It was simple, maddingly simple. The two cylindrical depressions on either side were where two of the knapsack nukes went, bases angled down into the heart of the Zap bomb. Both igniters had to be armed, both had to have the football inserted. The timer on the first nuke could be attached to a cable that plugged into a little slot on the second nuke. When the first nuke fired, it would immediately fire the second nuke, so they would fire almost simultaneously. When they blew, they would kick the thick steel sphere high into the atmosphere, miles up.
The third nuke went inside the sphere. There was a hatch on the side and a hole for the knapsack thermos inside. Slide the nuke in and set it to fire minutes later. No modifications needed to be made to the fusion, the Zap, bomb. It was more like a booster to the knapsacks, just a little added something to make their kick stronger, like ether added to gasoline in a car. When the sphere got high enough, the thermonuke would blow, and it would create an electromagnetic pulse. That was the game: not to blow things up, but to make that big Zap, the EMP.
I closed the big gray book, walked back to Nike’s cabin. I knocked, and he told me to come in. He was lying in bed, staring at a copy of Moby Dick.
“Enjoying it?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I thought if I stared at the words it might trigger something. Maybe the lazy has a residual effect? I thought I’d try.”
“Do some lazy,” I said.
“Nah,” Nike said. “You figure out the Zap?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Piece of cake. You can fire the Zap bomb. All you need are three working nukes. You have three working nukes?”
“Maybe,” he said, smiling. “Come with me.”
We walked into sick bay, past Suz sleeping, into the operating chamber. Nike stood by a small closet. I could hear some machine going ka-wheez, THUMP, ka-wheez, THUMP behind the door.
“When you gave the Kachemakers a nuke, what did we get in return?” he asked me.
“A broken nuke.”
“Ah,” he said, raising a finger. “Not quite. We gave them, well, the shell of a nuke. And what we got back were the innards of a nuke, a nuke that probably would have worked if there had been a football to go with it.”
“But there wasn’t.”
“No,” Nike said. “Those Kachemakers didn’t know what they had. The quarterback for that nuke had probably died long ago. But you know, Lucy designed and built the knapsack nuke.”
“She’s really Benelux?” I asked.
“Really,” Nike said. “The knapsack nuke was her baby alone, no one else ever touched it. She could take one apart just as well as she put it together. We had an old nuke before—that’s what we put inside you.”
“So you, uh, have the Kachemak nuke, right?”
“Wrong,” he said. “That one was no good. We had to get another. We had to get a nuke that worked, that had a football, and whose quarterback was still alive.”
Relays began to fire in my brain. I could imagine them, switch upon switch clicking and clicking, a memory coming back to me, some thought down in the deep well of the unconscious, bubbling to the surface like slow magma. Another nuke . . . ? Where had I seen another nuke?
Nike pulled the closet door back. It was one of those accordion-type doors, plastic panels that folded to the frame. Behind the door was a ticking and whirring machine, a big vat holding a hunk of meat in some sort of solution. Pumps clicked and thumped on top of the machine, and fluids flowed down tubes into the hunk of meat. The meat beat out and in, constricting, moving.
A heart. A human heart.
“Kaditali,” I said.
Nike nodded. “Was that the name of it? I wondered. It was convenient having the God Weirders there. We could pin the blame on them.” He opened a small freezer next to the heart– lung machine, pulled out a tray with four frozen hands in it.
“Sherry,” I said. The image of her bleeding into the snow, not hands but stumps, came back to me. I could feel the blood draining from my face, feel my knees wobble. I leaned against the operating table. “You cut out the heart of that kid.”
Nike shrugged. “We needed the nuke.”
I remembered the nuke hanging on the wall of their cabin, the battered green thermos. “But you left the nuke there.”
“Nah,” he said. “That was the Kachemak nuke. We switched it. Clever, huh?”
“You murdered them.”
Nike nodded. “Yeah, we did. Actually, Doc North did the cutting, but that’s true: we murdered them.”
I stared at the floor, thinking. More relays were going off in my head, but I didn’t want to think, didn’t want to figure it out for myself.
“That’s the first nuke,” I said. “Where’s the second? Where’s the third?”
Nike walked up to me, cupped a hand under my chin, and raised my head up. He stared in my eyes, then jabbed my chest with his other hand.
“In there,” he said. “In your heart. You’re the second nuke.” And he smiled. “And the Hammer, of course—the Hammer is the third.”
CHAPTER 19
The door to my right creaked open and Bron and Ruby walked in, Suzuki submachine guns slung over their shoulders. Bron had a roll of tape bulging out of his pocket. I casually noted that the red light on the intercom was on, meaning the mike had been open. Uh-oh, I thought.
Nike came up to me, cupped a hand under my chin, and raised my head up. He stared in my eyes, then jabbed my chest with his other hand.
“In there,” he said again. “In your heart. You’re the second nuke.”
“Yeah?” I said. I felt my scrotum tighten and my sphincter contract. Bubbles of sweat popped out on my upper lip, dripping down my beard. I was trying to be cool and tough. I was tough, all right, like a wet rag. “So? Why my nuke? Can’t you just scare up another one?”
“It’s not so simple,” he said. “We don’t have that many nukes. Besides, there are the codes . . . We can only punch so many.”
“So many?” I yelled. “So many! You can punch all the damn codes you want! You make the damn codes!”
“Oh no,” Nike said. “We’re sworn to our duty. We can only make footballs when we give out nukes. Only a very few tribes can qualify for a nuke. It’s the way of the Order of the Atom.”
I blinked my eyes. This was crazy. “You can cut a kid’s heart out to get a new football, but you can’t make a new football?”
“That’s right,” Nike said calmly.
“But . . .”
“Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if just anyone could make a code?” Nike said. “It would destroy the whole concept. The code is sacred. Its integrity cannot be maligned.”
“But what about your word?” I was grasping for straws. “You said you’d take me north. You said you’d take me to Denali.”
“That’s right,” Nike said. “I did. And here you are.”
“Damn,” I said. He’d kept his word. Damn, damn, damn.
“And here you’ll stay.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“Oh, yeah.”
Bron and Ruby moved to either side of me, and dragged me out of the room.
* * *
Doc North must have armed the Kaditali nuke while Lucy was taping me to the Zap bomb. Thanks for small favors. I don’t think I could have watched them take the football from the kid’s heart and plug it into the knapsack nuke. I don’t think I could have watched them thaw out the hands and place them on the thermos handle of the nuke. I don’t think I could have watched the little numbers whir into place, ready for their countdown.
Lucy and I were alone in the hangar bay. The Zap bomb rested on the bay doors in the middle of the floor, two cables hanging loose from the winch above. Lucy whistled as she placed my sternum over the end of one of the igniter holes in the bomb. I had a parka on, heavy boots, and my vest of all pockets—with the I Ching, The Man in the High Castle, and Heart of Darkness in the back pocket—under my coat. Lucy pulled my arms forward around the bomb, so I was hugging the big drum. Sh
e taped my hands and feet together with this silver tape, then wrapped row on row of tape around me and the nuke. Next to my skin, over my heart, she taped a small electrode; a wire ran from the electrode, up my collar, and into the Zap bomb.
“The cable fires the second nuke—Max’s nuke—when Nike fires your nuke,” Lucy said. “I’ll hook Max up to you, double redundancy. If for some reason your nuke doesn’t go, we’ll blow Max.”
“Swell,” I said.
“The third nuke—the knapsack nuke—goes in the sphere on top. That will go off by a timer. Ah, here it comes.”
Doc North came in, holding the Kaditali nuke. I couldn’t tell if it was armed or not. Like a wine steward displaying a fancy bottle of Chablis, the doc held the knapsack nuke before me and flipped up the little plate on the handle. I could see the number primed and ready to count down: 10:00:00. Doc clicked the plate shut, turned the cup on the thermos slightly to the right, and slid it into the depression on the sphere. He closed the hatch shut, then nodded to Lucy.
“Ready to go,” she said. “Give me a few minutes and then send the others in.”
“Yeah,” the doc said. He went out the hangar bay door.
Lucy watched, made sure the door clicked shut behind him, then pulled her wool cap off. The hair on the crown of her head had been pulled into the blue braid, and the rest of her hair hung loose around her face and down her back. She reached up, yanked hard at her braid. There was a slight ripping sound, and then the braid came up, still twitching, her scalp red and raw from where it had been. She pulled two wires hanging from the braid loose from beneath her hair, and the braid stopped jerking.
She took my own cap off, whipped out a sharp razor from her sleeve, and shaved a circular patch of hair from the crown of my head. Smearing some sort of glue on the bottom of the braid, she stuck it on my head, then glued two little dots at the end of the wires to my temples.
“Furrow your brow,” she said. “The braid is like a prosthesis.”
I furrowed my brow, felt the braid whip around my neck.
“Good,” she said. “Now, squint your eyes tight. Tighter.”
I looked down, saw the end of the braid curl up, then relax when I relaxed.
“Okay. That’ll do.” She coiled the braid up on top of my head, put the cap over it, then put her own cap on. She slipped the razor into the right pocket of my parka.
“My own little invention,” she said. “Neat, huh?”
“I guess. What’s it for?” I thought I knew, but I couldn’t hope.
“For you,” she said. “To cut yourself loose and disarm the Zap bomb.”
“Me? Disarm it? I can’t.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?” I felt something odd in my brain, as if something had grabbed my skull and was ready to crack it open like an egg.
“Who you are,” Lucy said. “What you are.”
“I’m Holmes. Holmes Weatherby, Aye-Aye-Aye.”
“Holmes Weatherby, III. Three,” she repeated. “The third. I had forgotten your name—except for the ‘third’ part—which is why I didn’t remember you when we first met. And I didn’t recognize you until you grew a beard—even then I wasn’t sure. But when you worked on the Zap bomb . . . I knew.”
“Knew? Knew what?”
“Think,” she said. “Listen to yourself. Listen to your memory.”
“No memory,” I said. I felt this dam in me ready to break. I pushed the tide back. “I can’t remember.”
“You don’t want to remember,” she said. “But you have to.” Lucy took out a vial, scooped a little of the white powder out with a small spoon and held the spoon to my nose. She cupped a hand over my mouth and I had to—I tried not to—I had to sniff in the lazy.
The dam burst. Great yellow light flooded my eyes. Heat lightning crackled up my spine; tidal waves of purple light washed over my body. Words danced before me, words and words and words, diagrams, charts, figures, the stuff and substance and being of . . . of the Zap bomb. I saw the manuscript, saw the title clearly: “A Hypothetical Proposal for the Construction of a Knapsack Nuke-Fired Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb,” and under it the name, my name, “Holmes Weatherby, III, Ph.D.”
Me. I’d designed the Zap bomb. I was its creator. I came to, the light rolled away, and Lucy stood there, staring at me, little spoon held over the vial of lazy.
“I’d never met you before,” she said. “Not formally. I saw you speak at several conferences, though. I wish we had been introduced. You did great work.”
“I built it?”
“No,” she said. “Not you. It was just your idea. But, yes, you designed it. We built it, but you designed it.”
“I . . . I put it here?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. But that was your idea, too. Put it on a mountain. Put the Zap bombs on several mountains.”
“You are Maggie Benelux?”
“Was,” she said. “Just like you were Holmes Weatherby, the Third. But those people are gone, and all we have left are ourselves.”
“I should die with the Zap,” I said.
“You did die with the Zap,” she said. “We all did.”
“No, me, now, this Zap. I should just let the bomb go.”
“Should you?” she asked. “Would you, Holmes? You let the bomb go before. If you let it go now, more will die, more minds will be wasted. Do you want that?”
“No,” I said. “But I don’t want the living. Not with what I did. Not with who I was.” It still didn’t feel like me.
“It was just an idea,” Lucy said. “You didn’t fire the big Zap bomb. It was just an idea. Let it be.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. But I wasn’t sure I could let it be. I shuddered, tried to forget. “How do I disarm it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’ll have to figure that out. But if you and Max can just cut yourself loose, that might do it. There may be some system in the sphere, with the third nuke, that will still make it go off. You’ll have to check that.”
“How long will I have?”
“Ten hours,” she said. “When you disarm the bomb, get away. Remember that. Get away—a thousand vertical feet should do it.”
“Yeah.” I said. “Wait . . . What about the knapsack nuke? Won’t that still go?”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “If you can keep the Zap bomb from blowing, that will take care of the knapsack nuke.”
“Okay.” I didn’t know what she meant, but I’d take her word for it.
We stared at each other for a moment, and while I looked at her, I remembered, remembered the feel of her body, the feel of her touch.
She smiled. “I’m sorry, Holmes. I wish it could have worked out better. It was good.”
“Yeah,” I said. “In the beginning it was good.”
I felt the bomb between my arms, felt its embrace on my embrace. “Yeah,” I said again. “It was good.”
The hangar bay opened, and Bron and Ruby came in, shoving Max and Suz before them. Bron dragged Max to the side of the bomb opposite me and helped Lucy tape Max to the Zap bomb. Nike dragged Max’s sled with Alice stuffed inside the sled bag into the hangar.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “Bron, you seem like a nice guy. Don’t help them.”
Bron grinned. “It’s for the greater glory of God. This will cure the PRAK.”
“Idiot!” I screamed. “You’re not even a Bron! Your name is Walter Abercrombie! Walter! Walter!”
“Shut up,” Bron said, and he slapped me across the mouth.
“Lower the Zap bomb down, then drop Suz and the sled after them,” Nike said. He looked at me, smiled. “Got to save weight, you know.” He chuckled. “Nice little torture, huh? You’ll see the sled and the dog and maybe think, hey, I can get away.”
The winch whirred above me and the cables jerked taut. Below the doors flipped open and a blast of cold air shot up at me. At the winch controls Ruby gently lowered Max and me down, straight d
own into the mouth of the Zap bomb’s crater below. I looked up, saw Nike staring down at me.
“Have a blast!” he yelled.
“Eat shit and die!” I yelled back, but I don’t think he heard me over the noise of the wind and the winch. I saw Lucy lean over, toss something down at me: a book. It fluttered in the wind, pages open, then fell down into the crater. The cable wound out, the blimp hovered over the crater, and Max and I came to rest on the very center of the hole. The hooks came undone from the bomb, and wound their way back up. I looked up, saw Suz and the sled lowered down on the cables. She landed a few yards from me.
“You okay?” I yelled at her.
“I think so,” said Suz. I could see her face contort slightly, then she smiled. “I’ll be fine. They’ll be done with us soon enough.”
“Ten hours,” I said. “The Wonderblimp will have to get out of range. How about you, Max?”
“I’m fine,” he said from the other side of the bomb. He started whistling. “We’ll be okay in just a bit.” He peered around the edge at me and grinned. The jerk actually grinned.
The hangar doors on the Wonderblimp closed shut. Her props came on, whirling in ever swifter circles, and the blimp slowly turned into the southern wind. Pointed down the mountain, toward the coast, the blimp strained at the two cables holding her to Denali. I heard a loud click, then the cables sang as they whipped away from the ridge and were slowly drawn up to the blimp. The Wonderblimp banked to starboard, came around, circled us. I strained my neck up, thought I saw Lucy waving from one of the portholes on the bridge. The Wonderblimp completed her circle, then headed south and moved away. She flew into the setting sun, blotting it out. Someone moved around on the port catwalk of the upper deck.
“Keep watching,” Max yelled. “Watch her.”
After the Zap Page 25