Cole’s life had been a lonely one since his divorce six months ago. Following the separation, he had been forced to rent an apartment in one of Washington’s less salubrious areas. The judge, meanwhile, had awarded his wife the marital home northeast of the city as part of the settlement in which she had cited Martin’s unusual state of mind as grounds for divorce.
Bitch.
He was also restricted to only seeing his kids for six hours every Saturday. And even those visits were strictly supervised.
Bitch.
It wasn’t as though she had needed the house. The geek of a lobbyist she was now dating earned at least ten times Cole’s salary and even owned - as she always gloated whenever Philip went to see his kids - a country home in upstate New York. As a matter of fact, the kids -mykids - were up there with the asshole right now.
One of his favorite scenes inIndependence Day was the one in which a crowd of Californian hippies on the roof of an LA skyscraper got zapped by aliens they were welcoming to Earth. Had the movie been for real, Cole thought, his dozy ex-wife would have probably been among the doomed new-agers. She believed in shit like aliens and the supernatural. For not the first time, part of him fantasized about her getting zapped by a deadly luminescent laser beam.
On the screen, the advancing alien ship emerged from above the clouds, casting a shadow over New York. Then Cole heard something that he had never heard on the film before. A dull banshee wail accompanied by hysterical screaming.
Air raid warning?
He paused the video. The sound was still audible.
Strange.
Scratching his head, he went to the grimy window of his living room and opened it. As he did so, the siren became more audible, although its moan was indistinct compared to the screams emanating from the hordes of people he saw charging along the street below.
Where do they think they’re going?he wondered. He pulled on a parka and headed downstairs to street level. Standing in the doorway of his apartment building, he took a perverse fascination in watching the people run. They didn’t seem to have a common destination in mind; some were running one-way, some the other. Smiling to himself, he folded his arms and watched the people panic.
He heard a squelchy thud that caused him to turn. He winced, realizing that somebody had thrown themselves - or been pushed - out of a high-rise building. Cool! Across the street, people swarmed into a subway station, trampling the weak in their stampede. A young woman bounced off the windscreen of a BMW as it raced along the street. Way to go! Two cars collided head on right in front of Philip; one of the drivers hurled through his windscreen by the impact. Why on earth would anyone want to miss this, the ultimate disaster movie? Talk about virtual reality.
The problem was, nobody knew precisely where the bomb was going to fall. The general consensus seemed to be that the most likely targets were landmarks such as the White House and the Washington Memorial. People in the vicinity of such places ran away from them as if the buildings themselves were about to explode. Not that it made any difference, of course. Martin knew that no human being could run far enough away from ground zero in such a short time. The disaster movie fanatic thought himself to be something of an authority on such matters.
Oh well, if the world was going to end, he figured that he might as well reserve himself a ringside seat. With this in mind, he made his way back up to his apartment. His kitchen closet was a trove of junk (most of it useless, but one never knew when it might come in handy) that he had collected over the years. Buried beneath it all was a foldaway plastic chair. Cole wasn’t sure how stable it was, but it certainly looked to be in good enough shape. He tucked it under his arm and grabbed a bottle of cold beer from the fridge.
Then he made his way up to the roof and made himself comfortable. The eerie rising and falling tone of the sirens excited him. He took a sip of beer, hoping that he lived just long enough to see a real mushroom cloud.
27-year-old Elroy Simpkins had just stubbed out his third crack joint of the day when the sirens began their chilling wail. Unsure what he was hearing, he peered through the window of his apartment onto the street below.
“All the people, man,” he mumbled to himself. “What the fuck they all doin’ there?”
A distant part of his mind registered the sound of multitudes screaming; of blaring car horns in the distance. Perhaps he’d smoked some bad shit, he thought. Wouldn’t be the first time. Sure as hell wouldn’t be the last.
In his intoxicated state, he was lured by the combination of people and noise like a moth to light. He made his way outside and lost himself in the cacophony. They all look freaked, man, he heard a voice in his head say. Gotta get me another fix. Like the transvestite guy who fixes things. Yeah, that’s it. I’ll go see the fix-man.
He staggered through the chaotic scene, past a man who was spending his last moments on Earth brutally raping a young woman, past another man who was randomly firing a rifle at any human target unfortunate enough to catch his eye. Simpkins, who looked at least thirty but figured he was probably younger, had never known anythingbut chaos. He was right at home. Subconsciously, he registered the lack of a police presence and sensed opportunity.
For some reason known only to him, he found himself drawn towards the local shopping mall, from where most of the noise seemed to be emanating. When he reached it, he was confronted by a scene that most people would have described as hellish. To Elroy Simpkins, it was comforting.
The shops were being emptied of their contents by looters. The process was random rather than systematic, although some shops were proving more popular than others. Jewelry shops for example. Apparently, nobody had given much thought to the value of jewelry in the aftermath a nuclear war. The same went for electrical stores, with TV’s and videos proving especially popular. Again, nobody seemed to be worried that there might not be any electricity with which to run their new appliances after a nuclear attack.
Other groups, however, were raiding grocery stores and supermarkets. Although many had been shut for the evening when the air raid sirens had started, that hadn’t deterred those who were smart enough to realize that food might very well become as valuable as legal tender in a post-holocaust world.
Unfortunately for Elroy, his ignorance of what was coming meant that he wasn’t concerned with stealing food. He wanted the valuable stuff that would pay for his next fix. And there were no cops around to stop him. He didn’t understand why, and didn’t particularly care. All he knew was that opportunities like this didn’t present themselves every day.
He ran through the shattered display of a jewelry store, grabbing whatever he could and stashing it in his pockets. Everyone seemed to be in a real hurry, so he figured he’d better hurry too, before all the good stuff was gone.
As he stepped back out onto the street, a volley of shots rang out. The teenage boy who fired them didn’t know why he was doing so, and was even less concerned with who he shot.
Elroy Simpkins found himself standing directly in the line of fire, and was the first person to be hit, a solitary bullet lodging in his left lung. He slumped to the ground, gurgling blood, blissfully ignorant as to why he was unable to move. He would never live long enough to appreciate the irony that his life had been prematurely ended by another crack addict.
Mercifully, he was dead by the time the bomb arrived.
Elsewhere in Washington, the air raid sirens provided an eerie soundtrack to an apocalyptic spectacle of hysteria on a biblical scale. With the highways jammed, the net effect was not entirely unlike that of a million rabid animals caged under sentence of death.
Many people had been woken by the sirens. A few slept through the commotion and continued to sleep until the bomb fell. A surprising number of people had, until that point, been completely ignorant of the crisis and thought that the sirens had been started by accident. Only those who checked the television to find the EAS message looping continuously discovered otherwise.
Within three minutes of
the EAS being activated, there were very few people in Washington D.C. who doubted that the warning was for real.
On the corner of 7thStreet and Rhode Island Avenue, a young mother holding her daughter was looking up at the skies in fearful anticipation of the inevitable. A puddle of urine had formed at her feet.
In the East Potomac Park, fifty or sixty students had gathered to spend their last moments smoking cannabis joints under the full moon. A boom box was blasting out loud rock music. Other passers-by came to join the students, bringing with them alcohol and a range of chemical substances. None of them wanted to have their senses intact when the moment of reckoning came. In the heart of a city in chaos, the jollity and high spirits in the East Potomac Park provided a somewhat surreal spectacle.
Elsewhere, however, hundreds of people committed suicide rather than face the horror of what was coming. The most popular means of doing this was by putting a gun to one’s head. Those without access to a firearm chose either to slash their wrists or take massive overdoses in the hope that they would lose consciousness before the bombs fell.
Meanwhile, similar scenes were being played out in towns and cities across the United States.
JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL CENTER, BALTIMORE
If there was anything that really bothered Jo, it was that Lewis hadn’t called her; even just to say a final good-bye. She imagined he was in some goddamn bar, too intoxicated even to understand what was going on. Her eyes moistened as she began to think about all the things she would never get to say to him. All the things she might never have the chance to do.
Jo was thirty-eight years old - although she could have easily passed for ten years younger - but now it seemed as though she might not live to be any older. She had spent the best part of her adult life helping the sick. It struck her as rather poignant that she would probably die with them too.
An eerie atmosphere had descended upon the hospital when the sirens began. A few staff and patients had left the complex to try and get to their families before the bombs fell, but most had chosen to remain with those whose ailments denied them the chance to leave. Nurses continued to do their rounds, as they would have done on any other evening shift. Surgeons who had been in theater when the sirens began continued whatever procedures they had been performing. People were generally politer to each other than normal, having gained a sudden appreciation for human life. Of course, there were some who became hysterical, but there was always somebody at hand to comfort them. The general consensus seemed to be to maintain a facade of normality.
Except that this time, the situation wasn’t normal at all, was it? Jo thought. In the background, the banshee sirens provided a chilling reminder of that.
Jo attempted a brave smile when she saw Dr Rosenberg making his way up the corridor towards her.
“You okay, honey?” he asked, immediately realizing how insane that must have sounded under the circumstances.
“I’m fine,” she lied, distantly wondering how many minutes it would be until her life ended in an annihilating flash. “Part of me is hoping that we get a direct hit, you know? I don’t know if I want to live to see what happens afterwards.”
Rosenberg furrowed his brow. “Part ofme is hoping this is just a big practical joke; you know, like H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds broadcast.”
Jo managed a bitter laugh. “Jeez. That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Everybody getting worked up over nothing.” She involuntarily shivered, thinking of the hysteria that must have gripped the general population by now. “You know, it just doesn’t seem real. Here we are, having a perfectly rational conversation, and in less than half an hour, all of this” - she gestured all around her - “could be dust in the atmosphere. We’ve known for over sixty years that this could happen -sixty goddamn years - and what did we do to stop it?”
“What could we have done?” Rosenberg noted bleakly.
A thin smile of reminiscence flickered across Jo’s lips. “Lewis always used to say that so long as the bombs existed, there was always a danger of something like this happening. I used to think that he was exaggerating. But he knew. Deep in his heart, he knew that the people in charge couldn’t be trusted with the power of Gods. If only they had listened to him,” she added meekly.
“Kind of ironic, isn’t it?” Rosenberg remarked, watching a nurse push an elderly man back to his bed in a wheelchair. “We’re still here, trying to save people’s lives using techniques developed by the world’s finest scientific minds, and yet science is about to destroy us all. I don’t know how World War Three will be fought, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones. Einstein said that. Ever since that first bomb dropped on Hiroshima, this was always kind of inevitable when you think about it. Have you ever heard of a weapon that’s been built but never used? Funny how things gain clarity at a time like this.”
Jo tried to disregard a vision in her head of the horrific aftermath; an aftermath that was but minutes away. She imagined crazed and mutilated survivors staggering through a desolate wasteland of radioactive debris, scavenging for whatever scraps of food they could find. Rape and murder would be endemic, not to mention the diseases encouraged by several million bodies rotting in a dead world. She remembered another quote that Lewis had once related to her. A quote first uttered by Nikita Khrushchev in 1962.
The living will envy the dead.
Jo had dedicated her life to the protection and preservation of other lives, and so her mind screamed in outrage that so many were about to be destroyed so cheaply. Somewhere in Russia, a faceless man had decided that it was right to order the deaths of millions of Americans he’d never met and who probably hadn’t entertained any feelings towards him one way or the other. Soon, she knew (if it hadn’t already happened), a similarly faceless man in America would decide to do the same to several million Russians, incinerating lives, hopes, dreams, plans and memories in an instant of nuclear extermination. In this supposedly enlightened age, historians looked back on the barbarities of the Dark Ages without realizing, ironically, that the self-destructive nature of mankind hadn’t really changed all that much after all. Only the weapons had become more sophisticated. She wondered if there would be any future historians to write about this night of infamy. And if there were, would they have learned anything from this? Probably not, she concluded. Probably not. You couldn’t stop mankind being what it was any more than you could train a dog to be a cat. And that, Jo realized, would probably be humankind’s epitaph: We emerged, we progressed, we learned, we built, we explored, and then we destroyed ourselves because it turned out we didn’t actually like ourselves very much.
“You know,” she reflected, “if Hopkins isn’t destroyed, we might end up being the only functional hospital for miles. And, before long, every injured or dying survivor will find their way here. We’ll be overrun. That’s a comforting thought, isn’t it?”
Rosenberg grimaced. “I’ve been trying not to think about that, Jo.”
CIVIL BEND, MISSOURI
Many years ago, when Beth Logan had been a young girl, she had stolen some candy from old Mr. Goldberg’s shop in the Queens neighborhood where she had grown up. All her school friends had done the same at one time or another, except that they had been more accomplished thieves than Beth. She stole not because she had particularly wanted the candy, but because she had craved the acceptance of her peers.
Mr. Goldberg had seen her pocket the candy bar, and as she’d left the shop, he’d stopped her. She still remembered being terrified that he would tell her parents; honest people who would have grounded her for life had they found out. But instead, he had just smiled at her and said, “Bethany, dear, if you want a candy bar and you can’t afford it, just ask. There’s no need for you to steal. You’re better than those other kids.” He hadn’t told her parents, and she had never stolen another thing since. Yet that single moment, when she had thought hemight tell them, had been the most frightening of her life.
Until the moment when she heard the EA
S announcement on the radio.
The Logan family -most of them, she corrected herself, remembering that Martin was somewhere above the clouds right now - were sixty miles from the Iowa state line when it started. She calculated that if the roads were this clear all the way, they could make Iowa in about forty-five minutes. That would be just after the bombs started hitting North America, presuming that the EAS had allowed half an hour’s warning of the event. Whiteman and Kansas City were far enough behind for them to be safe. So they would probably make it, she calculated.
But that wasn’t important, was it?
Cathy instantly recognized the high-pitched EAS tone as soon as it interrupted the radio broadcast, having heard it being tested on numerous occasions over the years. Memories of childhood came flooding back to her; of being told by a very severe schoolteacher to ‘Duck And Cover’ when the nuclear flash came. That memory was somehow associated with a recollection of the first time she had heard of an island called Cuba and of a Russian man called Khrushchev. She remembered that the adults around her had been frightened of something, although she hadn’t been old enough back then to understand quite what thatsomething was, except that it was bad and that there was nothing she could do to prevent it.
But now she did understand, and wished that she didn’t.
“Perhaps it’s a drill,” Patrick suggested. “You know, like they’re just testing out the system.”
Beth didn’t look over her shoulder. She didn’t need to in order to know that Cathy was crying. Despite all the problems between them, Beth wanted nothing more than to give her mother-in-law a reassuring hug right now. Perhaps, she reasoned, it was just that she craved human contact at this darkest of times, even if the sentiment wasn’t necessarily reciprocal. She knew that Martin would have wanted his wife and parents to make their peace at the time when it mattered most. And if not now, then when?
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