Worlds in Chaos (54 page)

“Ma’am, you’re being crazy,” Furle said. “What if they don’t come back? You’ll die out here.”

“What if they do come back . . . and I’d never see him again?”

Mitch glowered down from the helicopter door. “There isn’t time for this. Grab her and put her on board,” he ordered. The three soldiers closed around her, pinning her arms, and lifted her inside forcibly over her struggling and hysterical protests. Moments later, the Sikorsky lifted off once more into the violent skies.

El Paso was about as far west as it was possible to go and still be in Texas. But at least they had made it to Texas—twenty-nine of the forty-two who had left Vandenberg in the Rustler.

The scene as the helicopter came in was like the reception center at Phoenix, but with everything on a vaster scale. A quarter of the city had been obliterated by a new crater, which had buried the former downtown area under its wall. The pilot, who seemed to have relented after being uncooperative earlier and wouldn’t be filing any complaints, said reconnaissance flights had shown an immense crater field extending westward from Phoenix and to the northeast, but he didn’t know how far. The ruins of what was left of the city were being reinforced and bombproofed, while for miles around, earthworks, bunkers, and connecting roads looking like extended military fortifications were appearing across the desert slopes and among the mountains. But it still wasn’t matching the scale of the problem. The numbers of people pouring in were even vaster, their vehicles visible everywhere in thousands, in some places pulled off the roadways in untidy sprawls stretching for miles, filling the verges and any open ground, in others tossed like the aftermath of an air strike.

They landed at what looked like a regional airport, amidst the kind of scene that was becoming familiar: demolished and damaged buildings, excavations and repairs going on around the runways. One runway appeared to be serviceable. Mangled aircraft of all types were everywhere, and the hangar buildings that had survived reasonably intact were being shored up and earthed over as protective bunkers for any that were salvageable. The air, as they climbed out of the helicopter, was hot, heavy, clammy, and oppressive.

Leaving Furle to supervise the unloading of the injured and find them some kind of temporary accommodation, Cavan and Dan left on what showed signs of being an impossible task of finding them medical attention while Alicia and Dash stayed to do what they could. The best the helicopter pilot could suggest as a lead to whoever was running things was the colonel in charge of flight operations, and Keene went with Colby and Mitch to seek him out. After some asking around they found him in the glassless but functional control tower, following the approach of an incoming aircraft on a screen connected to an Army mobile field radar located somewhere nearby. He was obviously busy, stressed, and listened to them impatiently. When Colby presented his White House papers and Presidential staff ID, the colonel seized the opportunity to have his switchboard call the office of the acting commander of the area to get rid of them. The colonel then returned his attention to the business at hand, and a guard escorted them back downstairs to wait.

Less than half an hour later, an Army sergeant driving a Ford van with netting draping its sides and a layer of sandbags on the roof arrived to collect them. Apparently, everything had happened too quickly and universally to allow martial law to be declared formally in the U.S. Military control had been instituted as an automatic reaction locally, nevertheless—as doubtless had been done in all areas retaining any organizational capability at all. In El Paso an Army general called Weyland had taken charge after just about all of the area’s regular command structure and FEMA directorate were wiped out along with the fifty-plus percent of the city that was now craters and rubble.

As the sergeant talked, they negotiated their way around mounds of fallen rock and debris, wrecked vehicles, and mud traps created by the recent rain. Parts were like Boston in January, but with paths being cleared through mud and sand instead of snow. Along whole blocks, rescuers were still hauling the dead and injured from collapsed buildings. Sandbagged bunkers and shelters were being constructed wherever opportunity presented itself, and undamaged stores, homes, and offices adapted into dressing stations. But even with all the bulldozing and shoveling, the medics and nurses working frantically under tents and awnings and in hollows dug amid the debris, the mobile kitchens and relief workers handing out rations from trucks, untended cases and others too shocked or exhausted to help were everywhere: laid out along the roadsides, sitting blankly outside their vehicles, or just wandering aimlessly. The sergeant said that the services had been hard put to cope even before yesterday, which had been a massacre. Today they were overwhelmed.

The route took them west of the city along another piece of Interstate 10, with dry red mountains flanking the road on one side, and slopes leading down to the Rio Grande river marking the Mexican border on the other. They exited on a road that climbed for a short distance through a spread-out residential area that had been fairly evenly battered, and led into a valley with boulder-strewn sides and a scattering of industrial buildings and other facilities strung along the bottom. A gate through a chain-link fence, attended by sentries outside a gatehouse that had been reinforced by sandbags and corrugated steel sheeting, brought them into a parking area in front of a couple of office buildings, some sheds, and several unidentifiable structures standing below a high cliff with a mountain ridge rising beyond. Work crews in helmets, flak vests, and military fatigues were clearing rubble, filling craters, and finishing more dugout constructions. Both office buildings had every window shattered and were showing damage, especially to the upper parts.

The sergeant took Keene and the two others through a side door into one of the sheds, across a floor where stores were being sorted and vehicles unloaded, to the entrance of a tunnel leading into the mountain. He explained that Weyland had located his headquarters in a former mine working that had been converted years before into a repository for banking and financial documents as a precaution in the event of a major war. The tunnel led to a cage elevator which they took to a lower level, emerging into well-lit corridors with white, ribbed-concrete walls. After all the destruction and chaos of the preceding days, the order and normality of the surroundings seemed almost unnatural.

They came to an open area where military personnel at desks were working in front of a situation board occupying most of one wall, the others covered in charts, maps, and an array of aerial photographs. A large map of the surrounding parts of Texas and New Mexico was marked with red circles showing what looked like craters, and various other annotations. Weyland’s office was at the far end, consisting simply of a smaller space separated by a partition. It had a desk and side table covered with papers, more wall maps, and several upright chairs along two of the walls. A naked bulb hung from a cord overhead, shaking slightly to the vibrations of machinery somewhere nearby.

Weyland was tall and wirily built, on the young side for his rank, Keene thought, forceful in manner, with straight black hair brushed to one side and dark, intense eyes that refused to be cowed by the situation. His face was dark with stubble, and he wore a flak jacket over a grimy, sweat-stained shirt. The three arrivals were shown in by the sergeant, who then left. They introduced themselves; Weyland invited them to take seats. He draped his elbows over the arms of his chair and looked them over.

“I understand from the phone call that you just got here from Phoenix, and before that you were in a plane crash. You just about look it, too. We’ve got soup, beans, and coffee going, if you could use some.”

Mitch said that sounded great but explained that they had some injured back at the airfield who needed medical attention urgently. Weyland stared at them for several seconds. Then, sparing them a lecture on the obvious, he got up, went to the gap at the end of the partition that served as a doorway, and called over one of his officers. He outlined the situation, and the officer went away to make some calls. Keene and Colby nodded their thanks. Keene didn’t feel entirely comfortable about jumping the line. But there are times when one has to look after one’s own. “And now can we get you people something to eat?” Weyland asked again. They accepted.

It turned out that the general’s readiness to receive them stemmed more from a hope of being told more himself of what was going on than any recognition of a need to inform them. He had assumed from Colby’s credentials that they represented, or at least could enlighten him as to the existence of, some administrative authority that had survived of a national or even international nature. He was in landline contact with the military command at Cheyenne Mountain, several regional headquarters, and also a number of FEMA centers. As far as he was aware, Washington had ceased functioning. The President, along with his family and immediate staff, had vanished three days previously with Air Force One when the administration left for the war-survival and command center located near Atlanta. The Secretary of State was supposed to have taken charge in Atlanta provisionally, but Weyland hadn’t had any contact from there. A further mystery was the disappearance of the Vice President, who had left to set up a West Coast shadow government a day before the President’s departure from Washington. Colby set the record straight on that score, which led to an account of the mission that had taken him and Keene to California. It was the first news Weyland had heard of what had become of the Kronians. Keene presumed that General Ullman would have reported it at Cheyenne Mountain, which seemed by default to have become the nearest that existed to a national coordinating center. Weyland noted the details, clearly with the intention of reporting them independently anyway. His unspoken implication—that there was no guarantee that anyone from Vandenberg had made it to Cheyenne Mountain—didn’t hit Keene until a couple of minutes afterward. Maybe he was more tired than he realized, he told himself.

Weyland then moved to local and more immediate matters. Sitting on America’s rocky spine, El Paso was the focus of two floods of evacuees converging eastward from southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and in the opposite direction from Texas and Oklahoma. They were arriving hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and traumatized, the survivors of meteorite falls, firestorms, hurricanes, and rain torrents, bringing their sick and their injured by the tens of thousands; by the hundreds of thousands. And there, in the dust, the dryness, and the heat that was setting in after the rain, they would die, as they were already starting to, in numbers almost as large. The emergency measures that it had proved possible to mobilize in the time available were too few and too late. And in any case, all the planning had been a product of the slowly evolving thinking of years gone by. None of it had envisaged anything like this. The worst that had been imagined was nuclear war, in which strikes on worthwhile targets and perhaps population centers would produce intense devastation in relatively localized areas, but with comparatively unscathed regions between, able to provide help and relief. But with
everywhere
smitten equally, there was nowhere to turn to. For every township and community, enclave and locality, anything beyond the preoccupation of staying alive from one hour to the next and securing a refuge to gain some respite vanished from the equation of reality. The result was that the whole infrastructure by which the nation maintained itself as a cohesive social and productive organism was coming apart with a rapidity that in any other circumstance would have been deemed impossible; and the same was no doubt true for every other part of the world also.

“What you’ve told me confirms what we already guessed,” Weyland concluded. “We’re going to have to rely on our own resources to get us through this. No supraregional authority is going to emerge and start giving directions. The centers that I mentioned earlier have all got problems of their own as bad as ours here. Nobody has anything to spare. Our immediate concern is providing shelter accommodation and conserving fuel and provisions. The eventual aim is to consolidate communications between key centers along a line running through here, Denver, and up along the Rockies, that will enable mutually supportive logistics, including the restoration of a minimal power grid. With tight management I’m estimating hitting a rock-bottom situation at about three months from now, after which we should be able to start pulling things back together. In the war game scenarios, they used to figure on getting back to normal forty years after an all-out exchange. So maybe if we doubled that, we wouldn’t be too far out. What do you think? I wouldn’t be around to see it, but at least it would mean leading a useful life. So there’s my take. Where are you people going to fit in? What kind of plans do you have next?”

Three months? Start pulling things back together? The words echoed dully in Keene’s mind. It seemed that President Hayer had done too good a job in instilling hope and optimism when he addressed the nation. No concept of what the present events were leading to had yet taken root on any significant basis. Probably that was just as well.

Right now, Keene wasn’t about to launch into anything that would give Weyland cause to reappraise the prospects. Nothing was going to change them, and there was probably no better way in which he could expend his energies. And besides, Keene could feel his own energy draining, even as he turned the thought over. His eyes were closing involuntarily; he felt himself sway on the chair and checked himself with a start. The surroundings seemed to float out of focus and reverberate with hollow sounds and voices that came and went. He was distantly aware of Colby and Mitch looking at him strangely, and himself murmuring that he didn’t have any plans. . . .

And either he passed out then, or simply fell asleep on the spot.

44