by Gene Skellig
Suddenly Amy rushed past the reception desk and threw the door open, pushing the stroller with one hand as she fled the office as though it was on fire.
“What’s the matter, dear?”
“There’s a war! You’ve got to get out of here!”
“What do you mean?” called Triona Hobkirk as the door closed. Amy was already inside the elevator jamming her finger on “M” when Triona poked her head out the heavy oak door just in time to see the elevator door closing. She went back to the TV in the lunch room. In disbelief, she stared at the image of a mushroom cloud looming ominously over a city in the prairies.
Down in the lobby, Amy rushed past the security guard, and then ran down Hornby Street towards Georgia Street as little Janie-Lee erupted in howls and tears of protest.
I’ve got to get underground! Amy thought urgently as she pushed Janie-Lee along. I’ve got to get away from downtown. That was Winnipeg! If Winnipeg has been hit, Vancouver will be next. I have NO TIME!
One of the front wheels couldn’t stand up to the forces as Amy careened around a lamp-post. One of the paired wheels on the right side shattered. As the pieces flew in all directions, nearby pedestrians stared at Amy’s frantic progress down the sidewalk. They gave her a wide berth.
Amy wasn’t surprised to see that terrible image on the TV. There had already been a nuclear war in the Middle East and a much larger one between India and Pakistan and it hit her like lightning.
The war that was clearly underway would be going global. That meant only one thing: the probable extinction of the human race. But it was not going to be her extinction, Amy thought to herself. Right now, that meant getting underground. When she reached the Skytrain Station at Pacific Centre, Amy took one last look back at the skyline of the city she loved. As she looked up at the tops of the gleaming skyscrapers she realized that she was looking towards the very office where she had been only minutes before. The high hopes of finding a job and returning her life to a sense of normalcy were now utterly destroyed. Looking up at the corner office, in her mind’s eye she sensed Mrs. Hobkirk looking down at her.
She turned her attention to fighting the stroller down the escalator to the Canada Line.
Amy grew up in Richmond, adjacent to Vancouver, until she left home to study Engineering at the University of Calgary. After completing her degree, she spent ten years working on wind-farms in southwestern Alberta. Her promising career came to a screeching halt when she became a victim of down-sizing. Pregnant and unemployed, Amy moved back to Richmond to have Janie-Lee.
Amy became unemployed the same day she told her boss she was pregnant, and that it was his. She didn’t want him; he had been only a means to an end. Amy had lied when she told him that she was on the pill that night when they were forced to weather a storm in a small maintenance trailer on a wind-farm site. The sex had been unimportant to Amy. What she had really wanted was a baby. Her engineering career had kept her from finding the man of her dreams but she would not let a small detail like that deny her the chance to be a mother. Now, in her early thirties, she had her Janie-Lee.
Amy tried to quickly make her way down the escalator but the stroller wasn’t cooperating. It kept pulling to the right and getting hung up on the jagged steel teeth. She had to wait until the escalator reached the bottom. At any moment she expected to see the intense light and feel the heat of an atomic blast. But it had not come. She made it down to the platform. There was at least twenty meters of solid clay and concrete over her head. Is that enough? she thought.
She boarded the Skytrain to Richmond. The doors closed, and the Skytrain accelerated down the tunnel towards Yaletown Station. Amy felt her heart racing and finally looked down at Jannie-Lee. Looking up at her mom in a way that was almost disturbing, Janie-Lee wasn’t crying or even talking. She just stared up at Amy as though she knew that something important was happening. This was no time for tears.
Amy crouched down and held Janie-Lee’s face close to her own. “Everything’s going to be OK, sweet-cakes, Mommy’s here. We have to go on a trip now, and we have to hurry.” Satisfied with that, the toddler smiled at her mommy and turned her attention to her stuffed dog, Finnegan, pinned to her shoulder strap.
As the Skytrain approached Yaletown Station, Amy saw a few men rushing down the stairs to the platform and then waiting impatiently for the doors to open.
“Winnipeg’s been nuked!” a well dressed but disheveled looking man shouted. “Don’t go up there! We’re going to get hit too!” he pleaded to passengers getting off the Skytrain as he pushed his way on. One or two passengers paused, looking at the man, but then continued off the train.
As the doors closed and the Skytrain began to leave, several more people came running down the stairs and escalators, all with the same fear spurring them on, only to watch in despair as the Skytrain departed. People in Amy’s car were now shouting about what they were reading on their cell phones, blackberries, I-Pods and Net-Scrolls. News of nuclear attacks at Anchorage, Inuvik, Winnipeg and other places had gone viral.
It had taken twenty minutes for the panic to really get underway after the first report of the nuclear detonation in Alaska. It had been described as a terrible accident. But when Winnipeg was hit, and there were reports of other detonations in the Arctic, the news services started to speculate about the possibility that a nuclear war had started. Fifteen minutes later, when reports of American missiles having been launched and more reports of nuclear detonations in Canada had come in, it was clear that a nuclear war was underway. Time to panic.
At the next station, there were more frantic people trying to flee the city. They rushed in when the Skytrain’s doors opened at the Olympic Village station. This time nobody got off and the train was getting crowded. Many passengers tried desperately to call loved ones, to coordinate where to go and what to do. Amy’s Skytrain was getting so full that some people couldn’t push their way on before the doors closed.
At the same time, a Russian R-36M2 SS-18 missile passed a calculated point in time and space. The navigation computer sent a signal to the sequencer, which sent other signals to various timing and enabling circuits. As the bulky missile passed through 172,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains, explosive bolts blew off twenty-four cover panels and exposed ten Upravlyaemaya Golovnaya Chast Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles, MIRVs, to the light of day. Each assigned a different target in the Pacific Northwest, the re-entry vehicles began to separate from the R-36 missile. Once clear of the missile bus, their navigation computers updated their positions and began to course-correct their trajectories.
The pre-programmed target data from the Strategic Target Database had been downloaded into the missile’s central computer during the Launch Warning Phase just before this particular R-36 was launched. Designed for a counter-strike, the Russian MIRV’s were assigned widely dispersed targets. With up to forty decoys carried on the massive R36 missile bus, the resulting array of targets would easily overwhelm any antimissile defenses.
This particular R-36M2 had stood up well over the 30 years since it was first assembled at the Dnipropetrovsk assembly plant in what was now Ukraine. It had been reconditioned in a renewal program in 2009, demonstrating Russia’s commitment to restore the reliability and serviceability of their strategic weapons. And now it was in the terminal phase of its journey to the Pacific Northwest of North America.
As a result of the upgrades, fully 80% of the 1520 warheads installed on R-36 missiles found their targets. The targets assigned to this particular R-36 included a hydro-electric dam over the Columbia River at Revelstoke, a coal terminal in Prince Rupert, an oil refinery in Bellingham, the Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island, the industrial park on the south banks of the Frazer River at Surrey, the sprawling McChord Air Force Base at Tacoma, the Canadian Air Force Base at Comox, the Trident submarine base at Bangor, the Canadian Forces Underwater Naval Test Range at Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island, and a carefully calculated target site over Vancouver. The target coordina
tes corresponded to the center of Water Street in “Gastown”.
The ten warheads carried on the R36 were not identical. Six were 750-kiloton warheads, each fifty times the explosive power of the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. The larger, two-megaton, warheads were allocated to the Canadian Air Force base, the Trident Ballistic Missile Submarine base, and McChord Air Force Base. Programmed for surface bust, these more powerful weapons were meant to destroy hardened military facilities up to thirty meters under ground. .
The lowest yielding weapon was the one nickel-chromium encased neutron device, which was assigned to a strategic target at Prince Rupert, which was meant to be preserved for later re-occupation.
The flexibility inherent in the various types of warheads allotted to each R-36 missile was an example of the advanced state of nuclear weaponry that the Russians had achieved over the Cold War years and beyond.
It took just an instant for the detonation signal to set off the shaped charge of high explosives compressing the sub-critical sphere of lithium-deuteride into a supercritical implosion. The energy from the primary fission stage caused a secondary fusion reaction of the second-stage tritium material, and a far more intense final fission of the depleted uranium casing. This fission-fusion-fission detonation liberated an awesome quantity of energy in the form of visible light, Alpha, Gamma, Beta, Neutron and other forms of radiation along with a range of highly unstable isotopes of heavy elements directly over Vancouver’s Gastown district.
Amy’s Skytrain had just completed the final S-turn as it followed under the path of Cambie Street, winding its way around the Little Mountain hilltop at Queen Elizabeth Park, when the warhead detonated. When the intense burst of nuclear plasma encountered the solid matter of buildings, vehicles, trees and people within 1,000 meters of ground zero two things happened. First, the surface material was vaporized, adding its matter and energy to the expanding ball of plasma. Second, some energy was converted into a massively powerful electromagnetic pulse.
The EMP expanded at the speed of light until it was exhausted some twenty kilometers from the thermonuclear blast. It increased the voltage of any live circuits it encountered by thousands of volts. The sudden increase in electrical potential burned-out delicate components and connections. This rendered useless all manner of energized devices from computers and telephones to automobiles, and from the electrical systems of aircraft to common household electrical panels. Even wires buried twenty meters underground were affected. The linear-induction engine of the Skytrain whirred down to an eerie silence. Amy’s Skytrain came to a sudden stop. The mass of passengers surged forward, crushing a number of people. The lights went out. After a few seconds, the cries of pain and screams of panic began. Just as quickly, the noise subsided into whimpers and moans as the emergency lights came on.
Amy remained calm. She bent over and wrapped her arms around her daughter to shelter her from the coming blast wave. She feared that this would be their last moment of life.
At Ground Zero in Gastown, a one km wide ball of plasma was created when the intense energy was released. A searing fireball expanded outward from Ground Zero, following behind the EMP and initial shock wave that had stopped Amy’s Skytrain. The fireball torched its way into every vacant space within two km of Ground Zero.
People standing at the Olympic Village Station were incinerated in an instant as the fireball surged through the ventilation grills and access tunnels, sending a massive dynamic overpressure shock-wave further up the Skytrain line.
The Skytrain three minutes behind Amy’s, with 589 terrified passengers crammed into it, was pulling out of City Hall Station when it was also torched by the fireball.
The heat and energy began to dissipate by the time it reached the next station. There was merely enough heat left to severely burn the lungs and exposed flesh of the 220 people waiting at King Edward Station. Their dying bodies were tossed about and propelled further along the tunnel like leave propelled along by a leaf-blower. A wave of debris continued along the tunnel for another two km before it reached the chicane at Queen Elizabeth Park.
In the confined space of the subway tunnel there was enough force to overcome the resistance of the electrical motors and propel Amy’s Skytrain down the tunnel with a terrible screeching. The lurching acceleration and sudden stop 250 meters further along the tunnel threw the passengers about for the second time in as many minutes.
Crouched between two rows of seats Amy held on tightly, protecting her daughter as they were bounced around violently. She didn’t feel the blows as she was battered by the surfaces and passengers around her. All she could feel was the precious life of the child in her arms, and the instinct to protect her.
As the Skytrain screeched to its final resting place, just short of the dimly lit platform at 41st Avenue Station, Amy started to breathe again. Passengers began picking themselves up in the dim illumination provided by emergency lights that had been unaffected by the EMP. Amy saw that Janie-Lee was unharmed but weeping, staring wide-eyed up at her. Amy felt as though she had been severely beaten as injuries made themselves known.
Over the next few minutes while some of the men worked to open the door and others tried to kick out the large front window of the lead car, Amy took stock of their situation. She felt the air change direction as though it was being sucked back down the line towards the city.
Outside, over the cauldron that had been a beautiful city, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive particles began to rise skyward. The mushroom cloud could be seen for over thirty kilometers as it rose to an altitude of 60,000 feet over Vancouver.
They had gotten away from Ground Zero just in time. Amy realized that the lurching of the subway car was the blow-gun effect of a column of air shoved ahead of the blast, pushing her Skytrain like a cork. What blew past was air and dust from the floor of the tunnel, not the lethal radioactive materials which would soon be carried by fallout. They had not been exposed to any radiation yet. That meant that she had to get upwind, fast, or hunker down in some kind of shelter.
Amy knew what to do. Just last year, while visiting her parents in Qualicum Beach, she had gone to the impromptu movie theatre that had been set up in the Community Centre. There was a disaster film festival on, featuring the ten most significant war and disaster survival movies of all time. During the nine day festival, all ten films were shown at least twice and in some cases many times.
The films were on survival themes and ranged from the 1983 film about surviving the effects of a nuclear war, Jason Robards’ “The Day After” and the similarly themed 1984 BBC documentary “Threads”, to the 1936 film that eerily predicted the devastation of a global war in HG Wells’ “Things to Come”.
With her parents spending some rare time with Janie-Lee, Amy watched all ten movies and became hooked on the genre. After repeatedly going to the screening rooms, Amy got to know some of the regulars that came out for every film. On some nights, as many as sixty people turned up. It was a friendly atmosphere, with people hanging around to talk about the films and enjoy the free coffee and snacks provided by the organizers.
People’s interest seemed to be motivated by the recent wars in the Middle East and Pakistan. Films on nuclear war drew the largest crowds. From the way that people surreptitiously took more than one copy of the handout, Amy could tell that people were very interested in the core subject of the film festival.
The “Survival Squirrel’s Film Festival” handout contained a few things that were interesting to Amy. First, there was a list of thirty movie recommendations, including the ten selected for the festival. This gave Amy a “hit list” of films she would later track down and watch in her apartment back in Richmond. There were also a few TV series recommended, including a short-lived miniseries about a town coping with a nuclear attack on the United States. Internet links were provided for the books that the movies were based on.
There was also a list of recommended books on survivalism topics such as radiation shelters, long
term food storage, food scavenging, edible mushrooms, hobby farming, hydroponic growing, small-scale wind power, canning, and nutrition. There were also books on financial and social collapse. Amy bought many of the books to read during her quiet, lonely evenings. With no social life to speak of, Amy had lots of reading time on her hands.
Another interesting part of the pamphlet, to Amy, was the coupon offered by the event organizers. When Amy read the details on the tear-off coupon, she understood the motivation for the film festival. Marty and Katy had organized the entire film festival as a promotional event for their survival food and accessories business. The coupon entitled a customer to a 25% discount on any one of three main products offered at “The Squirrel’s Den”.
The first product was a 31-gallon Roughneck storage bin packed with sufficient calories, essential vitamins, nutrients and a few simple pleasures to sustain two adults for 90 days on a 2,200 calorie-per-day diet. A range of basic food items were nitrogen-packed along with food-safe oxygen absorbers and sealed inside heavy-duty mylar plastic bags. The beans, rice, sugar, grains, dehydrated fruits, freeze-dried meals and other basic foods could last well over ten years. The mylar bags were themselves sealed in two-gallon rectangular EZ-Store pails, made of some type of food-safe plastic.
The second product was the same Roughneck bin filled with: candles, lighters, matches, two sizes of alcohol-fueled cooking stoves, alcohol fuel bottles, water purification tablets, a hand operated reverse-osmosis water purification pump, three hand-powered rechargeable flash lights, a hand-powered “EMP sealed” hand-rechargeable radio, assorted hand tools, knives, an extensive first aid kit, assorted mosquito and bug lotions, burn creams, wet-wipes, and wide range of non-prescription medicines and an impressive first aid kit.
It also contained a “CBRN Kit” for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear. It included some multi-purpose items: six pairs of rubber gloves, two rolls of duct-tape, three N95 Particulate Respirator Masks, six cheap plastic rain ponchos, three pairs of cheap plastic goggles and a small tube of baby shampoo. There were also some zip-lock bags containing specialized CBRN items: military-grade RSDL - Reactive Skin Decontamination Lotion, hand sanitizers, disposable Bio/Chem Warfare Agent Detection Strips, one-time dosimeter strips, and six ten-packs of 65 mg potassium iodide pills with instructions. For an extra fee the “Essentials/CBRN/Medical” bin came with an EMP-packaged “Gamma Scout” radiation-detector with audio-alarm and ticker, measuring immediate and accumulated exposure.