Sarah remained still. Weasel’s head came up a bit. Eye contact. Then he straightened. Shorter than Sarah. But with eyes locked. “You and Mac and Stevie,” he said, giving a shoulder turn to indicate the two of us at the table, “you show me respect. And the dog, too. That damn Duke. He’s like another person. And I guess maybe I don’t quite know how to take it.”
Sarah nodded.
“Back in Southern Illinois, when I was left to fend for myself, my future was one day. That’s what my knowledge bought me. Every sunrise was a victory. Then I came up here. It started turning into week to week. I had a longer future.”
Weasel paused. Looked down. A full thirty seconds. Then he gave a little shake, like a dog waking up. Head up, shoulders back, he found his words.
“You, Sarah, have taught me that I am no longer myself. I am you. I am us. You know more than I ever dreamed of knowing. And you teach me every day. I will never disrespect you again.”
I got a little misty.
“Damn!” Stevie whispered, “who would’ve thunk?”
A tear slid from Sarah’s eye. She pulled Weasel in and wrapped him up. Her chin rested on the top of his head. She made eye contact and gave me a crooked smile, then gently patted Weasel on the back. Weasel slid his arms up around her waist and they remained that way until Sarah dipped her head and whispered. Weasel squeezed harder and then they separated.
“How about a break while I finish making this coffee?” Sarah said.
Nobody pointed out she had already done it fifteen times.
We broke for bathroom and stretching. I followed Weasel on to the deck. We had a nice snow cover. 180 degrees of our sight lines were woods and prairie. No roads, houses, or abandoned vehicles.
“You bring binocs?” Weasel asked.
I handed him a pair of Niko camo binoculars and he swept the view. Our deck was in need of repair and we kept it that way. The hand rails remained covered with snow. We didn’t approach the front edge. During snow season we left through tunnels and camouflaged our entrance/exits. The tunnels were seriously booby trapped. No tracks back. No safe entry.
“Sorry about my fuck up,” he said, handing back the binocs. “I still gotta fight that loner in me. It’s been planted pretty deep.”
“We’re all new to this, Weasel,” I said. “Each one of us has spent years and years alone. Hard to practice on relationships when you don’t even have a mirror.”
He handed back the binocs. “We’re clean. Got a turkey tryin’ to hide about 150 yards out by the scrub pine. All hunkered down.”
I looked. Couldn’t see a thing. Sometimes I think he just messes with me with his insights and abilities.
“You know what Sarah said to me?” he asked.
“No.”
“She told me she loved me. Whispered it right in my ear. Nobody ever told me that.”
He reached over. “Give me those glasses,” he said. “Think I see a doe.”
I realized at that moment that if we were explorers, Sarah was our captain.
• • • •
Three minutes later, Sarah called us back in.
“We’re quitting for today,” she told us. “Let’s return to who we are and remember what we mean to each other. But know one thing. All of this Earth talk is interesting and debatable. But what the planet did or how she responded to our assault on her sovereignty, was not enough to kill several billion people. Humans are too tough and ornery. Something else happened. Something human. That’s what’s next. That’s what’s on Mac’s flash drive. And we learn it tomorrow morning.”
• • • •
A new day, a new breakfast. I predicted a conflict free zone.
Sarah began. “Earth can tolerate 7 billion bees or 7 billion ants or 7 billion birds. She obviously had trouble with 7 billion human beings. Seven billion apex predators.”
“Hell, said Weasel, “I don’t particularly care to be in room with any more than two or three.”
“Amen to that,” Stevie replied.
Sarah grabbed a biscuit, slathered it with cherry jam. “We continue with a question: If you wanted to kill large numbers of a species, what’s your best strategy?”
“Easy,” Weasel replied. “Group ‘em. Herd ‘em.”
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “Ant colonies, buffalo herds, schools of fish, whale pods.”
“Turns out,” Sarah said, “humans in the 20th and 21st were very compliant in forming groups. Of the seven billion humans, a huge percentage grouped themselves in urban areas. Some of the mega cities stretched for hundreds of miles.”
“Sweet Jesus,” I said. “We hastened our own extinction.”
“What I think,” Sarah responded, “is that we encouraged it.”
“How?” I asked.
“In North America in 2020, Canada and United States,” Sarah said, “over 80% of the population lived near coast lines. That included oceans, gulfs, rivers and the Great Lakes. If you look at the old satellite pictures of North America at night, most of it is dark. 80% of humanity is living on about 5% of the land mass. This is how civilizations developed thousands of years ago and we never changed. If you consider the whole surface of the earth, 90% of humanity lives on approximately 1% of the planet’s surface. This is important, because humans affect not only lands, but also oceans and rivers and fresh water lakes.”
“Don’t shit where you live,” Stevie said.
“You gonna start with the Earth is alive stuff, right about now, right?” Weasel asked.
Sarah cut her eyes at him and moved the biscuits out of his reach. She continued:
“Humans grouped together because it was efficient and comforting. Their basic needs were shelter, jobs, division of labor, food, and water. If we’re talking about 10 or million people living in a small area, they needed huge networks and systems to keep everything running smoothly. Once the support system shut down, humans were helpless. Many of the survivors of The Collapse lived on farms or in small towns or what they called ‘off the grid’. They were the indies of pre-collapse industrialized nations. Others who made through were tough urban dwellers, who got lucky or had extremely good genes. Smart like rats and tough as cockroaches.”
“The clans,” Stevie said.
“Think about this,” Sarah explained. “In the 21st even the small cities had a million people. In China, there were over 45 cities with more than a million people. The big cities, and I’m talking all over the world, not just here, had between 15 and 35 million people. They had their phones, their cars, their antibiotics, their electricity, food, water, work, public transportation. Everything dependent upon the power grid. And the power grid totally dependent on coal and oil.
“We’re going to do the effects, not the causes. Easier that way. First thing to go was food. Drought, floods, and storms of biblical proportion for several years. Holes in the ozone. Crops failed. Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America all had rich breadbaskets thousands of miles deep and wide that just gave out.
“In ’21 climate change slammed the planet. Monumental hurricanes, blizzards, typhoons, tornado swarms. Eventually the grain silos are bare, the food warehouses are empty. All aspects of human feeding revolves around grains. Cattle eat it, bakers bake it, tacos and pita contain it. Chickens peck at grains and seeds. People begin to panic. Sad thing was they didn’t know they were going to die of thirst and anarchy long before anyone starved to death.
“Let’s take this in order. Remember, we’re talking a three-year span for the endgame. But it took over a hundred years to get there.
“First, all the food goes because of droughts in some areas and floods in others. How many trucks you think a huge grocery store needs a week? Big stores, 10 or 20 every week. Huge trucks. Some of the stores open all day every day. Think about how much food and drink 10 million people consume in one day. Multiply that by every large city on the planet.
“If you are beginning to starve, job one is feeding your family and yourself. Everything else goes away. Cops
go home, train engineers stay with their families, fire fighters don’t report to work, planes have no pilots.
“It didn’t take long for power to die. They got electricity from burning coal. Coal came from engineers driving trains and someone on the other end mining and loading the trains. Electricity ran the water delivery and filtration systems. And directed waste from millions of toilets and hundreds of factories away from drinking water supplies. And don’t forget cars. Gasoline came out of the ground with electric powered pumps.
“Trucks stop coming because the drivers are staying home to find food or can’t get gas because of power outages. Then what?
Riots.
Train engineers stay home to protect family. So do cops and soldiers.
No coal for turbines to generate electricity. Nuclear power plants take up the slack. Until their technicians are killed or starved to death or just don’t come in.
National Guard comes in. Citizens are better armed than they are. Guard retreats. Or joins citizens.
No power, no food. No heat or A/C. Millions of gallons of bottled water disappear real quick. Whaddya drink? Surface water. Contaminated because sewer and water treatment is gone. Imagine 100 million people from New York down to Miami without fresh water or sewer and garbage disposal. Where does urine and feces from 100 million humans go when there is no sanitary system? What’s it like in a week? Or two? Or a month?
Cholera, dysentery, hepatitis. If you have access to well water, you are good until someone with bigger guns finds out.
The nuclear power plants start to meltdown. We had three. Braidwood, Dresden, and Zion. All were near water supplies. Those are our hot zones now.
Groups began to coalesce. Farmers, gangbangers, cops, rich people, hoarders, preppers. The old, the young, the disabled couldn’t keep up. Within a year or two, the groups turned on each other. The ones with the most fire power won. The old, the young, the crippled, and the stupid—all dead. Thirty years later, the winners are the clans and everyone else is an indie.
Now add this into the equation. Antibiotics and vaccinations are gone. What happens. Bad tooth or hangnail can kill you. Polio, smallpox, diptheria, measles, cholera, mumps, AIDS—all of them unchecked. Millions of rotting bodies, millions or rats and mice, thousands of unchecked dogs and cats. And the Black Death. Who you gonna call?
So if you lived in a rice paddy, or a remote fishing village in Scotland, or a farm in Nebraska, you were ok. Unless of course you were near a nuclear silo or power plant. But if you were self-sufficient, independent, not near other humans, you survived. This is where we are now—19th century agrarian. Maybe 18th. I don’t know how many people are alive.
“Sarah,” I said, “even with humanity’s grouping instinct and dependence on technology and fossil fuels, Earth’s fury wasn’t enough to erase most of humanity from the planet.”
“You’re right, Mac,” she said. “And humans were smart enough to race from a few million people to seven billion in a few centuries and unfortunately smart enough to wipe most of us the surface in a few weeks. Thanks to your flash drive, I know how it all happened.”
“Bathroom break,” she said. “This next stuff is brutal.”
• • • •
“My research had taken us to days before the final Chicago riots in ’23, Sarah continued. “Earth was in the global collapse state. But not the Armageddon stage. Billions of humans could have survived starvation and hardship. We are, after all, a resourceful species.
“In the 21st, any person with a computer and link to the internet could talk to the entire world. And they did. Thankfully, many saved their conversations and threads on hard drives and flash drives. I even found audio and video files from the final days. Deciphering Armageddon was not difficult. Those conversation threads, and e-mails and news documents and pictures and videos were on Mac’s flash drive. There is so much information on there that I can’t begin to crack it. But there was a nice file that contained everything we needed. It was labelled, “I hope someone can read this.” It gave me a two-month chronology of the events. It is chilling. This is what I learned:
So when humanity is stumbling toward extinction from a series of catastrophic environmental events, a small group of men gives the human race the final push. The last straw was human, not Mother Nature.
She pauses a beat, dredging the last of her cocoa before continuing. “There was a group of countries that had nuclear weapons. They had them since the mid-20th and didn’t want anyone else to get them. They had — and still do have — thousands and thousands of nuclear bombs, rockets, warheads, missiles, suitcase bombs—you name it, they had it. United States, France, England, Russia, bunch of others.”
“So right now,” Stevie said, “there are thousands of nukes laying around the world.”
“Bad news, yes. Good news, no one knows how to set them off. And why bother? There are no more nations.”
Sarah continued. “In ’23, all but three of the world’s countries wish nukes didn’t exist. And the three that love them are led by either a psychopath, sociopath, religious fanatic or combination of the three. The first was a country that developed nukes that didn’t mind selling them. Pakistan. There was another country led by a clinically insane man that developed its own nukes. Korea. And finally, there was a relatively new state—a terrorist state carved out of parts of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, and Turkey in 2019. It was a big country full of deserts, oil wells, a few big cities, and a terrified population.
The new nation, was controlled by its religious leader, Hassan Dadras. Dadras came to power through a coup, taking over power from Sayyed Ali Khamene, who was considered a danger to the free world and all Muslims who were not of his sect. Dadras, the new guy, had complete, total control over all aspects of the nation and was a far more dangerous version of the guy he ousted. The new country named themselves The New Islamic State. The rest of the world labelled it as a Rogue State.
Under Dadras, The New Islamic State espoused the belief that all people on the planet should follow their brand of Islam. Which happened to be Shiite, an extreme and relatively small Islamic religious minority. Only 15% of world wide Muslims are Shiite. Everyone who was not Shiite—Christians, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, women, homosexuals, Sunni Muslims—were despised and should be converted, enslaved, or killed. Most Shias lived in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and India.
Now most people who fought fanatics at the time felt that Dadras was a 21st century version of Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot. He was a ruthless dictator who wanted to take over the world. He used religion as his cover. The others used nationalism, separatism, or just plain old let’s kill everyone but us.
Each mass murderer had a published reason for their reign of terror. And all of them were successful writers and sometime intellectuals. In the end, each of them had the same idea. Total control of every aspect of civilian life. Food, work, sleep, entertainment, religion, sexual practices. Some used nationalism. Others politics. The Christians in the Middle Ages, used the same reason as Dadras. Religion. That was the rationale behind the Crusades. You die in the name of our superior religion.
So Dadras was just a crazy killer hiding behind religion, Weasel commented.
Pretty much, Sarah said. But he got it done. Better than anyone in the history of humanity.
Most successful mass murderers, serial killers, dictators are brilliant. Dadras was off the chart. Among his many skills, he was also a world class chess player. He started his “world game” in 2019 when he came into power. The first things he needed was nukes, which he didn’t have.
Where did he get all of his nuke making materials? Stevie asked.
It takes billions of dollars and several years just to get military grade nuclear bomb material, Sarah said. Not to mention ICBMs. So Dadras just went out and bought what he needed. Dadras bought them from the military leader of Pakistan. With a little help from North Korea, whose leader thought Pakistan, The New Islamic State, and, his country, North Korea, were all sympat
ico.
Pakistan started its nuclear program in 1972, motivated by India, their neighbor and enemy, which had a headstart on Pakistan. Pakistan became an official Islamic state in 1956. What followed were decades of military coups, civil wars, poisonings, assassinations, and terrorist bombings.
So Pakistan has nukes, lots of nukes and a general named Muhammad ul Haq who takes power in a few years before the collapse. General al Haq is very willing to sell nuclear weapons to Dadras and his New Islamic State. He needs money to fortify his personal army and build some upscale palaces and castles. It ain’t easy being a dictator.
So Dadras buys nuclear weapons from Pakistan. Slowly. Since the New Islamic State didn’t have a delivery system, Dadras buys and begins stockpiling suitcase nukes.
Explain suitcase nukes, Weasel said.
Small enough to carry, but large enough to destroy several city blocks and release deadly radiation that lasts for decades and spreads through the air.
Stevie asks, Why they didn’t just buy some rockets from the other bad guys?
Sarah says, “Dadras couldn’t buy and hide ICBM’s because they are so huge. Can’t hide them. But suitcase nukes were perfect for his plan. They are powerful and dirty, and easy to smuggle into enemy countries. Not as powerful as the ones in the movies that can destroy and entire city. Less than Hiroshima. But a nuke is a nuke and it gets everyone’s attention and heads of state lose their objectivity when you say, ‘It’s just a small nuke.’”
• • • •
So from 2019 to 2021 in the Middle East, through a series of complicated and ingenious moves, Hassan Dadras acquires 11 suitcase nukes. During the year of 2022, he sends out agents and places eight of the suitcase bombs in lead-lined hidey holes in cities all over the world.
Dadras initiates his plan during the ecological catastrophe that is already crippling most urban areas. In early 2023, during the peak of one of the most extreme northern hemisphere winters in modern history, Hassan Dadras embarks upon his chess game. The prize—world domination.
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