Chapter 44

“Okay, my turn,” I chuckled as I picked up the fat cigar-sized joint of the Sisterhood’s weed.

Possession of the cannabis talking stick authorized the owner to speak without interruption. I inhaled deeply and gave the blunt to Sheila and took my place in our naked Truth or Dare fireside chat.

“Please be honest. What do you believe?”

The commander’s theology drifted all over the map from Pagan to Puritan, seasoned with native lore and eastern thought. Pinning her down was like trying to nail water to the sky.

“Don’t fuck over your neighbor,” she laughed as she waved my smoke-ring to one side. “That is the long and short of the Society’s code: ‘Fear is the father of all lies. Therefore, strive to be truthful and kind to all you meet. Do not be cruel. Treat family, friends, and strangers with respect, dignity, and compassion, especially if you think they are undeserving. Do not hate.’” Sheila recited the oath I had taken a lifetime ago.

“And it goes like this,” she said as she squatted and slipped another log on the fire, “terror disrupts our thoughts and diminishes our vision. Falsehoods clutter our brains with untruths we are forced to remember lest we are discovered to be deceitful. Do not be unnecessarily deceptive. Dignity is the acknowledgment of the other’s humanity, respect is your acceptance of their right to exist. Compassion is a reminder to be kind rather than callous when you engage with people, be they friend or foe. Beyond that, I will say no more. If you abide by this standard, I welcome you in peace and invite you to share with me the fellowship of our minds so we may better know one another’s spirit.”

She kissed my cheek and exhaled smoke in my face.

Like fence posts whizzing past on the highway, the days after SkyFire blurred together like shadowy spots on moldy bread. It was an extinction-level event on multiple fronts.

For the dinosaurs of national governments, it was the end of days. All politics are local and no one gave a rat’s ass about partisan policies when enemies were at the gate. For empires of affluence, it was game over in spades. The economy lay in shambles. Money was worthless. My grandmother used to tell me, “A poor man is only a rich man with no money.”

Poverty was the rule unless you stood on your own property with a wad of cash in your kit. The ATM and credit cards stuffed into wallets were useless pieces of colorful trash connected to someplace on the dark side of the moon.

For the gods of electronic media and the tyrants of internet kingdoms, there would be no tomorrow. Castrated by nature’s guillotine, the pricks in charge were shafted. Electrical dysfunction rendered impotent their capacity to seduce us for profit.

The airwaves once awash with data, red and blue hues of real and fake news, bizarre conspiracy theories, and weird views no longer belonged to the mighty. Anyone with electricity and a transmitter could be a player. For the rest of us addicted to reality through online social communities, cable television, and cell phones, it was cold turkey. There would never be another fix.

“Mable, say again, over.” Sheila’s eyes widened in alarm as she increased the volume, “Shh!” she hissed with her index finger to her lips in the universal call for silence. “I say again, Cholera. The shits. We have twenty-seven cases confirmed, three fatalities, six in critical condition.”

I winced as a chill crawled over my memory of childhood afflictions. In the days before vaccines, I inherited my immunity the old-fashioned way. As a charter member of the Malady of the Month Club, I endured mumps, measles, chickenpox, ringworm, pinworms, and a host of parasites and infections. My brother survived Polio.

“Our prayers are with you, Mable. Is the outbreak under control? Over.”

“Negative, Liberty. It is not.”

“Meeker, what is your status? Over.

“The Mayor has declared a public health emergency. We have ninety-seven in quarantine at the hotel. Active cases being treated in middle school. Flu is hitting the infected hard. We have no antibiotics. Battery low. Shutting down. Out.”

“Mable, repeat, our prayers are with you. Tune-in at the top of each hour when you can. Take care. Out.” The Commander blew a kiss as she scribbled something on her notepad. “Martha, please apprise Wendy and the medical team of the situation in town. Give her this. We’ll be meeting about Meeker...” Sheila paused and frowned at the clock, “ ... be back here in forty-five minutes,” she said as she ripped the sheet from her pad and presented it to the Queen of the Kitchen.

“Belinda and Sky, saddle-up for a recon mission. Take the bikes and the drone. Pack as many spare batteries as you can. We need high-def recordings of the town. Focus on security and conditions on the ground. Still, capture points of interest. Brenda, can you give ‘em a hand with their kits?”

“How ya doing, Wolfie?” Belinda teased and dismounted from her Onex bike, and stretched her arms, and rubbed her behind, and sighed as she worked the kinks from the trail out of her backside. She gave me an almost sympathetic grin before she held the binoculars to her eyes and scanned the route forward.

“Never better,” I lied as I wiped my black bandanna over my face. Two hours of almost nonstop riding. Old soldiers never die, we just wrinkle away.

“We should be able to see the town from the top of the rise,” I said as I straddled my motorbike and pointed toward the spot where the path passed over the crest of a sun-drenched ridgeline about half-mile distant. “I’ll set-up and put this guy through his paces. I haven’t flown since SkyFire, and I would feel better with a practice run.”

We weren’t exactly racing, but I was trying not to come in second as we dashed for our destination. Frosty finished ahead of me. Her eyes widened as she stared at the town, and her mouth formed a perfect circle as she smeared the syllables of two words into a single long howl of horror.,

“Holyshit!”

Meeker was, in a word, a mess. Ashes and ruins slashed across the pristine patterns of streets and buildings in a dance of random destruction. The same pulse of power which ignited the motors in our refrigeration units had run riot with the village’s appliances as miles of wound copper wire converted the influx of energy into a core-melting heat.

I shuddered in sympathy as I focused my field glasses on the village in the valley. I could only imagine myself in their shoes on that night: trapped between a blazing sky and a burning town with nowhere to run and no place to hide.

I moved next to Belinda and held my arm around her shoulders as we shivered together in the charcoal flavored sunshine. Since our sticky encounter with Fitzwater’s band of bonded brothers, I studied every aerial photograph of the town. Basic paranoia more than geography guided my curiosity.

Tucked into a pocket of high ground between two steep ridges, just north of the White River, the compact and well-planned town of Meeker spread out before us like a charred chessboard.

“The weather is ideal for a flyover, the sun is almost directly overhead,” I said as I glanced upward and squinted into the cloudless blue sky.

I slid the Quadcopter from its custom carry case and gave the mechanical marvel a quick inspection. All systems were good to go except for one small problem: I couldn’t see shit.

Our nearly treeless vantage point provided little refuge from the sun. The itty-bitty black plastic sunshade did nothing to prevent the glare of sunlight from bleaching detail form the drone’s handheld instrument panel.

Time for Option B. I removed the VR goggles from my backpack and plugged the connecting cable into the control panel’s USB port and adjusted the straps. When the fit was comfortable and snug, I tapped the power switch. My point of view instantly changed as I became the aircraft and was no longer me.

The onboard Hasselblad camera produced lifelike high-quality 4K videos, breathtaking and razor-sharp with crisp, vivid colors. The effect was a bit disconcerting. Whereas a moment ago a moment before I had been staring at the device, I was now me looking back at me without a pixel in sight. I shook my head and the image in the mirror nodded in reply.

“Open the pod bay doors, Hal,”

Swallowing hard, I snickered as I sank to my knees and lay prone as I hugged the rocky soil and looked around. A slight buzz leftover from a sunrise bowl gave the display’s reality a virtual kick. I’m not scared of heights as long as there was a railing between me and the scenery.

Vertigo and mountain crests have a mutual animosity and there’s no sense in testing gravity.