Then he was gone. Leona stared at the doorway for a moment, her mind whirling. Did Mulligan just—
“Did Mulligan just ask you out on a date?” Kelly asked, very much awake.
“I … I guess?”
Kelly smiled and clasped her hands behind her head, looking up at the ceiling. “Well, in that case, I guess you’d better get well soon, Lee. I don’t know much about these things, but I’d say the big man still has a lot of rawr left in him, if you get what I mean.”
Leona wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but then decided she didn’t need to know. She would find out herself. All in good time. Her gaze returned to the medallion. She studied it for a long moment, and she realized a soft smile had spread across her face.
27
Repairs had been underway for an entire month. Benchley paid attention to every detail, and ensured that Jeremy Andrews and his team of engineers had enough manpower available, not to just fix what had been broken in the earthquake, but to reinforce and strengthen the outpost’s power array. No one wanted to go through another event like the one they had just barely survived, and Benchley made it a priority for the engineers to move quickly and expeditiously. For weeks, everyone labored to put the base back together, and everyone had a hand in its restoration. Even Benchley had pulled on coveralls and spliced wire, welded piping, and serviced heavy equipment. No one was allowed any slack. Bit by bit, the station was patched up and made fully operational again.
But while Harmony Base was healing, it would bear scars for the rest of its life.
At night, in his quarters, he avoided sleep. Not because he feared his dreams—he had long since grown inured against them—but because Mike Andrews had finally delivered his mission log. And the things Benchley found in the report were shocking. Frightening. At times, even outrageous.
And most surprising of all, the report contained hope.
Unconfirmed reports of other survivors from the Northwest. Benchley found himself circling around that again and again. That there were survivors eking out a bare existence beneath the desolate rot that had once been San Jose had been surprising enough. But the mention—the mere rumor—of other survivors in the Northwest, where all the models and simulations had suggested that nuclear fallout would be less than anywhere else in the nation, set his mind roaming. San Jose was their first target, of course. But after that, Benchley knew the Pacific Northwest was their next destination.
There could be a society there. So why wait?
The notion took him by surprise. He had been planning on concentrating all the base’s energies on contacting the survivors in San Jose, making peace with them, and even outright providing for them, if they would allow it. Harmony had tons of bounty in its stores, all manner of items that the remaining residents of San Jose would need. But they were likely a small group, smaller than Harmony’s population. They wouldn’t need much, comparatively speaking. It wouldn’t take long to get them squared away, living like human beings again, as opposed to cannibalistic savages.
We can do both.
Benchley thought about that for a long time. Life after the Sixty Minute War had served only to refine his normally conservative approach to issues like this. Determine the mission. Plan the mission. Launch the mission. Support the mission. Sustain the mission. Exit the mission. Repeat.
But Benchley knew time was running short. Even though Harmony would survive, the next catastrophe that befell the post might be substantially worse. Mother Nature had already done what Mankind had not: wound the base, hurt it, send it a signal. There may not always be another tomorrow. And if the worst were to occur, the people of Harmony would need to find a place where they might be able to have a second chance.
The Pacific Northwest.
He nodded as he sat hunched over the log book and his tablet computer, his Spartan quarters illuminated only by the lamp on his desk. The Pacific Northwest. It was a veritable beacon flashing in the murky darkness as the sun slowly set across the decimated United States of America. He decided to make it the first order of business at tomorrow’s command staff meeting. While he had to let the command staff weigh in on it, he saw another mission departing from Harmony, one commanded by Mike Andrews. The kid was a star performer, and there was no one better suited to carry the torch.
The world had ended.
And Harmony’s mission had finally begun.
AFTERWORD
Earthfall had an odd conception. Originally, I’d written a bare-bones novella in very late 1982, which I used as a kind of outline for a screenplay in the summer of 1983. It didn’t take me long to write, as the adventure in the piece was so compelling that it kept me up at all hours, banging away on my shiny, new electric typewriter—personal computers were things of fancy back then—in between classes and dates and bottle after bottle of Pepsi. (It was sold in glass bottles back then, real glass bottles, not this tacky plastic we have today.) Back then, I was focused on writing a story that would combine the best of The Road Warrior with what little good there was to be found in the movie Damnation Alley…which basically amounted to some cool looking vehicles, and maybe a score by Jerry Goldsmith. I worked on that screenplay, off and on, for years.
Hollywood remained uninterested.
I put it away for at least twenty-plus years and forgot all about it, as one should when holding onto an unsalable property. Every now and then, I’d think back and reconsider it, but I always pushed it aside in favor of more contemporary projects, meatier projects that I could sink my teeth into. There are always new stories to be spun, and I try my best to look forward. After all, at my age, the road ahead is much shorter than the one in the rearview mirror, so I’d best keep my eyes up front. No telling what a guy might hit when blasting down the highway of life at 85 miles an hour.
Curiously, it was one of these “meatier projects” that led me back to Earthfall. I was working feverishly on a novel called Tribes, a Chricton-esque adventure novel with a sprinkling of science fiction dusted over it. At the halfway mark, I began to lose steam, and the project started to wander. The story wasn’t as lifelike as I’d hoped, and the characters were approaching insipid. No, that’s not right. They were insipid. When a writer can recognize that in his own work, and can’t write his way of the box he’s written himself into, then it’s time to step back and reevaluate.
Serendipitously, Earthfall came to mind again.
I pulled out the script—the novella has long since disappeared, and is nowhere to be found—and reread. Parts of it made me grimace in embarrassment. To think I’d actually shown this around! No wonder I was never the next hot thing in Hollywood. My skills sucked! The dialog was horrible, some of the sequences absolutely juvenile. I mean, twenty years after the bombs dropped, and people are turning into pumpkin-headed mutants? (Though in my own defense, I didn’t have 50 foot scorpions leaping out the wasteland sand.)
But still…there was a story there. A very rough one, but a story, nevertheless.
So I put Tribes aside and resurrected Earthfall. And while it was trying at times, it was also fairly easy—I knew where I’d wanted it to go back in 1983, but I hadn’t the chops to steer a story back then. I’m still unsure if I do three decades later, but I decided to make a go of it. It’s not survivalist fare, and it still retains a patina of 1950s pulp science fiction about it, but I did try and toss in as much weight as the story could handle and still move like a cheetah with a Saturn V rocket shoved up its butt. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you agree. Or, at the very least, didn’t find it too overwhelmingly odious!
Thanks are in order…
From 1983: Big shouts out to Rick Sylander, Kevin Slater, Marc Schliesman, Tim MacNary, Jill Ferrari, Caryl Dailey, Doug Aho, Leah Creatura, Todd Webster, Carolyn Payne, Gordon Dailey, Ann Juliano, Leonard Scott, Jackie Soma, Hank Netherton, and Bill Mellott. You all read the scripts, and for some reason, neglected to tell me every draft sucked. I’ve lost contact with many of you, but I love you all, and your friendship, love, and sup
port will never be forgotten.
And now, in 2013: Joe LeBert, Fred Anderson, and the long-suffering Derek Paterson, for your reviews and views. Will Allen for your beta—your comments were significant. Bobby Cooper and Scott Campos, for the sanity checks. Craig DiLouie for the blurbs and kind words of encouragement. Jeroen ten Berge for some awesome cover stuff, and Nathan Carlisle for his depiction of the SCEVs. Editors Sean Fox and Lynn MacNamee at Red Adept for your editorial efforts, as well as Diana Cox at novelproofreading.com for the final burnishing. And a salute to former Navy officer Paul Salvette and his lovely wife for formatting the ebook release.
Author disclaimer: despite the efforts of those above, the final result is all my doing. Mistakes and assorted grief are all mine. Accolades, if any are coming, are shared with all.
And the biggest thanks to you, the reader. It’s been a ball corresponding with you all, via email, via Facebook and Twitter, and on my modest blog. You make a guy feel all right about himself, even when he steps in it.
Which is often.
Stephen Knight lives in the New York City area. You can find more of his fiction at:
NOVELS
City of the Damned
City of the Damned: Expanded Edition
The Gathering Dead Series
The Gathering Dead
Left With The Dead (A “Gathering Dead” Novella)
The Rising Horde: Volume One
The Rising Horde: Volume Two
With Derek Paterson:
White Tiger
NOVELLAS
Hackett’s War
SHORT STORIES
Ghosts
Family Ties
Stephen Knight on the web:
http://knightslanding.wordpress.com/
Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/people/Stephen-Knight/100002176141614
Twitter:
@sknightwrites
Did you like this novel? Did you hate it? Compliments and/or complaints should go to:
[email protected]
And please…leave a review wherever you bought it!
Cover Art Copyright © 2013 by Jeroen ten Berge
http://jeroentenberge.com/
Sample Chapter:
THE CONVERT
by Fred Anderson
Available at Amazon
1
I wasn’t born a cripple. That’s something I did to myself two days shy of my sixteenth birthday. Drunk diving, I tell people when they ask, although technically speaking there was no real diving involved. Just a lot of drunk. I remember the day like it happened last week, even though it’s been twenty-one years.
July in Mississippi is a godawful thing. The day starts heating up before seven in the morning, and by early afternoon the temperature is kissing-close to a hundred degrees. Humidity stays above eighty percent more often than not, and the still, hot air feels like a damp blanket draped over you. The pale blue sky is empty save the almost-white sun, glaring down like the eye of an angry god. The day I broke my back was one of those days.
Just a couple of miles outside of Starkville, where I grew up, the Old South Quarry cuts into the red clay cotton fields like an old battle scar. During the Great Depression the quarry did a booming business, harvesting limestone out of the bedrock to be crushed into gravel and powder for the concrete used by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the construction of structures all across the south. My grandfather was a down-on-his-luck welder and part-time farmer in those days, and spent two years building bridges for the Corps. It seemed like every time I went to church with them on a summer Sunday morning as a child, riding high in the front seat between them in their old green and white farm truck but still barely able to see over the dash, he had a new story to share about someone losing a finger or toe, hand or foot, during the construction of whatever bridge we happened to be crossing. Once he told me about a man buried alive in cement who, as far as he knew, was still encased down there at the base of the pylon holding up the bridge. He would’ve told me more, I think, but my grandmother shushed him up.
When the Depression ended and most people—my grandfather included—found permanent work, business fell off for the Old South Quarry. Limestone was cheaper coming out of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, and even though demand was up because of all the post-war construction, the supply from the more mountainous states far exceeded need. By the time I was tugged from my mother’s womb, red-faced and screaming from the gross insult of birth, the quarry had been closed for nearly eighteen years and Starkville teenagers had been swimming there for ten.
On that sunny July day there were four of us piled into Kenny Wilcott’s piece of shit Chevy Nova, roaring down the dirt road that circled around to the back of the quarry where the hole in the security fence was. Trigger Foster—his given name was Jonathan but he’d been Trigger to us ever since he shot himself in the foot on a duck hunt with his older brother when he was twelve—had filched a case of Milwaukee’s Best from the stash his old man kept in the garage, and we were ready for a party. As much of a party four guys can have with twenty-four piss-warm beers and no girls, anyway.
Russ Howard pulled the first beer out of the plastic ring and handed it over to me. It felt like a mug of the Russian tea my mom made for me whenever I was sick. Even with the windows down, the car was an oven, but that didn’t matter. We’d be cool soon enough.
The car hit a pothole and the four of us bounced as one.
“Goddammit, man, watch the road!” Trigger cried. He was sitting up front with Kenny, gripping the dash with both hands. Not long after the duck hunting incident, his older brother had been killed when he thought he could pass an eighteen-wheeler on a two-lane road and lost control of his Trans-Am. The car rolled six times, throwing Trigger’s brother some thirty feet headfirst into a sweet gum tree. Trigger told us later that his head had been split in half right down the middle and most of his brain ended up in the crook of two branches, almost fifteen feet off the ground. He’d been jumpy in cars ever since, not that anyone could blame him.
“Relax, princess,” Kenny said, but he eased up on the gas a little. He rubbed at the top of his head, which had banged into the roof when the car dipped. Kenny was on the junior varsity basketball team with me, and played center because he was so tall. Being several inches shorter—but not short, mind you—I played shooting guard. Between the two of us, we helped the team make it to the quarter-finals the previous year.
Ahead, I could see the rusted chain-link fence surrounding the quarry, and beyond it, the emerald lake sparkling in the summer sun, its color undiluted by the heat haze clinging to the ground. Limestone dust in the water gave it the unique color, reminiscent of exotic Caribbean locations. As we drew closer, I saw schools of bream and sunfish swimming lazily around the shallow edge. The quarry had been carved into the side of a small hillock, and toward the far end where the deep water darkened to near-black, a white stone cliff towered almost fifty feet above the surface. All that was visible of the old office at the top was a glint of glass through the kudzu overgrowth.
Kenny brought the car to a stop just outside the fence and shut it down. Drifts of red dust swirled around us, stirred up by our jostling drive. The air smelled of honeysuckle and the pesticide farmers soaked their cotton plants in to keep the boll weevils down to manageable levels. Out in the open green field, a symphony of grasshoppers crackled and rattled. Trigger relaxed visibly and held his hand over the seat for a beer.
I popped the tab on my own and got it to my mouth before it foamed all over the car, then gulped it down as fast as possible. We didn’t bring it to sit around and sip it like the people in beer ads, after all. Pitching the can through the window into the tall grass, I opened the door to get out, but before I could, I let loose a massive belch. The sound rolled across the water like the crack of gunfire.
“Danny Mac sounds off!” Russ cawed, and pitched me another beer.
Danny Mac. It’s been years since anyone called me that, except
for my old buddy Jake Conrad—more on him in a bit—who did it occasionally when he was worked up about something. Usually the government. Maybe the nickname was kind of lame, no pun intended, but hell, who isn’t lame at that age? No matter how pitiful it sounds now, it was far better than my given name of Daniel Edward Mackenzie. Doesn’t that sound stuffy and pretentious? Even now, as forty looms not too far around the corner, I’ll take being called Danny over Daniel any day, though I prefer Dan. Nice, short, and simple.
But then? Then I was Danny Mac.
I drained the second beer almost as quickly as the first, and by the time we scrambled through the hole in the fence and down to the water’s edge, my third was half empty. I was already starting to feel light-headed. We’d been down at the mall all morning, feeding quarters into games in the arcade and hanging out at Camelot Music, and hadn’t bothered with lunch.
The dirt road we drove in on ended at a chained and padlocked gate, and turned to gravel inside the fence. It was the same one the loaded trucks used back when the quarry was in business, and it led right down into the water. Standing at the lake’s edge, you could see the road continuing under the surface as it descended into the depths. To be honest, it always creeped me out a little to float over it and look down through my mask. It seemed so out of place down there, stretching into the murky darkness. A path to nowhere.
The pulverized gravel at the edge of the lake formed something of a beach, and that’s where we spread out our towels. Trigger tied the remaining six-packs together with a piece of old clothesline from the trunk of the Nova and lowered them into the cool green water. We waded out four abreast, hissing reflexively first when the water touched our balls, then our armpits.
An hour later, snorkeling in the middle of the lake, I was as far from sober as I was from the shore. Through my mask I watched the fish and turtles glide far below me, dim dark shapes against the midnight green. From time to time I drifted over underwater meadows of some tall grass, gently swaying in the convection created by the sun’s rays. Pale lime-colored tendrils reached for me out of the darkness like questing fingers, and I thought of dead things slowly rotting down there, just out of sight.
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