Limited Exchange

​How would you ensure your family survived a modern nuclear war in America? In the late 2020s, two Christian families find themselves caught in the middle of a nuclear war with China, fighting for survival. Carson Akins and his friend Neal Reiter find themselves trapped in unenviable, life-threatening situations while war rages and fallout descends around them.
 
Carson, a high-tech engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area races against the clock to rehabilitate a 70 year old fallout shelter for his family. Across the bay, Neal must get his wife and disabled five-year-old daughter out of Silicon Valley and to safety in Oregon. Little do either of them know it is too late as the warheads explode and deadly fallout descends.
 
Neal, a former US Air Force nuclear weapons technician, struggles knowing that weapons he maintained have now killed millions while Carson makes difficult choices about the survival of strangers. Their ordeals test their faith in God as they wrestle with the place of suffering in what appears to be the last days. 

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Excerpt: Prelude

​I awoke to a crash. Before I was conscious of my actions, I swung the covers off and my feet were on the carpet. Halfway into my slippers, I heard a mournful and slightly apologetic “Mommy…” faintly from the kitchen.
            My wife Jenna had already been awake. “I’ll take care of it,” she said from beneath the covers. I stood my ground for a moment processing everything that just happened. Jenna ignored me and went to the kitchen.
            What if that was a nuke? I thought. I imagined being awoken to the night sky illuminated by a terrible false sunrise, followed by the windows being blown in, filling the carpet with broken glass. That is why I insisted our slippers be next to the bed. The gray light that streamed in from behind the curtains wasn’t from a bomb.
            I kicked off my slippers and lay back down. My heart was pounding and that peculiar feeling of wasted adrenaline burning off made my legs tingle. Last night, I prayed fervently that the Almighty might give us some warning before any nuclear apocalypse happened. Lord, please let us get out of here today. I was all prayed out of anything more to say to him.
            My phone didn’t ring all night. There were a few text messages, but nothing important. One of my teammates was asking me if he was supposed to come into the office today. I texted back “no.”
            The governor had been very explicit about going to work. Until further notice, everyone except those in essential services or businesses were being asked to stay home. Here in Silicon Valley, we learned to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic. For most of us on the engineering side at Business SCADA Solutions, “BizScad,” we had to come in most days. We made software and computer controllers that worked with heavy machinery or infrastructure components. There was no way a team of six could work remotely on a piece of one-meter oil pipeline designing a sensor mount.
            Work was a thirty-minute drive from our house in Cupertino across the valley in San Jose. I made it home in less than 20 minutes yesterday. The war scare was keeping people home as more than just a suggestion. We hadn’t seen the world this deserted in years.
             Jenna came back a few minutes later. “It’s under control.”
            “What happened?”
            “Mila dropped a bowl making cereal and it broke.”
“We told her not to use the ceramic ones,” I said. Jenna shrugged. Mila liked the colorful ceramic bowls much more than the drab plastic ones we kept on a low shelf for her. She was a girl, alright. To get to the ceramics, she would have to use her stool and grab on to the counter while reaching well above her, something that was precarious for a little kid with cerebral palsy.
“I’m going to the bathroom, then you can shower,” Jenna said.
I grunted my assent and picked up my phone again to check the status of the world war with China. Twitter had always been a cesspool of negativity and partisanship, but if you followed the right accounts, it was a better source of breaking news than TV. The app showed I had notifications in the triple-digits. I missed a lot in the six hours I had slept.
The first tweet I saw was that there were Internet outages on the East Coast. Communications disruptions, including satellite phones, were being reported. In the past few weeks, we understood the implications of cyber warfare in the modern era. There had been riots in the South after the first of the month when the EBT system went down. Chase Bank was still reporting intermittent issues with its ATM network.
            RUMINT— rumor intelligence—though suspect, was a timely source of things the real news media might take an hour or two to get to, if “official sources” confirmed it at all. The way RUMINT worked was like the busybody down the street reporting on the NextDoor app that the police arrested Billy Joe Bobbins the other day and they loaded lots of Amazon packages into the evidence van. Combine that with reports of someone stealing packages from the neighborhood in the past few weeks and you can make a safe assumption that Billy Joe was the culprit in the porch-pirate raids.
            Generations that grew up with newspapers reporting what happened yesterday or needing some authoritative figure like Walter Cronkite to tell them what the Pentagon said sneered regularly at Twitter. “I’m not going to believe some guy with a teddy bear as an avatar,” my wife once said about the rumor news. She changed her opinion when “official sources” confirmed what a guy claiming to be a defense contractor said. The Twitter weirdos were more accurate than she originally gave them credit for.
A guy in Colorado Springs who lived up against Cheyenne Mountain, the home of NORAD’s bunker, said that armed security forces were patrolling the residential streets of the neighborhood that abutted the perimeter. For that guy, there was no point in taking shelter. His house would be inside the fireball if NORAD got hit.
            Censorship notwithstanding, military members were sneaking messages out about what was going on. A relative of a sailor stationed in Bremerton, Washington, reported that a fleet ballistic missile submarine hastily departed with a skeleton crew before dawn. The brother of a TV reporter in Minneapolis said his brother, who was assigned to an Air Force missile squadron, sent a text last night saying, “Going underground.”
Ham radio hobbyists were listening to shortwave radio transmissions and kept tweeting out streams of nonsense letters and numbers, the coded (and indecipherable) Emergency Action Messages being sent to military assets around the world. Normally there were a couple routine messages a day in peacetime, but now it was every few minutes.
What jarred me was seeing photos of Air Force One and the similar, but less colorful E-4B emergency airborne command post taking off from Andrews Air Force base half an hour ago. Being partway through my pilot license lessons, I was an aviation enthusiast now and had installed an app that tracked aircraft by their radio transponders. The E-6B Mercury aircraft, also known as Take Charge and Move Out, TACAMO, were flying.
These modified 707 airliners trailed long wires and were used as airborne antennas to send messages to submerged submarines. The president on one of the special 747s could order a nuclear war by relaying it out to the Mercury fleet. Although the app didn’t report locations, it logged the signals of multiple Mercury planes, a bunch of the planes of the USAF’s VIP 89th Airlift Wing and loads of refueling aircraft. The Doomsday fleet was in the air.
I dialed my best friend and project manager, Carson Akins. Carson answered on the first ring. “Any words from our source?” I asked.
            He was out of breath. “No, nothing from last night.” His Air Force Chief Master Sergeant brother-in-law gave us a “two-minute warning” last night that I was eternally grateful for. It was our version of the angel showing up to Joseph in a dream telling him to get Jesus to Egypt.
            “Why are you out of breath?”
            “Hustling to get back from Home Depot. I needed to make a last run.”
            “I thought you did that last night?” I asked, surprised. Carson was no fool and no slacker.
            “I did, but I discovered a major problem and I gotta go back. When are you hitting the road?”
            “After eight. Gotta get Mila’s prescription as soon as the pharmacy opens and that’ll put us past any rush hour into the city.”
            “Godspeed.”
            “You too buddy. I’ll call you when we’re across the bay.”
            Carson gave me a “roger,” and hung up. I wished that he could come with us to Jenna’s parent’s place in Oregon. Instead, his family was going to hunker down in the basement and hope the powers-that-be in the world got a heaping dose of sanity.

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