by Kyla Stone
“Is it safe to come out?”
“Nothing is safe,” the waitress said.
He couldn’t think of a thing to say to that. He rubbed his eyes again, the white spots finally fading enough that he could see to clamber out from beneath the table.
He coughed, struggling to breathe, and raked his hand through his hair. Particles of dust drifted to the floor.
Thick gray dust swirled through the air. Debris and glass littered the tile. Most of the tables and booths near the window were broken and splintered like someone had taken an ax to them.
Only the two against the far wall—including the one he and the girl had sheltered beneath—were spared.
“Oh, hell.” The waitress was looking behind them.
Logan turned to see zigzagging cracks spreading across the side walls flanking the hallway at the rear of the building. Above the hallway entrance glimmered a patch of gray, smoke-ridden sky.
The roof over the back section of the Beer Shack had partially collapsed. Great chunks of concrete and roof tumbled into the hallway that led to the bathrooms, storage, and staff room.
Ten more feet and the roof would’ve collapsed on top of him.
From the other side of the bar, someone moaned.
“What the hell was that?” a woman cried. “What happened?”
“A nuclear blast,” the waitress said.
“No way,” said a preppy white guy with his dirty-blond hair in a ponytail at the base of his neck. “It was an earthquake!”
“You an idiot? This is Florida, man.”
“An earthquake happened in Tennessee, so what do you know?”
“A tornado,” someone else said. “Like a hurricane of glass. That roaring sound—it was the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard.”
“No quake. And no tornado, either. It was a nuke. Like on the news.” Julio stood behind the bar, drenched in beer and alcohol from dozens of broken bottles, blood streaking his face. Amber and clear glass shards pierced his face, neck, arms, torso.
A piece the size of Logan’s thumb jutted from the man’s right thigh.
“You need medical attention,” Logan said.
“Nah, I’m fine,” Julio said, though his face was pale. “Just don’t care for blood is all.” He pointed a blood-stained finger. “Help her.”
A blonde woman in her mid-forties slumped against one of the fallen bar stools beside a younger man with brown hair pulled back in a ratty ponytail. Logan recognized her as one of the regulars—Tamara Santos.
A three-foot-long metal rod had somehow punched through the shattered window, and now protruded from the woman’s stomach. Her white-knuckled fingers clenched the shaft as red spread in a widening ring across her cream silk blouse.
“Help—me!” cried a heavy, bald Indian guy in his fifties. His pallor had gone ashen. He sucked in panicked, uneven breaths. The man had been thrown from his seat by the blast and slammed against the far wall.
He huddled on the floor amid the glass and debris, cradling his right arm to his chest. A white stab of bone poked from a bloody gash in his forearm.
A few feet away, old Walter leaned heavily against the bar, breathing hard and rubbing his rib cage. Blood dripped from several cuts on his wrinkled forehead. “I think I busted a rib, and I can’t work my leg right. Call the paramedics!”
“They’re not coming.” The waitress scraped her hand across her face, a laceration on her forearm leaving a streak of blood behind. She stumbled to the broken windows. Glass jagged as teeth rimmed every frame. “No one is coming.”
Logan followed her, picking his way through the debris: the tipped and broken bar stools, a fallen ceiling fan, one unbroken blade still spinning lazily.
More sounds from outside filtered through the ringing in his ears. Car alarms blaring. Screams and shrieks and desperate cries for help. The stench of gasoline and burning rubber filled his nostrils.
But it was the sight before him that stole his breath and iced his insides.
The mid-rise apartment building across the street was half caved in, as if a wrecking ball had struck its entire left side. Great chunks of brick and concrete had slid from the building and smashed into the asphalt.
A chunk the size of a small house had obliterated a car. It was only a mangled mess of metal now, the wheels barely visible beneath the onslaught of rubble.
Further down the street, a pile-up of at least thirty cars smoked and burned, the crumpled frames of trucks, vans, and cars barely recognizable.
A telephone pole had fallen across a capsized bus. A Starbucks blazed, flames leaping from the shattered windows.
People pulled themselves from burning cars, staggering, choking, screaming. Others slumped against the curb, bleeding, cradling injuries, staring blankly at the carnage around them.
A little Latino boy wept, his mother trying to comfort him. Her dress was torn and bloodied. She only wore one sandal; one foot was bare, her nails painted a vivid teal.
Several men raced by, followed by a black couple tugging two middle-school-aged girls behind them, faces panic-stricken and smudged with dirt.
“Look,” the waitress whispered, pointing at the sky.
Dreading what he would see, Logan slowly raised his eyes.
Above the screaming chaos, crashed cars and downed trees and shattered glass, above the apartment buildings and shopping complexes, rose a terror like he had never seen.
An immense black cloud boiled into the sky—blotting out the sun, blotting out everything.
7
Dakota
Dakota stared at the immense cloud as it boiled above downtown Miami, monstrous and raging, a violent orange-red mass almost a mile wide with a fiery blood-red core. The massive cloud punched up through the atmosphere, climbing and expanding at an astonishing rate, the air around it ionizing until the sky took on a savage glow.
The colossal cloud swelled with a terrible, violent swiftness until it seemed to blot out the whole horizon.
It continued to rise as if it would break through the sky itself.
Until that moment, it hadn’t seemed completely real.
It was real now.
She desperately hoped Eden had obeyed her instructions, that she’d found a way to protect herself until Dakota could reach her.
“We’ve been nuked?” asked a pony-tailed guy kneeling over his injured girlfriend. “How is that possible?! I thought our silo missiles would shoot down anything headed our way!”
“They would.” Dakota squinted, her eyes still slightly blurry. “But this is a groundburst. An airburst wouldn’t have the stem of the mushroom touching the ground, and it would be lighter, white almost. Not like this.”
“What does that mean?” Julio asked.
“It detonated on the ground.” Her stomach clenched, acid burning the back of her throat. She took several slow, steadying breaths and wracked her brain to recall all the things Ezra had warned her about. “It’s not a missile strike.”
“What was that flash of light, then?” asked Walter, who was next to Ponytail, crouched on the floor over the blonde woman—Tamara—with the metal rod impaled through her stomach. “And that noise like a freight train?”
“A nuclear blast releases massive amounts of energy in the form of a giant fireball, a light and heat wave, a shockwave blast, and radiation,” Dakota said.
She stared at the mushroom cloud rising from the earth—dark, heavy, and menacing.
“We must be far enough from ground zero to have missed the fireball and the worst of the light wave. The thermal heat wave was probably blocked by the large apartment buildings across the street or other buildings along its path.”
“How do you know?” Ponytail blinked at her rapidly. He was still partially blind.
“We’d have second- and third-degree burns,” she said simply. “Or we’d be dead.”
“How far are we from the actual blast?” Logan asked.
She’d had the presence of mind to count the seconds betwee
n the light wave and the shockwave, which worked much like thunder and lightning. Though she wasn’t positive if she’d started counting fast enough.
“The shockwave travels nearly a thousand feet a second, while the light wave is almost instantaneous,” she explained hurriedly. “By counting the seconds between them, you get a rough idea of your distance from the blast. I counted seven seconds, but I probably missed a second in the beginning. So about a mile and a half from ground zero, give or take.”
“So we’re safe here,” Walter said.
“I didn’t say that.” She glanced at her analog watch, the one Ezra bought her for her seventeenth birthday over two-and-a-half years ago.
12:40 p.m. The bomb had exploded at 12:38. Two minutes had already passed. “We need—”
“Where did the bomb hit?” the bald guy interrupted.
“The point of impact must be somewhere downtown,” Dakota said. “There’s no way to know for certain yet.”
Julio sucked in his breath as he gingerly tugged a large amber shard from his thigh. Blood darkened his jeans.
“You okay?” Dakota strode across the glass-strewn floor and handed Julio her apron over the bar. He was bleeding heavily. “There are more clean hand towels stacked beneath the sink.”
Julio pulled out a smaller shard from his forearm with a wince. “Just a prick.”
“We have to get in there and help those people!” said Jesse Peretti, the full-bearded Jewish accountant slumped at the end of the bar.
His long beard was bloodied, pieces of glass clinging to the graying bristles, a gruesome purple knot the size of an egg forming on his right temple. He swayed as he stood. He’d suffered a concussion, at least. “My daughter works on Brickell Key—”
Dakota shook her head. Pity welled inside her, but she didn’t know how to help him other than to speak the truth, no matter how harsh it was. “Everything located within the epicenter of that fireball—within a half-mile radius at least—it’s all gone.”
They stared at her, shocked numb.
“We’re talking temperatures of 300,000 degrees Celsius, fifty times hotter than the surface of the sun. The intensity of the thermal blast is hot enough to ignite birds in midair and liquify steel. It instantly vaporizes everything—buildings, cars, glass, asphalt. People.”
For several seconds, no one spoke. The horror was too much for anyone to comprehend. Tens of thousands of people, all going about their normal, boring, pedestrian lives not five minutes ago—suddenly gone in the blink of an eye.
“At least we’re safe here.” Tears watered Ponytail’s red-rimmed eyes. “We can wait until the firefighters and paramedics come for us.”
Julio jerked out another glass chunk and pressed a towel to the wound. “Are you crazy, man? Don’t you know anything about nukes? Remember Hiroshima?”
The guy stared at him blankly.
“What goes up must come down,” Dakota said.
Logan rubbed the stubble along his jaw. “Fallout.”
“I heard that was just a myth,” Ponytail whined, like if he believed it strongly enough, he could make it true.
“If the fireball explodes in the air, like with a nuke, fallout is present but minimal,” Dakota said, remembering one of Ezra’s frequent lectures. “When it detonates on the ground, all the vaporized soil and debris get pulled up into the cloud. As the cloud travels downwind, the radioactive material cools and falls, creating a large swath of fallout and contaminating everything it touches.”
“We need to get out of here.” Logan turned to her. “What do you suggest?”
“Time, distance, and shielding,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Three ways to get safe. We’re within the radius for some prompt radiation exposure, but a mile and a half out, it should be minimal.”
“Okay, then we’re fine—” Ponytail started.
“No, we’re not. Which direction is the wind?”
Logan glanced out the windows at the row of palm trees across the street. “The wind is blowing north, I think. Toward us.”
She felt dizzy, sick to her stomach. “If we’re right and ground zero is south of us, then we’re directly downwind.”
“What does that mean?” Ponytail asked.
“A southerly wind—blowing south to north—will bring the worst of the fallout right to us. That’s enough radiation to start destroying your internal organs within hours. It’ll kill you in days.”
“Okay,” Julio said, his mouth tightening like he was struggling to keep himself calm. “What do we do?”
She fought to keep her own frantic panic under control. Panicking now could mean death. Only clear thinking and a plan would keep them alive.
“How long do we have?” Logan asked tersely.
She checked. 12:41 p.m. Three minutes had already passed.
When she spoke, her throat was raw. “The radioactive debris starts falling back to the ground about ten minutes after impact. We only have seven minutes to find shelter.”
8
Dakota
“We can’t do anything about time or distance. We need shielding,” Dakota said. “We need a thick, dense barrier, and fast.” She gestured at the shattered windows, the exposed air all around them. “This place won’t cut it.”
Bald Guy lurched to his feet, clutching his broken arm to his chest. “You said distance. My car’s at the curb. I’m driving and getting as far from that bomb as possible!”
“If your car even works,” Dakota said. “You see all these car wrecks? What about rubble? What’re you gonna do when the roads are clogged and you’re trapped out in the open? Your tin can of a car won’t protect you once the radiation falls.”
Bald Guy grimaced in pain and started to protest, but Logan shut him down with a sharp look. “What will protect us?” Logan asked.
“We need to get as much mass as possible between us and the radiation. The best shelter is the middle of a large building, or better yet, a basement underground.”
“Thanks a lot, Florida water table,” Walter grumbled.
“What about the huge office complex across from us?” Logan asked. “It’s twelve stories.”
Dakota glanced out the window at the shiny new building designed with huge panes of glass on every floor—every pane exploded in the blast. The left end sagged dangerously. A section at the top had collapsed.
“It’s too damaged and unstable. Plus, an office building won’t have enough food or water for a bunch of people to survive for a week.”
“A week?” Tamara wheezed. “Are you insane?”
“There's the Showtime cinema,” Julio said, ignoring her. “No windows in the auditoriums, thick cement block construction. Other stores on either side of it; plus there’s a restaurant above it on the second-story promenade. That helps, right?”
“They have a concession counter,” Walter said. “Lots of snacks and water bottles."
Logan moved toward the doorway, already scanning the street outside the bar. “It’s in that shopping center three blocks from here. We can be there in a few minutes.”
Dakota nodded. It was as perfect as they were going to get. They didn’t have time to consider any other options, and they’d wasted too many precious seconds already. Ezra had taught her better than this. “Let's go!”
Bald Guy pulled out his car keys with his unwounded hand. “There’s no way in hell I’m staying someplace directly in the path of radioactive fallout.” He stumbled through the shattered glass door, not even bothering to open the frame.
“I’m with him.” Ponytail leapt to his feet, already palming his keys. “I’m getting as far away as fast as I can. You guys are crazy to listen to her. What does she know? She’s just a waitress.”
“Dakota knows plenty,” Julio snapped with uncharacteristic sharpness. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders. I trust her.”
Dakota flashed Julio a tight, grateful smile. He’d always been kind to her. And fair. “It’s fine. If he wants to
be an idiot, let him be an idiot.”
“Raphael! Don’t leave me!” Tamara raised her hand weakly, grasping for her boyfriend.
“You’ll be fine. I’ll meet you at the hospital.” Raphael barely squeezed her hand before striding through the door after the first guy. He never even glanced back.
“He always was an asshole,” Tamara muttered, wincing.
Logan shook his head in disgust. “They made their choice. We need to go.”
Julio moved gingerly around the corner of the bar. “Radioactive waste is about to fall on our heads. We have to go, now. Tamara, we can try to carry you. Let’s get you up."
Jesse rubbed the purple knot on his forehead. He righted a bar stool and sank onto it. "It's safer to stay here and wait for an ambulance and the police."
“There’s no time,” Dakota warned. “We only have a few minutes.”
Tamara shook her head stubbornly. Her eyelids fluttered. Her pallor was ashen from the loss of blood. “I’m staying right here and waiting for the paramedics.”
“No paramedics are coming!” Dakota bit back her frustration. “Don’t you get it? No one’s coming. Not for a long time.”
But they wouldn’t move.
Dakota wasn’t a sociopath. She didn’t want to leave them. But she wasn’t going to get killed for anyone too stubborn to see the truth, either.
“Count me in,” Walter rasped. He tried to push himself off the bar counter, but his right leg twisted beneath him, and he stumbled. “There’s no way I’m stayin’ behind and lettin’ y’all have all the fun.”
Julio came around the bar and grabbed his arm. “We’ll help you. Don’t worry.”
For a heartbeat, Dakota looked longingly back at the rear of the bar, at the collapsed beams and slab of roof blocking the hallway to the staff room.
Her bug out bag was in there. And her XD9. She could make it without the contents of the bag, but the gun…
Two of the fallen beams shifted, rubbing against each other with a groaning, grinding sound. A spray of dust and rubble snowed down on several nearby tables.