December 13th, 2030

David sat in the same chair Juliet had been in over twelve hours ago with his head staring up at the dimly lit ceiling. A gross piece of brickwork stuck out from the edge of the ceiling covered in moss and rotten with worms, but other than that it was clean. Cleaner than most of the walls and ceilings and floors of the lower four floors.

Juliet lay prone on the old, dirty, and rusted metal cot that David had been asleep in for over twenty-eight days now. After nearly a half-hour of simply marveling over his sudden awakening, Juliet had finally realized that she was exhausted. She tried to force David to sleep as well, but he was adamant that he was perfectly fine and that Juliet deserved the sole comfort they had. Later he would go down to the second floor and get one of the remaining hospital beds for her to sleep on, but in the meantime he tried to slip into a deep sleep in the chair. Now he knew just what Juliet had gone through in the past four weeks.

Four weeks.

He still couldn’t believe Juliet that he had been out for a month. What she must have done just to get him up to the Quarter and what she did to keep him alive through the coma . . . all alone.

David was mad enough at himself for both of them, although Juliet had insisted that he hadn’t anything to be mad at. He couldn’t have controlled a fight outside The Morgue, assuming they were right. He couldn’t have controlled what happened to him or stopped himself from falling comatose.

But she was wrong. Everything that had happened was David’s fault. Everything.

If only he had listened to Miri. She’d told him to stay away, but he couldn’t.

He shuddered. The thought of his sister standing on a metal balcony, hands tied, feet bound, mouth gagged nearly made him break down to tears. It may well have been the result of his imagination⎯after all, he’d been two hundred miles away when the warhead detonated⎯but that didn’t change anything. She was gone now. Dead or not, he didn’t know, but David always had the feeling that it was not.

He could still hope, couldn’t he? Juliet would tell him that he was just tricking himself into believing what he wanted and that he needed to let go of such a fantasy. In his own mind, he knew the chances were slim at best; the Russians had placed her near the heart of the machine. But there was that line about hope, right? Never lose it, or you’re already defeated.

David still had to wonder if it had all been his fault, though. No one had volunteered to help, after all. It was basically David, John, Juliet, and Miri against the entire Russian nation⎯terrorists who had invaded their own nation because of superior tactics and weapons. They’d divided the opposition, gave no chance for a peaceful resolution, and set off three massively destructive warheads in three separate countries. There was no way to reach them all and, paralyzed by having to decide who would live and who would die, David had tried to reach the most logical choice. John had tried the most illogical.

No matter how they had played their cards, Darrow’s weapons would have been detonated on at least one continent. If they had had more time, David and Juliet might have been able to stop the Canada bomb. He assumed the Russians had installed a motion-sensor into the machine, causing it to detonate whenever someone came in range. And John . . . well, the reports were that he hadn’t even made it to Europe when his plane was shot down mid-flight.

So, the world had ended.

And it was because of that tragedy that David had fled into this secluded hospital with Juliet, whom he had fallen in love with just a week earlier. It seemed like quite a coincidence, two complete strangers falling in love after one had saved the other from the apocalypse. Like something from one of the many novels David had tried to write when he was young.

He wondered often what had happened to the former U.S. government, or for that matter any of the men who had played a part in trying to save the world. No one was quite so sure, but there were rumors that at least one of them was still alive. Hopeful rumors with no real truth behind them, but David entertained them anyway. If anyone, he hoped it would be Slogan. John was a great man and a brilliant mind, but there really was no hope there; no one can survive being shot down at twenty thousand feet in the air. And the president . . . everyone knew he was really only an icon. Arthur was the only one who could be of any real help now.

Even so, none of it really mattered, because even if there was some semblance of the old government left, they would be sat upon by the Centrals; crushed by the new league of power in the Afterlife era. And aside from that, Miri was what really mattered to David. Besides Juliet, whom he loved more than life, she was the most important person in the world to him. If she was alive.

For the three or so days that they were together before the disaster, David and Miri had joined the federal government in a plot to stop a terrorist. When David looked back on it, it was all a bit absurd. How had his professor, who didn’t even believe in violence, become the usher of the apocalypse?

It didn’t really matter anymore. The really crucial thing here was that they had done it. The brother and sister from Methane Missouri⎯a stupid nickname they had invented for their home state⎯had convinced an entire nation of the most absurd idea in the history of absurdity: that a college professor would invent the weapon they all knew was bound to come sooner or later. The thing they couldn’t do was stop it. Maybe they could have if they hadn’t been so outnumbered.

Another image of Miri standing on a steel-grated platform blurred through David’s mind. Tear streaks scarred her face where there wasn’t any dirt, and her hands and feet were bound by a white cloth. More imagination. Then there was a light, a darkness, and then a light again. David awoke on the ground next to Juliet who had found and saved him to the insanity of another world entirely. That was reality.

Perhaps it was simply fate that it had happened this way. After all, if it had never happened just like it had David would never have met the woman lying sound on the cot. It was an odd way that the universe had about it; sometimes it allows you to go through the hardest time you’ve ever gone through alone, and at others⎯the times you really can’t handle yourself⎯you’re never really by yourself. Whenever you’re about to lose it, there’s always someone there to keep you sane.

And sane he stayed. More than sane, in fact. He stayed alive. Juliet had saved his life, just as he had saved hers.

“David?”

David clipped his eyes open and darted to Juliet’s shadowy silhouette sitting up on the cot, one hand helping her sit up straight. Even in the complete darkness, David could envision her face, more beautiful than the day they first met.

“Awake already?” he asked her. “You must’ve really gotten paranoid in the last month.”

She laughed it off. “Well I guess we both know where I got it from.”

“You mean John?”

This time they both laughed. John was the most carefree person either of them had ever met.

“Exactly. John. What time is it?”

David glanced toward the shaft, down the vertical corridor, and seeing small traces of light, replied: “It’s about four.”

“The thirteenth?”

“Yep.”

“How long have I been sleeping?”

“About ten hours, give or take a few.” David smiled. “Though no one deserved it more.”

“We need a clock.”

David laughed off her remark and managed to heave himself out of the chair. He crossed the room to a small icebox where they kept the leftovers, pulled out a plate of what looked like trout, and paced back to the cot. “I see you‘ve been keeping the food stores full.”

Juliet smiled widely and looked affectionately into David’s eyes. He leaned in and kissed her gently on the lips, then pulled back and offered her a fish already cleaned and cooked. She took it happily and the two of them ate their breakfast in silence.

David suddenly found himself doing something he hadn’t done for a very long time: absolutely nothing. He stabbed slice after slice of trout and ate his breakfast, but his mind was completely empty.

What he really needed⎯what both of them really needed⎯was something to occupy their time. A hobby. A job; just something to make the time go faster. They always had to hunt and gather up what they needed to survive, but that was less time-consuming than one would think.

David thought about going to get that hospital bed for Juliet. He had been promising her that they would make the fifth floor into as much of a home as they could. The farthest he’d even gotten was to move the cot and ice box in there, the both of which were complete mysteries. The cot simply because: why have a cot in a hospital? But the ice box was a bit more mysterious.

For example, when the ice melted in their box, they would use most of it for drinking water and the rest for cleaning. Dishes, sheets, covers, anything they needed to be clean. The mystery was that the ice formed in a cavern about three miles to the north, and it stayed frozen for anywhere from a few days to two weeks, even in a twenty year old cooler.

David had always wondered why the cave was cold enough to sustain ice while the geography around it was mildly tropical, but he was also just thankful that it did so. He had tried to take Juliet’s approach of a simple mind: don’t wonder why it happens, because there’s no way to answer. Just be glad that it happens as it does. An easy enough approach, for Juliet. But David was a scientist in the loosest sense of the term. It wasn’t what he’d intended, certainly, but it had most definitely helped explain a few things after the Accident.

There were a few scientists left, if they could be called that. Mostly what they were discovering now was the bottom of a bottle, but collectively they had concluded that the Accident⎯which was now deemed as David’s fault entirely⎯shook the earth off its natural course. After a readjustment somehow, the planet was back on course, but that hadn’t stopped the infections, diseases, or tragedies.

Infections, diseases, and tragedies which had virtually destroyed earth in a matter of days. Not months, not weeks. Days. Six point eight billion dead within four days.

Dead.

David decided not to let that train of thought take him any farther. He put his plate on the nearly-destroyed side table to the right of the cot and began to walk to the elevator shaft. Maybe getting that bed for Juliet would help clear his head of those self-induced guilt thoughts. If not, at least they would have a real bed large enough for the both of them.

“Where are you going?” Juliet asked as he rose from the cot.

“Fourth floor,” David replied. He hooked the rope from the pulley around his waist. “I’m going to grab one of the hospital beds down there and bring it up for you.”

She smiled. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know.” He smiled back at her. “But I figure you deserve that, at least. Maybe then we can finally start acting like a family.”

“Is that what we are?”

“What do you mean?”

“We never got married.”

David sighed to himself. Juliet had always hated the fact that they could never be properly married. Something about the whole thing just bugged her. He supposed it should bug him too, considering that half his life revolved around God, but he’d never much been one for the regulations of religion. Belief, sure, because when he’d heard the concept something just clicked in his mind.

Rules, on the other hand, weren’t really his forte.

“You know the reason for that,” he said gently. “There’s not a religious man within a thousand miles to marry us.”

“I know. I just wish we had it written down somewhere. My name’s still Adams. I wish it was Penner.”

David closed the gap between he and Juliet and took her hands in his. “You want to be called Penner, you got it.”

She beamed at him and he kissed her once more.

“It does have a nice ring to it,” David said when he pulled away. “Juliet Penner.”

“I like it.”

“Better get used to it. No telling how long you’ll have to live with the infamous name.”

“Infamous or not, I still love it. And I love the man who gave it to me.”

“I love you, too. And just to prove it, I’ll haul that bed up here so you can finally get a good night’s rest.”

Juliet reluctantly released David’s hands and allowed him to go back to the elevator shaft.

“Be careful,” she called after him.

“You know me better than that.”

“That’s why I have to remind you. Here.” She tossed the surgical mask she had worn just a day ago to David. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

He laughed wryly and strapped the mask over his face. “Be back in a minute.”

David jumped down the corridor and felt rushing wind under his feet for at least two seconds. Juliet hated his way of abusing the pulley system⎯always told him it would break someday and then he’d really be sorry for his juvenile enjoyment⎯but it was so much faster than her method of inching down the shaft.

When the fourth floor suddenly appeared before David’s eyes, he straightened his legs parallel to the ground. The momentum of his jump pushed him through the opening in the wall and he crashed into the room, rolling on the ground to try to reduce the pain. In the end, it was worth the feeling it gave him; like he was Jackie Chan flipping around in impossible ways.

Since he wasn’t Jackie Chan, however, David remembered exactly why he hated coming down here. The smell of decaying bodies burned his nostrils and the sight of rotten corpses made him have to fight to contain breakfast. Perhaps he shouldn’t have eaten fish just before going wading through dead bodies.

But no matter the discomfort, several hospital beds lined the nearest wall. David supposed there was no reason to be picky—after all, he was hardly shopping for a brand new Serta mattress—but he still inspected the beds and picked the one that seemed best adjusted to three years of apocalypse. He took it and wheeled it back to the perpendicular corridor.

Getting it up was the tricky part. David tied the pulley-rope around the sides of the bed, and then the top and bottom of it. In fact, if there was a place on the bed that looked sturdy enough and a rope could tie to, David shoved the rope through. When it looked like a Christmas present with all the fixings on it, he tied the rope back to the section still dangling in the elevator shaft, then grabbed the opposite rope and took his feet off the floor.

Apparently David’s weight wasn’t more than the bed’s. He simply hung there in the corridor, not even causing the bed to budge.

After a minute or two of thinking, David got it. He planted his feet in the wall and used that leverage to pull the rope, effectively causing the bed to ease out of the fourth floor and creep up to the fifth. Juliet grabbed it and pulled it into the Quarter, and his mission was complete.

Eventually both he and the bed were in the Quarter where they belonged, and Juliet beamed radiantly at David.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked when he noticed how absolutely positive she was. Sorry as he was to say it, no one was that happy in these times.

“Fine.” Jokingly, she became bothered. “I can’t adore the fact that my lover just did all this so we could finally sleep in the same bed?”

David‘s heart raced. He hoped she wasn‘t going to bring up the fact that he didn‘t want to have kids again. “I’ve just never seen you look so optimistic.”

“Well, I guess when you woke up from a coma⎯which, like you said, doesn’t just happen⎯a light went on.”

“So there’s nothing bothering you?” He almost didn’t want to ask because if he did she might actually say so, but if he didn’t he risked appearing insensitive.

Juliet hesitated, and in that moment David caught something from her. Some kind of glimpse into her thoughts. He supposed that after three years of complete isolation with her it was only natural.

“Yes,” she conceded. “Something strange did happen right after you woke up.”

Concern crossed through David‘s mind. At least it wasn‘t what he was afraid of. “I knew it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’d just woken up for the first time in a month, I didn’t want to worry you.”

He was almost tempted to smile because of her thoughtfulness. “But now I’m fine, I’ve been awake and completely fine for a good ten hours.” He said it so calmly Juliet was persuaded to believe it. She knew David; when he was calm, he was calm. When he wasn’t, he wasn’t—and there was a definite distinction between the two. Even he knew that much, though he’d never admit it.

Juliet crossed her arms, sat on the end of the hospital bed, and looked to the ground. “There was a Renegade here last night.”

David’s eyes widened, somewhat a mix of curiosity and concern. It was a tough battle, but concern beat out the curiosity. “A Ren? Here?” He rushed to Juliet’s side and sat with her. “Did he . . . did you talk to him?”

“I followed him into the woods. He can move, David. Like us. No sound, even through the entrance, but he left a boot-print. He was carrying something out of the front door and I heard him from here in the Quarter, so I followed him just to be sure everything was all right.”

A print? If the Renegade had been able to slip through the entrance to the Morgue without a sound it wasn’t likely he would leave such a visible mistake. And the sound Juliet had heard didn’t make sense, either. If the Renegades were nearly as isolated as David and Juliet, they had all but perfected moving without creating audible sound. That included stealing objects which, sad to say, David had to resort to every so often.

All that aside, however, David was more interested in Juliet’s experience. “What happened?”

“He tried to kill me. Nearly gutted me with his knife.”

Now anger completely drove away the curiosity. “What?”

“It’s okay, David.” Juliet took his hands, trying to calm him. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you.”

“And why’s that?” David’s mind darkened with anger, not at Juliet, but at the fact that he hadn’t been there to defend her. He realized as soon as it surfaced that he was becoming irrational, but irrationality is sometimes necessary. For now he’d have to let it run its course.

“Because I knew that you would act like this,” Juliet said. “Try to calm down. We had a fight and we ended up in a stalemate, so I asked him a few questions. His answers were so strange I almost see why people are afraid of them.”

David breathed hard and tried to appear calm, as Juliet suggested. “Did he say anything useful?”

“No, but he did let on that the kidnappings and attacks aren’t just random. I think these guys may be organized, and there’s no telling how many of them there are.”

“Organized? What, like the Mafia?” David’s aggressive and somewhat sarcastic questions were betraying the fake composure he’d put up, so he tried something more logical. “Did he let on anything about where they come from? How they know so much?”

“Again, no, but my guess is that they’re hiding in plain sight. Regular people like you and me from the colonies. At the very least, they have informants. That would explain how they know you live here.”

Juliet stopped, and David caught it as soon as it slipped from her mouth.

“They know I’m here?”

She simply nodded. “Just before he left, he told me he would come back for you. I didn’t mention a thing to him⎯in fact, I told him I live here alone.”

“Then how would they know? Literally no one knows, not even the Centrals or their Runners.”

Juliet frowned. “Like I said, they must have people. Someone might have been scoping us out for a long time to see if you were here. It’s obvious they want something with us.”

“To kill us, you mean.”

Juliet nodded. It was the most reasonable guess. “Either way, he just vanished. Even left his weapons behind.”

“You let him go?”

“No, of course not. We faced off for what must have been a full minute before he dropped his knife and disappeared into the jungle. We were in a clearing surrounded by a natural dome formed from the jungle. He was standing right in front of the dome when he turned around and vanished. Believe me, I tried to track him, but there was literally nothing. He’s a ghost.”

Which only intensified David’s suspicions about why the Ren had alerted Juliet and then drawn her out into the open. “I thought you said there was a print outside the entrance?”

David could tell Juliet thought he may have stumbled upon something. “He left one in that dark dirt . . .”

“Almost like he wanted you to follow.” David stood, began pacing, and stroked his chin. He turned off every function aside from basic control and thought process. This was how he sorted everything out.

“You think he wanted me to come for some reason?” Juliet broke his meta-thinking.

“You said you heard him take something from the Morgue?”

“I think so. Where’s this going?”

“It was all a trick, Juliet. If he’s so great at not leaving a trail, then he must have left the boot-print on purpose. And if he was coming for me . . . he might not have known that I was here at all. Maybe he was just trying to find out if I was.”

It clicked immediately. “And I was the means of info. He only said he’d come back for you because he needed to see my reaction. He’s a profiler, like you or John.”

“Maybe not a profiler, just someone who pays closer attention than most. When did this happen?”

“No, come on, David. This is silly.”

It certainly was silly, but it was also serious. The Renegades knew where he was now, and if anyone could reach him in his venerable fortress it was them. If they came, they would undoubtedly kill Juliet too. David couldn’t be responsible for that.

“It’s possible.” David looked Juliet in the eyes and told her that the sole reason he would abandon logic would be to protect her. He’d done it before.

“How is it even near possible?” she asked, letting on that she was almost convinced to go along with it.

What would follow if David were to explain everything then and there would be a massive and quite boring explanation, so he opted for a more subtle approach.

“Do you remember when we first met?” he asked, not looking for an answer. “When we were at the White House and the president was filling me in on everything. Afterward they opened literally everything to me via cell phone⎯there wasn’t a single one of their secrets I wasn’t let it on.”

“Secrets? What⎯?”

“Just let me finish. Crime rates had gone up dramatically in the last ten years, with over fifty percent of the adult U.S. population having been convicted felons at one time or another, most of them repeat offenders. To retaliate, the FBI hired thousands of people. As long as you’d finished high school and hadn’t been charged with a felony, you could get a job. They created a new division known as the Pre-Crime Task Force and had their profilers train the new agents in the common physical characteristics of criminals⎯facial ticks, speech patterns, the works. They were to be employed as the federal version of state cops. They never got around to it, but if even one Renegade was in that program, he could have taught it to the rest.”

Juliet was momentarily at a loss. “You’re saying that the FBI created cops who could pick out a criminal just by looking at him?” It was obvious it was a bit of a stretch.

“Just think about it, Juliet. Remember about two years ago when I told you there was a murderer living nearby? Didn’t he end up killing three people before being killed himself? It’s no different than that. Anyone can learn to do it.”

Apparently when she thought about it, Juliet came to the conclusion that David was right. At the very least, that it was possible. “So he used those techniques to find you. The obvious question, then, is what they want with you.”

David had already begun thinking of answers to that question before he even told Juliet about the Pre-Crime Division. There were too many options to consider, though. It could have been because of Miri somehow, or it could have been the fact that John had been one of the instructors for the new agents, or it could have just been a coincidence. The Renegades were likely the only ones that knew, and even then some of them probably didn’t.

“I don’t think there’s any way to answer that one,” David told her. “What we need to focus on now is moving and figuring out what it is they stole.”

Juliet was on top of that one. “It looked like a space probe, just bulkier and obviously nowhere near the same size. It was mostly a dirty white with . . .”

The rest David didn’t hear, because he completely zoned Juliet out. Panic gripped his spine and shook him like a rag doll, causing trembles in every conceivable part of his body. Something reminiscent of fear, only on a much more massive scale, sliced through David’s mind.

Juliet must have noticed the complete transformation in his disposition, because she suddenly stopped talking and stared at him. “David? What is it?”

David put the panic aside for a moment, knowing he couldn’t frighten Juliet by being frightened himself. “It was a . . .” He gulped. “It was experimental tech built by the British scientists. I consulted on it while we were on the run.”

“What was it? Defensive countermeasures?”

“No, no it was a replica of Mark’s machine, based on the schematics you and Miri got for us.” David’s voice quivered as he said the words. “When the Russians turned the machine into a bomb, we tried to turn ours into one to see what it would do.”

The same cold fear began to set in around Juliet, David could see. “And?”

David exhaled. “And it worked.”