President Hartmann has called out the National Guard
riots and looting reported in New York, Washington, and Detroit, and numerous smaller cities
in Chicago is a smoldering ruin. Mitchell Grinstein is reported dead, as well as other top A.L.F. leaders. A firebombing has destroyed a wing of the new Police HeadquartersLoop reported in flamesbands of armed men moving from the ghetto sections into the Near North
Community Defenders in California charge that they had nothing to do with original attackhave demanded that the bodies be produced and identifiedmass burial, already ordered
bombing of Governors mansion in Sacramento
Liberty Alliance has called all citizens to take up arms, and wipe out the A.L.F. that an attempted revolution is in progressthis was the plan all along, Alliance chargesCalifornia attack a signal
A.L.F. charges that California attack was Hartmann ploycites Reichstag fire
Governor Horne of Michigan has been assassinated
national curfew imposed by S.U.U. has called on all citizensto return to their homesstill out in one hour will be shot on sight
A.L.F. reports that Senator Jackson Edwards of New Jersey was dragged from his police sanctuary in Newark and shot by Liberty Troopers
martial law declared
reports that last bandit plane has been shot down
Army has been mobilized
Hartmann has declared death penalty for any who aid so-called revolutionaries
alleges
charges
reports
IN KENTUCKY, a forest was burning. But no one came to put it out.
There were bigger fires elsewhere.
George R. R. Martin
George R. R. Martins varied output is divided between horror, fantasy, and science fiction and has earned him multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards as well as a Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. His science fiction novels include Dying of the Light and, with Lisa Tuttle, Windhaven. Martin has written some of the best novella-length science fiction in the past two decades, including the award-winning Sandkings, and Nightflyers, which was adapted for the screen in 1987. Much of his best writing is collected in A Song for Lya, Songs of Stars and Shadows, Sandkings, Songs the Dead Men Sing, Tuf Voyaging, and Portraits of His Children. His horror novels include the period vampire masterpiece Fevre Dream and The Armageddon Rag, an evocative glimpse at the dark side of the sixties counterculture considered one of the top rock n roll novels of all time. A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings are the first two novels in his epic Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin has written for a number of television series, including the new Twilight Zone series, and edited fifteen volumes of the Wild Cards series of shared-world anthologies.
TO THE STORMING GULFGregory Benford
TURKEY
TROUBLE. KNEW THERED BE trouble and plenty of it if we left the reactor too soon.
But do they listen to me? No, not to old Turkey. Hes just a dried-up corn husk of a man now, they think, one of those Bunren men who been on the welfare a generation or two and no damn use to anybody.
Only its simple plain farm supports I was drawing all this time, not any kind of horse-ass welfare. So much they know. Cant blame a man just cause he comes up cash-short sometimes. I like to sit and read and think more than some people I could mention, and so I took the money.
Still, Mr. Ackerman and all think I got no sense to take government dole and live without a lick of farming, so when I talk they never listen. Dont even seem to hear.
It was his idea, getting into the reactor at McIntosh. Now that was a good one, I got to give him that much.
When the fallout started coming down and the skimpy few stations on the radio were saying to get to deep shelter, it was Mr. Ackerman who thought about the big central core at McIntosh. The reactor itself had been shut down automatically when the war started, so there was nobody there. Mr. Ackerman figured a building made to keep radioactivity in will also keep it out. So he got together the families, the Nelsons and Bunrens and Pollacks and all, cousins and aunts and anybody we could reach in the measly hours we had before the fallout arrived.
We got in all right. Brought food and such. A reactors set up self-contained and got huge air filters and water flow from the river. The water was clean, too, filtered enough to take out the fallout. The generators were still running good. We waited it out there. Crowded and sweaty but O.K. for ten days. Thats how long it took for the count to go down. Then we spilled out into a world laid to gray and yet circumscribed waste, the old world seen behind a screen of memories.
That was bad enough, finding the bodiespeople, cattle, and dogs asprawl across roads and fields. Trees and bushes looked the same, but there was a yawning silence everywhere. Without men, the pine stands and muddy riverbanks had fallen dumb, hardly a swish of breeze moving through them, like everything was waiting to start up again but didnt know how.
ANGEL
We thought we were O.K. then, and the counters said so, tooall the gammas gone, one of the kids said. Only the sky didnt look the same when we came out, all mottled and shot through with drifting blue-belly clouds.
Then the strangest thing. July, and theres sleet falling. Big wind blowing up from the Gulf, only its not the sticky hot one were used to in summer, its moaning in the trees of a sudden and a prickly chill.
Goddamn. I dont think we can get far in this, Turkey says, rolling his old rheumy eyes around like he never saw weather before.
It will pass, Mr. Ackerman says, like he is in real tight with God.
Lookit that moving in from the south, I say, and theres a big mass all purple and forking lightning swarming over the hills, like a tide flowing, swallowing everything.
Gulf storm. Well wait it out, Mr. Ackerman says to the crowd of us, a few hundred left out of what was a moderate town with real promise.
Nobody talks about the dead folks. We see them everywhere, worms working in them. A lot smashed up in car accidents, died trying to drive away from something they couldnt see. But we got most of our families in with us, so its not so bad. Me, I just pushed it away for a while, too much to think about with the storm closing in.
Only it wasnt a storm. It was somethin else, with thick clouds packed with hail and snow one day and the next sunshine, only sun with bite in it. One of the men says its got more UV in it, meaning the ultraviolet that usually doesnt come through the air. But its getting down to us now.
So we dont go out in it much. Just to the market for whats left of the canned food and supplies, only a few of us going out at a time, says Mr. Ackerman.
We thought maybe a week it would last.
Turned out to be more than two months.
Im a patient woman, but jammed up in those corridors and stinking offices and control room of the reactor
Well, I dont want to go on.
Its like my Bud says, worst way to die is to be bored to death.
Thats damn near the way it was.
Not that Old Man Turkey minded. You ever notice how the kind of man that hates moving, he will talk up other people doing just the opposite?
Mr. Ackerman was leader at first, because of getting us into the reactor. Hes from Chicago but youd think it was England sometimes, the way he acts. He was on the school board and vice president of the big AmCo plant outside town. But he just started to assume his word was it, yknow, and that didnt sit with us too well.
Some people started to saying Turkey was smarter. And was from around here, too. Mr. Ackerman heard about it.
Any fool could see Mr. Ackerman was the better man. But Turkey talked the way he does, reminding people hed studied engineering at Auburn way back in the twencen and learned languages for a hobby and all. Letting on that when we came out, wed need him instead of Mr. Ackerman.
He said an imp had caused the electrical things to go dead, and I said that was funny, saying an imp done it. He let on it was a special name they had for it. Thats the way he is. He sat and ruminated and fooled with his radiosthat he never could make workand told all the other men to go out and do this and that. Some did, too. The old man does know a lot of useless stuff and can convince the dumb ones that hes wise.
So hed send them to explore. Out into cold thatd snatch the breath out of you, bite your fingers, numb your toes. While old Turkey sat and fooled.
TURKEY
Nothing but sputtering on the radio. Nobody had a really good one that could pick up stations in Europe or far off.
Phones dead, of course.
But up in the night sky the first night out we saw dots movingthe pearly gleam of the Arcapel colony, the ruddy speck called Russworld.
So thats when Mr. Ackerman gets this idea.
We got to reach those specks. Find out whats the damage. Get help.
Only the powers out everywhere, and we got no way to radio to them. We tried a couple of the local radio stations, brought some of their equipment back to the reactor where there was electricity working.
Every damn bit of it was shot. Couldnt pick up a thing. Like the whole damn planet was dead, only of course it was the radios that were gone, fried in the EMPElectroMagnetic Pulsethat Angel made a joke out of.
All this time its colder than a whores tit outside. And were sweating and dirty and grumbling, rubbing up against ourselves inside.
Bud and the others, theyd bring in what they found in the stores. Had to drive to Sims Chapel or Toon to get anything, what with people looting. And gas was getting hard to find by then, too. Theyd come back, and the women would cook up whatever was still O.K., though most of the time youd eat it real quick sos you didnt have to spend time looking at it.
Me, I passed the time. Stayed warm.
Tried lots of things. Bud wanted to fire the reactor up, and five of the men, they read through the manuals and thought that they could do it. I helped a lil.
So we pulled some rods and opened valves and did manage to get some heat out of the thing. Enough to keep us warm. But when they fired her up more, the steam hoots out and bells clang and automatic recordings go on saying loud as hell:
EMERGENCY CLASS 3
ALL PERSONNEL TO STATIONS
and we all get scared as shit.
So we dont try to rev her up more. Just get heat.
To keep the generators going, we go out, fetch oil for them. Or Bud and his crew do. Im too old to help much.
But at night we can still see those dots of light up there, scuttling across the sky same as before.
Theyre the ones know whats happening. People go through this much, they want to know what it meant.
So Mr. Ackerman says we got to get to that big DataComm center south of Mobile. Near Fairhope. At first I thought hed looked it up in a book from the library or something.
When he says that, I pipe up, even if I am just an old fart according to some, and say, No good to you even if you could. They got codes on the entrances, guards probly. Well just pound on the door till our fists are all bloody and then have to slunk around and come on back.
Im afraid you have forgotten our cousin Arthur, Mr. Ackerman says all superior. He married into the family, but youd think he invented it.
You mean the one works over in Citronelle?
Yes. He has access to DataComm.
So thats how we got shanghaied into going to Citronelle, six of us, and breaking in there. Which caused the trouble. Just like I said.
MR. ACKERMAN
I didnt want to take the old coot they called Turkey, a big dumb Bunren like all the rest of them. But the Bunrens want in to everything, and I was facing a lot of opposition in my plan to get Arthurs help, so I went along with them.
Secretly, I believe the Bunrens wanted to get rid of the pestering old fool. He had been starting rumors behind my back among the three hundred souls I had saved. The Bunrens insisted on Turkeys going along just to nip at me.
We were all volunteers, tired of living in musk and sour sweat inside that cramped reactor. Bud and Angel, the boy Johnny (whom we were returning to the Fairhope area), Turkey, and me.
We left the reactor under a gray sky with angry little clouds racing across it. We got to Citronelle in good time, Bud floor-boarding the Pontiac. As we went south we could see the spotty clouds were coming out of big purple ones that sat, not moving, just churning and spitting lightning on the horizon. Id seen them before, hanging in the distance, never blowing inland. Ugly.
When we came up on the Center, there was a big hole in the side of it.
Like somebody stove in a box with one swipe, Bud said.
Angel, who was never more than two feet from Bud any time of day, said, They bombed it.
No, I decided. Very likely it was a small explosion. Then the weather worked its way in.
Which turned out to be true. Thered been some disagreement amongst the people holed up in the Center. Or maybe it was grief and the rage that comes of that. Susan wasnt too clear about it ever.
The front doors were barred, though. We pounded on them. Nothing. So we broke in. No sign of Arthur or anyone.
We found one woman in a back room, scrunched into a bed with cans of food all around and a tiny little oil-burner heater. Looked awful, with big dark circles around her eyes and scraggly uncut hair.
She wouldnt answer me at first. But we got her calmed and cleaned and to talking. That was the worst symptom, the not talking at first. Something back in the past two months had done her deep damage, and she couldnt get it out.
Of course, living in a building half-filled with corpses was no help. The idiots hadnt protected against radiation well enough, I guess. And the Center didnt have good heating. So those who had some radiation sickness died later in the cold snap.