“Get you a beer?”
“I’m fine for now, thanks.” She knew everything about this was terrible: burning wood to cook meat from methane-farting cows and serving it on throwaway petrochemical plates.
“Bison,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Supposedly better.”
“It’s really good to see you, Red.”
“Pleasure’s all mine.”
“Tell me about what happened.”
“You want the full version? Or—”
“There’ll be time for that later, I hope.”
“You know about what was on his back.”
“Just enough Cobalt-60 to make the site unusable for a hundred years.”
Rufus nodded.
“But other than that—there would be no collateral damage.”
He nodded. “That was the idea. Minimal casualties. But enough
of a mess to stop geoengineering activities here until T.R. could build a new gun—at least a couple of years.”
“And send a message.”
“Messages ain’t my area of specialization,” he said.
“Shutting down the gun would cause a termination shock.”
“Chance they were willing to take, I guess.” He sighed. “Anyway, I didn’t know what it was.”
“Of course not.”
“Thought it was a bomb. Thought I could disable it. Maybe give him a chance to get out of this in one piece.” Rufus stared off across the desert, replaying it in his mind’s eye. He stuck out his tongue, then, after a few seconds, pulled it back in. “He stopped.”
“What?”
“Yeah. When he saw Jules, apparently. That’s how Jules tells the story. I didn’t see nothing but the device, through the sights of my rifle, so Jules had to tell me that later.”
Saskia nodded.
“He stopped,” Rufus repeated. “Like he realized, at that instant, that people were taking shelter down in the bottom of the shaft.”
“He understood that he was about to take our lives,” Saskia said, nodding.
“I hit it three times. Just to be sure. Tore it wide open. But because of what was inside of it, he got a lethal dose of the gamma rays. Something was wrong with his leg before, he wasn’t moving right. Anyway. Down he went. In the army I learned enough about NBC—”
“NBC?”
“Nuclear-biological-chemical warfare. I didn’t want to come near any of that shit. Soon as I seen him go down I scooted down the pile into the pit under the hopper cars and sheltered in place. Drones stopped coming. I heard the sheriff driving up from Bunkhouse. Hopped down the railroad tracks, keeping the boxcars between me and any radiation, and waved ’em off. Told ’em to call in the NBC guys from Fort Bliss. White Sands. All of that. But they’d already picked up the gamma rays from the air. So NBC was already on-site.”
“The people who came and rescued us.”
“Yeah.”
“I saw the lake of yellow from the plane—”
Rufus nodded. “Sulfur’s what they got in abundance, it’s what they’re using for the first layer. Army had rad-hardened bulldozers. They brought ’em in on trains overnight.”
“Amazing.”
“What?”
“That they have such things.”
“This country is a mess,” Rufus allowed, “but it’s still one of the only outfits that can pull a fleet of lead-lined bulldozers out of its ass on short notice. They got started at first light, moving the pile over to cover the contaminated area and keep that shit from spreading on the wind. Gravel’s on its way. Later they’ll cap it with concrete.”
“The dead man?”
“Still there. Will be forever.” Rufus looked toward the table where T.R. had been talking to Mohinder and the army officer. They were looking down at maps and aerial photos, talking it over.
“Let’s talk later,” Saskia said. “I’m so glad you’re safe.”
“You enjoy horseback riding?”
“Love it.”
“Western style?”
“English, I’m afraid.”
“We’ll put you on Patch,” he said, “he’s as easygoing as they come.”
“I am very much looking forward to you taking me on a ride, Red,” she said as she was turning away. But she wasn’t sure that double entendres were his cup of tea. There was a stratum of society in which she had lived most of her life where that kind of persiflage was something you were expected to know how to do, just as you were expected to know how to shoot pheasants and use a finger bowl. She felt a bit stupid, just for a moment, that she’d used that sort of conversational gambit on this man who’d lived his life on the opposite pole of the world from all that. It wasn’t quite fair of her. She hesitated, thinking she really ought to just say what was on her mind in a more plainspoken way.