After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

  Well, maybe not. Max didn’t have to follow me; I mean, maybe Nike could blow his nuke, sure, but Max was ready to die. He knew that the radiation from his own nuke was slowly killing him. That gave him an inner peace, he said—an edge, I thought. Anyway, Max said he’d stick with me. I thanked him for that.

  Max and I sat around the big table in the Talk Roadhouse with K-2, Nivakti, and Rindi, sipping tea. I told them about my nuke. I told them I’d have to go with the Wonderblimp, that I couldn’t risk staying with them. I finished my tea, refused a second cup, and rose to leave. Rindi put a hand on my shoulder, pushed me back down.

  “Maybe if we got up on Denali, on the other side,” she said, “maybe Nike couldn’t fire your nuke.”

  I shook my head. “It won’t work. He’d bounce a signal off the clouds or something. He’d fly around until he could see me, and then where would you be? Dead with me.”

  “Climb the mountain with us,” Nivakti said. “K-2 has given us permission to join a party. We’re going to make an assault from the west, take dogs as high as we can go.”

  “It’s never been done from Sue City,” Rindi said. “Never, not from this low down. Dogs, Holmes. Dogs up Denali.”

  I bit my lip, thought about it. Maybe I could run. Max settled it, though. “Our place is on the Wonderblimp now,” he said. “We both have nukes. Holmes must stay so they never use his. And I must go in case I have to use mine.”

  “Max . . .” I said. “You would fire your nuke?”

  He tapped his chest. “They can fire my nuke. But I can fire my own as well. I would fire it, yes. This madness must stop now, here and forever. I would fire the nuke.” He stood up, and Rindi and Nivakti rose, too.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Isn’t there something that we can do?” Rindi asked.

  “Yeah,” Max said. “Take care of the dogs.”

  They followed us to the doorway, helped us struggle into coats. Rindi dashed outside, ran to the dogs yapping outside the lodge.

  “Wait,” she said.

  We went outside. Rindi came back a moment later with Alice on a leash. “Take Alice. She’s a little old to climb the mountain. You might be able to use her.” Rindi winked. I smiled. Old Alice had gotten me out of a jam before.

  I took Alice, then hugged Rindi. Nivakti put his arms on my shoulders, and smiled. “Fear not, tannak,” he said. “We will meet you on the mountain.”

  As I walked out the door and into the cold, I smiled at that. For some reason I knew he was right. We would all meet on the mountain, the mountain that would take our breath away.

  That afternoon the Wonderblimp left Sue City and headed east, toward the Great One.

  CHAPTER 16

  Red tracers flew into the night and shattered the glass of the gun nacelle. Pocketa, pocketa, pocketa, the bullets jumped along the arc of the bubble, sending spider webs out from moon craters in the glass. I’d been about to slide down into the nacelle when I heard the bullets whiz by; sense had told me to perhaps wait a minute and contemplate the inner serenity of the armored catwalk.

  I ran back to the intercom and slapped the button. “They’re shooting at us!” I yelled, but I think Nike figured that out.

  “Shoot back!” he said.

  I looked out a port in the catwalk, figured out how those tracers had found the nacelle: the spotlight was just aft of the bubble, making it glow like a cat’s eye.

  “Kill the spot!” I yelled back. Someone complied, and the lake below disappeared into a pool of dark. I ran forward, slid down into the nacelle, wiping shards of plastic out of the seat. The muzzle flash might give them a target, but then, their muzzle flash would give me a target—whoever they were.

  The Wonderblimp had been coming down on a lake Nike’s map called Che Lake. Che had been like this big war hero before the Zap, but I couldn’t figure out why he had a lake named after him out here. Nike had wanted to land somewhere south of the Denali massif “to do some repairs,” he’d said. I’d found the lake—it was a big lake, ten miles long— and I figured it might be a nice, safe, easy place to land.

  Two out of three wasn’t bad, but the third one—safe— could be crucial. I didn’t know who or what was shooting at us—forget why—but when we turned the spot on and came in low over the lake for a landing, some jerk down in the woods started firing up at us.

  Nike flicked the running lights off, too, and swung the blimp around, ready to make another pass over the woods. The tracers had come from a clearing on the edge of the woods, among a group of buildings. The moon wasn’t up, but the white of the snow reflected the stars, and we could see well enough to strike. I hoped they couldn’t see the dark of the blimp well enough to strike back. If they were smart, I thought, they would look for a shape that blotted the stars, and shoot back at it. Maybe.

  I slipped a belt of bullets through the machine gun—a damn fortune in bullets—and hoped the sucker wouldn’t jam like it had jammed on me back at God Weird. Christ, I hoped these weren’t God Weirders, either.

  “Holmes,” Nike’s voice said over the intercom, “we’re going to pivot on our nose. You just keep wailing away until you’ve liquidated that nest, okay?”

  “Right.” I knew what Nike had in mind; I’d seen him do the maneuver coming into Ship Creek. Bron would whip the elevators and rudder so that the Wonderblimp would be doing a slow bank around its nose. What I had to figure out was the point to pivot around. “Take it in fast,” I told Nike, “and on my signal, pivot.”

  “Got it, Holmes.”

  I had to think why I was risking my ass to save the Wonderblimp. Nike had told me he’d put a nuke in my chest, and if I tried to run, he’d blow it. Wouldn’t it be kind of smart, I thought, to let those guys down there get the Wonderblimp? I had to wonder, too, why Nike let me risk my life. Lucy had hinted that they had some arcane plan for me, and the thought occurred to me that said plan might work best if I wasn’t ground up into hamburger.

  Whoosh, whiz, wham, these thoughts went through my mind, but they were only fleeting thoughts. Someone was firing on me; therefore, I had to fire back. Maybe if the bullets hadn’t been firing so fast I would have come to my senses. Yeah, maybe. And maybe I would have gotten shot anyway. Screw it. I shot back.

  The blimp swung around over the lake, about two hundred yards out. I heard the props kick on full throttle, then felt the forward elevators creak and the nose drop down. We descended to about two hundred feet, then held steady. The shore rushed toward me, then the clearing. I fired a few rounds, watched the tracers slide down, dancing across the snow. I saw tracers fly back out of a small building just to the left of a large central building. I fired a few more rounds at the building, saw the bullets flick into the log walls. A round answered me, and I heard the dull thwack of bullets striking the heavy plastic armor of the bottom of the blimp.

  “Pivot over the small building to the left of the main one,” I told Nike. The blimp moved slightly to the left, came in low over the building, then the nose shot down and I was thrown hard to the left, like I was in the bottom of a tornado. I smiled, pulled back on the machine gun, and squeezed back the trigger.

  Fire flew down from the blimp, tracers and incendiary bullets every sixth shell screaming down into the bunker. The machine-gun fire was a drill boring into the house, a drill with a bit of fire. The machine gun on the ground fired back, then fell silent. A figure ran out of the bunker as it burst into flames; the body fell still in the snow.

  “Pull out,” I said over the intercom. “We got him.”

  The nose straightened out, then we leveled off. Nike lit the searchlight, swung it over the snow until he found the body. The gunner shouldn’t have made it as far as he had. A splotch of red spread on his back, and a puddle of blood pooled out under his torso. I felt my stomach rise to my tongue, then watched in morbid fascination as my dinner flew out of my mouth and into the bottom of the nacelle. The puke drained out the star-burst holes and into the night.

  * * *


  I’d wasted a good dinner for nothing—oh, maybe for remorse, but not complete remorse. The gunner wasn’t dead and she wasn’t a he, either. Bron swung down in a rope and monkey harness and picked the body up; she screamed when he lifted her, so we lowered a stretcher and yanked her up to Doc North, pronto. Turned out a bullet had only winged her—and, okay, with a .50 caliber bullet, “winged” isn’t so pleasant—but hadn’t done anything permanent, like kill her. We set the blimp down on the lake, and, while Doc North did his cutting and stitching, bedded the Wonderblimp down for the night. What was good for the blimp was good for me; I slept, too.

  Morning broke like a fire alarm slicing through a bad dream. I swung my feet over the edge of the double bunk, almost hit Max on the head as he kneeled over, tying his tennis shoes. I plonked to the floor, did a few toe touches, then slipped into my own shoes. Maybe an adrenalin hangover does that to you, or maybe it’s getting shot at and not dying. Anyway, life felt a little better. But I felt like a rat for being in such good shape while that woman was lying back in sick bay with a few inches of flesh sliced through her.

  I tapped softly on the sick bay door, and Doc waved me in. The gunner snored loudly, big chest rising and falling like a mountain range in an earthquake. She had cropped hair, a few long strands lying across the pillow. I walked over to her, stared down at her face, and then smiled.

  Suz. It was like old home week. Suz from the Ship Creek Militia. I reached down, brushed a strand of hair out of her face. She squirmed around on the bed, rolled over, and opened her eyes. Suz squinted at me, then smiled.

  “Holmes,” she said. “Good to see you again.”

  “Don’t speak so soon,” I said. “I was shooting the machine gun last night.”

  “You?” She grimaced, and I could see the pain shoot through her. Doc North stirred, came over, and stood next to us.

  “Cut it short, Holmes,” he said.

  “Sure.” I put a hand on her forehead. “I’m sorry, Suz, but you were shooting at us.”

  “’S okay,” she said. “All’s fair, you know.”

  “Right. Why, Suz?”

  “Big Mac. We’ve been tracking the Wonderblimp since it left Ship Creek. We were going to take you at Sue City, but K-2 wouldn’t let us. I was manning the bunker out here in case you came over.” She smiled. “We were spread a little thin. You did some good shooting.”

  “You too,” I said, thinking of how she almost peppered my butt. “It wasn’t worth it.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Huh?”

  “Enough,” Doc North said.

  But I wasn’t going to let it stop there. “Big Mac’s a ruse. That stuff about paying for blimpers was a bunch of crap.”

  “Now,” the doc said.

  “I better go,” I told Suz. “When you’re better . . . ?”

  “Uh-huh.” She drifted back into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  Lucy sat next to me at breakfast. Max watched over Suz in sick bay; we’d agreed to take shifts, least we could do for her. Both of us remembered the break she had given us at the center. Ruby had shot a moose that morning; we were eating fresh moose steaks for breakfast, welcome after weeks of dried jerky stuff we’d had to make do with. No eggs, alas. I’d have killed for eggs.

  Lucy looked like her old self: femme fatale in blue hair. She had the fishing lure earrings on and her old leather glove. Back in action. Her braid swished over and tickled my chin.

  “Need some reading done today, Holmes.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said around a mouth full of moose steak.

  “Serious reading.”

  “Sure. Bring it to sick bay. I’m helping the doc watch Suz.”

  “The gunner? Why do you feel for her? She tried to shoot you.”

  I shrugged. “We go back. It’s a long story. Least she tried to kill me fairly.”

  “Holmes . . .” she said. She ran a finger down my chin. “I had to put the nuke in. You know that.”

  I stared at her, looked away. “Screw it, Luce. Just get me the reading.”

  “Holmes . . .”

  I finished my steak, washed it down with coffee. “Bring it to sick bay.” I got up and walked aft.

  * * *

  Suz was sipping a milk shake through a straw when Lucy came into sick bay. She raised an eyebrow at Lucy, glanced at me. I nodded.

  “That’s the one,” I said. “Suz, Lucy. Lucy’s the blimper you wanted to get your paws on.”

  “Huh,” she said.

  “Read it,” Lucy said, tossing me a thick gray book. “When you’re done, page me. I want a report.”

  “Sure.” I looked at Suz, and shrugged. “Eat your dinner,” I said, and opened the book.

  The book had no title on the cover, but it did have a word that could make it a best seller in certain circles, if there had been enough people left in the world to make such a thing as a best seller possible. “Secret,” the book said on the cover, and the word was repeated on a piece of tape stuck over the leaves of the book. I snapped the tape and opened it.

  “Operating Manual for a Five Kiloton EMP Bomb,” the title page read. My breath got a little short when I read that, and I could feel my heart beat a tad faster. The Zap bomb, and here was an owner’s manual. I flipped through the pages, scanned headings, looked at charts and drawings. It wasn’t hard to get the gist of it: in nice little squiggles that made words that made thought that made concepts become real was the how, what, where, and why of running a doomsday machine.

  I fell into the science and power and mystery of the Zap bomb, learned how the bomb worked (“The EMP bomb is essentially a standard many-megaton thermonuclear device designed to be exploded at high altitude.”), what it did (“At altitudes as low as 20,000 feet, the EMP bomb can produce an electromagnetic pulse capable of crippling unshielded electronic equipment within a 500-mile radius.”), and what it could do (“Some research indicates that an EMP bomb may have an adverse effect on the neurological systems of certain mammalian species, including man.”). The 457-page report told all, told more than I really wanted to know. After sections subtitled “Theory” and “Function” and “Test Results” was a small chapter titled “Operating the EMP Bomb.” The meat of the matter.

  “Garçon,” Suz said.

  I emerged from the world of the word. “What?”

  “Garçon,” she said again, waving the glass. “More soup, please.”

  I smiled, took the glass, got up and poured her another milkshake. The EMP, I thought. But that was history. Why could Lucy possibly need to know how to fire the Zap bomb? I took the glass back to Suz, sat down again, and read the final chapter.

  The Zap bomb, I read, was a hydrogen bomb with a fusion core that had a piggyback fission bomb strapped to it. Just like the nukes the Wonderblimp gave out needed a football to be fired, the Zap bomb needed a nuke to fire it—three nukes, actually. The fission nukes ignited the deuterium-tritium core, and the resulting fusion implosion gave off neutrons that whammed into uranium 238, which caused another fission explosion. For convenience in handling, and to prevent accidental explosions, the Zap bomb came in two parts: the core and the nuke igniters (it used three nukes for redundancy). Whoever had designed the Zap bomb had built it so that a knapsack nuke could be used as the igniter. Three nukes—that meant three people died to fire the Zap bomb.

  My hands sweated as I read the book, and I could feel my heart itch. I wondered if the original Zap had been fired in this manner, and then I thought, hell no, if it had, the war might never have come. This Zap bomb wasn’t standard issue. This Zap bomb was a special device, a very special device. I set the book down and stared at the bulkhead in front of me.

  “Heavy reading?” asked Suz.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like a nap,” she said. She handed me the empty glass, and I let her fall into slumber. Lucky lady. I had to go talk to Lucy.

  * * *

  I paged Lucy over the
blimp’s intercom, and she told me to meet her in her cabin. I banged on the bulkhead next to the door, and she told me to come in.

  Her hair fell loose in writhing waves to her waist. She sat on the edge of her bunk nearly naked, wearing thin panties and a sleeveless undershirt. She had her glove off and was combing the tangles out of her wet hair with her hand. Lucy smiled as I came in, lifted her head up, and tossed that blue mane over her shoulder. She patted the bed next to her.

  “Sit,” she said.

  I walked to a chair opposite her, shoved her blimper blues onto the floor, and sat down. I laid the big gray book on my lap, knocked on it with my knuckles.

  “Quite a tome there,” I said.

  “I hope it wasn’t real deep reading.”

  I shrugged. “I only read the dirty parts.” She smiled at my joke and I smiled back, then thought about what she’d done to me and Max, and let the smile grow into a grimace. “It’s pretty mean reading.”

  “Mean is as mean does. What does the book say?”

  “It’s an operating manual for an EMP bomb. Tells you how to arm the sucker, what it will do, the whole thing. It probably would be pretty practical if you had an EMP bomb.”

  “Yeah,” she said, grinning. “It would.” Lucy let her hair fall forward in front of her face, finished combing it. She swept her hair back over her shoulder, smiled at me.

  “Your bunk comfortable?” she asked.

  “Max snores,” I said. “Yeah, it’s all right.”

  “You liked my bed before,” she said, patting the mattress.

  “That was before,” I said. “Lucy, I—”

  “Why, Holmes?”

  “Things changed.”

  “They can change again.”

  “Not now, Lucy,” I said. “Maybe—” But I kept thinking of the nuke in my heart. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Just thought I’d ask.” Lucy picked up her jumpsuit, slipped into it, put her shoes on, stood. “Let’s go talk to Nike. He might want to hear about what you read.”