Rockfall

by William Allen

  One good thing to come from this approaching debacle was a relaxation of the travel ban, I soon found out. Evacuation orders for low-lying coastal regions were already being issued by the time the three of us returned to the house. Marta, having temporarily abandoned the watch station downstairs, met us as we came in the back door and explained about the temporary change in the travel restrictions. “No other way to complete the coastal evacuations,” she said.

  “I’ve got the camera feeds rerouted to the screens up here,” she explained. “We got too much to do for me to hang out downstairs.”

  “But honey,” Mike interjected. “You do it so well.”

  “And I look damn good doing it,” Marta retorted saucily.

  “Where are the kids?” I asked carefully, not wanting to step on toes.

  “Lisa has them all watching movies in the den,” Beatrice explained.

  “Can you get Pat on the road?” I asked Nikki, who was sitting in the living room, transfixed by the coverage. “With the travel ban temporarily lifted, this may be his best chance to get here.”

  Nikki jumped at my suggestion, her trance shattered as she fumbled for her cellphone. Whatever the consequences, I knew she would want her husband to be with her and the kids. Knowing Pat, he was likely already halfway to New Albany. No moss growing on that guy, I thought with approval.

  As an older brother, I knew the chosen spouse of a younger sister was never supposed to be good enough for the little princess, but Patrick Parker defied that bit of conventional wisdom. I loved my little sister, but all of us in the family thought we’d gotten lucky with Pat as an in-law. Quiet and outwardly unassuming, Pat had a quick intellect and a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor that often left me in stitches. Like Mike, he seldom talked much about his darker experiences in the Army, but Pat had dozens of hilarious stories that usually resulted in him being the butt of the joke.

  As Nikki frantically began to speed dial her husband, I eased into a seat at the end of the unoccupied sofa by the door and watched as Beatrice quickly switched back and forth between the channels. None of the national broadcasts even mentioned the impending hurricane, but the local channels provided non-stop coverage, routinely breaking into the national news to give updates. This disconnect nagged at me for a few minutes, and then I thought my earlier musings.

  No FEMA temporary housing, no interest free loans, and no insurance payouts. These points bounced around in my head, clamoring together in a variety of connections until I finally experienced a flash of clarity. We weren’t seeing any coverage on the national news because the Federal government was going to leave us to our own devices. No sense in alarming the other sheep when a wolf was coming.

  No aid was coming, I reminded myself. We were going to face this onslaught without a safety net. This might be our trigger event, I mused darkly. Unlike what we saw in fiction, it turns out the end of our society can happen in stages, with different parts of the country falling apart at varying rates. One need look no further than the destruction of the West Coast, or the lawlessness in the Southwest, to understand. If this hurricane hit with the force being projected, then this storm could very well herald our own descent here.

  “How long do we have until this thing makes landfall?”

  “Two days, three if we’re unlucky,” Mike replied almost instantly.

  “Unlucky?” Nancy asked. “How is an extra day unlucky?”

  “Gives it more time to develop,” Beatrice noted. “I remember when Tropical Storm Allison sat over Houston on for two days straight, just building strength.”

  “Dumped more than thirty-five inches of rain on the city and flooded the downtown area before finally moving on,” Mike added. “And that was just a tropical storm at the beginning of June.”

  “This is going to be much worse, I’m afraid,” I continued regretfully. “We are looking at maximum sustained winds of over one-hundred-and-fifty miles-per-hour already for Hurricane Debbie. No telling where that will be when the storm finally makes landfall. Still nothing definitive on the track?”

  Mike shook his head with a sigh. “The damn thing is just drifting back and forth in the Gulf, soaking up energy as it continues to develop. From what I can tell, the National Hurricane Tracking Center hasn’t reset yet after evacuating Miami, so what we’re getting is from the NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center.”

  “Think it’ll reach a category 6 before landfall?” Nikki asked after ending her call.

  “No such thing,” Mike scoffed, a touch of humor finally entering his tone as he tweaked our little sister. “That’s just something they made up for the SciFi channel.”

  “Really?” Nikki and Nancy exclaimed together.

  “Yeah,” I chimed in, adding my knowledge to the mix. Rogue hurricanes were more in my prepping wheelhouse than meteorites wrecking civilization as we knew it. “Anything with sustained winds averaging over one hundred seventy-five miles per hour is a Cat 5. Doesn’t matter how high the wind speeds reach. There’s no upper limit.”

  “Why is that the cutoff?” Nancy asked, her curiosity piqued by the number. I knew the answer, but I resisted the urge to speak the words out loud, so I instead I just gave her a shrug.

  Nobody needed to hear that anything over one-hundred-and-seventy-five miles-per-hour sustained winds simply meant overkill, since anywhere such a storm made landfall would be declared a zone of total destruction. Nothing this side of a purpose-built bunker would be able to survive such force. Coward that I was, I just shrugged in response to Nancy’s question.

  Turning instead to Nikki, I gave her a searching look, and she nodded. As I expected, Patrick Parker was already on his way here.

  “Okay, folks, I think we need drag out our hurricane protocols,” I formally declared, and Mike went straight to the bookshelf to grab the correct binder.

  “You guys have your own hurricane plan?” Beatrice asked, and Marta gave her mom a comforting pat on the shoulder before joining her husband at the table.

  “Of course we have a hurricane plan,” Marta finally replied to her mother. “We’ve got kids, and we live in a state that experiences so many hurricanes. Even this far inland, you know how bad they can be. We get the leftovers all the way up to Fort Worth, too.”

  The black, three-ring binder wasn’t anything special, just something I’d recycled from my office and stocked completely full with several checklists, an action plan, and page after page of supporting documentation. I’d used the first emergency short-form checklist that crazy morning when Mike had called me, babbling about a rockfall. That was simply intended for an effort to mitigate damage in a situation where we had little to no advanced warning.

  This time, with at least forty-eight hours to get ready, Mike unclipped the four-page checklist we’d last used two years ago when Hurricane Della threatened to make landfall in Port Arthur. What the heck was it with hurricanes starting with D lately?

  That Category 3 hurricane paused in the Gulf for nearly twenty-four hours before swinging east to lay a beatdown on Houma, Louisiana. We’d gotten lucky there, lessons were learned, and I’d continued fine-tuning this document for years, which I’d been developing even before my move back to the country. Much of the text was cut-and-pasted from open source or government handouts, but neither Mike nor I were shy about stealing from private sources. We weren’t trying to write a book, just get the best information in a handy format for our own personal use.

  “All right, guys and dolls,” I started, gesturing to the lists.”We need to split this checklist up into the prepared sections. Find your holes and give me the damage assessment.”

  Marta took the household and healthcare section, Mike got the one he’d written for engineering and infrastructure, and I kept the farm section. As we planned, these three core areas overlapped in multiple places, and the three of us already knew when and where. Nikki, who was aware of the plan even though she lived too far away to previously participate, looked on with a knowing grin while Nancy and Beatri
ce continued to give us confused glances as the three of us sat the table and hashed out a multi-stage action plan.

  “Damage assessment? The hurricane hasn’t even hit yet,” Beatrice grumbled, and Marta gave a short laugh to break the tension before answering her mother’s question.

  “Bryan always says that,” Marta explained. “He means how much is it going to cost or how long is it going to take to do something. As in, what’s the price for the new air filters, and how long will they take to arrive via UPS versus ordering from Amazon.”

  Listening with one ear to Marta’s words, I nodded at Mike to get the ball rolling.

  “We’ve already sandbagged the pump house, so I can mark that off. Next, we need to test and deploy the storm shutters,” Mike announced, “followed by prepping the windmills and securing the vehicles and everything loose around the homestead. For once, I don’t see any outside items we need to pick up or purchase.”

  “Think we should try to dismount the windmills instead of simply letting them freewheel?” I asked, thinking about the potential damage. “If these winds are above a hundred , we might lose all three. In fact, the odds are pretty darn high.”

  Mike’s brow creased as he considered my question.

  “I know how much you hate heights, brother. You up for doing some high wire work?”

  From his grin, I knew Mike was enjoying my discomfort, but I had to be honest.

  “No, but we’re going to do it anyway,” I replied with a long-suffering sigh. “We can’t take the risk of losing them. Hell, even if towers get blown down, we can rebuild. If, and only if, we have the rotors and heads.”

  Marta opened her mouth to ask a question, but the distinctive ring tone of Nancy’s cellphone interrupted the proceedings. Nice to know someone else liked Imagine Dragons. She answered the phone with a no-nonsense, “Nancy here. What’s up?”

  While the woman engaged in a tense, thirty-second phone call, the rest of us went over our various parts of the action plan. I wasn’t looking forward to penning up the cattle for an indeterminate period of time, but no one could ever come up with a better way to prevent the cows from otherwise being turned into thousand-pound projectiles. Yes, if a tornado hit the barn, they were screwed anyway, but that was the gamble we were all taking.

  When she finished the call, Nancy quietly slipped the phone back in her purse and cleared her voice.

  “That was Bobby Owens at Dispatch,” she explained with a huff of breath. “The Co-Op is calling in all the linemen and support personnel for this hurricane. They’re going to house us in the old high school gym and disperse the trucks to the satellite branches. We’ve got until eight a.m. tomorrow to report, or they’re sending deputies out to round us up.”

  “Makes sense,” Mike grudgingly admitted, then held up his hands in a ‘hold on’ gesture. “I meant the location. That gym was built as a back-up fallout shelter back in the eighties. Solid concrete, and while it looks ugly as sin, the thing should be able to take the wind.”

  Nancy nodded. I could see the concern in her eyes as she spoke again.

  “Bobby said they’re setting it up with cots, and provisions are being made to take care of the families of workers out in the field…”

  “Lisa is staying here with us,” Nikki announced confidently.

  “But my sister…”

  “We’ll take care of her, hon,” Nikki interrupted again. Laying her hand on the other woman’s arm, she gave Nancy a little squeeze. “If that hurricane hits, the county is going to need your help to get the lights back on. Least we can do is take care of your baby.”

  “Yeah, what she said,” Mike piped up, pointing at our feisty sister with encouragement, and we all shared a little laugh.

  “Okay, okay,” Nancy said. “I give. Now, what do we need to do first?”

  “Tarp the greenhouse,” I said in unison with Mike, and Marta simply nodded along in agreement.

  “Tarp?”

  “That’s the only way we’ve come up with to protect the greenhouse,” Nikki explained. “If the high winds don’t wreck the structure, Mike is convinced we’ll get hail that’ll break out all the panels.”

  “So we’ll cover the whole thing with a layer of horse blankets to reduce the chance of impact damage,” I elaborated, “then ratchet them down. After that, layer over with a heavy plastic tarp to protect the blankets from getting soaked and collapsing the framework anyway.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work,” Nancy observed. “So we’d better get started.”

  I groaned, already rubbing my back at the imagined abuse to come, which elicited another laugh from the group.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  With plenty of willing hands, we got the greenhouse covered by three o’clock that afternoon, and then Mike and I drafted Nancy as we spent the rest of the day carefully dismounting the three windmills. Nancy proved to be a steady worker, and she handled the electric winch we used to lower the heavy and bulky wheels with practiced ease. Using the lowboy trailer, we transported the complete upper sections to the machinery barn, then used the A frame hoist to shift the shells around as Mike, Nancy, and I disassembled the awkward windmill heads down into their component parts. We had the advantage of using power tools in the barn, and I think Mike and I managed to impress Nancy with our mechanical skills. At least, we got the parts separated with no stripped bolts and very little wasted motion.

  I say with some pride at a job well done, because Nancy certainly earned my appreciation. She might not have our muscle, or bulk, to horse those big parts around, but there was no quit in the lady. She worked methodically, making practiced use of our power tools to carefully disassemble the windmill components with a level of obsessive-compulsive disorder that made me feel right at home. As a bonus, Nancy also kept her humor about her as she worked.

  “Never thought I’d see a lawyer sweating that much outside of a courtroom,” Nancy quipped as I manhandled one of the wheels into a convenient corner for storage. Mike insisted we wrap the vanes in burlap and after the three of us detached the motor, the wheel became a lot more manageable.

  “Don’t you mean, off the golf course?” Mike jabbed, and I gave his beefy shoulder a casual backhand as I walked by.

  “Never played the game and you know it,” I snapped back in irritation.

  “Never?” Nancy marveled. “I thought they taught that as a required course in law school?”

  “Nope,” I retorted as Nancy began returning tools to the toolbox attached to the front wall of the barn. “I must have missed that day. Never much cared for the game, or the waste of time. Don’t tell me you play?”

  “Ugh, no way. Tennis, casually, but never golf,” she replied with a throaty chuckle. “When I lived in Tyler, there was a health club I went to that had courts. Lisa and I used to go and bat the ball around a little, and she got pretty good at it after a bit. Anyway, I used to laugh at the women who showed up in their cute little white outfits with the short skirts, but then they never even unzipped their bags before going to hang out in the lounge.”

  “Yeah, Marta hates that kind of crap, too,” Mike said, rejoining the conversation after stacking the last of the wheels against the corner. “We belong to a gym over near our house in Ft. Worth, and she was always carping about the women who showed up to work out in full makeup and designer sweats.”

  “Not really a workout if you don’t break a sweat,” Nancy agreed with a derisive snort. “So, what’s next on the list?”

  “I’m going to change the bearings on these tomorrow,” Mike said with a gesture to the dismounted wheels. “Then I need to pull all of the yard clutter inside, or at least, out of the wind. Those benches out front, the swing sets, and Marta’s bird bath are all getting moved somewhere safe.”

  I gave Mike a thumb’s up at his statement before adding to the list.

  “I’ll help with all that,” I agreed as I turned to Nancy, “but I need to talk to that brother-in-law of yours and see if he can go ahead and harvest w
hat he can of the corn crop.”

  “Isn’t it still a little too early?” Mike asked, curiosity attracted by the idea.

  “Better to get what we can now, rather than see it all blown away or ruined. If the rain will hold off another day, I think he’ll be able to get the combine in there, at least. I think we’ll end up needing that corn at some point.”

  Mike grunted, but didn’t bother to disagree.

  “Then,” I continued, “I was thinking about making a run over to Wilson’s and top off our supply of chicken feed. Maybe run by and see Sally Dwyer after, since I’ll be in town anyway.”

  Nancy turned at my words, but didn’t say anything.

  “What?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Not my place to say anything is all. Is she your girlfriend?”

  Mike stifled a laugh, and I gave him a dirty look before replying.

  “No, nothing like that. Sally is, was, a client of mine. A lovely lady, and she’s a hard worker. She has a son who works at the feed store. Billy’s a nice kid, but he has Down Syndrome, and I don’t like the idea of the two of them trying to ride out the storm in their little mobile home.”

  “Wow, I really stuck my foot in my mouth there,” Nancy observed with an embarrassed chuckle, but I waved her off.

  “If you’re living here, then you get a say, Nancy,” I responded honestly. “Sally has been struggling since the furniture plant closed, but she has some useful skills to offer and like I said, I worry about the two of them trying to wait out a storm in that trailer.”

  “Oh, shoot,” Nancy remarked. “I forgot about that. What are we going to do with the trailer here? And what about all our stuff? At least, at the apartment we had a better chance to weather a hurricane.”