Ashes (Ashes Trilogy 1)

By the end of it all, her eyes were still dry, but Tom’s hand gripped hers hard enough to hurt.

“So that’s why the moon is green.” In the kitchen, next to the woodstove, Alex hugged a mug of tea from which all the heat had long since gone. Two hours ago, they’d been scarfing Oreos, and now the world was in flames. Well, half the country, which was enough. “I remember now. We studied Krakatau in world history. After that blew, the sunsets were bloody and the moon was blue and green because of all the ash in the air. Our teacher said that the sky in that scream painting by Munch? He painted it that way because he’d actually seen it, right after Krakatau.” She looked across at Tom. “It’s the same, isn’t it?”

“Maybe.” Tom hesitated. “If what we heard is right. It might not be, though.”

“Tom, we’ve heard it a couple times over from different people in different countries, so there has to be some truth to it.”

“Unless they’re just repeating a story.”

“But the story makes sense, doesn’t it? You wipe out power and communications with a bunch of those e-bombs. Boom. No power, nothing works. That guy from England said there were enough all over the world to knock out just about every country.”

“But it might be only rumors. People panic. They can’t know for sure without satellites.”

“Which are gone. You’re the one who said that would happen. You know that means there’s no Space Station either. Without computers, they can’t come back here, and nothing works up there. So they either suffocated or froze, and now they’re orbiting in that big, dead tin can; they’ll be up there until the orbit decays and they burn up.”

“It still might not be everywhere,” Tom said stubbornly. “We only picked up five broadcasts.”

“We were lucky to get those. Besides, you thought of this days ago. What did you call it? Mutually assured destruction? Well, you were right; good for you.”

“You know, I didn’t want to be right about this.”

“Maybe not, but hey.” Alex let out a bitter laugh. “You called it.”

“Not all of it.” Tom’s face was bone-white in the Coleman’s light. His mouth was a black gash. “I didn’t think about e-bombs and targeting nuclear waste storage facilities.”

“More bang for the buck.”

“No, the facilities wouldn’t explode like an atomic bomb.”

“Same diff. You’re not the only geek in the universe; I had a very weird physics teacher who really got into doomsday, especially after that earthquake in Japan when those reactors in Fukushima started going critical. Besides, it’s not that hard to understand. You set off bombs over the facilities, the water cooling the waste rods vaporizes, the rods melt and release radioactive steam, and then boom! Just like back in the eighties, with Chernobyl. Do you know how fast the core overheated there?”

“No.”

“Only a few seconds after they tried to scram the reactor.” Her eyes stung, and she could feel the bright burn of panic in her chest. “Like I said, he was a real geek. We spent two whole days on Chernobyl. It took something like forty seconds for the temperature to spike and radioactive steam to build up to the point where that first boiler blew. Forty seconds. The fires went on for weeks, and that released even more radiation. That’s what’s happening out there, over and over and over again, only it’s a thousand times more destructive because the facilities are bigger. Come on. You’re the explosions guy; you know about firestorms and pressure waves from nuclear explosions. Everything melts or vaporizes, and that’s just the first day.”

“Alex—”

“Because without power, there’s no way to cool any of the remaining reactors, or the rods in the facilities that weren’t hit—”

“Alex, calm down.”

“Which means they blow up, too: every plant and every storage facility in the country, around the world, everywhere.”

“Hey. Stop.” He was out of his chair now. “This isn’t doing any good.”

“I don’t care! The moon is green, Tom. It’s green!” She thought she was shouting—the words cut like knives in her throat—but all that came out of her mouth was a tortured, watery wheeze. “The world’s over! There’s crap and dust and debris in the air and people are dead; they just dropped dead when the e-bombs went off, and the ones who didn’t will die. They’ll starve or get radiation sickness or kill each other—and what about those kids? And Jim? We still don’t know what happened to them, or if other people have changed, or when we will—”

“But we haven’t. We’re not dead, we haven’t changed, and we’re not going to.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.” Kneeling, he captured her hands. “Look at me, listen to me. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in fate.”

“What does that—”

“Shut up and listen. I’ve lived through firefights you wouldn’t believe. You don’t know how often I thought I was toast; that I thought, This is it, I’m going to die. But I made it home. I made it here.” He reached up to cup the back of her neck. “I made it in time to save you and Ellie.”

“That was luck.”

“It was fate. I was exactly where I needed to be at exactly the right moment. I refuse to believe that we’ve gone through all this just to die,” he said fiercely. “Now we are alive. We are safe. I am not going to let anything happen to you or Ellie, and that’s a promise.”

Fate or not, that’s not the kind of promise you can keep. I’ve got a monster in my head that might have other ideas. Oh, but she wanted to believe him. She was shaking all over, a deep and visceral shudder so strong she was afraid she would blow apart. “B-but where are we going to g-go? W-we can’t go back. Wh-where?”

“We don’t have to go anywhere right now. We’ll think of something. Come on, I’ve got you, ease down.” Somehow he’d pulled her from her chair and they were on the floor, and she was clinging to him, every muscle tight as a coiled spring, and then he had clasped her to his chest the way he had Ellie, and they were rocking back and forth. “It’s okay, I’ve got you,” he said, holding her tight. “Ease down. I’ve got you, Alex, I’ve got you.”