DAN motored out Route 90, toward the sunrise. The first day out from Seattle passed in a blur of wind, noise, and speed. The highway stretched before him nearly empty. Now and then he’d veer into the passing lane to overtake a slower-moving truck, but not often. Traffic in the other direction, headed back toward Seattle, was heavier, but still sparse. Far fewer vehicles than he’d expected, even in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. For hours on end he was alone on the highway, devouring four lanes of empty pavement with the only sound the dronesong of the engine, a vibration in his windscreen, and his worry.
The guy at the factory had said Nan was headed east, in a refrigerator truck filled with medications, being escorted by a motorcycle gang. But Dan saw no other bikes, much less a pack of them, though he kept his eyes peeled and slowed to peer carefully down each exit ramp he passed. His own machine felt heavy, awkward, and he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was built that way. It also had a wobble in the front end at around forty miles an hour, nearly sending him off the road once when he’d overcorrected.
So he didn’t go forty.
Cryptic inscriptions started appearing on the road surface west of Spokane, spray-painted in big swoops of Day-Glo orange. Eventually, recalling the shipboard radiological training, he decoded it: radiation dosages, probably in either millirems or millisieverts per hour, plus the date the survey had been taken. Eventually he deduced that whoever was spray-painting the markings was maybe three days ahead of him, also headed east.
The numbers climbed as he neared Spokane. As he motored through, the turnoffs and side streets lay eerily empty. Looking down from the overpasses as he went through, as far as he could make out the city was intact, but deserted. Evacuated early on, apparently, since he didn’t see any smoke, fire, or other signs it had actually been hit.
Which was going to make it harder to do what he’d intended. Namely, ask along the way if anyone had seen Nan and her entourage-slash-captors.
A UPS truck stood parked at an off-ramp. No keys, but the gas cap was unlocked. He deployed his hose and filled the bike up with the pink-tinted high-eth wartime fuel substitute. He searched the nearby undergrowth until he found a couple of discarded two-liter soda bottles. He filled them, too, stowed them in a saddlebag, and pushed on.
But the orange numbers kept rising. When they hit 150 per hour he started to sweat. First of all, if it was in millirems, he was getting about ten times as high an exposure as it would be if it was millisieverts. The type of radiation mattered too—alpha radiation, neutrons, or gamma—but he was pretty sure fallout would be mostly alpha and thus a direct one-to-ten conversion factor. Accumulated over time … He pondered it uneasily for mile after mile. There was no safe dose. Once you hit about 100 rem, especially over a short period, you could expect active sickness: nausea, low white blood count, hair loss, weakness, immune system compromise, and so on. If those painted numbers got much higher, he’d be running a real risk just being out here on the highway.
But those were only the overt, immediate symptoms. Even at doses below the levels that made you noticeably ill, the risk of cancer later started to climb.
He shook his head, squinting into the wind, bent over the handlebars as he blew along, goosing the Honda up to seventy, eager to get through the city. But then, the readings he was seeing were several days old. Surely some of the fallout had decayed since then.
Bottom line, though, there was probably a pretty damn good reason he was alone on the road. He was picking up dosage the longer he stayed out here. Letting himself in for some bad shit. If not immediately, later on.
Still, he pushed on. Didn’t stop, except once to piss, and even then stamped the dust off his boots before he got back on. Keeping a close eye on the numbers. Which kept rising.
Until they peaked somewhere past Coeur d’Alene. Then began to drop as he turned south, crossed a bridge, and left the deserted suburbs behind for a long valley.
He breathed a little easier as the orange digits stabilized at 20. Not great, but he could stand it for a while.
The highway twisted between deserted-looking wooded hills green with summer foliage. Discreet signs informed him he was in a national forest. And that only he could prevent wildfires. The air was scented with pine and juniper and sun-warmed wildflowers, a hot dry summery smell, pleasant even when you were blowing through at sixty miles an hour. He stayed at that speed, with sixty-five on the downgrades. He had plenty of throttle left, but seventy had seemed scarily fast. He wasn’t really used to the bike and had no idea how long ten-year-old tires would last. He didn’t want to be going eighty if one blew. Especially since he was riding without a helmet.
Toward dusk the valleys deepened and the hills grew steeper. They were covered with dry-looking grass and low twisted trees and scrub. Along some stretches the builders had chiseled down through the rock that stood to left and right. Its drilled-out cross sections showed striated sediments in pale shades of red and gray and brown, pale jewellike tones hidden for millennia deep in the earth.
He grew worried again, and not only about his daughter. The gauge had started out full, since the staff at the pharma plant had filled the tank. He’d refueled in Spokane, from the UPS truck. But as the day went on the needle seemed to fall faster and faster. Obviously, there wasn’t as much energy in the pale pink ersatz gasoline.
He slowed to fifty to stretch whatever was left. The highway stayed empty, the valleys picturesque but still deserted. He didn’t pass any towns, or signs for any kind of rest stop, plaza, or wayside. And steadily the hills grew more rugged, steeper, the rock cuts deeper, the valleys narrower and tiding with shadow. The air grew chillier too; he must be gaining elevation.
The low-fuel light glared orange. He pulled over and kicked the stand down. Swung his legs off, and stretched the kinks out of back and legs. Massaged his aching butt. Then poured the contents of both two-liter bottles glug-glugging into the tank.
The warning light dimmed slowly, as if reluctant. This amount probably wouldn’t take him much farther. He pulled back onto the road, and a few minutes later spotted a side road that looked like it might lead to a forest service facility. Instead it dead-ended at a graveled turnaround. He had to skid to a halt, wheel the heavy bike around, and gun it back to the highway.
Another worry: the spray-painted notations on the highway were rising again, climbing once more as he pushed east.
Yeah, now he remembered. Some of StratCom’s missile fields had been north of here. The numbers quickly reached 150 millirems per hour. Granted, that was last week’s reading, but radiation didn’t decay all that fast. Actually, it depended on what isotopes were in the fallout, but he had no clue to its composition.
If he was stranded out here for any length of time—say, from running out of gas and having to walk—he could easily absorb a really dangerous, even a fatal, dose. For the hundredth time he wished for some kind of dosimeter or counter. But aside from the staff at the evacuee camp, who’d worn badges, he hadn’t seen anything like that since leaving the ship.
At long last, west of Butte, he spied a sign for a truck stop. He swung off at Ramsay. As he coasted in, though, a heavy stink of death, of sweetish rotten meat, met his nostrils. A miasma so massive and choking he could barely breathe.
The truck stop building was locked, so he rolled on through the town, a small, rectilinear burg of neatly kept homes. Modest houses with attached garages, a nice mid-American town, but oddly lacking any stores or factories or other visible sign of economic activity.
But no one was home. The short hairs rose on the back of his neck. He was remembering old films, old shows. Zombies and body snatchers, Stranger Things and The Postman and The Walking Dead. A weird combination of the frightening and the long-familiar. The absolute silence didn’t help, nor did the thick, cloying stench. No dogs barked as he chugged down the main street, keeping it under forty, made a right, and rolled past the high school. He spotted a black-and-yellow shelter sign, and pulled into the principal’s space. A sign taped to the inside of the front office window read LEFT FOR SISTER EVAC CITY ROCK SPRINGS WY and gave a phone number.
The door with the shelter sign was closed but unlocked. He groped his way down concrete steps to the basement, but had to halt there. No light, but the dank nose-twitching smells of mildew and long-dead mice were at least a change from the rotten-meat stink up in the sunlight.
Back in the saddle … rolling past a soccer field, its grass deserted, the nets hanging limply in the quiet sunlight. The only movement anywhere was that of the crows, who fluttered up from the pavement as he approached, and cackled noisily back down, cursing him out behind his back after he passed. They were eating what had at first looked like spilled grain on the road. But when he got closer he saw it was the carcass of some large animal, so flattened and smeared out he couldn’t even tell what it had been. Not human. At least, he didn’t think so.
He’d expected to leave the rotting scent behind as he got out onto the highway again, but instead it grew even heavier. He pushed on a mile or two, suppressing his gag reflex. The odor kept thickening, until it seemed to be physically slowing the bike, the air itself denser and more resistant to any passage.
Until he saw its source at last.
They lay in rows, as if felled that way. Penned in wire enclosures, overlooked by elevated walkways. Grotesquely swollen, red-brown and white hides puffed out like balloons, mouths gaping open. Black clouds of flies milled above them, the massed buzzing audible even over the mutter of his engine as he puttered past. He couldn’t tell if they’d been shot, or gassed, or killed in some other way, but the cattle lay in windrows, hundreds of them, thousands, past a sign that proudly proclaimed MONTANA’S PREMIER CATTLE AUCTION HOUSE, open Tuesday with sales on Friday for feeder calf and yearling steers and heifers in the fall, October through December.
Okay, so it had to be the truck stop. He bumped across the divider, U-turned, and headed back.
The doors were shatterproof Lucite, but a heaved-with-a-grunt concrete block got him through a plate glass window overlooking the fuel pumps. The interior smelled dank, and the floor tiles were stained, as if something had leaked and dried and never been cleaned up. He used the toilet, though there was no water pressure to wash with, then browsed the sale aisle. Motor oil. Plastic jerricans that would fit in the saddlebags. Yeah, he needed to extend his range. Tire pump. Blue plastic tarp. Bungees. Patch kit. Maps. Flares. He didn’t want to be a looter, but he needed this stuff, and no one seemed to be around.
He jimmied open the manager’s desk with a screwdriver, found a loaded stainless Ruger .38, and tucked it into his belt. Montana seemed more deserted than threatening, but still he felt more secure with the revolver’s weight dragging at his pants.
The food aisle … somebody had plundered it before evacuating, but he found canned Vienna sausages and onion Pringles. He munched them sitting at the table in the little café, washing it down with a warm Pepsi. Shades of The Road … He tried the telephone on the wall, hoping to call Blair, but the line was dead. And of course his cell registered no bars.
By now it was dark outside. He wished again for some way to measure the radiation he must be accumulating. The contamination here had been so severe the authorities had put down thousands of valuable cattle. But he couldn’t think of any detection method.
The same protective measures you applied on shipboard, then. Keep to interior spaces. Close the doors. The building had been locked up, sealed against the fine radioactive dust to that extent, at least. A roll of duct tape and some cardboard patched the window he’d broken.
He discovered a discreet little bunkroom in back that long-haul truckers must have rented by the night, before the big freights had gone full driverless. The bunk beds were sagging, obviously hard-used, but better than the concrete floor. He wedged towels under the door. Covered himself with a thick layer of on-sale sweatshirts. And lay there in the dark until it took him as well.
THE next day he rose at dawn, and shaved with bottled water. He deployed a hand pump from the store to fill his tank and two of the jerricans with gas from the buried fuel tanks. He crammed the Honda’s top case with quarts of oil and Slim Jims and Lance ToastChee and Little Debbie fig bars. He left two of the tissue-thin hundreds on the counter to pay for his purchases, though it seemed a meaningless gesture.
The sun greeted him in long golden glints across the mountains, glowing off the dew-shining pavement as he hit sixty and then seventy. More confident now on the bike, pushing it harder.
Butte looked as deserted and abandoned as Spokane had been. The strikes on the missile fields to the north must have smeared a deadly plume across some of the most productive grazing lands in the country. No doubt the cattle in his wake weren’t the only livestock to be put down. There’d be meatless days for a lot of Americans in the year to come. Maybe grainless days as well.
But in every nuclear-disaster movie he’d ever seen, hadn’t food been scarce? The gaunt survivors reduced to an endless crawl across a desert, fighting over each scrap of sustenance, each mouthful of drinkable water?
Maybe science fiction had forecast the future all too accurately.
The spray-painted readings stayed steady for an hour, then started to rise again. Two hundred an hour. Two fifty. Not long after, an irregular structure poked up ahead. He rolled off the throttle, steered to center lane, and coasted in.
The roadblock was makeshift, two trailers parked across the lanes. Large hand-lettered signs read ROUTE 90 CLOSED. DETOUR. Crooked arrows pointed to the right. But that turnoff was blocked as well. A few yards up the hill behind it, an American flag hung fluttering from a MECO boom truck. A dark bundle swayed gently in the breeze below it.
As he rolled to a halt men spilled from a faded green mobile home parked on the berm. They were in civilian clothes, sheepskin coats and cowboy hats, and carried hunting rifles. Some had huge Western-style hoglegs in holsters strapped to their thighs. All wore flu masks and the red, white, and blue–blazoned armband of the Mobilized Militia.
A bearded older man with wild white hair stepped out last. He held up a palm and slashed a finger across his throat, pointing to the bike. Dan kicked the stand down and cut the ignition. The throaty roar of eighteen hundred cubic centimeters died, leaving an echoing silence and a high keening in his ears.
“Mornin’, amigo,” the old man said, ambling up. He scanned him up and down with a white phone-sized device, gaze lingering on his boots, while Dan waited. At last he snapped the counter off. “Warm, but not hot. ID, if you don’t mind. Sorry to tell ya, 90’s closed between here and Hardin. Heavy alpha contamination. Where we bound today?”
“I’m headed cross-country.”
“I see that. Nice old bike. Headed where?”
“Basically, just east from the Seattle area. I’m due in Washington in a few days.”
Two more men with shotguns came out of the mobile home and ranged themselves behind the trailer. They leaned against it, watching him, pulling their masks down, and lighting up what looked like hand-rolled smokes.
“Goin’ in the wrong direction for Washington,” the old man observed mildly, examining his ID.
“I mean Washington, DC.”
“ID says Navy. That a Navy uniform you got on under there?”
He was still in khakis, though the windbreaker was from the truck stop. “That’s right.”
“Got orders? Registration for that there machine?”
“I’m traveling under message orders. Nothing on paper I can show you, if that’s what you want. And the bike, I uh—bought it.” For the first time, he wondered if he should have asked for some kind of receipt. But it hadn’t seemed like anyone would be asking, in the aftermath of a nuclear laydown.
“Bought it. Says here you’re a captain. Captain of what?”
A younger man joined them, in a tan barn coat and an Army battle dress cap, though he was in jeans and boots. Actually Dan was still an admiral, though only for the duration, but there didn’t seem any point in explaining that. His ID, indeed, still carried him as an O-6. “Captain is a rank,” he said patiently. “Equivalent to an army colonel. I’m headed for DC for my next assignment, and looking for my daughter on the way. Last anyone saw of her, she was leaving Seattle with a load of medicine, headed east on 90. In a truck. A lot of motorcyclists were riding with her. I’m not sure why. Seen anything like that?”
The old man tucked Dan’s ID into his own side pocket and gestured to the mobile home. “No sir, can’t say I have. We carrying today?”
“Got a .38 in the saddlebag. I’d like my ID back?”
“Actually, I ’spect you might could be a deserter,” the old man said mildly.
“We hang deserters,” said the younger one, unzipping his coat and suddenly fast-drawing a .45 from a leather holster. He pointed it and thumbed the hammer back. “Let’s have the gun, mister. Carefully. Slow.”
Suddenly the bundle hanging limply from the boom truck made sense. Close up, Dan could make out a boot hanging off one of its feet.
He raised his hands and nodded to the saddlebag. “The one on the right. You can take it out. But I’m not a deserter. I’m Captain Daniel Lenson, US Navy, on compassionate leave, looking for my daughter. I’ve been fighting in the Pacific for the last four years. You sure none of your men have seen her? She was in a refrigerator truck with about thirty Berzerkers. Kind of hard to miss, I would think.”
“Oh, we don’t miss much out here,” said the old man equably. He nodded to the mobile home again. “Lot’s changed since the war, Captain. I’m Colonel Rutter, Silverbow M&Ms. Come on, get down off that hog. Keep your hands where we can see ’em. We’ll get you checked out, see if you’re who you say you are.”
“Better hope so,” the younger man said.
“Take it slow, Derek,” the old man told the younger one. “Not everybody’s a antiwa or a looter. Captain here could be just who he allows to be.”
Moving carefully, keeping his hands in sight, Dan dismounted and followed the old man. The “colonel.” He lurched a bit, unused to walking after the hours of riding. The younger man, Derek, fell in behind. From time to time the muzzle of the .45 dug into Dan’s back. “I hope you have that safety on,” he said over his shoulder. But the guy didn’t answer, just prodded him again, harder.
For the first time it occurred to him that though the old man sounded country friendly, he might really be in shit city here.
Inside a radio was tuned to the Patriot News. The announcer was blustering, bullying, pouring contempt on someone whose name Dan didn’t recognize. Through a window, he glimpsed a solar array sparkling in the sun behind the trailer. A woman sat at a notebook computer. Smoke from one of the hand-rolleds curled up from a tray. “Can we run this boy, please, Angela,” Rutter said, handing her Dan’s ID. “Says he’s on leave from the service.”
Dan started over to the desk, curious what database they were accessing, but was steered away by Derek’s pincer-grip on his shoulder and pushed down onto a plastic chair that looked like it had come out of a waiting room. The younger man stood over him, still pointing the .45.
“Y’like some coffee?” Rutter said, pouring himself a cup at a side table. “Guess we can spare a mug, for one of our fightin’ men.”
“If he really is one,” Derek said, hovering like a concerned parent. Only he looked more threatening than concerned.
Dan said, “Sure, I could use a cup. Black is fine.”
It was hot and strong and for a moment the little cramped trailer seemed almost hospitable. Until he looked out the window again, and saw more clearly what was swinging in the wind behind the array. Traitors. Deserters. Looters—with his top case jammed to the brim with what he’d taken from the truck stop …
“Fugitive from the Zone,” the old man said, letting himself down into a worn armchair opposite Dan. “Guy out there, I mean. He showed up on the list, we judged him, took the appropriate action. Now. You said, your daughter.”
Dan cleared his throat and looked away from the window. “… Yeah. She’s a medical researcher. From Seattle. She rescued a production run of a new antiflu drug—”
“For the Chinese flu?” Rutter said. “That’s hittin’ pretty hard some places, I hear. About time they come up with something for that.”
“—For the Chinese flu. Yeah. She’s taking it east for distribution, I think. The pharma manager said she was being escorted by a local motorcycle gang. Only apparently she never arrived wherever she was going. According to FEMA, and Archipelago, and whoever else ought to know. I’m trying to find her, or find out what happened to her.”
The woman at the computer murmured something inaudible. Rutter twisted in his chair, then turned back to Dan. “Sounds like you’re not where you’re supposed to be, Captain. This says you’re aboard a USS Savo Island, out of Norfolk, Virginia.”
“Your database is way out of date. Savo left the East Coast before the war, and I left her about a year after the war started. I’m on leave now. I told you that.”
The old man nodded understandingly. “But all we got is your word for it.”
“Then contact the CNO’s office. The chief of naval operations. They know me and where I am. That’s who I’m reporting to in DC.” A suspicion flared. “Do you really have connectivity? Or is that a freestanding database?”
He started to get up, but Derek moved menacingly to block him. “Don’t worry about any of that, Captain,” Rutter said. “We make our own minds up, out here.”
One of the guys from outside pushed in through the door. He wasn’t quite as gray as Rutter, but wasn’t all that much younger. Actually, though he was more weathered, he looked to be about Dan’s age. He leaned his shotgun in a corner and came over, taking off his hat. Regarding Dan with a bemused gaze from above his mask.
Dan nodded back, but the guy kept staring. Finally he said, “Lenson.”
“Right. And you’re—?”
“Simo Hardin.” The man pulled down his mask. “From Reynolds Ryan. You were my division officer. First Division.”
“Holy smoke. Hardin,” Dan said, taking his hand as a rush of memory overwhelmed him.
His very first ship. The old destroyer, worn even beyond her many years, laboring in the terrifying seas north of the Arctic Circle. Intercepting a submarine that shouldn’t have been there. And at last, torn apart and sinking, when her sick and fatigued captain had made one single wrong rudder order.
It might have seemed coincidental, running into a member of that old crew here. But it happened often enough that when you ran into old shipmates, guys you’d served with or under or had commanded, it wasn’t a shock. He cleared his throat. “That’s right. Hardin. You were from out West, weren’t you?”
“From Wyoming, but I live here now. Got out as a first class, and took over my dad’s construction business. Until the war, anyway.” To Rutter, Hardin said, “We were on a tin can that went down after a carrier ran over her. Why’re you holding him, Colonel? This guy’s the real deal. A senior officer, now, I hear. Pretty much a hero.”
“Also a looter, and maybe a deserter,” Derek sneered.
“Not this guy,” Hardin told him. “He doesn’t have it in him. He was the fucking straightest arrow aboard. We all hated him, back then. But we respected him too. Whatever he tells you, you can count on. Saw his name in the news, over the years. He’s been everywhere. Shit, this guy’s got the Medal of Honor. You assholes should be kissing his feet.”
“Thanks … Simo,” Dan said, a little overwhelmed. Remembering the moments of terror as Ryan had been torn apart, flaming, destroyed by her own, because of her deadly cargo.
Remembering, too, what he’d always wanted to know from back then. Such as, who’d tried to kill him on an icy deck one black and freezing night. He’d always suspected Slick Lassard and his pot-smoking deck gang. And hadn’t Hardin been one of them?
But maybe this wasn’t a good time to bring that up. “Yeah, great to see you. And thanks for your service. In the Navy, and, uh, the Mobilized Militia.”
The woman at the computer murmured something else. Rutter squinted, face darkening under the white beard. He sighed heavily. Got up, hoisted his pants over his gut, and glanced toward the door. “Guess we don’t have enough to hold you on. Since Simo here vouches for you. I’ll put a pass notification up on our chat. If you hit another roadblock that might help.
“See, we got our own network. When the government dies, citizens got to step up. Like it was in the old days. But I might have some bad news for you too.”
Dan rose. “Bad news,” he repeated.
Rutter looked away. “From some ways east of here. Angela here did a search for what you told her. They found a woman … midtwenties … a body, over near Chadron. Suspected murdered by a guy on a motorcycle. They’re still looking for him.”
Dan reached for support as the trailer reeled around him. “What are you saying? Do they have … did they identify her?”
Rutter steadied him with a hand. “Angela asked. No ID on her. Real sorry to tell you this.”
“Well, maybe it isn’t—can we get a—a picture?”
The woman turned in her chair. She was older, crag-jawed, but her eyes were kind. “This here system is hard-wire routed. We don’t have the bandwidth for pictures. I’m real sorry.”
“Where is it?” he forced through numb lips. “Chadron, you said. Is that in Montana? I’ll go there. And see for myself.”
“You’ll want the sheriff’s department. And no, it’s in Nebraska. Good ways east of here.”
“That’s a hard day’s travel,” Hardin said. “More like two, on that bike.”
“And he can’t take Route 90,” the woman said. “It’s still too hot to cross. Full body dose, the levels they’re reporting, he’d be toast. Gonna have to jog south. Maybe through Yellowstone. Then pick it up again on the other side, around Sheridan, or take 25.”
“Get his bike filled up,” Rutter told Hardin. “Give him some water. And Derek, give him his pistol back. He might need it, out on those roads these days. Captain, I’m real sorry about all this. I wish we had better news for you.”
Dan might have answered, but he wasn’t focused on what was going on. He felt poleaxed, like one of the dead steers back in the feedlot.
He stumbled back out to the bike. Tried to concentrate, to listen, as Hardin gave him directions. The woman came out, carrying a road map. They fueled his bike, tucked MREs into his saddlebags, patted his back. From overtly hostile, they’d suddenly become almost like family. Even Derek bumped fists and wished him good luck.
Dan accepted it all in a dazed stupor, as if he were watching a golem controlled from elsewhere. The golem accepted things. Muttered thanks. Remembered directions. But didn’t seem to be all there. He climbed back on the Honda and hit the start button. But, the starter didn’t work anymore. He kicked it several times and at last it caught. The militiamen dragged the roadblock aside to let him take the turnoff.
When he looked back, in the little vibrating handlebar mirror, they were all looking after him, growing smaller and smaller, until they too were gone.