Fire

by Alan Rodgers

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  Chapter Six

  IN TRANSIT BY AIR OVER THE SOUTH-CENTRAL UNITED STATES

  Luke woke briefly near Memphis, when the pilot spoke through the plane’s intercom. There was trouble in Memphis, he said, and in St. Louis. The plane wouldn’t land in either city; instead, it would continue on to Kansas City — this flight’s ultimate destination. The airline would either find new connections for those passengers not bound for Kansas City, or put them up until connecting flights could be arranged.

  The whole idea was too much for Luke to cope with, and he couldn’t do anything about it anyway; he tucked his head deeper into the seat-back’s padding and pushed himself down again toward sleep.

  Before he was asleep he heard the plane’s two stewardesses gossiping in the aisle a few rows back from him. The first said that the pilot had told her that there was rioting in the Memphis and St. Louis airports, and that that was why they couldn’t land. The second asked her how she was going to get home, and what she was going to do, and where she was going to stay. There was a long gap — for a moment Luke thought they’d stepped back out of earshot — and then the first asked the second what it even mattered where they went, and if there was going to be any home to go to in the morning anyway.

  Luke would have shuddered at the thought of riot-torn airports, but the whiskey was too warm, and the sleep was too comforting and seductive. Worrying over his immediate future would have meant waking and clearing his head, and there was no sense in that, none that he could see, so he closed off his mind and hid from the trouble that pursued him — hid from it in his dreams.

  The next time he woke there was no way to hide.

  The plane was somewhere over the Ozarks, he thought; those looked like low, time-worn and rounded mountains down below him, though in the moonless darkness it was impossible to be certain. Luke was sweating, and cold. The whiskey had worn off, or at least worn thin. His body hurt and his head hurt and there was a demanding queasiness in his stomach. All of that could be the effects of hangover and tension. But those things wouldn’t have woke him, not by themselves. Luke was a heavy sleeper — he’d slept through worse more than once in his life.

  No, it was something else that had woke him. Something like the foreboding he’d felt since the clerk at the Blue Mountain Airways desk had found the flight for him . . . like that foreboding, but much more immediate and intense.

  Something was happening. Something powerful and inevitable. Unstoppable.

  Luke Munsen wasn’t a man given to visions or premonitions; the idea of such things, even in others, was preposterous to him. Nonetheless he knew, impossibly, that the end of the world as he knew it was at hand.

  Knew to look west-northwest out the window beside him, and watch the state of Kansas out beyond the horizon. Knew, five minutes later, to shield his eyes from blinding-glowing radiation as he saw the first flicker of light like a distant, tiny sun.

  A nuclear explosion, turning three hundred square miles of Kansas wheatfield into vapor and a deep, magma-lined pit.

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  Chapter Seven

  WASHINGTON

  It was midnight when President Paul Green went to the situation room. In all the months since he’d taken office that room had never been empty at any hour of the day or night.

  Tonight it was deserted, just like most of the rest of the White House. His staff was abandoning Paul Green, and he knew it. How could he not have known it? There was so much . . . absence all around him. They thought he was crazy. That was why they were all going away. Ignoring his orders when he could find someone to give orders to. Threatening to impeach him, for God’s sake! Threatening, hell — they were actually trying to do it.

  “I’m not crazy, damn it!” He shouted the words out loud, even though the room was empty and there was no one to hear what he had to say. “I’m not. There’s a patriotic American trapped over there, trapped in the hands of those . . . those . . . communists. And they’re going to kill him. All of you know damned well they’re going to kill him. What am I supposed to do, just let them have him?”

  As he spoke Green crossed the room, studying the blinking consoles and lighted terminals that he’d never really understood.

  “This isn’t my fault. It’s not. Okay, maybe I did give him the bomb. It’s still not my fault. The man is a private citizen. He acted on his own initiative. How was I supposed to know what he was going to do with a nuclear bomb? Yeah, so he told me what he was up to. Maybe he did tell me. I damned sure wouldn’t have given him the thing if he hadn’t. But how was I supposed to know?”

  That was the console, over there. He was pretty sure. Usually there was a simple box with a red light, and all he had to do was put in his key and push a button.

  Keys, actually. Two keys. One of them his, one of them for the Secretary of Defense. Green had that other key, along with his own. He’d taken it from the man when he’d called him into the Oval Office and fired him. Not that he’d wanted to give it up; Green had had to cuff him one upside the head to get the key from him.

  No trouble at all sending off those missiles ordinarily. Green had even practiced it a couple of times, with the safeties on, of course. Trouble was, the black box had disappeared yesterday somehow, the same way a lot of other things had disappeared.

  Well, let them take that stuff. They couldn’t take away this room. It was too big to move, too delicate and vital to disable. And as long as Paul Green had this room, he held the fate of the world in his hands.

  “I’ve known that man all my life. Went to church with him every Sunday. He’s been like a brother to me. They’ve already killed my wife, damn them, and now they want to kill my oldest friend! I’m supposed to leave him to rot in some stinking Russian jail?”

  That button, there. All lit up red and glowing. Of course that was the one. That was the one that’d allow him to set off the missiles without the box.

  “I won’t do it, you hear? Not for the whole goddamned world! Are you listening?”

  No one was listening. The room in which Green stood was one of the three rooms in the world best shielded from electronic eavesdropping — perhaps, in fact, it was the best protected. It would have been hard to measure the difference.

  And no one heard and no one saw when President Paul Green pressed the button that meant the beginning of the end of the world.

  “Die,” he said. And then he turned and left the console. Went back to his room. Tucked himself in bed and went back to sleep.

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  Chapter Eight

  IN TRANSIT BY AIR OVER THE EASTERN UNITED STATES

  It’s the end of the world, Luke thought. He could still feel the atomic firelight warming his skin through the cabin window. Right now. the bombs are dropping, and it’s the end of the world. He waited, pensive, for three long breaths, expecting his own fiery death to follow an instant behind the explosion. But he wasn’t dead, he realized as the shock and sound of the explosion finally reached and rocked the plane, following behind the brilliance the way thunder follows lightning. The plane rocked and turned, but the pilot had it under control, and they weren’t going to die. They weren’t at ground zero, they weren’t anywhere near it, and there wasn’t another explosion. Not anywhere nearby, at least.

  It’s Kansas City that’s gone, he thought. It must be. What other city is there in that direction? Wichita? Why would anyone bomb Wichita?

  My God. Where are they going to land this plane?

  Off in the west the thermonuclear light faded back down to a dim glow. Overhead the intercom hissed, and the pilot began to speak, then stopped. Luke could hear the faint sound of the pilot’s cabin radio somewhere in that hiss, but it was too faint to make out whatever was being said.

  Radiation sickness. I bet I’m going to die of radiation sickness. This high up, he was sure, the air wouldn’t be dense enough to slo
w or still the rays. Or would it? Physics wasn’t his field — far from it — and the physics he’d had as an undergraduate hadn’t sat well with him. He’d listened as the instructors had spoken of things like time turned to mass, listened hard enough to answer the questions that confronted him on the tests. But really: what the physics people had to say was at least as preposterous as the nonsense that the psychics were always spouting — even if physics was true and real and empirical. Some parts of reality, if you asked Luke Munsen, were better left to specialists. Give him things that were alive and tangible, touchable and watchable. Even chromosomes, small as they were, had substance. In physics class even matter had seemed to turn unsolid.

  Carefully, fearfully, he brought his fingers up to his face, probing to see if the radiation had peeled away the flesh it had touched. The skin was warm to the touch, and ever so slightly tender. Sunburned, almost. But it was whole, and it was firm.

  The sensation of the plane beginning to lower itself in preparation for landing, and then the pilot’s voice through the intercom: “We should be landing at Kansas City airport in another twenty minutes. No word yet from the tower in Kansas City as to the exact nature of the phenomenon off to the west a few moments ago — but then I’m sure we’re all well enough informed to know what it was. If any of you are inclined to pray for the sake of our world, it might be wise to do so now.”

  Oh Christ. This is the last thing in the world I need to be listening to. He turned to look out the window, and watched as the fieriness in Kansas slowly faded down toward a glow. Nuclear war, he thought. There was a nuclear war going on, and here he was in a plane in the sky over the deepest heartland of targeted America — and he was alive. Alive. Survivable nuclear war. It was a catch phrase pasted together by some hawkish politician to justify an increase in the defense budget. It was stupid. But here he was, surviving.

  Surviving for the moment, anyway.

  Momma, save me from the crazy people running the world.

  Twice more before they landed in Kansas City the plane’s captain spoke through the intercom. Or maybe it was three times; Luke only paid enough attention to be certain that the man wasn’t saying anything important.

  When they reached Kansas City the landing itself went quickly and smoothly — too well, in fact, to be comfortable with. Four minutes after they’d first touched the ground, they were taxied and stopped and leaving the plane, walking out into an airport that was ominously empty.

  The bomb had to fall somewhere around here. The whole damned city must be holed up underground someplace, hiding. Afraid that some fool is going to fire off another one. He looked out the boarding-area window and saw that the right side of the plane he’d just got off of was faded, bleached looking — bleached exactly the way years of sunlight will leach the color out of paint. My God. If the blast did that to the plane, what did it do to me through the window? The skin of his face was warmer, now — more than warm. Fiery, blistery. He reached up to touch it, ever so lightly, and felt tiny blister-pustules of sun poisoning. I’m going to be okay, Luke told himself. It isn’t anything worse than a sunburn. A bad sunburn. The sun is radiation, too, after all. Light is radiation. Radios are radiation. Radiation is normal, ordinary stuff. That was what he told himself. He didn’t believe it for an instant, not even the parts that were true.

  There was one airline clerk at the counter just beyond the lounge, a scared-looking woman with washed-out skin and stringy-sweaty hair. She directed him to his “evacuation flight,” at a gate in another part of the airport. There was a plane there bound for New York, she said, and it would be leaving in a few minutes. She told him that if he went directly there he’d have plenty of time to get to the gate before the plane departed. She was right, too: even after he took a wrong turn and spent five minutes lost in the airport’s dry, carpeted corridors, he managed to get to the right plane in time. Just barely in time, but in time nonetheless.

  If he hadn’t made that wrong turn, in fact, there would have been plenty of time. As it was he only had a moment at the ticket desk, and then a rush through the boarding gate.

  And when Luke saw Herman Bonner sitting at the waiting lounge at the gate across from his — reading some magazine as he waited for a flight that the sign above him said was bound for western Kansas — when he saw vile Herman Bonner in the Kansas City airport in the middle of a nuclear war, there wasn’t any way to find out what in the name of God the man was doing there.

  Which, perhaps, was just as well.

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  Chapter Nine

  WASHINGTON

  Paul Green woke at four in the morning, curious and tingling as a child awake too early on Christmas morning. Is it really the end of the world? Is it really time for the Rapture? He had to know. He had to know right then.

  Rapture.

  Rapture was the real reason he’d given Bill Cartwright the backpack nuke. It was a secret so big that Green would never have said it out loud, but it was the truth. The world needed the Rapture. And once he’d been in office long enough to figure out how everything worked, he’d realized that there were too many safeguards. There was no way he was going to be able to start the end of the world with so many people watching him. There were too many people standing between the nation and nuclear war, too many people who’d find a way to make peace, even if Paul Green did everything he could to make a war inevitable.

  That was over, now, though. All of those people were away from him, gone of their own accord. The only problem Paul Green saw right now was that he couldn’t figure out how he was going to find out about the Rapture. Ever since he’d been elected there’d been people around to tell him these things whenever he wanted to know them — mostly they were the same ones who kept trying to stop the Rapture. Now they were gone, and that was good, but there was no one to tell him what was happening. Sure, the Marines still had guards for him — extra guards — even though they weren’t taking his orders. And there were the Secret Service people, from over at the Treasury Department. They didn’t talk to him any more, but they still followed him around any time he even thought about going out in public. A few bottom-rung civil service types — secretaries, office assistants — had shown up for work yesterday. They weren’t anywhere to be found at four in the morning, and even if they had been they didn’t have the security clearance to tell him what he wanted to know. None of the people he’d be able to find had enough clearance.

  The only ones he could still get to jump, in fact, were the press and broadcast people — and they didn’t even work for him.

  He could turn on the TV, turn to CNN. They kept themselves up on things pretty well. But he was President, for God’s sake. It wasn’t dignified for him to be getting his news off the television — not even cable TV. It wasn’t right.

  The Situation Room. Yes, that was the answer — there were a couple of screens in there that kept track of the status of everything, everything everywhere in the world.

  Paul Green showered and dressed himself hurriedly, grinning with childlike excitement all the while. Such a day, such a day! Paul Green had dreamed all his life of the Rapture. Dreamed of ascending wingless into heaven. And now here the day was at last, the day when all of it was to come true.

  When he finally got to the Situation Room, finally figured out which screen he had to read, his disappointment was tremendous. He’d pushed the button, all right. Only the people on the other end of the line hadn’t listened to him. Almost none of them had, anyway. None of the submarine commanders, the people with the best missiles he had. None of the bombers. Small loss, there; the bombers weren’t likely to get close enough to put their nukes anywhere that counted.

  Silo missiles . . . nothing. Wait. No. Two of the techs down in the Eidner silos in west Kansas had launched their ICBMs.

  And all of their missiles had malfunctioned.

  One missile had lost track of itself in the instant after
it’d launched, and the damned thing had turned most of two counties in Kansas into fire and dust. Two others had got themselves as far as the Arctic Ocean before their guidance systems had malfunctioned and sent them harmlessly down into the water.

  Or maybe they hadn’t malfunctioned at all. Maybe one of those high-handed fools at the Pentagon had purposely put a stop to his Rapture. Aborted those missiles intentionally.

  Or maybe not. Maybe they had malfunctioned. It was certainly possible the other two had malfunctioned, wasn’t it?

  He should have expected it. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been warned.

  Someone from the NSC had briefed him about the problem the month after he’d taken office. The man had been a real technoid, almost impossible to understand. What he’d said broke down to this: no one was sure any more whether the missiles would even make it out of their silos. There was something the man said about computers, and the complexity of machines, and something he called beta testing. Paul Green didn’t know computers from washing machines, but he could still get his hands around the concept. Nothing tricky worked the first time you tried it. Missiles had gotten especially complicated over the last twenty years. And with missiles the problem was worse than usual — kind of hard to figure out what went wrong when the thing that didn’t work had already blown itself up. They were working on the problem, working on it real hard, but the problem was, the NSC man said, that they wouldn’t really know whether they had the situation licked until they actually shot the things off with real live warheads.

  Paul Green had looked that NSC man in the eye, and he’d felt himself smile a lot more hungrily than he’d ever meant to where anyone could see. And he’d said sure, why don’t we shoot some of those missiles off? Just to test them out, like, of course.