Page 3 of Chaos

The breeze tugs at her fluffy blond bangs, revealing a pale strip of forehead. “I expect a report any minute.”

“Good.”

For the next hour, I shake filthy hands, give smelly hugs, work up a few tears while Ottilie busies herself on a satellite phone, one of a set we’ve got working.

Eventually, Stan’s body is loaded up, and I finally return to the clean confines of my shiny black sedan.

Knox, my bodyguard, opens the car door for me. He was Secret Service before the plague, assigned to the White House. His hair is so dark it shines blue, and with his black suit, he looks like power as it was in the old world … or rather, like an accessory of it.

I gesture Ottilie in first.

She glances up at Knox, then sharply away as she ducks down to sit inside.

“Well?” I ask when we’re underway, the car swaying around turns easily through the empty streets, the scent of freshly-used hand sanitizer chasing away the stink of smoke.

“They got us a name.” Her thumb flips through images in the phone, the one with the graphic of an alien. “Yorke Hardt Garrett, Major.”

I know that name. “How do I know that name?”

Ottilie keeps going. “He was a ranger, then he was moved to operational detachment missions which is—”

“I know what it means,” I whisper.

It means he’s good.

Better than good.

Good enough to become a serious problem.

“We were able to follow CCTV footage of their caravan. It headed down the beltway and got off at I-66. From there, they went to I-81 and rode that all the way south to West Virginia, where they took a west exit at Staunton. That’s in the Appalachian Mountains.”

“Why? What’s up there except hillbillies and trees?”

Ottilie shrugs.

“Who do we have down there? A woman on the ham, right?”

“Yes. Renata in Sulphur Springs Town,” she says.

“That’s right.” Renata is aways wanting to make a peace accord, trying negotiate her own autonomy in that region.

“Shall I contact her?”

“Not yet.”

How do I know him, though? I keep thinking about that name as we drive across the empty city, through the White House gates, as we park and go inside, as I take my seat in the Oval Office and Ottilie blathers about needing more people to work with the children and problems with people resisting work details and an elderly woman who can’t be moved from her home.

Yorke Hardt Garrett.

How do I know his name?

I stare at the grainy photo before heading to dinner in the banquet hall. As I eat and all during the evening schmoozefest Otillie insists upon, where I shake more grubby hands and listen to mopey people tell me they’re afraid of this group that managed to escape our bridge.

Yorke Hardt Garrett. The name is spreading like wildfire.

They whisper about him, though they don’t know his full name. Moved like a ghost, they say. Shot twenty of us without reloading, they say. Never mind facts or even logic. The story grows as if he’s a boogeyman come to kill them all. A secret agent. Maybe he’s a Russian spy.

That’s when it hits me.