by JE Gurley
Ferguson leaned out of the cab of the engine. “All aboard!” he yelled. “Get on or get left behind. This train’s headed for Yuma.”
Mace took one last look around counting heads before climbing aboard. He had lost no men or women in the raid, but he knew luck had played as big a part as his planning had. He also knew that his luck was not likely to hold.
“Let’s go,” he yelled as the train began to move.
General Hershimer leaned against the window and looked out over his city. The airport was in flames. Buildings downtown burned. His F-16’s had been destroyed on the ground at Luke. Even his train of munies was lost. Explosions in the area told him that the enemy had infiltrated his perimeter. He had lost.
He grinned at his reflection. “I may have lost, but I won’t let Schumer win.”
Beside him, one of the .5 kiloton tactical nukes reminded him of the power at his disposal. Unlike the nuclear weapons depicted in thriller movies, this one did not have a shiny glass exterior or a digital readout ticking down the minutes. Designed for a missile, it exploded at a preset height and distance, but he had attached a simple timing device. He rested his tumbler of whiskey on top of the nuke, smiling at the juxtaposition.
He checked his watch. “Four am. In two hours, Boom!” He spread his hands apart mimicking an explosion. The resulting blast would destroy everything within a three-mile radius, him included. He had no intention of leaving. He knew that losing Phoenix ended his career. It would be better to die in the heart of a nuclear fireball than face President Hastings.
He groaned and turned to Sergeant Reid, sitting as far from the nuke as he could. “That dumb shit’s probably never even fired a weapon.”
“Yes, sir,” Reid answered nervously, afraid to say anything else that might cause the general to detonate the nuke sooner.
Hershimer stared at his aide, saw the sweat streaming down his face and knew he was a coward. The thought of dying did not bother him. Perhaps it was the three-quarters of a fifth of Cutty Sark he had consumed, or perhaps it was his acceptance of the inevitability of defeat. He would not face his end sober. That would be asking too much of his resolve. Many of his troops had defected to the enemy when word spread like wildfire that the rebels had destroyed his small fleet of jets. The artillery barrage from Schumer’s tanks had slowly broken their spirit. Soon, Schumer would move his troops into the city and he couldn’t stop him.
“I’d give anything to see that bastard’s face as the city turns into a mushroom cloud.” His laughter burned his throat, so he downed the rest of the whiskey. He eyed the bottle. “No, I have to make it last until morning.”
“Yes, sir,” Reid answered carefully. “I can go find another bottle, sir.”
Hershimer patted the pistol on his hip. “Oh no, sergeant. I want you right here beside me. I won’t let you desert.”
“There’s still time to escape, sir,” Reid suggested hopefully. “We could just disappear, the two of us. No one would know or look for us.”
His sergeant’s desperation was not lost on him. “Coward!” he spat. “It’s our duty to remain, Sergeant. It’s our … duty.” He let the last word roll off his tongue. He had done his duty for twenty years and one mistake was going to end it. He would not live out his life with the taste of failure in his mouth. “Duty.”
He turned to stare out the window again and heard footsteps as Reid scrambled for the door. When he turned back, Reid was gone. He smiled. He preferred to die alone rather than in the company of cowards.
25
Phoenix, Arizona
Colonel Schumer was beginning to relax. His A-10 Thunderbolts had caught General Hershimer’s F-16s on the ground and had destroyed them all without a single loss. Resistance was weakening along the perimeter and some unknown ally was attacking south of the downtown area. Scores of Hershimer’s troops had surrendered. It looked as if victory was just a matter of time. Therefore, the startling news that Major Richards brought shook him badly.
“That crazy bastard, Hershimer, has a nuke!”
Schumer stared at his second-in-command to see if he was joking. He saw nothing but fear in the major’s eyes.
“How do you know?”
“We just picked up his aide, a Sergeant Reid, trying to get through the lines. He said it’s set to detonate at 6 a.m.”
Schumer glanced at his watch. “That leaves us just over an hour to evacuate. How big?”
“Half a kiloton.”
“We have to pull back well beyond the blast radius, say five or six miles.”
“Impossible!”
Schumer knew that Richards was right. They would barely have time to move their own people, much less the people in Phoenix, but they had to try.
“Order everyone north. Tell them to keep moving. Load every vehicle that runs. Bring in the choppers and find anything that will fly at Sky Harbor. Just get them in the air for now. We’ll decide where to send them later. Announce to Hershimer’s men what’s he’s done. The war’s over. Nobody won. Now, it’s just a matter of survival.”
Richards nodded and raced off.
Schumer could not understand Hershimer’s reasoning. To kill everyone to prevent him from taking the city took a special kind of madness. As he looked out over the city, he thought word had already spread of the nuke, but then he realized that what he had thought to be wholesale desertion was in reality sporadic fighting between cornered troops and zombies. In such chaos, he could do little for Hershimer’s men. To delay his army would only invite disaster.
He now questioned his decision to attack Phoenix. His desire to free the munies and to protect his own charges had driven him, but the result was poor payment for his good intentions. Men and women on both sides had died and more would die in the next hour and a half. They had no time to transport the munies from the city. They had no time to accept the enemy’s surrender. At the very moment of his victory, he now had to retreat.
Through his binoculars, he saw his tanks returning, sometimes driving through pockets of the enemy. Some clambered aboard the tanks. Half an hour earlier, the tank crews would have repelled them with withering machine gun fire. Now, to the credit of his men, they allowed this, often encouraging it. Vehicles began to head out of the city in all directions, but not enough to hold the thousands trapped within the city.
With their weapons turned to face the threat from the north, the defenders of Phoenix were not prepared for the zombie attack. The creatures swept out of the darkness and through them in a bloody fury, pausing only long enough to rend flesh and break bones. They would reach his position in less than half an hour. He lowered his binoculars from the sickening blood bath.
“It’s time to go,” he called to those waiting around him.
Captain Lacey realized the battle was lost long before the chaos began. General Hershimer had been big on talk but poor on delivery. The airport was gone and Colonel Schumer’s helicopters controlled the airspace. The haphazardly thrown together defenses were falling quickly, and without leadership, the men were in a blind panic. No word had come from Hershimer in hours. Word had come of an attack near the marshalling yard about the time the train from San Diego was due to arrive. He immediately suspected O’Malley had something to do with it. He had never trusted those snipes. They were too damned cocky. He had been on the point of withdrawing his men when the rumor that Hershimer had a nuke began to spread. He knew this was no mere rumor. He had delivered the six Red Rock nuclear warheads to the general personally. While he had always wanted to witness a nuclear detonation, he had no desire to be standing on ground zero when it went off. It was definitely time to fend for himself.
“Men,” he announced, “this war is lost and Hershimer’s gone ape shit on us. It’s time to get the hell out of Dodge.”
No one argued the validity of his statement. He could read the fear in their eyes. If he looked into a mirror, he would probably see the same fear in his. He knew that if O’Malley was responsible for the attacks near the mars
halling yard, he had an escape plan, probably by train. Maybe it was time for a lift.
He gathered as many lost and confused men as he could along the way. They encountered zombies twice but fought their way through. Luckily, the zombies seemed more intent on moving north than in killing humans. Avoiding them seemed to work. He didn’t question their motives. Let them have the city for as long as it lasted. They could fry with the general.
The train was just beginning to pull out of the yard when he arrived with his ragtag collection of refugees. He stood on the tracks in the train’s path, his hands raised in the glare of the train’s three headlights. He was not surprised when O’Malley stuck his head out of the cab and yelled for him to move.
Lacey stood his ground as the locomotive inched toward him; then stopped. “I thought I might find you here,” he said,
“Don’t start anything you can’t finish,” O’Malley warned. He held a rifle in his hands. “There are over fifty armed men aboard.”
Lacey laughed and threw down his rifle. “I’m through playing soldier, O’Malley. The general has a half-kiloton nuke to play with. He intends to blow up the city rather than lose it. We’re just looking for a ride out of here.”
O’Malley’s face went pale. He stepped back into the cab to confer with Ferguson. In the meantime, another figure that Lacey recognized jumped down from of one of the boxcars.
“The oiler. Why am I not surprised to see you here?”
Mace shrugged. “It seemed too good an opportunity to waste. We freed the munies. They’re safe.”
“Well we’re not. Very soon, a big old nuclear bomb is going to wipe Phoenix off the map, courtesy of General Hershimer.”
“What?”
“The general’s gone off the deep end. I brought him the nukes from Red Rock, a nuclear base near Tucson.”
“I know the place. One of my friends was stationed there.”
That somehow didn’t surprise Lacey. Mace had not struck him as a simple oiler looking for a job. “My, my, you are informed. Did he tell you how big of a mess a half-kiloton nuke makes?”
“No, but I can guess. I don’t suppose you know when.”
“No idea. I don’t expect him to wait too long.”
“Are you looking for a ride?”
Lacey bowed. “Humbly.”
O’Malley walked out and looked over the crowd of over a hundred men and women waiting nervously. “I can’t leave them,” he told Mace. To Lacey, he said, “We’ll have to couple more cars to the engine.” He started to climb down from the engine. “I’ll get Soweta.”
“No,” Mace yelled.
O’Malley stopped halfway down the ladder and looked at him. “For God’s sake, man! These people need to come with us.”
“You take this train out of here now,” Mace answered. He pointed to a second locomotive coupled to a string of boxcars. “What’s wrong with that one? Show me how to get it started. I’ll worry about stopping it later.”
O’Malley scowled at him. “You ain’t in the union. I’ll drive.”
Mace waved Ferguson and the train they had arrived on out of the yard. Lacey was a little apprehensive as he watched it pick up speed. A few of his men, worried that the next train might not leave in time, hopped aboard wherever they could find space to stand or sit. He too was worried, but he didn’t really believe that any of them would have enough time to escape the blast anyway. At least he would have a ringside seat for the biggest explosion he had ever seen.
It took O’Malley fifteen minutes to get the engine cranked and ready to go. Men and women clambered aboard the boxcars. With each minute they waited, more people poured in as if word had spread that escape might be possible, but each minute they waited also kept them in the danger zone. Finally, the train was ready. Lacey crawled up onto the engine with Mace.
“You’re taking a big chance,” he said.
“The war’s over,” Mace told him, “for now anyway. Once we’re clear of here, you can help us rebuild Tucson or go your own way. We need good men.”
“They won’t give up, you know. The military doesn’t like rebels or traitors.”
“We have a vaccine. If they want some, they’ll return to protecting the citizens, not exploiting them. If not, well, we’ve got guns.”
“A vaccine.” Lacey nodded. “That makes a difference. Maybe I’ll stick around for awhile.”
“You two hang on,” O’Malley warned as he pushed the throttle forward. The train began to move. O’Malley pointed up ahead of the train. “One of you boys jump down and throw that switch to put us on the right track.”
“I’ll get it,” Mace replied.
“I know how to throw a switch,” Lacey said. “I’ll do it. I’ll ride in back. I should have a good view from there.”
He hopped off the train, threw the switch, waited until the last boxcar passed, and then swung aboard. Stragglers hurried to catch the last train out of Phoenix. No one knew when the bomb was set to detonate, but Lacey suspected that they would be cutting it very close. It was with great relief that the train finally slipped behind the shelter of the North Maricopa Mountains. He stood at the open door and stared out. The flash caught him off guard. He closed his eyes, but the light was so intense he could still see it through his eyelids. It was as if the sun had risen directly over Phoenix. If not for the intervening mountains, the flash would have blinded him. As it was, he had to turn away and wipe the tears from his eyes. When he looked back, ribbons of red and orange etched the predawn sky racing away from the blast.
The blast was less powerful than he had expected, but more frightening. He watched the shock wave approaching the train across the desert floor like a ripple, preceded by a blast of air hotter than any summer haboob. Grains of sand dug into his flesh and peppered the side of the car. Behind them, the rails lifted and rolled like a plucked guitar string, racing toward the train at breakneck speed. The boxcar bucked, bounced and swayed as the wave passed beneath them. The entire train became a Coney Island roller coaster but continued down the tracks. A dirty mushroom cloud rose over the city. Downtown, Sky Harbor airport, and everything north of the Salt River and south of Piestewa Peak was now dust in that cloud. He would learn later that buildings collapsed up to a distance of six miles from the epicenter of the blast. Windows shattered in buildings fifteen miles away.
Even with warning, he knew most of the several thousand people in the city could not have escaped the blast zone. The irradiated dust containing their ashes would follow the prevailing winds and fall slowly on cities and communities to the east. In normal times, tens of thousands would have died of radiation sickness. Now, it would be a mere handful; people who had managed to survive the plague and zombies only to succumb to another of man’s follies. Some of the dust would reach the east coast, eventually Europe, no Chernobyl-style disaster, but a parting gift from General Hershimer. He imagined NATO would not be pleased with its American ally.
He counted himself among the lucky.
Bahati leaned against Martin Schumer’s shoulder and wept. They were returning to Salt Lake City, not in defeat, but certainly not in victory. They had lost over two hundred people during the battles along I-17 and in Phoenix. They had escaped only minutes ahead of the bomb. She had watched it through the rear view mirror, a sight that would forever haunt her dreams. They had rescued less than four hundred of Phoenix’s defenders. Others might have escaped in other directions, but thousands, including the very people they had sought to rescue, had perished. It seemed only fitting that snow was falling, blanketing the landscape in a cold, white shroud. It was as if the planet wept for them.
There was no sense of celebration in the convoy, only the realization that some factions of the military would go to any lengths to keep the status quo as it was. They would have to wrest the country from their grip by force.
“Will it ever end?” she asked.
Schumer tightened his arm around her. “I think more and more people will come over to our side. The tid
e has turned in our favor. Once word spreads about what General Hershimer did, they will begin to have doubts. People who doubt the rightness of their cause will waver. In the end, we’ll win.”
“How many more deaths?” She had seen too many deaths to contemplate a prolonged fight. So many had died during the plague, it seemed such a waste to continue.
“Too many,” he answered. “I’ll try to persuade people to our side, but any threat has to be met with force or we will all become slaves.”
She nestled in his arms. All she wanted now was to return to Salt Lake City, leave the war behind her. In her new adopted country, she must forget her past and look forward to the future. She would not share Martin Schumer the man, with anyone else, but she knew that she must share Colonel Martin Schumer with everyone. At least for the next few days, she had him all to herself. That would have to do.
26
Agua Caliente, Arizona
Renda held her little girl, Tia, in her arms as she watched Mace and the others position another trailer along the road leading to Agua Caliente. He worked bare-chested in the warm spring sunshine. She marveled that at forty-six, in spite of the few gray hairs on his chest, he still had the lean, well-muscled body of a much younger man. He was a doting father and a natural leader. The small community around the solar farm had grown to over eight hundred people. Lines had been run to the sewer and the nearby waste treatment plant was brought back into operation. Newly drilled wells provided sufficient water. At first, there had been a discussion of reclaiming houses in Tucson or Yuma, but Mace’s wisdom prevailed. Agua Caliente was self-sufficient and well protected. Everyone participated in the local militia exercises and armed patrols scoured the area. The threat from the military had not vanished, but they were now better prepared.
Mace had made radio contact with Colonel Martin Schumer in Salt Lake City, the man who had led the assault on Phoenix. Envoys would arrive soon by helicopter to coordinate the distribution of the new vaccine. Erin’s medical staff now numbered thirty-five people, augmented by many of the San Diego medical team. Of the over four-hundred munies rescued from the train, fifteen had died and forty remained under medical care. An additional fifteen had arrived with radiation poisoning from Phoenix. She was treating them with Neupogen, a granulocytic stimulating factor that promoted white cell growth. She held high hopes for a complete recovery. Her labs had taken over all of the original trailers and a large metal building recently constructed for vaccine production.