Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  “I bought a large track of land in California just south of Yuma and Highway 8, where the Gila River used to flow into the Colorado. I not only want to build luxury homes, golf courses, and fancy restaurants along the Colorado there, but divert water into canals and man-made lakes to maximize the riverfront. With the coast a disaster area, a big river city should not just keep California’s senators Democratic, but receptive to my concerns.

  “I’ll build another city on land I bought in Nevada, north of Needles, where Nevada, Arizona, and California intersect. Yuma will be the third river city, one in each state, and Santa Clara, Mexico, the fourth. I bought several large tracks of land north and south of Yuma, and north and south of where the Gila River should flow again into the Colorado. A drone from Vegas will clear land for all four cities.”

  “America is likely to lose a quarter of its population. I expect the impact to kill 50 to 100 million Americans. Where you gonna get people to live in all these cities?” his father wanted to know.

  Jackson just laughed. “Ah, hell, I have the opposite problem: how am I gonna transport, feed, and house 150 million Americans before they starve or freeze to death?”

  “150 million?” Lisa asked. “I thought it was 100.”

  “Oh, I am sheltering about 50 millions reliable Democratic voters, and another 50 million of their spouses and children, but another 50 million or so paid several thousand each to be flown to my survival camps in Australia, Patagonia, and Scandinavia. I deliberately kept my Democratic voters close by giving them free transportation, food, and shelter in northern Canada and Alaska, while sending everyone else far away. Since most of their homes will be destroyed, the question becomes, where the hell do I put them all? Every city will be reduced to rubble. And since I will be spending billions keeping them alive, how can I get something out of it?

  “Well, everyone expects Democrats to lose the senate since we have to defend 25 seats, compared to only 10 Republican seats. So I pre-positioned heavy construction equipment, huge tents, and bulk food in my amorphous metal hangers in each of those states: Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and Tennessee. I plan to dismantle the thousands of big hangers I still have and re-assemble them to house millions of loyal voters. If I only transport those who agree to vote my way, I can not only pick up all ten Republican seats, but a bunch of the 25 Democratic ones by having a loyalist beat them in a primary.

  “Most Democrats took my offer and fled north, most independents paid me for shelter overseas, yet most Republicans stayed home because I wouldn’t shelter them for any price, and because Palin, Fox News, and conservative pundits ridiculed those who left, accusing them of abandoning America. Many of those Republicans are going to die, most of those independents won’t be back before November unless they agree to vote a straight Democratic ticket, and the first Democrats I bring back will promise to vote for my primary candidates. So I could have up to 35 senators who owe me their jobs. That may not seem like much, but I should get something for my time and money.

  “Long term, I plan to build other clean energy cities in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, as well as Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming to work on shale oil. Each state should be lightly populated after getting buried by the impact, so just a few hundred thousand voters in each could determine their representatives. Salt Lake City is only 800 miles from Kitt Peak, so it’s gonna get hit hard, and 80% of Utah’s population lives there. 85% of Nevada’s three million residents live in or near Las Vegas, which is less than 500 miles from Ground Zero and unlikely to survive. Much of California and Texas live near the coast, so a million voters there could determine their senators.

  “If I can later extend things to Idaho and Montana, two more lightly populated states, I could have as many as 30 senators and nearly a hundred congressmen. With Oregon and Washington, that means the entire west would be solidly blue. That much political support could shave off years of our space projects.”

  Jackson sounded finished, but just as the professor was about to criticize him, Lisa cut him off.

  “Wait! He’s holding something back.”

  Which unnerved Jackson. Was he that obvious? He checked the hallway like a teenager, then closed the door.

  “The government doesn’t know this, but Arthur wanted to find out how large these gamma-ray warheads scaled up. So he kept building bigger and bigger ones. He was suppose to keep them under one kiloton, but…” Jackson looked away from his father. “What he did wasn’t even illegal. His contract with the military simply specified nothing over one kiloton. But if word got out, boy, it would become illegal in a heartbeat, and the government sure as hell would take them away. So Arthur wants to sell his company to wash himself of liability, but he has a few dozen warheads as big as five kilotons. If a terrorist stole one, he could obliterate an entire American city. But decommissioning them is tricky, dangerous, and expensive.”

  Jackson coughed uncomfortably.

  “Anyways, Arthur is going to drop them where I want to build my river and shale oil cities. The Plain States and Texas won’t be buried under enough regolith to justify this. The small ones are great for clearing freeways, but not enough for an entire city. He’s never even been able to test the 5-toners, but an optimum airburst shouldn’t leave much of a crater according to his computer models.

  “Any-hoot, by sunrise, they will have dropped a few dozen big bombs to clear land to build my cities, and several thousand smaller ones to clear the roads and highways, so that my construction crews can start road building. Without the gamma rays, it would take decades to build across 1500 miles of deep regolith.”

  The professor snorted in disgust at this end-justifying-the-means reasoning, but Lisa really liked it. What balls! Her dad is basically going to nuke California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Mexico, a foreign fucking country. No wonder he looked so stressed out. Outstanding!

  37

  After having sex, showering, and sleeping, Jackson and Lorena went downstairs only to find Lisa sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, staring at her cell phone. After half a day, Rance would have called or returned if he could. Which meant he was already dead, or would soon be. Lisa wanted to go look for him, even threw a hissy fit for the cameras, but her dirt bike had a busted axle from doing too many high jumps. So she sat depressed, without talking or moving. It was so un-Lisa-like. Lorena silently embraced her til Lisa started crying uncontrollably.

  Jackson couldn’t believe both of his kids were widowed while still teenagers. Feeling useless, he looked for Chucha. Lost in thought, he reached the side yard to find the dog missing.

  “Chucha!” he yelled impatiently.

  Nothing. Jackson had a large side yard, with a line of orange trees along the fence that were finally producing. By the garage, however, it was pretty messed up from the heavy equipment that dug out the hole that he put his two sheds in. Good thing his paranoia made him put the sheds in, too, because otherwise he, his wife, father, and daughter would soon die. They may still die, but possible death still beat certain death. He climbed the mound of dirt that used to be under his garage and instantly saw the hole in the wooden fence, where a bulldozer must have backed into it. Jackson deflated like a balloon.

  Chucha escaped. Jackson no longer had body odor.

  Suddenly frantic because he really liked that fucking mutt, he called him over and over, down the driveway and into the street. He never expected to care this much.

  “Goodbye, Chucha,” he finally said to his favorite pet.

  Jackson descended the ladder to his basement for perhaps the last time, helmet and neck supporter in hand. He would soon discover if the shed was his salvation or his coffin.

  The professor had already started lecturing in front of the porta-potty between the two sheds. The professor didn’t just speak, he lectured, the tone of his voice telling his students to pay fucking attention because they may soon be tested on it. Everyone p
acked into the tight space forced Jackson to stay on the ladder. Chava stood on a box to film their last moments for posterity. What is it with kids, and their need to record everything?

  “So down in here, unlike everyone else in the Southwest, we don’t need to worry about the heat cooking the surface, the pressure wave swatting everything away, the sonic boom blasting ear drums, the blinding light burning eyes, or even the regolith since my grandson is going to get us out. Thank God my son had the sense to bury his amorphous metal asteroid shelters down here instead of used shipping containers because they would probably have collapsed under the weight of thousands of tons of regolith. Our door is not 100% airtight, so everyone must wear helmets and ear plugs or risk their ear drums exploding.

  “The nearby impact is going to make solid rock behave like a pebble thrown into a pond. The land will rise up, then fall back down like a blanket when making a bed. So we are going to be thrown up hard into the ceiling, then hard against the far wall, before dropping fast to the floor again. Because a sizable trail follows the main body, we may have more than one earthquake, so stay flat between the mattresses, don’t sit up, and try to sleep.”

  Someone snorted in derision, and when the professor looked up, Jackson discovered with surprise that it was him.

  “To maximize the likelihood that we survive this threat, we have stacked mattresses nearly to the ceiling, only allowing room for us to squeeze flat into the middle of the stack. We will face towards Ground Zero, like the bow of a ship towards a wave. The far wall is lined with mattresses so we are less likely to break our legs or sprain our ankles. By laying flat, with our arms and legs spread out, we actually will not be thrown up or down very much. The entire shed will be thrown, sure, but within the shed there just isn’t much space. Imagine a shoebox with one pack of cigarettes versus a shoebox packed tight with cigarette packs. It matters less how much the shed moves than how far we are thrown within the shed. We have just a foot of space along the wall so we can get to the door after all this is over. And, one way or another, it will be over soon.

  “To avoid breaking our necks or crushing our heads, we will wear helmets and neck supports while laying horizontal. To avoid twisting ankles, everyone is wearing hiking boots with ankle supports. Our guests can thank Chava for going to Tucson to buy them boots, helmets, and neck supports.

  “Everything in the storage shed is packed as tight as possible. No one can stay in there because its impossible to tell what stuff will move, despite hundreds of pillows, sheets, curtains, towels, and clothes. Anyone staying there could be smacked alongside the head by a canister of compressed gas.”

  “Dr. Jackson, what are our odds?” the white cameraman asked nervously from behind his camera.

  “I’d say 50-50, but it’s possible to scare yourself to death, or the stress triggering a heart attack. Which is why I gave each of you a bottle of our best wine,” he said, taking another swig from his own half empty bottle.

  “This sheets da bomb!” called out Lisa drunkenly, recklessly waving her empty Chateau Petrus around, until her mother impatiently took it away.

  “You just drank $10,000 worth of wine, young lady!”

  “Worth every penny!” her daughter replied, swaying like a skyscraper in an earthquake. “We got any million dollar bottles? My fiancée is dead and I want to mourn him.”

  Which shut her mother up.

  “Listen carefully,” the professor continued. “Your neck support may not help much if your neck muscles are all tensed up. I know this won’t be easy, but the more relaxed you are, the more likely you will survive this. The more stressed out you are, the more likely you’ll have a heart attack or brain embolism.”

  “Emblowism!” repeated his drunk granddaughter.

  “We have 15 minutes. I hope you all took my advice and emailed your last will and testament to your loved ones and said goodbye to everyone who will miss you. If you use Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace, then let your friends and family know where you are. You should prepare yourself by coming to terms with your life, the good and the bad. Forgive those who did you wrong, and pray for forgiveness for those you did wrong.”

  The professor glanced up at his son hanging on the ladder to see if he wanted to add anything.

  “Hey, don’t look at me!” Jackson protested half-jokingly. “I’m sorry I crashed your pickup, but I was only 12. Give it a rest, already, you hater.”

  The professor shook his head, disappointed that his son chose to joke in such a serious moment. Although he was still pissed about losing his favorite quarter ton truck.

  “Mom, I took the Landshark to Vegas with Rance on New Year’s Eve,” Lisa confessed, bordering on tears. “Y’all blessed the marriage, I had my ring, and I couldn’t wait til summer, so I forged a letter from you guys.”

  “You got married without me?” her mother demanded.

  “We never got there.” Now she was in tears. “A cop pulled us over and gave me a ticket for going 89. Which was cool since I was going 160 when I passed him. I thought he was going to impound the car.”

  “Why didn’t he?” his father asked, correctly assuming she drove so fast because she needed to get laid. Teenagers act like they have more hormones than neurons.

  “He said a billion people were going to die because you weren’t president, and arresting me would only kill more people by distracting you.”

  Well, now. That was the best damn compliment that anyone, anywhere, ever gave him. Jackson liked this cop.

  “But he still gave you a ticket.”

  “He said bad behavior shouldn’t be rewarded. Then he followed us home.”

  Wow! Jackson really liked this cop.

  “I can’t believe you were going to get married without me,” Lorena said, still furious.

  “I can’t believe I’m gonna die a virgin!” Lisa retorted angrily. “And it’s all your fault, mother! All that guilt and shame you threw on me when you weren’t even a virgin when you got married. I can’t believe you demand of me what you yourself could not do. You were pregnant and unmarried when you turned 16. How dare you! How fucking dare you!”

  Damn! Lisa dropped the F-bomb on her own mama.

  “I’ll have you know that I’ve only been with one man my entire life!” Lorena screamed back.

  “And when I find the bastard,” Jackson joked, making a fist to punch the palm of his other hand. “For the record, I’m the best she’s ever had.”

  Well, that didn’t ease the tension, and nobody but the millions of web viewers wanted to hear about their sex life. Despite her black belt, Lisa was incapable of hitting her mother. Her father, sure, but not her mother, but Lorena had no qualms smacking her kids if they disrespected her. Even David, who infamously kicked the shit out of the state cage fighting champion, preferred to run than fight his mother.

  Jackson squeezed into the bodies below him to hold back Lisa while his father calmed Lorena down. He was tempted to tell Lisa that they were keeping her from fucking her fiancée because he cheated on her with astonishing regularity. A private investigator documented his infidelity in exhaustive detail. He even hid a tiny camera in his bedroom that sent back video over a Wi-Fi signal. Which is how he found out that Lisa was giving the guy blow jobs. Sometimes twice a day. Which made him feel older than Methuselah.

  “The Landshark can really go 160?” he instead asked.

  “Faster!” his daughter said, face flush with liquor.

  “You really a virgin?” her father asked astonished.

  Lisa turned around furious and Jackson was suddenly glad that Lorena had taken away her bottle. Jackson quickly climbed the ladder so she didn’t kick his ass since he was incapable of hitting her back. Which annoyed him for years.

  “Mi amor,” Jackson said to his wife to stop Lisa from beating him up. “Remember when I proposed marriage and you pointed out that there were better looking women out there, so I said I wasn’t marrying you because you were the most beautiful woman in the world?”

&
nbsp; Lorena turned shock-white. Mierda, here it comes.

  “I lied,” Jackson boasted with a grand smile, meaning he did marry her because she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Lorena, however, waited for the other shoe to drop, and Jackson realized he was being too clever for his own good. Again.

  “When you agreed to marry me, you made me promise only one thing. You said you would always stand by me as long as I remained yours, only yours, and yours forever.”

  Lorena looked like someone bleached her face. She didn’t like where this was heading. Waiting for death was bad enough.

  “Well, except for drinking games when I drank water while you got drunk off of aguardiente, I have never cheated on you. Taken advantage of you, then gotten you drunk, yes, but I have never broken my promise. Since the day we became novios, I swear on the lives of our children, I have been faithfully yours, only yours, and I will be only yours forever, so help me God. Til death do us part.”

  Statue-like, his wife reacted as if he just quoted Shakespeare in Cantonese. Not knowing how to respond, she started gulping her wine down like Lisa.

  “But you need to understand something,” he ominously continued rather than leave well enough alone. “It was easy! It’s not that I never had opportunities. I just never had temptation. You promised to take care of me, and you kept your promise. If we are going to die soon, I want you to know that I kept my promise as well.”

  Half expecting a shoe to drop, Lorena burst into tears. She looked ready to collapse. Jackson quickly dropped down next to her, picked her up, and gave her one of his bear hugs. She weighed so little that he could carry her forever.

  “Anyone else have anything to get off their chest?” the professor asked. “Before you air your laundry, however, please remember that we may just survive this mess and everything is being recorded. So speak now or forever hold your piece.”

  “Dad,” Lisa mumbled. “Chava isn’t gay.”

  “What the hell? I ain’t gay!” the flamboyantly good looking guy with colorful clothes, an obsession with his appearance, and hair fucked up just like kids like it insisted.