NOEMI HAS TAMED a tiger shark. That’s what she tells me, anyway. “We go fishing together,” she says. “Is that so strange?”
I tell her the tiger shark is one of the most ruthless predators in the sea. “It could cut you in half in the water, just like that,” I say. She seems not to care.
“They are very intelligent,” she says. She is right about that. She tells me the shark’s name is Carina.
“Carina?” I say. I can hear myself sounding incredulous, the way the ditzy best friend would, if this were a movie. I miss seeing movies, but only sometimes. They have the quality of dreams.
“Carina is the name of my daughter, who was killed,” Noemi says. “She was eight years old when she died,” she adds. “The shark reminds me of my daughter, a little. She is a beautiful swimmer.”
Her grown-out hair hangs down like seaweed, hiding her face. She traces patterns in the sand with her toes: a hashtag, a noughts and crosses grid, a large letter C.
WHAT IS
– JEFFREY FORD –
ON SEPT. 14TH, 2025, at precisely 6:59AM, an old US Airforce C-17 cargo plane swept down over what was left of Oklahoma City and, staying low, headed due east. Approximately twenty minutes later, by the first light of day, the plane’s navigator spotted the skeletal-like remains of an enormous, dead Hackberry tree in the middle of a field, close by a dried out stream bed. The tree coincided with his mission coordinates, and he gave the order to the load master to prepare to make the drop—a 5,000 pound pallet. A few seconds later, the pilot circled back to the location and then a silk white blossom burst open in the sky. The payload drifted down slowly and the plane went round above. The drop was spot on target, so close to the tree that part of its parachute tangled in the branches. After the successful delivery, the aircraft slowly climbed to 28,000 feet and set a course back toward northern Michigan.
An hour and 13 minutes later, the sun, now fully risen, found the pallet sitting, undisturbed where it had landed. The temperature began to rise from the 90 degrees of the previous night toward the 120 it would no doubt reach that coming afternoon. An infernal breeze stirred, lifting the pervasive dust and swirling it over and around the pallet. In no time the atmosphere at ground level was thick with powdered dirt, decreasing visibility with each minute that passed. It was at this time that the radios in the hovels, huts and homes of those still living in Lincoln County crackled with the news that there had been an air drop. The last time such news had come, six months prior, there had been a dozen individuals who’d crawled or leaped out of bed to make ready for the journey. This time there were only five, and each of them noted the chilling final words of the transmission that this would be the last drop.
All five of those who’d been listening every morning for a month and a half for word that relief was on the way had been witness over the past ten years to the onslaught of the drought that at first presented itself as merely a couple of dry years in a row. It seemed the entire mid and southwest suffered it together. Climate change theories were shrilly put forth in the media, delivered with a spirit of desperation. There were scientists who claimed it was already too late. Crops were nominally depleted, but still they were planted (cotton in the case of Lincoln County) and there was an adequate yield at harvest time. Then there intervened a year, 2017, that was quite prosperous, and many of the farmers and the farm communities laughed at the climate change proponents and sided with those politicians who denounced bans on fossil fuels, ridiculed steps to offset the flood of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Super storms, increasingly scorching temperatures, tornadoes that leveled cities, floods that redrew coastlines and snow in March were blamed by those in charge at the Oklahoma State House and by other oil company shills across the country on the sins of homosexuals, the result of god’s wrath toward abortions and a turning away from the church. Then in 2018, the drought stopped playing games and came on with a vengeance.
A MILE AND a half away from the Hackberry tree where the pallet had landed, Eben Wallis sat in the room he called his ‘observatory.’ It was an upstairs corner room from which the roof above it and the upper side wall of the house had cracked in an earthquake and fallen off to leave the rest of the floor, the bed and desk and chair open to the sky. After the catastrophe, the room wasn’t good for anything else but a sort of perch. He’d enter it from the upstairs hallway through its door, and step out into the morning. There, he’d set up a chair and a telescope. At sunrise, before the day got so hot that the air rippled in the distance, he’d scan the horizon for any signs of activity or change. Most days he saw the same—given the sky was clear enough, although it often wasn’t—endless dust, tumbleweeds, no birds. That Sunday he saw the parachute wafting to and fro like a ghost trapped in the Hackberry tree. He noted it down in his journal and then went to dress and prepare himself for the journey.
Although the top corner of his place had suffered a loss the rest of the old farm house was still fairly intact. It was difficult keeping the dust out, and so he had newspaper taped to the windows and weighted snake-like tubes of material at the bottoms of the doors. Most of the windows and exits of the house were sealed up. He lived alone, and had done so for seven years after his wife had died of some strange disease that had turned her green. They’d lost their only son seven years before that. The boy had been killed in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. At one time Wallis had been a cotton farmer and had owned all the land for as far as the eye could see around his place. “All the useless land,” he said to himself that morning as he loaded a clip into the Ruger and slid the gun into a shoulder holster. He put his straw hat on, pulled the brim down, and went to fetch Jester, his horse. Outside he could feel the breeze rising and predicted a mild stirring of the dust that morning and perhaps a sand storm by afternoon. He tethered Jester to his wagon and started out northwest toward the drop point.
AT THAT VERY moment, Bev Searle turned the key on her 2011 Ford F150, and the beast groaned to life and then sputtered out. She wasn’t sure whether it was flooded or just stodgy from lack of use. Running it even for a few minutes to keep it in condition was a waste of gas she could ill afford. It was her desire to always have in reserve at least enough to make it the hour from what remained of Midlothian to what remained of Oklahoma City when the time came for her to finally give up and flee. The trip she’d be embarking on today, to the drop point, would be the longest she’d taken since the last drop. When Midlothian and the surrounding towns were leveled by a series of earthquakes back in 2018 and the federal government sent troops in to rescue whoever was left and move them out of the quake zone that the state had become, Bev stayed behind. Her husband went with the soldiers, promising her that he’d be back with supplies, but after six months went by and he never returned she gave up on him. She didn’t blame him for leaving; her grief had been all consuming. There was nothing left in her for him. She refused to go because her three children—four, six, and ten—had died of the mystery illness locals called the green shakes and were buried out back. For years, when the dust covered their graves and tried to obliterate their memory from the earth, she spent an hour or more every morning digging out the headstones.
It was only two years earlier, after having been bitten in the night by centipedes that had infested her bedroom, that she became too sick and too weak to shovel for months in a row. The dust blew over the graves and they were lost to her as if they’d sunk into the ocean. After most people were gone she scavenged around through the fallen and ravaged homes and found the truck with a full tank, a Marlin 60 .22 rifle—18 shot—and an abandoned black dog of indeterminate breed. She could have fled north whenever she wanted to, but the urge never came. She whistled to the dog, Pepper, and it leaped into the bed of the pick up truck. She headed out of her garage and avoided the road, which was nothing but a chaos of crumbled asphalt. Instead she drove around the back of the dangerously tilting two story house and headed out southeast across the waste of blowing dust. She looked at her place in the rear-
view mirror and thought about how she’d fret every time the earth started grumbling.
ALTHOUGH THE ENTIRE mid and southwest suffered the devastating drought that depleted the country’s food stores and caused mass migration, food riots, water riots, economic collapse, it was only Oklahoma that had succumbed to ever more frequent, ever more powerful earthquakes as well. Back around 2008, the state began to allow fracking as a means of extracting natural gas from the ground. The process involved drilling deep into shale and then injecting powerful streams of water, chemicals and sand into those openings to release the natural gas, which would then flow upward to the wellhead. The waste water and chemicals were trapped in holding wells deep underground. The politicians in the state, primarily the governor, vouched for the safety of the process. Then the earthquakes started. Where there’d been a measly two a year at only 3.0 magnitude, in less than six years that number rose to a thousand, some at magnitudes of 5.0 and even as high as 6.8. You’d think that would have put a halt to the fracking, but no, the governor helped to push through a bill that prevented the fracking companies from being sued, so it was business as usual. As the years went on past 2015, the magnitude and frequency of the quakes increased and left death and destruction in their wake. Eventually the underground wells that held the waste water and chemicals were compromised due to the fierce earthquake activity, and the grim slurry they held infiltrated the ground water. Many believed the chemicals were the cause of the green shakes.
JAMES REBOTH HAD the most successful living set up in what remained of Lincoln County. Also the son of a cotton farmer, he’d prepared for the coming drought and destruction from the very beginning, reinforcing his house, digging deep windmill wells that offered him steady if also contaminated water that needed straining and boiling, and installing a series of solar generators which were effective as long as the dust stayed settled, which was about half the days of the week. Some of the places that remained as habitations still had electricity, but his did not. There was an outpost of soldiers in Oklahoma City who tried to keep the electrical plant going, but many of the lines that led east had been severed. He made his own. His one goal was to hold onto his land until after the drought passed. He planned then to make a killing planting wheat and corn for a starving nation. The one thing he didn’t plan on, though, was how long the drought would last. His wife and grown son were with him and also well versed in the survival techniques necessary to last in the Oklahoma hell. They were, in addition to being well outfitted, well-armed. After the news that morning that the day’s drop would be the last, James gathered his wife and son together and explained how they would have to take the entire palette.
“Kill the others?” his wife asked.
“Who’ll know?” said his son.
“I’ll take the truck. You two take the cart and horse. Larry, you get down and hide in that dried streambed and make your way up behind the drop site. Stay low so no one can see you. Mary, you wait out of sight at the rise of the hill overlooking the spot. We’ve got to watch carefully cause we don’t want to all be shooting at the same person. I’ll be a sitting duck out there when they perceive the treachery. We know the woman with the black dog will be there, so you take her out, honey,” he said to his wife. “Junior, you go for that troglodyte.”
“That reptile guy? Shit, he puts me off anyway. What is that runt?”
“He was taken by the shakes,” said the boy’s mother. “Only thing is he recovered. When you live through it, not many who do, your skin gets thick as gator skin and you get all kinds of fucked up looking.”
“He needs a bullet,” said Larry.
“That’s for sure,” said his father. “Now, I’ll get out of the truck and stand behind the open door. After you hear my first shot, start shooting.”
“Wait,” said Mary. “What about that hippie couple?”
“Oh, fuck them and their stupid homemade horse travois. I don’t think they even carry. We can pick them off at our leisure and keep their three horses. Two for the table and one for the stable.”
“Meat,” said Larry. “We ain’t even had jack rabbit in a while.”
“OK, let’s pack up and move out,” said James.
THE FACT WAS, nobody had had jack rabbit lately, although everyone had had an abundance of it not but a month earlier. This drought, like the historic one of the 1930s, the Dust Bowl, saw infestations of certain animals and insects rise in mind-staggering proportions and then suddenly disappear. Just like in the earlier event, this time there were also locusts. 2020 had seen storms of them. The scorpions in 2023. People slept with their boots on, and sometimes when walking across open ground, there was a definitive sound of crunching as if walking on egg shells. They were striped bark scorpions, and their sting was usually not deadly but it hurt like hell. From the spring of 2024 and well into 2025, the jack rabbits swarmed. It was a mystery as to what they even lived on, there being hardly a shred of vegetation as far as the eye could see. Still, they were everywhere, even invading homes. The survivors shot and trapped them, cooked them and ate them. They were fairly tasty if you didn’t have to eat them every day.
Their abundance in the drought areas of Oklahoma drew packs of coydogs from Tennessee through Arkansas where the climate was somewhat better, although still dry. The coydog was a canid hybrid that scientists in the past had predicted would be limited to a few unusual cases in the wild since the dog and the coyote had different mating seasons. Once the drought had come and the temperature had climbed all over the country to remain consistently high, mating seasons were extended and it was noticed by around 2023 that packs of these animals had begun to pop up. They’d not been in Oklahoma before the jackrabbit infestation, but they certainly were after it had struck. These packs didn’t bother people when they were well-fed, but like a lot of drought infestations the rabbits seemed suddenly, to a day, just to have disappeared, leaving the dogs hungry. The packs quickly became vicious and wily and looked to other sources of flesh in a land of nothing but dust.
THAT POOR GREEN fellow who James Reboth’s son had diagnosed as needing a bullet, was the first one at the drop site, having arrived alone, on foot. He’d known before the others that the plane was coming. He took up a spot 30 yards from the Hackberry tree and sat down in the sand with his legs tucked under him and waited, watching the parachute shift in the breeze. His name was Martin Pell, and he too had grown up in Lincoln County on a cotton farm that had been in his family for generations. Back at the onset of the drought, his mother had succumbed to the shakes and his father to a heart attack. His sister and brother had fled north with the rescue troops, and he had stayed behind with his 95-year-old grandmother who was too weak for the journey. He’d modified their house to withstand the onslaught of dust and dirt, and laid in solar generators and enough gasoline to last for a long haul—not quite as long a haul as it had turned out to be, though. In a reversal of fortune it was Pell’s ancient grandmother who nursed him back to health from the green shakes using old farm remedies and Muskogee medicine. In the year it took for him to get back on his feet, 2020, the old woman would sit by his bed at night and tell him tales of her experience living through the 1930s Dust Bowl. “When the black blizzards blew across the fields, I saw Satan’s face in their towering clouds,” she said.
Pell recovered only for his grandmother to promptly take ill as soon as he was up on his feet and could cook and care for himself. When he thanked her and told her how sorry he was that her effort to save him had made her weak, she commented on her near-demise. “Martin,” she said, patting his arm, “to be honest, it’ll be a relief.” From her deathbed the last thing she told him was that the green cast of his skin and the distortion of his features made him look like Toad of Toad Hall from the book The Wind in the Willows. He laughed and remembered that book from his childhood and her reading it to him. He only let himself think of it once, though, seeing as the story he recalled, much of which took place next to a stream, in a lush wood, and between good friends
was too much to bear when he woke from that world into the waste of Lincoln County. All through the years of the worsening drought, Pell, who had a degree in electrical engineering from Oklahoma University, used a satellite dish he’d at one time gotten television reception off of to stay tenuously linked with what still existed of the internet. His skill with the computer was how he knew the plane was coming, and why he’d arrived at the site to warn his fellow survivors.
THAT HIPPIE COUPLE mentioned by Reboth’s wife, Mary, weren’t a hippie couple at all, but a couple of once well-off business professionals who’d lost nearly everything in the Depression that followed the worsening drought. Theo and Susan Shebel were their names. While their money still had any meaning at all, they’d had to gamble on what was the best course of action. Did they get a place out in the country and hunker down, learn to be resourceful until things got better or did they head north in the direction of the great migration and face riots and food lines and the camps set up for the homeless? They chose the former and tried to be smart about it, studying as much about desert survival as possible, storing enough goods and water and gas as possible. They hadn’t counted on the earthquakes, one of which had swallowed their truck whole, one that had laid waste to their barn. Luckily their three horses, perhaps the biggest investment they’d made before moving out into the old farm house on the outskirts of the tiny town of Meeker, all survived. Reboth was right that they didn’t carry guns, but they did take machetes with them wherever they traveled.
Drowned Worlds Page 18