Standing at the top of stairwell, dressed head-to-toe in his NBC suit, complete with gas mask, he turned the lever and opened the door, accessing the security vestibule for the first time since the impact. He went in and Vasquez sealed the door behind him as he made his way to blast door number one.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m cracking door number one.”
“Roger that.”
Kane turned the wheel and pulled the lever to open the door, keeping his .45 at the ready as he stepped from the vestibule into the basement of the house. He pulled the door closed behind him and told Vasquez that it was clear for him to come and seal it.
Vasquez opened door number two and ran down the vestibule, pulling the lever to seal blast door one tight behind Kane and spinning the big red wheel. Then he left the vestibule and resealed blast door two, restoring complete integrity to the silo. “LC, we’re a hundred percent again,” he announced over the net.
“Roger,” Ulrich replied from Launch Control. “Marcus, we’ve still got zero movement above. You’re clear to enter the house.”
“Roger.” Kane ascended the stairs and opened the door into the house. The first thing he noticed was that the floor was covered with a thin film of grayish black dust not visible on the monitors. “I’m in the hall,” he said.
“We’ve got visual.”
“There’s a lot of ash in here,” he remarked, moving into the living room, where everything looked filthy now and the dead body was mostly eaten away. Outside, the day was gray and overcast, with a dark layer of continuous cloud looming much lower over the ground than he had expected.
Stepping out the back door, Kane scanned the landscape through the scope of his M-4, seeing nothing alive, not even a bird. The only movement was the ash and dust blowing about. The mutilated corpse of the dead man by the grill was frozen and covered in filth. The outside of the house was scorched, the tan vinyl siding twisted and melted by the heat of the grass fires as they had passed. Nothing had regrown and there was no real color anywhere.
He scanned 360 degrees around the house to make sure there were no threats on the horizon, then took a rake from the back porch and went to the garden. “It’s all clear up here, Jack.”
“Roger. I’m lowering the lift.”
Kane saw the garden begin to drop into the earth and stepped back as the sound of the hydraulic lift pervaded the breezy silence. Dirt fell over the edges of the opening as the deck descended fifteen feet to the bottom of the cargo bay. Kane stood looking down as Forrest drove the Humvee up onto the garden-covered deck, which was just big enough to hold a single Army six-by-six truck. Forrest then jumped out of the Humvee and hit a button on the wall.
“Raising the lift,” he announced, and ran to jump back onto the lift as it began to rise. It stopped at the top, locking into place, and he drove the Humvee out of the garden and across the yard to the gravel drive. “Lift up and locked.”
Ulrich acknowledged the transmission as Kane went to work with the rake, quickly smoothing away the tire tracks in the dirt and raking away the square depression in the soil outlining the edges of the lift. In a few hours’ time the wind would do the rest.
Forrest got out of the Humvee and waited for Kane to put the rake away. “Have you tried the air?” he asked.
“No.”
Forrest took the Geiger counter from inside the vehicle. “Background radiation is a tad elevated but still in the green. I’m going to try the air.”
“That’s not a good idea, Jack,” Ulrich said over the net.
“I’m not wearing this mask if I don’t have to.” He pulled the mask from his head and drew a shallow breath, the air smelling to him more like a dirty fireplace than anything else. “There’s a lot of particulate matter but I don’t think it’s volcanic. It’s not hurting my lungs.”
The two loaded up. Kane got behind the wheel and took off his mask, tossing it into Forrest’s lap. “Ready?”
“Definitely. Wayne, we’re going off the net, but leave the receiver on until we get back.”
“Roger that. Good luck.”
“Back before you know it.”
Kane put the Humvee in gear, drove down the hill and out through the fence, stopping at the road. “This is some fucked-up shit here,” he said, leaning into the wheel and looking out. “It’s high noon and look how dark it is. This sky’s never gonna clear up before we run out of food, man.”
“It has to,” Forrest said.
“How’s that?”
“Because if it don’t, we’re fucked.”
Kane grunted and stepped on the gas. “This is a dumb idea, Jack… just so you know.”
Forrest chuckled, lighting up a cigarette. “So why’d you vote with me?”
“Because you’re the best officer I ever had… and if this is gonna be your last mission, I’m gonna be on it.”
Forty-Three
Forrest and Kane had covered all five major medical centers in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, by late afternoon, and they hadn’t found a single frozen bag of intravenous antibiotic in any of the freezers. What they had found were dozens and dozens of dead patients who had been left behind to die.
“I’m sorry,” Kane said, getting in on the passenger side of the Humvee. “It was worth the try, Jack.”
“I’ll drop you back at the silo,” Forrest said, hitting the starter.
“Drop me what?”
“I’m pressing on to Topeka.”
“I knew you’d pull this shit,” Kane said. “Lemme drive.”
Forrest watched the highway as they rode, eyeballing various abandoned cars and trucks, remembering Iraq and Afghanistan, where such vehicles were once as likely to explode when you passed as not. Here, though, he was more concerned about an ambush.
There was almost nothing else to see on the ride south to Topeka, only a few buildings and no sign that anyone had passed that way in the last four months. Even the abandoned vehicles looked decades old, covered in grime, some of them burned to the frame, tires melted into the asphalt.
“McCarthy sure as hell got this part right,” Forrest muttered.
“Who’s McCarthy?”
“He wrote a novel years back about postapocalyptic America. His world was postnuclear rather than postmeteor, but this is almost exactly what he described. He won the Pulitzer for it.”
Kane had never been much of a reader, having always preferred to play sports in his free time. “That’s why I never liked to read, Jack. Who’d want to know about this shit sooner than you had to?”
An hour later he said, “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“Over there to the left, way out. I think I saw a flashlight.”
“You think or you’re sure?” Forrest said, craning his neck to see into the blackness.
“Can’t be sure,” Kane said, not daring to take his eyes from the highway, his speed no faster than forty-five miles an hour. The headlights of the Humvee did not penetrate far enough into the murk for him to be sure they wouldn’t hit some kind of obstruction or debris in the road. Spits of snow had begun to fall as well, adding to the miasma.
“Remember the eighty-four-mile marker,” Forrest said. “On the way back we’ll want to keep our eyes peeled.”
Thirty miles farther on they were approaching the outskirts of Topeka. Along the highway, they began to see signs of past military action, civilian cars armored with welded boilerplate, riddled with .50 cal machine-gun fire, some blown apart—probably by javelin antitank missiles. They passed an M60 tank that had thrown a tread while running over a pickup truck but was otherwise undamaged. They drove slowly through a shattered roadblock, seeing scores of dead bodies strewn about in the dust, all of them strangely mummified now, freeze-dried in the arid cold.