Free Digital Winter by Mark Hitchcock Page A

his mother.
    More people arrived in the ER, but the stream seemed to have slowed. Maybe he would be able to see his mother soon.

    Rosa had the radio on in the condo and had been following reports closely. The San Diego news station had kept up a constant flow of conversation, most of it repetitious, about the outage. When they reported that parts of the city had power again, she felt a flood of relief. Rosa liked things orderly and consistent. Change made her nervous.
    Donny wheeled out of his room, stopped a foot short of the window, and fixed his gaze on downtown San Diego. He seemed content but was no longer laughing.
    He didn’t move. He just stared.
    Rosa stepped to him and placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Quite a day, Donny. Quite a day.” When she turned to walk away she caught a glimpse of Donny’s reflection. It didn’t look right, didn’t look like him.
    She did a double take.
    The reflection turned and looked at her.

    President Nathan Barlow returned to his schedule. Several meetings had to be canceled because of road congestion, which was fine with him. He had a mountain of information to read. He might even set aside thirty minutes to read something other than government documents.
    He was tired. He, like anyone who followed the presidency, knew that presidents aged at twice their normal rate. The weight of responsibility, the long days, the overflowing schedule, and the inability to please everyone—sometimes anyone—pressed him down.
    Still, he loved the job. It had been the only thing he truly desired. As a boy, his great-grandmother had said what grandmothers had been saying for generations: “In this country, a boy like you could grow up to be president.” Barlow had taken those words to heart, and politics became his only passion.
    Born to wealthy parents who made their money in banking, Barlow attended the best schools in Massachusetts, including Harvard. After his undergrad work, he studied at the London School of Economics, where he excelled. His father set him up in banking, and he spent the next ten years earning a fortune as an expert in international finance. Even then, his mind ran to the halls of congress, and on those days when he felt especially resourceful, the Oval Office.
    It had all worked out, and at times he thought some higher power had scripted his life for him. As if he were in a dance class that painted footprints on the floor to teach the waltz, all he had to do was step where guided.
    Part of his daily routine was to allow time for reflection and reminder. Each day, he sat in the Oval Office, or the private study next to it, or on Air Force One and said, “I am the president of the United States.”
    Most days, he didn’t believe it, but then some crisis would arise, and everyone in the country looked to him as if he had answers at the ready. It was the only thing he hated about the job—the way people looked at him when things went wrong.
    Troops in Afghanistan had been reduced to a handful, but the Middle East was still a mess. Iran and North Korea seemed to be in a contest to see which government was most loony. The economy was better but not great, and the mountain of impossible-to-pay debt threatened to send the economy spiraling back down. Greed was still normal in the institutions that nearly bankrupted a dozen industries. The two-party system continued to be more obsessed with who got the last word in than achieving meaningful legislation. The country that once demanded the world’s respect was slowly becoming a joke. He wouldn’t allow that.
    Or so he had said.
    He knew enough history to know that the bigger the country, the harder the fall. Historians noted that ancient Egypt and Rome supposedly could not fail but did anyway. The Soviet Union had been a force to reckon with but then fell apart. The British Empire had been an empire for a long time. Even mighty China was marching toward