Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  “Are you okay?” Dr. Paul Anson, a C.D.C. colleague and good friend asked, changing seats to sit next Adam.

  “Should have been worse,” Adam mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Pacifica.”

  Paul nodded. “It put so much debris into the air, it reminds me of the differences between Mount Tambora’s eruption in 1815 and the eruption of Toba 74,000 years ago. Tambora caused the 1816 ‘year without a summer,’ but Toba emptied at least thirteen times as much material into the atmosphere, driving humans to the point of extinction.”

  “Pacifica should have caused as much. It was as if something deliberately held it back. It still nearly wiped out a third of the U.S., not to mention destroying islands clear to Japan,” Adam said.

  Paul glanced at Adam’s notebook. He smiled.

  “Dr. Grigori and his lists.”

  Islands: Stromboli, Panarea, Selina, Vulcano, Filicudi, Graham, Basilizzo, Alicudi, Lipari, Ustica, Linosa, Pantelleria, Ischia, Ponziane, Ventotene’, Capri,Giglio, Copraia, Montecristo, pianosa, Elba, E’gade, Favignana, Sicily.

  He’d made notes in neat paragraphs below the list:

  These islands sank beneath the rising waters after blowing up. Only Sicily, Vulcano, Stromboli, and Lipari were considered to have active cones. Vulcano possessed one of three calderas in the Italian system, with the other two being on either side of the city of Naples: Campi Phlegraei (with some forty cones, fifteen craters and crater lakes), and the Somma Caldera—it’s magma chambers three miles beneath the earth’s surface—within the arc of which sat Vesuvius.

  Mount Etna, in Sicily, had over two hundred secondary events and hundreds of parasitic cones, a few large enough and active enough to have names of their own. Mount Etna was one of the largest volcanoes in the world. Stromboli had suffered almost daily eruptions for millennia. Gas pressure beneath its lava lake crust built quickly, eruptions occurring as separate, distinct bursts up to several times per hour. Each eruption on Stromboli had been recorded to throw pyroclasts tens to hundreds of meters into the air. Yet people lived there...

  Adam shook his head at his own words. Had lived there until a few hours ago.

  Another list:

  Possible cones/active, dormant, unknown, mainland.

  The words marched in his notebook, a ‘mount’ of its own of site after site:

  Mount Vettore, Mount Ortles, Mount Sila, Mount Polino, Mount Vulturo, Mount Papa, Mount Cervati, Mount Stella, Mount Alburno, Mount Cervialto, Mount Matesse, Mount LaMeta, Mount Velino, Gran Sasso, Mount Corna, Mount Prato Magno, Mount La Futa, Mount Sabini, Mount Cimoni, Mount Ebro, Mount Roccameloni, Mount Blanc, Mount Rosa, Mount Viso, Crater Lake DiVico, Crater Lake di Bolsena, Steam Vent Grosseto, Steam Vent Mount Amiata, Trachytic Volcanic Mass Roccastrada, Crater Lake Bracciano Sabatini, Mount Marmolada, Mount Adamello, Mount Coldi Tenda, Mount Catrio, Comelico Pass, Stelvio Pass, la Cisa Pass, Predel Pass, Abitoni Pass, Cerreto Pass, Pesia Pass, Mount Abano, Mount Acqui, Mount Solfatura, Trachytic Volcanic Mass Sassoforte, Trachytic Volcanic Mass Campiglia, Mount Latial, Mount Roccamonfina, Crater Lake Lagodi Licola, Crater Lake Lago di Fusaro, Crater Lake Mare Morto, Crater Lake Lago Lucrino, Crater Lake Lago Averno, Crater Lake Lago di Agnano, Mount Grillo, Mount Barbaro, Piano di Quarto, Fossa Lupara, Mount Cigliano, Mount Astroni, Mount Pianura, Sulphuric Gas Vent Cave of the Dog, Steam Vent Torre Annunziata, Lava Dome Colle Margherita, Lava Dome Colle Umberto, Steam Vent Lardello, Steam Vent Castelnuovo, Steam Vent Serrozzano, Steam Vent Lustignano, Steam Vent Sasso, Steam Vent Monterotondo, Steam Vent Lago…

  “I may not have everything correct,” Adam admitted. “Fix it later.”

  “Have you ever considered,” Paul suggested, eyeing the block of words, “that you might be more than a trifle O.C.?”

  Adam laughed. “Obsessive Compulsive? Lots of folks are into lists. Helps us think. You’ve done those crossword puzzle magazines for as long as I’ve known you. Helps you pretend to think.”

  Both men studied as the satellite replay showed clear evidence that the explosions had been simultaneous.

  But what was the blur, just before?

  This time only the noise of the original explosion and the resulting unavoidable shock waves affected the rest of the world. The sulfurous ash should have reached Germany, Switzerland, France, Greece, Tunisia—within so short a time that few, if any, could have escaped. The clouds and the tsunami might have traveled as far as southern Africa, India, the British Isles, even America. The stratosphere should have been filled with debris, reflecting back the sun’s light, bringing calamitous winters and icy summers for years. It should have triggered an Ice Age. Worldwide famine would have followed. Could it still?

  Instead there was an enigmatic blur—and a bubble. Who or what was screwing with them?

  “Look at that!” Paul exclaimed.

  Out the window they observed as another plane went higher. “Reckless morons. That isn’t the WHO team, is it? Be just like them to try getting the first good look.”

  Paul forced a nervous chuckle, showing he intended no disrespect to anybody in the World Health Organization.

  “I don’t know,” Adam replied, the craft being too far away to recognize. He was appalled at the risk they were taking.

  Paul wore binoculars around his neck, through which he’d been trying to see what lay behind the western wall that shut this Mediterranean anomaly from view. He looked through these now.

  “Nope, not one of our group. I’ll bet they’re media.”

  Adam was half out of his seat. “What are they trying to…? Reach the top of whatever…? Damn, we need to warn…!”

  Paul grabbed his hand, pulling him back down.

  “My God, we don’t even know how high the damn thing goes,” Paul whispered.

  Dread had all the passengers pressing to see out the windows on that side, the aisles full, as the other plane climbed. Then it was out of sight.

  “Please take your seats,” a steward’s voice said over the speakers. The message was repeated as none obeyed.

  “Fools, it isn’t worth it!” a woman shouted. Adam personally knew her, Dr. Christina Chang. An expert in emergency trauma care, she’d been part of the group that accompanied him to Pacifica, years ago.

  Another—a man he knew only from articles on paleo-forensics—cried out, “Lord, please help…!”

  Explosion.

  People slapped hands over their ears, screaming. Several vomited as the air pressure shifted abruptly, their own plane diving, turning, the pilot trying to avoid fiery, flying pieces of metal. Their plane rattled and shrieked as if it had been struck by lightning.

  Those standing in the aisle tumbled. Some had actually passed out. Dr. Chang fell into Paul’s and Adam’s laps. They held onto her.

  “It’ll be okay, Christina,” Adam told the moaning, half-conscious woman as he cradled her head.

  Up high, where perhaps darkness barely began. Was there a place where it became difficult to see the barrier? Adam imagined this enormous column reaching into space, meteors shattering against it like so much gravel. He could envision it topless, as if it had never closed into a finite cylinder or went out too far for the bubble’s summit to be recorded.

  Who

  What

  Is

  Screwing

  With

  Us?

  Down below, the fragments of the demolished aircraft fell onto ships converging on Italy. Nothing hit the plane Adam was on, nor the one carrying personnel from the WHO and medical trauma teams.

  At that altitude, one could see blood splattered on the phenomenon’s west wall. As if there had been a war in heaven.

  Or the punishment of fallen angels.

  Fallen

  angels.

  Adam blinked, confused.

  None aboard his plane spoke another word until they landed in Paris, to be assigned to one of the fleet of waiting helicopters.

  Silence, as if each were in their own private bubble.

 
««—»»

  Rescue units landed in numerous places as close to Italy as possible. They stared at the walls of death. There couldn’t be any doubters now but that the cause must be supernatural—in the strictest sense of its meaning: being beyond any accepted rules of what constituted the current and approved criteria of ‘normal’. That interpretation might include anything from gray aliens to Anti-Christ, from God to Gaia’s Revenge, Hell to the (Hollywood) Saints Go Marching (Back) In.

  After they’d witnessed the crashing of a plane full of media personnel, the rescuers’ spirits were dashed. Could they even get in? Then what?

  Adam’s group of six helicopters landed in southeastern France, north of the postage-sized nation of Monaco. They were less than a mile from Italy.

  Adam stepped out of the helicopter. His first site was of a badly burned woman holding a baby in shock from its own third-degree damage. Somehow, she mustered a run up to him. Burned? He wondered how she’d made it past the unseen barrier. She babbled but not in Italian. Nor was it in any other language Dr. Grigori knew. He determined it must be an idioglossia from the insane.

  “Signora,” he told her softly but loud enough to be heard over the helicopters. Pilots ran past them, unloading personnel and supplies as Adam spoke to the woman. “Let me help you. Please…sit and allow me to examine both of you.”

  Paul shouted nearby. “At least we won’t have to cut off their clothes!” He leaned back into the chopper for water and antiseptics. “Still we need to intubate, clean the burns, get at least the mother on morphine…”

  “…and get them both to Paris ASAP,” Christina added.

  With no warning the burned woman let out a wail and on the last of adrenaline threw her baby into the still-whirring blades of the helicopter, ending the poor child’s misery. Adam staggered backwards as the blood hit him in the face. He stood, mute, white as Carrara marble, noticing that what he’d mistaken for a charred baby blanket was really skin hanging from the mother’s arms.

  She slid to the ground, crying tears of blood and human grease. She rubbed her eyes until she rubbed them out. Then she died before anyone had time to react, all of them frozen in mental paralysis at the scene.

  Adam moved first, using his shirttails to wipe his face. In such a way, he hoped to hide his tears, remembering Laura’s dead, deformed fetuses.

  He walked through a copse of tall pine trees to the very bulwark, now displaying trapped ash cloud, lava, stones. A man’s form stood there, half in/half out. As if he’d been crossing the lunatic fringe when the country behind him detonated. It bisected him vertically. His face was calm, even happy on what must have been a beautiful day. One perfect arm and hand stretched to pluck a pine cone, one perfect leg and foot planted in France. The rest of him had fried, the brain incinerated inside the burst skull, flowering outward like the petals of a black narcissus.

  They could fly around but not over it. Nor could they land there, not even drop emergency supplies by parachute. Even the satellites couldn’t photograph the interior. Those on trajectory directly over had been broken apart, for technology had not progressed far beyond the dawn before Pacifica. It took money to fuel the sciences. Even what had been the richest nations were struggling to maintain their infrastructures and defenses. How much more would it take before the planet became a Third World World?

  Adam knew, as surely as the other masters of science suspected—for this was nothing short of uncanny—that whatever held responsibility for this, wanted them to see it.

  Wanted Adam to see it.

  Boiling cauldrons of clouds crackled with lightning.

  Wanted him to see this…

  The victims in Torino thin as Turin’s shroud, the canals of Venice evaporated. The magnificent Florentine palaces of the Doges toppled like gilded tarot cards. In Rome, new glitz alongside ancient Imperial glory—crumbled. Naples, sunk between the two calderas, raising epic vats of fire. People had few moments to burn and shriek, wailed prayers gone unheard above the bestial howl of mountains erupting unto their own deaths.

  The blur.

  Over and over Adam had reviewed the satellite’s record.

  Tranquility.

  Blur.

  Then as an atomic dawn.

  Boom.

  It came to Adam in a chaotic flash. The blur! It was the total of all the dormant or dead volcanoes risen again in an identical instant. Dead cones and empty craters wouldn’t have contained residual magma chambers, necessary for triggering fulmination.

  “…How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?”

  “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not made alive, except it die.”

  – I Corinthians 15:35-36

  Joined by active volcanoes, resurgent calderas—part of an intrigue no human could grasp the motive for.

  New ones and the ruins of their ancestors had come up so fast that the satellite couldn’t properly record this bazaar upheaval, nor could even a special computer break down the pico-seconds of extraordinary action into anything remotely resembling clear images.

  A pixelated blur.

  And no doubt a planet killer, had it gone beyond the limits set by those peculiar walls.

  Adam thought upon his honeymoon, how he and Laura had strolled around the ruins of Pompeii, inhaled the scent of ripe vineyards growing in the rich soil on the slopes of Vesuvius. Pompeii, preserved and open to tourists to this day, yet other towns destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 A.D., like the town of Herculaneum, buried sixty-five feet deep in the pumice, ash and rock of flowing lahars, were built upon anew. Here the modern town of Erculano had been built on top of the dead and devastation of Herculaneum. And Stabiae, mostly buried in pumice in 79 A.D., was eventually rebuilt as Castellammare di Stabiae.

  Portici had been utterly destroyed by Vesuvius in 1631, yet there was a new small town thriving over the bones of the old. There the newlywed couple saw the ornate royal palace of Charles of Bourbon, King of the Two Sicilies. And then there was Pozzuoli, a Neapolitan suburb very near Campi Phlegraei’s bull’s-eye. The old Roman market had sunk about forty feet after its construction in the first century A.D. Magma beneath the caldera had since pushed it up and down. Hannibal laid siege to the city (then called Puteoi) in 214 B.C. Volcanism changed the town’s level, submerged parts, and chased people off. But there it was, thriving. As were Torre Annunziata, Torre del Greco, and other towns and cities built near or on the Vesuvian slopes or in either the Somma caldera or the Campi Phlegraei caldera.

  Finally, Laura commented, “Imagine, all these people live on top of graveyards.”

  “Going back through the eons,” Adam pointed out, “the whole world is a graveyard.”

  Solemn moment. One didn’t share a romantic kiss during such a cheerless instant. Instead they squeezed each other’s hand.

  The Grigoris journeyed on to Rome, the Eternal City. They walked through the Piazza Barberini to visit the Fountain of Triton, passed through the twin churches of St. Maria di Montesanto and St. Maria dei Miracoli in the Via del Corso. Surely the Coliseum had pancaked, down into the stalls where gladiators waited to fight and Christian martyrs awaited death as mass entertainment. The Vatican must have become Dante’s Inferno. The poet Petrarch had walked some of those same streets, inventing sonnets for his love Laura. She was the unreachable wife of a noble who happened to be related to another writer who came along a few centuries later, the Marquis de Sade.

  The blur. The cones of the dead were like tombstones. They were like evil spirits, appearing on cue to aid in their master’s deadly power trip.

  Adam now found himself saying the dead and dormant names out loud, as if to evoke a god’s secret name was to negate its power. “Albano, Acqui, Amiata, Cimini, Grosseto, Sabatini, Roccamonfina, Vulsini…”

  It was a talisman he spoke in an awed whisper as he walked up to the man, half and reasonable to the eye in France, the other half horrible to behold in Italy. Adam reached out with no small temerity, touching finger-to-finger, crea
ting a static electric connection with the man-form…

  ««—»»

  Nature the Grand Unified Theory and Turbulence.

  God the Abstraction.

  Creation the Snowflake Fractal.

  First Six Days in the Mystery’s Fluid Dynamics.

  Seventh Day with the Smooth Column In a Wind Tunnel.

  Angels the Intermittencies and Periodicities.

  Lucifer the Curve In a Straight Line.

  Jesus the Predictability Among Exponential Labyrinths.

  Male Disciples the Paradoxical Reductionists.

  Magdalena the Chaos Kiss.

  Faithful the Infinite Sparseness.

  Revelation the Pathological Patmos.

  World’s End the Conceptualized ZigZags of a Single

  Bolt of Lightning Staking Its Claim to Nonlinearity.

  – from The Enantiodromia

  So dark it was after being stretched, pulled at every curve and corner. Coming apart. Yet always at one inside himself.

  Event horizon? Rabbit too late for a date down the black hole.

  Two universes collide, membrane passing through ’brane.

  High road, low road, and I’ll get to Singularity a’fore ye…

  He sucked in the sulfuric acid. It mixed with the air to form a concrete in his lungs. As he leaned into the wind, it blew the volcanic ash so hard that Adam’s lips and gums bled. Granite blocks, warped and twisted by the heat, rolled beyond him like tumbleweeds. He stumbled, sank knee-deep in softly-sponged bodies, mushy and spoiled as tainted oysters, smelling of rust and rotten eggs.

  (And all that the wind whirled and tossed by, only the dead laid down to die.

  (But as all saved the damned, blue higher and higher, he did not care for his brain was on fire.)