Epilogue
Thursday, April 1, 2021, 1:30-2:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Mary was stocking the Ball-Mart meat counter when she heard the first sonic boom.
Oh, she thought, that must be another tribute by the President from the Blue Angels for the health workers for defeating the virus. He was kind of a jerk to us last night, but he’s always thinking about what Americans really need.
***
Vaneida sat in the jail cell at the D.C. Lockup and thought, I was just bait. Bait to get Okomo to come in. But I didn’t even call him. Janice wasn’t picking up when I called her. Maybe she was arrested and called him. So, is she in here too? And Joe… did they arrest him?
Okomo had come to her cell Wednesday morning, escorted by two guards, not in D.C. Police uniforms. He had said he would do what he could to get her out. But then the Attorney General had come to the cell door and asked Okomo if he could speak to him. As they walked away, it looked to her like Okomo was more a prisoner than an attorney who had come to advocate on behalf of a client.
Did Joe have anything to do with this? Vaneida thought.
She had just resolved to re-examine her entire relationship with Joe, from the first SNRM meeting he attended onward, when she heard a loud boom.
***
Mike was sitting across the bar from Janet, still vainly trying to get through to his son’s cell phone, when they heard the boom. The Three Amigos in the corner straightened up and looked around.
“Did a tree fall on the roof?” he asked.
“I’ll check,” Janet said.
***
“Dear Respected,” the military aide said, approaching the Supreme Representative of the Korean People.
“What is it?”
“Dear Respected, it appears that a line of American ICBMs is approaching us at this moment.”
The Supreme Representative laughed.
After a moment he said, “Do you know what this means?”
“No, Dear Respected.”
“It means we have won.”
“We have won, Dear Respected?”
“Moscow must be in flames, and perhaps Washington as well, since the Russians would have launched on alert. But we still stand. Therefore, we have won.”
“Yes, Dear Respected.”
“Don’t you want to kill me, Colonel?”
“Dear Respected?”
“Don’t you want to kill me, Colonel?”
“Why, Dear Respected?”
“Because I have led you and everyone you ever cared about to their deaths.”
“No, Dear Respected.”
“Why not?”
“It seems… it seems pointless at this moment, Dear Respected.”
“Yes,” the Supreme Representative of the Korean People said. “Pointless. Indeed.”
A moment later, he rose, and said, “Let us go see the dogs one last time.”
“Yes, Dear Respected.”
***
“Should we be evacuating?”
“Excuse me?” said the President of Russia, in the underground bunker beneath the Kremlin.
“Should we be evacuating?” repeated Sergei Borisevich.
“To where?” the President said. “Do you have another planet we might go to?”
Sergei shook his head, turned, and walked away. In the corner, General Valery, the Chief of the General Staff, had taken his pistol out and seemed to be in the process of shooting himself.
Slight miscalculations were made, the President thought to himself.
***
In the bunker deep below the White House, the Vice President sat at the head of the table. Several aides and cabinet members occupied the other chairs.
“He would not come downstairs,” the recently canned Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, flipping up his eyepatch to reveal a perfectly functional eye. “I begged him to evacuate, but he would not come. He said something about ‘I am the Scarlet Beast.’”
“Where is Mother? …I mean, my wife?”
“Sir, external communications have been severed. It’s part of the protocol.”
“Oh,” the Vice President said.
After a minute, he mumbled, “I suppose I am President now.”
“For now,” Max King said.
He stared across the table at the Attorney General, who stared back at him.
***
Jenna Jones sat in a clearing beside a river in the Catoctin Mountains where she had stopped for lunch during a week-long solo kayak trip she was taking to get away from the stresses of Washington.
She had heard the sonic booms and had figured out what they probably meant; her father had been an Air Force captain for Strategic Air Command when she was a child, and later, somewhat of a pacifist.
Now Jenna looked at the sky, so beautifully blue, and wondered how much radiation she had already received. Not so much, at this distance, she thought. Not yet.
Her second thought surprised her.
Did Shakespeare waste his life?
From a certain perspective, she thought, every effort expended by every human being in all of history to create anything lasting was now officially a waste.
All the conniving by politicians for advantage. All the work of scientists. All the money-grubbing by Wall Street tycoons. D-Day. World War II. All the wars. Okomo’s entire… forget Okomo. George Washington’s entire life. Abraham Lincoln’s presidency was pointless. FDR… pointless. Reagan… pointless.
It was all wasted, because one very strange, dangerous man had been allowed to occupy what actually turned out to be what people said it was: the most important job in the world.
If she was right, it looked as though he had succeeded in killing a thousand times as many people as the Holocaust. Possibly everyone.
Every movie ever made. Every book. Every math theorem. Every scientific achievement. Every building ever built. Every university. Every limerick, every joke. Even every murder.
…All music! No music ever again!
But Shakespeare it was who stuck in her mind. All the millions of words, written out longhand, then printed, then published for hundreds of millions of people, learned by heart by fifteen generations of actors and students, all those lovely turns of phrase – every single one of them rendered meaningless because one stupid man was elected president twice. No student would ever read them again. Even aliens could not possibly understand them, should they happen by this backwater of the galaxy in a billion years, by which time the sun would have swallowed the earth anyway.
Maybe the fact that the human race had been able to enjoy them for a limited time counted for something. But there was no more “forever.” No more “eternal.” This one man, and those who had put him in place, had banished those particular words from human experience. And all other words, she suddenly realized.
Jenna heard another sonic boom, this one closer. Maybe she would be spared the long weeks of dying of radiation sickness and starvation her father had described to her, after all.
She stood up and recalled lines from a high school play, from a part she had wanted, but lost to, of course, a boy. Now she might be the last being ever to say them, or hear them. Jenna stood on a large rock nearby and spoke them to whatever animals and insects might be near:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The rest is silence, she thought.
Then the sky grew very bright indeed.
© 2020 Nolan O’Brian