It might have been seconds, or minutes, or hours. I touch a bit of shattered glass and am surprised when blood wells from my fingertip, a small red bead. Daddy's face appears above mine, pale and quivering; he is asking me something, but I do not answer. Noise nudges at my eardrums like a blunt instrument. My tongue is an alien slug. It is hard to believe I have ever spoken before in my life.
"Lovebug? Sarah? You all right?"
"All right," I repeat. "Yeah, I-I'm all right."
I sit up, ears ringing. The cellar is hazy with dust, the floor littered with collapsed shelves and broken jars. Blake is helping Felicity to her feet as Pete sobs into Lyle's shoulder, the latter cradling him with limp arms. Dan is wheezing, leaning on the wall for support. Mama still has her hand on Pete's foot, but her face is yet to register any emotion, eyes passing from person to person as though trying to remember why she walked in the room to begin with. Allie and Jack have their faces buried in each other's necks; they come apart slowly, maintaining contact between their limbs, loathe to cede one inch of each other when just a minute ago they had been bracing for death.
"Is anyone injured?" Daddy rasps.
"Gil," I say, insides wisping with dread. "Gotta go get him, gotta bring him in—"
I take an unsteady step toward the stairs, but Daddy's arm swings out to bar my way.
"That blast...this distance...I can't imagine..." Allie chokes. "I'm so sorry. I know it means nothin' now, but I don't think he suffered long."
"How would you know that?" I whisper, still staring at the shadowed stairwell Gilberto had disappeared up minutes before (or had it been longer?)
"Well, no one's poundin' on the door," Allie replies, apologetic. "Or callin' for help. And, then, there's the cows..."
Nothing. No distant lowing, no yelling. There are booms and thuds—inanimate things undergoing their own death throes, compromised supports buckling, reconfiguring to rubble—as well as a steady, dull roar, a heavy white noise my gut tells me is fire. It is coming from everywhere.
"God Almighty," Felicity murmurs.
Daddy grips his jaw with his hand as though he fears it will fly open.
"You reckon it was a nuke? And whaddya mean, 'this distance?'" Lyle asks Allie. "How far does it go, when it goes off?"
Allie rubs her face with her hands.
"This isn't my field—I'm not a physicist," she prefaces, steadying her breath, "but I am sure that was a nuclear bomb. I can't imagine—I mean, what else would feel like that, first the explosion, then the shockwave? And what else would they use an ICBM for, especially one capable of reachin' this far? I can't really guess our exact distance from it without knowin', like, megatons or whether the bomb detonated in the air or on the ground—"
"But why would they bomb out here—"
"Maybe it was headed for Tulsa and malfunctioned—"
"This ain't happenin'—"
"Jesus, Lord in Heaven, hallowed be thy name—"
"Fuck the bomb," Dan says through the babble. We stare at him. "Few miles nearer, I reckon, and we'd've been incinerated nice 'n easy. Instead, we're stuck down here, bugs in a jar. If the fallout don't kill us, we'll starve."
"Thanks for spellin' it out," I rag. "For a moment there I thought we was lucky."
"W-we're gonna die!" Pete tears at Lyle's arm. His father smacks him upside the ear.
"We ain't gonna die," Mama says. She gets to her feet and stands over the lantern, the crescent moons of flesh under her chin glowing ghostly. "Lissy, Blake—start goin' through them jars. We eat the broke ones first. Pete—check the spigot in the back, make sure it's still drawin' proper from the well. Lyle, you and Daddy get to duct-tapin' 'round the doors. There's a kit with batteries and tools somewhere under that mess. That'll seal out some of that fallout gunk, won't it?"
Allie starts to argue, but Mama plows forward.
"And Dan, you gimme that now or so help me," she orders. Dan hesitates, eyes darting side to side, then drops the sock in her outstretched hand. She stuffs it down her shirtfront.
"Y'all"—she points fingers at the tantum and me—"take the phones and see if you can't make 'em do somethin'."
"There's a possibility that the bomb's electromagnetic pulse has damaged—" Allie starts to say, but Mama cuts her off.
"You, missy, are gonna do me some math."
We do as we're told. The tantum and I paw through the collection of phones; his and Allie's, the most expensive models, won't even turn on, while mine is sluggish and has no signal. Daddy's ancient Nokia is the most responsive, ringing when we dial 9-1-1, but for whatever reason the call just hangs there, unreceived.
"I still say our best option is the radio," the tantum asserts. "Maybe there's a wire in one of the phones we could use to repair it..."
He grabs a screwdriver from Daddy's tool kit and starts fussing with his phone. I listen in on Mama and Allie, who are arguing in low voices.
"—tryin' to tell you before, Mama! Tapin' the doors doesn't matter 'cause we're all breathin' contaminated air right now comin' down the surface vent! I can't determine the particulate count or the level of radioactivity exactly, but—"
"Then we cut off the vent, nail over it with wood from the shelves—"
"And asphyxiate? Listen, there're ten of us in this room—which can't be more than what, 1,600 cubic feet?—and we're all respirin' machines. Forget about usin' up the oxygen—we exhale roughly two pounds of carbon dioxide each a day. You close up that vent, we're dead in hours."
"Well dammit Al, if the outside air's no good how long can we keep breathin' it?"
"I don't know. I don't know what choice we have."
YOU ARE READING
The Floating Cradle
Science FictionSixteen-year-old Sarah hasn't seen her sister Allie in nearly a decade thanks to a family feud she can hardly remember. But the world waits for no grudge; around the time of Sarah's birth, a race of aliens known as the tanta made first contact with...
