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.
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