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

by Ginger Booth

  “Amen to that,” Brazeau agreed. Amiri nodded as well.

  “But look, New England did a lot right,” Cam continued. “Connecticut? Nearly unscathed. Including its nuclear plant. New Hampshire? Not bad, considering. Narragansett and Boston just weren’t ready yet. What we had in place, worked. The scale of the disaster exceeded our plans. But things are under control. We have to credit Link for that, as well as Cullen. Compare New England’s results to Virginia. New England we can help. Virginia? Different story.”

  “Are there plans to help Virginia?” Amiri asked. “I’ve heard Virginia has requested we take in refugees. Or demanded.”

  “Not at this time,” Cam said. “We have too many civilian dislocations of our own, plus the Hudson–New England merger. Jersey and Narragansett aren’t sorted out yet. Governor Cullen has had conversations with General Taibbi of Penn, and some inland super-states. But that’s not ours to say. Our is, ‘No, we can’t, sorry.’ Except for the nuclear reactors. Possibly the Navy.”

  “The Navy?” Amiri asked.

  “The Navy lost their ports,” Cam said. “But Hudson loves Navy. Penn does too, I imagine. I don’t have an official decision to share. I’m just saying. It’s our navy, too. They were here for us with bells on for Project Reunion.” Cam shrugged and left it for the viewer to connect the dots.

  Amiri moved on to Ty Jefferson from our panel, the hero who led the Staten Island borough council through the epidemic. He continued to lead the borough as a Resco these days.

  “Cam, what happens now in Jersey?” Jefferson asked.

  “Right now, quiet lockdown,” Cam replied. “That phase will last different lengths of time, depending. But everyone needs to settle down. There will be shifting, as coastal refugees are re-distributed, and criminals are identified and processed. We need agricultural areas and previously quiet suburbs back to growing crops by planting time. Urban areas may take longer.”

  Cam’s bland expression suggested to me that ‘longer’ could be a long time indeed.

  “Let’s talk about race,” Jefferson said, one of the foremost black leaders in the nation.

  “Ty, I defer to you on that,” Cam said sincerely.

  Ty Jefferson waved a hand, a throwaway gesture.

  “OK,” Cam conceded. “Jersey has a lot of dislocations. Including black city dwellers in white suburban or rural areas. There are a lot of criminals, not all yet collected and prosecuted. At the beginning of the Calm, Penn solved its prison population by releasing incarcerated felons into Jersey. A lot of them were black and Hispanic. There is…racial mistrust. Racial fear. It is not ungrounded.”

  Jefferson shook his head in disgust, but conceded, “It is not without grounds.”

  “I know this sounds trite,” Cam continued. “But my own husband is half-black, and from urban Jersey. There’s a talk that good black parents have with their teenage sons. Because the world is not fair. Please, Ty. Help me out here. It’ll come better from you.”

  Jefferson pursed his lips and shook his head, refusing.

  “Alright. Let’s say this advice is to anyone in Jersey who finds themselves in a new community,” Cam said. “You want to stay. And I’ll tell you this, you do want to stay, right where you are. Because if you are found…undesirable…where you are, you’ll be moved to a refugee camp.”

  “A concentration camp,” Jefferson suggested.

  “Refugee camp,” Cam insisted. “You’ll be moved however many times it takes. Each move will be less nice.

  “So where you are, your new neighbors have every reason to scrutinize you. Distrust you. Want you gone. Yes, maybe because you’re black. And here’s this white guy, me, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Except gang, I do, actually. I served years in the Middle East. I was the wrong race, and wore a hated uniform. I had to learn how to be approachable. Non-threatening. Win friends from people who had every reason to despise me. Every reason to want me gone.

  “I advise you to exert yourself. Be non-threatening. Be helpful. Work hard. The thought ‘But this isn’t fair!’ – that thought is not your friend. This process is going to be as fair as we can make it. But no, I predict it will not be fair. You know that. As a black leader, you know that, Ty.”

  Ty Jefferson nodded. “Where’s Emmett MacLaren? He was in charge of urban North Jersey.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel MacLaren has been reassigned,” Cam said. “His area of Jersey will remain under regular army control for now. Not Resco control.”

  Amiri cut in, “Colonel Cameron, was Colonel MacLaren a last chance for the Newark area? And the attempt abandoned?”

  Cam shrugged. “The approach wasn’t succeeding. We’re trying something else now. Please understand. The goal of martial law, is order. Disorder brings no good things. Crime. Insurrection. Starvation. Abuse. Drug addiction and death. And the disorder spills out and blights other areas that would otherwise be safe and productive. The Resco Raj wants good lives for all our citizens. But order is a prerequisite. If a refugee camp is the highest level of civilization we can manage, then that’s what they’ll get.”

  “There are good, innocent people trapped in that nightmare,” Jefferson said.

  Cam nodded slowly. “That’s why we tried Emmett MacLaren first. He brought in our best black Rescos as advisors. Including my husband at times. We settled veterans in the area as leavening, Cocos and militia. Emmett himself is the blackest white guy I know. His father was special operations in sub-Saharan Africa, and his unit mostly black. They were practically Emmett’s foster-fathers. Successful black guys, with strong families. And of course the Army is nearly half black. As officers, we’ve led black soldiers our whole careers. But Emmett couldn’t make the Resco model work in North Jersey. We tried, Ty. Hudson gave it our best. But those communities were not very successful even before the Calm.”

  “A sad business,” Amiri concluded. “Our hearts go out to the people in Jersey caught in less than ideal circumstances. I hope in time, things will get better. Were there any more questions on Jersey? I’m eager to move on to climate change and sea level rise. Ah, we have a question first from our town hall in Ithaca Upstate. Yes?”

  “Marie Roberts, Coco in Seneca Falls,” the woman identified herself. “Who did this to Jersey? What’s being done to find and prosecute the people responsible for this mess in Jersey and the city? And why was a known bio-terrorist, Canton Bertovich, buried with military honors in Emmett MacLaren’s district in North Jersey?”

  I shook my head no to Amiri. But Carlos nodded yes. Yes won.

  25

  Interesting fact: The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was generated by a magnitude 9.2 earthquake – the third strongest earthquake ever recorded. The waves were up to 100 feet tall, and killed perhaps 280,000 people across 14 countries. (Estimates vary.) Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand were hardest hit.

  Cam smiled faintly. My estimation of his acting skill skyrocketed. “Hi, Marie, great question. Here’s the thing. We’ve identified three people who were behind the Ebola epidemic, and setting up Jersey to fail. General Tolliver of Penn was executed in a coup. Doctor Clarke Whitfield was executed for crimes against humanity. We have names for her science team, but they fled to South America. Major Canton Bertovich committed suicide. Why did he choose to die in Jersey? Well, he grew up there. Maybe he liked that marsh.

  “Now they’re dead. We can’t make them any deader. We do know who authorized their actions. In fact, who ordered them to commit these acts. That was the Congress and Commander-in-Chief of the United States. Why was Hudson singled out for such heinous treatment? Because our urban population was far above sustainable levels. You know these things.”

  “But someone gave him military honors,” our town hall questioner Marie Roberts insisted. “In Emmett MacLaren’s district in North Jersey,” she repeated.

  “They buried him,” Cam said. “That’s not a crime. And arguably, Bertovich was not a criminal. He obeyed orders. I never received orders like that, thank
God. I would not have obeyed them. But he did.

  “I don’t like it any better than you do, Marie. Actually, I went ballistic when I saw that story. I risked one of my most cherished friendships, with Emmett MacLaren. Who is one of the finest soldiers, finest men, I’ve ever known. But Emmett did nothing wrong. And we will not follow up. The past is dead. Our proper concern is for the present and the future.”

  I could have hugged Cam. Emmett and Cam spent a long time closeted in our bedroom that Sunday morning, hashing it out. Emmett gave Cam more truths than he’d ever wanted to know about the dark side of the Calm Act, and Emmett’s ties to the death angels. Cam was pretty subdued afterward. When Emmett left Monday afternoon, they’d embraced, albeit guardedly. Their friendship would survive, changed but not broken.

  “But they’re still out there,” Marie persisted. “These so-called ‘death angels.’ Poisoning the oxycontin and distributing it.”

  “No further comment,” Cam said. He shifted in his chair, pain clear on his face.

  “Are you alright, Colonel?” Amiri asked in concern.

  “No, actually,” Cam said. “Could we take a break?” He was overcome with a wracking cough.

  We gave Cam a rest, and swapped in Carlos Mora for the relatively benign topic of the Hudson–New England merger. Connecticut’s Governor Fallon was also on our panel. Between them they painted a just but rosy picture of Connecticut’s recent experience transferring into Hudson. Dwayne Perard joined the video lineup for a few minutes to assure everyone that yes indeed, Long Island was still in business to deliver voter testing and train-the-tester workshops.

  The sticky bit was the fate of New England’s far more ambitious draft constitution. Conveniently, our Hudson constitution expert, Cam, was asleep. Carlos punted, saying that in practice, an incomplete constitution was the least of our problems this month. And our now-customary trouble-shooting Resco-at-large, Emmett MacLaren, was currently touring New England to evaluate status and make recommendations.

  Mercifully, no one mentioned the fact that Emmett’s last trouble-shooting assignment ended in failure, in North Jersey. He hoped to give them the same chance to rebuild as the Apple Core. Instead they got pure martial law crackdown, with no end in sight.

  We didn’t take many questions. Then Amiri gave everyone a quarter hour intermission.

  “Welcome back, Cam,” Amiri said with a broad smile. “Feeling better?”

  We’d switched out the office chair grouping for our normal slouchy leather couch, with Cam’s feet back up on pillows on the coffee table, head laid on the couch back, swaddled in blankets. A breakfast tray sat between Cam and Amiri, bearing glasses, water, and fine Kentucky bourbon.

  “A-OK,” Cam claimed unconvincingly. His eyes looked glassy. “Sorry. I didn’t want to appear on camera this slouchy. But having my feet down for so long really hurt.”

  “Understood,” Amiri said. “Just let us know if you need to take a break again.”

  Cam agreed with a nod and fortified himself with a second finger of bourbon.

  “For our last segment, we’ll talk about climate change,” Amiri said. “A topic that has been forbidden and censored for several years now. Until today.

  “We’re up to about seven foot sea level rise so far. The rate of rise seems to be slowing today. Colonel, weren’t we expecting this to stop at six feet?”

  Cam shrugged. “Six to ten was our best guess. There’s only so much ice volume on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But, rising water, huge tsunamis, plus a South Pole heat wave, are causing domino effects. Meaning, melt from the edges of the East Antarctic, possibly Greenland. Though it’s winter in Greenland now.”

  “Was this a natural event, Cam?” Amiri asked point-blank.

  “We believe it was a human-accelerated, natural event. Meaning, the Western– Let’s just call it the WAIS.” Cam pronounced it ‘Waz.’ “The WAIS was going to collapse, we knew that. This sea level rise was inevitable, within the next twenty years we thought. Could have been this year. And the rise would have been fast. Like within a week or a month. But that wouldn’t generate a tsunami. Or rather it would generate a lot of little tsunamis, that wouldn’t reach North America. To generate a tsunami takes a sudden massive shock.

  “No tsunami in history has been this large. There may have been one since the last ice age. But that’s just a theory. It is far from easy to generate a wave of this magnitude. Like, ten thousand Hiroshima bombs sort of not-easy.”

  “Surely you exaggerate,” Amiri said.

  “I don’t remember exactly,” Cam admitted. “But something like that. We have a lot of bombs bigger than Hiroshima. Anyway, I’ve been following our climate team’s progress, investigating what happened. At this point, their best guess, is that yes, this event was triggered. By a truly colossal bomb. More likely more than one. But that alone isn’t enough. So the thinking is that the bomb was intended to trigger the WAIS to collapse. Kind of slowly, kind of fast, depending on how you look at it. Now, at any rate. But it triggered an earthquake as well.”

  “Who would do that?” Amiri probed. “Or rather, why would anyone do that?”

  “Well, there’s the two things, the tsunami and the sea rise,” Cam said. “My guess is that no one intended the tsunami. They just wanted the sea rise.

  “So what does the sea rise do? Well, it uses a lot of energy, cooling the oceans. Could slow climate change, break us out of a vicious cycle of worsening global warming. That would be a result worth shooting for.

  “The other possibility is that they really did want to cause devastation. And underestimated the effect. There are hundreds of millions, maybe half a billion, living at sea level. The aim may have been to disrupt industrial activity. And depopulate. And it did that.”

  “That doesn’t really shed light on who did it, though, does it?” Amiri said.

  “Not really,” Cam agreed. He didn’t turn to Amiri anymore, so much as roll his head that way on the couch back. He wasn’t well enough for this.

  “Don’t we have satellite images?” Amiri pressed.

  “Yes. They aren’t much help,” Cam said. “White continent. Followed by a deep white fog. Seismograph reports are consistent with a record-shattering earthquake, with something funky first. There were nuclear detonations, big ones from the radiation measurements. That’s what the scientists can tell us.

  “We’ve provided the scientific evidence to IBIS, the new interstate FBI, and asked them to investigate who did this. I’m sorry, Amiri. We have no answers yet. Let’s move on.”

  “Right, let’s move on,” Amiri said. “Of course, the key question now is, what will this do to our weather?”

  “Which we also don’t know,” Cam allowed. “We have cooled the ocean. Especially the southern world ocean. And added lots of fresh water on top. Non-obviously, we warmed the northern oceans. Our new seven feet of water was pushed up to us from the tropics. And the wind is howling. Because the continent is cold, the ocean is warm, and cold air rushes under warm.

  “The polar vortex, around the North Pole, keeps coming unglued and wanders south into Canada, Russia, sometimes Europe. That’s caused us some extreme cold the past few winters. The vortex is bothering Siberia at present, and we’re a little warm here in North America. That could shift. There is a risk that ocean circulation patterns could change. Whole ocean currents could move, or slow. But those changes would probably take years. There’s momentum already in the system, unimaginable gigatons already in motion. Yeah, I’m getting too deep here, huh?

  “Their best guess for the weather this year is extreme instability, possibly cooler. If the winds don’t die down, well, that’s a problem.”

  Amiri gave a nervous laugh. “Extreme instability. Well, we’ve already seen that.”

  Cam pursed his lips. “I don’t think we have, Amiri. I mean the kind of instability that threatens crops. Freezes out of season. Desiccating winds, followed by devastating floods. We anticipate a challenging year. We advise defensive a
griculture. We’ve asked the state agricultural offices to staff up to prepare advice and best practices.”

  Amiri’s face registered shock. “Are we talking famine?”

  Cam nodded very slightly. “That’s possible. I’d like to encourage everyone to take this seriously. If you still haven’t grown food, it’s time to learn. Every little bit could matter this year.”

  “You’re serious,” Amiri said.

  “Very much so,” Cam agreed.

  “But we have stockpiles,” Amiri probed.

  Cam nodded, but offered no comment. Anyone like me, involved in food production, knew those stockpiles would deplete fast if not renewed this year. Harvests were good the past two years, but Project Reunion allowed a lot more mouths a seat at the table.

  Amiri pressed harder. “Do you anticipate lower wages?” Rations and wages amounted to the same thing, in Hudson.

  “Not at this time,” Cam said. “We’ll do what we need to do. Let’s move on.”

  “Right,” Amiri said. “Colonel, what can you tell us about our overall progress, with climate change? The world has a significantly lower population – Well, let’s stop there. Do we know how much lower the world population is?”

  “Roughly,” Cam agreed. “Before the tsunami, we were down to about four billion. It’s possible the tsunami brought that closer to three billion. Loss of life in the southern hemisphere is…unimaginable. And the Indian Ocean.”

  Amiri was too staggered to reply at once. “That’s…”

  “Perhaps a moment of silence for the fallen,” Cam suggested. He closed his eyes and bowed his head. Amiri followed suit, and pulled himself together.

  “Thank you,” Amiri murmured. “So carbon dioxide levels are now falling?”