by David Poyer
“We have limited supplies of bottled water. Please restrict yourself to one one-liter bottle per person. Bathroom facilities are located between the shelter areas. Do not dispose of feminine hygiene products in the toilets. Plan to stay until the emergency is officially declared over.” She glanced toward the door and swallowed visibly. “We will now, um, seal the shelter. Close that, please. Pull the red handle all the way down.”
Some people stirred as the door thunked closed. Others sat immobile, heads down, sunk within themselves. Nan checked her phone again, then turned it off. No telling how long they’d be down here, and she didn’t see a recharge station.
Which left her with nothing to occupy her mind. She felt adrift, atomized, suddenly cut off from the grid. There wasn’t even a Patriot News Service screen, though by law PNS had to be on 24/7 in every public space.
“So what were you working on?” said Frederica, who’d apparently appointed herself Nan’s shelter buddy.
“Oh, medical stuff … immunizations.” She wasn’t supposed to discuss LJL. Jhingan had finalized the formulation, and Qwent Pharma had started preliminary bulk production. She’d gone out every other day to oversee it. Her initial misgivings about Qwent had pretty much been laid to rest. The drugs for medical use were produced in an entirely separate, completely new annex than those for pesticides, and the staff seemed dedicated to getting the new compound out quickly and in quantity. In fact, the first million doses were packaged and ready to ship, as soon as they got the official go-ahead.
As for her own personal disobedience … the release of the compound’s existence and its formulation to scientists around the world … that had not gone as she’d envisioned. Old Dr. Lukajs had understood her veiled allusion instantly. “You are saying, this should be common possession of humanity,” he’d said, stopping dead in the hallway and turning to stare at her.
“Uh … I guess so. Yes.”
“So you have social conscience after all. I did not think your generation possessed.”
“We’re not all the same, Doctor,” she snapped with a flash of anger.
“Maybe not. Your loyalty is not to corporation?”
“Only as long as they’re doing the right thing.”
And he’d grinned, showing stained crooked teeth, and patted her shoulder as a grandfather might. “You are too young to risk. But I have suffered at the hands of governments before. And they cannot punish me for long, whatever happens.” He’d waved a hand airily. “Not when I am, how much, eighty-five years? Write up an email with test data and the formulary and dosage statistics. I will take it from there.”
But now she wasn’t so sure they’d done the right thing.
She’d been worried about enemy civilians. That they’d die without the drug.
But now, was that same enemy attacking her country, trying to kill them all?
If not, what was this alert for?
And more to the point … what was she doing down here? Maybe these others had nothing pressing to keep them above ground. But she did.
She took a deep breath. “Excuse me,” she said, and got up. Her seatmate looked surprised. Nan forced herself into motion. Toward the shelter manager, who still stood looking uncertain beside the sealed door.
“I need to leave,” Nan told the woman.
Who gaped at her, and recoiled. “What? B-but … that’s not permitted. If you don’t feel well, there’s a bunk in the—”
“I’m not ill. I’m a medical researcher. And I have something important to see to. Let me out. Now.”
“Against shelter regulations. Sorry.” The woman shook her head and crossed her arms, tapping one foot like a stern schoolteacher.
“Oh, really? Show me where it says that. That no one can leave.” Nan grabbed for the laminated sheet, but the woman jerked it away, lips set.
Instead of arguing, Nan reached around her for the red bar that sealed the door. They had hatches like that on the ships her Dad had taken her aboard. She jerked it up, pushed it open, and stepped through.
Back into the now deserted, dank-smelling, unlit stairwell. A child’s pink sneaker lay forgotten in a dim corner. Strange, she hadn’t seen any kids in the shelter. Maybe in one of the other rooms.
The steel door boomed shut again behind her, echoing like the door of a prison cell. Then, after a moment, grated as it was dogged again from inside.
She took a deep breath, looking back at it. Her heart started to race. Had she just made a really stupid choice? She poised knuckles above sheet steel, intending to knock. Then shook her head, angry at herself. No. She had work to do.
She was starting up the stairs when a bright light reached down it toward her. Like a sudden passing away of a dark cloud from the sun. But it brightened still more, very rapidly, until the glow was blinding, even attenuated by the concrete well.
She dropped to one side of the stairs, huddling, wrapping her head with both arms. Yet still the glare penetrated, a blazing throbbing scarlet red lighting up the insides of her eyeballs, of her very brain.
The brightness ebbed and instinct drove her sliding backward down the steps. Her coat rucked up; the concrete edges scraped her belly. She reached the corner where the stairwell made a right angle, crawled around it, and curled into a fetal position.
The shelter shuddered, then jolted. Concrete groaned and cracked. Dust filtered down like gray snow, seething the air. The noise arrived on its heels. A bellowing crack, then a tornado-howling that went on and on.
The stairwell banged and quivered and rocked. She lay with hands locked over her head, waiting for the roof to fall in, to collapse, to crush and bury her. A harsh scraping resounded from above, like a gigantic bulldozer blade passing over. Shards of blue glass and scraps of colored plastic bounced down the stairs. A chunk of fiberglass tumbled from step to step. It halted, spinning and rocking, beside her. Prying her eyes open, she made out the scarlet-white-and-gilt hoof and haunch of one of the carousel horses.
The roar lessened, the bulldozer blade roar waning. Rumbling away, into the distance.
She lay still for several seconds. Then cowered again as a second flash bounced down the stairwell. Not quite as bright as the first, and its shock and howl took longer to arrive. It too passed over, still deafening, but less loud than the first.
She crouched there for minute after minute, fists clenched, waiting for another detonation directly overhead. A final blast, to cave the world in on top of her.
But it didn’t come.
Finally she stirred. Lifted her head, rose to hands and knees, coughing, and brushed the gray dust off. Broken glass prickled her fingers. She wiped the blood on her lab coat and backed down a few steps, glancing back at the shelter door. Still sealed.
She muttered, “I have something important to see to.” And pushed herself forward again, up the steps, toward a diminished daylight.
* * *
THE whole lawn was on fire, the sod scorched, smoking, burning. Blue glass littered it, sparkling like early frost. The carousel and bandstand and bee arbor had been blasted across the quad, their silhouettes pressed into the grass like cutwork, their foundations ironed down into the soil. She crouched low, tensed for another flash, opposite the robotics wing. Its windows were empty of panes. Through their gaps she glimpsed wrecked interiors, desks flung through walls, a jumbled mass of wrecked and smashed equipment. Fire glowed in the windows. Smoke was streaming out of the roof, which was peeled back like the lid of a sardine can.
She turned in a circle, appalled. To the north, in the direction of the city, a tremendous black looming thunderhead flickered with internal lightning. Below it the familiar skyline was gone. Tall silhouettes of familiar buildings, vanished. The Columbia Center, erased. The Gateway Tower, obliterated. Lost in a growing pall of black smoke rising from a full quarter of the horizon as she gazed northeast, shaking, shocked to stillness again.
Seattle. The city she’d come to love. Barhopping in Belltown. The Republic of Fremont, where her
artist friends lived. Her favorite bike trail, out to Alki Beach. And the tech and medical companies, the brilliant innovators that had pushed the envelope in so many ways. The places her friends worked. Josh, at Cray. Meredith, at Dendron. Ethan at Sporcle, which had converted to defense research with the coming of the war. No, wait—Ethan was at Microsoft now.
With a shock, she tried to grasp the fact they might all be dead.
Would anything be left of that splendor, that brilliant youth, that sense of standing on the cusp of the future?
And maybe Seattle wasn’t the only city that had just been leveled. Two bombs, or missiles, or whatever those had been, must mean it had been a big attack. Maybe nationwide, with similar thunderheads over Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, New York, Washington, Atlanta.
The government had always warned it was possible. That was why the Allies were fighting, they said. So nukes could be banned. So no country ever had to worry about annihilation again.
For a second Nan wondered, again, if she was screwing up. She was no expert on nuclear weapons, but every employee had had to sit through the emergency procedures and the state civil defense briefing. Many feet of concrete and earth had probably protected her from the initial neutron burst. The flash had nearly blinded her, but the blast had passed overhead. And the wind was from behind her, from the west.
She might be all right, if she could get to where she needed to be quickly.
But her destination lay toward the city center.
She couldn’t really be sure, everything was so changed, but the ominous black cloud seemed to be towering over Mercer Island. Or somewhere to the north of it, maybe near Redmond. Qwent Pharma was south of that, between her and the cloud.
She checked her cell again, but the screen was blank. No, not just blank, but dead. She pressed the Home button again and again, to no avail.
Okay, she more or less knew her way … she jogged across the quad, avoiding the twisted remains of the bandstand. Skirting the grass fires, she came to the parking area.
One of the little self-driving company cars was plugged into a charge point. The others were wrecked, but this one had been partially protected from flash and blast in the shadow of a concrete pillar. Its blue paint was scorched and still smoking, but aside from that it looked undamaged. She unplugged it, pulled the door open, and slid in. “Start up,” she ordered.
The car seemed to flinch. The dash screen lit. But when she gave it the address, and told it to go, it didn’t. Just sat there, as if it didn’t understand.
Okay, then, she’d have to drive manually. She was rusty, but remembered how. She touchscreened to Manual, moved the shift to reverse. The electrics whined as it backed out of the lot. She kept glancing at the sky. Maybe more missiles were coming. Because that had been a missile, hadn’t it? Out here in the open, the flimsy plastic roof of the car wouldn’t protect her for a second.
The only answer was to get to where she was going as quickly as possible, before another flash tore open the sky.
She bumped over a curb as she pulled up the ramp onto 509, then corrected and headed north. Past the airport. Since the war, rationed gas and scarce power had meant few cars on the road. So only a few trucks blocked the way, and most of them, whether human- or self-driven, had obviously pulled off to the side when they’d seen the flash. They lay knocked askew or toppled by the blast. The macadam of the road itself, though still smoking, seemed undamaged.
Peering ahead at the hovering cloud, she measured its edges with two fingers. Her dad had shown her how to judge the direction of a squall, when they were out sailing. If it widened over time, it was blowing toward them. So far this blackness seemed to be holding steady as she drove toward it, which should mean it was drifting to the north or northeast. She wasn’t sure what the prevailing winds were. Maybe she should, but being a researcher at Archipelago during a war meant there wasn’t much time for anything but work.
She pulled onto the breakdown lane to skirt a tangle of wrecked vehicles. A late-model Prius lay pinned beneath a truck. Both were burning fiercely, and one glance convinced her there was no point stopping to see if she could help.
Qwent was in Tukwila, near the golf course. Without thinking, she tried her phone again. But Google Maps didn’t work … of course. She freaked for a moment. How was she going to get anywhere without directions? “You can do it,” she whispered. She might make some wrong turns, but surely she could sort-of-remember the way.
A few minutes later she spotted the exit and pulled off. The streets were more congested here, and littered with smashed buildings, so she had to drive more carefully.
But now they weren’t empty. Men—not many women among them—were edging out from basements, from the shelters FEMA had converted subways and lower floors into. She frowned. They were carrying things. Tools. Crowbars, mainly, but axes too, and baseball bats. A few halted, looking after her as she passed. Then up at the sky, fearfully.
Yeah. She guessed no American would look at the sky the same way ever again.
* * *
A FEW blocks farther on the smoke got heavier, to the point she couldn’t make out the next intersection. This part of the city was on fire, but, by some freak of the explosions’ effects was not totally destroyed yet. She steered gingerly around a fallen light pole. Glass littered the pavement like hail, crunching under her tires. All the windows had been blown out here. Now she saw what the crowbars were for.
For prying loose the bolts on security gratings. For jimmying open doors, and smashing them in.
More and more people filled the street. Some staggered, skin hanging in burned strips from their arms and faces. Those who hadn’t reached shelter in time. Others looked unhurt, at least so far. Some of the men were carrying merchandise. Women were emerging too, skirting the blown-over cars and smashed buses. She braked hard to avoid one rushing out of a convenience store, arms filled with boxes of rationed infant formula and cereal. The woman didn’t even glance her way.
Nan pressed harder on the accelerator, but the car felt sluggish. She glanced at the charge meter for the first time. Below the red line, and sinking fast. “Fuck,” she muttered, peering up at the sky again. It was visible in slices of smoky black through the blasted-out upper stories of the buildings, where the interior walls had been blown out into the streets.
She steered around a woman lying in the street, curled like a roasted insect. Another block on, and her little vehicle was barely moving. A warning symbol pulsed on the dash. She wasn’t just running out of charge. The debris littering the still steaming asphalt had done her tires in. The car whined to a halt, shuddered, and died.
“Just. Fucking. Great,” she muttered. She checked the side- and rearviews to make sure no one was lurking back there. Then got out.
She stood in the middle of the street, looking around anxiously. Wondering if she should be helping the wounded, instead of her intended mission.
Shouting and thuds echoed down the block as the looters battered their way into another store. They hadn’t noticed her yet, but they would soon. Unless she hid.
But then she couldn’t get to Qwent.
She was pondering this dilemma, weighing her own safety against what she ought to do, when a shattering thunder rolled down between the shattered burning buildings. The rioters burst into furious activity, hastening their steps, casting apprehensive looks over their shoulders as the air vibrated.
From the street behind her, the roar grew. Of many engines. Of V-twins, unmufflered and full-throated.
She covered her ears as the Road Kings and Dyna Wides, Electra Glides, Ultra Classics, and Fat Boys swept past. The riders slid shotguns from scabbards as their tires crackled over the glass. Most of the looters scattered, though a few stood their ground, bats or crowbars at the ready. The wounded wandered among them, hands covering their faces. Blinded, burned, concussed … walking dead from the neutron burst. She shuddered, then ducked back into her car as bike after bike howled past. Their riders all wore the s
ame sleeveless black leather vests. A colorful scarlet and black patch depicted an enraged Viking. Arched over it was the legend BERZERKERS, with a smaller Z on its side stamped over the larger one. Belatedly, she realized what ominous symbol it formed. They wore other insignias too: American flags, Confederate battle flags, POW/MIA stickers, and the back-to-back Bs of the Black Battalions.
One of the Harleys slowed as it approached her car. The engine blupped down to an idle. It coasted to a halt and its exhaust blew past her, heavy, laden with hydrocarbons, mixing with the rapidly thickening smoke.
“Need a hand there, little lady?” its rider said.
Huge legs straddled the black bike. The skin of his massive bare chest was reddened. A black tangled beard fell to his lap, braided with copper and silver beads, but his head was shaved except for a patch on the back where a braided queue dangled. BFFB was tattooed across his forehead, with other acronyms or slogans unscrolling from his cheeks down his neck. A medieval-looking axe dangled from a carpenter’s belt, and he propped a black assault rifle on one gigantic thigh. He wore no helmet, just a red bandanna in a do-rag, and his eyes were concealed behind reflective wraparound sunglasses.
Nan glanced behind her. Screams and shouts echoed down the street. The bikers were revving their machines after the looters, ignoring the wounded pointing shotguns and firing over their heads. The pedestrians faded, retreating into stairwells and alleys where the bikes couldn’t go. A few Berzerkers dismounted and followed them in, but only for a few feet, as if establishing their dominance. After which, shouting threats, they swaggered back to their machines.
“I said, you need help here?”
He rolled the black machine closer. It was hard to hear him over the rumbling engine. As if realizing that, he gunned it, then shut it down. Extended a huge hand sheathed in black leather. Tattoos writhed up his arm. One she recognized: an eagle, globe, and anchor. “Hey,” he said. “You a doctor?”