The Alejandra Variations (7 page)

He blinked, staring at her. The name, the face, came to him. Rhoanna.

Confused, frightened, and desperate, he said, "I don't know." His throat was dry in the Sonoran heat. "Let me think. Just let me think!"

On the highway not a single car obeyed the speed limit. In his rearview mirror, Nicholas could discern the teeth of faraway Picacho Peak to the south. Barreling up the road from behind came a wildman in a huge car, possibly an armored Cadillac.

The Highway Patrol was nowhere to be seen.

"Oh, God. Hold on!" Nicholas yelled.

He jerked his car off to the far right-hand side of the highway in order to avoid a fiery collision. His wife had turned around to see the frantic car approaching.
Rhoanna!

"Grab the babies!" Nick shouted at her.

In blue jeans and workshirt, her hair tied up in a turquoise scarf, Rhoanna leaned across the seat of the car as the Cadillac rocketed up beside them. Nicholas pulled a sharp maneuver that tossed his wife bodily back into the front seat, still holding the little girl in her arms. The baby screamed, having been rudely awoken from her dreams. The little boy had disappeared behind the seat, probably as safe there as anywhere else in the vehicle.

The Cadillac sideswiped Nick's car with a dinosaur scream—but otherwise there was no harm done.

The Cadillac wobbled back into the center of the two-lane highway, carried on down the road by its frantic momentum, in search of better prey, now that the world was coming to an end and law didn't matter. The man was doing better than one hundred ten miles an hour, by Nicholas's reckoning.

Nick lifted his foot from the gas pedal and for a brief second closed his eyes. He'd never been so frightened in his life. Everything seemed to rush about his ears.

The baby began screaming loudly in her mother's arms.

The radio—which up until now had been a squall of static—suddenly resumed broadcasting. The announcer's voice was unsteady; as he spoke, the words themselves seemed to shake.

He cleared his throat, then said, "The President has called for a state of national emergency. Several American cities have been struck with nuclear weapons. Governor Lowen has called out the National Guard to assist with emergency procedures, and martial law is now in force. Citizens are urged not to panic."

The man had obviously been reading from a prepared statement, and sounded like a machine ready to slip a few gears. Nicholas switched the radio off after searching the airwaves for other channels. Even the stations in Phoenix had gone off the air.

Nicholas
, the voice came. Look
around you
.

"Oh, Nickie, what are we going to do?"

Nicholas slowly turned to his wife. In the glow of the sunset to the west, her face was illuminated by a divine light. Her green eyes floated in a vision that was both beautiful and sad. Another woman's name came fleetingly into his mind, but vanished as if thrust out by the horror of the situation. Melissa? Melissa who?

"Da!" the little boy in the back seat squealed excitedly, pointing a chubby finger out the window to the west.

Still driving, Nicholas looked off toward the horizon and saw a row of snaggletoothed mountains. Thrown up against the sky like a nightmare were hundreds of jet contrails from Davis Monthan Air Force Base. Blossoming up from the south like the spidery arms of a giant ocotillo cactus, each one was tipped with the deadly glistening jewel of a fighter craft or bomber.

But that wasn't what his son was pointing to.

What is it, Nicholas?

The little boy knew nothing of adult matters. Nicholas gazed where the boy was pointing. Off in the distance, between two tall, ragged mountain peaks, a dirigible of some kind was slowly drifting across the desert. He recognized it. It was one of the Donner Luftwerk Corporation's giant air-freighters, just the thing to attract the attention of a small child fascinated by bright, shiny things in the sky.

His son giggled with delight.

The contrails above, with their silver arrowheads of destruction, shook the entire desert with sonic thunder. Nick pulled over into a roadside rest area.

It was a good decision. Ahead of him, driving
against
the swell of traffic, the Cadillac with its frenzied driver was coming back down the highway. Nick swerved up into the rest-stop entrance where the Cadillac could not possibly get at them.

"Jesus!" he swore as his wife held on tight to the screaming baby girl.

They heard an ugly rending of steel accompanied by a chorus of bursting glass and an explosion. Nick shut off the car and looked around. The Cadillac was somersaulting down the highway, having collided head-on with another speeding automobile. The other car had been instantly transformed into a twisted ball of metal and fire.

"My God!" his wife cried, clutching the child.

Nicholas got out of the car and stared with horror at the Cadillac, which had come to a tormented end in a cactus-studded gully beside the road. There were cries from the interior of the automobile, from someone made sober by the heartless fires that engulfed him.

What was in the sky, Nicholas?

Nicholas spun around and saw an older gentleman—a farmer of sorts—standing beside him, his eyes wide, staring at the carnage littered on the highway.

"What did you say?" Nicholas asked him.

"I said, 'Did you see that crazy sombitch?' Craziest thing I ever did see!"

The man was a scrawny creature, wearing a grimy baseball cap and four days worth of beard on his rawhide face. He dribbled chewing tobacco down the side of his stubbly check.

"Jimminy Christ!" he snorted, shaking his head violently. "Now what the sam hill you think made him do that fer?"

Nick stared at the man. "The radio," he said simply.

"The radio?" he asked incredulously, as if Nicholas too had gone loco. "What the hell you talkin' radio?"

Nicholas pointed into the sky. "It's an attack." His voice sounded hollow, dreamlike. "The Russians are attacking us." They could hear the small rumbles of the sound barrier being broken by jets and bombers as they slid up into the stratosphere, heading north.

The old guy laughed and slapped his thigh. "Now yet talkin', pardner! Now yet talkin'! I always did want them Ruskies to pull a fast one on old Uncle Sam! Yessir!"

Suddenly there was a vast orange ball of hellish light to the south of them.

What is it, Nicholas?

Nicholas turned around. It wasn't the old man who had spoken. Who, then?

The ball of light—like a vision of Armageddon—got progressively larger and larger, expanding until it filled the entire southeastern horizon. Tucson was directly underneath it.

"Christ Almighty!" the farmer gasped.

The shock wave would be upon them within ten seconds. Nicholas smelled the man's bowels as they let loose, filling his overalls.

"Oh, Lordy," the old man whimpered, his eyes gone blind with a glimpse of the terrible Angel of Death. He crumpled up beside Nicholas, dead in the stench of his own waste.

Nick swiftly turned away from the glare and ran back to his car.
Only seconds
, his body told him hurriedly.

"Get out!" he screamed. He pulled open the rear door and grabbed his son, who was looking at the pretty orange sky.

"But, Nick!" his wife protested, arms full of wailing baby. "What are we going to
do
?"

Nicholas!
the cry rang out in his mind, but he was too busy to pay any heed to it. He was like a prairie animal caught in a savage range fire.

They had to get behind several feet of dirt to protect themselves.

No!
came the insistent voice from within.
Help us, Nicholas!

The rest stop was set up on a low rise that sloped down into an arroyo full of blooming saguaro cactus and tangly mesquite. With the light of Ragnarok behind them, Nicholas shuffled his family down the side of the asphalt rise and over a modest railing. They dropped into a culvert lined with cement and overgrown with sage weeds and debris.

The instant they skidded to a halt, the shock wave descended. It was like being beneath the crest of a fantastic tidal wave. Thirty miles high, it swept over them. Nicholas covered his ears, bidding his wife do the same—and as he did, that inner voice screamed to him.

Don't stop!
it yelled.
We have to know more!

But Nicholas knew that it was the end. No single multi-targeted independent-reentry-vehicle warhead could have done this kind of damage to Tucson. This was far more widespread than the destruction done from a lone MIRV bursting in from the ionosphere. This was a different weapon entirely.

Yes, Nicholas! That's it!
came the hidden, interior chorus.

Something far back in his mind told him that only those within a ten-mile radius from the epicenter of the blast would be killed instantly. Twenty-five miles out everything would sustain major damage. But
seventy
miles out?

Phoenix lay just forty miles up the road. Yet the shock wave and surge of radioactive light that was sweeping over them seemed as if it arose from the force of
hundreds
of warheads.

Yes!
the voice encouraged.

The wind soared overhead in a scream so colossal that Nick thought that he'd go deaf. His son had disappeared—along with part of the culvert itself. A truck, probably the dead farmer's, stripped of paint and glass, crashed into the gully like a child's push-toy.

"What's happening?" he yelled into the wind, clutching his ears.
"What's happening?"

He stood up and tried to locate the boy. But he knew he didn't have a son. Or did he?

He turned and saw his wife, then staggered backward in the blood-colored light.

His daughter was fused to his wife's chest. His wife had no face. They were on fire. Nicholas screamed and ran through the culvert underneath the highway to where it opened outward, facing Tucson and the southern deserts.

He
had
to know!

A mushroom cloud seventy thousand feet high had sprouted in the sky, topped by a scar of reddish-black. But the black was not from ash and smoke.

Nicholas realized what he was seeing: The bomb had been so powerful that it had actually punched a hole in the atmosphere; above the mushroom cloud he could see stars. Stars!

Tucson was being sucked up into outer space!

"Jesus!
" he shouted, putting his hands to his face.

When he did, he felt bone. The flesh was dripping from his fingers and hands.

He fell backward against a rock and sat down with a jolt. What madness kept him grappling for life? The wind had abated slightly, and the light had dimmed. He believed he could hear the atmosphere rushing up into the cold wastelands of space, pulling up the glowing dust that was once Tucson with it.

Then, like something lovely and delicate from a fairy tale, he saw it. The Donner Luftwerk air-cargo freighter lumbered its way over the desert terrain just a few miles away. Untouched! How it had survived the holocaust he didn't know; but there it was, moving lugubriously like some happy-go-lucky sky-elephant.

All of his attention was focused upon it with childlike fascination. Like his son's.…

The voices inside him said,
Nicholas! That's it! You found it! That's exactly what we're looking for!

But he didn't care.

There was nothing he could do with the fact that an air-freighter like this one had taken out Tucson. The ships from Donner Luftwerk were Trojan horses, eased up to the unsuspecting walls of Ilium, their bellies full of death.

And Phoenix—with Williams Air Force Base forty miles away—was next.

He tried to stand up, but fell back onto the hot desert floor. "Please," he cried out. "No more! I can't stand it anymore!"

He thought he heard the helpless cries of a child—his child—coming from the far reaches of his consciousness. The cry echoed from the culvert behind him, sounding haunted and terribly lost.

But there was nothing he could do.

Then he heard a different voice, expressing an even greater urgency.
Nick!
it shouted.
It's real! It's happening! It's really happening!

Suddenly, he had visions of Soviet Backfire bombers at sixty thousand feet. He saw SS-20s racing across the Danube and up over the Pyrenees. Trident missiles rose on columns of superheated steam out of the oceans. Lasers arced down crimson beams from satellites in space.
War!

The visions, the
facts
, stampeded across his mind in megabytes of precise data; he couldn't separate them from what he was literally seeing.

It's real, Nick!
It was a woman's voice this time
. World War III is really happening!

Overhead, the Donner Luftwerk air-freighter drifted like a gray cloud, its engines directed toward an unknowing Phoenix.

With each beat of his heart, the end of the world got closer and closer.

His last thoughts were of the woman in the ditch.

The Second Variation

Chapter One

THE GIRL'S FACE rose over the horizon of his consciousness and smiled down at him. Her voice was soft and flowed to him through the dim folds of wakefulness.

"Hi, doll," she breathed. "It's been a while, hasn't it."

Nicholas blinked several times, looking up at her. The skin of her face was pearl-white, her eyes green and wide. Small star-clusters of dusty freckles dotted each rosy cheek. Her platinum-blonde hair, short and prim—almost military in its style—surrounded the moon of her young face. It filled his whole waking world. She didn't appear to be any older than eighteen years of age. And he had never seen her before in his life.

It's been a while?

He shivered. His body was telling him that indeed it
had
been a while, but a while since what?

The girl put an arm around his bare shoulders and helped him slowly sit upright. The bones in his spine snapped and popped into place as if they'd been too long settled into one position.