Rock Fall
Copyright© 2015 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 7: Gloria’s Birthday Party
When the bishop and his wives had left, Sydney shook her head. “Pardon my French, but Jesus!”
She turned to Chris, “I’ll ask you now, in front of the others. Will you marry us? All of us?”
“Without reservations. Well, except for one caveat — even emancipated you have to be eighteen to get married. I do too.”
Amy laughed wickedly. “I do believe that the bishop would do it, given a chance to recover. And, I have a secret weapon, at our need.”
“What’s that, Amy?” Brenda asked.
“Dr. Dewitt has a certificate allowing him to marry people. He usually uses it at Ren Faires, under the name of ‘Friar Skinny Tuck.’ I’ll sound him out tomorrow at school.”
Brenda nodded. “I have a naughty suggestion. Chris sleeps in his g’grandparents’ bed, which is beyond huge. Room enough, and then some, for us all. I know it’s a school night, but I vote we all jump in bed with Chris. Then go to sleep!”
Chris had expected Amy and Brenda to snuggle close with him; it was Sydney and Lisa, with Sydney behind him. On the other hand, the fact that all of them went right to sleep was a surprise.
Monday surprised Chris. Yes, there was a lot of talk about the sheriff and there were a lot of tremulous sighs. Not many people came up to Chris and said thank you for removing the plague that had been the sheriff. What his fellow students were interested was the capital “V” Vein.
When Chris got home there was Keith, smiling broadly. “The trenches are dug. Goodness! Do we have a mess of gravel to move!”
Chris swallowed. “Tell me you aren’t rushing things. This was supposed to take two days.”
“Hah! The surface granite is rotten, through and through! Steel drills cut through it like butter! We had all the holes drilled by lunch. Kirk and Dwayne laid the charges by the afternoon.”
Chris gulped. “Dwayne?”
“Chris, he’s a good powderman that has been frustrated with not working. I watched him. His hands were as steady as they were three decades ago. He was singing your praises before and after we fired the shots.”
“Thank you, Keith. Thanks from the bottom of my heart.”
“Well ... there is one way to thank me.”
Chris laughed. “And that would be how?”
“The bishop has twenty-nine families that want to move up here. You want to lay sixty pads. Some of us want to get together and fill the rest of those pads.”
“I ordered sixty mobiles, Keith. I can’t promise long lives and happiness to those who come up here, but I can promise some mobiles.”
“Yes! I know you worry about who is the boss, but you are.” He scuffed one foot. “We may have more families than mobiles. We are willing to double up.”
“Keith! Don’t be silly! You are a day ahead of schedule! There is plenty of room for another trench!”
Keith sighed. “There is room for two more trenches.”
“Then cut them, dig them out and lay the utilities for them. I’ll see if I can get more mobiles.”
“Chris, that’s a lot of money!”
“Keith, like as not I can sell them to FEMA if things go in the toilet but we here get through things okay. If not...”
“But that’s a really great deal of money!”
“Keith, I tell you true. I have a feeling that money won’t be worth beans after December 5th. Particularly not worth beans! In that case, all the money I have left in the bank is going to be worthless ... unless I spend it now.
“And yes, for your ears only, we have located the vein. No matter what happens we will still have gold. Like the wag said ‘Gold has never been worth zero’ and like I heard in a movie once: ‘spendable gold.’
“We should be in good shape, whatever happens,” Chris concluded.
Dwayne appeared and joined Chris and Keith. “You’re going to get rich on the backs the union.”
“Dwayne, you’re an idiot,” Keith said, rounding on the man. “Who is laying in supplies for our families for the winter? Who is putting in housing for our families up here on the mountain? What, you want that rapist, Klaus, to protect you?”
Chris smiled slightly. “I’ll have a check for you first thing in the morning Dwayne, if you object to helping us.”
“You can’t fire me!”
“No, but I can lay off you and all the rest of your union members, and then apply to decertify the union. I can advertise and get experienced miners up here in droves in a few days. Assuming you are still in the union when they hear you have got them all laid back off again.”
One of the workman spoke up. “Mr. Gutterman, what’s really going to happen?”
“You really want to know? I can’t tell you we will get six inches of rain or six feet of snow, not with any scientific certainty. What’s going to happen is that when the Rock falls it’s going to make a hole in the ocean between sixty and seventy miles in diameter and twenty to twenty-five miles deep.
“Approximately six or eight hundred cubic miles of material will be melted in a fraction of a second. Half of that goes up, half stays on the ground, molten rock hotter many times than lava. Afterwards it will boil hundreds of cubic miles of water, probably for a least a couple of months and still be warmer than the seabed for a decade. It may cause earthquakes over much of the Earth’s surface; it will cause tidal waves. Tidal waves are strange things and how big one will be is difficult to figure ... an island on the equator could see between six and twelve feet.
“Some of the debris will be sizable — a few feet in diameter. Most of the debris will be very fine rock powder. Unlike a volcano that takes months for the dust cloud to go around the world, this dust will take less than ninety minutes.
“Local effects will be light, unless there is a secondary meteor strike. But the Earth is a huge place considering the amount of debris. There most likely will not be an earthquake here, but you wouldn’t want to be in the mine.” Chris laughed. “Odds of a tsunami hitting Pine Valley are pretty remote.”
“So it’s not going to be so bad,” Dwayne stated.
“Here in Pine Valley there may be a few heart attacks on the day the Rock falls, and that’s it ... assuming people don’t panic beforehand.
“It’s short term in many places other than Pine Valley that things will be awful, especially coastal towns in the South Pacific. Samoa, Guam and Hawaii will see tidal waves. So will the west coast of the US. Earthquakes may happen along the Pacific Rim. The west coast of South America will certainly be devastated, and to some unknowable extent along the Central American coast. New Zealand and Australia’s heavily populated east coast will be devastated. Going north, the Far East is going to be badly affected, particularly the nations south of the equator.
“Going further down the timeline, the dust will block a lot of sunlight. It’s going to get cold — no one can predict where or how cold it will get. When it finally warms up next summer it will be later rather than earlier — and we will likely get a lot of rain. Maybe summer after next we’ll be able to plant crops.”
“Christ!” Dwayne said, “And the government is doing nothing?”
“I expect they are doing something, but not on the scale of what will be needed and they are definitely not talking about it. And, lamentably, there is more.”
“More?” Dwayne asked.
“Two words: ‘Global economy.’ We get a lot of things these days we get from overseas. We are close to energy independence, but the same is less true for many raw materials.
“The day before the Rock falls, Dwayne, is likely the best day we will have for a long, long time.”
“Why? Tell me Chris, why would they lie?”
“They are right about being concerned how many people would die in the resulting panic. They could have broken the news slowly, but they would have had to go about it very differently. They are afraid, Dwayne. They feel that their progressive world view — the one that routinely denies reality — will protect them. They’ve missed the bullet up to now — but this time they will take it squarely between the eyes,” Chris said to the shop steward.
Later, Chris was alone with his four friends. They shared a hug, all of them, then stood and went back to work.
They all were sleeping on one bed; Chris was amazed that he had adapted so quickly to not sleeping alone. Although it was a bit of a trial when there were five together. Unlike the proverbial “usual women” they didn’t all get up together to go potty. Two or three times a night taught Chris rapidly to ignore distractions from sleep.
Still, that night was a turning point. The sun was up, but it was only a little after five when Sydney shook him.
“Chris, get up. Things are happening.”
He got up, making an effort to let everyone else sleep. “I get up early,” Sydney admitted when they were out in the hall. “In a past life I think I must have been a farm girl.
“Chris, the news is scary.”
“Scary, how?”
“There is rioting in Cairo. The Egyptian economy tanked a couple years ago. They quintupled the price of bread yesterday. The last reports were that four million or more people were in the streets.”
Chris looked at her, standing pale in the early morning light. “That’s not all, is it?”
“The last reports were two hours ago. An hour ago, rioting started in Ankara and Athens. The networks don’t admit it, but the live reports have stopped; even the Internet is down to those cities.”
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