Winter Kill - War With China Has Already Begun

by Gene Skellig

  The third, “Tasty Treats” Roughneck, contained a large number of quality freeze-dried meals, long-life canned goods, tobacco, hard candies, flavored drink crystals, tea, sugar, artificial cream, and instant coffee in individual packets.

  Amy figured that the three main products would allow a person to save time and energy by buying one of each, and then add more of the first and third type as needed. There was also a long list of individual items available which could be thrown together to customize other Roughnecks or accompany one of the three core bins.

  What Amy was more interested in, however, was finding out what motivated Marty and Katy to put so much energy into providing such a service to what must be a very small number of customers in the Oceanside area. The business must be operating at a loss, as the contents must cost more than the bins were selling for. No matter how she approached the question, Amy couldn’t glean anything from Marty and Katy about why they were doing it. She noticed that they were stockpiling a large number of these bins in the warehouse at the back of their office.

  After the festival, Amy returned to her apartment in Richmond and busied herself with working through the rest of the films and doing some fact-checking on some of the more interesting survival strategies she had become aware of.

  Amy found the films to be deeply depressing. They made her worry about the future she was bringing Janie-Lee into. Something about the genre was very intriguing to her, however, and kept her interested in learning more. She was drawn to the intellectual challenge of surviving some of those worst-case scenarios. As an engineer, she noticed a great many logical and scientific errors in the films but she also recognized a few things that the film-makers had gotten right. She was particularly interested in the nuclear war scenarios.

  Her web-searching confirmed that gamma radiation levels diminished quickly. Every hour that you could stay in a well protected location would greatly increase your chances of survival. She found that the more than 1,500 Roentgens per hour that an unprotected person could be exposed to in the first hour of fallout would be fatal. However, this would be cut to 1/10th as much radiation within just seven hours, and 1/100th as much two days later. By staying sheltered for two weeks after the heavy fallout, this improves to 1/1000th. So the immediate danger from radioactive fallout could easily be mitigated, as long as one does not ingest radioactive particles.

  On another level, Amy found the film genre to be deeply challenging. She worried about the inherent conflict between her own moral standards, her determination to improve the situation for her daughter, and the larger context of a world which could no longer support the demands being placed on it by over seven billion people. Fairness and the idea of equitable distribution of scarce resources now seemed to be an unsupportable ethical fantasy.

  Now, faced with the horrifying reality that all of those disaster movies had suddenly become sickeningly real, and that she and her daughter were in peril, Amy no longer had any qualms about what she should do to survive. She would do anything necessary to survive and to assure the safety of her child.

  Janie-Lee was surprisingly well behaved, or at least very quiet and attentive to everything her mother said. After making their way out of the Skytrain and into the tunnel, Amy found that there was just enough space along the raised concrete path running alongside the tracks for Amy to push Janie-Lee’s stroller. Most of the other passengers made their way along the concrete between the rails, moving faster than Amy could.

  The emergency lighting grew stronger as they neared 41st Avenue Station and ascended the first flight of stairs towards the surface. Amy took Janie-Lee out of the nearly useless stroller and carried her in her arms as she climbed up the immobilized escalator. At the middle level, Amy notice an “Orange Julius” kiosk and considered stopping to scavenge some food and drink, but then realized where she was and had a much better idea.

  Remembering that this Skytrain station would come out in the plaza in front of the Oakridge Center, Amy immediately knew where to go for shelter. For a moment, as she stared up at the beautiful sky in disbelief, Amy hoped that the blast had been some other kind of accident, and not a nuclear strike. But when she turned and looked to the north and saw a huge vertical cloud dwarfing the mountains beyond, reality came crashing back.

  Not knowing where else to turn, most of the other passengers headed towards the shopping mall. A few, probably locals, headed in other directions.

  The lower levels of the buildings and houses nearby were intact, however north-facing windows on the upper floors of the few five and six story buildings were heavily damaged. Amy figured that the Oakridge neighborhood must have been partly sheltered from the blast by the rise at Little Mountain, just one km north of Oakridge Centre.

  Amy calculated her distance from downtown Vancouver as she hurried across 41st Avenue to a small four-storey concrete building on the northwest corner. Just as she came up with the answer, six km, she put Janie-Lee down for a minute and looked up at the partly flattened top of the tall black cloud that loomed over the city. It was being blown northeast. So she was safe from fallout, Amy reasoned, because she was southwest from ground zero, basically in line with the airport.

  She suddenly turned 180 degrees to look towards the airport. What she saw next made her turn and run. She saw a flag blowing in the gentle south-westerly breeze.

  Amy tried to work out the geometry in her head as she ran along the east side of the commercial building, passing a few small businesses before reaching the far end of the building. She turned left at the corner and rushed for the concrete half-wall surrounding a steep concrete staircase that went straight down to the Bus Driver’s Club. She held tightly to the railing as she carried Janie-Lee carefully down the steep stairs as fast as she could. The airport is five kilometers from here, upwind! she kept thinking to herself. She knew that the terrain between Vancouver International Airport and Oakridge was gently sloping with no hilltop like Little Mountain to shelter them.

  Amy tried the door-knob and found it open. She carried Janie-Lee inside and quickly closed the steel fire-door behind her. Suddenly blind in the near darkness, Amy held Janie-Lee close to her and tried to catch her breath. In the dim light, she could see that nobody appeared to be in the Bus Driver’s Club or BDC as she knew it. As her eyes started to adjust to the darkness, she could see that at least one of those wall-mounted emergency lights was on, at the far end of the large room. It cast a dim glow throughout the large open space of the BDC.

  “Who’s there?” asked a man’s voice from behind the bar.

  “I’m Amy Arnott,” Amy said, moving closer. She was surprised to see a pair of very hairy legs and the distinctive blue uniform shorts that bus drivers in Vancouver wore on warm days like today. When he stepped out into the light, Amy saw that his shirt was wrinkled. He smelled like beer and vomit. “Who are you, a bus driver?”

  “Yeah. I’m John Simpson. Nice to meet you, Amy. You’ve just come in from the street, right? What the hell happened out there? I was sleeping it off in the back room there when the building started shaking. I woke up in total darkness.”

  Amy was now close enough to see the bearded face of a stocky little man no more than five foot four.

  “There’s a war! Vancouver has just been nuked, and I think the airport will be next.”

  “Get serious! I felt an earth-quake or maybe a bus drove into the building, but nothing more. You’re pulling my leg.”

  “OK, John, then why’s the power out? Check your cell-phone, it’ll be dead too,” Amy said, looking around the club.

  The BDC hadn’t changed since she was there with a bus driver from the 41-UBC route. On a late-nite bus ride back to the 41st Ave station to transfer to her Skytrain. The friendly bus driver had invited her to join him for an after-work beer at “his” club. Amy agreed to go, and was introduced to the underworld of bus drivers and heavy mechanics. She was shown something that few non bus drivers would ever know existed, an after-hours speak-easy where bus drivers and
mechanics from the “Bus Barn” on 41st Avenue could drink beer in their uniforms.

  “I’ll go look outside, then.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that.”

  “Wha-” was all that John could say. He was suddenly bathed in bright light blazing under the fire door. The entire BDC was illuminated like when the lights come on at closing time. Every ugly stain on the carpet was visible. Even the grime on the tables stood out distinctly. He covered his eyes as Amy wrapped her hands around Janie-Lee’s eyes and pressed her own face into her wrist to block out the light.

  After what felt like minutes, but was more like two or three seconds, the room went black again. The emergency lights failed. All three of them folded to the floor, disoriented by the flash and subsequent blackness. Janie-Lee began to cry.

  “Don’t be afraid, sweetie Pie, mommy’s here.”

  “What was that?”

  “The airport, I think.” Before Amy could say more, she was drowned out by the rumbling sounds and vibration from what sounded like a train crashing through the building overhead. She realized that the shock wave must have reached the building above them. Then a much more violent force struck, and the entire building shook like it was being ripped up out of the ground by a giant hand. Nearby, there was a shrill whistling sound, and then a “clunk-kuh-clunk-clunk-BAM!” as something rolled down the concrete stairs and smashed against the fire door, bursting it inward. An orange glow came through the door, and the shrill whistling stopped.

  “Samson, get over here!” Amy sprang into action, leaving Janie-Lee crying where she lay on the middle of the floor.

  “What? OK. By the way, it’s Simpson!” as he hurried behind her to the fire door.

  Amy tried to dislodge a heavy four-drawer filing cabinet out from where it had come to rest in the doorway. When Simpson joined her, they stood it up and pushed it back outside, into the debris-filled stairwell. Then they looked up.

  “That’s a… That’s a...” He couldn’t finish his sentence as he stared into the hellish conflagration up at street level. They quickly closed the door, and the shrill whistling resumed.

  “We have to seal this door. The firestorm is sucking the air out of here.”

  “There’s some duct tape behind the bar.” John disappeared into the darkness. Janie-Lee screamed as John stepped on her leg and fell on her in a heap. Amy crawled toward the sound, reaching out with her hands. Then light sprang up from John’s cigarette lighter, and Amy rushed to pick up Janie-Lee.

  When John found some candles and duct tape, they sealed up the fire door. Amy felt some hot, smoky air moving into the club from the building’s air-handling system. After tracking the smell to the mechanical room behind the bar, she found the damper to stop the air coming into the club from the building’s mechanical system, and then she sealed off the cold-air return where air had been escaping.

  In the hours that followed Amy and John rigged some table cloths over the air vents, hoping to filter out any fallout particles once the firestorm on the surface abated and they could allow some fresh air to circulate.

  Amy explained to John that they would have to stay-put in the BDC for up to two weeks as the fallout from the blast at the airport would be coming down directly on them. They were safe, as the club was deep under street level and the thick concrete building above would help. But there would be radiation coming through the thin fire-door, so John stacked all the beer kegs in front of the door and then he pushed a candy-bar machine up against them to stabilize the wobbly wall and add mass to the fire-door. Then they stood the BDC’s two pool-tables on their sides to make a small sanctuary in one corner. They stacked food and drinks from the bar into one corner, and brought all the table cloths and linen they could find for bedding. Amy found that the building still had some residual water pressure, so she filled several pails of drinking water, and had filled a few more for sanitation in the club’s washrooms before the water pressure died completely.

  In the first hours after the nuclear explosions, Amy had secured the critical elements: water, food, and shelter from radiation. Their chances for survival were good, considering that they had been within five or six kilometers of two large detonations. But they were not out of the woods yet.

  Then Amy remembered that she had been carrying those four packets of Potassium Iodide pills she had bought from The Squirrel’s Den. She crushed one pill for Janie-Lee, and gave it to her with water as she explained to John what they were for.

  Eventually John remembered something about Potassium Iodide being scarce in the weeks after the Japanese nuclear disaster after that Tsunami, but John was still skeptical. He did not really believe that the greatest danger from radioactive fallout came from ingesting radioactive iodide produced in nuclear explosions. The radioactive iodide is taken up by the thyroid gland, leading to all sorts of deleterious health consequences. But he accepted the logic that by flooding the thyroid gland with potassium iodide, the danger was mitigated. Amy tried to share hers with him, but when he found out that she only had enough for her and Janie-Lee for ten days, he refused.

  After an uncomfortable first sleep in their sanctuary, they only knew it was the next day by John's the mechanical wristwatch. Without it they would have had no way to keep track of time.

  In the days that followed, Amy told John as much as she could remember from the disaster film festival. John became increasingly frustrated with Amy’s insistence that they not unseal the door until fourteen days had passed. They had no way of knowing that the gamma radiation had fallen to safe enough levels after just eight days, because most of the fallout had been blown to the east; not much had fallen on their area.

  When they emerged from the BDC on June third, it was to an alien landscape. The larger structures were recognizable from their concrete shells but the interiors had been completely removed by the blast and firestorm. The asphalt had been boiled off in most places, leaving only whitened pea-sized aggregate behind. The now gravely roadway was covered with scraps of wire and metal that had been burned to a greyish white, devoid of any color. The fires were out, and pools of ugly black water proved that rain had fallen in recent days.

  With as much water, beef-jerky and other bar food as they could carry, the three left the BDC at first light and made their way west on 41st Ave. After one block they reached the burned-out wreckage of the Bus Barn. The destruction seemed to be getting less the closer they got to Oak Street. A small ridge to the southwest must have deflected some of the blast.

  Following a hunch, John led them to an old concrete building behind the Bus Barn. Sure enough, the old garage was basically intact thanks to the nearby ridge-line and sturdy 1940’s era construction. Inside was an old 1977 GMC “New Look” diesel bus. It was from a disused line, kept as a training aid for apprentice mechanics. John Simpson knew all about it. He had driven the old bus on a test run with some of the apprentices just a few days before the blasts.

  The old bus had been powered-off when the nukes hit. Because it had none of the sophisticated computer systems of today’s buses, the bus’s simple electrical system was not damaged by the EMP. The battery itself had been ruined, but they found a new battery in the workshop, and a Honda generator. The new battery was fast-charged for two hours while John replaced a tire that had been punctured by flying debris. Once the battery was charged enough to make an attempt, the old bus started easily. Before heading out with the bus, John asked Amy to explain the plan again.

  “We’ll follow the ridgeline cutting across 33rd Ave, then follow Alma down to 4th. That should keep us in areas that were sheltered from the blast at the airport, and still far enough from downtown. If the way is clear enough to drive through with the bus, we should be able to get to Jericho Beach before noon.”

  “And you expect to find a boat there, in all of this?”

  “No, I don’t expect to. We need to. So we’ll go and see what we can see,” Amy said with confidence.

  In their journey across Point Grey they avoided the
devastation of Kitsilano to the northeast and Dunbar to the south, running the gauntlet between the two blast zones. Traffic was non-existent, but they did see some people on foot.

  Before reaching Jericho Beach, they passed a Canadian Forces establishment on 4th Avenue. A long line of survivors were waiting outside the hospital building of the small Jericho Beach Detachment of 73rd Communications Regiment. As they drove by, Amy made eye contact with a woman who was talking to a young woman with a long pony tail and an extremely pink jacket.

  For Jillian Vogel, standing in the line-up talking with the young woman she and Manfred had been seeking for three days, it had been strange to see a bus operating on 4th Ave. There were few vehicles operating ever since the nuclear blasts had destroyed almost everything electrical in the region. Only a few fire trucks and police vehicles in the more sheltered areas were still working, particularly up at UBC where many of the survivors on the west side of the city hoped to find help.

  After passing the Jericho Detachment, John drove past the burned-out ruins that had been the old wooden Youth Hostel near the beach before arriving at the WWII-era concrete building that housed the Jericho Beach Sailing Center.

  The fence had been stripped away in the blast, along with all of the sail boats and windsurfing boards that had been in the compound. The building itself had stood up well but its contents were burned and melted into a charred mess. Amy led them around to the west end of the building, farthest from what was left of Vancouver. They paused to look around. The office buildings downtown were gone. Only a few of the apartment buildings in the West End remained. It was as if a giant bite had been taken out of the downtown skyline. Following the shoreline with her eyes, she saw that everything from Kitsilano Beach to Locarno Beach had been completely destroyed.