Chapter 31

The days melted into weeks and the weeks flowed into months as winter searched for spring. For the first couple dozen wake-ups, I started each morning with the unreal feeling that I was at the bottom of a rabbit hole. By the end of the second month, the sense of strangeness decreased, and I was able to open my eyes without breaking into a cold sweat. I was still on the wrong side of the looking glass, but Wonderland had become my home.

I didn’t make a journey to Liberty Mountain to search out a place to hunker down and wait for the world to end. I’d never been a prepper and thought the Sisterhood’s obsession with survivalism and their belief in the coming apocalypse to be a weird way to spend a life.

“My boss is a brilliant woman; too bad she is wasting her life up here in the mountains,” I said to Darlene one morning over a cup of coffee.

“What do you mean, ‘wasted’?” Darlene paused mid-sip and frowned at me.

“You know, wasted, as in unproductive. Sheila’s got so much talent, ‘tis a pity she’s throwing it all away,” I noted between sips of Colombian nectar.

“Why? Would it be better if we worked in one of those underground missile silos waiting for the command to exterminate all life?” Darlene tilted her head to one side and gave me one of her strange smiles.

“If the world never goes to Hell in a handbasket, they’ll have squandered their lives,” I sputtered lamely under my partner’s steady gaze.

“If it doesn’t, then we’ll have spent our lives as free women doing what we love in the company of friends in one of the most beautiful places on earth.” Darlene pointed out the window. “Shitloads better than working a dead-end job with no future, don’t ya think? Now hurry up, or you’ll be late to work.”

Darlene leaned over and kissed me and sent me on my way with a smack on my ass. I forced myself to admit it, maybe she was right. Who was I to judge? Their lives were no more “wasted” than nuns cloistered away in convents or monks locked away in endless prayer.

Life with the clan didn’t turn out to be anything like the long and glorious vacation I had hoped it would be. Rather than living a life of leisure, I found myself laboring harder than ever before. Herodian, an ancient Roman historian, once asked a Roman slave how he spent his days. The slave was reported to have replied, “Sometimes I do what I want, but most of the time, I do what I must.” Amen brother. You and I are kindred spirits.

The Sisterhood never had a problem with boredom. Everyone, including me, held at least one second job in addition to our primary duties. If that weren’t enough to eat up spare time, they’d also assigned me to be a drone operator and rifleman. My to-do list was longer than my day.

Like everyone else, I worked the equivalent of two full-time jobs. My typical workday included eight to twelve hours as Sheila’s shadow and another five to seven hours working in the kitchen or the gardens in the cavern beneath Liberty Mountain. In my free time (ha!), I tried to learn how to fly the drone I was supposed to operate.

Occasionally, to catch-up on the political bullshit back home, I took a shift at the communications center. Scores of live global news channels streaming in via satellite were the Sisterhood’s window on the world and an endless source of news and entertainment.

The easy-going routine of the Colony shattered like glass the day warnings of an incoming ballistic missile attack swarmed across the globe. Hawaii issued its alert with a tagline made necessary by its 2018 fuck-up. “This is absolutely not a drill. This is the real thing,”

Two minutes and twenty-two seconds passed before the Alaskan Tsunami Early Warning system activated to deliver an identical message. ICBMs were inbound and headed to the land of the midnight sun.

Within minutes, the amphitheater of the multimedia center transformed itself into a situation room as every member of the Sisterhood took up their duty stations monitoring and sampling global reaction and back-channel shortwave transmissions. The flurry of activity crawled to a stop as we watched in growing horror as civil defense commands in Australia, Japan, and Canada echoed similar warnings to their citizens.

“Oh my fucking word, it’s happening.”

Sheila’s face went ashen as tears welled up in her eyes and cascaded down her cheeks. She gripped my arm to steady herself as she fought against gravity and despair.

The center’s control officer had activated a digital timer when the first alarm sounded. Positioned high above the banks of television screens displaying all the major network feeds from around the world, the doomsday clock was crossing over to the other side of midnight. Assuming the elapsed time since the commencement of the “event” was correct, we were less than ten minutes away from the start of the Third World War.

In a matter of moments, the wall of monitors in the media center went from a collage of random images to a pulsating pattern of flashing news bulletins. The wall of monitors filled with talking heads as one nation after another raised the alarm of Armageddon’s approach.

Like a bystander watching someone jump from a burning high rise, I rode a wave of terror, and my gut turned to jelly as I waited for the inevitable splat! I braced myself against Sheila, and we clung to each other for mutual support.

As the digital clock flicked to 00:10:00, Hawaii announced, “Oops, Sorry. False Alarm.” Several seconds later, Alaska recalled its alarm without explanation, and within a minute, kangaroo-land and our neighbors to the north both canceled their warnings. Japan, the only country to experience a nuclear attack, took another forty-five seconds to kill their doomsday message.

Mankind had been playing Russian Roulette with nuclear war for decades, and the hammer had finally fallen on a live round. Dumb luck or the hand of fate intervened. The bullet in the chamber was a dud.

After monitoring the situation for another hour, Sheila declared a Colony-wide stand-down and a day of thanksgiving. No doubt to allow her and everyone else a chance to decompress and find a clean change of underwear.

“Job well done. Fall out, liberty for all until eleven-hundred hours tomorrow,” the leader commanded as she dismissed the women from duty.

When I turned to leave, Sheila’s hand grabbed my shirt sleeve. “Not so fast. I’m still on duty, and so are you. There is a meeting we must attend. Follow me,” she instructed as she led me to a small conference room at the rear of the amphitheater.

When we entered the meeting room, we found four of the five women from the executive committee already seated in the padded leather chairs around the conference table. Martha, my boss from the kitchen, played bartender, and filled glass goblets with generous servings of the Sisterhood’s delicious brandy.

The meeting, if you could call it that, was more of a group funk stuck at the intersection of “What” and “The Fuck.” No one said a word as we sipped in silence. I settled into the contours of my leather chair and took long slow swallows of the golden brew. Brandy is a distilled version of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and it was soon working its magic as a peaceful amber glow tinted the atmosphere of the room. Alcohol pushed my unspoken thoughts past my lips before I had a chance to silence them.

“What the fuck just happened?”

“What do you think happened?” Sheila asked she tilted her chair back and crossed her feet on the table.

I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. I took a deep breath I tried again. “I think we got a warning shot between the eyes. We are so not ready for this...”

I left the sentence unfinished as my voice went silent. I shrugged my shoulders and nodded toward Sheila and the women of the committee. Sheila held her hand palm-up and spread her fingers open like a flower in a gesture of invitation. The floor belonged to me.

“We would be fucked if this had been the real thing. We lack the force of arms to hold this valley; we are not prepared. Not even close.” I gazed into the worried faces around the table.

“What about our Defense Force?” Sheila offered.

I turned to Brenda the Quartermaster. “As the only person here with any real combat experience; do you think we could maintain this position against anything stronger than a troop of deranged Boy Scouts?”

“No. No, I don’t,” Brenda said with a humorless chuckle.

“We’re safe, but we aren’t secure. The heaviest weapons in inventory are semi-automatics for hunting. We have fifty rifles with two-hundred-thousand rounds of ammunition. There are no military-grade weapons. Short of raiding an arms depot, what do you suggest?” Brenda got the implications of my question, and leaned forward, narrowed her eyes, and gave me a look of concerned determination. Since I was hired-help and this post-event gathering was a leadership meeting, I wasn’t sure which protocol to follow. I studied Sheila’s face for clues on how to proceed as I took a few sips of brandy and licked my lips.

“Speak truthfully so that we may better know your mind.” Sheila lifted her glass of spirits above her head and pantomimed an invisible toast.

“I’m not a soldier, and I don’t play one on TV, but I think we’ve got a problem. This place is now my home, thank you, you’ve all done an incredible job.”

I made eye contact with each sister in turn and nodded my head. I was pleased to see my complement acknowledged with a smile, nod, or at least a raised glass.

“If the shit ever hits the fan, there is no doubt we will be safe. However, it’s one thing to survive the storm; it is another to prevail through all the years that will follow. In an all-out battle with intruders, we can’t win a war of attrition. You--er, we, yes, we--need a force multiplier.” I paused and scanned the faces around the table.

“Force multiplier?” Martha echoed in puzzlement.