Midnight by Anna Dove (books for new readers .TXT) 📕

What a heavy responsibility it is, to have secrets. The whispers of tragedies to come, bottled up like fermenting vinegar. The conversations from the previous night echoed in her head, like horror movie scenes that one tries to forget. All of these people, wandering about with their strollers and grocery bags, racing to make their next meeting, trying to decide whether to order whole or skim milk in the latte, paying the gas bill and picking up the dry cleaning. All of these people, rushing about in sweet oblivion to the fact that somewhere in the country, a nuclear bomb would wipe out hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions... Her gaze fell unwittingly to her watch.

12:17 pm.

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Haley could not finish her second cup of coffee, but she kept it in her hands to keep them steady and occupied, lest they tremble. On the other side of her desk sat the communications assistant, a skinny girl with sleek black hair pulled into an unforgiving knot at the nape of her neck. The assistant’s face was long and thin, with protruding cheekbones and deep set brown eyes. She wore a black dress and black heels and was overall quite strict in appearance.

“Haley?” she said in a thin voice that perfectly matched her exterior.

“Yes,” started Haley. “Sorry. Go ahead.” The assistant had been speaking for a while and a few minutes into the speech, Haley’s mind had wandered. New York. She knew people in New York, friends of friends. One lived in Brooklyn and had a puppy and worked at a local brewery. Another lived in Soho and worked in the financial district. Real estate, she remembered. If it hit New York today, they would be incinerated.

“I’m sorry,” she suddenly broke out, interrupting the communications assistant, who stopped mid-sentence and stared again, irritated. “I have to deal with something urgent. Please come back tomorrow and we will sort out the messaging on these subjects.”

“Okay,” retorted the other, and standing up, grabbed the folders and papers she had brought, and left the room in a huff audibly muttering under her breath about raises and not having to put up with incompetent people.

         +

Elizabeth met Carlos just outside of the Eisenhower building. As she approached, he sensed immediately that something was very wrong.

“Are you alright?” he asked, facing her. His expression was anxious; he had never before seen her so pale or with such dark circles under her eyes.

“No,” she said haggardly, and her gaze searchingly met his.

He offered his arm, and she moved toward him, when suddenly behind her there sounded a terrible crashing noise. She whirled around, to see a Prius wrapped around a metal lamp post. She gasped, but as she did there was another crashing sound, and to her right a car rear ended another. There was a scream, and another. All at once, the majority of all the vehicles on the road seemed to lose control, swerving into each other and into sidewalks and storefronts. Their electric engines and systems seemed to be malfunctioning simultaneously. Metal scraped on metal, human cries echoed, and the smell of burnt rubber emanated almost instantly.

Dumbfounded, Elizabeth could not move, as her eyes took in the horrors before her. A man rolled out of the passenger seat from a crushed car fifteen feet away, clutching his leg, from which the bone protruded. His mouth gaped in a silent scream.

She felt her arm pulled; Carlos grabbed her chin and pushed it toward the sky. His finger pointed toward some clouds, and she followed its direction as if in a daze.

There, free falling from the sky not very far away, was a passenger plane. It spiraled toward the earth unwaveringly, until it disappeared from sight behind the buildings. A moment, then a great horrible pillar of smoke hurled in a cylinder upwards.

After a brief moment of frozen bewilderment, pedestrians began to run. Dodging around trash cans and benches they leaped, fleeing broken glass and smoking metal. Some of the women took off their heels and abandoned them, shoes flung into the dirt. Unearthly screeches came from those unfortunates trapped inside crushed cars. A woman rushed towards them, her eyes wide open but fixated on nothing. She stopped as she almost collided with them, and then opening her mouth, she shut it again and lept past them.

“Run,” hissed Carlos frantically, and grabbing her hand tightly, he pulled her from her dazed reverie, and into the smoke and the twisted metal of the nightmarish street.

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Haley sat alone in her office. She tried to breathe evenly and slowly to calm her body. Her hands rested on the oak desk; they trembled and left sweaty marks on the wood.

She remembered Alan Turing after he had broken the Nazi code with his Enigma machine. She remembered that the British had to stand by and watch as their ships were obliterated, as their men were blown to pieces, because holding ones’ cards close to ones’ chest is the only way to win. If the British had prevented every Nazi attack and so shown the Germans that the Nazi code was being intercepted every day, the Germans would have invented a new code. And so the British watched as their fathers, brothers and sons were killed, so that the continent might be saved. Life, sometimes, is a game of chess, but the kings and queens, the bishops, rooks, knights, and pawns are not wooden and stone, but flesh and blood.

Her telephone rang, and the light blinked on line one. It was the Senator.

“Haley--can you go over to Lee’s office in Dirksen? I’ve scheduled a meeting with him and you and I. We need to ask him about the members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. And Haley--I’m asking you because it just needs to be the three of us.” His voice was tense.

“Yes, I’ll go now,” she