Hot Wire (30 page)

A patrol car raced by in the other direction, cherries stabbing through the rain, then another Army truck pulled in behind me, headlights glaring in the mirror for a second before it passed in a flurry of spray. The traffic had stalled completely up ahead and it looked like it had been stuck there for a while. When I reached the end of the queue, I pulled in behind a brand new Beamer 6-series sports car and sank back against my seat, waiting for whatever was going to happen. The line wasn't moving at all and some of the drivers were standing together on the pavement, talking and looking around. Nobody was in the Beamer, but its lights were on and the engine was running.

The traffic jam must've been a quarter-mile long. I couldn't tell what was going on, but there were a lot of cop cars and emergency vehicles blocking the highway up ahead and I could just see a couple of big trucks parked on the embankment. I sat there for a while, wondering if I should abandon the Plymouth and try sneaking off in the dark, but that was crazy. The last thing I wanted to do was hitch north again and I wouldn't last a day trying to hoof it across the valley. The road block was probably just a bad traffic accident – nothing unusual in that kind of weather. I had to find out what had happened before I did something drastic.

I turned the engine off, grabbed the keys, then got out in a light drizzle. More cars were pulling in behind me, their headlights surrounded by haloes. A siren coughed somewhere and I could hear CB static coming from a big 18-wheeler up the line. A group of men were standing around a pickup truck thirty or forty feet away and I walked over to them, trying to smooth out my hair and clothes. I was a wreck, covered with bruises, my shirt ripped and burned, and I must've reeked of gas and smoke. Walking by the Beamer, I noticed that the keys were still in the ignition.

The men huddled in a circle next to the pickup truck, talking intently in the middle of the two lanes of stalled traffic. There were a couple redneck types – truck drivers, maybe – some guy in a business suit and a fat geek in a raincoat who looked like a tourist. The cars were full of people: women slumped in their seats, kids sleeping in back, drivers talking on cell phones or listening to the radio. Everybody looked tired and pissed-off. I hesitated for a second, checked my back, then walked over to the pickup, trying to act casual. The guy in the business suit looked over and did a double-take when he saw me.

"Jesus Christ," he said. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah." I shrugged. "It's no big deal."

"What happened? Did you have an accident?"

"Nah." I gave him this innocent look. "I had to change a flat a couple miles back and fell down in the mud. My flashlight went out and I couldn't see anything." I brushed some crap off my tattered shirt, trying to act embarassed. "I'm a mess..."

"Are you alone?" he asked. "Where are you going?"

"Fresno." I looked down the line of cars. "What's going on?"

"Homeland Security." One of the rednecks turned his head and spit a gob of chewing tobacco on the pavement. "Some kind of checkpoint, but they won't say what for."

"They're checking IDs," the fat guy said nervously. "I heard they're detaining people, taking them away in trucks."

"What for?" I clenched up, glancing back at the Plymouth. It was blocked in now, so I didn't have a choice. I was going to have to ditch the car and try to get away on foot.

"No one knows." The suit looked worried. "It's just a rumor." He studied me, his eyes concerned. "How old are you, anyway?"

"Twenty-two. I'm a student at Golden Gate University."

"It's the same old crap," the truck driver went on. "They're groping kids in airports, confiscating guns, spying on everything we do and now they got these random checkpoints all around the country. I'm telling you this ain't America anymore. They keep pushing it and pushing it with this Big Brother stuff, but people aren't going to stand for it much longer. You can bet on that. This isn't the Soviet Union. People are gonna fight back."

"They're probably checking for illegals," the suit said. "Narcotics, maybe. Weapons. There's a war on you know."

"There's always a war on."

"Maybe they're looking for terrorists," the fat guy said.

"Terrorists." The truck driver sneered. "How many times are we gonna hear that before people start to wake up? This is police state stuff. They're trying to scare everybody with all this terrorist crap. Get us to fall into line."

"Conspiracy theories. That's all I hear anymore."

I edged away while they were arguing and headed back to the Plymouth. The Beamer was still sitting there unattended with the keys in the ignition. Maybe it belonged to the guy in the suit. I was tempted to just get in and drive off, but there were too many cops and civilians around. When I got back to the Plymouth, I was still trying to decide what to do. Just then, another patrol car went by on the shoulder of the northbound lanes, the cop behind the wheel glancing over in my direction. That settled it. I had to get out of there before somebody asked to see my ID.

The suitcase and the briefcase were lying in the back seat of the Plymouth. I needed the money, but I figured I'd ditch the files and head down the embankment, try to circle around and hitch a ride north after I got clear of the area. If I could get back to Patterson, maybe I could find another car. I glanced over my shoulder, then opened the back door and grabbed the suitcase. The thought of just walking away from the highway made my stomach crawl. If I couldn't get a ride, I was screwed. I didn't have any food or water. I didn't even have a jacket.

That's when it happened.

#

There was a soft thump in the distance, way off to the north, then the horizon lit up like a giant flare had gone off and this white-hot blob of light suddenly appeared in the direction of San Francisco, turning night into day for a couple seconds. I wasn't looking at it directly or I would've been blinded like half the people standing around on the highway.

The sky darkened again as the blob of light rose into the air, turning orange and red and expanding like a balloon, forming this dome that spread across the horizon, getting bigger and bigger. Then a huge, bloated fireball detached itself from the earth and floated up in a column of boiling flames, surrounded by these clouds that expanded around it like a stack of perfect smoke rings.

A mushroom cloud.

It was beautiful. Fantastic. Lightning bolts crackled around the thing, then the sound hit us and there was a kind of rushing rumble that shook the ground as the shock wave passed under the highway and radiated across the valley. The wind picked up for a minute, scattering trash over the pavement and whipping my hair around my shoulders, then the air sucked back again, blowing in the other direction.

I just stood there in the middle of the highway with my suitcase full of money, hypnotized, watching that giant fireball surge into the sky. The storm clouds opened like a portal to let it through and the mushroom cloud spread out like an anvilhead that must've been miles across and thousands of feet in the air. My mind was a blank. I felt like I was on an alien planet or something, looking up at this cosmic monster.

Crewcut's bosses had set off the bomb. The maniacs had actually done it. People were screaming all around me, running between the cars, huddling on the pavement, some of them standing in the middle of the highway, staring up at the sky in total shock and confusion. The horizon was glowing like all of northern California was on fire and the cloud from the explosion was still spreading, still getting bigger. We were almost a hundred miles away, but the thing was gigantic and I suddenly realized what it meant. San Francisco was gone. Oakland. Berkeley. The Bay Area had been wiped off the map.

Nothing happened for a minute. The highway and valley were lit up with this weird red glow, the mushroom cloud reflecting off the car windows and rearview mirrors. Then a horn blared somewhere and the panic started. A black SUV raced by on the embankment, heading south towards the roadblock which was already breaking up. Sirens screamed in the distance. I could see the patrol cars and Homeland Security trucks pulling out a quarter-mile away, racing off in the other direction.

The civilians went crazy, suddenly desperate to get out of there. The people who'd left their cars scrambled to get back to them and somebody collided with me, letting out a shout. Engines started, but the gridlock was bumper to bumper. The drivers found themselves blocked in and started ramming into each other, pounding on their horns, trying to get clear of the lines of stalled traffic. Women were shrieking, children screaming. A car bounced down the embankment, then another, their headlights speeding across the valley. The highway had suddenly turned into a demolition derby.

A truck smashed into the Plymouth, backed up, crashed into the car behind it. A windshield shattered. Steam gushed from a busted radiator. I ran over to the Beamer, looking around. The guys I'd been talking to had vanished in all the chaos. People were abandoning their cars now, stumbling down the embankment, completely out of their minds. Off to the north, the mushroom cloud was still billowing into the air, surrounded by a livid halo, the horizon glowing like a bed of coals.

I jumped into the Beamer, tossed the suitcase on the passenger seat, then started the engine, released the emergency brake and slammed the stick shift into reverse. Tires squealed behind me and a car shot off the embankment, sailed through the air, then crashed into the field next to the highway and rolled over on its side. I backed up, thumped into the Plymouth, then put the transmission into first and plowed into the car in front of me, knocking it forward a couple feet. A space opened. Just enough to get through. I turned the wheel all the way to the left, backed up again, then drove forward and down the embankment just as two or three cars went by, their headlights flickering through a field of waist-high grass. I followed them the best I could, hanging onto the wheel, the Beamer clattering over ruts, the grass thrashing against the doors and hood. Above me, cars were working their way along the shoulder, trying to get past the traffic jam. Another quarter-mile and everybody would be free and clear. Then it hit me and I started laughing – a kind of hysterical giggle. The bomb had gone off just in time. Nobody was going to be looking for me now. They were either dead or they'd have other things on their mind.

Ten minutes later, I was back on the highway, heading south for L.A. with my suitcase full of money, the flaming ruins of San Francisco glowing in the rearview.

It was my lucky day.

###

Phase Four

"Government conspiracy, political intrigue, action, thrills, and psychedelic horror – this book has a little tantalizing piece of everything."

– The Troubled Scribe

When a classified military convoy transporting nerve gas is hijacked in the Nevada desert by a group of Middle Eastern terrorists, Homeland Security investigator Matthew Drake is assigned to put the suspects under surveillance.

But when the gas is released inside a luxury high-rise hotel in an apparent attempt to assassinate the President, Drake realizes – too late – that the hijackers weren't terrorists, the convoy wasn't carrying nerve gas, and something is very wrong in Washington D.C.

Now mobs are rioting in the Bay Area and panic is spreading across California at a frightening speed, threatening to engulf the entire country.

On the run with disgraced CIA surveillance technician Gena Hahn, Drake struggles to contain a sinister plan to achieve total control over the human mind.

Gary Carson was famous in the third grade for writing a series of grisly monster stories he pecked out on a typewriter and read in front of the class.

In college, he lost his edge for a while and wrote dull, literary short stories and poetry that appeared in various campus magazines and other bird-cage liners.

Later, he got back on track by dropping out and writing features for The Westport Trucker, an underground newspaper that ran headlines like "WHO STOLE JFK'S BRAIN?"

After spells as a programmer, system administrator, web developer and general IT monkey in Kansas City and San Francisco, he later worked in Reno, Nevada – the land of legalized prostitution, quickee divorces, toxic waste dumps and the giant radioactive tarantula.

Currently, he's living in Rolla, Mo., writing and waiting for the system to collapse.

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