Bobby Akart - First Strike

The imagery of a nuclear detonation blinded him in his sleep, causing him to roll over to bury his face in the pillow. Then, as quickly as the cloud expanded into the atmosphere, human figures appeared to walk out of the fire. They were charred and still smoldering. Skin had peeled away from their bones while muscles and organs melted before his eyes.

And there were the screams. Ghostly. Eerie. Painful. Souls in agony as they begged for help. Not help for their wounds. They sought someone to put them out of their misery.

What didn’t fit into his fitful dreams were the incessant beeping sounds accompanied by an electronic, monotone voice. The wails of the dead or dying contradicted the repetition of the computer-generated monster filling his head.

Frustrated by his inability to reconcile the intrusion of the outside voice with the nightmarish scene he was visualizing in his mind, Peter opened his eyes and shot up in bed. He blinked twice in order to focus on the cheap LED clock on his nightstand. It was 3:27 a.m. He took a deep breath and listened.

The voice was muffled, as if someone was sitting on the head of the person speaking. His mind raced. Or was the voice being smothered by a pillow in an attempt to silence the warning?

Peter jumped out of bed naked, disregarding the open curtains in his first-floor bedroom that he’d failed to close when he’d passed out earlier. He rushed into his living room. The BBC International broadcast had been replaced with the IPAWS warning chyron.

He rustled through the couch and found his cell phone. Peter was fully awake now, standing in his living room unclothed and completely lucid. He noticed the time of the first text alert. He checked the time on his iPhone, which was most accurate. It had been eleven minutes.

“Dammit!” he yelled loud enough to wake his adjoining neighbors if they hadn’t been awakened already. Shadows of people milling about in the hallway forced Peter to remember he was naked. He raced back to the bedroom and quickly put on a fresh set of clothes.

As he dressed, he tried to remember how long it took the IPAWS system to activate after an ICBM missile launch had been identified. How many minutes did it take to identify the launch? Who did it? Russia? China? North Korea? From where? Land-based or submarines right off our coast somewhere?

Peter gave up and rushed to the closet. He grabbed his black backpack and the tactical sling-style pack that contained his handgun, ammo, and several other items. Within two minutes, he’d filled his backpack with clothing, and he dashed out the door, leaving the lights on and the television playing. There was no time for that. In fact, he wasn’t sure if there was time to escape the number one nuclear target in America, the White House, less than ten miles away.

Peter bulled his way through confused neighbors. He’d never gotten to know them, and now was not the time to introduce himself. He hurdled the shrubs lining the sidewalk outside his building and rushed between parked cars until he reached his Ford Mustang Mach 1. In that moment, he found himself thanking God for the four-hundred-eighty horsepower the car provided him to escape what was coming.

He never slowed down to think about what he was doing. He was frenzied, intent on going as far west as possible. Hiding in a bathtub, or under a desk in a school room, or in the basement of an office building was not going to protect him from the massive firestorm generated by a direct hit on the nation’s capital.

Ten miles away wasn’t enough for Peter. With the gas pedal mashed to the floor, he raced west on South Washington Street, periodically passing slower vehicles by using the wrong side of the road. He risked his life by driving in excess of one hundred miles an hour as he blew past Target and into the suburbs of Falls Church.

Every radio station, both local and on satellite, was repeating the IPAWS warnings. He reached the Capital Beltway Outer Loop and took the north ramp, hoping to get on Interstate 66 for a faster getaway.

Peter glanced at the clock and performed the mental calculations. It had been about thirty-one minutes since the launch of any missiles. Whether from North Korea or the Yasny Launch Base in Dombarovsky in western Russia, Washington, DC, would be hit within five minutes.

He wheeled the Mach 1 through traffic and along the shoulder of the beltway to enter I-66. He used the five westbound lanes and the tight emergency lane against the concrete median to get as far away as possible from the capital.

Suddenly, the sky lit up in his rearview mirror. Peter resisted the urge to get a better look. He knew what it was. He gripped the steering wheel and pressed forward, driving as fast as he could without looking back.

And then, suddenly, without warning, the two-year-old Ford Mustang Mach 1 died.

Thursday, October 24

Near Sacramento, California

By the time the weary travelers had reached the Eisenhower Highway, the traffic was at a standstill due to an accident at Blue Canyon some forty miles away. The hotels around the Auburn exit were packed, with many people sleeping in their cars. It was half an hour before midnight when Owen said they needed to decide if they were gonna pitch a tent or keep going. They opted to stop and set up camp.

They backtracked several miles on Highway 49, known as the Golden Chain Highway, so named to honor the 49ers, waves of immigrants and easterners who flocked to Northern California in search of gold in the mid-nineteenth century.

They pulled off into a parking lot adjacent to a walking trail built alongside the North Fork of the American River. The rocky cliffs overlooking the dark blue water would be an idyllic site to wake up to the next morning to continue their trip to Lake Tahoe.

The expert campers had retrieved only the gear necessary to set up their family tent and the extreme-cold-weather sleeping bags to snuggle into for the night. While Owen and Lacey speculated about the exodus of people and where they were going, most likely Reno or Salt Lake City, Tucker spent some time on his cell phone.

He was struggling to get a cell signal. If he held the phone a certain way, one bar would appear. When it did, he scoured the web for news. It was more of the same, so it didn’t hold his interest. The long day was making him drowsy, and he was about to power down his phone when he decided to conduct one more search.

During their trial run, both he and his mom had vowed to always know where the nearest fallout shelter was located for so long as this crisis was hanging over them. His first search, fallout shelters near me , yielded no results.

He lost the cell signal again and put the phone away for the night. But the issue nagged at him. He tried to search a different way. He recalled his dad telling him about the elementary school near the Dumbarton Bridge. Tucker searched for schools near his location, and the first result was Placer High just a few miles away. He navigated to the school’s website and began clicking on all the available links. Then he found what he was looking for, sort of.

The Placer High website touted a number of apps that were suggested to make student life better. One was the STOPit app that allowed students to anonymously report situations like bullying or sexual assaults. They also suggested the same disaster app relied upon by millions of Californians, only to be fooled by a false alarm. On that page, he found what he was looking for. The recognizable graphic comprised of three yellow triangles on a black circle.

With his eyes drooping from exhaustion, Tucker navigated to his Google Earth app and clicked on the little yellow man, as he called the Pegman found on Google map applications. He dragged and dropped Pegman onto the street in front of the school. He rotated the school into view and slowly moved down the streets to study the fronts of the various buildings. He came to Agard Street in front of the basketball gym, and he barely saw it. The fallout shelter sign was attached to the white stucco and tucked behind a large overgrown bush. It had faded from the sun hitting it from the west in the past, but it was definitely there.