Read Bombshell Online

Authors: James Reich

Bombshell (3 page)

When she awoke, she had lost two hours, and she guessed that four more hours must remain between her and the edge of the desert, running up against the black ribbon of the interstate. She moved slowly, watching the terrain with her night-vision field glasses and travelling in bursts.

When she reached I-25 during the morning of April 3, Cash was wracked with cramps. The soaking combat fatigues had worn raw patches in her skin. Her feet and hands were blistered and painful. Her breath misted in the last of the cold air as she pulled the clothes from her body. A sliver of red sun shimmered on the horizon. She was no longer nervous. She had emerged. The guerrilla war had begun. She had to switch clothes and bury the fatigues in the sand. For the second time, she stood naked at the edge of the desert. She had stashed her street clothes in her backpack. After dressing, she wiped the remains of the thick zinc block she had applied to her face and shook the dirt from her hair. Her cap, goggles, and backpack she would keep. It was time to show the world a game of truth or consequences like it had never seen. As she pulled on her ripped black drainpipe jeans, she realized that she was gripping a small object in her fist, and that, unconsciously, she had borne it from the wasteland.
She opened her hand and stared at it. It was a small clot of green mineral, and she recognized it immediately: trinitite, the mutant fallout of Oppenheimer's bomb. It must have insinuated itself while she was crawling away from the obelisk. Across the decades, this last rogue shard had found its way into her hand. It was supposed to have all been cleared away in the forties, she thought. Yet, she knew that these things could never be cleaned up. They were always there, even if they were no longer visible, and this strange talisman had been waiting for her. She took one of the laces from her boots and pushed it into her tight jeans pocket before putting on her street shoes.

After burying her sweat-soaked fatigues and hot boots in the sand, Cash began to walk south, blindly applying mascara as she shadowed the guardrail of I-25. Lizards skimmed along the shoulder as the heat pulsed from the asphalt. Behind her, forensics crews would be sifting through the wreckage of the monument, analyzing her tracks. It was a relief to be walking on the paved road in her sneakers, jeans, and T-shirt. She twisted her cap around to protect her neck from burning, anticipating as she walked how good it would feel to be riding her motorcycle again, getting home. To reach Radium Springs, she hitched a ride with an elderly Hispanic couple. The man who drove their sun-scarred pickup turned the radio to a Tejano station. Steering with his knees and encouraging his wife to steady the wheel, he rolled and lit a joint, dragged on it, before passing it to his wife. The skunk smoke of marijuana filled the cab with earthy, gluey vapor before they wound down the windows, getting stoned enough without hot-boxing. The woman smiled without teeth and offered it to their passenger. Cash took the joint and sucked it in, watching the naked desert, relaxing. It had taken her two days to escape the desert plateau after her destruction of the Trinity monument, just as long as it had taken for the hospital where she had been born in Pripyat to be evacuated after the catastrophe at Chernobyl. By the time she reached Radium
Springs, Cash had cut a 160-mile triangle across the route of the dead. She had been a ghost, near sleepless and hollowed by haunting.

Her black motorcycle, a Virago 250, was safe, still chained to the streetlight between the dumpsters at the back of the café where it had been for the four days it had taken her to infiltrate and escape the blast zone. She was right to have reasoned that it would take a few days before anyone would become suspicious of it, or to have the guts to either vandalize it or steal it, or for the café owners to call the police about an abandoned bike in their back lot. She would hairpin back along I-25. Sitting astride her machine, with the bootlace she had saved, Cash secured the fragment of trinitite to her necklace, a salvaged and polished bicycle chain. Pulling down her goggles, she rode out.

On the southern side of Albuquerque, close to the airport, the traffic crawled and halted. Where the road narrowed for construction, there was a police checkpoint. Cash watched the line ahead. They were stopping every vehicle. Moving slowly forward, she reached into her pack and fumbled for a pack of chewing gum. That and the wind from the road she trusted would obscure the scent of marijuana on her from the truck ride. She pushed more of her black hair under her cap, thinking of her photograph left at the scene, not wanting to be recognized yet, not by a traffic cop. It was unlikely that the USAF would have released information this early, she thought. They would want to finish their forensics, and then the hunt for her would almost certainly be passed silently to the FBI, or if they realized she was an alien, without a U.S. passport, papers, or concrete identity, perhaps to the CIA. If they took her seriously, she reminded herself. Still, if they would not in the beginning, there would be time for them to reckon with her in the coming weeks. The roadblock cops were both stocky and suffering in the rising heat. She noted the badge and tag of the one that approached her.

“Good morning, ma'am. Would you mind raising your goggles, there? And maybe removing your hat. I appreciate it. I just need to check your license.” Cash handed him her license. It was a forgery, but she retained absolute confidence in it. Officer Valdez appraised her as he handed it back: mid-twenties, ugly dark hair. “What's Bikini Kill?” he asked, eyeing the lettering on her white T-shirt and the design below, a marker sketch of an old record player.

“They're my favorite band,” she smiled, smacking her gum. “Punk rock. Feminists.”

“Never heard of them.” Valdez smiled back at her in a good-natured manner that she knew could be false. He wiped sweat from his brow and adjusted his sunglasses, pushing them up into his thick black hair.

“They broke up,” she explained.

“Uh-huh. Where are you heading?” Valdez flicked his eyes toward his notebook, before watching her again and making another rapid study.

“Santa Fe.”

“From?” Valdez took in her small, athletic frame, narrow hips. The jagged crop of her black hair surrounded a face that was pale, almost gray and sickly. Her eyes were surrounded by a smear of mascara and the dark coins of exhaustion. Her misshapen upper lip protruded slightly.

“Acoma. I checked out the pueblo yesterday, but stayed over at the Sky City Casino. Is something going on? Can you tell us what the stops are for?”

He didn't answer her. “You look a little burned out. Get lucky at the casino?”

“I wish, man. All I got was lost.” He's hard to read, Cash decided.

“Well, ride safe, okay? You can head on through.”

Her kind went without suspicion, for now, at least.

Far ahead, over I-25, she expected helicopter rotors throbbing in the brilliant blue sky over the smoke shops and the bucket seats of the speedway stadium and the casinos. Instead, she rode east to I-40 through the neon of Central Avenue: diners and tattoo parlors, a city inside smeared poly wrap, a postmodern reconstruction of the fifties, with chrome and the Cold War played out by pompadour street gangs. She would avoid the main artery, instead winding through the raw drought hills of old Route 66. This highway would be quieter than the road that passed between the reservation lands and abandoned film studios. Cash opened the throttle between the drab planes of the canyons and ascended into the hills.

3

APRIL 3, 2011. CASH HAD LIVED IN NEW MEXICO SINCE HER OWN
Tenderloin tragedy just before her twentieth birthday in 2006. In a haze of grief, she had ridden an Amtrak from the West Coast to Lamy, where the desolate stop had drawn her down from the great silver train and into the rippling heat of the desert. The sky was radiant blue. It reminded her of the blue medals she had seen awarded to the Liquidators of her home city, a drop of red in the rocks, serpents of radon.

In the late morning, Cash returned to her home, a mining cabin in the sometime ghost town of Madrid thirty miles southwest of Santa Fe. She leaned her motorcycle against the remains of the adobe wall that had once separated her cabin from her only neighbor. Carbon hills drew cowls about the sparse cabins situated at wide intervals along the slopes that flanked the drag. Without undressing or removing her frayed high-tops, she collapsed into a numb and dreamless sleep. Madrid was a place for ghosts, a smoky antique scene for the dispossessed and disappearing.
Madrid was a short scud of a tourist trap along Highway 14, otherwise known as the Turquoise Trail, a destination for bikers—at least the bar was. There, the speed limit dropped and the dun hills gave way to an isolated half mile of new age schlock stores, galleries, jeweler shacks, and New Mexican kitsch: turquoise, silver, serpentine, iron pyrites, quartz, a general bonanza of cheap minerals and stones. The road was strung over with lights between the trees and telegraph poles. Yet, behind the over-painted and decorous snare of the brief drag, Madrid was dark with mysterious shacks, a taxidermy of wrecked and rusting vehicles that no one could repair or move, disintegrating and melding with the charcoal dirt. Dogs roamed the track roads, trash-blown anonymous spaces off the single paved tourist street. Nothing was considered unusual in Madrid. Guns discharged randomly. Small hysterias echoed. Trash burned in oil drums. Skeletal vehicles were overcome with sand and coal dust. It was a settlement that had been abandoned, reclaimed, and that could be abandoned again at any moment. There were resident credentials to be honored and each day was a hungover carnival. The residents rotated their improvised costumes: hippie, Vietnam vet, draft dodger, biker, cowboy, digger, artist, dissident, marijuana activist, beatnik, earth mother, or deluded middle-class white medicine woman, some hybrid of those. If there were children in Madrid, Cash thought that they must be hidden in those occult outhouses on the black slopes, behind beer bottle walls, prayer flags, and sun-bleached folk art.

Her sleep had lasted until the evening, when she rose, showered, and watched aircraft lights moving over the darkened landscape from beneath her tin portal. Cash regarded the Blackhawk helicopters and V-22s from Holloman and Kirtland Air Force bases scanning low over the desert and the mountain ranges of Sangre de Cristo, Ortiz, and Jemez and the Cerrillos hills. Their rotors droned and receded. Military exercises and drug busts were not uncommon along the spine of the state. Yet, now she wondered
if they were looking for her. Had she touched a nerve? Were downtown areas of Albuquerque restricted by plastic stripes of yellow police tape in the hunt for the audacious terrorist who had dared strike at the sentimental nexus of the American nuclear dream? She decided that she was almost certainly hoping for too much, too soon. It would be necessary for her to unfold her plans for those with eyes to detect them. She pulled a bottle of tequila from the freezer compartment of her old refrigerator. The slight frost along the bottle bit her fingers. Cash drank as the chopper lights roamed the sky.

Cash recalled that when Robert Oppenheimer observed the first evil flowering of the atomic bomb over the New Mexico desert, he had at that moment taken for himself the person of Shiva, the Lord of Destruction. Sitting and drinking beneath the stars, Cash envisioned Oppenheimer running a hand across his unshaven jaw, flicking sweat into the sand from his death-tainted fingertips. As she had shadowed Oppenheimer, she had subverted him. This burlesque was the opening of her war on the nuclear industry. Cash told herself that she was performing acts of corrective sabotage. In her wake, a wasted phallus in the desert; ahead of her, power plants and cruel billionaires, men with atrophied consciences. She thought of the men who had worked on the Manhattan Project, developing the most devastating weapon in history. How could they work, suspending what nightmares must have troubled them? These men razed Hiroshima, Nagasaki, sent waves of death over Japan, and set their glittering sword of Damocles over every city of the world, forever. Superimposed over footage of unspeakable missile arrays, she saw Oppenheimer's face in a strobe light, forming a rictus of disingenuous astonishment with his hair shining under the glare of television studio lamps. She tried to envision her father, as he must have been in the Soviet Union before she was born. She did not know his name. She did not know her mother's name. Absent any photographs, she thought of her father as resembling Robert Oppenheimer. What she
could not conceive, as her father brought her mother to Pripyat in 1970, was that he was unaware of the danger. Cash saw his eyes shifting and complicit in the Soviet sleet. Chernobyl. Her mother and father disappeared after they had escaped with her from the Soviet Union. The dislocation, the alienation required purpose or atonement. By now, she did not doubt that her parents would have succumbed to cancer from the radiation bequeathed to them by the sphinx at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, as they smiled at their boiling newborn in her bloody wraps.

Cash had been stolen away from the land of the Soviets almost twenty-five years ago. She ached for her dead abandoned city, for her transplanted youth. It was for only a matter of days after her birth, under the glittering smoke and contamination of Pripyat, that she had ever been a Russian-Ukrainian girl named Varyushka. Her name was derived from
varvara
, meaning “foreigner,” and “barbarian.” She had been cut off. The only means Cash had to revisit the artificial city of her birth was through her dreams and the hot fluid grip of natal memories, hallucinations gnashing together, arranging the burnt dust into seductive reconstructions, a virtuality of her blood and skin. The site of her birth had become a place of terror that teenage boys visited in video games. She was a shadow, an alien remnant, as though she had exploded like a monster from that new womb that men had made. It was in America that she had resolved that the creep of atomic cities must be stopped. If she was not born to protect the crimson forests and steppes of the Amazons, then she would protect the great plates of the United States, the old antagonist.

Other books

Leisureville by Andrew D. Blechman
Chained by Jaimie Roberts
Hunter of the Dark by Graham, J A
HowMuchYouWantToBet by Melissa Blue
Down by the River by Lin Stepp
Feehan, Christine - The Scarletti Curse by The Scarletti Curse (v1.5)


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024