The Nuclear Winter

by Brian Thompson

  He lightly smacked my cheeks and shined a light into my eyes. One by one my senses returned to normal. My hearing and ability to speak came alive after touch, sight, and taste in that order. He’d had two fingers pressed hard into the side of my neck. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. Why didn’t you drink? It — it doesn’t matter. The pill…you swallowed it?”

  He’d shoved it into my mouth. Too disoriented to think about whether he was trying to end me, I swallowed it. Immediately, I coughed to spit the thing up, but it was too late.

  “It’s a formula to restore your vitals and boost adrenaline production. You should’ve drank, and this wouldn’t have happened.”

  A wavelike feeling like nausea stirred in the pit of my belly. My body felt as if a power switch had been flipped, and electricity crackled from my poor split ends to the edge of my toenails. I propped myself up, got to my feet, and conjured large fireballs in my hands. I was ready to rescue my mother and get the heck out of wherever I was.

  “Good,” he said. The green emeralds hanging from his neck gleamed in the moonlight. “There’s been an incursion — ”

  “Incursion?” I repeated. The word was unfamiliar.

  “We’re in danger. All of us.”

  The curse words couldn’t come out of my mouth fast enough. I winged fireballs at him, again and again, but he dodged them all, so I changed over to shooting flaming streams from my hands. He caught one to the leg and crumpled to the ground. He begged me to spare his life. “Please,” he said, waving a hand at me. “I’m not the enemy here. He is.”

  “Who?”

  “Outside, if you want to die first.”

  “Who?”

  He winced. My fire had burned through his body armor and singed the skin on his shin. “Nobody knows. Terrorist. One of the Chicago Fourteen, I bet. Trust me.”

  I didn’t. I’d use him like he used me. “What’s the plan?”

  Liam stood and hissed from the pain. The burn gave him a limp. “We get your mum and get to safety.”

  Sounded good to me so far. He opened the door to the cell, and we were greeted by a push of fire. “Ladies first,” he yelled.

  The heat would’ve kept a normal person out of the corridor. Not me. As I jogged through the hallway, the flames grafted onto me. Soon, my entire body was covered in orange inferno, but the corridor was clear.

  Liam gave me directions from behind. “Next hallway on the left,” he yelled. “Hurry!”

  I turned. The sight of my mother, tubes and wires hanging from her body and slumped over the shoulders of a stranger, froze me. I couldn’t move or breathe. His identity was concealed by a menacing black bodysuit and mask with odd shaped gray eyes. I couldn’t attack him without hurting her, but she’d eventually heal, and I couldn’t lose her again, so I shot everything I had in his direction. The stranger gently set Mom to the floor and shielded her from my flaming attack with his back.

  I gritted my teeth, exhaled, and intensified the blast as I approached. His head turned to me. No, I was not going to stop coming for them.

  The fire had little effect. How fireproof could his suit be? When I least expected it, he lifted Mom in his arms and turned his back again to protect her. No way was he escaping. With my right hand still shooting flames at his back, I hooked my arm around my mother’s dangling neck. He’d hurt her by dragging me with them. I kicked him in the back of the knee to cripple him, and I might as well have been stomping on a piece of concrete. Holding on to Mom was my best bet.

  He elbowed me in the chest with so much force my sternum had to have caved in. I flew backward, hit a wall, and lost consciousness.

  However long I was out, the first thing I saw was a blurry, bloodied Liam sitting between my outstretched legs. Throbbing pain beat through my head and my neck. He reached forward and touched me on the shoulder, I think. Turning my head was torture.

  “Can you walk?” he asked before spitting a stream of blood onto the floor.

  Walk? I had no feeling below my neck, and I was out of breath. He figured that out after asking me a third time without a response, so he downgraded his questions to a blinking system—one blink, yes, two blinks, no. Keeping my eyes open through the livewire popping, white smoke, and thick dust swirls was difficult for me, but he was patient. Eventually, he’d gotten his answers: I couldn’t talk, walk, or feel anything. But I had my own questions about the freakishly strong super being who had kidnapped my mother.

  “What?” was all I could muster to mouth to him, and to move my stinging lips took an eternity.

  With a mix of amazement and terror in his voice, he shouted over the sirens and dropping fragments of ceiling and frantically pointed at a giant hole in the ceiling in the middle of the hallway. Beneath it were massive chunks of fuzzy pink insulation, drywall, concrete, and silver HVAC pipes. He pointed and talked. From what I gathered through lip-reading and my stunted hearing, I learned the truth. After knocking me unconscious, the guy who attacked me had flown through the ceiling. Mom was gone. Sure enough, above a mound of broken rebar, cotton-candy-like shredded insulation, and crumbled drywall was a man-sized hole.

  Only one thing mattered now: getting her back.

  With staggered heaves, Liam dragged me to safety. Under the circumstances, lugging me by the armpits was the best he could do. As we passed broken and twisted bodies, I learned that while death has one color, it has many dank, chilling, indescribably terrible odors.

  Closing my eyes and breathing through my mouth didn’t help. Either my hands brushed limp, booted feet and slithered through pooled blood[XW80] or I tasted debris fragments and electric smoke. I willed my arms to cross over my breasts, but no matter what I tried, I could not hold them there. I cursed myself for being weak and helpless again. Inhaling hurt. The more I avoided sucking in air,[XW81] the closer I approached hyperventilation. A multitude of tears fell from my eyes and quickly dried because of the bodysuit’s cooling unit. So, I cut loose and wept. Mom, Nat, wherever she was, Nat’s father, my father, Old Guy, Moses — it all purged out of me in uncontrollable, ugly sobs, wails, and sniffling.

  Unbothered, Liam propped me up next to a solid steel panic room door, squatted in front of me at eye level, and tried to arrange my body against the wall to make me comfortable. Good luck with that. Shooting white knives that I couldn’t blink away stabbed at the backs of my eyes. My muscles burned. Nothing would change that but time, rest, and obscene amounts of painkillers. The way things were going in this place, it appeared I’d get none of those.

  “I haven’t exactly been straight with you.” Liam unmasked me. “Our predictive measure is that girl you almost killed. We call her the Forecaster. She saw all of this, down to the moment — ”

  “What?”

  “His people abducted her. We thought we could prevent that prediction, take measures.”

  I’d heard what he said, but my throbbing brain slowly processed it. “What?”

  “Her last foresight was… She termed it Nuclear Winter. At first, we took it literally: an enemy attack, World War III, Extinction Level Event, end of the planet — not a person.” He said the next sentence with a large dose of belief. “Until you. She meant you. You are the Nuclear Winter.”

  Bull crap. She should’ve changed her psychic channel. I meant a lot to one person in this world, and I’d just watched her get abducted by a flying man. Besides, if I possessed that kind of power, Mom would never have gotten taken, Natalie wouldn’t be in a coma, and Mr. Gupta would be alive. By my count, only one of those was my fault. But I would’ve been able to prevent them all. Nevertheless, if he thought I was that powerful, and “the Forecaster” hadn’t been wrong before, nothing would change his mind. I’d have to play along to make it out of this nuthouse.

  The chamber had a handprint biometric lock and keypad. When it opened, I waited for Liam to drag me inside. He did not. He walked in himself and left me. I’d been used to guys walking in front of me and then standing aside to let me in first and standing aside so the
y could check me out without me noticing. This was not that. Dude genuinely abandoned me. What a way to treat me, the “Nuclear Winter.”

  I treated myself to a heavy portion of dignity and didn’t follow him on my knees like a servant. I’d strut in like a queen. With a deep breath, I urged my body to move. First, I rolled to my right and put my fists on the floor. A few grunts later I was on my knees and then my feet. Liam was pressing buttons on a control panel. I’d seen elevators like this one in older buildings. They were solid metal, not clear around the sides like the ones I was used to, and they did not use antigravity technology to smooth the ride. Instead, your stomach dropped [XW82]when it went down and had a tingle and rise sensation going up.

  Leaning against the inside, I asked him, “Where are we going?”

  “Down.”

  Obviously. The level we had been on was one story with high ceilings. The elevator panel had no floor indicator. Down, yeah, but how far down and to what? If Liam were going to kill me, he had ample opportunity to do so. After being dragged this far, I owed it to myself to find out where he wanted to take me.

  We descended for minutes…long enough for my body to stiffen. I assumed the distance had to be at least a mile underground. At its bottom, the door slid open. In front of us was a yellow and black symbol — a fallout shelter sign. Liam led the approach, and I hobbled after him the best I could. Through a series of checkpoints, we finally reached our destination. I expected to find the president there, but I’d forgotten her name. Mom had lectured me about not remembering the name of the first woman of color president. Now, I’d meet her and would have to call her “Madam President” until someone referred to her by name.

  The place smelled of mold, and everything had a coat of dust and cobwebs on it. Clearly, the place hadn’t been intended for immediate use. The attack must’ve drove them down here. The stench of age made me cough. Looks like this hyper-technical suit of armor had its limits.

  Liam had alerted the bomb shelter’s residents — a strikingly handsome Hispanic man in a pressed blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. His diamond-studded wedding ring glinted in the overhead light. The freckled redhead at his side wore a black dress and a string of sparkling diamonds around her neck. My defenses came up as they moved closer.

  “So, Liam, this is the Nuclear Winter?” He pointed to me and clapped. “Not a catastrophe after all. Wouldn’t be the first time we’d misunderstood the Forecaster. Well then, welcome!”

  His tone wasn’t negative; it was…happy. Sincere. Regardless, I palmed two fireballs and prepared to strike. That’s when the woman came to his defense. At first, I’d thought she was his younger wife. Her body language said otherwise.

  “At ease, young lady. We won’t hurt you.”

  My hands were still aflame, and I had no reason to put them out. Stories underground surrounded be three people I didn’t know or trust, I’d fight my way to the surface if I had to.

  “We all have an understanding about the final prophecy,” Liam said. The three of them laughed. “The Forecaster said the Nuclear Winter would bring desolation.”

  I paused, thinking one of them would shoot me dead and this would be the end of my story. Not quite. They thought it was funny.

  “Who are you, anyway?” I asked the man.

  “State Representative Ramsey Mateo,” he announced as if I’d won something. “Welcome to Square One.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Oh, great. A politician.

  I didn’t feel right calling him Ramsey, and Mr. Mateo sounded like he was about to teach me high school science. “And who is she?” I asked him.

  He introduced the woman with the jeweled necklace as Claire, his chief of staff. There was softness in her freckled face. Not her expression. She focused on the miniature bonfires at the end of my arms. Suddenly, my flames extinguished. Claire smirked. She’d done it. The jewels around her neck were white emeralds, not diamonds, and she’d turned my powers off. All that was left of my fireballs were trails of smoke drifting up from my gloves.

  When he verbally corrected her for binding my abilities, her voice jumped an octave. “With all due respect, she’ll kill you.”

  “You’re assuming she does not want to see the surface again, Miss Allen.”

  His words were more factual and less threatening — not that he wouldn’t kill me if he wanted it. In consideration of that, Claire released her grip. Now I could roast them all. Fireballs returned to my hands. That little bit of freedom — the access to my abilities — eased my anxiety.

  “You’re not going to kill me?”

  “No. Are you going to kill me?”

  His expressions were hard to read. The wrinkled brow and the “that-is-insane” flash of whitened teeth said he didn’t think I’d murder him. But nothing said I wouldn’t die anyway. I wasn’t a killer, at least a premeditated one. My eyes fell on the white emerald necklace around Claire’s neck. She could shut me down at any time, and it had to go.

  “Why’d you all drag me down here?”

  Liam interrupted Mateo. “We didn’t plan to. The incursion forced our hand.”

  I squeezed my fists in frustration. “Use smaller words!”

  “They had us under surveillance — took your mum and the Forecaster. We couldn’t risk losing you, also. We’re in Square One to regroup.”

  Claire brushed her auburn bangs with her hand and cleared her throat. The facility’s invasion had bothered her. Did she know Mom?

  “What’s your problem?”

  “With you?” She leaned against a dusty filing cabinet. “You’re a liability.”

  My eyebrows raised at her bold statement. “So, you want me dead.”

  “The world would not miss you.”

  Both Liam and Mateo stepped between us to keep the ensuing shouting match from coming to blows — Liam pulled me aside, and Mateo tended to Claire. I couldn’t hear what he said to her, but whatever it was, it cooled her off. My anger was at a boiling point. One more thing, another smart remark, and I’d turn her into a Roman candle.

  Mateo explained Square One as a web of underground facilities meant to jumpstart what was left of society after a nuclear holocaust or whatever they thought I was capable of. Heads of state, politicians, diplomats, and whomever resourceful enough to save would gather in structures like this. Everyone else — the poor, homeless, working class people — were radioactive toast.

  I wondered how the government could allow most of humanity to die. Then, I thought logically. Survival of the fittest: the strongest, ablest, most capable human beings to rebuild society from nothing as quickly as possible. Having superpowers would only help. Which meant — they wanted to use me? Start over with nothing but us?

  I was able to toss the fireballs in my hand at them before Claire sucked away my powers. One of them landed near her head and set the shoulder of her dress ablaze. Mateo stripped off his suit jacket and patted the flames away. It burnt away most of the material and made her white bra visible. Liam stepped behind me and, with his forearm at my throat, jammed a needle through my body armor and into the side of my neck. Within seconds, I blacked out.

  I found myself strapped to a metal table by the arms and legs. They’d stripped the top of my bodysuit down to my waist. Goose bumps dotted my entire torso. Thank God, they let me keep my bra and shirt though they didn’t provide much warmth. An intravenous needle was embedded in the bend of my left arm, and clear fluid coursed through the tube connected to it. I hadn’t eaten or drunk [XW83]in days. Pretty sure they were juicing me up for an impromptu blood donation and that nothing about it was going to be safe or nonlethal.

  Liam lay on a table beside me with a similar looking tube in his arm. He was going to be the recipient of the blood they sucked out of me. His body shuddered every couple of seconds. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Mateo standing at the edge of my bed. He placed a hand at my calf. Struggling with what little strength I had left didn’t break the bonds or shake him off. “This is your fi
fth,” he said, tapping the bag of fluid with his fingers. “You were dehydrated.”

  And with me well hydrated, they could drain my body of its blood like a leech.

  “Are you a religious girl?”

  “I’m Catholic.”

  “Me, too, albeit not a very good one.” Mateo eyed the machines as he spoke to me. “You have to recognize the poeticism of this moment, though. Christ gave His blood for the salvation of the world, and as we speak, you are going to do the same.”

  I yanked at my bonds. “I didn’t give anything. I’m held against my will, drugged, and strapped to a table by some psycho with a God complex. And, could’ve been the version I read, but He chose to do it.”

  “Did He?” That wicked smile again. He switched the IV feed with a different tube and forced me to flex my fingers to begin the blood flow. “Didn’t His Father send Him to Earth to die? Dying was His sole purpose—the one thing forecast thousands of years before His birth—that He would die so that we might live and thrive and be powerful.”

  All the politicians I’d ever heard of told the parts of the story they wanted you to believe. I called his plan a couple of choice words before following with “And what is forecast for me?”

  “That somehow, you escape this place before we get what we need,” he said, drawing and cocking an Ordnance he’d kept tucked in the back of his pants. “And you will destroy the planet. Which is why, once the initial blood transfer is complete, that is, I will shoot you in the head.”

  Lovely. “Can I pee first? I can let it go all over the place if that’s better for you.”

  Mateo checked the monitors and yelled for Claire. “Bring a bedpan,” he hollered. “Strip her down. I can’t stand that smell.”

  Since I lacked my abilities, she couldn’t have been far away. Sure enough, the high heels clicking against the floor grew louder. “You gave her four IV bags without a catheter?” she said, still a distance away.