Autumn in the City of Lights (7 page)

Karl’s smooth, clear voice set my teeth on edge.

“I realize the peace talks are on hold until the bomber is found,” he said soberly. “But I recently received news I must share.”

I touched the back of Grey’s arm, and he took my hand in his, winding his fingers through mine. He glanced down at me, and I could see the same concern in his eyes that I felt. He squeezed my hand, then placed his other on top of mine. His fingertips were cold, but his palms were warm, and they thawed my own icy fingers between them.

“This morning,” Karl continued, “we received word of a plan to hold a meeting of survivors across the globe, a Summit of New Nations. We’ve been invited to be part of this conversation.”

A collective gasp came from the crowd, and chatter began to fill the air. Grey and I looked at each other with wide eyes.

Karl waved his hands in a downward motion, trying to quell the excitement.

“The Summit takes place in six months, and I think it’s in all of our best interests to make sure
our
leaders are there to represent us on the global scale. But there’s one problem.”  He paused, looking around at the rapt audience. For a moment, I felt his gaze on me, and I shuddered.

“People of Los Angeles, we are going to have to work
together
to get there. Because the Summit of New Nations is in the City of Light — Paris, France.”

I was struck dumb. Paris. Only months ago, Grey and I had stood on the Eiffel Tower, staring at the signs for a French Reconstruction Front, wondering how on earth we were going to stop Karl from taking over the world. And now this Summit of New Nations would be held in Paris? It couldn’t be a coincidence.

I turned my head, catching Grey’s eyes, and knew he was thinking the same thing. He squeezed my hand reassuringly while the people around us continued their nervous chatter.

“Please, everyone. Calm down, calm down,” Diego said, walking to center stage. “Is this true?” he asked Karl.

“We picked up the transmission on our shortwave less than an hour ago. Contact Hoover — they must have heard it, too.”

“And can we be sure this transmission actually came from Paris and not another aggressive group?” Diego asked.

Karl thought for a moment, leaving the audience in suspense. “We can’t. The best I can say is that the transmission was weak, as if coming from a long distance. And minutes after it ended, there was another one from New York, relaying the same information.”

“Paris wants every post-plague settlement to send a delegate to assist in re-building our global communications. We shouldn’t miss out on this opportunity. I suggest the Westside and New Burbank each send someone.” Karl turned to the audience and projected his voice. “Hold elections, or send Diego here. It doesn’t matter to me. But we need to move fast. The world is coming back together, and we should have a say in how that happens.”

“If each city is to send a delegate, why are we sending a representative from the Westside
and
New Burbank?” Diego asked.  “Perhaps we should be sending one to represent us all.”

An undercurrent of boos was audible despite the hearty applause.

“This city is not yet unified,” Karl said, speaking above the noise. “As evidenced by the bombing at our last meeting, we still have a long way to go, and I’m not confident you, or another representative, will have the best interest of my people at heart. I will go to represent them.”

The muscles in Diego’s jaw tightened. I could tell he was annoyed by Karl’s command of the discussion.

“Fine. An election will be held for New Burbank to choose its delegate. Until then, this meeting is adjourned.”

It was just after mid-day by the time we got back to the hospital. I headed toward Ben’s room with the others close behind me, and crashed into Shad’s back when he stopped suddenly in the doorway.

“Shad, what–” I began, but words fell away when I stepped around him and saw what had caused him to stop short. Ben was awake.

Relief washed over me, as he turned his head and smiled at us. Rissi broke away from Connie’s side to wrap her arms around me.

“Look at Ben!” she shrieked with joy.

“I see! I see!”  I rushed to the bed and dropped my arms around him. To my surprise, Shad fell in behind me and draped his long arms over us all.

“Careful, everyone,” Grey said, walking up behind me and staring down at Ben. “You’ve suffered a spinal injury. We need to restrict your movement until the swelling subsides.”  He began giving Ben the once over.  “How long have you been awake?”

“About an hour,” Connie said.

Ben’s voice was soft, but alert. “What did I miss at the meeting? We throwing Karl in the stockade yet?”  He tried to smile, but I could tell it was false.

“How are you concerned about that right now?” I asked.

“Better to focus on that, than this.”  Ben gestured to his legs. Then I frowned. I hadn’t seen him move his lower limbs yet.

“Can you all step out for a few minutes while I examine him?” Grey asked. He seemed even more earnest this time, and suddenly the joy I’d felt about seeing Ben awake was replaced by a sinking feeling.

We stood outside the exam room for twenty minutes. Rissi was confused. She seemed to think Ben would be walking out of here with us in a matter of hours, now that he was conscious. I wasn’t as naïve.

Grey opened the door and gave us a grim smile. “Ben still has no feeling below the waist.  We’ll know more in a few days.”  He looked down at Rissi. “Are you okay hearing this? Or would you like to let us talk first?”

“I’m okay,” Rissi said, taking my hand.

“I think, given the current situation, we should keep him here for observation for at least a few days, then re-evaluate.  Depending on what happens, we can make the call whether to let him come home or not. At that time, we may need to make some adjustments at the house.”  Grey glanced at Daniel, who nodded.

“I’m pretty handy,” he said. “If we need to put in ramps or anything, I can take the lead on that.”

“Ramps for what?” Rissi asked.

“For a wheelchair, Riss,” I whispered. “Ben may need one.  We’re not sure yet.”

“Oh,” was all she said.

“Ben’s taken the news remarkably well,” Grey said. “I’m truly amazed.”

“He knew the diagnosis might be coming,” Connie chimed in through her tears. “When he woke up, he realized what was going on right away.”

I hoped we wouldn’t need to install ramps. I hoped Ben
would
walk out of here. Soon. But I didn’t like the tightness in Grey’s expression.

We all walked back into the room and found Ben staring out the window. He turned to face us and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “You guys again, huh?”

I smiled, wanting to be strong for him. But Rissi didn’t. She started crying as she went to his bed. Ben wrapped an arm around her and cried, too. I found Grey’s hand and willed my eyes to remain dry. If we all started crying, it would only make Ben feel worse.

“Hey Marissa,” Connie said. “I have an idea. Why don’t we go home and start dinner, and then bring it back here so we can all eat together. Will you help me?” Rissi reluctantly agreed, and Connie gave me a sad smile over her head. We both knew Rissi needed to be taken away for a while for Ben’s sake.

After everyone else left, Shad and I sat down and filled Ben in on the Summit of New Nations in Paris, and the three of us discussed whether we trusted Diego enough or if we should vote for someone else. Then there was the problem of how to get to Paris.

When Connie, Daniel and Rissi returned with dinner, Daniel brought a surprise for Ben. “No doubt you’ve heard about the radio transmission from Paris,” he said. “I know you like to be take part in the evening conversations, so I figured you might want it here.” Daniel placed Ben’s shortwave radio on the table. “I don’t know what the hell you do on this thing all night, but I bet you money it’s alive with chatter now.”

As Ben took the receiver from Daniel, his eyes lit up, and I saw the first real grin since he woke. “Thanks, Daniel. Maybe I can still be useful with this.”

“What do you mean,
still be useful
?” Shad demanded. “That’s ridiculous. You’re a walking encyclopedia...” Shad trailed off when he realized what he said. “I mean, well... you know... a wheeling... you don’t have to walk to be useful around here.”

Ben ignored Shad’s comment and waved him forward. “Come here, I’ll show you how to use it.”

The dinner Connie and Rissi made was absolutely delicious, but we were too focused on listening to the broadcasts on the shortwave radio to pay much attention to food.

While we never heard a repeat of the broadcast from Paris, we did hear a version of it from the people at Niagara Falls, and on other channels from the groups in Virginia, Washington State, and Canada. They’d all received the Paris transmission and were passing on the details, like a children’s game of telephone.

“...calling it the Summit of New Nations. Everyone’s sendin’ somebody,” said the Southerner. “We’re having our own elections here, but we got no way of getting there.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” said Franklin, the leader in Vegas. “New Burbank has a jet and a pilot. Not sure what’s to be done about fuel, but I’m sure we’ll find a way.”

“We should reserve this channel for official business, gentlemen,” Diego’s slightly accented voice chimed in. “Unless there’s something urgent...”

“Cut the crap, Diego,” Franklin said.  “This is an open channel, and we’ll damned well talk about what we want to right now. You want an official channel, switch to another one. Meantime, I need to chew this over a little bit... start wrapping my head around it.”

“Sorry, Diego, but I have to agree with Franklin on this one,” said a man whose voice I didn’t recognize. He had a distinctive East Coast accent that reminded me of my father’s favorite Prohibition-era gangster film. “If this isn’t official business, I don’t know what is. We should talk about this before we decide anything. Right now, I’m skeptical. What if this is some kind of power play?”

“I understand your reservations, Vincent,” the woman from Washington State said. “I have my own as well. But I think we’d be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn’t at least try to go into this with some modicum of good faith...” Ben turned the volume of the radio down.

“Well, things are about to get interesting again,” he said, eyes staring off in the distance, trying to work something out.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Daniel said. “The world used to not be that big of a place. It was just a matter of time before we all started talking to each other again.”

I wished I could tell my friends everything I knew about Karl – where he was from, what he was capable of, how he already had a presence in Paris. They would be more skeptical than they already were. But they couldn’t know. It was just too dangerous. If Karl found out they knew, there was no telling how far he would go to silence them.

Connie reached forward and touched the microphone connected to Ben’s radio by a long spiral cord. “It’s amazing how these things work. I didn’t realize you could talk to the other side of the globe.”  She dragged a finger across the recessed lines of the mic before reverently setting it back on Ben’s side table.

“Well, you can’t normally reach that far,” Ben said.  “These use line of sight to transmit back and forth. So on a normal day, you couldn’t transmit to the other side of the world even if you wanted to. It’s simple physics. The earth is round. There’s no straight line between this side of the planet and the other side... unless you dig a hole. And that’s not how radio works.”

“Then how was anyone on this continent able to hear Paris?” I asked.

“Well, there’s this phenomenon called ‘skip.’  It’s a bit complicated, but the basic version of it is, if there’s a lot of solar activity, it can cause radio waves in the air to get caught in the atmosphere and get reflected back down to earth. So on certain days, a radio signal that could only travel say from here to New York,
could
travel from here to Paris.”  Ben paused for effect. “So Paris could have been trying to get this message out for quite some time, but didn’t have the right atmospheric conditions to reach the rest of the world. Pretty amazing if you think about it.”

I smiled. Ben was already starting to sound like his old self.

“Are you going to Paris, Autumn?” Rissi said, breaking me out of my thought.

“What?” I asked. “Why would I go to Paris?”

“Because someone from New Burbank is going. You told Ben earlier, remember?”

“I remember, but I didn’t mean
me.
”

“What about Diego?” Connie asked. “I was friends with him back in Hoover. He’s smart. He’s been a pillar of this community. I think people trust him. Ben, you worked with him in the Mayor’s Office.”

“I suppose he’d be the logical choice,” Ben said, considering.

“No,” Grey said. “It can’t be Diego.” All heads spun to Grey as he entered the room. He quickly greeted us, then went on talking while he claimed his dinner. “I like him just fine, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t
know
him. If I had to nominate anyone it would be Daniel, Autumn, or Ben.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, doc,” Shad said, his forehead crinkling in annoyance.

“No offense, Shad,” Grey said. “I think you’re a courageous young man, but I’m not sure you’d excel in a forum-like setting.”

“A what now?” Shad asked, only half serious.

“My point,” Grey said with a soft smile. “Again, I mean no offense.”

Shad smiled back and nodded. “Yeah, I’m more the take orders type, not the giving them type. I get it. But still, I like Diego.”

“I agree. Diego is the logical choice here,” Connie said, as if that closed the subject.

I opened my mouth to argue and was surprised when Connie’s eyes flashed with tears.

“No. Autumn, I am tired of everyone I care about being in constant jeopardy. In the past, we were in the middle of it all, and we couldn’t help the situations we were in. But this time it’s different. Let someone else be the hero.” She tossed her napkin down, stood up, and walked to the hall. Daniel followed her, and moments later, I heard crying.

“What’s wrong with Connie?” Rissi whispered.

“She just wants to make sure we’re all safe,” I said. “We just need to give her some space right now.” I knew Connie was thinking about her three children and husband before The Plague. She was right. She’d lost too much. We all had.

“I still think it wise to discuss who the representative should be,” Grey said.

“What about you, doc?” Shad asked. “I could see you winning an election. You and Autumn are still pretty popular. You could beat Diego if you threw in your hat.”

Grey considered for a moment. “That is a possibility.”

“Shad, you know you’re going, right?”  Ben pointed out.

“Wait, what?  I thought we just established I’m not form material,” he said, butchering Grey's phrase.

“Not as a representative, but as a pilot,” Ben said. “They’re going to need a transcontinental aircraft. There aren’t many of those. We’ve got a couple at the New Burbank airport, but those are some really sophisticated planes. Not many folks can operate one. Daniel has to go, whether Connie wants him to or not. And he’s going to need a co-pilot he trusts. I know he’s training a couple people, but at the end of the day, he’s gonna choose you.”

Shad’s brow furrowed. “Damn. You might be right.”

“I know I am. So the real question is, who do we want to send with you guys as a representative? Diego?  Grey?”