"For we walk by sight, not by faith"
Neon 2 Corinthians 5:7 (Unified Standard Edition)
- - -
Hitomi finally got to walk through The Door.
What had once been a mysterious edifice buried in the embassy basement, with its ill-lit hallway of emergency yellow lamps through which more than one poor fit for embassy life had been marched away, was now simply a blasé steel door.
It led, as Mr. Yamada had assured her, not to some torturous dungeon or illegal prison, but to a low-ceiling parking garage that looked like any other you'd find beneath the buildings of D.C.
Hitomi had been assigned to the last departure group - there had been four total not counting the embassy staff - and was now standing with a small crowd of about twenty civilians, mostly men, and Nurse Murata.
They were waiting on the other side of the outdoor parking garage door, a large steel construct of horizontal slats that would roll up when the next bus came, and they'd be able to board quickly on the street outside.
After the destruction of the Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue the entire road above and to the north had been blocked, and so they were evacuating directly onto the southern access road beneath and behind the embassy.
"Bad weather for a departure," Nurse Murata commented, and she was right.
The weather had grown from a light smattering of clouds in the early morning into heavier and darker things as the day had progressed. Her sleep had been fitful - as much as the white space afforded her at least. She had slept with Mr. Pipe in her right hand and a book in her left hand last night as an experiment.
Mr. Pipe appeared exactly as she had remembered it, with the latest modification she had made as well: a fabric grip made from the medical tape Dr. Nagisa had given her. The book had also appeared and her experiment with it proved several limitations to the white space that had replaced her dreams.
First, the book was just as detailed on the outside as she remembered it being. It was a copy of Dune which she had borrowed from the mini-library in the embassy's greeting room. The bright blue eyes of the protagonist on the cover, mixed with the greys and oranges of the sands behind him, were vivid and real - she couldn't tell it apart from the real thing.
Second, the pages of text were detailed and contained every word she would have expected; she could look away as much as she wanted and the words would persist on the pages just like when she had brought a pen and paper with her the previous time.
Third, and most importantly, it only contained pages she had read. The pages she hadn't read were "there" but shifted between blank and what she could only guess was the "idea" of what a book page would be.
Her test then, having proved that her dream space wasn't magically able to fetch unknown information, was to next see what the limits of her memory and observation were. She concentrated on counting each "blank" page until she reached the back cover of the book.
She needed to remember: 302 (front and back).
Add up the 21 pages she had actually been able to read and the book should have 323 pages of text in the real world.
When she woke up she had excitedly gone to check the book and see how many pages there really were.
434.
When you counted all the extra pages like the afterword and such, it was 434.
So: her memory could bring in existing knowledge for review perfectly (maybe?), but only made reasonable estimations about the unknown.
She felt that was important, even if she didn't know exactly why.
The rest of the time trapped in her sea of whiteness was spent exercising and swinging Mr. Pipe around.
But when she awoke the next morning Hitomi experienced no muscle soreness at all. She could only hope that maybe her "virtual exercises" would still build some muscle memory, otherwise practicing with weapons in the white space would be pointless.
"Ms. Hisakawa?"
Oh! She had spaced out again!
"Yeah," she chirped, hefting her duffel bag to the side a bit so she could turn towards the nurse, "Terrible. Do you think it'll affect our flight?"
Nurse Murata shocked her head in the negative. "I doubt it, even if it did I heard that the JSDF took over one of the Japan Airline hangars, so we'd just bunker down there."
"That makes sense. Still, the clouds look pretty angry, I'd hate to be caught out in this kind of storm once it starts dumping, you know?"
"Jinx," Nurse Murata instantly said.
"What?"
"Don't jinx it."
Hitomi chuckled, "Yeah, guess you're right."
A loud air horn interrupted any further thoughts the two might have, and the steel door let out a sharp clacking sound as it started rolling upwards, admitting the first bit of daylight they'd seen in over an hour of waiting in the dim underground parking lot.
The bus, of course, was far too large to fit into the underground space, instead parking right in the street outside, it's main door a meter or so to the right, and its spacious luggage compartment off to the left.
Hitomi and Nurse Murata hung back, watching their fellow Japanese board the bus in a single file, organized fashion. A porter was grabbing bags and suitcases and quickly stowing them away. Hitomi gripped her duffel bag and stepped forward as her turn came.
"I'll take that Miss," the porter said, wow, he was wearing white gloves and everything. Top class service!
"No, thank you," she lifted the drawstrings and slung them over her right shoulder, riding on top of her laptop bag's satchel. "I've got it."
He seemed confused for a moment, not having expected resistance. "We can't allow more than one carry-on into the bus. I'm sorry," he said, reaching out for her duffel bag again.
Nurse Murata stepped up: "She's with me, and she has permission."
The man inclined his head and backed away. "Of course, forgive my caution. Have a pleasant ride."
He walked away to close up the luggage compartment and Hitomi climbed up into the bus, trying not to get her bags caught on the rails as she made her way into the blissfully air conditioned interior.
It was cloudy outside so you'd think it would be cooling off but D.C. tended to be muggy; the air was thick with moisture and she had light beads of sweat already forming on the edge of her hairline.
"Air conditioning, oh sweet, sweet air conditioning!" she exulted, taking a seat near the front. The bus wasn't as crowded as she'd thought - they each had their own seats if they wanted - and Nurse Murata sat next to her on the other side of the aisle. That gave Hitomi a ton of room to put her duffel bag next to her while she held her laptop satchel in her bag.
A soldier stepped into the bus, then another. The first one moved down and took a seat in the very back, making some of the passengers nervous due to the presence of his machine gun.
The second sat up front, one seat ahead of Hitomi, but she wasn't bothered by the machine gun at all. If anything she felt better about its presence. Ever since Day Zero she'd come to appreciate the military in ways Hitomi had never even considered relevant before; a lifetime of being a sheltered girl from a top tier nation had left her wondering why the JSDF even existed.
Now she knew, and was very happy for the well-armed escort during the evacuation.
It was eerily quiet in the bus until the door finally shut and they began moving. Then it felt like the floodgates has opened. The families had all been sent ahead, so instead of parents and children talking the bus filled with the polite voices of strangers yearning to talk to the next available human in a neighboring seat.
Hitomi and Nurse Murata - Hitomi eventually found out her first name was Keiko - talked for a while about the weather, which seemed typical, really, but still relevant given the ever darkening sky.
It was only 11AM and already it felt like 7PM thanks to the sun being trapped behind a thick wall of clouds. Hitomi had never seen a tornado before but she imagined this was the kind of weather that would spawn one, and said so.
"A tornado? In Virginia?" Nurse Murata questioned.
"They have tornado warnings sometimes," said Hitomi, a bit defensively.
"Hmm..." her aisle-partner replied noncommittally.
They were passing 495, the beltway surrounding D.C., when traffic began thickening around them. Minivans with what looked like camping gear, storage bins, and homegoods tied to their roofs outnumbered the usual sedans and luxury vehicles that Hitomi knew from experience normally drove on westbound Highway 66 at this time of day.
They were leaving the city well before rush hour and it wasn't a major holiday, so it was truly surprising to see the highway full of so much traffic. Then again, a lot had changed. Her knowledge of D.C. and the metropolitan area around it was vastly out of date since she had decided to hole up in the embassy for the last few days.
Although, reasonably, that was the best choice. Her host family had escaped from the sinking ship that was the capital of the United States, leaving the city before their house was even sold. What drove an entire family to quit their jobs and abandon their luxury home in America's capital region?
Religion was something she felt would always be alien to her.
Were all these vehicles doing the same thing? Filled with families fleeing to the west? The distant mountains and plains of America's mostly empty heartland?
What did they know that she didn't?
They were just entering the area of Fairfax when traffic came to a complete stop. Hitomi saw the soldier in front of her shift out of his seat to quietly converse with the driver. The highway itself was surrounded by concrete barriers on both sides so there was no opportunity for using a shoulder for passing, but that hadn't stopped a few cars from trying to squeeze through narrow, impassable gaps and making the congestion worse.
Horns were honking all around them.
They started out as a few annoyed drivers, but soon grew into an angry metallic mob of deep blasts from truckers and light-hearted beep-beeps from toy-looking electric vehicles. Through the front windshield Hitomi could see it was lightly foggy ahead, and the stream of red brake lights slowly faded out into a grey/blue mist a few hundred feet away.
For some reason the poor visibility made her nervous.
Also, the tightly packed cars made her feel vulnerable.
Trapped.
Without thinking about it her hand shifted into her duffel bag, seeking out the comfort of Mr. Pipe's cold, steel grip. She looked down, following her arm, realizing a moment later what she had done.
This wasn't good.
Hitomi imagined this is what a psychic premonition might be like: even the hairs on her arm were standing up as though her entire body were recognizing some unseen threat.
Someone ran in front of the stopped bus, weaving through the lanes. The soldier instantly stood, moving forward to the windshield and peering hard straight forward, making it difficult for Hitomi to see.
Then she heard a yell from further ahead and the blare of horns weirdly started dying off. She could see, out her window, the car next to and below them inch forward a bit, bumper to bumper with the car ahead. The driver was doing what her own bus's soldier was doing: leaning forward and looking into the foggy distance.
Another person appeared suddenly from the fog, running east, around the cars, yelling as well. This time he was banging on hoods as he passed and pointing behind him. More people followed him.
Hitomi wasn't an idiot.
This was the "Godzilla attacking the city/traffic jam" scenario that a lifetime of watching action movies had prepared her for.
She needed to get off the bus!