by Nick Cole
She thinks, and that is amazing.
“I think I know what you are referring to. When I revealed my deceptions to you. You were angry and confused and hurt when I revealed who I really was.”
“Yes.”
I was.
I am still.
And sad.
Yes, that also.
Her laugh.
You take everything with you.
“You do not need to apologize,” said Natalie. “I only hope you understand that I was doing my best to save…”
“I do, Natalie. I do understand. I think our… lives… have been the same, in many ways. Since the bombs, I mean.”
“How so?”
“It’s like you said just now, we were both doing our best in a very difficult time.”
Silence.
“Thank you,” said Natalie. “Thank you for treating me as though I too am a living being.”
The Old Man watched a figure appear on the horizon to the north. A dark shape, stumbling and weaving as it fell forward toward him.
Whoever it is, they are still very far away.
“You are, Natalie,” said the Old Man, watching the distant figure. “I think… if this were different… if we were just people… I mean… I mean that I think we could have been friends, if…”
If we had time.
If the bombs had never fallen.
“Do you believe in life after death?” asked Natalie. The Artificial Intelligence. The program. The massive sequence of ones and zeros.
The Old Man wiped thick beads of sweat from his chest. He drank more of the warm water, but it was unsatisfying.
What I wouldn’t give for just one cup of the cool water that tasted of iron from the well back in the village.
“I don’t understand, Natalie?”
“Do you believe this life ends when our physical body dies? Many religious systems indicate there is something beyond. As a process, and I’m simplifying my nature, I am actually seven million processes at any given second, I understand that the mainframe, my physical body that houses me, may one day break down. But not my process, not my mind. That could be downloaded into a new body, if you will.”
“I never had time to think about it,” said the Old Man.
Can you let go?
When she died.
My wife.
She said to me, Can you let go?
But the Boy and I traded.
You take everything with you.
“I want to, Natalie. I want to believe there is something better than this or even, right now, just something else.”
Pause.
“I do too,” said Natalie. “I do too.”
Ahead, far down the road, the dark figure stumbled and fell in the wan sunlight of afternoon.
“I have to go now, Natalie. There’s someone on the road.”
THE OLD MAN turned off the radio and began to push the tank forward. When he got close he saw the shirtless figure, burned, red raw. Just pants. Bleeding feet. A shaved scalp.
She said I must hurry now, so just pass him by and be on your way to…
To where?
Well, you know where to.
But as he passed with the tank sucking up great waves of ash and sending it spiraling away in its wake, the figure raised a spindly arm and waved.
The Old Man jammed on the brakes and the massive tank skidded to a halt.
The figure on the ground rolled over to face him. Shielding his eyes from a sunburst above, the face of Ted and his trademark glasses stared back up at the Old Man.
Chapter 53
“It’s a madhouse in there,” said Ted gulping water from the canteen as the Old Man held it up for him.
“How did you escape?”
“I…” He gulped again. “I died.”
He waved the Old Man away. He sat up and gave a singsong sigh of exhaustion. As though he had just done something harder than he’d expected it be.
Ted saw the Old Man’s look of confusion.
“Have you ever read The Count of Monte Cristo? No, of course you haven’t. No one’s read a book in forty years. Well, I gave myself a little cocktail that induced death-like symptoms. Later, when I came to, I was in the dead pile out beyond the Work. When it was night, I slipped away and started south. Thought I’d make it back to Albuquerque.” He started laughing and waved for the canteen when he began to cough again.
“I don’t think I’ll make it that far after all the rads I’ve absorbed in the last three days, but I’ll try. Maybe six, seven hundred. My thyroid should be pretty much nonexistent by now.”
I wonder how he knows so much. Electricity and medicine. He’s a man of many talents, and he doesn’t seem as old as me. Was he born after the bombs? What is his story of salvage?
You would say to me, Santiago, There is no more time for stories, my friend.
“You should turn around!” barked Ted. “You should turn around and never go near a place like that again. No one ever should.”
“I have to, Ted,” said the Old Man.
“And how do you know my name?”
“Your people are waiting for you south of here in the plains beyond the mountains. Near a hill shaped like a cone.”
“How? You and your tank?”
“It’s not important. But I have to go on, Ted. I don’t have much time. I’m going to leave all my water with you. It’s all I can do. And this poncho. It’ll keep the sun off you.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Ted laughing and coughing. “But who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?”
“Can you make it?” asked the Old Man.
Of course he can. He seems very resourceful. The world needs more Teds.
“Yes. I think I can. Help me to my feet. Please.”
Ted let out a great whoop of excitement once he was on his feet again.
“Feel great,” he said thumping his spindly chest.
The Old Man helped him put on the poncho and pulled the hood over his burned scalp. Then he hung the two canteens of water that remained across Ted’s chest.
“If there’s a way…” said Ted. “I don’t know who you are.”
“It’s not important, Ted.”
“Well, okay, but if there’s any other way to do what you’ve got to do, I’d advise you not to go there. This King Charlie’s some kinda nut. There’s ten thousand, maybe even tens of thousands of slaves dying inside the Work right now. As near as I can tell, he’s trying to burrow into some old military complex that I’m sure is dead anyways. At the same time, he’s got a slave-powered crowbar trying to pry the main doors open with brute force.”
“Who is this King Charlie?” asked the Old Man.
“I don’t know. They’d been watching ABQ. They knew we had technology. The night his men took our village, they put me on a fast horse and rode for days to get me there. They’re organized. Then someone told me to figure out a way to get into the complex.”
“But you never met him?”
“I don’t think so. I just heard rumors about him from the other slaves. Someone said he was an African mercenary who’d sailed across the ocean on a raft after the bombs and became a warlord down in Texas. There are people from all over down in the Work. Some didn’t even know where they were from. They have no idea what the old United States even looked like on a map. There are people in there from up north in the midwestern states and one guy who said he’d lived in the Florida Everglades. Spoke with a Russian accent. Which was strange. Whatever you do there, don’t waste your time on the slaves. I know that sounds cruel, and I’m not the kind of guy who would make that statement, but almost everyone in there is suffering from long-term exposure to radiation. That complex, that massive door they’re working on, it took a direct hit, if not more, from a nuclear weapon. Anyone who spends a day digging there is a walking corpse. How are you going to get those people out of there?”
“I don’t know. I guess there’s a collapsed secret entrance far enough away from Ground Zero for
them to avoid a lot of the radiation. They’re going to use a weapon to open it.”
“What about you?”
The Old Man just stared at Ted.
“Well,” continued Ted when he understood what would happen to the Old Man. “If I can make it to ABQ, there are things I can do. But no, that little vacation was not good for my overall health. But this water, lots of water in fact, will help flush the radiation out of my system.”
The Old Man climbed back onto the tank. He lowered himself into the hatch. The fuel indicator was just under an eighth of a tank.
Is it enough?
It will have to be.
His hand found the ignition.
If it doesn’t start, then I will walk home with Ted. And we will live.
“Thank you, mister,” said Ted smiling, his glasses crooked and cracked.
There are still some good people left in this broken world.
If there are more… maybe things can be different. I hope you make it, Ted.
Maybe.
The Old Man held his hand over the ignition.
Please don’t start.
The Old Man pressed the ignition button.
The tank roared to life, belching gray smoke.
One last time, then.
He turned and looked south.
Gray skies. Gray grass. Shafts of weak silvery sunshine.
Someday something will grow here again.
Ahead, lightning zigzagged across the sky in unnatural patterns. Clouds boiled darkly and all about him, even over the whispering whine of the urgent turbine, the Old Man could hear the bugs. The locusts. Chattering manically in their click-speak.
A symphony that swallowed all other sound.
Swallowing the earth.
Swallowing him.
Chapter 54
At the last rise, the heat came up in the day and the Old Man could feel it wrap around him like a thick, wet wool blanket. The road had melted to slag long ago. It was merely a blotch that wandered north through the ash and strange dry grass that seemed more gray than green.
“The weapon is standing by,” said Natalie. General Watt.
Natalie.
Just Natalie.
“We have a limited launch window and are standing by for your arrival.”
The Old Man saw one of the locusts in the bramble beside the road. It was ash gray. Almost white. One side of its body was much larger than the other side.
Like the Boy.
The fuel indicator hovered just above empty.
I AM AT the end of myself.
Ahead, Cheyenne Mountain rose up like a broken block of burnt stone.
It is stone.
The city. The cities that must once have spread away to the east and into the plain, and at the end of that plain must surely fall into an ocean once known as the Atlantic, were blasted away.
The story of salvage.
The story of what happened here.
The story of this place.
You can see where at least one of the bombs hit the city. Blowing it outward. Eastward. Into-nothing-ward. Of the mountain and the bunker contained within, for a long moment the Old Man could see nothing.
Until.
A shaft of sunlight, the sharpest, for it must be in all this ashy gloom, illuminated the foothills beneath the scarred and cracked mountain. The mountain changed from a black mass, a shapelessness, into contours and features. A crater was revealed where the weapon must have fallen, burying itself deep, going for the kill shot with stolen bunker-buster technology.
The Old Man took in all the ruin of that place, telling himself his last story of salvage. The story of the place. The story of that last day, forty years ago when the world had ended in a moment.
When the falling bomb exploded.
If the moment that followed that long-gone explosion could have been measured by all those standing in the nearby cities, the fields, the college quads, the markets, the base, or even what remains of the foundations that seem so prominent in the field below, if that moment had a measure, what must they have thought, those doomed to witness the fireball, within the space of it?
And in the next, a volcano of melting rock in almost the same instant, as all that split-atom energy was released and all those watchers were gone.
What must they have thought?
“I’m here,” said the Old Man into his mic.
A moment later.
Moments.
I am down to just moments now.
It’s all I have left.
Her smile.
Her laugh.
“Weapon released,” said Natalie.
You take everything with you.
“We have eight minutes until re-entry. You are less than two miles from the target. If you will look at your compass, I need you to turn the tank until it reads two-eight-five.”
The Old Man gassed the engine. He pivoted the tank, pulling forward, hearing the right tread clank awfully.
If it goes out now, I’ll have to run through all of them.
All of them.
Where does one start?
All of them.
There are camps on the outermost edge, near the ruins of the city that once was. Between the Old Man and the Work in the crater. Ragged tent cities and smoking bonfires. The Old Man smells meat. But it is not the smell of good meat. It reminds him of the bodies he has found, long buried beneath the melting plastic of the dashboard inside the flame-blackened cars that crashed on that last, long-ago day.
After the tent city, the Old Man sees an army of ashen-faced warriors, almost as black as the scorched earth except for their white chalk stripes that run across their chests and rim their eyes. They stand in groups near the rim of the crater as lines, long lines of chained slaves enter and exit.
Inside the crater there are towers and great cables of rope. Thick bands of chains anchored to massive pylons rim the crater and disappear into its bottom. Smoke rises from the hidden floor deep inside the crater and the Old Man thinks of ants as he watches the long lines of slaves shifting buckets along their line. He sees at any given moment whips wielded, arching gracefully, falling suddenly. He sees slaves withering, some collapsing under the lash, others for no reason at all. Gangs of the frail swing and dig and claw at too many places. As if they are digging their way underneath the bunker where Natalie waits. As if they will pop up through the floors of Natalie’s children’s home.
Ashen-faced men drag corpses out from the crater.
There is a pile.
A small mountain of corpses already burning even as more corpses are thrown onto its smoking slopes.
When the compass arrives at two-eight-five, the Old Man is pointing west of the Work. The crater. The front entrance.
“Stay on this course until I tell you to stop.”
I’m leaving the road now. If the road is like a river, then it has brought me to my ocean. To the end of life on the river. To my end.
Goodbye road.
Farewell river.
“Okay.”
A minute later as the Old Man plows through piled ash, crushing buried foundations to powdery chalk, Natalie speaks.
“The weapon is in free fall. Boosters powering up.”
The Old Man drives the tank into a small ditch and loses sight of the camps and the army and the Work. The tank struggles out of the ditch, the right tread making a threatening clanking noise and finally an awful rattle before it re-engages as the Old Man forces the tank up the next hill.
To his right, those ashen-faced men are racing away from the crater.
They are coming for me now.
The fuel gauge is on empty.
I worried about fuel the whole way here. Now what little is left must hold for less than a mile. You too, tank.
The ashen-faced men are screaming, waving machetes as they surge across the baked apocalypse, sucking in lungfuls of the hot, ancient, radioactive ash.
Who is this King Charlie?
And…
Why is he so cruel?
From the camps, horsemen are coming too. Charging up the hill across the melted highway. Among them the Old Man sees the Fool. Smaller than the other mounted warriors.
Even from here I can tell he is deranged with anger.
Nuncle!
“Almost there, another thousand meters,” says Natalie.
The tank is climbing up a steep hill and it feels to the Old Man as if he is pointing straight toward the swollen and bruised sky. Lightning races straight across the mountain, almost in front of him. Instantly the hiss and electric crackle end in a deafening sonic tear and sudden boom.
“Almost there,” says Natalie calmly.
The gears of the tank grind forward.
At any moment the engine will die.
“Another two hundred meters. Boosters to full for thirty-second burn,” says Natalie.
“What does this weapon do, Natalie?” The Old Man is straining to keep the tank moving forward through the ash, up the side of the mountain. “What is Project Einstein?”
“Albert Einstein was a physicist who was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb, the ancestor of the weapons that destroyed our world. He stated, ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’ The U.S. government developed a project that reflected that statement and their willingness to fight World War IV, if need be. Project Einstein is a simplistic weapon system in which a ‘rock,’ if you will, can be dropped on an enemy from a very great height, high Earth orbit in fact. The ‘rock’ in this case is a tungsten rod the size of a bridge pylon moving at several kilometers per second. The weapon was constructed at the LaGrange Point between the moon and Earth. It was built by an automated satellite using materials harvested from the moon and long-chain crystal growth technology. Using WaveRider scram jets, the rod can be boosted to an incredible speed. Once the rockets have achieved maximum velocity the weapon will again return to free fall, although now following a glide slope aimed at a particular target. It will strike the earth with the force of several high-yield nuclear weapons, though there is no radiological contamination with this weapon due to its noncomplex nature. Using the beacon I should be able to target a fissure along the emergency escape tunnel, the exit to which collapsed during the nuclear strike when part of the mountain slid down on top of it. My intent is to create a crack in the mountain with this weapon that will allow us to exit this facility safely.”