by Nick Cole
He checked the dosimeter and saw that the radiation levels were well into the redline.
The tank, which was capable of sudden and alarming bursts of speed, tore through the front entrance of the restaurant. In a moment the Old Man was crushing through the darkened kitchen, heading for the back wall.
The brick in these buildings must be rotten. Made even more so because of the radiation. So I’ll see if it puts up much of a fight against our tank. Right, my friend?
Right, Santiago?
Silence.
The tank burst through the back wall of the restaurant in a dusty spray of redbrick and launched itself off a loading dock, landing in a wide alley beyond, after a sickening moment of free fall.
“Ha ha!” the Old Man shouted in triumph.
He pivoted the tank right and sped off down the alley. The alley led to a small side street and the Old Man chose a road leading down toward the center of the town.
The tank bounced softly along the street, crushing or pushing other debris out of its way. Ahead, the Old Man could see the northern rim of the valley and the ribbon of highway climbing up out of it. A few streets later he took a right turn, and a block after that he urged the tank up an ashy embankment and back onto the old highway heading north.
Chapter 52
Beyond Trinidad the road ran through a plain forever burned. A brief fork of lightning arced across the sky from west to east.
I have never seen lightning move sideways. Always up and down. But never across.
He stopped the tank.
He opened the hatch and a moment later noticed that the fuel drums had disappeared.
Probably when the building fell on me.
I’ll have to make it there on what’s left in the tank.
There is nothing for miles around.
The Rockies are like the dark shapes of ships crossing the ocean at midnight. You would have seen such a sight, you would know what I mean, Santiago.
“Natalie?” the Old Man said into the mic.
“I’m here. Where are you now?”
“I don’t know exactly. I don’t have my map with me anymore. But I’m just past a place called Trinidad.”
“You must hurry now. We don’t have much longer.”
“How far away am I?”
“Two hours if you maintain a high rate of speed.”
“Do your people have protection against the radiation? It’s very high here.”
“Yes. We have a convoy of vehicles that run on electric power. If the weapon does its job, we should be able to exit the facility in lightly shielded vehicles and make our way to someplace safe.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” began the Old Man. “If you don’t know where to go . . . well, there are some people waiting for you at a place once called Wagon Wheel Mountain. They’ve been told you might come and they’ll wait there for you. Then they’ll try for Tucson. You and your people could go there too.”
Ash stirred and whirled briefly on the melted road.
Far out on the plain another flash of lighting arced brightly across the darkening hot afternoon.
Silver sunbeams shot through clouds to the east.
“You should activate the beacon now,” said General Watt. Natalie.
Yes. I should.
It feels sudden. As if it’s all happening too fast.
That is always how things happen that you don’t want to have happen. Right, Santiago? You would say that to me. You would say that and then say, my friend.
The Old Man opened the case containing the beacon. Turning the device around, he located the on switch. A green light responded. But the red light that indicated the malfunctioning laser continued to blink.
Even if it worked, what good would it do me now? I’ve probably absorbed too much radiation.
The Old Man reached down and drank warm water from his canteen. His mouth tasted of metal. His tongue was numb.
“I have your signal,” said Natalie after a moment.
“What do I do now, Natalie?”
“Keep the beacon on. I’ll direct you to the emergency entrance near Turkey Trail. It’s south of the main complex. The mountain collapsed there when we were hit. The weapon should create an opening or allow us to set charges and clear the area.”
And what will happen to me when this weapon goes off?
You would say to me, You know the answer already, my friend. There is no need to ask.
Yes, you would say that to me, Santiago.
“And what will happen to you, Natalie? Will you stay behind or . . .”
She said she would self-terminate if they didn’t make it out.
Yes, but that was when there was no hope.
Isn’t there always hope? Tell me of hope, Santiago. Tell me how you felt in the days and nights on the boat when the fish carried you farther and farther out into the gulf. You had hope, my friend. Otherwise you would not have fought so hard. Fought with every skill of fishing you’d ever learned. You had hope, didn’t you?
“You have given us a chance,” said Natalie. “You have given my children a chance. I won’t lie to you anymore. Once you’re over the target, I will need to download into a secure and portable mainframe that is barely big enough to contain me. In fact . . . I will be ‘asleep.’ There will not be enough memory for my processes to run at optimum capacity. Someday, if they can ever find, or build a new mainframe, they will try to reactivate me. Someday.”
Lightning appeared briefly, farther to the north.
And where will I go?
“I was wrong, Natalie,” said the Old Man. “About what I said to you.”
“You have said many things since we first began to talk to each other. But, I think . . .”
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 windo
w 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.