The evening after the world ended, Chad Dumier found himself sitting alone on a street corner in Paris, a half drunken bottle of cheap beer clutched in one hand. Majestic-12, the international cabal he had dedicated the last eight years of his life to fighting, was defeated – but try though he might, he could find little joy in the victory. The leaders of majestic-12 had been slain, taking their plans with them to their graves. The worldwide communications hub they had used to monitor and control the flow of information across the entire world had been destroyed, but it had taken the world down with it.
Most of the governments in the world would not survive this, Chad knew already, and law enforcement and military forces were thrown into disarray. As if in illustration of this he heard a great crash as the fires now raging through the local government building down the street from where he sat claimed another floor of the ancient architectural masterpiece. Looters roamed the city with little or no opposition – by this point they included most of the population – burning and breaking as they went. They paid Chad little mind, a hunched figure crouched on the pavement, but government workers of any level as well as any who still dared wear the uniforms of MJ-12 or the police were beaten and killed. Many in the mob had got hold of guns one way or another, and they swarmed the streets while the forces of authority were scattered and confused. It was a cleansing of the rot which had taken over for so long, though, and perhaps necessary.
Majestic-12 had been destroyed, the almost sole aim of his life for so long, yet he could not find it in him to celebrate. He had always known that the cost of such an important victory would be high, but now for the first time he wondered if he would have been willing to pay it. Not that it had been him who had to make that decision in the end. Perhaps he should be thankful for that. Chad's knowledge of the conspiracy outside France was, in truth, hazy and it had never occurred to him that MJ-12 was so entrenched that their defeat could conceivably do the damage it had, with the scenes in Paris doubtless being played out thousands of times in thousands of cities across the globe.
Chad glanced down at the bottle in his hand, which was now empty. He wasn't truly drunk, although the alcohol was doubtless contributing to his feelings of confusion and vague despair. Now he thought of it, in fact, being truly drunk sounded like a very tempting thought. There was a supermarket just around the block, and Chad picked himself up from the street and went to look for any alcohol that had been missed when the shop was looted earlier in the day.
Nicolette DuClare perched on the edge of her bed, hunched over with her arms around herself to ward off the cold yet for some reason unwilling to seek the shelter of the covers on the bed. She stared numbly at the four walls of her room, much as she had years before. At the time, though, she had always been seething with rage against her mother after some argument or other – she could barely remember, now, what they had argued about and why it had seemed so pressing at the time. Now, Nicolette's thoughts of her mother dwelled on memories from before all that, before their shared home had become a warzone with every conversation a battle.
A mother is a hard thing to lose, and Nicloette had never really known her father. What hurt most, though, was the fact that they had parted on such bad terms with no chance to make amends. Her mother's death seemed to put their relationship into perspective, and the angry confrontations of the last year or two before Nicolette had left for good seemed trivial indeed.
When she had first heard the news of her mother's death Nicolette had surprised herself with her lack of feeling. Only now, coming back to her old home, did she truly feel the weight of her loss. She suspected that it had just not been quite real at the time and with more immediate matters to occupy her mind she had simply pushed the truth away rather than deal with it. Now, detached from other immediate concerns in her life and in the house of her childhood, the sense of loss overwhelmed her. Finally, Nicolette curled up on her bed and cried for her dead mother.