Storm Front

by Robert Conroy

  The man who’d done the stabbing was identified and hustled off to the store’s offices, while his wife sobbed in disbelief that this could be happening to nice people like themselves. She held a small child tightly to her body, and the child was also crying. Sheridan police would come, but not for a while. Maybe they would take her husband in and maybe they wouldn’t.

  The off-duty cop said there might be other cops in the store and volunteered to find them. In a little while he came back with four men and a woman, all police officers, and all from other cities. It didn’t matter. They’d be happy to help keep order in Sampson’s. After all, several of them had their families with them.

  Tyler sighed in relief. However, he couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t thought to check for cops in the store in the first place. Management training hadn’t covered this sort of contingency. He decided to canvass the crowd for medical specialists. With luck, they might have a doctor in the building, or a nurse. Hell, he’d settle for a veterinarian.

  A clerk from pharmacy came over with a note. The stab wound was more like a slash into skin and fat, and nothing vital had been touched. They were going to treat it with disinfectant and butterfly bandages that they had in stock. The victim was embarrassed that he’d gotten into the mess and relieved that he was going to live. He did not want to press charges. Also, the unconscious man was awake and alert and had no idea who’d conked him. Tyler thought he really did know and was confident that it was the guy who’d been stabbed. Paybacks are hell, he thought.

  Help me make it through the night, Tyler mused, and then realized it was a line from a song. By whom and from where, he was too tired to remember. He didn’t care. He just wanted to get the hell out of this place. Why hadn’t he done something less dramatic and dangerous with his life, like joining the Army’s Special Forces?

  * * *

  Her mouth hurt where her teeth had been loosened, and her nose throbbed. She felt dirty and she was alone. Cindy Thomason wanted to go home. She wanted a shower and she was afraid that her period was going to start from all the stress she was enduring. She wanted the accident to go away. She was sorry she’d ever taken her brother’s Corvette. She didn’t want to see her boyfriend, Boyd. He’d urged her to take the car because it would be neat to drive around after school. What an asshole. Then she wondered which of them deserved the title more.

  “I’m in so much trouble,” she complained softly. A woman sitting beside her and also leaning against the wall heard her and smiled. It was far too late to offer advice. The woman had said that she thought that Cindy was a spoiled brat.

  Cindy was also hungry. It struck her as odd that a city hall and police station would have nothing to eat. The vending machines were long empty, but there was a rumor that food from local restaurants would soon be arriving. It wasn’t helping at the moment. Her stomach growled again.

  Cindy was spoiled, not totally stupid. She knew that her problems were her own doing, and that her mild pangs of hunger were nothing compared with the gaunt and starving creatures she sometimes saw on television from Somalia, or India. Still, she was a sixteen-year-old kid with a broken nose and loose teeth and she wanted to go home, even though it meant facing some really ugly music.

  She took her cell phone from her purse. Crap. The battery was getting low and the charger was in the car, which was buried under a mountain of snow on MacArthur. She’d looked out a window a few minutes earlier and what used to be the highway was barely visible. Still, she felt she had to do something, anything, a lament she’d heard so many older people make.

  First, she swallowed her pride and tried calling her boyfriend. There was no answer. She could only conclude that neither Boyd nor his parents had made it home. What a surprise, she thought as she looked around at all the people in the hallways with her. An old lady said it reminded her of the London Blitz, whatever that was. She thought she remembered a rock group by that name.

  That left her family. Her mother had been home when she’d called earlier, and Dear Mom let it be known that she was totally pissed at Cindy for having wrecked the car and for being stuck in a police station. Cindy knew she was being unfair about Mom. She knew her mother was genuinely concerned and frankly relieved that she was safe. Hey, how much safer could she be than in a police station surrounded by cops, and with a face so swollen and bloated that no one would even think of trying to hit on her.

  As the phone rang, she hoped her brother wouldn’t answer. Of course, he should be safe and far away at Michigan State in East Lansing where he’d be drinking beer or pretending to study. A sleepy voice answered. It was her father.

  “Dad, you made it home!” she said with delight.

  “Kind of looks like it, princess.” He yawned. It was the middle of the night.

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “You didn’t have your phone on. Check your messages.”

  “Oh. I kept it off because I’m low on battery.”

  “So am I, kid,” her father laughed, and the familiar sound warmed her. “I had a devil of a time making it in. Had to walk the last mile or so. So, to what do I owe the honor of this call?”

  “I want to come home. I’m hurt and I’m ugly.”

  “Aren’t they caring for you?” he asked with sudden concern. Her mother had told him about her predicament and he too had come to the conclusion that she was as safe at the police station as anywhere on the earth.

  Cindy saw her opening and jumped in. “My face hurts and I haven’t seen a doctor, and I’m hungry. There’s no food. And now some cop is talking about jailing me for endangering another cop and causing that big tie-up. It wasn’t my fault, Dad. I’ll be put in a cell, Daddy, with hookers and drug addicts and lesbians.”

  “The hell you will,” he snarled. “You just hang on there and I’ll figure out a way to get to you.”

  Cindy realized she was crying and not faking it. She desperately wanted to go home. So what if she lied just a little.

  * * *

  Lauren Landsman, Governor of the State of Michigan, stared at the men gathered around the table. They were Brigadier General John Soames of the Michigan National Guard, and Dennis Consiglio, Commander of the Michigan State Police. TV6 Weatherman Wally Wellman was represented through a speaker phone.

  “Wally, are you there?”

  “Yes, Governor, and at your disposal.” Wally’s voice came through tinny and nasal, but she grinned at the familiar inflections.

  And how considerate and professional of him to not call her by her first name. “Do you still speak for the consortium of weather experts in the area?”

  “I believe so. I’ve been speaking with them fairly regularly and I believe we’re all on the same page for once.”

  This was essentially the truth. Confronted with the reality and magnitude of the natural disaster that was still developing, genuine attempts were being made to share knowledge in the hope that some sense could be made from the arrival of the huge storm. Wally had been selected as their spokesperson because he had been so right and because he knew the governor. Still, there were a couple meteorologists who wouldn’t mind if he fell flat on his face.

  Lauren stole a glance at a large video screen on the wall. It was a satellite view from the Weather Channel feed and showed the snow line running over southeastern Michigan as a white crescent that started in Ohio and ran northeast into Ontario. Of course, both Ohio and Indiana, along with Ontario, were experiencing their own share of extreme weather, but she was the governor of Michigan, not anywhere else.

  “So what’s the prognosis, Wally?”

  Wally’s voice came through clearly. “Believe it or not, the rate of snow does seem to be diminishing. However, it is still extremely heavy and being compounded by fifteen- to twenty-mile-an-hour winds that are whipping up what is already on the ground and causing serious drifting. We’ve had reports of drifts almost ten feet high, if you can believe it.”

  “Just for the heck of it, Wally, about how much snow has
fallen?” Lauren asked, knowing that the exact depth was almost irrelevant. At a point, all that mattered was that a huge amount of snow was on the ground and still more was coming.

  “Officially, thirty-eight inches, but a lot of places have received a lot more. Even though the snow front is a relatively narrow band, it still covers quite an area.”

  The governor looked again at the weather map on the television. The satellite photo showed the snow line as a clearly delineated white streak across her state. It looked about fifty miles wide. To the north, where she was, the skies were cloudy, but they’d get no snow. South of the snow band, there was rain and flooding, but, again, no snow. The scene switched to a closer-in radar view that overlay towns and major roads. All were covered in a blanket of brilliant white. The sophisticated radar could show particular streets and key locations, but what was the point? Everything was in the snow field.

  “So, Wally, for one million dollars, when will it stop?”

  “Within twenty-four to thirty-six hours would be my educated guess,” Wally answered. “Like I said, the storm is weakening and will continue to weaken. Unfortunately, the cold front coming from the north has also weakened. It’s like two heavyweights that have punched each other out and still achieved no advantage. As I said, the snowfall rate has diminished slightly, but not enough that it’s apparent to anybody stuck in it.”

  “And how much more snow?” Lauren asked.

  “At least another two feet.”

  “Jesus Christ,” General Soames blurted. “Sorry, Governor.”

  “No problem,” she said. “Wally, is two feet a maximum estimate?”

  There was a pause. “Governor, do you realize you want firm estimates from people who didn’t even think it was going to snow in the first place? That’s almost funny. No, two feet is a minimum. My guess is at least a foot more than that.”

  “Mr. Wellman, this is General Soames interrupting again. I appreciate your caution after everyone got burned in the first place, but that raises a point. How come nobody saw it coming?”

  “Because we deal with what we know and develop probabilities from it, General. We’ve watched literally scores of storms like this one come north and head east without ever a flake of snow falling up here. Therefore, in our collective wisdom it was determined that what had happened in the past was likely to happen again. There was a margin of error, just like there is in political forecasting, but nobody took it seriously. Even if we did, what would we have said? That there was a one in a hundred chance of a major storm clobbering us? Who would have paid any attention to that? I said something like that a little while back and got reamed by my manager for not being upbeat. It’s like when we say there’s a thirty percent chance of rain. That also means there’s a seventy percent chance it won’t. Hell, is the sky partly cloudy or partly sunny? Choose your poison. As much as we’d like to believe that weather forecasting is a science, it’s still very much of an art.”

  “So what made this storm deviate from the norm?” Lauren asked.

  “Who knows? Maybe the clouds were thicker than we thought, and that made them stronger. Maybe a herd of cows in a field all farted methane at the same time or maybe some butterfly got squished and all that caused a deflection in the course of the storm that multiplied as it went. Frankly, we may never know and, worse for us forecasters, it may never happen again. This may be nothing more than a mindless aberration to remind us that we’re not in charge. Stop me, I’m starting to preach. Next I’ll start lecturing on chaos theory. People are going to want scapegoats and I wish them good luck finding one.”

  Lauren grinned. “Go back to bed, Wally, or try to stop the cows from farting. We’ll have dinner together after we dig you out. That is, if we can find you.”

  When the line disconnected, she turned to the two men. “All right, what now?”

  Soames spoke first. “I’ve got several thousand National Guard people with tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, and plows trying to work their way down the major roads. It’s slow and tedious and the snow keeps covering up the path behind us.”

  “Same here,” said Consiglio. “We’ve contacted a number of civilian construction firms and other companies that have heavy equipment, and they’re coming in, but getting them to the roads in the first place is a problem. We’re all making progress, but it is so damned slow. Even when it stops, it’ll take forever to clear.”

  “Have you found any more, uh, casualties?” Lauren said, thinking of the family dead in a car in Sheridan.

  Both men nodded and Consiglio spoke, “Sadly, yes. An older couple was found frozen to death and people in at least half a dozen other cars and trucks have suffocated.”

  Lauren sighed. “The mayor of Detroit was on the phone a few minutes ago. He was hysterical and I don’t blame him. Hundreds of fires are raging out of control in Detroit. What can we do for him?”

  Soames and Consiglio looked at each other. In older cities like Detroit, many of the homes were within spitting distance of each other. A fire in one could—would—easily spread to its neighbors and continue to devour buildings until either stopped by the fire department, or by fire breaks. Fortunately, so many abandoned houses in Detroit had been torn down that there were a number of such fire breaks. This was no consolation to people whose homes were being destroyed by fire.

  “Not much,” Consiglio said and Soames nodded. “They’re still on their own and likely to stay that way.”

  Lauren Landsman’s stomach tightened at the response, even though it was what she’d expected. At least a hundred and fifty people were known dead from the storm and cities were being destroyed. And there wasn’t a damned thing she could do.

  * * *

  Like many of Sheridan’s homeowners, Tim Cassidy had bought a gas-fueled generator to power essential items like the furnace and freezer if his electricity should ever fail. The utilities in his subdivision were underground, but they had to be above ground elsewhere in order to feed into the sub, and that’s where the problems would occur and leave him stranded. In a previous house he’d lost electricity for a week and everything in his freezer and refrigerator had thawed and gone bad. It had cost him hundreds of dollars, and since his insurance deductible was higher than his loss, he’d had to pay for everything.

  Thus, when the storm knocked out the electricity, he felt a sort of vindication. He fueled up the generator and turned it on, after prudently turning off the main circuit breakers to the house in case the electricity should unexpectedly come back. Fat chance of that, he thought, and went back inside. At least his furnace would run and his family would be warm. If he didn’t open his freezer and refrigerator, his food should be safe for a while. He also kept his garage door open for ventilation.

  No one ever found out what went wrong. The most likely villain was a loose connection that caused a spark that ignited some leaked fuel. For a short while, only the leaking fuel burned and easily could have been put out if somebody had been there and seen it. But Tim had been satisfied that everything was okay and had gone inside.

  The generator’s tank exploded with a roar, sending flaming gas over everything in the garage, and that included two cars and a couple of five-gallon cans filled with gas and kerosene. The cans went up quickly while the cars burned.

  Tim Cassidy responded immediately upon hearing the roar of the explosion. He opened the door to the garage and was thrown back by the wall of flames that was feeding on his garage and which craved the new source of oxygen his opening the door provided.

  “Out!” he screamed as he picked himself up and slammed the door shut. He checked himself over. Other than some singeing and a shoulder that wasn’t working right, he was okay. His wife and two kids grabbed coats and ran out the back door. The front was too close to the burning garage. Cassidy grabbed his cell phone and called 911. It was all he could do. He hoped the fire department would arrive soon. As he stood outside and watched his beautiful home burn, he realized that there were no tracks of any kind
in his street, and that drifts were up to his head.

  * * *

  Fast food places tend to congregate together. Not only is it good marketing in that a customer has a number of choices, but all of them have similar profiles when it comes to an ideal location, high visibility and good traffic flow being among the most important.

  Along MacArthur a half mile north of the City Hall campus, there was a row of such outlets. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut all peacefully coexisted in a brightly colored array of buildings. The parking lots were adjacent and connecting; thus facilitating those family outings where one child (or parent) wanted a beef burrito while another wanted a Big Mac. Only a little farther down Panera Bread, Starbucks, and Tim Horton lurked.

  Before the snow started, the restaurants were all geared up for a typical busy Monday lunch. Students from the schools who thought that fast food was better than cafeteria barf and business people and other workers with limited lunch time would soon be lining up at the counters and the drive-ins in a rush that was a daily challenge to handle. Parents with little kids who thought that a Happy Meal was a culinary adventure would complete the scene. It was organized chaos that was repeated every day and made the owner-franchisees a ton of money.

  But not today. It soon became apparent that the only people in the stores would be the employees. Fred Halavi, an immigrant who’d arrived from Lebanon ten years earlier, owned and managed the Burger King. It offended him that so much food would go to waste. Although he was now a U. S. citizen and quite prosperous, he would never forget the days of his youth when food was scarce and malnutrition common. He recalled his mother rooting through Beirut’s garbage cans for leftovers that hadn’t rotted too badly. Luckily, the money from other relatives already in America rescued them and delivered them to the land of plenty. Where the Halavi family had worked hard and thrived.

  He glanced at the two older women who’d shown up for work. They were middle-age plus housewives with grown children who liked to make a little money on the side while their husbands were at work. They were ten times more dependable and hard-working than the high school kids who worked the afternoons and evenings, and sometimes only if they felt like it.