The Blockade
Page 6
Truth is he’s no more lucky than anyone else. He just happened to be the one who walked down that particular sidewalk at the same time the hundred dollar bill blew by. If the bill blew by a minute earlier a nice little old lady with a poodle named Murray would have picked it up.
If it blew by three minutes later the bill would have been picked up by Sid, an old drunk, who’d have taken it to the nearest 7-Eleven and used it to pay for a twelve pack of beer.
It wasn’t a case of luck. It was a case of timing and nothing more.
Another example: When Joe and Flo Shmoe finish their dinner that night they walk into the parking lot. And there they are both killed by an airplane door falling from the sky. It seems something broke on the door as Rainbow Airlines flight 235 flew over the city and the door came flying off.
The airplane kept going to Cleveland because… well, what else could it do?
The door clobbered the couple as they walked to their car.
By now you know the rest. If they’d left a few minutes earlier when they ran out of wine, the door would have crashed harmlessly into the parking lot, bounced, and landed on the roof of the taco restaurant next door. They’d have been safely in their car, halfway home.
If they’d decided to stay for dessert they would be inside the restaurant wondering along with everybody else what that loud crash was outside.
But no. Their timing was such that they were in the parking lot when the door crashed down, squashing them like bugs.
Sorry to see you go, Joe and Flo Shmoe.
But hey, it is what it is. Joe didn’t go from incredibly lucky to incredibly unlucky to incredibly dead all in the same day.
Luck had nothing to do with it.
It was just a matter of timing.
Yes, there’s a point to all this.
Most of Joe and Flo Shmoe’s friends, at their joint funeral, considered it an amazing coincidence they were walking through that parking lot at the exact moment that aircraft door came crashing down.
Even their two sons, Moe and Bo Shmoe, and their daughter Jo Shmoe, thought the event was rather amazing. And that was long before they got a multi-million dollar wrongful death settlement from the airline.
Similarly, most people would consider it an incredible coincidence that the coming of Saris 7 saved Johnny and Tina from Mexican cartel assassins. After all, they’d say, it was against all odds that the meteorite chose that exact moment – when the cartel was onto Johnny and after him, to come crashing into the earth.
But it wasn’t a coincidence. Saris 7 was going to strike the earth at some point. It just happened to do so when Johnny was terrified and in fear of being shot at any minute.
It was just timing. That’s all it was.
Now then, having said all of that, Johnny being saved a second time from the Mexican cartel… by a second meteorite… now that was a bizarre coincidence.
A coincidence of immense proportions.
-17-
On that day, when Johnny and Tina consulted in their upstairs bathroom about the cartel coming after them to torture them and kill them, the sky suddenly started to darken.
It looked like a storm front rolling in; something not uncommon for the city of Lubbock. Lubbock got torrential rains several times a year, and since it was an agricultural community, such rains had always been greeted with glee.
Only this storm front looked rather odd.
The huge cloud rolling in wasn’t black, as though it was full of rain.
And it had none of the streaks of lightning, flashing from deep within the blackness, which normally foretold a thunderstorm was coming.
No, this huge cloud, which covered the eastern half of the sky, wasn’t black at all.
Or even gray.
It was a dark brown.
Now Lubbock, Texas has always been plagued with huge walls of brown dust rolling in to cover everything and everyone with a dusty coating of yuck.
What those events are called depends on who you talk to.
For generations they were called “dust storms.” Old timers still call them that.
Youngsters, though, call them “haboobs.”
That’s a term some meteorologist at the National Weather Service pulled out of… somewhere. Nobody knows its origin or why it suddenly replaced the term “dust storm,” which was perfectly fine for hundreds of years, since the Comanche roamed the land.
A local weatherman used the term one day out of the clear blue sky and all Lubbockites looked at one another and shrugged. They just assumed he was drunk and let it pass, until a newsman on a rival newscast used the same term.
And it stuck.
Now a term which once applied to desert sandstorms in the Middle East applies to periodic storms which pick up a good portion of New Mexico and deposit it on the plains of Texas.
But even that didn’t look like what was happening in Lubbock on the day Johnny and Tina decided what to do about the cartel coming after them.
The television happened to be on in the master bedroom, and an Emergency Broadcasting Signal came blaring over it.
Johnny walked into the bedroom to turn off the TV, assuming the station was just doing its required monthly test.
It wasn’t.
Crawling across the screen was an important announcement.
“A meteorite has struck the earth in the Eifel region of Germany. Skies are expected to darken in coming hours and temperatures are expected to drop to below freezing. Precipitation will be in the form of ice and snow and will accumulate for the foreseeable future. Freeze is expected to last from two to three years. Please take appropriate actions to ensure your safety.”
Once again, the United States government blew it.
Ten years before they knew about Saris 7 streaking through the heavens on a collision course with earth.
Yet they chose not to tell the citizens, fearing a nationwide panic. It was a handful of rogue scientists, including Hannah Jelinovic Snyder, who blew the whistle and gave the public a few weeks’ warning.
Millions died because they weren’t prepared.
The government knew about Cupid 23 as well. Cupid 23 broke off of Saris 7 in the collision which knocked Saris 7 off its original path and diverted it towards earth. And like a baby duck will follow its mother wherever she goes, the smaller meteorite followed Saris 7.
Cupid 23 was smaller and slower and tended to wobble a bit. That slowed her even more, and was why she didn’t arrive at Mother Earth until several years after her own mother.
But she was here now, and ready to wreak her own wrath upon the earth.
Because she was slower, more of Cupid 23 burned up entering our atmosphere. But there was enough of her left to pack a wallop of a punch. The freeze she caused wouldn’t be as long as the first one. And the temperatures wouldn’t drop quite as much.
But the world was still in for another bad time.
It was like a boxer’s “one-two punch.” It wasn’t the first punch which did the damage. The first punch just makes the opponent drop his defenses. It weakens him and sets him up for the second punch, which drops him like a rock.
Cupid 23 was like that second punch.
Millions of people around the earth would commit suicide in the first few days. They just didn’t have it in them to survive a second freeze. They said, “Not again,” and ended their lives forever.
Once again, the world was cast into semi-darkness and cold temperatures and misery.
But not everybody was upset about it.
Johnny had a huge grin on his face as he read the crawl moving over and over across his TV screen.
Tina, standing beside him, was freaking out. She was slightly tempered by the quarter gram of crystal meth she’d smoked just before her shower, but wasn’t so out of it she didn’t understand the implications.
She saw Johnny’s stupid grin and asked, “What in hell are you smiling about, stupid? Don’t you realize what they’re saying? The world is gonna freeze again!”
“What? Are you nuts? Why?”
“Because once the snow starts falling the roads will become impassable again. And once the roads are impassable the cartel won’t be able to come after me. We’ll be safe until the next thaw.”
Tina froze like a statue, her drug-addled mind trying to process everything at once.
It was good that the cartel would call off their dogs for awhile.
But having to live through the hell of another long freeze, that was a bad thing. A very bad thing indeed.
One which she didn’t think was worth it.
-18-
Flash forward three months…
Lubbock has had a couple of hard precipitation days.
In a normal world they’d have presented themselves as thunderstorms. They’d have dumped several inches of rain into the area’s playa lakes, where the water would have slowly evaporated. That which didn’t evaporate would slowly soak into the ground to add to the area’s water source, the Ogallala aquifer.
But this wasn’t a normal world.
This was a frozen world.
Everything was white. But not picturesque.
It stopped being pretty long before.
Now it was just a white torture chamber. One which there was no escape from, for there was no place to run. The only way to beat the snow was to ride it out to the thaw.
Lubbock, and the rest of the planet, was a very dismal place.
The city was doing a bang-up job in keeping the streets clear, so Johnny’s customer base still managed to visit him on a regular basis. So there was that.
Johnny provided free dope to a civilian employee of the Lubbock Police Department, who promised him an early warning if the cops had him in their headlights. His name was Joe, and he assured Johnny he was safe.
“They know about you,” he told Johnny. “They’ve always known about you. But they can’t arrest you because the jail is bursting at the seams. There’s no place to put you. Even during the thaw they only got one court up and running. They only got a few cases done before it froze over again.
“You’re on a long list of people they’re gonna arrest when it thaws out again and they make room in the jail, but you’re safe until then.”
So there was that.
Johnny figured that at some point, one of two things was gonna happen.
Either he’d finally run out of drugs to sell and would have to go straight. Or become a street level dealer working for someone else.
Or his junkies would stop showing up because they’d stolen everything there was to steal and collected all available blue money in the city.
Either way, he had enough food, jewelry and blue dollars to live comfortably for a very long time.
So he chilled and took it easy. For now, anyway, the heat was off. It was business as usual and things got more or less back to normal.
Flash forward three more months…
Joe, the civilian who filed police reports for the LPD, knocked on Johnny’s door.
“You’re early,” Johnny said. “Your monthly freebie ain’t due for another week.”
“I didn’t come for that. I came to warn you.”
“Warn me about what? Did they make room at the jail?”
“No. This is something different.”
“So tell me. What the heck is it?”
“Two men came to the police department yesterday. They were looking for you. They were asking how they could find out if you were in jail. And if you weren’t, did they know where you might live.”
“Why in hell would they go to the police station?”
“One of them had a blue hundred dollar bill tucked into the brim of his hat. I think they were waving it around hoping somebody would offer them your address for it.”
“What did they look like?”
“They were Mexicans. Not local Hispanics. Mexicans, like from Mexico.”
“How do you know?”
“You could tell. They both wore black suits and black hats. Shiny material with skinny lapels. Black boots with silver tips on the toes. I’ve been to Juarez enough times to recognize the style. And their English was terrible. They were hard as hell to understand. But they were definitely Mexican nationals.”
“Did they get the info they were looking for?”
“No. Nobody saw the hundred dollar bill and took the bait. They left. I overheard the conversation and the officers who talked to them said they looked sleazy and were probably cartel. They were laughing and saying they might take care of the Johnny Connolly problem for them. That they wouldn’t have to find a cell in the jail for you. All they’d have to do was gather up your body parts and throw them all in the dumpster.”
Johnny seemed to take offense at the remark.
Joe put his hands in front of him, as though to ward off a punch, and said, “Hey, I didn’t say it, man. One of the detectives did.”
Joe still had a week to go before he was due another gram of heroin. But he’d delivered valuable information which could well save Johnny’s life, and Tina’s too.
Johnny knew he owed the man, for he’d gone out on a limb to get word to him.
He handed Joe a postage-stamp sized baggie full of dope and said, “Thanks, man.”
When he walked Joe to the door he stepped onto his porch and looked one way up the street, then the other.
And he wished the house they’d chosen wasn’t on a main thoroughfare. It was on one of the streets city crews cleared after every snowfall.
There was half an inch of ice on the road surface, and driving was still a slippery endeavor. But the street was drivable, and would make it much easier for the assassination team to get to him.
He ran to the dining room, where Tina was eating a bowl of soup.
He told her of the problem, and told her to finish her meal and start packing.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he said.
“But if the cops didn’t tell them where we lived, maybe they’ll just go back to Mexico.”
“No. It doesn’t work that way. They didn’t come all this way to turn around and go back. If they did they’d be killed themselves.
“The police station was just their first stop. They thought the cops would give me up to get me out of their hair. But they won’t give up there.
“The next thing they’ll do is to search the streets for junkies. They’ll tell them they’re looking for me. And they’ll offer them cash or a big score to give me up.
“And it’s just a matter of time before they do.”
In the garage was the brand new black pickup truck they’d purchased a few months before, before the world froze again.
The cargo bay was crammed full of food.
Within two hours the back seat was crammed full of clothing and dope and cash, along with three cases of bottled water.
They left the garage door wide open when they pulled away.
It didn’t matter. They had no plans to return.
-19-
Hannah and Captain Wright walked side by side down the long corridor and whispered as they went.
Even their whispers seemed to echo on the bare concrete walls.
“Wow, I feel like a prisoner. The only thing missing are the handcuffs and the shackles,” she said.
“They do take their security procedures seriously,” Wright responded. “I understand it’s gotten much more strict since the breach.”
Hannah merely nodded, accepting that a breach of their top-secret bunker was probably good cause to tighten up their procedures.
And she had a point. Any outsider, watching the group walking down the hallway together, might presume the visitors weren’t visitors at all; but rather prisoners being escorted from one cell to another.
As Hannah looked around she noticed that she and Wright were the only people in the bunker who were not armed.
The three people walking in front of them wore side arms.
The two guards behind them carried M-16 rifles at the ready.
Everyone they passed, everyone she saw going in or out of the various rooms they passed, had a 9 mm pistol on their hip or a rifle on their shoulder.
Some had both.
The bunker had the look and the feel of a prison.
She passed a closed door with a sign:
CHILD CARE UNIT
Hours 0001 - 0001
The numbers on the sign puzzled her, until she translated it to mean the unit never closed. And if the residents included workers who were married with children, and which operated three shifts, twenty four hours a day, it made sense that child care had to be available all the time.
The sign on the very next door read:
KINDERGARTEN
Hours 0730 – 1600
And the next room:
GRADE SCHOOL
Hours 0730 – 1600
And the next:
MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL
Hours 0730 – 1600
She suddenly felt sad for the people who lived here, and who wouldn’t be allowed to leave until the thaw.
When she and Mark set up their shelter beneath Salt Mountain, so many years before, they’d tried hard to make it homey.
Or at least as much like home as possible.
Now granted, there was only so much they could do in an abandoned salt mine.
But at least it felt like home. And there was room to stretch out, as some of the old mine shafts went a mile or more into the base of the mountain. There was room for pets, for livestock, for basketball courts. Even a small soccer field.
This… this… this operation seemed to contain many times more people, in an area roughly the size of a football field.
Not only that, but every wall was unpainted concrete, ugly and gray and cold to the touch.
Everyone they encountered bore a weapon, and most had scowls upon their faces.
She wondered how a small child, growing up in this environment, might be affected by it. What kind of adult would they be, once they were freed from their concrete tomb? Would they be borderline insane? Unable to relate or to associate with people who’d grown up in unfiltered air, with the freedom to come and go wherever they pleased?