He was surprised to see no sign of snow or frost on the ground as the helicopter landed. Standing beside the window holding on to a strap, he strained to identify Jo among the people streaming out below them. Even from this height, he recognized Tom’s masculine gait, and he was followed by a double line of children who stood beside the farmhouse, out of the worst of the downdraft. Anna’s slight figure followed them, long brown hair blowing out from behind her. He expected to see Jo at any moment, but she didn’t appear.
Fear stabbed at his heart. Had she been hurt? Died? It was a perilous world, to be sure. Maybe she didn’t want to see him. That would be even worse, he thought selfishly. Only now, as the helicopter touched down and the engines were set to idle, did he realize how much this homecoming was truly about Jo and how terrified he was that something had gone wrong.
He stood behind Pope as he unlocked the door and slid it along, letting in the wind and, with it, the smell of home.
And there she was.
She stood in the doorway of the farmhouse, hands clasped over her mouth as if torn between the prospect of joy and the fear of despair.
Then she saw him as his eyes fell on her. And finally, he understood the mystery that he’d spent his entire life deriding as a mental illness of the weak minded.
He jumped down onto the familiar mix of gravel and earth, ignoring the cries of greeting from everyone but her. And he held her.
#
His reunion with Jo had been the finest moment of his life. It seemed that their relationship had somehow flourished in their imaginations while they’d been apart. After the relief and shy, nervous passion of their initial reunion, Jo had taken him on a walk around the farm and made her confession. She had been married before, but that marriage had ended in divorce, leaving no children. She apologized for not telling him, but all Buzz could do was try to reassure her that it didn’t matter one jot to him. In his mind, the flood had drawn a temporal line, washing away everything that had happened before. He had no interest in the past, he told her, and no idea what the future held. The present was all they had, then, and he was determined not to waste it.
So, he asked her to marry him.
She said no.
Why? It was too soon, she said. And she was right. But the irony that it was he who was making the illogical but romantic gesture gave him some comfort as he got up from his kneeling position and shoved the ring—made by hand in his laboratory out of a cultured crystal—back in his pocket.
This was on the third day after he’d returned and the honeymoon period—as he called it—was about to come to an end.
He’d called a meeting to be held in the school room that evening. He’d hoped to end it by announcing his engagement, but with that plan in ruins, he walked into the room a few paces ahead of Jo.
Scanning the room, he could see that all the adults were there. Anna, the schoolteacher, sat at the end of the front row, her hand engulfed in Tom’s. Buzz had experienced a little childish disappointment when he’d found out that their attraction for each other had blossomed into a genuine attachment. Frankly, he’d not imagined Tom capable of such maturity. But then, the man’s options were limited at present.
Tom himself had given Buzz a rough update on the situation on the day he’d arrived, but it had only been today that the two of them had gone through the inventory in the stockroom, and he’d shown Buzz around the cultivated land he’d created—with the aid of child labor.
Dom and Maisie sat at the other end of the row. They’d arrived only shortly before Buzz had been taken to Hazleton to see the president. He’d found them in a house on the land overlooking the valley containing the farm. Maisie had been suffering with the strange water-borne sickness that had killed one of the school children and almost killed Jo. Then Dom had come down with it, and Buzz had been all for abandoning them, but Ellie had twisted his arm—agreeing to take Max off his hands if he would give a home to Dom and Maisie. His irony circuit pinged again as he considered that Ellie wasn’t here, but Max was. No one had seen the boy for the past couple of hours, but Buzz wasn’t about to delay this meeting to go find him wherever he was sulking.
In a dark corner lurked Ted Pope, who seemed to believe he needed to be wherever decisions were being made.
Buzz sat on Anna’s desk. He felt self-conscious, but it was time to re-establish order and make a plan.
“Thank you all for coming and for doing such a good job of keeping the farm running in my absence. Tom, could we begin with a summary of how things stand?”
Tom got to his feet, clutching a sheet of lined paper and came to the front of the class before turning around as if he were about to read out his summer homework.
“We did well, before the weather changed. Luckily, most of the varieties in the seed store were fast growing…”
Because I’d chosen them to be, Buzz thought.
“…so we were able to grow a good crop of pole beans.” He looked down at his paper. “Just over a thousand pounds of fresh beans that are now stored in the freezers and another thousand pounds of dried beans. We had some challenges finding storage bottles for them, but got enough together from the houses on the other side of the island.”
Impressive. Two thousand pounds of nutritious food in the space of a few months.
“We also planted and harvested smaller crops of zucchini, peas and carrots. A little over a thousand pounds in total. The potato harvest was small because we had to dig them up when the weather went cold and they were not fully grown. The children have cut and gathered hay across the island, but we do not have enough animal food to keep them all for long. We must make choices about how many we keep.”
Anna put her hand up. “And that depends on how long this cold will last. Is it just a weird, early winter caused by the flood? Will there even be a spring to follow?” She looked at Buzz, who’d been scribbling notes as Tom spoke.
“First, I want to say that you’ve done a great job to plant and gather in a worthwhile harvest a short time,” Buzz said, looking at Tom, who nodded appreciatively.
“It was a community effort. Dom and I did most of the heavy lifting, although Maisie is a good peasant.”
Buzz looked across at Maisie, who was beaming from ear to ear, though she was as far from being Tom’s “type” as it was possible to imagine. And Dom, who sat next to her, was also smiling.
“And the children, they worked harder than they have in their lives,” Tom continued.
“We’ve continued their education,” Anna said, “though we have had to think about what’s likely to be most useful to them in this new world. Some of the academic lessons have been replaced with home ec, for example. Maisie’s a good cook.”
“Sounds like a regular Little House on the Prairie,” Buzz said, not noticing the forced smiles. “To answer your question, Anna, I don’t know what’s going on with the weather. I’ve come back with a crate full of data, computers and Ted there,” he said, gesturing at the special agent. “Oh, and Max, of course, to try to work that out. But I don’t think it’s seasonal, so we have to prepare for the weather to be like this, or worse, for the long term. What’s the state of the supplies inventory, Tom?”
Dom stood up. “I’ve been looking after that. I’ve got a full report here, but we’ve held regular meetings to keep on top of it. We’ve rationed essential supplies and completed searching all the buildings on the island. I’ve got everything itemized.” He held out a battered school exercise book. “We didn’t know the wi-fi password, so we couldn’t connect to the printer. It’d be good to transfer these to a spreadsheet.”
“Good work,” Buzz said, though he hoped his reluctance to acknowledge Dom’s work wasn’t showing in his voice.
Buzz looked around the little group. He couldn’t entirely explain why he felt just a little annoyed at the efficient way they’d not only kept the community here alive, but had prospered, even as the weather had turned worse. But he forced his mouth into a smile. “Well, I’m impresse
d. I guess the question now is what to do next.”
Special Agent Pope cleared his throat. “Do I have to remind you, Doctor Baxter, that your mission is to interrogate the data and come up with a model to predict the climate over the next period?”
Buzz put his hand up. “No, Special Agent, you don’t have to remind me. But I have a responsibility to this place and that needs dealing with first.”
Putting her hand up again, Anna said, “Well, perhaps we have an answer to that.”
“Oh?”
“You can see that we’ve managed to run the community during your absence. Perhaps we should leave things as they are while you get on with your work.”
Not liking how this was going, Buzz looked around the assembly, finally alighting on Jo, who was now standing against the wall at the end of the front row. “That’s great, but someone needs to be in charge. Decisions have to be made for the coming months.” And this is my farm, he thought.
He could sense the tension in the room as Anna continued. “Yes, we understand. But for the past months, we’ve done that collectively, and where we can’t agree,” she added, cutting off Buzz’s objection before he could speak it, “then Tom makes the decision. It doesn’t happen often, but he’s been in charge and, as you said, it’s working out well.”
“Oh, so that’s what this charade is all about? Handing over my farm to your boyfriend?”
The room erupted as Anna leaped to her feet and jabbed an accusatory finger at Buzz, though he couldn’t hear what she said over the shouting. Dom was beside her, yelling, as Maisie sat with her hands over her cheeks as if she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. The only person who didn’t move was Tom, who remained standing beside the teacher’s desk staring fixedly outward.
Buzz knew he’d acted petulantly, but his rational mind couldn’t cancel out the feeling of betrayal, especially as his eyes found Jo’s and she turned away as if disappointed, or ashamed.
Finally, Tom held his hand up and the room went silent. He turned slowly to Buzz. “I am sorry that you feel this way. I understand you see this as your project, your farm…”
“It IS!” Buzz bellowed.
“…but you left and we took over…”
“So, the lunatics are running the mental ward?”
“…and we’ve done a good job so far. We don’t think this is a good time to rock the boat. Let us take this responsibility so you can get on with your work.”
Ted Pope came to stand beside Buzz. “He’s talking sense, Buzz. You’ve got enough to do without running a farm.”
“But it’s my…”
Pope shook his head. “No. This isn’t about who owns what. Don’t you understand? This is about the survival of the human race.”
Buzz looked into his eyes, mouth open. He’d been focusing his mental energy entirely on tackling the intellectual problems of climate modeling and short-term survival. He’d deliberately shielded his thoughts from considering what the long-term implications were, because he knew that clouding his mind would only make it harder to do his work. But Pope was right. His xenobots had been released in the wrong place, plunging the world, and North America in particular, into a new ice age. And the only way he could help was to figure out what that meant in practice. Maybe the planet would continue to cool until it was completely uninhabitable, or maybe it would stabilize. He had no idea what they would do about either scenario, but the first step was to quantify it. Know your enemy. He gave the tiniest of nods, did a one eighty, and stalked out.
As he reached the door, it swung open and Max collided with him. “Get off me!”
Max looked up. “But I’ve got something to say!”
Buzz was able to tame his inner toddler, his curiosity just overriding his impulse to complete his dramatic exit.
“What? Where have you been?”
“You know where the boat was tied up?”
“Of course.”
“There was a car there.”
Buzz saw it in his mind’s eye. It had been half in and half out of the water.
“Yes, and?”
“It’s gone.”
“What?”
“It’s rolled down.”
Buzz felt as though he was losing his grip. “What?”
“The water! It’s going down!!”
#
“Good grief, you’re right!” Buzz said.
He’d taken an ATV out to the place where Kujira had been moored, with Max somehow managing to balance on the back without touching him.
Buzz had been able to see that the water level had dipped before he stopped the ATV and got off. It was as if the tide had gone out, leaving a shoreline of rocks and mud that followed the hill down.
He turned as the second ATV came to a halt and Ted Pope climbed off it. Buzz let out an inward groan, but it seemed the secret agent was going to be his shadow for the time being, so he’d just have to get used to it.
“I can see where the water line was,” Pope said, pointing down the hill a little as Buzz began walking toward the water. “Be careful, it’s likely to be slippery.”
Buzz nodded, keeping his eyes firmly on his feet. Before the flood, this would have been a mix of gravel, rocks, earth and grass, forming a winding road that ran up the side of the mountain. Now, it was all those things plus a green slime that covered everything and generated a stink of something like rotting seaweed, but with a deep, noisome undertone that Buzz didn’t want to try to identify.
“So that’s about forty feet,” Pope said, “give or take.”
Max ignored him and looked across at Buzz. “It sort of worked, didn’t it? The xenobot.”
“Yeah.”
“Care to explain?” Pope said, this time obviously directing the question at Buzz.
Buzz sighed. “It’s the reverse of the process that caused the flood. Ice is forming and displacing liquid water. It should have happened at the south pole but…” He shrugged. They all knew how that had worked out.
“No, I don’t get it,” Pope said, persevering. “If water turns to ice, shouldn’t it be causing the level to rise?”
Max nodded. “Ice has a lower density. If you took a pint of water and poured it into a measuring jug, took a reading, and then put it in the freezer, it would have gone up.”
Pope rubbed his eyes. “Look, it’s been a hell of a long few days. Can one of you please explain it?”
“Not definitively,” Buzz said. “You’re right that ice occupies more volume than water for a given mass, but as we saw with the original flood, what matters most is where it’s distributed. With the flood, what had been solid water was suddenly released into the ocean, generating the massive surge we saw. This time, as the ice forms, it’s somehow lowering the level. Good grief. I think I understand.”
“What is it?”
“Are you a religious man, Ted?”
“I like to think I’m a good Irish Catholic boy.”
Buzz patted him on the arm. “Then I suggest you pray real hard that I’m wrong.”
Chapter 9
Carl
Yuri sat beside the fire and ate Yankee beans, watching as sparks rose up into the cold night air. Warren Duarte paced back and forth, blowing billowing clouds of smoke into the air then sucking on his cigarette.
Bobby swallowed a spoonful of chicken curry and watched as Duarte fretted. “Relax and have something to eat, Sergeant.”
With a final pull on the cigarette, the vet flung the butt away, sending it arcing orange through the air and then slumped into a camping chair beside Yuri and Bobby. Carl and the remaining two soldiers were checking the perimeter. “Ah, it’s just so damn frustrating,” he said as he rummaged through a box of ration packs by the light of the fire.
“Still no answer?” Bobby asked. At first, he’d been happy enough to delay their return while Yuri rested and he bound the Russian’s wrist. He was pretty certain it wasn’t broken, but there wasn’t much he could do other than soothe the pain a little with medication. Yu
ri had stumbled a few steps, supported on either side, since arriving back on the ground and had given Bobby the dubious honor of supporting him while he urinated behind the capsule out of sight of the others. But he was still weak, and moved his arms as if he were wearing a lead-lined shirt underneath his blue cotton ship-suit.
Duarte activated the ration pack, massaging the pouch of the MRE to get the flameless heater working. “I just hate being hung out to dry like this. First they tell us to get here as quick as we can so we can secure Yuri here, then they won’t give us clear directions where to take him.”
“Like I said, it is president I need to see.”
“Yeah, but the trouble is, my friend, neither of us gets to decide that for ourselves. I don’t see why they don’t tell us to go back to base, then we can put Yuri on a plane and he’d be in Denver tomorrow.”
Bobby finished the last of his curry and moved on to dessert—some sort of vanilla paste that tasted a whole lot better than it looked. “As far as I’m concerned, it stinks. They could always send out a helicopter if they want him that desperately. Or even reinforcements so we can keep him here for a day or two while he recovers.”
“You Americans, you do not have nose for politics like we Russians. My friend and commander, John Brady, he was so naive. Mikhail and me, we are used to looking for political reason for orders.”
“Oh, and what d’you think the political reason for giving us no orders is?” Duarte asked, jabbing his fork at the Russian.
Yuri shrugged. “I am, how do you say? Warm kartoshka. Hot potato. I think, perhaps, they are disappointed I survived. Now there is fox in chicken house and they don’t know what to do with him.”
Ice: Deluge Book 4: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Story) Page 7