Prologue
At the beginning of the first year, despite news stories of record-cold temperatures that resulted in crop failures, the words “ice age” were hardly on anyone’s lips. Supermarket shelves still overflowed, though there were spot shortages and prices crept up. But as the year wore on, store shelves started to empty and prices skyrocketed. Though the United States was still the world’s largest food exporter, there were calls to reduce exports, and these were followed by resolutions, introduced into Congress, mandating export quotas on most food items and prohibitions on many. Before the year ended, it was illegal to export any food at all.
American agriculture was failing and there was a final bailout. This time it was for farmers, agribusinesses, and sectors of the food processing industry.
Most people were beginning to understand that the once mundane, day-to-day problems of obtaining food, heating oil, and even toilet paper were soon going to become more difficult, until they were all but impossible.
At the beginning of the second year, snow on the ground, usually gone by the end of March, lingered in many of the northern states until mid-May. Motor fuel rationing was instituted as refinery output had to be redirected to heating oil production. On the pretext of national security, American troops invaded the oil fields in the Middle East which led to the United States becoming involved in multiple wars. Industrial production started to decline and jobs evaporated.
Food rationing began in the cities and the first food riot occurred in Detroit where sixty-three people were killed. After that, street violence increased and no large city in the country made it through the second year without at least one major riot over food.
The grid started to fail and electric power was rationed and only available at certain hours of the day. In the spring of that second year, there was a rush to get wheat and other staple crops planted and home gardens sprung up from coast to coast. But, other than in the southern states, little was harvested because the cold weather came too early again.
By the third year, America’s cities were eerily quiet. There were massive crop failures and severe food rationing across the United States and around the world. In the Midwest, once breadbasket to the world, wheat, corn, and soybean farmers were completely out of business. Pigs, cattle, chickens, and other agricultural animals were slaughtered until there were almost none left, because there was nothing left to feed them. In Florida and California the citrus industry was obliterated. Further north, Canadian crops were virtually nonexistent and the US-Canadian border, once the longest undefended border in the world, had American troops at every crossing to stem the flow of Canadian immigrants who could not be cared for.
In just a few parts of the lower forty-eight states—the American Southwest and states along the Gulf Coast—there was still a short growing season, and that’s where tens of millions of Americans were trying to go, but almost no one in those states wanted them. And in February, citizens of Los Angeles, California, were stunned by a blizzard that left a foot and a half of snow on the city for the first time in its recorded history.
Across the nation, supermarkets were now closed and what little food there was came through “official” government distribution centers where corruption and theft were endemic. Those who had connections—and the Army—still ate well, but almost everyone else lived on starvation rations, if they lived at all.
Each time draconian measures were announced, they were welcomed. “Food hoarders” were cited as having a hand in the mass starvation and an Executive Order was issued authorizing the rounding up of all food stores—including those held privately—for a “redistribution program.” Police and military units went door-to-door looking for food that was now considered contraband. Bounties were offered and neighbor spied upon neighbor. Rumors flew as to who had food—to be interpreted as “who was illegally hoarding,” now a federal crime. Anyone who didn’t look cold and hungry was reported and woe be to those who were even a little overweight, as they soon received visits from the authorities, some of which led to gunfights that left citizens, police, and military personnel dead.
When gun control was called for, at first, only the desperate turned theirs in. When bounties of food were offered for them, once again, neighbor fingered neighbor.
The Mormons were targeted, as they had the tradition of storing against bad times. Temples and churches were ransacked, then burned when the mobs found nothing. Mormon families and anyone else thought to have food were confronted and those who couldn’t conceal the goods they had so prudently stored in better times had it taken away, often violently.
In the end, the redistribution program promised from the seized food never materialized. That which was confiscated simply disappeared.
For a while, both police and military units remained loyal to the government and carried out the orders they were given, some out of a misguided sense of duty and patriotism, others because they saw the chaos in the streets and obeyed their orders because it seemed to be the safest course to follow or because it got them and their families fed, but most remained loyal because wearing a uniform was a license to steal. But even that didn’t last. When their rations were cut, many police and military units became vigilante groups and sought food from a now largely unarmed population using violence whenever and wherever they had to.
Gangs formed, sometimes with the old police forces and military units at their cores. Other times it was private citizens banding together for survival. In the cities the gangs roamed looking for ever-dwindling caches of food until the caches disappeared, either consumed or successfully hidden. Along those highways that were still open a new phenomenon, collectively called “road pirates,” was born. They preyed on those trying to escape south into what was, at least, warmer weather. Often, the armed “authorities” who appeared at your door for “inventory inspections” were actually roving gangs or the road pirates who posed as government officials. It didn’t matter, you lost everything in either case.
Though hunger was now rampant across the United States, the rest of the world had it worse. In countries close to the equator, there was still a lengthy growing season, but the only crops that could survive the climate change there were those imported from the temperate zones. However, because they were unfamiliar to the natives, few of those crops were planted, so they, too, starved. According to UN estimates, three to four million people died of malnutrition every day in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America and the rate was increasing. There was nothing anyone could do about it.
In this third year, nearly half of what had once been a burgeoning population of the earth had perished. Governments no longer promulgated the fiction that the change in climate was a freak weather pattern, and politicians ceased promising solutions. No one knew how much worse it was going to get, but it was now clear it would.
But for all the riots, for all the call for gun confiscation “to end the violence,” the sad truth was that most people in the United States did not die from violence. Most simply hid in their homes, hoped for help, prayed for miracles, and in the end, almost all of of them drew their shades, climbed into their beds, and quietly froze or starved to death.
It was in the third year of the new ice age that Clayton tried to make a run from Yakima, Washington, to Los Angeles, California, to save himself and his family.
Chapter 1
August 24
The Cascades had been snow-covered from their bases to their peaks all summer long while temperatures in Yakima, typically over a hundred degrees this time of year, had gone over seventy-five just once in three years.
It had long been clear to Clayton—and billions of others—the new ice age had begun.
After months of preparation, this morning he was taking his family south to Los Angeles, where they had relatives. Ice age or not, Southern California still had a growing season, and a garden might be all that stood between getting anything at all to eat and starvation.
He considered himself lucky to finally get away. They’d left Yakima just before sunrise. For the first eighty miles the road was no longer maintained so travel along I-82 was slow. But as they reached Hanford the road got better. From here on the Army kept clear a few roads that led west to the coast and south into California.
It was almost 9:30 when he crossed the Columbia River and ten minutes later he turned west onto I-84, at Umatilla, Oregon, a road maintained because it serviced the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and the nuclear facilities at Hanford. He glanced in the rearview mirror to see how the kids were doing. Wedged between sleeping bags on the passenger’s side, his ten-year-old son, Robert, was trying to go to sleep. Robert had the dark hair and thin lips of his mother and he’d inherited her doleful expression that masked whatever was going on inside either of them.
On the other side of the van was Danielle—beautiful, blonde, thin, and barely five-foot-two. She wore a black T-shirt with red lettering across the front that read:
Fuck Off
or I’ll Kill You ’til You’re Dead
The shirt was a sore spot with him, but what had him really fuming was the fight she’d put up when he’d forced her into the van.
At sixteen, she shifted back and forth between moments when she was still a child and moments when she was becoming a woman. She had a boyfriend Clayton had never met, and she swore she would never leave Yakima. So she was the last to know, Clayton revealing it to her only as they loaded the van. He had fresh scratches on his arms she’d inflicted when she’d resisted. She had a slight swelling under her left eye from where he’d slapped her. She’d barely spoken since being forced into the vehicle and she now stared glumly out the window.
In her lap, her six-month-old sister, Audrey, slept. Clayton had nicknamed her “Whoops” because she’d been unexpected—testimony that tubal ligations don’t always work.
On the front seat, next to him, sat his wife, Emily, her face clouded by that cheerless expression that, after seventeen years of marriage, he’d come to detest. He glanced at her. She’d been quiet since leaving and he had the sense to leave her alone, for now.
It wasn’t leaving Yakima that bothered her. She’d have done anything for her husband, and he said they had to go. It was the way they left, without telling anyone, without inviting anyone else to come along, that upset her. Clayton told her she just didn’t understand: They had to go alone; they couldn’t save the world.
Now, the miles rolled by. Large pieces of debris appeared in unlikely places on the road. Only the Army kept the roads clear anymore, and they didn’t do it as a public service; they had their own agenda.
There were stretches where encroaching layers of sand and gravel made driving treacherous. He was careful with his speed, rarely going much over forty, usually doing under thirty. At some point in the future—no one could predict when—the roads would be obliterated, first buried by the ever-accumulating rubble once the Army ceased maintaining them, then torn up by the glaciers when the ice age deepened. Much of civilization was going to be erased once the mountains of ice began to move.
“Are you going to talk to me?” he finally asked.
Emily didn’t answer.
“I wish you’d talk to me.”
“We could have said goodbye,” she said.
“We couldn’t. Too many people suspected we were going, already. Word would have gotten around. The police, the damned churches, or the gangs would have come and taken everything away from us: the gas, the guns, the little bit of food we have…”
“I wish you wouldn’t swear.”
He shook his head in exasperation. “Damn’s not a swear,” he said. They rode in silence for the next few miles.
“We could at least have said goodbye to my family,” she said.
“Then your brother, Reverend Jim, would have been there.”
“His name is James.”
“I don’t care what his name is. We’d never have gotten out of there if he’d had his way. The guy’s a goddamned communist.”
“Please stop swearing,” she said softly.
Several more miles passed in silence.
“There were others who wanted to go with us. They’d have given anything to go,” she said in a low voice.
He didn’t respond.
“My brother-in-law begged.”
“You shouldn’t have told him what we were doing. The more people who knew, the more chances we had of losing everything when the authorities showed up. We’re lucky we got away.
“He should have been making plans himself,” he added.
“But he didn’t,” she said.
“It’s like the ant and the grasshopper, Emily. He frittered away his summer.”
“That’s right. He frittered away his summer. He’s an asshole. You’ve been saying it for years. Not everyone plans like you do. He needed your help. You could have helped him.”
Asshole. He’d never heard her use that word before. He pressed on the accelerator a little more and the van went a little faster.
“Why couldn’t we have brought Joanie and her brother?” she asked referring to their twelve-year-old niece and nine-year-old nephew.
“We don’t have room.”
“Why did we have to bring all that stuff back there?”
“We need it. We need the damned gas,” he shouted.
“I’m not talking about gas. Clayton, you brought power tools but there’s no power. You brought picture albums and left the people behind. You even brought your cell phone, and there’s no service anymore. We have room for a dozen or more people back there.”
“We couldn’t have gotten that many people in here.”
“We could have brought three little cars filled with people, filled with the gas we’re using for this van and your junk,” she yelled.
“Shut up, Emily,” he yelled back, “just shut up.”
He looked at the thermometer he’d taped to the side view mirror. It read thirtysix degrees Fahrenheit.
They’d seen no one else on the road since they’d left. Not that Clayton expected to. There wasn’t enough gas to go around anymore and anyone who had some was more than likely hoarding it until there was a chance to escape south. Gasoline was something you lied to your friends and neighbors about. If you were smart, you lied to your wife about it, too.
He’d started preparing for this trip six months ago, bartering for supplies, monitoring the news, and listening to the rumors. And, when there was nothing else to do, he painstakingly drew and redrew the route they would take. He fine-tuned it with each bit of information he considered significant and finally settled on a route that would take them along I-84 West to Gresham, where they’d turn south on I-205 then get on I-5. From there it was 170 miles until, just beyond Roseburg, they’d cut west on OR-42, at the Winston turnoff, and head for Bandon and the Oregon coast. Where towns appeared on the maps, he’d like to have chosen roads that skirted them. But if they weren’t used by the Army, there was no way to tell from the maps which might be navigable, so most of the trip would have to be along the main highways. In the end, the route he chose was exactly that which the Army used.
He knew from the radio that I5, running north-south through central California, was no longer maintained because of inclement inland weather. But US 101 and US 1, along the Oregon and California coast, were open because the moderating effect of the Pacific Ocean still made for milder weather there.
As he drove through the Columbia River Gorge his CB scanner jumped from one channel to the next. Some signals, because of skip, came from hundreds of miles away. There was no shortage of religion. “Jesus wi
ll save you!” “Christ will keep you warm!”
But there weren’t enough channels to accommodate everyone and broadcasters spent a good deal of their time feuding and bickering for airtime.
He looked in the rear view mirror again. Robert was still trying to go to sleep. Whoops slept in Danielle’s lap. Danielle leaned her head against the window and brooded. He wanted to say something about her shirt, but it would lead to another argument with his strong-willed daughter. It could wait. He still wanted to know where she got it.
He glanced again at Emily. She stared at the road ahead and didn’t speak.
Sure, he thought, they’d left Emily’s sister and her family. They left her bachelor brother. They left neighbors they had known for years. Some were people who wouldn’t leave, who believed the weather would change or the government could save them. Like horses, they wouldn’t leave a burning barn. There was macabre irony in that metaphor.
There were others who had already left and even more who wanted to leave. But few down south wanted them because there were barely enough resources, even in California, to support the people already there. The ice age had changed everything.
Until recently, the main roads going south were patrolled by state and federal authorities, and they turned the emigrants back. But once the emigrants got far enough south, they often had no means of getting back. Initially, the authorities put those who made it that far in work camps. But people fleeing the cold and the hunger really didn’t care. Work camps meant somebody else had to feed them and keep them warm. However, the camps themselves became strains on the resources available. There were rumors that, when things got bad enough, there were riots and massacres at some of the camps. But who knew the truth? That was one thing there was more of than ever: since the ice age had started, there was no shortage of rumors.
Ultimately, the work camps had to be closed and the travel laws were no longer enforced. So, if you could find the gas, the roads were open. But travel was risky. There were the stories of those whose occupation was to prey on unwary travelers: the road pirates.
Danielle Kidnapped: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Ice Age Page 1
