The Takeover, page 25
But some part of Rachel’s brain must still be trying to function. She had thought of something earlier on, just outside the hospital, but what had it been? She lay in the Emergency Room lobby staring up at the ceiling, trying to remember.
Where was she? She felt herself fade in and out of consciousness. The white whale was pulling her down deeper.
She swam towards the surface by sheer force of will. No! She wasn’t ready to give up yet.
And that was when it hit her: Oxygen! There were canisters of oxygen in hospitals.
Now all she had to do was find one in time.
*****
She needed to find a respiratory ward. Those usually had oxygen. She crawled towards the elevators, forced herself to her feet (or rather foot), and stared at the signage until it went from double to single print. There it was: Pulmonary / Respiratory Services: East Tower, 3rd floor.
Climbing the stairs felt impossible in her current condition, so she jabbed at the elevator “Up” button instead. To her surprise, the elevator dinged and opened; it must still be working on emergency generator power. She hobbled in and stabbed at the circular button with the “3” on it. It looked like “33” to her eyes. She sank back down onto the floor.
Ding! Third floor!
The doors opened. She crawled out, the doors closing on her bum knee before she could get clear. Yowling in pain, she found yet another reason to crave some painkillers. Dragging her way forward on hands and one knee, she made it past the elevator monster that was trying to kill her.
The next few…what? minutes? hours?...passed in a delirium of half-dreams and visions of oxygen plums dancing in her head. She awoke and slept, awoke and slept, and whenever she awoke she crawled as far as she could towards the respiratory ward before blacking out again. After an indeterminate length of time, she reached the nurses’ station and dug through the top two drawers of the desk until she found a set of keys.
Dragging herself around the respiratory ward, she searched in vain for a utility room with even one oxygen canister. The fact that she had to reach up and try to put a key into a lock with double vision and about ten different keys from which to choose just about killed her, but she kept at it. Who knew she had such a strong will to live? She hadn’t known it herself until now.
At last her determination paid off. She unlatched a door and discovered what felt like the equivalent of King Tut’s tomb: an entire utility room full of compressed canisters of oxygen!
One canister was already in a portable cart, all set to go. In a near paroxysm of joy she fit the cannula to her nostrils and opened the cylinder valve to full.
Pure bliss.
She had died and gone to heaven. Or rather, she had not died and gone to heaven.
She set the tank to maximum air flow and still wished for more. The canister was meant to supplement breathing, not replace breathable air altogether—but after the oxygen deprivation she’d just been through, even a reduced flow of air felt like a miracle.
Her eyes roamed the room, taking in dozens of oxygen canisters—and this time it wasn’t the double vision talking, they were really there—two storage racks filled with E cylinders. She figured each canister would provide her with about five hours of oxygen at maximum flow (something she knew from her time spent inside airless domes of late). The fact that her brain was trying to calculate just how long those canisters would last was an encouraging sign. It meant that, concussion or no, her cognitive abilities were still functioning.
She felt the white whale receding into the depths, biding its time. It wasn’t done with her yet. But then again, she wasn’t done with it, either.
*****
The next six days were the strangest of her life. She was stuck on the third floor of an empty hospital inside an empty city inside an empty dome, knowing she was the only person alive for miles around. There was no one else to talk to, so she talked to the white whale and it talked back.
Over time, she found crutches and wheelchairs and bandages and pain meds, so it turned out there were worse places in which to be stuck than a hospital. Percocet to the rescue!
The bottle’s warning label read, “Percocet should only be taken in the manner prescribed by your doctor.” Well, she was a doctor—a doctor of astrophysics, but hey, why split hairs? No other doctor inside this mausoleum of a hospital was going to contradict her, so she went ahead and prescribed herself a full dose. It made her loopy, but loopy was good—loopy was a big step up from dead. The worst of the pain went away, and even the white whale seemed to enjoy it.
She lived a strange half-life for the next several days, tied to oxygen canisters for life support and never quite feeling like she had enough air to breathe. She changed out the nasal cannula for a mask and still couldn’t get enough. If she fell asleep and the canister ran out, she jerked awake, clawing at her throat for air. It was like the worst case of sleep apnea ever recorded in history. She always kept another canister within easy reach, ready to go—her cold metal security blanket.
At night the hospital glowed with red emergency lighting. She slept as much as she could through those red hours, praying she would wake again the next morning. On what she guessed was the third night, the red lights suddenly flickered out. The hospital’s backup generator must have died, leaving her in total darkness.
She panicked: she couldn’t see a thing! Even with the oxygen mask on, she gasped for breath out of raw, uncontrollable fear. She had no flashlight, no way to see! When the oxygen canister finally ran out in the middle of the night, as she knew it would, she was able, with trembling fingers, to exchange one canister for another by feel alone.
When morning arrived and the first meager light of day trickled in through the windows, her first order of business was tracking down a flashlight. She ended up collecting three of them from different nurses’ stations, determined never to be so blind and helpless again.
With the generator off, the building became even more tomblike. She despaired of ever getting out. Maybe she was dead already and just didn’t know it.
Her double vision improved after a few days, although she still felt seriously concussed. Her bum knee was even less cooperative: it remained swelled to nearly double its usual size, and she found she could put no weight on it at all without grimacing in pain. At first she used a collapsible wheelchair to get around the third floor, cradling an oxygen canister in her lap like a giant baby. Then she began using a rolling oxygen cart as a kind of crutch and found that that worked better. Each day she made several short trips around the third floor for water and bathroom breaks. The glug-glug-glug of the water cooler made a strange music to her ears as it filled the empty plastic bottles she’d managed to dig out of the recycling bin.
Food was her only other necessity. She used one of her empty oxygen canisters to smash the glass of a vending machine on the third floor and subsisted on chips, candy bars, and peanut M&Ms.
After six days and nights of this bizarre existence, she found herself down to her last five canisters of oxygen, with only one day left until the next jump (assuming there was one). Would five canisters be enough? It was going to be close.
It dawned on her that she might be the only person alive who had ever survived ten whole days inside a dome. If she were lucky and the dome jumped again, then oxygen in the form of good old-fashioned breathable air should come flooding back in, kickstarting the whole process over again. If she were unlucky and the dome didn’t jump, then she was in serious trouble. She could try to hop down three flights of emergency stairs with a concussed head while dragging a portable oxygen canister behind her, but it didn’t sound easy, and then she would have to pray the canister lasted long enough for her to make it to the southern edge of the dome.
The Percocet kept her feeling more relaxed than she would have otherwise. Of course she would get out of this little scrape. Of course she would live. She curled up beside her oxygen canister lover and drifted off to sleep for another endless night.
Interlude: Jump 13
January 8, 2042
Unlucky number thirteen lived up to its reputation. The thirteenth jump had catastrophic effects worldwide, resulting in the displacement or death of untold billions.
The total number of merged domes worldwide now stood at roughly 60,000. Each dome was some 24 miles in diameter and over 1 mile tall, encompassing an incredible 484 square miles of land.
On a planet with roughly 57 million square miles of land all told (not counting land under the oceans), the as yet unseen aliens now controlled 29 million square miles of it, as compared to the humans’ 28 million square miles—which meant the aliens now had what might be called a controlling interest in Earth.
Did they intend to take over the whole planet or only half of it? The domes already “owned” nearly 51% of Earth’s total land mass—the very definition of a hostile takeover in corporate terms. Was it possible these aliens were applying this same sort of logic to the planet as a whole?
Chapter 26
January 8, 2042 – Oval Office, Philadelphia
The President’s face was drained of all color.
“These numbers can’t be correct. They just can’t.” He looked like he might be sick.
Bill Cohen, his Secretary of Defense, stared at him solemnly. “I’m afraid they are, sir.”
“Twenty million! You’re saying twenty million Americans lost their lives this past week—and that was before today’s jump?”
“That’s our best estimate. Some died inside the domes, but the vast majority died outside of them this time around—from exposure to freezing temperatures, illness, starvation, violence, and a myriad other causes.”
“Good Lord. And how many more are projected to die after today’s jump?”
“We’re reluctant to put a number on it, sir.”
“Just give me your best estimate. I know you have one, Bill.”
Cohen struggled to meet the President’s eyes. “We estimate another eighty million. Additional deaths. Here in America.”
“Eighty—. On top of the twenty million from before. You’re telling me a quarter of the population of America could be dead in a matter of days.”
“Yes, sir—assuming any of us survive. If the domes jump again ten days from now, all bets are off. Only survivalists may make it after that. These estimates assume no more jumps after the one that happened earlier today. Otherwise…”
“Jesus.” The President buried his face in his hands and remained silent for a long time. “What are we talking about worldwide?” he mumbled through his fingers.
“On the order of two or three billion, if we had to hazard a guess, but there’s no real way of knowing.”
The President shook his head, looking impossibly weary. “All right, Bill, thanks.” He waved him out.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Not your fault, Bill.”
As Bill headed out the door, the President sat down on the couch, or rather collapsed onto it, and closed his eyes. He sat there for a long time trying to forget what he’d just heard. “Shit,” he whispered. “Shit.”
For once he was alone and no one tried to talk him out of his depression, which ran deeper than anyone suspected. He poured himself a stiff drink and downed it in one gulp.
“I’m in a fake Oval Office in a skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia,” he said out loud to no one. “Nothing about this is real.”
No one contradicted him.
“I think I may be fake, too. A cardboard cutout of a President.”
If Gil Lametti were here, he’d tell him to buck up, not take all those deaths so personally, maybe even grow a pair. Actually, what Gil would say was, “Jesus, Mark, don’t wig out on me!” But Lametti wasn’t here. He was meeting with some congressional committee about something or other. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter much anymore as far as Mark Gardner, fiftieth President of the United States, was concerned.
Last year, after a botched rescue mission he had ordered, in which five U.S. Marines had died, he’d had to look each family member in the eyes in turn and tell them how sorry he was. Now, he tried multiplying those five Marines by four million to arrive at the twenty million Americans now presumed dead, but it was an impossible feat—he couldn’t even begin to wrap his mind around it.
He’d dreamt about those Marines the very same night after their deaths. They’d stared at him from the same contorted positions in which they’d died, inside the wreckage of their crashed helicopter. They hadn’t looked accusatory, just sad. He wondered if he’d dream of twenty million sets of eyes staring down at him tonight. Would they look accusatory, or just sad?
He thought of a fragment of a poem by William Butler Yeats he’d had to memorize back in his college days. He spoke it aloud now to an empty Oval Office situated inside the tallest skyscraper in Philadelphia.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Funny how he could still remember those lines after all these years. “The centre cannot hold,” he said to himself again.
He poured himself another, downing it in one go, then cut himself off. Two was enough for now. He had a press conference in fifteen minutes, and it wouldn’t do for him to show up drunk—or for the White House press corps to know he was an actual human being who could be just as depressed as any other person in this world. They didn’t want to know that, and he didn’t want to tell them.
Chapter 27
January 8 – Pasadena, California
Rachel didn’t need an announcement over the hospital’s loudspeaker to know when the dome jumped: she could feel the whoosh of air rushing in. Her ears actually popped! She tore off the oxygen mask and took her first deep breath in a week.
Talk about your simple pleasures!
She wasted no time saying goodbye to the hospital; she was more than ready to go. Stuffed in her two jacket pockets were a prescription bottle of Percocet and enough bags of peanut M&Ms to keep herself fed for a week. Her last half-full canister of oxygen she left behind; it was too awkward to carry down the stairs, and she shouldn’t need it anyway going forward. Her plan was to get out of the dome and get out fast.
With the elevator no longer functioning, she had to limp down the emergency stairs one slow step at a time until she reached the lobby. Then she claimed one of the wheelchairs waiting near the hospital entrance and wheeled herself out of there like a lunatic escaping an insane asylum. She knew the hospital had saved her life, but that didn’t make her any more fond of it.
No more half-breaths for her! She gulped the air, savoring it as if it were the nectar of the gods (and maybe it was).
Out on the street, she noticed the palm trees were missing their fronds. They looked like rows of pillars from a forgotten temple of old. The grass had turned a sickly brown. A week without oxygen would do that, she guessed.
She returned to the spot where her bicycle had crashed. It was still laying there (of course it was, since no one else was in here to mess with it), but she ignored it and continued wheeling herself down Pasadena Avenue in her wheelchair. Eventually she cut over on Bellefontaine to Fair Oaks and continued south. She was amazed at how fast she could go, now that she had actual air to breathe.
She followed Fair Oaks for a good mile. The avenue was broad, with two lanes each way and a red-brick median down the middle. Palms and southern magnolias grew alongside the road—usually a beautiful sight, but all dead now. The whole area looked dead, in fact. Restaurants were shuttered, businesses boarded up, parking lots vacant.
“The Apoc l pse is here,” one sign with several of its letters missing read outside a restaurant, and she half believed it. A car had crashed head-on into a telephone pole adjacent to the sign, as if to bear witness to the fact. The dead occupants were still inside; Rachel could tell that much from a glance.
She saw no living persons in Pasadena but plenty of dead ones. They were scattered about randomly—a lone body here in the middle of a parking lot, another one there with his back propped up against the façade of an urban sweat lodge. One woman rested against the bole of a tree as if she were taking a nap, but the crow cawing on top of her head seemed to suggest otherwise. An older couple sat in rocking chairs on their front porch, heads canted towards one another; maybe they’d made a suicide pact and drunk poisoned lemonade together on the count of three. Two children in flowered dresses lay facedown on a brown lawn, unmoving. If they were playing at being dead, they were doing a really good job of it. A dog also appeared to be playing dead next to them.
More bodies of people and pets were visible on the side streets she passed, but she had no desire to look any closer. She pictured her own body lying prone next to her bicycle after the crash and knew just how close she’d come to being one of them.
The further south she went, the more crashes she saw. Drivers must have been trying to escape the dome when they went into hypoxic shock. One Buick was buried deep inside a Winchell’s Donut House. Other crashes were far less spectacular, amounting to little more than fender-benders, but their occupants had fared no better for all that. They sat inside with their mouths agape as if they couldn’t believe their fate. A few had managed to open their front doors and were draped across the seats or curled up on the pavement below, but that was about as far as they had gotten. She could picture them gasping for air, clutching at their throats, opening their doors in a last-ditch attempt to find more oxygen, but she knew better than anyone how doomed those attempts were.
