Atom

By Stephen C. Sutcliffe

What are the Beasts foretold in St. John’s Revelation? The Children of Atom avenge their post-Alamogordo legacy, and change, forever, everyone’s Fourth of July.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 28, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469772769

Stephen C. Sutcliffe

Stephen C. Sutcliffe was born April 24, 1953 in St. Petersburg, Florida, and graduated in 1978 with a B.A. in English from Arizona State University.

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ATOM

A Novel

Stephen C. Sutcliffe

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Atom

Copyright © 1976, 1997, 2008, 2011, 2018 Stephen C. Sutcliffe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011919352

ISBN: 978-0-5952-1601-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-7276-9 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 04/08/2019

Contents

A.H. vs. A.D.

A LEGACY OF ALAMOGORDO

Chapter 1     PARADISE

Chapter 2     . . . AND ATOM BEGAT . . .

Chapter 3     A CALL TO ARMS

Chapter 4     THE AMBITION

Chapter 5     A SUMMIT

Chapter 6     THE RESOLVE

Chapter 7     INTERLUDE-I

Chapter 8     A CONFIRMATION

Chapter 9     MARTIN’S GIFT

Chapter 10   ATOM’S RANSOM

Chapter 11   THE CONSEQUENCE

Chapter 12   INTERLUDE-II

Chapter 13   SANCTUARY

Chapter 14   HOME, SWEET HOME

Chapter 15   A GENOCIDAL VOW

Chapter 16   THE EXCHANGE

Chapter 17   THE FISHERMEN

Chapter 18   THE SACRIFICE: A COSTLIER DEMAND

Chapter 19   THE HOSTAGE IMPERILED

Chapter 20   THE NATURE OF THE BEAST(S)

Chapter 21   A LAST SUPPER

Chapter 22   THE RELINQUISHMENT

A.H. vs. A.D.

August 6, 1945—Zero Day, A.H.

(anno Hiroshima)

A LEGACY OF ALAMOGORDO

O n July 4th, in the fourth year of the seventh decade of the twentieth century, 1963 A.D., or the year 18 A.H., Luther Michael Brethren—dark-haired, slight, tall for his eight years, with distinguishing blue eyes—spent the morning with his parents at an amusement park, and the family was back home preparing to swim at a local beach, and attend an evening fireworks display in Ft. Lauderdale.

It was a long, slow, hot, Florida summer afternoon.

Michael sat alone in the den, watching the New York Yankees play the Cleveland Indians.

The broadcast ended with the game bound for extra innings, and he switched channels to a program about starving children in foreign countries. Across the screen flashed infants with swollen bellies and exposed ribs, eating whitish gruel from bowls, or lying sick in beds, unable to move or cry. The documentary lasted a half hour.

Next was a film about the early space launches at Cape Canaveral. Michael watched Alan Shepard and John Glenn climb into their Mercury capsules, lift off the Florida space pad, and disappear into the sky atop giant Redstone and Atlas rockets.

A special on atomic power began.

The show reviewed the historical evolution of the first nuclear weapon: Einstein, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and a long string of scientific greats paraded across the television.

The Los Alamos triad appeared: first, the explosion at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, followed by the genocidal blasts of Little Boy and Fat Man over Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, and footage of the devastated buildings and radiation-poisoned casualties in both cities.

This gave way to post WWII tests in Nevada, and an H-bomb blast on a remote, Pacific atoll.

The transmission recalled the Communist Bloc Occupation, the development of nuclear power by the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, the Cold War, the test ban protests of the fifties and early sixties, and the historical impact of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A civil defense lecture commenced, describing the radius of destruction for different megatonnages of weaponry, what to do in case of a blast, and a probable scenario of the planet’s devastation after an all-out radioactive exchange. People took refuge in air raid shelters. Children hid under their school desks, as Michael practiced a half-year before during the Cuban confrontation.

The film then dwelt briefly on recent developments in nuclear firepower, and the peaceful applications of atomic energy.

Unfolding on the screen for the last few televised minutes were recorded images of nuclear blasts: scores of them, one after another, great, flashing pyres rising over New Mexico, Japan, Nevada, and the Pacific—blast after blast, mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud, holocaust after holocaust, fire storm after fire storm, against an eerie musical backdrop. The den was otherwise quiet.

The hypnotic spectacle lulled Michael into a fragile sleep.

He dreamed he was still awake, overcome by a powerful delirium. Michael tried to repel it with the capabilities a boy of eight has, but he was rendered helpless—catatonic in a millisecond’s time: a combination of paralysis, and the nightmare fear that freezes a child in bed at night so he can’t scream for his mother and father.

His hands clenched the armrests of the chair; the television and den melted away.

…a desert full of cracks and jagged splits like the Mohave. The scorching sand spread off into the distance like an enigmatic plain in a surrealistic painting: beyond the featureless horizon loomed a great, and menacing void…

Thousands of starving children lay scattered in every direction, as far as the eye could see, neglected, baking in the sun, covered with dirt, their cries coalescing into a spine-chilling moan borne on an age-old zephyr of despair.

Michael leaped and darted gingerly, surprised at his grace and agility, avoiding contact at all costs with the afflicted infants who were powerless to raise their distended selves in the sweltering heat.

Abruptly, an unmistakable rumbling—

From one side of the desert, out of a thick, yellow cloud, emerged an army of Yankees, in the tens of thousands, not baseball players in pinstripes, but dressed like those he’d observed in civil war movies, with rifles, bayonets, blue uniforms and caps.

A host of Native Americans rushed forth from a similar golden sandstorm at the opposite end of the plateau, colorfully decked in feathered regalia, painted, bare skinned, with bows, spears, quivers, knives, arrows . . .

Michael sprinted down a vast, barren alley between the mobs, over a narrowing causeway of anguished children wailing if they could—their pleas all but drowned by the ghastly trouncing and primordial howling of the converging soldiers and tribes.

While the throngs approached, he witnessed the blinding flash of a mushroom cloud . . . then another, another . . . all around, three hundred and sixty degrees, mushroom clouds shot up along the horizon. Michael realized both these charging legions of Yankees and Indians, as incalculable in size as the cracked, surreal desert he ran upon, weren’t convening for purposes of waging war. They’d fled for their lives away from the white-hot clouds, straight into an unexpected battlefield, not of their design.

Michael discerned he was hopelessly imprisoned by the fleeing masses . . . What???

Ahead on the surrealistic plain, midway between the thundering seas of bodies. A tall, pointed object. A monolith of faith, hope, possibility, promise. An Atlas rocket, alone on the fractured desert, surrounded by famished children!!!!!!!!

Michael ran with all his power to the base of the tower, and scaled a metal ladder to a Mercury capsule that rested atop the giant missile, anticipating the shock waves of the explosions.

He gazed down from the gantry upon the desert and dying children, and saw the multitudes swarming on the Atlas from all sides. There was little time before they’d either climb up the structure, or uproot the missile with their human tides.

Michael understood: the battalions and tribes raced from the fiery holocausts for one reason—to inhabit his berth.

He squirmed inside the Mercury capsule, and activated a confusing array of switches.

The Atlas rocket refused to budge or launch.

He looked out a small, square window in the capsule at mushroom clouds getting larger, brighter, and closer, feeling the Atlas missile rock and sway.

Suddenly, Yankees and Indians stared at him through the glass, pounding on the exterior, reaching inside, seizing him, while obscuring the mushroom clouds beyond.

A huge noise; a great rush of air…

The rocket was toppling!!!

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Michael, what’s wrong?

He saw his mother’s face.

On the black and white television screen, a man was explaining a new washing machine.

John! I can’t get him out of the chair. Michael, come on, dear, we’re going to the beach, then the fireworks.

Michael’s father appeared, gently twisting his hands. What’s the matter, son?

Father lifted child, but could not pry the hands free. The chair and Michael briefly rose together. He’s getting strong.

He saw something unpleasant. his mother turned off the television set.

Mike. Don’t let that tube spoil our Fourth.

He won’t take his eyes off the screen.

What was he watching?

A baseball game, last I checked.

CHAPTER 1

PARADISE

Monday, June 19, 1978 (33 A.H.)

Titan: Pacific Coastal Community (p. 410,000)

T he morning began typically for Luther Michael Brethren. A warm, early-summer breeze rustled the window curtains of his bedroom, and rays of sunlight brightened its walls and floor. He heard birds outside. Cars passed in the street. Remote business thoroughfares and freeways droned. The air-conditioners of neighboring houses hummed. Children voiced afar.

A stereo alarm sounded atop a desk; hard rock displaced the relative quietude.

Michael Brethren showered, dressed, and walked to his car.

He drove through suburban avenues, merged with traffic, battled fifteen minutes of stoplights, and turned into an industrial park. Past lines of cars, and a guard shack, he trekked to the entrance of a semiconductor plant.

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Michael hurried outside in the late afternoon—the starting line of a four day leave of absence, turned on the car stereo loud, and drove off quickly.

Children skated and cycled about on less frantic residential streets near his house. Neighbors conversed, mowed grass, washed cars, or played basketball in their driveways.

He arrived, shut down the radio and engine, visited the mailbox, and went inside.

The house was empty and still; the quiet enwrapped him.

The real day was under way. Choices manifested. Gazing upon a sun low in the west, he imagined the coming dusk, thought of coming days, weeks, and months, about the next five years—forgot time altogether.

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Michael lived in a West Coast home his parents recently bought. Six months before, they had traveled to Europe for a year’s stay. He agreed to care for the place until they returned. It was a rare and unlikely fate—an opportunity to live alone in new surroundings, and a chance to soften the transition from college to full-time employment.

He stepped into a gigantic backyard. An eight-foot high wall spread all around, and a green lawn stretched south almost out of sight, arrested by a ravine.

On the other side of a patio and pool began a grove of oak and maple trees, obscuring a distant greenhouse.

Beyond, the left side of the acreage opened like a fairway; the right was a containment of the oaks and maples, highlighted by walnut, palm, and willow trees.

A row of lofty pines dwarfed the remote back fence, while shrubs of evergreen, roses, and oleander wove amidst the grove, and enlivened both side walls.

After a dip in the pool, Michael retrieved an electric guitar from the house.

Proceeding across the yard, he passed the greenhouse, reaching the wide stretch of grass.

A large box stood forty yards from the pines; Michael unlocked and opened the wooden structure, rolling out a guitar amplifier that rivaled his own height. He next connected the guitar, via an assemblage of plugs, effect boxes, and long stretches of cord, and then turned on the system.

Free of past tyrannies imposed on his musical progress by uncompromising roommates and neighbors, he could play