Arc Light (82 page)

She shrugged. “Well, I dunno. When they finally let me get off that ship after the nuclear attack, I hitched a ride across the country.”

“You hitchhiked across the country after the nuclear war?” Lambert asked, astonished.

She looked up for a second to show him the face she made before looking back down at her shuffling feet. “Not really hitchhiked. I rented a car in Palo Alto.”

“And drove across country to New York?” She nodded.

Lambert shook his head, but she didn't see it. He felt like reaching out and pulling her chin up, but instead just repeated his question. “What do the people think? I want to know. I need to know.”

She looked up at him when he said that, intelligent blue eyes flitting across his for a second before they skirted off to stare to the side, her head still raised. “They're scared, mostly. They're pissed off and all, at . . . at the Russians”—
and your father,
Lambert thought—“and they want to win the war, but they're scared that . . . ”

“Scared of what?”

“You know,” she said, her head dropping again.

“What?”

“Armageddon,” she said in a voice barely audible.

Stuart could hear his breath hissing through the gas mask as he climbed. His flashlight swung across the metal wall of the cylindrical access shaft.
NO LONE ZONE
was stenciled on the wall marking the point of the Launch Control Center below which no personnel had ever been allowed to be present alone.

Stuart could see the shaking flashlight on the wall below, the light produced by their last batteries dim, as Langford followed him up. Rung after metal rung they climbed.

Finally Stuart reached the large metal hatch on the side wall. He put his flashlight under his armpit and raised the Geiger counter. It immediately began to click. The light rain of particles picked up noticeably when he waved the receptacle past the hatch, but the ferocity of the radiation detected had died down noticeably in the two months since the attack.

Stuart looked down at Langford.

“Let's do it!” Langford said, his voice muffled through the gas mask.

Stuart hooked the handle of the device onto a higher rung of the ladder and reached out to grab the large wheel on the door with both hands. The wheel moved with surprising ease due to its diameter, but with each turn it emitted a whining metallic squeal. After a quarter turn, the hatch popped open slightly with a deep metal clack, and a handful of sand trickled down the wall of the shaft. Stuart pulled the hatch open all the way, and even more sand fell.

He reached into the side tunnel and began to scrape the sand out by hand. It fell down onto Langford, who ducked his head against the downpour. The soil was soft, and with every plunge of his gloved hand another ledge collapsed in an avalanche. Stuart dug until he had uncovered the pole that had been buried in the escape tunnel.

He pulled the pole back, and another wall of sand broke and slid to the tunnel floor. Working the pole back and forth he loosened huge volumes of sand and scraped it out of the tunnel into the shaft.
From behind, Stuart heard the clicking of the Geiger counter and turned to look at Langford. Langford swung the wand toward the end of the tunnel and the clicking turned into a steady buzz.

Fuck it,
Stuart thought, and he turned and jabbed vigorously at the sand. A ray of light suddenly blazed into the tunnel and caught him by surprise.

Stuart stared at the bright light. It had been so long that he had forgotten just how different natural light was from artificial illumination. They clawed at the last of the sand without speaking. Finally Stuart crawled out the end of the steel tube and stood up on the earth's surface.

There was nothing. Anywhere. Langford stood up beside him. He turned on the Geiger counter, and its buzz was so steady that it sounded like a hum.

“Let's get outa here,” Langford said, and they began to jog to the southwest, as agreed—the shortest distance to the edge of the base and opposite the direction of the wind on the day of the war, according to the meteorological printout on their teletype.

The grass crunched under their feet as they ran. It was not just dry: it was ash frozen in place. Each step sent a puff of dust flying out from under the soles of their overshoes. They passed the foundation of the Alert Maintenance Facility. There were some fixtures and wiring protruding from the cement pad, and the stubs of walls clearly demarked the various rooms, but there was nothing else. Rubble was strewn all around but it was unrecognizable.

They ran in silence for what had to be almost a mile. Stuart and Langford now both labored for breath in the hot suits. Although he had been fit before the war, Stuart now felt light-headed and faintly nauseous from the exertion.

After ascending a gentle hill, one of the few elevations within the huge base, they stopped to rest. Two round, black overlapping disks—craters—lay just ahead. “Number Four,” Langford said, but the Number Four Silo was not anywhere visible, sealed somewhere under the thin layer of black glass into which the silicates in the top-soil had melted.

Stuart looked back around from where they had come and slapped Langford with the back of his hand. A charred crater dug into the earth several hundred meters to the north of their launch center. Similar craters dotted the landscape all around for as far as the eye could see across the scoured and scorched terrain. At Stuart's feet, however, he noticed a green shoot of grass, the first sprout emerging from the postnuclear plains of Wyoming.
There's still life,
he thought staring at the slender blade.

“Come on,” Langford said, and they resumed their jog down
the hill, skirting the crater directly in their path. Sweat poured from Stuart, and his boots made a squishing sound in their overshoes. He licked his lips under the mask, but the salty sweat did nothing to quench his thirst.

Mile after mile they jogged, slowing finally until they were running at a pace no faster than a brisk walk. Back down on the flat Wyoming plain, they saw the twisted remains of the base's fence ahead at quite a distance. As Stuart lowered his head, his mind began to wander.
How much radiation are we absorbing?
He didn't worry about it; he just wondered. He mentally calculated their time exposed and decided that it shouldn't be too bad yet. Maybe higher cancer risk years down the road, but nothing to worry about now.

What's out there? Did they hit the cities? Has the government survived? Has America survived? How many people?
He thought about all his relatives and friends and where they lived. Close friends, old college girlfriends, whoever came to mind—he arranged all by city and probability of survival.

The fourteen-foot-high cyclone fence was seared black and bent and twisted at tortured angles. Stuart and Langford simply walked over it gingerly, and resumed their run away from the radiation.

They saw their first car half an hour later. It was off in the distance, but it turned off the two-lane highway toward which they headed and sped down a dirt road, kicking up huge quantities of dust behind it. Stuart and Langford both had the same idea, and Langford pulled the Geiger counter from his belt. Langford hit the power switch just as the car disappeared behind a low hill ahead. The device was nearly silent except when waved over the two men's dusty protective gear.

They removed their suits, which were coated in radioactive ash. A second car headed down the narrow road and squeezed by a canvas-covered army truck that it met coming in the opposite direction. Stuart hiked the pistol belt and holster higher up onto his thinning waistline and they both began to run again, this time much more briskly. The cool air against Stuart's sweat-soaked uniform and filling his lungs felt incredibly refreshing. They headed straight for the hill beyond which ran the road that carried so much traffic for such a remote area.

As they climbed the hill, Stuart's spirits were rising. They had watched as more trucks, cars, even buses came and went down the highway in the distance. There were lots of people, and they would soon be among them. Stuart dug his toes into the dirt of the uphill slope despite the cramping of his calves.

They topped the hill and stopped in their tracks as they looked
down on the scene below. Row after row after row of bodies lay in the dirt. Lone men and women and small groups of people walked among them, paper surgical masks on their faces. They were viewing the bodies, many of the distorted shapes clearly not more than just pieces of bodies, it appeared from that distance, and here and there among the thousands of corpses was a collapsed woman with friends comforting her or a single man kneeling in front of a corpse. But mainly it was just a parade of people slowly walking by the dead, looking but not finding, searching but not wanting to find.

Langford headed down. Stuart started to call after him but knew he wouldn't hear. Langford had a family in town.

“Can I make you a drink, Greg?” Walter Livingston asked in a jovial voice.

“Oh, uh, no, thank you.” He walked into the large apartment, his Secret Service detail remaining in the marble foyer, looking at the lavishly decorated sunken living room with corner views out over the park. “This is a really beautiful place.”

“Oh, well, thank you,” the First Lady said, beaming as she fluffed up a pillow that lay against the armrest. She placed it back on the sofa in its correct place against the corner of the seat back.
No maids,
Lambert realized.
Everybody is gone from the City.

“I don't suppose you had any trouble with midday traffic?” the President asked smiling, shaking a mixer containing martinis for himself and his wife.

Lambert laughed. “No, sir,” he said, shaking his head and taking the seat to which the First Lady directed him.

“Bet we could get a court no problem,” Lambert heard coming from the hallway as the President and First Lady took up places around him.

“I just ran. It's too hot.”

“C'mon, Nance!” Nancy Livingston appeared in the room toweling her hair, stringy from the shower, with her brother Jack nipping at her heels. “We can just go right across to the city courts and play one set.”

They saw Lambert, and Nancy turned and said, “It's too
hot,”
in a low voice.

Jack Livingston, the President's son, glared at Lambert, slipping
the earphones of his CD player on his head and heading back toward what must be the bedrooms. Nancy walked past the living room and into the kitchen. Lambert saw the First Lady sitting on the edge of her seat, turning first to see that her son had disappeared and then to look at the kitchen door, where her daughter was rattling around. The First Lady smiled at Lambert, obviously calculating how best to manage the problem social situations regularly caused by her children.

“So, Greg,” the President said, licking the spilled martini from his fingers as he settled in. “How goes it? Tell me everything.” He sat with his back away from the cushions, leaning forward and ready to talk. Lambert grew anxious, knowing he had only a few minutes and that the President was ravenous for news.

Nancy plopped onto the sofa next to her father, a bowl of grapes in her lap and a towel draped modestly around her neck to cover the front of her thin T-shirt. “Mr. Lambert, you have met our daughter Nancy, of course,” the First Lady said as Nancy crossed her bare legs underneath herself, placing the bowl in her lap and feigning a quick smile at him, not baring her teeth. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the First Lady, wearing a dress and pearls, looking at the girl who wore baggy khaki shorts and on whose faded shirt was a picture of a plateful of food held in two bony hands and the caption “Visualize World Peas.”

“Good afternoon, Miss Livingston,” Lambert said as she brushed a wet strand of hair back from her face and dropped the first grape into her mouth.

“Well,” the President said, “are we going for Moscow?”

Lambert considered the classified nature of the information he possessed and the propriety of a social chat on the subject of war plans, but he knew that the answer was obvious and that the President was just breaking the ice, and so he said, “Looks like it. We took Kaluga yesterday, and we're knocking on the door at Tula.”

“Any sign those tanks in Ryazan are going to make a move?”

“It's beginning to look like they're out of gas,” Lambert said. “They've been positioned to the southwest of the city in what looks like an ‘armored pillbox' defense.”

“God bless those carrier boys in the Black Sea, hey? They really cut those oil shipments from the Caucasus.”

“They did at that, sir.”

“What about the other fronts? What about Siberia?”

“We're just south of the Khor River about fifty miles south of Khabarovsk, which is of course their Far East Army Command headquarters. We're also sprinting up the coast from Vladivostok
virtually unopposed and are crossing the Samarga River today.”

“What about Sakhalin Island? Did the local Russian commanders just roll over and play dead?”

“Well, there have been some scrapes along the way, but most had more to do with the Russian Army commanders calling themselves the new Sakhalin Defense Force and demanding to retain their arms, or outright demands for money for the weapons than anything like loyalty to Moscow. As we go into all those little towns on Sakhalin, our people are reporting that even the Russian soldiers and airmen are hungry. When the people with the guns can't keep themselves fed, you know the unarmed civilian populace is in bad shape. It's that way all across Siberia. Russian government has just broken down, and the loyalties to Moscow among the rank and file draftees of the army on Sakhalin, a lot of whom were recently rotated from the Chinese front and are pretty war weary to begin with, is at a fairly low level. They were ready for somebody who could give them three hot meals a day.”