The foot was part of a child’s skeleton. Bleached bone white by the torchlight and by time, it lay curled within the protective grip of a woman’s corpsethe sex identified by a patched Air Force blue skirtbeneath a long table. The blankets that had been used to make a bed were from military stores, but had grayed with time.
Mildred knelt, drawn by the pathetic sight. It was nothing new, but here, where they’d only found the bodies of adults, the child’s death seemed more pronounced. She played the light over the two corpses. Neither appeared to have died from radiation sickness or violence.
Metal gleamed around the woman’s neck, and Mildred reached out for the stainless-steel dog tags. When she tried to move the chain from around the neck, the effort dislodged the skull from its tentative hold on the neck, and it went rolling away. The child collapsed more and seemed to meld in a jumble of bones into its mother.
Mildred studied the information stamped on the dog tags Lieutenant Jacqueline Dawson, followed by her service number and other pertinent facts. She’d only been thirty-one when the end had arrived.
“Wall you off from the world,” Mildred said in a thick voice, “still you think you gotta believe in love. Silly bitch. Love grows in safe houses, places where you worry about the mortgage getting paid on time, not whether you’re going to survive.”
But she knew that was an unfair assessment. The child could have been the result of a reaching out for creature comfort after the unit had been forced to cut itself off from the rest of the installation.
A pile of toys, shaped from bits of wood carved in the shapes of animals and trucks, filled a plastic basket at the foot of the bedroll. Machined blocks of metal and polished stones were mixed in with them.
However the child had arrived, effort had been made to care for it.
Mildred said a small prayer for them, the words coming easily. Her father had been a Baptist preacher. She started to back out of the area when she spotted the locked journal in the folds of the blanket. She picked it up, then held the torch close to the ragged clothing that fell apart at her touch. The key to the journal was in an empty tin of analgesics. It wasn’t much bigger than her thumbnail, with two forked teeth on the end.
Standing beside the workstation, Mildred fitted the key into the lock and turned. The tumblers inside gave reluctantly, and she opened the front cover without trepidation. Whatever secrets the woman had held had died with her decades earlier.
“Lt. J. Dawson” was written in a strong, clearly feminine hand. The blue ink was partially washed out by time and the yellow glow of the torch. The narrative began on the next page.
1/29/01 The world died nine days ago at approximately 1700 Greenwich mean time. It was noon in Washington, D.C., and 1000 hours on base. We’d been watching the presidential inauguration.
A quick scan of the next few pages told Mildred that Dawson had been trying to make sense of everything that had happened. Information had died immediately when the bombs fell and attacks in space destroyed satellite links. The base hadn’t known who’d started the attack and had been unable to renew any kind of communications on the backup systems that had been installed.
The story wasn’t new. In the places where Ryan had led his group, others had kept similar journals. She flipped through the pages. At first the entries had been inscribed with a regularity that told her the lieutenant had been trying to impose her own sense of security on the confusion that had broken loose around her. She looked at one only a few weeks later.
2/13/01 We’ve just been notified that we’re all trapped here. The radiation is going to be too much for any of us for possibly years.
Major Burroughs (the U.S. Army liaison for the project in charge of security) says we’re better off than the other sectors of the installation. With the experimentation our unit has been working on, the lab environs and this facility had to be shielded. And we’ve got enough supplies to last for decades. God, I say that, and I look at it on this page, but there’s no way it can last that long. No way we can last that long.