The Big Bang
Page 29
Hanner shook his hand. “See ya in two days.”
It only took eighteen hours. Most of that was driving, weaving around the stalled vehicles. He was still sixty miles outside of Los Angeles proper when the road became impassible, clogged with inert automobiles that had become wheeled tombs. The rears of the cars were scorched from the fireballs.
After parking the truck on a side street and strapping on his pistol, Alec climbed out of the cab. The street was gritty beneath his boots. He guessed there had been a blast near here; paint was blistered off one side of the houses. He was lucky, this time. The blast hadn’t been nuclear, but a nearby brewery had been targeted for the crime of creating alcohol. The fireball had been deadly enough, however, knocking birds from the sky, shredding people with flying glass or pulping their internal organs from the concussion. The grit under his feet was composed equally of the remains of buildings and humans.
With the maps in his back pocket, Baldwin walked steadily toward the city. He passed no one living. By this time, it was apparent to the residents this was a land that now breathed death. Those who could had fled, those who could not had died.
He had to walk around the blast-damaged overpasses and soon had tied a bandana around his nose and mouth. The stench of rotting flesh was everywhere. Flies buzzed around the cars, in and out of windows. Once, he heard a loud pop and whirled, the Glock in his hand, only to find that a bloated corpse in a luxury SUV had finally exploded from the heat.
The sun had set when he climbed up a shattered freeway ramp, trying to get his bearings. The unmistakable blush of electric light glowed in the darkness, a mile or so further. He hurried toward them, coming to a National Guard checkpoint. It was composed of an armored troop carrier next to cement barricades that ran across the road, gasoline generator rumbling and powering the lights. At first, he thought the place was deserted. “Hey, anybody home?” he called. After a moment, a thin shadow on the back of the armor carrier stirred to life, and shambled toward him, a lank figure in a uniform.
“Jesus Christ!” Baldwin said in shock. The black kid inside the uniform was thin, with bare patches on his head and weeping sores on his exposed flesh.
“Yeah, man, it’s ugly,” the grunt said. “What’s your business, mister?” He turned his head politely and coughed. He coughed a long time.
“My daughter…she’s in the city. I have to get her.”
The grunt wiped the bloody mucus off his mouth before speaking. “Sir, if she’s in there, she’s dead.”
“But…”
“They hit us with at least three bombs, sir. One down in Long Beach, one at UCLA, and one right in the middle of downtown. Bam, bam, bam, all at the same time. There was this column of fire that people could see in Laughlin. One of the guys from the AEC figured the temperature reached 10,000 degrees at the core, maybe 6,000 out toward the edges. There’s nothing left in there but ash.” The ravaged face stared at Alex for a minute. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“What?” He didn’t realize he was weeping. Tears were dripping off his jaw.
The kid in uniform sat down on the cement barricade. “Excuse me, mister, I get tired real easy.”
Baldwin blinked his eyes, screwed them shut, willed the tears to stop. Later, he might cry. He swallowed hard, forcing the pain back down into his guts, where it would live and feed until the end of his days. “I have to go look.”
“Why? Sir, it won’t do any good. You wanna end up like me? Last time I looked in the mirror, I like to puked. What good is it gonna do anybody if you go there? Hell, lots of the streets were wiped off the earth. There’s no landmarks.” He coughed again.
Alec wiped off his face with the back of his arm. “Then why are you still here, kid?”
The grunt smiled, showing bloody gums and loose teeth. “Hell, sir, cause I said I would be. I’m done, man, but I can still keep somebody like you from doing something useless.”
Baldwin looked past him at the ashen darkness. With an almost physical effort, he let it go. He turned Addie over to God, which is all he could ever do as a parent anyway. He prayed it had been quick for her and Kim, and that they’d been together at the last. The idea of his daughter facing her final moment frightened and alone almost broke him. He shoved the idea away from him and stepped closer to the soldier. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
The dying Guardsman took several deep breaths. “My brother lived in Moreno Valley. He was an asshole, petty thief, wannabe, all that crap. You get a chance, you tell him that Danny says, ‘I was right. You don’t gotta live like that.’” He took several more ragged breaths, and then gave Baldwin an address. Baldwin repeated it back to him.
Danny nodded, then slid down the side of the concrete barrier, coming to rest with his knees up against his chest. “Can you get me a blanket out of the carrier? I think I’m gonna sit out here and look at the stars. Never used to be able to see ’em, you know.”
Baldwin climbed the steps into the back of the personnel carrier. The door was unlocked. It smelled bad inside, the stench of sickness. He found a clean blanket, carried it out to the soldier, and tucked it around him.
“You know…” Danny started coughing again. When the racking coughs stopped, he resumed, “You know, that badboy is shielded.” He gestured toward the personnel carrier. “Lead around the cab and the compartment. She’s packing heat, too. And there’s iodine tablets in the back, for the radiation.” He dug in the pocket of his jacket, found a set of keys. “Go ’head, take ’em, they ain’t too hot.”
“If it’s shielded, what happened to you?”
“Dude, all we had was a tent for the first week. By then, we were cooked. That carrier belonged to some Army pogues. They got sent in to L.A. to check out the damage. They didn’t come back, homie.”
“I can’t leave you—”
“Man, take the carrier. At least that way, you have a chance of gettin’ to Mo Vall, and telling my smart-ass brother what he needs to hear.”
Alec took the keys from Danny’s trembling fingers. He extended his own hand and said something he’d never said in his life. “God bless you, soldier.”
Danny reached out a frail hand and they shook. “You, too, sir.”
Baldwin had driven a delivery truck during college, so the big carrier wasn’t much of a challenge. With the windows down to sluice the clinging odor of illness from the interior, he ended up bashing it past stalled vehicles, driving on sidewalks and lawns until he was clear of the worst of the choking jam.
The tears returned as he drove and he pulled over beside a blackened pile of metal that had been forty cars and SUVs. He’d promised Addie, in his mind at least, that he would come and get her. That her daddy would never let her down. But he’d promised Becka he’d come back, too. Shuddering, both hands clamped around the steering wheel as he sobbed, the real question came to him: Which promises were you bound to keep: those to the living, or those to the dead?
Wiping his eyes, Baldwin dropped the truck into low gear, turned north, and headed toward Becka and his destiny.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Roy M. Griffis
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0743-6
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