pulsed in her guts.
It let her know that she was still alive.
*
This morning, they left St. Michael.
They’d never actually discussed the “how” of it. There had been no need to. In the special near- telepathy old married couples sometimes employ she’d understood intuitively what he was getting at. She knew that he’d been used up; too tired to go on, too wounded, too bereft to fight. And in the part of her mind that listened to the tale of her own despair, she agreed with him. They were old, sickly. And the world had become unimaginably vicious seemingly overnight. There was no family to welcome them. No children to protect them. Nowhere they could ever really be safe again. She shared that much in Jimmy’s defeat, she admitted to herself.
But in the part of her heart that still lived, still dreamed and hoped, she nursed a deep and potent anger. Outrage at whatever had ruined the world simmered within her soul. She could have gladly torn the eyes from the heads of the ones that had taken her children, destroyed her family. She could have happily killed the ones that had so cruelly extinguished the fighting spirit of the man she had loved since she was nineteen years old. Washington D.C was gone, or at least unapproachable. Their daughter had been there, probably at work when the city was destroyed by a madman’s nuclear fire. They had no way of knowing if she’d survived the assault.
However, they'd heard little about Seattle’s fate since the fall of the spheres. And so they would drive into the West. They would try to reach Robbie’s place in Seattle. And if they couldn’t find their son and his family, they would go on, until they could go no further. And then they would say goodbye.
They cleared the dishes, scraping them into the little pail that Jenny had brought along. As they walked back to the Daimler, Jenny could almost pretend that this was just another of their day-trips, and that nothing had changed. For a sweet, painful instant, her mind gently insisted that this was so, but her heart knew that it was a lie.
And as she studied the wheat growing wild in the silent fields around them, Jenny cursed the God who had forced her to abandon her life.
*****
To Be Continued...