Sam got his breakfast where Pam was dishing it out; then he poured a cup of coffee, watching it steam as he walked out to the fire pit. Two pieces of wood lay on the white mound of ash and were being consumed by lazy licking flames.
He seated himself next to Shanteel, who was eating slowly, her eyes fixed on the distant east beyond the mountains.
“Worried about home?”
She nodded, expression pinching. “I signed up for this class ‘cause I didn’t want to be home this summer. Didn’t want to have to take care of my little sister, you know? Told Aunt Vee, ‘I’m gonna take anthropology. Find out about those Cherokee Seminole ancestors of ours.’”
“Wrong part of the country for either Seminoles or Cherokee.” He sipped his coffee. Almost burned his mouth.
“How was I supposed to know? Not that it mattered.” Her eyes thinned. “I just didn’t want the struggle. That little sister of mine? She’s burning up on the inside with rage. Gonna get herself killed. I didn’t understand at the time. But Aunt Vee did.”
After she hesitated for a time, Sam asked, “Understand what?”
“She knew. Said, ‘I understand what you mean about the Cherokee Seminoles.’ Odd tone in her voice. Now I wonder if she wasn’t saying, ‘You save yourself, Shanteel. Ain’t no one else you can save but yourself.’”
Shanteel shook her head. “If the president declared martial law, things are bad. That rage we all got? When the credit cards stopped working? When the stores said, ‘We only take cash?’ People who can’t feed their kids? People who think they’re not getting a fair deal? Not good, Sam. Not good at all.”
Sad irony tainted her laughter. “Never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I hope the mayor moved in the army first thing and locked the neighborhood down tight.” She paused. “Because the thing about rage is that before you destroy anyone else, you always got to destroy yourself and the people around you.”
“I suppose.”
“Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“Sort of Shakespearian, huh?”
A faint smile bent her lips. “Always a dead white guy to put you in your place.”
He thought back to what Amber had admitted before she blew up. “We’re all going to be feeling guilty, Shanteel. Second guessing if coming here was the right thing. You, me, everyone on this crew. It’s the not knowing. That’s what’s going to make it worse. Wondering if we were back home, what difference we could be making.”
“Help if we could call. Most have tried. No signal. Nothing. That’s going to jack up the anxiety.”
Sam couldn’t help it. He had to pull his own phone from his shirt pocket. Nothing. Mom? Dad?
Why hadn’t he tried to call?
“Sometimes things just are,” Shanteel said cryptically as she forked up another mouthful of scrambled eggs. “I gotta remind myself of that. After Mama... Well, I was told that by an attorney, and then by a social worker.” She nodded her head. “Sometimes things just are.”
He looked off to the east, wondering about his own family. Hell, if he were there, he would have just added more fuel to an already flammable relationship.
Someday, Dad, I need to say that I’m sorry.
The Shock
I was having lunch that Friday with a couple of people I worked with. I watched the consternation begin. The whole restaurant turned chaotic as more and more people tried to settle their bills. Everybody pays with a credit card, right?
The staff did their best as people pooled their cash. When that didn’t work, the manager agreed to take checks, but how many people carry check books these days? In the end, he took business cards, personal information, and accepted what were essentially IOUs just to get people out the door.
And that was just the beginning.
You don’t realize how dependent you are on money until it’s gone.
— Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.
Chapter Eleven
Bill Tappan left after breakfast, riding Old Tobe back down the mountain under Brandon’s watchful eye. He said he’d be back when there was more news. He also said he had an old wind-up emergency radio somewhere, and if he could find it, he’d send it back up the mountain with Brandon next time the young man returned.
For the next three days, Sam and the students worked on the site. Dr. Holly said he wanted to get the crew lined out on survey, identifying artifacts and features, and up to speed on plotting and recording.
Periodically Holly would drop a teaser for Amber about this cave that was going to blow their minds. Sam was starting to think it was a joke of some kind. He wasn’t sure that Amber ever began to share his suspicion; instead, she’d just arch an eyebrow, expression blank, as if a wall had been built between her mind and her face.
And no matter what the time of day, they all kept looking off to the east. Wondering what was happening back home. Talk was of family, friends, even a preoccupation about places, like Virgo’s Pizza, the dive just across University Avenue from campus.
There were few smiles as they lined out for the cook tent each morning to pick up plates filled with eggs and sausage—all of which were kept in an elevated cooler about a quarter mile back in the trees. A rope and pulley raised and lowered the cache from a high branch about fifteen feet up. That was supposedly beyond the reach of mister grizzly.
No one went back to the cache unless accompanied by one of the Tappans, who carried a gun and bear spray. Given Sam’s urban perspectives, the guns made him queasy. He fully understood that, yes, there were big apex predators in the area. Academically he could synthesize the concept that under the right circumstances, grizzly bears and the occasional cougar considered him a snack. Modern Americans don’t grow up with the idea that something with teeth and claws might eat them. Outside of monster movies, it just wasn’t in a Hempstead boy’s operative New York cognitive framework.
And speaking of movies and TV, anyone who had watched either knew that when someone had a gun, someone was going to be shot. In Sam’s anthropological universe, that was what they called culturally normative. Understood.
No one, however, sat down with the on-screen villain or tragically doomed character and ate lunch, or discussed the weather, or shared a light-hearted joke. Fact was, Pam spent all day in the cook tent with that serious-looking revolver strapped to her hip or hung within reach on a hook.
When Shyla asked her about it, Pam had barely shrugged, saying, “Grizzly country, and I’m down here alone all day frying bacon, burger, and steaks.”
Sam’s disquiet was further deepened every time Dr. Holly ventured farther from camp than the toilet, or accompanied them up to the site, his equally lethal-looking pistol holstered on his belt next to his Leatherman and Brunton compass.
When asked if that was standard field equipment for an archaeologist, he’d smiled. “Only in the back country. Will we need it? Naw. It’s like a seatbelt. Statistically the odds are tens of thousands to one against needing it. The kicker is, on those really rare occasions when your number comes up, you really need it.”
Like a seat belt? Call that analogy confusing at the deepest cultural level. Go back to that mythos: Unreliable people own guns. Some psychological flaw in their personality, an insufficiency of character, draws them to firearms. Or perhaps a deep-seated sense of inferiority for which they must over-compensate. Owning a gun reinforced their opinions of themselves: See me? I have a gun. I am, therefore, more masculine. Take me seriously, or you’ll suffer the consequences.
At worst? Bad people carried them. MS-13 cretin types. People who wanted to rob, shoot up a school or church, unleash mass-murder, or dominate the weak. The mentally ill and unbalanced craved guns. No nightly news report was complete without a murder, or murders, by “mentally disturbed” individuals.
Watching the Tappans trot around with guns on hips and horses—not to mention Dr. Holly who most certainly didn’t demonstrate any deficiencies of identity that Sam could see—didn’t fit the mold.
Kir
stin’s words from that drive out to the ranch kept replaying in Sam’s ears: What universe are we in?
But as the days went by, somewhere along the line, Sam stopped seeing the guns. When he realized that, it worried him to the point that he asked Shanteel. She understood guns and what they meant. She’d lost her mother to a policeman’s bullet.
“Oh, yeah,” she told him in soft tones. “I can feel them. Like the serpent in the garden, you know what I mean?” And she’d given him a squint of emphasis to make her point.
The beginning of day four dawned bright and sunny, as was usual in the mornings. The temperature was crisp, but they were all becoming accustomed to that, given the elevation.
Sam crawled out of his tent, surprised that he had slept the whole night through.
They had heard no additional news. Only Kirstin still religiously checked her phone. No signal. Speculation was that the government—as part of their state of emergency—had shut down the towers.
Everyone remained worried. Back at school, no one talked about family much. It was uncool. But since communications were down, conversation would start with “Did I ever tell you about my Dad?” Or something about a brother, or a grandparent.
After all, family, friends, colleagues, and pets were back in that world. Undoubtedly they were coping. Surely the military had established some system to ensure that people got groceries; that they could manage to get back and forth to work; and the government had to be keeping the lights on and the water running.
Dr. Holly figured they would have issued ration cards first thing.
When nature called, Sam now stumbled out into the trees just out of sight of the camp. This was another change. The guys no longer used the blue-tarp-wrapped latrine when they had to take a leak. The Tappan men and Dr. Holly sort of set the pattern, and the rest of them followed.
Sam looked up at the haze-thick sky, sniffed the morning wind, picking up a curious scent he didn’t recognize. At breakfast, he indicated his nose, asking Dr. Holly, “What’s that smell?”
The old professor sniffed. “Smoke. Did you notice the reddish glow at sunrise this morning? This thick haze? Something’s burning. Maybe California or Nevada.”
“That far away?” Danielle asked. “And you can smell it here?”
“You’d be surprised. On dry years this whole country is covered with smoke. Especially in late summer and early fall,” he told her. “It’s the wind patterns, where the jet stream blows. At times a smoke plume from a thousand miles away can be so dense you can’t see across the valley.”
He cocked his head, testing the scent. “This doesn’t smell like a forest fire. It’s different. More acrid. More like a burning dump if you ask me.”
Amber had just stepped out of the cook tent, her plate filled with breakfast. She stopped short, sniffing. Sam saw her tense, saw the muscles in her cheeks knot tight. For a moment, she struggled to still the turmoil behind her eyes. It was hard-fought, but she forced her face into that maddening, expressionless mask.
Like an over-tensioned spring, she walked over, seated herself between Sam and Dr. Holly, and in a low voice the others couldn’t hear, said, “I’ve smelled that before.”
“Oh?” Dr. Holly asked.
“We were downwind of Aleppo during the last days.” She forced herself to take a sip of her coffee, as if it steadied her. “We were under the smoke plume. It was what was left of the city burning after Assad and the Russians used high explosives to blow the roofs off an entire neighborhood and dropped incendiaries to burn the exposed rooms.”
“A city?” Sam asked. “An American city burning?”
He sniffed again, thinking it did smell like burning garbage.
The corners of Amber’s eyes had sucked down tight, the jaw muscles standing out in her wedge face. “Never mind. You’re right. It’s probably a dump.”
Dr. Holly lowered his voice, his long face sober. “Where are you going to find a dump—even for a big city like Salt Lake or LA—that’s going to burn with enough intensity to generate a plume this size?”
Sam tried to get his head around the notion of an entire city burning. He lifted his coffee under his nose to block the smell.
Dr. Holly glanced at the haze-filled sky. “We’ve never seen this before, not even during the Los Angeles riots in the nineties. But what happens when an entire city loses it? When everything breaks down to the point of mass hysteria and rioting? Looting the grocery stores, the liquor stores, Walmart, and Costco? When the highways are jammed and clogged?”
“If Syria is any yardstick to measure by, the electricity goes out first,” Amber said. “Maybe it’s a fire, or a collapsing building. Maybe someone runs a truck into a pole.”
“God, I don’t want to think about it,” Evan said softly. “But there’s something else.”
He’d lowered his voice as Shyla and Ashley walked by to go sit on the other side of the fire. Now he pursed his lips and said, “Later.”
“Want to give me a hint?” Amber asked.
“Airplanes. Remember the contrails when we got here?”
Amber tipped her head back to study the featureless gray sky. “They’re gone.”
Sam remembered Frank saying something about it that first day: “Yeah, southern Wyoming’s on the I-80 corridor. Draw a line east-west across the country and it runs through San Francisco, Sacramento, Reno, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Des Moines, Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh into that dense concentration of cities clustered from Boston, through New York, and Philly.”
Working on the site, high-flying jets had been the only human-made sound outside of the crew’s.
“Things are getting worse,” Amber said in a strained whisper. Sam thought her eyes looked like cracking glass. “Not a word to the crew, Sam. Not even a hint. Understand?”
He sniffed the wind again, swallowed hard and tossed his plate with its uneaten breakfast into the fire.
As he watched the flames lick up around the bacon and eggs, he asked himself: So, that’s what a city smells like when it burns? Were people burning, too?
Ripe For The Fall
I don’t want to write about the things I saw, did, or survived in the days following the collapse. I relive those days with total clarity, pain, and terror every night when I sleep.
My thoughts on these pages are about the whys and wherefores. The reasons Americans turned on each other like rats in a barrel.
The roots of our discord might be traced back to the end of the Cold War. With no Soviet Union, we had only ourselves left to fight. But I think it went back to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. The proceedings polarized Republicans and Democrats. The art of political payback had always been part of politics, but I think the Clinton impeachment institutionalized it.
— Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.
Chapter Twelve
Both Frank and Pam rode up to the site with lunch. All morning, Sam had been acutely aware of the lack of contrails. As he ate his sandwich, he stared off into the haze-filled heavens, wondering what else had gone wrong in his world.
The glass on his Brunton compass caught his attention. He lifted it, ran a finger across it. The smudge on his fingertip couldn’t be mistaken: fine ash.
If cities were burning in the west, what was happening in New York? New York City had the highest urban density in the country. He’d seen the effects of COVID, how entire streets had been emptied, windows boarded up, fearful people locked in their apartments. But they’d still had money, could buy food. The lights and water had worked.
Mom. Dad. Tell me you’re all right.
Now that he had no phone service, some perverse part of him ached to call them.
That afternoon the wind changed from the southwest to just about straight out of the north, carrying the hazy brown drift of acrid stink south where it concentrated over the Wind River Mountains. It hung there, a sickly brown miasma; Sam was thankful they were no longer breathing it. After all, it hadn’t taken that long for the toxic
effects of the burning World Trade Towers to show up after 9/11.
Shyla walked over and seated herself beside him, taking a finger to flick a strand of ash-blonde hair back over her ear; it had come loose from her ponytail.
“Got a lot done so far today, boss man.” She stared across the remarkable vista as she took a bite from her sandwich.
“Yeah. Especially getting all the hearths and FCR scatters mapped in.”
“They’re pretty easy to spot now. To think, before I got here, I’d never heard the terms ‘Fire Cracked Rock’ or ‘hackling fracture’. Now I’ll never be able to look at a broken stone again without looking to see if it’s been burned.”
Shyla stared out at the hundred-mile view. “Why did they haul basalt in for their fires when they had so many rocks right here?”
“The site sits on limestone. Basalt is a denser and stronger stone. It didn’t fracture when heated in a fire, and having more mass, it concentrated more heat. That meant it radiated for longer. If they were using it as a boiling stone, it didn’t dissolve when they dropped it into cold water. Didn’t leave grit in the food.”
“Makes sense,” she agreed. “That was a really good tip that Dr. Holly told us: ‘Look for what is out of place in the environment.’ Like those chipped cobble tools.” Her delicate brow lined. “What did he call them?”
“Teshoas,” Sam told her. “It’s a Shoshoni word. Probably directly translates as ‘big stone flake struck from a quartzite lag cobble that has hard cortex on the edge that stays sharp for longer.’”
He watched her face light up with a smile. The woman had remarkable eyes; in the direct sunlight they were a shade of blue-green, a turquoise that sparkled with vitality. He figured she could have modeled, looking a lot like the kind of woman they’d put on a magazine cover.
Dissolution: The Wyoming Chronicles: Book One Page 9