The Nuclear Winter

by Brian Thompson

  “The largest dormant beryl deposits on the planet,” she whispered. Once she read my “and?” look, she whispered,” Certain beryl gives powers to anyone who wears it.

  Mateo found it. Yeah, that was problematic. “How much time do we have to stop him?”

  From the way everyone moved, not enough. Without access to the secure channel, I had no clue as to how they — we — were combatting Mateo and Liam. Yes, I corrected myself to think “we.” The simulation had to have prepared me for this although I was winded and wouldn’t turn down a short nap right now if you paid me to.

  The chaotic scene slowed for me once I found my father. He paced, arms behind his back, on a raised circular platform surrounded by rotating holographic displays — maps, graphs, and body scans. He paused in my direction. Was he staring at me? No, through me. He fidgeted with the band on his finger until the center glowed ruby red. The thing calmed him but agitated Kendel. She pursed her lips and sighed the way Mom did when a restaurant messed up her order, and she [XW115]stormed into my father’s space. He ignored her until she pushed away the holograms to confront him.

  “With all due respect — ”

  “You know why.”

  He reloaded the displays, and she cleared them again. “I’m a decent strategist. I can — ”

  “Read and assess nine different situations simultaneously? You think I’d willingly make this call for any other reason? Any reason?”

  Kendel didn’t dare answer. My father had tremendous physical strength and offending him could be dangerous.

  “Besides,” he said in a calmer tone, “there’s no guarantee it’ll work.”

  She stepped off the platform and waved me to follow. Her quick pace was difficult to keep up with, but I managed to do it. “What were you talking about?”

  “You need debriefing.”

  We stopped in an infirmary. Kendel stuck a rectangular object into a compartment on her left arm bend. I picked one from the same cabinet she’d taken hers and snapped it into place. A needle pricked me in the skin. Couldn’t be a drug I’d been injected with. Whatever it was, I felt amazing. I kept my arm straight and allowed whatever it was to flow. “Then debrief me.”

  The story was a science fiction spy film. A border agent had notified my father about a man fitting Liam’s description who had touched down on the West Coast close to a crystal cave my father had been surveilling. They had three hours at best to intercept, and there was scientific-sounding [XW116]talk of a space-collapsing pocket dimension, a powered person who could open and close it, and how Liam could make the beryl crystals active without natural X-class solar flares.

  “They,” not “we.” Great.

  My face betrayed me, and Kendel chuckled. “You thought you’d be going.”

  “I-I trained… You trained me, and I — ”

  “Thought they want you for your winning personality? They need X-class solar flare radiation for the crystals to turn malignant. A targeted radiation blast.”

  I could do what my shadow wanted me to do — stay on the sidelines. Or… “I won’t go.”

  My answer caught her off guard, but this time, I centered my emotions. “You’re serious?”

  “Nat’s dad is dead, and when she wakes up, she’ll need a friend. Besides, tomorrow’s my birthday. I wanna see it.”

  Kendel’s right eye spasmed, just a quick twitch. Enough to warn me and reveal the truth.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  They had captured Natalee for leverage---her life for me activating the crystals. I’d never been more important to anyone. Ironically there was no decision for me. I knew which side I belonged on.

  Before I could respond, Kendel told me to let Natalee [XW117]die so the world would spin on unaware but ultimately appreciative of the sacrifice. A monstrous suggestion to say the least. Thinking of my best friend’s death for the rest of my life when I could’ve prevented it was not an option. I stomped behind my trainer to the secured dock where they would launch a counterattack. “She’s my best friend. My only friend!”

  “None of us have best friends,” she muttered over her shoulder as we arrived at the dock. “Saving loved ones are life-and-death [XW118]decisions where we don’t control the entire narrative. Loss is all we know and what we live. Better not to have them at all. Susan isn’t one of us, and her husband understood this.”

  Spare me the lecture. One life for the whole planet. Honestly, all the calculus pointed in this direction, but up to this point, my life story had been handwritten by everyone but me. “Lucy was a failure, a screw-up, and destined to die.” Except to my mother and Nat. The little drop of faith they had in me kept me going some days though they didn’t see it, and if Nat was going to die fighting, she would not do it alone.

  “Nobody controls me,” I told her. “Help me or get out of my way.”

  Kendel announced her intentions by shoving me to the ground and putting her mask on.

  Saving Nat meant going through her. So be it.

  I summoned heat into my hands. My suit warned me it could not protect me or my surroundings from this level of radioactivity. I imagined Kendel’s skin sizzling beneath her bodysuit and large sweat beads forming on her face. The spike in temperature hit me, too. Moisture dripped down my neck despite the bodysuit’s air conditioning. My fists throbbed and tingled, and now, I could only glance down at them briefly because of the light…Oh, the shockingly beautiful light! The rippling, bright orbs around my gloves stung my eyes, and I could taste the current — like licking the terminals on a battery. The sensations were addictive and too overwhelming to devour all at once, so I didn’t rush through consuming them.

  “Liam will slit her throat and make you watch.” She coughed and groaned while sinking to her knees. “He’ll force you to listen to blood pool in her throat as she gasps for her last breath.”

  “Open the dock, Kendel.”

  “Loss is all you’ll know!” she screamed.

  “Open it!”

  From the floor, she asked me was I willing to kill her if she didn’t do what I asked. Her tone of voice suggested she doubted I would. Inside, I questioned it myself. But backing down, at this point, wasn’t an option for me or her. Nat’s life hung in the balance, and so did the lives of many more. But killing her to prove my point? Would that make me better or worse than Liam? He believed he had the right to do so, too. I did not have that right either, but I’d push Kendel to the brink of death to get my way.

  The radiation I wielded, which had little effect on me besides the temperature hike, brought tremendous pain to my shadow. She scratched at the black tiled floor, rolled back and forth in pain, and whimpered like a gravely injured animal left on a roadside. Her condition bore a close resemblance to my post-treatment symptoms. It made sense. I was dosing the room with enough radioactive waves for torture and not to destroy her.

  Her mask dissolved, and she pulled out a small clump of her hair. Her trembling fingers sorted through the feathery red mass in disbelief. “Enough,” she groaned, crawling to the biometric panel. Then, her appearance changed. She rolled over and had become my father’s identical twin. For a split second, I shut down — long enough for her to activate the security door, roll underneath it, and toss up a whitish security grid between the two of us.

  She stared back at me with my father’s face, and for a moment, it dawned on me what had happened. Everything she’d prepared me for was for nothing. The mission had been planned and run its course while she occupied me with training I’d never use. She’d done it at the command of my father. Probably in the name of “keeping me alive.”

  He had no faith in me, and why should he have? I was his daughter — a total stranger who’d met him days before and remotely looked like him. Beyond my tanned skin and existence, he hadn’t been involved in my life. Why should he now? Still wearing my father’s form, Kendel smirked at me. His lips were thicker than hers, but the way they twisted was unmistakably Kendel’s. Behind her, the dock opened to a peaceful ni
ght sky with a bubbling light source in the distance — the wormhole held open by the Forecaster. “You’ll be safe here,” she said in his voice. “It’s what he wanted for you.”

  Screw what he wanted. I threw everything I had into breaching the shield she’d put around me, but as soon as she nabbed a jetpack, activated it, and flew through the wormhole, the shield fell. Great. I could go after her if only there was a three-hundred-yard-long ladder I could use to get to the wormhole. I cursed my father for being such a protective jerk and myself for not being able to fly. I ran to the dock’s edge and kneeled so the gusting winds would not knock me over. Down below the sloping rocks was darkness and certain death.

  The wormhole was still open. I couldn’t see that far away. Maybe my suit could? “Enhance visual display,” I said. The magnification increased tenfold, and I needed it a couple thousand-fold. Increasing it to maximum magnification helped a lot. Every head movement exaggerated my view, so I slowly lifted my chin. The Forecaster was the one holding the wormhole open. The strain had caused blood to flow from her eyes, ears, and mouth. However her powers to fold space and time worked, they were killing her, and I had to act.

  Kendel had nabbed the last jetpack, and all that was left were parachutes. The flight-capable vehicles probably did not include instruction manuals or, at least, how not to crash them. No one was around. If they were, they had strict orders not to help me. The Forecaster couldn’t extend the wormhole forever, and we were running out of time.

  I strapped a parachute to my shoulders, secured it the best I could, did the sign of the cross, and stepped to the edge of the dock. Though I had a death grip on the threaded ripcord, I lost my nerve and backed away. I’d flirted with death all this time, and I’d been close enough to smell it creeping up behind me. Jumping off this dock and plummeting to the cavern bottom was suicidal. I talked myself into it. I have a parachute. I’m not going to die.

  I ran as fast as I could, and the second I left the platform, I screamed at the top of my lungs and switched my powers to the hottest I’d ever burned. Though wind whipped past my head and alerted me of my free fall, I hoped I’d slow down. A second later, I surrendered hope and yanked the ripcord. My fire had burned the parachute off my back, and I cursed myself for not thinking that through.

  Soon, I was praying to God in Spanish anything I could think of to say. I told Him to let my mother I know I gave her crap, but I loved her more than I’d ever loved anyone else. And my father that I forgave him for leaving me behind. My racing heart skipped beats. I descended into total darkness. In another moment, I’d be completely shattered. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I’d be in whatever existed after this life. Hardly the end I’d have authored for myself. Then again, I wasn’t the one writing my story in the first place.

  I cracked my busted right eyelid which was one of the only things that didn’t feel broken. Thinking was agonizing, and the pain wouldn’t release me into either sleep or death. And, according to the diagnostics in my suit, my spine was broken in five places, so I probably shouldn’t move. Except I couldn’t move. My right lung was punctured. That explained the knifing in my chest. Didn’t feel like I lost teeth, but I tasted blood. Instinctively, I spat, forgetting my mask was still on. Retracting it wasn’t an option either. There had to be insects or wildlife down here. I wouldn’t let my last breaths be muffled screams while creepy, crawly things ate my eyeballs. Reading a bloodstained display wasn’t worse than being plastered across the floor of a canyon.

  Mom’s voice crackled through my audial comms. “Lucy!” she screamed. “Lucy! What did you do?”

  All I mustered in response was a tortured groan. I’d failed again.

  She yelled for my father using his full name. His middle name was “Ray,” and he was a junior? I couldn’t hear his response, but I knew it had to do with the mission and the senator since she told him what he could do with them.

  Moments later, she escaped the transport. The rush of wind in the connection gave her away. Not long later, a floating projection of her arrived in front of my face. Hysterical and speaking Spanish so fast I couldn’t understand beyond mi pequeña niña, she reached out for me. I wiggled my fingers and felt nothing. She wasn’t next to me, which meant the wormhole was closed. Then, the Forecaster must be dead.

  Tears burst from my intact eye. I tried, Mom, I tried. And now, I’m going to die on my birthday.

  “Mariposa.” Her voice trembled. “Baby girl, I need you to get up.”

  My throbbing, aching brain must be tricking me. Mom told me to get up? Bleeding to death with a broken spine and God knows how many powdered bones? She was the delusional one. “Just let me die in peace” I wanted to say. All that came out was a gurgling whimper. I’d written out my intentions long ago — a traditional burial near the ocean in a place called Xobai. She’d told me about it and shown me images. The place was heaven-like with clear water and golden sand beaches. The view from its cliffs was heaven.

  We’d put off a cross-country drive there many times, I never knew why, but the timing was always wrong for us. Not anymore. She’d invite no family members. We had nobody but each other. Every person at Penn High, including the faculty, either hated or pitied me. No crowds. Nobody to satisfy their piqued curiosity. Just her and a priest. After my last rites, she’d spread my ashes in the rippling waves, and we’d swim together one final time.

  My father might want to show up. Fine. With my death here, I’d finally have his full attention.

  What had she said to me again? Stand? My legs didn’t work — they couldn’t — with my spine in this condition. Everything hurt. I moaned in agony. Leave me alone. Let me die. Stop with the expectations. I’m average. Sub-average. Human. Dying. A spasm in my left eye cracked the eyelid. The three-dimensional scan of my torn body turned green at my right arm. Was it an error from a broken computer? Feeling returned in the fingers. I flipped it over to have my palm facing the uneven cavern floor. How? Bones and veins mend over weeks, months — not minutes. I bent my elbow, raised it above my wrist with my palm at the ground, and violently pushed to flip my body over. The impact knocked the breath out of me. Hand at my throat I gasped for air. The suit’s red display sensors blinked and sounded warnings. I already knew — my oxygen supply was desperately low. I slapped, scratched, and clawed the cavern’s surface until the sensors stopped, and I could inhale and exhale. My lungs had healed themselves, too, and I smelled fuel in the air. Overhead, an enormous shuttle flew toward the loading dock. Didn’t look like one of ours. In enhanced visual display, I saw they were not our guys. Wait…the attack across the country was a smokescreen! The real target was inside the fortress, and without a wormhole, my parents would take hours to return. Nobody could stop the powered attackers.

  The strength behind my voice surprised me. “Mom,” I said through tears. Dull soreness lingered in my muscles and reset bones. Best I could tell, everything functioned again.

  “Get up, baby,” she said to me as the hologram connection failed. “Stand and fight them.”

  I propped myself to a sitting position and then rose to my feet. Unbelievable. How deep was this canyon? Ten football fields? The mask showed me how off my math was. Eight thousand feet was about twenty football fields. I’d fallen that far and survived. Forget osteosarcoma. If those two couldn’t kill me, what could? Or, more importantly, how could I get up to ground level before Christmas? Climbing trails on foot would take days, and the search for whatever they were after wouldn’t take near that long. No, I’d have to find a quicker way. The suits were made for protection of the weapons. We were the weapons.

  Leveling the canyon wouldn’t work. I had to fly, and should I fall, I’d have to try again until I flew up the mountain. But how?

  This was nothing like my other life failures. Eventually, I’d get the results I wanted, but I just had to figure out how to do it fast enough to stop Liam and Senator Mateo’s plans. The whoosh of the flying transport engines had faded to nothing. They’d lande
d, and assuming they were powered, nobody left inside the complex could face them and win. I rubbed my gloved hands together. “Think,[XW119] girl, think,” I said to myself. “Physics, which you are failing, lift, drag, thrust… What’s the other one? Gravity?” Pale blue flames gushed from my palms and fingertips, and the force pushed my boots across the pebbly rock like I was roller skating. Turning my palms downward, I elevated to my tiptoes. With a little more push, I levitated a bit. Keeping my balance was hard. Either I wobbled too far forward or too far back.

  Kendel called my powers “intuitive” like they had a nature, a mind, all to themselves. Anything like that wouldn’t want to be trapped unused in a dead person’s body. Its best interest would be to help me do whatever I needed to do, right? My chest’s center started tingling. Instead of focusing on it or ridding myself of it, I allowed it to grow and spread throughout my body. The blasts increased at my foot soles and palms, and I was airborne.

  Despite my better judgment, I looked down and saw nothing but darkness below me. The falling sensation I’d feared dissipated. I was flying and in total control of myself. Not a parent. Not bone cancer or some rule or law. Me. I let out a primal roar loud enough to resound in my own ears. I soared higher and faster — so swift and sudden that I pierced the upper sky and discovered myself surrounded by clouds. Like performing a high dive, I tilted downward and descended at breakneck speed toward the dock. The mask display identified five hostiles gazing up. They fired Ordnance at me although I guessed, at this speed, no human eye could accurately target me. My heart beat overtime as I tried to slow my landing. Instead of landing with grace, style, or, I don’t know, on my feet, I hit the surface with a thud.

  They fired Ordnance kill shots — I could tell by the burn degree. Stun shots felt like a hundred honeybee stings. Kill blasts were another level. The electric shocks popped in my teeth fillings and burned the back of my eyes. I writhed and screamed, but I was alive. Ordnance couldn’t destroy me. Understanding that, I crawled out of the hole I’d made[XW120] and pointed bare fingers at them. Pink spurts of energy jumped from my hands and dropped them.