Epilogue - Liberation

I picked up a grenade from a fallen soldier and held it in a clenched fist.

I found one of Little Brother’s operatives cowering in the field, gawking at the smoke and gases lingering in the air. He told me he lost all radio communication; couldn’t get orders from his boss.

I told him, "Take me back to the city."

He refused, of course. "The radioactive fallout will kill us," he said. He was a pilot, and had a sidearm.

I showed him my grenade, and he told me he could take me close. "Take me to Kingwood," I told him.

Lux approached, headphones around his neck but silent. I tried to smile at him, but couldn’t. He joined me in the helicopter, in my uneasy truce with the pilot who had no master now and no stake in what happened.

In the air, we started to talk. I asked the pilot what he thought happened to Banlo Bay, since the missile missed its target.

“EMP,” he said.

“What?”

“Electromagnetic Pulse. Happens every time a nuke detonates. Electronics are fried.”

“For how long?” I asked.

“Forever,” he said. “Computers, cell phones, televisions…if this helicopter wasn’t military grade, if the wiring wasn’t shielded for this sort of thing, it’d never fly.”

“How long will it take them to rebuild it?” I asked.

“Rebuild?” He laughed. “More like abandon. I’m talking total meltdown. Bank records, credit card bills, even cars. Everything electronic will be ruined. Is all that stuff even manufactured anymore?”

Lux told the pilot to drop us off in Kingwood Forest, where we could see the skyline of Banlo Bay. Every light was turned off. Every alarm was silent. Every broadcast was dead. Little Brother had been turned off, his power stolen. If he was a part of Escher, like Escher predicted, then he might be dead as well.

Soon, the walls would come tumbling down, and every puddle of water would be a bird feeder; every highway would be a garden, and every park, a forest; every onramp would be nothing more than a gently sloping hill.

I was not afraid of nuclear fallout; Escher would not damage Kingwood Forest. The trees would protect me.

Lux and I stood near the great church. He waved wordlessly, and began walking away from the city.

So I was the last one. Someone needed to pull the Strangers back to together, to prepare the city for the life to come. Someone needed to guide the thousands of paranoid, terrified citizens into a realization that people could help each other, that everything was not lost. Someone needed to rebuild, to restart, to carry on Escher’s vision for reality.

But what was reality? What was it now, without him?

Difficult to say. All questions of reality had become unreliable.

Didn’t matter. I was here. Erika was gone, but within me still. Maybe I could live as fearlessly as she did, once.

Someone needed to prepare everyone else to live as the Strangers lived. Someone needed to prepare them for real life.

Survival is triumph enough. Funny, didn't feel like triumph. It was enough, though. I was still alive to try and make things right—for the first time in my life, truly alive and capable of making something right.

I pulled my red baseball cap up over my head. It fit perfectly.

Today, I am scared of…fuck it.