Fallout

CHAPTER 46

As Sally Montry drove at a reckless speed across the rugged and muddy terrain, fleeing the nuclear demons she herself had set in motion, Paige huddled in the passenger seat. After all she had seen and learned, the death of her Uncle Mike, the insidious plan of the militia and their paranoid fears of a secret UN base deep inside Groom Lake, the ticking timer on the nuclear device, she sat quiet, seemingly cowed, subdued.…

Watching for her chance.

Wondering how much time remained on the warhead’s countdown clock, and how they would escape the deadly rain of fallout even if they somehow managed to survive the blast itself.

The murderous secretary jammed the land rover into four-wheel drive and tromped down on the accelerator, kicking up chips of alluvial gravel from the boulder-strewn hardpan, splashing brown water from a puddle. The vehicle slewed from side to side, but the speedometer jiggled close to fifty miles an hour. Twelve and a half miles, Paige thought. That’s how far they’d make it in fifteen minutes. She didn’t know if that distance would put them out of harm’s way — how far away were those weathered press bleachers from the detonation zones on Frenchman Flat?

A mile from the fenced-in Dreamland facility, cracks appeared in the ground, wide arroyos carved into the desert where forerunners of a flash flood coursed, eating away the soft dirt. The driving became much rougher.

Slowing as little as she dared, Sally paralleled one of the gullies, frequently glancing into her rear-view mirror, searching for helicopter pursuit or her imagined United Nations security forces that were supposedly headquartered inside the hangar building.

The land rover roared recklessly across the desert, leaving a plain trail. Sally must be counting on the nuclear firestorm to obliterate any tracks. Stern-faced, her eyes flicking from side to side, Sally Montry cruised onward. Paige held onto the vehicle’s door to steady herself.

Craig and the others had remained behind at the second land rover, struggling to deactivate the warhead — but she didn’t think Craig had any possible way of knowing how to shut down a warhead. Mike Waterloo had asserted that no one could disarm the warhead in time. And Sally had shot him dead.

The bomb would go off, and everyone around it was doomed.

The land rover’s left front tire struck a boulder. Sally compensated by jerking the wheel, and the vehicle smashed into a depression, bouncing them savagely.

Paige picked that moment to lash out, reaching over to grab the steering wheel with both hands, jerking it to the right — hard. The rover lurched toward the steep gully churning with runoff water from the rainstorm. If they went over the edge, the tires would jam — the vehicle might even tip on its side, and they would be stranded, mired in the mud. Sally would never get away in time.

She would probably shoot Paige in her helpless rage, but it would do her no good. The murderous woman would still be trapped.

Sally howled and fought, wrestling for control. “Stop it, you bitch!” Freeing her right arm from the steering wheel, she jabbed brutally into Paige’s side with her elbow. Paige gasped with a sudden explosion of pain and released her hold.

“If we get stuck, we’ll both be fried in the explosion!” Sally yelled, jerking the vehicle back under control as she dropped her speed, veering away from the steep arroyo.

“That’s the whole idea,” Paige growled as she lunged for the steering wheel again.

But Sally clenched her right fist and swung hard backhandedly, striking Paige squarely on the bridge of her nose. The militia woman knew exactly where to hit, as if she had been trained in hand-to-hand combat. The blow caused a silvery explosion of pain behind Paige’s eyes. Fresh, warm blood spurted from her nose.

Paige gasped, seeing the scarlet stain spill onto her shirt. She held her head against the pounding pain, wondering if the other woman had broken her nose. “Damn you,” Paige said, her voice clogged and gurgling from the flowing blood.

“You don’t have a clue what could happen, do you?” Sally snapped. “I should have shot you.” She tromped on the accelerator. Loose rocks spewed from under the rear tires, and the land rover leaped forward again, frantic to increase the distance. “Nothing’s going to stop me now.”

Paige looked up, blinking the red haze from her eyes.

Suddenly something glittered overhead, a silent flash of motion that seemed nothing more than a blur across the sky, lower than the dark clouds. Then the noise came — a muffled passage, a whoosh that sounded as if a high-speed invisible truck had just roared past them.

The land rover rattled and jerked from the shockwave.

Through the biting pain in her head, Paige had a fleeting thought that the warhead had exploded after all and the distant shock front had just rocked them — but she knew that couldn’t be true. From this distance the flash would have blinded them both, and the blast front would have squashed the land rover like a recycled can.

“What the hell was that?” Sally grabbed the steering wheel, craning her neck to stare up through the windshield, then looking out the side to see what had just soared by, what had attacked them.

The sound came on again, tremors in the sky but not thunder — the rushing, roaring passage of something cruising just above them, close enough to touch.

Paige could see nothing, and neither could Sally. The secretary grew frantic, wrenching the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, attempting to drive an evasive path — but she didn’t know what could be pursuing them.

Paige caught an odd glitter out the corner of her own eyes: flashing lights moving incredibly fast, then nothing… like a mirror in the sky, as if it almost wasn’t there.…

“What is happening here?” Sally demanded, then tugged the land rover to one side to avoid a rugged cluster of boulders. She accelerated all out to get away from the mysterious invisible attacker.

Paige discerned an oval shape beneath the clouds, glowing, indistinct, which emitted a shower of lights that she couldn’t quite see. Then the strange craft moved faster than she could follow with her eyes. The image disappeared in the air, swallowed up in an illusion of the sky, once again soaring directly over the land rover.

Sally saw it too and jerked the vehicle to the left as the shockwave hit again — but then, without warning, the dashboard erupted in a shower of sparks. The land rover’s engine went dead, as if it had been smothered by a heavy pillow. All the lights and gauges winked out. The ventilator fan stopped. All power systems shorted out.

Sally could no longer steer, but the vehicle’s momentum pushed it along a few more feet until it bumped into a boulder and came to an abrupt stop. Dead.

Furious, Sally pounded on the steering wheel, on the horn, but even that emitted no peep, no sound at all. She turned the key, trying to start the engine again and again, but the vehicle didn’t cough, didn’t even try to turn over.

Flinging open the land rover’s door, Sally yanked out her handgun, jabbing it toward Paige who still sat trying to stanch the flow of blood streaming from her nose. She stumbled out of the vehicle into the rain, waving her gun around in search of a target. “What is this? What the hell is going on!” she yelled.

But Paige had no answer for her. She was as mystified as the militia woman. She thought of Doog and his hippie friends, coming up here to search for the hidden flying saucers.…

Sally stood, her feet planted on the muddy ground, turning back and forth. The secretary looked behind her toward Dreamland and the armed nuclear warhead, several miles distant. They had not come far enough to escape the atomic blast or the immediate fallout, Paige knew. Not nearly far enough. And their time must be dwindling to zero.

Then Paige heard the invisible enemy again, an approaching whine in the air that developed into a steadily building rumble, the roar of engines so powerful it sounded like an avalanche in the sky.

Enraged, Sally turned to look up, holding her handgun out as if she might fire upon the mysterious craft in a futile gesture — but instead Sally just stared, gaping open-mouthed in astonishment.

“I don’t believe it! The nutcases were right all along.” She gasped in amazement. “It’s a fuckin’ UFO!”

Then the blurry mirage thundered past like a self-contained sonic boom, streaking so low and so close that the entire land rover shuddered from side to side. The windows rattled. The open driver’s side door was nearly torn from its hinges.

The shockwave hurled Sally to the ground. Seeing her chance again, Paige leaped out, ignoring her bloodied nose and her aching ribs. She tumbled out of the land rover and scrambled to where the secretary lay stunned.

As Sally tried to pick herself up from the dirt, Paige crashed into her, tackling the secretary back down to the mud. She used both of her knees to trap Sally’s forearm. Wet dirt and sand splashed both of them. She pounded on the militia woman’s hand, trying to get her to release her grip on the gun. When Sally’s fingers only clenched tighter, Paige picked up a rock and smashed her knuckles.

With a yelp of pain, the other woman finally released her hold on the weapon, and Paige grabbed it up, standing above the snarling secretary, swaying. Her vision blurred, and the blood flowed down her face again.

But Paige drew herself up tall, her legs spread, both hands tightly wrapped around the handgun. Her finger slipped around the trigger guard. She had watched this woman gun down her Uncle Mike in cold blood. “Just stay right there,” she said, pointing the gun.

Sally struggled to her knees, her expression cold and furious. “We’ve got to run! If we don’t get to shelter before that warhead blows, we’ll be disintegrated in an instant! We’re still too close to ground zero.”

“It’s too late for that,” Paige said, feeling a remarkable clarity coming to her fuzzy thoughts. “But if it happens, you’ll have about a microsecond to say ‘I told you so’ before the flesh gets blasted from your bones.”

Paige gave the militia woman a little smile just to show that she really meant it.