CHAPTER NINE
Thirteen Days Post Bombs
White Sulphur Springs, WV
The smoke that trickled into the communications room wasn’t alarming as much as it was irritating. Troy wasn’t thinking at first. He believed that it was perhaps some wire burning, something simple. He told Madeline to leave, but he didn’t expect her to leave the shelter.
She was escorted out and Troy figured it was to the other level. After all, the bunker was a contained environment.
After radioing and tracing the source of the smoke, Troy had a bad feeling. What if the enemy tapped into their location and was using the outside ventilation to smoke them out? Immediately, he went into lockdown, closing and securing all bunker doors, both interior and tunnel entrances. No one was getting in. Every entrance was closed. The lockdown was protected by a two-person number system.
It was when he returned to get the president that he realized she was outside. By the time he had Major Reyes put in his code, the ground shook with explosions.
Troy’s heart raced out of control. What had he done? He sent out the president into the madness.
Six minutes.
It was a lifetime.
Six minutes it took to open the doors, arm up, and charge out.
He led the troops.
Racing up the tunnel entrance he could hear the gunfire. It was steady, in the distance, and then just as he reached topside, it slowed down like popping corn.
He emerged to fire.
The beautiful grounds had been set aflame, the once grand, white Greenbrier resort… burned. The entire left wing was engulfed in flames and thick black smoke billowed up into the air.
He had over twenty men on the perimeter, and body parts scattered about.
Every vehicle they had outside was destroyed.
He could hear screaming, and Troy charged toward them.
One of his soldiers was trapped in a burning truck. His hands pounded against the smoky glass. The door had been jammed and Troy jumped on the hood of the burning vehicle, smashed the windshield, and pulled out the driver.
He died within seconds.
“No, no, no!” Troy cried out. How could he be so stupid? How could he let it happen?
She was gone.
One lone soldier stationed on the exterior lived.
“They took her,” he said. “They took her, put her in the truck, and shot the two men with her.”
Defeated was an understatement. He was tasked with the job of keeping the president safe and he failed.
Troy’s next move was to find her. He also had to abandon the bunker; he didn’t know if the enemy would be back or not.
He and his remaining men, all seventy of them, gathered every weapon they could, bagged supplies and water, and hit the road. They divided up. Some went south toward Charleston. Troy went north. He figured that was where they had reports of invading troops. They would have to take her close.
Two days into the journey, exhausted from walking, wounds failing to heal, Troy spotted an orange flyer posted on a telephone pole outside a rest stop.
It was oddly placed, almost as if it wasn’t supposed to be there and Troy knew as soon as he saw it, that the flyer was coded.
It had to be.
To him it screamed a call to arms, a recruitment for a resistance. Something Troy was wanting to do.
With that flyer in hand, he radioed his men that had headed south and then, with his group, headed to the location on that flyer.
Hanlen, WV
When Cal was in secondary school, he had a class called Personal and Social Education. They were doing a study on war and effects on society and as preparation for the class discussion Cal watched two movies. Both were on nuclear war and both of them made during the height of the cold war era. They weren’t propaganda, they were a hard look at would could happen.
While the American movie, The Day After, really was medically informative, the BBC drama, Threads, scared the hell out of him so much that he had forgotten all about the American film. Threads was horrific; it dealt with the blast aftermath and the downfall of society.
And in the aftermath of his own personal confrontation with nuclear war, Cal was ready to kick himself for forgetting those movies.
How could he do so? He debated those movies in class, he had nightmares. Yet for some reason, knowing full well nuclear weapons had exploded by him, everything he learned from those films remained hidden in the file cabinet of his mind until he ended up on a cot in the medical camp.
Suddenly, upon looking around, he was in that final gymnasium scene of The Day After. Scores of people laying on cots and whatever they could find. The hero of the movie, limping his way to his love interest ravaged by radiation. All of it could have been avoided had he remembered an inkling of what he saw in those movies. Had he done so he would have insisted on finding shelter, at least for a week. None of them would be ill.
The effects on his body should not have come as a shock to him. He knew better. There was no one to blame for his ignorance.
Back then, when he watched them, nuclear war was a thing of the past. A relic of an age gone by, pretty much a fable that would never happen. However, there he was making his way to Louise.
He hobbled across the gym floor, stepping over sick people. Victims of war, fleeing from their home cities that were hit. Refugees hoping to find a safe haven became incapacitated radiated statistics stuck in a high school gym.
Just like Louise.
Cal made it his personal job to take care of her. Several times a day he tended to her, fed her, washed her, changed her, and at the end of the day, he sat with her. More than anything he wanted to move her somewhere private, but there was nowhere to move her. Not yet. Once she was better and didn’t need constant attention and IV treatment, Cal could move her to a classroom.
Then again, there was little medical help available. One doctor, two nurses and a few volunteers. That was it. There was news and chatter on the radio that help was coming. However, that seemed like a fairytale as supplies diminished.
There were positives.
Cal didn’t look nearly as bad as he felt.
He successfully avoided his reflection fearing he’d look like one of those stricken in the movie The Day After, or from the multitudes of images he had scene from Hiroshima. Surprisingly, he wasn’t as bad as his mind imagined. He wore a baseball cap to cover his balding head, his weight loss wasn’t as drastic as many, and he didn’t have radiation birthmark-like discoloration that many had. His radiated wounds were healing and he hadn’t lost his teeth. Something many of those in the gym had experienced. Their teeth just fell out.
Shortly after Cal gathered the strength to stand and help, he discovered Jake and Ricky. Since both of them weren’t nearly as bad as Cal, he encouraged them to get up and get moving.
They did.
Cal was convinced that staying busy was what made him feel better.
The three of them were quickly educated on what to do.