by Ginger Booth
Tsunami Wake
Calm Act Book 4
Ginger Booth
Contents
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
From the Author
Acknowledgments
Books by Ginger Booth
Calm Act Timeline
Copyright © 2017 Ginger Booth.
All rights reserved.
Cover design by www.coverbookdesigns.com. Map by Ginger Booth based on Google Maps.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
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1
Interesting fact: The height of a tide, from low to high, varies based on the shape of nearby underwater coastline. Open ocean tides are about 2 feet. The highest tides on Earth occur in the Bay of Fundy between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, at 38 feet. Long Island Sound, between Connecticut and Long Island, featured a 6 foot tide on average. Long Island’s south shore, facing the open Atlantic, had a 3 foot tide.
“Wow, Cam, your tide goes out fast,” I commented idly, enjoying the view of the deserted ocean beach out the open passenger window of his car.
Living in the Apple these days, I was starved for open seashore and a far horizon. My friend Cam humored me today by taking a scenic detour along Jones Beach, one of the sandy barrier islands of Long Island’s south shore, on our way to a meeting. My soul yearned to be soothed by the smell of salt air, the harsh cries and soaring elegance of circling seagulls. That spoke home, to me. The feel of the stiff cold onshore breeze whipping my hair at my face. The arrhythmic crash and susurrus of slow waves lapping the sand.
There was a bug in the wave subroutine. The waves weren’t delivering. I frowned. Maybe not such an idle comment. I’d never seen a tide draw out so fast. Not even in the Bay of Fundy. I knew this coast. That tide was wrong.
A couple seconds later, in similar delayed reaction, Cam slammed on the brakes and we skidded to a stop. Stopping like this was safe enough. There was no traffic on Ocean Parkway. The barrier islands were officially evacuated for winter, Cam had told me – off limits, no food or utilities, no water. We appeared to be the only people on Jones Beach that February morning.
He stared a moment at the tide sucking away across mud flats. I gazed at him worriedly. Abruptly, he pulled a U-turn and hit the gas.
“Change of plans,” Cam said. He picked up his phone to dictate a meshnet text announcement. “To LI Rescos, LI Cocos. Execute plan ‘Higher Ground’ immediately. This is not a drill. Zero warning. No lead time. ASAP. By order, Lieutenant Colonel Cam Cameron.” He handed me the phone. “Dee, check the dictation on that?”
I stared dumbly at the phone, my heart starting to pound, my palms to sweat. “Um,” I swallowed, “want me to capitalize ‘higher ground’ and ‘asap’?”
“No, I want that sent,” he said conversationally, while he drove like a maniac. There was no one else on the road, no. But several years had passed since the last time street sweepers cleared the sand off this parkway. Between the wind and the waves, the dunes of Jones Beach inexorably crept to reclaim this alien asphalt roadway for their own. The car lurched a bit as one tire or another spun, temporarily starved for traction. Judging by his sure control of the speeding car, Cam was accustomed to compensating for that.
“Check the routing. Should be two groups on the to-list, ‘LI Resco’ and ‘LI Coco’,” Cam continued. “CC ‘Hudson Top Resco’ and ‘Hudson Lead Resco’ for me too.”
I confirmed and sent, orange-flagged for forest-fire level immediate attention.
“Thank you,” Cam said, preternaturally courteous and collected while fighting the sifting sands for speed. “Text Dwayne for me? With our GPS coords.”
“Done,” I said, this accomplished. I carbon-copied Emmett as well, with a hasty ‘love you!’ from both of us to both of them. No time to get mushy now. Besides, heart-drumming, thinly reined panic doesn’t really coexist with love. I wasn’t feeling sentimental. “Anything else? Or are you ready to tell me what’s going on?” My voice squeaked a bit on that last.
Cam considered this, as he slalomed us through a right-hand turn, sand flying from the tires. We passed through this turnoff a few minutes ago, and were now back on the island-hopping causeway we’d just crossed to reach Jones Beach. “Keep an eye on the tide for me,” he directed mildly, gunning the car up to 50 mph. Awfully fast considering our iffy state of traction.
I swallowed nervously. “Can’t see the ocean beach,” I reported. “The tide’s going out in here, too, though.” ‘In here’ being the bay and islands separating Jones Beach from central Long Island – CLI, or ‘Sea-lie’ in local parlance. A mere couple miles of island hopping on our current route. Just a few minutes at this speed, if we didn’t spin out on the sand.
“Negligible tide in the bay,” Cam informed me. “Three feet on the south side of the barrier islands, almost none inside. Few inches.”
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. No, the tides would not ordinarily race out faster than they do in the Bay of Fundy, then. And the ‘negligible’ tide in the bay looked to have dropped a couple feet, very recently. Wet rock glistened above the water, on a sunny, dry, breezy day that would dry rock quickly. Today was even warm for February, almost 60 degrees. That wasn’t a new climate change thing. All my life, there’d been a clutch of weird fake-spring days in February.
“So, Cam,” I continued, struggling to be analytical to control the terror, “why do we think the tide is racing out?”
“That happens before a tidal wave,” Cam said. “Tsunami.”
I considered the wet rocks. Still getting taller. “You don’t get tidal waves much.”
He laughed shortly. “No, Dee.”
OK, it was a dumb comment. I grew up less than 30 miles from here, as the seagull flies, mostly across salt water. That’s why reading a tide was so automatic. No, Long Island didn’t get tidal waves much. I was getting shocky.
“Are we very, very screwed?” I inquired.
“Back on LI in a couple minutes,” Cam replied. “Then we head for higher ground.”
Check. There was no high ground on Jones Beach. The barrier island was a giant sand bar. “You seem surprisingly unsurprised,” I noted. “And unworried.”
“I am doing, not worrying,” Cam returned. “Surprise is for the unprepared.”
I grinned at him
. He looked like he was having a blast. I’ve always admired Cam’s grace under pressure. He seemed more himself, more alive, amused, charismatic and absolutely self-assured, when things got hairy. His enjoyment of his battle with road traction took the edge off of my panic, too. Cam must have made an awesome combat officer in the Middle East. He still was. He’d been telling me minutes ago how they’d just finished clearing the entrenched insurgents off Jones Beach before Christmas.
“Navigator, look for higher ground,” Cam prompted. “Check the meshnet. There should be a map flashing at you, ‘Seek higher ground now.’ Suggested evac target.”
Indeed, there was a map already flashing on the phone. Cam’s people executed fast, after receiving his text. Apparently the ‘Higher Ground’ protocol was prepared in advance and ready to execute at push-button speed.
Of course, on the map, we weren’t off the barrier sand bars yet. Then the highest ground wasn’t terribly high. Nor was there any obvious way to drive there. The only route by car was to overshoot going inland, and then loop around back. But if we did that, we might as well keep going further inland.
We both blew out a deep breath of relief as we escaped the last causeway and headed inland. That relief was short-lived. I checked the rear-view window. A strange engine-like growl was mounting behind us, like a freight train. Isn’t that what they say a tornado sounds like? A freight train? The horizon seemed to be getting taller. And closer.
“Cam, we’re out of time,” I said. “High ground to the right. But there’s no road! That bike path sort of–”
A deluxe paved bike path ran along the side of the parkway to our right. Deserted, like everything else. We hadn’t reached a residential area yet, hadn’t seen any people.
“Understood,” Cam said. Without further warning, he jerked the car to narrowly avert a bit of steel highway guardrail, a couple trees, and a chunk of granite the size of a riding lawn mower, to essentially leap us from the highway down onto the bike path. “Right direction?” he inquired.
“Yeah,” I squeaked. I unlocked my arms from their crash positions at dashboard and window. I dove down to fish the phone off the floor. I’d dropped it when my arms instinctively braced for impact.
New messages. I only checked one. Emmett had responded with a simple heart emoticon in response. When I uncurled from the floor, I glanced behind us through the rear window. Any illusion of a horizon was gone. A wall was coming, a greenish grey wall against the light blue sky. “Up, Cam. Now, Cam,” I breathed in terror.
He glanced in the rear-view window. “Right.”
And right it was. Cam swerved right through underbrush, a low point between the line of trees flanking the bike path. We bounded into a marshy stretch of flat grasses centered on a bit of babbling brook ditch, a typical northeastern storm sewer, created by simply shifting pre-existing brooks into a more convenient road-parallel heading.
Cam’s little electric car wasn’t a stream-hopping model. He backed up once to give it a second try, then declared time’s up. We grabbed one backpack each, abandoned the car, leapt across the narrow ditch, and started running uphill. I still can’t vouch for tornados, but an approaching tsunami does sound a bit like a freight train. Too bad its path is so much wider than train tracks.
We crashed through another hedgerow worth of winter-bare trees and briar cane, and ran across a rectangular field of winter-dead grass, rich in fragrant cow patties. Cam was a runner. Not me. Swimming’s my sport.
I half-fell, slipping on my second cow patty. Cam grabbed me, stripped me of my backpack, and hurled it away. He grabbed my hand the better to drag me by, and resumed running.
“Now we run like our lives depend on it!” he called out.
Because of course our lives did depend on it. Long Island had lovely barrier islands, probably even at that moment entirely underneath the first tsunami wave. Pretty little marshy islands daisy-chained across a lagoon-like bay behind us, followed by land so low it wasn’t inhabited even before the Calm. Too exposed to storm surges. None of it was any barrier at all to this big a wave. We hadn’t made it a mile from open water before we lost the car.
Mercifully, the next band of trees we crashed through had less underbrush. But we had to dodge left, not uphill, to run around an empty municipal pool, ringed with a rusted wire link fence. I gasped for air, Cam pulling me as much as me running. I was so grateful to break out onto smooth roadway.
Cam stopped, and yelled, “Breather!” over the roar of the oncoming catastrophe. I doubled over panting. He dug a few things out of his backpack. He slung a full canteen around my neck, and stuffed a satellite phone into his army camouflage jacket, some other things into utility pockets on his pants. Then he dropped the backpack before grabbing my arm to run again. Our breather was less than half a minute, and I’d barely caught my breath at all.
I refused to be the death of us. Cam would protect me with his life, if it came to that. I could damn well protect him, too, by not slowing him down. I ran, better than before the breather, no matter how short my breath was.
Beside the road, a park complex opened up to our left, the sort with big lawns and baseball diamonds, and pretty shade trees, winter-bare against the pale blue sky. Like the last field, whatever it used to be, this was prime LI pasture land now. The land rose higher in that direction, so we set across dead grass and cow patties again.
That’s where the churning frothing maelstrom of the tsunami crashed into us like a 6 foot wall.
2
Interesting fact: Nuclear reactors sited directly on the East coast included Seabrook New Hampshire, Millstone in Waterford Connecticut, Oyster Creek in Toms River New Jersey, Surry Virginia near Newport News, Brunswick in North Carolina, and the St. Lucie and Turkey Point power plants in southeastern Florida. Several more nuclear plants lay in more sheltered waterfront locations, away from open ocean, including Indian Point upriver on the Hudson, and Salem New Jersey on the Delaware River. The Pilgrim plant in Massachusetts closed in 2017.
Cam caught me around the middle as the wave hit us. We clutched each other, in a desperate struggle to not get separated in the roiling water.
Maybe a 6 foot wave doesn’t sound so big. Cam was over 6 feet tall. Barely.
But that’s not how it works, being caught in a wave. Churning powerful currents sucked us down and tumbled us so hard, that even if we could force our way up, we had no idea which direction up was. The balmy fake-spring February day was lovely for air temperature in the bright sun. It made no impression whatsoever on the North Atlantic. The salt water’s bitter cold numbed us in seconds. After smashing its way inland half a mile, the tsunami carried plenty of wreckage to bash us with. Yet there was still plenty ahead to bash us into.
We got caught on a tree for half a minute, and managed to pull up and gasp some air. Cam seized the opportunity to jettison his combat boots. His brand new hand-made boots, a gift I’d brought him from Emmett today. Coveted size 11 army boots, a size so popular that the Hudson quartermasters ran out of them a year ago. Now they might as well be lead weights.
Luckily I was wearing deck shoes. I kept mine to protect my feet when fending off obstacles, as I’d been taught for white water rafting. Keep your feet downstream to push off rocks in your path. Besides, I was too busy coughing out water and sucking in air to rearrange my outfit.
Our slender tree branch wasn’t strong enough to hold us against the current. It broke and we tumbled back into the cauldron, me clutching around Cam’s shoulders until he could wriggle around to grab me back around the waist, both of us holding onto the branch with the other arm. That mostly kept our heads above water enough to breathe. I didn’t know how far we’d been carried, but the flow was losing energy, starting to stall before sucking back out to sea.
“When I say,” Cam said, panting, “let go the branch. Hold onto me. We need a better tree.”
“Got it,” I agreed. No, we couldn’t afford to let the wave’s ebb drag us back, and lose all the ground we’d gaine
d.
“That tree – wait – now.”
Cam underestimated how deep the water still was, or we were in a little dip, because I couldn’t touch bottom. “Sidestroke,” I gasped, surfacing.
We tried that for a few seconds. The water got shallower and we tried to jog a few seconds. Deeper again but Cam could drag me. This slog couldn’t have lasted more than a minute. But reaching that tree seemed to take an eternity, fighting the current and the hypothermia both, with deep gasping breaths burning in my lungs.
Our savior was an oak, lovingly pruned for strength and beauty, and fine climbing for children. Judging from the rope, there used to be a tire swing. A few boards and jutting rusty nails spoke of a platform or tree-house once upon a time. The once-stately home nearby that the tree had graced was a jagged ruin. We hung on the oak’s lowest branch, easily strong enough to hold us against the current. We gathered air for a few minutes, while I gazed up at the tree in rapture. Thank you, bless you, friend!
“Hypothermia,” Cam panted. “Gotta climb.” Our legs still dangled in winter ocean. His pretty pink lips and ears looked blue. My fingers didn’t work anymore from the cold. I dully inspected my fingers. They were bleeding, and also turning blue. Perhaps not feeling them was just as well.
“The water’s leaving,” I argued hopefully.
“More than one wave,” Cam returned sadly. “In a tsunami. First wave not always the biggest. Could be in this tree all night. Up.”
With the verve of arthritic snails, up we climbed. My hands had no grip from the cold, so I held on with my forearms. Cam used his much stronger arms to compensate for what looked like a broken leg on one side and a broken foot on the other. He must have been in agony. One thick bough up, and we declared our progress good enough, winded and spent from the effort.
Cam tried to pull off his shirt – battle jacket, whatever – but couldn’t manage the fasteners. So he dug into a cargo pocket and brought out another miracle – a chemical pocket hand warmer.