The Last Run: A Novella (7 page)

But Mother Russia hadn’t fared very well, either. Moscow had been hit twice, and three more weapons were inbound. Submarine-launched ICBMs were dropping their payloads across the eastern portion of the nation, as those weapons sailed unmolested over China. Benchley wondered if the Great Wall would serve the Chinese well in the coming years, when the starving, sickened hordes from Russia edged eastward. That there would likely be no Chinese left to worry about the situation seemed more likely.

“General?”

Benchley watched the weapons tracking across the big display, descending toward Colorado, moving fast now as they slipped through the atmosphere. Three of them converged on the general location of Cheyenne Mountain, and a moment later, they detonated. And then, they lost the missile feed. Cheyenne had either been destroyed, or the communications relays so badly damaged that Harmony was left in the dark.

With nothing else to do at the moment, Benchley finally responded to Colonel Walters’s query. He tore his eyes away from the inactive display and looked at the wall-eyed officer, still standing by the vehicle operations desk.

“What is it, Colonel?”

“We’ve just picked up an ELT signal, a few dozen miles to the east,” Walters said.

Benchley blinked. “An emergency location transponder? From who?”

“One Truck,” Walters said.

***

T
HERE WAS A HOLE
in Mulligan’s memory, and no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t able to fill it up right away. He felt the rig was listing to the left somewhat, but he couldn’t remember how it had gotten there—his last coherent recollection was that he was driving SCEV One balls to the wall down one of the farming roads, blazing a path toward Scott City. And then, all hell had broken loose. His neck hurt, as did his shoulders and knees. He had a small cut on his cheek, and it burned, as if he had been stung by a hornet. He found a procedures manual lying in his lap, and he wondered what it was doing there, when it should have been tucked away in its pocket above the pilot’s seat. His sunglasses hung from his left ear; the right earpiece was broken, and the right lens was fractured, two thick cracks running right through it. He felt dizzy, disoriented, and an alarm kept repeating inside the cockpit, demanding attention. He moved his right arm, and the manual slipped off his lap and fell to the cockpit floor. After taking a moment to rub his eyes, he surveyed the instrument panel before him. All the displays were dark, but the master caution annunciator was illuminated, a single glaring, red eye in the center of the drab gray console. He recognized the alarm as the generator alert. The gen switch was in the ON position, but the generator had failed. Mulligan reached out with a trembling hand and moved the switch to the OFF position. The alarm fell silent.

“CJ…?” Turning in the seat hurt like hell, and a bolt of agony rocketed up his back and into his neck, terminating in a ball of fire at the base of his skull. Mulligan groaned through clenched teeth as he screwed his eyes shut. He had felt this way once before, when he was sixteen, and he’d driven his uncle’s prized Mustang into a stone wall.

Whiplash…how I’d hoped to never meet you again.

“Can’t breathe,” CJ said softly from beside him.

Mulligan opened his eyes. Moving more slowly this time, he turned in his seat, bit by bit, teeth still clenched against the pain in his back and neck. CJ was slumped against the far side of the cockpit. She was still in the co-pilot’s seat, but one of her shoulder straps had failed. The metal tongue at the end of the strap was probably what had taken out his sunglasses as it lashed across the cockpit, and left the painful welt on his cheek at the same time. Her eyes were wide and staring, directed out the filthy viewport before her, but she didn’t react to what lay outside.

Mulligan did. He gasped when he saw the towering mushroom cloud standing just a mile or two distant, still seething with dull red light, a volcanic upthrust of dust and smoke and writhing fire. It loomed over the SCEV like some sort of malevolent sentinel, peering down at them from its great height, as if debating whether to smash the rig flat like some bothersome insect.

Mulligan remembered.

A fucking nuke went off. Almost right next to us.

The hole in his memory began to fill itself then. He remembered the flash, and the SCEV’s electrical systems died in the EMP burst that the shielding couldn’t have dampened. He recalled watching the shock wave roar toward them like a filthy tidal wave, and it had slammed into the rig and sent it skidding across the road, where it reared up on its left tires and tumbled down the small embankment on the other side. The rig must’ve completed one full rotation, because it was currently right-side up. Mulligan saw bits and pieces of the rig’s MEP lying on the ground outside—shattered fiberglass, bent metal, popped panels that had been ripped off their hinges, a trail of destruction that clearly marked where the rig had rolled. He turned back to the instrument panel, gasping at the agony that ripped through him. A short row of old analog gauges were there, and he saw the rig’s pressure seal was still intact, reading fifteen point five millibars. The SCEV was still inflated, which meant despite the rollover, the vehicle was still pressurized. No radiation or other external contaminants were leaking inside.

Mulligan slowly turned toward the mushroom cloud again. The red glow inside it was diminishing, but it was still growing. He knew it would soon reach a stage where it would be stabilized, and grow no more. Then, the cloud would begin to break down, its crown dissipating as the higher winds aloft tore at it. But the damage had been done. The weapon was of the ground-strike variety, and it had vaulted tons and tons of soil and other debris into the air. Every one of these particles would be irradiated, and as they drifted back to the surface, they would emit radiation that would in turn affect the local ecology. Other particles would be carried farther away from the blast side, riding the winds for dozens or even hundreds of miles before they too fell back to Earth like some sort of malicious snow, deadly and insidious. Mulligan watched the cloud for some time, looking for any indication that might be able to tell him which way the wind was blowing. Usually, he’d just glance at the air data sensor readout, but the displays were dark, and the sensors themselves were likely trashed from the rollover. He tried to remember the wind direction before the blast. Was it headed east, toward Scott City?

“Scott,” CJ said, her voice small.

“Jesus, CJ,” Mulligan said, his voice barely more than a whisper as he stared up at the goliath cloud. “Can you see that fucker?”

“Can’t see…anything,” she gasped. “Peter…Peter…?”

Mulligan tore his eyes away from the mushroom cloud and looked at her. Her face was ashen, and her eyes gleamed dully in the afternoon light. She was in shock. As he watched, a small trickle of blood emerged from beneath her hairline, oozing down the side of her face. She wasn’t moving. Her left arm dangled listlessly, the fingers of her hand slightly curled. Her feet were spread far apart, or as far as they could get inside the foot well. She took deep but uneven breaths, breathing through her mouth.

“Where are you hurt?” Mulligan hit the quick-release on his harness, and the straps dutifully retracted on their gravity reels. He leaned toward her, but the pain in his back and neck tempered his actions, forcing him to move like an old man with very bad arthritis.

“I’m blind,” she said. “Can’t breathe. Can’t feel anything. Where’s Peter?”

“Pete?” Mulligan called out, his voice louder. The SCEV was absolutely silent, a quiet as a tomb. There were no sounds at all, no movements of air, no working pumps, no whirring fans. The rig had been severely damaged by the nuclear detonation and ensuing thermal and physical shock waves that had hammered it. Though built tough and designed to survive even the harshest of environments, there wasn’t a vehicle manufactured that could remain fully operational after a near-miss from a nuclear weapon that had a yield in the megaton range. Mulligan slowly clambered out of the pilot’s seat, using all the handholds he had routinely ignored over the previous years. He’d never needed them—even though he was six foot six, he had always been able to fold himself into an SCEV’s cockpit without doing anything more than grabbing a hold of a headrest to move in and out of the rig’s front office. Now, it was a different story. It took him almost a minute to clear the seat, and then he had to cling to the padded bulkhead, gasping against the agony that seared his nerves in his back, shoulders, and neck. He peered into the next compartment, and he saw Peter Lopez curled up in a ball before the inner airlock door. His back was toward Mulligan, but Peter’s face was turned upward toward the ceiling at an odd angle. A thin trail of blood oozed out of his right ear, and his eyes were half-open.

“Pete?” Mulligan slowly eased toward the motionless engineer. He grabbed onto the back of the chair at the engineer’s station and leaned against it. It tilted forward on its base, causing Mulligan to stumble a bit as he fought for his balance, releasing his breath in a long hiss as new torture flashed through his body. He fell to one knee with a groan and stayed where he was for a good thirty seconds, giving himself time to recover from the pain. Behind him, he could hear CJ breathing laboriously from the cockpit.

“Pete,” she whispered.

“Hold on, CJ. I’m checking on him.” Mulligan edged forward, sliding on the slightly stippled deck plating on his knees. He found it was easier to cover the last four feet on his hands and knees. When he put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, there was no response. There was a substantial depression in his forehead, and the skin around the indentation was purple from blood pooling just beneath the skin. Mulligan reached for the man’s neck, which had an unusual bend to it. He felt for the carotid, but there was no pulse.

Fuck.

Mulligan clambered to his feet and headed for the medical locker. He pulled out the automatic external defibrillator and returned to Peter’s side. He rolled Peter onto his back, ignoring the pain of his injuries. He opened Peter’s uniform blouse and pulled up his T-shirt, exposing his chest. Removing the AED from its case, he set it on the deck and pulled out the shock pads. A small display came to life on the unit, and the STANDBY light illuminated. Mulligan released a small sigh of relief. He had been worried that the EMP might have fried the unit, but apparently after traveling through the SCEV’s external shielding, the pulse no longer possessed a charge substantial enough to destroy the defibrillator. He stuck the pads to Peter’s motionless chest. The AED ran a patient assessment, and a moment later, the orange SHOCK button illuminated. Mulligan wasted no time. He pressed the glowing button, and Peter convulsed slightly as the electrical current passed through his body cavity, arcing between the two pads. It was over in a moment, and the SHOCK button flashed while the unit recharged from its internal battery. After three seconds, the button illuminated and held steady. Mulligan pressed it, and Peter spasmed once more. He repeated the process two more times, and by then, the AED was useless, its battery exhausted.

Mulligan started administering CPR, compressing the center of Peter’s chest thirty times, as he’d been taught, alternating with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He kept it up for five minutes straight, but Peter’s status did not change. Mulligan kept at it, even though the actions caused his own agony to increase.

Come on, man, come on—!

After another five minutes of compressions and assisted breathing, it became clear that Peter was dead—perhaps he could have been saved at Harmony, where there were surgeons and a vast array of medical equipment tailored for such an event, but the SCEV’s offerings were just too Spartan to be effective in treating his injuries. Mulligan looked down at his friend, and was surprised he felt a vague, misplaced anger.

Why weren’t you strapped in? Why didn’t you let me drop you off?

From up front, CJ whispered, “Scott…”

Mulligan turned toward the cockpit. He heard CJ fighting to breathe, so he returned to the medical locker and pulled out a bottle of oxygen. The O2 might come in handy. Laboriously, he returned to the cockpit, finding he had a remarkable amount of difficulty stepping over Peter’s body. Later, he would move him to the sleeping area in the back.

“I’m here,” he said to CJ as he reentered the cockpit. She was still slumped against the right side of the chamber, head lolling, staring out through the viewports at a vista she couldn’t see—a towering mushroom cloud that emitted copious amounts of radioactive waste.

“Peter,” she said again.

Mulligan debated on what to say as he fumbled with the oxygen mask. He turned the knob at the top of the green tank, and air whistled slightly as it surged out of the tank and into the small facemask. He gently slipped the mask over CJ’s face and tightened the elastic strap around her head, ensuring the plastic cover was properly positioned over her nose and mouth.

“Here, this should help,” he said, his voice rough. “It’s oxygen. You relax, there.”

“What…about…Peter,” she said, the words muffled by the mask and the soft hiss of rushing gas.

“I’m sorry, hon. Peter’s dead,” Mulligan said, wishing there was a way to soften the words so they didn’t sound so harsh. But standing in the shadow of a growing, radioactive giant, he found he had no skill for that at the moment.

CJ closed her eyes in response and said nothing.

“I’m going to release your harness and straighten you out in your seat,” he told her. “Then, I’m going to go back to the medical locker and get a cervical collar for you. I’m not sure, but I think you’re neck might be broken. Can you move at all? Your hands, your toes, anything?” When she didn’t answer, Mulligan leaned closer to her. He smelled the sharp tang of urine, then. CJ had wet herself, apparently without knowing. Or caring.

“CJ!” he said, louder.

“No,” she said after a long moment. “Can’t…move.”

Placing a hand on her shoulder to hold her in place, Mulligan released the safety harness. One strap retracted, while the one that had failed just hung there, fouled in its gravity reel. He put the oxygen tank in her damp lap and straightened out the kinks in the plastic hose, then gently eased her back into the seat. CJ lay there like a rag doll, almost lifeless except for the sounds of her breathing. Tears seeped out from beneath her eyelids.