Theo clapped his hands together. He very nearly gave a cheer. “It took me a week after watching that film to figure that out. But not Hasadiah, she was shrewd enough to figure it out in minutes.”
“They made facilities in remote locales,” Ariel said. “They filled them with artwork, technology, even seeds like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. If that’s still there, that is. The purpose was to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds in a locale that could be maintained for decades or centuries.” She glanced at the film projector. “Those places were far, far, far away from here. Once the government started building Cheyenne Mountain, they knew that it wouldn’t be a secret for long. They did what they could to protect it, but it’s always been a major target. To put something nearby that particular facility and expect people to survive after a nuclear event would have been ridiculous.”
Ridiculous and naïve, too. “So turn it off,” I said. I had a vision of someone pulling a plug out of a wall outlet, but nothing is ever that easy.
“The crux of the matter,” Theo said.
“We can’t,” Ariel said.
“The hell you say!” I said. “It’s not like it’s already gone off. The nukes probably won’t even last ten feet out of the bubble before they fall back to Earth. They might go off here, but you people don’t have to stay here.” I stopped and looked at Tate. Yes, they did have to stay here. Tate had admitted as much. He was crazy the minute he stepped foot out of the bubble, and he didn’t want to be crazy. Ariel was stuck here because in all likelihood she would vanish as soon as she went beyond the edge of the tech bubble. The others probably all had their reasons. It was a pretty good place to be if you were caught in your common, average, everyday apocalyptic universe, and more importantly, if it wasn’t a place that was a ticking time bomb of the highest caliber.
I didn’t want to be compassionate about Theo any more than I wanted to be compassionate about Tate, but everything wasn’t black and white.
“This place wasn’t designed to launch nuclear weapons,” Ariel said.
I took that in with an exterior aplomb I didn’t feel deep inside. “What exactly was it designed to do?”
“You’re not going to hit me with the crutch are you?” Ariel asked.
“Not unless you accidentally kill one of my friends,” I snapped.
She gestured at me to follow her. “There’s some more of the facility we need you to see.”
“This place was initially a conception of the 1950s, the height of the Cold War,” Ariel said. She pointed out features that were as antique to me as a covered wagon crossing the plains during the rush to claim free land. “It was meant to be self-sufficient, in that we have specialized batteries, diesel-powered generators, water reservoirs, and a store of foods that will last years.”
I already got that part. I’d eaten some of an MRE and looked at the mermaid-infested reservoir. I limped behind Ariel as she led me down a long hallway. I hadn’t been in this part of Cheyenne Jr. The signs indicated that we were entering a higher security area.
“The blast doors have been shut in certain events,” Ariel said. “The last was the night of the change. As all communications ceased from the outside world, our protocol was to lock down the facility. The three sets of doors were closed and locked for the first time since 9/11. We used reserves to power the main lines. Turning off the equipment would be tantamount to ‘pushing a button.’” She hesitated and added, “Pushing the button.”
“You mean a lack of power would automatically enable whatever nightmarish invention that’s been created here,” I said.
Ariel nodded at me.
I glanced behind me to see Tate and another man who were making sure I didn’t go schizoid with the crutch. Theo had vanished for the moment while Ariel explained the rules of the game to me. I knew that Theo had passed the reins to Ariel because I wouldn’t like hearing it from him. Perhaps he thought another woman’s words would be more palatable to me. We’ll see about that, I thought.
“The unit is programed to recognize the absence of energy and manpower as an attack on the facility and reacts accordingly,” Ariel said. “So we keep the power going. We keep pushing the buttons.”
I wanted to say bad words, but only, “Butterfly’s butt,” came out. Some long-gone politician with a lack of imagination had used his infinite wisdom and created a catch-22 of a magnitude equaling the Mount Everest of stupidity. The firefly pixies had it right. Humans were walking-talking morons.
Ariel looked at me. I gestured for her to go on. She pursed her lips and said, “This zone, this place where technology still operates, has kept the machinery active. So did my people. I suppose you can guess that we didn’t have an exact protocol for all the people vanishing in thin air.”
I didn’t think anyone had a protocol for that. Maybe the next time it happened. Learn by previous experience as one might say.
“There wasn’t any information coming in. All lines of communication had ceased to exist,” Ariel said as we went down the hallway. “We could even see down into the valley. No lights existed there, either. There were no landlines that were operational. Cellphones weren’t working, even when we re-opened the blast doors much later. No one came knocking on the door to see why we weren’t responding.”
I tried to imagine the mindset of the Air Force major. She and a few other people had been left alone in an instant without any guidance about what to do with their deadly equipment. The military wanted people to follow their orders, but sometimes the military also wanted to have free thinkers. My father had often lamented the way people followed orders too literally. Ariel had had a few choices. She was forced to interpret what her superiors would have wanted her to do.
“You didn’t see an invading force or nuclear bombs being dropped, so you chose to wait,” I said.
“This duty requires some freedom of choice,” Ariel said. “The threat was not visible. It was implied. Use the weapon? Don’t use the weapon. So I sent people out to gather intelligence. The first two vanished just outside the zone, as I’m sure you already guessed. One of the technical sergeants saw it. I didn’t believe him, and we didn’t realize that it would happen to all of us. Six of us witnessed the next man exiting the zone. All that was left was his ABU and combat boots.”
“I’ve seen a lot of piles of clothing,” I said.
Ariel sighed. “The next one was worse. The poor bastard paused halfway out of the zone before it happened.” She sliced her hand through the air to demonstrate what had happened to the airman.
I’d seen that, too. People had been cut into pieces by whatever force powered the world now. It had happened to Clora. (Today’s FB post: Not happy with Penn; Can I kill him without guilt? Alternatively: Let’s see how Penn goes up against pixies with silver toothpicks.)
“What weapon from another superpower does any of that?” Ariel asked, clearly not expecting an answer from me. “It was an apocalyptic event, but not one anyone could have imagined. It was like magic decided to come back and take everything back. We saw creatures that we’d never imagined, like centaurs and unicorns and a giant thing that flew through the air that was bigger than a C-5 Galaxy. The magic overpowered the world and made it into what it wanted. What it didn’t want were certain people.”
The question that many people wanted answered was why good people had vanished and people like Theo and Tate remained? No one really knew. No one might ever understand, and the theories were limitless.
Ariel came to a stop beside a door. The door wasn’t marked. It didn’t look like it had ever been marked. I wouldn’t have thought much of it because it looked like all the other doors in the hallway. She saw my expression and rapped her knuckles on it. It pinged in a way that suggested it was metal. “Yes,” she said, “the door’s steel. The frame is steel. The entire room is steel. It’s specially reinforced so that enemies can’t traipse in here and help themselves to whatever we’re hiding.”
“They could have a blow torch,” I
said.
Ariel brought out a set of keys and unlocked the door. Then she twisted the knob in an odd fashion that suggested to me that a person had to be aware of a special mechanism in order to open the room. The door opened, and I smelled a faint musty aroma. No one had been in there for some time. It wasn’t like someone had to go in there on an hourly basis to ensure the whole place didn’t go kaboom. She reached in and flipped a light switch. An overhead light came on and revealed a place of questionable fuss.
It wasn’t a large room. Three of the walls were painted the same creamy green as the rest of the place. There was a black steel wall of gadgets that looked a little older than some of the other equipment I’d seen. To be perfectly frank, it looked like a square version of the inside of an old WWII bomber. (Poppops again. Bibles, baseball, old movies, and airshows. I never really minded going with him. At the time, I thought that he would leave me all of his money, but the truth was that I loved my grandfather. Even Louise did.)
“Shouldn’t there be organ music and an evil scientist saying, ‘Bwahaha’?” I asked, only half-serious.
Chapter 17
Lulu Learns
The Present – Colorado
“For someone who doesn’t have access to a DVD player, you’ve been watching too many movies,” Ariel observed. I didn’t think that was nice considering they had just had a James Whale marathon.
“We have movie nights,” I protested. “I thought Penn told you about that. I sat next to him about a month ago, and he hit on me. I guess he was doing his job.”
“Penn said he thought you were frigid,” Ariel said, and there was the cold counterpart to my mother again. I almost smiled. I knew exactly how to deal with people like that.
“Penn is a rotten douchebag of whom I have an urge to eviscerate,” I said. “Let’s get back on track. What does this room do?”
Ariel glared at me for a moment. She didn’t like that I wasn’t subservient to her. I didn’t want to explain that my father had been head and shoulders above her paygrade. If I wasn’t going to kiss a 0-9’s tushy, I certainly wasn’t going to toady up to a bush-league 0-4. (Somewhere Louise was nodding approvingly.) “It’s not what it does,” she corrected. “It’s what it is.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a safe,” she said.
It didn’t look like a safe. It looked like a component of some archaic electrical system. If I pushed ten buttons over there, flipped two switches, then rotated five handles in rapid succession, then I might get a good cup of cappuccino. “What’s in the safe?”
“Keys,” Ariel said. “That’s the way the system works.”
“You’re going to have to explain it to me,” I said.
“The way that it works is that people were screened to be in the Personnel Reliability Program. It was applicable to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.” Ariel stared at the wall of dials and switches. “It was designed so that no one person could commit the final termination.”
Final termination. There was probably an acronym involved as well. (“Hey buds, let’s go get the F.T. done. Then we can have Blue Mountain coffee and eat MREs while all the other shizz happens.” Bumping fists would follow. Well, maybe low fives would have followed since we were talking about the 60s and 70s.)
“I know about the PRP,” I said instead of what I was thinking. My father had discussed some of the flaws in the procedure. People didn’t always do what they were supposed to do. Sometimes they got other people to also do things they weren’t supposed to do. The resentful part of my brain wanted to interject, Like the American Revolution? Then I answered myself: No, not like that. That wasn’t programmed to end the world if it didn’t work out.
Ariel glanced at me with evident disbelief.
“Surprise!” I said. “Blonde with more knowledge than you planned for. The PRP was meant to screen out individuals with psychological issues who might do something very, very naughty.” I smiled at Ariel’s open mouth. “The gist of it was that persons who have demonstrated the highest degree of responsibility would be selected to oversee these kinds of projects. Someone like you, for example.” And I didn’t even try to conceal the level of skepticism in my tone.
“It also covered medical and security issues,” Ariel said. “They didn’t want anyone blackmailing the people who would ultimately initiate a WMD.” (I was pretty sure she meant Weapons of Mass Destruction. The military and their acronyms. I could make up some of those, too, like AOD - Acronyms Of Death or DAIC - DumbAsses In Charge.)
“And so all the people in Cheyenne Jr. were aboveboard and sound,” I stated.
Ariel nodded. “It’s not that complicated. We have two people on duty at any time. Each has to get a certain set of instructions in order to facilitate the weapon. One opens the safe and obtains the key. Another one opens another safe and obtains a second key. Both proceed to another room in the facility and use the keys to open another safe. They take out what is essentially a firing mechanism and carry it to another locale in the section. They marry the unit to the weapon and both activate it.”
“Yes, that sounds simple.” It so did not sound simple. “You need to get the keys to open the other thing to get a thingymabob to put in the big guns to turn it off.”
Ariel appeared pained. All that military training and jargon put into an unpretentious sentence. “Well, yes,” she agreed.
And I sensed a “but” coming.
“But we need the codes for the first two safes,” she said.
“Which are located elsewhere,” I guessed.
“We sent people out to it,” Ariel said, “and they didn’t come back.”
“And you need a schlub to carry it off,” I concluded, “but why not just ask us?”
“Because you thought so highly of us,” Theo said sarcastically from the doorway. It was more sarcasm than I had ever heard from him. Tate and the other man had melted back. “You would have jumped right in to help the man who had beaten you and attempted to murder you,” Theo said, “as well as the man who had tried to kill all of your group in California.”
I couldn’t argue with that, but there were other things I could argue about. “We’re not unreasonable. However, you took hostages. You had your people kill one of ours.”
“That was purely unintentional,” Theo said. “We didn’t know that Clora wasn’t a survivor. There was no intent to kill her.”
“I could go on all day long about what you did and didn’t intend, Theo,” I said. “How can we trust you? How do we dare to trust you? You’ve given up nothing and taken everything you wanted. Let the other three go, and I’ll do whatever you want. There’s no reason to keep them.”
Theo looked at me, and I was struck anew by the color of his eyes. The small safe room had its fluorescent lights on and showed that whiskey color to a T. The reminder of my father’s collection of expensive alcohols made me swallow. I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to look at Theo again without thinking of that bottle of Glenfiddich, which was always going to make me think of my father. I didn’t want to associate my father with Theo; they were nothing alike.
I heard Ariel take a sharp breath, both expectant and longing contained in there.
“There’s a failsafe,” she said, knowing she was speaking to me, “but we have to get inside the device.”
“What does it do? What does it really do?”
“It kills everything,” Theo said. “It’s a nuclear bomb that blows up all of this mountain, and it blows up all of a particularly dangerous isotope of cobalt that has been inserted around the warheads.”
I wasn’t a physicist, so I didn’t know what that meant.
“It’s like a gigantic dirty bomb,” Ariel said, “except it doesn’t come in a suitcase and take out a city or a state. It explodes, it contaminates most of the world, all living plant life dies, which would immediately impact all animal life, and nearly everything would die out within a few months. After a certain period of time, the isotope be
comes inert, and the world begins anew with the people we’ve selected for survival. They would use the resources allocated to them and the seeds and plant life that were put aside for them. It would be all new.”
I dangled my foot into the water of the reservoir and stared out into the darkness. Occasionally I could see the white forms of the mermaids in the dimness. I could also hear splashing once in a while. I suppose I should have been worried about being lassoed with pale-colored kelp ropes, but I wasn’t. Instead, I was sitting close to the largest weapon that numbskulled scientists and politicians could have conceived of, who had simply left it in place because they couldn’t think of anything better to do with it.
Here was the gist: bomb active, bomb gets power, bomb doesn’t go boom. Girl gets codes to safe, keys are released, bomb is deactivated forever and more. World is saved from a Cold War remnant. The gistly gist of gisting right there in a big fat honking nuclear deterrent of a nutshell.
Theo led Ariel off, speaking in tones that were too quiet for me to discern the words, and let me go off on my own. Tate shrugged at me and the other man had winked. I limped back in the direction of the jail, but found the reservoirs instead. There was a rechargeable lantern next to the door, and I had availed myself of its use. I suspected that Salome had an intense fascination with the mermaids and came in often to observe them. Perhaps she even used the kayak that was still propped against the side wall.
Theo hadn’t answered me. He wanted something. He could keep me. He could send one of his sane people out with me, like Penn, for example. This was giving me a stomachache and a headache at the same time. Why not just ask for help?
Because we wouldn’t have helped. That wasn’t a bad answer. It was an honest answer. It was the answer someone would have thought about. But this was Theo, beloved of God, the man who had rang a bell to lure people to his brand of redemption.
Forest of Dreams Page 16
