“Well, you’re the technical guy. You’re intelligent.”
“Thanks for noticing. But I still don’t know. Better believe what Prescott says—if you value your ass, head for the Ephyran plateau.” He shrugged. “Which is where we are, more or less. Hey, look at all those Ravens over the city. Never seen that many.”
Cole knew that Baird wasn’t fascinated by Ravens down in Jacinto. He had his back to the endless lanes of stationary traffic for a reason. He didn’t want to look the drivers in the face either. They were a road-width away and at the wrong angle to make eye contact, but that was still too close for him.
“Dickson, did the engineers say anything about us closin’ the highway?” Cole asked.
“No, and I hope they don’t ask us. You want to go out there and put a do not cross tape in front of some poor jerk’s car now?”
“Yeah, that’s why the cops fucked off and left it to the army,” Baird muttered. “Because it’s going to get ugly pretty fast when those guys down there work out that most of them have found their parking space for the Great Hereafter.”
“What?”
“Do the math, Dick.”
“Don’t call me that, Baird.”
“Okay, do the math, Dickson.” Baird did an about-face and pointed north. “The engineers are giving us the traffic speeds, if you call one klick per hour speed. Unless those unlucky citizens over there start moving in the next four hours, then those back there—about where the radio mast is—are going to be barbecue. They might as well get out and walk. You think we should share that with them? ’Cause I think that’ll be a really interesting social experiment.”
That shut everybody up. There was one question nobody had asked yet, and that was whether anybody had family still stuck outside the zone. Cole didn’t, and he knew Baird didn’t, but Dickson and Alonzo never said a word either way. And everybody was going to lose friends.
Hanover. Hanover’s probably gonna take a hit. Where’s Gaynor now? Where’s Mortensen?
There was nothing Cole could do about it, so he tried to put it out of his head. He was staring down the on-ramp, trying to accept that there really was nothing anyone could do, when he saw a scruffy passenger van turn onto the ramp and edge slowly toward the checkpoint.
“Ah, shit,” Baird said. “This isn’t your lucky day, asshole.”
He started to walk to the barrier but Cole slipped in front of him. As soon as the driver looked his way, Cole knew he was going to face the hardest decision of his life. It was just some guy in his thirties, balding and anxious, with a woman and a teenage boy. But he wasn’t some faceless blur in passing traffic, or a number in a newspaper report that Cole knew was tragic but didn’t grieve for. He was an individual, right here and right now.
The guy rolled down the driver’s side window and looked at Cole as if he was his last hope in the world, which he actually was.
“Sir, the highway ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Cole said.
Cole wanted him to give up the idea there and then, to look disappointed and reverse back down the ramp without being asked. That would have made it a bit easier to live with. But he didn’t. The guy just slumped a little in his seat. Cole saw Baird moving in from the corner of his eye and held out his hand to stop him.
“We’ve driven for fifty-four hours,” the driver said quietly. “I live in Jacinto and my wife’s there. This is my sister and her boy. Is there another way into the city?”
It would have been easy to say there was, and to send the guy down the ring road, but it would have been more honest to shoot him and save him what was coming. Cole knew he had to deal with this if he was ever going to get a night’s sleep again.
“No, sir. It’s all at a standstill.”
The teenage kid leaned forward behind the driver and said something. Cole heard the whispered words Cole Train.
“Damn,” the driver said, distracted for a moment. “You’re the thrashball player, aren’t you? Nice to meet you, Mr. Cole.”
“Yeah, I’m Augustus Cole, sir.”
The man looked embarrassed. Goddamn, he meant it. Cole wanted to disappear. How the hell could he turn this guy back? It wasn’t anything to do with being recognized. It was a human thing, human to human, and if this war was about anything it was about stopping humans from getting killed.
“You wait a sec, sir,” Cole said, and turned around.
Baird wouldn’t look straight at the vehicle. He turned his head away and stood up close to Cole.
“Cole, no,” he murmured. “No, no, no.”
“So what you gonna do, Baird? You gonna do it by the book and send ’em back?”
“You going to pull back the barrier and start a riot?”
“I gotta live with myself, baby.”
“We all have. Yeah, even me. But orders are there so we don’t waste time and second-guess shit, and do things that look like a great idea but screw up other things we’re not aware of. It’s not our call.”
“He’s gonna die. And his sister, and his nephew.”
Baird spread his hands. “Cole, this is like being a wildlife photographer. You have to stand back. You dive in and save the gazelle, but the lioness doesn’t get her dinner and her cute little cubs starve to death.”
“This ain’t funny, Damon.” Cole only called him that when he thought Baird was getting out of line. His momma called him Augustus when she was mad with him, never Gus, and the habit stuck. “That ain’t funny at all.”
“Okay, you let them through because they’re the ones in front of you looking appealing and sad, and someone else further back in the frigging traffic queue doesn’t make it. Only they’re not in your face and you don’t see them. You feel any better about that? Maybe they’ve got sweet cherubic little kiddies and nice sisters too.”
“Yeah, but these folks are in front of me!” Cole knew Baird was right but it didn’t help any. It still tore him up. “I seen ’em! They’ve talked to me and they’ve called me Mr. Cole. Goddamn it, how can I do all that common sense and logic shit to ’em when they’ve looked me in the eye?”
Baird just shrugged in defeat. Cole walked the few meters up to the main highway and looked down the line of traffic nearest to him. If that pickup moved right up to the next guy’s fender, and the car behind reversed as far as he could, they could let that van in. Cole rapped on the pickup’s side window.
“Sir, can I ask you to move forward? I’ll tell you when to stop.”
The driver looked surprised. He had that I-know-you-from-somewhere look. “Sure,” he said. Cole watched him edge forward and knocked the hood when he was almost touching the vehicle in front. Then he waved the car behind back and created a van-sized gap, more or less. At least the nose would get in and make sure the family got into the line.
“You’re off your head,” Alonzo said. “We’re going to get lynched.”
“Yeah.” Cole moved the barrier and beckoned the van forward. “You get your ass in there, sir, and don’t tell anyone, hear?”
The pickup driver in front leaned out of his window and looked back. “How come he’s allowed in?”
It was barefaced-lying time. Okay, Momma, you know I gotta do this. Sorry. It’s not like I’m lyin’ to save my own ass. Cole drew himself up to his full height. He was even bigger than most people realized when he was looming right over them.
“Medical personnel,” he said flatly. “The hospitals are callin’ in all off-duty nursin’ staff. We’re gonna be needin’ ’em.”
The pickup driver swallowed it whole and gave him a thumbs-up. Hell, who’d call the Cole Train a liar? It was hard to see what was going on in a line of traffic in a six-lane highway. The driver behind the van had seen the pickup guy approve of what Cole had done, and nobody else reacted.
“Let’s put another barrier at the start of the ramp,” Cole said. “’Cause I can’t keep doin’ that.”
“Yeah, you said it.” Baird trotted after him and they pushed a couple of abandoned cars sideways across the r
amp so nobody was tempted to try to drive up it again. Then they walked back up to the barrier and stood looking south to Jacinto.
“How bad is it gonna be, Baird?” Cole asked. “The Hammer strikes, I mean.”
“Really frigging terrible,” Baird said quietly, and patted him on the back. “Terrible.”
INGAREZ-TYRUS BORDER: ONE HOUR BEFORE THE HAMMER STRIKE.
It didn’t matter. It just didn’t matter anymore.
Dizzy and Rosalyn were hundreds of miles from Jacinto but even if it had been twenty, they’d run out of time along with hundreds of millions of others who never stood a chance from the moment Prescott made his goddamn announcement.
“That’s it.” Rosalyn had slowed to a walk again. Dizzy didn’t have the heart to chivvy her along any further. “We’re stranded here. We’re not going to make it, Dizzy.”
“We got an hour, sweetie.” They were thirty kilometers from the nearest small town, walking along a country road lit by occasional sodium lights. “And we’re gonna be okay. We ain’t gonna get hit.”
“Honey, don’t humor me. Everyone’s got their time. I should have died in Halvo.”
“Don’t talk crap, sweetie. You were meant to live and I was meant to find you. Keep going. We’re gonna be alive tomorrow, I swear it.”
Dizzy wished with every bone in his body that it would happen, but he was staring into a void. Even if they didn’t get burned to death, what was the world going to be like with so many people dead and every big city destroyed?
He tried to imagine it. He couldn’t. He knew what heavily bombed cities looked like, though, and how they burned. He’d seen stuff from the early Pendulum Wars. The Hammer of Dawn was a hell of a lot bigger than that; the Indies had finally surrendered because they’d seen what just one low-power Hammer strike did to their fleet. He caught hold of Rosalyn’s hand again and carried on down the road.
From time to time he saw a car dumped at an angle, like a flood had carried it along and dropped it any old where. Folks had abandoned their vehicles in some crazy positions. Dizzy looked at every single one to see if any had keys left in them.
If they did, then he stopped to try the ignition, but so far they’d all run out of gas. He and Rosalyn weren’t planning on going anywhere special now. They were just putting as much distance between them and the city that would probably be a fireball in just over an hour.
How far would the blast spread? Dizzy knew enough to realize that fires like that meant ferocious firestorms, but he didn’t know how far away was safe. So they kept going.
He tried another car. This time, it started.
“Okay, sweetie, let’s see how far this gets us,” he said, feeling his heart leap. We’ll make it. “You feelin’ okay?”
“Just hungry.”
“I’ll find something. Don’t worry. And lock your door—I seen some bad stuff in some of the ports I’ve called at, and that ain’t gonna happen to us, not now.”
“People have been pretty good to each other so far,” she said, pressing down the tab on the door with a clunk.
“That’s gonna change if everything gets burned to charcoal, sweetie.” Dizzy drove cautiously along the road, keeping an eye out for anywhere he might find some food and water. “Check what’s in the back, will ya? We might be lucky again.”
Rosalyn twisted in the seat and groped around on the back seat. “Empty water bottle,” she said.
“Now that’s gonna save our lives.”
“Yeah? How?”
“Gotta carry water. That’ll be harder than finding it.”
The car kept going. Dizzy checked his watch, glad that he hadn’t traded it for something, and saw they had twenty minutes left.
He could hardly bear to look at it because he didn’t know if it meant he only had twenty minutes left to live. It made it hard to think straight. He had to forget about supplies now and concentrate on finding some shelter, some kind of protection for Rosalyn, because he didn’t know if the Hammer strikes were going to scatter debris and shit around, or if the blast was going to blind folks if they saw it. There might even be shockwaves. They had to find somewhere solid to hide.
The last thing that crossed his mind was running into grubs. They scared him a lot less than his own government now.
How could they do it to us?
How could they just give us three days?
They know everyone’s gonna die. The bastards are killing us off.
He’d been a hardworking, law-abiding fella all his life and paid his taxes. His stepson had served as a Gear and died doing it, died defending people the way the COG was supposed to. And all that ordinary folks got for their trouble was this. They’d been left to die while the folks in Jacinto, the rich capital, were going to be safe on their granite plateau behind their barriers.
Our government’s doing more than abandoning us. They’re killing more of us than the damn grubs have.
Now he had ten minutes, either ten minutes left with Rosalyn and his unborn child, or ten minutes left to find a way of surviving all this.
“There’s a store,” Rosalyn said. “It’s shut. Looks like someone got there before us.”
Dizzy screeched to a halt. Rosalyn saw a looted store, but he saw a bomb shelter and a source of stuff he could rip out and use to survive in the weeks and months to come. He hit the brakes and pulled up a safe distance from the front of the place. He didn’t want to surprise anyone and get his head bashed in now.
The place looked deserted. A couple of strip lights flickered at the back above the refrigerators. There were empty boxes scattered outside, but he couldn’t see any damage to the store.
“Maybe the owners cleared the place and ran,” Rosalyn said.
“You stay in the car and keep the doors locked, sweetie.”
Dizzy went to the trunk and took out the tire iron. He’d never broken into a building before or so much as taken candy from a store as a kid. But all goddamn bets were off now. The government had broken the rules of decent folk, so he would break the law with a clear conscience.
He had five minutes until the end of the world.
It took him a couple of practice swings to break in. The idea of glass shards flying around made him nervous, which suddenly made him start to laugh.
They’re gonna fry every city on Sera in a few minutes, and I’m worried about goddamn broken glass?
He swung for real and the window cracked. It took a second swing to crack it again, and then a third brought the whole pane crashing down.
He ran back to the car and helped Rosalyn out, then took everything he could grab from it—a blanket and some tools in the trunk—before locking it again and bundling them both through the shattered window.
Three minutes. We’re not gonna die, you assholes. We refuse to die.
“The power’s on,” Dizzy said. “Switch all the lights on as you go. No point falling over stuff in the dark.” He steered her toward the back of the store and found a stockroom. “Wait there.”
He had two minutes now. He raced around the shelves, looking for anything he could find, and scooped up candy bars and packets of cookies strewn around the floor. He found a couple of bottles of soda behind the cash desk with a bottle of liquor, both opened. That’d do. Hygiene was the least of their worries right then. He went back to the stockroom to give Rosalyn the looted stuff and found her in another back room next to it, filling the water bottle and a couple of buckets.
“The water’s probably going to get cut off if the pumping stations get hit,” she said.
“That’s my smart girl,” Dizzy said. “We got a minute. Come on, get on the floor and cover your head.”
It was the dumbest advice he’d ever given anyone. He didn’t know what the hell was going to happen. I used to be an engineer. I used to keep imulsion tankers running. I can use my head. He lay across Rosalyn to protect her from things he couldn’t even imagine and shut his eyes.
“I love you, sweetie,” he said. “And we’re not gonna
die.”
He held his breath and counted. His watch must have been fast because there was nothing at all for another minute, and for a stupid moment or two he thought it had all been some stunt to fool the grubs. The government wasn’t going to use the Hammer at all.
“Dizzy, if we—”
That was as far as Rosalyn got. Even with the door shut, Dizzy saw the pure white light flare through the cracks in the panel. A few seconds later, there was a distant booming roar that seemed to go on forever. He kept his head down and waited for a blast front to hit, but it never came.
The light was still there. When he raised his head a little, he could see it was coming from gaps around the door and from the dim overhead lighting. Somehow, the electricity supply was still working.
“Sweetie, you okay?”
“Is that it, Dizzy? Have they just started?”
“I don’t know.”
The roof didn’t cave in. There were no flames and he couldn’t smell smoke. He wasn’t in pain. He could hear a train coming, though, but they were nowhere near a rail track. He knew, because he’d tried so damned hard to get them a ride out.
“It’s a tornado,” Rosalyn said. “It’s coming this way.”
“Can’t be,” Dizzy said.
She was almost right. It was a ferocious wind. It roared around the building and shook the doors and security grilles, and then it was gone as fast as it came.
They lay there for a while waiting for … what? Dizzy didn’t know. He eased himself up on one arm and listened. He thought he could hear distant booming like artillery fire, but it didn’t sound as if there was anything happening nearby.
Rosalyn sat up. “It’s over.”
“Can’t bank on that.”
Suddenly the lights went out and the background hum that Dizzy hadn’t noticed before stopped dead. The power had finally failed. The hum had probably been the refrigeration or air-conditioning. Dizzy and Rosalyn sat there in the darkness, watching faint yellow light creeping under the door until he decided to get up and open it.
Even from the back of the small store, he could see that the skyline was a wall of red flame. He could smell smoke and something acrid like tar on the air.
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