Aurora(24)

“You’re lying.”

“I am. You bought me kitchen cabinets.”

“This isn’t a joke, Aubs. It’s real, and it’s happening.”

“I know. I’m scared. But we’re OK. Thank you for calling.”

“Do you still have the satellite phone I sent? It had three extra batteries, all charged. Check them. I will call you on it in the morning. We’ll discuss this again. It’s you and me, remember?”

“Because everyone else is dead,” she answered, automatically. It was their routine, and it had been funny once. It wasn’t right now.

“Let’s get you through this one day at a time,” he said.

“I plan to.”

“I love you.”

“You too.”

He hung up first. She walked into the living room, joining Scott at the TV. They fell into disaster posture, sitting upright at the edge of the couch flipping between channels, no news good enough or bad enough to satisfy.





9.





Provo, Utah

Monarch Air had an executive terminal at the Provo Municipal Airport, which was eighty-six miles from the site outside Jericho. It was a longer drive than Thom had hoped for, but he’d looked at numerous closer airports and none had air-traffic control towers. He didn’t want to risk being airborne with nowhere good to put the plane down once the event had started. The likelihood of bumper-to-bumper traffic on the outskirts of Provo seemed low, so that was where they landed. So far, aside from the wrinkle Marques had put in the plan, everything was going pretty much exactly as expected.

Ann-Sophie and the kids were the first ones off the plane, and they headed toward two waiting Suburbans, customized with exactly the same details as the models they rode around in back home, down to the apps on the iPads waiting in the seat backs and the brand of hand sanitizers in the door pockets. Thom had called ahead to order another car so that he wouldn’t have to ride with Marques, Beth, and her kid. There was a limit to his beneficence, and the phone call with Aubrey had irritated him. What was the point of caring about people, planning ahead for them, allowing them to borrow the use of your well-developed consequence-foreseeing frontal lobe, if they ignored all your advice? Kitchen cabinets? Great. I hope you enjoy them when you’re burning them for heat this winter.

Putting his sister out of his mind, he stood at the cargo hold in the back of the plane, supervising the unpacking of the bags, counting them off one by one as the handlers loaded them onto luggage carts. The plane would be hangared and serviced here for a few days, until Marques returned to fly it to the private airstrip near Sanctuary, where it would reside on a more long-term basis. A qualified mechanic was the one detail Thom had let slide so far, but that wouldn’t be hard to find, once the trouble hit. Who wouldn’t want a cushy, high-paying job in a safe environment once things got dicey? And this time Thom would be double-and triple-checking that guy’s marital status, you could bet your ass on that.

The baggage handler slammed the door at the rear of the plane and walked toward the SUV. Thom frowned.

“We’re missing one.”

The handler turned around. “Sorry?”

“You unloaded four bags. We have five.”

The handler turned back, opened the hold, and looked inside. “Nothing else in there.”

“Where’s the blue one?” Thom asked. The handler looked at him blankly. There really was nothing else in the hold. Thom turned to Ann-Sophie. “Honey!”

She turned from where she was helping the kids into the back of the car.

“Where’s the blue one?”

“What blue one?”

Thom maintained an even tone. “We have five go bags. Two red—those are the kids’. Two black—those are you and me. One blue. That one’s missing.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see it.”

“You had them take all the bags out of the locked cabinet in the garage, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Well, I thought so. I don’t know, Thom, I was upset. Your phone call was upsetting. I was trying to get to school to get the kids.”

“You didn’t have to go to the school,” he snapped, then reined in his tone. “You didn’t have to go to the school because Antonio was going to the school. That was the whole plan.”

Ann-Sophie straightened, turning icy. “I wanted to see my children.”

“That just—that wasn’t what we agreed. Remember? In the disaster-planning meetings?”

“I’m sorry, I guess I wasn’t really listening. Was the bag important?”

“No. I bought the stuff, packed it, systematically unpacked and repacked it for three years, and cleaned and tested everything in it on a rotating schedule because it was unimportant.”

“Knock it off,” she snapped, drawing herself up to her full height, which was an inch and a half taller than him. The baggage handler turned away and busied himself with unnecessarily repacking the four bags in the back of the SUV.

Ann-Sophie softened her tone. “You got us here, Thom. You did a great job. I’m sure whatever was in the bag, there are a dozen identical items like it at the place.”

She was right. The missing bag hadn’t been long-term provisions at all, it was a short-term PERK, or personal emergency relocation kit, to be used only if they’d been unable to fly and were forced to drive. And not just drive but maneuver through a hostile landscape with limited fuel reserves. There were extended-life body warmers, boxes of water-purification tablets, freeze-dried stroganoff and macaroni and cheese, tampons (for blood from wounds as well as their usual purpose), chain-saw blades for harvesting wood, and condoms.