Spiders from the Shadows - By Chris Stewart Page 0,1

torment. What had happened to his country? What might he have done differently!

James sucked his teeth and waited.

“We should have seen it coming,” Brucius continued.

Again, James didn’t answer.

“We should have known.”

“What are you talking about, Mr. Secretary?”

“The president we elected. He was good, smooth and said all the right things. But he didn’t love his country, at least not like you and I do. Not like our fathers. Not like our grandfathers. He saw our country as not that much different from all the others, not much better, in some ways maybe worse. He saw our sins and determined they precluded us from any further greatness. It wasn’t that he had an evil heart, he just couldn’t see or didn’t choose to see the good that was our country.”

“Hmmm,” was all James offered.

Brucius leaned over and ran his hand over his head, then rested his elbows on his knees and looked up. “It allowed him to surround himself with men like he was, only worse. Men who didn’t trust their own people. Men with a lust for power, and power, like cocaine, left them unsatisfied, always lusting for more. But it was us as much as anyone. We’re the ones who elected him. We’re the ones who put him there.”

“He paid a price for his folly.”

Brucius thought of the nuclear attack over Washington, D.C., that had killed the president and answered, “Yes, he did.”

They fell silent another moment. Outside, a powerful storm was raging: enormous black clouds, billowing and boiling, dark and full. Thunderous rain. Constant spiderwebs of blue-white lightning. Something in the atmosphere had been thrown completely out of whack—whether from the EMP attack or the nuclear fallout, no one quite knew. Maybe it was from both. Maybe Mother Nature was just ticked off, but she was birthing storms now that billowed with more fury than they’d ever seen before. A particularly close bolt of lightning CRAAACKED and the thunder followed instantly, causing the air to sizzle with the smell of ozone. Both men stopped and looked out the window. It was almost as dark as midnight outside.

“You get in and get out,” Brucius said after the echoes from the frightening thunder had rolledHe could have come home.”

Do not get yourself killed!”

James Davies studied his hands, large, rough, and thick-fingered. His father’s hands. His grandfather’s hands. The inherited hands of a former slave. A sudden chill ran through him. A premonition? A warning? He didn’t know. He looked across the table at his best friend, his mind drifting back. “Do you remember the first time we ever met?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? I can’t remember anything that happened even a month ago. That was back in college. It seems like another world.”

James rubbed his hands across his eyes. “I remember it like it was yesterday. We were sitting in a physics lab. There were, I don’t know, forty or fifty kids, all of them as arrogant and self-absorbed as we were, all of them certain they were going to be the next billionaire, president or power-crazy CEO. You don’t fill a classroom at Yale with the weak in intellect or ego. An hour into the lab I looked down the row and caught your eye. You looked at me, then motioned to the back door. We picked up our books and headed out—”

“There was a gym across the hallway,” Brucius remembered now. “We ended up shooting hoops.”

“Yeah. You were taller by four inches, but I could still dunk on you.”

“I was jealous of your money,” Brucius said.

“I was jealous of your determination,” James countered. “The fact you were making it on your own.”

“Your dad was paying your way through college. He bought you that cool car,” Brucius pointed out.

“Cool? Are you kidding? That British Triumph was nothing but a piece of junk.”

“It was a chick magnet, baby.”

“The sucker never ran,” James complained. “I spent more time on the bus than any poor black kid in Memphis.”

They both fell silent, smiling, the memory deep and full.

“I’ll always remember,” James repeated, his voice low and monotone. He was talking to himself now. “I looked down the row of kids and saw you. You looked at me. And from that moment, before we had ever even spoken, I knew that you were going to be my best friend.”

“It was a long time ago,” Brucius answered. “But that has proven true.”

“You know what else? Out of that whole group of kids, out of that entire bunch of snot-nosed, brilliant, ambitious, arrogant, give-it-to-me-because-I-deserve-it Yale