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It didn’t take a genius to realize right away that these were the launch codes for whatever was left of our nuclear arsenal. As the pandemic spread in the first years the military realized it couldn’t be maintained. They dismantled most of the bombs but kept a few in reserve, in locked up and long-empty silos. And these launch codes must still be valid since General Kurtz had stashed them away with his gold and diamonds.
I wondered how he got them, but then I remembered that there were always two sets, one with the president and another with the defense minister, in case the president had a heart attack. This copy must have been handed down that chain of command as each commander grew sick and passed it along to his successor, finally ending up in the hands of Kurtz.
I had a meeting with Wolfe and Johnson a few days later, showed them the paper and asked if we should do anything about it. They both agreed we should keep it in the safe. Then Wolfe mentioned that he once had a conversation with the General, who told him there were still a few operational silos in Nebraska. As we pondered this, I said that maybe the other letters stood for Utah and Kansas.
“Well, when we get there, we can look for them. That may take a few years” Wolfe said. “But do you really want a country with intercontinental nuclear missiles again?”
“Only for deterrence” I replied. “That’s why they saved them. Russia probably has them, a few other countries too. No sane leader would go to war in these times. But there is a chance someone might rise up and threaten us, or others. There were other papers too. I’ll go through all of them with Sheila and pass the relevant ones on to you, to find where these silos are located. They wouldn’t leave the launch codes without locations. That would be pointless.”
We did find coordinates in the following weeks, hidden on a sheet of statistics with certain numbers strangely underlined. That page was attached to a document that had no reason to be kept in the safe, so we knew something was up. Perhaps the generals who passed it down only wanted an intelligent president to have his finger on the button. I suppose I met their test, but I was never going to launch a nuke, no matter what. Even if some country in Europe or Asia attacked us, why destroy the other half of mankind because they ravaged us. That seemed like insanity times two. If humanity was to survive, some leaders had to remain sane.
It wasn’t a scenario I wished to contemplate. But these new-found documents forced the issue. With my two generals and Sheila by the fireside, we discussed all manner of possibilities. If some foreign power dropped a bomb on one of our coasts, my response would be that we play possum and quickly retire inland with whatever we had left. The area bombed would be just as uninhabitable to our enemy. Any retaliation would likely end in more missiles raining down on us. Now if some missile happened to strike the center of our continent, our enemies might be doing us a greater favor than they could imagine. It would simply become double the wasteland it already was, with the zombies gone.
But that’s the trouble with nuclear bombs. They destroy any advantage one wishes to gain. And with global weather patterns the lethal radiation will sooner or later drift back and dribble down on the foolish heads of its origin. They’d be spending the rest of their lives in some deep bunker, and you can hardly call that ‘winning a war’.
But no wars occurred. France and England were our close allies again, thankful for sending their soldiers back from our shores along with part of our fleet, to liberate them and restore their governments. The Russians pulled out of Southern Europe and most of Eastern Europe after that. Their dictator was assassinated for losing, and the new commander was content with their old borders, repairing their losses, licking their wounds. He wasn’t totally without ambitions of territorial gain. He sent what troops he had left to the far East, invaded Mongolia and northern China. He even had his eye on the northern islands of Japan, lost in the war of Nineteen-five. He conquered a desolation like Genghis Khan, and what he won was an empty boast, windy steppes that would fill your mouth with sand if you opened it to declare your conquest, fit only for roaming nomads.
With our census complete an election was held, and with little competition I was elected to a four-year term. In that time, we re-established order in the interior of our continent. Most of the tattered survivors we found joined us. We found the silos and guarded them well. We also recouped abandoned military bases, squadrons of jets and bombers, underground depots full of munitions. With these our military became a leaner, but far more effective machine. Half the soldiers were assigned civil service. The ones best qualified became a highly trained and well-armed defense force, with Wilde commanding the West Coast and Johnson the East.
The Russians we pardoned slowly and seamlessly integrated into our society. By the end of my term St. Louis had a population of two hundred and Chicago the same. These were the limits of the restored America. It would take another decade to stretch a sparse population of settlers to the west coast. But we did restore the trans-continental railroad, which proved useful.
I learned of these developments in my retirement, my hair turned grey, reading the Washington Post on the veranda of my mansion in Virginia, with Sheila at my side and Louie’s and Sophie’s children often in our laps and peace, like a gentle dove, cooing nearby.
Conclusion
Mankind slowly came to peace with itself after one war, with the vaccine distributed across the globe. The populations were so diminished, the planet enjoyed a respite from this creature called man. The Earth restored herself from all the scars that humans had created, pollution, deforestation and all sorts of imbalances. Animals regained their former habitats and numbers. Vast expanses of land enjoyed their primitive fauna and flora again. Forests spread their wide expanses of green. Global warming reversed itself. The oceans revived with life. The air was fresh again.
I think that Mother Nature caused this pandemic to correct our juvenile delinquency, as if she loved us, like a schoolmistress who finally had to punish her unruly brats with a chastisement they would never forget. We were out of control, constantly infighting and with our technologies and mindlessly greedy conglomerates raping the planet of every resource. We would surely have polluted our habitat past repair and doomed ourselves and every living creature to extinction in another few decades. We deserved the spanking.
And so, good mother that she was, and far above us in understanding and power, she put a stop to our misconduct, our malfeasance, with a winnowing. She opened the lid to her ever-bubbling cauldron, a restless soup of nucleic acids and proteins, and out slipped the COVID. It swept through our populations like a harvester through a wheat field. It was Death with a scythe.
She taught us a lesson and put us back in our crib, hoping we’d learn from our mistakes, setting us back to a state when we were harmless and would have generations to think it over before we once again reached the primacy of numbers and technology to do harm.
She stripped us naked again, like the weak and wondering baby we were only ten thousand years ago, just learning how to walk again, to build villages, fish and farm and domesticate the beasts around us.
And I hope we learned her lesson, to tread gently on her soft and tender turf and replace what we took, let it replenish before we took more, a symbiosis, a harmony and unity with our brother inhabitants of this house, the creatures she also created for a reason, as an example for us, as they all lived in an equilibrium that would continue as long as the sun.
In the following years I imagined I’d be happy contemplating life, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, pipe in hand, watching the youngsters grow into adults and their children likewise, thriving, enjoying and living off the bounty of the land. I knew I had one more book to write, a history with a moral lesson to it, the one we all experienced, the one that Mother Nature wrote wordlessly. She truly was our parent and guide in all things and especially kind to us, her favorite but wayward child, gifted with intelligence, invention, making us the pinnacle of her creations, able to change her world and rule over it, if we did so with the humanity and love that she also infused into our souls.
The End
