by Jeff Carlson
Ulinov was both a patriot and a student of his country’s rise to prominence. He’d caught the entry on the manifest that American analysts apparently had not, because he was certain of a double cross. Perhaps the Americans were too focused on their own rebels. Besides, the generations-old test was mostly remembered by its code name, “Ivan,” or the nickname “Tsara Bomba,” the Emperor’s Bomb.
He could not gloat. Instead, he felt pity. Leadville had transformed some of the nearby old mines into command bunkers, and Ulinov believed there was also new digging and underground construction here in town...but it would make no difference.
The 1961 fireball had been seen farther than six hundred miles away, lifting nearly thirty-three thousand feet from sea level. The seismic shock was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth. To limit fallout, because most of the drift was across Russian Siberia, the bomb had used lead tampers instead of the more typical uranium-238. Ulinov assumed this device would be similarly modified. Land had become far too precious to contaminate hundreds of surrounding miles.
This was the final gambit. The Russians had been bled down to cold, savage veterans poised too long on the brink of annihilation, a stateless population of warriors with one chance at eradicating the only superpower left in the world. The plane must be carrying the largest warhead they’d been able to pry out of their abandoned stockpiles—or more likely several warheads—because a missile launch would have been detected and answered in kind. Now it was too late.
* * * *
Ulinov fought them when the security unit tried to jam him into the truck after Kendricks. He wanted to feel the sky and the white mountains around him, no matter how foreign this place might be. He looked for the sun again—not the plane, but the warm, pleasant sun—as engines and shouts rose all around him. Radio static. The guns. It was the death-cry of a city.
For days, Ulinov had wrestled with his certainty and his fear, but he never tried to run. If he had, he would’ve alerted the Americans. But he hoped his people would understand. He knew what was coming.
He knew, and he stayed.
14
In California, Ruth flinched from the light in the east, an incandescent ripple like small suns popping suddenly in the morning haze. Three? Four?
At least four, she thought, trying to blink the hot white pinpoints from her eyes, but the light had been searing and unnatural. The fine hair on the back of her neck stood up like rigid metal pins. For several seconds, she didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. It was as if her body was a tuning fork, quivering and hyper-alert. The rocky slope under her feet was still and cold, but the breeze out of the west made a tangle of currents as it swept through the tiny crowd surrounding her. Then the warm people reacted. The eleven of them clotted together, protecting each other, grabbing at backpacks and jacket sleeves to increase every connection.
“What the fuck was that!?” Alex screamed, and Samantha said, “Mike—”
“Aah!” Mike had twisted down onto one knee, clutching his face. By chance, he must have been gazing directly at the target when those man-made stars flared upon the earth.
Lord God, Ruth thought. How many more had exploded in other places? There could be strikes all across the planet, obliterating the last scattered fragments of humankind. What if India or the Chinese had finally convinced themselves to take that step before anyone else did?
The enormity of it walked through her like a ghost and Ruth staggered, numb and senseless, and then Cam was there like always, shouldering through the group to catch her arm.
Hiroki moaned as Cam jostled by, a low noise like a dog. The others were also beginning to wake from their shock. Alex and Sam knelt to help Mike, but Newcombe was checking his watch and Ruth didn’t understand that at all.
“Mike! Oh my God, Mike!” Samantha cried.
Cam’s expression was fierce. “Are you okay?”
“What?”
“Look at me. Are you okay?” His brown eyes were intent and unguarded, and Ruth stared at him. The wind felt clean in her hair. She smelled pine trees and damp earth.
They had hiked down the eastern slope beneath the Scouts’ islands to give a send-off to Brandon and Mike, who planned to explore the nearest peaks across the thin valley, then return before showing themselves to anyone. D Mac was still undecided. The method for sharing the nanotech hadn’t helped. Mike thought it was cool, but even Brandon had hesitated at drinking from the splash of blood that Cam drew from his left hand.
Ruth had considered less gruesome ways. The nanotech was smaller than a virus and could be absorbed through the slightest imperfections in the skin. They should be able to pass the vaccine merely by rubbing their spit against the boys’ arms or with something as easy as a kiss, but they had to be certain. Smeared upon the boys’ skin, the vaccine might drift away or remain inert, and a kiss might only leave the thinnest trace to be exhaled and lost. Ingesting the blood was foolproof. The nanotech was also much hardier than a virus, so it was sure to survive their stomach acids and move into the bloodstream.
Still, drinking it was ugly. The boys were scared despite Cam’s encouragement, and Ruth had been bracing herself for his good-bye. He’d kept away from her all morning. He’d also brought his backpack. Cam and Newcombe agreed it was best to keep their weapons and gear with them at all times, no matter how much they liked the Scouts. Ruth had worn her own pack because of the data index, yet she could easily see how much Cam wanted to go east with Mike and Brandon. It would be very like him to attach himself to their task, offering his experience and his strength. He’d already given Mike his binoculars, two cigarette lighters, and a small amount of sterile gauze and disinfectant, equipping the boys as best he could.
But what if there are more bombs?
Ruth’s terror was a huge weight and she reflexively pushed against Cam, trying to get past. He stiffened at her hands on his chest, misunderstanding. Then she felt the same bright fear transfer to him. There was a slanting pile of granite behind Cam and he pulled her toward it, using the rock as a blast shield.
“Here!” he shouted.
The others came after them, slow and dazed. “That was a nuke!” Alex yelled. “That had to be a nuke, right? They’re nuking each other!” The boy set Mike against a boulder and tugged Mike’s hands away from his wet face, trying to examine the damage. Brandon joined them and then Newcombe and D Mac. Ed directed Kevin and Hiroki into the safe space and everyone knelt down.
Even packed tightly together, they were a miniscule knot of lives and Ruth looked at the sky again with that quiet reaching feeling. Nothing had changed up there. A wisp of clouds ran on the breeze, impossibly calm.
Newcombe squeezed in beside Alex in front of Mike. “Open your eyes,” he said. “You have to open your eyes so we can see, kid.”
“I can’t,” Mike groaned.
Ruth laid her fingers over the etched stone in her pocket. “Was that Utah?” she asked. “Where was that!?” The need in her voice made her ashamed, because that scorching light was a horrible thing to wish on anyone...but if the flash had been in Colorado...if the holocaust was that far away...
“We should try the radio,” Newcombe said. “Get the radio.”
“Yeah.” Cam shrugged off his pack and set it in Kevin’s lap. They were clumped too close together for anything else. He pulled out a canteen and a bundle of cloth, then removed the thin control box and its aluminum headset.
“There aren’t any burns,” Newcombe said to Mike. “Can you see anything?”
“A little. I see shapes.”
“Good, that’s good.” Newcombe bent around and extended one hand for the radio.
“No,” Cam said slowly.
Ruth glanced back and forth between them, surprised that Cam would distrust him now, until she realized at the same time as Newcombe that Cam was no longer interested in them. She turned. They all did.
“Oh, fuck,” Alex said.
Peering beyond the line of rocks, Ruth saw an
immense arc of distortion in the atmosphere, a convulsing, tangled shock wave of force and heat. It spread like a circle on the surface of a pond, although it was so big that they could only see one part of the swelling hole in the sky.
Dully, she realized it must be hundreds of miles away—and hundreds of miles across. It was growing swiftly, rolling west against the normal flow of weather. It churned the air apart, wiping away the spotty clouds.
“Where was that!?” Ruth asked again, and her voice was high and sharp like a boy’s.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Samantha said.
“What do we do?” Cam said, even as he looked down at the radio in his hand. He offered it to Newcombe, but the soldier was staring at the sky like all of them. He didn’t answer until Cam pressed the gear against his shoulder.
“Yeah. Uh.” Newcombe groped for the headset.
“The radiation,” Cam said.
Then the side of the mountain across the valley from them seemed to jump. Dirt rippled up from the slope in patches and streaks. There were sharp cracks from the rock like gunfire. In the lower areas, trees swayed. Some toppled. To the southeast, a red cloud of bugs swirled out of the forest in confusion.
The quake shuddered down through fifteen miles of mountainside and valley in the blink of an eye. Then it raced over their peak. The ground lurched. One of the boulders above them scraped free and dropped—no more than inches, but it clapped against another granite slab with a bone-grating sound. Chips of rock pelted the group and opened two cuts on Brandon’s cheek. Most of them screamed. Cam dragged Ruth away, stepping on Samantha, falling onto Ed and Hiroki.
The earth was already stable again. It was only their own crowded scrambling that extended the chaos and D Mac and Newcombe shouted at everyone else. “Stop! Stop!”
“We’re okay, it’s done!”
Then the ground shook again. Ruth gasped and stayed down, although this movement was very different. It was lighter, an aftershock.
“It’s okay!” Newcombe shouted, but Hiroki had begun to moan again and Alex yelled and yelled without words.
“Yaaa! Yaaaa!”
Threads of dust and pollen came over the west side of the mountain behind them, lifted into the wind by the quake. It formed banners of brown and yellow, rushing east.
Ruth lay on her side in the open just beyond the pile of granite, watching the unimaginable dent in the sky. Cam moved to help her again. As his hands closed on her waist, she felt a glimmer of something other than mute animal fear. Gratitude. His attempt at escaping the rock hadn’t amounted to much, but it had shown his priorities. He’d left everyone behind for her.
Samantha was weeping now and Alex paced in short vicious steps between the other boys, pressing his fists tight against his head. “Those bastards!” he said. “Those bastards!”
Everyone else was hushed. The instinct to hide was overpowering, and Brandon made little noise as his father dabbed at his cuts with a dirty shirt sleeve, trying to stop the bleeding.
“Nine and a half minutes,” Newcombe remarked, studying his watch again.
His self-control was incredible and Ruth attacked it without thinking, full of envy and disbelief. “What are you doing!” she shouted.
“Approximately nine and a half minutes from detonation until the first quake,” Newcombe said. He almost seemed to be talking to himself, as if memorizing the information, and Ruth knew he’d write it in his notebook as soon as he got the chance.
“What does that mean?” she asked. “It must have been close—”
“I don’t know,” Newcombe said.
“It must have been Utah or even someplace in Nevada!”
“I don’t know.”
Samantha tucked herself against D Mac, weeping. Hiroki and Kevin quickly scrunched in on either side and kept their heads down. Ruth discovered she was also crying. When had that started? She rubbed her hand against the wetness on her face and looked away from the children. She wanted so badly to lean into Cam and close her eyes, but she hadn’t earned the right. She could only cross her good arm over her cast and hug herself.
He was preoccupied with Newcombe and Alex anyway. The boy had crouched with the two men, forming a tense wall around the radio. They found nothing except crackling white noise, channel after channel. “David Six, this is George,” Newcombe said. “David Six, do you copy?”
Static.
“Does anyone copy my signal? Come back. Anyone. Do you read me? This is California.”
Static.
“I know it works,” Newcombe said. “See? The batteries are good and we must’ve been far enough away that the circuitry wasn’t shorted out by the electromagnetic pulse.”
Alex said, “So what’s wrong?”
“The sky. Look at it. Too much disturbance.” Newcombe pulled his binoculars and dared a few glances to the east, then north and south. “That was very big,” he said softly. “As far as I can tell, it was way out over the horizon, right?”
Ruth pleaded with him. “We couldn’t even see it if it was in Colorado, could we? It’s too far.”
“I don’t know.” Newcombe unfolded their map of North America and set his notebook beside it, scribbling down 9.5. “Leadville is what, seven hundred miles from here? Call it seven hundred and twenty. But who else would be a target? White River?”
“Wait, I know this,” Mike said with his palms still over his eyes. “With the curvature of the planet...Seven hundred miles, we could only see it if it was, uh...”
“White River already got their asses handed to them,” Newcombe said. “Why hit ’em again? Especially with a nuke. Even a neutron bomb. The land’s too precious.”
“We could only see it if it was sixty miles high,” Mike told them. “No way.”
“It must have been in the mountains, though,” Newcombe said. “There’s nobody to bother with underneath the barrier, right? So the strike had to be at elevation.”
“Leadville’s only two miles up.”
“But it looked like a flashlight, right? Shit, look at it now,” Newcombe said, forgetting that Mike was half-blind. “It went straight through the sky.”
“The atmosphere’s just not sixty miles tall,” Mike insisted, but he was wrong. Life-sustaining amounts of oxygen could not be found even as low as the tip of Mount Everest, at twenty-nine thousand feet, and yet Ruth knew that the gaseous layers enshrouding the planet actually rose beyond the orbit of the space station, more than two hundred miles above sea level, although the farthest reaches of the exosphere were thin indeed.
Ruth had to believe her own eyes. She couldn’t ignore Newcombe’s training. Leadville was the most powerful city on the continent—the most high-value target—and a doomsday bomb at that altitude might easily have sent its light all the way through the sky. Maybe the flash had bounced. There was no question that the column of heat behind the light had bubbled up far above the cloud layer, the force of it reverberating back and forth for hundreds of miles.
Would it reach them? The radiation, Cam had said, and Ruth felt the wild seesaw of emotions in her change again. She began to mourn. She hadn’t made many friends during her short time in Leadville, but the ISS crew was there along with nearly everyone else she knew in the world, James Hollister, her fellow researchers, and other people who had done their best to help. Four hundred thousand men and women. In all likelihood they had just been vaporized—and yet she felt ambivalent about Gary LaSalle and the weapons tech he’d developed in support of the insane, brutal schemes of Kendricks and the president’s council.
Was that what this was about? Who had launched the missile, the rebels? A foreign enemy?
Ruth laid her good hand on the dirt and traced her fingers through one boot print, as if the broken tread marks were some sort of Braille. As if there were answers.
“It couldn’t be Colorado,” Mike said.
“Look, kid, somebody just shot off a few warheads!” Newcombe yelled. “You—”
Cam stopped them. “Easy,�
�� he said. He had been quiet for several minutes and Ruth realized this wasn’t the first time she’d seen him step aside to gauge everyone’s state of mind before neatly solving a problem. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter!?” Alex shouted.
“Whatever happened, we have to decide what to do. I say we all get moving. Today. Now.” Cam gestured east into the valley below them. “We need to try to reach as many other people as possible and get off the mountains.”
For an instant, there was only the wind.
“Before there are more bombs,” Cam said.
“Yeah. Yeah, all right.” Newcombe glanced at the Scouts and their stunned faces, Mike with his hands still on his eyes, Brandon squeezing his palm against his bloody cheek.
“We split up,” Cam said. His voice was aggressive now, and he pointed at Ed and Alex. “Three groups. You, you, and us. That just makes the most sense.” He kept his back to the hole in the sky, staring at them instead. “We have to do this,” he said. “Get up. We’re going.”
* * * *
D Mac and Hiroki chased Ed back up to their camp to grab the rest of their packs and sleeping bags as Cam unwrapped his left hand again. He reopened the knife wound he’d made earlier, bleeding too much into a tin cup.
“No,” Samantha said to her brother. “Please, no.”
Brandon shook his head. “We can’t stay here, Sam. You know we can’t.”
Alex drank from the cup quickly and Kevin did the same, but Alex took it back from him when Samantha refused. “He’s right,” Alex said. “Come on. He’s right.”
“Stay with me,” she said.
The ground trembled lightly again and they heard one of boys shout on top of the mountain. Then the earth heaved. Ruth was still sitting down but immediately lost her balance. She thought she bounced. Cam and Newcombe slammed down on either side of her and someone kicked her arm, a bolt of pain. Her mind went white. Somewhere there was screaming, Samantha and Brandon and herself.