Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  The girl who Adam had spoken to before floated in the water—a piece of cloth torn from her clothes tied tightly around her neck.

  The others stood near the island’s edge. Holding hands, they sang, “Somewhere over the rainbow, angels fall. If you follow the rainbow, you’ll die in true Hell’s hall.”

  ««—»»

  Fires everywhere, the world a giant piece of shattering glass, mountain ranges pushed up taller, new mountains shoving away towns with their highways. People jumping into lakes and rivers, into to the seething, falling mud and ash, only to be boiled alive. Prayers and curses unheard in thunderous roars that blew out so many eardrums that people stumbled to their deaths into streaming fissures…

  Adam wrote all of this in his notebook, perhaps absent-mindedly, as automatic writing. Or merging from a much deeper source, drawn from a part of the mind he no longer knew.

  …elsewhere, victims sank as the earth liquefied beneath their feet, burying them up to their necks. Then the ground solidified again, their heads the only thing above and screaming as the earth crushed their bodies to slow powder, leaking the moisture that all of us are primarily made up of down into the water table. Aftershocks. Foreshocks. Like the spasms of psychics. Stress, amplitude, hypo centers, magnitude, permeability, resonance and wavelength. Volcanoes bringing down aircraft in pyroclastic clouds, jet fuel exploding. Lahars made up of pumice, ashes, and volcanic rock fragments all-in-a-jumble buried cities. Lava bombs, tornadoes of burning cinders, and newly formed black glass.

  He’d sketched a mountain, a hole in its top, a black scribble of magma pooling at its base. He wrote underneath it:

  Magma that has reached the surface could cool and harden very fast, too fast for crystallization to occur, solidifying into a glass known as obsidian. Long ago, small rounded pieces used in jewelry in the North American Southwest were called Apache tears. Other pieces of obsidian were cut to make spear points and arrowheads.

  Two days after the team found the murdered girl’s body, they returned to Oz Island for a final attempt to vaccinate its young residents. This time, the boat came right up to the island’s edge. The little tribe lay in a line, all but one strangled with cloth torn from blue jeans and T-shirts. The last—the one elected, no doubt, to do the job—had cut his own throat with a sharp slice of obsidian still clutched in his hand.

  Goodbye, Fruit Loops.

  Adam and the team disembarked and headed toward the tower. There was a tremendous thunderclap, following a bolt of lightning big enough to be a ride at the ruined Disneyland. The team hurried back to the boat, each praying to outrun what would possibly kill them if they caught them.

  Adam shivered, for he had seen the scrawled words in the sand above the bodies. Probably written by their killer before killing himself… Right?

  Nosce tempus.

  Know thy time.

  He wanted to pull that tower down! But they didn’t have time to waste. And there were no authorities to tell. The three Pacifica states no longer had any National Guard nor did the rest of the country send theirs, having them busy with all the refugees.

  Now, in the post-quiet of the interview, Adam looked at what he’d written. Did he even dream about this? How could he not with the constant publicity? Twenty-five years of it; how much would he simply imagine?

  He flew, high above a crumbled and distorted world. Suddenly he fell. An angel called him.

  “I have waited so long for you.”

  Supposedly, dreams of falling were experienced by most people. It was the single most common dream.

  To Adam, such dreams amounted to a form of subconscious gravity, choosing to reveal the fear of what it was to be human. The conscious brain work on ego-driven propulsion, the very act of survival in a world often hostile to individuality. Once asleep, the pretenses dropped—so to speak—and there you were…clawing at the air, reaching for anything to stop that belly-flopping descent. Or, more often than not, end your downward spiral at an abrupt and unforgiving bottom.

  No one was saved. Not in the dreams. Not in the End Times.

  He briefly shut his eyes.

  ««—»»

  “I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

  The bright Sun was extinguish’d and the stars

  Did wander darkling in the eternal space

  Rayless and pathless, and the icy earth

  Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

  Morn came and went—and came,

  And brought no day…”

  – from “Darkness” by George Gordon Noel Byron (Lord Byron)

  Byron had written it during the cold and darkened summer of 1816 on the shores of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva. One of these in his vacationing party was Mary Shelley, wife of Byron’s friend, Percy Byshe Shelley. She wrote Frankenstein that same dreary summer.

  This, after the enormous eruption of Mount Tam Bora in Indonesia in April of 1815, considered by many volcanologists to be the largest single eruption in recorded history. Scientists were still arguing whether or not the combined explosions of twenty volcanoes that had names—like the Three Sisters, which were often considered as one—and the three mud bumps at the Salton, which were seldom counted at all, plus un-counted, unknown or crackling sudden new ones, and two calderas could come under the heading as one spectacular devastation.

  Mount Tam Bora had been 13,000 feet before the eruption, and tallied down to 8,700 feet after, leaving a caldera 4 miles wide and .4 miles deep. 19 cubic miles of blue debris had exploded into the atmosphere.

  “Should have been much worse,” he muttered. He went on, though no one was around anymore to hang on his every word. “Anything as bad as Pacifica should have caused a major Ice Age, perhaps extinctions on the scale of the dinosaurs after the K/T event. Not that it wasn’t bad enough…” He actually looked up. Unconsciously? “Was somebody trying to send us a message?”

  Adam Grigori recalled black clouds.

  The

  universe

  had

  been

  switched

  off.

  Matchsticks. In towns lucky enough to still have debris and not have been disintegrated, as if picnicking at an atomic bomb epicenter or swallowed by sharking crevices opening and snapping shut like jaws. Unfortunately, many of those matchsticks were thin as splinters, several inches to several feet long. Victims were impaled by them, even sliced to sushi pieces, as in the infamous Chinese Death of a Thousand Cuts.

  Nuclear power plants and government silos had been built to withstand a possible major quake. Still some complex systems cracked, failsafe features compromised by what nobody save a soothsaying Kreskin could’ve seen coming. Radiation leaks did occur…at least.

  Factories producing hazardous chemicals—including industrial acids and pesticides, and laboratories making drugs dangerous to many—were demolished, the poisons at liberty to pollute the land. The air. The water.

  The survivors.

  Over the past twenty-five years, refugees from Pacifica and the surrounding states affected by the disaster and its clouds of toxic debris had been monitored. Among them, leukemia and thyroid cancers were still on the rise. Rates of all forms of cancer were as high as fifty times the norm. Birth defects produced further despair among survivors already plagued by depression, immune deficiencies, and loss of motor control and simple skills.

  Except Adam. He hadn’t been diagnosed with a single injury or illness. As for his amnesia, doctors concurred it was the result of a severe mental shock. Then…long-term post-traumatic stress. Except he never appeared even mildly freaked out.

  As the years went by, speculations began, some very public, that he’d never been there when everything blew and shook to hell—and high water.

  The Space Needle in Seattle, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, the San Diego shipyards, Big Sur Surfers, mountains, deserts—Adam squeezed shut his eyes and saw them all simultaneously.

  Then he found himse
lf staring at his hands as if expecting to see… What? There was nothing.

  Nothing in his helping hands any different than people across the world who had come to the aid of those who suffered through calamities such as major earthquakes or hurricanes, or volcanic eruptions and giant tsunamis. Sympathy, altruism, empathy. Is that what he hoped to see in his hands? The very things that caused rescuers to risk their own lives to help others in direst need?

  This didn’t happen after Pacifica. The mass exodus of survivors and anyone afraid of staying nearby the disaster were viewed as plagues of locusts. Just those three states? Must have brought it on themselves.

  God.

  Sin.

  Karma.

  Spiritual contamination.

  “There are more things between Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of…”

  Dust cloud.

  Ash shroud.

  Zombie crowd.

  The freeze followed. Then on its icy heels came the heat/drought/famine, and with it, global economic failure. And finally, the California flu that killed further millions around the world, equated with the Spanish influenza outbreak of the First World War, estimated deaths 50 million from 1918 to 1990.

  No rescuers came. No saviors. Only ghouls had returned, to profit, perhaps to record the dead and their unholy leader, The Lord of the Flies. And, mostly, only those half-dead managed to get out, peddling their relics to the sickest of voyeurs.

  Ghouls rush in where angels fear to tread.

  As Adam left his office separate from where he worked at Atlanta’s C.D.C, he noticed an older woman shuffling down the street. Bleached hair down to her hips, eyes heavily ringed in black liner, clothes from another era—bright and scanty to the point of scandal. She was dressed as if she was a young hottie singer-dancer in a music video from way back.

  Maybe she was a celebrity fan, like many others around to mourn the loss of their major Hollywood favs, drowned or buried alive or crushed beneath the rubble of mansions and meaningless bling and junk-in-the-trunk. There had also been mass suicides by fans over what the psychiatric community-at-large dubbed Superstar Syndrome: Lovesick Fantasies From Misdirected Religious Mania. These continued for about ten years. There had even been a pop-psychology book entitled The Auto-Erotic Auto-Da-Fe.

  This woman wore a faded photograph of a long-dead pretty-faced actor around her neck, like a saint on a medallion. She stopped to stare at the doctor who still looked younger than his estimated forty-three years. She had one cobwebbed look of confused recognition. Yes, she’d seen his likeness before, hadn’t she? Wasn’t he famous?

  Smiling coyly, she spread her legs wide and bent forward at the waist. She wriggled her flaccid breasts in the low-neckline, high-midriff teaser top.

  Then she promptly fell on her face.

  Others on the sidewalk began laughing. Drivers on the street rolled down their windows to jeer. Adam tried to help her up.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She couldn’t stand, but only managed to roll over and sit up. He saw she wore no panties. She’d landed hard on the buckled concrete—her nose was broken, a deep gash across her forehead, and she spat out several teeth. Blood running into her eyes panicked her.

  Adam pulled his phone from his jacket. “This is Dr. Adam Grigori. I need an ambulance. There is a middle-aged female who took a bad fall. She may have a concussion.”

  He gave the address, then clicked off. He promised her, “Don’t worry. I’ll wait with you. Can you tell me your name?”

  A young punk, on the stroll with a girlfriend as sleazy-looking as himself, pointed to the injured woman’s pimpled, bikini-waxed pubes. He answered for her with a snort. “Yeah, it’s Cathy Crabcakes.”

  ‘Cathy’ cocked her head, listening intently to something.

  “We’re all gonna die,” she said.

  Adam touched her arm. “You’ll be fine.”

  “No,” she argued politely, fingering the photo of the long-dead actor. “My angel tells me stuff. The best stars were all angels, come to earth. It’s why they were called stars. And mine just revealed to me that we’re all gonna die real soon. And ’nother thing?”

  Adam smiled. “Yes?”

  She said sadly, “My angel told me to tell you.”

  Chapter Seven

  ————

  “On a des devins quand on n’a plus de prophe’tes,

  Des sortile’ges quand on renounce aux cere’monies

  Religieuses, etl’on ouvre les antres des sorciers

  Quand on ferme les temples du Seigneur.”

  “One has fortune-tellers when one has no more prophets,

  spells when religious ceremonies are abandoned,

  and the lairs of witches open

  when the temples of the Lord are closed.”

  – Francois-Renée De Châteaubriand

  ————

  Laura Grigori pushed her brown hair out of her eyes and tried to ease her position on the mound of pillows. Working in bed wasn’t easy, her writing table and notebook balanced on her lap. Her insides were still sore from the last operation. A series of three sixth-month miscarriages left her with a prolapsed uterus. It had only been removed last week.

  “It sucks. It’s depressing, you know.” She grimaced, adjusting on the pillows again. “I’m only twenty-five years old, and I’m told I can never bear children.” The furry cheek of the cat lying next to her lovingly slid across her knuckles.

  Adam and she had been married for a little over three years. Laura was determined to have a career, and she’d also wanted a family. It was something she’d missed as a child, orphaned on the west coast, the rest… Well, she was writing about it, hoping she could empty her soul of at least part of its pain.

  It turned out that the couple shared Pacifica, revealed in a conversation on their first date.

  She’d seen the famous photograph of Adam, but knew little of him, this boy, growing up to be the distinguished double Nobel Prize winner (and her future husband) when he visited her college in Texas. Then, her major had been geology, and he was giving a speech on disease and species extinction in Earth’s early eras.

  She wrote:

  It sometimes makes me feel rather stupid when I remind myself that this same man, at the time only a couple years older than I am now, arrived at our camp and vaccinated us for the California flu. I was about four—or was it five years old? There was a long line of kids in front, many disabled. Most were sick from bacteria, protozoa, and parasites. Others had been born in the camp with birth defects.

  When my turn came, I saw he was crying.

  Hardly anybody attended to hear the doctor speak; only serious science students and the department heads showed up. She’d found a seat in the middle of the front row, figuring it a dull subject to the liberal arts crowd, the business majors, and those who didn’t want to give up an evening at a keg-and-sex-party.

  “Is he going to talk about Pacifica?” some girl Laura had vaguely known asked enthusiastically. “We could drink and get high, then go listen. Bet he’d come back to the sorority with us. He’s so buff!”

  Laura showed her the pamphlet. And all the other wanna-hear-dead-stuffers. Sounds like ‘stuffing the dead.’ Necrophilia. Ha. Not what she meant.

  “Ooh, gross. What a boring topic. He’ll never get laid that way!”

  Laura shook her head and tuned back in to the doctor’s speech:

  “…both marine and terrestrial ecosystems, climatic-caused biotic crises resulting in mass extinctions during the late Precambrian, Late Ordovician, Late Devonian, Late Cretaceous and Late Eocene, 99.9% of all life that ever existed on the planet became extinct. There is firm evidence of glacial episodes.

  “But mass extinctions might have sustained heavy losses due to the impact of a catastrophic extraterrestrial event, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Most mass extinctions of species take several million years to effect—according to some theorists—d
uring which Paleo-botanic evidence as well as isotopic, at a ratio of oxygen 18 to oxygen 16, caused climate cooling. Tab’s shower of bolide class meteors may have destroyed such planktonic species in the Late Eocene…” he continued.

  Laura yawned, embarrassed. She’d brought her cat, it, too, yawning in her lap. An earnest but average student, she wasn’t sure she heard a word he said. He seemed surrounded by a brightness. Her ears were full of strange whispers and stranger music. She felt dizzy. Maybe she shouldn’t have missed supper.

  Still, he was a very smart, very handsome man. She vowed to meet him after his speech concluded.

  It started with coffee and decadent desserts at a barely off-campus Argentine bakery. They sat outside, her cat on a leash. She wrote, remembering:

  I had a meringue ball filled with whipped cream and it was the size of my head! It was kind of like the largest piece of divinity in the world. Adam performed as a real gentleman, unlike the boys on campus who were certainly not. He treated me (and still does) as if I were the eye candy.

  She sighed, and continued: My poor darling. I’m more of a physical wreck than ever. Remember, I warned him before we were married. ‘I’m going downhill,’ I said to him. ‘My health is going to get worse. I am more than a pinch out of my mind. I’ll be a stone around your neck.’ And I kept changing my major. I can’t even give him children now. If anyone should be passing on their genes, it’s him. I hope he gives to a sperm bank.

  The fact that Laura had been given a shot at college at all was due to a new government program that offered further education for refugees, providing they met very strict guidelines. The schooling she’d received in the displacement camp had been hit or miss. Many other kids suffered developmental problems—the suicide rate among ages 12 to 24 was especially atrocious—or died from disease. Yet…