After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

  “Send the recognition signal, Holmes,” Nike said behind me.

  I jerked around, glared at him. Nike’s nostrils looked red; his eyes were dilated, bloodshot. He sniffed, wiped his nose with the sleeve of his jumpsuit. “You knew,” I said.

  “Some things you remember. I’ve seen it done once. But I don’t know the signal. Read it. Send it.”

  “If I send the wrong signal, the bomb will destruct.”

  “I know that, too,” he said. He ducked his head out the doorway, said something. Doc North came back in, pushing Suz in front of him.

  Suz’s hospital gown had been torn open, and her bandages ripped off. The long wound where the bullet had cut through her chest was raw and red. The wound gaped open, blood oozing in small drips, stitches like railroad ties across the center of the gap. Doc North had a scalpel in his hand.

  “The wound’s still fresh,” Doc North said. “I cut the stitches, and she’ll bleed pretty badly.” He smiled. “Heck, she might even die.”

  “Send the right signal,” Nike said.

  I stared at a paragraph on the page. “There’s nothing in here about recognition signals,” I said.

  “There has to be,” Nike said. “Give me that book.”

  Ping, ping, ping, the bomb transmitted. I was counting pings; ten pings, and we’d have to wait another fifteen minutes.

  “Damnit, here.” Nike stabbed a finger at a page, at a chart that said “Recognition Signals.” “The EMP bomb’s a model five-six-seven-three-oh-niner,” he said. “Send it.” He thrust the book back at me. “Send it!”

  “You can read,” Max said.

  Nike looked up. “What?”

  “You can read,” he repeated.

  “Yeah,” Nike said. “That lazy’s mighty fine stuff.”

  Nike shoved me out of the chair. Ping went the headphones before he ripped them off my head. Eight pings. Nike punched in a number on a numeric pad, flicked a switch to transmit, then stabbed a button that said “send.” I could hear the headphones lying on top of the console screech. Nike stood up with a satisfied smile on his face, turned, yelled at Doc North.

  “Take her back to sick bay,” he said, and went up to the bridge. Max and I followed.

  The twin peaks of Denali were before us, the north peak to the left, the south peak to the right, a ridge with a notch in it between them. The Wonderblimp hovered dead even between the two of them, level with the south peak, the higher of the two. I could hold my right thumb and forefinger out, and the thumb would blot out the north peak, the finger the south peak, and the web the ridge.

  “Which peak!” Nike yelled. “Which one is it?”

  Bron swung the blimp around to port, so the starboard side faced the peaks. A south wind blew us toward the pass between the peaks, so Bron swung us around nose first into the wind.

  “Cut props,” Nike said.

  We drifted backward over the pass until our prop speed matched the wind speed and we hovered directly between the peaks. Nike got out of his captain’s chair, grabbed a pair of binoculars from a pouch on his chair, watched through the big ports, scanning port to starboard, starboard to port, between the peaks. Then he pointed.

  “There she is,” he said, stabbing at the south peak. “There she is.”

  Bron steered us so that we drifted to starboard, to the south peak. I could see it now without binoculars. Like a volcano, a crater bubbled on the peak of the Denali, water oozing away from a ruby-red object glowing in the center. Bron swung us around to a pivot over the crater, and we circled and circled that unnatural caldera.

  “Denali’s not a volcano, is it?” Max asked. I shook my head.

  Nike leaned against the glass, hands spread out, staring at the growing crater. “The bomb,” he said. “The everlasting all-consuming liberating Zap bomb.” He turned to me, and like a mad whaler, pointed. “There she is, Holmes,” he said. “That is your destiny. You wanted to go north, boy? You wanted to go home. There it is.” He held his hand out, God’s arm reaching down to his creation. “That’s your home.”

  I followed his finger, stared at the bomb bubbling out of the mountain, and I knew, I knew. The Oracle had given me the sign, and it had been right: heaven over the flame, and there she was, the flame, the great, burning flame. My flame, my creation. The memories flooded back into me, synapses seeming to click right and left, thought after thought flooding my mind until, dizzy, I sat down. My nuke. My EMP. My Zap bomb.

  As I watched the crater grow, I knew then what Nike had in store for me. I knew. I knew what I would have to do.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Wonderblimp circled around Denali’s south peak until the nuke stopped glowing. Almost as fast as the ice on the summit had melted, it began to freeze. Ruby took the wheel, hovered the blimp over the caldera, and Bron, Nike, Max, and I rappelled down to the peak. It wasn’t like I wanted to help out, but I knew what they would do if I even balked: snip, snip, Suz’s stitches would fall away and they’d let her bleed into the snow.

  At 20,320 feet the air was thin, but not unbreathable. I had to move slow, save my energy, but I didn’t need the oxygen. Still, if I was out there awhile, if I didn’t have time to adjust, I could get altitude sickness.

  A crust of ice formed around the rim of the small crater; the crater itself was maybe twenty feet across, a pockmark on a small flat spot on the south peak. To the northeast another great glacier ran down the flank of the massif, a glacier that moved across lowlands and a river valley. The north peak jutted up on the other side of the pass to the left, granite strata seared into definition by wind and snow.

  Still attached to ropes, Nike and Bron were pounding steel stakes about ten feet long into the ice crust and through to the freezing slush. When the slush froze completely—maybe an hour, I figured—the stakes would be cemented solid and the blimp could tie up to them. I pounded smaller stakes into the ridge and set up snow fences, then rigged up climbing ropes to the stakes. Max and I hooked up to the safety rope and let the ropes to the blimp dangle away.

  I walked over to Nike and Bron, playing out rope as I went. Once again my movements seemed automatic; I felt as if this might not have been the first time I had climbed a mountain. Even though I had never climbed a mountain before, I knew I was doing the right thing: the sheer drop to either side, and the unstable rock and snow that might be underneath, convinced me that it would be a good idea to stay roped up all the time.

  The Zap bomb had quit glowing and was no warmer than dying embers from a campfire. Small clouds of steam rose from the bomb, and it sat on bare granite at the bottom of a cone-shaped crater. As the snow around and beneath the bomb had melted, the bomb had settled, until the legs of the nuke rested on rock ten feet beneath the top of the snow pack. Nike and Bron climbed down into the crater; Bron had another rope and the end of a cargo net slung over his shoulder.

  Out in the open I could feel the wind now, but it wasn’t strong, maybe only ten miles an hour. Still, it must have been thirty to forty below. My feet were snug in the big bunny boots, and just a wisp of wind snuck through my heavy parka. I had a wool balaclava pulled over my head and a cap over that. Nike had acquired a whole box of glacier glasses from somewhere; they’d never seemed useful before, but came in handy then. Max wore a pair of cleats of some sort on the soles of his boots, and I wished I had a pair, too. The snow was so wind-packed, except in the crater, that I had to stomp down hard to get a firm footing.

  “You taking that onto the blimp?” I yelled down at Nike.

  “Oh, yeah,” he yelled back. “Just you see.”

  Nike yelled up to the blimp to throw down two shovels, and someone, probably Ruby, lowered short, square shovels down on a rope. Nike and Bron shoveled snow onto the bomb to cool it off. As the snow hit the cylinder, it melted, then hissed.

  The Zap bomb didn’t look deadly; it looked a lot like a big drum, five feet high and five feet wide. A sphere about two feet wide rested in the middle. If I understood the way the EMP bomb worked,
two of the knapsack nukes would blow, blasting the sphere more than ten miles high. When the sphere got high enough, a timer would blow the third knapsack nuke, and the fission bomb would start the fusion reaction. At that altitude the conditions would be right for the explosion of the thermonuke—the sphere—to cause an electromagnetic pulse.

  Four big handles jutted out on the side, and there were two cylindrical depressions on either side of the sphere for the igniters, the knapsack nukes. The Zap bomb rested on four collapsible legs. Intense heat that had melted the snow had charred the casing of the bomb flat black. Bron threw more snow on the nuke, and after a few more minutes the snow quit hissing and started sticking.

  Bron waved up at the blimp, shouted something, and then Ruby lowered a cable with two hooks attached. Bron snapped the two hooks onto the handles of the nuke. He and Nike got on either side of the bomb, jiggled it free, then motioned to the blimp to pull it up. The nuke jerked free of the ice, then swung out, toward me. I jumped to my right, ducked as it swung over and out and up. Nike walked up to me, a hopping type walk: stomp, put foot down, stomp again.

  “Get back up to the blimp,” he said.

  “What for? You got your nuke now. What do you need me for?”

  He smiled. “I need you. You’re my reader.”

  “Hah,” I said. “You can read.”

  Nike looked down, shook his head. “Not now. You think I want to keep snorting that lazy? You think I want to kill myself?”

  I shook my head.

  Nike made a snipping motion with his hands. “Up,” he said.

  Up in the hangar bay Nike and the rest of them stood around the nuke. To them it was like some holy icon, the grandfather of nukes, the One Big One, the absolute bomb to end all bombs. Ruby had a brush out and was dusting snow and ash off the bomb’s smooth skin. Nike moved around the blimp, smiling at it, stopping, stooping to squint at something on its side. Lucy stood back from the circle, a big smile on her face, her braid whisking back and forth like a horse’s tail. Proud mama? Maybe.

  To me that nuke was the thing that should never have been built, a death too big to comprehend. Bombs like that had come screaming across the sky and blown my mind, and the minds of millions of good people, into madness and chaos. Hell, the Zap bomb had scrambled the minds of Nike, of Lucy, of Bron and Ruby and Doc North, had made them illiterate. That bomb had robbed me of my past, of my memory, of my very being.

  I had to wonder how the Zap had done that—how it had changed minds so. A vague memory of a college friend of mine came back to me, a bizarre kid who’d tried to kill himself once. He’d gone to a hospital, and when he came back, he had trouble remembering a lot of his friends. It was like someone had reached inside his skull and massaged his brain so that he forgot, so that he had turned from an animated, alive human being into a dull, unemotional hunk of putty.

  And something had. I remembered that friend—his name was Yon? Juan? Jon? something like that—telling me what had happened to him in that hospital. He said the doctors had strapped him to a table, given him some drug to relax his muscles, stuck a rubber stick in his mouth to keep him from biting his tongue, and put electrodes to his head. They had shocked him, sent jolts of electricity through his brain. He said it didn’t hurt, that it actually felt pretty damn good, like sex.

  Maybe that was what the Zap had done, I thought. Maybe the Zap worked like the shocks those doctors had given my crazy friend; maybe the Zap, the EMP bomb, jumbled things around a little, loosened up the electrical system of the mind. Maybe. If so, the Zap bomb wasn’t a holy icon—it was evil incarnate, death in a can. As I thought about it, it came back to me what had happened to my friend Jon or Yon or Juan: they’d zapped his mind one more time, and he had oozed into the slime pits of the streets, to become one of those people, like ol’ Spikes in the St. Herman’s Club, who drooled on bars.

  But Nike and Bron and Doc North and Lucy didn’t see the Zap bomb that way. To see the looks of awe on their faces, to watch how Lucy stared at that nuke like it was a long lost lover . . . how could they do that? I wondered. I thought of where they had come from and who they were. They were Nukers, maybe the people who had built the bombs. It was their creation, their toy. So engrossed in the technical mystery of the machine had they become that they had lost all comprehension of the Zap as a murderous device. To me it was a physical horror, but to them, even though it had rendered them ignorant, the Zap bomb was a wonderful machine. Their minds had been turned to mush by that thing. As I watched them caress it, worship it, fondle it, I realized that it had turned their minds to mush long before the Zap. All the Zap had done was improve upon the ignorance their minds had descended to long ago.

  Fuck them. Fuck them all.

  Lucy looked over at me and must have seen the look of disgust on my face. “What’s your problem?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. I don’t see how you can get so worked up over that.” I pointed at the Zap bomb.

  “You don’t, huh?” She smiled. “Very odd, considering—”

  “Considering what?” Nike asked.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Later.”

  Nike turned to me and grinned, a nasty grin; he crooked his finger and said, “Come. Come, boy. Come read to us.”

  We went to the lab and I took the big gray book and prepared to read. But before I could read, I had to know something.

  “Who are you going to trade this one to?” I asked.

  “No one,” Nike said. “This one is ours to keep and to have and to hold.” He looked out the open door, down the gangway to where the Zap bomb stood. “And to use.”

  “Use?” I asked. “Use on who? The Ruskies?”

  “No, no,” Nike said. “The PRAK.”

  I drummed my fingers on the cardboard of the blank, innocuous gray cover of the EMP bomb operating manual. “The People’s Republic of Alaska?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Why?” he asked. “Why? Because the silly people of this goddamn People’s Republic of Alaska live in a state of anarchy, with no law, no central authority, no one to protect them from enemies within and without, that’s why. Because crazies like the God Weirders run around stealing children, that’s why. Because with all this land, people starve, that’s why.” Nike banged his fist on the table, glared at me. “Because there is no civilization, no intelligence, no sanity in the PRAK, that’s why. This place is nuts. This world is nuts.” He lowered his voice, crossed his arms across his chest.

  “And I promise it salvation,” he said. “I promise it sanity. I will wipe clean the minds of the crazies, the idiots, the insane. And when they have been redeemed, we, we the nukers will come down from the mountain and show them the light. We will teach them how to be good people. I bring the PRAK hope, salvation. I bring them the cleansing.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little vial of coke, the lazy. “I’ll bring them knowledge.”

  I stared at him, turned from those hard, ice-blue eyes. “It’s not so bad, Nike,” I said. “There are good people here. They’re rebuilding the land. Things may not be perfect, and force may rule, but through force people are gaining their freedom, and through freedom they are gaining their dignity. Let them keep their dignity.”

  “They have no dignity,” Nike said.

  “So you say.” I let the book drop to the floor. It hit with a resounding thud. I slid the book over to Nike with my toe. “I suppose you want me to help arm the bomb?”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Nike said. “But, yeah, I counted on you helping out.”

  “Find another reader to do your dirty work,” I said. I turned to the door. “I’m sick of this shit. You can kill me. I don’t care.” I had to think of what the Ching said: retreat. Through small acts of resistance one will persevere.

  “Think, Holmes,” Nike said. “Go ahead and run. Where will you run to? You know I’ll blow your heart. You know I’ll destroy you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I’ll kill whoever is around you.”<
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  “I’m far enough away now.” I put my hand on the door.

  “I’ll catch you and tie you up and drop you on Ship Creek.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll nuke Sue City, I’ll nuke Kachemak.”

  I turned the knob.

  “I’ll kill Suz.”

  I stopped. “She’s done nothing.”

  “She’s from Ship Creek. I’ll kill her now.” He reached for the intercom switch. “One word to Doc North, and she’s dead. I’ll make it painful—open her stitches.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  He thumbed the switch. “Doc—” He held the switch down, glared at me. “Play ball, Holmes.”

  The door handle turned. I stepped back, and Max walked into the lab. “Do it, Holmes.”

  “Max?”

  “I was listening through the door. Do it. Let him blow the nuke. It’ll be the last one. For a while, we’ll live under the nukers. But they’re only a few of them. Minds wiped or not, we’ll endure. We’ll triumph. And there will be no more nukes. Do it. Get it over with.”

  “A good point, Hammer,” Nike said. “But we’ll grow. We’ll find more nukes and build more nukes. But a good point. Doc—” he said again.

  “Bastard.” I sighed. “Okay. I’ll read for you.”

  “Yeah?” the doc replied.

  “How’s the patient?” Nike asked.

  “Fine,” the doc said. “She’s trying soft food now.”

  “Good,” said Nike. He flicked the intercom off.

  “You’ll wipe my mind in the end,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Nike replied. “We intend to get far enough out of the way where that won’t happen. If you’re good, I’ll take you with us.”

  “I’d rather not. I’d rather run.”

  “We’ll see. But for now, read.” He picked up the gray book, held it out to me. “Read.”

  And I read.

  I took the gray book down to the hangar bay, and read before the Zap bomb. With the nuke at hand, I could understand the diagrams, figure out where to place the knapsack nukes, the igniters, figure out how to arm the Zap bomb. As I read, and as I looked at the bomb, I had the same feeling I had had before when I was sliding down the cable from the blimp at God Weird, or running dogs at the Redoubt. I knew this. I had done this before. I shook my head at the thought. Never. I had never done this. How could I? I must have had one of those minds that can figure things out. I figured out how the Zap bomb worked.