by Sweet, W. G.
The alleyway seemed to dip and then rise sharply as a sudden, strong vibration shook the area. The shaking lasted for mere seconds. Dust raftered down from the sky, shaken from buildings. In the silence alarms brayed, and glass shattered; fell from its frame to the streets below. Gunshots punctuated the silences in between the sudden periods of quiet, screams, yelling. Suddenly the ground shook harder, cracks appeared in the alleyway where Willie's body lay and threaded their way out into the street. Far off in the distance the earthquake shook harder at the epicenter, small booms coming over the sound of destruction as the time wore on. Nearby a building succumbed to the vibration and toppled over into the street clogging it from side to side. Cars rocked on their tires shifting violently from side to side, sometimes bouncing off in one direction or another, or slamming into a nearby car or building.
This time when the silence came the sounds that it carried were different. Weeping from the piled remains in the street. The zap and crackle of power lines as they danced in the street like charmed snake without their handlers.
Bobby's eyelids flickered, and his hand shot up to bat at a fly that had been examining his nose.
Watertown New York
10:00 PM
The first quake had been minor, the last few had not. The big one was coming, and Major Richard Weston didn't need to have a satellite link up to know that. He touched one hand to his head. The fingertips came away bloody. He would have to get his head wound taken care of, but the big thing was that he had made it through the complex above and down into the facility before it had been locked down.
He laughed to himself, before it was supposed to have been locked down. It had not been locked down at all. He had, had to lock it down once he had made his way in or else it would still be open to the world.
He had spent the last several years here commanding the base. He had spent the last two weeks working up to this event from his subterranean command post several levels above. All wreckage now. He had sent operatives out from there to do what they could, but it had all been a stop gap operation.
The public knew that there was a meteor on a near collision course with the Earth. They had assured the public it would miss by several thousands of miles. Paid off the best scientists in some cases, but in other cases they had found that even the scientists were willing to look past facts if their own personal spin put a better story in the mix. A survivable story. They had spun their own stories without prodding.
The truth was that the meteor might miss, it might hit, it might come close, a near miss, but it wouldn't matter because a natural chain of events was taking place that would make a meteor impact look like small change.
The big deal, the bigger than a meteor deal, was the earthquakes that had already started and would probably continue until most of the civilized world was dead or dying. Crumbled into ruin from super earthquakes and volcanic activity that had never been seen by modern civilization. And it had been predicted several times over by more than one group and hushed up quickly when it was uncovered. The governments had known. The conspiracy theorists had known. The public should have known, but they were too caught up in world events that seemed to be dragging them ever closer to a third world war to pay attention to a few voices crying in the wilderness. The public was happier watching television series about conspiracies rather than looking at the day to day truths about real conspiracies. The fact was that this was a natural course of events. It had happened before and it would happen again in some distant future.
So, in the end it hadn't mattered. In the end the factual side of the event had begun to happen. The reality, Major Weston liked to think of it. And fact was fact. You couldn't dispute fact. You could spin it, and that was the way of the old world. Spinning it, but the bare facts were just that: The bare facts.
The bare facts were that the Yellowstone Caldera had erupted just a few hours before. The bare facts were that the earth quakes had begun, and although they were not so bad here in northern New York, in other areas of the country, in foreign countries, third world countries, the bare facts of what was occurring were devastating: Millions dead, and millions more would die before it was over. And this was nothing new. The government had evidence that this same event had happened many times in Earth's history. This was nothing new at all, not even new to the human race. A similar event had killed off most of the human race some seventy-five thousand years before.
There was an answer, help, a solution, but Richard Weston was unsure how well their solution would work. It was, like everything else, a stop gap measure, and probably too little too late. It was also flawed, but he pushed that knowledge away in his mind.
While most of America had tracked the meteorite that was supposed to miss earth from their living rooms, he had kept track of the real event that had even then been building beneath the Yellowstone caldera. And the end had come quickly. Satellites off line. Phone networks down. Power grids failed. Governments incommunicado or just gone. The Internet, down. The Meteorite had not missed Earth by much after all. And the gravitational pull from the large mass had simply accelerated an already bad situation.
Dams burst. River flows reversed. Waters rising or dropping in many places. Huge tidal waves. Fires out of control. Whole cities suddenly gone. A river of lava flowing from Yellowstone. Civilization was not dead; not wiped out, but her back was broken.
In the small city of Watertown, that had rested above Bluechip, near the shore of the former lake Ontario, the river waters had begun to rise: Bluechip, several levels below the city in the limestone cave structures that honeycombed the entire area, had survived mostly intact, but unless sealed, it would surely succumb to the rising river waters. By the time the last military groups had splashed through the tunnels and into the underground facility, they had been walking through better than two feet of cold and muddy river-water. The pressure from the water had begun to collapse small sections of caves and tunnels below the city, and that damage had been helped along by small after-shocks.
When the last group had reached the air shaft, they had immediately pitched in with a group Weston had sent to brick the passageway off. The remaining bricks and concrete blocks were stacked and cemented into place in the four foot thick wall they had started. The materials, along with sandbags initially used to hold back the rising waters, had been taken from huge stockpiles within the city, and from the stalled trucks within the wide tunnel that had once fed traffic into the base. There was no way in, and no way out of the city. With one small exception.
The exception was the air ducting. The ducts led away from the city towards a small mountain-peak about a mile from the city. There the ducts merged together, inside a huge natural rock tunnel that had been part of the original network of caves and passage ways. That tunnel culminated deep within the mountain at a remote air treatment facility. There were also several access points where the ducting came close to the surface via tunnels and passageways that ran though the huge complex of caves. And it would be possible to walk through one of the many air shafts to the tunnel, break through the ducting, follow it to the treatment facility or outside to the surface and freedom. It would be difficult, but it would be possible. The end of the trip would bring them to the surface, from there they could go anywhere.
CHAPTER TWO
Billy Jingo: L.A.
March 4th
Billy paced the hallway, trying to think it out, telling himself they had to leave soon. Telling himself it was the right thing to do. The problem was that he was not used to doing the right thing. So unused to it, in fact, that he wasn't sure he wanted to try... should try.
The world had been turned upside down for the last few days. There was no official word that anything was wrong at all, but someone had fucked up. Of that he had no doubt at all.
The police? Gone. Fire department? Ditto. Army? Well, wasn't the National Guard supposed to show up when the shit hit the fan? But so far the army had not raised a finger to do anything for them at all. Th
ere was a base right over by the airport near the Los Angeles Freeway, but there had been no sign of them.
He lived on the north side, a high rise that had been new sometime back in the seventies. He had gone up to the roof twice during the day and looked over the city.
It appeared to be dead. There was a precinct only two blocks away, deserted, doors hanging open. Looters were carrying away cheap computer systems and who knew what else, a steady stream in and out of the front doors.
There were fires over past the park. It appeared to be a whole block over by Jordan Downs, but there were other single fires all over the city too. There had been for two days now, and no one had come to put those fires out. And there was more; you could hear gunfire from all over the city all night long. He continued to pace the hall.
This was not normally a bad neighborhood, but it was no picnic either. There had been a few fires here but the people that lived nearby had put them out quickly. Dozens of buildings had come down or were now tilted crazily. The looting had started at some point, and now there were armed men prowling the streets in gangs.
He had acquired a gun from a shop a few blocks over, ransacked, left open to the world. He had loaded it and waited, but the few that had ventured to his door had turned away when they had seen him with the gun.
Winston, the old man that lived in the back basement apartment, had called them all down to listen to the radio just a short time ago. Not your average radio, a Short Band receiver. They had ended up listening to military talk, military talk that was probably supposed to be restricted. The stories that had come from that radio said the rest of the world was no better off. Explosions or earthquakes, there was a great deal of devastation everywhere.
A few years before, the CDC had issued a warning about zombies, the inevitability of an attack. How it would come. Why it would come. What you should do. How to survive it, and more. Billy and his friends had gotten a good laugh over it. He had been down in Mexico at the time because of some trouble he had gotten into in New York. And he had been living like a king. What sort of trouble could come? What he had listened to on the radio in the last few days had changed his mind completely.
Washington D.C. was completely overrun, the President gone. They weren’t even sure he had made it into hiding. New York and Atlanta, overrun with the risen dead. Mexico, absolutely silent. Canada, the same. Millions of people absolutely silent. How could that even be? And right here in Los Angeles there was talk on the radio about dead roaming the streets too, and probably every city in between L.A. and New York, because if they had overrun the big cities, what kind of chance did the smaller cities and towns have, he asked himself.
CBS had stopped broadcasting here three days ago, even though what they had been broadcasting had been sketchy because the satellites were out. They had been dependent on travelers coming out of the east or up from the south. It had apparently not stopped broadcasting soon enough in the west, where T.V. viewers had witnessed the network studios being overrun, and the anchor of the evening news attacked on camera. The United states was under attack by an army of the Dead.
He had spent some time checking the other stations, cable, Univision? Nothing at all. ABC? NBC? Dead air. Cable? Satellite? Frozen pictures on some channels, nothing at all on the others, and not a single channel you could actually watch. The internet was dead. That had seemed worse than all the rest of it. Google didn't load the page for his browser, but it also didn't tell him why. Nothing.
And it wasn't just the United States, North and South America. Germany had not been heard from in a week. England, France, all the European countries were incommunicado. The radio mans words, not Billy's. Australia had seemed fine up until two days ago. They had been talking about the problems facing America and Great Briton. They seemed to be wondering what was going on the same as everyone else. Then the broadcast had stopped in mid sentence. Shortly after that the few HAM radio operators that had been relaying information from there had gone silent too.
He had paced the hallways since then. He should talk to Jamie... Beth... Winston... Scotty, a few others. It might be time to talk about getting out of here. The thing he was concerned about was the non action from the Military. That was not Military like. For them to be sitting by and allowing this to happen, it must be a serious thing. And he had no doubt that eventually they would get their shit together, or think they had their shit together, and then they would act. And who knew what their remedy for zombies might be?
He stopped his pacing. Who did know, he asked himself again. Nobody. He stood in the hall for a second. Jamie was upstairs with Beth and a few others. Night was coming. Traveling in the night was not an option, at least not one he wanted to explore. But maybe they should be ready to leave in the morning. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it was not something they should do hastily, but he did believe they should not stay too much longer. He turned back towards the stairs, debated only briefly, then walked back and climbed them to the second floor. He would start with Beth. Let Beth make the decision. She would know what to do.
Maine
Carl Freeman rose from his couch reluctantly, and walked to the front door. He clutched the thick book, which to him was his Bible, in his hand as he walked.
There had been some shooting, and quite a lot of panic in the last several days, but none of it had touched him. He had locked himself inside the house after the first earthquake had hit, calmly finished the thick tattered book, and then had begun to re-read it again. He was once again at the good part, not the same good part he had been at, but every part of the book was a good part to him, and so it mattered not at all which part he was in. But he was at the part where he might be able to help.
He knew now that the book, The Book, was not just a book. It was real. It had to be he reasoned, it just had to be. The author must have been like a God or something, maybe even was God, or something, and so he had written the book not simply to be read, although that had definitely been intended, but as a warning. Something to point the way. The Book was, well, The Book was a Bible, he had decided, and thank God he had been able to figure it out in time, thank God, praise God, because if he hadn't, he knew, there would be no hope at all. He worriedly pressed his fingers to the flesh of his neck. Okay, good, he thought, all's cool on the western front, no problem, wonderful, great, grand and glorious.
He opened the thick steel door and peered out. The ground, indeed the house itself, he thought, had been shaking for the last several minutes A lesser shock than the others. It was winding down., Maybe over, as far as the earthquakes were concerned at least. He stepped cautiously out the front door into what should have been darkness, but somehow was not. In the distance he could see that the sun was beginning to rise. He glanced down at his watch. Well, he thought, it must have stopped, or something. He stared at the horizon for a few seconds longer and then calmly walked off down the street clutching the thick book under one arm, leaving the door standing open behind him.
It was time to leave, he told himself, and if he ever intended to reach Stovington in time, he had better hurry.
Kansas
Wendell Smith edged the thick concrete door open slowly. Everything seemed fine, he thought. The ground wasn't burned, the houses were still standing, most of them, he amended as he saw some that had fallen and a few that were leaning precariously. Tommy Switzer's body was still laying where it had fallen at the base of the stairs, he noticed, and, although it was none too appealing, it was not burned either.
He hesitated briefly, and then quickly ushered his family out into the early morning air. Kansas City, never looked so good, he thought, and the air had never smelled so sweet.
He had ushered everyone down into the shelter just after the first earthquake had hit. They had already lost the television feed by then and had been down to the radio broadcast. That had been difficult to follow, but he had understood that maybe, just maybe, the meteor would hit them after all. Tommy had shown up after he had bolted the door. Too late, o
r it should have been too late. He had reluctantly opened the door back up only to find that Tommy had collapsed just outside the door, and as he had bent to help him to his feet he had seen the large wound on his back; what looked like a bullet wound to Wendell. He had seen bullet wounds before on a crime show he had once liked to watch. Someone had killed Tommy. He had slammed the door, shot the bolt, and they had ridden the next few days out in the shelter.
Yesterday had been completely quiet, and today there had been nothing more than a slight tremor. Maybe the end wasn't now, he reasoned, maybe the end was yet to come. Either way it didn't matter, the kids were safe, Lucinda was too, and he had a sudden urge to strike out for Oklahoma, which he fully intended to follow.
The children filed out one by one, wide eyed, followed by Mrs. smith, who peered cautiously around as Wendell had done.
“Wendell,” his wife asked, “you sure?”
“Yep. Honey, it's time to get on with life,” he paused and drew her into his arms, as the children flocked around his feet. “What do you think of Oklahoma, 'Cinda?” he asked.
“What'za Okahoma, Daddy?” little Jasmine Smith asked, as she tugged at his pants leg. Wendell bent and took his youngest daughter into his arms.
“Well, Baby, Oklahoma's a state, or was...” Wendell said with a smile. “How about we go there and find out for sure what it is, Baby girl, Huh?” She giggled, as he tickled her chin and set her down. He reached over and took Lucinda back into his arms and kissed her.
“You must be nuts, Wendell,” she said with a smile.
“Nope, just happy to be alive, honey,” he said through a large smile.
Between them they herded the children into the back of their aging station wagon, cranked the motor to life, and backed slowly out of the driveway, as they held hands across the split vinyl of the front seat.
L.A: Billy Jingo:
Evening: March 9th
