“Most doom-and-gloom predictors prefer eight, but I like being optimistic.”
And practical.
The Palo Verde nuclear power plant lying eighty miles to the west was days away from melting down and spewing radioactive waste. With a storm heading for them, they would be directly in the fallout’s path. And that held only three of the thousand reactors on the planet.
They had a thirty-percent chance of surviving the anthrax.
None of them would escape cancer if they didn’t find a place to duck and cover within the timetable.
And God help them if they received a lethal dose.
There wasn’t enough cyanide to spike everyone’s punch.
“Doc?”
Mavis pushed aside the thoughts and blinked until the screen of her tablet came into focus. A map had replaced her earlier graph. Blips of light arched across the green matrix. “What’s this?”
“Wide view radar.” Lister held his screen next to hers. “It looks like we’re being invaded.”
She glanced at her water bottle then sniffed it. It smelled like water not vodka. “I really need some sleep. I thought you just said invaded.”
“I did.” He set a finger on her screen, shifted the view then tapped it. The image zoomed in on one glowing circle until silver wings appeared.
“That’s a plane.” Please, God, don’t let China have followed up their biological attack with a more conventional one. She tilted the tablet to get a side view of the plane’s logo. Doh! Embarrassment heated her cheeks. Maybe he hadn’t noticed.
“It’s a commercial airliner.” Chuckling, he tapped the screen again and the view widened. Hundreds of dots studded Japanese air space until they merged into one giant splotch as America’s west coast appeared.
The Japanese were invading the US? “What can they be thinking?”
“They’re directly in China and India’s fallout path. The Japs know better than anyone, except the Reds, the shit sandwich they’re about to be served.”
She scrubbed her hands down her face. Why hadn’t she considered this? She’d only gotten sick a couple of days ago. Good Lord, what’s going on in Europe?
Lister shoved his face in hers and breathed stale coffee on her. “Now’s the time to get that big brain of yours working, Doc.”
“I don’t—”
“You do. And you can.” Lister eased away. “What did you do before the war?”
The war. Her brain slipped gears until it found a groove and turned. Funny how she didn’t think of either the influenza pandemic or the germ attack by China as war. Yet it was.
Humanity teetered on the precipice of extinction.
The nuclear meltdown threatened to push them over the edge.
And she’d been on the front lines serving in the Weapons of Mass Destruction program, trying to prevent selfish nations and self-serving despots and tyrants from bringing humanity to the verge of extinction in the first place.
She reached into her jacket pocket, searching for another cough drop. “I worked for the United Nations.”
“Exactly. You were a known spy. You know what WMDs can do, you understand their tactics. But more than that, you’ve been behind enemy lines, had guns shoved in your face, and been taken hostage by rogue governments.”
Shot, stabbed, nearly raped. All those things and more. Sweat misted her skin. But she hadn’t been alone. Others had her back.
“You, Doc, are the epitome of cool. You talk about bugging out, nuclear meltdown and extinction level events without so much as batting an eyelash.”
Her teeth clicked together. She wasn’t cool. She’d washed plenty of crabgrass out of her undies. Still…knowing her enemies meant she knew their weaknesses and how to thread the needle just right so humanity could come out the other side.
“What’s the answer? I know you have it.” Hope blazed in his eyes. “It’s people like you that’ll give us the edge.”
He needed to believe she had the answers just like his men needed to believe the officers knew what needed to be done. Just like the citizens needed to believe in the soldiers. So why did she picture herself as the nail keeping the kingdom from being lost?
On the other side of the window, David helped an elderly woman into the waiting arms of a soldier.
Well, hell, if everyone around her was delusional, didn’t that make crazy the new sane? She picked up her tablet and refocused. She could solve this problem. It was just one problem. The satellite zeroed in on the flock of silver birds. “Not all of them are heading this way. Some look like they’re heading toward Australia.”
He picked up a headset and adjusted the mouthpiece. “Give me a status on the Rising Sun Birds.”
White caught her eye. She shifted the screen and tightened the image on the slash under the plane’s wings. For a moment, blue waves filled her screen then the familiar bow-shape appeared. “There are ships under the planes.”
Lister eyed her screen. “That one’s a sailboat.”
The Japanese citizens hadn’t been thinking; they’d been following a primitive instinct to flee as if their lives depended on it. And they did. Unfortunately, they couldn’t outrun the radiation. In months, the American west coast would be awash in ghost ships ferrying corpses.
She set her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. Every problem had several solutions. I just need to find the solution. Find it. “Where are our boys?”
“Australia is mum on accepting the birds.”
Probably because there, too, everyone in charge had been wiped out by China’s anthrax stuffed animals. Which made landing a squadron of planes a rather tricky maneuver. But desperate people did suicidal things. She switched screens to her list of military assets. “Give me locations on the pacific fleet.”
The ships too far out of port to be safely recalled had been ordered to set sail for Antarctica. Those in Europe, Asia and the Middle East had evacuated as many personnel and their families as they could handle and headed for the same destination.
Lister changed screens. Blips popped up with unreadable names.
Mavis resisted the urge to slap herself for her shortsightedness. Zeroing in on the naval ships near Okinawa, she tapped them. “These guys need to save the insane from suicide and escort the other ocean going vessels to Australia. I want all airplanes routed to San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle.”
After relaying the order, he glanced at her. “I thought radiation will cross the equator and sterilize Africa, South America and Australia.”
“It will, but it will take a lot longer to reach and the exposure will be reasonably low.” At least that was the theory. How it played out in real life was anyone’s guess. She eyed the swirling weather fronts over the Indian Ocean. Nothing like playing chicken with Mother Nature.
But she would have to tackle the Southern hemisphere’s problem in the future.
For now, she had to help as many people into the future. “These submarines, why are they dry docked?”
Lister’s display showed the planes rerouting toward American shores. “Are you expecting another attack?”
“Nope, just thinking outside the box.” She double checked the class of subs. All were nuclear. Hot damn. She’d just won the lottery. “Do we have enough people to staff them?”
“Not fully, but operationally probably. Why?”
“Nuclear subs have years of power and can provide unlimited oxygen and fresh water to their inhabitants. And as a bonus, they could hunker down under the water safe from the radiation.”
“How long will our people need to stay under?”
God only knew, and He wasn’t talking. “Three months minimum.”