: 18 :

  3 HOURS LATER

  Jeremy sat with Alysse and Kayla in what was already being called the “common room” by everyone. It was a large kitchen area, outfitted with stove and a few fridges ready to hook up and assemble. A few others were there with their children, and everyone was asking everyone else how they had managed to survive. The stories all had a similar theme, he noticed—“I was in my basement” or “Me and the guys were cave-diving” or “I was scuba-diving at the time, and came up and saw everybody and everything had been eaten.”

  It seemed all the survivors had made it because they were beneath the surface at the time of the Ecophage attack. All except for Jeremy, who sat staring out at people through yellowed vision, thinking how lucky he was to have made it. It suddenly occurred to him that he might be the only living human being on Earth who had actually witnessed the Ecophage attack while it was happening.

  While everyone else exchanged stories, some of them commented to Jeremy that he looked a little green in the face. Alysse had smiled and pinched one of his cheeks. “Green like a Twi’lek.”

  Jeremy smiled. “Not all Twi’leks are green.”

  “What about the girl who danced for Jabba the Hutt?”

  He snorted. “Her name was Oola, but she was just one. Bib Fortuna, Jabba’s majordomo, he was a Twi’lek too, but you see he’s pale white—”

  “What’s a Twi’lek?” asked Kayla.

  Jeremy couldn’t believe he was explaining Star Wars lore at the bottom of a cave while the world was ending, but he pushed up his imaginary geek glasses and said, “They’re aliens in the Wars—er, Star Wars. They have these big head-tails, which they call lekku, and they wrap around their heads in great big loops.”

  “Aliens?” Kayla said. “Like the aliens that built the nanomachines?”

  “Uh, er…well, these aliens were imaginary. We don’t know what the aliens looked like that made the nanites, sweetie.”

  “He’s just talking pretend stuff now,” Alysse explained.

  Kayla said, “Oh.” Then she turned on her phone and began playing a mobile game.

  Not much longer for mobile games, he thought. Time’s running out for everything. No more Candy Crush or Among Us or Subway Surfers.

  “A’ight, ever’body!” Clyde shouted, standing on top of a foldout table and waving his hands. “A’ight, listen up! Quieten down! We got a few things to discuss.” Everyone turned to Clyde, who seemed to have assumed the role of fearless leader. “All right, okay, so here’s the down-low. We got the generator running, and between Cody, Stewartson and m’self, I think we can keep her a-runnin’.”

  Jeremy thought, You didn’t do anything to get it started, it was all Cody and Stewartson. But he kept his mouth shut. Why raise a stink right now?

  “As you can see, the generator’s got the lights workin’. We’ve tested the stove and the fridges over there, so we got plenty o’ ways to cook, clean, and store food. Hell, we even got runnin’ water in seven different bathrooms, set up just like public bathrooms like in a fuckin’ restaurant—” He stopped himself, looking around at their faces. “Oops, sorry. Sorry to these young’uns in here. Ol’ Clyde here’s got a potty mouth, but I’m gonna work on that.”

  A few people shuffled uneasily. Some people were still weeping. Weeping for the dead and for all of humanity.

  How long will this last? Jeremy wondered. I’ve only ever mourned one person at a time. I’ve not had any time to even think about Mom and Charles being dead. And Tynesha, Halen, Arnold, everybody back home. Uncle Kevin, Uncle Colt, Dave Beeman in the apartment across the hall. How long do you mourn for the whole damn world? He felt Alysse squeezing his hand, and he squeezed back. Jeremy realized tears were running down his face, and she must’ve noticed.

  “Now listen, folks,” Clyde said, tugging on his suspenders. And Jeremy almost had to laugh, because Clyde looked like one of those old-timey Southern politicians in black-and-white moves, strutting like real Boss Hog types. “This part is important, and it needs to be said. There’s no two ways about it, human civilization—at least, how it has existed fer the past few hundred years, even a few thousand years—is over.”

  Clyde let that sink in.

  Jeremy just listened. Alysse squeezed his hand again. Kayla’s phone chimed with sounds of Pokémon Go or some such game.

  “You all saw it,” Clyde went on. “You saw what it looks like out there. It’s over. Some o’ you drove here from Arkansas, Kansas, hell Melanie over there is from frickin’ Seattle. We all saw it. We called who we could to join us here in Silvid Valley, but not all of us could make it. Hell, my cousins, who I was s’pposed to meet on the way here, didn’t even make it. I have no earthly idea where they are.” Clyde hove a burdensome sigh, and scratched the back of his head. “Folks, I don’t know what all y’all believe in, which god or gods you pray to, but even if you’re an atheist, I’d say at the very least we owe it to the dead and dying right now to give them a moment of silence. Pray if ya like, or just sit there and have a cry if you don’t pray. Either way.”

  Clyde bowed his head. As did almost everyone else.

  Jeremy had no faith. He didn’t know what to call himself. Maybe agnostic? Undecided? A nonparticipant in the debate? But he did need a moment of true, calm silence. Now that it seemed like they were going to survive, he could sit still and hold Alysse’s hand and finally—finally—let his guard down.

  He surprised himself when bowed his head, and collapsed into tears, thinking about Mom and how she’d called him for supper, telling him to turn off the Wars.

  Once Clyde decided the moment of silence had gone on long enough, he said, “There’s no food out there. No cattle outside o’ this cave. No more farms or nothin’. This is it, folks. This is where we make humanity’s last stand. Nowhere else to go. This is it.” He added, “So, get that in yer heads. If anybody wants to leave, you absolutely can, nobody will stop ya. But if you leave this place…I highly doubt you will be able to ever return.”

  Jeremy was barely listening. He wept. He wept at the idea that there would never be another Star Wars movie, no good sci-fi novel ever written again, no more sequels to Mass Effect or Grand Theft Auto, no new Spider-Man comics, no more Ken Burns documentaries, no revisiting Netflix shows like Stranger Things or Squid Game. No wine.

  No. Fucking. Wine.

  No French fries or steaks. How the hell could that be? How was it even possible that just three days ago, he had been on the Internet perusing websites for various law firms looking for future jobs, combing movie news sites for any word about upcoming Star Wars movies, when the next one was to be released, and what it was going to be about?

  “Jeremy!” he could hear Mom saying. “Turn off the Wars, son! It’s time for supper! I can’t be hearing that R2-D2 squawking while I’m eating! It’s enough I have to hear it in my dreams after listening to you play it all day!”

  He wept.

  He wept because there was no more Star Wars. And somehow that was emblematic of everything that had happened. Because if a person could wipe out a thing that had had such a massive cultural impact, and was known the world over—just wipe it away like that—then how the fuck could humanity be expected to go on?

  “They’ll come back for us,” he said aloud, surprised to hear the vehemence in his own voice.

  “What?” Alysse said, leaning in. “What did you say, Jeremy?”

  Clyde was shouting out some orders about sleeping arrangements, and about how to start bringing all their vehicles down the big elevator, so nobody heard Jeremy say, “The Ecophage. It’ll come back to finish us off. We have to be prepared for it.”

  She shook her head. “How?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But we better find a way.”

  : 19 :

  2 HOURS LATER

  They slept.

  Jeremy didn’t know how or when they decided where everyone would sleep, people just seemed to choose certain stalls, and laid down their sleeping bags and blankets. Some people didn’t have everything they needed, because they had been in too big of a hurry to get here. Others shared what they could spare, including Jeremy, who gave a five-year-old boy named Austin and his twenty-year-old babysitter Gabby some spare blankets.

  All twenty-seven of their vehicles were brought down, one at a time, using the large cage elevator at the farthest end of the main corridors. It was a little chilly in these caves. Some people wanted to sleep in their vehicles, but Clyde reminded all the people (his followers?) that leaving cars running in an enclosed space would be a mistake. “Firstly, it’s a waste o’ gas,” he said. “Secondly, ain’t y’all ever heard of carbon fuckin’ monoxide?”

  Jeremy thought about correcting Clyde by telling him it was carbon dioxide, but what the hell difference did it make? The point was made, and nobody turned on their vehicles that night.

  During the night, Alysse held his hand, while Kayla cuddled up close to Alysse and went to sleep so fast and so easily that Jeremy found himself jealous. Because he lay awake for a long, long while, just staring at the cave ceiling. They slept on the ground in layers of blankets, right beside the blue Chevy Blazer that had once belonged to Otis Carmichael.

  Jeremy stood facing the ceiling. The generator had been switched off to conserve diesel and power, so there were no lights on except the flashlight he had beside him, facing up at a black ceiling. Jeremy stared at the ceiling, thinking, They drove us underground. The bastards drove us underground. Like snakes. Like worms. We’re going to have to hide underground for the rest of our lives.

  Then, some part of him—the part that had probably had him haul off in the library that time and knock out two of Kyle Abraham’s teeth for calling his mother a whore—suddenly clawed to the fore of his brain, put both of its feet on the ground, and declared, We have to be ready.

  And before he finally closed his eyes and fell asleep, Jeremy Braxton declared that he by-the-Force would be ready.

  : 20 :

  THE NEXT MORNING

  Jeremy stood facing east, at a fast-rising sun. He’d come up the elevator with Mathilda and Albert, both of them armed with their pistols, as they stood vigil, waiting to see if any more stragglers had shown up in the night. They hadn’t. The grass around the hill where the entrance was was still green, but all the lands beyond were gray and drab, and the smell of ammonia and bile swam up at them, assaulting their noses.

  Jeremy had now concluded that the smell would become second nature to them. He’d read somewhere that bears and other wild animals had evolved to be afraid of the smell of smoke, due to wildfires, and so when Native Americans had covered themselves in charcoal to go hunting, they had had to remain downwind, lest it cause their quarry to flee. He wondered if in a few thousand years humans would evolve to be terrified of the ammonia-and-bile smell left by the Ecophage. Would it code itself into human DNA? Would it become as natural to them to flee that smell as it was for cats to run from garden hoses, thinking the hoses were snakes?

  “We’re going exploring later today,” said Mathilda, apropos of nothing. They just sat on a couple of crates and looked east, at a sun rising over a whole new world.

  “Exploring?” Jeremy said.

  “Clyde wants all the caves mapped. Says there’s lots o’ rooms and corridors still need lookin’ into.”

  Albert nodded, and stood up to adjust the too-small pants falling off his too-wide ass. “Reckon I’ll go with him. It’ll give me somethin’ to do.”

  “I’ll come, too,” Jeremy said. “Hell, why not?”

  “Okay, Jedi Master,” Albert said. “Oh, hey, I got somethin’ for ya. Was gonna wait to show it to you ’til we went back below, or until I figgered out when your birthday was, and give it to you then.”

  “What is it?”

  Albert bent down on a knee that popped and reached into his backpack filled with snacks. He pulled out a black shirt, on the front of which was a very familiar sight to Jeremy. He had to laugh. The blond male figure standing at the center of the shirt held a white, glowing sword above his head, pointing towards the heavens, while a princess in flowing white dress and hair done up in two buns was beside him holding a blaster pistol.

  Designed by the twin brother artists, Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, the poster was iconic. The original artwork for the 1977 release of the first Star Wars movie had hung above his bed as a child, and, looking at it now, he got a little teary-eyed.

  “It’s a little too big, seein’ as how my wife got it for me. I’m a bit of a fan myself, but only the original movies. Never watched any o’ that Disney shit or that Jar-Jar business.” He handed it over, and Jeremy held it in his hands like it was the Shroud of Turin, a relic that must be handled with incredible care.

  “Albert…you don’t have to—”

  “Shut it. It’s yours. You earned it. You’re a Jedi, like your father before you. Ain’t that the line?”

  “From Return of the Jedi, yeah.” Jeremy smiled. “Thanks, Albert. I’m gonna take good care of this.”

  A few hours later, they switched shifts with a couple named Natalie and Sven, a pair of tourists from Sweden who had been visiting Florida when the Ecophage attacked. Now, they were stuck here in the States forever, underground with mostly rednecks and total strangers. Jeremy tried to make them feel welcome whenever he saw them, shaking their hands, thanking them for relieving him of duty.

  Jeremy went down below with Mathilda and Albert, back into the cave, into the corridors that were not entirely lit, so as to save on power. They met up with Clyde and several others in the common room, and there they pored over the map of the entire labyrinthine cave system. They divided into six teams of two, then went off exploring. Someone had found clipboards somewhere, as well as paper and pens. And so, armed with these, Jeremy went with Mathilda to begin an inventory of a section of the caves the maps had designated as Blue Zone.

  Jeremy checked in with Alysse before he left, asking how Kayla was faring. They had plenty of Coca-Colas for now, which helped mitigate her levels, keeping her from crashing. “You okay with me going off with Matty to check out the rest of the tunnels?” he asked.

  Alysse nodded, held his hand, and kissed it. “Go. We’ll be here.”

  “Okay. Hey, um…at some point, we’re gonna need to have some…that is, can I get some alone time with you? We need to talk. About everything.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding in total understanding. “We do.”

  They left it at that.

  Jeremy and Mathilda met up at a hallway juncture, and went down a flight of dark steps covered with metal grating, which slowly turned into just stone steps. Construction was only partially finished in Blue Zone, but most of Corridors A through E appeared ready for move in. Corridors A and B were completely empty, not a single table, chair, window or closed door, although there were several empty doorways that looked fitted for metal doors to be installed later.

  “So, how long you and your girl been together?” Mathilda asked. Her rough face had a ghostly pallor in the glow of their two flashlights. Jeremy assumed his face looked the same.

  “All of two days,” he said. “Maybe a few weeks, if you count Tinder messaging.”

  “Wait. You’re serious?”

  “Yeah,” he chuckled.

  Mathilda came to a dead stop. “You mean you guys only met forty-eight hours ago?”

  “Formally met, yeah.”

  “So Kayla…that’s not your daughter?”

  “No. She’s Alysse’s niece.”

  Mathilda’s eyes widened a fraction. Then she started walking again. “I guess we’re gonna learn a lot about each other down here.”

  “Yeah, suppose so. What about you? You got anyone here?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Anyone on their way here?”

  “No,” she said stonily.

  “Oh. Sorry. I mean, I don’t know your situation, but…I’m sorry.”

  “We all lost everything,” Mathilda said, and that seemed to be all that needed to be said on it. “This way. Map says there’s storage down here.”

  They came to a place that looked prepped for showers. That was good, they could all use a bath. Jeremy had noticed how bad his armpits were starting to smell. They tested the water and heard rattling. They determined that maybe later they could figure out a way to get the pumps to send water out this way. Far as they could tell, the Silvid Valley Underground Installation had water pumping from deep below in an aquifer. That’s what a brochure Cody had found said.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “They keep calling you the Jedi Master,” Mathilda said, as they moved into a corridor filled with denuded metal shelves. The corridor was empty except for those shelves, nothing to see here. “What’s that about? I haven’t heard the whole story.”

  “Oh. I’m, uh, sort of a Star Wars geek, I guess? But even that might be underselling it. You know how some people follow their favorite sports team, all the athletes, know all their stats and their married lives? Well, that’s me with Star Wars. I know the movies like the back of my hand, I know what year George Lucas married his first wife, what year they divorced, and what year he wrote each of the scripts. I read those behind-the-scenes books, I keep up with all the fake lore, the Expanded Universe, and the old lore that they now call Legends. Or…called Legends, I guess. Nobody calls it anything now. It’s all gone.”

  Mathilda shrugged. “Maybe not.”

  “No, it’s all gone. Trust me, I saw Atlanta. And from what the others say, it’s like that all over.”

  “No, I mean, nothing’s dead as long as it lives in your heart. Or in here,” she said, tapping her left temple. “You can always pass that shit on.”

  He sighed. “I guess so. But right now, I’m more determined to—hold up! What’s in here?”

  “Where?” She shone her flashlight to follow where his was pointing.

  A big doorway had appeared on their left, opening up into a big, expansive room. They stepped inside. It was empty except for several stacks of rubber tires, all looking like they were fit for military vehicles only. They crossed this chamber into another, and Jeremy was surprised to find several large, black cases, each one the size of a coffin, some of them stacked five high and coated in dust.

  “Whoa,” Mathilda said.

  “Yeah. Whoa.”

  Jeremy walked over to inspect them. Wiped the dust off one of the labels slapped to the side. It read: PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

  Jeremy looked over at Mathilda, who said nothing, only panned her flashlight around, looking a little worried. He ran his fingers along the side of one of these coffins, and found a set of clasps. He flipped them open and raised the lid. His eyes went wide as saucers when he saw what he first thought was a bazooka, a rocket launcher, whatever you called that thing that went BOOM! in Call of Duty. Jeremy’s father had owned lots of guns, but he’d only ever seen this kind of thing in movies or video games.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Mathilda agreed.

  They opened more of the cases. Some of the things Jeremy recognized—machine gun parts, magazines, another rocker launcher-looking thing—but other things he didn’t. Some cylindrical things, palm-sized, with what looked like pins in them. Too big to be grenades, he thought. Mines?

  One of the rocket launchers came with an instruction manual, still sealed in plastic. He opened it and looked it over.

  Then he looked at another case, this one twice as big as the other coffins. Jeremy feared opening it, knowing it couldn’t be a nuclear bomb for some reason his imagination ran wild and figured it might be. On this giant case, there was an equally giant label, and on it was mostly gobbledygook.

  NO: 818-A/3

  PROPERTY UNITED STATES MILITARY – OFFICE OF DARPA

  FEN #184979811552-003

  LRAD / GRANT

  DARPA, he thought. He knew that name because he’d had to site references from cases involving military theft for a paper on court-martialing. DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was a research and development agency for the United States Department of Defense. They made weapons, tools, gadgets, James Bond-level shit and world-ending shit. DARPA. You gotta be fucking kidding me, they just stored DARPA shit down here? They stored this whatever-it-is down here and just left it?

  At first incredulous, Jeremy then realized he shouldn’t be so surprised, because in the very paper he’d written while at Berry College he’d cited various failures of military protocol throughout the decades, failures that had shocked him at the time, and made him wonder why people even trusted the government at all. Shocking things like how they’d once misplaced a nuclear missile in some warehouse in Montana before a farmer found it when he bought the property at auction and gone in to inspect it, or how the nuclear launch codes for several sites across the country were supposed to be changed every three months, but were simply set to the same default 000000000 as they had been decades ago. Seriously, just a bunch of zeroes.

  Then Jeremy looked at the label again, and wondered what LRAD or GRANT meant. He took out his phone to ask Google, then remembered he couldn’t get a signal down here. He would have to take the elevator up later to use his old friend Google, who may only have days to live. Better use it while he could.

  They surveyed the rest of the Blue Zone, and when it became obvious the rest of the area had nothing of interest, they headed back. When they rendezvoused back in the common room with Clyde, they told him what all they’d found. Mostly nothing, some showers that may or may not work in time, and, oh yeah, some heavy military-grade shit, some of which was completely alien to them.

  Clyde looked mightily impressed, but also a bit distracted. “Well, we’ve also found somethin’ exciting. Well, sorta kinda exciting. Some people showed up today. A man and his three sons, they’re all underfed as hell. The dad’s been shot.”

  “Wait, what?” said Jeremy. “Shot? Shot by who?”

  “Somebody out in those gray wastes. Somebody who wanted the food him and his boys were carryin’. They barely got the hell outta there.” Clyde wiped his sweaty brow. “Tellin’ you, we need to watch the fuck out. Any survivors’re gonna eventually come this way. Today, tomorrow, or ten years from now. And they’re gonna want this little haven of ours. We best be ready to fight. We need to start thinkin’ about buildin’ up our defenses,” he said, saying it like DE-fenses.

  “You act like it’ll be Mad Max out there,” Mathilda said.

  “It may, Matty,” Clyde said. “It may, indeed. And sooner than you realize.”

  Jeremy didn’t know how to feel about that, so he didn’t comment. He left Clyde and Mathilda to discuss possible defenses, and went to visit Alysse and Kayla, maybe to have their talk. But both of them of were asleep on the floor and he didn’t want to disturb them. Jeremy leaned against the small doorway into their stall, watching them by the glow of an electric lamp someone had supplied them. He watched Kayla’s chest rise and lower, the rest of the angels. Alysse had an arm around her, snoring lightly.

  He went to find food in the kitchen, but before he got there, he heard screaming echoing down the halls. He ran towards it.

  : 21 :

  The infirmary that Joshua Collingsworth had first envisioned for Silvid Valley was perhaps ambitious in the beginning. The area was in a particularly large, bored-out quadrant of the cave system, with sixteen beds with steel supports but no cots. The ceiling was twelve feet high, and there were bright halogen lights hanging from steel beams. The infirmary had several steel tables that Jeremy thought rather looked like they were meant for future surgeries by whatever doctors had been expected to occupy this place. There were two adjustable hospital beds in one corner, with mattresses wrapped in plastic, but those mattresses had already been taken by a couple named Janet and Margery. There were plenty of blankets, thank God, and the cabinets had medicines that had expired.

  So yes, Joshua Collingsworth’s infirmary had been ambitious, but it had not been completed, not by half. It was inadequate to the task of dealing with a mortally wounded man, as the dying fellow on the table at the center of the room could readily attest. Writhing and thrashing, he lashed out, and several people fought to keep his arms and legs down while one tall man with glasses, who Jeremy knew was named Tyrone, tried reaching into the man’s guts to remove the bullet.

  And all this while his three sons hovered in the far corner and screamed, crying out to their father, even as Albert and Sven tried holding them back.

  Jeremy watched it all in horror, impotently wringing his hands and shouting to Tyrone and the others if he could help somehow. “Unless you’re a fucking doctor or a surgeon, no!” Tyrone shouted back at him. The table was so crowded there wasn’t even enough room for him to help the others holding the dying man down.

  Then, suddenly, the dying man went quiet. Jeremy saw him trembling, then give a wavering gasp. The dying man started babbling, “—told you—told you I wasn’t ready to dance—why did you make me dance—”

  “He’s going into shock. This isn’t working,” Tyrone said to the others. “Byron? I need you to stay with me, okay, Byron? Byron, just hole tight—” Then he shouted to Sven and Albert, “Goddamn it, get those kids out of here! I don’t want them seeing this!”

  The dying man’s legs kicked suddenly, he thrashed some more. And then he went still. So still that it could only mean one thing.

  “Is he okay?” one of the boys said tremulously. He looked no older than five. The other two looked maybe seven, eight-ish.

  Borne on a strange new instinct, Jeremy walked over to them, knelt in front of them, and said, “Hey, boys, what’s say we get outta here? Let the doctors work, yeah? Make sense? Come on, let’s leave them alone so they can help your dad. We’ve got ice cream, fellas.” He didn’t think that was true, but he needed to get them clear of this place.

  As if in a trance, the youngest boy said, “Okay. But he’s gonna be okay?”

  “They’ll take care of him. C’mon, let’s go find some snacks.”

  “Ice cream,” the oldest boy said. “You said ice cream.”

  “Yep, I sure did, and you can punch me in the noggin if I’m lying.”

  They didn’t have to punch him in the noggin, even though there was no ice cream. They didn’t have to think about anything for a while, because the truth slowly sank in when Janet and Margery came into the cafeteria where Jeremy had taken them, and they started to have “the talk” with the boys. A kind of talk that Jeremy knew something about, because his father had had it with him about his dog Sassy, and again when the doctors had thought Mom wasn’t doing so hot in her battle with cancer. Jeremy’s mother had survived, but he now had some practice in “the talk.”

  The boys were all crying. The eldest hugged his two younger brothers. He learned their names were from oldest to youngest, Gabriel, Stephon, and Tre, short for Trevon.

  The talk went on for a while, with different adults coming into the cafeteria to offer the boys their perspectives, consoling them, and promising them they’d always have a place here in Silvid Valley. Alysse showed up at some point and, unbeknownst to Jeremy, was watching him from afar as he consoled the three boys. When Jeremy spotted her, he tried to go to her, but found himself stuck in place when Tre, for some inexplicable reason, chose him of all people to grab hold of. The five-year-old clung to Jeremy’s right leg, squeezing, and sobbing.

  He knelt down and took the boy in his arms and kept saying over and over, “It’s okay. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

  Jeremy didn’t know how long he and Tre remained like this, a tableau of the last tragedies of mankind, but when Alysse came over to join in the hug, it seemed to crack some shell with Kayla, who came over to join in, as well. As did Tre’s other two brothers.

  It lasted a while. It lasted as long as it needed to.

  : 22 :

  8 HOURS LATER

  The body of Byron Jacobson could not be buried in the hard rock floors of the Silvid Valley Underground Installation, nor could it be burned or left somewhere to rot. So, in the first of many such trips that Jeremy believed they would have to get used to, he traveled up with Clyde and six others to dig a spot at the bottom of the hill. Out here, under the open sky, their eyes winced against such brilliant sunlight. Already they were all becoming sensitive to it.

  A few noticed Jeremy’s strange, green-colored skin. He said it was just some condition of his that had never been diagnosed, and they accepted this. He still had not told anyone how he managed to survive the Ecophage attack, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. The nausea still came and went, as did the occasional migraine. He wondered if he was still immune to the Ecophage. He wondered if it was like a normal vaccine, and that you eventually needed a booster.

  “Green like a Twi’lek,” Alysse kept saying, and it always made him smile.

  Presently, while he watched the Jacobson brothers mourn their father, Jeremy stood back from the impromptu ceremony and took out his phone. He checked to see if the Internet was still working, and was thankful that it was, even if it was a little slow. He saw that he had only one bar, and so quickly did a Google search for LRAD and GRANT.

  What he found intrigued him.

  After they had buried Byron Jacobson and allowed his three surviving sons to stand by the grave and say a prayer, they all quickly shuffled back down below. Jeremy had gotten the story out of Gabriel, the oldest boy, about how he, his brothers, and his father had survived by being on a museum trip, deep underground where the museum curator, a friend of his father’s, had invited them to see ancient African artifacts that hadn’t made it to the main exhibits aboveground. Gabriel described the horror when they emerged up top, their father becoming panicky, how they’d seen everyone dead and turned to gray goo.

  “Cool shirt,” said Tre, the youngest of the brothers, as he walked back towards the elevator. He’d been pointing at the Star Wars shirt Jeremy was wearing, the gift from Albert.

  Later, after they were finished with Byron’s ceremony and had all returned to the caves below, Jeremy gathered with Alysse, Clyde, Mathilda, Albert, Stewartson, Cody and Tyrone in the cafeteria. Jane and Margery had made a beef and vegetable stew the night before, using all the meat and vegetables they could before it went bad. Jeremy and the others were savoring every bite.

  “So,” Jeremy said, showing them screenshots of the articles he’d taken earlier. “It turns out that LRAD stands for ‘long-range acoustic device.’” He took out a user’s manual, still wrapped in plastic, never opened. “It’s a wave cannon.”

  “What the hell’s a wave cannon?” asked Albert, slurping down his stew.

  “Ultrasonic weapon. It produces an extremely loud noise. It can do so up to five, six miles away. Google says it’s usually used for deterrent and crowd control.” Jeremy gestured to Stewartson. “I had him take a look, he said it looks familiar to him. That right, Stewartson?”

  The tall, muscular engineering student pushed his glasses up higher on the ridge of his nose. “That’s right. This one’s a big bastard, but it looks similar to what we used in Fallujah. It’s terrific for suppressing huge crowds fast.”

  Clyde made a face like he’d just smelled a rancid fart. “This stuff really works? Loud noises actually make people scram?”

  Stewartson gave the redneck a severe look. “Yes, sir. I don’t care how badass you think you are, if this thing is pointed at you, and you’re within a mile of it, you’ll clap your hands over head and run like the Devil’s in your brain. Your eyes will vibrate inside your skull, and you’ll get an instant migraine that’ll last hours, maybe days. You’ll piss yourself. If you’re close enough, or if your exposure is prolonged, you’ll have permanent hearing lost.”

  Jeremy held up the article on his phone. “It also says here that turned up to 140 decibels, you won’t just go deaf, you’ll lose your balance, start vomiting, fall over.”

  “Yes, sir,” Stewartson said, taking his glasses off to clean them on his shirt. “You’ll wish you never done whatever it was that made someone point that thing at you.”

  Alysse’s eyes widened. “Jesus. What about the person firing it? Wouldn’t they go deaf?”

  Jeremy shook his head. “Doesn’t work like that. For one, there’s hearing protection included with the LRAD, noise-cancelling headphones, but you really don’t need them because apparently—and correct me if I’m wrong on this, Stewartson—an LRAD sends sound straight forward in a beam, say about thirty meters wide.”

  “That’s right,” Stewartson said, putting his glasses back on. “If you’re outside of that invisible beam, you can barely hear it.” He opened the user’s manual, starting thumbing through it.

  “So…why are we talking about this at all?” asked Mathilda, saying what they were thinking.

  Jeremy said, “Because I’m wondering how effective this could be against the Ecophage.”

  “I don’t know,” Stewartson shrugged. “I never used one of these myself, only saw our boys in the Hummers using something like it. And we don’t know if that’s something the nanites would be scared of, so…”

  “But it vibrates the air,” Jeremy said hopefully. “And the liquid inside any bodies it hits. Something as small as them, I have to imagine they wouldn’t like it, at the very least.” He looked at each of them in turn. “These LRADs can be vehicle- or shoulder-mounted. And there’s six of them. I think maybe if we haul them up top, along with some of our best all-terrain vehicles, and mount the LRADs onto them…I don’t know, might be a kind of defense?”

  Everyone was silent.

  Jeremy shrugged and looked at Clyde. “What do you think? You were talking about mounting some defenses. Well, here you go. Deliver a blow directly to the heart of their cloud if they ever come near, if we notice the trees and grass all melting into waste.” Then, on a whim, he smiled. “Deliver a blow to the heart of them, like proton torpedoes to the Death Star.”

  Clyde smiled wryly. “Ho-leeeee shit!” He pointed right at Jeremy, and said, “The Force is strong with this’un.”

  They all laughed.

  Mathilda clapped him on his back.

  Albert said, “Just like we always say! A damned Jedi Master! Hell yeah, let’s take a run at the Death Star.”

  They didn’t know it, but at the edge of the room, hovering in the doorway to the cafeteria, was Tre Jacobson. The boy stared in fascination of the adults, particularly at the man named Jeremy Braxton, the one who had consoled him first when his father died, and the man who everyone in the cafeteria was clapping on the shoulder and calling Jedi Master. Tre vaguely remembered a movie or TV show about a Jedi.

  And he thought, Death Star?

  : 23 :

  2 DAYS LATER

  It took some time to choose which six vehicles to take up top, then haul the LRADs up there and go through the process of hooking them up. The blue Chevy Blazer was one of the vehicles chosen, and Jeremy sat presently alongside Cody, Albert, and Stewartson (who everyone had taken to calling Stewie now) underneath a cloudy sky. Cody was looking with binoculars for any sign of the distant trees or grass starting to be eaten. On the eternal lookout for the Ecophage’s return.

  Jeremy was paying close attention to how Stewie assembled the LRAD, and asked questions incessantly, hoping he wasn’t getting on Stewie’s nerves. “I want to know everything about these things. Hope I’m not being annoying.”

  “No, no, I get it,” Stewie said. “Everyone in the colony should learn.”

  That’s what they were calling themselves now. A colony. Jeremy didn’t know who started it, but it had certainly caught on.

  Looking around at a clear day, he soaked it in. How many more good days would there be like this? If the Ecophage kept eating the world, including all the grass and trees, how much longer before photosynthesis totally failed and there was no more breathable air? He’d been thinking about that recently, and worried that soon others would, too. Right now, everyone was working on recovery and staying alive down in the cave—colony—but soon enough the more educated folks were going to ask the question: How will we get our air if this keeps going, if the world never heals?

  Right then, Jeremy assumed, the Ecophage was still eating Jupiter and its moons, just like Dr. Gilmore had described on CNN. Would they keep eating or get nice and full, and move on? Would they get “stuffed to the rafters” as Dad used to say whenever Mom made steak and he kept getting seconds and thirds and fourths?

  Jeremy looked out at a blue sky that might not remain blue forever, not if the nanites ate everything including the atmosphere. Then he looked over at Albert, who had his phone and iPad in his hands, looking for signals. He had his laptop on the ground, too, attached to his mobile hotspot device.

  When Jeremy had asked him what he was doing, Albert replied, “I’m pirating videos. If you’re right, and the Internet is gonna die soon, I want my favorite videos from YouTube, to watch for as long as I can.”

  Jeremy looked at Cody, who shrugged and rolled his eyes.

  “All right,” Stewie sighed, wiping his sweaty brow. “Let’s see what we have here.”

  Stewie had the LRAD all laid out, along with parts and tools they’d hauled up from the caves. Jeremy watched carefully how he assembled the thing, and listened intently to how it all worked.

  What Jeremy saw was a steel cylinder, as big around as a basketball, and about as long as his arms spread out from each other. It looked like the vehicle mount could be quickly detached and converted to shoulder mount on the fly. It had two handles, and two triggers on each handle, as well as a heavy laptop made out of steel and two cables running from the computer to the cannon-looking thing.

  “How do you control this thing?” Jeremy said. “How do you aim it?”

  “There’s a screen here,” Stewie said, tapping the laptop. “But when it’s hooked up to its vehicle mount, you point it using this.” He held up something that looked exactly like an Xbox controller.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope,” Stewie laughed. “The U.S. Navy replaced some of their periscope controls in their submarines with Xbox controllers, since the last two or three generations grew up playing video games and know how to use these kinds of controllers without needing training.” He tossed one of the controllers to Jeremy. “Simple as pie. Here, help me lift this thing up onto the top of your Blazer. Without a proper hatch on top, we’ll have to improvise, create sort of a turret.” He smiled and winked. “Just like Han and Luke in the Millennium Falcon’s turret, am I right?”

  Jeremy laughed at that. “Yeah, if only.”

  “I remember watching those movies when I was a kid. Over and over, man. Till my sister complained to my mom that I was hogging the TV. I played so many of those video games, too. Remember Racer?”

  “Oh, shit, man, don’t even get me started. Racer was so good! I remember dreaming of one day becoming a pod racer—”

  “What was the hardest track for you?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. The Abyss. The Abyss was so hard—”

  “Right?” Stewie laughed. “Those jumps were so unfair—”

  “Sooooo unfair! Like what maniac game designer programmed that shit?”

  They both howled with laughter.

  “Did you guys ever play any of the new stuff?” said Cody, suddenly interested and lowering the binoculars. “Jedi: Fallen Order, Jedi: Survivor, any of those?”

  “Oh, man, hell yeah. I played the hell outta those,” said Jeremy.

  “I never got into them,” said Stewie, gesturing for Jeremy to help him lift the LRAD’s main cannon. “They made me miss Knights of the Old Republic too much.”

  “Oh, man, you wanna talk about KOTOR now?” Jeremy squatted down to help him lift the LRAD cannon up onto the Blazer’s roof. The LRAD had a tripod that let out and connected to the stand that Stewie had bolted to the Blazer’s roof, and they walked carefully up a pair of step ladders and stacked boxes to reach the roof. “KOTOR is the absolute GOAT of all roleplaying games. Like there’s not even any discussion to be had.”

  “Which did you like better, KOTOR one or KOTOR two?”

  “One’s the best.”

  “I know it’s blasphemy, but I prefer the second,” Stewie grunted, as they eased the cannon into its main housing, then stepped back down to the ground, wiping their brows. “I mean, KOTOR two had the better background story for the protagonist.”

  “Completely disagree,” Jeremy said. “KOTOR’s protag was the greatest ever.”

  “I agree with the Jedi Master on this one,” said Cody. “I think it’s—hey, what’s that?”

  Jeremy and Stewie turned to see what he was pointing at. In the distance, near a row of hills still topped with green, the grass seemed to suddenly darken.

  “What is that?” Cody said. “You guys seeing that? Is that a shadow or—”

  “No,” Jeremy said, feeling his balls clench up. “There aren’t any clouds! Get back to the elevator, and get back below! C’mon, guys! Move!”

  “If it’s the Ecophage, maybe we could hit them with the LRAD—”

  “No time to aim it! Move!”

  “He’s right, Cody!” Stewie cried, already headed that way. “Back to the fucking elevator! Now!”

  Suddenly, they were racing back into the mouth of the hillside entrance, slamming the elevator door shut behind them, and Jeremy repeatedly hit the DOWN button as if that would make the elevator go any faster.