Glenbrook’s total population of 306 people is gone, lost in the aftermath of The Crash. Like the rest of Lake Tahoe and the entire western half of the United States, the forests and all the man-made structures have been laid flat by the shockwaves and earthquakes.
Meg stands at the lake’s edge, looks out over the beautiful blue freshwater expanse and takes a deep, cleansing breath. The lake appears alive and well despite the destruction all around it. She finishes off the last of her water bottle and kneels at the water’s edge. She dips the empty bottle into the cold water and refills it from the lake, careful to avoid sucking in the tiny mosquito fishes that populate the shoreline. When the bottle is full, she takes a long swig of fresh lake water then tops off the bottle.
She checks her cellphone again. The battery is dead. She considers tossing the now useless brick, but something tells her to hold onto it. Call it hope. She hopes that power will somehow be miraculously restored. She hopes that life will somehow return to normal. Yet, her rational mind tells her that her life will never be normal again.
Meg carefully secures her full water bottle in its zippered cover and heads away from the lake. She wanders through the little resort town named after its landmark, the Glenbrook House hotel. She walks past the crushed remains of the once-proud hotel and heads for what’s left of the town’s General Store. The General Store was once owned and operated by a local family who sold souvenirs, sundries and snacks to the year-round tourists. Tahoe once attracted skiers in the winter months and families from Nevada and Southern California who came in search of cooler weather during the increasingly unbearable summer months.
Meg finds herself picking through the ruins and collecting sealed packages of pretzels, potato chips and peanuts, which she stuffs into her backpack. It isn’t much, but it will sustain her in an emergency, and she can always come back for more. She also finds two Lake Tahoe baseball caps that fit her just right. So she wears them both.
Night is falling and she needs someplace safe to crash. So she returns to the lake and picks her way among the fallen trees and smashed log cabins near the shoreline searching for shelter.
Instead, she finds two small miracles.
Barely fifty yards ahead of her, picking their way slowly along the water’s edge and holding each other’s hands tightly, are two little blonde girls who look maybe five or six years old. Meg brightens. Survivors, children!
“Girls? Hey! Girls!” Meg runs toward them, screaming excitedly.
The girls freeze and turn to stare at Meg, then at each other. Should they run and hide or cling to this woman who is bearing down on them? Their faces are red and streaked with soot and tear tracks from weeks of crying. They are still wearing their pajamas. The older one carries a ‘Small Brown Bag’ from Bloomingdale’s, a sad crumpled shopping bag remnant from a bygone era.
Mia and Lily are sisters, the only members left of their family. They lost their parents and older brother when their home in Stateline collapsed. Mia and Lily were up late that night against their parents’ wishes playing in the crawl space right beneath their bedroom. Miraculously, they crawled out from under the collapsed house, realized they were alone, found a jumbo box of saltine crackers and an unopened package of Oreos and took the nearest road north to Glenwood. They stayed close to the lake, living on rationed crackers, cookies, pine nuts and lake water.
Under normal circumstances with a stranger approaching, they would have run as fast as they could in the opposite direction and hidden among the dead trees. Today is different. They run, instead, as fast as their little legs can carry them into the comfort and safety of Meg’s waiting arms. They might just as well be a mother and two young daughters separated by war and reunited in its apocalyptic aftermath. The moment they touch they become a family.
“My name is Meg. What’s yours?”
“I’m Lily and this is my sister, Mia. She’s five.”
Meg smiles through her tears. “I am really, really, really glad to meet you, Lily and Mia. How did you two get here all by yourselves?”
“We were hiding in the crawl space, hiding from the moon monsters. They made our house fall down on top of our mom and dad and our big brother, Jimmy. We were scared they would kill us too, so we ran away,” says Lily.
“That was a long time ago,” says Meg.
“It’s fifty-seven days. I counted.”
“What about food? What have you been eating?”
Lily opens her shopping bag and pulls out the empty box of saltine crackers and the empty Oreo package. She holds it up matter-of-factly for Meg to see.
“God, you must be hungry. You’ve been wearing your pajamas this whole time?”
The girls nod.
Meg sniffs at them, grimaces. “When was the last time you two had a bath?”
“Fifty-seven days,” blurts Mia.
Meg’s maternal instincts kick into overdrive. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Tomorrow during daytime when it’s warmer, we’re going to take a bath and wash your pajamas and get you all cleaned up. We’re going to discover the two pretty little girls under all this dirt. Okay?”
The girls nod and smile for the first time in fifty-seven days.
Chapter 7
Olympic Valley, California, October 31
Ankur Narine is the only member of his Stanford University postgraduate geology study group to leave Olympic Valley alive. He is alive because he is the only member with more than a passing interest in caves, particularly rare lava caves that formed above ground level.
Ankur had wanted to be a geologist since he was four years old. Now twenty-two, he still remembers his first rock collection as vividly as if it were yesterday. His uncle Kunnar had started him off with little chunks of marble, obsidian, quartzite, slate and limestone. Ankur studied each sample with Kunnar’s old magnifying glass. One by one, he held each rock up to the light and turned it slowly with his fingertips like he was evaluating a rare uncut, flawless diamond. He had quickly learned the three basic rock classifications: igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary, and he could accurately classify every rock sample he found near his family’s home in Seattle by the time he was eleven.
“You have rocks in your head, Ankur. You should think about geology.” Uncle Kunnar was always giving him advice. This time, it was career advice and this time, Ankur listened. The boy was well on his way to becoming a professional geologist, maybe someday even a famous professional geologist.
On September 3, 2029, a day Ankur will never ever forget, he stumbled upon the first lava cave ever found in Olympic Valley, at least to the best of his knowledge, which happened to be quite extensive. Uncle Kunnar had said he had rocks in his head. He had also said that Ankur was a “prodigy.”
The cave was in the unlikeliest place in the foothills leading down one of the eastern slopes toward Lake Tahoe, barely three miles from the lake itself. Nothing in the geological record suggested the kind of volcanism that would cause such a tube to form in or near Olympic Valley. Yet there it was.
Ecstatic about his find and with enough food in his backpack to last a few days, Ankur built a fire inside the cave and spent hours collecting shiny black obsidian samples, some almost the size of his fist, from the cave walls. He fell asleep by the fire, oblivious to the impending lunar crash, thinking only about the groundbreaking academic paper he would write detailing his monumental discovery. The lava cave was the “smoking gun” proof that there had been volcanic activity in Olympic Valley sometime during its distant past. His discovery would help rewrite the area’s geologic history and most of the textbooks.
When Ankur awoke on September 4, in shock, surprised to be alive after the massive earthquakes during the night, he knew immediately that the lava cave had saved him. He worried about the other members of his study group and tried reaching them by cellphone, starting with the three who had become his closest friends during his undergrad years at Stanford.
Even with ninety percent battery power, there was no signal,
no missed calls and no left messages. What had happened to them? Why hadn’t they called or texted him?
Ankur goes off searching for them and finds only the mashed up bodies of strangers. From Squaw Valley, where he had separated from his group, to Squaw Creek, where he knew several students were headed, he finds only crushed and broken corpses among the ruins. The air is thick with the stench of rotting human flesh, forcing Ankur to breathe through his mouth. He spends weeks digging through shattered wood and rocks and cinder blocks without identifying a single classmate. He is grateful to find food. He is more grateful that most of the area’s dead are completely buried from sight under collapsed ski lodges, shops, restaurants and Olympic sports activity centers. As it is, he has already seen too many things that he can never un-see.
As far as Ankur knows, he is the only human being to leave Olympic Valley alive. Nature has played the cruelest of Halloween tricks. It has turned a promising and wonderful field trip into a real-life horror story. He forces a nervous chuckle tinged with black humor, trying to assuage the pain he feels over losing his friends. They were all smart, witty and full of hope for the future.
All Ankur has left of them is a collection of grinning, duck-faced selfies on his cellphone and his memories from their years together before The Crash. He powers off his phone to conserve the battery, then chuckles to himself at the notion of saving it for an emergency. After all, he is living through the biggest emergency of his life! What can possibly be worse than this?
Despite being a second-generation Indian-American from a strict family, Ankur has been completely Americanized. He plays guitar well, has a penchant for death metal music, pop culture and stories about the zombie apocalypse. He might never see his guitar again, but his favorite music and stories are still stored on his phone.
His friends and classmates had simply called him “Ker.” It was a nickname that stuck after he’d schooled them on how to correctly pronounce his name, which no one ever got right the first time.
“It’s not ‘Anchor’. It’s An-KER. Accent on the second syllable.” The last thing Ankur wants is to be thought of as a heavy weight that keeps someone or something stuck in one place.
“Okay, KER.”
He picks his way carefully down along the rocks and sagebrush leading away from the cave toward the bottom of the hill. He glances back sadly at the lava cave, knowing that he may never get an iota of recognition for his incredible discovery. As an afterthought, he powers up his cellphone and takes several pictures of the lava cave, including a couple of selfies with the cave as backdrop, graphic evidence of his find. Then he heads for Lake Tahoe, filled with hope that the lake water is still potable, still stocked with edible fish.
Emerald Bay State Park, Lake Tahoe, November 17
Emerald Bay State Park naturally overlooks Emerald Bay, a small, scenic appendage poking out from the southwestern portion of Lake Tahoe. The mouth to the bay is less than a quarter-mile wide. The water is smooth as glass and would make a pleasant swim for anyone so inclined. The only swimmers in the bay or in Lake Tahoe are the mackinaws, rainbows and other members of the trout family, plus sockeye salmon, catfish, bluegills and mosquito fishes.
It’s been ten weeks since The Crash and Emerald Bay has attracted a small band of human survivors. These stragglers have hiked there from different spots around the region in search of freshwater and food. A few survivors have simply claimed squatter’s rights along the bay’s sandy, rock-strewn beach, and constructed primitive shelters from the fallen trees and branches strewn about as far as they can see.
The handful of survivors that began with Hannibal and Satin, Sam Hayden and Julia, has now been joined by Rachel, an attractive thirty-year-old yoga instructor from Sausalito, by Ankur Narine, the lone survivor of Olympic Village, and by the science teacher, Meg Baker, and her two found little girls.
Meg and her ‘daughters’ Lily and Mia settled there after meeting Hannibal and Satin on the banks of South Lake Tahoe. After wandering alone for so long, Meg is grateful to be with children and feel part of a small community again. Satin and Julia dote on the two little girls like protective maternal aunts. Satin, still nursing her broken arm, even censors her usual ghetto language when the little girls are around, often catching and correcting herself in mid-expletive.
Lily and Mia may have lost their mother, father and brother, but they have gained three surrogate mother figures. Together, the three women and children whom Hannibal has nicknamed ‘The Five’ take daily walks down to Cascade Lake, a tiny lake located just south of US 89 and Emerald Bay Road. There, they relieve and bathe themselves and teach the little girls the importance of preserving Lake Tahoe.
“We mustn’t pollute the big lake. We have to drink that water,” says Julia as she and Meg scrub the girls clean in Cascade Lake. “No peeing in the big lake, please.”
Rachel is the only female conspicuously absent from their communal baths, the only female who does not enjoy the company of children. Rachel likes to live completely in the moment, and children force her to contemplate a future that might no longer exist.
Thanksgiving
The women and children are busy preparing for their first survivors’ Thanksgiving gathering. They are among the nine known survivors from a population of more than forty million people.
“I like this lake better,” says Mia. “I can see the other side.”
“My teacher said humans couldn’t survive four days without water.” Lily is amazingly sure of herself for a seven-year-old.
Meg smiles at her proudly. “Your teacher is right. That’s why we came to Lake Tahoe, so we always have water.”
“Can people die of thirst, Meg?” Mia gazes up at her innocently.
“Yup.”
Standing at the water’s edge surrounded by a forest of submerged waterweed and coontail, Mia and Lily giggle each time the little mosquito fishes nibble at their feet and ankles.
“I never seen this many guppies,” Satin coos.
“They are mosquito fishes,” says Meg, “same family as guppies.”
Lily makes a face. “They don’t look anything like mosquitos.”
“They eat mosquitos,” adds Julia.
“Oh,” says Lily.
“Well, they must be hungry,” says Satin. “Has anyone seen a fu…mosquito lately?” She censors herself just in time.
Lily turns toward Satin. “What’s a fu…mosquito?”
Hannibal, Sam, Ankur and Rachel spend Thanksgiving morning collecting fallen wood, rocks and pine tree branches to fortify and expand their primitive shelters. The only tools are their own hands. It makes the work challenging and painstakingly slow. It forces them to think and innovate in ways they never needed before The Crash.
Rachel, lean and muscular, easily holds her own working alongside Hannibal, Ankur and Sam. She is the one survivor best suited to cooperative communal living in Stone Age conditions, having learned her survival skills while living on a commune as a younger woman.
The little group begins their new life on Emerald Bay with hastily constructed primitive shelters, simple lean-tos propped up against the hillside. They know they will soon need better protection from the elements. Though the weather is still unseasonably mild, winter is fast approaching. Winter in Lake Tahoe typically means cold and wind and several feet of snow.
No one doubts the need for warmer, sturdier shelters. So they gather thick clumps of mud from the shoreline and use it like mortar to construct walls for their shelters. The men naturally follow Rachel’s lead. She’s the only one who seems to know exactly what must be done and exactly how to do it.
They finish Meg’s shelter first. Since Meg has taken full responsibility for the community’s only two children, she needs more space for herself and the girls. So Rachel and the men carry mud from the lake’s edge and pack as much as they can around the structure, bonding the dead wood and tree branches together over a foundation made of rock. They smooth the outermost layer of mud with their hands as it
dries, giving Meg’s shelter a uniquely rounded-at-the-corners rectangular shape. When they finish, they stand back and admire their work.
“It’s not bad for four amateur mud hut makers.” Sam Hayden is out of breath from the work. It’s the first real protracted physical labor he’s ever done in his life.
“Speak for yourself, Professor,” says Rachel.
“You’ve done this before. I thought you said you’re a yoga instructor.” Hannibal eyes her suspiciously.
“I spent three years on a commune outside Sausalito where the counselors taught us how to live and build shelters using only natural materials. We didn’t have hammers and nails or saws. We learned how to live off the land and use what nature provides.”
Hannibal is impressed. “You are like a Swiss army knife.”
“Yeah, got a special tool for just about everything.”
“Excellent,” says Sam. “Teach us what you know, and we’ll teach you what we know.”
“Deal,” says Rachel.
Sam eyes Ankur and Hannibal. “Surely an astrophysicist, a geologist and a New York trucker know something they can teach a woman as independent and self-sufficient as Rachel.”
“Maybe,” says Rachel.
Besides building techniques, Rachel teaches them to recognize the edible plants growing nearby then demonstrates by eating them herself. So they all munch freely on dandelions, clover and pine nuts while they work.
Ankur has spent half his twenty-two years digging for and carrying rocks. He teaches the others how to identify and use the best rocks for each of their shelters.
With Meg’s shelter complete, they begin the next upgrade project, Sam and Julia’s shelter, just as The Five females return from their Thanksgiving Day bathing trip to Cascade Lake. Meg stares at her new shelter in wide-eyed disbelief.
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