Many a shared meal had been spent listening to her berate religion as the “opiate of the masses,” and the church - particularly the Catholic Church - as nothing but a bunch of misogynistic, power hungry political hacks. Having developed an interest in history, courtesy of his Uncle Ian, Jake could see her argument had merit, but for him, it wasn’t quite that simple.
He believed in . . . something. He wasn’t sure what that something was, and he had never really examined it too closely, but it was there. He’d felt it, at sea, sitting alone out on deck, staring at the horizon: a feeling of peace, of everything being right with his world. This feeling had always been brief and transitory, but it had been there. And in the aftermath of the Iraqi desert, with the knowledge of what he’d done, and what he’d felt while doing it, swirling endlessly through his post-traumatized mind, that transitory spark had been just enough to keep him sane.
And for the rest of the time, there had always been alcohol.
He sent Mary to pump the gas as he wandered over to the refrigerated cases along one side of the store. There were two one-gallon jugs of water. He grabbed them both. As he was paying for those and what turned out to be the last two cartons of cigarettes he would ever buy, the Reverend Jericho carried on with his sermon.
“As we all know, friends, God works in mysterious ways and through His servants to get what He wants. And what He wants now is a Reckoning for all the Godless iniquity running through America like a rabid dog. And what do we do with rabid dogs, my friends?”
The people there in the Gas-n-Gro looked right at Jake as the radio voice asked the question. He didn’t wait around for the answer.
10
The Motor Home
Somewhere in Nevada
Dani could feel the motor home moving. Every jolt, every bump, every pebble they ran over sent pain through some part of her battered body. He’d smashed her face against the table. She remembered that much. And he had probably broken her nose. Only one eye opened properly. The worst, though, had been the kidney punches.
She lay on the floor now, once again tied to the stanchion holding the table. She was hurt, she was scared, her jeans and underwear were gone, but she was still alive. And they were moving.
To where? She wondered. Didn’t matter. Wherever it was, sooner or later they would stop. And when they stopped, she needed to be ready to fight.
Ten
“Were such things here as we do speak about?
Or have we eaten on the insane root
that takes the reason prisoner?”
William Shakespeare
Macbeth
1
Medford, Oregon
Bobby Drummond could see where this was going, and he didn’t like it one bit. The ugliness had begun and it reminded him far too much of New Orleans after Katrina. Granted, that had been an actual disaster area, and Medford didn’t quite qualify, but the similarities were there, and from all reports, pretty much everywhere along the coast within three hundred miles to the North and South did qualify. And the coast sat less than a hundred miles away.
News of how bad things were outside Medford had spread through town like a Hollywood scandal. Everybody knew about it, everybody talked about it, and now everybody had started doing something about it. The looting hadn’t begun, thank the lucky stars, but the hoarding had, and the store shelves were empty of everything useful. Fighting had broken out at both the Maxi-Mart downtown (over baby food, no less) and at one of the only four remaining gas stations that still had fuel. Cars jammed the I-5 freeway in both directions and in all six lanes - lots of people leaving, lots of refugees coming in.
And what was he stuck doing? Providing security for some televangelist disphit. The Major had given him the assignment personally, and thus cemented Bobby’s low opinion of the Idiot-in-Charge, who now stood near the stage, looking up at the Reverend, and nodding his head in agreement.
What part of Law and (more importantly) Order did this abject stupidity fall under? The town teetered precariously on the edge of chaos, if it hadn’t already gone off the cliff. He should be out there, helping his fellow officers, helping the people of his new community, instead of babysitting some asshole with a God-complex.
And if the Major, himself, had planned to be there, then why the fuck did he need Bobby? Nothing was happening that could be even mildly construed as a security situation. The crowd was large, but well-behaved. Most people were just standing there and listening. He could sort of understand the wisdom behind having at least one person there to call in backup, should the need arise, but if the Chief of Police had known he would attend, then what possible purpose could Bobby be serving?
The disaster (or what part of it affected Medford) had been deemed bad enough to mobilize the County Sheriff’s guys, as well as the town cops. That hadn’t been The Major’s idea. The Sheriff had just up and done it, and God bless him for having the balls and active brain cells to take charge.
Like most communities of a certain size, a bloodless turf war existed between City and County. Technically, the City had jurisdiction over everything that happened inside Medford, but then Medford lay within the County, and so, therefore, the County had jurisdiction, when it chose to take it. Sheriff Gordon Anderson, himself a former Marine, couldn’t stand The Major. Bobby had learned that much from Greg Conelly last night, and having met the idiot in question, he understood, completely. But the City had been hiring, not the County, and so now he worked for Major Jerome Nesbit.
Bobby had been out at the junction of I-5 and State Route 62, dealing with a three-car pile up that had occurred when some knucklhead in an SUV decided to enter the highway through some poor family’s minivan, pushing it into somebody else’s cherry ‘67 Mustang. Damage to the Mustang alone could have been considered a hanging offence in some circles, and its driver actually had looked about ready to form a lynch mob, when Bobby showed up and forced cooler heads to prevail.
That, at least, had been serving a purpose. But this bullshit . . .
He stood off to the side of a hastily-constructed stage at one end of the public park adjacent to the Courthouse. A sizeable crowd had gathered, full of shit-scared people looking for answers about something unanswerable.
He’d seen it before, during Katrina, albeit on a grander and more horrifying scale. Some people just couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that Mother Nature could bitch-slap the crap out of them, and there wasn’t a damned thing anybody could do about it. And so they looked to anyone willing to give them answers - even if those answers were total, unmitigated bullshit. Someone like Thomas Fucking Jericho, or whatever the asshole’s name was, could then step in, dressed in a white linen suit, sporting a square, white bandage on one side of his head, and give them someone to blame.
“This has been a long time coming, my friends,” the man said through the microphone to the crowd of people he’d just met and, therefore, hadn’t possibly had time to befriend. “This is God’s punishment for the sins of abortion and homosexuality and Atheism and the denigration of His Church. For Godlessness and the mixing of the races. For sparing the rod and so spoiling the child.” A chorus of Yes! floated up and away like a mindless balloon. Bobby could see the Major raising both hands and shouting right along with them. “I’m here to tell you my friends, God has shown us His Rod...” No phallic symbology there, Bobby thought, “...and He’s not going to be sparing any child. Or any man. These are the End Times, my friends. We all need to get right with the Lord Our God.”
A chill went through Bobby’s spine. This was bad. Real bad. And he knew - just knew - it was only going to get worse.
2
Norris Geyser Basin
Yellowstone National Park
Maggie awoke with a scream of white-hot agony. She lay on her left side. Her head hurt, but that wasn’t the problem. Her ribs hurt and her breath came in short, labored gasps, but that wasn’t the problem, either. She opened her eyes and saw bus seats above her, canted at a crazy angle.
What are the seats doing on the ceiling? She blinked, trying to make sense of it, trying to understand.
Dim light came through the back windows, only there wasn’t any glass, and her feet were on the wrong side of them: the out-side. Somebody’s shoe lay on the metal ground amid the shattered glass, along with a cracked and clearly damaged cell phone, two pencils, and a trashy romance novel - one of those things her mom always called a bodice-ripper. Something had happened. She knew that much. But what?
Her Mom. Her Dad. Where were they? How were they? Were they even alive? Guilt and concern mingled with the pain and disorientation, creating a fragmented and congealing soup inside her soul. She still knew nothing, beyond the unreal horror of what had been on the news. The numbers were staggering. The news was all bad. And she still couldn’t get in touch with her parents.
She heard moaning, somewhere behind her and tried to roll over, but couldn’t. Her shoulder sent a jolt of pain right to her toes. Oh God, it hurt! She looked at it there beneath her. It, too, was canted at a crazy angle, as if she’d been folded in half, lengthwise. Why couldn’t she move?
She reached behind her, with her good right hand, searching. Her other hand, her left hand, attached to her pain-wracked left shoulder, lay on the metal roof of the bus, useless. Her searching hand found resistance and recoiled at the touch of something soft, wet and feeling broken. She brought it to her face, at first puzzling over why her hand looked so red. And then she knew. Blood. Whatever - whoever - was behind her was covered in blood.
She heard something else, just then: a light rumbling, far off and getting closer, and then a grinding of . . . gears? A car? No. Couldn’t be. You couldn’t drive a car on these roads. A truck, then. Her brain struggled to make sense of it all, to rationalize the irrational signals it was receiving from her senses. What had happened?
They’d been driving toward the West Gate - evacuating. Shintake had been sitting next to her. Where was he? She didn’t know, couldn’t see, couldn’t roll over. She’d confessed her need for a ladies’ room. So . . . what? Did they stop? Did she go? Her jeans felt wet, especially between her legs. Oh no! She’d peed herself. A wave of red-hot shame swept through her, but she shook it off. Prioritize, Maggie. Think! What happened?
She’d told him she needed to pee. He’d indicated the Visitor’s Center. And then . . . And then . . .
And then the geyser exploded.
The car, truck, whatever it was, pulled to a stop at her end of the bus. Somebody got out. A man. Two other men jumped out of the pickup bed. The driver came into view: Doctor Rick Galotta.
He squatted and peered through the shattered window. She blinked at him. He looked behind her and beyond her, and the color drained from his face. His eyes met hers. “Maggie? Honey? Are you okay?”
“No,” she replied. She wasn’t okay. None of this was okay. And if the hydrothermal eruption had only been the beginning, then nothing would be okay. Ever again.
3
Maxi-Mart
Winnemucca, Nevada
Charlie eased the truck to the curb and shut down. He looked around through his windshield: Winnemucca in all its glory. Unlike other, far more tourist-friendly Nevada cities and towns, which all (to varying degrees) looked like adult-oriented amusement parks, towns like this one were built for function, rather than form.
The desert - and Nevada was all desert - was a harsh environment: sunbaked and nearly waterless, the flora and fauna clinging to life with a brutal tenacity. Windswept valleys with just enough water to sustain human life had to be built to the conditions: low, sturdy buildings, made of metal or adobe or masonry, able to withstand oven heat in the summer and deep-freeze cold in the winter. And the wind - always the wind.
He sat parked along the street next to the Maxi-Mart. This was the chief attraction of Winnemucca - to truck drivers, at least.
Life on the road turned a lot of things most people took for granted into logistical nightmares. Not many banks, or grocery stores, or post-offices, or barber shops, or dozens of other ordinarily mundane establishments could accommodate a seventy-three-foot tractor and trailer. It had once taken Charlie three days and five different states just to find a postage stamp. Maxi-Mart, on the other hand, retail behemoth that it was, usually could.
And so there he sat. He was in no hurry.
A kid wandered across the parking lot, pushing his bicycle. A punk, Charlie thought. He wore his ball cap sideways on his head, and a ragged, short-sleeved tee shirt, white, over a dark, and possibly dirty, long-sleeved one. No coat. In this weather. He had to be high. His jeans, on the other hand, were worn low, exposing his underwear to his butt, below which hung the belt-line. The crotch fell to between his knees. He looked like a fucking clown. Charlie wanted to punch him on general principles. He shook off the image and went back to ruminating about his current circumstances.
In spite of his Driver Manager’s insistence that he get the load to Reno, he had no intention of doing so - at least until the disaster situation could get sorted out, which didn’t seem as if it would happen anytime soon. He had options, although none of them were very good.
He could (a): drive his load of weapons into a disaster area, which seemed the height of insanity; or (b): stay where he was out there in the middle of nowhere, which, with that same load of weapons, seemed only a slightly better alternative, and one that could very well be tantamount to asking for trouble; or (c): turn said load of weapons in to some responsible civilian authority. The third option seemed to be the only viable one, but he wasn’t sure Winnemucca would be the right place to do it.
It, too, had received a certain amount of damage from all the bouncing the Earth had done recently, although it didn’t seem to him as if it qualified for disaster area status. There was a State Police facility in town, though he suspected it would only be a substation and probably wouldn’t have the capacity to secure a truckload of guns. Still, it seemed better than the rest of the alternatives.
Then again, for all he knew, the cops here, along with whatever served as a controlling civilian authority, could be assholes, or worse: stupid, drunken, fucking assholes. Disaster, plus heavily-armed fucking assholes, equaled a scenario he didn’t really want to contemplate - at least not yet, not until he had to.
And as an added bonus, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that they hadn’t seen the worst of it. Wyoming was being evacuated for a reason. Idaho was being evacuated. Montana was being evacuated. Granted, the Powers that Be could just be playing it safe, and getting people out of harm’s way, just in case. But such an action wouldn’t be taken lightly. They wouldn’t evacuate that many people, cause that much panic, incur that great of an expense, without a really good reason. The possibility of a supervolcanic eruption seemed to Charlie like a pretty damned good reason.
Still, it hadn’t happened yet. The last such eruption happened seventy some-odd thousand years ago, somewhere in Indonesia, if he remembered all the documentaries correctly. Nobody in recorded history had ever seen one. It could be a lot of smoke, and no fire. Or maybe not. So evacuating Wyoming made sense. Best to be safe, right? And then they also started evacuating parts of Montana and Idaho. Reasonable minds might think this put the smoke vs. fire debate to rest. But again, nobody really knew. It seemed as if everything hung on the knife-edge of uncertainty, teetering like a drunken fool. Maybe it would happen. Or maybe not.
Such circular logic was giving Charlie a headache. And none of it solved his current problem: what to do about the truckload of guns?
So: table the question. Go shopping, instead. And this time, take the sidearm.
4
US-95
Tonopah, Nevada
Jake intended to stop in Tonopah for fast food, the biggest cup of coffee he could find, and long enough for Mary to try and pull some cash out of the bank. That had been the plan, at least, but when they arrived at the south end of town, they discovered an apparent police convention, clustered around what looked li
ke a repair shop. What passed for a traffic jam, there in the middle of nowhere, stretched five cars long.
“What’s going on?” Mary asked.
“I have no idea,” Jake replied, quelling the sarcastic addition of since I’m not psychic. He didn’t think that would help.
“Since we appear to be parked, along with everyone else on this road, why don’t you get out and see?”
“Yes, Mother,” he grumbled, this time refraining from calling her a pain in the ass. He didn’t really think she was one (most of the time), and in any case, it, also, wouldn’t help.
He got out, stretching a bit to ease the road-stiffness, then lit a cigarette and wandered over to the cluster of people standing around, looking as clueless as he knew himself to be. Five faces (three male, two female) turned to him, obviously eager to share the gossip. A tall, thin woman in her mid-forties, with shoulder-length brown hair and wearing a green ski-coat, blue jeans, and brown boots, with tan fuzz at the top, looked at the burning cigarette with distaste and then spoke before he had a chance to ask the obvious question.
“Somebody was shot, and somebody else - a woman - was abducted!” She reported with what sounded like glee.
“Uh huh,” Jake replied, not knowing what else to say. He took a final drag off the smoke and tossed the half-finished butt to the ground. The thin woman looked at him like something the cat dragged in. He ignored her.
“Happened about an hour and a half ago,” a burly brute of a man in an ill-fitting business suit added. He looked cold with nothing more than a dress jacket, but seemed too enthusiastic to get in out of the weather.
“Any idea how long we’ll be stuck here?” Jake asked.
“Finally! Somebody with a sensible question,” a mid-twenties, dishwater blonde man in jeans and a leather jacket said. “All these guys want to talk about is what happened,” he added, jerking his thumb in the direction of the others.
Pressure (Book 1): Fall Page 14
