The Nuclear Winter

by Brian Thompson

  The Ordnance barrels never moved from us. We were at their mercy. Trigger-happy guy worried me the most. He adjusted his fingers around his weapon’s handle a half dozen times. The others stared us down through their targeting scopes. I wondered why the heavy artillery. What they were carrying could’ve mowed down a few dozen people in seconds. “We have a deal?”

  “Lucy? Miss Sandoval? Are you here? Are you okay?”

  Oh God. Natalee.

  She’d ignored the destruction and walked inside of our busted front entrance. Though I’m sure she stepped carefully, I heard what I assumed were glass shards crunching underneath her feet. Any normal person outside of this science fiction action film would’ve turned around, ran away screaming, or called the police. Not my best friend. She had to see for herself what had happened. Her other friends used to call her a dumb blonde until she lectured them about how offensive it was to consider her brilliant and hardworking because she’s Indian or use the stereotype that blonde girls were stupid.

  The point man mouthed “Do not respond” to us.

  “I’ve called the police, and — ”

  The jumpy guy who’d thought I’d threatened him turned and unloaded a couple shots in Natalee’s direction. Then his friends opened fire on us. I shut my eyes, expecting to wake up on the other side of eternity. Instead, I heard a piercing scream and a hard thud and a sound like sifting sand and sizzling bacon. And I smelled burnt clothing.

  Oh God, I was dead. I’d skipped purgatory and ended up in Hell. My body was sweltering hot. This wasn’t happening. I mean, I believed in God more or less. Wasn’t I supposed to go to purgatory first and get a second chance?

  Mom jabbed me in the ribs. “Lucy!”

  She’d been sentenced here, too? She hit confessional every Tuesday night like clockwork, and she didn’t make it into Heaven either? God must be stricter with sins and other crap than I imagined Him to be. The worst thing I’d ever known her to do was lie to me before she killed those men in the clearing, but she also had a different name and another life I knew nothing about. More skeletons were likely lining her closet.

  I decided not to look. Eons could pass, and I’d never see the tormented for myself. The raging fire coursing inside of my body was enough. I deserved all of it. Unlike my mother, I hadn’t had my confirmation yet, and I’d altogether been a terrible Catholic. But I’d said a prayer every time — okay, sometimes — I’d done something wrong, which was often. Apparently, that wasn’t enough. Could I say it down here? Would God hear me?

  A strong pair of hands shook my masked face. “Get a hold of yourself. Natalee’s been shot.”

  What the — We were still in my house?

  I cracked my eyelids. The three armed men furiously batted at their legs, arms, and puffed-up [XW46]reddened faces. My stomach quivered. The bacon was their skin. One by one, they dropped to the ground screaming in agony at their simmering flesh and hair. Their weapons lay on the tile and had melted at the triggers and handles. Right before my eyes, the Ordnance dissolved into black and gray simmering puddles. A second ago, I remembered thinking those things were hot but still functional and they needed to be useless. The heat, the burning…it was me. I was doing it. This Hell on Earth was my doing. White flames burst from their limbs in bright flickers, and streams of black smoke formed a cloud above our circular pot rack. The rising temperature had charred the wooden outlays of the kitchen’s island and caused the white ceiling’s paint to buckle and peel.

  Small orbs of fire formed in my palms. I screamed and clapped my hands together. The orbs burst and spurted flames worse than before. My skin had a stinging sensation, like I’d lost circulation all over and not like I had become a living, breathing candle.

  Mom’s voice caught my attention from the hallway, where she checked on Natalee. “Dial it back.”

  “I can’t!”

  "Calm down, Lucy — ”

  “I. Can’t.”

  “Deep breaths!”

  Easy to be calm when your body wasn’t on fire. “Yelling doesn’t help!”

  “Focus!”

  “I mean, I don’t know how,” I shouted. Any wonder I failed everything in school?

  Yelling turned into shrieking. “Picture the flames going away in your mind and project it. Breathe. Picture. Release.”

  Mid-panic attack, my eyes stung. I rolled them and blinked again and again. My vision wouldn’t steady. Everything was hazy yellow. Two gaping holes appeared in the kitchen ceiling up through the floor in my room and the roof. The kitchen walls and ceiling, the hallway, foyer walls, a swath of the living room carpet, and a white cargo transport parked outside caught fire. Great. Heat vision? I was one more stupid thing away from crapping my pants. With my luck, the crap would’ve been flaming.[XW47]

  Mom tossed Nat over her shoulder, dodged the pillars of fire, and rushed in front of my flaming eyeballs. Instead of igniting her for challenging me, my inner spark immediately quieted. Everything returned to normal. Except for the fact I had heat rays coming out of my face[XW48] and I had razed half of my house because I couldn’t control them.

  Our attackers yelped and lay next to pools of smoking metal. Part of me thought I should help them until I remembered how they had shot my best friend and almost killed me.

  Mom gently set Nat into a kitchen chair and propped her up against the wall. The heat was worsening, the house was becoming an inferno, and we coughed like lifelong smokers. She wiggled out of her bodysuit and fearlessly plunged a needle into her thigh. After the shot revived her energy, she redressed. Her motions were quick-action, pinpoint-like muscle memory. She’d done this before. Not much about her was familiar to me anymore. This was the real person who had given birth to me, not the domesticated alter ego I was familiar with.

  The sight of my unconscious friend bleeding and slumped against the China cabinet unsettled me but not more than the hideous monster I’d become. Nat hadn’t asked to be a part of this madness. She was my only friend, and I’d unwittingly dragged her along for the ride. Dropping her off to get medical attention would be wrong, but I didn’t see much of a choice.

  Mom hefted Nat into her arms and motioned her head toward the double French doors at the back of the kitchen. “Follow me.”

  We hurried out of our burning, soot- and debris-covered [XW49]kitchen into the grassy backyard. The fresh, autumn air was a relief. There, on one of our concrete benches, was…Moses? It appeared he had been sitting there for a while bent over with hands folded. What was he doing? Contemplating the universe’s mysteries? He didn’t appear to be the type of dude to meditate, pray, or think about something beyond himself unless it involved money. All the money-motivated guys I knew like him were one hundred percent tunnel vision and useless for anything else. Maybe he was mentally calculating how much he could make off helping us this time.

  Mom set Natalee next to him on the bench. That was the first time I got a good look at her wounds. Two Ordnance rounds had tagged her beneath her left collarbone. Her white blouse and button-down blue sweater were singed at the sleeves and drenched in blood. She grimaced and let out a tearful moan. Still alive.

  Behind her, our home was collapsing. How many times had I taken it for granted? Not many people I went to school with could afford to live like me. With any luck, the approaching emergency vehicle sirens could save it, but I knew I’d never see it like I remembered again.

  Moses slowly placed his arm around Natalee’s shoulder to steady her wobbling figure, and he looked to my mother for instruction. The end of his nose was clotted with blood. “Twelve ten Meredith Avenue. Dayton, Ohio,” she told him. “Take her around the back of the building. Knock four times.”

  He nodded and immediately teleported them away. I swatted at the foul-smelling golden cloud they left behind. “Dayton, Ohio?” I asked out loud.

  Mom turned her back to me and made a holo call. “Yeah. You need to see Rhapsody. ETA five minutes,”

  Who was she talking to, and what was she talking ab
out? My best friend is bleeding to death. “How are we getting there?”

  Mom grabbed me under my near my ribs. Her grasp was tight. “Arms around my waist. Don’t let go, and don’t forget to breathe.”

  Oh God.

  I followed her directions and squeezed her side.

  The next thing I knew, we rocketed into the air. Flying fast and invisible. The drop in my intestines was sudden, and I held my breath to compensate. Her advice came back to me. “Don’t let go, and don’t forget to breathe.” The pressure glued my arm to her side. I couldn’t let go if I wanted to. Inhaling through my mask was surprisingly easy especially considering how quickly the air whipped past. The back of the mask’s material had solidified and kept my head from moving too much in any direction.

  We were soaring high as well, I guessed, to avoid birds and insects but low enough to dodge aircraft. Everything I saw was baby blue and white puffiness, and our forward thrust sort of froze my head into place. From the corner of my eye, I saw Mom. I had no idea she was keeping this massive level of information from me all these years, but now, I needed to know it all. Wherever we were going, I assumed an explanation had to be close by. Otherwise, judging from what I’d just done, I’d be like a walking lit match in a building made of C4 explosives.

  Mom squeezed my ribs and spoke through my earpiece so clearly it was like she was inside of my head. “Hold on.”

  We shot forward so fast I temporarily lost my hearing. Thank God we flew in a straight line. Otherwise, I would’ve gotten sick inside of my mask. I lost consciousness once or twice. The last time, when I woke up, we were on a gradual arcing descent slow enough that my body didn’t revolt. Soon, we landed behind a lone building in a parking lot. The impact of Mom’s feet shattered the road surface and sprayed large concrete chunks into the air. I had no time to process anything that had happened. She ghosted — her word not mine — us through the locked back door and pulled her mask off. Her face was flushed red and sweaty. I took off my mask and imagined I must look the same or worse.

  The room was, I guessed, about ninety feet long and wide, painted gray, and dimly lit. The wall we had passed through had a ginormous medicine cabinet stocked with vials and various sizes of labeled bottles. At our left were five maroon cushioned chairs. To our far right was a circular white curtain and medical monitoring equipment. I’d seen them before in the hospital. That’s where Natalee must be. Moses was nowhere to be seen.

  The reality of how we’d arrived washed over me. We’d flown hundreds of miles away in less than an hour. The math didn’t add up. Ten miles a minute or more had to mean…we went faster than seven hundred miles an hour. Considering the events of the past few days, it was the most amazing thing to have happened but not the strangest.

  My muscles and my bones were tight and sore. I knew no amount of massaging would help this, and there was no time for real rest. Still, Mom settled into one of the chairs and sighed. My back and leg muscles wouldn’t unlock, so I folded my body the best way I could into the seat next to her. “Where are we?” I asked.

  She patted my left knee. “The stiffness goes away. You’ll get used to it. What about your feet and hearing?”

  This was not a normal conversation, but she made it sound as if I’d slept in an awkward position with no pillow instead of traveling on a plane-less supersonic flight. “Fine.”

  “How are you feeling otherwise?”

  Going through chemotherapy meant hearing “How are you feeling?” on a loop, but who wanted to know the truth? Nobody wanted to hear “I had my guts cut out, microwaved, and put back in” or “Feels like I’ve run a marathon, and at the end, someone shot me with a flamethrower.” Not to mention the condition of my best friend. “I’m good.”

  “We couldn’t leave her in a hospital. She’s seen too much. So, I had Moses bring her here.”

  “Where’s ‘here’ exactly?”

  She licked her lips. “A pharmacy storage unit run by someone I trust. She delivered you.”

  My eyebrow raised. “She who? An OB/GYN?”

  “It’s complicated. She knows how our biology works.”

  A random, regular chick helped deliver me? “Explain.”

  The chair squeaked as she repositioned herself to better face me. She mentioned the basics about radioactive beryl and how the rare blood protein we have processes it. Adrenaline turns on our abilities, but my prolonged labor weakened her adrenal glands. There were four adrenaline booster shots she carried around in case of emergencies like today.

  “Focus directs what you can do,” she added.

  I didn’t want to be a weapon of mass destruction. I’d rather have had a harmless ability, like living. Instead, I’d destroyed my childhood home and given third-degree burns to men who were trying to murder me. “I don’t want to do anything, focus on anything. I want to be me.”

  “Listen,” she said to me. “That look…the way you look right now. I never wanted this. It’s — ”

  There was a time and place for this discussion, and it was not now. She’d given me the most information I’d ever had about my life, and I wanted more. “Can we check on Nat?”

  “No. Let Isabella do her work. She’ll give us updates when she can.”

  “What do we do while we wait? Sit here?”

  With a smirk, she replied, “We eat.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The suggestion that I desert my dying best friend for brunch sounded heartless, but the second Mom said eat, my stomach reacted with an angry grumble. Like, how dare I discover I was inhuman, barely evade death, and neglect to feed my face? I discovered what she said was less of a good idea and more of a necessary command. Our abilities stressed our systems and made us slaves to our body’s cravings. We had to eat or suffer the consequences. Still, I resisted. “Not leaving.”

  “Okay. You’ll want to know what’ll happen next. Your insulin levels will crash. You’ll get cold shivers, won’t be able to think straight or walk. Isa will start an IV, and I’ll be back by the time you wake up.”

  No fair using my hatred of needles against me. Her sketchy doctor friend would’ve had to dig around in my arm to start a drip. The hospital nurses meant well. None of them could pin down my veins. When they tried, the bruises took weeks to heal. Looking back at the drawn curtain, I concluded that I’d do no good unconscious. With time, she’d be in better condition, and I’d be able to get her to safety far away from us dangerous mutants.

  Once she knew I agreed to her proposal, Mom ghosted us through the wall and onto the street. The bright, midmorning sun made me reach for my mask. Its blue heads-up display reminded me of my first holo, and the eye visors automatically yellow tinted for environmental glare and brightness. Its filtered air flow tickled the inside of my nose like a slow-building, never-culminating sneeze.

  By the end of the first city block, my balance wavered. Mom clutched my right elbow and pointed at the corner. “Easy. We’ll go there.”

  We’d walked several more blocks to the Chicago Liner Diner. In the shape of an old-fashioned train car, the thing looked like a gray tube that a strong enough wind could blow apart. High-speed [XW50]travel had come a long way since this relic was made, what, twenty years ago? I’d never known her to be sentimental or interested in history, and we could’ve hit a fast food spot and eaten. “What kind of food?” I asked her.

  Mom helped me up the stairs and opened the sliding metal door. “I’m guessing diner food.”

  Suddenly, she’s sarcastic? This should be fun.

  I trudged inside. The smell of cooking food hypnotized me so badly she had to nudge me forward. Coffee. Eggs. Meat. Waffles. Pancakes. I kept myself from jumping the counter and eating whatever I could.

  I walked down the narrow aisles of green padded booths. There were four older couples eating, and one deeply tanned man, who had haunting green eyes and a cane, sitting alone and drinking [XW51]from a coffee cup. Those people occupied the few tables at the front. The open first booth I saw had dirty pl
ates on the table, so I passed it and took the last available one at the back of the restaurant. I groaned and folded my body into the booth seat which is when I saw Mom had not moved from her post at the front of the car.

  “What are you doing?” she mouthed to me, hands open. “Takeout!”

  Wasn’t it obvious? I mouthed “Getting ready to eat” and glanced at the menu, to which she said, “We’re not staying” and repeated, “Takeout.”

  The scent of cooking eggs and bacon distracted me from using an inside voice. “Why not?”

  Mom waved me back to the front, and I made the same motion with two hands. She shuffled past the stools and tables to meet me. The way she eyed the front and checked over her shoulder didn’t help my anxiety at all. “It’s not safe,” she said in a hushed whisper. “Moses’ boss is searching for us. Besides, there’s no emergency exit.”

  She could pass through solid objects. “Oh yeah, there’s an emergency exit — ”

  “That’s subtle. No. We’re getting takeout.”

  Is that why we got takeout? All these years, it was the one thing that made her cooler than most other parents. Especially when she found the vegan spot that delivered. And we weren’t going to dine at home. Was I supposed to comfortably chew from a disposable container while sitting at my comatose best friend’s bedside? “It’s a diner in a freaking train car. A freaking old diner train car that you picked — ”

  “I have a feeling we shouldn’t. We’re getting takeout. Period.”

  “C’mon Máma, please? Sit down. I’m tired. You’re tired. Look, I hurt everywhere, and we’ll get a chance to talk about things.”

  She didn’t outright say no, which meant she was considering it. She loosened the straps of her knapsack. Mine was already on the seat next to me. I called her Máma when I really wanted something. I’d won her over.

  “You’re not slick. And stop speaking Spanish. Your grandmother would siphon her blood from your veins if she heard you speaking our language sounding like a gringo. We eat fast.”