Note: This story was originally written for the Yuletide challenge for December 2008. It would take place in the middle of season2.
Holy Thursday, Day of Judgment
.
John tiptoed out of his room and down the hall, wary of Cameron. But she didn't seem to be around and his mother was sleeping, so he went to the kitchen to get a snack and calm down from his nightmare.
The light over the small kitchen table was turned down low, but it was bright enough to see that Derek was awake. He had a bottle of beer and his handgun in front of him on the table. The beer looked half-empty; John wondered about the clip.
Derek had heard him and glanced up without alarm. "Hey. You okay?"
"Yeah," John shrugged. "Just hungry." He pulled open the fridge, waiting for the inevitable comeback about how they were all going to be eating cockroaches in the future, but it didn't come.
He glanced over his shoulder to see Derek looking at his beer or his gun. John poured himself milk and grabbed the leftover pizza, settling down at the table to eat it cold.
They sat for a little while, while John ate one slice of pepperoni, and then he decided it was late enough he was going to ask.
"I've never asked before, but can you tell me? What did you do?" John asked and added when Derek frowned at him in puzzlement, "Judgment Day. How did you survive? You were younger than I am now; you didn't train for it..."
Derek shrugged and took a swig of his beer. He set the bottle back on the table and stared at it in moody silence. His thoughts seemed to be on his own past, John's future.
John thought that was all the answer he was going to get. He didn't want to press too much, since he knew it was a hard memory, but still, he wanted to know. "Derek, you're the only one I can ask."
"You shouldn't know too much of the future," Derek answered. "If we change it, it won't matter anyway."
"What if we don't?"
"Then... we all failed. And we're not going to let that happen."
"But if it does? What's it going to be like? You said, you and Kyle were outside and the sky turned to fire. What happened? How did you survive? I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important..."
Derek's gaze sharpened on him. "Why?"
"Maybe it'll help me."
That got Derek, as John knew it would. He slumped back into his chair and toyed with the gun, spinning it once. The safety was on, John saw, but he still tensed as the gun went around.
Derek's voice came out level, but distant, as if telling a story that happened to someone else. "We were playing baseball on the lawn. Kyle thought it was fireworks. We looked up, and saw the rockets streaking overhead... What we'd heard were cluster bombs falling on the city."
"Not a nuke?" John frowned, curious.
Derek laughed grimly. "Oh yeah. High up...."
* * *
He grabbed Kyle's arm and started running for the front door. Kyle struggled at first.
"Derek, what is it, what's --?"
Then the world went white- in an instant there was brilliant light, so bright it shamed the sun. There were no shadows, no color, only that blazing light high overhead.
It faded an instant later, but Derek knew what it was. Nuke. Only a nuclear bomb could do that.
And that meant the city was fucked.
He couldn't help a glance upward - the sky was red, spreading out from a point high to the south, coming their way.
"Inside!"
His heart was hammering and he knew he had no time. Seconds. They raced into the foyer. There were stairs going upward, but no stairs going down. They had no fallout shelter.
But he was earthquake-country born and bred and he knew the safest place in the house was the old, sturdy dining room table. He threw Kyle under there and followed, wrapping his body around Kyle tightly.
"Derek! Get off!" he heard Kyle start to complain until the deafening roar drowned him out. It sounded like a massive storm, hitting the house as if a giant slammed a fist into it.
He stayed there, hugging Kyle against him, listening to the wind scream and the house groan. A hot wind blew against his back and tugged at his hair.
Then it stopped. The silence seemed just as deafening, except for the sound of Kyle's panting breaths. Kyle was gripping his forearm in both hands and shaking.
Derek held him tightly, face hidden in Kyle's hair and shoulder. "Hey, we're okay," he murmured. "We're okay."
Kyle's breath hitched. "What ... what was that?"
"War," Derek answered. "We're at war. Someone bombed us."
He had no idea who. Not then.
* * *
"We were on the edge of the shockwave. Most of it hit the basin," Derek added softly. "The high-altitude burst saved us from a lot of the fallout, but the EMP knocked out the power south of Santa Barbara. Fried a lot of other stuff."
John frowned, caught by an odd thought. Skynet was electronic; it risked itself by launching a high-altitude nuke. Unless it hadn't been Skynet at all but the humans' attempt at a counter-strike. "Skynet must be shielded from EMP..."
Derek shrugged. "I guess. The bomb didn't slow it down. Though we didn't see the machines for a few days."
* * *
When they crawled out from under the table, Derek could hear the distant sound of screaming. "Watch your feet," he told Kyle automatically and tugged him around the shattered glass from the blown-out windows.
He opened his phone. It turned on, but there was no signal. He turned it back off to preserve the battery. The landline was dead.
"What - what are we gonna do?" Kyle stammered.
"Wait for mom," Derek answered. Their dad was downtown in the Chase tower, far away. But their mom worked at the Wells Fargo on Lankershim, less than two miles away. Derek was really hoping she was on her way home.
The house was trashed, with most of the windows broken and everything loose tossed around. The power was out. The smell of burning plastic rose from the back of the entertainment console.
While he and Kyle were gathering the camping gear from the upstairs hall closet - sleeping bags, the LED hand-crank lanterns, light-sticks -- he heard the roof creak loudly and shot a look upward. A fall of plaster dust fell on his face.
When they went downstairs, he made sure they waited underneath the dining room table, in case the roof collapsed. It would be stupid to live through a nuclear bomb and die when his house fell over.
They had a battery-operated radio in the earthquake kit and Derek turned it on. The first clear signal he found was in Spanish, and though he could only pick out a few words, he could hear the panic in the announcer's voice.
Then he found an English-speaking voice and wished he hadn't.
"... People are urged to stay inside. Only the worst injuries should be brought to hospitals. Keep the telephone lines and shortwave radio clear for emergency personnel.
"... No further details are known about the bombing at this time - only that it does appear that a nuclear weapon of unknown strength was detonated high above Los Angeles. Several separate explosions have been reported across Los Angeles and there is at least one massive fire in the Mid-Wilshire corridor. All people are to stay inside..."
Then he heard the front door creak and a wonderful voice call out, "Derek? Kyle?"
"Mom!"
They ran to the foyer and into her arms, and for just a moment, Derek let himself believe everything was going to be all right.
* * *
"Your mom's tough," Derek said, as an aside to John. "She's had to be. My mom, before that day, I would've said she was soft. She worked at a bank, she did yoga, she liked to cook and do chick stuff like scrapbooking, and could never quite hide that she didn't like camping. But that day... she turned into the toughest person I've ever known."
John listened, marveling. Not just that Derek was talking, though that was enough all by itself. Derek was talking about his grandmother.
"Yeah?" he prompted. "What did she do?"
Derek snorted. "What didn't she do? She filled up our backpacks, one for each of us to carry. Only a few minutes after the start of Judgment Day, and she had a plan already..."
* * *
"Come on, boys, hurry up!"
"Mom, where are we going?" Derek asked. "What's the hurry?"
She shook her head. "No, we're going underground."
"What?" he stared at her blankly. "Where?"
"Those tunnels from your report," she answered and patted his shoulder. "We'll be protected from the fallout there."
"Fallout?" he repeated blankly. He knew it had something to do with radiation and it was bad, but the Cold War had ended before he was born. He didn't know this stuff. "But the tunnels are downtown."
"We're going to take the Red Line in."
"You think it's running? Power's out everywhere, the radio says."
"Then we'll walk," she declared firmly and fastened the waist strap on her hiking backpack.
He stared at her, as if she was a stranger. "What about dad?"
Her lips pressed together and she glanced away, strength faltering for a moment. "I ... I don't think the tower could've survived the shockwave, Derek." She grabbed his arm. "Don't tell Kyle. Not yet."
She didn't think Dad was still alive. He wrenched his arm free. "We'll find him."
She gave in a little too easily. "All right, if we can get to his building from beneath, we'll try to find him. I'll leave a note just in case." And she did - not a tiny paper note either, but a giant note on the cream wall of the kitchen with a big black marker. 'Jack, we've gone downtown to find you. Meet a week from now, the 28th, in the basement of your building. I have the kids. I love you. Anna.'
She put the marker in a drawer, and stuffed the rest of the protein bars into the pockets of her jacket. "Let's go."
She held Kyle's hand in her left, and Derek held his other hand.
"I don't want to go," Kyle said. "I want to stay here and wait for dad."
"We're going to find him, buttface," Derek told him.
"Then we should take the car."
"I left my car at work. Besides, the roads are messed up. So we're going to take the subway," Anna forced a smile and ruffled Kyle's hair. "It's an adventure, honey."
"It's not an adventure. It's a war. Derek said," Kyle said petulantly and Derek wanted to smack him.
Anna shot Derek a remonstrating glare and he shrugged. It was true, after all.
"Come on, let's hurry," she said. Outside, she glanced up at the sky, at the strange clouds and the orange light that gave everything a weird tint outside.
Derek had always heard the phrase "it's chaos out there" from the movies and scoffed. He learned there was truth in it. Some cars were working; others had stopped dead. Some had run into other cars when the traffic lights went out.
People were shouting at each other, hiding their fear in anger.
They passed two people kneeling on the ground covering their eyes, moaning about going blind. The first time, Anna hesitated as if to try to help, but the second she marched past without a glance.
They dashed across Lankershim - normally an impossible task without the crosswalk - to the people milling around in the plaza in front of the Red Line NoHo stop. Derek almost didn't recognize it with the brightly-colored metal awnings stripped from their support pillars and smashed together. A few people were still climbing up, leaving the subway. "Lady, it's dark down there," someone told Anna. "The train's not running."
Anna didn't reply, just coaxed Derek and Kyle to keep with her as they walked down the steps. At first there was plenty of light, but as they went down, it got darker. By the time they got to the ticket hall, it was murky and dim. Anna didn't stop at the quiet machines, and Derek felt a bit guilty as they went across the "Tickets Required" stripe on the floor.
It wasn't totally dark, since there were a few emergency lights high up on the wall; Derek's eyes adjusted to it well enough he could see the steps and the platform. The train was down there, inert and quiet, its doors stuck open.
Two officers of the Metro Police were at the bottom and looked up when the family came down the steps. "Ma'am, the station is closed. You'll have to go up. The train isn't running."
She didn't say anything as she approached, with Derek holding onto Kyle and following her. "I'm walking the tunnel to downtown," she stated firmly.
"Ma'am, it's not safe --"
"In case you didn't notice, a nuclear bomb just went off," she cut in. "This is the safest place to be in the entire fucking city!"
Derek and Kyle shared a shocked glance at their mother's language, and Derek realized she was a lot more upset than she was showing to them.
"So, no, I'm not going up there again, and if you're smart you won't either," she told them, walking close. She was about half the size of one of the men she faced, but Derek thought she looked about twice as strong. "I'm walking downtown to find my husband, and my kids are coming with me."
The guards looked at each other, looking uneasy. "It's a long walk," one of them started, but cut himself off when she gave him a death glare.
"All right," the other gave in and stepped aside. "Don't touch the third rail. If the power comes back, you might not get warning when it goes live."
"Thank you." She nodded, and pulled Kyle after her. Derek followed as they went to the front of the train and jumped into the middle of the track.
The emergency lights cast pools of light every hundred yards, leaving deep darkness in between. Anna snapped a light-stick, and by the light of its eerie green glow, they began the long walk downtown.
* * *
Derek got himself another beer, and sat down again across from John. "He was a trooper, your dad," he smiled faintly in memory, the shadows lifting from his eyes. "He kept walking, wanting to get to Dad, even when he was dragging his feet with exhaustion. But Mom decided to stop for dinner and to sleep in one of those side-access niches in the tunnel."
He popped the top off the bottle and flicked it into the trashcan. "We weren't alone down there, of course. My mom talked to people, and we heard a lot of rumors: downtown was gone, there were fires spreading in the city... They were all true. But you know what's not true? That disaster brings out the best in everyone. Sometimes it brings out the worst. Even on Good Friday."
* * *
Nobody had to tell Derek that the three guys approaching them were bad news. His mom glanced at Kyle, who was sleeping. Derek hadn't been able to sleep yet; the sleeping bag was a thin cushion between him and the hard tiles of the floor.
"You got another of those?" one of them asked, indicating the hand-crank LED lantern that served as the Reese's campfire of sorts. The three spread out to cover the niche. Derek tensed, getting ready to do something even if he didn't know what. He had his hunting knife in the pocket of his backpack, if he could get to it without being noticed. It was slightly behind him, and he carefully and slowly moved his hand closer, while not taking his eyes off the thugs.
His mom answered calmly, as if she faced thugs in a dark subway every day, "No. Just the one, and we need it to get downtown tomorrow."
"Downtown's gone, lady. So you don't need it. We do."
She stared up at them. "What are you gonna give me in return?"
They were briefly stunned by her request to trade, so accustomed to intimidating everyone they met. One of them pulled a knife. "How 'bout we just take it?"
"You're going to threaten me right in front of my children?" she demanded incredulously. "Were you hatched out of an egg, that you have so little respect?"
When the one nearest Derek took his eyes off Derek to smirk at his buddy, Derek grabbed the handle of his knife and slipped it under his thigh. He was quivering, as if he was cold, but it was pure need to move rising up inside him.
The gangster with a knife leaned down really close to Anna and flicked her hair with the point of his knife. "All I want is a light. Why you making this so hard?"
"Get away from her!" Derek lunged at him, knife out and ready.
"Derek, no!" his mom shrieked.
The blade sank with barely any resistance right into the neck until it ground against bone.
Derek and the thug toppled over, falling almost on top of Kyle before rolling off the little platform and onto the rails.
Derek hit the ground hard, squished between the concrete and the guy, but he held onto the knife and pulled it out.
Blood spurted, some of it on Derek's face, and he shoved away frantically and stumbled to his feet.
The other two started toward him, looking vengeful, but Derek waved the knife. His hand was shaking so hard he could barely hold on. "Get away," he demanded, and his voice cracked. "Get away from us."
"Walk away right now," Anna said coldly, and Derek flicked his gaze toward her. She had his dad's handgun out and was pointing it at them. "You could've shared with us. But you tried to take and people aren't gonna stand for that shit when life is already hard and getting harder. So learn your lesson and walk the fuck away."
The two looked at each other and down at their dead leader. "You better watch your back, you bitch," one of them snapped at her, trying to be all tough. "We catch you, you're dead."
But they walked away into the dark anyway.
Derek waited, standing between the rails, until he was sure they were gone. Then he looked down at the dead man at his feet and the blood on the concrete. Shivers began to wrack his body and the knife dropped to the ground.
"Derek, honey?" his mom murmured.
He turned to face her, bracing himself for revulsion and disgust at her son the killer.
But there was nothing but sympathy and love. She put the gun down and held out both hands. "Come here, baby. I'm so sorry I couldn't give you a world where this didn't happen. But you're okay, and Kyle and I are safe. That's what matters. Come here."
As he hadn't done for years, he crawled into her lap. She wrapped her arms around him and stroked his hair as he cried.
* * *
"It was Good Friday?" John prompted, when Derek stopped.
"Yeah. There were some tough guys, gangster types with knives, who wanted to take our lantern. She got them to leave us alone."
John listened, wondering exactly how his grandmother had chased off a bunch of armed thugs. But there was something in Derek's expression that forbade asking questions right then, and John was afraid if he interrupted, Derek might stop talking altogether.
Derek's hand opened and closed restlessly into a fist on the top of the table, even though the rest of him was still. John frowned, gaze caught by the motion. That old tattoo, barely visible on Derek's left forearm.... John had thought it was an old girlfriend, but now he knew it spelled out 'Anna.'
"It was hard to sleep that night," Derek continued after a moment. "We could hear the sounds of other people moving around in the tunnel, and I kept thinking those guys would come back. But eventually we got up, ate a power bar for breakfast, and kept walking.
"We made it to downtown. It was a burning shell already. Dad was either dead when his building collapsed or he'd gotten out and tried to head home. Either way, he wasn't there so we went back to the Red Line. We heard about strange flying craft up in the sky shooting people and dropping explosives - HK-1s, I learned later. More people were taking refuge down below. And that made us a target."
* * *
Derek watched Kyle play tag in the tunnel with Isabel, the six-year-old daughter of some new friends, and felt vaguely angry that Kyle could play as if nothing had happened.
He could still smell the blood on his clothes, despite trying to wipe it off. Anna stayed close to him and he wanted to curl up against her. But he didn't. Instead he stared at nothing and kept his knife on his belt even though he could barely touch it without tremors shaking his arm. He knew he had to: the world had changed, and he was going to have to change with it.
The lights flickered to life in the tunnel suddenly, and people scrambled to their feet, away from the rails.
Since they weren't at a station, there weren't that many lights, only single fluorescents on the walls every twenty feet or so, but after so long in dimness, it was blinding at first.
Derek looked around at the dazed and dirty faces. People who ordinarily wouldn't have gone out in public without shaving or with two-day-old eye makeup smudged under their eyes no longer cared about that.
From down the tunnel, he heard the echoing sound of screaming over the excited babble about the return of the lights. Someone had been touching the third rail, maybe... Derek pulled his backpack a little closer to him, away from the rail, just in case.
The screaming grew louder, and he began to hear a rattling, popping sound. Guns.
Kyle, who had mistaken bombs for fireworks, wasn't fooled again and drew closer to Anna. "Put your backpacks on," she told them, very calmly. "You know how to get to your father's parking garage if we get separated. Meet there."
"Yes, Mom," Derek answered, and he noticed she had the gun in her other hand.
"Watch out for Kyle. Go." They started to trot as fast as they could, carrying their backpacks, with Derek making sure he was between Kyle and the electrified rail.
Other people not as weighed down caught up to them, pushing and shoving.
But the screaming was coming from in front of them, too, and people were heading toward them. "This way! Not that way!" one terrified man told them, shoving back the other direction.
Anna stopped where she was and looked around in the tunnel frantically. But there was nowhere to go. "Hide there," she told Derek and Kyle, pointing at one of the niches in the subway wall where workers could stand when the trains passed.
Derek put Kyle behind him, even though Kyle protested, "I wanna see!"
Derek waited tensely as the screaming and the sound of gunfire came closer, more obviously in both directions to herd the people into the middle.
A man tried to push Derek and Kyle out of the niche, but Derek shoved him away so he fell off the walkway and back down to the tracks.
He saw the thing coming in from the south first - a tall shiny metal skeleton, walking like a man, but with glowing red eyes. And it had a machine gun and a belt of ammunition that hung down to the floor, firing at the people milling helplessly in the middle like a herd of cows waiting for the butcher.
People screamed, but Derek and Kyle were silent, watching.
Anna went to the front and started to fire at it with her gun. The bullets hit it, seemed to rock it back and made it pause its fire, but that was all. Then the clip emptied and she clicked on an empty chamber.
Her gaze met Derek's and he realized what she was going to do. "Run!" she yelled.
"Mom!" Kyle screamed.
Derek jumped down to the tracks, pulling Kyle down with him.
He saw the machine - the robot - raise its weapon and fire at her, one round right in the body. She fell. The people around her scattered.
The machine continued forward, firing at each person with a terrifying, cold efficiency. Little Isabel fell right next to her parents, gone in an instant.
It was coming closer to Derek and Kyle. Derek put Kyle behind him, but he couldn't stop watching his mom. She was still alive, and her eyes met his - and in them he read all her love and her determination.
Then she grabbed the metal ankle of the machine as it passed her and with her other arm outstretched, touched the barrel of the gun to the third rail.
Blinding sparks filled the tunnel and a hideous electronic screech cut right into his brain.
But inside the sparks, barely visible, he could see the machine tip over like a felled tree.
He grabbed Kyle and shoved him to make him move. The nightmare robot crashed to the ground, twitching, maybe dying. But Derek knew there was another one somewhere behind them.
They ran past their mother's body and into the darkness.
* * *
"We ran," Derek stared blankly into the horrors of his past. "All I had left was Kyle."
John's eyes felt hot and wet. She was dead. His grandmother Anna Reese was living not far from here, blissfully unaware that Judgment Day was coming. She was going to give her life to save her sons from one of the machines.
He opened his mouth to say something to Derek. Then he decided not to try, realizing there was nothing that could make it better.
Derek murmured to himself, "It was Easter. A year later I lost Kyle in those tunnels, too."
He said nothing more, lost in his memories of a future that John prayed wasn't going to happen. John reached across the table and grabbed Derek's arm, offering his sympathy. Derek didn't look at him, but he didn't pull away either.
Neither of them broke the silence as first light glowed behind the curtains and eventually, the sun rose to begin a new day.
end.