convertible and slewing the sports car sideways into the side of a fourth vehicle.
Startled by the unexpected impact, and by the split-second shock of his driver-side airbag ballooning instantly into his face, the BMW driver snatched his foot away from the accelerator pedal, and stomped on the brakes. It was an utterly natural reaction. Given the same set of circumstances, a lot of drivers would have done precisely what he did. But it was exactly the wrong thing to do.
With that simple act of reflex, a multi-car fender-bender was transformed into a chain-reaction, propagating backward through the speeding lines of traffic as cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses crashed blindly into the wall of suddenly stationary vehicles to their immediate front. And amidst the rending of metal and the shattering of glass, drivers and passengers were crushed and broken right along with their vehicles.
The Russian warheads had not even penetrated the atmosphere, and already American citizens were beginning to die.
Charlie Sweigart tapped gently on the door to Gabriella’s room, and then opened it enough to stick his head in. “Hello?”
There was no answer. Gabriella was sleeping.
Charlie shuffled into her room, his hospital slippers making soft shushing noises as they slid across the tiled floor. He wheeled his IV rack in behind himself, taking care that his IV tubes didn’t catch on anything as he quietly closed the door. He probably didn’t need the IV anymore. He was over the hump now, and well on the road to recovery, but the doctors kept reminding him that advanced hypothermia was nothing to play around with.
He felt okay now, or at least well enough to finish his recovery at home. Of course, there might not be any home left to go to. His apartment was in San Diego, and if the news reports were accurate, California was coming unglued. Even if the missiles were shot down, or turned out to be a hoax or something, his two-bedroom loft in Mission Hills might not survive the panic that was ripping through his city.
There was nothing he could do about that now. The missiles would strike, or they wouldn’t. His little home would be preserved, or it would be destroyed. Ten minutes from now, the lid might come off the pot completely, and the superpowers could all start lobbing nukes at each other. Planet Earth might finally get its Third World War, but nothing Charlie could do from this hospital would make the slightest bit of difference. He could do nothing but wait, and Gabriella’s room seemed like a good place to do that.
He turned and looked at her. The sight nearly stole his breath away.
The tall ocean scientist was curled on her side, blue hospital sheets bunched and tangled around her long- limbed body, golden hair fanning across the pillow and spilling over the curve of her cheek. For a half-second, Charlie thought about brushing the hair from her cheek so that he could see her face more clearly. But he didn’t want to wake her, and he wasn’t at all certain that his touch would be welcome.
Gabriella had said things to him in those last few minutes of consciousness aboard the
He wanted Gabriella’s words to be real, and he wanted her to mean them. But he couldn’t control that, any more than he could control the warheads hurtling toward his country. So he stood and watched the gentle rhythm of her breathing. And his heart was so full that he almost didn’t care if the world came to an end.
With another computer bleep, another trio of messages appeared in the alert window of the STRATCOM tracking screens:
> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #4
> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “DELTA”
> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 97.4 %
To his right, Major Lionel could hear a man’s voice whispering, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”
Lionel, who hadn’t felt the slightest desire to pray since he’d outgrown bedtime prayers at the age of nine, suddenly wondered if this might not be a good time to start again.
Randall Dixon kicked open the door to the shipping office. The flimsy interior door gave way easily under the sole of his size-11 work boot. Particle board fractured and the simulated wood grain laminate split into several pieces as the broken door swung around on its hinges to bounce off the wall adjoining the doorway.
He hefted the ball-peen hammer he’d grabbed from the cab of his Freightliner. He caught a blur of movement out of the corner of his left eye as a little turd of a man dove for cover behind one of the desks. Dixon grinned. “Knock-knock, asshole.”
Silence, and then a quiet scuffling sound as that weasel Gillespie tried to burrow his worthless ass further out of sight.
Dixon took aim at a desk lamp and swung with the hammer. The lamp disintegrated in a shower of electrical sparks and broken glass.
“Eleven violations,” he growled. The hammer came down again, pulverizing an acrylic paperweight full of tiny starfish. The blow sent several pieces of paper fluttering to the floor.
“Eleven violations,” Dixon said again. “You wrote me up for every piddly-ass rule you could think of, didn’t you, you useless sack of shit?” To punctuate the last word, he brought the hammer down again. A coffee cup was jolted off the edge of the desk. It lay on its side, draining dark liquid into the coarse gray weave of the industrial carpet.
“It ain’t enough for you to get me kicked off the long-hauls where a man can earn a living wage,” Dixon said. “You gotta go after my ticket, don’t you? I break my hump for this company for eight years, and that’s how you’re gonna repay me — by jerking my license to drive a rig.”
The only answer was a series of muffled beeps. Gillespie was trying to use his cellular phone to call for help.
Dixon raised the hammer and held it cocked. The next time he swung, it would be to bash in the little pencil-pusher’s brains. “Calling the cops, ass-wipe?” He laughed. “Won’t do you no good. You ain’t heard? Russian missiles headed right for us. In about five minutes, we all gonna be dead. Our ashes are gonna be glowin’ in the dark like one of them science fiction movies.”
He flexed his grip on the wooden shaft of the hammer and began edging around the end of the desk, moving quietly so Gillespie wouldn’t be expecting him.
“You’re going
“If I’m gonna be dead in five minutes,” he said, “I want the pleasure of killing you my
On the last syllable, he lunged around the end of the desk and leapt toward Gillespie. The little man squealed in terror and threw his hands up to protect his face.
Dixon brought the hammer down with every ounce of anger in his soul. He felt one of Gillespie’s wrists break as the blunt steel head of the heavy tool blurred through its arc without slowing. With a crack like the snap of a bullwhip, the hammer collided with Gillespie’s skull.
The first whack probably killed the bastard, but Dixon hit him six or eight more times just to be sure the job was done properly. Then he dropped the hammer on the floor and went outside to smoke a cigarette and wait for the end of the world.
The computer emitted its now-familiar bleep, and three more lines of text appeared in the alert window:
