by David Walton
I understood at once. There had been past ages on Earth when fungi had been the dominant kingdom on the planet. The Ligados were trying to recreate such an age. An explosion like the one Paul described would blow enough radioactive debris into orbit to circle the globe and block sunlight for years. Plants would die. Animals would die. The human species would probably survive, but billions would die, and our technological infrastructure would be all but destroyed. We would become dependent on the fungus for everything.
“But . . . the Ligados have been converging here,” I objected weakly. “They’ll all die, too, along with us.”
“It’s never been about the people,” Paul said. “The people are disposable. In one move, we’ll eliminate human overpopulation and create a climate where we can never grow so numerous again. By the time the sun finally peeks through the dust clouds, it’ll be a new world. A world where Kingdom Fungi dominates the planet.”
I wanted to be horrified, but I wasn’t. The fungus in my mind prevented that. I could see the power of this plan, the reshaping of the world to the perfect environment for the fungus, at the same time taking out its major competitors for the use of the Earth’s resources.
“What about our glorious future as symbiotes with the fungus?” I asked. “The future you showed me in Brazil?”
“That will still come,” he said, a little sadly. “For some humans; the ones who survive. Just not for us.” He shrugged. “There are just too many of us. It was always only meant for a few.”
“But won’t this destroy the Amazon?” I asked. “All the trees, the animals, the whole ecology the fungus controls and grows in. They’ll die, too.”
“It was never about them either. They’re a means to an end, just like we are. This will turn the clock back, to a time when fungus ruled the Earth. Any species that can survive in that world will serve the fungus.”
A man in civilian dress, presumably the nuclear engineer, came up to Paul. He held a tablet in his hands, which he poked at with his thumbs, typing as he walked.
“We’re all set for remote detonation,” he said. “Everything is wired and status is green.”
“Remote?” Paul frowned. “Why remote? We’ll be just as dead upstairs as here. If it’s all wired, push the button.”
The engineer shook his head. “We have to control the timing precisely,” he said. “We want to create a rolling chain reaction so that each of the detonations increases the overall strength of the blast. The whole thing takes less than a millisecond, but if the controller is destroyed too soon, the timing will be off, and we won’t get nearly the megatonnage we expect. We might barely destroy the city.”
“Okay. But you’re ready?”
The engineer held up the tablet, which showed a simple status display along with a rectangular green button. “That’s all it takes.”
“Wait,” I said. “This is a high-risk plan. If the blast isn’t large enough, there will be a backlash. The rest of the world will unite to destroy us. Barron and others like him will have full rein. And if it’s too big—surely there’s a point at which not even the fungus can survive. Where the entire planet is sterilized of life. Is it really worth that risk?”
“We’ve modeled it,” Paul said. “Checked and rechecked the numbers. The range of error is pretty wide.”
“But . . .” I said, not knowing how I was going to finish the sentence. I could feel my resistance to the idea dissolving. Paul was a mycologist; he would know how much radiation the fungus could handle. I knew it was just the infection in my brain that made the death of billions seem like a good idea, but I had a hard time thinking of why it would be bad.
I wondered what Shaunessy thought about all of this, and realized that I hadn’t seen her since I’d turned the corner of the tunnel. Maybe she’d changed her mind about being down here after all and had gone back up the elevator. It was probably for the best. She might have resisted, and then the soldiers would have shot her. Better that she die cleanly and instantaneously, like all the rest.
“Back to the elevators,” Paul said to the group. “We need to go back up.”
I went with them dumbly, my resistance gone. I could only fight the idea if I had a better one, one that benefitted the fungus just as much, and I didn’t. I didn’t even feel sad. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more elated I felt. We were going to do it. As soon as we reached the top, the engineer would press the button on his tablet, and it would all be over in a moment. All of the rapacious greed of humanity swept away to make room for a saner, more balanced approach to life. I was only sorry I wouldn’t be there to see it.
The freight elevators were large, but not large enough to hold everyone. I rode with Paul and the engineer and about a dozen soldiers, while the other soldiers and civilians took another elevator. We rode up in silence, until I said, “Goodbye, Paul.” He turned, surprised, and regarded me. Then he nodded and ruffled my hair. “Goodbye, little brother.”
I thought of Shaunessy, and Melody, and Andrew, and the thousands of people in the city to our north. We would all die in an instant, like turning off a light. No pain, no fear, no prolonged anticipation. It was a good way to go. The push of a button, and a new chapter in the history of the Earth would begin.
We hadn’t reached the top yet when Paul turned to the engineer. “Is this far enough?”
“Should be,” the engineer said.
“Then don’t wait for the doors to open,” Paul said. “Hit it now.”
The engineer lifted the tablet and turned the screen on. “Shouldn’t we count to three or something?”
The elevator squealed and jerked to a stop. “Nope,” Paul said. “Just push it.”
Automatic gunfire tore through the elevator doors. The engineer jerked and danced and then fell, joined by two of the soldiers. The doors started to open automatically, but stuck halfway. Two more soldiers forced them open under a hail of bullets, while the rest returned fire. I cowered on the floor, covering my head with my arms. One of the soldiers hurled a grenade, and at the sound of its blast they ran out of the elevator toward the cover of a concrete wall. Holding my breath, I snatched the tablet from the engineer’s hand and ran after them, cringing as a bullet sang past my ear and sparked against the elevator door frame.
The soldiers zigzagged as they ran, and I imitated them. The man in front of me went down with a bullet in his back, and I tripped over him, sprawling flat. The tablet flew out of my hand and went skidding along the pavement. More bullets whined overhead, and I hugged the ground, shielding myself with the soldier’s dead body as best as I could.
Barron’s soldiers surrounded the facility, taking cover behind armored trucks. As I watched, the last of the Ligados soldiers fell. I couldn’t see Paul anywhere.
“Cease fire,” a booming voice said, amplified to be heard above the gunfire and accompanied by a brief, piercing tone. I felt the command deep in my gut, and wished desperately that I had a gun, so I could cease firing it. McCarrick’s fungus had apparently reached my brain.
The shooting stopped, leaving an eerie quiet that seemed to echo across the desert. I sat up carefully, my heart still thudding with adrenaline. My ears rang. I looked around. Where was Paul? Then I saw that the elevator doors—the ones with the bullet holes—had closed again. Paul was on his way back down.
Others saw it, too. Soldiers ran for the elevators and jabbed the buttons, then clambered aboard and headed down. They would stop him, I was certain of it. Without the tablet, what could he do? Perhaps there was another way to signal the nukes from below, but I doubted it. The only way to detonate them . . .
I stood, scanning the ground for the tablet, and spotted it about twenty feet away, black against the black pavement. “Neil!” Shaunessy ran up to me. “Are you okay? Were you hit?”
I told her I was fine. Once she had heard the plan to detonate the nukes underground, she had sneaked back to the top and called Melody. Melody had called General Barron and warned him, and the rest I knew.
“I don’t think they were going to change their minds,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
She lowered her voice. “Melody knows we’ve been infected with McCarrick’s spores,” she said. “Most of the base is. She said to tell you she’s working the problem.”
“Working it how?”
Shaunessy shrugged. “I don’t know.” She lifted her phone. “I’d better give her a call and tell her you’re all right.”
She put the phone to her ear and turned away from me, using her finger to plug the other ear. I sidled away from her, toward the fallen tablet. There was still a chance. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to me. I bent and picked it up.
The screen was scratched, but otherwise it seemed undamaged. I felt around the outside for the on button and pressed it. The screen came to life, and I swiped once across the front to dismiss the opening display. The tablet showed me the same green button I had seen before. I remembered what I had said to Shaunessy earlier: If I could push a button that killed all the people in the world but helped the fungus spread and survive, I don’t think I could stop myself.
“Put it down, Neil.”
It was Shaunessy’s voice. I didn’t look up. I stretched my finger out to touch the green button. A part of myself, deep inside, screamed at me to stop, but I couldn’t. The desire to push it was just too strong.
But no. I had been here before. It was just like pointing the gun on Shaunessy and trying to keep from pulling the trigger. Then, I had failed. This time, I wouldn’t give in. Pushing that button felt like the best thing in the world, but I knew it was wrong. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted, not the real me. If I pushed it, I would die quickly, but billions around the world would die slowly, in horror and starvation. I thought of my parents. Of Julia, and her baby girl, Ash.
My hand stopped in midair, my finger still outstretched toward the button. I strained against it, the muscles in my arm and neck clenching painfully. A wave of nausea washed over me. Not pushing that button was like not reaching for a glass of water after drinking nothing for days. Or not holding out a hand when a child was drowning. That button, that beautiful green button, encompassed all that was good and right and lovely. It called to me. I had to push it. I just had to.
And then it was gone. I felt the impact before I heard the shot, like a sledgehammer to my shoulder. I hit the ground before I knew I was falling, the tablet tumbling out of my grasp. I screamed in pain and surprise and in sorrow for the loss of the green button.
Shaunessy stalked into my vision, the pistol I had given her still smoking in her hand. She stood over the tablet and fired a bullet down into it, shattering it into pieces. She lifted her phone and said, “I just shot him. We need a medic here, right away.”
Pain arced through my arm and upper body. My vision narrowed. I couldn’t see Shaunessy anymore, just a circle of desert sky. The green button still called to me, and I felt tears running down my face at the opportunity lost.
The only chance left was Paul. Maybe he couldn’t detonate all the nukes without the remote, but if he could just detonate one, that would kill the general and the core of his slave army. It might be enough for the main Ligados forces to the south to regroup and retreat, possibly to make a play for another nuclear facility in the coming weeks.
I imagined him running through the underground tunnel to the place where wires from each of the warheads converged. He would tear away the antenna, find the leads that completed the circuit, and . . .
The ground buckled under me, an enormous force tossing me into the air . . . and then nothing.
CHAPTER 35
I opened my eyes. Which shouldn’t have been possible. If Paul had succeeded, even with only one warhead, I shouldn’t be thinking at all.
They explained to me later what had happened. Nuclear weapons work by using conventional explosives to crush a hollow plutonium core, smashing the atoms together and causing a chain reaction. However, if the compression force is not equal in all directions, the core will deform, and the plutonium won’t reach a critical density.
Safety measures generally act on this principle. A liquid is inserted in the core to inhibit symmetrical compression, or else the explosives are electronically wired to prevent simultaneous detonation without a prior signal. The nuclear engineer had programmed the signal to turn off the safety measures into his remote. Paul, however, had simply connected the leads to set off the conventional explosives.
The explosives in two thousand one hundred and eighty-three nuclear warheads packed quite a punch, enough to destroy the elevator shafts, collapse the underground cavern, and injure fifty-seven people on the surface. Cracked plutonium cores were now leaking radiation deep underground where nobody could get to them. It would be the worst radiation disaster in the history of the nation, but the city of Albuquerque—and the world—would survive.
At the time, however, I only knew that I was inexplicably alive, and that every part of my body hurt. My arm was on fire. My head throbbed, and my muscles felt battered and bruised. I wasn’t sure if I could move.
A voice came over the loudspeakers, but this time it was female. Melody’s voice. “The enemy has been defeated,” she said. “General Barron is no longer in command. You want to put your weapons down. You want to return to the medical facility in Kirtland Base where you will await your allocation of antifungal medications. Your greatest desire will be to take these medications, in the prescribed dose, for the next three years.”
The smoke and dust cleared a little, and Shaunessy stepped into view, now without her pistol. She looked up into the sky for a few minutes, squinting against the bright sun. Finally, she looked at me. “Sorry about that,” she said.
I could hardly breathe from the pain, but I gave her what I thought was a smile. “I deserved it,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, and her smile was brilliant. “Yes, you surely did.”
Melody visited me at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque. I still felt groggy from surgery, where they had removed bullet fragments from my shoulder. Shaunessy’s bullet had hurt me more seriously than mine had hurt her, fracturing my humerus right at the joint and damaging ligaments and cartilage. It would be a while before I could fly back to Maryland, and my whole arm would stay in a cast for weeks.
“And you’re taking your antifungals, right?” Melody said. She sat on the edge of the visitor’s chair by my bed, somehow making it look elegant.
I grinned. “Do I have any choice?”
“Not really.”
“Everybody within twenty miles is taking them like vitamins,” I said. “Where did you ever get such a supply?”
The wrinkles around her eyes crinkled, though she didn’t exactly smile. “While McCarrick was putting every infectious disease research facility to work growing more of his spores, I set every pharmaceutical lab with government contracts to mass-producing antifungal meds. I thought they might come in handy.”
“Smart,” I said. “But how on earth did you get the better of General Barron? Did you convince the president to revoke his command, or what?”
“Oh no, it was much easier than that,” she said. “I put some spores into his coffee.”
“You what?”
“They can withstand high temperatures with no loss of viability,” she said. “I confirmed that ahead of time.”
“You drugged the commander of the American forces?”
She shrugged. “In a manner of speaking. After that, it was a matter of getting my hands on that command signal, which was easy enough. They were piping it through loudspeakers by that point. I recorded it, played it for the general, and told him to pass his command over to me.”
I shook my head. “You’re a scary woman. How did you avoid breathing the spores in the base yourself?”
“I’ve carried an oxygen mask in my purse ever since you and Shaunessy came out of the server farm, and a larger, filter-b
ased gas mask in my luggage. A mask that I did not surrender to the general’s little safety recall.”
I shook my head, impressed. She had thought of everything, been prepared. Much more than I had been. I hadn’t even managed to anticipate my own family.
“Look,” I said. “I know I’ve screwed up. A lot. I completely understand if you don’t want me working in your group anymore, and I’m sure Shaunessy won’t want me there. But—”
“Neil.”
“Wait, hear me out. I love my job. I’m not as good with computers as Shaunessy—or well, anybody, really—and I don’t know the mission details as well as Andrew, and everything I touch seems to just fall apart, but if there’s some place for me, I don’t know, some data entry position, or a math tutor for language experts, or something, I want to do it. I don’t want to leave the NSA.”
Shaking her head and suppressing a smile, Melody set a slim box on my lap. I looked at her, then back at the box, which was cream colored, with no writing or label on it. I used my good hand to grasp the top, shaking it slightly until it eased away from the bottom. Then I looked inside.
On the left, behind a plastic panel, was a medal. The ribbon was green, with a thick vertical red stripe bounded by thinner yellow stripes. On the ribbon hung a gold disc embossed with a stylized eagle and the words National Security Agency around the circumference. To the right of the ribbon, a gold card bordered in red proclaimed it as the NSA Meritorious Civilian Service Award.
I don’t know how long I gaped at it before speaking.
“You can’t keep it yet,” Melody said. “There will have to be a ceremony with an official presentation, handshakes with whoever ends up keeping the director’s job, that kind of thing.”
“I don’t deserve this,” I said. She raised an eyebrow. “I admitted the guy who planted spores in the NSA server room,” I said. “I lied to all of you, gave sensitive information to an enemy of the United States, and shot an NSA agent. I very nearly detonated two thousand nuclear weapons on American soil.”
