Brandon started the engine and slalomed around the parking lot to the office. Penny was standing at the full-length glass windows with the motel manager, gaping at the flurry of dust and sand that flew down the road and funneled through the lot. Brandon honked twice to attract his wife’s attention. He knew that, to keep her safe, he would have to get out and escort her to the car.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something bad.”
“Should we be driving now?”
As she asked this, a rock the size of a softball came out of the wind—either picked up from the side of the road or hurled down from the sky—and smashed the office window. In the split second between seeing the rock come out of his peripheral vision and hearing it strike, Brandon grabbed Penny with one hand and hugged her body against his, turning them both away from the point of impact, and used his free hand to press her face into his shoulder and shield her neck. He ducked his head above hers and squeezed his eyes shut. Glass flew all around them. When it had stopped falling, he opened his eyes.
“Are you hurt?” he yelled into the howling noise.
She shook her head and then, out of concern for him, tried to brush the square crystals of tempered glass off his shoulders. Brandon held her wrists to stop her, but already her fingers had been cut by the razor edges and were bleeding.
“We can’t stay here,” he yelled. “We must get to the car.”
They stepped over the office’s jagged windowsill and ran to the passenger door. In that brief span the wind had died down again and was now no more than a confused whisper. Brandon opened Penny’s door, swung her inside, and slammed it. As he ran around to the driver’s side again, he saw that the darkness to the north had grown dramatically and now reached halfway up the sky. The mushroom cloud was obscured by the leading edge of the storm. He climbed in and put the car in gear.
“Where are we going?” Penny asked.
“The airport, I guess,” he replied.
“They won’t fly in this storm.”
“Well, then east, away from that.”
He pointed at the line of clouds.
“Fine by me,” she said. “Go, go, go!”
Brandon made two turns out of the parking lot to get onto West 58th Avenue heading east. He rethreaded the route by which they had originally driven in from Interstate 70 and the airport. While he was still on city streets, another rock came—definitely out of the sky this time—and hit the pavement in front of their car. That one was the size of a football and exploded like a hand grenade. Soon rocks, boulders, and bits of gravel were raining down, denting metal and breaking glass where they struck the car. Driving became more difficult as they bounced over this debris.
When they headed up the freeway on-ramp, the black cloud passed completely over them. It was as if night had come down without twilight. Brandon had the eerie sensation that it was snowing. He turned on the headlights and saw large, puffy flakes drifting along their path like a blizzard in June. But it was nowhere near cold enough to support a snowfall.
In the darkness and at the speed he was driving, he soon struck a rock in the roadway that was big enough to break the suspension. Penny screamed. The car slewed to a stop.
“Now what?” she asked, catching her breath.
The snow was falling fast. It was already two inches deep on the hood in front of them, and where it collected above the hot engine it was not melting. Brandon turned on the wipers. They flailed across the cracked windshield but, rather than clearing away the snow, they only smeared it into a thick paste.
He realized it wasn’t snow but ash. And the disturbance was not an atomic blast somewhere behind them but a volcano in full eruption. In the moment of his hesitation, the ash layer had gained another inch.
“If we stay here, we get buried,” he said. “Trapped inside the car.”
“We go out there, we’ll be buried, too,” she replied.
“Yes, but we might find shelter first.”
They opened their doors simultaneously, pushing against the weight of ash and stones rising above the rocker panels. He ran around to her side of the car, the ash clinging to his feet and sucking at them like soft mud. Penny’s side was closer to the edge of the ramp and the buildings just off the freeway.
He covered his mouth and nose with his linen handkerchief, and Penny used her sleeve and the collar of her blouse. He helped her climb over the guardrail, and they headed down the slope holding hands, her right in his left. The fine ash clung to their eyelashes, making it even harder for them to see in the darkness.
Toward the bottom of the slope, on the edge of some kind of drainage ditch, Penny slipped and fell. Her hand pull out of his. He turned to find his wife half buried in the ash, struggling to get up. He took her hand and pulled to free her.
The ash was at the level of his knees and around her shoulders now. He struggled to pull her up but, for all its fine and feathery lightness, the ash weighed them down like a heavy layer of dirt.
Stones still fell out of the sky like shrapnel, making powdery craters in the ashy surface all around them.
Penny tried to speak, inhaled hot ash, and went into a coughing fit.
Brandon had a sudden memory flash: the burials at Pompeii, those plaster castings of people struggling in their bed of ash. He had always wondered why the bodies remained faceless and formless when they had been so carefully preserved. He suddenly understood that people buried in hot sand and rocks did not die gracefully, with composed faces and clean limbs. Instead, they struggled, they thrashed, they gasped, and they screamed.
Penny’s head was already covered. Her hand moved in his with frightened, frantic force and then went still.
Brandon would not go on without her. He held her dead hand and screamed against the flood of ash.
* * *
The middle third of the country, from North Dakota to the Texas Panhandle, and stretching as far east as the Mississippi River, was just … gone. Two weeks after the event, John Praxis was still trying to wrap his mind around that reality. The immediate blast effects of the Yellowstone Eruption appeared to have been limited to relatively uninhabited parts of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, but the rest of the area had received a blanket of ash and hot rocks, thicker toward the east than in the west because of the prevailing winds, including the jet stream in the upper atmosphere.
Over much of the country, nobody knew anything for sure. No reports, no official warnings, no lingering calls for help … nothing came out of southern Montana as far north as Boseman and Billings, or from northern Utah as far south as Provo, eastern Idaho as far west as Twin Falls, or western Wyoming as far east as Casper. Just sudden, dead silence.
Denver, Colorado—more than four hundred miles away from the caldera—sounded early reports of ash fall and gas clouds and then went quiet. Brandon and Penny were supposed to be in Denver, supposed to have flown out that morning. But the flight they were to have taken never landed on its inbound leg—or if it did, it never boarded, never left. Denver International Airport was rumored to be under eight feet of ash and cinders, under a sky of perpetual night filled with lightnings from the eruption’s leftover kinetic energy.
Air traffic across the country had come to a halt. A cloud of the finest ash particles and poisonous gases reached into the stratosphere and were said to be circling the northern hemisphere. San Francisco was already enjoying the most glorious red sunsets just three days after the event. Planes from one coast to the other were routed through northern Canada or down by Mexico City. But most people simply stopped flying for the duration, because the fallout had shut down all the airports east of Reno and west of Cincinnati.
Kansas City, under two feet of ash and inside the no-fly zone, could no longer serve as the capital of the Federated Republic. Plans were rumored to be afoot to move the center of government. Some people said it was going south to Austin, Texas. Others that it would go back to Washington, D.C. At least the latter had a complex of gove
rnment buildings and museums which had already served the country for two hundred years. But not many people were left in the central government to make that decision.
Still other people said the Federated Republic, and that America as a country, were finished. That the two coasts—now separated by a vast, savage, and desolate wilderness such as Americans had not experienced since the 1860s—would become two separate nations. That it was the only way to survive.
The country had once enjoyed the greatest interconnection known to human history. It had formed a single, continent-spanning society bound together with fiber-optic strands and microwave beams, satellite relays and earthside down links. All of this connection had supported intelligences that thought, imagined, communicated, and managed the country’s economy and its political affairs at the speed of light. But that information economy was now broken. Rumor and hearsay had become the new knowledge, transmitted through a patchwork of surviving links interrupted by great, gaping holes in a network that had once been seamless and coherent.
According to what Praxis had heard from his granddaughter Jacquie, who still worked at Tallyman Systems in Houston, many of the greatest intelligences had been sundered in mid-thought by the event. Conversations between mechanical brains which had once been measured in nanoseconds and had now endured for decades were suddenly chopped off as if the other lobe of a hive mind had suddenly died in mid-transmission. Many of those intelligences that survived the initial trauma had gone catatonic from the sundering and were not yet recovered.
And that was a minor loss compared to the staggering death in human and animal life. But over the coming weeks and months, the surviving humans on the continent would miss that electronic communion even more than absent family members and friends. The loss of interconnection would set the country back a quarter century—no, farther, because the old ways of managing the country had been abandoned for a generation or more.
Finally, there were the effects on climate and agriculture. The rest of this summer of 2059 was going to seem like winter. And the winter of 2060 and beyond was going to be a bone-breaker. Hard times lay ahead.
John Praxis had conferred with his daughter Callie, who was already taking care of Brandon’s two children, Kenny and Stacy. They waited until all hope for the parents’ survival was gone, then held a memorial service at Holy Trinity for as much of the family as were local and could make the trip.
The candles trembled in the children’s hands as Father Barthalomaios chanted the Trisagion—“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us!”—three times over. And when the service came to the final hymn, the Troparia, the children placed their candles in the stand on the memorial table. Praxis simply extinguished his candle where he stood, pinching out the flame with his fingertips and never minding the pain.
As they walked out of the church, Callie left the children with Paul’s wife Connie and took him aside. “What do we do now, Dad?” she asked.
“I’ll adopt Kenneth and Anastasia directly,” he said. “Or you or Paul can take them into your homes. They won’t lack for loving care and a future.”
“No, I mean, the whole family, our future, our business.”
Praxis considered. His extended family was concentrated in California and in parts of Texas outside the Ash Fall. Aside from Brandon and Penny, none of the others had been in harm’s way and, for that, thank the Lord God—or Who- or Whatever was filling that position these days.
As to the business, they had probably lost a third of their active projects—the sites inundated and the client organizations disrupted if not destroyed outright. But the family’s engineering and construction business had actually been falling over the last decade or so. PE&C’s backlog had grown exponentially during the reconstruction after the Great Bay Quake, and due to improving technologies in water and wastewater management, electric transmission, and transportation, with new facilities replacing the old. Their company had also benefitted from the growth in population and its demands for housing and infrastructure. But that surge had long since come to an end. Artificial intelligence and automation had not only increased the profit margin on engineering services but also distributed them beyond the realm of human specialists.
People who wanted housing could now buy their own “homebuilder kits.” These included boss intelligences who interviewed the future homeowner, designed the structure according to taste, programmed large-scale printers to extrude bricks, woodwork, plumbing sets, wiring, and other materials, and instructed a team of termite-brained construction ’bots to do the hands-on work. City planning departments could now purchase industrial-strength versions of these kits to build their municipal infrastructure. State departments of development ran their own execution services with boss intelligences and ’bot gangs. Human specialization and expertise now came in a box, and no one had to contract with a firm like PE&C to get things done.
Thank God he had set Susannah to do the analysis which had led to creation of the Praxis Family Association. They were on the road to self-sufficiency, no matter what happened in the wider world. But, for now, they still had a core business to run.
“We shift over to making shovel and transport ’bots,” he told his daughter. “Lots of them, millions of them, in fact, if they’re small and quick enough. With enough of them, maybe we can dig out the country.”
“More like two-hundred-ton mining trucks,” she said.
“Yeah,” he agreed. Then, “No. That’s old-think, big-think. We have to think like the beavers and squirrels we let loose in the Stanislaus forest—small, distributed, fast, and busy, working twenty-four hours of the day and night. … Then we find a constructive use for all that volcanic ash—maybe for making glass, if there’s enough silica content, or just as plain old aggregate in new concrete.
“Once again,” he said, “Praxis Engineering and Construction’s going to rebuild the country. This time from the center outward.”
Part 6 - 2088:
Love Amid the Ruins
1. Bump in the Road
Pamela Sheldon was driving her boss, the Patriarch of the Praxis Family Association, John Praxis, back to the compound on Coyote Creek, which lay along the East Bay shoreline in what used to be the cluster city of Fremont. They were traveling south on the battered strip of asphalt and concrete that in years past had been designated Interstate 880, or the Nimitz Freeway. Neither name meant much of anything anymore. The highway now connected nothing except one burned out crater in Oakland with another in San Jose, and the states that had once been so interconnected, as well as the national government that had built the highway system in the first place, no longer existed. Even Pamela, who was old enough to remember the name “Nimitz,” couldn’t say exactly who or what that had been. And the “way” was nothing like “free.”
Taking the highway was just barely better than going cross-country. Almost every overpass they came to had fallen into the roadway. Then they had to divert to the off-ramp, drive across the intersecting street—without breaking an axle in the potholes or grounding the car’s blast-resistant V-frame on chunks of concrete—and come back down the on-ramp. It made for a twisting, corkscrew sort of travel.
Not that Pamela herself was doing the driving. The HUMV-IX’s intelligence did all the work, using video imaging in the infrared frequencies and obstacle ranging in the ultrasonic. That way they could ghost along at night, lights off, and attract the least attention from the road companies and other scavengers. No, she was just along as excess baggage. Praxis had needed her to watch his back as he left the building in San Francisco where his meeting had just ended, and he would expect her to check him in through security at the family compound. Praxis was her responsibility until he was standing safely inside his own front hallway and had removed his shoes.
Since she was officially his bodyguard, Pamela tried to amuse herself by monitoring the vehicle’s automated defenses. Redundant scopes and screens in the dashboard facing the front seats offered a human’s-eye
view of the electronic sweeps and countermeasures the armored car was currently projecting and reflecting. The circling green radii and wavering red loop patterns stretched out across a shadowy, faded-back landscape of pavement, trees, dry brush, and arroyo which was pocked and gridded with the solid imagery—built up from various databases—of pillboxes, scattered warning beacons, informally claimed territorial zones, and formally filed if antiquated property lines.
Nothing was moving in the night. And that was just as well.
Pamela was about to switch off the screens, fold her arms across her chest, and drop her head for a two-minute nap when she heard a faint click! from the undercarriage. She came instantly alert. What could that—?
The seat bottom kicked her hard in the butt.
A yellow glare rose outside the darkened windows.
The dashboard exploded outward to enfold her in a Kevlar balloon.
The armored body did a somersault that left her weightless and disoriented.
And then the car came down on its side.
* * *
The last time John Praxis had sat in a dentist’s chair to have his teeth budded was twenty-five, no, twenty-six … well, a quarter century ago, anyway. With moderate care and sonic cleaning, a new set of teeth was supposed to last an old-style lifetime—seven or eight decades, at least. Now Praxis had to sit still for the surgeon to implant new buds and install a hard-plastic bridge across them that would serve the triple purpose of protecting the soft tissues while they grew, giving him something to chew with, and back-stopping the gums when he started teething again, just like a newborn baby.
This time he was only replacing six molars, three uppers and three lowers, on his right side. Those teeth had smashed together when his ground car struck a land mine, a Chinese relic left over from the Time of Troubles. No one had been badly hurt in the blast, because the car was armored on top, sides, and bottom. But Praxis’s jaw had clicked shut when the airbags went off, and the force of the impact broke his teeth. He was ready to opt for crowns and cement, the old-fashioned way, because the roots and his gums were still strong. But Dr. Hockley had overruled him. “We don’t repair in this shop, John. We replace. I won’t let you pay for anything less.”
Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Page 22