“Itzawight,” his voice said in a far away drone. “Awightzzz.” She felt the prick of the needle, the light dimmed, his voice spat static: The light dimmed a little further, and then she found herself falling back into the darkness.
Watertown New York
Project Bluechip
11:00 P.M.
The first quake had been minor, the last few had not. The big one was coming, and Major Richard Weston didn't need to have a satellite link up to know that. He touched one hand to his head. The fingertips came away bloody. He would have to get his head wound taken care of, but the big thing was that he had made it through the complex above and down into the facility before it had been locked down.
He laughed to himself, before it was supposed to have been locked down. It had not been locked down at all. He had, had to lock it down once he had made his way in or else it would still be open to the world.
He had spent the last several years here commanding the base. He had spent the last two weeks working up to this event from his subterranean command post several levels above. All wreckage now. He had sent operatives out from there to do what they could, but it had all been a stop gap operation.
The public knew that there was a meteor on a near collision course with the Earth. They had assured the public it would miss by several thousands of miles. Paid off the best scientists in some cases, but in other cases they had found that even the scientists were willing to look past facts if their own personal spin put a better story in the mix. A survivable story. They had spun their own stories without prodding.
The truth was that the meteor might miss, it might hit, it might come close, a near miss, but it wouldn't matter because a natural chain of events was taking place that would make a meteor impact look like small change.
The big deal, the bigger than a meteor deal, was the earthquakes that had already started and would probably continue until most of the civilized world was dead or dying. Crumbled into ruin from super earthquakes and volcanic activity that had never been seen by modern civilization. And it had been predicted several times over by more than one group and hushed up quickly when it was uncovered. The governments had known. The conspiracy theorists had known. The public should have known, but they were too caught up in world events that seemed to be dragging them ever closer to a third world war to pay attention to a few voices crying in the wilderness. The public was happier watching television series about conspiracies rather than looking at the day to day truths about real conspiracies. The fact was that this was a natural course of events. It had happened before and it would happen again in some distant future.
So, in the end it had not mattered. In the end the factual side of the event had begun to happen. The reality, Major Weston liked to think of it. And fact was fact. You couldn't dispute fact. You could spin it, and that was the way of the old world, spinning it, but the bare facts were just that: Bare facts.
The bare facts were that the Yellowstone Caldera had erupted just a few hours before. The bare facts were that the earth quakes had begun, and although they were not so bad here in northern New York, in other areas of the country, in foreign countries, third world countries, the bare facts of what was occurring were devastating: Millions dead, and millions more would die before it was over. And this was nothing new. The government had evidence that this same event had happened many times in Earth's history. This was nothing new at all, not even new to the human race. A similar event had killed off most of the human race some seventy-five thousand years before.
There was an answer, help, a solution, but Richard Weston was unsure how well their solution would work. It was, like everything else, a stop gap measure, and probably too little too late. It was also flawed, but he pushed that knowledge away in his mind.
While most of America had tracked the meteorite that was supposed to miss earth from their living rooms, and had been side tracked by all the trouble with the former Soviet Union, he had kept track of the real event that had even then been building beneath the Yellowstone caldera. And the end had come quickly. Satellites off line. Phone networks down. Power grids failed. Governments incommunicado or just gone. The Internet down. The Meteorite had not missed Earth by much after all. And the gravitational pull from the large mass had simply accelerated an already bad situation.
Dams burst. River flows reversed. Waters rising or dropping in many places. Huge tidal waves. Fires out of control. Whole cities suddenly gone. A river of lava flowing from Yellowstone. Civilization was not dead; not wiped out, but her back was broken.
In the small city of Watertown, that had rested above Bluechip, near the shore of the former lake Ontario, the river waters had begun to rise: Bluechip, several levels below the city in the limestone cave structures that honeycombed the entire area, had survived mostly intact, but unless sealed, it would surely succumb to the rising river waters. By the time the last military groups had splashed through the tunnels and into the underground facility, they had been walking through better than two feet of cold and muddy river-water. The pressure from the water had begun to collapse small sections of caves and tunnels below the city, and that damage had been helped along by small after-shocks.
When the last group of five men had reached the air shaft, carrying the inert form of a woman between them, they had immediately pitched in with a group Weston had sent to brick the passageway off. The remaining bricks and concrete blocks were stacked and cemented into place in the four foot thick wall they had started. The materials, along with sandbags initially used to hold back the rising waters, had been taken from huge stockpiles within the city, and from the stalled trucks within the wide tunnel that had once fed traffic into the base. There was no way in, and no way out of the city. With one small exception.
The exception was that air ducting. The ducts led away from the city towards a small mountain-peak about a mile from the city. There the ducts merged together, inside a huge natural rock tunnel that had been part of the original network of caves and passage ways. That tunnel culminated deep within the mountain at an air treatment facility. There were also several access points where the ducting came close to the surface via tunnels and passageways that ran though the huge complex of caves. And it would be possible to walk through one of the many air shafts to the tunnel, break through the ducting, follow it to the treatment facility or outside to the surface and freedom. It would be difficult, but it would be possible. The end of the trip would bring them to the surface, from there they could go anywhere.
March 7th
Route 40: The Southwestern Desert
The truck began to rattle deep in the engine block and a second later a loud wheeze rent the air, bringing the smell of hot motor and burned oil with it.
Sammy Black's eyes shot up to the mirror and he saw the dark spray of oil behind him on the highway, the trail of smoke coming away from that, following the now coasting truck. His eyes came down and the rear tires on the truck suddenly locked up and he had to fight for control as the pickup skated across the wreck dotted interstate and plowed into the side of a burned out SUV. The airbag was in his face before he could even react, and a second later the truck slammed back down to the ground from the bounce the rear end had taken at impact: The quiet began to creep back in to the roar in his ears.
He pushed himself slowly away from the steering wheel, flexed his jaw experimentally and felt blood go trickling away, running across his chin and then down his throat as he laid his head back against the headrest and waited for his blood pressure to drop and the roaring in his ears to taper off.
The silence of the desert came back a few moments later. How long he didn't know, but he had flexed his left leg and the pain had made him scream. The next thing he knew his eyes were opening to the late afternoon sun and the desert quiet.
His fingers scrambled across the seat top and he found the bottle of water he had been working on. The whole back of the pickup was full of water and packaged food. Camping stuff, the things that hikers ate. Freeze
dried this and that. Jerky. Protein cakes. It was the first thing he had done after he had set off the last canister in Houston. He had driven south and then began southwest. He found the bottle, lifted it to his lips and drained it. He had not realized how thirsty he had been.
He had started in North Carolina, worked his way into Georgia, then Alabama before the shit had really hit the fan, and he had barely managed to keep the truck on the road when the first quake had hit.
He had just left the tunnel that passed under the Mobile Bay when the quake had hit with such force that he had bounced off the road, skipped over the concrete rail and found himself rolling slowly down a grassy median toward the highway below. He had managed to get the brakes on and get turned around, pointing back up toward I10 above, but he couldn't get the truck back over the concrete rail, so he had left the truck to see if there was some other way to get back up onto I10. When he stepped through a break in the concrete rail, and back up onto the highway a few seconds later, he turned his eyes back to the tunnel he had just come through. Water lapped at the roadway. The tunnels swept down into that water. The whole bay had seemed to be boiling, agitated, but as he had watched the water had suddenly dropped, receding, leaving the bay a muddied mess. All around him there were screams of panic, calls for help, and he was torn: If the water went out that fast it was a… He couldn't make it come, but it was bad. A hurricane could suck the water out like that, he had seen it once, but so could a tidal wave, a tsunami... His breath caught in his throat as he realized it could very well be a tsunami. He ran back down to the truck and got it moving. A few miles down the road he had managed to work his way through a field and back onto I10, running in the night for the Louisiana border.
The trip had been harder from there on. He'd had one vial left and he had decided on Houston as the best possible place to use it. Getting there had been tough, but he had made it late noon four days back. Far too late to do much good in his opinion. The city was devastated. Gunfire sounded everywhere, fires burned out of control. He had triggered the canister and dropped it into Galveston Bay a few hours later.
From there he had headed north west. Interstates when he could find them, desert when he could not. He had found route 40 and he was now somewhere in between New Mexico and Arizona. He looked down at his leg after a few moments. He looked quickly away.
The leg was a mess, and he was not going to be able to get it out from under the dash, and even if he did he would probably bleed out once the pressure came off the leg. He sighed. His hand searched along the top of the passenger seat, not finding what he wanted. Movement was painful, but the sun was sinking, albeit slowly, and he did not want to be in this truck flinching at every movement or sound in the night. He did his best to lean forward and keep his leg from moving. His gun was wedged between the very edge of the seat top and the pushed in dash. He closed one hand around the grip and pulled. It was wedged tight, but it did pull back a few inches. Something on the gun was catching on something under or on the edge of the metal lip of the dash. He pushed the gun forward and then pulled back again. Almost, but a grating sound reached his ears, and he could feel the vibration in the weapon as it ground to a halt, once again hung up.
He pushed it back and forth lightly, realizing it was the seat cushion that was forcing the gun up into the dashboard. If he could get his fingers wedged in there, over the gun, push it downward, then pull back, maybe... He jammed his fingers into the tight space, ignoring the skin that scraped of on the sharp edge of the dash. A second later he was forcing them past the edge of the barrel and taking a deep breath. In his hurry to pull the gun free he forgot about his leg and pressed down with it as he suddenly yanked back.
The pain was like fire, a live wire straight to a circuit in his brain. The circuit overloaded and he slipped instantly into darkness.
Route 40: The Southwestern Desert
March 8th
Sammy Black
The sweat trickled across his eyelid and then slipped into the eye as it opened, stinging. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt the pain flare slightly in his leg as he moved it in his reaction. He kept his eyes closed, trying to remember. It came to him after a brief second. He was in the truck. Wrecked... Night was coming... He opened his eyes slowly, ignoring the stinging from the salty sweat.
No... The sun was low, in the wrong place... Morning, he decided. Somehow... Somehow he had slept the night through. It was gone. Morning was here. He remembered why he had slipped away, moving the leg. He looked down at it now. It was much worse. Swollen, pushed hard against the dashboard, black and purple where he could see the skin through the shredded and ripped cloth of the pants. He could feel the metal lip of the dash embedded into the long bone of his thigh; like a hatchet, he thought.
His leg stank, he stank, like urine and spoiled meat. Maybe he had been out for days. He had no way to know, just laying here rotting in the heat. It was morbid, but he couldn't get the mental picture out of his head once he had thought it into being.
He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. It did seem to help clear his head, but a low buzz came right back, if it had ever been there. He wasn't sure. Maybe it had, but it settled in as though it belonged there. He remembered the gun. The gun he had reached for that had started it all and he felt the cool metal under his right hand. He curled his fingers around it, they were stiff, unwilling. He looked down at his hand. Scraped skin, dead and black clung to his fingers. The bone showed through in places. Black blood flaked off the fingers as he forced them to close around the grip.
~
The wolf was fifty yards away, hidden in a slight dip in the desert, an arroyo that cut through the hard pan, dry now, but it could change in an instant out here. The bare rock that lay against his belly, cool, an escape from the heat. Nevertheless, he panted. Already his body was overheated in the desert morning.
He had smelled the man a few hours before light and followed the scent. He knew the scent of man. It had always meant fear, flight, but lately it often meant food, sustenance. He wondered, as he lay, which one this would be.
It was quiet in those hours before sunrise, still he had been afraid to follow it to its source. He had heard it breathing... Whatever this man was he was not dead yet. The wolf could wait. Waiting was something he understood.
The roar took him by surprise and he whined deeply in his throat, flattening himself against the cool stone. Crying in his fear, but time slipped by and the noise did not come again. He waited, listening, watching the sun lift further into the pale blue of the sky, but he heard nothing more. He lifted his head from the ground, stood on gaunt legs, and howled into the quiet of the morning. He sank back to the cool rock and waited. Nothing answered him. A few minutes later he raised from the rock and made his way up onto the highway.
Watertown New York
Project Bluechip
Pearl
She came awake with a start. In her dreaming she had been leaning, leaning, holding the window sill and staring down at the street below. The heat, the cold dishrag freezing her tiny fingers. She had leaned back, shifted hands, placed the rag against the base of her neck once more, leaned forward and braced herself against the window frame and her fingers, slicked and unfeeling from the ice had slipped. She had plunged suddenly forward, falling, faster, panicked, and she had awakened as she had slammed into the surface of the bed, a scream right on the edge of her tongue waiting to leap.
“Here.” A woman's voice. A soft hand at the base of her neck, holding her, easing her back down to the bed. “It's okay now.” She held Pearl's head up and bought a water glass to her lips. Cold, ice clinked together in the glass, she took the straw between her lips and drank deeply. She collapsed back against the bed.
“Where?” She managed at last. “Where is this place?” The ceiling was florescent lights in a panel ceiling. Dropped ceiling, her mind supplied. An Americanism.
“Blue,” the woman told her as Pearl's eyes focused on her. She was short, slim, dressed
in fatigues, a pistol in a holster at her side.
“Blue?” Pearl sounded as doubtful as she felt. She must have misheard. “Drum?” She asked. It was the closest military base.
“Blue,” the young woman shook her head. “The new base... Blue.” She smiled, but it was a tired smile. “You remember anything at all?”
Pearl shook her head, but then spoke. “A car... A boy with a gun... An earthquake?”
“English?” The woman asked.
Pearl nodded. “Was it then? An earthquake?”
“More than one,” The young woman sighed. “It's bad up there. You're lucky they found you, Jeffers and the others. Lucky.”
Pearl nodded and then moved her legs and nearly fainted. She looked down, both were bandaged. She recalled the gun. “Shot?” She asked.
“No... No, just scraped up, banged up maybe” The woman told her.
“Badly scraped up?” Pearl asked.
“No... A few cuts, but they are swollen. A day or two and you'll be fine.”
Pearl didn't hear the rest as she sagged back against the bed and fell away back into the dream once more...
Watertown
Franklin Street
Roux
The roadway was tilted crazily, the snow was gone. Cold persisted, but it didn't bother him in the slightest. A small, silver canister lay just a few feet away. Inhaler, his mind supplied. Maybe his other self agreed, but something inside him didn't seem to want to agree. He ignored the canister and the line of thought for the briefest of seconds and it was gone completely. Slipped away from him to where ever thought ended up.
He had been lying half in, half out of the gutter for the last several hours that he knew of. He had no idea how long before that. Days? Weeks? Weeks seemed wrong. Days, he decided. He turned his attention back to the roadway before him. Was it a roadway? When he thought roadway, he thought highway, something like that. From what he could see this was more like a city street.
Earth's Survivors: box set Page 109