Los Alamos

The Emergency Alert System begins its jarring ping and dial tone song as a lone white pickup truck fights against high winds wanting to push it off the two lane New Mexican highway.

“This is the Emergency Alert System. This is not a test. Repeat, this is not a test. A national authority has issued the following emergency statement: Due to developing weather patterns combined with the man-made disaster at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, an extreme weather event has formed. Previous mandatory emergency evacuation orders were issued this morning, April eleventh two-thousand-twenty-four at nine hundred hours, to the states of New Mexico and Colorado. Mandatory emergency evacuations have expanded and now include the following states: New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma. Please be advised that those residing in the westerly neighboring states of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California should prepare for the possibility of an evacuation order. United States citizens currently in Mexico are advised to immediately travel to the Mexico City United States embassy and await further advisory announcements. Reserve all cellular and landline calls for emergencies only. Keep your radios on and tu--“

Pale fingers with chewed nails twist the radio knob inside the speeding pickup truck.

“--exactly why we should have mandated fallout shelters in homes like the Swiss did in seventy-eight! Now we’re looking like assholes with thumbs up our asses because some lab coat-wearing idiot in New Mexico got careless! You know what, we deserve to die.”

With a slap, Andie shuts the radio off. She puts her right hand back to her mouth in search of a nail to bite. She’s only fifteen and without mascara she looks closer to twelve. Buckled in, she sits on the edge of the driver seat, her toes just reaching the gas pedal. Outside, the wind whips around the truck. Andie eyes the cattle fence lining the road as it jerks back and forth with each dirt-filled blast of hot air. She tries to focus on the next plateau through the hazy air. Almost there.

A gust of wind shifts the truck to the right. Andie grabs the wheel with both hands, overcorrects and swerves across the lane. An ID badge falls from the rearview mirror and lands in the passenger seat next to a simple, silver urn. Andie grips the steering wheel and looks over to the urn…and the badge. On the badge is an unkind photo of a handsome man in his sixties and the name David Masin, PhD. Los Alamos National Laboratory is printed at the top in an uninspired font.

The wind picks up, thrashing the truck. Andie leans into the wheel, using all her weight to keep the truck on the road. No one else will be on the road. Only she is dumb enough to be here. David Masin, PhD stares at her. No, not dumb. Angry. She swipes at the badge, sending it to the floor where she doesn’t have to look at it. She tightens her grip around the wheel as she takes the truck through a bend in the highway, wrapping around the foothills of the last valley she has to cross.

BAM!

A crow hits the windshield as the truck emerges into the exposed valley. Through the spidering windshield, beyond the black bird, Andie sees it. A storm, the destination, her terminus.

The man-made disaster from the Los Alamos National Laboratory looks like something out an H.P. Lovecraft story. Flashes of green lightning pockmark the twisted brown clouds of the expanding multi-tailed tornado. The earth beneath the tails swell and contract. The land, even the sky, seem to dislocate and rearrange as the tornado lurches across the plain. It grows exponentially, new tails lashing out from any end by the second, disrupting space, time, reality. 

Spellbound by the sight of the storm, Andie doesn’t notice at first when the truck lifts from the ground. Twelve feet above the highway, the truck starts to groan and stretch. The noise of the strange winds fills Andie’s ears. She tears her eyes away from the incoming dark clouds and whips off the seat belt to grab the urn. She spins it in her small hands to find the engraving.

Mariana Masin. Always loving, always loved.

Andie’s fingers begin to stretch and fade to a milky white. Her nails grow long and brittle, her skin thins and loosens. She looks to the rearview mirror. It’s lost its shape but reflects back an image like a pool of gasoline, Andie sees her face, she’s aged a century in a matter of seconds. The truck disintegrates around her as the brown and flashing green cloud envelops everything. Andie loses her grip on the urn, it drifts out of her reach. She cries out, but there’s no sound. The silver urn melts away and the ash inside thickens, like honey. Andie’s mouth opens to let out a silent scream, tears well up in her eyes. Before they can stream down her wrinkled face, the tears, like magnets to a fridge, zip to the floating honey. The glob of honey fattens and rotates. Somehow, it calms Andie. Her naked limbs feel heavy as she and the honey sink deeper into the storm.

She closes her eyes. She thinks about her dad, the PhD, the astrophysicist. How can someone so smart be so stupid. They were finally starting to get along again, like when it was the three of them, before her mom died. He opened up to Andie, told her about the work they were doing at the lab. It was unbelievable. Sending inanimate objects, then rats, then dogs, then monkeys, into another dimension. He was so stupid. It was obvious to Andie that this was their chance to change things, maybe even put things back to the way they were, maybe even better. And he just let the whole program shut down without a fight. It’s like he didn’t actually care. He didn’t feel the emptiness that Andie was told to “work through”, “move past”, “grow from”. Stupid. Andie wasn’t stupid. She convinced her dad to sneak her into the lab so she could see the portal before they dismantled it the following week. Her dad happily accepted the present she brought to the lab. He agreed with a laugh to not open it until the morning they were going to officially shut down the program. A proper goodbye to the amazing thing they would never be able to tell the public about. She wasn’t stupid. She understood more about quantum realities than the person, having to listen to her dad's ramblings about his work. She figured out how to build that bomb with instructions off the internet. She knew what an explosion by that portal could do. Well, it didn’t quite do what she expected. But at least she was somewhere else now. Not bored in school, not trapped in New Mexico, not lost without….

“Andie.”

Andie opens her eyes. The lightning green color of the storm has replaced everything else, except…the honey…in its place, a girl, fifteen like her, but not her, someone familiar, smiling.

Andie smiles back. “Hi, mom.”