The Nuclear Winter

by Brian Thompson

  “Don’t move,” one of them said. I thought she sounded like Tactician Anderson.

  Liam’s next shot was quick and nicked my right shoulder, but hers hit his shooting hand. From the way he waved his hand and cursed at her, she’d shot to kill. Sure enough, when I got a good look at his body, two of the fingers on his right hand were missing. His entire skeleton disappeared, reappeared, and disappeared. The women fanned out and encircled me facing outward. One of them approached me from behind, cleared the foam from the back of my neck, and attached a new bodysuit. It materialized across my skin beneath the chemical encasing and immediately started diagnosing and treating my wounds. My limbs trembled. Although my body’s systems were failing, one by one, my powers and senses slowly returned to me.

  Mindful of her delicate condition, I said, “Get out of here,” to the lady guarding my back. “I’m radioactive, and — ”

  “It’s the life,” said the woman. I realized she didn’t sound like Anderson; she [XW126]was Anderson. They all were. The mannerisms were all slightly different, but they were her. That was her ability — to multiply herself — and fighting like a freaking martial artist.

  After silencing me, she and the others shot randomly around the room. The chemical scent couldn’t cover the golden puffs of smoke that smelled of rotten eggs. I caught a glimpse of him near the provenance crystal then across the room and back to the stone. He was…teleporting? He could do that, too? Well, Mom flew, and I was a walking nuclear disaster. Why not?

  Wherever or whenever he arrived, he’d stay a second at a time before popping out. I conjured a fireball in my palm, but by the time I grew it to a throwable size, he’d disappeared multiple times. Though he vanished and reappeared, it didn’t look as if he’d mastered it. We’d have to stop him before he did.

  I dropped the fireball at my feet and lost my breath. I was dizzy, as if the room was a top, and my stomach cramped. My forehead was blazing, and if the heads-up display was right, I had dehydration along with a 105.3-degree fever, ongoing blood loss, and kidneys on the edge of shutting down.

  “Help,” I managed before collapsing to my knees.

  Anderson’s clone helped me stand and continued shooting. The mask couldn’t filter out the horrible stench anymore and I dry heaved. Nothing came from my mouth because there was nothing in my stomach to give, not even liquid. Another sound rattled the building, louder than anything I remembered ever hearing, and it stopped just as quick. Two people in bodysuits like ours dropped through the hole in the ceiling that I’d created. My parents! Anderson absorbed her clones all at once, which was strange, and nodded to my father, who was pleased.

  “You came,” he said to her.

  She pointed to his left hand where the glowing ring had been, and said, “You called.”

  “Thank you.”

  Their interaction was awkward, topped only by the strange and sterile way she and my mother hugged one another and separated. I doubt their bodies even touched — just arms. Everyone knew each other except me. Who was Anderson to them? She’d called Mom “Rhapsody,” so, she did know her from the past. What was that she called Anderson…Sasha? Anderson was “Sasha,” my father’s wife?

  My powers were back and no longer suppressed but multiplying quicker than before. Everything turned bright white around me, and while I could not see much or feel anything, I could hear — all except for a faint buzzing that distorted their voices.

  Anderson stated what all of us had figured out to some degree. My powers were growing too dangerous — nuclear bomb-like levels. After spewing out mathematical calculations nobody understood, she said the best way to minimize casualties was elevation as high as possible before detonation.

  “Detonation,” I said over the buzzing, “like I’m going to explode? Won’t that kill me?”

  “No,” she said. “Your power flushes out of you and replenishes itself, like a rechargeable battery. You’ll probably absorb much of what you output.”

  But she said casualties, so I wouldn’t die, but people were going to die? Because of me. How many? Could she give me an estimate? Did she even know?

  “Mom,” I called out into nothingness. “Mom, get as far away as you can.”

  “I’ll stay with her,” my father said. Had he not been my hero before he said it, that right there probably clinched it for me. “I’ve been through this before. Remember the pit?”

  “Not with this wide range of radioactivity you haven’t.” Anderson turned to me. “She can fly by herself, elevate to a safe distance…you can fly, Lucy, can’t you?”

  The buzzing in my head got louder and shriller. “Not really, I mean, I can’t steer or direct myself…can we move this along a little?”

  My father argued back. “There’s a city of twenty thousand below us. Without shielding, the radiation will hit the coast. Underground, maybe, one of the mines?”

  I interrupted him. “Dad.”

  “Consider all of the variables, Jason,” Anderson said. “You can’t do everything, not after flying to get here. You can hardly catch your breath. And the mines? She’d cause earthquakes and poison the ground. She’s better at a high altitude, below the ozone layer, and we cross our fingers."

  Mom put her hands up and joined the argument. “She’s not a statistic or a variable, Sasha, she’s a human being,” She yelled and pointed at me. “My daughter, our daughter.”

  “Okay, so I’m not a parent, so I don’t know anything.”

  “I didn’t say that, but — ”

  “But what, Rhapsody? She’s a variable and a human being who will survive, no matter what,” she shot back. “Who or what are you willing to sacrifice to save her?”

  The pain intensified. This debate had to end. “Máma,” I cried on my knees. “Help me.”

  She joined me on the floor, wrapped her arm around my waist, and whispered, “Hasta el final” in my ear. I bent my left arm and grasped her hand. That’s when it happened. We vaulted through the hole I’d seared into the roof, past the transport Kendel piloted, and whooshed into the night sky. I fought back, but her clutch tightened. In the thin air, among the clouds, my voice was little more than an echo inside my mask. “Let me go. You’ll die!” [XW127]

  Apparently, becoming a human nuclear bomb meant you could not sob. I wanted more than anything for her to live and for me to die. My father’s presence made Mom’s face light up in a way I’d never seen her smile before and would never see again. She removed her mask. I did the same. What I wanted took a backseat to what was happening now. We looked at one another, and the light within me illuminated our space in the sky. Without air to breathe, Mom passed out first. I held her until it grew to be too much and closed my eyes.

  EPILOGUE

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  My stepmother, who I now called by her first name[XW128], cooked a hot breakfast that morning, like she had pretty much every Tuesday since my fifteenth birthday last year, also a Tuesday. The day I incinerated my mother.

  Belgian waffles, sausage, eggs, and coffee. I smelled it all, and my stomach barely grumbled.

  Same as the other twenty-six Tuesdays, I had no interest in eating that meal, the two afterward, or a snack of fresh fruit in between. I supposed it wouldn’t have made much of a difference to her if I went downstairs and kept up appearances. She did wake up overnight to nurse a newborn — the baby I’d seen in her womb that my father didn’t know about and who had survived radiation.

  They’d been estranged. All it took to bring them back together was a secret daughter and an Extinction Level Event. That and my mother disintegrating into the molecules that formed her. Sasha explained it to me like this. “She existed,” she’d said with her hands in fists, “and then” — she opened her hands — “[XW129]she didn’t. No pain. She went from light to light.”

  Sunlight made me think of her smiling down on me. The nuclear winter afterward made sure I didn’t see light for a while. I imagined a priest would’ve told me it wasn’t my fault she died, that
God had a purpose in everything He did. I guessed so. There was no rational explanation why the atmospheric changes spread across three state lines. On the holovision, the falling flakes from the sky where I’d detonated were chalky gray, like burnt paper. With the 4-D holovision setting on, I’d felt them and shuddered with the memory.

  Nothing, besides my mother, the compound, and a chunk of the mountain had been incinerated, but the nation was on continuing terrorist threat alert. International flights inbound shut down indefinitely. The Americas had become the world’s largest islands.

  I pried myself out of bed, forced my feet down the sprawling staircase, across the carpet,[XW130] and into the kitchen. My breath hitched in my chest. I hadn’t been in it in so long that I’d forgotten I’d insisted my father build a kitchen identical to the one in my old house down to the Italian marble tiles. Sasha had opened the kitchen drapes for the morning light to shine in, as if she knew.

  So many memories. And loss.

  “C’mon, Sandoval, I can’t eat all of this by myself,” Natalee said over a heaping plate of food. She had become my roommate, at least until her uncle and aunt could get a workable visa situation and take her to India. She’d never been, and her father’s brother was what she called “India rich,” which, I guessed was different than American rich? Either way, the paperwork was delayed, and I was glad. Otherwise, I’d be cooped up in this house by myself, and someone else would have to help me do online schoolwork. Mom always had said she’d regretted never giving me siblings, and now, I had two.

  My father didn’t mind her being around, and neither Sasha. Isabella, the doctor she’d taken Nat to, had given Nat a transfusion of radiated blood to keep her alive while I was busy blowing up. Thus far, she hadn’t shown any positive or negative side effects or superhuman abilities. If she did, Liam had murdered Isabella, so we were on our own. My parents wanted to be sure of both before she left.

  She’d tried to pull me out of my depression with everything she could think of, Sasha and my father, too, but nothing worked. Telling a psychotherapist that I was the cause of the nuclear winter on the East Coast and half the free world’s problems right now would be dangerous. Not like they could commit me to a hospital that could hold me.

  Without thinking much about it, I tore a waffle section off and ate it. It was perfectly sweetened without syrup, and[XW131] I happily chewed it. I was hungry after all. I finished the other quarter and then the other half, some bacon strips, a handful of blueberries,[XW132] and a glass of orange juice. Nat and I treated it like a competitive eating contest which, of course, I won. She got a lot closer to beating me than I thought she would. I’d dropped a dress size or two since the New Year, and she looked the exact same. Not fair.

  My father entered the kitchen, kissed my stepmother, and looked at me with shock. “Hey. Good morning, girls.”

  I nodded and waved, my mouth stuffed full of eggs, and ignored Nat. She thought he was hot, and the youth in his face made her forget he was thirty-two-years old.

  “Have you seen the news out of Beckley this morning?” Sasha asked him. “Residents claim they found glowing precious stones like gold diamonds buried in the soil.”

  All noise in the kitchen ceased. The area around the provenance heliodor was still so radioactive[XW133] no regular human being could approach hit. But, if part of it had exploded, and we did nothing, superhumans would be running all over the place. My father placed a black circular disc next to my right hand. “You won’t shred this one,” he told me. “You in?”

  I wrapped my fingers around the disc and shed my bathrobe.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  TO: My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for the ideas and the drive to finish.

  My wife and business partner Heather and our three daughters. Your sacrifice of time and support is everything.

  My parents, Bradley and Barbara, my stepmother, Debra, for her inspiration, and my editor on this project, Kelly Hartigan of Xterra Web (www.editing.xterra.com)

  This novel marked a new beginning of sorts. Thank you to my BETA reading team and those who advised me on content and names: Pam Alexander, Claire Allen, Makayla Baker, Tiandria Cotton, Julie Druckman, Alan Fowler, Greg Freeman, Marché Scott-Jenkins, Gina Johnston, Beth Lowe, Donna Mengel, Jackie Rodriguez, Jhoseline Sanchez, Susan Scherrfel, Michelle Sutton, Meredith Talmage, Laramy Wells, and Jean Williamson.

  A special thank you to Christine Mayfield, Amy Purcell for “Gail’s Law,” Jeff and Diane Ransom, Richard and Virginia Dietrich, Phyllis Conway, the Lowe family, Kendel McAuliffe, Allie Petree, Angela Shamsid-Deen, and April Canavan.

  Discover more by Brian Thompson

  The Reject High series chronicles the journeys of Jason Champion, Rhapsody Lowe, and Sasha Anderson from high-risk kids tossed away by the system to confronting dangerous foes and finding a power all their own.

  Reject High ISBN: 978-0-989-10560-6 * Paperback * 270 pages

  Sophomore Freak ISBN: 978-0-989-10563-7 * Paperback *258 pages

  Forgotten ISBN: 978-0989105644* Paperback * 300 pages

  Champion Immortal ISBN: 978-0989105668* Paperback * 294 pages

  Available in print/electronic format at www.amazon.com

  www.greatnationpublishing.com

  * * *

  [XW1]Only hyphenated when used as an adjective before a noun.

  [XW2]Verb tense—should be past tense as with the rest of the narrative.

  [XW3]Verb tense—should be past tense as with the rest of the narrative.

  [XW4]1Comma after adverbial clause introducing independent clause.

  [XW5]Compound modifier. Hyphenate.

  [XW6]Oxford comma.

  [XW7]1No comma. And is not connecting two independent clauses or separating three or more items/actions.

  [XW8]Compound modifier. Hyphenate/.

  [XW9]Comma before please when it follows a request or command.

  [XW10]The proper name for GED. Not capitalized.

  [XW11]1A comma is not used when a subordinate (dependent) clause follows an independent clause (complete sentence). A comma is used between the two when the subordinate clause introduces the independent clause.

  [XW12]Compound modifier. Hyphenate.

  [XW13]Added to eliminate sentence fragment.

  [XW14]1Comma after adverbial clause introducing independent clause.

  [XW15]Note: This could be a potential issue with some readers, particularly those who prefer the term African American. As the nurse’s race/skin color are not important to the plot, I’ve deleted this.

  It’s your choice to delete it, leave it as is, or change it.

  [XW16]Compound modifier. Hyphenate.

  [XW17]Compound modifier. Hyphenate.

  [XW18]Compound modifiers formed with adverbs ending in LY are generally not hyphenated.

  [XW19]Lay vs. lie.

  [XW20]1Comma after prepositional phrase introducing independent clause.

  [XW21]Comma before parenthetical element.

  [XW22]Verb tense—should be past tense as with the rest of the narrative.

  [XW23]Compound modifiers. Hyphenate. If you don’t like the look of the suspended hyphens, recast to: the back side of a jet painted shiny white, blue, and gold.

  [XW24]Comma before direct address.

  [XW25]Lay vs. lie.

  [XW26]Lowercase. Not his name.

  [XW27]Compound modifier. Hyphenate.

  [XW28]1Comma before coordinating conjunction connecting independent clauses.

  [XW29]Comma before direct address.

  [XW30]Verb tense—should be past tense as with the rest of the narrative.

  [XW31]Only hyphenated when used as an adjective before a noun.

  [XW32]Proper form for plural of Martinez

  [XW33]Comma before interrupter.

  [XW34]Revised. As originally worded, her fingers were wondering.

  [XW35]1No comma. A comma should not be used to replace an implied that.

  [XW36]Oxford comma. />
  [XW37]1Comma before coordinating conjunction connecting independent clauses.

  [XW38]Only hyphenated when used as an adjective before a noun (e.g., a face-to-face meeting).

  [XW39]Comma after subordinate clause.

  [XW40]Proper format for dialogue interrupted by thought/action without a dialogue tag.

  [XW41]Shined vs. shone. The verb shine has two past-tense forms: shined and shone. Shined and shone are competing acceptable past tense forms of the verb shine. Use shined with an object and shone without an object. Example: She (subject) shined (verb) the flashlight (object). The sun (subject) shone (verb) brightly (adverb -- no object).

  [XW42]Oxford comma.

  [XW43]Farther vs. further.

  [XW44]Verb tense—should be past tense as with the rest of the narrative.

  [XW45]1No comma. A comma should not be used to replace an implied that.

  [XW46]Compound modifier. Hyphenate.

  [XW47]Love this. Great example of Lucy’s attitude.

  [XW48]1No comma. And is connecting the two facts: heat rays and razed half the house.