Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  Lorena look bewildered. “Which job would that be?”

  “I resigned from the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. I no longer chair the party.”

  Lorena laughed in relief. “You should have quit three months ago when you started moving, housing, and feeding one hundred million Democratic voters. I’m also glad you sold your fish farms. Just how many full time jobs do you need?”

  A workaholic without a job, Jackson had no answer.

  An hour later, Rance cursed himself for not bringing a soda. His ass hurt from humping so many rocks and he cut his leg on brush. Right through his favorite blue jeans. And he could not find the fucking helicopter.

  Just when he convinced himself that it couldn’t be in the ravine, because unpredictable wind off the walls would make it a bitch to land and take off, he found the damn thing. Perched on a sled pushed by a dualie truck sat the Bell 430 in a lean-to shack, protected on three sides and above from regolith. All he had to do was move the truck forward so the rotors cleared the shack.

  Hiding the Honda dirt bike, he quietly sneaked his way to the copter. He knew if he asked for permission that Butler would say no. Why the hell would he say yes? As for Governor Cooper? He preferred Hillary anyways. Obama was too much of a pussy, all that post-partisan talk about finding common ground and looking for bipartisan solutions. Fuck the wingers. Politics is war, not business. You don’t accommodate the other side, you make the other side accommodate you. And you punish them every time they don’t, painting them in the worst possible light. Republicans would oppose anything he proposed regardless of how much it benefited the country. Republicans always put party before country. That’s what made McCain’s campaign slogan so great.

  Rance bet that Butler would keep it fully fueled, so all he needed to do was fly it to Green Valley, pick up his fiancée and her rich family, then save their lives by flying them to safety.

  Out of breath, he reached the helicopter and opened the door. He smiled as he recognized the cockpit. It was even a newer model. Then an unseen pilot leaned forward from the rows of seats behind the cockpit and shot him in the gut.

  Rance stared at the gun forever before the shock wore off enough to look at the hole in his stomach. It was such a tiny hole. He tried to plug it with his left index finger to reduce the bleeding. Then he fell on his back with a hard thud. He must have landed on a rock because something poked his lower back.

  A cowboy stepped in front of him. At least, he had the boots and hat. He put his gun back in its shoulder holster.

  “Shit, sorry,” he said almost sincerely. “I meant to get you in the chest. Those gutshot wounds take forever to die from.”

  The fucker smiled as if this was fucking funny.

  “Mr. Butler promised me a million dollars if I had to kill anyone to keep him alive, so I guess I should thank you.”

  As the pilot turned to walk to the cabin a bullet cut his spine. Rance didn’t even remember pulling the Kimber .38 Super from the small of his back. Didn’t remember firing. He looked at Lisa’s gun in his hands with surprise. She liked it because it had so little recoil. He did remember Lisa loading it with CorBon 130-grain jacketed hollow point. God he loved that woman!

  “Fuck! I can’t move my legs! I can’t move my fucking legs!” the cowboy cried, thrashing about in sagebrush.

  “Ain’t so funny now, is it, motherfucker?”

  “Fucker! I’m gonna kill you,” the cowboy promised.

  “Really? What are you going to do? End my suffering sooner? There’s no doctors around, so I’m already dead.”

  With that, Rance decided to kill the cowboy again. His gun was already pointed towards the helicopter’s fuel tank, so he shot until he saw fuel begin to leak. He put down the gun and opened his cell phone to say goodbye to Lisa, only to see that he was out of range of a cell tower. Not being able to say goodbye to Lisa really depressed him. He desperately wanted to say he was sorry. The thought of her dying because of him hurt more than the gunshot.

  He heard the cowboy thrashing about trying to change position, groaning and cussing like crazy. In a moment they would both be in too much a world of hurt to do anything more than cry like babies. His father told him to stay in Fairbanks. But, no, he wanted to throw Lisa in Cari’s face, knowing it would piss her off.

  He should have stayed faithful. Adultery killed him.

  Several men raced from the cabin. The only one he recognized was Governor Cooper, the dumb fuck who didn’t answer email, phone calls, or text messages. And who apparently didn’t watch the news, read the Internet, or call his wife.

  That Texas dickhead got him killed. The realization shook Rance from his growing stupor. He was never going to fuck Lisa because Cooper was an idiot. Rage possessed him. As Cooper ignored the wounded cowboy to fall to his knees by the leaking fuel tank, Rance thought he heard him cry. A Texan! Texans are only suppose to cry at weddings and movies. What a pussy!

  Now completely without pity, Rance emptied the last two rounds into Cooper. The first smashed into his upper back, turning him around, and the second one apparently shot his dick off, because Cooper grabbed his crotch and began howling. Which was lousy shooting because Rance aimed for the guy’s head.

  His other head, the one on his shoulders.

  The satisfaction from hearing Cooper scream like a baby was a welcome respite from the growing agony. He laid back and thought of Lisa, who had the tightest skin of anyone he ever knew. She told him she would make him happy, and he believed her.

  Bathed in memories of the woman he loved, someone picked up the cowboy’s revolver and emptied it into him.

  36

  When Lisa heard her father scream invectives into the phone, her knee-jerk reaction was to either run to him or away from him. But, being Lisa, she spied on him from the hallway.

  “No, you wait just a damn minute. The only way I can agree is if you make sure I survive. Only if I survive do you get paid. Yeah? Well fuck you. too, you damn extortionist. I own a thousand earthmovers. I don’t need you. You’re only losing warheads you can’t sell, while you’ll make a mint if I survive. With three billion people dead and another billion homeless, your biggest worry is getting arrested? I could have turned you in years ago. I even gave you a free asteroid shelter! Where would you have stored your ammo if it wasn’t for me? The feds would have found out, you ungrateful bastard. Fuck it! I’ll just kick out your family from their shed in Canada and make sure my surviving family hunts you down like a rabid dog. You sure? You’re not gonna renege again? Yeah, well, you better get it done before the main body’s tail finishes impacting.”

  He listened a moment, pacing loudly.

  “Uh-huh. Listen, just in case you fuck me, I’m gonna tell my cousin in charge of that survival camp to kill your family if I don’t survive. Yeah? You better program it right. And make sure you do my home with airbursts, motherfucker, airbursts.”

  The loud silence as he closed the phone dominated the room. Lisa didn’t know whether to silently disappear or rush to reassure him. Then she heard her grandfather speak.

  “Think he’ll follow through?”

  “Yeah,” she heard her father reply, totally cool, calm, and collected, his anger apparently manufactured. “For a genius, that guy’s a fucking idiot. For a few billion, he’d sacrifice his wife and kids. Still, I’ll give David a heads up.”

  Pissed at having been misled, Lisa marched into the master bedroom to demand to know what the hell was going on. Father and son exchanged glances, then her father shrugged.

  “Honey,” her father said in his birds-and-the-bees voice, “the underground shed protects us from getting cooked by the heat, swatted by the pressure blast, and crushed by the impact itself. It doesn’t, unfortunately, save us from getting buried under hundreds of feet of regolith.”

  “But regolith is just loose dirt. You have hundreds of bulldozers.”

  “Except there will probably be a lot of dust and ash in the air. Dust is bad enough, but
if the Yellowstone super-volcano blows, much less the volcanoes in Washington, then that ash will shut down the engines, killing or stranding the crews. Our rescue teams will themselves need rescue. We will become the modern equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits.”

  “Why can’t we just wait a few day for the ash to settle? We have enough food and water. What’s the problem?”

  “Oxygen. The ash may take weeks to fall. And the more people we have, the quicker we run out.”

  “Oh, by the way, Director Kowalski and his very pregnant wife just arrived from Kitt Peak.”

  “You see what I mean? It could take weeks to move that much dirt. If they can find us in the first place since Arizona may look like the surface of Mars.”

  We’re gonna die? she thought to herself. After all we did for so many other people? That can’t be right.

  “So what the hell are you geniuses doing about this?”

  Her father, not liking her tone, stepped closer to tower over her.

  “Several years ago I invested in a tiny defense start-up that made gamma-ray warheads, which have one thousand times the power of conventional explosives, but, if exploded correctly, emit no radioactivity like nukes. Rumsfeld gave this company billions. The neo-cons love gamma-rays.

  “Anyways, he’s going to send a drone from his headquarters in Las Vegas to detonate a gamma-ray just above us to blow away the regolith. GPS may not work, but he has the exact latitude and longitude of our garage. If necessary, the drone will detonate another two warheads. So even if we are buried a thousand feet deep, three air bursts should uncover us.”

  “All righty, then.” Lisa scrutinized their faces. “So what’s the catch?” Because there is always a catch.

  The men exchanged a long look.

  “Well, I for one never imagined calling artillery on my own home,” grandpa answered. “The concrete floor in the garage will probably melt. Like the meteorite impact itself, it’s gonna feel like King Kong is rattling us in a metal shoebox.”

  “But you’re not gonna kill us?” Lisa asked them, which immediately made them squirm. It only now dawned on her that she had never seen them squirm before.

  “We’re threading the needle as best we can.”

  Well, that was less comforting than learning that your own father was going to explode three micro-nukes on you.

  “Then there are the legal issues. Which is why I took this call away from the cameras. We obviously don’t have permission, which is why the owner wants me to buy him out, for many times what the company is worth. I asked the guy to explode the gamma-rays as soon as possible after the main body impacts so that the military’s detection system will dismiss them as meteorites. They will even produce a meteorite-like crater. It wouldn’t fool a professional, but not even a professional would guess the truth.”

  “So we’re good then?”

  Lisa desperately needed to know they were going to survive. She’s getting married this summer, for Christ’s sake!

  “Unless the drone gets smacked down in flight by falling regolith. Or if it misses us and blows up our neighbors. Or unless ash gums up its engine. Or if the laser ranger doesn’t work and it explodes on the ground.”

  “But, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?” Lisa asked sarcastically. “So you’re gonna pay this jerk a few billion just to un-bury us?”

  “No. He actually has a busy morning bombing several states and a foreign country. The impact is going to bury the Southwest under hundreds of feet of regolith for several hundred miles in every direction. From San Diego through Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, over Las Vegas and Albuquerque, all the way to the middle of Texas. Everything between San Diego, Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Denver and San Antonio will be wasteland, including nearly all of Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. And because you can’t build on loose dirt, a million square kilometers will basically be uninhabitable. To rebuild highways, I need to blast corridors down to solid bedrock from California through Arizona and New Mexico to Texas.

  “I have written agreements with those governors to use high explosives to uncover Highways 8 and 10. They just have no idea we’re gonna use gamma-rays. California gave me a contract to repave Highways 8 from San Diego to Yuma. Arizona will let me continue on the 8 until it hits the 10, and New Mexico and Texas will let me rebuild the 10 all the way to Houston. It’s about 1500 miles and roughly parallels the Mexican border.

  “They agreed because I will do it out of my own pocket, and their states only have to pay me the interest every quarter and defer the principal for a decade. And in return I have permission to put a high speed maglev railway in the middle of the freeway, which ensures that animals and idiots don’t walk onto my tracks. Even better, I told them that the impact and regolith may alter the terrain, so they agreed to indemnify me if I have to modify the highways. That means I can straighten and level them out as much as possible so that my maglevs can go as fast as possible. With gamma-rays, I can go through hills instead of around them.

  “I may not have mentioned this, but I am accumulating a majority share of the four major railroads, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, BNSF, and CSX, to get their land and right-of-ways. Union Pacific is the largest landowner west of the Mississippi, other than the federal government itself.

  “What I really want to do is get the states to pay me to rebuild the 10 highway the 2500 miles from San Diego to Jacksonville, Florida, then up the I-95 to Maine, and from San Diego up the 101 or Route 1 to Seattle. Regolith, earthquakes, and mega-tsunamis are almost certainly going to destroy those freeways. They have to be rebuilt, and I’ll do it on credit, in exchange for them letting me straighten and level them out, and put my railway in the center. They won’t pay for the maglev railway itself, but my costs will be much less if I’m constructing both the highway and railway at the same time. Naturally, I’ll cost-shift as much as I can. Their freeways won’t be as congested if people can take a fast train, or suffer from as much air pollution. L.A. to San Francisco takes 12 hours by car, but only a few hours by fast rail. I also want to build the maglev on railway land straight north from Houston through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, to the Dakotas, and eventually from Seattle and Portland to Boston and New York.”

  “That’s gonna cost hundreds of billions. How are you going to get a return on your investment?” his father asked.

  “After the impact, I’ll be buying lots of manufacturing, retail, metal workers, energy, construction, and distribution companies. I’ve already bought airliners, FedEx, and Uhaul. I plan on accumulating a majority share of big retailers like Walmart, Home Depot, AutoZone, Petsmart, and defense contractors. If I get a friendly president in office, I’ll completely rebuild the military using amorphous metal vehicles, ships, and aircraft since I hope to dominate civilian auto making, shipbuilding, and aircraft making anyways. The military and the government would be huge customers of a fast maglev network. In Europe, airline traffic fell in half as they finished fast rail service between major cities. Plus, I’ll string superconducting cable to transmit my clean energy electricity and fiber optic if I can get control over Butler’s OmniNet communications company.

  “But I’m also building the maglev north to get my hands on the 1.5 trillion barrels of shale oil in the Green River basin where Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming meet. That’s more than the entire Middle fucking East. At $100 a barrel, that’s $1.5 quadrillion dollars. 70% of it lies on federal land, so I need Cooper to win, although I bought as much of the private and commercial land as possible this past month.

  “Electrical grids now are organized by regions, and today’s technology makes it difficult to move bulk electricity between regions. By laying second generation superconducting cable along these freeways and railway land, I could conceivable provide solar, wind, and geothermal power to most of the country. Owning all that railroad land also gives me millions of locations to install solar thermal towers and industrial windmills. Diamond drill bits set in amorphous metal makes deep geothermal su
ddenly feasible across the country. And I’ll cover every roof with organic solar. Most of America’s power plants will be severely damaged by the impact, so if powering America is gonna cost a few hundred billion, we may as well spend it on clean energy instead of the usual coal, oil, gas, and nuclear. A decade from now I could provide most of America’s power.”

  The professor did not look convinced.

  “Arthur has thousands of gamma-ray warheads that he cannot sell. Palin won’t buy them because I’m a big minority shareholder. So I am buying the company to use drones to blast a corridor from the Gulf of Santa Clara, Mexico, the northernmost part of the Sea of Cortez, north to the Nevada border, and from Yuma west along Highway 8 to San Diego. From Yuma going east he will follow Highway 8 until it turns into the 10 and blast all the way to Texas. The drones are already being prepped in asteroid shelters in San Diego, Las Vegas, and San Antonio.

  “And since there will only be one road or highway through this regolith, I bought all the large tracks of land near it and near Gila’s tributaries, the Verde, Agua Fria, Salt, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and San Pedro. Thank God Ted Turner died, cuz his estate sold me almost everything he owned, a couple million acres, or about 2% of Arizona

  “The Colorado and Gila rivers dry up only because we divert most of their volume to irrigation. Just one canal to California has more volume than New York’s Hudson River. With the Southwest depopulated and the dams destroyed, they will flow once again. Regolith is just loose dirt, so it shouldn’t change the course of the rivers and tributaries.

  “Arthur is going to do more than clear the highway. He is going to blast away the regolith so I can build entire cities. Mexico’s Santa Clara will be my first big city in order to service the port. The gulf there is three kilometers deep. The Baja California Peninsula will protect Santa Clara from mega-tsunamis. With tsunamis destroying the west coast, Santa Clara will be the only port within a couple thousand miles for several years.