Barron’s soldiers surrounded the facility, taking cover behind armored trucks. As I watched, the last of the Ligados soldiers fell. I couldn’t see Paul anywhere.
“Cease fire,” a booming voice said, amplified to be heard above the gunfire and accompanied by a brief, piercing tone. I felt the command deep in my gut, and wished desperately that I had a gun, so I could cease firing it. McCarrick’s fungus had apparently reached my brain.
The shooting stopped, leaving an eerie quiet that seemed to echo across the desert. I sat up carefully, my heart still thudding with adrenaline. My ears rang. I looked around. Where was Paul? Then I saw that the elevator doors—the ones with the bullet holes—had closed again. Paul was on his way back down.
Others saw it, too. Soldiers ran for the elevators and jabbed the buttons, then clambered aboard and headed down. They would stop him, I was certain of it. Without the tablet, what could he do? Perhaps there was another way to signal the nukes from below, but I doubted it. The only way to detonate them…
I stood, scanning the ground for the tablet, and spotted it about twenty feet away, black against the black pavement. “Neil!” Shaunessy ran up to me. “Are you okay? Were you hit?”
I told her I was fine. Once she had heard the plan to detonate the nukes underground, she had sneaked back to the top and called Melody. Melody had called General Barron and warned him, and the rest I knew.
“Good,” I said. “You did it. You saved everyone.”
“I don’t think they were going to change their minds,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
She lowered her voice. “Melody knows we’ve been infected with McCarrick’s spores,” she said. “Most of the base is. She said to tell you she’s working the problem.”
“Working it how?”
Shaunessy shrugged. “I don’t know.” She lifted her phone. “I’d better give her a call and tell her you’re all right.”
She put the phone to her ear and turned away from me, using her finger to plug the other ear. I sidled away from her, toward the fallen tablet. There was still a chance. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to me. I bent and picked it up.
The screen was scratched, but otherwise it seemed undamaged. I felt around the outside for the on button and pressed it. The screen came to life, and I swiped once across the front to dismiss the opening display. The tablet showed me the same green button I had seen before. I remembered what I had said to Shaunessy earlier: If I could push a button that killed all the people in the world but helped the fungus spread and survive, I don’t think I could stop myself.
“Put it down, Neil.”
It was Shaunessy’s voice. I didn’t look up. I stretched my finger out to touch the green button. A part of myself, deep inside, screamed at me to stop, but I couldn’t. The desire to push it was just too strong.
But no. I had been here before. It was just like pointing the gun on Shaunessy and trying to keep from pulling the trigger. Then, I had failed. This time, I wouldn’t give in. Pushing that button felt like the best thing in the world, but I knew it was wrong. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted, not the real me. If I pushed it, I would die quickly, but billions around the world would die slowly, in horror and starvation. I thought of my parents. Of Julia, and her baby girl, Ash.
My hand stopped in midair, my finger still outstretched toward the button. I strained against it, the muscles in my arm and neck clenching painfully. A wave of nausea washed over me. Not pushing that button was like not reaching for a glass of water after drinking nothing for days. Or not holding out a hand when a child was drowning. That button, that beautiful green button, encompassed all that was good and right and lovely. It called to me. I had to push it. I just had to.
And then it was gone. I felt the impact before I heard the shot, like a sledgehammer to my shoulder. I hit the ground before I knew I was falling, the tablet tumbling out of my grasp. I screamed in pain and surprise and in sorrow for the loss of the green button.
Shaunessy stalked into my vision, the pistol I had given her still smoking in her hand. She stood over the tablet and fired a bullet down into it, shattering it into pieces. She lifted her phone and said, “I just shot him. We need a medic here, right away.”
Pain arced through my arm and upper body. My vision narrowed. I couldn’t see Shaunessy anymore, just a circle of desert sky. The green button still called to me, and I felt tears running down my face at the opportunity lost.
The only chance left was Paul. Maybe he couldn’t detonate all the nukes without the remote, but if he could just detonate one, that would kill the general and the core of his slave army. It might be enough for the main Ligados forces to the south to regroup and retreat, possibly to make a play for another nuclear facility in the coming weeks.
I imagined him running through the underground tunnel to the place where wires from each of the warheads converged. He would tear away the antenna, find the leads that completed the circuit, and…
The ground buckled under me, an enormous force tossing me into the air… and then nothing.
CHAPTER 35
I opened my eyes. Which shouldn’t have been possible. If Paul had succeeded, even with only one warhead, I shouldn’t be thinking at all.
They explained to me later what had happened. Nuclear weapons work by using conventional explosives to crush a hollow plutonium core, smashing the atoms together and causing a chain reaction. However, if the compression force is not equal in all directions, the core will deform, and the plutonium won’t reach a critical density.
Safety measures generally act on this principle. A liquid is inserted in the core to inhibit symmetrical compression, or else the explosives are electronically wired to prevent simultaneous detonation without a prior signal. The nuclear engineer had programmed the signal to turn off the safety measures into his remote. Paul, however, had simply connected the leads to set off the conventional explosives.
The explosives in two thousand one hundred and eighty-three nuclear warheads packed quite a punch, enough to destroy the elevator shafts, collapse the underground cavern, and injure fifty-seven people on the surface. Cracked plutonium cores were now leaking radiation deep underground where nobody could get to them. It would be the worst radiation disaster in the history of the nation, but the city of Albuquerque—and the world—would survive.
At the time, however, I only knew that I was inexplicably alive, and that every part of my body hurt. My arm was on fire. My head throbbed, and my muscles felt battered and bruised. I wasn’t sure if I could move.
A voice came over the loudspeakers, but this time it was female. Melody’s voice. “The enemy has been defeated,” she said. “General Barron is no longer in command. You want to put your weapons down. You want to return to the medical facility in Kirtland Base where you will await your allocation of antifungal medications. Your greatest desire will be to take these medications, in the prescribed dose, for the next three years.”
The smoke and dust cleared a little, and Shaunessy stepped into view, now without her pistol. She looked up into the sky for a few minutes, squinting against the bright sun. Finally, she looked at me. “Sorry about that,” she said.
I could hardly breathe from the pain, but I gave her what I thought was a smile. “I deserved it,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, and her smile was brilliant. “Yes, you surely did.”
Melody visited me at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque. I still felt groggy from surgery, where they had removed bullet fragments from my shoulder. Shaunessy’s bullet had hurt me more seriously than mine had hurt her, fracturing my humerus right at the joint and damaging ligaments and cartilage. It would be a while before I could fly back to Maryland, and my whole arm would stay in a cast for weeks.