Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,45

other portable electronics was discouraged during the daytime, and while in character, but was tolerated in private tents, in the hours of darkness, as long as you weren’t too loud.

But waking people up with an early-morning call was bad manners everywhere, and so when it rang, he lashed out and silenced it as quickly as he could.

“Salve,” he croaked into the phone, over the grumbles of his tentmates.

“I need you down here,” said his boss. “All hands on deck.” Then he hung up without explanation, leaving Corvallis with the vague feeling that he was missing something.

“What the fuck, Corvus,” complained a legionary in the next tent. “Mutate.” Moo-TAH-tay. This was bastard Latin, using the imperative conjugation to tell him to mute his phone. “Corvus” was the Latinized version of his name. He turned off the phone’s sound so that it wouldn’t continue to make cute little noises as he went on messing with it.

The trail of notifications on his phone told the story. They had originated from various people on various social networks, but they had all been triggered by the same event: the surprising obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon.

It had occurred before daybreak, at about 5:20 A.M. local time. The earliest postings were from insomniacal passengers and crew on coast-to-coast red-eye flights, reporting a sudden flash so bright it dazzled them from hundreds of miles away. This had faded too rapidly for people to snap pictures of it, but descriptions had been tweeted and Facebooked via the planes’ onboard Wi-Fi systems, and retweeted and reposted a millionfold by the time Corvallis saw them.

One Larry Proctor, a blogger who knew his way around the military and intelligence world (or so it seemed, anyway, based on a quick scan of a blog he’d been maintaining ever since his last tour of duty in Qatar), had picked up some traffic that had leaked to the civilian Internet from a .mil site, making a cryptic reference to a possible radiological event in southeastern Utah. Personnel stationed at nearby military bases were reporting that leaves were being canceled and units being mobilized. All of this was probably supposed to be kept under wraps, but nothing could prevent spouses and teenage kids from chattering about it. Someone in DC posted a snapshot of a pizza delivery guy on a Pentagon-bound Metro train, toting a stack of pizzas so high he had to use a two-wheeled dolly. Self-proclaimed experts in the comment thread were climbing all over one another to explain that massive pizza deliveries to the Pentagon were an infallible sign that something big was happening. A fourteen-year-old Texas girl’s emoji-splattered post, featuring grainy driveway footage of her camouflage-decked mom heaving a duffel bag into the back of a pickup truck and burning rubber down the street, went viral and was shown over and over on network news sites for lack of anything more definite from the actual scene of the disaster. Moab was a long way from anywhere, situated at an X made by the Colorado River and a two-lane highway. No Internet or phone traffic was coming out of it.

Corvallis took all of this in while putting on his caligae, the sandal-like marching boots of the Roman legionary, and pulling his kit together as efficiently as was possible while focusing most of his attention on his phone. He had been sleeping in his linen tunic, overwrapped with his wool cloak. It was cold up here in the mountains and so he pulled the latter garment around him before stepping outside the tent. This weekend’s event was an informal, light-duty sort of affair, family friendly. They’d set up their camp in a meadow, but a phalanx of modern RVs was visible a quarter of a mile down the hill, in a parking lot at the road head. Generators were purring and electric lights shining down there. Corvallis stuffed his gear into his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and trudged down the slope. He smelled bacon cooking in one of the RVs. Through its window he saw a television monitor showing live network coverage—the RV had a satellite dish mounted to its roof. He slowed down and looked in through the window. The video feed was from LAX, where the first of those red-eyes had apparently just landed and disgorged its passengers. News crews were waiting to gang-tackle witnesses as they emerged from security. Most of the people on that flight had slept through