The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(23)
He turned to take his beer off the counter and stopped. The television. He banged Shotgun on the arm. “Holy f*ck. You see this?”
Up on the screen, the game show was gone, replaced by a newscaster from the network. Gordo didn’t recognize the man on-screen, but it was easy to tell he was harried. On the bottom of the screen were the words “nuclear explosion.”
“Burly?” the girl said behind him.
“Just a minute. Hey, LuAnne, can you turn up the sound for a minute?”
LuAnne lumbered over and obliged, and Gordo realized it had gotten quiet behind him, the eleven Grimsby children shushed by their parents.
“. . . minutes ago. According to the White House, the Chinese premier has confirmed that the explosion was an accident during training exercises. Again, we apologize for cutting away from your regularly scheduled program, but in breaking news, a nuclear bomb exploded less than twenty minutes ago in the northern Chinese province of Xinjiang. While the scope of the destruction is not clear, the White House has informed us that this was an isolated incident. The Chinese government is reporting it as a military accident. At this time we believe a military aircraft carrying a live nuclear weapon crashed during a training mission. We don’t have much information, but we’ll go now to the White House where—”
Gordo didn’t wait to hear what the reporter from the White House did or did not know. He and Shotgun glanced at each other then scrambled out the door, followed closely by Patty and Ken Grimsby and their brood. His last image of the inside of LuAnne’s Pizza & Beer was LuAnne tossing her white towel on the bar and spinning toward the kitchen while Flower and Baywolf looked around in confusion.
All thoughts of the hippie girl and her angry boyfriend disappeared as he pounded the gas pedal against the floor of his truck. He saw Shotgun’s truck take the corner too fast, tearing up a cloud of dust, but he was too busy dialing Amy to worry about Shotgun. When he turned into his driveway, he hit the dip fast enough that he was pretty sure he got all four wheels airborne. He could feel his heart jackhammering as he slammed on the brakes and ran to get the shelter doors down.
And then, after all that, it was just the three of them inside the shelter, doors secured: Claymore wagging his tail, Amy telling him he’d been right all along, and Gordo feeling a hollow nervousness in the pit of his stomach.
He was ready for the end of the world.
Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center,
Twentynine Palms, California
One little nuclear explosion and everybody goes batshit. The newscasters had been jabbering all night, talking heads talking out of their asses, but nobody seemed to have anything to add to the initial reports that it was a military plane crash during training except that the Chinese government was now stating that the nuclear blast had been part of “an internal matter” and they were “securing the affected area.” Not exactly comforting, Kim thought, but probably not worthy of this level of alert. They were locked and loaded and ready to be boots up at any minute, though she wasn’t really sure what she was supposed to do in the event that nuclear missiles started coming down. Duck and cover? Probably better to be on a plane headed somewhere when mushroom clouds started growing. But then she remembered she’d read somewhere that a nuke could cause electromagnetic pulses that shut down electronics. Being aboard a plane when the electronics were fried seemed like an unpromising way to spend a morning.
Kim yawned and shifted in her bunk. Gunnery Sergeant McCullogh had spent the rest of the evening barking at the company until everything was as ready as it could be, and then Gunny did what good leaders do, which was allow them to get some rest. That was one of those military maxims that proved to be true: sleep when you can. Kim knew Mitts probably spent the night awake and overthinking the day to come. She wasn’t sure about Duran, but Elroy never seemed to have any trouble sleeping. Even though Kim had her nightmares—the usual one of making a decision that got one of the men killed, plus a new and not unexpected nightmare of having the flesh melt off her body as she was enveloped in a nuclear blast—she’d gotten some solid shut-eye. An hour of lounging in bed after waking up would have been nice, though. That was one of the things she missed most from civilian life. She loved the order, the discipline, the uniform, the weapons, the promise of violence, the sense of belonging to something bigger than herself that came with the Marines, but she sure as shit missed lolling around in bed on Sunday mornings and taking her time getting ready.
She gave her head a quick scratch, sat up, slipped the elastic off her wrist, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She’d actually worried for a little while that she was going to have to shave her head as part of enlisting. Kim knew she would have been able to pull the look off. She wasn’t vain, just honest about the fact that she had a pretty face. She’d always been athletically built, but as a softball catcher, she sometimes veered more toward solid than sleek. Three months in the Marines had erased all the extra padding. It felt as if she’d gone through a metamorphosis, turning into the woman she always wanted to be. Even though there were times she was terrified about being a lance corporal, about being responsible for her unit, she was also the most confident she’d ever been. Of course, that didn’t mean she was in any hurry to cut her hair.
She double-timed it to the mess and sat down with her unit, Duran sliding down the bench to make room for her. “What’s the scuttlebutt?”