Free Ashes of the Earth by Eliot Pattison Page A

turned and
pointed toward a little cabin tucked into the bottom of the ridge.
    In
the house two other men waited, a pair of hunters who'd also fled
toward the bell. The four of them had watched in disbelief the
horrific, confused television reports of rogue nations engaging the
rest of the world with nuclear and biological agent strikes. First
one station, then another had abruptly left the air, until the only
one they could receive was Canadian, from across the vast lake. Those
final broadcasts had lasted a few more hours, then with one more
blinding flash on the horizon they too were silenced. There was no
more television, no more radio, but they had heard enough to know
that those who had survived the initial blasts would likely die of
radiation or biological poisoning.
    Their
host, a retired professor of astrophysics, they learned, had brought
them to his wine vault, insulated under two hundred feet of stone. He
had quickly explained that it had a filtered ventilation system that
had been overdesigned by his father, and they had frantically stuffed
the vault with food, bedding, and every candle and oil lamp they
could find. Their host did not know how long they would need to hide
underground but gave his scientific opinion that sixty days should be
sufficient for the air to clear. Winding an old alarm clock, he set
it to ring every twelve hours. After every two rings, Hadrian had
sliced a mark into the wall.
    For
the first few days they had spoken of their families, pretending they
would see them again, and how they hoped the roads would not be too
clogged when they finally drove home. After the first week Jonah had
sat for hours at his table making calculations. It was then that he'd
begun to speak in colder technical terms, about the reach of warheads
and the half-life of radiation, the depletion rates of biological
agents. He had worked in weapons research, developing models for the
government demonstrating how once the low-quality, wide-ranging
biological warheads favored by lesser nations had been deployed they
would contaminate the entire planet, would wipe out nearly all human
life as well as other higher life forms.
    In
the long silent hours, Jonah had developed a new model, using weather
data from the last newspapers, showing how their location—one
of the most remote in the eastern part of the continent and protected
by the high ridges—had been spared the worst contamination by
an unusual shift in wind patterns.
    His
three guests—but almost never Jonah—had sunk into dark,
silent depressions lasting days at a time. In the night, in the
blackness when the last candle was extinguished, they wept.

    Hadrian
stayed in the
vault for hours, reading many of the pages but also exploring the
shelves. They held not only rare volumes—everything from common
cookbooks to popular bestsellers to foreign dictionaries—but
also glass tubes and columns containing the remnants of experiments,
stacks of old magazines, even, in an old shoe-box, a hand calculator
and half a dozen corroded batteries. Hadrian had been the old man's
closest friend in Carthage, but still Jonah Beck had kept many
secrets from him. Much of what was in the vault was illegal. But that
did not explain why Jonah's journal was so secret, or why Lucas
Buchanan so urgently wanted to find it.
    At
last he returned to the stool and studied the little plaque again.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. It
wasn't just a reminder. It was a manifesto. Jonah had been nearing
the end of his tragic life. But there had always been one tragedy he
thought he could reverse. On the very day he died he had spoken to
Hadrian as if he were on the verge of doing so. With a new, rising
pain, the realization came to Hadrian. Jonah had accepted death not
simply because he thought he had saved the exiles, but because giving
in to his killers' demands would have jeopardized those plans.
    He
sifted through the pages again, pausing over an entry made eighteen
months earlier,