CHAPTER FIVE

Sam Roberts had a few more hours to live.

He wanted to know how much radiation he’d absorbed in escaping the front entrance of the bunker, but the dosimeter had stopped working by the time he was clear of the massive door and the freaks in front of it.

Still, he would’ve liked to know how many rads he’d soaked up.

It was just before dawn.

He could see the lights of Tucson far off to the west, lying on the southern side of a gigantic black rock that heaved itself up from the desert floor. The pinpoints of light twinkled softly in the rising pink of first morning like tiny jewels set amid gray pillars of sun-bleached stone.

Earlier, outside Hatch, a small town that had collapsed into the drifting sands and rolling weeds, he’d stopped to scribble a message onto a piece of paper, his hands badly shaking.

‘Wouldn’t that be something,’ he’d thought. ‘To come all this way and I’m too sick to tell them the message.’

As he threw up again he tried to say, “Help me!” But no sound came out. His voice box was gone. Either scorched by the acid his stomach seemed to churn up, and that came out of him constantly, or fried by the radiation of two high-yield Chinese nuclear warheads deposited at the front door of his lifelong home forty years ago. Either way, he would never speak again. So he wrote the note. Then he added, Please stay away from me. I’m contaminated with radiation.

He watched the far city. Morning light opened the desert up to Captain Roberts. There were so many different colors. The golden sand. The pink rock. The blue sky. The red earth.

‘Best day of my life,’ he thought. ‘And I saw it all at least once’ …

He blacked out.

When he came to, it was noon.

His heartbeat pounded throughout his entire body, but it was slow and intermittent. Captain Roberts reached into his chest pocket. He took out the emergency syringe and jammed it into his thigh. His vision cleared as his heart began to race.

‘Last one,’ he thought.

On the horizon, Tucson looked gray amid the shimmering heat waves that rose above the road. Already his vision was starting to blur. ‘These injections aren’t lasting long,’ he thought.

He started the engine. The cells were below half full. He’d forgotten to set them to charge. I don’t know if it’s enough, but it’s all I have.

He took a safety pin out of the medical kit that lay sprawled across the passenger seat. He’d done a bad job of bandaging his own blisters. He pinned the message to his jumpsuit. ‘All I gotta do now,’ he thought, ‘is get close enough for them to find me.’

He gunned the engine and felt the acceleration press what was left of his thin body backward. He did his best to keep the dune buggy on the road with what little time he had left. The road shifted and swerved in the heat and sweat as his dying heart thundered out its last.

It was tough going. But he did his best.