The Last Run: A Novella

by Stephen Knight

  “Important to us, or important to them?”

  “Heh. Good question. How’re you feeling back there?”

  “About the same,” Peter said. “I haven’t blown chow all over the place, but that could change at any moment.”

  “Take heart. We’re about to put wheels on pavement.”

  “Thank God.”

  Mulligan wasn’t lying. Just ahead, another rural road came into view. There was no traffic on it, but in the distance, in the midst of another field, he saw several stalled tractors. People wandered around them, mystified by the fact they had suddenly stopped running. Of course, no one knew about the high-altitude explosions that had blanketed most of North America with powerful bursts of electromagnetic energy. Mulligan cringed at that. He figured it was a legit tactic, taking out the enemy’s eyes and ears, but the fact that so many civilians were going to be slaughtered still pissed him off. Not that there was any way around that. Nuclear weapons weren’t the most discriminate of offensive platforms, and the Russians were going to get back what they had dished out.

  Blasting through a small copse of trees, the SCEV slowed as it clambered onto the two-lane roadway. Telephone poles stood in a neat, albeit somewhat irregular, row along the left shoulder as Mulligan cranked the rig into a right turn. The SCEV accelerated smoothly, its big tires whirring as they rolled across the dusty macadam thoroughfare, kicking up dust and a small storm of stones that clicked against the rig’s thick undercarriage. Mulligan eased the control column forward, watching as the vehicle’s speed passed sixty miles per hour. A quick consultation of the GPS display told him they would be at the house in less than ten minutes at that speed. Mulligan pressed the column forward even more, and encountered the control stop. The SCEV’s speed topped out at sixty-three miles per hour. They were moving as fast as they could go.

  A quick flush of distortion made the displays pulse for an instant, and an alarm sounded. The SCEV had just detected another EMP emission, and a momentary, squealing whistle sounded over their radio headsets as the distant explosion caused a heterodyne signal that filled the airwaves. As CJ silenced the alarm, Peter reported that another nuclear explosion had been detected somewhere over the horizon. Mulligan figured that would be McConnell.

  “Systems check,” he ordered.

  “We’re looking good,” Peter told him. “No EMP-related damage. All systems are running normally. Judging by the strength of the pulse, the blast was a couple of hundred miles away to our southeast. From the waveform, I’d say it was a ground strike. But not strong enough to compromise us, anyway.”

  “But definitely a run-on suck for those on the receiving end.” Mulligan made a sweep of the instrument panel anyway, just to be sure. There were no indicators illuminated other than the historical alert captured by the interferometers positioned along the rig’s thick hull. It was true the SCEVs were shielded, but only up to a theoretical limit of 10 gigawatts. Additional shielding would have compromised the range, and the mission of Harmony Base required the vehicles be the eyes and ears of the command group in the post-holocaust environment. But the idea was that the rigs would have been safely underground, where over a hundred feet of earth and rock, along with the base’s grounded superstructure, would have provided even more dampening protection. So far, the SCEV’s shielding had survived both an aerial detonation that had doubtless crippled the nation’s power grids and fried pretty much every unshielded computer processor out there, and it had defeated the surge generated from the strike against McConnell.

  The alarm chirped again. “Okay, that was another one,” Peter reported dutifully. “Same as before. Would they launch two nukes against one target? Isn’t one good enough?”

  “The Russkies have weapons with a lot of throw weight, so they can afford to re-attack targets,” Mulligan said. “If you’re going to cause the end of the world, you might as well do it big time.”

  Another chime sounded, and an alert window opened up on one of the displays. Mulligan looked at the flashing legend.

  RAD LEVEL 20 μSv

  Damn, that was quick.

  “Twenty microsieverts…radiation level’s up to about the same as a chest X-ray,” CJ said, noting the same warning.

  “Yeah, could be from the airbursts earlier,” Mulligan said. “The wind isn’t moving fast enough for it to be fallout from those ground strikes.”

  “Give it time,” Peter said.

  “Feeling more chipper now that we’re on the straight and level, Mister Lopez?”

  “I still feel like I want to throw up, but I think that’s because Mankind is killing itself.”

  Mulligan nodded but didn’t comment. He felt pretty much the same way.

  Ahead, an intersection appeared. It was devoid of traffic, and of any sign of life—much like the majority of the country would be in the coming months. Mulligan toed the brakes and slowed the SCEV as he checked the moving map display. He needed to turn left and head east for eight minutes, then juke north toward where the house was.

  “Turning here,” he announced as he brought the rig down to fifteen miles an hour and eased it onto the next road. He scanned the area quickly, and saw not a soul. He glanced over at CJ, and saw her face was tense and drawn. She met his eyes for a moment, and tried to smile. But there wasn’t a damned thing to smile about.

  “I had friends at McConnell,” she said.

  Mulligan nodded and turned back to the road. “Keep up your scans,” he said. “We’ll be moving pretty quick, so stay sharp. Who knows, someone might step out in front of us and try and wave us down.”

  “And if they do?”

  “We’re not stopping for anyone, Sergeant.”

  “Hooah, Sarmajor.” And with that, CJ turned back to scanning the terrain as the SCEV accelerated down the road. Mulligan sensed movement off his right shoulder again, and he saw Peter edge into the cockpit and peer out the viewports at the pancake-flat landscape ahead. He kept the fingers of his left hand firmly wrapped around the handhold in the bulkhead and leaned against the copilot’s seat.

  “Well, I don’t see any mushroom clouds,” he said, straightening up after a moment.

  “I don’t think we need to see them to know they’re out there. You should get back to your seat—”

  CJ took in a sharp breath, but before Mulligan could think to address the circumstance, the brightest light he had ever seen slashed through the cockpit. Alarms wailed, and above them, Mulligan heard CJ shriek. The control column went dead in Mulligan’s left hand as the hydraulic boost suddenly failed, and through the glare, he could see the displays before him had gone dark. He immediately tapped the brakes, and found that the hydraulics had failed completely. He started pumping the brake pedal like mad. The SCEV responded and slowed in irregular pulsations. Mulligan had to put some muscle into it to keep the rig on the road, and for a moment, it crept perilously close to the shoulder. He thought he felt the rig slipping a bit, and he yanked the column to the right, bringing the rig more or less back to the center of the road. With a lurch, it came to an unceremonious halt.

  “My eyes!” CJ said, panic in her voice. “I was looking right at it, I’m blind!”

  “What happened?” Peter asked, and his voice also held volumes of fear.

  Mulligan blinked against the glare that filled his vision, despite the sunglasses he wore. He turned toward CJ, and what he saw outside the viewports took his breath away.

  An angry red-orange mushroom cloud climbed into the sky, growing larger by the second. Only one or two miles away, at the most. Vast amounts of debris was already falling earthward, trailing plumes of dark smoke.

  Why the hell would they lob a nuke out here? he asked himself, followed immediately by, Fuck you, Peter, you called the thing out, and here it is—!

  Then, he saw the shock wave barreling right toward them. A wall of dust and earth and God knew what else, being driven outward from the blast site by a wall of super-compressed air whose speed bordered on supersonic. And with nothing in
the flat, featureless, heavily-farmed landscape to impede it, the shock wave was headed right toward the SCEV.

  “CJ!” Peter leaned back into the cockpit, and reached for his wife. She still sat in the copilot’s seat, her face buried in her hands as she whimpered, rubbing her eyes ferociously.

  “Get back into your seat!” Mulligan shouted, tightening his shoulder straps with both hands, cinching them so tight that he was certain he’d have some interesting bruises later.

  The shock wave hit the SCEV like a locomotive, and Mulligan felt the rig actually being shoved across the road. Peter let loose a startled cry as he was flung backwards, away from the cockpit. And then, SCEV One’s left tires hit the soft shoulder, and the entire vehicle seemed to stumble and fall like a drunken man.

  ***

  “HOLY SHIT!” someone in the operations center said.

  Benchley sat in his chair, a wet tissue in one hand, his eyes still hot and burning from his tears. He’d managed to choke them back and regain some semblance of his command authority, but there was nothing much to do. The base was sealed, and everyone was doing whatever tasks their missions dictated they accomplish. There were tears, of course, but Benchley was proud of all of them. They were doing what they were supposed to do, while Mankind rubbed itself out in an internecine orgy of violence never before witnessed.

  There had been some momentary trepidation when one of the missile interceptors had struck an inbound track, blasting it into fragments. It turned out that the target had been a MIRV that hadn’t separated, and now, several nuclear weapons were inbound with projected impact points relatively near Harmony. But as they watched, all but one drifted farther to the east, continuing on in a bid to get as close to its intended target as possible. Benchley wondered if this meant that some city, maybe St. Louis or Memphis or Topeka, might be spared. But then, the detonations in other parts of the nation rendered that slim chance moot. Even if a major metropolitan area was spared a direct hit, the lethal fallout would make them just as uninhabitable.

  But one of the weapons had apparently been damaged, or knocked so far off course that it couldn’t correct for the mishap. It buzzed past Harmony at an altitude of four thousand feet—if it had gone off then, it would still have rung their bells—then zipped by at almost five times the speed of sound. The passage of what they presumed to be a nuclear warhead didn’t lessen the tension in the room. The weapon continued its sharp arc toward the Earth, passing through three thousand feet, two thousand, one thousand. When it still didn’t explode, Benchley knew there were only two reasons: the weapon had been so badly damaged that it was inoperative, or it was a ground strike weapon, and not one of the airburst variety.

  They had their answer when, a moment after the object disappeared from radar, it detonated several miles to the east. The Earth seemed to shudder in response, and a dull rumbling rolled through the base, not strong enough to make the installation heave on its elaborate set of shock absorbers, but forcefully enough to register on the seismograph network that surrounded the station. The weapon had obviously been in the megaton range, a true city killer, but its mission had been aborted. Somewhere out there, a city or a military installation would have another few minutes to live.

  Just the same, he ordered a damage control inspection, regardless. If the base had been injured, he wanted to know about it in the short order. So far, the engineering feeds to his station revealed nothing untoward, but he wasn’t going to trust a bunch of flat screen displays, even if they were driven by one of the more sophisticated military artificial intelligences out there.

  On the big map, the eastern seaboard was taking a licking. New York City had been hit with one weapon, and Washington had scored big in the nuclear lottery, taking a total of four hits with three more inbound. Boston was gone, and Atlanta and Miami were next on the hit parade. Slightly closer, the military facilities at Redstone Arsenal had been obliterated, as had virtually every military airfield in the nation. Forts Hood, Campbell, Rucker, and Riley were gone; curiously untouched at the moment were Forts Bragg and Carson, but the latter was lined up for a major hit. Several weapons were tracking toward Colorado, and there was no doubt in Benchley’s mind that Cheyenne Mountain was the big prize.

  But Mother Russia hadn’t fared very well, either. Moscow had been hit twice, and three more weapons were inbound. Submarine-launched ICBMs were dropping their payloads across the eastern portion of the nation, as those weapons sailed unmolested over China. Benchley wondered if the Great Wall would serve the Chinese well in the coming years, when the starving, sickened hordes from Russia edged eastward. That there would likely be no Chinese left to worry about the situation seemed more likely.

  “General?”

  Benchley watched the weapons tracking across the big display, descending toward Colorado, moving fast now as they slipped through the atmosphere. Three of them converged on the general location of Cheyenne Mountain, and a moment later, they detonated. And then, they lost the missile feed. Cheyenne had either been destroyed, or the communications relays so badly damaged that Harmony was left in the dark.

  With nothing else to do at the moment, Benchley finally responded to Colonel Walters’s query. He tore his eyes away from the inactive display and looked at the wall-eyed officer, still standing by the vehicle operations desk.

  “What is it, Colonel?”

  “We’ve just picked up an ELT signal, a few dozen miles to the east,” Walters said.

  Benchley blinked. “An emergency location transponder? From who?”

  “One Truck,” Walters said.

  ***

  THERE WAS A HOLE in Mulligan’s memory, and no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t able to fill it up right away. He felt the rig was listing to the left somewhat, but he couldn’t remember how it had gotten there—his last coherent recollection was that he was driving SCEV One balls to the wall down one of the farming roads, blazing a path toward Scott City. And then, all hell had broken loose. His neck hurt, as did his shoulders and knees. He had a small cut on his cheek, and it burned, as if he had been stung by a hornet. He found a procedures manual lying in his lap, and he wondered what it was doing there, when it should have been tucked away in its pocket above the pilot’s seat. His sunglasses hung from his left ear; the right earpiece was broken, and the right lens was fractured, two thick cracks running right through it. He felt dizzy, disoriented, and an alarm kept repeating inside the cockpit, demanding attention. He moved his right arm, and the manual slipped off his lap and fell to the cockpit floor. After taking a moment to rub his eyes, he surveyed the instrument panel before him. All the displays were dark, but the master caution annunciator was illuminated, a single glaring, red eye in the center of the drab gray console. He recognized the alarm as the generator alert. The gen switch was in the ON position, but the generator had failed. Mulligan reached out with a trembling hand and moved the switch to the OFF position. The alarm fell silent.

  “CJ…?” Turning in the seat hurt like hell, and a bolt of agony rocketed up his back and into his neck, terminating in a ball of fire at the base of his skull. Mulligan groaned through clenched teeth as he screwed his eyes shut. He had felt this way once before, when he was sixteen, and he’d driven his uncle’s prized Mustang into a stone wall.

  Whiplash…how I’d hoped to never meet you again.

  “Can’t breathe,” CJ said softly from beside him.

  Mulligan opened his eyes. Moving more slowly this time, he turned in his seat, bit by bit, teeth still clenched against the pain in his back and neck. CJ was slumped against the far side of the cockpit. She was still in the co-pilot’s seat, but one of her shoulder straps had failed. The metal tongue at the end of the strap was probably what had taken out his sunglasses as it lashed across the cockpit, and left the painful welt on his cheek at the same time. Her eyes were wide and staring, directed out the filthy viewport before her, but she didn’t react to what lay outside.

  Mulligan did. He gasped when he saw the towering m
ushroom cloud standing just a mile or two distant, still seething with dull red light, a volcanic upthrust of dust and smoke and writhing fire. It loomed over the SCEV like some sort of malevolent sentinel, peering down at them from its great height, as if debating whether to smash the rig flat like some bothersome insect.

  Mulligan remembered.

  A fucking nuke went off. Almost right next to us.

  The hole in his memory began to fill itself then. He remembered the flash, and the SCEV’s electrical systems died in the EMP burst that the shielding couldn’t have dampened. He recalled watching the shock wave roar toward them like a filthy tidal wave, and it had slammed into the rig and sent it skidding across the road, where it reared up on its left tires and tumbled down the small embankment on the other side. The rig must’ve completed one full rotation, because it was currently right-side up. Mulligan saw bits and pieces of the rig’s MEP lying on the ground outside—shattered fiberglass, bent metal, popped panels that had been ripped off their hinges, a trail of destruction that clearly marked where the rig had rolled. He turned back to the instrument panel, gasping at the agony that ripped through him. A short row of old analog gauges were there, and he saw the rig’s pressure seal was still intact, reading fifteen point five millibars. The SCEV was still inflated, which meant despite the rollover, the vehicle was still pressurized. No radiation or other external contaminants were leaking inside.

  Mulligan slowly turned toward the mushroom cloud again. The red glow inside it was diminishing, but it was still growing. He knew it would soon reach a stage where it would be stabilized, and grow no more. Then, the cloud would begin to break down, its crown dissipating as the higher winds aloft tore at it. But the damage had been done. The weapon was of the ground-strike variety, and it had vaulted tons and tons of soil and other debris into the air. Every one of these particles would be irradiated, and as they drifted back to the surface, they would emit radiation that would in turn affect the local ecology. Other particles would be carried farther away from the blast side, riding the winds for dozens or even hundreds of miles before they too fell back to Earth like some sort of malicious snow, deadly and insidious. Mulligan watched the cloud for some time, looking for any indication that might be able to tell him which way the wind was blowing. Usually, he’d just glance at the air data sensor readout, but the displays were dark, and the sensors themselves were likely trashed from the rollover. He tried to remember the wind direction before the blast. Was it headed east, toward Scott City?