by Annie Berdel
“I would ask them what the hell they think they are doing,” Lauren said
“It’s three guys versus you. Really? Who knows what they are after? Are your belongings worth more than you getting hurt?” Jonathan asked
Emma shot a quick glance at Angie. She was looking pale and knew where her mind was going. She tried to get Tommy’s attention but got nothing.
“What if they were after you and had you on the floor to rape you, would you not struggle to make them go away faster?” Jonathan quipped back
This was going from bad to worse and Emma needed to end this now, but she was too late.
“No,” Angie whimpered. “You fight. You fight and you keep fighting no matter what. Because you have to live with the decision you make,” she choked out through the tears.
Everyone in the room was looking at her. “Most people think the decision is just to live and there are no consequences to your decision. But there are consequences. Some that will haunt you for the rest of your life. You fight, and you teach your daughters to fight. Don’t teach your daughters to be victims. Yes, sometimes your life may depend on you not fighting, there are also ramifications that you will have to live with if you choose not to. I thought not fighting was the right choice once. But I stopped thinking because I was scared. Sitting here with all of you, I realize how uneducated I truly am trying to live in this world and survive. You all have a mom who loves you and wants you to learn so if, God forbid, something happens, you already have an answer in your head on what you would do. I wasn’t so lucky. I thought my best choice was not to make a choice. I had no choice to make because I had no training. Your mom is helping me change that and for that, I owe her so very much, because she is helping me get my life back.”
There was not a dry eye in the house as they were all focused on Angie.
Angie stood and walked out of the room.
Emma looked at Scott. Something exchanged between them and Scott got up and walked into the other room following Angie
He found her standing in front of the fire, staring into the flames.
“You OK?
“Ya, I really truly think I am” she said with confidence “I think everything is going to be OK”
Scott walked over and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m here if you ever need anything”
She reached up and touched his hand. “How about meeting me for coffee tomorrow? I’ve got some things I need to tell you.”
28
The days were starting to quiet down again and Emma didn’t want to waste the opportunity to check up on her girls and see how they were doing. Located all over the globe, they were brought together by a calling to be prepared and to protect those that they loved most. Sharing information daily, they built each other up in all areas of preparedness, from canning and water purification to firearms and child care and everything in between. They truly were a remarkable group of women.
Emma sat down in her favorite chair and logged into her computer. While the girls were her utmost priority, she also needed to catch up with her alternative news sites. Not trusting anything the mainstream media had to say, underground news sites had become a necessity to get to the facts. Add to that the connections Emma had with actual eyes and ears on the ground and the truth was breaking free and people were slowly waking up.
Julz was one of Emma’s connections. Julz ran a radio station from upstate New York called ucy.tv that Emma had a show on a couple times a week to talk about getting prepared. Emma had the utmost respect for the variable Wonder Woman who had painstakingly put together an eclectic blend of journalists from around the world who came together to voice the truth.
Glancing over the recent news, things weren’t looking good. Multiple quakes in an area of Louisiana caught Emma’s eye. Not much news about it in the mainstream media, but plenty if you knew how and where to get and piece it all together. There were people out there who understood what was happening and tried to get people to listen. Emma listened.
Emma pulled a binder down from her bookshelf and opened it up to the front page. Reading from the New York Times by Michael Wines…
BAYOU CORNE, La. — It was nearly 16 months ago that Dennis P. Landry and his wife, Pat, on a leisurely cruise in their Starcraft pontoon boat, first noticed a froth of bubbles issuing from the depths of Bayou Corne, an idyllic, cypress-draped stream that meanders through swampy southern Louisiana. They figured it was a leaky gas pipeline. So did everyone else. Just over two months later, in the predawn blackness of Aug. 3, 2012, the earth opened up — a voracious maw 325 feet across and hundreds of feet deep, swallowing 100-foot trees, guzzling water from adjacent swamps and belching methane from a thousand feet or more beneath the surface. “I think I caught a glimpse of hell in it,” Mr. Landry said.
Since then, almost nothing here has been the same.
More than a year after it appeared, the Bayou Corne sinkhole is about 25 acres and still growing, almost as big as 20 football fields, lazily biting off chunks of forest and creeping hungrily toward an earthen berm built to contain its oily waters. It has its own Facebook page and its own groupies, conspiracy theorists who insist the pit is somehow linked to the Gulf of Mexico 50 miles south and the earthquake-prone New Madrid fault 450 miles north. It has confounded geologists who have struggled to explain this scar in the earth.
And it has split this unincorporated hamlet of about 300 people into two camps: the hopeful, like Mr. Landry, who believe that things will eventually settle down, and the despairing, who have mostly fled or plan to, and blame their misery on state and corporate officials.
“Everything they’re doing, they were forced to do,” Mike Schaff, one of those who is leaving, said of the officials. “They’ve taken no initiative. I wanted to stay here. But the community is basically destroyed.”
Drawls Mr. Landry: “I used to have a sign in my yard: ‘This too shall pass.’ This, too, shall pass. We’re not there yet. But I’m a very patient man.”
The sinkhole is worrisome enough. But for now, the principal villains are the bubbles: flammable methane gas, surfacing not just in the bayou, but in the swamp and in front and back yards across the area.
A few words of fantastical explanation: Much of Louisiana sits atop an ancient ocean whose salty remains, extruded upward by the merciless pressure of countless tons of rock, have formed at least 127 colossal underground pillars. Seven hundred feet beneath Bayou Corne, the Napoleonville salt dome stretches three miles long and a mile wide — and plunges perhaps 30,000 feet to the old ocean floor.
A bevy of companies have long regarded the dome as more or less a gigantic piece of Tupperware, a handy place to store propane, butane and natural gas, and to make salt water for the area’s many chemical factories. Over the years, they have repeatedly punched into the dome, hollowing out 53 enormous caverns.
In 1982, on the dome’s western edge, Texas Brine Company sank a well to begin work on a big cavern: 150 to 300 feet wide and four-tenths of a mile deep, it bottomed out more than a mile underground. Until it capped the well to the cavern in 2011, the company pumped in fresh water, sucked out salt water and shipped it to the cavern’s owner, the Occidental Chemical Corporation.
Who is to blame for what happened next is at issue in a barrage of lawsuits. But at some point, the well’s western wall collapsed, and the cavern began filling with mud and rock. The mud and rock above it dropped into the vacated space, freeing trapped natural gas.
The gas floated up; the rock slipped down. The result was a yawning, bubbling sinkhole.
“You go in the swamp, and there are places where it’s coming up like boiling crawfish,” said Mr. Schaff, who is moving out.
Mr. Landry, who is staying, agreed — “it looks like boiling water, like a big pot” — but the two men and their camps agree on little else.
Geologists say the sinkhole will eventually stop growing, perhaps at 50 acres, but how long that will take is unclear. The state has imposed tough regulations and monito
ring on salt-dome caverns to forestall future problems.
Under state order, Texas Brine has mounted a broad, though some say belated, effort to pump gas out of sandy underground layers where it has spread. Bayou Corne is pocked with freshly dug wells, with more to come, their pipes leading to flares that slowly burn off the methane. That, everyone concedes, could take years.
The two sides greet all that news in starkly different ways.
State surveys show that one of the largest concentrations of methane lies directly under Mr. Landry’s neighborhood, a manicured subdivision of brick homes, many with decks overlooking the bayou and its cypresses. Yet only two families have chosen to leave, and while the Landrys are packed just in case, the gas detector in their home offers enough reassurance to remain.
The collapse last year of a side of a cavern more than a mile underground led to a large sinkhole in Bayou Corne, La.
“Do you smell anything?” he asked. “Nope. Do we have gas bubbling up in the bayou? Yes. Where does it go? Straight up. Have they closed the bayou? No.”
The anger and misfortune are focused on Mr. Schaff’s neighborhood directly across state route 70, a jumble of neat clapboard houses, less tidy shotgun-style homes and trailers on narrow roads with names like Sauce Piquant Lane and Jambalaya Street. There, rows of abandoned homes are plastered with No Trespassing signs, and the streets are deathly quiet.
Candy Blanchard, a teacher, and her husband, Todd, a welder, moved out the day the sinkhole appeared. They now pay the monthly mortgage on their empty and unsellable 7-year-old house as well as the rent on another house. Mr. Blanchard drops by their former home each morning to feed their rabbits and cat, who have lived alone for a year because their landlord would accept only their dog.
The couple rejected an offer from Texas Brine to buy their home, and instead have joined a class-action lawsuit against the company. They will never return, she said, because they do not believe the area is safe.
“The point we’re at now is what the scientists said would never happen, that this would be the worst-case scenario,” Mrs. Blanchard said. “How can you find experts on this when it has never happened anywhere else in the world?”
Mr. Schaff’s home also fronts the bayou, and he says he is loath to leave. But investigators found gas in his garage, he said, and he says he is convinced that state officials are playing down the true scope of the disaster.
A wry, amiable man with a salt-and-pepper goatee and glasses, Mr. Schaff said he had planned to retire on the bayou.
“It’s my home. I want to die there, OK?” he said, fighting off tears. “I was going to retire next year, was going to do some fishing, play with my grandchildren, do a little flying. And now, this.”
Emma thumbed over the date of the article. Almost 3 years earlier and it had gotten worse, much worse since then.
Just recently some seismic activity had cause quite a stir in the MSM which really sent chills up Emma’s spine. Digging around, the helicorders started going off not more than minutes after a 6.8 earthquake was registered in China. Could they be connected, Emma pondered.
Emma also noticed a sinkhole had opened up In Kentucky that unfortunately swallowed a lot of very expensive automobiles. Emma dug around until she got the exact location and, getting up, she walked over to her wall map.
Having pinned quite a few events on the map, it was easy to see a pattern developing. Was the New Madrid about ready to wake up? If the bayou were to blow with all the butane that was below it, it would set off a cataclysmic event that would disable much of the heartland of the United States. Running her finger along the lines developing on the map, Emma thought of the cities in harm’s way. Her finger stopped when it came to Memphis, Tennessee. “Shit” she thought and picked up the phone.
29
Emma heard Shelby pick up the phone and then grinned as she heard that long drawn out southern drawl. “Hey girlie girl!” Shelby said
“How’s my favorite Chickie this morning?” Emma asked
“Doing well. Just finished making some biscuits so perfect timing as I can talk while they are rising!” Shelby responded
Shelby lived “old school” prepper. It was one of the things that had drawn them together. While Emma enjoyed the benefits of modern comforts, such as electricity, Shelby had stepped completely away from it minus having an emergency phone in the house. Emma learned early on to call about mid-morning as Shelby would be returning from the barn having finished morning chores and would be somewhere in the process of cooking breakfast on her wood stove.
Emma had visited Shelby multiple times over the years and was always in awe of the woman. Emma learned how to pressure can her garden bounty without using electricity from Shelby. Having given up all the comforts of modern life, Shelby and her husband, whom she lovingly referred to as Mountain Man, had moved their family to the hills of Tennessee over 15 years prior and created a self-sustaining life without the influence of the outside world.
Situated back in a holler, finding her homestead was a chore all of its own. The neighbors, if one were to call them that as they were miles apart, were all related or close enough friends that they were considered family anyways. One does not just pop in because you were in the neighborhood. It took multiple dirt roads to even begin to get to the closest town that Shelby lived near, from there; it was a crap shoot to get to where her land began.
Shelby never got unintentional visitors so when a stranger showed up; it brought the attention of the community into full focus. They were courteous until the intruder left, as courteous as one could be with a shotgun hidden behind their back.
“Have you been able to get into town lately?” Emma asked Shelby
“Not for a couple weeks, why?” Shelby replied as she sat down to listen, giving Emma her full attention.
“Some activity going on. Just be ready and get your hams up and double checked,” she explained and then promptly filled Shelby in on what she was putting together.
Shelby was one of the strongest women Emma had ever met and Emma knew it was going to take extraordinary women to be the backbone of her present day underground railroad.
30
“What the hell” Chloe thought as she heard her phone go off. Rolling over, she looked at the clock. “Damn woman, doesn’t she ever sleep” she mumbled to herself as she tried to remember what time zone she was presently in.
“Hey Mama” Chloe groaned into the phone
“Chloe” Emma replied in a serious tone.
“Give me a minute, ‘kay?” Chloe said as she untangled herself from underneath her latest conquest as slid quietly into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
“Bid-ness or pleasure?” Chloe clanged out with a pucker of her lips
“All business” Emma responded and continued to explain to Chloe what was going on.
Chloe was not a prepper in the same sense that Emma or Shelby was. In fact, Chloe made her living by utilizing the oldest profession in the book, prostitution. But she was smart and learned fast.
Chloe and Emma met after a couple years of Chloe stalking Prepper Chicks on Facebook. Chloe was digging around looking for information concerning the nuclear plant that had sprung a leak in Japan after an earthquake. Living on the California coast, it was making her nervous with all the supposed radiation that was leaking into the ocean and hitting her shoreline. Chloe wanted fact. Strong, hard fact, not the bullshit hypothetical crap she kept running into. Rabbit trail after rabbit trail led her straight to Radchick’s internet site. Getting the information she wanted, Chloe had to figure out how to handle the ramifications of nuclear waste in her back yard. Digging further, she noticed a friendship between Christina, the admin on Radchick and the admin on a web site called Prepper Chicks. Chloe observed the information exchanged between the two women. Attracted by the fact that it was straight up information without interference of religion or politics, Chloe stuck around, something she rarely did, and little by little she formed a friendship w
ith Emma.
Emma drove out to Utah one year for a firearms class and Chloe drove in from the West Coast to meet up with her. Within a couple days, they were thick as thieves having shared most everything in their lives except Chloe’s occupation. Chloe didn’t think Emma would understand and didn’t want to lose someone she now considered family because of her choices, whether forced or not, that she had made in her life. She wasn’t proud of the fact that she fucked men for money, but it was what it was and there was no way around it anymore. She enjoyed the lifestyle that it fueled too much.”
“Let’s button up any loose ends and make sure we have a clear idea of your direction on the maps before this weekend. I want a general idea of which way you will be coming in, just in case.” Emma said
“Let me call you back in Fives” Chloe said and hung up the phone without waiting for an answer. Turning, Chloe walked over to the bed and briskly woke the man up. “Sorry Shorty but I’z got to run. Emergency.”
She heard the man groan as they both knew he paid dearly already for the next few hours and leaving early was not on his agenda.
Bending down, she kissed him on his neck leaving a hot trail to the bottom of his jaw. “I’ll cut you a free piece of ass over the weekend,” she whispered, flicking the outside of his ear with her tongue.
After a quick flick of her bare breast, the man got up and reluctantly got dressed and left the apartment. He knew she was good for it as he spent nearly every Thursday at her place.
Chloe took a quick shower and wrapped her robe around her and put on a pot of coffee. Sitting down at the bar she pulled out a well-worn binder out from the built in bookcase located by her knees. Created to hold cook-books, Chloe had found a much better use for it. She had binder after binder of survival information hidden in plain sight. With Emma’s help she had added information that she would never have thought important, like maps. Now Chloe had a binder full of maps for not only roadways but also rail routes, bike paths, aquifers, tributary and topographical maps.