Snog opened his mouth to reply; then a motion across the lane way caught his eye. His breath caught, too, torn between hope and horror, as he saw the faces peering out through the thick hedge.

  “Oh, my God!”

  “What is it?” John demanded.

  “It’s the guys. Brad and Carl and Yam, they’re in the bushes across the road. My God, they’re gonna get killed!”

  “Maybe not,” John soothed. “If they’ve made it that far, then maybe they’ll be okay.”

  “No, no. The trucks, they’re high up, they can see ’em.”

  “What makes you say that?” John asked.

  “I dunno. I saw some people hide in the bushes and this truck came up and ran over ’em. It was like something told it they were there, or like it saw them hide.”

  “Could the trucks be linked to the campus security cameras?” John asked.

  Snog licked his lips, tasting the salt of tears. “I dunno, I guess. Yeah. That could be it. They’ve all got wireless modems these days and GPS units. They could be—”

  “What can you do about that?” John interrupted.

  “What?”

  “The security system, can you do something about it; shut it down maybe?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Just a second. I gotta work.” Snog put down the phone, cudgeling his brains. Yeah. Of course, doorknob, you did that hack last year! The Information Center probably never found the trapdoor. Okay, let’s see—

  His fingers blurred over the keyboard; in the background he could hear John’s voice, faint and far, probably continuing down his list of contacts and giving them the alert.

  Then: “I did it; cameras are off-line,” Snog said.

  “Did that have any effect?” John asked.

  Snog peered out the window. The purposeful motion of the cars and trucks and self-propelled hedge cutters suddenly slowed, grew more tentative.

  They’ll be operating from stored images now; they can read the maps and tell where they are with their own GPS units, but they won’t be able to see movement.

  “Yeah, I think it did. Everything out there has slowed down. I think the guys are gonna make a break for it.” He leaned out the window, shouted: “C’mon, guys. Yes! Go! Go! Go! Shit!”

  “What?” John said.

  “There’s a car, it’s coming right at them. Run, you shitheads, run! Oh shit, it must have sound pickups onboard!” Snog felt himself beginning to hyperventilate again and closed his eyes; there wasn’t anything he could do. Then there was the distant sound of a crash.

  He leaped up, turned, ran out of his dorm room into the corridor, sagged against the discolored wall, and then remembered the phone in his hand.

  “Oh Christ, sweet Jesus, they’re all right.” Snog pulled air in and laughed softly. “The car crashed into the lobby entrance, but they were inside when it hit. Carl’s got a coupla cuts, but they’re all right. Oh, man.”

  Everyone went into a series of manly group hugs, crashing back and forth into the walls as they whooped and shouted.

  Yam took up the phone. “Hello?” he said.

  “Hey, Yam. You guys have got to get out of the city.”

  “No can do, John. This is happening all over the state, every road. We’re stuck.”

  “It’s happening all over the world, my mother says. Skynet wants to keep the cities bottled up so that more people will die when the bombs fall. I kid you not, Yam. You can take your chances and maybe get out of there, or you can sit on Snog’s bed until you die. Your choice.”

  “Whoa. When you put it like that…But how? We only had to come about a hundred yards to get here and we barely made it.”

  “Maybe they could try going through the sewers and storm drains,” Sarah suddenly suggested. “In that part of the country you could probably get all the way to Maine without popping your head above street level. I can’t confirm that, but it’s worth a try.”

  “You guys hear that?” John said.

  “Yeah,” Yam said with a nervous laugh. “Hey, pop your head up, that reminds me of a video game I used to have.”

  “This ain’t no video game, friend. Get moving.”

  Snog took the phone back; he felt a little better now, enough to be really frightened rather than teetering on the edge of a welcome blackness. “We’ll give a try,” he said. “You know where we’ll be. If we make it.”

  “We’ll try you there in a few days,” John said. “Good luck, guys. Survive, we all need you.”

  “You got it. Over and out,” Snog said.

  Alaska

  John tossed the phone onto one of the tables. The fallout shelter was fairly elaborate, as such things went—all three of them had a lot of building experience, enough money, and paranoia to spare. There were two bedrooms-cum-storage-areas, this central communications room linked to fiber-optic cables running out into the woods, a state-of-the-art fuel cell system (without any dubious automatic controls, needless to say), and a small galley-type cooking area. It still smelled new, of green concrete and timber and paint, with a faint undertone of ozone from the electronics.

  And then there was the armory…

  “They’re such kids,” he complained, worried.

  “But they’re smart,” Sarah said. “If they make it out they’ll grow up fast.”

  “They’d better,” Dieter said. “Those kids are our brain trust.”

  Sarah could tell by the look on John’s face that the thought gave him scant comfort.

  Massachusetts

  “I think I read in the worst-case-scenario handbook that if you have to crawl through a tunnel for any length of time you shouldn’t crawl on your elbows and knees ’cause the skin’s thin there. So you should push yourself along with your palms and your feet, suspending the rest of your body as much as you can.”

  Snog looked over his shoulder toward Terri Neal’s voice; she was puffing a bit—Terri was heavyset—and that let him locate her; right behind his feet, in the Stygian, smelly darkness of the drain. “I don’t think I could do that,” he said.

  I think it would give me a heart attack if I tried.

  He was dirty and soaked with sweat and no doubt smelled even worse than the drainage tunnel they were crawling through. This was no time to try Superman stunts.

  “Then maybe the next time we come to a place we can stand up, we should rip up a blanket and make padding for our knees and elbows,” Terri suggested. “The book said that otherwise we’d be hamburger in no time. I’m paraphrasing, of course.”

  A long line of mumbled “uh-huhs,” broke out behind Snog. She had a good point, and though he hated to sacrifice a blanket, he figured they’d better do it.

  “Look,” Professor Clark said, “we can’t crawl all the way to Maine. Even if these tunnels do connect for that distance. Does anybody even know where we are?”

  He sounded pretty testy, not that Snog could blame him. The guy was at least fifty and pretty near filled the tunnel they were crawling through. Still, Snog was glad to have recruited him. Clark was a professor of engineering; that would come in handy. Leanne Chu, somewhere behind Clark, was a professor of chemistry. They’d also picked up fifteen other students who were willing to take a chance on the sewers. Snog was glad to have all of them along.

  He felt the weight of responsibility already and it made him aware of things they lacked. He kept thinking they needed rope for some reason. Terri had raided the Evian machine and had made each of them take as many bottles of water as they could carry. It was already apparent that they might not have enough.

  There were three handguns and six boxes of ammunition in his backpack; Snog figured that if the others knew about them, they’d freak. Especially the professors. But it was the one thing John had insisted on. “Whatever else you take with you,” he’d said, “be sure and have a weapon. ’Cause if you meet up with someone who has one and you don’t, you’re dead meat.”

  Better safe than sorry, Snog had figured. His family had always owned guns, so he saw them as tools and not icons of evil like the rest of his college friends seemed to.

  Of course, it is a shame that they’re available to nuts and criminals as though they were lollipops. But in this situation he was glad to have them. He’d have been even gladder to have some explosives and maybe an antitank launcher.

  Finally they came to a place where they could stand up; three drainage tunnels met in a round concrete silo-type arrangement. The floor was dirt over concrete; deep, sticky black mud, in fact. He tried not to think what had crawled in and died in it, because he could plainly smell something had—fairly recently, if the molecules were getting through his shock-stunned sinuses.

  Carl, Yam, and Brad hoisted him up to where he could look around, wobbling as he stood on their linked hands. He pried the heavy cover up, wincing as the rusty edges cut into his sore palms, and looked out the crack.

  “We’re out of the city,” he said. “It looks like an old suburban development—big yards.”

  There was a general sigh of relief.

  “I’m not seeing any vehicles from here,” he said. There were chuckles of pleasure at that. “Just trees, roads, and the odd roof.”

  “Can you see where we are?” Dr. Clark asked.

  “No, sir. I’ll have to get out and take a look around.”

  It was not going to be easy. The manhole cover must weigh seventy pounds or more. Necessary, he supposed: how else were they going to keep enterprising young men, such as himself, from messing around with them otherwise?

  With his friends propping him up, he braced his feet and hands against the sides of the hole and lifted with his back, straining upward as hard as he could. Just as he was about to give up, he felt it move, grating in its groove, a small shower of sand and gravel poured over his helpers, causing them to splutter and curse. Finally he managed to work it over to one side, and it fell with a dull clunk.

  As he stood on his friends’ shoulders, panting, he braced his hands on the rim and looked around.

  Uh-oh. It hit him like a pail of ice water. I’ve forgotten the machines.

  Any number of them could have crept up on him while he was struggling. His knees went weak for a moment.

  “Hey!” Carl protested as Snog’s weight shifted. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna take a look around.” Snog hoisted himself out of the manhole and scurried toward some bushes in front of a house. There was a dog lying in the driveway; dead, but not run over, just limp, with its eyes dry and its tongue lying on the pavement in a puddle of vomit.

  “Lemme up,” Brad said. “I’ll go with him.”

  When they’d hoisted him up, Carl muttered, “We should have let him go first; he doesn’t weigh anything.”

  Yam grunted in agreement.

  “It looks clear,” Snog said quietly. “Why don’t we try to walk for a bit? If things get hairy we can always drop back into the drains.”

  The others agreed enthusiastically, and within a few minutes everyone was stretching and looking around.

  “We’re not that far from the city,” Dr. Chu said, looking back toward Boston, where the midtown towers were small with distance, but quite visible.

  “Maybe Newton,” Terri agreed.

  “Still,” Snog protested, “considering how we got here, it’s quite an accomplishment. We came miles underground.”

  “But where are we going?” someone asked. “If you’re right about the bombs, we’ve got to get out of Massachusetts. Hell, right out of New England.”

  “My family has a place just over the border in Quebec,” Snog said. “It’s wilderness. We should be safe there. It’s got all sorts of supplies—stocked for the winter. Sort of a hunting lodge thing.”

  For a wonder, nobody sneered at him for coming from a family that killed Bambi, rather than buying pieces of mysteriously deceased cow at the supermarket.

  “You’re right,” Dr. Clark said, slapping Snog on the shoulder. “But what we really need now is some form of transportation.”

  The others looked at one another uneasily. Cars are out, that’s certain, Snog thought. He was glad nobody suggested it: maybe he’d lucked out, and everyone here would be a survivor type.

  “Yeah,” Yam said thoughtfully. “Something we can take off-road, like a dirt bike.”

  “Or a mountain bike,” someone else said.

  “Yeah, that’d be perfect,” Terri agreed. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry about gas.”

  Snog nodded. “So we’ll keep our eyes open. Meanwhile, we’d better get moving.” He checked his compass. “North is that way. Everyone keep as far back from the road as possible. We’ll go through backyards as much as we can, okay?”

  Everyone nodded and they started off. It was eerily silent; except for the occasional, distant sound of an automobile engine, even the birds were quiet.

  “Where is everybody?” Dr. Chu asked.

  No one answered, no one even wanted to think about answers.

  National Command Center, Western Maryland

  “Air Force One has been lost,” the general said, his heavy face grave. “We’re forced to conclude that there are no survivors…Mr. President.”

  The vice president said nothing for a long moment. He’d wanted to be president; for that matter, he’d planned to run in the next election when the current idiotic incumbent was out of the way. But not like this. He looked at the general, noting the slight sheen of sweat on the man’s face. “There’s more,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” the general agreed; something flickered over his features, a faint air of I told you so. “We’ve lost communications. We’re cut off.”

  “We’re cut off,” the new president said in disbelief. “I was led to believe that was impossible.”

  “So was I, sir. It was impossible until we routed all our communications through—”

  “I believe you called it a ‘point failure source’ during the discussions, General. Yes, go on.”

  The general paused, then looked the president in the eye. “We’ve also lost life support. We’ve reconnected the supply of canned oxygen, but the recirculation systems are all down.”

  The president raised an eyebrow.

  “We have about twelve hours’ worth of air, sir.”

  “Then why don’t we leave?” the new president asked in exasperation. What kind of a Mickey Mouse setup is this anyway?

  “The elevators aren’t running, sir. The ventilation ducts and blast baffles have all closed down, and we can’t get the hatchway motors to respond—those baffles are twenty-four-inch armor plate, sir, originally from scrapped battleships. The chemicals for the scrubbing system have been vented to the outside by the computers that controlled life support. And the stairway was sabotaged.”

  “Sabotaged, how?” the president bit off.

  “Explosive charges were set at several levels, sir. Essentially the stairs are gone. Buried under tons of rubble and twisted steel. We have engineering parties working on it, but excavation would take weeks with the tools available. Even if there weren’t unused explosive charges still set, which there are, and more blast doors at every level, which there are.”

  After a few false starts the president managed to ask: “So how do we get out of here?”

  “Even if we could get out of the bunker complex, Mr. President, we have every reason to believe that within half an hour the entire East Coast will be a nuclear furnace. There’s nowhere to go, sir.”

  President of Cinderland for twelve hours. I guess I can stop feeling guilty about surviving. “I don’t suppose I’m dreaming this?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Sir, I intend to visit the chaplain. It’s been a long while since I went to confession.”

  Alaska

  John hissed in frustration. He’d finished his list of contacts early and Sarah had put him to breaking into Skynet’s communications, but the damn thing was so fast he just couldn’t seem to get through. Snog or Carl or any of those guys could do this in their sleep, he thought bitterly.

  There was plenty of equipment; they’d installed the best. Unfortunately their experts were running for their lives from homicidal hedge cutters and ice cream trucks, and so were unavailable. Suddenly it occurred to him that what he needed was a computer to do this for him. Which meant creating a program. He sighed and leaned back. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it, he could. But his attention was so divided that he didn’t think he could do it now.

  “Mom,” he said.

  She looked up, her brow furrowed with concentration.

  “We should probably send out that message.”

  They’d prerecorded and loaded a general warning intended to go out over radio and TV via satellite, but hadn’t sent it yet.

  Sarah considered his suggestion and flashed a look at Dieter, who paused, then nodded. “Go,” she said to John, then went back to work.

  John keyed up the program, tapped in the code, and hit enter. His lips tightened. Every time he did that it reminded him of his fatal mistake. “I feel guilty,” he said to no one in particular.

  “’Bout what?” Sarah asked, not looking up from her station.

  He made a helpless gesture. “Here I am sitting and typing while the world’s about to go up in flames. Doesn’t seem right that I should be so comfortable.”

  His mother gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Poor baby. You’re not dodging killer cars and berserk bulldozers to escape a soon-to-be-blasted-to-hell city. Don’t worry, son. We’re all going to see a bellyful of blood and murder before this thing is over. Enjoy this respite while you can.”

  “Maybe enjoy isn’t quite the right word,” Dieter admonished gently. “We are waiting for the end of the world as we know it. Butperhaps we can utilize this time. I’ve finished my list. Let’s brainstorm some contingency plans. Then we’ll put our minds to breaking into Skynet’s communications system.”

  “Yes,” Sarah agreed, still looking distracted. Then her face changed as if something had occurred to her. She looked at John. “Sorry,” she said. “I was a little rough there.”