The Summer the World Ended (30 page)

She opened her mouth to yell, “Dad,” but her voice vanished under a tremendous explosion outside that lit the eastern sky over the mountains bright orange and shook the house. Seconds later, it faded to black. Had a previous bomb knocked her awake?

Dad scrambled through the door. A third explosion occurred seconds before bright light flooded the room. A horrible scratching roar seemed to pass right over the house.

“Daddy!” Riley screamed.

He grabbed her wrist with one hand and the camouflage backpack he’d planted in her room with the other. She looked around, disoriented as he hauled her out through the hall to the kitchen.

“Put that on.”

Riley caught the ‘go bag’ and started sniveling from the look in Dad’s eye as she slipped it on her back. She shrieked as another detonation thundered right overhead, shaking the house and knocking a few cups off the shelf.

Dad snatched his AR15 and an ammo can, flinging the rifle over his shoulder before grabbing Riley’s wrist again. He ducked through the patio door and sprinted into the desert. Riley stumbled along, trying not to fall, cringing and ducking each time something went
boom.

Chaos surrounded her on all sides. Scintillating white light spread over the sky, eerily like the flash they always show in those nuclear disaster movies. Riley whimpered and looked away, crying out whenever her bare feet found a rock or a bit of scrub.

After what felt like forever, Dad halted in a crouch by a mound of dirt. He stuck his hand into it, lifting a wooden frame similar to a huge cargo pallet disguised as ordinary ground with sheets of burlap, dirt, and bushes. Beneath it, a vertical cinderblock-walled shaft led underground, six feet on each side.

“Go, go,” yelled Dad.

Riley jumped as another explosion pounded through the earth. She hesitated at the edge. Dad grabbed the backpack and lifted her on to the metal ladder. Sniveling, she scurried down some thirty feet over metal rungs that felt like ice bars. She moved like a robot until her toes found frigid concrete. A
clank
rang from overhead as Dad shut the hatch.

She backed away from the ladder, pressing herself against a grey-painted metal door. Dad dropped down so fast it seemed as though he somehow slid along the ladder rather than climbed it. He rushed over and gave her a head-to-toe glance.

“You okay? Did you get hit by any shrapnel?”

Riley stood numb. Another blast outside made her jump, but she didn’t make a sound. When she didn’t react in another ten seconds, he lifted her shirt up to her armpits and spun her around.

“I don’t see blood. Does anything hurt?”

She shook her head.

Dad let go, pulled the inner door open, and nudged her through. She stumbled to the northwest corner of an underground chamber, about eight feet wide and twelve long, stretching to her right. Against the opposite wall sat a shelf with several pairs of boots, stacks of folded military fatigues, canteens, boxes of stuff, rope, and some tools.

At the far end of the room, a Frisbee-sized showerhead hung on a naked pipe, reminding her of chemistry class and the emergency wash. She cringed as a resounding
boom
rumbled through the ground, knocking dust off the ceiling. The southeast corner had a heavy, armored door that looked like a cross between bank vault and submarine hatch, complete with a wheel at its center above a standard-looking keyhole.

“We’re going to be fine, Riley. You have to stay calm.” Dad ran to the thick door and spun the wheel. After it locked with a clank, he grunted and hauled the door open. “In.”

She stared.

“Riley!”

She jumped and blinked.

Dad grabbed her by the backpack and pushed her through into a chamber larger than the last, twenty by thirty feet at least. To her left in the near corner, an exact copy of his radio set occupied a wooden table. A single bed, more of a cot, lay beyond it at the center of the left wall, past which sat an exposed toilet. The opposite corner had a smaller door, made of white plastic. A wide bookshelf rested against the wall at the end, between the toilet and door, and a mini-kitchen stood at the middle of the right side wall.

Two thick, wooden poles as big around as a telephone post supported the ceiling in the middle. The nearer of the two had a whirring aluminum pipe affixed to it, tipped with ventilation slats and a couple of blue fluttering streamers. A square folding table took up the center of the room, atop a faded blue oval throw rug. One metal chair by it wore a thick layer of dust. The southwest corner to Riley’s immediate right was home to a four-foot tall safe.

The air smelled damp and musty, the concrete floor felt clammy with a hint of wetness.

She spun in place, twitching each time an explosion sounded overhead. Silt fell in waves off the ceiling with every concussion, raining grit on her hair. Dad dropped his backpack on the floor by the radio table, pulled the heavy door closed, and spun the wheel. After flipping a locking bar in place, he finally seemed to calm down. He glanced around for a few seconds before grabbing a faucet-like knob protruding from a copper pipe and spinning it clockwise until it stopped.

“This is like those dungeons creepers build to hide their kidnap victims.” As the adrenaline of running through explosions wore off, she felt less and less comfortable being outside wearing only an oversized tee and panties. “I don’t like it here.”

“Creeper dungeon? What kind of movies did your mother let you watch?” Dad looked over from the radio, eyebrow up.

“Uh… that was the news, not the movies.” She shivered. “It’s freezing in here.”

He didn’t look over. “There’re pants in your bag.”

She became aware of the weight of shoulder straps, once more realizing a heavy pack perched on her back. Another detonation thundered through the ground. Something in a cabinet by the mini-kitchen station fell over. The image of the military convoy, the missiles, and the bombers in the sky looped on the movie screen of her mind.

“Dad, what’s happening?” She shrugged out of the backpack and ran to him. “Dad…”

“I don’t know yet.” He fiddled with the radio. “I’m trying to find out.”

Riley screamed and ducked into a squat at a particularly loud blast, which caused the lights to falter for a second. She jumped on the bed and curled up in a ball, huddled at the pillow end, which was closest to Dad. The scratchy green wool Army blanket wasn’t much, but she felt better clinging to it.

“This is Black Sheep. Colonel Bering, copy?”

Boom.
More dust fell from above.

With a whimper, Riley drew her knees to her chin and shivered. Her mind raced. North Korea on the news, the nuclear missiles driving by, the terror-stricken look in Dad’s eyes that morning. What had the radio told him? Did Russia do something? She thought back to dad on the phone in Mom’s house, talking about the death of some guy with a Russian sounding name.

Boom.

She pulled the blanket up over her face and cowered. Not long after another explosion, a droplet of water hit her on the head. She looked up at copper piping along the ceiling. One went to the back of the toilet, with a branch off headed to the mini-sink along the south wall.

“Colonel Bering, copy. This is Black Sheep. What is your status? Over.”

Boom.

That time, Riley didn’t twitch. She ducked deeper under the blanket―only her eyes faced the world.

“Damn. Comms must be out.” Dad fiddled with a dial. “Black Sheep to Colonel Bering, come back?”

Riley sniffled, shivering from fear as much as cold. Worry in Dad’s voice piled onto her already anxious mind, until a faint red glow winked on from a box mounted to the wall by the armored door. She perked up enough to get a better look.

The light emanated from behind a transparent plastic front. It wouldn’t have frightened her as much as it did, if not for the radiation symbol painted in black upon the clear part.

“Dad?”

He shifted in the chair so he could look at her.

She pointed. “What’s that red light mean?”

As soon as he saw it, a tear ran out of the corner of her father’s eye. “No…”

iley stopped sobbing maybe an hour later. Rumbles continued pounding overhead, though no dust fell on her anymore. Fetal, on her side, she stared across the bunker under the folding table at the micro-kitchen. Scenes from
The Last Outpost
filtered through her mind, changing to fit the real world. What happened to Amber? Was the East Coast hit too? How many died? Did Las Cerezas still exist?

Kieran.

Riley jumped out of bed and ran to the door. She tried the wheel, but it refused to budge, even with her grunting and bracing a foot on the freezing door.

“Riley!” Dad ran over and grabbed her arms. “What are you doing?”

“Kieran’s still out there!” She wailed. “We have to go get them.”

He pulled her away from the glowing red box. “No, Riley. I’m sorry… we can’t go outside. There’s lethal radiation up there.”

“But…” She struggled to reach for the wheel. “We have to
try
!”

He collected her in a bear hug, pinning her arms. “I’m sorry, honey. There’s nothing we could’ve done.” He shot a wary look at the red light. “We’re lucky we got in here when we did… a matter of minutes.”

They said the same thing about Mom.
She pictured Tommy’s melting away to smoke in the heat of a nuclear inferno. Her legs gave out and she wound up hanging in his grip. He carried her to the bed, sat on the edge, and held her like a four-year-old who’d had a nightmare.

“He can’t be dead. I just told him I’d be his girlfriend. No.” She bawled.

Dad held on until her loud, wracking sobs faded to soft whimpers. He eased her off his lap and pulled the blanket over her shoulders before heading to the bookshelf. Riley sat motionless, staring into space. He returned holding a white bottle with a mushroom cloud on the label and handed her a pill.

“I don’t want it.”

He pressed it into her palm. “You should take this. It’s iodide. It will protect you from radiation uptake and damage to your thyroid.”

She opened her hand and looked at the innocuous white pill, which could’ve been an aspirin.

Dad returned with a plastic cup of water.

“Aren’t you going to take one?”

“I’m over forty so it’s not that important. Besides, that’ll mean more for you.”

She sniveled. “Please don’t leave Kieran and his family out there.”

A distant rumble shuddered through the ceiling
.

“We’re still under attack. That red light means there’s lethal levels of radiation within a hundred yards of the way out. Holloman or Area 51 must have taken a direct hit. If we go outside, we’re going to die. Slow, painful, horrible deaths.”

She gulped down the pill and went through another round of sobbing. Dad squeezed her close, crying a little himself.

“What happened, Daddy?”

“I’m not sure. Probably North Korea, but it could’ve been Russia. Hell, maybe even a foreign agent compromised India and launched something at random. Past couple of months, the world’s been like a room full of angry cats. Step on one tail, you have a huge crap storm. You saw those missiles… command had to have been expecting something. I don’t think we went down without a fight.” He grumbled. “Hell, for all I know, maybe we shot first.”