Transport 2_The Flood

by Phillip P. Peterson

  Now mines closer to the barrier were exploding. It was only another hundred-and-fifty feet until the wotans would reach the main fence and the people behind it. But the piles of cadavers were slowing down their advancement. The beasts had to go round the mountains of bodies, which drove them into other mines. The noise of the exploding mines every few seconds was deafening.

  The first wotan reached the main fence. Travis Richards stood up behind the earth wall and shot it dead. A second one threw itself full force against the fence. It died immediately in a hail of bullets, but its weight flattened the barbed wire.

  “Careful down there!” cried Marlene. “We’ve got a hole in the main fence. Focus on the gap!”

  Two wotans used the bodies of the dead animals as a springboard, and jumped the fence. Travis ducked to the side at the last second. The two wotans, and four others that came storming up right behind, died in another hail of gunfire.

  “Jesus fucking Christ. They’re storming the fences as if they were made of paper,” Ernie cursed, before reloading.

  Russell allowed himself a quick look at the grassland. There were no more animals coming out of the forest. Most of the herd was between the two fences or just outside. But there must be at least another hundred animals storming forward.

  My God! We’ll never manage!

  “They’re getting through the gap,” warned Ernie.

  “Get away from the gap in the fence!” shouted Marlene.

  Camille Ott, Julia Stettson, and Edward Grazier threw themselves to the side. Wotans were still rushing forward.

  “We’re running out of ammunition,” gasped Ryan.

  “There are just too many,” shouted Eliot.

  He’s right. And they’re coming through the gaps. We have to defend the gaps!

  “I’m going down,” said Russell. He put two spare magazines in his pockets and slid down the ladder. The colonists were pressed up against the cliff walls. A good dozen wotans had already stormed to the other side of the earth wall and were attacking the frantic colonists. One by one, the animals were shot dead, but they were immediately replaced by stragglers. The sound of exploding mines still echoed through the valley. The ground vibrated with every detonation and Russell struggled to keep his balance. Beside him, someone screamed. Maxwell Lindwall tipped backward. Steam was rising from his chest. He must have been hit by some of the acid spraying out of the dying wotans. Russell kneeled down beside the eighteen-year-old and ripped open his shirt. It smelled terrible, but it was only a surface wound. The young man was trembling all over.

  “Take care of him, he’s in shock,” said Russell to Cookie Shanker, who was running toward his friend.

  “What should I do?” asked the boy in a quivering voice.

  “Dab away this shit from his chest. Then make sure that he doesn’t fall unconscious. Talk to him!”

  Russell didn’t wait for an answer, but kept running toward the gap in the fence. He fired at a group of wotans. One of them took five bullets before dying. Russell stopped in between Andrea Phillips and Chris Neaman, who were firing non-stop, to reload.

  “Die, you motherfuckers!” Chris roared.

  Russell had the feeling that they had been fighting for their lives for hours, but the sun had hardly moved. No more than a few minutes could have passed since the first shot had been fired. Hundreds of dead animals lay on both sides of the ragged remains of the fence.

  “Watch out, Russell!” he heard the hysterical voice of Sophia O’Hara behind him. From the corner of his eye he noticed a movement, a shadow that was approaching fast. Instinctively, Russell jumped back, pulling Andrea back with him. He stumbled and she fell on top of him. They tumbled over each other, and Russell threw a protective arm around the gasping woman. A scream! From where he had just been standing. It was an inhuman scream and stopped as quickly as it had started.

  Russell wanted to stand up, but stumbled over Andrea. He fell down again, and rolled on the ground. When he stood up, his left knee was crippled with pain and his leg gave way again.

  In front of him, a new gap had appeared in the fence. Underneath a dead wotan, lay Chris Neaman in a pool of blood.

  “Fuck,” Russell swore, but he felt nothing. That would come later. If there was a later.

  He hobbled over, dragging his left leg behind him and, with Andrea’s help, heaved the dead monster off Chris. What he saw made him want to retch: acid had sprayed onto Chris’ head and eaten away half of his face. His left eye was wide open with a look of total surprise. To the right of it was nothing but a hole, out of which dripped a hissing white liquid.

  “Russell, watch out!” Andrea pulled him back. He almost stumbled again. A good dozen wotans were stampeding through the gap. Russell grabbed his weapon and fired. It only clicked. “Oh fuck!” He would never be able to jump out of the way in time!

  But at that moment, the wotans exploded in the gap in the fence. Someone had thrown a grenade, and dirt, entrails, and white liquid flew in their direction. Thinking fast, Russell threw himself to the ground and protected his head with his hands. He was immediately covered in dirt, some of which he breathed in. It burned like hell. Coughing, he tried to get the stuff out. At least he hadn’t been hit by any acid. He tried to stand up, but a new stab of pain in his knee caused him to fall screaming back to the ground. He saw another shadow flying toward him, scrambled for his weapon in the dust and fired. Click.

  The magazine is still empty, you idiot.

  A loud bang right beside him. Someone had saved his ass! The monster flew over him and fell to the ground several feet away from him. Russell rummaged around in his pocket for the last magazine and groaned as he racked the slide.

  “Help! Help me!”

  He recognized the voice. It was Patrick Holbrook. Russell couldn’t see what was wrong with him.

  I have to get away from here!

  He dragged himself forward, bit by bit, foot by foot, away from the gap in the fence, while all around him, wotans fell dead to the ground. Bullets whistled so close to his ears that he could feel the gusts of air.

  It was difficult for Russell to concentrate on anything except the pain in his knee. He crawled on, as if in a trance.

  I have to keep going! I have to get away from here!

  Somewhere behind him a grenade exploded. The blast almost took his breath away. After a few long seconds he turned around.

  I’m far enough away from the gap. Get up! Now!

  He screamed as the pain seared through his knee, but by propping himself up on his weapon, he finally managed to get to his feet. He looked around. It was a scene from hell. The cadavers of wotans were piled up in great heaps in front of, on top of, between and behind the fence. Many of them had terrible injuries and missing limbs after being crushed underfoot by the animals streaming from behind. Some of them were just a slimy mass, torn apart by explosions. In between, people—streaming with blood, unconscious, screaming in pain or dead. A few feet away he saw Patrick Holbrook. The boy was lying in a sea of blood, his spine twisted at a bizarre angle.

  And it wasn’t over yet. More wotans were surging through the fence toward the observation post.

  Russell lifted his weapon and emptied the magazine into the herd. He screamed, but over the sound of the shots and explosions he couldn’t even hear his own screaming. He took one out. And another. From the corner of his eye he could see the muzzle flare of his comrades. Row by row, the wotans went down. But one was still racing in his direction. Russell took aim and fired, but his last magazine was empty.

  He threw himself to the ground, but as he was falling, something heavy collided with his head. He felt a flood of pain, which obliterating everything else.

  Fuck!

  He was enveloped by darkness.

  Chapter 37

  “He’s coming to.”

  He heard the voice before he opened his eyes.

  I’m alive!

  It was the first thought that shot through his head.

  I’m ali
ve!

  The next thing he felt was pain. Pain in his leg, pain in his chest, and his head felt as if it were being squeezed in a vice. Slowly he opened his eyes. In front of him, the face of his wife swam into view. She was smiling.

  “Ellen,” he croaked.

  Then Dr. Lindwall was looming over him, and a flashlight being shone into his eyes.

  “Can you hear me, Russell?” the voice droned through his head.

  He nodded weakly. “What happened?”

  “You were concussed, which is why you probably have a terrible headache. And your knee is badly bruised. You’ll probably be hobbling around for a few more days, but otherwise you’re fine.” He hesitated. “Apart from your cancer.”

  “The observation post?” groaned Russell. The dead! The injured!

  “We drove them back,” said Ellen. “It was close, but in the end we killed all the wotans. Unfortunately we lost some people.”

  In his mind’s eye, Russell could see Patrick, dead in a pool of his own blood. “Who?”

  “Holbrook’s son is dead. And Chris Neaman and Ryan Dressel.”

  “Ryan? He was next to me on the platform. How . . .?”

  “A wotan caused the lookout to collapse. Ernie and Eliot suffered slight injuries, But Ryan fell right in front of a monster.”

  “Three dead?”

  “And twice as many injured. But Marlene is glad that we were able to survive this wave.”

  Russell nodded. As sad as the losses were, he was surprised there weren’t more. Especially as he had doubted they would be able to defend the observation post at all. He had led military missions with more casualties. But children had died here, and consequently he couldn’t feel happy about their victory. “Ty?”

  “I don’t know. They’ve been working through the night. Even when John found out about his son’s death he only went to see his wife briefly before disappearing back in the laboratory. Marlene is at the observation post. They’re re-erecting the torn-down barrier and laying new mines.”

  Russell gripped the edge of the bed and tried to sit up. The pain in his head was hellish. He let his feet drop to the floor. His legs were trembling.

  “Russell, what are you doing?” asked Lindwall. “You can’t get up yet.”

  Ellen forced him back into bed. “I won’t allow it,” she said softly but firmly. “You need to rest. At least for a few hours.”

  Russell did not put up any resistance. He sank back into bed and drifted into a restless sleep.

  When Russell woke up a few hours later, he felt strong enough to sit up and eat the bowl of stew that Ellen had placed on the table beside his bed. His headache had subsided to a dull throbbing. Pushing aside the empty plate, he stood up and hobbled over to the washbasin. When he looked at himself in the mirror he got a fright. His face looked gray and sunken. His left cheek was caked with bits of dry blood, and a thick bandage was wound around the top of his head. There were dark shadows under his eyes.

  Ellen had put out clean clothes for him on the chair. His threadbare combat uniform reeked from the open hamper in the corner. He hobbled over and searched the pockets until he found the little box with the medication. He opened it, swallowed two of the stimulants, and staggered over to the door of the infirmary.

  The infirmary was located at the edge of the housing settlement. There was nobody in sight. Most of the colonists were probably at the observation post helping with the clean-up operations. But he heard a woman sobbing from Christian Holbrook’s hut. It was Paulina, crying over Chris, her fallen son. Should he go and see her? He decided against it. The fight wasn’t over yet. If Ty and his atom bomb failed, then all of the colonists would be dead after the next onslaught.

  He turned right and dragged himself over to the physics laboratory, the door to which stood open.

  John Dressel stared at him from bloodshot eyes. In front of him lay sheets of paper with complicated-looking calculations. Ty stood a few feet to the side at a table and was stacking up gray blocks with gloved hands.

  Russell shuffled over to the physicist and grasped his shoulder with both hands. “I’m so sorry,” he said huskily.

  “It’s okay,” said Dressel. “I know that you were with him at the start of the battle. It’s not your fault that the damn tower fell down later.”

  “Don’t you want to take a break?”

  Dressel’s face was rigid as a statue’s. “I couldn’t save Ryan, but I have two more children. Once we’ve finally blocked the pass and are safe from these damn beasts, there’ll still be time to mourn.”

  Russell nodded and turned to Ty. “How’s it going?”

  The weapons expert pointed at a table beneath a window. Two metallic corpuses lay on the table, similar to the egg-shaped halves of the bombs, but now perfectly hemispherical, and bigger. There was a small indentation in the flat end of each one. “Cashmore was right. With the hot press, we were able to reshape the plutonium cores quite easily. Those are the two halves, which we will later combine into a supercritical mass in the cave. This part of the job is complete.”

  “What else do you need to do?”

  “Detonating the bomb using this method is extremely inefficient, because we can’t compress the plutonium. Only a small percentage of the atoms will be split during the chain reaction. That’s why we’re trying to reflect back as many of the neutrons that first escape from the core by surrounding the steel pipe with graphite at the point of the explosion.”

  “Graphite?”

  “Yes, Cashmore still had a couple of pounds, which he took out of a spectrometer in his lab.” Russell looked at the gray slabs on the table. Ty continued. “Graphite is an excellent neutron reflector and during the early stage of the explosion it’ll reflect back a large part of the neutrons into the bomb, like a mirror. We hope that’ll compensate for the loss of efficiency.”

  “So you’ll just set up these slabs around the steel pipe in the cave?”

  Ty shook his head.

  “Unfortunately it’s not that easy. Each of the two bomb halves is already almost at critical mass. If I simply put the graphite next to them, there’s a risk that the reflected neutrons would start a chain reaction on their own. Not like in a bomb, but like in a nuclear reactor. It’s essential that the chain reaction only starts after the detonation, so we need to work out exactly how much graphite we can use.”

  Russell noticed the pile of paper in front of the physicist. “And that’s what you’re calculating now?”

  Dressel nodded. “No problem in theory. But in practice it is, because the graphite is unfortunately impure.”

  Ty grinned. “Tomorrow morning, when we’re finished with converting the initiator, we’ll carry out an experiment and tickle the dragon’s tail.”

  Russell stared at him blankly. “You want to do what?”

  “We’ll gradually surround the bottom half of the plutonium with graphite, until we reach a K-factor of one. In other words, until a chain reaction starts!”

  Russell shuddered. “You want to start a chain reaction here? Are you serious?”

  Ty’s grin broadened. “Don’t worry. Once you have just enough mass for a chain reaction, you get delayed neutrons first. They ensure that the fission rate only increases at a snail’s pace. It isn’t dangerous and we’ll stop the experiment as soon as we’ve reached that point. Then we’ll know what we need to know.”

  Russell felt uneasy: a chain reaction here in the middle of the laboratory? It sounded dangerous. He turned round to the physicist. “What do you think about this?”

  “If we proceed cautiously, I don’t think we’ll have any problems. We just have to be careful that we don’t emit any prompt neutrons.”

  Russell looked puzzled, so he continued. “During a chain reaction, both delayed neutrons and prompt neutrons are emitted, which immediately split into new nuclei. As long as you only work with the delayed neutrons, you can control the process, but if you amass too much reflector material at once, there’s a danger that the
chain reaction will be driven by the prompt neutrons alone. If that happened, I wouldn’t want to be present.”

  Russell frowned. Compared to Ty’s explanation, this did sound dangerous. “And what then? Would there be an explosion?”

  “No, but the process is equivalent to an out-of-control nuclear reactor. Like in Chernobyl, a huge amount of radiation would be emitted and the core of the atomic bomb would melt.”

  “And you seriously want to carry out this experiment here?”

  John Dressel waved his arms around helplessly. “What other choice do we have? We need precisely the right amount of graphite so that we don’t just end up with an expensive firework.”

  Russell shook his head and left the laboratory. Ty and Dressel reminded him of two children who had discovered their mother’s lighter and were now playing around with it in the garden shed. Only that the two children here in this laboratory were playing around with an atomic bomb. In the middle of their settlement!

  Chapter 38

  “Was it really necessary to take the children down there?” asked Russell.

  After visiting the laboratory, he had hobbled home but couldn’t find any peace of mind. After lying in bed for a few hours, he had gone to Marlene’s office.

  She was pale, and her eyes were bloodshot. Her hands were trembling, and Russell wondered when she would collapse. She was sitting in her armchair and had put her feet up on the table. A cup of something steaming was balanced on top of a pile of paper.

  “I would have preferred not to,” she said quietly. “But we needed them. We could only defeat those monsters by mobilizing all our forces. The youngsters made up half our line of defense. Without them, the beasts would have run us down.”

  “But the children should be the future of our little society! Now we’re sending them to slaughter!”