Warren Murphy - Ground Zero

Destroyer 84: Ground Zero

By Warren Murphy apir

Chapter 1

La Plomo, Missouri, was dying.

For almost fifty years it had been dying. A farm town nestled in the rolling paradise of Adair County, La Plomo had been hit hard by the Depression, although it had never been a dust-bowl town. Back then the Santa Fe Railroad stopped at La Plomo a dozen times each day, hauling La Plomo corn, wheat, and soybeans to market.

After the war, La Plomo started to change. The ugly blacktop highways went up. The trains came less frequently. To the north, beyond Grizzy Creek, nearby Kirkland flowered into a center of commerce, but La Plomo remained a modest farm town. It boasted only one business strip, consisting of a drugstore, restaurant, and general store across the street from a simple rectangle of grass on which sat a cabled-down Korean War-vintage jet fighter that had been placed there for children to play on. Such was La Plomo's modest town square.

This incongruously modern touch did nothing to change the basic character of La Plomo life. Fathers still hunted squirrels with their male children. Skinny-dipping in the watering hole was a summer tradition. Square-dancing often led to marriage.

Adult La Plomons entertained themselves with their outdoor bean festivals, where locals repeated the same cornball gags their great-grandfathers had yarned a century ago. Only the names of the local politicians changed.

A pocket of changelessness in a fast-moving world was La Plomo. Always a close-knit community, the farms kept it that way, all through the long cycle of seasons, good and bad, to the present day.

Then came the drought. The wheat dried up. Even the tall green corn withered and shriveled. The economy started to dry up too. Foreclosures began. Farms that had been in families since the Civil War were sold off to strangers. People pulled up their roots and moved to the city and its civilized horrors. More than a community was being tested. A way of life began to break apart.

La Plomo truly started to die then.

On the night La Plomo, Missouri, gasped its last-literally-Aldace Noiles lay in bed contemplating the changes he had seen in his life. It had sprinkled some that evening. A few final drops pattered on the eaves of Noiles's simple house. He enjoyed lying alone in bed, in the dark, the sound of rain sprinkling his roof. It made him feel safe and warm, which to a sixty-seven-year-old widower was a not-unimportant thing.

Aldace had been La Plomo's postmaster during the postwar years. He had been but a lowly mail clerk when his draft number had been called back in 1943. When he returned in '46, the postmaster announced his retirement and Aldace slid right into his old job. La Plomo was that small. The population then was less than two thousand. Tonight, Aldace reflected, it was considerably less than a thousand.

He had no inkling of it, but by the time the dawning sun burned off the strangely yellow prairie mists, the total population of La Plomo would drop to zero.

It was the events of the 1943-46 period of his life that made Aldace Noiles appreciate the simple pleasure of lying awake in bed without worry or fear. Sure, La Plomo was hurting. But it would go on, might even prosper again one day. Aldace Noiles might not see that fine day, but he knew it would come.

Aldace Noiles appreciated being alive. He had been with the Rangers in Burma, where the Japanese were dug in deep. After months of fearsome fighting, the Japs had retreated into caves and the only way to get them out was to burn them out.

Ranger Aldace Noiles had wielded a flamethrower, and the things he had to do with that terrible tool, the power fire had over human flesh, haunted his sleep for years and years after he had returned home.

Aldace had a simple prayer in those days. It was: "Please, dear Lord, let me die in my own bed."

He mumbled it for the first time in a rain-swollen foxhole. It stayed with him during the long voyage home on a troop ship. Even after he had returned to his simple bed, physically whole but emotionally impressed by war, Aldace made a special point of kneeling at bedtime and repeating his midnight mantra. War made a man appreciate his simple joys like nothing else.

These days, Aldace Noiles invoked that prayer less religiously than he once had. He was retired now. Didn't even drive anymore. Dying in bed looked more and more like a sure thing. But every so often-say, once or twice a month-he remembered to say it.

Tonight happened to be one of those nights.

Aldace Noiles wasn't sure when he fell asleep.

At his age, sleep was a stealthy fog that stole up on a body slowly.

He woke up suddenly, in surprise. He seldom awoke at night anymore. No worries troubled his rest. He had a government pension. The mortgage was paid off back in '66. But on this last night, the night he was destined to die in bed along with the remaining 862 inhabitants of La Plomo, Missouri, Aldace Noiles shot bolt upright, clutching at his throat.

It was the stinging, coughing sensation that he noticed first. There was a burning tang smelling faintly of geraniums in his dry old nostrils. Like a beached trout, Aldace took a gulp of air through his mouth. He released it like a dog spitting out a throat-caught bone. Except the bone wouldn't expel.

Aldace noticed the yellowish haze in the room. Moonlight coming through the gauze curtains made the haze shine evilly.

Aldace coughed again. This time a glob of reddish phlegm spattered on the bedspread.

Aldace looked at it in horror. His first thought was that he had cancer. But cancer didn't come on sudden-like to rob the breath. And Aldace had smoked his last Marlboro back in '59.

The coughing racked Noiles's pigeon-chested torso. He fell out of bed, faded pajama legs flapping against his thin shins as he stumbled, coughing, to the green-tiled bathroom.

He ran water into a drinking glass and gulped it down.

The water came up as a pinkish vomit. It had no sooner hit his stomach than it regurgitated again, along with the creamed beef and garden-fresh peapods that had been his dinner.

The coughing got worse. His lungs labored for air, but each breath was shallower, each exhalation more painful. He spat another bloody clot of viscous matter, and feeling himself about to retch again, hung his head over the porcelain toilet.

Then he heard the sounds. They came through the walls. Coughing. Other people coughing. Choruses of coughing, racking, crying. Someone screamed. It sounded like old Widow Story.

Somehow Aldace Noiles found the strength to stumble out his front door. The grass was damp under his bare feet. The night was cool, but the air was not. It burned his lungs. He thought the grass burned his feet too.

Looking up and down the street, Aldace saw lights in the houses come on. One here, another there. La Plomo was awakening. And Aldace could see why. The moth-bedeviled auras of the streetlights were yellow and hazy. They were cool blue lights, not the harsh halogen lamps that Mayor Dent had tried to force on them. They shouldn't be yellow. The pure night air of La Plomo should not be yellow.

A car started up and screeched back out of its driveway. He recognized young Randal Bloss at the wheel. The car careened down the street and went up on a lawn, crushing a mailbox perched on a whitewashed post. Bloss stumbled out, holding his throat, his tongue out, coughing and hacking. He ran around in an aimless circle, like a beheaded chicken, and then simply lay down on his back, looking up at the hazy yellow air and coughing out his life.

"I'll get help, Randal," Aldace hollered. He returned to his living room. The phone in his ear was silent. No dial tone. He plunged back out to the street.

"Don't you fret!" he called. But Randal Bloss' struggles were growing feeble. His forearms folded, the hands hanging from his wrists flaccidly. He reminded Aldace of a beetle on its back after being hit by a squirt of Black Flag.