“What about Sharon?” Marie asked.

“I don’t know. She wasn’t there—in the dream. It was winter and I saw them there in the cabin, Lacy and Quentin. Will you tell Quentin to keep it with him, the key to my place?” Chuck said. “Please. He won’t understand if it comes from me. He thinks I’m a nut. But I know you’ll understand. You always understood me. You’re the only one who did. It’s important.”

“Yes, I’ll tell him. Chuck, I believe you. And I love you. You know that.”

Chuck Phelps had cried only one other time as a grown man, on the day he realized he was in love with another man’s wife and would never, ever, have her, or a real life. He cried a second time, holding the hand of the woman he loved.  He sat with her until she fell asleep and a nurse chased him out of the hospital room. He’d driven back home in the summer twilight, in a dull trance, full of regrets. He wished he’d never gone to their shitty war. It had ruined his life.

   Two days later, at two o’clock in the afternoon in the small community hospital in Nevada City, Marie dreamed of herself walking out, pregnant and hopeful and fearful all at once, on a hot July day, years before, watching the afternoon’s splendid painting of the sky’s beauties: the pines’ tops moving slightly in the warm breeze, the smell of those pine trees in summer, the confusion of the forest floor as she picked her way toward the Phelps place. She felt herself speed up, walking faster, something waiting for her. She felt/saw herself climb up onto an old stump, holding her precious round belly from which a daughter would emerge soon. She glanced behind her, back toward her home with its new shiny metal roof, put on that summer by her young husband. She thought she could hear Quentin hammering.

It was at that instant, with July’s big sun shining in her eyes, that Marie Collier passed away, the sound of a Sierra summer in her ears.

CHAPTER 24

Are you there?

The text messaging box sprang up on Miles’ iPhone, displaying Price’s cell number. He had forgotten all about his boss, his job, his fiancée, and even his parents. The last ten hours had been so intense that he’d had no time to reach out to anyone.

Yes. Miles tapped a message out on his phone quickly, hoping Price was okay.

I’m sending you something.

What? Miles wrote.

Not necessarily Genesoft’s GMOs that are making people sick. Probably Fukushima Daiichi site. Alarming report being suppressed by MS media.

Where are you? Miles wrote.

Office, Price texted back.

Can you get out of there?

No. They’re here. Open file attached to email sent you.

Miles switched screens and opened the email attachment. He read the top of the document quickly, a document from a laboratory in Great Britain, with a report on something called “Black Dust.”

What is this Black Dust? Miles texted.

Radioactive dust suspended in atmosphere. Dropping now along W Coast.

Is this what’s making people sick? Miles wrote.

I think so. Extremely high levels of radiation. Don’t think I will make it. Wish I’d had a son like you.

Miles looked at his screen, stunned by the text. He put down the phone. Price had always been friendly with him—kind, in fact—constantly covering for him and pushing him forward at the paper, even trying to get him a job on a big-city paper through his network of friends. But he’d never suspected a father-like love. The man he’d considered a crank was still trying to do his job as a journalist, even now. He was ashamed for having thought of Price as anything less, and for not having understood what Price really was: a committed member of the Fourth Estate.

“He’s got an emergency power plant, a big one. Diesel,” Dillon said excitedly. He’d come up from the hatch in the floor that led to the bunker complex. They’d only been here for a few hours and already the Phelps ranch was turning into a doomsday-prepper Disneyland—or wet dream, as Dillon called it while surveying the man’s gun collection. More than thirty rifles, mostly assault rifles, each type duplicated ten times. When he climbed down into the bunker for the first time, it had looked to Miles like a government armory.

   Dillon had been on a scouting mission. Miles had intended to follow Dillon down into the bunker, but stopped when he got Price’s text.

“Don’t know how this guy did it. But he did. It’s a commercial rig and it’s vented somehow. There’s a thousand gallons of diesel down there, believe it or not, in two steel tanks. All we have to do is flip a switch and we’ll have juice. He left instructions. They say we should turn on the Apple computer on the dining-room table,” Dillon said.

“Well, go turn the power on. What are you waiting for?” Miles said. “I need to charge my damn phone.”

Dillon saw he was upset and went back down the ladder into the maze of underground rooms and hallways, Maglite in hand.

*   *   *

Howard Price turned on his small red Maglite, which he kept in his desk drawer for emergencies. It would be all the light he’d have until morning, as the building’s emergency generator had run out of diesel and quit, plunging the building into total darkness.

He put down his iPhone. The phone’s battery was dead, and he had no way to charge it unless he went out into the parking lot and used his car’s battery. He was tempted, but that trip would be dangerous, if not impossible.

He didn’t want to face the glass wall that was protecting him from the Howlers that were wandering the building. Instead, he turned the flashlight on the Building Seven poster a friend in the 9/11 Truth Movement had mailed him. He looked at the building that had fallen on that fateful day into its own footprint and in a grey cloud of dust, pulverized.  Never hit by anything more than random debris, he thought. The poster’s caption read: 47 stories of steel and concrete don’t vaporize and collapse at free-fall speed because of fire. Wake Up America!

   He would never know the truth, Price realized. He might not have had children, or a wife, but he’d worked for the family of mankind during his whole long career. His personal life had been a sad one. But now he saw it differently, and he smiled in a way he’d never smiled before. He felt oddly free of the sense of personal failure he’d carried with him for so long.

I’ll die happy.

He forced himself to turn from the poster and shine the small Maglite onto the city room outside. It was empty. The Howlers had left, unable to break down the thick bulletproof partition separating his office from the others. But he knew they were everywhere in the office park. He’d seen them from his window wandering the grounds. The city’s streetlights, for whatever reason, still worked, illuminating the bike paths and parking lots bathing them in a cold halogen light.

If I am going to die, why not do some good first, he thought. He’d gotten the story about the “Black Dust” three weeks before and pasted it to his office wall along with recent 9/11 stories. He’d been keeping track of the fallout from the Fukushima disaster, underreported by the corporate media. This time, and unlike during the aftermath of 9/11, he’d kept a meticulous journal that tracked all the four reactor’s major events as they happened. He’d filled up several notebooks, sometimes working late into the night. He had the weather patterns off the coast of Japan, both tide and wind, updated continuously on his computer since the disaster. It soon became clear that the Japanese company that ran the plant was losing control of the situation. Worse, the men—and women too, he supposed—who’d been sent in to try to repair and shut down the plant would die of radiation exposure in weeks, according to independent scientists who were blogging day and night.