Thirty days.
The countdown has started, North America shivers under the shadow of a massive alien spacecraft, and humanity is hurtling toward an unknown future that lurks at the end of the timer. Somewhere, somehow, the heroes are making their plan...
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NAPA, CALIFORNIA, USA
August 11, 9:00 AM
There was no worse news Cole Chasseur could have heard in the middle of an apocalypse than that things were getting better and that he couldn't take credit for it.
He'd had a rough few days. He had moved from his San Francisco penthouse to his summer retreat in Napa, a converted vineyard, to avoid the vagaries of city life—the tear gas, the Molotov cocktails, the demands for multi-billionaire CEOs like himself to donate their wealth to help the common man. And now, if his Twitter homepage and the government memos were to be believed, the spacecraft was cleaning the air?
"Someone get me another mimosa!" Cole called, returning his glass to the coffee table with a clink. Thirty seconds later, his chef placed another in front of him and took the numerous empty champagne flutes in his meaty hands back to the kitchen. Cole chugged half of the fresh mimosa before lowering the glass to the table and moving outside to the stone terrace. It was too early in the morning to drink away his sorrows. He'd come back for it later.
Cole had bought the vineyard and the attached faux-Tuscan villa as the architectural equivalent of a juice cleanse. His doctor had told him fresh air was healthy, and instead of opening the windows in his office, he had bought an estate. The dull blue sky and patches of green among the dirt reminded him of a Renoir painting he had seen at the Met once, A Road in Louveciennes. He had a higher vantage point here, and there were no people in sight, just how he liked it. He had heard that people were fleeing en masse from the Southeast, but the United States was a big country and the roads would only take them so far. It would be a long time before any caravan of dusty travelers despoiled his estate.
Cole's silent meditations on the landscape and the fragility of beauty were interrupted by a shout from inside: "Cole, President Underwood's chief of staff is calling!"
"Tell him I'll be right there, Colette!" Cole yelled, and returned to the sitting room. Colette silently handed him his cell phone and his half-finished drink, then stood in the corner, supervising from afar. She wrote on her notepad.
"Hey Chuck, how's it going over there?" Cole asked and gargled the remainder of his mimosa before swallowing it.
"You know how bad it is. We have a humanitarian crisis on our hands."
"So I've heard. Where are you right now?"
"I'm in the War Room. We've been calling all the shipping company CEOs to coordinate with FEMA and deliver relief to affected areas. Time is of the essence here."
"What can I do?"
"We want your staff and logistical networks. Food, water, and clothing must be delivered to the Twilight and Midnight Zones. We want your people to work with the boots on the ground and get this stuff to the people who need it most. Most of all, we want public-facing leadership. There are protests on the street in San Francisco calling for your head. They think you're out of touch. If you don't do something, they're going to storm your Bastille, and we'll see then how much your wealth insulates you from this crisis. Capisce?"
