I was past exhausted.  The fighting and endless driving had all but wrung the last ounce of energy from my bones, but I couldn’t stop, not now.  There was work to do.

“DPM,” I started, but he was fixed on Adam, who was stalking away.  I snapped my fingers. “Mike, over here.”

He turned to me and shook his head, “Yeah, what’s up.  Glad you’re back.”

“Get a fire going and get all the lead you can find. I know we’ve got some fifty pound bricks lying around here, so get someone to round them up.   We need some lead sheets pronto.  And a Geiger counter.  I don’t suppose you’ve got one stashed away somewhere, do you?”

“Mike, what’s going on?”

“So that’s a no the Geiger counter?”

“Yeah, probably.  I don’t know why we’d have one.”

“Well, check anyhow.  I wonder if they’re hard to make, you should check into that too.”  I turned to the guard nearest me.  “Find my father and bring him here.  I don’t care what he’s doing, just get him here as fast as you can.”

I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers into my temples, trying to make the jumbled thoughts churning through my head coherent.  “DPM, hold up.  You said something Smarto and Kevin..?”

“Yeah, word is they’ve been captured at the trade summit.”

I let the words sink in for a few seconds before opening my eyes again.  “Ok.  I need you.  This may be the hardest we’ve been fucked in a long time.”

DPM started to ask something, but I cut him off when I saw my father coming down the hill from the Roadhouse in a trot.  “I need a garage,” I told him.  “Functional, but a few miles from the Roadhouse at least.”

Mike was quiet for a few seconds.  “I think I know one we can use.”

“Good.”

Skip stopped in front of us, no more out of breath than a man half his age would have been.  “What’s so urgent it’s got your panties in a twist?” he asked.

“We’re at war with the Associated North and we didn’t even know it,” I told him.

Dad seemed to slump just a bit at the weight of the news.  “You’ve got evidence I assume.”

I motioned to the tarped thing in the bed of the truck.  “I need it checked out, but…”

“But what?”

“I think that’s an atom bomb we intercepted.  We didn’t dare fiddle with it, but it reminds me of one.  DPM, do you know anyone..?”

“Sure, loads of people.  The tech’s only been dead for the last twenty years, but we’ve got loads of nuclear engineers.  Scratch that.  Nuclear weapons engineers.  Fuck me!”

“And you brought it here?  What if that was the plan and it’s on a timer?” Skip asked.

“We didn’t want to risk leaving it on the roadside to be found by harriers.”

Dad wasn’t very pleased with the answer, but he didn’t say more about it.  “DP, see if you can find someone who knows anything about bombs enough to tell us what the fuck this thing is.  Be discrete about it.  Get whatever you need from the garage and get this thing out of here, at least ten miles distant.  Take a dozen guards with you; I want Roney to hand pick his best men.  You’ve got twenty four hours to get some answers and get back here.  I’ll leave it to your best judgment if you want to bring the bomb back or not.”  Skip turned to me then.  “You look like shit.  Go get some sleep.  There’ll be an emergency council meeting when DPM gets back and I’ll need a full report from you.”

“Can’t do that just yet,” I said as I opened the back door of the truck. The AN prisoner fell to the ground in a heap.  “I’ve need some answers first.”

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