After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

  About five thousand feet down, barely visible, a small circle of black rock stood out from the surrounding snow. The crater around it was no more than a dimple, but something had gone off there. The hole was too small for a nuke, certainly too small for a five-megaton nuke, and even too small for the knapsack nuke. Something had blown in the nuke. I remembered that the fission bomb fired by explosives firing chunks of uranium into a sphere of uranium. Could the explosive have fired, but not started a fission reaction? Maybe, I thought. But I knew. The thought nagged at me: I knew.

  I stared at that small crater for a few more minutes, then turned and walked back to our camp, winding rope around my shoulder as I went back. When I got there, Max was sitting outside the tent, looking at the pictures in the book Lucy had dropped for me, sipping soup.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “No nuke,” I said. “There was a small blast crater though, like the crater a bunch of dynamite would leave. But that’s that.”

  “Huh.” He held the book out to me. “There was a slip of paper taped in this book.”

  I looked at the cover: Little Monster Grows Up, the book Lucy had had by her bed. When I opened the book up, a piece of paper fell out and fluttered to the snow. I picked it up. Someone—Lucy—had scrawled something in a childish hand on the paper. “NUK DONT WERK,” it said, “BUT IT DO GO BOOM. GET WAY.” I smiled. She’d warned me, twice. She had to have tooted some lazy to write the message.

  “I don’t get it,” Max said. “But we’re alive.”

  I smiled. “Yup, we’re alive.”

  * * *

  Below us a dog howled. Alice howled back, another dog joined in from below, and soon the mountain air was filled with the chorus of a good dog howl. It sounded like a breakfast howl to me, but Max’s ears were more discriminating.

  “Sam!” he yelled. “That’s old Sam!”

  I cupped a hand to my ear, listened. “And Ouzel!” I said. “Max, Nivakti and Rindi! They’re down there!”

  “Hot damn!” he said. “Let’s get the sled loaded.”

  We had Suz out of the tent and strapped in, the tent and bags folded, and ready to go in less than ten minutes. I stood on the runner, Max ran behind, and Alice yanked us down the mountain.

  They first appeared as a little dark blob in the snow, but as we got closer I saw that there were at least thirty dogs there, with three tents and four sleds. Max and I were whooping our lungs off, and that got the dogs howling even more. Three people in bright orange parkas walked toward us, waving their arms and screaming.

  The sled hit a patch of pale-blue ice, and went skittering, me right behind. Two of the orange figures stopped waving, and they split apart, stringing out rope between them. I tried to dig my heels into the ice, but every time I’d get a grip, the sled would jerk forward again and yank me off my feet. The ice looked like it was going to quit soon—it gleamed and then faded into powder below us—but we were still moving awfully fast.

  I heard it before I saw it. The snow rumbled, and then a crack about five feet wide appeared before us, perpendicular to our path. Alice dug in, tried to yank the sled around the crevass, but she couldn’t stop, couldn’t pull us around. I saw her dip over the edge and plunge down. I glanced back, saw Max whipping out his ice ax, digging in, trying to keep us from falling into the chasm. I squinted my eyes and screamed. It had worked once before. “Alice, jump!”

  It worked again. She jumped, the air got a little shimmery, and when I opened my eyes again Alice and I were on the other side of the crevasse, pulling Max out. I hit the brake and Alice collapsed, panting, foam on her chest.

  One of the orange figures ran up to us, patted Alice on the head, and stepped up to the sled. She reached up and pulled her parka hood back. “Hi, guys,” she said.

  “Rindi!” Max yelled. She ran to him and they hugged.

  “You almost bought it,” the other person in orange said.

  I turned, nodded. “Nivakti.”

  He smiled. “Yeah. How you doing?”

  I looked down at the camp, the dogs, K-2, and some other people I didn’t recognize walking up to us. “Pretty damn good,” I said. “Pretty damn good.”

  * * *

  They took us inside their main tent. A big charcoal stove had the tent toasty, almost ten degrees above zero. We laid Suz out on a foam pad, wrapped her in a sleeping bag. They had a pot of moose stew going, a pot of tea, their own little Talk Roadhouse on the south flank of Denali.

  “We were going to set up our summit camp today, try to take the top,” K-2 told us. “But the weather will hold. We can wait a day.”

  “It’s still there,” I said.

  “Where’s the Wonderblimp?” Rindi asked.

  “Blown up.” I told her about the Zap bomb, about Nike dropping us on the peak, about getting loose, about tossing the bomb over the north face, about the explosion . . .

  “See?” I said, flicking the braid out from under my hat. “Saved our lives.”

  “We heard an explosion,” K-2 said. “Thought it might have been an avalanche. And we saw the blimp two days ago, but they were on the other side of us.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We came up the Ruth Glacier.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “I think Lucy jumped from the blimp before it blew,” I said. “Someone parachuted. You see anyone?”

  K-2 shook her head. “If she did, she could be anywhere.” She waved her arm at the dozens of peaks south of us.

  “Yeah,” I said. I had to think she made it. Lucy. She had done right at the end.

  “Why didn’t the nuke go off?” Rindi asked.

  “The nuke doesn’t work,” Nivakti said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The knapsack nuke, the Big Zap . . . They don’t work.” It came back to me. I knew that. Lucy had known that. I had designed it that way. And Nivakti knew it, too. I remembered his story at Kaditali. “The bomb doesn’t work,” he said.

  “You never finished your story,” I said to him.

  He nodded. “That’s right. The bomb didn’t work.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, the umialik pushed the button. The numbers started counting down. A loud siren went off, and we all ran outside the dance house where the bomb was kept, only the umialik staying. We ran and ran, trying to get away, but we knew we couldn’t get away. Then the siren stopped. The bomb exploded, but not like it was supposed to, more like a big firecracker. Boom!” Nivakti waved his arms. “And then nothing.” Nivakti smiled, then continued.

  “Where the umialik and the dance house and the bomb had been there was a small crater, but nothing else. The world had not ended and our village was still alive. Then the shaman looked at the crater and nodded his head. ‘Just like the seal told me,’ he said. ‘There will be a little bomb but not a big one.’ And we all laughed and laughed and laughed, because we had pleased the whale after all and gotten rid of the umialik and his ugly wife. Later, the leads opened again and a second pod of whales came through and we took many, many whales.”

  “So the bomb didn’t work, then?” I asked.

  Nivakti finished his tea and smiled. “It worked, but not the way the army said it was supposed to.”

  I smiled and thought about what Nivakti had said. Lucy had designed the knapsack nuke, Nike had said. It was her baby. She was the one who pulled the thing off. I don’t know how she did it, but through all the testing, all the designs, all the production, she had conned the generals into building and handing out a knapsack nuke that didn’t work.

  And me? I had used that nuke in my design for the Zap bombs. I couldn’t remember if I had known if the knapsack nuke had worked. But I had designed my own bomb not to fire, either. The wiring: I remembered the wiring. One little wire could easily be disconnected, and this I remembered: I had written specific instructions that that wire not be connected. I began to chuckle at that. The chuckle grew into a slight titter and then I laughed and laughed and laughed. My chest heaved with guffaws, and I gripped my si
des in slight pain.

  “What’s so goddamn funny, Holmes?” Max asked.

  “The knapsack nuke doesn’t work,” I said. “It never, ever worked. Benelux designed it that way.” I didn’t want to tell them about my own bomb.

  “But the Zap War,” Rindi said.

  “Yeah.” That sobered me. “Those suckers worked.” How? I thought. Well, it must have been some other bomb, a real bomb. That made me feel better; it wasn’t my nuke. They hadn’t figured my secret out. “But the one we found on the mountain. It never would have blown.”

  “Never?” K-2 asked.

  “Never,” I said.

  Max chuckled. “So Nike’s plan was screwed from the start.”

  “Not totally,” I said. “Our chest bombs might have worked, I think . . . Oh,” I said.

  “Lucy put the chest bomb in us,” Max said.

  “If she even put a bomb in me.” I looked at Max, Max with his balding pate, his chest bomb leaking radiation. “Or you.” I stared at Max’s head. “Max?” I asked. “How long have you been going bald?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “The last few years.”

  “Has your hair been coming out in clumps?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Just a few strands at a time.”

  “Max, you’re not dying.”

  “What?”

  “Radiation sickness causes the hair to fall out almost at once,” I said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just know. Did you ever know your mother’s father?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “He died when I was fourteen.”

  “Was he bald?”

  Max thought about that. “Bald as a cue ball. Mom said he turned completely bald by the time he was fifty.”

  “How old are you, Max?”

  Max held up his hands, ticked off his fingers. “I can’t remember. I don’t know, maybe forty, forty-five?”

  “Max, Benelux—Lucy—did you a big favor.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no chest bomb in you,” I said. “Not one that works.”

  “No nuke?” he asked.

  “No nukes,” I said.

  “So why am I going bald?” he asked. He chewed his lip. “You mean, it’s natural?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “I’m not going to die?”

  “Not unless you do something stupid,” I said.

  “Goddamn,” Max said. “And I’d worked up such a good hate for that bitch.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

  K-2 rummaged around in a pack. She pulled out a small steel flask, came up with some cups. “I was saving this for when we got to the top,” she said. “But I think we can break into it now.” She poured a finger full of brown liquid into glasses for Max, for Nivakti, for Rindi, for Suz, for me. “To the end of the end of the world,” she said.

  We clinked glasses. “To the end of the end of the world,” I said, and drained the cool, fiery liquid down my throat.

  “One more,” I said, and K-2 refilled our drinks. “To Benelux, Electrolux, Lucy,” I said. “Who gave us life.”

  We clinked again. To Lucy, I thought. And to life.

  To life. Things would go on. Life wasn’t so bad there in the damn People’s Republic of Alaska. I mean, even if I didn’t know who the hell I really was. I knew who I had been, but I really didn’t know who I was.

  It didn’t matter. I’d figure it out one of these days. And if I didn’t, why, I’d just make my life up as I went along.