THERE wasn’t much in the way of flights from San Diego north. And nothing, of course, to the Seattle area. The tall officer with the graying hair had deplaned at the Navy terminal in Coronado and inquired at the passenger information desk.
“You’re not really headed to Seattle,” the Air Force enlisted there said. “You do know it’s not there anymore.… That it was hit?”
“My daughter worked at Archipelago,” he told her.
“Oh.” She blinked rapidly, and looked away. “I’m sorry, sir. The news from there … it isn’t good.”
Dan Lenson was still an admiral. At least so far. The recall message, pulling him from his command after the invasion of Hainan, hadn’t taken away the wartime promotion. Not yet.
But he’d have traded it all, promotion, pension, career, hell, his own life—for just one call from Nan.
He had six more days of leave. Eaten one up crossing the Pacific, then gotten a day added back crossing the date line. At the end of the week, he was due in Washington. For what, exactly, the chief of naval operations hadn’t specified. But he could guess.
Reversion to his prewar rank of captain, and a desk job entombed so deep in the Pentagon’s eighteen miles of corridors he’d never see daylight again. Until the Navy could process him out.
He stood motionless in the empty terminal, stalled like an engine without spark. His brain echoing empty. His soul blank. Daughter gone. Bereft.
And then what?
Home to Arlington, to Blair. He’d have her, at least. But she was a busy woman these days. She’d warned, in the one email exchange they’d managed since his relief, that she might not even be in the country when he got back. Sure, her job.
Their careers had always taken priority. You could call it duty, to put the best spin on it. Especially in wartime. But the word had a bitter sting. He’d given up too much. Spent so little time with the only daughter he’d ever have. But he and her mother had split up, and he’d been so busy since …
Water over the dam, Lenson. And it’s too late now.
If only you could revise your life. Rewind it. Reformat it. Erase the bad parts, and amp up the good, so that it played the way you should have done it all along …
A blue screen near the overhead flickered. Lines of text shifted. He stared blankly up at it. Then jogged over to the window overlooking the airstrip.
A quarter mile away across the concrete, a wheeled train of pallets was being snaked up into a potbellied transport.
He went back to the service desk. “That C-17. Where’s it headed?”
The airman looked anxious. “Relief supplies, Admiral. Four flights a day, up to McChord.”
“That’s near Seattle, right? Where the nukes hit?”
“McChord’s south of Tacoma, sir. That’s where they’re running the relief effort out of. I wouldn’t say ‘near.’ But it’s probably as close as you can go without getting lit up.”
“Lit up” apparently meant “irradiated” these days. He snapped his ID down on the counter. “I’d be grateful if you’d find me a seat.”
She hesitated, then cocked her head and began keystroking. “I … guess we might could manifest you, Admiral. Space A. Bucket seat. Hope you don’t mind noise. But are you … really sure you want to head up there? I mean, I wouldn’t advise it. I really wouldn’t, sir. Not many people headed that way. Unless they got a damn good reason. Which … well, I guess you might.”
“Thanks for the warning. I’ll be careful.” Dan picked up his bag and followed her pointing finger toward the exit.
Then turned back, remembering: The CNO had wanted him to call once he got to CONUS. “Is there a DSN line here?” The defense switched network should still work, if anything did.
The airman opened her mouth as if to object, then glanced at the stars on Dan’s collars again. “Certainly, Admiral. The CO’s office is right down that hall to the left.”
BARRY “Nick” Niles had been Dan’s commanding officer years before, at the Cruise Missile Project Office in Crystal City. Afterward he’d become, not exactly an enemy, but definitely not an admirer. After 9/11, though, Niles had turned into a reluctant rabbi. Now the first African American chief of naval operations, he’d fought the war from that position.
The base’s commanding officer put Dan through to Niles’s main office number. After that, though, Dan got passed up the line. Niles’s deputy didn’t know what he was calling about, and asked him to hold.
Fully a quarter hour passed before the foghorn tones Dan knew so well tolled in his ear. “Lenson. You back in town?”
“Uh, not exactly, Admiral. Just landed in San Diego.”
“Uh-huh. Good job in Operation Rupture Plus.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me, I didn’t think you could do it. How soon can you be here?”
Be there? In DC? He frowned. “There must be some misunderstanding, sir. I was authorized leave en route.”
“Leave?” Niles sounded as if this were the first time he’d encountered the concept. Then added, “Oh—yeah, I forgot. Nancy, right?”
“Nan. She was in Seattle. I need to find her, Admiral.”
“Okay, yeah, I get that. My son’s in the Gulf right now. At least I know where he is.” A short pause. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“No sir.”
“Here’s the situation. We’ve got a summons for you from The Hague.”
He’d gotten a heads-up on this from Blair, but had hoped it would get overlooked, or die of its own accord. Apparently his luck was running true to form. “The International Criminal Court.”
“Uh-huh. For what they call war crimes. Related but not limited to your abandonment of that German tanker.”
“Not abandoned, sir. I had to remove the higher-value unit from the threat vicinity.”
“Oh, I read your report. And you’re not the only poor son of a bitch in this particular barrel. But the thing is, how do we respond? According to the administration, if we send people to trial, it compromises sovereign immunity. But if we don’t go, the Chinese will refuse to appear too. We’d have to corral them ourselves, then convene some kind of ad hoc military tribunal, without the UN’s blessing. Which the fucking British and Indians are making themselves difficult over.”
Dan frowned. Somebody had to be held responsible for this war. For the deaths of millions, most of them civilians. Or was Niles saying aggressors like Zhang, and his bloody generals, would get away scot-free? The men who’d sowed first conventional, then nuclear devastation across two continents? He looked around the empty office, and caught the base commander, outside, peering in through the door. He gave the guy a thumbs-up and forced a smile. Said to Niles, “Um … So what’s the decision, sir?”
“I don’t know! I wanted you to stay in China. Take command of relief efforts in the south. But I got overruled. They’re still trying to decide what to do, but they wanted you in pocket back here in the States.”
“Uh-huh. Well, what do you think, sir? I’m perfectly happy to go face the music, if it means the Chinese get indicted too. I did the right thing. They didn’t.”
The heavy voice turned testy, more like the Niles he knew. “Are you even listening? It’s not up to you, Lenson! You just hang loose. Go look for your daughter. But stay in touch, so when they make up their fucking minds we can lay hands on you.”
And with a couple more “Aye aye, sir”’s on Dan’s part, and a slammed-down phone on Niles’s, the conversation seemed to have reached its end.
McCHORD was a madhouse scramble. It reminded him of Bagram in the first months after 9/11. Trucks, pallet-trains of water and supplies, tent shelters and conexes lining the airfield, National Guard ambulance-modified Oshkoshes rumbling here and there seemingly at random. A dark sky hovered too low for comfort. Lightning flickered, and thunder growled in the distance. He carried his bag toward the terminal as one of the ambulances tore past, nearly running him down. Dan remembered writing the humanitarian relief op order they were probably operating under. He kept trying his phone, but the screen just read NO SIGNAL. Yeah, the airbursts had probably wiped out every cell tower in a hundred-mile radius.
There wasn’t much to go on. Seattle had been among the hardest-hit population centers in what the Patriot Network was calling C Day. Much like the old Pearl Harbor slogan, now it was “Remember C Day.” Central and north Seattle had essentially been obliterated by megaton-range airbursts. A dud had impacted south of Port Orchard, apparently aimed at the sub base at Kitsap. Neither he nor Blair had been able to get through to Archipelago, where Nan had worked in some kind of biomedical research. Her cell didn’t respond, and the electromagnetic pulse had wiped out landlines throughout western Washington State.
And that was all he’d been able to find out.
The line at this service desk was sixteen deep, but eventually he got close enough to ask if there was transportation into the city. A harried-looking sergeant regarded him as if he’d asked for the next bus to Hell. “Sir, ain’t nobody going in there without MOPP gear, a full-face respirator, and a damn good reason.”
“My daughter worked there. Archipelago Systems.”
The guy looked away. “Their campus was in the blast zone, sir.”
Dan took a deep breath. Not what he’d hoped to hear. “Well, what happened to the casualties? Is there anything like a central registry? A database of the wounded? The missing? The … deceased?”
“Not that I know of, sir. Give us another week, we might have something like that stood up. But not yet. Next?” The sergeant looked past him.
But Dan didn’t leave, as he was obviously expected to. “Come on, help me out here. Where would you look? If it was your kid out there.”
The sergeant rubbed his nose. “Um … I’d probably start with the evacuee camps. Federation, Geyser, Dash Point, Penrose. If your daughter came out still walking, she might be there. If she was a casualty, well … you’d want to call the local hospitals. But they’re overwhelmed too, what I understand.” He shook his head and looked past Dan again. “Sorry I can’t help more. Really sorry, sir. Next?”
Outside, Dan stood undecided for a few minutes, looking up. Thunderheads. Anvils in the sky … it would rain soon … he shivered as a chill wind fluttered a hand-drawn map. It was tacked to a bulletin board with duct tape. It showed Dash Point as the closest of a constellation of evacuee camps scattered to the south and east of the stricken city.
More trucks rumbled past, headed out the gate. McChord seemed to be the arrival point for emergency supplies, which were then distributed to wherever FEMA had gathered survivors and evacuees.
No central list at all? Hard to believe. But then again, not all that incredible, if the computers and electrical power and phones were all down. He didn’t envy whoever was in charge of this mess. If anyone was.
So, the camps the sergeant had listed. Check them? One at a time, hoping to catch her face in the welter of tired, frightened people?
Taking charge himself crossed his mind for perhaps a quarter second, but he dismissed the thought. He’d run one tsunami relief effort, in the Maldives. That didn’t qualify him to honcho anything this size, with so many federal, military, state, and local authorities to coordinate.
No. She was his daughter. He was her father.
That was his sole and primary mission now. To find her.
Even if she no longer lived, he had to know.
IT was pouring icy rain by the time he caught a ride. First to Millersylvania, in a water truck. The woman driving wore a blue dosimeter badge clipped to her coveralls. She didn’t have much to say, other than that she hadn’t slept for two days and only got one meal in all that time. “It’s fucking hopeless,” she muttered, staring through a rain-splattered windscreen as she noodged the heavily loaded deuce-and-a-half up to forty-five. “Nobody knows how many people there are in these camps. We have to get them moved south before the weather changes. It keeps raining like this, they’ll be drowning in mud.”
Dan bent forward, squinting at the water sleeting down the windshield. Was it … black? “What about radioactivity? The plume, from the bombing?”
She shook her head. “You’re looking at the rain? That’s from all the fires. They say the worst stuff mostly blew off to the northeast, but who the fuck knows? We could all be fucking sterile now. Nobody tells you nothing. That’s the worst part. If I believed all the rumors, I’d go nuts. Like, about the rebels.”
He massaged his forehead. Apparently he’d missed a lot, or more likely, the controlled media hadn’t bothered to cover anything that might sap morale in the war zones. “Uh, rebels?”
“In the Midwest. They declared independence. You believe that? Not that we’re not all super pissed out here too. Considering how little help we’re getting.”
THE evacuee camp lay inland, fronting a freshwater beach, and it was a sea of blue. The same pale blue plastic fly covers he’d seen at other refugee camps; in Ashaara, in the former Yugoslavia, the Maldives, and a dozen other disaster areas around the world. The truck groaned to a stop near a rustic pine picnic shelter. Hundreds of people were already lined up waiting, heads lowered against the rain. They wore tattered ponchos or black plastic trash bags with holes torn for head and arms. They held plastic jugs, coolers, pails, and fishing rods. They seemed orderly, or perhaps simply too tired, frightened, hungry, and overwhelmed to be anything but submissive.
As he swung down out of the cab he wondered briefly what the fishing rods were for, but dismissed it. Much more important to fight his way through the crowd, to where hundreds of scraps of paper, photographs, hand-scrawled notes, were nailed, pinned, stapled, and taped to the wall of the headquarters building, so many they overlapped like leaves, quickly growing sodden in the rain.
WHERE ARE YOU HOLLY CAPOLLONE WE ARE AT KANASKAT MOM AND DAD
SAKURA FAMILY MEET JUNE 19 AT NOON AT TOLMIE STATE PARK
LUKAS—SANDY, WILLIAM, AND FEY HAVE GONE TO STAY WITH AUNT BARB IN EUGENE. POP POP PLEASE CALL US AND LET US KNOW YOU ARE ALRITE
A ranger at a picnic table was handing out index cards and pencil stubs. Clipped to his lapel was the same type of blue dosimeter badge the water truck driver had worn. Dan stood in line again, hair dripping, rain in his eyes, fighting a growing rage at the disorder and futility all around. He got a card and a pencil at last, and positioned himself against a tree trunk to write.
Once upon a time, he was old enough to remember, the country had been prepared for a catastrophe like this. There’d been civil defense drills. Shelters. Procedures. Duck and cover. Not that a school desk would have been much protection. But still … when had the country lost the will, or the wisdom, to prepare for the worst? Even as the threat had grown, as weaponry on both sides had assumed fearsome proportions, the government had ignored the basics: protection of the civil population, public health, disease control, infrastructure resiliency. Instead, both sides had wrestled in the mire. Shrill, endless, pointless fights over identity and abortion and guns and tax rates. While underwriting enormous expenditures, on a defense that had largely crumpled when an enemy actually attacked.
He snarled, pressing the pencil hard into the paper.
The point snapped off. When he inspected it the small print stamped into the cheerful yellow paint read MADE IN CHINA.
No, this was futile. Nan would never see this. He balled up the card and threw it into an overflowing trash can and retraced his steps toward the road.
Then halted, appalled.
A weeping child huddled beneath a bush. A sign hung around her neck, but it was wet, torn, unreadable. She was perhaps eight, and her hair had been burned away down to the scalp. Her bare arms were erupting with what looked like flash burns. The skin was peeling. Straw-yellow plasma stained her pajama pants.
He nearly stopped, but his next step forward revealed four more children lying on the ground. Outside a trimly painted outdoor lavatory people were openly relieving themselves, adding to brown piles that stained their broken shoes or bare feet. Dozens of sick lay tossing uneasily on the concrete pad beneath a picnic shelter. A ceaseless drone of groans and weeping and screams floated on the stinking air. A lone woman in a Salvation Army uniform moved among them with a bucket of water and a soup ladle, but there was no sign of any medical attendance.
And behind him, down a trail from the north, stumbled more wounded. An unending line, like the damned in a medieval painting. The bent figures carried suitcases, backpacks, computers. Their clothing hung in rags, and they shambled as if hypnotized, mouths slack, gazes fixed. They infected the breeze with a stench of rot and burned meat. They passed nearly in silence in the pelting rain, with only faint whimpers and a harsh panting, as if they couldn’t quite catch their breaths. Some stumbled blindly, hands outstretched for the backs of those they followed. Some were completely naked, with bloated arms and faces, contorted and horrible. Raw burns glistened on their cheeks and foreheads and arms. Blood and yellow fluid ran down their arms, mingling with the pouring rain. Which they didn’t seem even to register, except for one gray-haired Asian-looking man, who carefully held a shredded, useless umbrella to shield a short woman with a floral scarf tied tightly over her eyes.
A middle-aged woman stumbled and fell, sprawling. The red plastic bucket she’d carried tumbled away. The others did not pause. They stepped around her, or on her hands and feet as she groped. No one stopped to help her. At last, moaning, she stirred, rolled over, and laboriously pushed herself up to all fours. She searched anxiously about, patting the ground for the bucket, which had rolled a few feet away, into a patch of dripping weeds. When she found it she reached in to cradle something inside, kissing the limp thing fervently.
Then she crept on, after the others.
He stared, not wanting to believe his eyes. It had been days since the attack. Had these victims walked all the way from the city?
He trotted back to the ranger. “Can’t we do anything for these people? They’re wounded, still coming in. They need food. Water. Shelter. Medical care. Bandages, at least.”
The ranger’s face closed. “These are the lucky ones.”
Dan stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“They made it out alive. The Army brings food in the evening. They truck in water. And we’re boiling more, from the lake, on those wood fires over there. But without power, pumps, lighting, internet … it’s nearly impossible to get anything done.”
“What about medical care? There are children dying here.”
“You think I don’t know that?” The ranger’s face reddened. He slammed a fist down. “You think we haven’t been trying, is that it?”
“No, not exactly, it’s just that—”
“I don’t know who the fuck you are, mister, but we’re doing the best we can. There aren’t any supplies. The worst-off ones come in on the trucks. The medics triage them. The ones who won’t make it, they tell me to make them as comfortable as I can. And that’s it. The ones that’re burned, well … they’re dead already. They took so much radiation in the initial pulse that even if you dress the burns, they die in a few days anyway.” The ranger’s gaze suddenly fastened to the collar of Dan’s khakis. To the stars pinned there … “What are you, anyway? A general? Why don’t you get some of your fucking troops in here? Get us some fucking help!”
Dan felt sick. “Sorry,” he muttered, and turned away. Suddenly his own loss didn’t seem so great. Or, more accurately, seemed now to be only one fragment of a much greater failure, a mere splinter in a great running sore on the body of the country he’d tried to defend.
Maybe if he’d done his job better somehow, fought harder, made other choices, this wouldn’t have happened.
Yeah, that probably wasn’t really true. But it was how he felt. That he should have done more.
He retraced his steps, and found the little girl who crouched beneath the bushes. He carried a tin cup of water to her, and washed out her burns. Bound them as best he could with clean leaves from the woods and the laces from his shoes. She didn’t cry. Just stared into the distance. Then he sat with her. Until, gradually, she slumped against him. The next time he looked down, her eyes were closed.
It wasn’t military people who started wars. They only went out to do the fighting, when the politicians failed.
But they weren’t the only ones who suffered, either.
THE girl died two hours later, never speaking a word. He didn’t even know her name. He sat with her until the end. Then picked her up, gently as he’d once held his own daughter, years before. He carried her behind the picnic shelter, where other bodies had been laid out. Scores. No, hundreds … a few yards away a Ditch Witch was chugging away, scooping out a long trench in the soil by the edge of the woods. He told a black woman in coveralls by the ditch, who made a note on a yellow tablet. There were lots of other notes on that page.
As dark fell, shooting broke out. A popping of small-arms fire, some distance away. No one seemed to remark on it, nor did they look disturbed. As if this happened often. The firing went on for some minutes, then gradually died away.
He left the camp with the ration truck, which took him back to McChord. He couldn’t do anything useful at the camps. Just add to the burden, exacerbate the chaos.
And he still didn’t have a clue what had happened to his own daughter.
Which really meant … cold logic here, Lenson … starting at the last place he knew she’d worked, and tracing what had happened there. Discovering how close to the zone of utter destruction she’d been during the attack, and, if she’d survived, where she might have gone from there.
It was all he could think of to do. And he owed her mother some kind of resolution, at least. Even if the news was bad, even if it was final, he should tell Susan.
That night he dozed on the floor in the passenger terminal. A restless sleep, disturbed by nearby coughing, loud snoring, muffled sobbing, and more of the distant shots. The waiting area was carpeted by recumbent bodies. The first responders, firefighters, truckers, supply people, guards, Red Cross and other volunteers. He’d seen pictures of Russian train stations during the Revolution, and the subways in London during the Blitz. This looked much the same.
When dawn came the bodies stirred. He lined up with the others for weak coffee and limp white bread and withered apples. No one asked what he was doing there. Everyone had a job. Except him.
When he went outside again a fire truck stood idling a hundred yards away, shining wet with streaks of foam, freshly emerged from the decontamination line. Helmeted and suited-up figures were restowing equipment. Respirator masks hung from their belts or around their necks. The dawn sky was still overcast, the wind was still damp, but at least it wasn’t raining.
Masks … in IndoPac you carried yours with you wherever you went. And his was still in his duffel.
He found his bag undisturbed in the DV lounge, where he’d dropped it off before heading to Millersylvania. He pulled out his jacket and soft cap. Slung the mask, in its carrier, around his waist. Unpinned his stars and dropped them into a pocket. Then headed out of the terminal, to see whom he could talk into giving him a ride.
FOUR hours later he stood panting amid blasted and twisted cars in the Archipelago parking lot, looking up. The immense circular building had been smashed and torched. He caught the carbonized whiff of burning and char even through the charcoal filters of the mask. And mixed with it, disquieting and ominous smells of rotting flesh.
Nan had been developing a flu drug for Archipelago. That much she’d told him on their infrequent phone calls during the war. The main research campus, here in Seattle, had been within the blast radius of the southern burst. The firefighters who’d given him a lift here had told him he wouldn’t find much. That everyone would be either evacked or dead. But Nan had once mentioned the name of her team leader.
A Dr. Anton Lukajs, who’d apparently relocated to a satellite facility in Yakima.
And, fortunately, the fire truck could patch its radio into an operational landline back at the station.
“Yes, Doctor Lenson worked for me,” an ancient, quavery, Middle European–accented voice informed him. “She is your daughter? I too have one. A daughter. In Albania.”
Dan pushed the mask higher on his face. He could risk a few minutes’ exposure. He said into the phone, “Is she with you? Do you know where she is?”
“I have not seen her since I left Albania. She was working for the government there, and then afterward I heard—”
Dan clutched his head. “No. Sorry. I meant my daughter, sir. Doctor Nan Lenson. When did you see her last?”
“Oh. The disaster. You are the hero, right? The naval officer?”
“Right now I’m just Nan Lenson’s dad. Please … can you tell me anything? Where is she? When was the last time you saw her?”
“No, no, she is not here. A very competent researcher, though she had independent ideas. She and some of the younger faculty had their doubts about security of formulary information. I had to agree with them, they had a good point—”
Dan took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down. The guy was old, he’d been through a lot. He said again, mastering his impatience, “I’m sorry, Doctor, but I only have a few minutes to use this line. Can you tell me the last time you saw Nan Lenson, and where that was?”
“When did I see her? Just before the attack. At the campus. But … wait a moment. Yes. I remember. A woman who was in the bunker with her came to Yakima with us,” the quavering regretful voice muttered. “She said Doctor Lenson left just before the first warhead hit.”
Dan fought a sinking feeling. “She left the bunker, you mean? Before the burst? Why in hell would she—”
“Well, perhaps not. Just before, or just during—she was not sure. Just that she, Doctor Lenson, your daughter, yes, forced the shelter manager to open the door, and left. Saying she had something important to do.”
Dan nodded grimly, as if that could encourage the guy to remember. “Something important. Okay. What could that have been, sir? Where would she have gone, to check on something so important she’d leave a bomb shelter during an alert?”
“Well, that I do not know. My guess is that it had to do with Qwent.”
“Qwent. And that is—?”
Lukajs explained that Qwent, or perhaps he was saying Quant, had a pharmaceutical plant not far from Lake Washington. Manufacture of the new drug had been subcontracted to them. Nan had been in charge of overseeing that effort, both hitting the production milestones and maintaining quality control. “They had just finished the first production run. Preliminary bulk production. She went there every day to check on it. It may be she felt she must find out if it was protected, or had survived the blast. She was very much involved. Very concerned the compound, it is called LJL, would be properly manufactured, properly packaged. Since Qwent also manufactured a pesticide at the same factory, you know. She was—she is—a good girl. I mean, a good scientist. You are her father? I should tell you that.”
“Thank you.” Okay, he had to admit that sounded like her, to put her project ahead of her own safety. “But you, or this woman from the shelter, never heard from her after that. After she left the bunker.”
“No one. Not a word. I am sorry, Admiral.”
Dan wondered how he knew his rank, then realized Nan must have told him. For some obscure reason, this buoyed him up a little. She’d been proud of him. Just as he had been so very proud of her.
He thanked the old man quietly, and signed off.
THE Qwent facility, the pharmaceutical plant, lay at the top of a modest crest, looking out over the lake. He could see, now, where all the soot-stained rain was coming from. Beyond the water, which was like a pool of ink dotted with patches of floating ash, the city was still burning. A heavy smoke shrouded its broken remains. Small twisted forms lay scattered along the lake’s near shore. After a moment he recognized them as ducks, or maybe geese.
The hand-laid brickwork told him the shell of this building was old. Converted from some earlier industrial structure, an old factory, probably. Now it was all just twisted wreckage. Shattered rubble—bricks, pieces of gray mortar, glass, twisted iron beams—littered the ground outside a chain-link fence. Looters had already been at work; broken computers and the spilled guts of process equipment, more glass, stainless tubing, wrecked motors, the debris lay scattered across the grass, which still showed signs of flash scorching, although a few fresh, pale green shoots were pushing through. A corkscrewed-off section of metal roof, complete with blasted and wrecked solar panels, lay canted across the chain link.
He skirted it to a gap and walked up to the building, following the whine of chain saws and yelling voices.
A crew in face masks, rubber boots, and heavy gloves, but without protective suits, was digging at one corner of the building. Dan couldn’t see why and didn’t care. When he trudged up, one of the men halted and looked at him quizzically. Dan lifted his mask. “Where’s your supervisor?”
“See Jimmy,” the guy said, and pointed.
Dan found Jimmy, who wore a green-and-yellow shirt with Qwent embroidered on the breast pocket, and asked his questions. To his surprise, the super nodded. He lifted his mask and palmed sweat from his face. “Sure. I seen her. Long dark hair, young, Archipelago tag? White coat? Yeah, she was here.”
“You mean, the day of the attack? Before or after the hit?”
The supervisor nodded. “On C Day, but after the burst. Definitely after. We were still getting the building evacuated, computers and process equipment loaded on trucks. She came in with a motorcycle gang.”
Dan furrowed his brow, not sure he’d heard that right. “A … motorcycle gang?”
“Yeah. The Berzerkers. I recognized their colors. No idea how she picked those dudes up. Not a bunch you want to get in their face, know what I mean? But she seemed tight with them. They had their guns on Heremy, he’s the manager? Or was—he hasn’t been back since. I heard ’em arguing. He didn’t want to let the shipment go. She persuaded him otherwise. With them pointing rifles at him.”
“Hm,” Dan muttered. Not sure what to make of what he was hearing.
“Next thing we know, she’s hijacked a reefer truck. You know, a refrigerator truck? And they forced us to load up all million doses. Then they all took off. The Berzerkers, her, the truck, everybody.
“And I ain’t seen them since.” He looked Dan’s uniform up and down. “Where’d you serve?”
“Navy. Taiwan Strait, central Pacific, then the invasion of China.”
“Oh yeah? What’s it like there?”
“A disaster,” Dan said. “Famine. Disease. Fallout. We hit them hard.”
Jimmy gazed out over the ruins of the city. “As bad as here?”
“At least. In fact, probably a lot worse.”
“Good,” the guy said, satisfaction clear in his voice. “Serve the fucking slants right. I hope they all died screaming. Thanks for your service.”
Dan digested this in silence, he too looking out to the north, over the ruins of what had once been Seattle. Now it was a plain of radioactive rubble. Still smoking, still burning, though it had been days since the strikes. Just miles of level destruction, stretching away until it was lost to the eye in a dark reddish haze, through which the sun shone like a distant ruby. There had to be thousands of bodies down there still. Charred. Buried. Burned.
He looked back at the lake, blinking sweat from his eyes. Now he understood. The dark lumps floating on its far side weren’t clumps of ash. Or, not just ash. He hadn’t been able to see them well through the blurred, fogged, single-element lens of the mask.
They were bodies. Corpses. Floating on the lake they’d taken refuge in, when the searing heat had become too hellish to withstand. Cooked like chickens on a grill. But still alive, while they roasted.
He shook his head, and tore his fugitive mind back as Jimmy held out a bottle of water. Dan poured some into his hand, washed his face, drank two swallows, and handed it back. He wanted more, but drinkable water seemed to be in short supply. “Thanks. Thanks a lot. Where do you think they might’ve been headed?”
“Couldn’t tell you. We just wanted them out of here before the wind changed and brought that fucking plume back over us. Or before that mob decided to start shooting. We were all in shock. Half the people on the line that day … God, it was bad. And they kept walking past, from the city. Burned, blinded, arms missing, carrying dead kids, their skin hanging off them … they’d just stop, looking at nothing, if they still had eyes … then fall down dead.” He swallowed. “We cleaned up most of the bodies, put them on the trucks, but they were layin’ all over the grass here.”
Dan squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Yeah, I can imagine.”
“My best guess … your daughter … maybe they’d head inland. You know, east? Maybe toward Yakima? Seems like I heard one of them mention that.”
Yakima, where Dr. Lukajs was. Where Archipelago had relocated to. But Lukajs had said Nan wasn’t there.
But her team leader hadn’t exactly come across as on top of things, and there might be enough confusion that she could be there and her boss didn’t know it. A possibility, anyway. But how was he going to get to Yakima? He was turning away again when the guy said, “You got transportation?”
“Uh—no.” This would be a problem. He had no car, and from everything he’d heard, gasoline was scarce and all the public charging stations for EVs had gone down in the Cloudburst. Bus, train? They’d be packed, if they still ran. He could maybe pull rank and get aboard, but even as he thought it, knew he wouldn’t.
Plus, if she wasn’t in Yakima, he might need to follow her trail somewhere else. Nan, and this … gang … had apparently showed up here to get the drug. He still hadn’t figured that partnership out. Unless this Jimmy was feeding him some kind of bizarre confabulation.
The supervisor was walking away, back toward the building. He called over his shoulder, “Well, hey … it may not be what you want. But one of the guys, he left this here.”
Dan followed him around the corner, and halted.
It lay canted against a dumpster. Scorched on one side, and dented, probably by the bricks that lay scattered around it. But by some miracle, the gas tank hadn’t exploded.
He contemplated a battered black Honda Gold Wing. The windshield was cracked. Deep scuff marks along the side showed where it had been laid down, maybe several times. Or maybe that was from the bricks and debris kicked up by the shock wave.
Jimmy reached into the leather saddlebag and came up with a key. When he turned it the headlight came on, though not very brightly. A hollow click evidenced signs of life in the battery, though not enough charge to turn the starter over.
Nan had left with a motorcycle gang. Was this the way to find her, to literally follow in her tracks?
Magical thinking? Maybe. But if this was a straw, he was ready to grasp at it. At the very least, today he’d learned one shining, intoxicating fact. She’d been alive. Alive and kicking, making things happen, after the attack.
Which lifted an immense weight from his heart, though a sickening anxiety remained.
“This is yours, Jimmy?” Dan asked the guy. “This bike?”
“Mine? No. A guy left it last year, after they laid him off. Said I could sell it if I wanted to. But the market’s been kind of … anyway, I never got any takers. So if you want it, I’ll let ’er go. Cheap.”
Dan didn’t have much cash. A skimpy roll of the new-issue, tissue-paper-thin hundred-dollar bills. If you needed something out in the war zone, either the Navy supplied it or you did without. He had most of his pay socked away, a nice chunk of change by now, but no way to access it. And if he did what he was contemplating, he’d need every dollar left in his wallet.
At last he slipped off his Academy ring. Over an ounce of massive fourteen-carat gold. It had accompanied him for thirty years. Gone around the world, accumulated dents and dings from ships and subs and planes. He valued it, sure. But a ring could be replaced, while Nan …
He held it out, the carved facets of his class crest glittering in the dull reddish sunlight. “How about this?”
“Whoa. I can’t take that from … is that gold?” Sudden avarice glittered in the man’s eyes. Yeah, that age-old shiny yellow metal never lost its appeal. The worse things got, the more valuable it became.
“Give me your full name and I’ll buy it back later. So, no worries. And if you never hear from me again, well, then, it’s yours. Deal?”
Jimmy hefted the ring in his palm. “Uh … sure. If that’s really how you want to do it.”
“Deal, then.”
Suddenly enthusiastic, Jimmy rushed about, helping him siphon fuel from a wrecked car. Dan checked the oil on the bike. The level seemed adequate, though it was dirty, obviously overdue for a change. The other workers gathered around, interested. They jumpered the bike into a hesitant grumble. One man checked his tires and pronounced them “Worn, but okay if ya don’t push it in the rain.” Another briefed him on how to change gears. A third sketched out directions to Yakima. Yet another broke out a sandwich and handed half of it over. “For the road,” he said.
Dan was gifted bottled water, a ragged blanket, a rusty multitool, a small tarp. He thanked them, and stuffed it all into the saddlebags. Sailing a small boat taught you one thing: it was better to have a thing and not need it, than to need it and not have it. They all agreed Yakima was only 150, 160 miles away. One tank would probably get him there. “Down Route 90, then head across the mountains. Keep Mount Rainier on your right,” Jimmy said. “And you can ask along the way if anybody’s seen a shitload of Berzerkers convoying a reefer truck. That’d be hard to miss.”
“And watch for zombies and cannibals,” another worker added.
Dan shook hands all around, zipped his jacket, and climbed aboard. No helmet, but considering this was the long-awaited Nuclear Apocalypse, he wasn’t going to worry about a lid. He blipped the throttle experimentally, put it in first, and let up cautiously on the clutch. The bike jerked forward and stalled. He got off, kick-started it again, and climbed back on. He wobbled around the building, nearly running into a toppled section of fence, but straightened out on the scorched grass and headed down the hill.
Second gear … third.
But as he rode, gradually pushing up his speed as he got used to the machine, the heartsickness returned. Why had anyone ever thought war solved anything? It only traded old dilemmas for new, far more terrible problems.
Someone needed to pay. For that dead girl-child. For the men and women who’d died beside him, out in the far Pacific. For this murdered city, through whose abandoned, smashed, radioactive streets he slowly rode.
But who could bring charges, assign blame, pass judgment, hand down punishment? He could think of only one court, at least on this earth.
But if the US wouldn’t submit to its jurisdiction, neither would the Chinese.
The ICC inquiry … Maybe he should respond. Offer himself, as a sacrifice to justice. Whether or not the administration thought it was a good idea.
He shook his head angrily. That could wait for later. For now, he’d better concentrate on what he was doing.
At first the asphalt pavement was buckled, warped, melted in the higher spots, the hills, where the heat from the fireball had struck most directly. But as he rolled south, gradually picking up speed, buildings no longer slumped across the pavement like toppled giants. Fewer wrecks littered the road. Wires no longer trailed across his path, and power poles and lampposts and sometimes even road signs still stood. The sky brightened as the smoking city fell behind. The mingled stenches of burning and death grew fainter, though those of uncollected garbage remained, giving off a rank, vegetable rot, and here and there his wheels splashed through backed-up sewage.
But town after town he rolled through lay deserted. Storefronts were shuttered, or their plate glass lay sparkling on the sidewalks. No one was out on the streets. The roads stretched empty, the gas stations and recharge stations dark, the traffic lights unlit. He didn’t even see any birds or stray dogs. Hadn’t there been a dog in every movie about the apocalypse?
His disquiet grew. What had happened to the country? He’d been away so long. Years, in fact. Things had changed. Even beyond the impact of a nuclear war.
He hesitated. Steered around a wrecked and abandoned cop car, its windows smashed out, its interior still smoldering tendrils of plasticky-smelling white smoke. Then inhaled, deep, and gunned the throttle as clear highway opened ahead.
A reluctant pilgrim, he set out to cross a ruined land.