Pressure (Book 1): Fall

by Thomson, Jeff

  “Yeah,” Jake agreed. “Out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie agreed, feeling his testicles inch their way upward. “You suppose they want to welcome us to Ass-Crack, Oregon?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Can we backtrack and go around?”

  “Not really,” Jake said. He got down on his belly and lay there, arms beneath his chin, staring at the unfriendly tableau. Charlie did the same.

  “What, then?”

  “I have no idea.”

  A thought popped into Charlie’s mind. He could almost see the lightbulb floating over his head. He smiled. “I do.” Jake turned his head to look at him. “We go right through the fuckers.”

  2

  Charlie unlocked the two heavy padlocks (guaranteed to thwart anyone not using a blowtorch), cut the wire seal, then opened the rear doors, and crawled into the pitch-dark trailer. The load sat exactly as it should sit: four feet back from the end of the trailer, with two extendable load locks holding it in place. He flicked on his large flashlight and ran the beam over his cargo.

  The manifest listed two cases each of what he was looking for. Now all he had to do was find them. The trailer reeked of gun oil. It made his nose itch, and he could taste it at the back of his tongue. The cases would be relatively light, compared to the weaponry and ammunition, and so they would either be at the back of the load, or on top of it.

  He was looking for the nomenclature of the items: numbers 0614379BA, and 1325489HA, because, like his trailer, the boxes carried no obvious markings that might signal a would-be thief to the contents. He found the first, almost immediately. The two cases sat atop the pallet directly to his right.

  He cut the bands holding one of them to the pallet and dragged it off the top. The damned thing was heavier than he thought it would be, and he felt a nice little twinge in his back muscles as punishment for his stupidity. But the cloud held a silver lining: the other two cases were behind the first.

  “Mind telling me what you’re doing?” Jake said from behind and below.

  “I’m performing animal husbandry,” Charlie replied, dropping the second box next to the first.

  “I thought you were just fucking the dog,” Jake said, in an offhand jibe.

  “I only do that on even-numbered Thursdays.” He cut the thick tape holding the top of the first case closed, and opened the box, revealing a nice, neat layer of brand new body armor, individually wrapped in plastic. “We have a go from Houston,” he declared, pulling one of them out and tossing it to his friend.

  Jake looked at it, puzzled for a moment. Charlie gave him the benefit of the doubt for being as brain dead as he felt. It had been a long day. Sure enough, his friend identified the item and smiled.

  “You’re not as big of an idiot as I took you for.”

  “Smarter than the average bear,” he agreed, tossing two more packages onto the end of the trailer. “Make yourself useful.”

  Jake departed to bring the armor to Mary and Dani, as Charlie opened the second case, and found the other thing he was looking for: riot helmets, with attached face shields. Gotta love gun shows, he thought. They certainly come in handy at the end of the world.

  3

  The Western United States

  As one vent became two, then three, then four, then five, then six, cities up to three hundred miles from Yellowstone became buried under ash and pumice from the Devil’s own blizzard. This included: Missoula, Helena, Great Falls, and Miles City, Montana, Mt. Rushmore and Rapid City, South Dakota, Sheridan, Gillette, Casper, and Rock Springs, Wyoming, Provo and Salt Lake City, Utah, Twin Falls and Boise, Idaho, Cardston and Milk River, Alberta - trapping and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

  The force of each eruption was like a hammer pounding on a plate of glass. Fault lines as far East as New Madrid, Missouri, site of what had previously been the strongest recorded quake in American history, rumbled awake, cracking Mississippi River levees from Cairo, Illinois to Ashport, Tennessee.

  To the South, the long dormant Snake River Faults gave with a terrifying lurch, adding to the chaos and mayhem in Idaho and Utah. In Salt Lake City, almost every large building not owned by the Mormon Church crumbled to rubble. This had nothing to do with heavenly intervention. The Church had a lot of money, and they had spent it wisely by constructing their buildings to a higher standard. But in the end, it did them no good. The ash rendered the city uninhabitable.

  To the North, Edmonton, Red Deer, Calgary, and dozens of other cities and small towns added their names to Vancouver on the list of Canadian places damaged by seismic forces. In Alberta, a massive sinkhole formed beneath the picturesque town of Trout Lake, and the waters of its namesake poured in. The only permanent residents not killed were the ones who weren’t there.

  And to the West, the San Andreas Fault, weakened by all the activity caused by first the Denali Quake and then the Cascadia Subsidence event, rolled, as if a gargantuan gopher raced just below the surface from Seattle, all the way down to where it shot offshore North of San Diego. It didn’t shift, it didn’t crack, as if Mother Nature decided not to kick the West Coast while it was down, but that hardly mattered to the already devastated cities from the Pacific Northwest to the southern Bay Area. In homes and commercial buildings and schools and churches and every other kind of structure, from Santa Barbara to Camp Pendelton, plaster cracked and glass shattered in a cacophony guaranteed to wake the dead, although it didn’t add any new corpses.

  The same could not be said for the communities to the North. In the Bay Area, the entire strip of land from San Mateo to East Palo Alto, between the San Mateo and Dumbarton Bridges on the western side of the San Francisco Bay simply vanished.

  And in Yellowstone, the supervolcano kept right on erupting.

  4

  OR 140

  East of Odessa, Oregon

  The plan was in place, such as it was. Jake had seemed skeptical, but to his credit, he’d apparently decided to trust Charlie. Now all that would be required was for Charlie to trust himself. The key to it all proved to be simple physics, and the Law of Gross Tonnage: If it’s bigger than you, stay out of its way..

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Jake had asked after he’d told him the plan.

  “Always a possibility,” he’d replied. “But in this case, no.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He hadn’t been sure then, just as he wasn’t sure now that he’d backed up a full half-mile so as to get a running start at the hill. So he’d bluffed his way by saying, “I’m driving a seventy-five thousand pound battering ram, Jake. What could go wrong?”

  Fate - ever a cantankerous bastard - having been tempted, the ground had begun to shake, then. It had bounced and vibrated and rumbled for about twenty seconds, and then it had stopped. Charlie and Jake had just looked at each other.

  “What could go wrong?” Jake had mocked.

  What, indeed?

  He puzzled over this as he steeled himself for the task ahead. The chrome veneered, iron pipe deer catcher on the front of his tractor should bear the brunt of the impact well enough. At least he hoped so. What was it they said about what to do if a deer jumped out in front of you? Speed up.

  What do they know?

  Basic physics, for one thing. He didn’t know the math, but he understood the principle, well enough: (a) mass (seventy-five thousand pounds), times (b) velocity (as fast as he could possibly go), equals (c) one Hell of a lot of force.

  Of course, once the assholes at the road block saw him barreling down on them like a maniac, they might run like little pussies and back the two pickups out of his way. That possibility did exist.

  Whether they’d be smart enough or not . . . ?

  Doesn’t matter, he said to himself. Quit fucking around and just do it.

  He adjusted the body armor around his torso, slapped the riot helmet atop his head, closed the face shield, tightened his seat belt, and then flashed his headlights at Jake, giving
him the prearranged signal. When he saw the SUV top the rise with its high-beams blazing away, he put the truck in gear and started his run.

  He cycled his way through the gears, slamming the accelerator to the floor with each shift, the engine roaring in protest. And with each gear change, he picked up speed.

  He hit the top of the hill at forty miles an hour in seventh gear. Ahead, he saw Jake’s SUV, its lights blazing as it eased over to the left side of the highway and slowly approached the road block. Jamming the truck into eighth, he floored the pedal, cut in his high-beams, and started yanking on the air horn.

  The assholes weren’t moving. They just stood there, looking dumbfounded as Charlie’s big-ass truck hit sixty, then seventy.

  An insane grin plastered itself across his face. He couldn’t help himself. It felt the way it had when he was a little kid, seeing a fire truck go racing by, its siren blaring, the excitement filling him with glee. He let out a whoop of sheer, unadulterated joy.

  Now the assholes started to scatter, but it was already too late. The two penis-compensation trucks filled his vision as he smashed through the road block with a scream of crushing metal. They flew apart like Tinker Toys being hit by a nine iron. He saw the one on the left take out two of the cars parked on the side of the road: BAM, and they were just gone. The other truck twisted and bounced, end-over-end, off to the right, pieces of it flying in every direction.

  And then he was through. He scanned the windshield. Saw no cracks. Looked at the hood. Saw nothing obvious. Checked for the telltale wobble and flop of a flat tire. Felt nothing.

  Holy shit, he thought.

  “Holy shit,” he said aloud.

  “HOLY SHIT!” He yelled, laughing his ass off. His eyes swept to the driver’s side mirror. Jake’s SUV was right on his ass, exactly as planned. He yanked on the air horn three times, and kept driving. Jake flashed his lights at him. They were okay.

  He let out another joyous whoop, and sped off into the dark, empty night. Damn, that was fun!

  5

  OR 140

  Beyond the Road Block

  Jake pulled the SUV to a stop at the side of the road behind Charlie’s truck. They’d gone roughly twenty miles past the road block, and it looked like nobody had followed.

  Mary dealt with the mad dash with her typical stoicism, but Dani and poor Molly hadn’t liked it one bit. All three ladies had huddled in the backseat, hugging each other for comfort and protection, when Jake blasted through the wreckage, right on Charlie’s ass. Mary had climbed back into the front after they discovered to everyone’s surprise that they hadn’t died in a fiery crash. She looked at him now.

  Her eyes were bloodshot, as, he felt certain, were his own. She gave him her sardonic half-smile.

  Dani, on the other hand, looked as if she had officially hit overload. He couldn’t blame her. “How you doing, doll?” He asked, looking at her in the mirror.

  Her expression remained blank for a moment, then she seemed to return to a bit of life. The reflection of her eyes met his. She smiled. “I’m having the time of my life,” she said, dead-pan. It was an expression he had used on her many times.

  “That’s my girl,” he said, as Molly entered her two cents into the conversation by nuzzling his ear. God, I love women, he thought.

  Most people held to the old cliche that men were the stronger half of the pair, but he knew better. Men were basic wimps compared to women, when it came right down to it. They acted tough, acted as if nothing in the world affected them, but that was all bluster and bullshit. Deep down, women were strong as tempered steel. The difference, he supposed as he watched a single tear roll down Dani’s bruised cheek, was that women had the guts to show their emotions.

  He reached into the back seat and held out his hand to her. She took it. He gave it a gentle squeeze, then gave her an admiring wink. She smiled.

  He might have lost himself in her eyes had there not come a sudden knock on his window. He physically jumped in his seat and swung around to look outside, forgetting to let go of Dani’s hand. She lurched forward and gave a cry as he almost made her face plant into the back of his seat.

  “Sorry,” he apologized, letting her go as he turned to look out his side window, directly into Charlie’s shit-eating grin.

  He popped open the door and joined his bouncing friend on the road. Charlie seemed to throb with excited mirth.

  “Holy shit, was that ever fun, or what?” Charlie said. Jake noticed that he no longer wore either the helmet or the body armor. Jake still wore the armor, as did the two ladies. They got out and joined them on the road.

  He smiled, looked at Dani, then said, in a perfect imitation: “I’m having the time of my life.”

  6

  Klamath Falls, Oregon to

  Gunter’s Gap, Oregon

  They rolled into Klamath Falls about three in the morning. There were no street lights, no stop lights, no beckoning signs from convenience stores or gas stations, just an eerie darkness, made all the more sinister by the fact they knew what was supposed to be there. Jake could see the dim outlines of the buildings as they passed, and the streets as they branched off to one side or the other, but little else. As before, in Lakeview, he almost missed the sign pointing to the turnoff for Highway 97, where they cut north toward Crater Lake.

  Of course, it didn’t help that his road-weary eye sockets had a couple dozen lead filled ping pong balls in there, or that his brain was well on past numb, both from the enormity of what was happening and the not inconsiderable fact that he’d been up for over twenty-four hours. Furthermore, he was performing this feat of endurance without benefit of coffee, the last cold dregs in his cup of which had long since run out.

  By the time he hit the fork onto the 62, his cerebellum was pretty much flat-lining, but at that point he could afford to go into auto-pilot. He’d driven this road on many, many occasions. His body knew the way, even if his gray matter had turned to goo.

  Gunter’s Gap sat nestled in the crook of a small valley created by the Rogue River as it cut through the forested mountains of Southern Oregon. In 1700, when the last Cascadia earthquake ripped through the Pacific Northwest, it changed the course of that river, leaving behind a waterlogged gash in the earth’s surface. By 1890, when Gunter discovered his Gap, the waters had all drained into the ground, creating a large aquifer and the verdant, more or less flat valley in which the town now sat.

  Most of the surrounding area was so rugged as to make any kind of construction impossible, which is probably why the majority of the territory had been turned into either National Forest, State Park, or Recreation Area, because the land wasn’t good for much else, except maybe clear-cut logging. Old Gunter (whoever the Hell he was, and Jake had long since forgotten) had managed to find a spot flat enough that he could build on it without chopping off half the mountain. And so he did what humans have seemingly always done: he found a piece of build-able land and he built on it, and a town was born.

  What he had neglected to do, however, was cut an easily accessible way to get in and out. The gap portion of Gunter’s Gap sat along an east/west axis, with a one hundred foot cut in the ridge to the east, and a three hundred-fifty foot cut in the one to the west. A road went in one end, crossed a bridge over the Rogue, looped around the town square, and exited on the other end. The eastern exit led to the Rogue River National Forest, which was to say: nowhere.

  The western entrance, due to its proximity to Highway 62, received most of the traffic, but even in broad daylight it was nearly impossible to spot the turnoff until right on top of it - unless you knew it was there. Happily, even in Jake’s sleep-deprived, stress-created, brain-dead condition, he did know, and so managed the maneuver without thinking, which helped, because the capacity to do so had long since left the building.

  His tunnel vision was such that he headed straight into the town square, clearly without realizing there was no way in Hell Charlie could get his rig in there without getting stuck, and/or causing un
told damage to property. His friend’s brief use of his horn caused Jake to pull his head out of his ass, just in time.

  He and Charlie met in the middle of the street. The night was still and quiet, the air cool and crisp. Jake could hear the gurgling of the river beneath the bridge on the far side of the three hundred fifty-foot wide bowl that fed into the town. A gas station, dark and (as he well knew from previous visits) closed, sat off to one side. He could smell the fumes, but they barely registered.

  Charlie pointed toward the street down which Jake had been about to lead them. “Don’t think so.”

  Jake nodded and blinked, trying to get the sleep-deprived stupidity out of his head. He jerked his thumb toward the side of the bowl opposite the gas station. “Just park it over there,” he said. “I’ll drive you in the rest of the way.”

  Charlie did so, backing and filling with some difficulty, until he’d gotten the truck more or less out of the way. Jake stood and waited by the SUV, thinking and feeling nothing, until his friend returned. They got in, saying nothing.

  They pulled into Ian’s driveway a little past four-thirty in the morning. Jake put the truck in park, turned it off and sat there listening to the engine tick as it cooled. That seemed to be the extent of his energy.

  After a few moments, he glanced over at his mother and saw her staring forward through the windshield at nothing in particular. She finally looked at him through bloodshot, barely focused eyes.

  Dani and Charlie, in the back seat, carried the same blank expressions. The five of them (including Molly who, proving to be the only sensible one, lay sound asleep with her head in Dani’s lap) sat like that for about minute, saying nothing, thinking less.