Panting for air.
She settled her mind, steadied her respiration, and doubled her pace.
Noble checked his watch. Twenty minutes to the drop point.
‘Captain Pinback,’ he called over his shoulder.
Pinback clumsily unbuckled his harness and left the EWO station. He stood at Noble’s shoulder.
‘Take over. Fly the plane.’
Noble stood up. Pinback sat in the remaining pilot seat, secured straps and checked instrumentation. Hand on the thrust lever, hand on the stick. The twin portholes of his blast helmet reflected the storm beyond the cockpit windows.
Noble patted him on the shoulder.
‘Thank you, Captain.’
Noble headed to the back of the flight deck. He ducked beneath viscous drip-strands of melted insulation hanging from overhead cable runs as if they were cobwebs.
He settled in the gunner seat in front of the launch controls, and buckled his harness.
He checked his watch.
Seventeen minutes to target.
Frost’s leg gave out.
Pain grew until she could feel the jarring impact of each footfall in her fingers, her teeth.
She covered a full mile so consumed by agony it filled her senses, rendered her near deaf and blind.
Then her leg simply ceased to function and she fell face down in the sand.
She massaged the limb, punched it, cursed it. She tried to get to her feet, but immediately fell on her ass.
How far was she from the plane?
Had she reached safe distance?
She dragged herself up a high dune and rolled down the other side. She took shelter in a deep depression, hoping to avoid the worst of the gamma flash.
She unhooked her belt canteen and shook it. Dregs. She emptied the bottle, shook last drops into her mouth, and tossed it.
She looked at the sky. The storm was clearing.
Weird serenity. She had done what she could to survive. Live or die. It was out of her hands.
She touched the empty sheath strapped to her chest rig, stroked the Ranger insignia stamped on the leather. She put up a good fight. Her father would have been proud. He would have nodded approval, said, ‘Good job.’
The gas mask pouch, still slung round her chest and shoulder. She pulled the hood over her head and secured the mask.
She pictured the warhead, sitting in the blood-red light of the payload bay. A simple steel canister bedded into the flight-frame of the missile. The exposed physics package, trailing cable, ready to fire the moment the Tomahawk received the Go signal from the B-52’s weapon management system and became a self-governing entity.
She sat and waited for the blast.
Noble checked his watch.
‘Sixty seconds. Hold her steady.’
He flipped open the twin WPN REL switch covers.
Missile status paneclass="underline" all green.
His battered copy of The Little Prince sat on the console beside him. He picked it up and hugged it to his chest.
He stared at his G-Shock and counted down the final seconds.
He reached forwards, put his fingers on the twin release switches.
‘Ten… nine… eight… seven…’
Mix of exhaustion and relief in his voice, like a guy making it home after a long, long journey.
‘…three… two… one.’
One moment Liberty Bell lay broke-backed and beached in sand. Next moment she was consumed by unholy light.
57
Frost sat looking down at her gloved hands. She thought about being alive, the fact of existence.
Gamma flash.
For an instant she could see finger bones, look right through her hand like an X-ray.
She blinked her vision clear.
She ought to duck-and-cover, but the instinct to take shelter was overcome by a compulsion to see the blast.
She scrambled to the top of the dune.
Ten megaton ground burst. Stellar heat. The fission core rose over the desert like a second sun, a dust vortex drawn skywards, blossoming into a vertiginous mushroom cloud.
The monstrous thunderclap of detonation.
The firestorm rushed towards her across the desert. An oncoming juggernaut of flame.
She threw herself against the side of the dune, scrambled and squirmed to get beneath the sand before she was engulfed by a wave of superheated air.
58
Miles of desert fused to iridescent glass.
Scalloped dunes, shaped by blast-wind, formed the petrified troughs and waves of a frozen ocean. Sand, momentarily liquefied by supernova heat, frothed at the crest of each ridgeline like delicate, glassy foam.
An infernal, smouldering landscape. Gunshot cracks as the crystalline crust began to cool.
A gloved fist punched through vitrified dust. A succession of blows broke an aperture wide enough for Frost to twist and squirm free.
She climbed to her feet. Dust streamed from her flight suit and respirator. Boots slid on silica glazed slick as ice. She struggled to retain her balance.
Heart-hammering asphyxia. She tore off her mask and threw it aside, part suffocated by sand-clogged filters. She bent double, whooped for air.
She caught her breath and straightened up.
She climbed to the crest of the dune, each footstep crunching through a brittle layer of trinitite, and stood looking east towards the crash site.
The mushroom cloud risen thirty thousand feet, a mighty column of dust and smoke blocking the sun, turning day to red twilight.
She stared in awe.
Somewhere, within the cloud, were the remains of Liberty Bell and her crew. They had been reduced to their constituent atoms, transmuted to rare isotopes, and were now diffused among the mesosphere.
She tied a bandana over her mouth and nose. A rudimentary fallout mask. One last glance at the thunderous cloud, then she turned and headed for the mountains.
Lacquered dunes glittered red sunlight. Her boots crunched glass as she travelled west across a transformed world.
LaNitra Frost. A solitary figure limping across a crystal sea.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Charles Walker and Katy Jones at United Agents, and Oliver Johnson and Anne Perry at Hodder.
All illustrations by Noel Baker.
About the Author
Before writing his novels, Adam Baker worked as a gravedigger and a film projectionist. Impact is his fourth horror novel.
www.facebook.com/adambakerauthor
http://darkoutpost.blogspot.com/
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Also by Adam Baker
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Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Adam Baker 2014
The right of Adam Baker to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.