“Didn’t I hear Patrick say something about not second-guessing yourself? You’ve done all you can. Now we ride it out and pray for the best.”
“I thought you were agnostic?”
“What’s that old saying? In a foxhole—and when the world comes to an end—there aren’t any agnostics or atheists. There are only believers, wetting themselves.”
Carpenter gave the world a last scrutiny. The end of days had come. He supposed he should feel pleased his dire predictions had proven true but it was hard to get excited over what might prove to be the death knell of an entire planet. “How could we do this to ourselves?”
The dark clouds and the purple flashes now filled half the sky and swept toward the compound like a swarm of ethereal demons.
Slayne was hastening a few stragglers toward the bunkers. “A penny for your thoughts?”
“You can have them for free, Diana.” Carpenter nodded at the atmospheric upheaval. “The human race has rolled the dice on its existence, and the dice have come up snake eyes.”
Havoc In A-Major
Minnesota
It had long been reasoned, by sane and reasonable men who assumed that the majority of their fellow humans were equally sane and reasonable, that no one in his or her right mind wanted nuclear war. Nukes were a deterrent. They kept tyrants from overstepping the accepted bounds of tyranny. They kept despots from spreading the borders of their despotism. They kept nations from waging all-out war on other nations.
To these sane and reasonable men, this had seemed a sane and reasonable system. It had worked for so long— admittedly, not perfectly—but reasonably well, enough that planet Earth had enjoyed an extended period of relative peace and global prosperity.
Toward the end, more and more countries had acquired more and more nukes. The superpowers, those who had had nukes first and hoarded them as they hoarded gold on the theory that an enemy who was afraid of one nuke would be terrified of ten thousand, built their stockpiles to
a point where they were perfectly happy to sign treaties that forced them to dismantle a few each year, after which they would have 9,997 left.
But since envy holds true for nukes as much as it does for fancy cars and palatial homes, the little countries had seen how smug the big countries were behind their wall of nuclear deterrence, and they wanted deterrents of their own. So it wasn’t long before a dozen small countries had nukes.
Only one country on the whole face of the planet had developed a nuclear program out of necessity. Israel’s survival depended on nukes its government denied having, but they didn’t mind one bit when word of the secret hoard was “accidentally”
leaked and the country’s enemies found out about the weapons.
At the outset of Armageddon, no one had known the exact number of nukes in existence. Experts had said that this or that country possessed this or that many, but the experts had been doing what experts always did when they didn’t know, yet were being paid to pretend they did: they blew wind. The truth was that keeping complete and accurate track of the manufacture and development of all the components that went into the making of a nuclear bomb or missile, from the plutonium to the housing, was impossible. So the experts had given their best guesses, and those who paid them had been content.
It didn’t help that the experts vehemently disagreed. One had said the total was 27,304. Another had said that that was preposterous, and there were only 10,563. Still another had claimed that surely the total tally of warheads must exceed 50,000.
Kurt Carpenter hadn’t trusted any of the assessments. All that mattered to him was there were a lot of nuclear weapons, and when the next world war came, odds were that a lot of them would be used.
That wasn’t all.
Biological and chemical weapons had become all the political rage. Treaties had been signed to limit their production, usually with public fanfare so the politicians who signed the treaties would be perceived as great humanitarians. But those same politicians had required their militaries to secretly develop new and ever more lethal stockpiles. Just in case, had been their mantra.
There had also been reports of even more exotic weapons.
Weapons spun from the pages of science fiction. Devices so terrible, they were spoken of in hushed whispers behind locked doors.
Kurt Carpenter had done the math, and the conclusion he’d reached was that the next global war would result in horrors the likes of which had never been seen.
But Carpenter did his math a little differently from most.
The common consensus had been that if X number of nuclear bombs and missiles were set off, it would result in Y amount of destruction and Z amount of radiation.
The common consensus had been that if bio weapons were used, they would do what they were designed to do— induce disease, shrivel the brain so it resembled a fig, produce a quantifiable number of fatalities, and that would be that.
The same with chemical weapons. The victims would die, screaming in agony while their skin burned off or they broke out in cancerous boils or their lungs tried to claw out of their chests, and then the catalyzing agents would break down, and that would be that.
Carpenter didn’t see it that way. To him each type of weapon and the results it produced weren’t necessarily distinct and separate. Carpenter didn’t see them as one, two, and three. Oh, the effects produced by one, two, and three were well documented when each was tested alone. But what happened when one, two, and three interacted? What was the consequence when, say, a bio weapon or a chemical weapon was employed in a zone of high radioactivity from a nearby nuclear strike? What did mixing one and two add up to? What did mixing two and three? Or one and three? Or one,
