Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  In the final judgment, it was his IQ—

  “Extra cool, too good for school,” said the interviewer. Adam laughed now, genuinely smiling at the joke. It was that I.Q. which kept him from ending up in one of the displacement camps that the government had set up for the huge numbers of refugees.

  His name, Adam Grigori, had been chosen thanks to a national contest about the unknown pale-blonde poster boy in the desert. The winning name had been sent in anonymously, perhaps a nod to California’s San Gregorio fault.

  After only four years in college he became Dr. Grigori. Then another two after the outbreak of the California flu, for which the young microbiologist created the vaccine (though it came after the deaths of millions globally), Dr. Grigori subsequently won two Nobel Prizes. The first was for peace, on the tails of his return to what was now referred to as Pacifica—a region overrun by looters, survivalists and gangs. Classic Mad Max. He’d drawn them together, ostensibly to vaccinate the lot, and in the process pacified and united many. His long hair and beard like them probably helped the cause.

  The second prize had been for medicine—the vaccine itself.

  “Modern day savior?” the interviewer asked.

  Adam got a faraway look in his eyes. Near on a flashback like a 1960s hippie. “Vox clamantis in deserto…”

  “Pardon?”

  “More like the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

  “Ah,” and the interviewer let Adam continue.

  “Well, I’ve read that prophets often emerge from wastelands. Actually, the folks I found at the geological disaster we now know as Pacifica, were often looking for free land or had been trapped there, getting even less help than New Orleans did after Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Nothing turned out to be free because virtually nothing ever is. Even the gangs were tired of it. It’s a mind-set. I, we, my team, just happened to show up at a time when we could do some good, instead of getting killed and eaten.”

  He gave a self-conscious shrug.

  His gaze trained just past the interviewer, a list jumbling through his mind:

  Grogan Fault, Eaton Roughs Fault, Garberville Fault, King’s Range Fault, Bartlett Springs Fault Zone, Maacama Fault Zone, Mendicino Fracture Zone, Green Valley Fault, Rogers Creek Fault Zone, Calaveras Fault, Hayward Fault, San Gregorio Fault, Imperial Fault, Cerro Prieto Fault, San Jacinto Fault, Elsinore Fault, Laguna Salada Fault, Santa Lucia Banks Fault, White Wolf Fault, Santa Cruz Island Fault, San Clemente Island Fault, Quien Sabe Fault, Las Positas Fault, Verona Fault, Pleasanton Fault, Death Valley Fault, Panamint Fault, Santa Ynez Fault, Sur-Nacimiento Fault, Coast Range Fault, Melones Fault, San Gabriel Fault, Mt. Diablo Fault, Whittier Fault, Norwalk Fault, Anacapa Island Fault, Newport-Inglewood Fault, Santa Susana Fault, Murray Fracture Zone, Puente Hills Fault, Palos Verdes Fault, Coronado Bank Fault Zone, Rose Canyon Fault zone, Sierra Madre Cucamonga Fault, Antioch Fault, Concord Fault, Pico Fault, San Fernando Fault, Homestead Valley Fault, Camp Rock Fault, Malibu-Santa Monica Fault, Coyote Fault, Superstition Hills Fault, Pinto Mountain Fault, Garlock Fault, Owens Valley Fault, Zayante Fault, Rinconaida Fault, San Andreas Fault, Pacific Plate, North American Plate, Explorer Plate, Juan de Fuca Plate, Gorda Plate, Cascades Subduction Zone, Seattle Fault, Tacoma Fault…

  “That’s quite a map,” the interviewer pointed out, following Adam’s gaze. “Would you explain it to us?”

  Adam was surprised. “You don’t already know this?” Then he remembered this was an interview. Just go with it.

  “I was two years old when it happened. I know a bit from school, but they mostly just teach us the basics. You get that: It Happened. And At Least A Billion Died There. With Associated Problems Globally. When It Was Over.”

  Adam turned back to his map. “Let’s start here. The San Andreas Fault. It runs about 800 miles, ending at the Salton Sea, just southeast of it with the Brawley Seismic Zone at the sea’s south end. Here—” his hand swept an area, “—are three glassy volcanic domes with high heat flow. These are basically boiling mud pots in what was commonly called the Salton Trough. Subsurface water heated to 400°C by magma moving beneath the surface often caused many small quakes before the disaster.”

  Adam circled his hand around another region. “Here is the Long Valley Caldera, near the border with Nevada—”

  “Can you explain…”

  Adam nodded. Just go with it. “Basically, a caldera is where a super volcano exploded, then left a super-charged crater, filled with magma, which may—at certain times—erupt, an eruption capable of far more damage than its original volcano. Long Valley did this, yet somehow without affecting its Nevada side…save for the debris that blew in. Even that was minimal—combined with all the other volcanoes. Not that it didn’t wreak havoc with the world’s atmosphere, but the effects should have plunged the planet into an Ice Age, threatening many species—our own included—with extinction.”

  Adam paused to let that sink in. He held up a thumb and finger about two inches apart. “Came that close, people. What stopped it? There haven’t been scientific answers to settle it.”

  “What do you think stopped it?” asked the interviewer.

  Adam shrugged, a smile tugging at his words. “Maybe angels were watching over it.”

  “Are you a religious man, Dr. Grigori?”

  Adam fully grinned. “I don’t know what I believe. I’d like nothing better than to find an angel reclining on my shoulder, reading copy for my next book, and telling me Hey, you misspelled Gawdawful. If you’re going to blaspheme, at least maintain five brain cells: one is lost, one is out looking for it; one went to Vegas where something I dare not speak of HAPPENED to it so it now must stay in Vegas; one went to attempt a hopeless rescue. Only the last brain cell remains for your employment as a fact checker.”

  Polite laughter. What-happens-in-Vegas jokes (or New York, Chicago, D.C., or Hell) went out with jeans worn so low you seemed to be draped in the flag of the nation of Fruit of the Loom.

  Returning to the map, Adam coughed into his hand. “Up here in Northern California is Lassen Peak, a volcanic mountain north of Sacramento, once the capital of the state. Mount Shasta and its numerous fumaroles is north of Lassen Peak, as is Medicine Lake, both being California volcanoes.”

  His hand slid upward. “Then farther north is Crater Lake, another caldera left when Mount Mazama violently exploded 7,700 years ago… A volcanic cone came up in the lake a thousand years ago, called Wizard Island. This also went off when this Oregon caldera erupted without warning. Mount Baker, Mt. Hood, Mount McLoughlin, Mt. Adams, Mount Saint Helens, Mount Rainier, Mt. Thielsen, Glacier Peak Dome, Mt. Newberry, The Three Sisters, and Mt. Jefferson. And, as I mentioned before, nameless others.”

  Adam sighed, then took a deep breath. No matter what important project he was currently working on as a research microbiologist, this was what the interviews always boiled down to.

  What stopped it?

  Some made pretense, initially, of displaying interest in how he would next save the world. But it always came back to:

  What stopped it?

  What stopped whatever triggered Pacifica? Until it blew every volcano and shook each fault line from the Baja border with Mexico to the Canadian border, and just to the borders with the states of Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona…but not beyond?

  It was as if California, Oregon, and Washington had been cursed.

  Adam continued. “Sacramento, California. A city built upon crap, supposedly protected by piss-ant levees, was lost beneath ash and water. Two triangular pieces of land, across the bay from one another and partly built upon landfill created from the debris of a quake that struck in 1906, fell into the Pacific Ocean. As a matter of fact, many port cities were constructed using large areas of weak bay sediments and artificial fill.

  “Take modern Seattle, Washington. It had been directly erected upon the remnants of itself after it was destroyed by a fire in 1889—which created an underground city that drew many tourists. Then t
here’s the Northern Triangle in California which was known as the Marina District, containing as well the cities of Novato, Sausolito, Mill Valley, Anselmo, San Rafael, Olema, Point Reyes and the Point Reyes National Seashore.

  Adam gestured, pointing downward. “The Southern Triangle ran from San Francisco down south and east to San Jose, then southwest to Santa Cruz, including Daly City, Burlingame, Pacifica, San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Boulder Creek, Felton, Davenport, Saratoga, San Gregorio, Menlo Park, Santa Clara…”

  The interview listened in awe, immersed in Adam’s ticking off of city after city after city.

  “…and then places like Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda, San Pablo, and Vallejo also ended up permanently under sea level because of the drop.”

  Adam paused, shaking his head. “But not Mexico. No part of Mexico with its fault lines in a volcano suffered. Not even Baja. A calamity so huge that seismologists admitted that the Richter scale couldn’t properly measure it.”

  The interviewer nodded. “Tell us about the tsunami that accompanied.”

  Adam nodded. “Ah. That. It first struck our west coast, then reversed itself. Reversed itself, to hit Japan. Back in 1906, a massive earthquake that hit San Francisco on April 18 at 5:12 A.M. sent out a tsunami only a few feet high to strike the coast of Japan. But Pacifica… The sheer stretch and power of this tsunami hit Japan as far south as Taiwan, with a towering wave that kept its momentum, considering it had to travel across the entire Pacific Ocean. Numerous islands in the Hawaiian group were permanently, totally, submerged. Here we lost pretty much every island off the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington.”

  Adam Grigori swung his chair back around so he could face the camera, and that smile again. To reassure? To be pleasant? It was hard to tell under the beard.

  “So, did we see this coming? Seismologists have always sworn that believing freaky crystal ball predictions of California’s eventual fall into the sea required too many LSD or meth adventures, plus a picture of Nancy Reagan and her astrologer in a locket worn over a nipple, pierced by a splinter from a cat’s scratching post in Atlantis.” He caught the interviewer’s smirk. “Okay, not that much fell into the ocean. How about the predictions of Edgar Caycee? The sleeping prophet, off by some miles when he said Nebraska would have some great beachfront property. But, truly, how much land dropping into the sea does it take to believe the foretellings? Who would have guessed that six volcanoes in California, thirteen volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Mountain Range plus some that were unknown, two calderas, and about—” He mentally counted. “About seventy, in various categories of plates and faults both large and small, along with the entire Cascades Subduction Zone, barring anything Canadian, would go off all together, as if in some geological suicide pact?”

  Divine retribution? Nah…no? He gathered his thoughts for his next words.

  “Survivors from Seattle through the hard-hit Los Angeles Basin—still afloat, although flattened and burned out—through San Diego were lucky if they made it into the next line of Western states. As the dust and gas clouds accompanied them, they stumbled into Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona. Lake Tahoe turned green and so many dead fish floated on the surface, the rumor was that you could walk across the lake from the California side to its Nevada side. At that point, the human tide sought better conditions in Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, joined by people fleeing Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona homes and skies.

  Again, he pointed to the map. “See those two red circles? Those are the locations of the other calderas in the United States: valleys in New Mexico and in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone has long been considered the most dangerous. A ticking time bomb of calamity. Experts placed it on high alert status after Pacifica, but nothing worse happened than a few geysers shooting up higher and hotter for a while. Yellowstone Lake and Old Faithful turned red, the Great Salt Lake in Utah turned purple. People from the Pacifica Three, as we refer to the destroyed states, and their neighboring states fled these, too, along with mass exoduses of wide-eyed evacuees, terrified and choking. They pushed into the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. But there was really no place to run.”

  Adam knew this to be true. He knew it because the stress on economies of host states produced tension between the residents and refugees. There was difficulty in producing enough food. There was a sharp rise in an already burgeoning crime rate. They started putting people into displacement camps for control. Bad, bad times.

  He went on. “Acid rains came next, then a drop in the global temperature ruined crops—along with the S02—Sulfur Dioxide—forming a sort of mirror around the entire planet, shutting out sunlight. Droughts. Many millions more died of starvation.”

  Adam considered carefully his next words. What he said to reporters. To anyone. What every member of the Pacifica flu inoculation team had sworn secrecy to: a selective relating of disinformation. Disinformation about one thing:

  Not all who survived fled the area.

  And who were these people who’d stayed behind? These survivors who’d stayed, or moved in or back when they thought it safe? Willing to crawl from their shelters/hovels/bunkers…to start a process of genuine rebuilding?

  No.

  They sought to profit.

  Many folks who’d long ago made motion pictures about chainsaws, mutants, and cannibalism, oh my! would have glowed with righteous vindication at the idea. Except that most of them had perished when La-la Land met the geological version of the Loup-garou.

  But there were pockets of people—critters, cults of the post-apocalyptic/post-traumatic stressed—who believed they were the stars of their own shock-u-mentaries. They lived on the new beaches, the new islands created by cities built upon garbage sinking… Here, they’re a stray piece floating up to the ocean’s surface. They lived in mountains which had neither shaken to pieces nor been blown apart by suddenly-activated magma chambers, like a bad burrito in a peptic ulcerated stomach.

  The team had run across—occasionally run afoul of—cults dangerous as HELL. They dubbed them with silly names to manage their own stress: the Booberries, the Unlucky Charms, the No-Count Chokulas, the Corn Pops, in honor of the exploding brain cells one could actually hear during drugged-induced, dark, hex-git-nekkids.

  And not to be laughed at: the Fruit Loops who served an unseen ‘sorcerer’ who dwelled inside a tower ripped from once-Disneyland’s castle. The structure had floated all the way from Anaheim to their island off what used to be San Francisco. Oz they called their master-sorcerer, these mostly barely-pubescent kids who likely had never even seen The Wizard of Oz.

  “Physician…” A sly, slue-eyed girl had addressed Adam, who had offered her people the medicine from aboard a boat, never given permission to land, “…have you healed yourself? Nosce te ipsum.”

  Know thyself.

  She knew Latin?

  Then she skipped off, singing a crazy version of a song from the love generation days of Haight-Ashbury:

  “If you’re going to San Francisco,

  you’d better bear cadavers to our lair.

  If you’re going to San Francisco…

  you’ll be meat for creepy zombies there.”

  Enfants perdus, he’d thought of them.

  Lost children.

  The interviewer coughed for Adam’s attention. Chewing his bottom lip, he asked: “Dr. Grigori, do you remember anything yet?”

  Adam knew the young man had been waiting to ask this question.

  What stopped it?

  Always followed by…

  Do you remember anything?

  Always the same.

  What they really wanted—even after a quarter century—was a scoop on his personal details. His nightmares. His supposed visions of corpses.

  Adam’s expression, no smile. “You mean like houses upended, filled with bodies crawling like demons across the ceilings? Victims of severe brain injuries violently shaking limbs as if possessed by devils? Dea
d babies with rictuses until you wonder what perverted toy company put those hideous dolls on the market? Bags of human skin hanging like laundry from the edges of broken paving, because the super sheer shockwave and the tsunami that followed, all of it like a Satanic sonic boom which tore the skeletons out of them? How about the lake of black blood and bile created in San Bernardino where the San Andreas fault ran right through the backyards of more than 3 million people? How it looked like the La Brea tar pits only bigger, and a stench from the bubbles of gas rising to the surface from the decomposing bodies?”

  The interviewer’s jaw dropped. The cameraman zoomed in for a close-up.

  “You remember that?” the reporter asked, eyes practically glowing with hopeful tears.

  Adam frowned. No. No, damn you. I don’t remember. “No. But I’ve seen the books that have been published. Sent to me free of charge in exchange for my publicity blurb. Books full of glossy photos of the dead, of the living, as broken as Christ-like figures upon the cross of nature. Pictures and videos of acts of pity and acts of the primitively selfish. Great for any coffee table, reading while sitting on the toilet, or just fun for the whole family.”

  The interviewer blubbered, “D-Dr. Grigori, I swear, I never m-meant to offend…”

  Adam knew the calendar date. It was the anniversary. He began to sing softly, satirically: “Twenty-five years ago today, Pacifica taught its band to play. Wiped out Sgt. Pecker’s and Haight-Ashbury, too. Then waited to see what 1 billion less would do.”

  The interviewer blinked at him, clueless.

  Adam said, “That’s your cue to Get out, stupid.”

  ««—»»

  The team didn’t want to give up on Oz Island and its child-inhabitants. They had sailed back the next day, hoping to convince them to get vaccinated. But their hopes were dashed about twenty feet from the shore.