He kept his foot hard to the floor, easing up when he saw signs of subsidence on the road ahead, or abandoned vehicles. Only once had he needed to take a shovel and make a ramp down onto the next stretch of road.
Both his training teams would be heading for the same destination. Whether they made it in time was another matter. The earthquake had also finally convinced Jo that a massive, world-wide descent into chaos was actually underway. For that, and for other reasons, there was a strained silence inside the SUV.
"Richmond was well inside the largest tectonic plate on the planet," said Don gently. "I think your friends and family will have survived."
He knew that both her parents were dead, but he figured there were cousins, and she must have friends.
"The middle of Canada, near the USA border, and somewhere east of Moscow, are the places furtherest away from fault lines. Richmond wasn't far behind."
Then he realised he was rambling. But he didn't like a woman sitting beside him and looking really pissed off. What man did?
"Why did you have to steal the SUV?" she said sharply.
"It was a second-hand car dealership," he said apologetically, "and none of that matters now."
"But it mattered then," she said doggedly.
Don bowed his head. He wasn't going to win this one.
"Why couldn't we give that woman and child a lift back there?" she said angrily.
"Because there will be other people along shortly," he said, "and because we have a mission to complete. We have to travel light and fast. We're a small piece of a much larger plan."
She didn't look convinced. He tried to think of it from her perspective.
"Look," he said, "you promised to serve the public when you signed up for Richmond Tactical. I understand that. And Tactical is part of policing. The safety of people is your number one priority.
"With elite forces it's – different. With policing it's clear what's legal and what's not, and who the bad guys are. But if we fail, there will be a lot of grief heaped on a great many others. We have to trust our handlers, and I would trust Cal with my life. I also trust him to do the right thing for the free world."
She deflated a litle, but still looked irritable.
Then Don saw a barricade across the road, and took the SUV off the tarmac. He swore as the vehicle came to a stop. He'd been trying to avoid this. The SUV was on a back road with a small town coming up. The local underground militia must have put up road blocks around it, anticipating some sort of return to a feudal system. Unfortunately, they were probably right.
"What do you know about far-right groups in South Carolina?" he said, as he brought up a map on his cell phone. Yes, tiny little Macre. One road in and one road out. At least that simplified things.
Jo looked at the barricade, then at him.
"Tactical have dragged individuals in for due process. We get a bit of stupidity, like firing weapons in the air. I'm not sure which group claims allegiance this far south."
"I think I'll go and have a talk to them," said Don, getting out of the car and walking round to her side of the vehicle.
She looked alarmed. "Ah, you'd better take this, then," she said, reaching into her backpack and handing a Smith and Wesson sidearm out the window. He pushed it back toward her.
"If I take a weapon I will think like a person with a weapon," he said enigmatically. "And then I'm just one of a dozen people with weapons. Those are not good odds." She raised her eyebrows, but said nothing.
"Here's the plan," he said. "By now they've got hunting scopes on the car. They will decide you are not a threat, and their attention will turn to me. But if anyone gets near the SUV, head into the trees and go deep. I'll find you later.
"And for God's sake don't come and 'rescue' me," he added. "I know what I'm doing, all right?"
She nodded dubiously. In truth, he had no idea what he was about to do, but that was his strength – using what was there to get the results he wanted. He just didn't need her complicating his movements.
"What about your arm?" she said suddenly.
"I'm not going into a bar fight, if that's what you're thinking," he said with a smile. Then he was gone.
He counted nine heads and three hunting rifles ahead of him. The others would have shotguns, resting against the line of cars across the road.
"Stop right there, and put your hands on your head!" called an older man as he got closer.
Don complied. "Wanting to get to Charleston," he called back. "Me and the wife. Too far to go round, happy to pay for use of your road."
He could see them thinking. This hadn't started out as a money-making venture, just a finger aimed at the government, but they were opportunists. This type always were. There was some discussion, and then they waved him in.
Stupid really. What would money buy them in a day or two? But there were few people who could resist appeals to their baser nature. These were the sort of people who would take all his money and send them back the way they'd come in.
He slipped through a small gap in the barricade, and leaned against a car so they could pat him down. It was a shoddy job.
"Don't normally have much cash on me," he said, "but you're in luck. I was going down to buy a boat and trailer when the quakes struck, so I got five thousand on me. I could give you five hundred."
Don saw the nod from the leader, but when the rifle butt met the back of his head he wasn't there. The older man had a fancy western rig and a WW2 Luger in it. Don hoped the bloody thing was actually loaded. He chopped the man's arm aside as he slipped behind him and pulled the Luger from the rig.
It took a second to find the safety on the left side and flick it off. Then he shot the man with the rifle in the leg, and jammed the muzzle under the leader's chin. No one ever took the easy way, so he'd learned to start with the hard way. It got results.
"Here's what's going to happen," he said, slowly and clearly. "I'm taking shit-for-brains here as insurance, and the rest of you are going to reverse some cars so my wife can drive the SUV through. Try something funny and I'll shoot your boss without thinking. Do as I say and we'll let him out half a mile down the road. Understand?"
"You prick!" groaned the man on the ground, going white. "You've broken the bone!"
Oops, thought Don. He was trying for a flesh wound, but sometimes you got what you got. The man would need a hospital, and soon. If there were any still open.
Jo got out of the car as Don approached, using the older man as a shield. He motioned her round to the driver's side. She started to say something, but he cut her off with a sharp slice of his hand. He knew these situations, and they needed to get moving while the local militia were still stunned by what had happened.
He positioned his captive in the front passenger seat, while he held the Luger on him from the back. He took the Smith and Wesson in his other hand, pointing it out the window. Let the militia see what their chances were. It turned out the militia were convinced. The trip through the barricade went exactly to plan.
When they got to Macre it was still standing, though most of it leaned drunkenly. Anything brick or concrete was down, and some of the debris had crushed cars on the sidewalk. Clean-up gangs seemed bewildered by the extent of the damage.
On the far side of town, no one at the other barricade was expecting problems. Hell, they had a barbecue going, and Don could see a few beers being tipped back. He floored the SUV when they were twenty metres out, and was past one end of the barricade before they realised what he was doing. A few shots went wide when they were well down the road, and then they were clear.
A little while later he noticed how withdrawn Jo had become, and pulled off near a diner. He was relieved to see the quakes hadn't shut it down. When they were back in the car, takeaways spread across the dashboard, she started to shake.
"That man . . " she said.
"Isn't dead," said Don. "You saw me shoot him, but he's just got a busted leg. And I know they looked like regular people, maybe neighbours
back in Richmond, but they weren't. And we're in a hurry. Understand?"
She got out of the car, and walked away from the diner. Don figured she was furious with herself for not coping emotionally. She hadn't joined Tactical to lose her nerve every time things got a bit gnarly – but the world she knew had just come to an end.
He caught up with her, and turned her to face him. She pushed him away until he folded her in his arms. Then she cried for a long time.
"It's okay," he said. "It really is. Sorry I haven't got one of those frilly white handkerchiefs, with initials in the corner, to offer you."
She snorted through her tears. "You're going to solve the problems of the world with a handkerchief?" she said.
"It's a start," he said, smiling, and led the way back to the SUV. Then he looked at the time. They needed to be in Charleston in two hours.
18
Nationwide media
The White House
"I bleed for this great country of ours," began the President. He stood at a lecturn opposite his desk in the Oval Office. It was mid-afternoon on the day of the 'quakes.
Theo sat with a row of White House workers to one side, out of camera shot. He was next to the Press Secretary who had encouraged him to submit his ideas. Many of them were woven into the President's speech, though not in the way Theo would have said them. There would be no mention of a possible alien presence on the planet.
"All of us can see the devastation around us," continued the President. "Cities have been hardest hit, with death tolls close to a quarter of the population. Small towns have fared better."
The confidential Civil Defence report an hour before had assumed less than twenty percent of the living would eventually make it out of the cities. Most of those would not survive against country people determined to hold onto what they had.
"This level of devastation is more than we, your government, can handle," he continued. "It would take more than the resources we have on hand, or could gather together in the forseeable future. Other nations have the same problems, and we can expect no help from them."
He was using every form of communication the White House had access to. His message spread out from military bases across the nation, from media centres, and from Civil Defence stations. Anything that could be made ready in the last few hours. The message would run on an endless loop for days.
The President paused, placing fingertips to his forehead.
"I am about to ask you to do a very difficult thing. I am asking you to accept a new reality. The United States of yesterday is gone, and the United States of tomorrow will be what we make it.
"If we do nothing, the people that survive the riots and the end of normal services will live in caves and set grass snares for rabbits. But if we take the short window of opportunity before petrol stations are exhausted and food runs out, we might be able to build a new country in the ruins of the old. A new country of farming communities similar to the ones our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers knew."
There was a long pause. The message so far had been optimistic, but it was about to be tempered with the realities of civilisation's fall from grace.
"We are asking families to move, on foot if necessary, to the nearest small town on the lists that follow. We are asking those towns to triple in size.
"Single people between 18 and 40, not attached directly to a nuclear family, are to report to the nearest military base or police station. You will be trained as the policemen and women in the new communities.
"This means each house will have to house two families, or a group of four people older than 40, and houses left vacant will also take in two families. Small towns of ten to thirty thousand people, with good growing land, and easily defensible borders, have the best chance of surviving the troubles to come.
"I have no right to ask you to do this, and you must think carefully about the future for you and your family. But I say this!"
The President raised his voice, and his words took on the stern tones many had admired in the elections.
"The areas outside the new communities will become worse than the badlands of the old West, worse than the ghettoes. Lawless gangs will come for what you have – people without the skills to work with others, people already lost to drink, drugs and a handout mentality. Warlords will emerge, and a truly evil way of life will develop. It will feed savagely on anything it can find. Our communities must be ready!"
The President took a deep breath, and read from a sheet he had prepared earlier.
"People of the United States of America, we are about to enter our second civil war. Make no mistake, this will be a terrible time. It will pit you and your family against others who would destroy you. It will not end, like most wars, with a polite 'cessation of hostilities'. It will end when only one side is left standing.
"As I close my address, I call upon the words of a president who lived in the shadow of nuclear holocaust. He would have understood what we are facing today. He said, 'Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.' "
The President stepped back, and the Vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stepped up to the lecturn. He was a man chosen for his strong speaking voice and popularity with the public, and he began to outline the details.
He described hospices for the old, and ill, who would no longer be able to get the drugs they needed to stay alive. There would be panels of doctors who would assess requests for euthanasia from anyone, for any reason.
People would need proof of skills, work history and community involvement, to live in the new communities. There was no place for those without a team spirit, and a willingness to work.
No children were to be born for the next five years. Each community would vote on compulsory abortion, understanding that the loss of a woman from the workforce, and the arrival of non-productive mouths, could destroy a community in the early years.
He talked about the minimum repair of houses, the preparation of roofs to collect rainwater, and the installation of septic tanks and long drops. Repairing the sewage system would take too much from the few resources that remained.
Work rotas for planting orchards and tilling crops. New produce markets. Rationing systems and labour coupons. Old cash or credit would no longer be legal tender, and new money would be distributed equally to all. Price and labour rates would be fixed, and rigidly enforced.
Gun shops would be emptied by police or military, all private weapons handed in or secured against theft, and all 4WD vehicles collected by the military. There would be the establishment of armed community patrols, with assistance from the military when needed.
The collection of human and animal wastes for the farms would be necessary, and hygiene courses as the first line of defence against disease. Quarantine stations would follow.
At the end of a long list of main points, the Vice-chairman softened his stance.
"If we do these things," he said. "If we work together, if we protect ourselves from the lawless, we anticipate our level of technology will be similar to that of the early 1800s. With our libraries intact, the road back from there should be swift. We may return to a communication age in the lifetimes of the very young today. I ask you to hold on to this dream, as we face the hardship and uncertainty of the coming years."
Then his voice hardened. "But make no mistake, there will be no knocking on our doors later, when the food runs out in your garage and lawless gangs roam the streets."
When the broadcast was over, Theo filed out of the room with the others. He headed for the Situation Room, where Cleet was wrestling with the best ways to use the few resources they had. Could communities mine and smelt iron without machines? How would they make gunpowder and muskets? How would they preserve food for winter?
The two men nodded to each other as Theo entered.
"Don't like leaving you with all this," said Theo deferentially, "but I'd like to return to Colorado."
Cleet looked puzzled.
&nbs
p; "It's a long way," said his boss. "You'd be more use here."
"My people need help on the reservations," said Theo.
Cleet's eyebrows rose. "I didn't know you kept in touch. . ."
"I get out there when I can," said Theo quietly. "It gives me a feeling of belonging."
Cleet nodded.
"And the reservations aren't on the list of new communities," continued Theo.
"Not enough people," said Cleet. "Too spread out, no real centre. Hard to defend. Do you want to convince your people to come in to one of the small towns?"
"No," said Theo. "I want the people to come back from the cities. There's water, horses and cattle on the reservations. We can go back to our old ways of living. We can deal with threats once we're back on horseback. There aren't too many ways in and out of that back country."
Cleet smiled. "You lucky bastard. You'll have a whole extended family, and the land of your people, to fight for. You're going to enjoy this, aren't you?"
"I don't know," said Theo, "but it's what I have to do."
Cleet walked over and shook his hand. "Good luck, my friend," he said.
19
Wairarapa plains
North island, New Zealand
Jimmy answered the satphone, and Doug suddenly found himself unable to speak. The runabout bobbed on the black and grey water, and moonlight reflected weakly back at him. So this was what it felt like to have lived through a natural disaster.
"You gonna report in or what?" said Jimmy, his usual blunt self. Doug smiled. The familiar voice was a balm.
"A little appreciation of the fact we're all still alive would be nice," he commented wryly. Jimmy said something off the phone, and there was a ragged cheer from the control room in Wellington, with a few loud whoops and catcalls.
"Happy now?" said Jimmy, when he came back on the line.
"Yeah," said Doug, grinning. He encouraged good morale. It was a great antidote to the sometime horrors of civil defence work. Then he used the GPS in the satphone to read off their current position for his number two.
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