After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

“Wait a second,” said Rindi. “I don’t understand. That thermos is a nuke?” I nodded. “So what does that have to do with the kid? Why did they cut out the heart of the child?”

  I pointed at the slot in the thermos. “There’s a code, what we call a football, that fits in here and arms the nuke. The football is a pattern burned into the heart of a child. In order to fire the nuke, you have to cut out the heart of whoever is carrying the football.” I smiled. “But the dumb Devil’s Club didn’t find the nuke.”

  “It’s just as well,” Nivakti said. He grinned. “The nuke doesn’t work.”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t work?” I asked him.

  “The nuke doesn’t work.”

  “I suppose you’ve tried to blow a nuke?” Rindi asked.

  Nivakti kept smiling. “Yes. The umialik, the captain of my whaling crew, got mad at his wife. He had a nuke, and he tried to blow it.”

  “It didn’t work?” Max asked.

  “Sort of,” Nivakti said. “Not the way it was supposed to.”

  And he told us his story.

  * * *

  “Six years ago,” Nivakti said, “before the war came, an army man flew up to our village and offered us a nuclear weapon. He said that we could use it to protect ourselves from the Russians. The umialik told us he was going to take the weapon for his own, because he was umialik. He said his wife would be the football.

  “We didn’t want the bomb, but we liked the idea of the army cutting the umialik’s wife’s heart open and burning that code in there, so we agreed. Most of us didn’t like the umialik’s wife. She was an ugly shrew, fat, short, with all her teeth gone and her hair thin and stringy. But the umialik liked her because she was a good seamstress.

  “The army people came up the next winter in this big airplane and took the umialik’s wife onto their plane and cut her open and made the football. They had a little ceremony and gave us the bomb. The bomb was bright and silver and looked a little like a seal. We took the bomb and put it inside an old dance house.”

  “That was when?” Max asked.

  “Before the Zap,” Nivakti said. “After the Zap, when all you white people left our village and we went back to some of our old ways, that was the time we blew the bomb, during the whaling season.” Nivakti glared at Max for interrupting, then continued. “We were anxious, because we had only taken one whale the season before, and many of our children were hungry. It had been months since we’d had whale and we wanted badly to get another whale.

  “We got lucky. The leads, the open channels in the ice, were narrow and there was a whole pod of whales almost within shouting distance of our village. We knew surely that we had pleased the whales and that they would allow us to take them.

  “We went out on the ice, the umialik’s wife leading the way, carrying her bucket of water for the whale to drink. All went according to ritual and it seemed as if nothing we could do would offend the whales. Just as the umialik’s wife turned to go back to shore the umialik stopped her. There was blood on the snow where she had squatted. The umialik pulled up his wife’s parka, and it was there for all of us to see: a red spot on her breeches, over her crotch. The umialik’s wife was in her period.

  “What could we do? We knew that a menstruating woman would surely offend the whales, so we didn’t even bother chasing them. We packed up our gear and started back to the village. It didn’t surprise us that a storm moved in and closed the leads.

  “The umialik was in a rage. All the way back to the village he beat his wife. By the time we returned, she was bruised and bloody. But she didn’t flinch from the blows, just let the umialik keep hitting her, stumbling now and then but getting back to her feet each time.

  “At the village the umialik went to his iglu, dragging his wife with him. He began to drink, and got drunker and drunker. We could hear his wife’s screams and hear his curses, but no one dared to go in and help.

  “Finally, the umialik came out of his house, dragging his wife behind him. By then she was half-dead, her hair matted with blood, her face puffed up like a mushroom, one arm broken. The umialik went to the shaman’s house and asked him what he should do.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rindi said. “Do about what?”

  “Should the umialik kill his wife?” Nivakti asked. “She had offended the whales, and something had to be done. So the umialik went to the shaman to ask what he should do.” Nivakti glared at her, and went on with his story.

  “We all gathered around, watched the shaman go into his trance. When he came out he spoke in the voice of the seal, so we knew he had talked to the whales and received their answer.

  “The shaman told the umialik that he would have to kill his wife. He should take her heart, get the football, and blow off the bomb. Only this would please the whales.

  “The village was quite afraid of this, and would have stopped the umialik, but the umialik had grabbed his gun and threatened to shoot anyone who would stop him. Well, we knew we would all die if the bomb went off but then we knew one of us would die if we tried to stop the umialik, so what could we do?

  “We followed the umialik to the old dance house where the bomb was kept. We crowded inside. Someone lit a lamp and by its glow we could see the silver bomb, a little seal covered with dirt and dust.

  “The umialik brushed the dirt off the bomb and unscrewed the top of it. We watched as the umialik took out his knife and cut his wife’s throat. The wife was so far gone by then I don’t think she even felt her life go from her. The umialik cut open her chest and took out her heart. Then he cut her heart open and got the thing, the football you called it, Holmes.

  “One brave hunter rushed the umialik then and tried to take the football from him, but the umialik was fast and shot the hunter in the arm. None of us dared stop him after that. We watched in horror as the umialik took the football, the piece of the heart, put it in the bomb like the army said to, and pushed the button. We watched in silence as the numbers counted down on the bomb. There was a hush as the bomb whirred and clicked. Suddenly a loud siren went off in the bomb, which made us all run, all except the umialik. The umialik stayed right there, hugging the bomb, weeping, his wife’s heart in his hand.

  “We ran outside the dance house, ran and ran, knowing that the bomb would go off and knowing that we could never run far enough. Then the siren stopped and we all fell to our knees. I kissed my wife good-bye and hugged my children. There was a loud explosion up on the hill. And then—” Nivakti stopped, stood up, went to the window. “I hear gunfire.”

  “What?” we screamed.

  “Gunfire. Listen.”

  We ran to the door. From toward Ship Creek the pop-pop of small-arms fire could be heard.

  “Militia, probably,” Max said. The gunfire stopped. “Practice, or someone’s drunk.”

  Nivakti nodded. “As long as they don’t fire at me.” He patted the Subaru.

  “So what happened?” Rindi asked.

  “Oh,” Nivakti said. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” I asked.

  Nivakti just smiled.

  * * *

  We stayed at Kaditali about an hour, then continued on. Rindi and I watered the dogs, and she taught me how to check their paws and feet for cut pads, broken nails. We tidied up Sherry’s house, cut a new pile of kindling and put it by the stove, and shut the door. Nivakti left a little carved ivory seal on the kitchen table, and Max and Rindi left a small sack of bullets. I left a note to Sherry’s heirs saying thank you for the food and whiskey and warmth and we were sorry that they had died. I didn’t think anyone could read it, but maybe they would find a reader who could.

  At Kaditali Marsh the trail met up with the railroad, then split, the railroad following Cook’s River, and the trail going straight north. If the Wonderblimp hadn’t been blown off the track after God Weird it would have taken the railroad into Ship Creek. Max said that from there the trail became known as the Strange Trail, for some reason he didn’t know.

  “Ma
ybe we should follow the railroad tracks,” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “It’s out of the way. The Strange goes right into Ship Creek. The railroad’s a little tricky. It goes below some big bluffs, and some of those bluffs have mean and nasty folks at the top who like to throw stones down on you. We go north.”

  North. The land kind of flattened out there, this broad plain of glacial scrubbed till. There were little dips and hills but most of Greater Ship Creek was flat. My kind of country.

  Rindi took the lead, then me, followed by Max’s team, and Nivakti and his dog Aklaq chasing. We had offered to let Nivakti use a few of our dogs, but he had smiled and said, “Aklaq is enough.” He wasn’t kidding. I expected you could put Aklaq in my team and right away replace five dogs. He was a bear, all right—that’s what Nivakti said the word Aklaq meant.

  Some teams had gone down the trail ahead of us; there were recent tracks. God Weirders? Had two groups gone through? The trail was punched flat by someone; we had no trouble following it. Twice we stopped at forks to make sure we took the right trail. I kneeled down in the snow and pointed out little crystals of blood.

  “You think one of them might have been hit?” I asked Nivakti, who seemed to know these things.

  He shook his head. “Bleeding paws.” He pointed to a dog print, and drops of blood in each print.

  Rindi got down and picked up a wad of snow, crumpled it in her hand. The snow was dry, crinkly little shards of flakes, crystals like daggers.

  “Nivakti’s right,” she said. “Must have been a thaw and then a freeze. This trail would be bad on dogs. Better put booties on.”

  Rindi took out a bag of what looked like marble sacks, slipped the sacks on each dog’s feet. She rummaged in her bag, came up with more booties, and told Max and me to do the same for our teams. It couldn’t hurt. The dogs looked silly, but not as silly as some poodles I’d seen, and they didn’t seem to mind a bit. Rindi offered Nivakti some booties for Aklaq, but Nivakti shook his head.

  “Aklaq is tough. He won’t need those.”

  The sun was sliding into Cook’s River just over Mount Iliamna, a volcano on the south end of the Alaska Range. I glanced back at Kaditali Marsh behind us, Cook’s River spreading out where Turnagain Arm and the inlet met. Big chunks of ice twice the size of the Wonderblimp caught the rays of the setting sun, glowing like monumental jewels. Banjo Snowshoe Mountain was pink to the east; Rindi pointed out the Redoubt, a black blob at the base of the mountain. I shuddered at the height, still didn’t believe I’d come down that hill.

  Thunder cracked up the trail.

  Rindi brought her team to a halt, and I came up hard behind her, Alice almost running up into her wheel dogs. I jammed my brake in, set the hook, ran up to get Alice out of Rindi’s way.

  More thunder cracked. Then some pops, another crack, and a boom that rattled the trees along the trail. Rindi dragged her dogs into the woods, Max was halfway there, and I couldn’t even see Nivakti. I ran back to my sled, took the snow hook out, started to lead Alice into the woods.

  I had my wheel dogs off the trail and into the brush when a bee whizzed past my face, then some thunder rumbled. I glanced up, saw two sleds racing down the trail at me. One sled was a freighter, about eight dogs, followed by a lighter sled, with maybe twelve dogs. The musher with the light sled was shooting at the musher with the freighter. I ducked down, watched. The person on the light sled leaned forward, bracing herself against the handlebar, both hands on her submachine gun, and fired four quick shots, crack-crack-crack-crack, fanning the gun slightly. The person on the freighter let go of the driver’s bow, fell backwards, his team loose.

  The musher on the light sled dragged her brake, stopped at the shot dog-driver. Max and Rindi ran out to the light sled. The driver was dressed in a white snowsuit, with a red armband. I glanced at the freighter as it went by me.

  It was a God Weird sled, like the one back at Kaditali, only without a machine gun. Stuff was piled on the basket and on top of the stuff was someone covered up with a fur blanket. A blue braid poked out from under a rainbow-colored ski hat.

  I grabbed Alice, yanked her on the trail, paused to lift a wheel dog over a line, then got on the sled and yelled, “Hike!” Alice started yapping and took off like a greyhound after a rabbit.

  “Holmes!” Max yelled at me. I didn’t look back. I was being stupid. I thought I knew that person in the sled. She glanced back at the sound of my name, and I smiled.

  Alice earned herself twenty hugs and a belly rub for that run. She was pulling on her tug lines the way a fish takes the hook. The swing dogs took up the beat and the wheels were hunks of beef pounding into the snow. We had her.

  I came up to the sled, yelled, “On by!” and Alice pulled up beside the sled, pace for pace with those God Weird dogs. They snarled at us but my team didn’t bat a lash. I stepped a foot over, put my right foot on the God Weird sled, grabbed the driver’s bow. Okay: I had both sleds now. How was I going to stop them?

  The woman in the basket glanced back at me. She had ice blue eyes; one eyelid was swollen half-shut, black and blue. She smiled, squinted at me. My heart sank.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Don’t thank me yet, kid.”

  She held up her wrists; they were bound together with nylon rope. I let go of the handlebar for a moment, grabbed my knife, flicked it open, tossed it to her. She grabbed for it, and it bounced out of the sled.

  “Crap,” I said. The sleds were spreading apart as the God Weird dogs starting fighting with my team. I looked up the trail and saw a slight hill coming up—going down, as it were.

  With my right foot I reached over and tapped the brake. Wrong idea. The God Weird sled fell behind me and I had to let up, grab the side of the basket, tap my own brake. Okay, that might work after a fashion. I kept my left foot on my brake, hung onto my handle, reached over with my right foot, and then hit both brakes at the same time and yelled, “Whoa!”

  My wheel dogs, Sam and Ouzel, hunkered down. The brakes were screeching and clawing and ice was flying up in my face. My legs were spreading apart, and I was halfway to doing a split. Heck, I’d flunked Miz Jackson’s ballet class in second grade. It isn’t going to work, Holmes, I thought.

  Alice stopped. The God Weird dogs stopped. They all fell into a writhing mass of panting dogs. I looked up. The sleds were pointing downhill. I was leaning back, feet on the brakes, and the lady in the basket was laughing. I thought real seriously about letting her go. But I’d let people go before . . . A bunch of hands and arms and bodies came up from behind me and took the God Weird sled. I got back to my team, set the snow hook.

  “Thanks,” the lady in the basket said. As I got closer I saw that not just blue braids, but red, yellow, orange, and green braids poked out from under her hat. She wore a blue jacket with a patch that had PATAGONIA and the outline of a mountain embroidered on it.

  “Who are you?” she asked me.

  “Just some dumb bush punk,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Just some dumb bush punkette,” she said. “Why? Who did you think I was?”

  “Oh, a friend of mine.”

  Lucy. I’d thought she was Lucy.

  CHAPTER 11

  At the top of the hill where I had rescued the ersatz Lucy, I could see the remains of the city. Ship Creek spread across a flat plain at the base of some big mountains. The plain looked like someone had taken a cheese cutter to the edge of the mountains, sliced off a hunk, and shoved the rock into Cook’s River. At the north end of the plain I could see the remains of burned skyscrapers, black skeletons against the white river.

  A layer of haze hovered around the tops of the skyscrapers, haze fed by dozens of small fires burning in an arc south of the buildings. Black was the color of the dead city, and white and brown the colors of wilderness reclaiming the land. As far as I could see were charred buildings, collapsed metal frames, frames dusted white by a recent snow. Alder bushes grew around the remains of subdivisio
ns and apartment complexes, and into the dead streets. There must have been thousands and thousands of people in that city once. The lady in the red armband walked up to me.

  “Where did they all go?” I asked her.

  “Who?”

  “The people.” I waved my hand at the dead city.

  She shrugged. “Home,” she said. “After the Zap, there were riots, and then people got hungry. Ships didn’t come with food. Gas ran out. Some people stayed. A lot of people starved to death. Most people just started walking south in the summer. They’d come from the south, and I guess they decided to return to the south. Hunger makes you do that.” She smiled, anticipating my question. “Some of us had food, or knew how to hunt.”

  I stood there staring at Ship Creek, wondering about all the people who had been, wondering who was still there, if maybe Lucy was among the survivors, and if maybe the Wonderblimp was somewhere nearby.

  The lady in the red armband clapped me on the shoulder. “You did us a favor.”

  I turned, smiled, and gave her an aw-shucks grin. “How’s that?”

  She walked over to the woman in the God Weird sled, helped her out. When the woman got out of the sled, I saw that she really didn’t look like Lucy. It was the blue braid, that was all. They both had blue braids. The woman in the red armband put a big arm around the woman in the sled. “You saved our refugee.”

  “Refugee from what?”

  “God Weirders,” the refugee said.

  I looked down at the shot dog-driver—ex-dog-driver. He was dead, Red Armband’s pistol having put some holes in him in places it wasn’t a good idea to have holes. The dead dog-driver’s cap had fallen off. His head had been shaved and his scalp painted red. I kicked the body. “This guy?”

  Red Armband nodded. I looked at the refugee. “You from God Weird, Patagonia?”

  “Was,” she said. “Hey, how’d you know my name?”

  I nodded in Red Armband’s direction. “This lady shouted it when she was chasing you.” Red Armband gave me a funny look. I closed my eyes, thought, whoops.