The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(14)
“What the f*ck was that?” The president was looking at the screen as well.
Everybody in the room was now staring at the map of China, looking at the bloom and fade of light near the northwest corner of the country. That is, everybody but the national security advisor. She was staring at the uniform who had been whispering in her ear. “Was that it?” Alex asked. She turned to look at the officer by the console. “Was it a missile? Whose was it? Are there any others in the air? Was it just the one?”
The officer, who had one of the earpieces on his headphones pressed back against his head, held his hand up to Alex, looked at the screen, and then nodded. “That’s it,” he said. “It wasn’t a missile.”
Manny realized he’d been drifting between watching Alex and the officer and looking at the burst of light fading back to darkness. “If it wasn’t a missile, what the f*ck was it?”
The room had gone weirdly quiet, a sudden vacuum of sound in the wake of Manny’s question, and he knew he wasn’t the only person who jumped when the phone behind them rang. It was not just a phone that rang. It was the phone. He remembered as a kid when they showed the president picking up the hotline to the Russians in movies, how it was usually a red phone, sinister and there as the last resort before nuclear winter, but it wasn’t until he’d actually spent some time in the White House that he realized the phone was real. And the phone was ringing. There was no question that the person on the other end was going to be the Chinese general secretary, and it took only two rings before Steph stepped over to it, her hand on the receiver.
“Can somebody,” she said, barking out the words to the room as she prepared to pick up the phone, “tell me just what the f*ck that was on the screen?”
“That,” said Manny, looking at the screen again, where the flare of light had already started to dissipate, “was a nuke.”
Xinjiang Province, China
For a moment he thought he was going to throw up, but he didn’t slow down. The truck had barely made it through the barricades, and even then he’d had to drive over two soldiers. The thought of the thump and the screams was enough to make him gag again, but no matter what happened, he wasn’t going to stop driving. He’d wanted to get to his sister and her family.
He’d been too late for that.
No, he wasn’t going to stop for soldiers and he wasn’t going to stop to vomit. He wasn’t going to stop until he ran out of gas, until he’d put as many kilometers between the area and himself as possible. The officials claimed the situation was under control, but the area in which they claimed it was contained seemed to grow every day. That, plus the original broadcasts, which featured local newscasters and party officials he recognized, had been replaced by people he didn’t know, people from outside the province. There had been rumors at the factory, rumors at the market. He knew of at least two men who had been working in the mines who had not yet been allowed home. Worse than any of that, and what had finally prompted him to steal a set of keys for the truck and stow a water bottle and a little food in the pockets of his jacket—the most he could manage without calling attention to himself—was that three days ago all communications with the outside world had been cut off. No landlines, no cell phones, no Internet. Nothing in or out. Just the official television and radio broadcasts.
It had been only five days since the first incident at the mine. He had assumed it was just another accident, but it didn’t take long for the whispers to start spreading. A virus. The army experimenting with chemical or biological weapons. The old woman who brought him his soup at the restaurant around the corner from his apartment insisted that it was ghosts, that the miners had disturbed some sort of supernatural force. The sister of one of his friends, a girl who spent most of her free time reading pirated copies of American novels for teenagers, claimed it was either vampires or zombies, and that was why the army arrived so quickly.
At first, he didn’t think too much of any of it. People died in the mines. That’s the way it was. At least he didn’t have to work there. While he didn’t love his job in the factory, at nineteen he made more money in a month than his parents were willing to believe. They kept insisting he was exaggerating when he told them his salary. He had a small apartment to himself. He had his own television, a cell phone, a computer, and he even had the occasional night alone with that sister of his friend. His own sister and her two children were only a short walk away from his apartment, and she had him over for dinner a few nights each week. So if he did not see his parents as often as he would have liked, the five-hour bus trip something of a hardship, it was hard to complain.
Five nights ago, when most people thought it was just an accident, he’d had dinner with his sister, and while he bounced his nephew on his knee, his sister’s blowhard husband went on and on about safety lapses at the mine, about how this sort of thing was bound to happen with all the steps they skipped. Four nights ago, he’d been aware that there was talk, but it was one of those nights when his girlfriend—or whatever she was to him—had come over, and the two of them didn’t do much talking.
But it was three nights ago that he really took notice. He’d cooked himself dinner and then tried to go online. His computer was having none of it. He wasn’t concerned, because even though the village had a relatively fast Internet connection, it was sporadic. Then he pulled out his cell phone to call his parents and realized he didn’t have a signal. And on the television, every channel was blank except for the official local channel, which was on a one-hour loop. He sighed, read for a while, and then went to sleep.