Airburst.
It’s coming it’s coming—
What if she had not been in the canyon? The cave?
That thought lingered, resonating upon the hovering and fragility-infected length of one, shell-shocked moment that went on and on forever, a moment of blinding light and nothing else, soundless and impossible.
The white light pierced through the waterfall, the darkness, it turned her rear-facing mirrors into squares of snowblind purity, sunburst utter white and utter glory. The radio died in a huge burst of static. The wailing klaxon was silenced upon the mountain.
Some voice of reason deep inside her, Tom is that you? Are you here? Are you alive?, was whispering to her in its silence, Think, Sophie. Not impact yet, it’s airburst. Airburst. Knocking out communications, the—
The blinding light turned scarlet. The one moment fractured.
A wave of heat swelled through the waterfall, spinning its arcs of water into gouts of ice and steam. The H4’s tinted windows flared and turned to deepest black. Sophie hit the brakes to avoid hitting the end wall of the cave. She went blind. She took in a breath to scream, but the shock of it all was stolen from her as an immense thunderclap shook the cave walls, made the mountain groan and set the H4’s windows juddering and quaking in their frames. Somehow the driver’s door lock sprang up and a little dying alarm went off, two chirps then done and gone.
The sonic boom of the airburst nuclear strikes — over Denver and NORAD and the Air Force Academy and Colorado Springs — turned into a long, cascading tide of overlapping waves of roar and thunder.
It’s happening. It’s really happening.
Seconds had passed, eternity.
At ten miles an hour, with tinted windows blinded off and doused in the savage light of the aerial nuclear explosion, the H4 crunched into the far wall of the cave. One of the airbags, the passenger airbag of all things, went off with a bang and puffed away half of Sophie’s interior space.
She coughed, a gargling sound. She swallowed stomach acid.
The windows began to de-tint themselves. One headlight was broken, the other casting a garish light directly against the cave wall. Back behind her, outside, the airburst fireball flickered the mirrors once more, and the windows all went dark again. Thousands more nuclear warheads were soon to fall. The real strike, the ground strike, would come down now in mere minutes, with no defense systems or aircraft operational to stop them.
Everyone in Black Hawk would burn. The world.
As if disembodied, thinking but unable to act, trembling there with vomit dripping down her silk blouse and down her ankles, Sophie wondered: if millions of people were to scream at once, all crouched down in their basements and their office building shelters, would she be able to hear it there, miles away?
Soon.
Soon, soon, soon.
No time
no time no time
Sophie struck herself, her unfeeling thigh, her face. She shook the steering wheel in a frenzy, grunting and sobbing, as if doing so would wake her from the nightmare. A thought was racing like fire inside of her, if she could only concentrate for a moment, hear it, think instead of just feeling this terrible immediacy of panic—
Get inside
get inside the shelter
get get in
nnnnnnnnnn
She opened the driver’s door, clicked out of the seatbelt and tumbled down onto the frigid and muddy cave floor. Somehow she had turned off the ignition—but when?—and the keys were clutched in her right hand, the hand that was shaking madly and angled like some strange piece of ivory that was no longer a part of her. Light, an accursed and incredibly hot sheet of crimson light, was shivering through the waterfall from outside and turning the cave into a horrid striped tangle of light and blindness.
She gagged on the exhaust trapped in the cave. She was still on the ground. Everything was sideways, and cold mud was getting into her mouth and filling up her hair.
She crawled up on all fours, looked around frantically for the shelter’s entrance, and she could see the pale green glo-lites along the cave floor, their feeble and ceaseless radiance made sickly by the burning fires of the roiling sky outside.
Shelter!
She was soaked, freezing, burning, sweating, covered in filth and vomit and tangled up in the door-torn remnant of her skirt. Kicking off her shoes, she crawled for the hidden hollow that led in deep to the shelter’s ladder, guided only by the glo-lites themselves. The scarlet light and unearthly heat burned away behind her.
There were air shafts piped over her head, vents and grills and tubes, and a huge artificial square in the left cave wall, half-covered by a muddy blue plastic tarp. Yanking the tarp, popping its fringe out of shower-curtain loops, Sophie saw the crude narrow gash in the rock which led down into the shelter far below.
She was nearly in darkness then, and another wave of thunder rose and tumbled down through the canyon far behind her. Was that the wave of another nuclear detonation in the atmosphere, another airburst, just now reaching her from dozens or hundreds of miles away? Which city had just been blacked out and presaged for destruction? Laramie? Boulder? What if this was being repeated over every city in the nation, every military base, every city in the world?
Where were Mitch and Lacie?
Tom?
She kicked the cold metal activator plate near the floor, encircled with its own emerald ring of glo-lites. Her pupils shrank and her eyes filled with stinging tears as the fluorescent grid lights along the left wall pulsed on, the ones most needing replacement flickering crazily before burning with a false, unwarming light. She edged deeper into the hollow. The claustrophobic shaft was just three feet in front of her, its dripping and icy aluminum ladder leading down into the dark. The oval lights inset between the ladder’s rungs flicked on one at a time, down and down, and somewhere deep behind walls of stone a generator was humming on.
Did it always run? Had she just activated it?
Sophie crawled to the ladder, nearly slipped head-first into the shaft. It was far, far deeper than she remembered. She righted herself, slipped with her bare foot onto a low rung and caught herself with her other foot kicking and curling, Get down, down, she looped her elbows into the ladder, coughed vomit, began to climb down into the shelter’s entryway.
She fell off the ladder near the bottom, dropped six inches and tilted into the shaft wall.
Seconds later, shivering so hard that she could barely control her arms and legs, Sophie hunched down upon the landing in front of the steel-plated vault door. Her toes curled around the drainage grill that was gurgling with frigid water at her feet.
She spun the door’s auto-locking wheel, her hands slipping off the condensation droplets, beads of water stuck between the grooves of the wheel’s inner rubber ring. The wheel squealed, spun, stuttered and then jammed.
No!
She pushed harder in the opposite direction, then counter-clockwise again. The wheel jammed in the same position with an angry screeching of hidden gears.
Sophie screamed, throwing all of her weight into the wheel. Come on! Harder.