From The Dragon and the Crown Volume I Book 2
The Eris War
Volume 1: The Dragon and the Crown
by Admiral Chaim G. Resh, USN detached
Book 1: The End of the Beginning
Part 2: Judgment Day
Chapter 8: The City's Burning Tears
Santa Fe, New Mexico, 12:05 p.m. MDT (2:00 p.m. EDT, 6:00 p.m. GMT), July 16, 2022
Late the previous evening, an Aztlán agent, a man who could follow directions - if they were spelled out for him in words of one syllable - had driven an 18-wheeler containing a 1-megaton thermonuclear device in its cargo hold into downtown Santa Fe, parking it in a truck park. He had then quietly walked away through back alleys until he found his way to one of the local transit stations, where he caught a bus headed for the suburbs. About five miles out of town he spotted a Motel 6; debarking at the first stop after that, he walked back to the motel, where he rented a room for the evening.
The next morning, as per his instructions from his political cell sergeant, after getting up and having breakfast in the down-at-heels greasy-spoon diner across the street from the motel, he walked from there to a nearby open field with line-of-sight visibility right into the city and the truck park where he had left the truck the night before. Smirking at the surprise the people in the city were about to receive, he triggered the truck bomb with a radio signal, using a device his cell sergeant had given him --
-- and found out that five miles away from Ground Zero on a perfectly clear day wasn’t nearly far enough to avoid being roasted alive by the bomb’s thermal pulse . . .
§
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 12:15 p.m. MDT (11:15 am PDT, 18:15 GMT):
Another not-too-bright Aztlán dupe standing just south of Albuquerque International Airport, carefully taking out the little black gadget which his superior in the Aztlán cell of which he was a member had given him two days before, depressed the little red button on it just the way he had been told to do - thereby taking out Albuquerque (and himself) in the same way via a 750 kiloton ground-burst. No witnesses, no witnesses . . .
§
“What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know, Bob - maybe we’d better go see,” said Bob Nugent’s wife, Elaine, a trim, brunette lady with the prettiest smile Mikhail Pushkin had ever seen in his life, save for that of his late wife, Raísa. Nugent never wasted an opportunity to tell others how lucky he’d been to marry her - she’d had a host of suitors before he’d met and courted her and won her hand, and no wonder: she’d been the loveliest girl at the University of New Mexico, Santa Fe, as well as one of the smartest, on the Dean’s list every quarter since she’d first entered school there, majoring in microbiology. Nugent, who had majored there himself, in electronic engineering, was no slouch himself when it came to intelligence, with a posted IQ of at least 140, but he always swore Elaine beat him out in the brains department by at least 15 IQ points.
It was the alarm in Elaine’s expression that galvanized the two men into instant action. For a moment or two, they had thought that perhaps the sudden blinding flash of light outside, as if a cosmic flashbulb had just gone off in the Nugentss back yard, so bright that they had all involuntarily turned away from the windows, blinking to get the fireballs out of their eyes, might have been due to some local accident. Trucks carrying hazardous waste were always passing by on Route 44, which, at its nearest point, was only a mile or so from San Ysidro, where the Nugents lived. There was also a branch of the Southern Pacific about two miles to the north of the town, one used by both passenger and freight traffic; it, too, carried a lot of hazardous waste traffic in the form of big petrochemical tanker cars, and sealed boxcars carrying mystery cargoes that almost certainly held militarily useful items, such as nuclear waste or even biowarfare matériel. And about two miles southeast of the town was a big refinery which routinely processed everything from petroleum products to witch’s brews including such chemicals as chlorine and even fluorine. The flash could have come from any of these.
But Elaine, already heading for the front door, which faced southward, toward Albuquerque, said, “You could see it out of windows on both sides - anybody notice but me?”
She was right. The flash had been visible from both the east and west windows of the Nugent’s front room. Whatever it was, it had come from either the south or the north - or maybe right above them, but if so, they’d probably all have been gas and ash by now, not hale and whole and heading out to see whatever it had been.
Elaine reached the door first. She threw it open, heedless of danger - and stopped dead in her tracks on the front stoop, mute and staring, lips slightly parted, her eyes riveted on something far south of them.
“Elaine, what is it, baby?” her husband asked her. He’d never seen her like this before, and it frightened him. He tried to peer around her to see what it was. So did Pushkin, coming up on her other side.
Slowly, without turning around, still staring southward, Elaine said, her voice low, “Oh, dear - I think we may be at war.” In all the twenty or so years of the Nugents’ marriage, she had almost never raised her voice above what was needed to carry clearly to whomever she spoke; as she had said, many times, yelling and screaming about things rarely communicates what one’s audience needs to know, and just adds to the confusion rather than doing much that is useful. The contrast between her habitual calm, now with a strange, studied edge to it, and the words she had just spoken frightened her husband even more, and he cringed back a little from her, not sure he wanted to see what it was that had so captured her attention.
Stepping to one side, so that her husband and their guest could see it, too, Elaine said, “Take a look.”
After an eternity or two of staring at the horror rising up in the southern sky, Bob said, his voice low and shaky, “Oh, dear Jesus.”
“Bozhemoi.” Staring at the thing that reared itself higher and higher there to the south, aiming for the heavens themselves, Pushkin felt his whole world shift under and around him. “Bozhemoi,” he said again, in the same low whisper in which he’d uttered it the first time. The word, spoken reflexively, without awareness, was the most reverent and honest of prayers.
There in the distance, just over the horizon, where Albuquerque lay some 30 miles away, a vast mushroom cloud, shot through with every color of the rainbow, lightning dancing everywhere within it, was climbing into the sky, the signature ring of blazing nitrogen circling its bulbous cap like an infernal halo. Within its monstrous, roiling bulk was the fireball that had just blasted Albuquerque into blazing rubble and toxic gas; though no longer sun-hot, that great bestial heart of the nuclear spectre now standing so tall before them on the desert was still bright enough that the cloud surrounding it blocked its light no more than the last gauzy veil draped about the body of an exotic dancer would have concealed her nudity. The three of them still couldn’t look directly at it for more than a second or two without having to turn away again, blinking, so bright it still was.
“Um . . . better grab hold of something, boys, here comes the ground shock . . .”
“Oh, shit - Misha, grab that post, there!” yelled Bob as, responding to his wife’s warning, he reached out for another of the posts supporting the roof over the porch. Fortunately the porch’s two corner posts were both well-braced and very strong, having been, like the rest of the porch, constructed of California live oak. The two men thus easily rode out the groundswells caused by the shockwaves shuddering outward in all directions from ground zero that now rippled eerily across the land on which the house stood. Elaine, rather than trying to stay on her feet, had fallen to her knees on the porch, behind the low wooden wall that wrapped around the porch on both sides and both sides of the stairs leading down from the porch to the ground below. There she had wedged herself tightly into the southeastern corner of the porch, where two of the low walls came together, bracing herself with her feet.
As far away from the city as they were, the three of them might as well not have worried about the ground shock. After being transmitted from the city through the packed desert earth and the bedrock below it, the ground-shock was gentle enough to rock a baby to sleep by the time it reached and passed under the Nugents’ home. The only real signs of its passage were the veils of dust that rose above the ground, shaken free by the shockwaves passing under them, the intricate interference patterns of which were mirrored in the draperies of dust floating above, and the mild sway of the cacti, big and small, scattered across the flat landscape between the Nugents’ home and the burning city there in the distance. The only man-made structures between their home and the city were roads and a few fence-posts. From the time of the Spanish land-grants up until about two years ago, when it had been seized by the federales on the basis of spurious claims of unpaid taxes, most of that land had been owned by ranchers and one or two small-farmers, and in the intervening two years since its seizure by the Bureau of Land Management nothing much had been done with it. So there was nothing at all to block the view between the Nugents’ land and the city - something which, Pushkin thought, wasn’t much of a mercy.
Why the feds hadn’t also seized the Nugents’ land at the time they took the rest was something of a mystery. Bob, who had tried to find out why but had never been able to get a straight answer, had been worried that they’d be the next to go, their land seized in the next mass takings, this time of the properties ranging north and east from their land over an area about five miles by ten that included a number of homes like theirs, small parcels of land on which stood single-family homes, garages, occasional small outbuildings, that sort of thing. None of that land contained a ranch, a farm, or any other business. Elaine thought that that land hadn’t been seized yet because, due to the different uses to which the two parcels of land had been put, taking this land would require different legal strategies on the part of the federal government than had the other takings.
Well, pretty clearly now, thought Pushkin, the question was moot - or less than moot, totally irrelevant. God, i>look/i> at that thing there, rising, rising so high, so high . . .
Suddenly the veils of dust that filled the air virtually everywhere all around them began marching northward. Hot dust hit them in the face, making them choke and gag. It spilled across the porch and began to enter the house through the open front door. “Get down behind the panels!” Elaine yelled at the two men. “It’s not nearly as bad down here!”
Dropping down beside her in the corner of the porch where she now crouched, Bob and Pushkin found that she was right. It was still dusty - dust spilled over the edge of the porch’s low wooden southern wall, carried there by the hot wind driving north out of Albuquerque, but it didn’t slap them across the face the way the stuff had when they had been standing up with nothing at all between them and it.
“What the hell is going on here?” Bob said, more to himself than anyone else, bewildered as a child whose world has just turned up side down. “What’s all this dust for?” If he hadn’t been so sandbagged by what had just occurred, he’d have known. Gently, as if soothinf a frightened youngster, Pushkin told him, “It’s the same thing that happened a few minutes ago, when we had to hold on because the ground was moving. That was the ground shock - the shockwave from that bomb being transmitted through the Earth’s crust. Shockwaves move a great deal faster through solid stuff like earth and rock than they do through air. So the air shock took longer to reach us, that’s all. As it came, it picked up the same dust the ground shock threw up out there and brought the dust along with it, and of course the thermal pulse from the bomb, the heat. That’s why the wind is hot. It would have been much, much hotter if your house had been much closer to the city - we’re lucky you live all the way out here.”
“We’re lucky we were all inside when it happened!” Elaine said, an odd note in her voice. Pushkin turned to look at her. She was staring in horror at the front wall of the house.
“Bozhemoi, look at that,” Pushkin said softly, staring at it.
Below the edge of the shadow of the paneling of which the walls around the porch were made, the stuccoed southern wall of the house, which Bob had repainted just four months before, was still clean and white as it had been when he’d come over to visit just a couple of days ago. Above that line - above it, the wall had turned a sick beige color, spotted here and there with darker golden-brown or even mahogany patches. Sitting up, he reached up to touch one of the latter. It had a weird texture, rough but somehow gooey, as if something there had melted slightly. It was hot, not enough to sting, but definitely a lot warmer than it should have been even in full sunlight at noon on a Summer day. Scorched, he thought. The wall’s been scorched there, and the paint or underlying plaster or both are bubbled up from it.
Then Pushkin noticed, at the very edge of the meeting of the porch and the steps down from it, a small lizard, twisting and turning as if in terrible pain, its mouth opening and closing, bright red tongue darting in and out, making strange little chuck-chuck-chuck noises, as if it were coughing. There were blistered places on its sides, and a patch on its back that looked baked. Victim of the thermal pulse, Pushkin thought. As if to confirm the idea, a yellow scorpion suddenly fell from the top of the paneling next to him, landing by his right foot. It, too, writhed and twisted about in agony, its stinger striking the wood flooring of the porch again and again, its claws reaching out, closing, opening, withdrawing, reaching out again, as if its entire nervous system was in upheaval. All along one side its bright yellow coloration had been replaced by the ugly brown-black of charring. How weird, the way the thermal pulse touches this thing, does nothing to that thing, jumps completely over another only to burn a fourth to a crisp, he thought absently. A vague realization came to him that he was no longer firmly anchored to the real world in an emotional sense, but rather beginning to drift on the psychological winds. It scared him - a blessing, for that galvanized him back to full alertness, brought him up out of a gathering fugue and cast him ashore on a great, blinding-white beach of full conscious, once more himself.
“That’s right, you got to see some of those tests they had over on Kamchatka,” Bob said, a “That’s right, you know about this” note in his voice that made Pushkin a little nervous. Did Bob blame him for - for that, that thing in the distance? Reflexively he opened his mouth to say that yes, he had witnessed a couple of tests of the Soviet Union’s bigger thermonuclear devices while he was Undersecretary of Defense, but had never been so much as consulted about any of them, when it dawned on him that Bob was merely hoping that maybe Pushkin could enlighten him about the unenlightenable, could answer questions he’d never even known existed in the first place, could bring some sort of order and sanity out of this unthinkable horror for them all. The mute terror in Elaine’s eyes, the terror she would never, ever give voice to, even in extremis, said the same thing. The two of them, his brave, staunch-hearted friends, were on the verge of falling apart, and whatever could he do for them?
From someplace deep within himself he’d never known before existed, Sophia rose up, showing him what to do. Wordlessly - the answers these two dear people needed now couldn’t be couched in words; they needed action - he scooted over the boards of the porch flooring until he was between Bob and Elaine, then, putting an arm around each, drew them gently to him, and held them like that while an unknown length of time passed. It couldn’t have been long - afterward he couldn’t make out any significant change in the Sun’s position in the heavens from where it had been when he began to hold them like that - but when he finally relaxed his arms, letting them fall away from him a bit, they were both calm, almost serene, as if they’d been touched by an angel.
Still letting Sophia guide him - he could feel Her within him, Pallas Athena become a Christian Saint, directing him, inspiring him, showing him what needed to be done - he said, smiling on his friends, “I believe we are needed, the three of us. Shall we see what we can put together to take to help the poor, lost souls there at the fringes of the city who have survived? It may not be much - it can’t be much, not compared to the overwhelming need we are sure to find there - but if we can save even one life, comfort even one dying man and relieve his pain so that he doesn’t go into the darkness alone and in agony, we shall have done something good, something great. Shall we not go?”
Elaine, tears standing out in her eyes, smiled and said, “Of course. You are an angel for thinking of it - our angel. We have no right not to share you with those people out there. Thank you, Misha - spasebo.” And she leaned over and gave him a quick, gentle kiss on the cheek.
Then, sighing, she began to rise to her feet. As she did so, steadying herself on Pushkin’s shoulder - he was still sitting down on the porch floor - she extended her other hand to her husband. “Come on, Bob, I think that’s the best idea I’ve heard all day. Or since . . . it started, anyway. Let’s go see what we’ve got in the house.”
“Sure, babe,” Bob said, likewise getting up, supporting himself by pushing off from the porch wall so he wouldn’t overburden Pushkin, though letting Elaine help him up as well. “-Misha, why don’t you and I go out and see if we’ve got enough gas in the car to get to the city and back, and look through the garage, see what we have there that might come in handy over there?” he said. “-Here, let me give you a hand, pal . . .”
Taking Bob’s hand, Pushkin joined his two friends and, with them, headed into the house.
It took them about forty-five minutes to figure out what to take, load the Nugents’ Chevy station-wagon, and head out for the city. Part of the reason for that was due to the sudden loss of all electricity. When Albuquerque had gone up, the portion of the Grid that served it and surrounding communities had of course failed completely. They hadn’t noticed it at first, because there hadn’t been any lights on in the front room - the sunlight coming in through the windows was more than enough light, so why waste energy? - and it only became obvious once they got back to the house. The two men had had to help Elaine start up the Nugents’ methane-fired emergency generator, the one they’d set up several years before in their top basement, along with methane tanks for its fuel. The refrigerator and freezer had to be kept running as long as possible, until they’d eaten up the perishables stored in them, and while they could use the Colemans the Nugents had for lighting at night and cooking, until they began gathering wood for the fireplace, they’d need the electric heaters during the desert nights. It didn’t take too long to get the generator running and the refrigerator and freezer turned back on again, though, and once that was out of the way, they could turn their full attention to loading the car.
While Bob and Pushkin were getting the car ready, checking the fuel (there was plenty, enough for at least ten trips out there and back), loading the car with everything from the large first-aid kit Bob kept in the garage (“In case of accidents when I’m working on my home improvement projects,” he told Pushkin, laughing, pointing at the scars on his hands and arms; “and believe you me, I’ve had lots of them, so this kit here’s had one hell of a workout over the years!”), two extra cans of gas Bob had in a well behind the garage that was lined and covered with concrete, to keep out the heat, a well-filled chest of tools (not only did it contain such things as screwdrivers and a hammer but also, Pushkin saw, surprised, wire-cutters, a metal-saw, and a number of things which, though they might not be entirely legal for private ownership these days, might come in damned handy over there in the pandemonium wherever survivors from the city gathered), and things Elaine brought from the house, such as blankets, another first-aid kit, two hampers filled with food along with several bags of canned goods, a manual “organ-grinder” style can-opener, and bags of old clothes which the Nugents had been planning to give to Good Will or the Salvation Army, but might be put to far better use now where they were about to go. It was also she, he noted with approving surprise - and yes, why not Elaine, so steady under fire, so calm and determined, of course it would be she! - who brought out from the house, one after the other, three small-arms storage boxes containing two Glocks and a monster of a .357 Magnum revolver, two pump 12-gauge shotguns in their canvas storage bags, and something like twenty boxes of cartridges for the handguns and shells for the scatterguns.
“You sure we’re gonna need all those, babe?” Bob asked her, meaning the firearms.
“We might - and I don’t want to leave them behind and then find out, too late, that we needed them,” she said as she carefully made places for them in a large hidden storage space under the floor in the back of their big station wagon. A vintage model - “It’s a 2001 Chevy wagon; I refurbished her completely right after I got her about five years ago, and she’s in cherry condition now, nothing but the best for her, runs like a dream!” Bob told Pushkin proudly. “I upgraded her engine - the only thing in her that isn’t original equipment or replacement for it -- and she gets at least thirty miles per gallon, so we’ve got more than enough gas in her tanks to take us there and back again about ten times!” - it had a tremendous amount of room in it, more than enough to hold the three of them and everything they wanted to take.
“You think we got enough of everything in there, babe?” Bob asked his wife as they were packing the last of the things they’d decided to take in the car.
“We don’t want to take it all with us now, honey,” she told him. “We can’t stay out there forever. Maybe a few hours, but not much longer - otherwise we’ll come back to find our place stripped bare by some two-legged jackals who decided to do their shopping in our home before heading for the hills. And we’re going to need most of what we have - I never did open up our ‘Mormon chest’ for this; it’ll all be there for us when we get back. If the local yahoos haven’t gotten here first.”
“‘Mormon chest’?” asked Misha, puzzled. The phrase sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
“Oh, that’s the sub-cellar - you know, the cellar beneeath our cellar, which Bob showed you a couple of months ago - where we keep at least a year’s supply of food for ourselves and at least two other people. We’ve got something like 500 MREs down there, a ton of canned vegetables and fruits and meat, canned gravy, canned milk, boxes of dried milk, unopened bags of flour and sugar, just about everything you’d need to keep four people well-fed for over a year, or maybe a lot more. I haven’t inventoried it lately, and we keep adding to it all the time, so we could have ten years’ worth of food down there for a whole damned army and I wouldn’t know it,” she told him with a grin.
“The main thing I’m worried about,” she said, frowning again, “is whether we’ve taking enough ammunition with us and if our firepower will be enough. I’m not worried so much about the people we may run into near the city. They’ll be in bad shape, most of them, shock-y and more than grateful for whatever we can do for them. I do want us to leave before the Army or anyone like them comes - they’d take everything we have in this car and the car itself and we’d have to walk home. - Assuming they’d let us go.”
“How about looters?’ asked Bob.
“There won’t be any looters,” Pushkin told him. “There’d be nothing left to loot, at least as far as anyone outside the city is concerned. People might come to the city from outside the way we’re going to, to help. Looters might remain behind to loot the homes of people who do that. But go to the city itself to do any looting? After seeing that?” he said, waving his hand to indicate the view to the south, through the open garage door, where the great thermonuclear toadstool that had been squatting there for the last three-quarters of an hour was beginning to lose definition as its ghastly cap spread out farther and farther across the land, thunderheads starting to collect at its edges.
“Er, I guess you’re right. It’d be kind of pointless,” Bob conceded.
“Not to mention lethal. No, looters won’t be the problem - not there. Here, though, they could be - Elaine is quite right, we should not stay there too long, for otherwise we would give looters a chance to come here before we could get back here to protect your place. The main problem we might have there would be from National Guard or Army units, as Elaine has just said - these blankets, the food, the first-aid supplies, everything we are bringing, even the car, could be used to help the survivors, and they would simply commandeer them for that purpose. Likely they would also make us stay there, to help. And in the meantime, the fallout would come drifting down, and soon we ourselves would be coming down sick from it. No, we must go there, give what help we can for a few hours, distribute what we are bringing to whoever is already in charge there, and then leave. Otherwise we risk coming back to an empty house - or not coming back at all. Ever.”
[Continued in following post]
Volume 1: The Dragon and the Crown
by Admiral Chaim G. Resh, USN detached
Book 1: The End of the Beginning
Part 2: Judgment Day
Chapter 8: The City's Burning Tears
Santa Fe, New Mexico, 12:05 p.m. MDT (2:00 p.m. EDT, 6:00 p.m. GMT), July 16, 2022
Late the previous evening, an Aztlán agent, a man who could follow directions - if they were spelled out for him in words of one syllable - had driven an 18-wheeler containing a 1-megaton thermonuclear device in its cargo hold into downtown Santa Fe, parking it in a truck park. He had then quietly walked away through back alleys until he found his way to one of the local transit stations, where he caught a bus headed for the suburbs. About five miles out of town he spotted a Motel 6; debarking at the first stop after that, he walked back to the motel, where he rented a room for the evening.
The next morning, as per his instructions from his political cell sergeant, after getting up and having breakfast in the down-at-heels greasy-spoon diner across the street from the motel, he walked from there to a nearby open field with line-of-sight visibility right into the city and the truck park where he had left the truck the night before. Smirking at the surprise the people in the city were about to receive, he triggered the truck bomb with a radio signal, using a device his cell sergeant had given him --
-- and found out that five miles away from Ground Zero on a perfectly clear day wasn’t nearly far enough to avoid being roasted alive by the bomb’s thermal pulse . . .
§
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 12:15 p.m. MDT (11:15 am PDT, 18:15 GMT):
Another not-too-bright Aztlán dupe standing just south of Albuquerque International Airport, carefully taking out the little black gadget which his superior in the Aztlán cell of which he was a member had given him two days before, depressed the little red button on it just the way he had been told to do - thereby taking out Albuquerque (and himself) in the same way via a 750 kiloton ground-burst. No witnesses, no witnesses . . .
§
“What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know, Bob - maybe we’d better go see,” said Bob Nugent’s wife, Elaine, a trim, brunette lady with the prettiest smile Mikhail Pushkin had ever seen in his life, save for that of his late wife, Raísa. Nugent never wasted an opportunity to tell others how lucky he’d been to marry her - she’d had a host of suitors before he’d met and courted her and won her hand, and no wonder: she’d been the loveliest girl at the University of New Mexico, Santa Fe, as well as one of the smartest, on the Dean’s list every quarter since she’d first entered school there, majoring in microbiology. Nugent, who had majored there himself, in electronic engineering, was no slouch himself when it came to intelligence, with a posted IQ of at least 140, but he always swore Elaine beat him out in the brains department by at least 15 IQ points.
It was the alarm in Elaine’s expression that galvanized the two men into instant action. For a moment or two, they had thought that perhaps the sudden blinding flash of light outside, as if a cosmic flashbulb had just gone off in the Nugentss back yard, so bright that they had all involuntarily turned away from the windows, blinking to get the fireballs out of their eyes, might have been due to some local accident. Trucks carrying hazardous waste were always passing by on Route 44, which, at its nearest point, was only a mile or so from San Ysidro, where the Nugents lived. There was also a branch of the Southern Pacific about two miles to the north of the town, one used by both passenger and freight traffic; it, too, carried a lot of hazardous waste traffic in the form of big petrochemical tanker cars, and sealed boxcars carrying mystery cargoes that almost certainly held militarily useful items, such as nuclear waste or even biowarfare matériel. And about two miles southeast of the town was a big refinery which routinely processed everything from petroleum products to witch’s brews including such chemicals as chlorine and even fluorine. The flash could have come from any of these.
But Elaine, already heading for the front door, which faced southward, toward Albuquerque, said, “You could see it out of windows on both sides - anybody notice but me?”
She was right. The flash had been visible from both the east and west windows of the Nugent’s front room. Whatever it was, it had come from either the south or the north - or maybe right above them, but if so, they’d probably all have been gas and ash by now, not hale and whole and heading out to see whatever it had been.
Elaine reached the door first. She threw it open, heedless of danger - and stopped dead in her tracks on the front stoop, mute and staring, lips slightly parted, her eyes riveted on something far south of them.
“Elaine, what is it, baby?” her husband asked her. He’d never seen her like this before, and it frightened him. He tried to peer around her to see what it was. So did Pushkin, coming up on her other side.
Slowly, without turning around, still staring southward, Elaine said, her voice low, “Oh, dear - I think we may be at war.” In all the twenty or so years of the Nugents’ marriage, she had almost never raised her voice above what was needed to carry clearly to whomever she spoke; as she had said, many times, yelling and screaming about things rarely communicates what one’s audience needs to know, and just adds to the confusion rather than doing much that is useful. The contrast between her habitual calm, now with a strange, studied edge to it, and the words she had just spoken frightened her husband even more, and he cringed back a little from her, not sure he wanted to see what it was that had so captured her attention.
Stepping to one side, so that her husband and their guest could see it, too, Elaine said, “Take a look.”
After an eternity or two of staring at the horror rising up in the southern sky, Bob said, his voice low and shaky, “Oh, dear Jesus.”
“Bozhemoi.” Staring at the thing that reared itself higher and higher there to the south, aiming for the heavens themselves, Pushkin felt his whole world shift under and around him. “Bozhemoi,” he said again, in the same low whisper in which he’d uttered it the first time. The word, spoken reflexively, without awareness, was the most reverent and honest of prayers.
There in the distance, just over the horizon, where Albuquerque lay some 30 miles away, a vast mushroom cloud, shot through with every color of the rainbow, lightning dancing everywhere within it, was climbing into the sky, the signature ring of blazing nitrogen circling its bulbous cap like an infernal halo. Within its monstrous, roiling bulk was the fireball that had just blasted Albuquerque into blazing rubble and toxic gas; though no longer sun-hot, that great bestial heart of the nuclear spectre now standing so tall before them on the desert was still bright enough that the cloud surrounding it blocked its light no more than the last gauzy veil draped about the body of an exotic dancer would have concealed her nudity. The three of them still couldn’t look directly at it for more than a second or two without having to turn away again, blinking, so bright it still was.
“Um . . . better grab hold of something, boys, here comes the ground shock . . .”
“Oh, shit - Misha, grab that post, there!” yelled Bob as, responding to his wife’s warning, he reached out for another of the posts supporting the roof over the porch. Fortunately the porch’s two corner posts were both well-braced and very strong, having been, like the rest of the porch, constructed of California live oak. The two men thus easily rode out the groundswells caused by the shockwaves shuddering outward in all directions from ground zero that now rippled eerily across the land on which the house stood. Elaine, rather than trying to stay on her feet, had fallen to her knees on the porch, behind the low wooden wall that wrapped around the porch on both sides and both sides of the stairs leading down from the porch to the ground below. There she had wedged herself tightly into the southeastern corner of the porch, where two of the low walls came together, bracing herself with her feet.
As far away from the city as they were, the three of them might as well not have worried about the ground shock. After being transmitted from the city through the packed desert earth and the bedrock below it, the ground-shock was gentle enough to rock a baby to sleep by the time it reached and passed under the Nugents’ home. The only real signs of its passage were the veils of dust that rose above the ground, shaken free by the shockwaves passing under them, the intricate interference patterns of which were mirrored in the draperies of dust floating above, and the mild sway of the cacti, big and small, scattered across the flat landscape between the Nugents’ home and the burning city there in the distance. The only man-made structures between their home and the city were roads and a few fence-posts. From the time of the Spanish land-grants up until about two years ago, when it had been seized by the federales on the basis of spurious claims of unpaid taxes, most of that land had been owned by ranchers and one or two small-farmers, and in the intervening two years since its seizure by the Bureau of Land Management nothing much had been done with it. So there was nothing at all to block the view between the Nugents’ land and the city - something which, Pushkin thought, wasn’t much of a mercy.
Why the feds hadn’t also seized the Nugents’ land at the time they took the rest was something of a mystery. Bob, who had tried to find out why but had never been able to get a straight answer, had been worried that they’d be the next to go, their land seized in the next mass takings, this time of the properties ranging north and east from their land over an area about five miles by ten that included a number of homes like theirs, small parcels of land on which stood single-family homes, garages, occasional small outbuildings, that sort of thing. None of that land contained a ranch, a farm, or any other business. Elaine thought that that land hadn’t been seized yet because, due to the different uses to which the two parcels of land had been put, taking this land would require different legal strategies on the part of the federal government than had the other takings.
Well, pretty clearly now, thought Pushkin, the question was moot - or less than moot, totally irrelevant. God, i>look/i> at that thing there, rising, rising so high, so high . . .
Suddenly the veils of dust that filled the air virtually everywhere all around them began marching northward. Hot dust hit them in the face, making them choke and gag. It spilled across the porch and began to enter the house through the open front door. “Get down behind the panels!” Elaine yelled at the two men. “It’s not nearly as bad down here!”
Dropping down beside her in the corner of the porch where she now crouched, Bob and Pushkin found that she was right. It was still dusty - dust spilled over the edge of the porch’s low wooden southern wall, carried there by the hot wind driving north out of Albuquerque, but it didn’t slap them across the face the way the stuff had when they had been standing up with nothing at all between them and it.
“What the hell is going on here?” Bob said, more to himself than anyone else, bewildered as a child whose world has just turned up side down. “What’s all this dust for?” If he hadn’t been so sandbagged by what had just occurred, he’d have known. Gently, as if soothinf a frightened youngster, Pushkin told him, “It’s the same thing that happened a few minutes ago, when we had to hold on because the ground was moving. That was the ground shock - the shockwave from that bomb being transmitted through the Earth’s crust. Shockwaves move a great deal faster through solid stuff like earth and rock than they do through air. So the air shock took longer to reach us, that’s all. As it came, it picked up the same dust the ground shock threw up out there and brought the dust along with it, and of course the thermal pulse from the bomb, the heat. That’s why the wind is hot. It would have been much, much hotter if your house had been much closer to the city - we’re lucky you live all the way out here.”
“We’re lucky we were all inside when it happened!” Elaine said, an odd note in her voice. Pushkin turned to look at her. She was staring in horror at the front wall of the house.
“Bozhemoi, look at that,” Pushkin said softly, staring at it.
Below the edge of the shadow of the paneling of which the walls around the porch were made, the stuccoed southern wall of the house, which Bob had repainted just four months before, was still clean and white as it had been when he’d come over to visit just a couple of days ago. Above that line - above it, the wall had turned a sick beige color, spotted here and there with darker golden-brown or even mahogany patches. Sitting up, he reached up to touch one of the latter. It had a weird texture, rough but somehow gooey, as if something there had melted slightly. It was hot, not enough to sting, but definitely a lot warmer than it should have been even in full sunlight at noon on a Summer day. Scorched, he thought. The wall’s been scorched there, and the paint or underlying plaster or both are bubbled up from it.
Then Pushkin noticed, at the very edge of the meeting of the porch and the steps down from it, a small lizard, twisting and turning as if in terrible pain, its mouth opening and closing, bright red tongue darting in and out, making strange little chuck-chuck-chuck noises, as if it were coughing. There were blistered places on its sides, and a patch on its back that looked baked. Victim of the thermal pulse, Pushkin thought. As if to confirm the idea, a yellow scorpion suddenly fell from the top of the paneling next to him, landing by his right foot. It, too, writhed and twisted about in agony, its stinger striking the wood flooring of the porch again and again, its claws reaching out, closing, opening, withdrawing, reaching out again, as if its entire nervous system was in upheaval. All along one side its bright yellow coloration had been replaced by the ugly brown-black of charring. How weird, the way the thermal pulse touches this thing, does nothing to that thing, jumps completely over another only to burn a fourth to a crisp, he thought absently. A vague realization came to him that he was no longer firmly anchored to the real world in an emotional sense, but rather beginning to drift on the psychological winds. It scared him - a blessing, for that galvanized him back to full alertness, brought him up out of a gathering fugue and cast him ashore on a great, blinding-white beach of full conscious, once more himself.
“That’s right, you got to see some of those tests they had over on Kamchatka,” Bob said, a “That’s right, you know about this” note in his voice that made Pushkin a little nervous. Did Bob blame him for - for that, that thing in the distance? Reflexively he opened his mouth to say that yes, he had witnessed a couple of tests of the Soviet Union’s bigger thermonuclear devices while he was Undersecretary of Defense, but had never been so much as consulted about any of them, when it dawned on him that Bob was merely hoping that maybe Pushkin could enlighten him about the unenlightenable, could answer questions he’d never even known existed in the first place, could bring some sort of order and sanity out of this unthinkable horror for them all. The mute terror in Elaine’s eyes, the terror she would never, ever give voice to, even in extremis, said the same thing. The two of them, his brave, staunch-hearted friends, were on the verge of falling apart, and whatever could he do for them?
From someplace deep within himself he’d never known before existed, Sophia rose up, showing him what to do. Wordlessly - the answers these two dear people needed now couldn’t be couched in words; they needed action - he scooted over the boards of the porch flooring until he was between Bob and Elaine, then, putting an arm around each, drew them gently to him, and held them like that while an unknown length of time passed. It couldn’t have been long - afterward he couldn’t make out any significant change in the Sun’s position in the heavens from where it had been when he began to hold them like that - but when he finally relaxed his arms, letting them fall away from him a bit, they were both calm, almost serene, as if they’d been touched by an angel.
Still letting Sophia guide him - he could feel Her within him, Pallas Athena become a Christian Saint, directing him, inspiring him, showing him what needed to be done - he said, smiling on his friends, “I believe we are needed, the three of us. Shall we see what we can put together to take to help the poor, lost souls there at the fringes of the city who have survived? It may not be much - it can’t be much, not compared to the overwhelming need we are sure to find there - but if we can save even one life, comfort even one dying man and relieve his pain so that he doesn’t go into the darkness alone and in agony, we shall have done something good, something great. Shall we not go?”
Elaine, tears standing out in her eyes, smiled and said, “Of course. You are an angel for thinking of it - our angel. We have no right not to share you with those people out there. Thank you, Misha - spasebo.” And she leaned over and gave him a quick, gentle kiss on the cheek.
Then, sighing, she began to rise to her feet. As she did so, steadying herself on Pushkin’s shoulder - he was still sitting down on the porch floor - she extended her other hand to her husband. “Come on, Bob, I think that’s the best idea I’ve heard all day. Or since . . . it started, anyway. Let’s go see what we’ve got in the house.”
“Sure, babe,” Bob said, likewise getting up, supporting himself by pushing off from the porch wall so he wouldn’t overburden Pushkin, though letting Elaine help him up as well. “-Misha, why don’t you and I go out and see if we’ve got enough gas in the car to get to the city and back, and look through the garage, see what we have there that might come in handy over there?” he said. “-Here, let me give you a hand, pal . . .”
Taking Bob’s hand, Pushkin joined his two friends and, with them, headed into the house.
It took them about forty-five minutes to figure out what to take, load the Nugents’ Chevy station-wagon, and head out for the city. Part of the reason for that was due to the sudden loss of all electricity. When Albuquerque had gone up, the portion of the Grid that served it and surrounding communities had of course failed completely. They hadn’t noticed it at first, because there hadn’t been any lights on in the front room - the sunlight coming in through the windows was more than enough light, so why waste energy? - and it only became obvious once they got back to the house. The two men had had to help Elaine start up the Nugents’ methane-fired emergency generator, the one they’d set up several years before in their top basement, along with methane tanks for its fuel. The refrigerator and freezer had to be kept running as long as possible, until they’d eaten up the perishables stored in them, and while they could use the Colemans the Nugents had for lighting at night and cooking, until they began gathering wood for the fireplace, they’d need the electric heaters during the desert nights. It didn’t take too long to get the generator running and the refrigerator and freezer turned back on again, though, and once that was out of the way, they could turn their full attention to loading the car.
While Bob and Pushkin were getting the car ready, checking the fuel (there was plenty, enough for at least ten trips out there and back), loading the car with everything from the large first-aid kit Bob kept in the garage (“In case of accidents when I’m working on my home improvement projects,” he told Pushkin, laughing, pointing at the scars on his hands and arms; “and believe you me, I’ve had lots of them, so this kit here’s had one hell of a workout over the years!”), two extra cans of gas Bob had in a well behind the garage that was lined and covered with concrete, to keep out the heat, a well-filled chest of tools (not only did it contain such things as screwdrivers and a hammer but also, Pushkin saw, surprised, wire-cutters, a metal-saw, and a number of things which, though they might not be entirely legal for private ownership these days, might come in damned handy over there in the pandemonium wherever survivors from the city gathered), and things Elaine brought from the house, such as blankets, another first-aid kit, two hampers filled with food along with several bags of canned goods, a manual “organ-grinder” style can-opener, and bags of old clothes which the Nugents had been planning to give to Good Will or the Salvation Army, but might be put to far better use now where they were about to go. It was also she, he noted with approving surprise - and yes, why not Elaine, so steady under fire, so calm and determined, of course it would be she! - who brought out from the house, one after the other, three small-arms storage boxes containing two Glocks and a monster of a .357 Magnum revolver, two pump 12-gauge shotguns in their canvas storage bags, and something like twenty boxes of cartridges for the handguns and shells for the scatterguns.
“You sure we’re gonna need all those, babe?” Bob asked her, meaning the firearms.
“We might - and I don’t want to leave them behind and then find out, too late, that we needed them,” she said as she carefully made places for them in a large hidden storage space under the floor in the back of their big station wagon. A vintage model - “It’s a 2001 Chevy wagon; I refurbished her completely right after I got her about five years ago, and she’s in cherry condition now, nothing but the best for her, runs like a dream!” Bob told Pushkin proudly. “I upgraded her engine - the only thing in her that isn’t original equipment or replacement for it -- and she gets at least thirty miles per gallon, so we’ve got more than enough gas in her tanks to take us there and back again about ten times!” - it had a tremendous amount of room in it, more than enough to hold the three of them and everything they wanted to take.
“You think we got enough of everything in there, babe?” Bob asked his wife as they were packing the last of the things they’d decided to take in the car.
“We don’t want to take it all with us now, honey,” she told him. “We can’t stay out there forever. Maybe a few hours, but not much longer - otherwise we’ll come back to find our place stripped bare by some two-legged jackals who decided to do their shopping in our home before heading for the hills. And we’re going to need most of what we have - I never did open up our ‘Mormon chest’ for this; it’ll all be there for us when we get back. If the local yahoos haven’t gotten here first.”
“‘Mormon chest’?” asked Misha, puzzled. The phrase sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
“Oh, that’s the sub-cellar - you know, the cellar beneeath our cellar, which Bob showed you a couple of months ago - where we keep at least a year’s supply of food for ourselves and at least two other people. We’ve got something like 500 MREs down there, a ton of canned vegetables and fruits and meat, canned gravy, canned milk, boxes of dried milk, unopened bags of flour and sugar, just about everything you’d need to keep four people well-fed for over a year, or maybe a lot more. I haven’t inventoried it lately, and we keep adding to it all the time, so we could have ten years’ worth of food down there for a whole damned army and I wouldn’t know it,” she told him with a grin.
“The main thing I’m worried about,” she said, frowning again, “is whether we’ve taking enough ammunition with us and if our firepower will be enough. I’m not worried so much about the people we may run into near the city. They’ll be in bad shape, most of them, shock-y and more than grateful for whatever we can do for them. I do want us to leave before the Army or anyone like them comes - they’d take everything we have in this car and the car itself and we’d have to walk home. - Assuming they’d let us go.”
“How about looters?’ asked Bob.
“There won’t be any looters,” Pushkin told him. “There’d be nothing left to loot, at least as far as anyone outside the city is concerned. People might come to the city from outside the way we’re going to, to help. Looters might remain behind to loot the homes of people who do that. But go to the city itself to do any looting? After seeing that?” he said, waving his hand to indicate the view to the south, through the open garage door, where the great thermonuclear toadstool that had been squatting there for the last three-quarters of an hour was beginning to lose definition as its ghastly cap spread out farther and farther across the land, thunderheads starting to collect at its edges.
“Er, I guess you’re right. It’d be kind of pointless,” Bob conceded.
“Not to mention lethal. No, looters won’t be the problem - not there. Here, though, they could be - Elaine is quite right, we should not stay there too long, for otherwise we would give looters a chance to come here before we could get back here to protect your place. The main problem we might have there would be from National Guard or Army units, as Elaine has just said - these blankets, the food, the first-aid supplies, everything we are bringing, even the car, could be used to help the survivors, and they would simply commandeer them for that purpose. Likely they would also make us stay there, to help. And in the meantime, the fallout would come drifting down, and soon we ourselves would be coming down sick from it. No, we must go there, give what help we can for a few hours, distribute what we are bringing to whoever is already in charge there, and then leave. Otherwise we risk coming back to an empty house - or not coming back at all. Ever.”
[Continued in following post]