Final Winter

Adrianna raised her head and kissed Brian on the lips. ‘Perhaps. We will talk about it later…right now, no…’

‘Okay,’ he said, pulling her down again with his strong arms. Adrianna felt safe and secure — and puzzled at how this man was affecting her. He said, ‘What do we do now?’

She snuggled into his arms again, feeling content and sleepy, and smiling at the thought that this was the first man she had slept with in a very long time that she had not killed. It was an odd and glorious feeling.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘We do nothing.’

~ * ~

In Idaho, the switch took just a few minutes, the time it took to empty out some of the Chinese-made toys from the trailer and fill up the empty space with the heavy black containers that had been in the storage facility. Vladimir and Imad then put some of the toys back into the truck. There. Still looked nice and peaceful. Imad leaped up, grabbed the leather strap at the rear of the trailer and pulled down the sliding door. The rattling noise was loud in the empty lot. Vladimir went back to the storage trailer, closed the door, locked it. There were probably ten or twelve cases of toys in there.

Imad joined him. ‘So what happens to those toys now?’

Vladimir said, ‘They will stay here forever, I suppose.’ Imad said, ‘A pity. I know some children from poor families in Vancouver. They would enjoy them. Forever, you say?’

Vladimir looked around at the empty parking area, the lights from the sleeping town. This is what it will be like, he thought, in so many places across this country. The streets will be empty and there will be no traffic and, so long as the power generators keep working, the lights will come on at night, all the while the bodies in the bedrooms and living rooms and hospital rooms will decay and dry out and rot…

He said, ‘I suppose the owner of the facility could open it, but what for? In a matter of weeks, there will be much more important things to concern themselves about than toys in a storage area. No, they will be here forever, until archeologists from Russia or China or Brazil come here to explore the dead cities and dig up the bones.’

Imad rubbed at his hands. ‘I’m cold. Let’s get out of here.’

‘That sounds fine.’

In a few minutes they were back on the highway, heading east, and Vladimir felt more awake. Being outside in the Idaho air had woken him up, and seeing another checkpoint’s assignment successfully carried out cheered him. Just a few more things to do before they reached their destination — and before he reached his destiny.

Imad shifted the truck into a higher gear and said, ‘I asked you earlier, before we got to that town. What do you fight for?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘What do you fight for, Vladimir? Do you fight to see the red banner rise again? To see the Soviet Union come back upon the world stage and take its leading role? Do you want to have Russians take over this land? What do you want?’

Vladimir looked out at the painted lines flashing before them as they rolled along the highway. He said, ‘Nothing as complicated as that. I just want to smash. And kill. That’s all. There are times for politics and discussion and great thoughts, and there are times to be barbarians. I want to be a barbarian. I want to smash and kill.’

Imad laughed at that. He kept a merry smile on his face as they continued their drive, and the sun rose on their faces.

~ * ~

In a chair that had been occupied a day earlier by Dan Umber, Blythe Coonrod worked the evening shift in a part of the government archipelago in the United States that was the Department of Homeland Security. It had been a quiet evening, just going over the previous shift’s downloads, making sure the in-house servers were chugging along merrily. But as she sipped her first cup of tea of the evening and thought about heading out of the room for a comfort break, it looked like the screen on the monitor had frozen.

Everything on the screen had turned black.

‘Christ,’ Blythe whispered as she leaned forward — her ID badge, hanging from a thin chain around her neck, clinked against her keyboard — and then she dropped the cup of tea when a bright red icon with a flashing light appeared.

A real-time hit. Be damned.

She moved the cursor, double-clicked on the icon.

WATCH LIST MATCH.

ENGAGE YOUR PROTOCOLS.

WATCH LIST MATCH.

ENGAGE YOUR PROTOCOLS.

‘Holy shit.’ Blythe couldn’t remember the last time — if ever! — her shift had experienced a real-time hit on the watch list. She made another move with the mouse. Waited. Somewhere deep in the pedabytes of information that the numerous American intelligence agencies stored were thousands of photographs of men and women of interest who were on the watch list. The system she was working matched those photos with all the people coming into the United States at any recognizable crossing — JFK airport, LAX, San Diego, little burgs in Maine or Vermont, for example — and it looked like she had just received a live one.

There.