Reset

“So they say,” Nora took another sip. “Malcolm, from what I read, no one is in New York. It was evacuated.”

He glanced beyond her to the camp. “Does Grant know? He’s from New York.”

“He has the same magazines, I do. So I don’t know if he read them or not.”

“Anything about the war?” Malcolm asked.

“Nothing. Then again, I grabbed gossip magazines. There was also nothing about the virus. Just the rag sheet where they predicted it.”

“So in that one month, from that last magazine, until our reset, everything went to shit.”

“Looks that way. Amy and Grant are so optimistic.” Nora looked back.

“What about you?”

“I want to say I’m realistic. But the love of my family puts me in the optimistic category. Jason, I think he is wrestling between fear and faith.”

“That’s good.” Malcolm lifted a tool and pointed it at her. “John isn’t optimistic, he’s being a realist. He’s not holding high hopes that his family made it. At least what he told me. He said, he’ll grieve when he knows.”

“What about you?” Nora asked.

“Me? I may not seem it but I’m crushed.” He squinted his eyes. “We all are and must face what we find. I just hope, if anything I find my oldest son.”

Nora furrowed her brow in confusion. “Why just him?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I want them all to be alive. But him… I was a young father when he was born. Too young and he and I butted heads all the time. Before I left for New York, we got in the biggest fight. He called me an Absentee Dad that I was never around. And I keep thinking how that kid had to feel when he heard I was killed and his last words to me were, ‘Why don’t you stay in New York, not like we’ll notice if we never see you again’. And in my anger, I told him that maybe I would. Stupid.” He tossed a small part, reached out and grabbed the cup from Nora’s hand and took a drink. “And on the other hand, a part of me is thinking, why bother? Why go look? That maybe it is for the best. I’m actually thinking of fixing this buggy and heading right to Champaign.”

“Why would you say that?”

“It’s selfish. But they mourned us, Nora. They lost us, grieved us, and got over us. If they are alive, they have nothing to lose if they never see us again. Us on the other hand, we have a lot less to lose if we never know.”

“If you really believed that you wouldn’t be working so hard to get our transportation going. You’re just scared like the rest of us. But come tomorrow, we’ll get up and we’ll go. We’ll all go. We’ll be more fearful than hopeful. But we’ll go, because not knowing is really not an option.” She exchanged glances, catching his unspoken words through expression that he was in agreement, and then Nora took her drink cup and finished off the nightcap.

NORA’S ENTRY Day One AR (After Reset)

Suddenly I am cast into a surreal existence. Trying with all that I am to decipher if what I am experiencing is real or a dream. Perhaps I am still in a state of stasis or that explosion has me in limbo.

This is Day One. Not because it is the first day that we are awake, it isn’t, but rather, the first day that we emerged from our reset state.

We were reset, for how long, remains to be seen. I can’t think of that aspect of it, I did for a small amount of time and it can be insanity inducing. I decided to place my focus on my family. After witnessing the fall of civility on the base, my heart is completely and utterly broken. Jason mentioned that perhaps I was indeed supposed to be in stasis. That maybe, like Amy, I was going to be snatched away from my room in some late night, post explosion covert operation. Deep in my heart I know that not to be true. In my deepest wishes that my family received the inoculation, I know they didn’t. I was not supposed to be there. They all believed I was Summer Rosewood.

I wonder if Summer, the real Summer, got the inoculation?

In some aspect the cure had to work. According to Meredith, someone, somewhere, actually a lot of people, had to be immune to it.

My family.

What they must have gone through when they heard that I died in that explosion. How devastated they had to be. I hate that they felt that pain, I hate thinking of them suffering through an illness. Of Rick trying his hardest to care for the girls. What if Rick died and no one was left to help my daughters. What of Mia who was only three? What if she was never ill and was left to care for herself. That scared me. She didn’t know. Her survival of the virus wasn’t a guarantee of her survival in the world.

I was quite a distance from my hometown, but not so far that I couldn’t get there.

There are seven of us remaining. I am not convinced, like the others, that the president jumped into the elevator and rode down below for a fiery death. I think he ran. I think he slipped out, ran and kept going.