Blue Hope: (Book 2) (Red Hope) Read online

  Blood streamed out of the hole and down her arm. She stuck her hand under her armpit to apply pressure and mask the pain.

  Connie reached up again, this time being more careful, wiping the broken glass away and pulling. With all her effort, she stood up and started breathing again.

  So much dust. So much glass, she thought.

  The ringing in her ears wouldn’t let up. She was dizzy and leaned on the table to keep from falling. The nausea hit like a freight train, her stomach erupting up and out as she vomited onto the table. The pile of dusty glass shards stopped it from flowing off the table edge. She felt instantly better, then vomited again.

  The ringing in her ears was quickly replaced with the cacophony of every car alarm and house alarm going off within a 50 mile radius.

  Wee-ow-wee-ow-wee-ow!

  She heard screaming coming from the bedrooms.

  “Catie! Cody!” she yelled. “Mommy’s coming!”

  She hobbled up the stairs without her crutches and stumbled into the first bedroom. Two legs stuck out from under a bookshelf that had fallen over and landed on the bed at an angle. The legs were moving. She knelt down to look.

  “Cody, are you hurt?” Connie asked.

  “No, but I’m really scared!”

  “Okay, okay, hang on. I’m going to help you get out.”

  She gently pulled on his feet. He slid out like a pan from an oven. Once he was out from under the bookshelf, he burst into tears. Cody stood up, clutching his favorite stuffed dinosaur. Connie gave him a tight hug and kissed his forehead.

  “Come with me,” she said, grabbing his hand and hobbling along the wall toward Catie’s room.

  They found a similar mess, but she was on the bed, curled up under a blanket and whimpering. A tall lamp had fallen onto the bed. Connie hobbled over to the bed and ripped off the covers. Catie was still clutching her iPad with Minecraft on the screen, but she wasn’t paying any attention to it.

  “Are you hurt anywhere?” Connie asked.

  “Just my ears, they’re ringing.”

  “Okay, sweetheart, so are mine,” Connie said in an effort to comfort Catie, hugging her tightly. “We’re gonna be okay.”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy, I was playing Minecraft.”

  Connie put on a tough smile.

  “It’s okay, Honey. I’m not mad about that at all.”

  Connie noticed that the room had gotten considerably brighter, and kept getting brighter. She stepped over the broken glass to the window and pulled back the shredded curtains. In the distance, from the direction of downtown Houston, a mushroom cloud was slowly building up toward the heavens. The house began to rumble with a low-frequency tone. The wooden chair rattled across the floor.

  Her cellphone rang. The caller ID said it was from Chris Tankovitch, the director of NASA and now a family friend.

  She answered.

  “Connie! You gotta get yourself and the kids to the bathroom. Get in the tub and put a mattress over them and…”

  The voice of Chris Tankovitch faded out.

  Signal lost.

  The ringing in her ears was not going away. She moved her jaw to try to get rid of it.

  “We have to get out of Houston quick,” Connie said. “Go, go, go.”

  The kids shuffled down the stairs trying to avoid the broken glass. Connie clutched the railing, trailing far behind her kids.

  “Mommy, I’m scared,” Cody complained as he waited at the bottom of the stairs, afraid of the mountain of broken glass and debris.

  “I know, Honey, just walk around the edges, okay? Try not to touch any of it.”

  She grabbed her purse and crutches and led the kids out through the front door. On the front porch, she looked around, stunned. This neighborhood was usually quiet during the day, but now all the alarms were blaring.

  Connie scanned around the neighborhood. All of the windows were broken out of every house. She noticed her minivan. Her heart sank.

  Ohhhh of course, she whispered.

  The carport had fallen over onto the family minivan. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Change of plans kids. Let’s go visit Mrs. Janson.”

  Connie flexed her jaw again to try to get rid of the ringing in her ear. She moved with great effort down the three steps to the front yard. The fence separating her driveway from Mrs. Janson’s was too tall for her to climb. She had to walk all the way to the street and then then back up the neighbor’s driveway. The kids just climbed over it.

  Mrs. Janson was the former wife of Captain Robert Janson, a test pilot who flew many of the experimental aircraft for the Air Force during the 1960’s. He’d died ten years earlier, but she managed to live by herself next to the corporate housing that Connie and her family were using.

  The sound of distant sirens and ambulances came and went, echoing throughout this suburban enclave like noises through a canyon. Connie peered up and down the street, but couldn’t see the actual vehicles. Just the evidence of their sirens.

  Then it sank in. Nobody was coming to help.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Mrs. Janson didn’t answer.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Connie reached in the mailbox and took out the spare key that Mrs. Janson always kept there. She opened the door and let it glide full open.

  “Mrs. Janson? Hello?”

  Connie suspected what she might find.

  “Cody, Catie, you stay here, okay?”

  She crutched into the doorway. Out of instinct, she flipped the light switch on the wall a few times. No power.

  Connie eased through the living room toward the kitchen. On the floor lay the woman who’d been so kind to them since they arrived in Houston.

  Mrs. Janson wasn’t moving.

  With much difficulty, Connie knelt down on the ground next to her, moving away a swath of broken glass for her knees to rest. She pressed her fingers on Mrs. Janson’s neck and couldn’t find a pulse. The glass had done irreparable damage to the old woman, leaving cuts everywhere.

  Connie put her hands together over the old woman’s sternum and began to push down and release, doing her best to remember the CPR training she’d had as a teacher. Every push caused a crunching sound to emanate from Mrs. Janson’s chest – the result of cartilage snapping and ribs breaking. Connie was told this would happen during CPR, but wasn’t prepared for the awfulness of it. Every compression caused the dozens of cuts to bleed a little more. Connie leaned down and put her ear to Mrs. Janson’s nose and mouth.

  Still no breathing.

  Still no pulse.

  Oh Mrs. Janson, thought Connie, you poor woman.

  Connie pulled out her phone and tried to dial 911. Still no signal. Connie started CPR again, but slowly gave up, knowing the outcome was grim without any emergency help available. Connie looked around, sniffling back her tears of worry, wondering what to do.

  She took a shawl from the kitchen chair and lay it over Mrs. Janson. She leaned down, kissed her on the forehead and whispered, “Forgive me, Mrs. Janson.”

  Connie reached for her crutches and stood back up. She saw the big wooden key on the kitchen wall that held all of Mrs. Janson’s keys. Each one had its own hook. Connie took the old Honda key and crutched back to the front door where the kids were waiting. She exited the house and locked the door, depositing the key back into the mailbox.

  “Is Mrs. Janson going to be okay?” Cody asked.

  “Yes, she’s going to be fine.”

  One day Connie would explain the truth to them. Not now.

  “Mommy, the cloud is getting taller,” Cody said.

  The mushroom cloud continued to climb. It finally blocked out the Sun, sending a shadow over the street.

  “Mrs. Janson said we could borrow her car – everybody get in.”

  The kids climbed into the back seat and buckled themselves into the child safety seats. These seats often held Mrs. Janson’s grandchildren when they visited from their condo in downtown Houston.

 
Connie climbed in. The one saving grace of her back injury was that she still had most of the control of her right foot, allowing her to legally maintain driving privileges. She could drive any car with an automatic transmission – like Mrs. Janson’s blood-red Honda.

  She eased the car out onto the street and drove to the main road, maintaining a low speed to avoid all of the debris in her way. Every traffic light was blinking red. She started to see more cars here and there, all heading for the outer belt known as Interstate 8, presumably to head north out of the city. She followed the hurricane evacuation signs meant to direct the massive outflow of cars during bad weather.

  Connie got onto the freeway, heading north toward their home in Fort Worth, normally a five hour drive away. After only ten minutes, the traffic slowed to a crawl, high on a bridge above an infinite sea of oil refineries, some of which were on fire. Black smoke covered the entire area.

  Traffic inched forward, taking over an hour just to reach the other side of the bridge. Connie found herself surrounded by scared and frightened drivers trying to escape northward from Houston. She exited the freeway and got onto the service roads which flanked the interstate. She saw several grown men yelling at each other and fighting in what must’ve been a fit of road rage. The service roads proved to be a godsend because they allowed her to advance at a steady rate. She made good progress in a situation that defied progress. Once Connie reached the suburbs in the far north part of town, she got back on the interstate and gunned the engine, ignoring speed limits.

  “Kids, we’re heading home.”

  “What about Daddy?”

  “He’ll be fine. He’s not in Houston. He’s on Mars. This doesn’t affect him.”

  I hate lying to the kids, she thought.

  CHAPTER 5

  Blame this whole mess on Dmitri Stalov. He’s the reason why Earth lost all power and communication during the attack. He’s also the reason why so many people lived.

  Dmitri grew up in a large house on the outskirts of Moscow during the 1960’s and 1970’s. His father, Fyodor, was an upper level member of the Communist Party. His job was to set yearly quotas for how much industrial farm equipment would be produced. Regardless of input from farmers, Dmitri’s father would dictate how many tractors and hay balers would be made. Little Dmitri loved touring the factories with his father. He was too young to understand the closed-door meetings that involved a lot of shouting, loud boom sounds followed by screams, and his father leaving quickly while wiping blood from his hands.

  Despite his naïve factory visits, Dmitri developed a keen interest in all things mechanical and electrical. At the age of twelve, he built a doll house for his sister that had a working electric elevator.

  With the help of his father, Dmitri entered the University of Moscow at the age of 17 to pursue his interest in electronics. The prodigy loved making gadgets to play tricks on his friends. His most successful device was a small battery-powered box that could scramble the signal of any radio within a thirty foot radius – all at the push of a button. His magnum opus came during the finals of the 1980 Winter Olympics hockey championship – that’s when America played against the Soviets and won the so-called Miracle On Ice. Just when it looked like the Soviets were going to lose, Dmitri mashed his finger on the button of his radio scrambler and didn’t let go. His family lost their minds with rage. They jumped up and down. They looked behind the radio. They bent the antenna. Occasionally when a family member would reach a ridiculous pose holding the antenna, Dmitri would release the scrambler’s button, making the unsuspecting uncle think that holding the antenna while in a pirouette pose fixed the broadcast. Tears of laughter ran down Dmitri’s face as he tried not to let on about his trick. With only seconds left in the game, he mashed the button down for good.

  College didn’t go well for Dmitri because he often knew more than his professors. When the days of university ended, Dmitri was sent to a missile design bureau to do the grunt work of a 21-year old engineer. That included getting coffee for the engineers who had earned their seniority in the bureau. Unlike his other compatriots, he stayed late to read the technical manuals written by his predecessors. He became an expert in the design of automatic guidance systems. When the USA launched the GPS satellite system in the mid 1980’s, Dmitri was part of a secret team chosen to decode the purposely scrambled signal – with the goal being for the Russian military to use it. Combined with their own GLONASS GPS system, the Russian military had access to nearly double the number of positioning satellites, making accurate placement of military vehicles very reliable.

  With such position information available, Dmitri developed small guidance systems that could steer micro-bomblets precisely to a target – all for the benefit of Mother Russia. His bosses took notice of his work and in his spare time Dmitri put together a plan that he thought would save all of humanity – he was young and idealistic.

  He proposed the idea of taking existing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM’s) and replacing the large warhead cluster with 144 small GPS-guided micro-nukes. Instead of vaporizing all of humanity, his missiles would precisely strike communication hubs and power plants.

  The bosses didn’t like this friendly attack method because they thought the Americans were bloodthirsty animals with their only desire being to kill as many Russians as possible. Eventually, Dmitri convinced his overseers that the single act of destroying the enemy’s communication and power supply networks would actually be more disabling than a single 10 kiloton nuke dropped on Washington DC. Several tests were carried out in real Russian towns on the Eastern steppes. Only thirty six unsuspecting citizens were evaporated. By Soviet standards, it was a stunning success. Dmitri became the apple of the politburo’s eye. His father was proud. With that said, Russia would still drop several 10 kiloton nukes on the major cities of their enemies for completeness sake.

  Throughout the 1980’s, a large portion of Russia’s ICBM fleet was secretly re-warheaded with the load of bomblets destined to take out every major communication hub and power plant in America, Europe and China. Dmitri became celebrated and the young engineering prodigy settled into a comfy university teaching job in Leningrad. Every year he taught from the same notes. Every year he gave the same tests. Every year his students cheated from his old notes and old tests. This efficiency freed him up to pursue his hobbies and outside interests.

  As a rocket enthusiast and a proud Russian, Dmitri’s new hobby became proving that the Soviets’ attempts at a Moon Landing in the 1960’s could have succeeded. Not many people realize it, but the Russians desperately tried to beat the Americans to the Moon. They designed a rocket called the N1 which produced nearly ten million pounds of thrust, making it the most powerful rocket ever built. The Russians built four test vehicles and all four crashed, the second one producing one of the loudest non-nuclear explosions in human history.

  Dmitri spent many years building detailed computerized mission models and sub-assembly models to see how each rocket dealt with common problems such as failed steerable rocket nozzles and guidance. Without realizing it, Dmitri became obsessed with the American Saturn V rocket, the rocket that eventually did take mankind to the Moon – just not for the Soviets.

  After studying the most minute details, he realized that the Soviet N1 rocket was simply inferior in every way. In hindsight, it was inevitable that the Saturn V would make it to the Moon before the N1 did. In fact, he felt it would be difficult to develop any technology under the troubled environment that hounded then-modern Russia. Dmitri grew depressed.

  On a particularly warm August evening years before the fall of the Soviet Union, Dmitri left his apartment to get dinner and never came back. Two weeks later, he showed up in an American submarine in New London, Connecticut, having defected to the United States via an old-school network of spies. Until his handlers could figure out what best to do with him, he stayed in a red brick house just up the hill from the Naval Submarine Museum, which he toured on a daily basis. His new name
would be John Smith – although he didn’t sound like a John Smith when he spoke.

  John (Dmitri) was presented to the CIA as an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile expert. And he was for the most part. In fact, he told his new handlers about an idea he had that would defeat the Russians even faster than a direct attack with mega-explosions. He explained how to use small GPS-guided bomblets to destroy the Soviet communication networks and power distribution centers. His classic line became, “Disabling their ability to communicate will prevent their ability for massive retaliation.”

  The CIA hated Dmitri’s idea. That all changed on another warm August evening. While testing a microphone before a radio news conference, President Ronald Reagan jokingly said, “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

  It was a great joke, enjoyed by the nearby press. Unfortunately, it leaked and the Soviets put their entire Far East Army on high alert status. Reagan was surprised that Russia would ever consider that the USA would provoke a nuclear war. It was an almost inconceivable thought to him, forcing him to realize that they were just as scared of us as we were of them. In a timely meeting with the CIA, Dmitri’s more humane missile warhead conversion idea was revisited and tentatively approved.

  A test missile was created and dropped on a fake town in the New Mexico desert. Aside from a few vaporized jackrabbits, nobody was killed. It was a stunning success. A portion of the American warhead fleet was changed over to these so-called “CommKnock” warheads – the name had multiple meanings. Dmitri told people it meant Communication Knockout, but when Dmitri left the room, the generals said it stood for Commie Knockout.

  Dmitri single-handedly caused both sides of the Cold War to re-envision themselves as the nicer and more humane of aggressors. His idea would lead to the saving of millions of lives not only in America and Russia, but in Europe and China and wherever else the thousands of ICBM’s were aimed. Dmitri was happy and after three years in Connecticut, he vanished without a trace. His last note was an email to a colleague saying, “I’d like to visit the Southwest. Oh, and I ate all your prunes.”