Tsunami Wake: Post Apocalyptic Thriller (Calm Act Book 4)

by Ginger Booth

  Sean nodded thoughtfully, then frowned at a new thought. “Do we know how this threat was delivered? An anthrax attack on Boston. Very specific. Very quick. This whole thing, from Cam posting a few metrics, to Link throwing a state away. What, two hours? Three?”

  “About three hours, sir,” Cam said, “until General Link called you.”

  “Alright. Obviously I don’t have all the facts,” Sean said. “I certainly wouldn’t hand Jersey over to Virginia because someone made a terrorist threat. That’s ludicrous. It’s my state. If someone attacks it, I defend it. This is gibberish.

  “John?” Sean continued. “You have the most reach and contacts. I’d like you to follow up, investigate, and explain to me this dysfunction in New England. I don’t want to do anything about it. I don’t even want Connecticut. No offense. You have a lovely state. You’re our kind of people. But I was very fond of having a cooperative quiet neighbor to the east. Now it’s gone squirrelly, and I want to know why. Especially if states will continue to break off of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” John agreed.

  “In the meantime, no public announcements yet,” Sean directed to Carlos. “We are in discussions about the transfer of Connecticut. Not conclusions. You can go forward with the voter testing. Just call it a contingency plan for now. My apologies for jumping on you for that, Carlos. You were proactive. It was a good idea. Keep ’em coming. Did you have anything to add tonight, Pete?”

  “I did,” Pete Hoffman agreed, Hudson’s top Resco. “Gentlemen, Dee, there’s a difference in style between Hudson and New England. You’ve needed to be independent, self-reliant. Your command chain hasn’t worked. I get it. But the command chain in Hudson works. You will avail yourselves of it. Cam, note I’m speaking to you, too.”

  Cam, John, Carlos, and I nodded, in variously unconvincing degrees of meekness.

  “Pleased, darlin’?” Emmett asked, when he at last wandered into our bedroom that night. Restless, he drifted toward a corner. Gladys and I had hastily piled plastic storage tubs and sewing gear there, to clear out space for John Niedermeyer to sleep in the grow room on the fourth floor. Normally we used that space for craft projects as well as the indoor crops.

  “To have Connecticut join Hudson?” I asked. “Sure! I mean, it was weird. But I’m glad, if it happens. Aren’t you?”

  “Uh-huh,” Emmett semi-agreed. He peeled the top off a storage tub and looked inside. He scooped a hand in and brought it out with a quarter bodice of wedding dress spilling down, replete with pins, and trailing unfastened lace. “Are you putting this together, or tearing it apart?” he asked softly.

  “I haven’t gotten back to it since Christmas,” I hedged. I hadn’t worked on my wedding dress in over a month. “I was reworking the bodice. You’re not supposed to see it until the altar, you know. When it’s a dress instead of in pieces.”

  “Uh-huh,” he breathed, and poured the dress fragments back into the tote.

  “You’re tired, Emmett,” I suggested gently. These summit meetings were grueling for him, playing host as well as participant. And of all the Rescos, his own urban North Jersey was going the worst, and that couldn’t feel good. He was up by 5 a.m., and it was after midnight now. He’d spent the past couple hours brainstorming Jersey again with Pete and Carlos and Ash. “Come to bed.”

  He sat heavily on the bed and threw off his clothes in a rush, tossing them onto a chair he kept there for the purpose. When it was warmer, he still put his uniforms away fastidiously, no matter how tired he was. But that January night, it was barely above forty degrees in our bedroom. The game now was to shed our clothes as fast as possible, then duck under the down comforter to pull on the sweats he wore for pajamas. We stored the pajamas under our pillows.

  Cam claimed to me once that living without heat in winter was romantic. Somehow Emmett and I weren’t rising to the challenge. Of course neither of us was a playful comedian like Cam’s husband Dwayne. Maybe if we were less solemn. We used to play, once. After midnight, after a long workday, wasn’t play time. Perhaps compassion would serve well enough.

  “Did you accomplish anything?” I invited. “Carlos and Ash have any ideas?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, stretching to lay his back flat. He shoved his pillow aside and laid an arm across his forehead. “Time limit. Carlos suggested a six month time limit. Win, lose, or draw, by April I’m out of Jersey. Like a tour of duty. And treat it like a tour of duty in the meantime, instead of a nine to five job. Get in, stay in, then get out.”

  “No weekends off?” I asked numbly.

  “I come home for meetings and stuff,” he replied. “Stay an extra day then. Maybe once a month. Maybe less.”

  “Oh.” I begged myself to think of something positive to say. But for once, Emmett spoke faster than I did.

  “Sorry, darlin’,” he said quietly. “But this is exhausting. Waste twelve hours a week coming home, going back. Comes out of my sleep mostly. Half the time I’m in the wrong place. Switching gears doesn’t work. I’m here physically, but not emotionally. Not really. This would have been normal for an army wife before the Calm. Not so different from Project Reunion.”

  That seemed a moot point. Before the Calm, I’d never imagined marrying an army officer. And Project Reunion was special, our joint crusade. I tried to get involved in North Jersey, be of some help to him in taming the urban wreckage and hardened insurgents. But the inner cities weren’t my place, weren’t my people. For decades, ever since they moved north to work in the Connecticut munitions factories during World War II, the blacks and whites had lived separate lives. Different cultures, different neighborhoods, different accents. We had no Jim Crow laws. We just didn’t mix. I barely knew them. And the social mess in North Jersey now was far worse than any little Connecticut inner city.

  “Then what?” I asked. “After April?” Did it just keep going like this? Most of the lead Rescos had other specialties: engineering, diplomacy, intelligence, sea rescue. But Emmett was a combat officer. He directed combat a couple times a week now, in Jersey.

  The pause was so long, I thought he’d fallen asleep. But he replied, “Don’t know. Take a break for a month and do it again, probably. You sure won’t have a house like this in North Jersey. Not by April. Need sleep. Good night, darlin’.”

  I lay awake thinking a long time. Mostly recalling his sad expression as my woven hemp wedding dress fabric poured through his fingers, back into its storage bin. It’s not like I didn’t have a career of my own to pursue. Before the Calm, I was a single professional, a software development manager for a media company. With Emmett I was the same, for the most part. Single with benefits. A very nice house, sadly deficient in heat. But no doubt my place in Connecticut would need to cut back on heat now, too, to abide by Hudson’s stricter carbon standards.

  I was growing very tired of making Emmett sad by stalling on the wedding. But he didn’t have time to hold a wedding now. It wouldn’t make any difference. We’d still live separate lives.

  I decided to ask him, after the house emptied out from the summit, if he’d like to just quietly get married before going back to work in Jersey. If that would make him happy. Because I didn’t want him to be sad anymore over that. I loved him. And I’d take as much of him as was available.

  That original projection, one in ten survival chances for life on Earth. That’s what I meant to ask him about that night. I’d forgotten all about it.

  Emmett fell out of bed around 4 a.m., yanking his uniform on. I blearily registered that Pete Hoffman was in our bedroom, the two of them trading rapid-fire army jargon. About all I caught was the location. Passaic. Mass attack on the Passaic food distribution hub.

  Emmett kissed my lips briefly, and was gone. That was the last time I’d seen him in person.

  6

  Interesting fact: As early as 2014, scientists warned in the journal Science that only two glaciers pinned the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) in place, the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. Both were failing
. Collapse of the WAIS could raise sea levels by as much as 3 meters, and that collapse was imminent. How long the process would take was unclear. Other papers suggested the collapse could take as little as a few weeks.

  Our helicopter landed on the central green at Brooklyn Prospect. Militia hustled forward to pull Cam and me off. The chopper took off again straightaway for its next tsunami victim rescue assignment, down by Coney Island.

  I was able to shuffle along slowly, leaning heavily on a woman in the ubiquitous army camouflage. Nothing was broken, but I was horribly stiff. Another two hulking militia carried Cam on a stretcher for the remaining hundred yards to home, which fronted the green. My home, the gorgeous double-wide brownstone Emmett had selected to lure me into living with him in the Apple Core. The house, now renowned as the ‘Brooklyn Resco mansion’ came nicely equipped with amenities, such as power and Internet, the last surviving tree in Brooklyn, a lap pool, and a militia barracks next door. Before moving in, I never would have guessed how handy the militia feature would prove.

  What I longed for, trudging up to the half-story grand entrance, was for Emmett to throw open the doors, enfold me in his arms, and carry me inside. What I got was our housekeeper Gladys, directing the militia to deposit us on the living room couch. Hudson’s ruler, Governor-General Sean Cullen, his political second Lt. Colonel Ash Margolis, ruler of the Apple Core, and Connecticut’s lead Resco, Lt. Colonel Carlos Mora, smiled at us from their various corners of the first floor. But they had phones glued to their ears, and that familiar air of Rescos directing controlled chaos.

  Married to a Resco, sort of, I knew that look well. They didn’t have time to deal with us.

  “Where’s Emmett?” I asked Gladys, yearning.

  She pursed her lips, and pushed me into the couch. “They haven’t heard from Emmett yet.” I bounced forward in my seat in panic, and she pressed me back. “Communications are spotty, Dee. Don’t worry. First things first. Dry clothes and a hot drink for you two.”

  “And a phone?” Cam begged her receding form. Gladys waved a hand dismissively over the banister as she thudded up the grand staircase to my room.

  Gladys knew Rescos, too, and she knew me. She wouldn’t let either of us have a phone or computer. Her priority was to get us dressed in warm dry sweats and thick socks, swathed in down comforters, with our feet up on pillows on the coffee table. She firmly required that we finish our first cups of home-grown herb tea and a plate of sliced apples and cheese besides.

  She was right, of course. My peeled apple slices had a beautiful blush of pink, where the apple skin’s color had bled through. The flavor was divine. The local fresh little mozzarella balls tasted of a clean fresh spring breeze. What the tea lacked in flavor, it more than made up for with how good the hot china mug felt in my fingers, the steam expanding and clearing my sinuses with warmth.

  Gladys hovered over us, fists on hips, to observe compliance with her orders. “I could fire up the hot tub,” she suggested. “Or draw baths for you…” She reconsidered Cam, whose battered knees and ankles would no longer bend. We had a hell of a time getting him into dry sweatpants.

  “I want a phone,” Cam reiterated. “I want to call my husband. I need to take back command of Long Island.”

  “Thank you, Gladys,” Sean Cullen said, arriving to place an encouraging hand on her shoulder. “You can get back to making dinner now.”

  “Don’t let them get up,” the housekeeper admonished the head of state, firmly wagging an accusing finger at us. “His knees are swollen to the size of grapefruit, and he refused to take aspirin. She’s only in good shape compared to him. They should both be in bed.”

  Sean tamped out a grin, and nodded. “I’ll take it from here.” Gladys moved to leave at last.

  Sean continued to us, “I think it’s best you two catch a nap. We’re doing a national broadcast at 6 p.m. That’ll help bring you up to speed. Cam, your husband Dwayne has been in command of LI all day. He’s doing an outstanding job. After the broadcast, you can talk to him. But not if you’re delusional. You’re sidelined with injuries. Dwayne’s in place. Dwayne’s in charge. Do not undermine Dwayne during a crisis.”

  “Understood, sir,” Cam said, chagrined.

  “And Emmett?” I begged.

  Sean looked away, his mouth set in hard lines. “The Jersey shore was hit hard. We haven’t heard from Emmett yet. Or his Cocos.” A Coco was the next level down from a Resco. A Coco was the face of martial law to a single community within a Resco district. “It may take a while to re-establish communications.”

  That sounded reasonable. But I wished Sean would meet my eye. “PR News? I should be involved in this broadcast.” I was one of the managing directors of PR News. Of course I should be in on this crisis broadcast.

  “That’s a negative, Dee,” Carlos Mora called out from my office. He’d momentarily covered his phone with a hand to bark at me. Then he turned back to his computer, phone at his mouth to continue urgent discussions with someone, somewhere.

  “You weren’t available,” Sean said gently. “Others stepped in, just like with Cam. Please. I have to prepare my speech. Relax. Do nothing.” He directed that last sharply at Cam. “Regain your strength.”

  The governor was already walking away when Cam asked, “Sir? Where’s my CO? Or is that in the broadcast, too?” Colonel Tony Nasser was Cam’s commanding officer. Colonel Pete Hoffman was mine, insofar as I was a junior Resco.

  Sean sighed. “No. Definitely not. Tony has nuclear power plants of concern. He’s not available. Dee, Pete can’t leave Jersey now, either. I will be your CO for the day.” He gave us a wan smile. “And I’m very busy.”

  “Yes, sir,” we both said sadly. Testament to our unfitness to do anything useful, the nuclear power plant comment sailed past us without registering.

  “Good to see you safe,” he said pointedly. “Rest. Get better.”

  It rankled. But for the greatest crisis yet in young Hudson’s history, hero Lt. Colonel Cam Cameron and I, one of the masters of our media, got sidelined on the couch. But they were right. I could have told the living room monitor to show us what was going on. But I chose to obey. We slept for an hour before the big broadcast.

  Some time during the nap, I finally stopped shivering.

  “Good evening, everyone,” my old friend Mangal began, on the big screen in my living room at 6 p.m. I was surprised to see him as the news anchor tonight. Mangal and I normally worked behind the scenes.

  “Tonight’s broadcast is a special report on today’s tsunami crisis, a joint effort between Project Reunion News and Indie News Web. We have video and reports from correspondents all along the northeast coast. We’ll also carry a short national address from Governor-General Sean Cullen of Hudson.

  “First, what we know of what happened. Tsunami waves of unprecedented size and power are traveling up the Atlantic Ocean. They first struck the continental ex-United States in Florida around 8:00 a.m., and continued north at 500 miles per hour.” Mangal’s face shrunk to a box at lower-left on the screen, so the main display could show a schematic of the wave moving up the east coast, with a time-line. The wave traces ran straight across the Atlantic, east-west parallel lines.

  “We received no warning here in Hudson, because communications and power were knocked out all the way up the I-95 corridor. For the most part, the eastern seaboard was caught by surprise south of Long Island. North of Long Island, there was some little advance warning. We’ll get back to that.”

  Mangal drew a deep breath. “We’re not certain of the cause of this catastrophic wave system. But we believe it was a semi-expected event – the collapse of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, near the South Pole.”

  The schematic expanded to include the Atlantic from North Pole to South, parallel angry red wave lines marching up the lines of latitude. Then the view zoomed in on the whole of Antarctica itself. A large paisley-curved section of the continent, including a north-reaching peninsula, was outlined in throbbing red
.

  Mangal continued, “Scientists have known for years that this ice sheet was unstable. Global warming was expected to cause it to break up and slide into the ocean, possibly very quickly. This single glacier system, on a continental scale, includes enough ice to raise worldwide sea levels by up to six feet.” An animation played while he said this, imaging a possible breakup sequence of the WAIS.

  I was impressed. Our graphics designer Will must have spent all day on the illustrations and animations.

  A new animation replaced the shattered WAIS, to portray an abstract sloping shoreline with vertical ocean depth meter. Deepest blue showed yesterday’s sea level, medium blue for a new higher level. “At this point,” Mangal continued, “we believe two and a half feet of sea level rise are accomplished so far.” A third, higher, lightest blue level added onto the schematic, which zoomed out to encompass the shoreline receding to vanish under water. “And we expect that to double, to five feet or more.

  “That was all very complicated,” Mangal said, his face in the corner swapping out with the graphics to dominate the screen. “To recap: we were surprised by a tsunami of record-breaking size and power for the Atlantic Ocean. This was not a single wave, but a continuing event.

  “This event is not over. In addition to the huge flooding waves, the underlying sea level has risen, and will likely continue to rise. It could take days, months, or years to stabilize at the new, higher level. In fact, sea level is expected to rise throughout our lifetimes. It’s just rising abruptly this week. The massive tsunami waves are damping out at this hour. But they remain a risk. Larger waves are possible.

  “This cannot be stressed enough. The coastline Is. Not. Safe. We urge you to pay careful attention to instructions issued by your martial law community coordinators, the Cocos. If you do not have a Coco, or communications are broken – stay safe on high ground. Do not go below the tsunami high water line. Again, this event is not over yet. Stay high and dry, and stay safe. If you have a Coco, obey instructions from your Coco, not news from the Internet. Local conditions vary widely.”