While we at least had the hope of having commercial power restored, the news that we would be getting a refurbished transformer and the likelihood of not receiving a replacement for quite some time, if ever, reinforced our need to begin gearing down. With multiple sources of alternate power, we would be able to do some things without the Co-Op, but not all of it. Then I remembered the methane generator I still had crated up in the machine shed and gave a little grunt at the memory. Another item to be added to the ‘to do’ list. Suddenly, I felt tired. A bone deep weariness that threatened to roll over my body, and I felt myself go weak.
“Your back bothering you?” Charles kidded as I leaned against the wall in the mudroom and removed my boots.
“Nah, my back has stopped speaking to me at this point,” I admitted sourly, my pride a little more bruised than anything else. I shook off the exhaustion and got back into the moment.
Working hard on the farm over the years had added to my strength in endurance, getting me into what I thought might be the best condition of my life, and competing against my brother Mike at doing things like hauling hay or mending fences became something of a competition for the two of us. Today, I’d worked as hard as ever, but the results hadn’t been up to my expectations.
Charles Brewer, in addition to being over ten years my junior, left the rest of us in his dust. He was simply a physical beast. He never said how tall he was, but my best estimate was six foot eight or nine, with biceps as big as my thighs. According to Mary, he’d grown up embarrassed by his size, or more properly, his lack of coordination. By the time he could get his arms and legs to cooperate, he was in college at Lamar working on his engineering degree. With his blonde hair and blue eyes, all he needed was a Fu Manchu mustache and an axe to look like the stereotypical Viking berserker.
Funny, he might be scary-looking, but in reality, Charles possessed a very mild personality. A gentle giant, Mary called her husband when he was out of earshot. He was a hunter and I knew he could shoot, but I would still pick Pat or Sally, if Mike was busy and I needed somebody to watch my back. No offense to Charles, but I knew they wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.
“You need to take it easy,” Sally cautioned, giving me a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Not everything needs the brute strength approach. Watch how Nancy does it, lifting with her legs and not her back.”
“Yep, we can’t afford any workplace injuries,” Mary chimed in, bumping her husband out of the way as she shed her rubber boots. “I don’t think you’ve got worker’s comp coverage.”
“We’ve got whatever Marta and Dorothy can do for us,” Nancy added, joining in the conversation. She still looked a little worn down, even though I’d made a point of having her run the tractor to give us the mechanical advantage of the cable. Much easier to hoist a hundred pound load than try to manhandle it up a ladder.
“Don’t forget Dr. Pat,” I chimed in, giving my brother-in-law his due.
“Not a doctor,” Pat pointed out with a long-suffering sigh. “That’s the first thing they taught us in school. We can do a lot, but not everything.”
“Yeah, honey, your golf game is for shit, and I can still read your handwriting,” Nikki announced from the doorway. She must have heard the rumble of our footfalls in the mudroom and came to add her two cents. It was an old joke, and she got the expected chuckles from the crowd.
Looking around at the tight confines with all of us squeezed in out of the rain, I realized one of the first new projects we needed to tackle was building an addition on to this room. With the never-ending mud and slop outside, we needed more space to hang our wet weather gear, as well as air out our boots. Plus, I needed to find us some kind of deodorizer, stat. And that spawned another, more troubling thought.
As the rest of the crew filtered into the house, I gave Pat a small gesture and pulled him back while giving Nikki a nod. She would no doubt hear what I’d had to say later, but I really wanted to pick her husband’s brain first.
“How are your feet, Pat?”
Giving me a curious glance, Pat looked down at the thick wool socks he was wearing. Thinking about my question, I saw a dawning understanding.
“You worried about immersion foot?”
I gave a shrug, and then had to admit my ignorance.
“I only know what I saw on TV,” I said, “but given the circumstances, I thought I should ask. People are pushing hard out there, and despite the slickers and rain gear, we come back in soaked. Our feet might not get drenched, but they stay damp. Every day, and for hours at a time.”
“No, you’re absolutely right,” Pat huffed, clearly feeling like he’d missed something. “We saw it with some of the guys in the Philippines, and…other tropical settings, but I didn’t make the connection here. I should have, though. Hell, I read an article in one of the emergency medicine journals dealing with this very problem. Well, it was about the homeless in Seattle, but you get the idea.”
The mention of that dead city made me shiver, and I’d never particularly liked the place. Any city where you couldn’t tell if you were being panhandled or mugged rated very low on my personal scale, but likely that was no longer a problem.
“What can we do?”
“I can give a short class on foot care,” Pat volunteered. “Main thing is to change your socks every day, keep yourself dry when you can, and watch for blisters. The water makes the skin become more susceptible to abrasion damage, and that can lead to infections. And that’s leaving aside the risk of developing a fungal infection.”
“Great, in addition to trench foot, we have to watch for athlete’s foot,” I grumbled. “Why didn’t I see that one coming too?”
Pat didn’t flinch away from my whining.
“Same reason I didn’t think about immersion foot, Bryan. And that’s something I’ve been trained to watch for, dammit,” the former Army medic explained without heat, as he paused before continuing. “And that brings up a whole host of other issues. We’re already seeing a massive explosion in the mosquito population as well as other insects brought on by this unending rain.”
“Hey, it stopped raining for a few days, right after the hurricane,” I protested, “and the hogs went bonkers, worried their wallow was going to dry out.”
Pat knew I was clowning, making the effort to lighten our mood, and he shook his head. He knew me too well by now.
Simply put, if the rain didn’t stop at some point, we were screwed. In addition to the massively overflowing waterways, we were seeing serious cropland erosion as well as the undermining of foundations, both in structures and the roads.
Closer to home, this morning at breakfast I’d heard about Beatrice and Nikki taking the kids over to work in the greenhouse yesterday and finding the rainwater had started eating away at the corners of the poured slab. This erosion left a six-inch gap between the bottom of the slab and the sodden earth underneath. Only quick thinking by the ladies and a liberal use of rock chunks stuffed into the growing cavity prevented the building from being further undermined until the slab cracked. Again, a stopgap measure that would keep our greenhouse functioning, but I worried about the long-term effects. I wondered how we were going to pour concrete and let it cure if the rain never stopped.
On the farm front, I had other worries. With the ground super-saturated with all this rainfall, how would we plow the fields to plant winter forage? We had hay, but how would we survive a long, cold winter without ryegrass? I had enough hay put back for two normal winters, but my gut told me this wouldn’t be enough. I could try to buy more hay, but then I had the problem of storage, and that was assuming I could find anyone willing to part with that commodity this late in the year.
“What?”
Pat’s question cut through my whirling thoughts and I had to shake my head before answering. I’d gotten bogged down in the rabbit hole, again.
“Sorry, got too many things going on right now,” I replied honestly. I’d learned long ago it was no use lying to Pat. He could tell.
Which was yet another reason not to play poker with the man.
“I’ve been watching you, Bryan. You’re right. Too many things on your plate right now. Delegate some of it, or you’ll be back on the high blood pressure medication.”
Patrick Parker suddenly sounded like a crusty old frontier doctor, and I had to chuckle.
“What?”
“You sound like that grumpy old doctor on Gunsmoke,” I replied, trying to use humor once again and setting the bait. “Doc Adams, I think was his name.”
“How would you know that? That show was off the air before any of us were born,” Pat complained, but I just smiled as he took the hook.
“Oh, man, you’re too young to remember, I guess. You’re all Disney and Nick-At-Night. No cable growing up for us out in the sticks. All I remember seeing were reruns on Channel 7 when I was a kid. Except I didn’t know they were reruns. Ask Mike some time. We thought Gunsmoke, Hogan’s Heroes, and Gilligan’s Island were still in production,” I announced with a laugh before continuing.
“I wanted more episodes of Hogan’s Heroes, and imagine my shock to find out not only was Colonel Hogan dead but the shows all went off the air before I was born. Just reruns, man,” I said with mock sadness.
“So what are your top concerns right now you can hand off to other people?” Pat continued, still focused on our earlier conversation. Tenacious, that was Pat’s watchword, after all.
“Well, you just addressed one of them,” I admitted. “I want you to hold a clinic and go over proper foot care and check for blisters or sores. Maybe get with Marta and see if we have any supplies you can use.”
“And…”
“And I’d really like to know if we can pour cement in the rain, and how we get it to cure properly,” I added. “With the constant rain, we’re seeing things like the greenhouse getting undermined, and that’s a bad sign. Plus, I don’t know how the heck we’re going to get the pad poured for the other greenhouse in this slop.”
“I’m sure Mike or Charlie can figure that one out,” Pat replied without a pause, gesturing for me to keep going.
I was saved from spilling all my anxieties at that point when Tommy came bustling into the mudroom, looking like he’d run the length of the house.
“Uncle Bryan, you and Uncle Pat gotta come quick,” he managed to say.
“What’s wrong?”
“Daddy has the radio running, and they’re talking about the war in Asia.” He pronounced Asia like he was talking about another planet. As if sensing my question, Tommy added, “Daddy said they’re planting mushrooms this time.”
That got Pat into his Crocs in record time, and I wasn’t far behind. We both knew ‘planting mushrooms’ was Mike’s colorful way of describing nuclear detonations.
CHAPTER SIX
The office was packed with bodies as Pat and I carefully wound through the crowd of family and friends to reach the folding desk Mike used for the radio setup. Since the office was already wired for the necessary cables, we’d moved the gear up from the monitoring room downstairs because of the extra space. With Charles and Billy added to the bunkroom, I was sleeping on a cot in the office. I’d offered Charles the cot but he’d declined, claiming that even though his feet stuck out from the end of the bunkbed, he wasn’t sure the folding military surplus cot would take his weight. The way that tired frame groaned last night when I settled down for sleep, I suspected he might have been correct.
I glanced over at the cot and felt a strange sense of relief that I’d thought to make up my bed this morning before heading out to work. I usually did, which used to amuse my wife to no end. I didn’t use hospital corners or anything fancy, but it went back to my early childhood. Make the bed and look out for traps. Mike and I shared a bedroom at one point in our childhood, and let’s just say pranks were sometimes played. My best one involved a plastic tarp and a twenty-five-pound bag of ice on a cold winter’s night and leave it at that.
Given my brother’s grim expression, I think he would have preferred the chipped ice treatment over what he was going to say. He’d been chatting with Beatrice while they waited, but he launched right into his report with no preamble.
“While we were offline from the hurricane, the war in Asia went from hot to inferno, guys. The BBC just announced an estimated five nuclear detonations detected in the contested region of Western China over the last week.” Mike’s announcement brought gasps all around, though most likely they had already heard the news.
“Any word on the yield or fallout? Airburst or ground?” Pat asked automatically, and Mike grimaced again before answering, though his comments actually made for better news than I expected.
“Not much data that way, and our sensing equipment was down from the hurricane, but my take is our exposure here was negligible. I still have the warning sensors, like those little keychain devices, and they never chirped enough to get noticed.”
I nodded in agreement. I wore one on my keychain, disguised as a rubber chicken, of all things, and it’d never sounded off when I went out to take care of the animals. Amazing what you can pick up at a gun show, including a radiation detector disguised as a rubber chicken.
“No sense worrying about it now,” Sally observed pragmatically, “but are the bigger sensors back up and running?”
“Yeah, they’re actually mounted at an offset to the radio mast,” Mike explained, and I only understood what he meant since I’d earlier helped install and then just recently taken down the tower he was talking about. Mike and Nikki had re-mounted the guy wires and hoisted that tower first thing this morning.
“Any other word on what’s going on over there?” I asked, now that the key points had been covered.
“The Brits don’t know who did what, but they’ve been listening closely to any broadcasts. Just about twenty-four hours ago, Russian news media announced their forces routed a Chinese army trying to invade Kazakhstan. Since the Russians have almost complete control over their print and broadcast media, as well as just about everything else within their ever-expanding borders, I’m going to interpret this statement as their victory lap. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have said anything. No word about the nukes, though.”
“Anything on Netfeed about this?” I asked almost as an afterthought. Nobody these days trusted what came out of the strictly curated Internet, so I expected a negative response, but my niece Tammy surprised me.
“There’s a statement just eight hours old from the president criticizing the Russian government for the wanton slaughter of thousands of Chinese refugees in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” she said, carefully pronouncing the long and tricky name, and I saw she was reading from her tablet.
“Dang, wasn’t expecting that,” Mike said, giving his daughter a ‘proud papa’ smile despite the nature of her discovery. “I figured he’d keep his trap shut.”
“What does all this mean for us?” my other niece Rachel asked, and her mom, Nikki, answered before anyone else had a chance to open their mouths.
“It means nothing, sweetie, other than be sure and eat all the vegetables on your plate at dinner,” my sister insisted, cutting her eyes at the rest of us in warning. Message received. Don’t talk about this kind of stuff in front of the kids.
“Yeah,” Mike added, “This is just something I wanted people to know about, but Nikki’s right. Doesn’t change the way we do things around here, or the chores we need to get done. So let’s get out of here and go have some lunch. I’m starving.”
With that statement, the room began to clear out as hungry workers headed off to the kitchen. Despite his words, Mike hung back and gave me a significant look. He glanced at Pat and nodded for him to stick around as well.
“That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, little brother,” I said to Mike, shaking my head in mock disappointment.
In truth, I was just a little bit terrified and fighting hard to hide it. The specter of a global war, a nuclear war, had hung over us since at least this current round of disaste
rs started, but confirmation that the nuclear genie was out of the bottle just took us that much closer to the annihilation I feared. All of the preparations we’d made would eventually fail if we suffered an all-out nuclear war. We might be able to avoid most of the fallout in the shelter, but then what? We were already facing what I worried might turn into a reasonable facsimile of the nuclear winters of the sort predicted by Carl Sagan and others.
My conversation with Nikki just days ago seemed overly hopeful, given this news.
“Oh, that may not even be the worst of it,” Mike replied, dropping his voice. “You know when the BBC World Service does their five-minute reports, they’ll sometimes mix in a little London weather bit? Well, they’ve stopped doing it.”
“Uh-huh,” I replied dumbly, not following.
“The weather, Bryan. They’ve stopping talking about the weather in England. I noticed it before the hurricane, but they’re doing it again today. Zip on conditions in the UK at all.”
He let that sink in for a second, and I got it.
“The Gulf Stream is fucked up,” I said and snapped my fingers, and I saw the puzzlement on Pat’s expression.
“Pat, if not for the Gulf Stream, the British Isles and Ireland would have weather comparable to Siberia,” Mike explained quickly. “The meteor strike released a lot of energy into the planet when it struck. Kinetic energy we saw, with the tsunamis and earthquakes. That’s the obvious stuff. There’s more, though. I’m sure the ocean strike released untold millions of tons of water vapor into the air, and we’re seeing all this rain as a direct or indirect result.
“More, though, is all that heat the impact generated had to go somewhere. Sure, a lot of it ended up radiating out into space, but enough stuck around to raise global temperatures for the short-term. With all this extra thermal energy pumped into the world’s weather engine, we’re also seeing long term climate balances shifting.”
Tertiary Effects Series | Book 2 | Storm Warning Page 5
