A Different Alchemy Read Online Free PDF Page A

and Jeffrey didn’t ask about the man’s child.
    “Was your wife near the stadium?” Jeffrey said.
    “No!” Griggs snapped around to face Jeffrey as if a threat had been issued. But then the man had a flicker of recognition, maybe remembered the day Jeffrey had brought Galen to work on what had ended up being the very last “Bring Your Child To Work” day. “No,” Griggs said again. Then, “But my brother was. He thought of Stacey as his own daughter…” Griggs put his face in his hands and shook.
    What could Jeffrey say that would make anything better? It wasn’t worth trying to joke about how much it might cheer the man up if he threw useless boxes of useless paper out the window.
    “What are you going to do?”
    “Hang out here for a while,” Griggs said. “Collect myself.”
    “I meant in two days, for the city’s relocation.”
    “Oh, we’ve all been planning to go. I’ll still go.”
    “You’d still go there with your brother? Like nothing happened?”
    Griggs didn’t say anything else. Only stared blankly at the picture of his daughter.
    From the window, Jeffrey could see some of the papers swirling around on the ground. Griggs put the picture of his family back on the desk before offering a nervous laugh, the type of hysterical laugh someone would give if they had a gun to their head with someone telling them to be happy or else have their face blown off.
    Jeffrey shifted from one foot to the other. “Do you know where the keys are for Hangar 3?”
    The other man shrugged.
    “Take care of yourself, Griggs,” Jeffrey said, but the only response he received was another shrug.
    Before leaving, he looked back one more time. Griggs was still there, still sitting at his desk without picking up the phone or doing anything at all, simply sitting there as if that would allow time to freeze and keep anything else from happening.
    Jeffrey didn’t see anyone else on his walk to the hangar. Its main door, large enough to accommodate the planes, tanks, and whatever else might be inside, was closed, but the side entrance, miniature in comparison, was unlocked. With the lights off, only the outlines of the giant machines could be made out. With the click of a switch, however, a series of overhead lights revealed a selection of green, grey, and camouflage metal.
    There were no planes in the hangar. Jeffrey had no idea if they were someplace else on base or if someone had already taken them for other purposes. He saw two helicopters, three tanks, and one Humvee. A single golf cart was parked in the corner. It too was painted camouflage as though that would help it be taken more seriously. With another flip of a switch, the hangar doors rumbled to life and the enclosure opened to the world.
    Everything in the hangar, even the helicopters, was to be used in the migration south. Strangely, nothing made the citizens feel more comforted about their upcoming journey than armored machines of war.
    But, Jeffrey thought, they could handle having one less tank to lead the charge south. The same group that had set fire to the stadium, letting part of its population burn with it, would have to do without. He noticed a tarp strewn on the ground where another vehicle had been parked until recently. There was no telling where the transport was now. It was possible that a military Jeep was currently making its way down Interstate 95 on the way to Florida, a family trying to get away from the madness before everyone else. It was also possible the vehicle was sitting at the bottom of Colliers Lake with a drowned Colonel still sitting inside, an empty bottle of whiskey in the seat next to him.
    In all of his years in the military, Jeffrey had never actually been inside a tank. But then again, he had also never fought in a war, jumped out of a plane, really, done anything related to actually protecting the country. In front of one of the machines at last, he was surprised at how much bigger it was than he thought it would be.