Megaton Murphy (Sci-Fi Sizzlers), page 1
Megaton Murphy
Craig A. Falconer
Megaton Murphy
© 2021 Craig A. Falconer
This edition published September 2021
The characters and events herein are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Some of the locations herein are also fictional while others have been liberally adapted.
Reader’s note: Megaton Murphy was written, edited and produced in Scotland. As such, some spellings will differ from those found in the United States. Examples of British English include using colour rather than color, organise rather than organize, and centre rather than center. An exception to this rule is the use of proper nouns, which retain their American spelling where applicable.
Contents
Books by Craig A. Falconer
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1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Judgement
Author’s Notes
Books by Craig A. Falconer
Not Alone: First Encounter (Prequel)
Not Alone
Not Alone: Second Contact
Not Alone: The Final Call
~ Contact Trilogy box set ~
Not Alone: Fractured Union
Not Alone: Leap of Destiny
Not Alone: Revelations
~ Discovery Trilogy box set ~
Not Alone: The Awakening
Not Alone: Hidden Wonder
Not Alone: Endgame
Not Alone: Origins
Terradox
The Fall of Terradox
Terradox Reborn
Terradox Beyond
~ Terradox Quadrilogy box set ~
Funscreen
Sycamore
Sycamore 2
Sycamore X
Sycamore XL
~ Cyber Seed Quadrilogy box set ~
Sci-Fi Sizzlers:
Wanderlust
Pamela 2.0
Sunset Stays
Pumpkin Splice
Happy, Inc.
When Santa Slays
Arise With Us
Replica
Whence They Came
A Scent Of Man
Megaton Murphy
Yester Year
Too Good To Be True (Nov 21st)
Bound For Glory (Dec 19th)
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1
I’ll be honest: this time last week, I didn’t hardly even know what a nuclear explosion was.
I’m 22 now and I was 12 when we dropped the bombs, so I do know some of the names and the dates and that kinda stuff.
You know, what they tell you in school.
The thing about that is that I didn’t exactly stick around in school for too long. So even though people might be surprised to hear it given what kind of job I’ve been doing for the last two years, I probably know less than the average guy on the street.
If I hadn’t been working at that one bar on that one night, I never would have ended up here. None of this would have happened. That’s all spilled milk to me right now, but a story does have to start at the beginning.
It was a regular Tuesday night right until closing time, when a guy in a suit walked up to the bar. He was dressed way too smart for that place.
I told him he was too late for any more drinks, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He told me he’d been there for a while and had heard me telling stories to all different kinds of customers all night.
See, I was never good at the reading and the counting, but even the teachers who didn’t like me used to say I was good at telling stories.
One of my favourite words is meander and that’s something I’ve been known to do. I always had trouble concentrating. I didn’t get my Foxuzon medicine until after I gave up on school, when I lost a finger at the steelworks and the doctor did a whole bunch of tests to make sure nothing else was wrong.
It turned out I had some lead poisoning, was what he said, probably from when I was a baby, and it might have stunted my development. I didn’t think that was the nicest thing to say but he said it in a pretty nice kind of voice at least, and he was a good guy to offer me the new medicine.
Foxuzon was part of a trial that I didn’t even have to pay for, which was just as well since I couldn’t barely even pay for the bus ride each time I had to collect my supply.
Anyways, I’ll meander back to that night at the bar.
This hotshot-looking guy in the suit said there was something about my way of speaking that made it hard to stop listening, and that he was looking for someone to do some talking for tour groups at some kinda facility down in Nevada. He said they could pay me pretty good but that the real good thing would be the tips an entertaining guy like me could make.
I don’t think no one had ever called me an entertaining guy before and I liked the sound of what this guy was telling me. I didn’t have any ties to the bar so I agreed to the guy’s offer of a two-week trial run, fully paid. He was only in town for a funeral and I went out west with him when he headed back out there the next day.
My new boss in the suit turned out to be a pretty high-up guy named Hanson. He had a thing for last names so always insisted on calling me Murphy instead of Darren, just like he insisted on me calling him Hanson instead or Mr Hanson or whatever his first name is.
Huh, in two years I guess I never found that out.
But yeah, two years. Everything went well in those two weeks and really everything went well for two years, right till last week.
I didn’t want for all this to happen but I’m not here to pretend it didn’t. I’m not here to pretend I didn’t do what I did.
All I’m here to do is get my side of the story out.
I’m not a monster.
Please, you’ve gotta believe me…
2
I worked as a tour guide at the Sand Point Nuclear Test Facility. My job was to take people around the built-for-bombing empty town and bring it all to life. We called it a show town, because it’s not tiny like a model town and it’s not a ghost town that everyone up and left.
It’s a town on a test site, to show what can happen.
From the moment I first walked into the silent town square I knew it was going to be the easiest job I ever had. The place was so creepy, so weird, so not like anywhere else… it was gonna capture everyone’s attention with or without a good guide.
Most weekdays I would have three or four school groups, then at the weekends it was tourists who sometimes came from way further than you might expect.
My contract was for weekdays and that’s what Hanson paid me for, but I worked weekends for no official pay just to get my hands on those tourists’ tips.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked engaging with the school kids and giving them something to laugh about after the boring lectures and slideshows they have to watch in the education centre before they get to wander around the town. The trouble was that kids don’t have no money and teachers don’t tip, so those days I was making less than I did on a good day at the bar.
But the weekends? I made out like a bandit.
We got all sorts of visitors thanks to Hanson and his idea to advertise the place in Vegas. Things were really taking off in the city when I moved west and none of that has slowed up. We would usually get families and couples but once or twice I had some mob guys looking for private tours.
A lot of my style was about jokes and doing little scares on the tourists, like when I’d have the mannequins set up to fall forward when someone opened a door. I was worried about hacking off the wrong guys, but it turns out those types love laughing at each other and can usually take a joke with their group as long as there ain’t no outsiders around to see it.
And the tips from those guys... they would make you wonder where the money came from, if you didn’t already know.
As it all turned out, I had a late night in one of the big new casinos the night before the incident. That wasn’t my usual scene but it was my roommate Benny’s birthday and he loves to gamble. Really he loves anything that smells like a way of making money without working for it, and he’d tell you that himself.
The problem with the late night was that it made me have a late morning, as a late night often does.
I still got to work just in time for my first tour, but only because I didn’t have to clock in at the compound’s main staff area. I had my own thing going and always drove straight to the show town.
Anyways, it was a long day.
My third tour group had a really difficult kid who the teacher couldn’t control and who even the other rowdy ones couldn’t keep up with. He was a tough one to get along with, I’ll just say that.
I dunno how much you know, but the buildings in our show town are as realistic as you could imagine, with all the furniture and everything else. Mannequins, fake food on the table, you name it.
We don’t have any glass, but other than that it feels pretty much like wandering around some
This kid was moving stuff around, banging on surfaces, just being a real pain in everyone’s ass. I can never say too much to a group member without getting in trouble, especially a kid, and after getting practically no sleep overnight he was the last thing I needed six hours into a long day.
His poor teacher apologised at the end of the tour and all I could say was I was glad I didn’t have to deal with the kid every day like she did.
And listen, I ain’t blaming the kid. I stayed up too late, I didn’t wake up early enough, and I made the next mistake, too.
That’s on me.
The fourth tour group couldn’t make it on account of a problem with their bus, so it turned out that I got some time to myself. Like I said before, I like guiding the kids around… but that day, I needed a break. I almost did a little dance when I heard they weren’t coming.
On any other day I woulda gone home early. But that day I knew Benny had some guys visiting. I knew they were probably pretty shady and I put my foot down that they had to be gone when I got home from work.
The tips I got were great, like I said, but living ain’t cheap and I was trying to save for a real place. Putting up with a roommate like Benny was the price of that, I guess, and he wasn’t all bad.
Anyways, I didn’t want to go home early when we’d made that deal. I also didn’t really want to go to the staff room at the compound like I mighta done if I’d had two-and-a-half hours to kill a few months ago. We got a new receptionist last year, Cindy, and things were good between us for a while. Really good, you could say. But then it all got awkward and sitting there with just her wasn’t something either of us would want.
Really there was no place else for me to go, so I just stuck around.
In hindsight I was definitely taking the goldy-hair comparison from earlier too far, because what I did next was sit down on the bed and decide that it was just right.
I even thought I was being smart by setting the real alarm clock on the dresser to go off in two hours.
When I glanced in the new-fangled safety mirror above the dresser and saw how tired I looked, I decided it should probably be a while before I had another night in Vegas.
If I had known what would be looking back in that mirror when I glanced at myself again a few hours later, I would have never lay down.
You’re probably guessing by now that my alarm clock didn’t do it’s job, and if you are then you’re guessing right.
Like I said earlier, I have my own gig here and I always drive straight in and straight out. I was never late and had never hung around longer than I was supposed to. I mean, why would I? Why did I? By accident, was all, and I guess no one sees accidents coming.
I woke up in the dark, to the sound of an alarm that I swear on my life must have been created to wake the dead. My ears were pounding and it only took a few seconds for my heart to join them.
I rushed to the empty window frame and saw the least welcome sight of my life: a red light flashing in the distance.
It was coming.
There was no sense in running. It was already too late.
3
I knew the actual house wasn’t gonna be destroyed for at least a few more years and that the detonations we tested out there weren’t close to the level of what goes on at other sites, but Hanson and everyone else had still told me a million times to never be there at the wrong time.
All kinds of safety checks made sure radiation levels were never too high after one of the blasts, and the fact that no one at Sand Point had ever gotten sick was a pretty good sign to me that the checks were good enough.
So we had checks after the small-scale tests and we had warnings never to be around… and don’t think I didn’t hear those warnings echoing in my mind even as the alarm pounded away at my brain.
It was almost like they were teasing me, telling me I shoulda paid more attention and never shoulda gone out to the casino with Benny when I had work the next morning.
The warnings teased me because there I was: smack dab in the middle of the wrong place at the wrong time. Worst of all, I had no time to be any place else.
There was no plan for what to do in this scenario, kind of like there’s no plan for what a lion-tamer should do once the lion wrapped its jaws around his head. All my safety training, which wasn’t all that complicated, was about making sure I never ended up in this situation to begin with.
To clear one thing up: you really don’t have to tell me I’m an idiot for sleeping on this job… believe me, I already know. I usually stop by the main compound at lunchtime and that’s when I’d see if there was a notice on the board about any tests they might be running, since I’m never there in the morning like everyone else.
But I was just so tired from the night before, I ate my lunch in the car and closed my eyes for a few minutes. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call comfortable, which I guess is why I opted for the bed when I decided to have a bigger rest later in the day.
You gotta understand that tests are pretty rare too, so I’m also gonna say there was some bad luck about all of this. But I do know I shoulda been a lot more careful and I won’t pretend otherwise.
If you don’t know the show town you might wonder why I didn’t run, but there really was nowhere to go. The whole idea is that the town is in the blast zone and the rest of the compound isn’t, so it’s a pretty good drive.
The kids come in their buses and I have my car, but it would have taken minutes to get to a safe spot and I knew I only had seconds.
If I’d parked my car on the other side of the house someone might have been able to see it from the compound in the surveillance scope, then they’d have known I was here and surely would have halted the test. But I parked where I always park, so of all the things to beat myself up for I don’t think that’s one of them.
I thought about sheltering in the car but I figured I might be safer in the bedroom closet, three doors away from the outside and with no glass to shatter like would happen to the car windows.
When I was a kid my Uncle Jay used to laugh at me for closing my eyes when I was hiding, as if it would make a difference to whether he could find me. I guess hiding in the closet was like that, but at least I felt like I was doing something to protect myself.
The alarm stopped right after I got in, and all of a sudden the only thing I could hear was my heart. It couldn’t have been five more seconds until all I could hear was nothing at all.
It was already dark in the closet, but when the blast hit it got dark everywhere. When the blast hit, it got a different kind of dark.
Instantly, I was out.
I was gone.
The old me was dead.
4
I don’t know how long I was blacked out.
When I stumbled out of the closet, the alarm clock I had set up was on the floor. It had been knocked down by the radioactive air that burst through the bedroom door.
The closet door had held firm but I could still feel the heat on my skin, along with a weird disoriented feeling in my head. I really was stumbling with every step.
I was a little bit surprised the force hadn’t been enough to knock over the dresser and I definitely put that down to the type of detonation, not the thickness of the doors. Even in the living room, none of the bigger furniture had toppled. Dining chairs for sure, but not the wooden sideboard or the table.
Maybe I got lucky with the scale of the detonation, I thought.
After gazing around the living room from the bedroom door I went back in to check myself over in the mirror. I only know it’s not made of glass and I wish I could remember the word for the material it is made of, but the point is it was still there. That was how I saw myself.
