Busted Flush

“No sweat,” Tom came back. “A little radiation doesn’t scare me.”

Hei-lian kept her face impassive at the implied slap at the People’s Republic. After some quick satellite consultation between Hei-lian and her superiors Tom had used his gift of hyperflight to bounce to orbit and then down to Beijing, where he picked up hastily gathered radiation-detection and air-sampling gear. He now wore it on a makeshift harness along with the video camera and a Guoanbu satellite-link radio.

Hei-lian caught Hong’s eye. He monitored the telemetry from Tom’s sensors. He gave her a scarcely perceptible headshake. No malfunction. He might have a weak stomach, but he was shaping up well under stress.

The camera’s eye angled down. The scorched earth swept up. Tom leveled his flight off at perhaps thirty meters’ altitude.

Six figures shuffled toward him along the road. They had a mottled reddish color.

“Closing in,” Tom reported.

“Mon Dieu,” Alicia said, choking.

For a moment Hei-lian’s brain resisted making sense of what her eyes saw. Then she could no longer hide from it. Their clothes had been burned or blasted away. Their skin was gone. Their eyes were shiny tracks glazed down flayed cheeks. One cradled coils of his own intestines in stubbed arms. A purple greasy tail trailed in the white dust behind him.

“Use the wastebasket, Hong,” Hei-lian said through teeth clenched so hard they squeaked. The tech caught it up just in time. The room filled with the acid reek of vomit.

Hei-lian barely noticed.

“Going back up,” Tom said. If the horrific and pathetic sight affected him his voice gave no sign. Hei-lian wondered what went through his mind.

“I can see a crater ahead of me now,” he said. “Not very big. Maybe fifty–sixty yards across.”

“This cannot be!” the professor exclaimed. “A crater would mean the fireball came in contact with the surface. Vaporized soil and rock would be sucked up and mingled with unconsumed radionuclides. It would produce substantial fallout.”

He took off his glasses and polished them furiously with a handkerchief. “Substantial.”

But the instruments continued to show radiation levels scarcely more than background. Something strange was going on here. Hei-lian felt relief at having a mystery to distract her from the images that kept shambling through her mind.

“I’m coming up to the crater,” Tom said, in effect narrating the action they saw on the screen. “Wait—there’s something down there in the middle of it.

“It’s—a kid. A naked kid. In the middle of the fucking crater.”

Tom Weathers touched down. The heat from the lumpy green glass walls baked his skin and forced him to squint his eyes to prevent their drying out. His Geiger counter chattered; the voices from Kongoville assured him he could endure it for a few minutes without permanent harm.

The boy lay sobbing in the midst of a patch of unaffected sand.

“Hey,” he called. “Hey, kid.” The boy was white—fish-pale all over, in fact, and jiggling chubby. Maybe he spoke English.

The kid had his head on his arms. He kept crying.

“Listen,” Tom said. “It’s okay. I’m gonna get you taken care of.”

“Go ’way!” the boy shouted with a wave of his arm. English. Cool.

Tom squatted down at the edge of the patch of sand. “You want me to just leave you here to the mosquitoes? Not a good plan, man.”

“I—killed them. I kill everybody. I shouldn’t be around people. I didn’t want to do it. I want to die!”

“Hey, buddy,” Tom said. “Just take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”

The boy sat up. His pale belly spilled sadly over plump thighs. “I didn’t mean to. I never mean to. But the Highwayman shoved me out of the truck and drove off and then he was gone and these tanks were coming down the road. They started shooting at me. I got scared, and—” He drew in a big shuddering breath and waved his hand around. “This.”

“You did this?”

He nodded. “It always happens when I get scared.”

“Let me get this straight,” Tom said. “You cause nuclear explosions?”

“Yes! Haven’t you been listening? When I get real scared I fucking blow up. Are you some kind of ’tard?” The spasm of anger passed and his eyes gushed tears again. “I wish I was dead. I’m too dangerous to be around!”

The voices in Tom’s head were going ape-shit now. He ignored them. The warm feeling—like the aftermath of a good fuck; that three-way with Hei-lian and Lilith, say—spreading up through his belly from his loins told him what he was dealing with, and what he had, at any cost, to do.

“What’s your name?”

“Drake.” He sniffled and dabbed tears from his eyes. “Who are you?”

“Pleased to meet you, Drake. I’m Tom Weathers. Locally I got hung with some unpronounceable handle. I used to go by the Radical.”