Dahlia Black Read online

  Jon Hurtado, Dahlia’s boyfriend, was in the White House that day.

  He came to see me and told me about her last moments. Probably best you talk to him to get the story, but what I recall he told me was this: She was standing at the center of the Ellipse, the circular park just south of the White House fence, and was looking up, eyes closed, at the sun. Feeling the warmth of it on her face. Jon said he was holding her hand when it happened. The way he described it, it sounded as if Dahlia’s skin, in that split second of the Finality, turned to light, to warmth.

  I didn’t go anywhere that night.

  I also didn’t turn on the television. I couldn’t bear to see the breathless coverage of what was happening. Turns out, the coverage didn’t last very long. With everyone disappearing, business ground to a halt. Power went out. All cellular phone service stopped; only the landlines worked. The Internet went down and stayed down for a good two weeks. The country, the world, was silent.

  My first thought was of David.

  I wished he had been there to see it, to experience it.

  That sounds strange, considering the Finality was met with so much pain and sorrow, but it was revelatory, a meaningless miracle. Not meaningless in the sense that it was useless or unimportant—quite the opposite. It had no true meaning. It was like a tsunami or an earthquake, an act of nature that devastated us but had no intrinsic, larger meaning.

  Wow, I’m starting to sound like Glenn now . . .

  The country took a long time to recover.

  The world, too, for that matter.

  Alabama and Texas were the first two, and so far only, states to leave the union and become their own countries. Oregon and Florida threatened to secede but couldn’t find enough votes and enough fortitude to do it. I’m sure many of the Rocky Mountain states—like Colorado—considered leaving as well, but the EMP attackIII two years ago ended that pretty quickly.

  They won’t be out of the darkness for years to come.

  In the last year of my presidency, before the institution was reconfigured and the military came in via their soft coup, I did track down the Twelve.

  We found Simon Household in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  He put a gun to his head before he could be brought in. The whole scene there was fascinating: the man lived very much as he died. Not only did he not have any fingerprints—the coroner told me he’d had them removed through complicated and painful laser treatments—but there was some suggestion that he was suffering from a form of the Elevation.

  Clearly, the mysteries of his past went with him to the grave.

  We did find a list of associates and tracked most of them down: assassins, spies, mercenaries, and straight-up criminals. The Twelve were in bed with some pretty bad people. They were all shipped off to various prisons. I have no doubt that a fair number of them were executed.

  Simon’s right hand, Adalynne, is locked up.

  If you want to talk to her, I can get you in.

  As you know, most of the people who served in my administration went off to chase their own adventures. I’m sure you’ve spoken to Glenn. The Disclosure Task Force members have moved on too. Dr. Roberts died of cancer three years back. I know Dr. Mikoyan went east, to Japan, I believe. I’ve heard Dr. Faber lives in Colorado, at home off the grid, and Dr. Venegas works for the new administration.

  I can’t really sum it all up for you.

  I suppose that’s why you’re writing the book: to try and find a pattern, a story, inside the chaos. But sometimes the universe doesn’t make that easy. It defies our feeble attempts to corral it into trite forms and expected angles. All that being said, I do believe I did my best to lead our country through its most trying time, through humanity’s greatest challenge.

  Looking out there right now, even with our country divided and our economy crippled, I’m even prouder of us than I was when I was sitting in the Oval Office. You can smell it on the wind. Even though we did not ask to rebuild, it is what we are doing, and we are doing it with such grace.

  I believe the world is going to be a wonderful place.

  Even better than it was before.

  * * *

  I. From videos I’ve seen, the bulk of these campers set up their tents by the Old Faithful geyser. They sat around singing songs, playing the guitar. I assume they went there for the beauty but stayed for the consistency. The geyser, a sort of geothermic clock, hinted at stability that they’d likely never really experience again. Those people wanted to hang on to it as long as they possibly could.

  II. There are plans to rebuild DC and bring the electricity back on, but they remain halted until a stable government comes into power. However, the longer the place remains empty and silent, the more it seems people prefer it that way.

  III. President Ballard is referring to the electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) attack carried out by a white nationalist group called the Identity Council in an attempt to start a race war. There is still much confusion over how the attack was carried out or the true goal of its formulators. By all accounts it was deemed a failure, and many researchers assume the weapon went off accidentally while en route from Texas to Seattle.

  45

  ADALYNNE WOLLHEIM, FORMER CIA AGENT AND GUIDING MEMBER OF THE TWELVE

  PENNINGTON GAP, VA

  APRIL 22, 2026

  The thing most people don’t think of when they think of prisons is silence.

  The buildings are typically very quiet, and when there are noises—the clangs of closing doors, the drumbeat of boots on hallway floors—they can be jarring.

  I don’t know why my hackles were raised going into United States Penitentiary, Lee, in Lee County, Virginia. Lee used to house only male inmates but with the population changes in the aftermath of the Finality, it became one of the few high-security federal prisons still in operation. The so-called worst of the worst were sent there. I’d been in numerous prisons over my journalistic career, and yet this one gave me the creeps, so to speak. Perhaps it was because I was there to meet with Adalynne Wollheim, considered by many historians to be one of the most dangerous people currently living in the United States.

  Dangerous, not because she’s particularly strong or fast or violent, but because of what she knows. Adalynne is, for all intents and purposes, the last remaining member of the Twelve, the clandestine “black unit” headed by Simon Household in the years prior to and during the Elevation. While the group had been rumored to exist for many decades—there were fabricated documents purporting to detail minutes from the Twelve’s meetings circulated in the 1960s—evidence of their work did not materialize until after the Elevation had reached its peak. And by then it was far too late to hold anyone accountable for the many crimes they were found to have committed—crimes including treason and murder.

  Adalynne Wollheim is in her early forties and has her long brown hair pulled back in a tight bun. We meet in the prison atrium, surrounded by five armed security personnel. Adalynne’s ankle bracelets never come off.

  She has a cool demeanor and speaks quite slowly, carefully choosing her words for maximum impact. While I recorded our conversation, Adalynne insists that I print only the transcript. So that is what I’ve done.

  ME: Thank you for meeting with me. I realize it wasn’t an easy decision, considering . . .

  ADALYNNE: Considering what?

  ME: You’ve become one of the most hated people left in the country, possibly even the world. I know professionally that this is probably due to media oversaturation; they put your face and name up all the time. I also know that you didn’t work alone.

  ADALYNNE: The country needs a scapegoat for what happened.

  ME: That’s likely true. How do you feel about being that scapegoat?

  ADALYNNE: Feel? I don’t feel anything about it. I knew what I was getting involved in the minute I was recruited. You don’t join a secret mission unless you’re willing to accept all potential outcomes. There was never any doubt that when the chips all fell, we were going to be bl
amed.

  ME: And you think that’s unfair?

  ADALYNNE: Fair, unfair, that’s semantics for children. It’s a matter of principle. Moral fortitude. I find it funny that soldiers are celebrated with parades and flowers when they arrive home and no one wants to know just what they did overseas. A soldier is a soldier when they are at war. They can’t be soldiers at home. It’s an insidious Jekyll and Hyde mind-set. Those of us who joined the Twelve, we did so knowing that we’d never be fully accepted again. But we were confident that our work was essential to safeguarding humanity. And we were successful in that mission . . . for a long time . . .

  ME: Who was Simon Household?

  ADALYNNE: I’ll tell you only two things: One, he did not commit suicide in a hotel room in Tulsa. And two, he was always more myth than man.I

  ME: So he’s still out there . . .

  ADALYNNE: Maybe. Maybe he was never out there in the first place. Sorry, I’m not going to give you answers.

  ME: Tell me about the mission. What were you protecting us from?

  ADALYNNE: Seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it? This. A broken world. I don’t know why the earlier instances of the Pulse didn’t work. We never figured that out. My guess would be that humanity wasn’t ready as a species, as a society. We kept this pandemonium at bay for decades. I think that’s worth commendation.

  ME: The experiments you ran. What did you learn from them?

  ADALYNNE: Only that the human body is capable of incredible transformation. We consider bone and muscle to be locked into place like stone. But it can be manipulated; it can be warped for both good and bad. President Ballard, the Disclosure Task Force scientists—they all looked at the Pulse with optimistic eyes, seeing what they wanted to see: a grand statement about humanity. We are worthy, we are exceptional, we are the Elevation. But that’s not true, for the creators of the Pulse—call them the Ascendant if you want to. We were just putty, an experiment, lab rats. You saw Dahlia Mitchell’s final interview, the moment that she froze . . . What do you think she was hiding?

  * * *

  I. As far as I’ve been able to determine, both these things are true. The reports that Simon Household ended his life in a Tulsa hotel room came about the usual way: unsubstantiated rumors after a body was discovered with Household’s wallet on it. The corpse had been sitting for a week in a bathtub and was bloated beyond recognition. But it wasn’t Household. There were sightings across the country, other bodies that seemed like good fits. Perhaps the myth of Simon Household rose out of those events. Regardless, dead or alive, he’d become notorious: the boogeyman of the Elevation, going down in history as the man who ruined the world.

  46

  JON HURTADO

  IRVINE, CA

  MAY 10, 2026

  My final meeting with Jon Hurtado takes place in an abandoned office park in Irvine, California, just south of Los Angeles.

  He flew in the night before and didn’t get much sleep. Chugging coffee, he picks me up at my hotel and drives me here, to a place that has not seen more than one or two people a month for well over two years. That is exactly why Jon comes here. He sees it as an escape—not from the reality of the Finality but into an older reality, a time before this landscape was cluttered with human construction.

  The buildings around us, all typical office park structures of glass and steel, have been beaten by the weather. Windows are shattered, granite steps are cracked and chipped, and the lobbies—as far as I can see from glancing through the doors—are choked with plants that have run riot as rainwater has leaked in and soil blown through the broken windows. It has a certain beauty.

  We stand in a parking lot and watch the sun set.

  This is what the Pulse, the Elevation, the Finality, means on a human scale.

  Vastness.

  We tend to think of the universe as vast, the stars out there far beyond our reach, and the spaces between them impossibly distant. But there is a vastness now here on Earth. Overnight, the spaces between people have lengthened from feet to miles. Wars do that; natural disasters do that too. But they leave their marks, right? Scars in the earth and shattered glass everywhere.

  But here, there are no marks, no signs.

  Just emptiness.

  It’s only been three years or so since this place was abandoned. The first time I came, there were squatters in a few of the buildings over there.

  He points off to my left and I turn to see a low structure. There are a few dozen bicycles chained to a fence in front of it, all of them missing tires.

  The squatters left the place busted up—windows shattered and doors knocked down, more than enough space for the elements to scream through it and the wildlife to get a foothold. Now the place is home to several families of raccoons and a pack of coyotes. And those are the carnivores. I bet if you went floor by floor, you’d find a full ecosystem in each. From fungi chewing through the discarded manuals and office reports to the feral cats hunting sparrows and field crickets.

  But come here, this is what I wanted you to see.

  Flashlight in hand, we enter one of the buildings—this one rather intact—and make our way up the pitch-black staircase to the fifth floor, where we emerge onto a landing. Before the Finality, this likely served as a lunch spot for office workers looking to smoke cigarettes or get fresh air. Today, its moss-coated railing looks out over a circular park that was once crisscrossed with concrete paths.

  This reminds me of the Ellipse in DC.I

  The day of the Finality, Dahlia and I were there. She must have felt it coming; she said there was an electricity in the air that made me need to move, to get out. So we left the hotel where we’d been holed up and walked to the park.

  I think Dahlia had it all timed just right.

  She knew exactly what she was doing. At the park, we walked across the lawn holding hands. Dahlia didn’t want to talk about the Finality. She didn’t want to talk about the Pulse or the Elevation. She wanted to keep things simple, like they’d never be again.

  “The first time we met,” she said, “we looked up at the stars together.”

  “I was looking,” I said. “You came in and told me what I was seeing.”

  “The Seven Sisters. The Pleiades.”

  “I didn’t forget.”

  “They’re one of the brightest constellations,” Dahlia said, “and one of the earliest written about. The Maori, the Persians, the Sioux and Cherokee—all of them have legends about the Seven Sisters. They’re even in the Bible. The Blackfoot people have a legend about them being orphans: they weren’t cared for by the people, so the Sun Man turned them into stars . . .”

  “Like the Elevated.”

  Dahlia didn’t answer that.

  I asked her to give me some wisdom, something I would never know—something only the Elevated, only the Ascendant, knew. To leave me with a message, a bit of knowledge. She pulled a letter from the back pocket of her jeans and handed it to me. Then she kissed me and said, “We end but we continue.”

  I didn’t get it. I still don’t.

  We stopped walking and she asked me to tell her a joke.

  I could only think of some corny jokes my grandfather had told me. Dahlia still laughed at them. Then she told me she loved me and would always be nearby. We were still holding hands when she looked up at the sky and raised her arms as though she were going to just drift upwards. She didn’t.

  She vanished.

  I didn’t see it happen.

  I was holding air and her clothes fluttered to the ground.

  Look . . . there . . .

  The sun’s last rays hit the circle of overgrown grass beneath us. I see movement near the closest building and several deer emerge from the long shadows to graze. As we watch them, Jon turns to me, smiles. There are tears in his eyes. We watch for a moment and then make our way back to his car. He hands me the letter that Dahlia gave him the day of the Finality.

  I will close this book with it.

  * * *

  I.
The Ellipse is one of Washington, DC’s, most recognizable features. A circular open space just south of the White House, it was originally used as a corral for horses in the early 1800s. Fittingly, that is what it is used for now.

  47

  A LETTER TO HUMANITY FROM DAHLIA MITCHELL

  UNDATED

  I used to have nightmares about alien invasions as a kid.

  In my dreams, the aliens appeared in complicated spacecraft that resembled massive, nearly invisible snowflakes that blinked into existence above our cities. Colored lights flashing in roiling fogbanks that washed over the buildings. Then there were waves of fire as the ships let loose their destruction, skyscrapers flooded with flames, black smoke choking out all visibility. I would see this from my parents’ apartment building, and in the dream I’d try to run down the stairs and beat the tsunami of fire. Sometimes I made it; sometimes I was engulfed.

  I’d wake up terrified and awed either way.

  These dreams are vivid even now.

  Maybe it was Nico and me sneaking into too many bad movies. But I always assumed this was how it was going to happen. If they came, when they came, it would be riding a never-ending wave of annihilation. We would be conquered by force and broken by our own weakness.

  But that never happened, of course.

  Some people saw the Elevation as an invasion.

  It wasn’t quite like that.

  Sure, we were colonized by the Pulse Code, but there was no force.

  And there was no other to arrive.

  When the Finality comes and the Elevated shift from our reality to the next one, there will be no one to greet us, no outside intelligence to lay down the welcome mat and show us the way. Over the past twenty-four hours, my vision of the other side has gotten stronger. I’ve seen it for what it is: a ready-made community, a prefabricated world, that was never inhabited. It has sat empty, abandoned, since before we’d even left the treetops.