“That would be great,” I responded carefully. “Who told you that?”
“Heard it at a briefing with the governor’s science advisor. He said we’ve had similar situations in the past with earthquakes and volcanoes.”
“Oh,” was all I could say. I cut a glance at Mike, a silent question, and Mike gave a subtle nod.
“That’s what we were wanting to find out, Andy,” I started, but the canny detective reacted to that small exchange like I’d set off a road flare.
“What are you boys not telling me?”
“I’ll get to that in a second,” I replied with a raised hand, “and I’ll let Mike cover it with you. Here’s the thing though, Andy. Full disclosure. I came here expecting you to have these connections, and I wanted to pump you for information on what we can expect from the governor. So, tell us what you know and we’ll do the same.”
“Yeah, that’s the Bryan I remember. No fucking around and getting straight to the point,” Andy said with a sigh as he sat back in his swivel chair, looking every day and then some of his sixty plus years in that instant.
“All right, the governor had a get-together several weeks back. Invited all the sheriffs and had most of the police chiefs from the fifty biggest cities and towns. The topic was disaster relief and mitigating storm damage. I got the call to go and figured this was going to be another golfing weekend at another hill country resort, except of course, the rain never stopped, and no one even brought their clubs.”
Andy went on to describe the topics, and I felt my eyebrows rise as the incredible story unfolded. The governor had several experts come in to discuss the long-term effects of the rain, including erosion, subsidence of buildings and foundations, and the reclamation of damaged cropland. Then the National Guard adjutant general gave a presentation about disaster relief and recovery with regional cooperation. No FEMA, no flood insurance or government loans, and no federal troops for anything except holding down the border.
“Regional cooperation,” Andy repeated, a sour expression on his face. Like he’d bitten into a rotten sausage. “The governor has some half-assed agreement with New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana for mutual support, but all that really means for now is Texas is not only responsible for all our own refugees, I mean displaced citizens, but for the southern half of Louisiana as well.”
“Debbie took out New Orleans?” I asked, dumbfounded. Nothing about that on the television news, which I now knew must have been even more censored than I’d thought, and more worrisome, no comments on the HAM networks either.
“Debbie? Shit, New Orleans went before the first squalls hit. Dallas is just about overrun with the former residents of the Big Easy, and there’s not much can be done about it. Grin and bear it, I guess. Well, and hire more displaced cops.”
“You mean the ones from the evacuated areas? That’s what you all are doing here?” Mike asked, and I wondered how he knew. I also decided we needed to spend a lot more time listening to the HAM bands now we had the system back in working order.
“Yeah, that’s what the county commissioners here decided to do,” Andy confirmed. “Then that asshole Robards tried to turn them into his own little Stasi unit here, but Sheriff Crawford shut that shit down real quick.”
“I guess we’re not the only ones with problems,” Mike muttered under his breath, and Andy cocked his head.
“Landshire? I heard the boys had him under scrutiny, not that I can comment, but I was already out the door when that was going on.”
I nodded before elaborating. Andy’s comment made sense. One of the key roles for the Texas Rangers, after all, involved corruption and malfeasance investigations of public officials.
“That first shooting I was in, the one Ernie was giving me shit about, was with some bad boys we’re pretty sure worked for our sheriff,” I explained. “They were trying to kidnap the niece of one of his political enemies. I was just in the wrong place at the right time.”
“Watch him then,” Andy warned. “Be plenty of opportunities for empire building in the months to come, and not much my guys or the governor will be able to do to stop it.”
“We are,” I replied carefully. “And the new deputies he’s got working for him, they look more like inmates than law enforcement.”
“If he’s got connections, wouldn’t be hard to do. Think his whole department is dirty?”
I shook my head in the negative. “At least one of his lieutenants seems straight up. And not that happy with his boss after he left them out in the weather when the hurricane hit. Not enough room in the Emergency Services bunker.”
“Well, that’s one to watch, if true. I’d look to see who all got an invite to his bolt hole, and then keep an even closer eye on them. Keep your guns close, Bryan, because pretty soon things are going to get worse before they get better.”
“That’s what we figured,” I replied with a sigh. “Now, Andy, you’ve been more than patient, and answered a lot of our questions that had been nagging at us. Only fair that we ruin your day, or week, with what we know.”
“Given that setup, I’m not sure I want to know, Bryan.”
“Sometimes, I wish I didn’t know either,” I agreed, “but it isn’t the complete end of the world. Mike, if you would, please?”
Taking his cue, my brother gave Andy a brief background on his military service, and his relationship with Bart, before getting down to the matter of the previously unknown meteorite making impact, and the sudden death of hundreds of millions, if not at least a billion people. Mike was clinical, like a pathologist reading off his autopsy notes.
Andy took it all in, and his skin took on an unhealthy pallor as Mike’s recitation wound down after only a few minutes. He said nothing for nearly sixty seconds, but he continued to nurse the cup of room temperature coffee still sitting on his desk.
“Not an ELE, then?”
ELE was shorthand for Extinction Level Event, like the meteorite that knocked the dinosaurs off the top of the food chain sixty-five million years ago. I hid my shock at his knowledge of the lingo. That abbreviation was something a scientist might use. Or a prepper.
“No, we don’t think so, anyway,” I replied, eyeing the retired Ranger with some caution. He’d been shocked, but maybe not as shocked as he should have been.
“How much worse is this going to get? I know you don’t think this will wipe out the race, but what about surviving right here?”
I looked away from the man’s desperate expression.
“I’d move my family further inland,” I admitted. “You’re still too close to the coast here. Mike expects we’ll continue to periodically receive hurricanes for the next six months to a year.” I glanced at my brother, who nodded in confirmation. “Same intensity as this last one.”
“Winter is going to be a bitch,” Mike added, his voice going low. “Expect an early freeze. And a delayed spring. Not sure we’ll get in a real growing season next year, so make sure your family is stocked up.”
“Christ Almighty, give me strength,” Andy prayed under his breath, and he looked at me, hard.
“Are you ready for what’s coming? No,” he held up a hand before I could answer. “Don’t answer that. It was wrong for me to ask.”
“Andy, I didn’t come here to cause you trouble,” I said, wanting to believe my own words. “The next few years are going to be hard, harder than you ever imagined. Like I said though, I just wanted truth for truth, and you’ve given us much to think about as well. I know your family is here, but you really should think hard on relocating.”
“You’ve given me a lot to think about, Bryan. And you, Mike. This sounds a lot like the old theories about nuclear winter from the nineteen-eighties. If this is true, then the question we need to be asking ourselves is quite simple,” Andy observed.
“Why is the president and his cronies trying to cover this up?” I supplied the question, and Andy touched his nose. Bingo.
“Do you think the governor knows?” Mike
asked. I could tell he was getting a weird vibe off my old shooting instructor as well, and I suddenly remembered deciding to come in unarmed. Maybe not the best decision after all.
Andy laughed, relaxing a touch in his seat.
“He’s a consummate actor, a real chameleon, but no, I don’t think he knows. I’m sure he’s heard the rumors, I think we all have, but without any evidence to back it up, everybody has just dismissed the whole thing. But that goes back to my earlier question: why is it important?”
“Political fallout for not catching the damned thing?” I suggested. “Happened on his watch after all.”
Andy shook his head. “Relatively new president, replacing an administration that cut the NASA budget, he could easily dump it on his predecessor. No, there’s got to be something more to it.”
Mike grunted at that. He’d frequently ragged on the recently elected president’s cuts to NASA, but those had to do with what was hard to hide as pork being shoveled out to the various districts by congressmen eager to garner the votes. And Congress was quick to tie that cut funding to a spending bill the incumbent was later forced to sign to keep the government going. Mike hadn’t complained near as much when his predecessor, a member of the political party Mike supported, had cut the overall funding for satellite coverage and basic science programs. As one of my law school professors so succinctly put it, the wronged party all depended on whose ox was being gored.
Andy’s casual dismissal of a political reason seemed like a kneejerk reaction, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that he was right. The current president could just have easily laid the blame off on a prior administration. The previous resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave spent as much time in office gutting departments as feuding with Congress. Notably, this included slashing the NASA budget to the bone. Who knows if those programs would have given us any advance warning about the meteorite, but the Washington spinmasters had plenty of ammunition to work with.
No, there was something else going on.
“The economy?” I asked, bouncing my thoughts around with the group. This was something Mike and I, along with Nikki and Marta, and Pat, now that he was with us, did in small groups in the evenings. With Andy and what he knew, this practice gained a new dimension.
“Is screwed,” Andy responded after a pause. “We all know it. Hell, all Americans know it on a gut level, but we still keep shuffling forward. The Fed keeps printing money, the banks continue running with gradually reducing withdrawal restrictions, and with prices frozen, the country will continue lurching down the road. A decapitated chicken, but the rest of the body thinks the bird’s still alive. Going to be a reckoning at some point, but no reason for the Feds to lie about the cause of the catastrophe.”
“They don’t want us looking over our shoulders,” Mike blurted out.
“What?” I whispered, my throat like gravel.
“The president…he wants us to think this was started by some terrestrial activity,” Mike continued, his voice laced with dark emotion. “Ring of Fire and all that jazz. Something triggered by a series of earthquakes and volcanoes. That’s what his people have been preaching to the population since the first reports started rolling in.”
“Oh, Lord have mercy,” Andy said, as if he was realizing something for the first time.
“But why? Why lie about something like this?” I managed to stammer out.
Mike gave me a sad smile, like he was the butt of a joke and being a good sport while taking the ribbing. It was an expression I knew well, but what he said next had me sitting back in my seat with a gasp.
“The president doesn’t want us to know it was a meteor that hit, because they know there’s another one coming.”
“Well, shit.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The drive back was quiet for the first twenty minutes, with both of us thinking about Mike’s apocalyptic guess. And it was still a guess, and one we’d talked about before in the abstract, but with Andy’s input, the possible suddenly became the probable. Another meteorite, or a series of them, on the horizon was something the president might very well try to conceal. The news would trigger a worldwide panic, and what would be accomplished?
“Think he was right to do it?”
Mike’s words jarred me from my own thoughts, but I kept my eyes on the road. We were taking a different but slightly shorter route back, sticking to the smaller roads and avoiding Highway 96, which was still littered with abandoned cars that’d run out of fuel trying to evacuate from Beaumont. The state was still clearing cars off the shoulders, but the route was rumored to be awash in empty vehicles and desperate refugees. Ah, displaced persons, I mentally corrected myself. So we were taking Highway 92 to Spurger, then cutting back over through Kirbyville to get back to New Albany and home.
In the early afternoon, the rain fell in a dispirited drizzle, and the flooded ditches made driving hazardous, but at least none of the bridges along this route were still underwater. This rain had long ago overwhelmed the countryside’s ability to channel the outflow of the flooding, even after a few breaks in the weather. The land was simply flooded, waterlogged, and my side glances revealed submerged fields reminding me of rice fields in Louisiana and the flats down around Winnie.
I didn’t have to ask who Mike meant by his question. After a moment to reflect, I replied.
“I don’t know. I guess it depends on what he knows. What if there is another one on its way? A slate wiper? Or a planet buster? Would you want to know? That’s the real question, I guess. And I thought you hated the guy, anyway.”
“Ah, hate is a strong word. I didn’t vote for him, and I don’t agree with his politics, or that of his party, but he hasn’t done half the strong-arm stuff I was worried about.” Mike paused, considering, before he continued.
“I don’t know about this president, but like you said, if this is it, the end, then no, I don’t think I’d want to know. When I was in the Army, and I was deployed, we used to joke about things. Morbid shit, you know? We’d make fun of the Hollywood movies, where you hear a gunshot, and the hero goes down. Did we want to see the bullet coming, or hear it, right before you take the hit? I think I’d rather not see it coming. Just a sting, then the lights go out.”
I nodded, encouraging Mike to keep going.
“I saw a guy in my squad, Matthews, take a bullet like that. Right in the side of the head. He went down, hit the ground like a puppet with cut strings, and we all knew he was gone. I saw other guys hit, screaming and begging while the medics tried to stop the bleeding, but you just knew they weren’t going to make it. But Matthews, he just fell down, a look of surprise was all he had on his face.”
Mike had never shared anything like this before, and I was slightly amazed at his sudden desire to share. The discussion with Andy must have really gotten to him, I thought.
Before we could continue the conversation, I happened to glance to my left and caught sight of something out of the ordinary. In this part of the country, like a few miles outside of the small community of Fred, the surroundings were decidedly rural, and the narrow, two lane stretch of Highway 92 was not much traveled by outsiders even in the pre-Rockfall days.
The small single story sat back about two hundred yards from the road in a wide clearing carved out of the tall pine trees, and we were just pulling past the cattle guard driveway when I saw a telltale flash coming from the vicinity of the front yard. Then I heard the familiar report, faint over the sound of the truck’s engine.
“Shit! Is that…”
“Rifle fire,” Mike replied drily as I eased the truck to a stop. We were about thirty yards past the gate now, and I could see more detail as I eased the truck in to park on the muddy shoulder of the road. Two trucks, parked in a chevron pattern with noses almost touching, sat astride the gravel driveway, and I could make out figures crouched behind the front ends of the paired trucks. Broken windows on the trucks marked where at least one person in the house was objecting to the
presence of their unwanted visitors.
“You getting a signal?” I asked Mike as he fiddled with his phone.
“Nope, not a single bar. Was going to try 911, but that’s a no-go.”
“What’re you thinking we should do? Are those deputies with their backs to us?”
Of the two of us, I knew Mike had the better eyesight. If those trucks were Tyler County Deputies, he would be able to tell better than I could.
“Nope,” Mike replied again, and stuffed his phone into his shirt pocket as he reached under the front seat of the truck.
“We could drive on into Fred,” I reasoned. “Only three miles or so up the road.”
“Won’t help these people,” Mike replied evenly, his voice revealing no stress. “There’s nothing there but a gas station, if it’s even still open. No police station. We’re here, and we can do something.
Clearly, Mike had already made up his mind. “Shoot”, I muttered under my breath. This was Tractor Supply all over again.
Since our last bit of unexpected gunplay, Mike had decided he was never going to get caught in a shootout with just a pistol. Hence the cased AR-10 he’d loaded behind the seat before our trip. I’d yet to see my hog gun returned after the shooting at Wilson’s, confiscated by the deputies and undoubtably already missing from the evidence locker at the Sheriff’s Office, so I’d replaced it with an old Marlin Model 336C I’d picked up many years ago at a gun show. The 3x Redfield scope was nicked over time, but the glass was still clear and I’d be comfortable with the rifle out to two hundred yards. Mike, with the heavy barreled AR in 7.62x51mm and a Nikon scope, was probably able to hit reliably at two or three times that range.
While Mike was uncasing his black rifle and slipping a magazine carrier on over his rain slicker, I was opening a metal ammo can containing cardboard boxes and made myself busy, stuffing additional 30-30 cartridges into my jacket pockets.
“How many of them, you reckon?”
Tertiary Effects Series | Book 2 | Storm Warning Page 11
