Jeff Carlson - Plague War

But what if there are more bombs?

Ruth’s terror was a huge weight and she re†exively pushed against Cam, trying to get past. He stiffened at her hands on his chest, misunderstanding. Then she felt the same bright fear transfer to him. There was a slanting pile of granite behind Cam and he pulled her toward it, using the rock as a blast shield.

“Here!” he shouted.

The others came after them, slow and dazed. “That was a nuke!” Alex yelled. “That had to be a nuke, right? They’re nuking each other!” The boy set Mike against a boulder and tugged Mike’s hands away from his wet face, trying to examine the damage. Brandon joined them and then Newcombe and D Mac. Ed directed Kevin and Hiroki into the safe space and everyone knelt down.

Even packed tightly together, they were a miniscule knot of lives and Ruth looked at the sky again with that quiet reaching feeling. Nothing had changed up there. A wisp of clouds ran on the breeze, impossibly calm.

Newcombe squeezed in beside Alex in front of Mike. “Open your eyes,” he said. “You have to open your eyes so we can see, kid.”

“I can’t,” Mike groaned.

Ruth laid her ‚ngers over the etched stone in her pocket. “Was that Utah?” she asked. “Where was that!?” The need in her voice made her ashamed, because that scorching light was a horrible thing to wish on anyone…but if the †ash had been in Colorado…if the holocaust was that far away…

“We should try the radio,” Newcombe said. “Get the radio.”

“Yeah.” Cam shrugged off his pack and set it in Kevin’s lap. They were clumped too close together for anything else. He pulled out a canteen and a bundle of cloth, then removed the thin control box and its aluminum headset.

“There aren’t any burns,” Newcombe said to Mike. “Can you see anything?”

“A little. I see shapes.”

“Good, that’s good.” Newcombe bent around and extended one hand for the radio.

“No,” Cam said slowly.

Ruth glanced back and forth between them, surprised that Cam would distrust him now, until she realized at the same time as Newcombe that Cam was no longer interested in them. She turned. They all did.

“Oh, fuck,” Alex said.

Peering beyond the line of rocks, Ruth saw an immense arc of distortion in the atmosphere, a convulsing, tangled shock wave of force and heat. It spread like a circle on the surface of a pond, although it was so big that they could only see one part of the swelling hole in the sky.

Dully, she realized it must be hundreds of miles away — and hundreds of miles across. It was growing swiftly, rolling west against the normal †ow of weather. It churned the air apart, wiping away the spotty clouds.

“Where was that!?” Ruth asked again, and her voice was high and sharp like a boy’s.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Samantha said.

“What do we do?” Cam said, even as he looked down at the radio in his hand. He offered it to Newcombe, but the soldier was staring at the sky like all of them. He didn’t answer until Cam pressed the gear against his shoulder.

“Yeah. Uh.” Newcombe groped for the headset.

“The radiation,” Cam said.

Then the side of the mountain across the valley from them seemed to jump. Dirt rippled up from the slope in patches and streaks. There were sharp cracks from the rock like gun‚re. In the lower areas, trees swayed. Some toppled. To the southeast, a red cloud of bugs swirled out of the forest in confusion.

The quake shuddered down through ‚fteen miles of mountainside and valley in the blink of an eye. Then it raced over their peak. The ground lurched. One of the boulders above them scraped free and dropped — no more than inches, but it clapped against another granite slab with a bone-grating sound. Chips of rock pelted the group and opened two cuts on Brandon’s cheek. Most of them screamed. Cam dragged Ruth away, stepping on Samantha, falling onto Ed and Hiroki.

The earth was already stable again. It was only their own crowded scrambling that extended the chaos and D Mac and Newcombe shouted at everyone else. “Stop! Stop!”

“We’re okay, it’s done!”

Then the ground shook again. Ruth gasped and stayed down, although this movement was very different. It was lighter, an aftershock.

“It’s okay!” Newcombe shouted, but Hiroki had begun to moan again and Alex yelled and yelled without words.

“Yaaa! Yaaaa!”

Threads of dust and pollen came over the west side of the mountain behind them, lifted into the wind by the quake. It formed banners of brown and yellow, rushing east.

Ruth lay on her side in the open just beyond the pile of granite, watching the unimaginable dent in the sky. Cam moved to help her again. As his hands closed on her waist, she felt a glimmer of something other than mute animal fear. Gratitude. His attempt at escaping the rock hadn’t amounted to much, but it had shown his priorities. He’d left everyone behind for her.

Samantha was weeping now and Alex paced in short vicious steps between the other boys, pressing his ‚sts tight against his head. “Those bastards!” he said. “Those bastards!”

Everyone else was hushed. The instinct to hide was overpowering, and Brandon made little noise as his father dabbed at his cuts with a dirty shirt sleeve, trying to stop the bleeding.

“Nine and a half minutes,” Newcombe remarked, studying his watch again.

His self-control was incredible and Ruth attacked it without thinking, full of envy and disbelief. “What are you doing!” she shouted.

“Approximately nine and a half minutes from detonation until the ‚rst quake,” Newcombe said. He almost seemed to be talking to himself, as if memorizing the information, and Ruth knew he’d write it in his notebook as soon as he got the chance.

“What does that mean?” she asked. “It must have been close—”

“I don’t know,” Newcombe said.

“It must have been Utah or even someplace in Nevada!”

“I don’t know.”

Samantha tucked herself against D Mac, weeping. Hiroki and Kevin quickly scrunched in on either side and kept their heads down. Ruth discovered she was also crying. When had that started? She rubbed her hand against the wetness on her face and looked away from the children. She wanted so badly to lean into Cam and close her eyes, but she hadn’t earned the right. She could only cross her good arm over her cast and hug herself.

He was preoccupied with Newcombe and Alex anyway. The boy had crouched with the two men, forming a tense wall around the radio. They found nothing except crackling white noise, channel after channel. “David Six, this is George,” Newcombe said. “David Six, do you copy?”

Static.

“Does anyone copy my signal? Come back. Anyone. Do you read me? This is California.”

Static.

“I know it works,” Newcombe said. “See? The batteries are good and we must’ve been far enough away that the circuitry wasn’t shorted out by the electromagnetic pulse.”

Alex said, “So what’s wrong?”

“The sky. Look at it. Too much disturbance.” Newcombe pulled his binoculars and dared a few glances to the east, then north and south. “That was very big,” he said softly. “As far as I can tell, it was way out over the horizon, right?”

Ruth pleaded with him. “We couldn’t even see it if it was in Colorado, could we? It’s too far.”

“I don’t know.” Newcombe unfolded their map of North America and set his notebook beside it, scribbling down 9.5 . “Leadville is what, seven hundred miles from here? Call it seven hundred and twenty. But who else would be a target? White River?”

“Wait, I know this,” Mike said with his palms still over his eyes. “With the curvature of the planet…Seven hundred miles, we could only see it if it was, uh…”