The woman’s face is still mostly smooth. The only signs of her true age are an array of laugh lines that crinkle whenever she smiles, which she does quite a bit, finding something humorous in almost every situation. Her hair is a tawny blond, its rich color diminished somewhat by the encroaching grays, the ones she’s just not vain enough to try to hide behind the quick fixes of bottled hair products. The woman—and more importantly, the man who adores her—knows that youth and vitality are more about what’s on the inside than what’s on the outside. The interior is what’s important, and only a precious few intimates get to see that. The exterior? Hell, everyone else on the planet can see that, free of charge.
The girls look like both of them, a mix of her fair skin and honey-colored hair, but with his eyes and nose. He thinks the nose looks much better on them than on him. It confers an impression of quiet, regal strength that makes him wonder how they’ll fare in the coming years when boys begin to circle around them. Would they take the males on head-to-head as he would, or would they instead use the mother’s good nature and occasional guile? He finds he almost can’t wait to find out, but he knows these things will happen sooner than he’ll want. It’s not going to be easy watching them winnow away the list of suitors until they find the right ones. And when that happens, they won’t be his little girls any longer.
He pulls open the screen door on the small house they leased on the plains of Kansas, where the land is flat and seems to go on forever, broken only occasionally by trees or telephone poles that stand a silent vigil in the heat of the midday sun. From somewhere in the humid, sticky distance, a crow caws, and he feels a momentary portent of dread flutter across his heart. But why? The day is perfect, the weather calm, and his family waits for him only a few steps away in the small kitchen. He enters the room, and the girls shriek with delight as they leap toward him with no hesitation, even though he’s been gone for so many years of their lives that he sometimes feels he barely knows them. His wife’s smile is broad and welcoming, and her dark eyes twinkle as she turns from the kitchen counter, forgetting about the lunch she had been about to serve.
“Well, it’s about time, stranger!” she says, laughing, her voice bright and clear.
Behind him, the crow caws again.
He awoke to the total darkness that could be found only beneath the surface of the earth. He lay in his rack and listened to the sounds of the base: the gentle whisper of climate-controlled air moving through the ductwork, the muted sounds of equipment operating, the occasional footfalls in the corridor outside his quarters as someone walked past. The clock on the nightstand read 0246. He wasn’t officially on duty for over five hours, but he knew he wouldn’t be sleeping much more.
The dream. Always the dream.
Sometimes when he awoke, he was filled with an overwhelming despair that made him contemplate suicide. So easy, so amazingly easy, to end it. The varieties of method to his self-inflicted demise were endless. Gunshot. Overdose. Hanging. Slashing his wrists and bleeding out in the shower. Or simply accessing one of the emergency exits, where he could climb up to the surface and let God do His work as he walked back to the house.
Other times, he awoke clear-headed and mostly free of the numbing despair. But the sad loneliness was always there, followed by the shame that he had failed to execute the one mission that mattered most. That failure left him an empty shell most days, making him into little more than a ghost that haunted the base. The vitality, the zest for life, the need to serve and carry out his sworn duties … all fell by the wayside, washed out of him like the rays of the sun could diminish the colors of an old photograph.
Why, he always asked himself as he lay alone in the darkness in small, cramped quarters. Why them? Why not me?
The base had no answer.
1
The wasteland was as dry and barren as the surface of the moon. Over the course of decades, the topsoil had been bleached by the sun’s searing rays, the soil converted to chalky dust. No vegetation