He’d had some trouble with his thick fingers getting the blade opened. He remembered how just a few hours ago he’d used it to spring the car window! How different a world that was! He began to grow woozy with blood loss. The blade probed stupidly at the arming button. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Yet there came a second when the blade seemed to lock under something, seemed to hold steady, and Gregor leaned against it.
There was a pop, and the button itself flashed out of its receptacle and disappeared. He’d pried it loose! He bent, saw nothing, only a wire lead headed through a hole down through the armored case.
He stared at it.
His lungs issued the moan of a leaking organ, a last long grace note falling out of the riddled apparatus. He felt like a fool, an oaf. What could a man do in the face of such madness?
The numbers flashed ever onward, pulling the world toward fire and nothingness. He heard himself screaming at the insanity of it. His rage grew until it was animal, and from all that he had left he screamed again and again, as if the volume of his voice could somehow halt the rush of the numbers.
The numbers fell out of focus.
He blinked and they were back.
2359:18
2359:19
2359:20
He screamed again.
Then he lifted the pistol and set its barrel into the receptacle out of which he’d plucked the button.
He fired.
The gun bucked in his hand and flew free, out into space. The smell of powder rose to his nose.
Gregor laughed.
He’d tried to stab, and now shoot, an atom bomb!
At least he had his wit at the end of the world.
It was all sliding away in the foolish flutter of the numbers. His focus wobbled, then quit altogether. He was lost in blindness. The pain inside had become awful. A dog was loose in his guts, eating them.
Vodka! Vodka!
He reached into his jacket pocket. It was still there! He pulled the thing out and, not risking losing his grip on the bomb, he simply smashed the bottle neck against the table, shattering it, and brought the jagged nozzle to his mouth.
Hot fire raced down, its taste a century’s worth of mercy. Here’s to vodka, I drink to vodka!
He lifted the bottle in toast as the seconds rushed toward the last, the final, the midnight that was forever.
“I drink to the bomb!” he shouted.
“I drink to the motherland!” he shouted.
“1 drink to Comrade General Arkady Pashin!” he shouted.
And he allowed the bomb to drink.
Into the hole blown through the button channel by the bullet he poured what was left of the vodka.
“Drink, you motherfucker,” he shouted. “Drown your sorrows in vodka as better men before you have, you goat-fucking son of a bitch.”
The bomb drank the liquid hungrily.
2359:52
2359:53
2359:54
Gregor watched the numbers slide away with growing, hazy disinterest. They were like a red tide of blood, come to choke the world in its own rotten evil. A laugh bubbled from Gregor’s lips. He watched the numbers reach toward midnight….
2359:55
2359:56
2359:57
2359:58
2359:58
:58
:58
Gregor stared at the number: forever and ever, it would read:58.
Then the light blinked off.
Gregor’s head fell forward and he slid to the floor, where he quietly bled to death.
It was a joke!
It was a fucking joke!
And heeeere’s MIRV.
“What’s it on? Is it on a piece of paper or something?”
“It’s on a card, taped to the—”
“Tear it off! Tear it off!” Peter yelled.
He waited a second.
“What’s the letter?”
“B.”
B!
Bypass Primary Separation Mode Check!
“Final launch commencing,” Megan was saying.
“Punch it.”
There was a second in which the universe seemed suspended.
“Punch it! Punch it! Punch it!” Peter was screaming.
“We have an abort,” said Megan. “We have a launch abort.”
The cheers from Delta rose, filling the corridor.
“You did it, Walls!” yelled Peter, lurching on the sheer joy of it, the sheer pleasure, looking at his watch to note this moment, to see that it was ten seconds after midnight, and they’d made it, they’d made it!
I beat you, Megan.
He sobbed the truth.
I love you, Megan, Jesus how I lo—
After Midnight
The call came at 1:30 A.M. It awakened Megan on the cot in the small room off the studio. She shook the confusion out of her head, blinked, and thought for just a moment it was Peter again, and the sound of his voice, twisted but recognizable over the wires, came to her in memory. Her heart quickened. She saw his face. She smelled him. In her heart she touched him. But then she heard the yelling, the screaming, the pounding. The agents were acting like boys at some Fourth of July celebration. It was juvenile, party time, and it felt all wrong to her, somebody else’s party. She was frightened.
She got up and went into the studio. They were still pounding each other on the back and shaking hands and hugging and she had a terrible feeling of isolation from them. Then she looked and saw that the older one, the one called Leo, wasn’t part of it.
He walked over to her. Duty, that bitch, shone on his constricted face. There was triumph in him, but no pleasure and actually a good deal of pain.
“Mrs. Thiokol, at about midnight tonight our Delta force unit fought its way into the installation at South Mountain and managed to disable the Peacekeeper missile just prior to launch.”
“So there’s not going to be a World War Three?” she asked hollowly, as if she cared.
“Not tonight,” he said, but there was something else on his face. She knew, of course.
“Peter didn’t make it, did he?”
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry to say, he didn’t. He was hit in the head at the last second after Delta broke in and stopped the launch.”
I see.
She took a deep breath. She thought of her squashed tins, crumpled and lurid on the floor. His head, smashed by the bullet. Peter limp on the floor of some hard governmental site, among lean soldiers busy with the drama of their own existence. It was so imbecilic, she almost laughed.
“If it means anything, they say he was a hero. An incredible hero.”
Oh, this was rich. “A hero.” Oh, Jesus, spare me, you asshole. I mean, who gives a fuck? Am I on your team now? Am I supposed to sleep with some hideous little medal?
“No, no, it doesn’t mean anything,” she said, and went back to her room so that they could not see her grief.
Walls sat mute in the chair, facing the dead board of switches. He felt absolutely wrung out. He felt like he was back in solitary, in the little cell with FUCK NIGGERS scratched into the door.
Then he smiled.
Come through some doors today, yes, sir.
Walls waited in the launch control center for another hour, just like that, sitting there, trying to feel something. The only thing he felt was hunger. He was ravenous. He noticed a brown paper sack lying on the console, spotted with grease. He opened it, and discovered a peanut butter sandwich in a Baggie, a bag of Fritos, and an apple. He gobbled down the sandwich but was still hungry. But he didn’t feel as if he had the energy left to open the Fritos.
Finally, the phone rang again. He picked it up.
“Yo?”
“Walls, this is Delta Six. We’ve mopped up the Soviet resistance now. You can come out.”
“Yes, suh. You best get some medics here. Man in here, hurt bad.”
“Yes, we have medics now.”