Rock Fall Revisited
Copyright© 2021 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 6: Rock Fall Plus Three
Lynn shook my shoulder the next morning. “I’m going out!” she told me. “I’ll be right back!”
I managed not to guffaw, but I did roll over into where she’d been. Ten minutes later, she crawled back into bed. I moved back to my side of the bed, and she sighed. “It’s cold out there! How come my spot is still warm?”
“Mine’s cold.”
“Thirty-eight degrees and drizzle,” she told me.
“You feel like an ice cube.” I wrapped my arms around her, and she snuggled back against me.
“Logan,” she whispered a few seconds later. “I love you.”
“I know. Lynn ... it’s not something we can talk about yet, okay?”
“I’ll be seventeen on the seventh of January.”
“We’ll have a big party,” I promised.
“I’m willing to wait as long as you want,” she told me. “But if you don’t want to wait...”
“Lynn, right now we all need to focus on the things we need to do to stay alive. When we’re more secure...”
“And if we are less secure every day?”
What a terrible thing for a young person to have to think! Worse... I knew it was as likely as the reverse. I hugged her tight, and she put her hands around mine, and a second later, she was asleep again.
I gave her a couple of minutes and then got up and found Sarah sitting in the kitchen, staring out at the misting rain.
“Was it just panic yesterday?” she asked. “The snow is all but gone.”
“No, I don’t think so. The temperature dropped really fast after Rock Fall. But I don’t think you can cool off the entire world that fast. The air has various temperatures, the ocean has temperatures, and those are all most likely seasonal — and highly connected. A little off-kilter gets quickly corrected.”
I stopped and whistled. “Did I mention that while the dust might have arrived early, the moisture will arrive later? That might be a bonus, because it will give the dust time to settle out of the air. At least a little of it.”
At nine that morning, I led the other men outside, and we spent the rest of the morning moving food down into the bunker, while the women spent time with the children, essentially teaching school. There were now five adult women and nine school-age children.
I wasn’t certain how they divided the duty, but Emma and Ginny did most of the teaching, with Sarah in charge of the household and Amy helping her. That first day with us, Nita went from job to job, clearly distraught, clearly unable to focus. Twice I saw Sarah talk to her, but I knew Sarah wasn’t giving her a hard time. Those two women had been friends for a very long time.
At one in the afternoon, Sarah, Amy, Lynn, and I drove into town and worked the phones at the community center. Mark had changed the way things were supposed to work. Now, each block had a monitor and an alternate. They were supposed to go from door to door before noon every day, and then call in their status to the community center between one and two, no matter if the status was good, bad, or indifferent. They were supposed to call in emergencies at once; which is why we had the routine reports, after any emergency was likely to be found.
It was just luck that Lynn wasn’t far away when one of the town’s volunteers went to Sarah, rushed and excited. “There’s been a fire at Deep Creek!”
The address matched Lynn’s house, and Sarah knew at once it was someone who wasn’t exactly quick on the uptake. Mark realized that it was important anyway and wheeled in a whiteboard and put a half dozen addresses up on it, three of those from Deep Creek, and three more where people had died of heart attacks since Rock Fall.
About three, Mark and Jim came in, and Mark and Sarah spent some time hugging. Then, we met again.
“Was yesterday a fluke, Logan?” Mark asked.
“You know as much about that as I do,” I told him. “When I was going to ASU, a couple of times a year, we’d go rafting down the Salt River, east of Phoenix. It was white water and a lot of fun. Still, the river was warm for the most part, as it had a lot of time in the sun.
“About a mile before we’d get out, we’d reach where the Verde River joined up. The Verde was ice water. What you wanted to do was find a patch of warm water and hover in it until you either lost it or it lost you, or it was all mixed — and thus very cold. You could usually go a half mile or so and stay warm.
“After that, you froze, and in another half mile, you were blue and had to get out.
“The ocean is still warm. There are still large chunks of the atmosphere that are at the normal temperature. It’s my belief that in the next half mile, so to speak, the cold water is slowly going to overwhelm the warm patches, until we start getting really cold. After that...”
“And the Feds still say nothing. There’s no news and damn all advice!” Mark said with exasperation. “What’s it like elsewhere? Yesterday I tried to call a friend I met in Texas a few years ago, and I was told that the lines were all busy.”
“We may never know what’s up anywhere else,” I told him.
The phone rang on Sarah’s desk, and she spoke a few words and hung up. “Emma says we need to turn on the TV. Speaking, more or less, to the topic at hand.”
Mark flipped on the TV that had started off being on all the time and was now relegated to “very infrequent.”
All of us blinked. The picture showed an American flag waving in a breeze, and the music in the background was “America the Beautiful!” That segued into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” then into Sousa marches.
I picked up the phone and called the house, asking for Emma.
“What are you guys watching?”
“Everyone is watching the flag waving.”
“Take the kids downstairs, Emma. Don’t let them watch the TV.”
“Right,” she said and was gone an instant later.
I turned to Lynn. “You might want to leave about now.”
“I don’t want to.”
“If you barf, you’re going to have to clean it up by yourself,” I warned darkly.
Amy looked at me and then at Lynn. “I take it that this isn’t good?” she asked, waving at the flag.
“No, this isn’t good. This is right out of ‘Conducting a Revolution, 101: Breaking the News to the Public.’”
As I said that, the picture flicked, and a man in army fatigues appeared in front of the camera. Two stars, I thought. That was interesting.
“I am Major General Stavros Germania, United States Army, currently attached to the Continental Army Command. Please wait two minutes for an important announcement. Please inform everyone in your vicinity that an important announcement is about to be made in two minutes and that they need to watch.”
He simply sat then, looking into the camera, not saying anything, his eyes unblinking and never wavering.
There was no hint of a cue, but his eyes dropped, and he started reading.
“At 1443, Eastern Time today, the US Army statistical service informed the Pentagon that the twenty miners trapped in a cave-in in Colorado had been moved from the ‘Missing’ column to the ‘Presumed Dead’ column because they had been trapped for 72 hours without oxygen.
“Those men represented casualties in the current emergency ranging from nine hundred, nine hundred and ninety thousand, nine hundred and ninety-four to one million and thirteen American casualties since Rock Fall.
“Military commanders have decided that one million dead and injured Americans deserve more of a response than what had been forthcoming from the administration. When the president told the Joint Chiefs of Staff at 1510 that the data was wrong and he’d see that it was corrected, the Joint Chiefs acted.
“At 1600, troops of various military units seized the White House, the US Capitol, the Executive Office Building, and a number of other office buildings. The US Supreme Court, held incommunicado since Rock Fall, was released.
“The president, the vice president, the cabinet, and most of their deputies were detained. Most senators and representatives were also detained.
“At 1710, the Joint Chiefs held a summary court-martial for the Commander in Chief, on charges of cowardice and failing to command. The verdict was unanimous. He was shot two minutes later. Similar verdicts were issued for his cabinet, the senior members of the House and Senate, and those sentences have since been carried out.”
The scene shifted to a location, probably on the Mall, I thought, where heaps of bodies lay twisted and torn in the late afternoon light.
“A Military Emergency Committee was formed and assumed command of all US military forces. The Emergency Committee then tried and found the Joint Chiefs of Staff guilty of treason and had them shot. Currently, the Military Emergency Committee is reviewing evidence of other malfeasance in office and will be rendering additional sentences.”
“The current toll of dead and injured in the United States increased today by about ten thousand, trending down since Rock Fall. Hawaii had three-quarters of a million casualties — they had not been adequately warned, and there were no adequate preparations for the tidal waves they experienced. None of this was reported to the American people. More than a hundred and fifty thousand Americans were killed on Guam; for that matter, all of the residents of most American possessions in the South Pacific died on islands like American Samoa, which, to all intents and purposes, have been washed away.
“Damage in the continental states hasn’t been as significant, but nearly ten thousand people were injured by secondary impacts from Rock Fall. Thousands more have been injured in the subsequent earthquakes; earthquakes that are still continuing, particularly in central and southern California.
“Mexico has suffered more than a million dead along its west coast. Yesterday, they announced that they will no longer export oil or food to the US. This is a serious thing as the ground shock from the impact has destroyed about two-thirds of our fracking capacity; our oil production has dropped by a third.
“One of the charges against the president was that he, based only on an Executive Order, has been drawing down the US strategic petroleum reserve to meet local shortages. More than half of it is gone, and we will sorely miss that fuel in the coming weeks and months.
“The Pacific Rim countries of South America, SE Asia, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, the Philippines, Japan, and many more, lay devastated. For the first time in more than a century, this country hasn’t rushed to succor those in need. The president seemed to ascribe to the theory that if we weren’t going to help our own people, why should we help foreigners? Longtime allies have been deserted and abandoned, with the subsequent collapse of America’s reputation in the world yet another significant casualty of the government’s inaction during the crisis.
“The Military Emergency Committee has announced very strict rationing on all sales of all petroleum-based fuels and oil stocks. Exact details will be announced and implemented within the next three days. Because of our difficulties with other countries, no other country, not even Canada, is willing to sell us oil. Fuel is going to be a major issue this winter, and preparations are going to have to be made to keep people warm as well as safe.
“There will be other emergency directives coming soon from the Emergency Committee. Food stocks are adequate at the current time, but because of hoarding, they are uneven; the rationing will continue as before. Fuel stocks aren’t adequate and are even more uneven.
“Across our great nation, right now there are dozens of ‘weather events’ that our meteorologists say are suspicious. It is believed that the dust from the impact is already affecting the weather, cooling some areas by as much as ten degrees. Not all areas are affected and not all areas are affected equally, and the events are frequently transitory in nature.
“The scientists tell us that these ‘anomalies’ are likely to grow in the coming days. They say that much of the northern US will experience much colder temperatures than usual over the next months and probably unusual precipitation events as well. That is to say, expect lots of rain and snow. It is the belief of the scientists that these events will steadily increase in duration and severity for the next six to eighteen months.
“The Military Emergency Committee will be contacting local authorities as to the nature and scope of the emergency rules. As of this time, the only area under martial law is Washington DC and it is our fervent hope that that can be lifted in a few days. All state and local elected officials are confirmed in their offices at all levels below the Federal government. So far, only the Federal Executive and Legislative branches have been suspended.
“It is our hope that we can hold legislative elections in ninety days, to elect new members of the House and Senate, and ninety days later, a new president and vice president. At this time, it is our intention to forbid anyone who has held national political office before today from running for any of the vacancies. Members of Congress not shot for their complicity in the failure to prepare the United States for Rock Fall will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Most of them will be asked to retire.
“We have taken a heavy blow,” the general told the camera. “Because of the limited actions of the former administration in preparing for it, the blow has fallen heavier than was necessary. Relief efforts have been slow, hampered by secrecy more akin to the preparations for invading a hostile country. That has stopped, and we will ensure that our fellow countrymen are succored as they should be and informed as they should be.
“Thank you and good evening.”
The waving flag reappeared, and the Star-Spangled Banner was played in the background.
“Shit!” Amy said.
“That’s not very lady-like,” Sarah told her. “But, yeah, that twice over.”
“Logan?” Mark said. “I don’t see that this means much for us, at least in the short term.”
“You think?” I said sarcastically. “How about no more fuel deliveries here, ever?”
Mark blinked. “That ... that wouldn’t be good.”
“And what happens if the Columbia and the lakes freeze?” I went on. “We might have managed with hydropower, if the governors of Oregon and Washington embargo it — but we won’t if it gets really cold. And if we embargo the power, a lot of people elsewhere are going to get cold. I seriously doubt if there’s going to be enough hydropower generation to take care of our own needs even if there are no losses because of the cold.”
“Don’t forget,” Sarah piped up, “if there are no gasoline deliveries, cutting firewood has just gone back to nineteenth-century technology, and there’s not much left of that. You’re going to want to locate a number of two-man saws, set up wood teams, and start cutting a lot of green wood. We are going to have to use our ingenuity, Mark.”
“There are some other considerations,” I interjected. “Contemplate Hawaii. They said more than three-quarters of a million people died on the islands. That’s two-thirds of the population. I think nearly everyone must have been killed on Guam. Relief for either place would have been difficult at the best of times. Now? Honestly, it would cost two or three times as much to succor a person in Hawaii than it does in California. Maybe ten times that to rescue someone on Guam.
“No matter what he just said about rescuing Americans, they aren’t going to do much for those people, which means that when people find out, they are going to think as badly of these people as they do of the president right now. Once you open the door by fomenting violent revolution, it makes it easier for the next guy, although usually they work from within the revolution — see Lenin and Stalin and the rise of Napoleon.
“I think we can expect troubled politics as well as troubled weather in the future.”
Lynn stuck her tongue out at me, and I looked at her curiously.
She glared at me defiantly. “I didn’t hurl; I never felt like hurling. You want me to trust you, how about trusting me?”
“Fine, let it rest, okay? You did okay.”
She nodded and subsided, her eyes bright.
I turned to the rest. “Two more things about the state of the government. Did you hear the Emergency Committee’s little dance about responsibility? The Joint Chief’s ordered the executions of the president and his people, then the Military Emergency Committee took over and executed the Joint Chiefs. That’s bound to be an attempt at insulating themselves from criticism of the original deed.
“And, two-star generals like the one who spoke are usually someone more senior’s deputy. I’d say whoever heads the Military Emergency Committee is very interested in covering his ass, which makes this more of a political gesture than ever. High words, but I have a feeling that not only hasn’t the second shoe dropped, but the first one hasn’t stopped bouncing either.”
Mark had been watching and listening. “All we can do are simple things, like Sarah said. About two-thirds of the residents these days aren’t country folk and are going to be hard-put to do what has to be done. Nonetheless, if they don’t work, they’re not going to eat and aren’t going to stay warm. The Kim’s at the store have already turned over their remaining stocks to the town, and we’ve got that put someplace safe.
“I think we need to prepare the high school as even more of a mass shelter than we had figured. Few people in town are going to be able to deal with things without power.”
“You’d be surprised how many in the county areas won’t be able to either,” I told them. “I saw the Dwyer house yesterday. It was all electric; they had almost no food, no wood stockpiled, few tools ... I nearly filled the truck with Deputy Lewis’ things, but didn’t have any trouble fitting in the Dwyer’s few things. If they’re typical, you’re going to be getting a lot of unexpected guests who don’t live in town but aren’t country folk either.”
Mark looked flustered. “We can’t handle very many additional refugees. There will be — pressure — from the townies to kick them out.”
“Ignore the pressure,” I told him. “The county people will be far more knowledgeable, on average, about what will need to be done. Even some of the gentleman farmers are going to have some cows and goats — get them in, put up a temporary corral on the football field. When it gets cold enough so that you can’t keep them alive any longer, butcher them and put them in a shipping container. The town has a bunch of those.”
Mark nodded. “That’ll help.” He grimaced and said, “Walk in reefers...” He shook his head sadly. He looked at Jim. “We’re going to have to do a lot of planning in the next few days. Tomorrow we need to finalize a plan for making the school into an even larger shelter. We’d only been planning on using the commons, the kitchen, and the gym. I think we’re going to have to use some of the classrooms as well. What we’re going to need is to find as many wood stoves for those rooms as we can find, because I’m with Logan on this — every time the government talks, they mention how things are cooling off.”
Suddenly Mark laughed. “I have a wood stove,” he told us. “Jim has two. Let’s get them moved to the school, get some carpenters and the like on flue ducting. We’ll have to abandon our houses. We can send the rest of what we have to out to Logan’s.”
“Aren’t we putting a lot of our eggs in one basket?” Jim asked.
“Yes, we are. But unless you want to leave your family there or in town, Jim, why not?”
Jim nodded. “No, we both know what’s going to happen in town. Logan’s right about civil unrest. The odds of us having our jobs a week after the power goes off are zero. Just surviving the change in administrations will be tough.”
“Well, that’s why I’m working so hard on the emergency plans,” Mark told him. “If we have plans, if we can produce some solid accomplishments, maybe it will make them wonder about what new blood could offer them that was better.”
“Maybe,” Jim admitted.
Mark turned to me. “Sarah says you are a man of many hidden talents, Logan.”
I blinked. I wasn’t sure if that meant she’d told him about the bunker or not.
“Something like that.”
“Well, Jim hasn’t mentioned it yet, but we were talking to Bud Grant down in Vancouver and Kosterman in Battleground earlier today. As you know, Battleground contracts with the county sheriff’s office for police protection, and the sheriff’s office was moved there about twenty years ago. They’ve been working with Vancouver, Woodland, and Camus. They’ve cut Woodland loose from the county, and Longview will take over there. The paper companies are organizing things in Camus and Washougal.
“Basically, the idea is that Vancouver is going to look out for itself, Battleground is going to have the sheriff’s department, and they’re going to look out for themselves, and all the rest of the small towns in the county can look out for themselves.
“To make it ‘legal,’” he made air quotes, and Jim sniffed in disgust, “Sheriff Kosterman is delegating the power to deputize additional officers for work in the county areas to local police chiefs. As soon as we get done here, Jim will swear you in, Logan, and further delegate the ability to deputize to you. Right now, he’ll authorize the issue to you of a pistol, a shotgun, and a rifle, and some ammunition.”
“I hope you realize that I didn’t do any real soldiering in the army? That I was a glorified supply clerk?”
Mark laughed. “And I remember who used to shoot us when we went through our paintball phase in high school. You never missed, and you could always sneak up on us.”
“You came to play on my turf,” I told them. It was true. When you know every tree and cranny, it’s easy to hide and sneak.
“Logan, this is important, okay?”
“Okay.”
We were really late getting home, but no one talked about it. I took the weapons right downstairs and locked them in my paranoid father’s gun safe. Jim had issued me a thousand 9 mm pistol rounds for a Glock 9 mm, a thousand 12-gauge shotgun shells for a twelve-gauge repeating shotgun, and a thousand 30-06 rounds for the World War II vintage M-1 that he’d given me. It wouldn’t have helped, I thought, to mention that my father had no intention of fighting it out for the house — but he’d prepared for that eventuality.
The three new weapons had a lot of company in the gun safe — more like a spacious walk-in closet — and so did the ammunition.
I wasn’t sure why it worked out that way, but Lynn got up at the start of dinner and told us the day’s weather readings. She’d made three measurements, although the last had been a little late. After that, the day’s weather report was a feature of dinner, even though I couldn’t see why. It wasn’t as though you couldn’t look outside and see what the weather was.
“It was 38 with drizzle this morning at seven a.m.,” she announced, “42 at noon with no rain, and at six thirty when we got home, it was 44 and still no rain. The cloud cover has been total all day.”
We didn’t turn on the TV that evening until the younger children went to bed. Lynn, Briana, and Leslie watched for a half hour before they called it a night.
The news was more complete. There was a summary of world news, half of which was about how Europe was coping. Outside of Europe, the news went from bleak to catastrophic. Probably a billion and a half people had died on Rock Fall Day, and all of the Pacific coast countries of South America, SE Asia, and the Pacific Rim had been hard hit. Most of Australia’s main cities were on their southeastern coast. Melbourne had been shielded well by New Zealand and Tasmania, and the waves hadn’t been as forceful there as elsewhere — but the fact remained that even there the water level had briefly lifted more than two hundred feet, destroying buildings by flooding. Most of the population had been moved back inland and were safe.
Sydney, however, was too far north. While part of the wave was blocked by New Zealand, there was enough distance for it to sweep south and north past New Zealand and hook into Sydney. There, a three hundred-foot surge devastated the city, instead of relatively gentle flooding like Melbourne. Still, most of the people survived, even if their town didn’t. Brisbane was further north and got a two hundred-foot wave which caused a great deal of devastation, but not a great number of deaths.
The problem was that Australia had two-thirds of its population homeless, and they’d been augmented by about ninety percent of the New Zealanders. Food was already an issue.
As for the continental US, there had been quite a few tornadoes, but for us it was the earthquakes in Southern California. There had been a 7.9 quake in LA and another 7.8 quake near San Jose, and while the loss of life had been low, a lot of buildings and freeways were damaged or destroyed. And it was cold and raining ... Tent cities were going up east of LA, and as bad as things seemed, the situation appeared to be well in hand.
I mean who gets excited about snow in Bismarck in December? While a foot of snow this early was unusual, it wasn’t unknown.
None of the weather in the US was that unusual, not really.
At the end, it was an Air Force captain who spoke. “There is a lot of interest in the scientific community, as well as our own native curiosity, to know what the crater looks like that Rock Fall left us.
“The answer to that is we aren’t going to know for weeks and perhaps months. We sent an aircraft carrier south from Hawaii, but at about six degrees south of the equator, they began to run into storms similar to Category 5 hurricanes. They had to turn back.
“Some brave pilots have tried to fly high enough to fly over the storms, but those storms reach sixty and seventy thousand feet. The carrier admiral ordered them to return.
“NASA tells us that the Rock landed on a heading that trended northeast. As a result, the debris picked up an extra six hundred and ten miles an hour of additional velocity in that direction. About one percent of the impactor went back into space, moving faster than escape velocity. The equivalent of about a tenth of the mass of the Rock was lofted into orbit. Most of the debris failed to make one orbit, but about five percent of the Rock is still in Earth orbit. This makes life extraordinarily hazardous for a satellite. Not a single satellite of those we had before Rock Fall in low Earth orbit still functions, and most can’t be found. Those satellites in geosynchronous orbit have fared better, but some have failed.
“The best guess is that in about five years, we’ll be able to put a satellite into low Earth orbit and have it survive long enough for meaningful data to be transmitted to the ground. Such a satellite would have an expected life span, even then, of two or three orbits. I’m told that it will take a hundred years for near-Earth space to be nearly as clear as it was at the dawn of the space age.”
Later, Lynn sat on my bed as I stripped out of my shirt.
“Do you hate me?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why are you so down on me?”
“I’m not down on you. What’s happening is that you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Moreover, at your age — you might not want to believe it, but given the situation — you’re growing — maturing — by leaps and bounds each day.
“You think you’re doing the right thing, and I disagree. This is going to come as a shock, Lynn, but this is what relationships are like at first. Ask Sarah or Nita, ask Emma, ask Ginny.”
“I don’t know what to do...” she said forlornly.
“Stop trying so hard,” I told her. “Lynn, you’re my friend, okay? Friends cut each other some slack. Actually, we cut each other lots of slack. I don’t know what to do either, you don’t know what to do — but then, none of us do.”
“But you seem to know...”
“Sure, but I guess wrong, too. Right now, all we have is experience and what we’ve learned in our lives up until now. I’ve had a more paranoid than usual upbringing, so I’m pessimistic. Mark is a natural optimist — I have to admit, I’ve never heard him as pessimistic as this afternoon.
“Jim believes that most people are scum of the earth, and he should put them in jail. He has to fight it all of the time. But he does.”
I sighed. “Once upon a time, I was responsible for just myself. I was comfortable with that. My mistakes were my mistakes. Now — I have others under my care. If I make a mistake, it can hurt and maybe more than hurt, a lot of others. The sunrise threw me for a loop, Lynn — just like it did you.
“You think the death of your parents and the Dwyer’s was a surprise? It rocked me back to my heels. It knocked Jim and Mark for loops, too. We thought we had a couple of months to get people used to working together, coming together to help each other. Not two days.
“This has been a shock to all of us, and all of us are having trouble dealing with it. We each have our own way of trying to cope — I’m giving you a lot of slack. I hope you will give me some too.”
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