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Alex lay on his side and wove the fabric between the logs in a pattern that would provide maximum strength. Sure, they could survive for a while here at the campsite, given their luck with hunting and fishing.
But I want to find out what’s going on!
The deaths must be related to Cronkite’s visit and the sneeze.

The brothers worked through dinnertime and finished at eight. They would leave at first light. After cooking up freeze-dried lasagna and apple cobbler, they crawled into their sleeping bags and fell asleep within moments.

* * *

June 11, 2018

Charli rubbed her fists against her eyes like a toddler at bedtime. She sat quietly, paying attention to Ruby Mountain’s new-house smell and the sounds of the air circulation system. She opened her eyes and looked down at the picture, on her tablet, of her favorite nephew, Zachary. The same photo had been on her desk in the White House. It showed him holding up a crayon drawing he’d done for her. He hadn’t survived.
Now is not the time to cry.

She watched the president stare blankly at his notes and run his hand through his gray hair. Yesterday the sixty-eight-year-old Hallstrom had been a dynamic older guy, the kind you’d see out sailing, hiking, or in a Viagra commercial. Now he was an old man. Everything about him seemed colorless, and the twinkle in his eye was missing.

Hallstrom ran his hand through his hair again. “This meeting is for—hey, where’s Maddix?”

Charli said, “He’s in his quarters. His sister died, and he’s devastated. Inconsolable. His sister raised him. I’m going to sit with him after the meeting.”

“The world’s having a tough time, as you might expect.” Guccio looked down at the table, uncharacteristically somber. “Not only are loved ones dying—spouses, children, friends, parents— but people know it’s not over yet. More loved ones are going to die. It’s going to get worse.”

“The only thing that helps is that everyone is going through this together.” Charli pushed her fingers against her temple.

“World’s largest support group,” Guccio said.

Charli nodded. “Exactly. That’s been helpful to me. I found that the girl who’d been my close friend since preschool is …”

When she didn’t continue, Hallstrom nodded and put his hand on Charli’s wrist. “I understand. Let’s all get together after dinner and forget about being leaders for a while. Maddix too.” He paused. “But for now, let’s do our job. We need to figure out what happened—why so many died—and what we can do about it. First, I want to know why we didn’t get a heads up on this. Seth?”

“Well, we did give you a heads up two days ago. We were looking for some kind of crop-dusting agent. It was a top priority—”

“Why couldn’t you find anything sooner?” Hallstrom squeezed the bridge of his nose.

“We just couldn’t detect anything until two days ago.” McGraw looked down. “These damn emitter things were just too small. If it makes you feel any better, even if we’d known right away what was going on, there would have been nothing we could have done about it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well,” Seth said, “right now, over a billion people have these things in them. All these people will die as soon as they fall asleep. No one has come up with a way of either removing the devices or defeating them. They give off x-rays, but we can’t see them directly. Now, if we had a few months—”

Hallstrom put up a hand and dropped his chin toward his chest. “Okay, never mind. I get the idea. Let’s have an overview.”

Seth glanced at his notes. “It all boils down to this. Seventy percent of the humans on this planet have died or will soon die, probably as a result of an airborne agent released from Cronkite’s sphere.”

Charli asked, “Probably? Could it be related to DJ1 or unrelated to our … visitors?”

McGraw gave a little nod. “I think it came from Cronkite because that path he flew just seemed so much like a crop-dusting pattern. Also, the CDC told us how to do x-ray tests to check for the emitter things that seem to cause death. No one here in Ruby has been infected. We think that’s because our air is so well filtered.”

“Maybe it’s because we are so far underground.” Guccio said.

“Maybe, but there’s a third reason I think Cronkite’s behind this, though this is a little more sketchy.”

“Sketchy?” Charli raised her eyebrows.

“Remember in Cronkite’s tirade he said that the population of Earth should be 2.1 billion?” McGraw looked around the table. “Well, our rough estimate is that when everyone who is infected dies, that will be the new world population.”

“Oh, no way.” Guccio shook his head.

“Well—” McGraw said.

“No.” Guccio continued. “First off, isn’t it too early to estimate how many will die?”

“Perhaps.” McGraw ran his hand through his hair. “But the CDC did a statistical analysis of the frequency of infection based on the sampling—”

“Right, maybe. But how could Cronkite know how many people would get infected? He just spits out a bunch of stuff like—” Guccio made a raspberry sound with his lips then changed to a Goofy voice. “‘Ga hilk. There we go, that oughta kill off exactly 5.472 billion humans.’”

“Well, I said it was sketchy.” McGraw looked at him. “The idea is that with his advanced technology, he could calculate how many emitters to release.”

Charli spoke up. “Wow, I just realized what may be going on here.”

Everyone turned to her.

“If Seth is right, we’re not being exterminated, we’re being culled. Cronkite’s thinning out the herd—like animal husbandry.” Charli watched as the others digested that.

McGraw continued. “Next, we’ve inferred that it had some kind of time-release mechanism. But people didn’t just drop dead. Bottom line, any infected individual who went to sleep after Noon EDT on June 10 never woke up.”

Hallstrom asked, “So people who are infected but haven’t slept yet—”

“Will die as soon as they fall asleep.”

“People are going to try to stay awake.” Charli pinched her lower lip and pulled on it.

“That’s what I’d do.” Guccio said. “Whatever it took.”

McGraw nodded, “And the other thing—”

“Wait a second.” Hallstrom said, “Why have it happen when people fall asleep? Why not have everyone just drop dead?”

“More humane?” asked Charli.

“Oh, right.” Guccio said. “That makes a lot of sense, Charli. I’ll kill five billion people, but I’ll do it in a nice way.”

“Well, maybe he wants us to, I don’t know, see him as humane. It’s also a little neater.”

“Neater?” Guccio cocked his head.

“Instead of dead bodies all over the streets, there are nice, dried up packages at home in the beds.”

McGraw continued, “The other never-before-seen thing is the way the bodies dry up. When people have observed it happening, the body dries up in a matter of minutes. This is actually a good thing, relatively speaking, because it means that we don’t have to quickly dispose of the bodies.”

“Which goes along with the culling idea.” Charli said.

“What do you mean?” Hallstrom frowned.

Charli held out one hand with the fingers spread. “If we have five billion—with a ‘B’—bodies decomposing and spreading disease, there’s no way the remaining population would survive. Is that right, Seth?”

“In general, no, unburied corpses don’t spread disease, but with that many bodies …” he waggled his hand, “maybe. It would certainly make things worse.”

Hallstrom rubbed his face. “Got it. How about the social aspects of this? Give me a feeling for how things played out.”

Charli looked at her notes and paused. “Okay, remember that this happened at noon, New York time. That meant that on the other side of the planet it was midnight, and most people were sleeping—and dying. So, you can picture a wave of death traveling along the time zones.”

“And people ahead of the wave didn’t know what was coming.” Guccio said.

“They did, actually,” replied Charli. “The news reporters picked it up and social media exploded. For example, let’s say you live in London. It’s 5:00 p.m. and you have, say, six hours before you’ll go to bed. By 7:00 p.m., London time, CNC.com had the headline: ‘Mysterious Deaths in Asia—Linked to Sleep?’ Thirty minutes later they changed it to, ‘Don’t Fall Asleep!’ So, for example, a Londoner, as long as she watched the news or was on the internet, knew what was coming. Most people east of Hawaii and west of Moscow have had advanced warning and are probably going to try to stay awake.”

Hallstrom put up one hand. “Guys. Let’s take a break and continue in thirty minutes. You’ve got more, Charli?”

“A lot more.”

* * *

June 11, 2018

Charli turned off her cell phone and descended into Ruby Mountain’s lower level, checking that no one followed. She slipped into her secret hideaway, a furniture storeroom holding desks, chairs, and lamps all pushed together like chunks of ice in Antarctica. She collapsed onto a couch. Had she been a smoker, she would have lit up. Time to sit and think.

Having seventy percent of the population dead or soon to be dead was, of course, a big deal for everyone. But it was different for her. In addition to the loss of loved ones, she was dealing with something else. The revelation of her aloneness. No, it wasn’t a revelation. She was alone. That wasn’t news. But it emphasized her situation.

She leaned back on the couch and put her feet up on a small filing cabinet. It was like the saying, “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.”
John Lennon, right?
But in her case it was “Life is what happens when you’re busy achieving your goals.”

The die-off was a slap in the face. Like, “Hey, girl, snap out of it!” A wake-up call.

Charli heard that Adina Golubkhov was now dead—bet she didn’t foresee that. Adina saw how sad it was that Charli loved no one, and Charli was finally, as the big three five approached, ready to agree. She had plenty of excuses. She was the top adviser to the president. She couldn’t find intellectually stimulating partners. Many men couldn’t tolerate her superiority. Those excuses seemed thin now.

Her dad and Nana had raised her to be independent. Were they too successful? Maybe she was literally too smart for her own good.

Or maybe it was her requirement for perfection. She rejected anyone who wasn’t perfect.
Is that reasonable, or is it a flaw in my personality?

And what about having a child? She didn’t want to think about that.

There would always be time to find someone after she was done saving, or at least improving, the world. Now that the world might be ending soon, for her and everyone else, she’d have to reevaluate. That’s what she did for the next twenty minutes of the break, and during that time, her aloneness transformed into loneliness.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Back in the situation room, Charli poured herself a cup of coffee then sat down and continued her report. “Due to the total randomness of the deaths, and we have no indication that it’s not random, there are many superstitions going around. Realize that social media have put this whole thing into hyperdrive. One of the top hashtags right now is hashtag howtonotdie.”

Guccio said, “Right behind hashtag—”

Charli glared at him.
This is no time for jokes.

“No, I wasn’t making a joke.” Guccio held both hands out. “I was going to speculate that hashtag howtostayawake was also popular.”

She went back to her notes. “So. Superstitions. Just as everyone has superstitions about what can prevent a cold or stop the hiccups, many people think they know the key to staying alive. The top belief is that if you are really sick when you fall asleep, you’ll be spared. So, we have people bleeding themselves or ingesting poisons and, of course, many end up dying from the treatment. And none of these treatments are effective.”

McGraw spoke up, “How do you know?”

She paused. “True, we don’t know for sure.”

“Okay, next question, Charli.” The president consulted some notes. “What’s going to happen? Is there going to be a meltdown?”

“The consensus is crystal clear,” Charli leaned back and crossed her arms. “If everyone keeps their heads, there will be no breakdown of society. In a perfect world—”

“What is this perfect world thing of which you speak?” Guccio asked.

“Gordon, stop. I was about to say that if it were a perfect world, it would actually be a walk in the park.”

Young spoke up for the first time. “Forget it. How could that be? I predict a total failure of society.”

Charli leaned forward again. “Well, let me give you an example: Food distribution. The wheat is still there, and thirty percent of the people involved in its distribution are still alive and well. Yes, there will be some farms on which everyone died, but all we need to do is redistribute farmers to those places, and much of the wheat can be harvested. Same thing with the trucking, distribution centers, grocery stores, and so on.”

Charli looked up from her notes. “But here’s the most important thing. With seventy percent of the population gone, we only need thirty percent as much food as we did in the past, so even if some farms fail or some stores close, we are okay.”