by James Kiehle
Then the van turned around, faced forward, and was halted abruptly as it smacked between a pair of trees and lodged there. Russ flew forward, striking his head on the steering wheel. He felt thin trickles of blood snake down the side of his face. Dizzy, he looked out the window and watched brown water race past as debris and dead animals collided with his van, then disappeared in the wash. A car swiftly flowed by, upside down and tumbling, a family of four inside, their faces screaming in silent horror.
Russ was trapped in a vehicular bubble inside a huge and murky natural aquarium; disoriented and unbelievably afraid. A human body, age and sex indeterminate, whisked by him, arms and legs akimbo, followed by somebody’s boat, a metal skiff, and then, a child no older than four.
•
The trees, skyscraper high, were hard for the convicts to see beyond and the logging road going downhill was cut off by a slide of rocky mud. Not much choice but go back up.
“Up that hill there, see what’s left,” Bolt told them.
After a grueling climb back to the main highway, Bolton scanned all directions. The road east and west was littered with rocks and boulders and clumps of ice. Behind them, north, was Mt Hood. South… now south was something worth looking at. Binoculars would have come in handy because far off, camouflaged by a shelter of firs, was some kind of building. A two or three story one from the look of it.
“I see our new pen,” Bolt said, pointing.
“I don’t see it,” Cassidy said.
Bolt laughed, “Hell, you couldn’t see your dick with a microscope. Trust me, it’s there. Let’s go.”
No one questioned where they were going, no one asked for a vote. They just walked in a line behind the largest man any of them had ever seen.
Bigger than Brutus.
Not a cartoon villain, but a flesh-and-blood psychopath who’d probably found the lawless world of his dreams.
Bolton stopped and held up his hand. “Wait. Do you hear that rumble?”
“What is it?” Calderon asked, all of them listening with concern.
Bolt said, “Trouble.”
•
Russ had no idea of how far he’d been swept along before the van hit the trees and was stopped but around him the raging torrent continued as water leaked into every slight opening. Russ was surprised that the logs and rocks and metal that pounded on the van didn’t crack the windows. He worried that he would soon run out of air and held his breath involuntarily.
Then, almost as quickly as it had started, the rapid flooding eased. The enormous wave’s power was in its leading edge. At full fury, the deluge had overwhelmed the Caravan but soon it receded until the waters were only as high as his tires. After waiting for several long moments, Russell opened the door and looked down, still shaking in terror.
His van was stuck between two stubborn hemlocks, the front end jammed. Perry saw he was close to six feet above the ever-lowering waters. He realized that if he stayed where he was, the van would likely crash to the ground. If he jumped, he’d either die or break his legs —same thing, here and now— hitting what might eventually become semisolid ground.
No time to lose.
Russ climbed cautiously into the middle of his van, which tilted, and quickly collected what he thought he’d need to survive. All of his belongings had been thrown into large, green plastic yard bags, so he grabbed a near-empty one and randomly tossed things into it. He made his way back to the front seat and looked down through the open door, the van shaking.
The water level was falling quickly, so Russ gripped the bag in front of him, held his breath, and jumped. He knifed into the water hard and was instantly swept away by it, barely able to hold onto the plastic bag. Russ had no control over his movements and tried only to keep his head above water. Carried past trees and rocks and dead wildlife, the plastic bag helped keep him buoyant and he held it tightly.
Then Russ saw a broken fir tree, its top half bobbing in the water in front of him. He smacked into it hard; its bark cut through his clothes and tore skin on his rib cage.
Disoriented, Russell managed to see ahead far enough to spot a ponderosa pine tree stripped of its needles, its barren top swaying in the water. As he got closer, Perry reached out and grasped for it, missed, but then strained against the current and barely took hold of the thin tree with his right hand. His bag nearly fell free, but Russ grasped both tightly, and he held on for dear life.
About five minutes passed as the flooding subsided. Russ finally let go of the pine and splashed into the lowering waters, his right arm almost without strength or feeling. Standing in rushing, cold water on top of viscous mud, he was finally able to gain a foothold and stand up. Now only knee deep and falling by the second, the waters calmed.
A few minutes later, Russ balanced on sloppy ground.
Russ collapsed on the mud-laden forest floor, panting. He had no idea how long he lay there catching his breath. He wasn’t even aware that the moon had suddenly come back out. A mist of dust and spray had accompanied the waters and covered the sky as if under a heavy fog. Russ looked upward and saw patches of clouds between a thin patina of smoke, as an orange glow spread between earth and sky.
The world looked surreal.
And he was here to witness it.
How weird was that?
•
Hungry and weak, the escaped convicts stopped at a natural rock formation with a vista of the terrain, hearing something odd. Across the way, like a watchman, the far-off building lorded over the deep falloff to a very large gully, carpeted by endless tall slivers of firs below.
There was a noise, a crashing, like a bowling ball hitting not ten pins but more like a trillion pins, rumbling loud enough to fill the air, surrounding and penetrating the very hard frames of the men, who looked towards the source and wavered side to side, hearts in their throats.
But a moment later the sight of a fast-moving wall of water from the east stopped their hearts cold as an unbelievably high wave smashed through the mountainous barricade where the lower slopes met the jutting high hills of the range, and flooded the forests with astonishing speed and power.
It was over in a minute, but time enough for the raging alluvion to blanket the entire large valley all the way to the next mountain, where the structure stood and, to the west, endless waters disappeared into the far hills.
“What do we do now, Boss?” Calderon asked.
“Learn to swim,” Bolt said.
28. Color of Cash
Had his brain been active, in the sense of his being conscious, Leo Tabor would have probably felt like Dorothy, gripped and lifted by swirling winds and, like it or not, headed for Oz. But Leo’s unknown perfect storm came from water, the result of the massive flood from the destroyed and melted and now raging former-Ice Shelf and from A) his position on the Columbia River near a gap between mountains; B) the angle of his craft to the oncoming flood that lifted the Minx up over the leading edge—elevator-style, then drifted quickly backwards against the flow and C) the top of the wave that grew ever higher as his boat more or less surfed on the raging waters until the wave spilled into lower slopes on its western flank. There it deposited enormous quantities of debris from the dams and everything else it had gutted in its path; the surrounding hillsides collapsed, blocking waters, a natural dam stopping the flow behind and sending the main body of it south again, leaving behind a new and very large expanse of water high into the Cascades.
Where a lake was formed, held in place by a natural dam.
Leo, on that lake now, didn’t know all this because he had probably been in a coma or its close cousin. Still, Tabor could guess how he was here, but not where he was here.
Looking down, his boat was slowly sinking—he knew that much.
Poor Minx.
Before all this, Leo Tabor had a fantastic sense of direction. Even as a boy, visiting a strange city like Seattle or San Francisco with his pop, he’d be asked which way was which and never was wrong. It wasn’t just the land
marks that he used, but the position of the sun or the stars at night, sometimes just instinct—saying the kind of right answer that gets you tousled hair, a proud grin, and an attaboy.
But here and now, Leo didn’t know which way was up.
Nothing looked familiar, not the sky or the hills or the trees surrounding and towering on the shore beyond or the lake his little Minx was sinking into—nothing told him where he was. It wasn’t a brain freeze or something temporarily forgotten that caused this state, it was simple and direct: Where the fuck am I?
Tabor knew that the atom bombs had gone off and that the concussion knocked him flying across the deck, folding into a fetal ball of pant-pissing terror before he blacked out. It felt like time had passed, but how much? Minutes? Hours? Days?
Rip van Winkle came to mind.
His head pounded like mad, a headache to fell a giant. Somewhere in the submerged below-deck area, knee-deep water at an incline, was some aspirin. Leo tried to get to it, each step feeling like a Denver boot was strapped to his legs. He managed to get to the head, pop the top off the bottle and swallow half-a-dozen pills, hoping that would do the trick.
Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink, he recalled, but he scooped up lake water to wash the meds down anyway. Best he could say, he didn’t die… yet.
Top deck, he surveyed the horizon and the waterscape that separated Leo from the shore and a mountain beyond. Clearly, he had to swim; his life preservers were probably near Sacramento by now. There was nothing really to take except a light jacket which Leo tied around his waist, then climbed to the bow and dove off just before Minx lowered into freezing cash green water and disappeared.
Seldom sentimental, Leo swam towards shore without looking back. By the time he reached shoreline, his Brutus arms were Popeye’s sans spinach; his winded lungs like unfilled party balloons.
He sat on the rocky, littered shoreline, breathed deep and pointed a thought: This must be north.
And then: So what? North leads to what? Desolation? Or a line of fully functioning Open 24 Hours fast food franchises stretching to the Canadian border?
And he gets there how? Call for his limo?
Besides, the closest Leo came to money now was the color of the lake. Thinking that, Leo laughed hard enough to almost echo in the trees, realizing how he was starting over from less than scratch, had virtually nothing but the clothes covering his skin, and found it hilarious that Leo Tabor had gone from the richest man in the state to the poorest.
Like that.
•
Russ Perry sat in the mud, tried to control his breathing and emotions. Nothing seemed authentic except for the mud on his fingers. Russ felt like he was stoned and mindlessly drew abstracts in the wet soil: A palm tree, a mushroom cloud, a little girl and her mother...
Russ wiped his dripping nose on his wet sleeve and tried to stop shivering.
He needed dry clothes and apparently brought along only his old Lady Gaga Rules! tee shirt and some Nike sweat pants in the plastic bag; the rest was in the van, and who knew where that was.
And a gun. His dad’s old forty-five.
Russ stripped down and shivered, then got dressed in his drier but still damp clothes and set his wet ones over the branch of a broken pine.
Still in a daze, he wearily sat on the ground and listened to the world. There continued to be a low rumble in the air as the flood channeled its assault through the dense woods far to the west, but that was it.
No other noise.
Perry had no inkling of what he should do. Would he be able to stay alive? Should he even bother? Everyone he knew was most likely dead, most especially his beloved wife and daughter, likely scattered into subatomic molecules.
Of course, there was Bend. Russell could think of no reason why it would be a target. It was even possible that his friends and neighbors were still around, a comfort, until he realized that the elevation of the town might mean it would be under water from the flooding.
Still, if nothing else, Russ had a destination.
Bend.
His lone hope.
Huge, covered in thick forest. Daunting.
Russ slept fitfully on the ground, shivering in the night, covered in everything stuffed in his plastic bag, but only dozed a few hours off and on.
At daybreak, Russ peered up at Temple Mountain, knowing he had to climb to the summit and look for the two tallest peaks in the state: Mt. Hood to the north, Mt. Jefferson to the south. He would not be able see the Three Sisters or Mt. Bachelor, which were close to Bend, but seeing Jefferson would be enough to get his bearings.
It was tough going, slippery and steep, trudging through the mud until he was back on dry land, higher up, where the floodwaters had not reached.
Then, behind him and to his right, he heard a metallic crunch and a hard thud.
His own van crashing back to earth?
The roaring in the skies had died down. A light wind brushed against the firs and gently swayed them. He calmed himself. Closed his eyes. Listened for a moment.
Wildlife noises as deer and rabbits and squirrels made their way through the thinning woods, moving to higher ground. The wind simultaneously smelled fresh and musty. Opening his eyes, taking a deep breath, Russ followed the sounds. The trees began to thin. Near the summit, where the high firs had given way to a rocky top, he struggled to climb past a series of boulders, and stopped to catch his breath. Looking back, Russ could see southward over the lower hills beyond.
Mt. Jefferson, far off, obscured by mist and smoke; Mt. Bachelor, though comparatively small, was somewhere behind it. To the north; Mt. Hood. Majestic, covered now by a thick, rust-colored cloud bank, an eleven-thousand-foot symbol of the state that affected weather patterns and erosion and population growth. Unlike other stand-alone Cascade Range peaks like Shasta and Rainier, Hood was not a gargantuan stone but an elegantly shaped triangle of a mountain. From Portland’s west hills where he was raised, its silhouette looked like something a kid might draw.
Here, Perry’s view was of the south face and from this perspective Hood appeared misshapen and little more than a clump of rocks, barren of snow. The entire cap of the peak had apparently been blown away by the bombs, leaving it less a mountain than a high mesa. Russell could only guess that several thousand feet of it had been lobbed off. Pockets of steam drifted up like campfire smoke; the skies beyond were the color of coffee.
And Russ knew that if he’d been standing in this spot when the bomb went off, his eyes would have liquified. Spared, as he averted the light and was too far away from the actual blast to feel its heat or be exposed to gamma radiation, he thanked God, even though Russ and the Lord had not been on the best of terms for years.
Something to do with unkept promises.
One of them held a grudge.
•
Peter Grant held up a hand to shield his eyes from sunlight and studied the far hill. He saw the smoky remnants of the bomb that Hitchcock said destroyed the Compound in Idaho but he had little data to confirm or deny the installation had been hit by a nuke.
Janine Hitchcock stared down at the more petite Deb Lansing, who said, “Colonel Hitchcock, not two minutes ago you said it was an honor to meet me. Now you pull this? What, is this an insurrection?”
Hitchcock shook her head.
“You don’t get it, do you? Before our beloved president dissolved, he said we should start with a clean slate,” Hitchcock said. “That slate begins here. My entire platoon, what I will call my Aryan Brigade, is on a mission to purify what remains of the country.”
Lansing’s eyes were huge in disbelief.
“Genocide? Are you out of your fucking mind?” Lansing said loudly. “You may not know this but there aren’t many people left to kill.”
“Don’t fret your liberal little head,” Hitchcock said. “I’ll be selective.”
“Get this in your head, colonel: As it happens, with everyone in authority presumed dead, by protocol, you are addressing the de
facto president of the United States, and if you—”
Without warning, Hitchcock slapped Lansing’s face so hard that she was knocked to the ground. Grant stepped in, but the troops in the Humvees all climbed out and those already in position raised their weapons and pointed them at him.
Hitchcock said firmly, “No, you listen up, lady—you aren’t the de facto of shit. My world, my rules.”
“Go to hell.”
“Sticks and stones and hand grenades.” Hitchcock said and turned to Peter. “Now you know the score, Grant. Me, one. You, zero.”
“Not much of a game,” Peter replied. “You’re taking command?”
Hitchcock smiled wide.
“Well, let’s just say you’ve both been relieved of yours.”
Lansing, standing now, dusting herself off, said, “You’re a world-class psycho-bitch, Hitchcock.”
“Lady, you don’t know the half of it,” Hitchcock replied.
29. Sea Change
The Oahu Queen sailed under a burnt-orange sky, drifting slowly across the Pacific under nominally restored power.
If Judy and Iris closed their eyes—as they almost could now, after a day and night of attending to the scores of injured and the dead—this would almost be a fantasy cruise, but the reality was that the voyage was anything but soothing. The rather small and slow vessel, engines intermittently stalled, was pounded by one storm after another and tossed about like the S.S. Minnow. On this surprisingly calm morning, Judy and Iris slumped into what was left of the dining room, plopped down at a table and almost fell asleep on the spot.
Roger Lind, among the survivors, joined them, bearing stale muffins and a pot of weak coffee. His brother’s family—nephew Arnold included—had been washed to sea and drowned; too ironic, in Iris’s mind.
If he was feeling despondent, Roger hid it well. “The captain says we’re making better time,” he told them, pouring a cup of coffee for Judy. “It took some effort to hot wire this buggy, so half steam ahead.”