“Based on your area of expertise, you already enjoy a number of special clearances. Today, you’re going to be privy to information classified as Top Secret. Understood?”
“Absolutely, Mr. President.”
“Good. You’ve kept us waiting long enough. You may begin.”
Travis approaches the screen at the front of the room, his stomach doing flips. This is it, he realizes. He is meeting the President of the United States. The world is ending, and his nation needs him. Nobody listened to his theory, but now he gets this one chance to make his case. The President will be grudgingly persuaded before committing to decisive action.
Dr. Travis Price saves the world.
On the screen, he sees a map of downtown Miami overlaid with a bull’s eye pattern rendered in shades of red.
What does this have to do with the monsters?
“I don’t understand,” Travis says, staring at it.
The President grunts with irritation, folding his large hands.
Goodall places his elbows on the table and says, “Dr. Price, your area of expertise is the weaponization of nuclear fission, is this correct?”
“Nuclear nonproliferation,” Travis mutters.
The Director reads highlights from his resume, focusing on his support of exercises by the Office of Nuclear Counterterrorism and the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, as well as development for the Radiological Assistance and Consequence Management at the Los Alamos Lab.
“You are one of the nation’s leading experts on the effects of nuclear device combustion on populations in urban centers,” Goodall says.
“That is accurate.”
“Good. Then explain the graphic on the screen, if you please.”
The realization makes him gasp. Even with the world coming to a violent end, the terrorists could not give up their grudge against the Great Satan.
They finally did it. They blew up an American city.
“Who did it?” he says, his face reddening. “What kind of madman would do this?”
Even in collapse, America could, and would, retaliate. He heard America still maintains twenty-four-hour flights of strategic bombers able to drop nuclear warheads virtually anywhere in the world.
Goodall smiles. “This is purely a hypothetical, Dr. Price.”
“Hypothetical, sir?”
“Options,” the President grunts. “All options are on the table.”
“I see,” Travis says, feeling sick.
Terrorists did not bomb Miami. The President wants to bomb Miami. Miami, and perhaps other cities as well.
Pure madness. Things must be worse on the surface than he thought. The cities are filled with Infected and have become breeding grounds for the monsters.
Drop the bomb, and they all go away.
But so do the cities themselves, and millions of survivors still living in them.
During the Cold War, a U.S. Minuteman missile crewman once asked the chain of command how he could verify whether a launch order was coming from a sane President. The generals removed him from his post.
If I voice any dissent, I wonder what they’ll do to me?
“This graph shows the effects of detonation of a one hundred fifty kiloton device at ground level in North Miami,” Travis murmurs. “That’s the average size of a single warhead in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”
“Speak up, Dr. Price,” Goodall says.
“It’s about ten to fifteen times the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everything in the center ring would be exposed to explosive force equaling fifteen pounds of pressure per square inch of overpressure. Everything would be destroyed. People, buildings, everything.”
The bomb explodes in an intensely hot fireball, creating a giant crater hundreds of feet deep and sucking tons of earth into a massive mushroom cloud. Within the blast, buildings and people, normal and Infected alike, vaporize in a flash, becoming part of the cloud. Structures and bodies fly apart in the earthquake and sudden change in pressure. Debris rockets through the air with the force of bullets. Shattered windows turn into flying knives of glass. Miles away, thousands of fires burn, merging into raging firestorms. Flesh melts in the fierce heat; internal organs cook; brains boil. The smog blots out the sun. Dirt and ash rain down as radioactive particulates for miles in every direction, even farther on the winds.
“At a little over a mile from the blast, buildings would suffer heavy damage, and intense heat from the blast would start numerous fires. At a little over two and a half miles, covering El Portal in the south, Pinewood, Golden Glades, most houses—would be—crushed flat—”
His stomach leaps into his throat. He stumbles toward a metal garbage can and vomits. Behind him, he hears a woman mutter, Christ.
“Excuse me, I’m not well,” Travis says, wiping his mouth.
“You may continue when you’re able,” says the President, and turns to ask another man at the table a question about his afternoon schedule.
Travis does not hear the answer. His stomach lurches again, producing a trickle of bile. He spits several times before standing and facing the room with watery eyes, his face burning with embarrassment.
“I apologize, Mr. President. I may have a touch of flu.”
“Tell us about the fallout,” the President says.
“Fallout,” Travis says mechanically, as if he has never heard the word before. “Yes. For a surface burst, outside of ground zero, the area impacted by the blast and the initial nuclear radiation will be less severe than, say, an air burst of similar yield. Local fallout can be dangerous over a large downwind area, however—”
A single gunshot cracks, startling them. The President’s advisers gasp, some already half standing. The President glares at the door.
People are shouting outside in the waiting room.
“John,” the President says to one of his people. “Go take a look.”
“I don’t think we should open the door, Mr. President. You would be exposed.”
“It’s all right, John. I think our people have things under control now.”
The door opens from the outside, giving Travis a clear view. The waiting room is filled with men and women in black body armor. One of the Secret Service agents kneels with his hands on his head, while the other lies grimacing on the floor with a soldier hunched over him, applying a tourniquet to his leg. The other men in suits cower in their chairs.
The President watches them, his face turning from red to purple.
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?”
The soldiers glance at him. The wounded agent cries out in pain. Two men in desert combat uniforms enter the conference room, pistols holstered on their hips.
“Mr. President,” the first man says, taking off his cap.
“General,” the President says. “Glad you’re here. What’s the meaning of all this?”
General Donald McGregor, the chairman of the joint chiefs, is a wiry stringbean of a man compared to the President, but just as intimidating. Travis once met him during nuclear terrorism exercises. He is a ruthless son of a bitch, much like Fielding, and with incredible power at his command.
The General pauses in the doorway, taking in the red rings radiating from downtown Miami on the screen. Travis steps away from it, trying to disappear. McGregor frowns. His eyes flicker to meet the President’s.
“That, sir,” he says, pointing at the screen, “is not going to happen.”
The man behind the General whistles. Soldiers in black body armor file into the room, carrying automatic weapons.
Ray
Unsure of whether he is struggling toward air or plunging deeper into abyss, the man swims against warm tidal currents. Light sparkles in the thick, murky depths. He lets go and drifts weightless toward consciousness.