Bombshell

by James Reich

  Cash activated the timing mechanism and watched the first digital seconds of its ninety-minute countdown flicker away on the glowing red display. She retreated, scraping her torso along the grit of the crater zone, pushing her knees into the surface. A small metal structure modeled on a half-submerged bomb shelter had been constructed close to the monument for the atomic tourists. It had a shallow roof of corrugated metal with windows that would permit the tourists to look down into the sparkling green maw of the original nuclear blast crater in the same manner in which a glass-hulled boat permits a view of the floor of the ocean. Beside it a wall of a dozen rented portable toilets had been arranged. Cash hurried to the last of these and found it unlocked. The interior had been cleaned in advance of the tourists arriving in the morning. It smelled of domestic disinfectant. In the unlit plastic shell, she pulled her Polaroid camera from her backpack. Hastily, she grabbed for the rolls of electrical tape and the typewritten manifesto sheet she had prepared to leave as her death card. Shivering with cold and tension, she held the camera up before her face to shoot her self-portrait. This she would also leave behind. The flashbulb blinded her. There was no time to wait for her vision to adjust or to try to see the resulting photograph through her night-vision lenses. She shook the photograph in the cold air and blew upon it for a moment. With her teeth, she cut a strip of the electrical tape to fix the photograph to the back of the toilet door, hoping that it would survive, trusting that it would be searched for evidence. Below that she fixed the page of her manifesto. She would give them a little of her identity to work with. Her photographic image slowly coalesced as she fled from the scene.

  Three miles to the south, once more she passed within spitting distance of the MacDonald Ranch House. The adobe building had been restored and held in suspension to appear as it did in 1945 when it had been the folksy scene surrounding the final assembly of the mechanism of the atomic bomb. It was dangerous to approach it, moving on a missile route road, leaving boot tracks. Kicking through the mesh of the padlocked screen door and shouldering the weak antique interior door from its hinges, Cash pushed inside. Locating a museum case in the darkness, holding her breath, she crashed her elbow through the glass, casting burning matches onto the maps, photographs, and documents arranged inside it. Raising a flaming match ahead of her, she saw a crude computer-printed sign: PLUTONIUM ASSEMBLY ROOM. A cardboard display of old photographs leaned against the wall. Stacking it on a wooden desk in the corner of the room, she pictured it flaming toward the ceiling beams. Making certain that this was lit, Cash burst from the wrecked door frame, vaulted the low moonlit wall, and sprinted south.

  Away from the restricted roads, she stumbled often, cutting her legs and bloodying her hands as she scrambled across the rocks, leaving thin trails of skin as though she were being ripped up in a coral forest. She navigated with the luminous face of her compass, struggling to work out her distance from the bomb. Her lungs ached in the frigid night air. Looking at her watch, eighty-six minutes had passed. It was time. Finally, she knew that she could stop running and face the remote blackness of Trinity. Ten miles from the blast site, her breath coming in raw heaves, Cash turned to watch her explosion. Nervously, she checked her watch again. In her obsessive plans, she had calculated that this was the same position Doctor Julius Robert Oppenheimer must have occupied as he watched his detonation in July 1945. Then, across the gulf of rust-red rock between her and the beginning of the atomic age, the first flash came.

  After the flash, she watched the mushroom cloud of her own bomb rising, an accusing ghost extending its arms, a bulbous fire head inclining and swiveling beneath the stars. Cash wished that she could have been closer to it, for time to crawl so that she might have watched the Trinity obelisk being blown apart in endless frozen frames. She pulled the heat into her, the smithereens and shrapnel of black lava and pallid mortar ripping through the night air. She wanted to see the dark plaque warp in the concussed night, glowing hot in the blast and smashing into the buckled net of the perimeter fence. It took several seconds for the sound of the explosion to reach her, a punch of pain from the ancient dirt. She saw Warhol’s silk screens of the atomic bomb, death and disaster. Fragments of the obelisk were blown into the dark. Flaming meteorites of tar and lava rained down on the metal shelter. The portable toilets were blasted from the surface of the blast area, their sandbag moorings torn open, some with melting doors sending reeking chemicals into the crystalline desert night. Inside the flames, she saw Valerie again: her lost love, the wired golem waving her gun in a schizoid tornado of typewritten sheets, humiliated, rising out of the silver elevator of her rage toward the failed assassination of Andy Warhol. She shot him. She saw silk screens of electric chairs. These would never hold her. In the freezing dark, Cash was sweating from the fusion of her strange natal wounds with the livid constellation of the new wounds that she was about to inflict on America. Working alone, she would ignite more warning flares like this one, and she would accelerate into murder and shutdown.

  On 5:29:45 am, All Fools’ Day, the memorial obelisk at Trinity was destroyed.

  2

  AS CASH’S BLAST SPLIT THE LAST HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE, IN confusion and disbelief, almost hesitantly, sirens groaned and howled across the infertile hills. She listened to the scrambling of jeeps and helicopters and saw the febrile web of searchlights gathering and blazing across the site. Alarms sounded across the wasted canyons. Blast doors sealed the Virgin Galactic spaceport and flashlights scanned the billboards and the concrete facility, illuminating the machines that had been used to construct the runway. Pressing herself between two rocks, she drank a pouch of orange juice and gagged as she sucked rations from another foil packet. She needed to run again. A helicopter passed directly overhead, its rotors coating her in loose dirt. It seemed that it did not detect her. It had begun. Through the dawn, Air Force firefighters fought to extinguish the brush ignited by Cash’s explosives. Small piñons flamed like twisted effigies in the rising sun. Forensics crews in HAZMAT suits waved Geiger counters at the scene of smoking lava and twisted metal where the monument had stood. They studied the smashed glass of the crater shelter and examined the scattered plastic toilets. Cash had made the decision to escape the desert and the region of White Sands Missile Range by retreating to the Southwest, rather than scraping north toward Highway 380, where she would almost certainly encounter more roadblocks and roving military police. Instead, she made her way toward I-25, the Rio Grande, and the town of Truth or Consequences. The route would be fifty miles to the interstate, retreating across bleak terrain, keeping herself invisible among the red and black rock formations, the furnace of day and the freezer of night. She planned to cross the river where it narrowed to the north of Elephant Butte and hitch the final stretch down to Radium Springs and her motorcycle. Sometimes she would hear a distant military jeep, the barking of a dog, or the transit of another chopper investigating the scene, looking for whoever had penetrated and attacked the site. These attentions buzzed like flies around an open sore.

  April 2, 2011. The Trinity bomb site was not opened to tourists. The earliest buses were turned back, and all others canceled. Cars were halted before Stallion Range and permitted no further. No one would sell hot dogs. No one would pretend to be caught in a blast for cameras. Cash reached the Rio Grande at early evening. The final blood red swell of sunset gathered and poured into the canyon as she descended, and the darkness enwrapped her once more as she lowered herself toward the sound of water. Early April was too soon for rattlesnakes, but the rocks and scrub were themselves barbed enough to bite at her combat fatigues. The trees along the lip of the vermilion-lit crevasse recalled a strip of atomic blasts silhouetted against the oncoming night. When the stars penetrated, she saw them reflected in the river, bright as fuel rods, their radiation pulsing through eternities of decay, lethal forever. For a moment, she thought that she heard voices, yet as her ears sought the sounds, she discovered coyotes calling one another along the opposing watersides
. The river grew louder as the shale and mud slipped beneath her boots. The sides of the canyon spread blank black walls between her and the rising moon. Cash forced herself down and the freezing river stole her breath, stiffening her lungs and slowing her muscles as she fought to swim with the pack on her back and her clothes becoming dead weight. Water flecked and then poured into her windpipe as the current hauled her down. Cash began to drown, kicking weakly and reaching blindly into the nothingness that swallowed her. She coughed water into water. Silver bulbs exploded. Suddenly, she was caught on a hump of stones. Twisting and contorting, she found herself kneeling, vomiting across a shimmering mosaic of rocks. There, Cash lost consciousness.

  When she awoke, she had lost two hours, and she guessed that four more hours must remain between her and the edge of the desert, running up against the black ribbon of the interstate. She moved slowly, watching the terrain with her night-vision field glasses and travelling in bursts.

  When she reached I-25 during the morning of April 3, Cash was wracked with cramps. The soaking combat fatigues had worn raw patches in her skin. Her feet and hands were blistered and painful. Her breath misted in the last of the cold air as she pulled the clothes from her body. A sliver of red sun shimmered on the horizon. She was no longer nervous. She had emerged. The guerrilla war had begun. She had to switch clothes and bury the fatigues in the sand. For the second time, she stood naked at the edge of the desert. She had stashed her street clothes in her backpack. After dressing, she wiped the remains of the thick zinc block she had applied to her face and shook the dirt from her hair. Her cap, goggles, and backpack she would keep. It was time to show the world a game of truth or consequences like it had never seen. As she pulled on her ripped black drainpipe jeans, she realized that she was gripping a small object in her fist, and that, unconsciously, she had borne it from the wasteland. She opened her hand and stared at it. It was a small clot of green mineral, and she recognized it immediately: trinitite, the mutant fallout of Oppenheimer’s bomb. It must have insinuated itself while she was crawling away from the obelisk. Across the decades, this last rogue shard had found its way into her hand. It was supposed to have all been cleared away in the forties, she thought. Yet, she knew that these things could never be cleaned up. They were always there, even if they were no longer visible, and this strange talisman had been waiting for her. She took one of the laces from her boots and pushed it into her tight jeans pocket before putting on her street shoes.

  After burying her sweat-soaked fatigues and hot boots in the sand, Cash began to walk south, blindly applying mascara as she shadowed the guardrail of I-25. Lizards skimmed along the shoulder as the heat pulsed from the asphalt. Behind her, forensics crews would be sifting through the wreckage of the monument, analyzing her tracks. It was a relief to be walking on the paved road in her sneakers, jeans, and T-shirt. She twisted her cap around to protect her neck from burning, anticipating as she walked how good it would feel to be riding her motorcycle again, getting home. To reach Radium Springs, she hitched a ride with an elderly Hispanic couple. The man who drove their sun-scarred pickup turned the radio to a Tejano station. Steering with his knees and encouraging his wife to steady the wheel, he rolled and lit a joint, dragged on it, before passing it to his wife. The skunk smoke of marijuana filled the cab with earthy, gluey vapor before they wound down the windows, getting stoned enough without hot-boxing. The woman smiled without teeth and offered it to their passenger. Cash took the joint and sucked it in, watching the naked desert, relaxing. It had taken her two days to escape the desert plateau after her destruction of the Trinity monument, just as long as it had taken for the hospital where she had been born in Pripyat to be evacuated after the catastrophe at Chernobyl. By the time she reached Radium Springs, Cash had cut a 160-mile triangle across the route of the dead. She had been a ghost, near sleepless and hollowed by haunting.

  Her black motorcycle, a Virago 250, was safe, still chained to the streetlight between the dumpsters at the back of the café where it had been for the four days it had taken her to infiltrate and escape the blast zone. She was right to have reasoned that it would take a few days before anyone would become suspicious of it, or to have the guts to either vandalize it or steal it, or for the café owners to call the police about an abandoned bike in their back lot. She would hairpin back along I-25. Sitting astride her machine, with the bootlace she had saved, Cash secured the fragment of trinitite to her necklace, a salvaged and polished bicycle chain. Pulling down her goggles, she rode out.

  On the southern side of Albuquerque, close to the airport, the traffic crawled and halted. Where the road narrowed for construction, there was a police checkpoint. Cash watched the line ahead. They were stopping every vehicle. Moving slowly forward, she reached into her pack and fumbled for a pack of chewing gum. That and the wind from the road she trusted would obscure the scent of marijuana on her from the truck ride. She pushed more of her black hair under her cap, thinking of her photograph left at the scene, not wanting to be recognized yet, not by a traffic cop. It was unlikely that the USAF would have released information this early, she thought. They would want to finish their forensics, and then the hunt for her would almost certainly be passed silently to the FBI, or if they realized she was an alien, without a U.S. passport, papers, or concrete identity, perhaps to the CIA. If they took her seriously, she reminded herself. Still, if they would not in the beginning, there would be time for them to reckon with her in the coming weeks. The roadblock cops were both stocky and suffering in the rising heat. She noted the badge and tag of the one that approached her.

  “Good morning, ma’am. Would you mind raising your goggles, there? And maybe removing your hat. I appreciate it. I just need to check your license.” Cash handed him her license. It was a forgery, but she retained absolute confidence in it. Officer Valdez appraised her as he handed it back: mid-twenties, ugly dark hair. “What’s Bikini Kill?” he asked, eyeing the lettering on her white T-shirt and the design below, a marker sketch of an old record player.

  “They’re my favorite band,” she smiled, smacking her gum. “Punk rock. Feminists.”

  “Never heard of them.” Valdez smiled back at her in a good-natured manner that she knew could be false. He wiped sweat from his brow and adjusted his sunglasses, pushing them up into his thick black hair.

  “They broke up,” she explained.

  “Uh-huh. Where are you heading?” Valdez flicked his eyes toward his notebook, before watching her again and making another rapid study.

  “Santa Fe.”

  “From?” Valdez took in her small, athletic frame, narrow hips. The jagged crop of her black hair surrounded a face that was pale, almost gray and sickly. Her eyes were surrounded by a smear of mascara and the dark coins of exhaustion. Her misshapen upper lip protruded slightly.

  “Acoma. I checked out the pueblo yesterday, but stayed over at the Sky City Casino. Is something going on? Can you tell us what the stops are for?”

  He didn’t answer her. “You look a little burned out. Get lucky at the casino?”

  “I wish, man. All I got was lost.” He’s hard to read, Cash decided.

  “Well, ride safe, okay? You can head on through.”

  Her kind went without suspicion, for now, at least.

  Far ahead, over I-25, she expected helicopter rotors throbbing in the brilliant blue sky over the smoke shops and the bucket seats of the speedway stadium and the casinos. Instead, she rode east to I-40 through the neon of Central Avenue: diners and tattoo parlors, a city inside smeared poly wrap, a postmodern reconstruction of the fifties, with chrome and the Cold War played out by pompadour street gangs. She would avoid the main artery, instead winding through the raw drought hills of old Route 66. This highway would be quieter than the road that passed between the reservation lands and abandoned film studios. Cash opened the throttle between the drab planes of the canyons and ascended into the hills.

  3

  APRIL 3, 2011. CASH HAD LIVED IN NEW MEXICO SINC
E HER OWN Tenderloin tragedy just before her twentieth birthday in 2006. In a haze of grief, she had ridden an Amtrak from the West Coast to Lamy, where the desolate stop had drawn her down from the great silver train and into the rippling heat of the desert. The sky was radiant blue. It reminded her of the blue medals she had seen awarded to the Liquidators of her home city, a drop of red in the rocks, serpents of radon.