Samantha was weeping now and Alex paced in short vicious steps between the other boys, pressing his ‚sts tight against his head. “Those bastards!” he said. “Those bastards!”
Everyone else was hushed. The instinct to hide was overpowering, and Brandon made little noise as his father dabbed at his cuts with a dirty shirt sleeve, trying to stop the bleeding.
“Nine and a half minutes,” Newcombe remarked, studying his watch again.
His self-control was incredible and Ruth attacked it without thinking, full of envy and disbelief. “What are you doing!” she shouted.
“Approximately nine and a half minutes from detonation until the ‚rst quake,” Newcombe said. He almost seemed to be talking to himself, as if memorizing the information, and Ruth knew he’d write it in his notebook as soon as he got the chance.
“What does that mean?” she asked. “It must have been close—”
“I don’t know,” Newcombe said.
“It must have been Utah or even someplace in Nevada!”
“I don’t know.”
Samantha tucked herself against D Mac, weeping. Hiroki and Kevin quickly scrunched in on either side and kept their heads down. Ruth discovered she was also crying. When had that started? She rubbed her hand against the wetness on her face and looked away from the children. She wanted so badly to lean into Cam and close her eyes, but she hadn’t earned the right. She could only cross her good arm over her cast and hug herself.
He was preoccupied with Newcombe and Alex anyway. The boy had crouched with the two men, forming a tense wall around the radio. They found nothing except crackling white noise, channel after channel. “David Six, this is George,” Newcombe said. “David Six, do you copy?”
Static.
“Does anyone copy my signal? Come back. Anyone. Do you read me? This is California.”
Static.
“I know it works,” Newcombe said. “See? The batteries are good and we must’ve been far enough away that the circuitry wasn’t shorted out by the electromagnetic pulse.”
Alex said, “So what’s wrong?”
“The sky. Look at it. Too much disturbance.” Newcombe pulled his binoculars and dared a few glances to the east, then north and south. “That was very big,” he said softly. “As far as I can tell, it was way out over the horizon, right?”
Ruth pleaded with him. “We couldn’t even see it if it was in Colorado, could we? It’s too far.”
“I don’t know.” Newcombe unfolded their map of North America and set his notebook beside it, scribbling down 9.5. “Leadville is what, seven hundred miles from here? Call it seven hundred and twenty. But who else would be a target? White River?”
“Wait, I know this,” Mike said with his palms still over his eyes. “With the curvature of the planet…Seven hundred miles, we could only see it if it was, uh…”
“White River already got their asses handed to them,” Newcombe said. “Why hit ’em again? Especially with a nuke. Even a neutron bomb. The land’s too precious.”
“We could only see it if it was sixty miles high,” Mike told them. “No way.”
“It must have been in the mountains, though,” Newcombe said. “There’s nobody to bother with underneath the barrier, right? So the strike had to be at elevation.”
“Leadville’s only two miles up.”
“But it looked like a †ashlight, right? Shit, look at it now,” Newcombe said, forgetting that Mike was half-blind. “It went straight through the sky.”
“The atmosphere’s just not sixty miles tall,” Mike insisted, but he was wrong. Life-sustaining amounts of oxygen could not be found even as low as the tip of Mount Everest, at twenty-nine thousand feet, and yet Ruth knew that the gaseous layers enshrouding the planet actually rose beyond the orbit of the space station, more than two hundred miles above sea level, although the farthest reaches of the exosphere were thin indeed.
Ruth had to believe her own eyes. She couldn’t ignore Newcombe’s training. Leadville was the most powerful city on the continent — the most high-value target — and a doomsday bomb at that altitude might easily have sent its light all the way through the sky. Maybe the †ash had bounced. There was no question that the column of heat behind the light had bubbled up far above the cloud layer, the force of it reverberating back and forth for hundreds of miles.
Would it reach them? The radiation, Cam had said, and Ruth felt the wild seesaw of emotions in her change again. She began to mourn. She hadn’t made many friends during her short time in Leadville, but the ISS crew was there along with nearly everyone else she knew in the world, James Hollister, her fellow researchers, and other people who had done their best to help. Four hundred thousand men and women. In all likelihood they had just been vaporized — and yet she felt ambivalent about Gary LaSalle and the weapons tech he’d developed in support of the insane, brutal schemes of Kendricks and the president’s council.
Was that what this was about? Who had launched the missile, the rebels? A foreign enemy?
Ruth laid her good hand on the dirt and traced her ‚ngers through one boot print, as if the broken tread marks were some sort of Braille. As if there were answers.
“It couldn’t be Colorado,” Mike said.
“Look, kid, somebody just shot off a few warheads!” Newcombe yelled. “You—”
Cam stopped them. “Easy,” he said. He had been quiet for several minutes and Ruth realized this wasn’t the ‚rst time she’d seen him step aside to gauge everyone’s state of mind before neatly solving a problem. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter!?” Alex shouted.
“Whatever happened, we have to decide what to do. I say we all get moving. Today. Now.” Cam gestured east into the valley below them. “We need to try to reach as many other people as possible and get off the mountains.”
For an instant, there was only the wind.
“Before there are more bombs,” Cam said.
“Yeah. Yeah, all right.” Newcombe glanced at the Scouts and their stunned faces, Mike with his hands still on his eyes, Brandon squeezing his palm against his bloody cheek.
“We split up,” Cam said. His voice was aggressive now, and he pointed at Ed and Alex. “Three groups. You, you, and us. That just makes the most sense.” He kept his back to the hole in the sky, staring at them instead. “We have to do this,” he said. “Get up. We’re going.”
* * * *
D Mac and Hiroki chased Ed back up to their camp to grab the rest of their packs and sleeping bags as Cam unwrapped his left hand again. He reopened the knife wound he’d made earlier, bleeding too much into a tin cup.
“No,” Samantha said to her brother. “Please, no.”
Brandon shook his head. “We can’t stay here, Sam. You know we can’t.”
Alex drank from the cup quickly and Kevin did the same, but Alex took it back from him when Samantha refused. “He’s right,” Alex said. “Come on. He’s right.”
“Stay with me,” she said.
The ground trembled lightly again and they heard one of boys shout on top of the mountain. Then the earth heaved. Ruth was still sitting down but immediately lost her balance. She thought she bounced. Cam and Newcombe slammed down on either side of her and someone kicked her arm, a bolt of pain. Her mind went white. Somewhere there was screaming, Samantha and Brandon and herself.
Gradually she realized it was over. She looked for Cam and saw his face bent with his own agony. He lay on his side, picking dirt out of the cut on his bad hand. Kevin groaned, testing his ankle. Ruth heard more yelling from above and Mike said, “What’s happening?”