[An imagining. Not a prediction. At least, not yet. – FWP]
“Dad!” I shouted over my shoulder. “The groceries are here.”
“Why tell me?” came the answering shout. “You know what to do.”
Well, yes, I did. But I didn’t like to do it. All the same, I stepped over to the master console, pressed the toggle that focused the monitor camera, and winced as the driver’s face became visible. It was the same one as last week. He leered at me the same way.
“Do you have a shipment for Hayes?” I said.
“I got a medium-size package marked Hayes and a great big one for you, sugar.”
I forced myself not to react. “Put the package on the conveyor.”
He took his time about it, but after a couple of minutes he fetched a box marked Hayes in large block letters and tossed it onto the belt. I waited until his whole body was back inside his vehicle, then triggered the belt. It jerked forward. Five seconds later, the package was completely inside the safety box. I slapped the safety that dropped the outer security panel. The driver awarded me a parting sneer and sped off.
Dad ambled over to peer at the sensor readings. Temperature and vapor emissions were within normal limits. The needle on the radiometer ticked forward once, then settled against the left stop. My heart fluttered.
“Dirty bomb with a crack in the shielding?” I murmured.
Dad shook his head. “We’d get a persistent positive reading. Probably an activation glitch. I don’t usually use the radiometer. Why would anyone dirty-bomb a private home?”
“Well, there was Houston—”
He nodded. “And then there wasn’t. It looks safe, Leah. Let it in.”
I pressed the Admit key. The inner security panel rose, the belt groaned as it went through its slow, spiraling descent to our level, and presently the parcel entered our home proper. I slapped the safety to drop the inner security panel. I would have opened the parcel myself, but Dad shooed me back.
“Let me do this, hon.”
He did, in his usual painstaking way. Fortunately, the parcel was perfect and innocent. It contained no surprises. The contents were the what we’d ordered. Three precious pounds of ground beef, a two-pound loaf of bread, a quart jar of strawberry preserves, and assorted canned beans, vegetables and fruits. The quantities were correct. Every item bore an origination-point seal. It was one of our better days.
No fresh vegetables or fruit, of course. Those days are over.
“So we’ll eat for another week,” I muttered.
“Yeah. Put the perishables in the fridge, Leah?”
“Sure.” I hefted the box of goods and headed downstairs.
I returned to the living-room level to find Dad sitting on our sofa, staring at his tablet screen with a look of annoyance.
“Something up?” I said.
He scowled. “They’re sending a truck.”
I peered at him. “They want you to come in on a Sunday?”
He nodded.
“Any explanation?”
“None. Last time, it was some garbage about employee security.”
“I remember.”
Dad grunted. “I’d better tog up.” He headed up the stairs to the storage area.
I couldn’t help but worry. The last time he left the house, his car was attacked on the way out and on the way back. The driver had to spray tear gas to drive off the mobs.
It hasn’t happened often, but more than once mobs like those have shucked a man out of his vehicle and stomped him to death. Yes, even out of an armed and armored, high-security truck like the ones Dad’s employer sends for him. What do you mean, were they looking to steal something? Get serious. Mobs don’t need a reason. That’s what makes them mobs.
Dad came down the stairs in his going-to-the-office gear: combat helmet, plate-carrier overshirt and Kevlar pants, steel-toed construction boots, a .45 in an appendix-carry holster, Bowie blade at his side, and a chest rig stocked with loaded mags, Mace, and first-aid items. Only his head was visible, and not all of that. He looked ready for the Manhattan front lines. I had a hard time believing he wouldn’t smother under the weight.
He saw me inspecting him and chuckled. “What am I missing, hon?”
“Varmint gun.”
“Won’t need it this time. Going to the Tarrytown offices. The town was fumigated day before yesterday.”
“Doesn’t always kill the bigger rats. Think you’ll be back by game time?”
“Hope so. It’s Bears–Packers at Lambeau Field. Old-time football.”
“Give me a call if you think you’ll miss the kickoff, okay?”
“Leah,” he said, “you know I’ll call you as soon as the pow-wow is over. What are you going to do while I’m out?”
“I think I’ll fix some pilaf.”
“To go with hamburgers?”
“I still have a good onion and some garlic. Anyway, we haven’t had beef in a month. Live a little, okay?”
He grinned. “Okay.” He glanced at the monitor. “Truck’s here. Try not to worry, hon.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He went upstairs to the exfiltration area. I slid the lever forward that extended the access tube. When I got the mouth to within about a foot of the truck’s security portal, I took manual control, docked it, and waited for the green light. It lit at once.
I could see Dad’s silhouette as he passed through the umbilical, knocked on the portal, and waited. The driver’s-side gunner gave him a once-over, nodded to the driver, and the driver allowed him into the interior. Seconds later the truck was moving at high speed toward the turret-lined entrance to the Hutchinson River Parkway.
I closed the umbilical’s security panel, retracted it, and headed downstairs to cook and fret.
Dad did get back by game time. He said there were no incidents this time, coming or going, other than a little rock throwing. Still, he looked wearier than usual. He went to the bedroom to shed his gear. I scooped modest portions of my not-quite-gourmet concoction into two shallow bowls and toted them to the living room.
Dad was back just before the coin flip, once more in his usual garb. The clothes he’d taken to calling his fatigues. He wouldn’t explain why. He settled into his chair in front of the transceiver, picked up his bowl, sampled the pilaf, and smiled approval.
“It’s good, hon,” he said. “Mom would have liked it.”
I just nodded thanks. He doesn’t often mention Mom. It’s not smart to continue when he does.
The Packers won the toss and elected to receive.
It was old-time football, all right. What Dad calls smash-mouth. The Packers stayed on the ground all the way to the Bears’ fifteen, threw an incompletion, and had to settle for a field goal. The kicker must have been angry. The ball bounced off the Lambeau Field dome and back onto the field.
“That’s the way it’s been going for them,” Dad muttered. “Quarterback’s got no arm.”
“He’s not that bad,” I said. “It’s got to be hard to throw accurately with that little light.”
“Power allotment,” he grunted. “The nukes are at their limits. We’re fortunate, Leah. If it weren’t for the geothermal unit, we’d be feeling our way around like moles.”
Just how different are we from moles, I didn’t say.
“Why couldn’t they have made the dome out of Lucite?” I said.
“They wanted to,” Dad said. “The cost was prohibitive. Takes a lot of Lucite to stop a Vulcan round, and the fabrication and installation would have been a bitch, so they went with steel.”
The Bears took the kickoff all the way back to midfield and played the hurry-up to catch the Packers unready. It worked. The Bears’ wide receiver snagged the ball in the Packers’ endzone. He waited for the ref to signal the score and trotted to the sideline.
“No touchdown dance,” I murmured.
“No fans,” Dad said, “so why bother?”
“There’re fans,” I objected. “There must be ten million people watching them right now.”
Dad didn’t reply.
The Packers took the kickoff for a touchback. Their offensive unit returned to the field sluggishly, as if they weren’t sure why they were there.
“Geez, guys,” I muttered. “Show a little spirit.”
“Why should they?” Dad said. “No fans cheering wildly in the stands.” He snorted. “No stands.”
“Why couldn’t they have kept the stands?” I said. “People used to pay a fortune to attend an NFL game.”
“Cost and security,” he said. “The security dome would have had to be four or five times as large. As it is, the cost nearly broke the Packers. It did break a lot of other teams. There were thirty-two at one time. Now there are eight, and staging games just for those eight is so expensive there’s only one per week. If it weren’t for the federal subsidy, there wouldn’t be any. Besides, can you imagine what it would take to get ten or twenty thousand people into an enclosed stadium without mass bloodshed?”
I shook my head. “I know. It’s just... oh, forget it. I don’t know why we bother watching.”
Dad did something he seldom does, these days. He turned to face me squarely and took my hands in his.
“Leah,” he said, “it’s what we have left. It’s something. We have power and a working transceiver. The wireless signal here is pretty good. The game is on, so we watch. What else would we do on a Sunday afternoon, buried here like a pair of corpses?”
I started to say something, bit it back.
“We can’t go out,” he said. “We can’t go visiting, or shopping, or to a movie, or to a park, or to church. We don’t have the means and even if we did, the risk is too great. The savages are always on the lookout for targets. We have to make do with what we have in this little fortress I built for us. This damned, dark, damp underground fortress.” His voice trembled. “Thank God we got out of the Bronx before... before it got really bad.”
He wouldn’t say in time. We hadn’t been in time. Not quite.
“Remember how you used to complain about the apartment? How cramped it was, how there was only one bathroom and practically no closet space?”
I nodded.
“If we hadn’t ditched it and moved out here, do you think we’d be alive today?”
He was plainly on the verge of tears. Part of it was losing Mom to the savages, but another part was the sense of failure. He’d wanted more for me. A regular college education. A social life like the one he’d had. A horde of suitors vying for the hand of his only daughter, marriage and children and a regular family. Those things had receded into the mists.
I haven’t been out of the house in eleven years. What higher education I could get came from the Internet. I haven’t yet had a paying job. I might never have one. I’m twenty-three and a virgin. I might die a virgin.
Others have it worse. A lot of others and a lot worse. We’re safe in here. We eat regularly. Dad seldom has to go out and when he does, he gets the best protection Teleoperated Systems can provide. They think a lot of him. They should. There aren’t a lot of waldo operators who can do the nano-etching he does.
I should have been more thankful and I knew it.
“Forgive me, Dad,” I said. “I know we’re the lucky ones. I just have... you know, girl stuff to deal with.”
“I know, hon,” he said. “So did... Mom.”
We sat in silence for an endless moment. The game continued without our attention.
A little animation returned to his face. He perked up.
“There’s a boy at the office...” He hesitated. “I like him. You might like him too.”
My flags went up. All red. I struggled to control myself.
“Tell me about him,” I said.
“Well, he’s... in agriculture,” he said. “Works a combine waldo. He’s good at it, a real natural talent. He’s well-mannered, too. A Christian.”
“Oh? What denomination?”
“I never asked,” he said. “He wears a cross pendant, though. You don’t see those much anymore.”
We don’t see anything much anymore, I didn’t say.
“Keep going,” I said. “Is he decent-looking?”
Dad shrugged in that way that says How am I to judge?
“Leah,” he said. “He’s alone in the world. He lives at the office, in the barracks there. He lost his family in the Trenton riots. Both parents and two younger sisters.”
“And he wants to start a new one,” I muttered.
Dad nodded.
“You haven’t said how old he is,” I said. “Or his race.”
He grimaced. “Seventeen. He’s white.”
I forced myself to keep still.
“Would you like to meet him?” Dad said.
“Can you arrange for us to chat over the Net?” I replied. “I think it would be a bad idea to bring him here before we’ve had a conversation or two.”
“I’ll get on it.” His gaze flicked to the transceiver. Halftime had arrived. The Bears were up by seventeen.
“The Packers don’t have it today,” he said.
“Or they’re not putting it out,” I said.
“They looked a lot better back in October,” he said. “Well, that’s the game. On any given Sunday—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Heard it all before.” I headed to the stairs to fetch a bottle of water from the fridge, stopped. “Dad?”
“Hm? What, hon?”
“I miss... Eucharist.”
He winced. “I don’t know, Leah. I’ll see what I can do.”
I nodded and continued on.
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