OneThreeThirteen (A Presidential Agent Novel Series Book 1)

OneThreeThirteen - Chapter 1

AT 12:01 ON THE MORNING of January 3, 2013, the bombs began to fall. My husband John and I were shaken from our beds by the percussion blasts from a series of atomic bombs dropped on downtown Chicago.

Of course, that was not our first assessment of the situation. No. Not by any means. We would never, in a million years, have assumed that the end of the world – as we knew it -- was at hand.

No, our first assumption was that some damn fool drunken teenager had run into the side of out house with his brand new car that he'd gotten as a Christmas present from his over moneyed and over indulgent parents.

You see, we live in a very affluent neighborhood on an equally busy street. People in our area are always giving their teenage children cars as gifts. Because as John puts it, "Their parents would rather part with the money than spend time chauffeuring around the little monsters they've created."

So, when the house had shaken with such force, that it momentarily seemed to have lifted up off its foundation and then settled back down with a loud thud, it was the only rational thing that made any sense.

I remember being violently jolted awake. Too startled to do much of anything else, I reached out for my husband.

"John." I whispered. When he didn't answer, I rolled over, grabbed his bulky shoulders, and started shaking him furiously. "John. John! Are you awake?" I whispered in the dark.

"Grace, for God's sake. Stop shaking me! Of course, I'm awake."

"Did you feel that?"

"Yes, Grace," he answered, somewhat annoyed. "I felt that! As if the whole house shaking wasn't enough to wake the dead," he mumbled.

Sitting up, John swung his feet over the side of the bed and searched, by memory, for his slippers.

"All I can say is that if any of those damn kids have put a hole in the side of my house, I'm going to haul their daddy's rich ass into court and make him pay. This is not going to be like the last time, Grace, when that Baker kid mowed down our mailbox and tore up half the damn lawn with his car before speeding off."

My big burly husband, who stands six feet four in his socks, weighs in at about two hundred and fifty pounds, and under normal circumstances is a gentle giant. But he'd had enough.

As the kids in our neighborhood had turned from tweens to teens and gotten their driving permits, there had been an ever increasing number of driving mishaps with our house taking the brunt of them.

Our house sits on the corner of a curved four way intersection. Most of the driving mishaps occurred when teen drivers either did not stop or had misjudged their speed and had careened through the intersection and ended up on our front lawn. I knew John's disgruntled tone stemmed from the frustration he felt at having to replace, not one, but two new fences. And reseed the lawn where spinning tires had torn up tender shoots of grass, and time wasted installing a new mail box every few months.

I clutched the blue and white wedding band quilt, that had been a wedding present, to my chest as my husband of twenty years, threw on his robe and guided his feet into his slippers without ever turning on a light. "John, what are you doing? You can't go down there. We should call the Police!"

"You call the police! This is my house and I'm going downstairs and check things out. You can wait here if you want, for the Police!"

"John no!" I reached for him, but he shrugged away from my grasp and stormed out. I sat paralyzed listening as his footsteps echoed in the hallway outside our bedroom.