Chapter Two (draft)

Chapter TWO (Carlyle POV)

“This station is a public resource.”

Uniformed cop.  Fuck.

“What?  We got an EBS and...”  Paulie started to say, and then he realized.  He could feel his chest heave.

Carlyle squinted his grey eyes and hitched up his Sam Browne belt to emphasize the point.  He wasn’t gonna be messed with.  There was still a plaintive smile to project.  

Paulie surveyed him and thought he deserved respect.  He had a gun and a uniform, but he wasn’t intimidating in the slightest.  But... 

That had often been a problem, to idiots that thought they could get away with it.  A lanky, balding policeman to most casual lookers, Yamhill County Deputy Sheriff Berwood Carlyle was not that simple.  People often underestimated him.  He’d been a sometimes-bad guy in his military past.  He knew how to exact ‘hurt’ to get answers, if he had to.  He didn’t think that side would creep back up again, but caution was better than not.  

This is a stupid kid, he thought.  He would be proved wrong.

  

(They’d see that nasty side later, during the water riot in LaFayette.  No one actually witnessed that he’d killed Steven Plano.  Or would say it.  Closed case.  Cops can do that.  Emergency, all that.  Don’t be a shit-head when you don’t have to be, right?)

He intimately knew the local emergency drill.  He’d help write it.

He was up on his back porch, looking at the bug-zapper in action, and saw the initial blinding blast north.  Big.  Serious.  He finished his warming Pabst beer in a futile swig, and went back inside, back into the bedroom, to put his uniform on.  It was still slightly warm from taking it off, laying on the antique chair in the master bedroom.  Carlyle dressed in silence, as his radio in the far kitchen repeated dire words.

He wound his way back, waited for a noise-break, and keyed the mike.  “16-34.”

“Go ahead, 34.”  It was Jennifer, sweet, big-bosomed blonde Jennifer Glumb.  He smiled because he knew her way too well.  Especially her husky voice when she was getting fucked.  They usually did it listening to Seal.

“On the way to Foxtrot,” he said, “Anything from old man Lanes?”

“Negative, 34.  Busted the book out.”

“Just run the scenario, Jenny,” he coached to his mistress. “Call him on the land-line. We got this.  Probably a big propane explosion.”

“No, it’s really bigger than that.”  Static.

“No, it’s not.”

He knew he forgot his Sam Browne.  Like a partner left behind.  He turned his radio to as low as he dared and walked back to the bedroom of his long ranch house.  The hallway always seemed too dark, he thought, padding his badge and pulling his collar to a comfortable place against his neck.

The thick carbon-colored leather of his laden belt was squeaky as he buckled it.  Distinct.  The cuff-case was especially worn.  They made a petite jingling racket in their small-of-the-back pouch.   Carlyle winced.  She’d’ve heard that.

She did.  The room smelled of Tide detergent, dogs and ineffective cinnamon candles.  

Lynn woke up and turned over in the king-sized bed, sensing the activity, their Papillons rustled at her feet, and she whispered “Too much to do, Babe?”  

How to play this?  He knew it was big.

“Feel that earthquake Lynnie?”

“What, honey?”  She was barely awake.  He could hear it in her words.  He realized she had no idea.  Better that way.

“Gotta check it out, Luv.”

“Okay.”  She was out again in seconds, she could always do that, he thought.

“I did dinner, chicken,” and she faded out again.  The wine glass and the water bottle told him all he needed to know.  Medicated.  At least it wasn’t pot. 

Carlyle kissed her tanned forehead and buttoned his top button.   

That was the last time.

For now, Carlyle knew he had to take control, and make it stick.  There’d be no second-guessing about this later.  Had to be ‘done right the first time.’  The local radio station was an obvious place to start.  Chatter on his radio was spat with “nukes” and “terrorists” and “Portland’s gone.” 

Deputy Carlyle wasn’t ready to bite.  Seriously, in America?  He was willing to believe in a big conventional bomb, but a nuke?  

No way.

“As a public resource, I’m going to be your liaison with law enforcement.”   He offered his hand earnestly.  

“What’s your name, I’m Woody Carlyle.  Deputy.” 

Paulie was - for once - without words.  The remnants of THC and alcohol burnt out, but not quickly.  Isa upstairs.  Cops.  Bombs?  A headache began to emerge.  A familiar set of pain.

“Paulie,”  he stammered, “ I’m Paulie.  What’s goin’ on?  You got here quick.”

“Can you get other stations here?

“What?”  That sounded absurd to Paulie.  Why would you want to hear other stations while you’re broadcasting?

Kalim loved driving small cars fast.

And that made those damn Interstates the only good ways out.  So many people needed to use them.   

But not at this hour, and maybe never again.

All Portland’s infrastructure north of the railroad station was irrevocably gone, to some degree.  Parts of the marina still float while they burn.  Thick black eddys form from the burning styrofoam.  A shitload of everything else, south to Rose Quarter, west to the hills, was burning or getting ready to burn.

The 9 greyhounds in the sand at the track had been fixated on a mechanical rabbit racing on a large mechanical steel and electrical loop.  (They were night-racing for our gambling friends in Qatar and Abu Dhabi.  

The motor on the rabbit track failed a nanosecond after the first X-ray doses - before one brilliant-white ending flash, and maybe the dogs caught their prey, happy at the last.

Most of Jantzen Beach Mall got a huge wallop on the main lobe.  Hayden Island is not bedrock or even good dry-river sediments.  It’s a frickin’ sand bar in the middle of a massive dioric river.  Not many rivers cut through mountain ranges.  The Columbia had no choice after the glacial dams burst in Montana, over and over again through the multiple Ice Ages.  What was the Snake became the Columbia.  The water had to find ‘down.’  When it backed up behind Sauvie Island and that jog to the northwest, it dropped silt and sand into a long, flattened strip.  Calling it an ‘island’ is a geologic stretch.  It’s a silt bar.

To this day you can find Montana granite south of Portland, and they aren’t little ‘erratic’ rocks, but boulders that’d make a Dodge Ram cough and die.  The underlayment of Portland’s skyscrapers is tenacious and old-school.

The way the Device was loaded into the truck - it had been engineered for an odd (but theoretical) oval shape - made Kalim wonder.  The physicists said the designed blast was abetted by the lead-lined van walls.  It made it possible to ‘aim’ it for effect.  He’d parked it on the corner they wanted, facing south.  He turned the key to arm the device and then swallowed it, with a V-8 veggie-Blast.  That’s what they wanted.  

The new car was where they said it would be, past the 7-Eleven, and it was unlocked and pre-stripped of anything valuable.  He calmly got in and pulled onto the street.  

He wondered if he’d get away clean or ‘consult with his Prophet.’  They said he had 30 minutes, so he headed east to get southbound on I-5, then east on I-84, even though he knew it was topographically flat for a long ways.   East.  Mecca was a ways south of that.   The world drops at 8 inches per mile... he had to be at least 22 miles away to miss the combination of flash effects, the actual blast wave, and the inevitable vacuum of it all rushing back in, on rivers of fire and super-heated soot.  He pressed the accelerator of the 1980 Ford Escort to the floor.   He wondered how far he could get before the fallout found the prevailing wind.  

Without any traffic, things looked good.  He could probably make The Dalles in 2 hours, if he floored it.  The cops would be busy elsewhere, he reasoned.  Then to farther places.

Kalim also wondered about the odd, shining tubes that curled back in on that Device.  It looked like a small jet engine with 600 chrome ‘crazy-straws’ glued to it.  When they put it in the van in Oregon City, the chassis had set down completely on the rusty leaf springs with a groan.  The tires mushroomed a bit.  

He thought it was too heavy for the van, but they insisted.  

Combined with the sheets of lead - all that weight in the walls - the “heat” of the core was protected from pig-dog prying eyes and the random Geiger counter, and allowed a margin of ‘aiming.’  

Kalim knew they were serious about this.  The lead was shrapnel for the Device, they said.  It would boil and become superheated bullets .

A Figure-8.  A major lobe north-east and a lobe south-west.  And then a wall of white fusion with a rough ten-mile radius.  That’s what Al-Fajir thought was happening, anyway.  

Old men and their math said it was going to be bigger than that. 

Mehmet Al-Fajir was driving past Longview, northbound on I-5 in the middle lane, when he saw the sun-glow in his rear-view mirrors.  He was inwardly disappointed that he didn’t see a dual-pulse.  Or the sky catch fire like a sea-anenome.

He’d changed his mind and hadn’t preceded Kalim to the east, against the plan.  He pressed the accelerator to the floor, the Jeep Cherokee lurched to 70mph, and he smiled.  He had a blonde girl in Federal Way, and she was waiting for him.  

Kalim and Mehmet had different destinies.

When the bright and chipper NEST guys showed up, breathing stale, canned air and wearing heavy layers of protection, they found traces of those shiny chrome tubular pieces.  After extensive lab tests - concluded almost seven weeks later - they realized it could have been a thermo.  But it fizzled at atomic, Thank God.

The shock effectively ended the Interstate 5 bridge between Oregon and Washington.  Best thing for it, actually.  Bad piers from the start.  Too many spans.  A huge river.

Fires likes Hell ignited across the Columbia River in Vancouver while the first seismic waves pummeled the piers of the marinas on the Oregon side.  Water rose and steam clouded.

The tuned fork that was the 405 bridge crumbled at the reverberations, falling largely intact from the concrete bridge footings.  It was a piece of shit anyway, even though it was pretty.  At the time, there were no vehicles of any kind on the bridge.  Trucks hate the steep approaches and after a certain hour the cops get too ‘stalky.’  But it was an urban artery.

Far to the east, the I-205 bridge experienced a ‘structural defect detection.’   That means a piece fell away.  Three southbound cars arced off into the Columbia from a good height, less than a dozen drivers slammed their brakes or turned and drove away, and the rest burned in place as the cloud moved east.

“There’s gonna be a outrush from Portland, you get that, right?” Carlyle queried.  “And we’re the funnel to the beach.”

“Jesus Christ, Deputy, I’ve been up since 10 am.  Which is early for me, by the way.”

Paulie could feel the sweat of his shirt, re-sticking.  A taut, unpleasant feeling.  

“The funnel?”  He had heard that.  Seemingly everyone born before 1980 knew the Oregon coast was the best place to survive a nuclear war.

“There aren’t many ways south out of Portland that lead to civilization or hospitals now,” he started, “Do you have a map here?”

“What the fuck, this ain’t geography in here.”  Orcutt thought about the roads, though, because he hated traffic.  And he knew McMinnville was in a funnel.  99-West was a major road.  KSLC could reach to I-5 from Tualatin to just south of Salem, and without other stations to interfere, probably further.  The west side of the south suburbs would be a right mess, and the Sunset Freeway would be a disaster.  The 205 and I-5 nexus was within range.  

“You make a statement, then.”

“What?  You know more than I do.”

The EBS fired up again.  Paulie Orcutt and Deputy Carlyle shook their dropped heads and waited.  The tones went quickly, then the reassuring voice was there again.

“This is the Emergency Broadcast System.”  

“Duh.”  

“In accordance with federal regulations, a nuclear disaster has been declared for the Oregon counties - pause - Willamette, Washington, and Clark County, Washington.”  Scratchy, long pause.  “Please follow local law-enforcement instructions and evacuate.” 

The lot in Salem got violent quickly.

Metal will keep radioactivity, there’s nothing you can do about it.  Lynn Carlyle wasn’t aware, or didn’t frankly care.  She rummaged through the piles on the tennis courts, finding diamonds, gold, silver and other goodies.  It was like Disneyland.  So many glittering things.  

CHAPTER ONE

Chapter ONE

Red Glare.

In the far corner of his left eye, out of the broadcast booth.  Maybe out the far window?  No way.  It’s so crusted with ivy.
Paulie shrugged that thought away, a wool blanket on a hot morning.  Had to be on the big equipment.  An arc.
Overpeaking transmitter back in the equipment room, he thought - having seen that before, if you turn the output too high - but he hadn’t seen a peaking needle on the panel.
His ears popped liked he’d just climbed 5000 feet.  A rumble.
Fuck did I blow a transmitter?
He checked the digital timer on the current song, a habitual task.
His gangly hands danced across the college station’s panel, a wash of blue-white flannel and black metal.  Bulky earphones, brought up on a well-worn paddle, revealed a familiar song, the last 28 seconds of - checking that fucking timer again -  Oh, yeah, I played that for Lisha...

That was really bright, he tripped up, mentally doing a ‘second-take.’   Really white and then orangy-red.
Physically, he felt a slight heat.  A residue of...  smoked 4 hits of decent pot before he came to this shift.  So maybe that was just a output spark that seemed really big...
Something must’a fried bad.
He sniffed the air but there wasn’t anything.  Transmitters smell of oily metal if they fry.  The options were quickly and quietly weighed and surfed.  None of the needles were off.  He shook his head, saying “no” like he did when his Dad pushed the swing too far... so long ago, it seemed.
“Fuck!” was all he could muster verbally, until he took a sharp breath, and muttered “I didn’t even have it cranked up.”  He considered leaving the booth, turning everything off, perhaps popping upstairs for a quickie with Isa, gorgeous auburn Isa, but that idea dropped away.
Isa.  There’s a whole book there.
Because he knew he’d hear about this over-wattage tomorrow from Professor Langdon, from the other DJs, and from the newspaper staff if the radio failed, on dummy-up night.  It was a connection he felt, because he had another of his series in that paper.  He wanted to be there until it was done.  It was a ritual.  Maybe an obligation.


When the ground wave hit, Paulie dismissed it as a remnant of a tequila shot he’d taken - as a dare at the Delta House pre-function - and physically it was abrupt and it popped his chair off the floor.
In later years, he would say he had initially thought it felt like an earthquake.  Not a close one, but a deep roller.  Far away.  But he felt that first sharp shock, the one that took him for a mental ride.  The one that ruined the night.




 “It’s The End Of The World” by REM was only 20 seconds from fading to untenable silence.
Paulie knew he had to do a station identification at 11 past the hour.  That was gospel.
That’s two songs away.  I’m stoned.  Get it together Orcutt!
He knew he had a Clash song spun down a quarter-turn on the other turntable.  “London Calling” was one of his favorite songs.  Also at his disposal, an 8-track cartridge loaded, ready to play Golden Earring’s “Radar Love,” which was always loaded in case of unexpected ‘dead air.’  The 8-track held 4 tapes, the last three slots held public service announcements.  Fucking boring ones.

Paul “Paulie” Prince Orcutt was spinning old 80’s vinyl on 90Spot3 FM that Thursday.  Some Thursday shifts he’d just play all requests, and run the 100-watt station into the AM hours.  He didn’t have to pay for the power, he reasoned, when he kept it on late for the first time last fall.  he wasn’t in the MEDIA Department, but he was the only one who wanted that late shift.
The newspaper staff was working two ivy-swathed buildings away, third floor, and they kept requesting their favorites on the phone.  Paulie expected this, and welcomed it.
(A tiny - albeit prominent - yellow lamp, a bulb under a scratched plastic dome, gracing the panel’s upper right side, lets you know the phone is ringing.  It goes on if people are listening.)
Seth and Marjorie and all associated MEDIA department people were dummying up that week’s edition of the ‘Linkshire Edition.’  Furious editing and copying and pasting was involved, Paulie knew.  He’d seen them do it, twice.  It is a laborious process.  He knew the smell of the wax that bound the words to the page that would head to the printer in Salem by 6 AM.  He knew most of the other journalists, and felt no competition at all from them.

Red Glare.

On the mixer panel.  Top right.
Two reds.
Simultaneously, on the big box racked in the Equipment Room, off to Paulie’s left a series of lights.  The tone in his phones became irritating.  Insisting.  Frantic.  Known.
Paulie pulled off those ‘Princess Leia’ headphones and swiveled to port, expecting something to fizzle out in that darkened room beyond.  He hoped to see something melt, or spew sparks.  It could be cool.  The fire extinguisher was mounted on the inside of the ‘cage.’
It was...
The Emergency Broadcast System lights.  The audio tone of it overrode anything else on his headphones, now discarded to his lap.  The amber phone light also lit, as an accent.

Paulie snatched up the telephone handpiece from its cradle, brusquely spat out “Not now!” and hung up.  The amber light lit up as soon as he hung up.
The outside hallway began to stir with noise.  He looked right, through the large glass panel that held down sound and looked great.  Too late for that kinda noise, he thought.
The EBS tone went through its paces.  Paulie reached for the black manual, and out fell the two yellowish envelopes distributed monthly to every radio station in America.  One was for tests, and the other wasn’t.
If the book’s day-code matched the corresponding card-code, it was a valid message, Langdon had told him, eying him to make sure he’d understood.

And then there was dead air.  The dread vampire of radio.
“This is not a test,” it began.  “The Emergency Broadcast System has been activated.  Stand by for further information.
Sam Stearn popped through the door, out of breath.  Paulie made an instant assessment of his state.  He was a senior, and knew the whole radio station. He was sweating, his button-up cotton shirt sticking in odd places.  His dirty-blonde hair was tussled up.  His fly was curiously unbuttoned atop his torn-knee 501s.  He was barefoot and didn’t look like he wanted to be.
“Fuck man, you see that?!”  he yelled as a question.  Spittle flew at Paulie.
“What Sam?! I’m here!  The EBS is fired up.”  His voice was hoarse.
“That explosion,” he stammered, “Looks like Portland.”
Paulie felt his neck hair stand.  The room seemed to chill.
He turned back to the panel and keyed the microphone.
“Be right back.”
It didn’t matter.  The EBS overrode the panel.

The tones.  He stayed a few moments more.  Sam was jostling back and forth on his ankles at the studio desk.
“It won’t work, Paulie...”  They both knew the microphone would be disabled.
Shouts from the dorm above became more obvious as the security door cracked open with increasing frequency.  You could hear the ‘thud’ below when it found its ‘chock’ again, and locked behind fire-proof steel.
The three floors above were emptying.  The rooms had generous windows, and the light and shock had left no one asleep, or stoned, or drunk.  (No one slept through it, as far as anyone could tell, was the topic of discussion weeks later in the Student Cafe.)
The ‘Highest Building in Yamhill County’ had a direct view through the oak grove to the north of what had happened, and exits at the west side produced ‘girls in panties and blankets’ to the delight of the guys that cruised out, leaving other dorms.  Some migrated to get a better look.
They poured out to the rose garden.  “That flash,” was oft repeated.  There was an unmistakeable orange glow to the north.  And a slow rumble.
Maybe Portland is on fire, like Chicago from that cow and the lantern, Paulie thought.
Adrenaline was getting high.



“This is a broadcast from the Emergency Broadcast System,” it started, as it always did.
No one was in the studio.
"This is not a test."
“An emergency alert is in effect for the following counties: Willamette, Washington, Yamhill...” the feminine voice trailed off, robotic, clipped and impersonal in the din of actual noise.  “Stand by for further instructions.”
Sam and Paulie ran back in and caught some of the broadcast.
Once he heard “Yamhill,” he knew ‘the fan was already covered in shit.’
Outside, down the hall. he saw the reflections of bright red and blue flashes that mean that one thing.
Cops.
Outside, now filtering in.
A wall of uniforms started filling the hallway as Sam and Paulie waited for the confirmation transmission.  It didn't go out on air.
The waves were temporarily smooth.  Silent.  Dead Air.
Then it came.

The chaos descended.  Young Paulie Orcutt wasn’t at all ready for it.
Sam made an excuse to leave.  He'd had weed in his pocket, it later turned out.  The cops were too much.




Much later, the physicists would call this the “Garage Job.”
It was a particularly dirty fucker.  A Frankenstein Atomic.  Bits and pieces.  Fallout was off-the charts, so deaths would continue for decades as the cancers settled in.
The burning ruins of Northwest Portland incinerated almost 8 thousand households completely - denizens included - and a untidy 10 square miles around it was dosed so intensely with radiation that they - almost 45,000 living scabs, had a few days.

They wouldn’t be good days.