The Last Run: A Novella (6 page)

“You said that was from a secondary base,” CJ said a moment later. “Does that mean all the big bases have fired?”

“I’d say it’s a safe bet all birds are in the air,” Mulligan said.

“So how much time does that give us?”

Mulligan shook his head. “I don’t know.” In reality, the best he could hope for would be to get to the house, load in Tess and the girls, and close the airlock before anything untoward happened. Kindlebrook was the only military installation worthy of hitting (aside from Harmony, of course), so he didn’t think a nuclear weapon was specifically heading their way. He was more worried about fallout from detonations against valuable targets, such as McConnell Air Force Base, located outside of Wichita. The air data sensors on the Mission Equipment Pod strapped to the rig’s back told him the breeze was moving at a leisurely six knots from the southeast, so that meant that clouds of lethal radioactive fallout could soon be heading their way. And while weapon systems such as intercontinental ballistic missiles were outside of Mulligan’s range of experience, he presumed they were capable of supersonic velocities, maybe as high as ten thousand miles per hour on re-entry. Depending on where a weapon was launched from, he figured they had maybe another ten minutes or so until mushroom clouds were starting to sprout across the prairie.

Is it enough time? Can I get there and load up Tess and the kids before the fallout rolls in? And if I can, and we make it back, what if Harmony won’t send the lift up?

Mulligan figured that since he had nothing to go on, he would just have to do something he’d never really done before: Leave it all to chance.

“We’re likely pretty far from any valuable targets,” he told her. “I don’t think we need to worry about any detonations in our vicinity.”

“What if they hit Harmony?” Peter asked.

“You know the answer to that already. Harmony’s buried over a hundred feet below ground. It would take multiple strikes to take it out, and if the Russians do that, then we’d be screwed no matter what,” Mulligan said. “Harmony’s a military target, but it has no offensive value, and it’s part of the missile defense grid. If the Russians want it, they can get it, but that means they’ll have to pass up servicing more important targets.”

“Important to us, or important to them?”

“Heh. Good question. How’re you feeling back there?”

“About the same,” Peter said. “I haven’t blown chow all over the place, but that could change at any moment.”

“Take heart. We’re about to put wheels on pavement.”

“Thank God.”

Mulligan wasn’t lying. Just ahead, another rural road came into view. There was no traffic on it, but in the distance, in the midst of another field, he saw several stalled tractors. People wandered around them, mystified by the fact they had suddenly stopped running. Of course, no one knew about the high-altitude explosions that had blanketed most of North America with powerful bursts of electromagnetic energy. Mulligan cringed at that. He figured it was a legit tactic, taking out the enemy’s eyes and ears, but the fact that so many civilians were going to be slaughtered still pissed him off. Not that there was any way around that. Nuclear weapons weren’t the most discriminate of offensive platforms, and the Russians were going to get back what they had dished out.

Blasting through a small copse of trees, the SCEV slowed as it clambered onto the two-lane roadway. Telephone poles stood in a neat, albeit somewhat irregular, row along the left shoulder as Mulligan cranked the rig into a right turn. The SCEV accelerated smoothly, its big tires whirring as they rolled across the dusty macadam thoroughfare, kicking up dust and a small storm of stones that clicked against the rig’s thick undercarriage. Mulligan eased the control column forward, watching as the vehicle’s speed passed sixty miles per hour. A quick consultation of the GPS display told him they would be at the house in less than ten minutes at that speed. Mulligan pressed the column forward even more, and encountered the control stop. The SCEV’s speed topped out at sixty-three miles per hour. They were moving as fast as they could go.

A quick flush of distortion made the displays pulse for an instant, and an alarm sounded. The SCEV had just detected another EMP emission, and a momentary, squealing whistle sounded over their radio headsets as the distant explosion caused a heterodyne signal that filled the airwaves. As CJ silenced the alarm, Peter reported that another nuclear explosion had been detected somewhere over the horizon. Mulligan figured that would be McConnell.

“Systems check,” he ordered.

“We’re looking good,” Peter told him. “No EMP-related damage. All systems are running normally. Judging by the strength of the pulse, the blast was a couple of hundred miles away to our southeast. From the waveform, I’d say it was a ground strike. But not strong enough to compromise us, anyway.”

“But definitely a run-on suck for those on the receiving end.” Mulligan made a sweep of the instrument panel anyway, just to be sure. There were no indicators illuminated other than the historical alert captured by the interferometers positioned along the rig’s thick hull. It was true the SCEVs were shielded, but only up to a theoretical limit of 10 gigawatts. Additional shielding would have compromised the range, and the mission of Harmony Base required the vehicles be the eyes and ears of the command group in the post-holocaust environment. But the idea was that the rigs would have been safely underground, where over a hundred feet of earth and rock, along with the base’s grounded superstructure, would have provided even more dampening protection. So far, the SCEV’s shielding had survived both an aerial detonation that had doubtless crippled the nation’s power grids and fried pretty much every unshielded computer processor out there, and it had defeated the surge generated from the strike against McConnell.

The alarm chirped again. “Okay, that was another one,” Peter reported dutifully. “Same as before. Would they launch two nukes against one target? Isn’t one good enough?”

“The Russkies have weapons with a lot of throw weight, so they can afford to re-attack targets,” Mulligan said. “If you’re going to cause the end of the world, you might as well do it big time.”

Another chime sounded, and an alert window opened up on one of the displays. Mulligan looked at the flashing legend.

RAD LEVEL 20 μSv

Damn, that was quick.

“Twenty microsieverts…radiation level’s up to about the same as a chest X-ray,” CJ said, noting the same warning.

“Yeah, could be from the airbursts earlier,” Mulligan said. “The wind isn’t moving fast enough for it to be fallout from those ground strikes.”

“Give it time,” Peter said.

“Feeling more chipper now that we’re on the straight and level, Mister Lopez?”

“I still feel like I want to throw up, but I think that’s because Mankind is killing itself.”

Mulligan nodded but didn’t comment. He felt pretty much the same way.

Ahead, an intersection appeared. It was devoid of traffic, and of any sign of life—much like the majority of the country would be in the coming months. Mulligan toed the brakes and slowed the SCEV as he checked the moving map display. He needed to turn left and head east for eight minutes, then juke north toward where the house was.

“Turning here,” he announced as he brought the rig down to fifteen miles an hour and eased it onto the next road. He scanned the area quickly, and saw not a soul. He glanced over at CJ, and saw her face was tense and drawn. She met his eyes for a moment, and tried to smile. But there wasn’t a damned thing to smile about.

“I had friends at McConnell,” she said.

Mulligan nodded and turned back to the road. “Keep up your scans,” he said. “We’ll be moving pretty quick, so stay sharp. Who knows, someone might step out in front of us and try and wave us down.”

“And if they do?”

“We’re not stopping for anyone, Sergeant.”

“Hooah, Sarmajor.” And with that, CJ turned back to scanning the terrain as the SCEV accelerated down the road. Mulligan sensed movement off his right shoulder again, and he saw Peter edge into the cockpit and peer out the viewports at the pancake-flat landscape ahead. He kept the fingers of his left hand firmly wrapped around the handhold in the bulkhead and leaned against the copilot’s seat.

“Well, I don’t see any mushroom clouds,” he said, straightening up after a moment.

“I don’t think we need to see them to know they’re out there. You should get back to your seat—”

CJ took in a sharp breath, but before Mulligan could think to address the circumstance, the brightest light he had ever seen slashed through the cockpit. Alarms wailed, and above them, Mulligan heard CJ shriek. The control column went dead in Mulligan’s left hand as the hydraulic boost suddenly failed, and through the glare, he could see the displays before him had gone dark. He immediately tapped the brakes, and found that the hydraulics had failed completely. He started pumping the brake pedal like mad. The SCEV responded and slowed in irregular pulsations. Mulligan had to put some muscle into it to keep the rig on the road, and for a moment, it crept perilously close to the shoulder. He thought he felt the rig slipping a bit, and he yanked the column to the right, bringing the rig more or less back to the center of the road. With a lurch, it came to an unceremonious halt.

“My eyes!” CJ said, panic in her voice. “I was looking right at it, I’m
blind
!”

“What happened?” Peter asked, and his voice also held volumes of fear.

Mulligan blinked against the glare that filled his vision, despite the sunglasses he wore. He turned toward CJ, and what he saw outside the viewports took his breath away.

An angry red-orange mushroom cloud climbed into the sky, growing larger by the second. Only one or two miles away, at the most. Vast amounts of debris was already falling earthward, trailing plumes of dark smoke.

Why the hell would they lob a nuke out here?
he asked himself, followed immediately by,
Fuck you, Peter, you called the thing out, and here it is—!

Then, he saw the shock wave barreling right toward them. A wall of dust and earth and God knew what else, being driven outward from the blast site by a wall of super-compressed air whose speed bordered on supersonic. And with nothing in the flat, featureless, heavily-farmed landscape to impede it, the shock wave was headed right toward the SCEV.

“CJ!” Peter leaned back into the cockpit, and reached for his wife. She still sat in the copilot’s seat, her face buried in her hands as she whimpered, rubbing her eyes ferociously.

“Get back into your seat!” Mulligan shouted, tightening his shoulder straps with both hands, cinching them so tight that he was certain he’d have some interesting bruises later.

The shock wave hit the SCEV like a locomotive, and Mulligan felt the rig actually being shoved across the road. Peter let loose a startled cry as he was flung backwards, away from the cockpit. And then, SCEV One’s left tires hit the soft shoulder, and the entire vehicle seemed to stumble and fall like a drunken man.

***

“
H
OLY SHIT!”
someone in the operations center said.

Benchley sat in his chair, a wet tissue in one hand, his eyes still hot and burning from his tears. He’d managed to choke them back and regain some semblance of his command authority, but there was nothing much to do. The base was sealed, and everyone was doing whatever tasks their missions dictated they accomplish. There were tears, of course, but Benchley was proud of all of them. They were doing what they were supposed to do, while Mankind rubbed itself out in an internecine orgy of violence never before witnessed.

There had been some momentary trepidation when one of the missile interceptors had struck an inbound track, blasting it into fragments. It turned out that the target had been a MIRV that hadn’t separated, and now, several nuclear weapons were inbound with projected impact points relatively near Harmony. But as they watched, all but one drifted farther to the east, continuing on in a bid to get as close to its intended target as possible. Benchley wondered if this meant that some city, maybe St. Louis or Memphis or Topeka, might be spared. But then, the detonations in other parts of the nation rendered that slim chance moot. Even if a major metropolitan area was spared a direct hit, the lethal fallout would make them just as uninhabitable.

But one of the weapons had apparently been damaged, or knocked so far off course that it couldn’t correct for the mishap. It buzzed past Harmony at an altitude of four thousand feet—if it had gone off then, it would still have rung their bells—then zipped by at almost five times the speed of sound. The passage of what they presumed to be a nuclear warhead didn’t lessen the tension in the room. The weapon continued its sharp arc toward the Earth, passing through three thousand feet, two thousand, one thousand. When it still didn’t explode, Benchley knew there were only two reasons: the weapon had been so badly damaged that it was inoperative, or it was a ground strike weapon, and not one of the airburst variety.

They had their answer when, a moment after the object disappeared from radar, it detonated several miles to the east. The Earth seemed to shudder in response, and a dull rumbling rolled through the base, not strong enough to make the installation heave on its elaborate set of shock absorbers, but forcefully enough to register on the seismograph network that surrounded the station. The weapon had obviously been in the megaton range, a true city killer, but its mission had been aborted. Somewhere out there, a city or a military installation would have another few minutes to live.

Just the same, he ordered a damage control inspection, regardless. If the base had been injured, he wanted to know about it in the short order. So far, the engineering feeds to his station revealed nothing untoward, but he wasn’t going to trust a bunch of flat screen displays, even if they were driven by one of the more sophisticated military artificial intelligences out there.

On the big map, the eastern seaboard was taking a licking. New York City had been hit with one weapon, and Washington had scored big in the nuclear lottery, taking a total of four hits with three more inbound. Boston was gone, and Atlanta and Miami were next on the hit parade. Slightly closer, the military facilities at Redstone Arsenal had been obliterated, as had virtually every military airfield in the nation. Forts Hood, Campbell, Rucker, and Riley were gone; curiously untouched at the moment were Forts Bragg and Carson, but the latter was lined up for a major hit. Several weapons were tracking toward Colorado, and there was no doubt in Benchley’s mind that Cheyenne Mountain was the big prize.