James Axler - Judas Strike

Shifting to another position, Ryan felt the journal in his pocket. Pulling it out, he used the panga to slice off the lock and flipped through the book to see if there was a diagram of the cottage, or any useful info inside. The handwriting was faded, but still legible in the dancing illumination of the candles.

“Good enough,” Mildred finally announced, and placed aside the hammer. Walking around the cottage, the woman surveyed the work. The planks were double thick over every window, almost four inches. No way could the crabs get through that. “Good idea about those nails, Dean.”

The boy shrugged. Driving some nails through the wood before they attached them over the windows seemed an obvious thing to do. Anything coming through the glass would impale itself on the sharp steel points. Crude but effective.

“Looks pretty solid,” J.B. stated, returning a rifle to the blaster rack. All of the weapon were useless, rusted solid, and the ammo was even worse.

Fortunately, he spotted some silverware in the kitchen. If it was real silver, and not just silver plate, then with some clean sheets and sunshine he could start producing high-explosive guncotton by the pound. Then disassemble the plumbing and they’d soon have some pipe bombs. Fuses were the problem. Maybe he could use the merc primer in the dead ammo to bleed a crude flash-fuse. Yeah, that just might work.

“Hey,” Jak said, going to the dining table and emptying his pants pockets of oysters. “Forgot had. Got before crabs came.”

Knowing the mollusks wouldn’t stay fresh long once out of the water, the companions took seats and started dividing up the seafood. Having eaten only a short while ago, Krysty let the others have the oysters and took some small sips from her canteen to control her hunger. Even if they found edible food down here, there was no chance of clean water. That they would have to distill from the sea. A long and slow process.

Screwing the cap back on, Krysty noticed Ryan was still engrossed in the little journal.

“What is it, lover?” she asked, going closer. The man wouldn’t be spending this much time reading some suicide note.

“Good news, or good luck for us, whatever you want to call it,” Ryan said, thumbing deeper into the book until coming to blank pages. The last few pages were written in a different color ink than the rest, which made it easy to find the pertinent parts.

J.B. glanced up. “What do you mean?” he asked around a mouthful of oyster.

“The dead guy we found is from predark days, all right. He talks about how this lighthouse has a bomb shelter in the basement. If the seals held, there should be ammo, food, everything we need. And lots of it.”

“Hot pipe!” Dean cried, jumping from his chair. “Let’s go!”

“Slow down, son,” Ryan said, rubbing his chin. “The door is booby-trapped. Gonna be a triple tough to get through. Plas mines in the floor and ceiling—we miss one, and the whole place goes up.”

“Read in journal?” Jak asked frowning.

“Yeah, he rambled on about skydark for a while, then got to the important stuff.”

“He saw the war.” Mildred said the words as if each one were alone and independent of the others.

Ryan tossed over the journal. “Read for yourself. J.B., let’s start on that door.”

As the men walked off, Mildred snatched up the journal and started to turn the pages. The personal journal of somebody who actually saw the world end. Incredible.

In the background, Doc snored softly in a chair, and the mutie crabs clawed and scratched at the iron plate blocking their way into the underground cottage. Placing her blaster on the table for easy access, Mildred moved a candle closer for better light.

She began to read aloud:

“My name was Ronald Keifer, and in this journal I will confess everything. But I cannot be judged, because there is no law anymore. Not since this afternoon when the bombs began to fall and the whole world caught fire while David and I watched from the imagined safety of our island….”

PLACING ASIDE his fountain pen, Ron reached up to close the window above the tiny desk. For a moment, he listened to the thick silence, the ticking of the windup clock on the shelf blessedly silent now that he had smashed it with a hammer.

A trickle of sweat formed in his hair and flowed down the side of his unshaved face to dangle from his badly healing chin for a second before plummeting onto the clean white page of the pocket journal. He stared at the tiny stain as it spread across the paper and blurred the words. His sister had given him this book to jot down his thoughts, and to remind him to write while he was stationed here in the Marshall Islands. The goddamn middle of nowhere. The edge of the world. The words made the man shake, and he concentrated on breathing to stay in control. But it was so quiet here. So very quiet.

He had been watering the garden when the horizon strobed with brilliant light flashes. At first he thought it was a ship at the Navy base exploding, or maybe lightning, but then he felt the powerful vibrations in the ground and realized those were nukes going off. A lot of them.

Holding a bucket of paint and a brush, David stopped painting the side of the cottage and stared directly at the growing fireballs in disbelief until suddenly he started clawing at his face, screaming. Ron was already hugging the ground, his face buried under both arms while he prayed to God this was just some a horrible dream. But the terrible rumblings of the nuclear detonations grew in volume until quakes shook the island, then came the hot wind that stole the breath from their lungs, boiling atmosphere pushed out of the way of the expanding mushroom clouds. Even as he crawled for the door, every window on that side of the lighthouse shattered. Only the lighthouse beacon itself survived the atomic concussions.

Dragging the weeping David through the howling winds, debris from the annihilated naval base peppering the island, Ron somehow managed to get inside and to bolt the heavy door closed. Designed to withstand the worst tropical storm, the lighthouse saved their lives that day, the granite walls holding back the unimaginable hurricane of the sky bombs.

Bandaging David’s eyes, Ron put his partner to bed and tried to summon medical help. But the telephone was dead, the static and hash so thick on the landline it was impossible to even know if it was working. And the radio didn’t function at all, even though the internal parts hadn’t been damaged from the glass shards of the windows. Then Ron recalled a lecture that the electronic pulse of a nuke would fry civilian computer chips, and such things as radios and computers would be permanently dead. The sudden realization that they were alone hit the man hard, and he forced it from his mind, clinging to the belief that the U.S. Navy or the local coast patrol would soon arrive to take them to safety.

Carrying the now unconscious David into the cellar, he fumbled with the military lock to open the lead-lined door of the bomb shelter and closed it tight, using all four bolts. It was a pointless act. They were alone on the island; besides, the gamma wave from the blasts had already come and gone. If he was dying of radiation, there was nothing he could do about it now. However, it made Ron feel better, safer. Without turning on the chemical lights, he slumped to the cold concrete floor and raged at the fool politicians who had ordered the death of the human race. What the hell had they been thinking, that humanity could somehow survive a nukestorm? Were they mad? Of course they were.

Outside, the hellstorm of cobalt fire raged louder than any possible hurricane, and days passed before the vibrations in the air and the ground slowly ebbed. While the winds battered the building above them, David wept insanely when he wasn’t asleep, the rationed shots of morphine all that Ron could do for his friend. And every time he regained consciousness, the man began to scream, raking cracked nails across his sunburned face to rip away the dressings. Blisters had formed on every inch of exposed skin, and Ron didn’t know if his friend would live. And he was certainly blind. The medical supplies were only the basic materials, field-surgery kits for fast repairs to keep a wounded sailor alive until the corpsman arrived.