“RICK!” SOFIA CRIED, RUSHING into his small bunker and causing all six dogs to bark at the commotion.

She was panting. Anxiety contorted her normally placid, pleasant face. “I just found a disabled mini-drone in the barn. They’ve discovered us, I fear.”

Rick had fallen asleep after his last recording and was up only a few minutes to do muscle rubs and attempt to relieve his tetanus spasms with acupressure. He spun around on his old oak and leather office chair, its springs screaming, and held out both hands to grab hers.

“I heard the alarm. Are you sure it got inside the barn and under the covers? Did a cat or other animal possibly drag it there?”

“Its motors were still running, and the little bastard was squirming around the floor with broken propellers. I wouldn’t have known it was there except for that telltale sound. When I lifted the foil cover, I saw it flailing aimlessly with its lights on. We must assume the camera was working and transmitting.”

“Shit!” Rick screamed. “After all these years, they finally found us!”

He paused for a moment and peered up at his wife of forty years. Sofia, too, was thinking the same thing.

“This is the time. It is the end my friend, like that sad old Doors song I asked you not to play years ago. Too sad for me,” she lamented.

Rick was blinking to push the tears from his eyes. He knew they needed to scramble to execute their plan.

“Any idea how long?”

“How long what?” she questioned.

“How long it was in there?”

Her flowing gray hair rustled across her purple jacket as she shook her head.

“Don’t bite your lip,” she thought. “It’s a sign that something’s burning inside. Manage any fears in this moment.”

“We must assume it was concurrent with the alarm,” she replied. “What was that? Three minutes ago?”

He released his grip on her hands and spun around to the array of vidscreens on his desk. “My God! Two hundred twenty-four seconds since the alarm sounded. We’ll run out of time!”

“No, no,” she assured him, pursing her lips in defiance. “You’ll execute the plan you’ve practiced too many times, and I’ll perform my duties. But I don’t plan on leaving you. We’ll die together today if it comes to that.”

Rick bolted from his chair, hugging Sofia. He breathed in slowly and rubbed his chin up her neck, kissing her earlobe. “I always loved your neckline. The softness. That scent.”

Pulling back, he looked at her for what might be the last time.

“We have two to three minutes, and we must move quickly. Leave me with Pete and Molli and take the others with you. Don’t forget to grab your bags. I hope you and I are both too well matched in our paranoia. No drones will arrive at our abode today bearing gifts of ordnance. At most we’ll be red flagged for this, don’t you think? We’ll see each other soon.”

Sofia looked at him and smiled, her warm gray eyes also filling with tears. “Don’t bullshit me, my love. You said similar reassuring words before we were separated those two times after the Debacle.”

“But we made it back together!” he boasted, his head tilting to the side.

“Rick, we lived good, long lives; many of those years with each other. I will execute to our plan, as much as my heart says not to. I’ll take the four. You grab Pete and Molli because you know they’ll want to come with me and the others. I’ll see you on the other side, wherever that may be.”

She turned hastily, raising both hands to wipe her tears, then exited through the heavy wooden door. As she did so, Rick noticed her long, white cotton dress with a simple angled pattern along the hem, a gift from their Navajo neighbors. He recalled the many times he had removed that dress from her smooth shoulders.

Rick swallowed hard. “I cannot let these emotions interfere with my resolve,” he meditated beneath his breath. “I, too, will execute to our plan.”

He released Pete and Molli from his grasp, and they barked wildly at the inability to follow their mother. These two dogs, one a Scottie mix, the other a Westie, were named after a friend of Rick’s from long ago; Peter Scott, and his long-lost girlfriend.

Rick wished he was with him now. He sensed that Peter would have loved to die there with him, to perish for a just cause, a larger purpose, or even to assuage Peter’s long-held guilt that he was responsible, at least in some small part, for the cataclysm thirty-eight years’ prior. The Great Debacle.

“I don’t have time for this!” Rick grumbled. “Kids, stop that barking! I need quiet to get my act together!”

The dogs scampered to the carrying crates beneath his desk, their favorite places to sleep or hide, with eyes peeking out and barely noticeable in the dimly lit room. Rick had to keep them low to monitor the vidscreens without ambient light interference. He pounded at his keyboard rather than issue voice commands. It was just his way of keeping the discipline intact for this monumental moment he and Sofia had planned the last decade.

* * *

Sofia hopped into her 1962 International Scout 80, a relic from the prior century and long since converted to electric. She appreciated its light weight and how it managed its way through the snow, almost gliding on top of the white fluff in the wintry weather of Northeastern Arizona. Her grandfather had been a dealer of these vehicles and saved this one in his garage for his only granddaughter.

She glanced to the rear of the Scout, ensuring the four dogs were taking their places on the makeshift bed of blankets she kept in the back. A suitcase, always packed in anticipation of this immediate exit, was on the front seat.

Racing down the dirt road from the house, Sofia suddenly heard multiple sonic booms. Not a good sign, she knew. While she always gripped the steering wheel with two hands, given the Scout’s lack of power steering, she took her right hand off the wheel momentarily and crossed herself, something she had not done since last attending a Catholic mass decades earlier.

Rick was too busy in his bunker to watch Sofia leave the house. Embedded in the rise of a small hill, they lived there the last twenty-two years and had done considerable construction from its original structure.

Most of their effort was to build directly into the hill, carving out sections of the hillside to add rooms, and finally, to excavate a small set of rooms for Rick’s bunker. Given his circumstance and the secrecy of his personal mission, most of his activities in the last five years occurred within this bunker and its few adjoining rooms. It was deep enough in the metallic hillside to be concealed from the prying eyes of the technologies the oligarchs deployed to keep the populace in check.

Rick was monitoring the signals caught by the dishes he had surreptitiously constructed at the top of the hill. The hillside was replete with old mining equipment, the perfect place to erect multiple well-camouflaged dishes, intended for this moment. They were actively relaying tracking signals to his monitoring vidscreens, signals he could not ignore.

He calculated how much time he had on a scratch pad. “Damn! This will be cutting it close,” he groaned, speaking to the dogs as if they understood. “I have less than three minutes to do two hundred seconds of work.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw an explosion a mile away in one of the perimeter cameras. The shock wave hit him immediately.

It was Sofia, he was certain. A small drone missile had either hit her Scout or impacted nearby. Either way, he knew what this meant.

His heart beat faster as his eyes filled again with tears, dripping onto the old black keyboard. “God, don’t take my girl and sweet dogs. Don’t do this! Go, Rick, move forward,” he whispered. “This is your one chance to execute your plan; to save another species; to make amends for humanity’s collective ignorance.”

He glanced at the vidscreen above his desk that displayed multiple feeds from cameras positioned around the house, vertical gardens, and barn. “Jesus, more damn mini-drones coming.”

With a few keystrokes, he released a dozen small defensive drones intended specifically for this purpose. “If my drones destroy these babies, I hope they’ll knock out the tracking signals for what’s surely to follow.”

The execution process was now in full swing. He watched as the barn’s roof receded, pulling back its layered metal sheets in sequence and stopping just beyond the vertical plane of the barn walls.

“Barn,” he mused, trying to purge Sofia’s circumstance from his mind. “No cows or horses here, but a convenient facade for all these years.”

The outer walls collapsed, shaking the ground beneath him. “Beautiful, just as planned.”

The barn’s exposed floor revealed one more thing that needed to occur for his laser arrays to gain unhindered access to the evening sky, but something had deviated from plan. The laser array platform was only at eighty-nine percent of its extended length from the underground vault. Having designed and installed it, he knew that any variation from spec could mean catastrophe.

“What the hell?” he screamed at the dogs who were still in their carriers, frightened by his frenzy. “Come out, guys, we’re taking a quick look.”

Rick threw the heavy bunker door open and ran through the house, something he had not done in the last five years. During that time, he had been a prisoner in his own bunker. Self-imposed.

In order to evade the constant snooping of drones flying around his house, as well as other devious mechanisms employed by the paranoid oligarchs to spy on its citizens, Rick was forced to exile himself into a thousand square foot set of rooms at the rear of the house, deep in the hill.

After all, the government considered him dead or missing. He and Sofia had to make sure they continued to assume so – at least until this final moment when it mattered no longer.

With killer drones or even military jets likely screaming across the high desert plains to reach him, he didn’t care anymore if a mini-drone or hidden camera or satellite caught his image. This was his time, the first time outdoors in five long years, and likely the last.

As Rick ran through the house, he glanced at the changes Sofia had made to the furniture and decorations. He wanted to stop and take it in, the beauty of this desolate home in a destitute and neglected part of Vista, one of three domains in Westrich comprised primarily from the western portion of the former United States.

His mind raced back to Sofia, perhaps dead, hopefully not wounded and helpless, or alive and running from the wreckage. Seeing that first small explosion, he felt they’d both be dead soon since his bright signal would likely bring quick and lethal retribution. Aside from being hypersensitive to embarrassment, oligarchs were quite ruthless when it came to doling out punishment to any citizen who deviated from expectations.

The signal was the product of ten years of planning, deception, and cunning. The plan to construct the signals was decided the day he heard his friend Rodney went missing after getting red-flagged by the Vista government for speaking out against the oligarchs.

Rodney was a Navajo silversmith, one of the few remaining craftsmen who knew how to make everything useful with the metal. Rick had known him for years, long before he and Sofia moved from Farmington to this isolated home seventeen miles east of Tuba City. Rodney was fearless, outspoken, and truthful, and he carried his culture with pride in everything he did.

Rick was only officially aware that Rodney was still missing, but in Vista, that likely meant he was dead. The government had devised so many methods to monitor and control individuals to ensure compliance within their system: recording and analyzing their movements, using connected intercom systems to hear their whispers while sleeping, or invading one’s thoughts through hypersensitive sensors and AI algorithms.

That was old technology by now, but effective in controlling or eliminating aberrant members of society. After the Great Debacle, nobody questioned authority or the diminution of personal freedoms, as long as that authority kept them safely alive.

Rick scampered towards the barn, with Pete and Molli striding along, recalling his thoughts of that day.

“The end of disgust in humanity’s foibles. The end of our mistakes. The eventual dissolution of the species. But Rodney’s death and so many others cannot be for naught. I must tell somebody who might care. I must warn them.”

Upon reaching the barn, he stopped for a moment to survey his work. Here was the mechanism to enable his brief signal, an array of the most powerful lasers he could construct in concealment, given the circumstances. They weren’t the most powerful in the world, but they were strong enough to do the job he needed.

He had spent untold hours just below the ground’s surface, constructing the Petawatt power storage facilities to enable the short transmission. Twelve, ten-second microbursts of condensed information. One hundred twenty sequential ticks of the clock with a few seconds in between for power recharges and cooling.

Such a bright light sent into the sky would, for those few, brief moments, outshine the sun by many factors. This was his decade-long dream, and a minor platform glitch was not about to stop him.

Rick fell to the ground to peer under the array, cursing that he’d forgotten to grab a flashlight in his haste. He heard a strained hum of motors at the array’s edge, evidence that they were attempting to push the platform upward to its full extension. Grabbing the side of the array platform, he shook it with vigor. It was too heavy to yield to his arm strength.

“Dogs!” he yelled as they jumped on him. “Not now. Go!”

They scampered away, wondering why he was on the ground but not playing with them as he always did.

“Let’s see,” he considered. “Stay calm, as per your training. Don’t worry about the power sequence that will begin in twenty-five seconds. Survey the hinges. Are they the same height?”

Then he saw the problem. ‘No, look there!” he cried, as if the dogs understood.

He crawled on the ground over to a thick metal hinge at his right. It was not as extended as the others, causing the entire platform to shift downward on one side from the horizontal plane of the ground.

“I’m out of time, and it’s heavy gauge metal. No choice but to kick the damn thing!” he shouted, pounding his bare heel against it. “Idiot! Going out in your bare feet and no time to put shoes on.”

He kicked it again. With that effort, the hinge righted itself and the platform sprung into its locked position.

“Deep gash,” he mumbled, sensing a warm, steady flow of blood trickling across his ankle.

It mattered not, for he was certain death was imminent in the next few minutes. In these last moments, he thought it a good thing to feel the pain of life.

Rick hobbled quickly back into the house with both dogs in the lead. “I must get to the bunker before the first sequence begins! I must see that it executes per plan.”

The dogs shot through the open door, and Rick followed, leaping into his bunker as the first flash began. He closed his eyes hard and slammed the heavy door shut, yet heard whimpers from both dogs.

“Damn it! I hope you’re not blinded,” he lamented.

He was breathing hard and hyper-aware of the warm blood now pouring from his torn heel, but he needed to center himself before proceeding. Sitting back in his chair, as he had done thousands of times before, he forced his stress and energy to drop from the top of his head to his one point. He then imagined it dropping through his feet and into the floor.

“You’ve got this, dude. Envision the black obelisk,” he uttered, a reference to his favorite point of focus at the start of his meditations.

Rick’s eyes opened to the vidscreens in front of him. Four cameras, one at each edge of the laser array, were catching the sequences of microbursts as they continued to fire off per his plan. He checked the gauges for power and battery storage, which were within spec.

It was finally happening. His decade-long dream was in process. To his right, a vidscreen readout from the dishes on the hill indicated multiple images were approaching at high speed.

“ETA, ninety-two seconds. Damn! I’ll not get each of these transmissions completed. Ten or eleven. Sorry, people. I mean beings, whatever life you might be on distant planets. I did my best for you; did my best to warn.”

One of the dogs was whimpering loudly.

“Pete! Molli! Come sit on my lap.”

He watched as both dogs stumbled their way to his chair, sniffing for his scent.

“I’ve blinded you poor kids. But here, come up on my lap, and I’ll tell you a story.”

Rick grasped their chubby bellies and set one on each leg, hugging the dogs to keep them from falling onto the floor, partially blinded as they were. Molli began licking his face, her eyes closed.

“And the story begins,” he started, ignoring the scream of an approaching projectile. “A man and woman once lived on the Navajo reservation. They had two dogs. No. Six.”

The air exploded around him.

In the haze, he opened his eyes. A vidscreen remained active, showing a blue screen, the only working light in the disheveled room. The bunker door was mostly intact, but Molli caught the brunt of the weight as his body flew against the wall. She was crushed under his shoulder. Pete was whining, wondering how he’d gone from a happy state outside to blinded and in pain in just a few moments.

Rick was bleeding from his ears and his heel. Blood from a four-inch gash in his forehead obstructed his left eye’s view. He couldn’t tell if the throbbing pain in his head was from his tetanus or the impact against the wall.

“I see another one coming, and this is where I die,” he murmured.