A handful of papers which represented their future.
The woman behind them, on the other hand, looked like she’d just walked through hell.
She appeared little more than a walking, talking zombie.
She slouched as she slowly walked.
She had bags beneath her eyes and looked to be exhausted.
She was overworked, not having had a day off in weeks.
It was only then Hannah remembered the sign she’d seen hanging on the front door on their way in.
WELCOME.
HOURS OF OPERATION
9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
SEVEN DAYS A WEEK
It was only then Hannah realized the two people who ran this office had been sacrificing their own days off, and indeed themselves, in an effort to catch up with their backlog.
And she lost all thoughts of complaining about their situation.
Obviously some had it far worse.
Chapter 37
In Little Rock the ash finally stopped falling.
Scientists said the Yellowstone Caldera appeared to be going back to sleep.
“It’s still too early to say, because we still haven’t been able to get back to ground zero,” a spokesman for FEMA told a group of assembled media. “But we think the short-term danger has passed.
“We’ll be shifting our focus in the weeks and months ahead to the long-term problems.
“Problems like the cleanup: how to get rid of the millions of tons of ash which clog our highways and our agricultural areas. How best to rid the land of the poisons which will kill any crops we try to plant.
“How to continue to feed the masses despite a loss of seventy to eighty percent of arable land.
“And how to deal with the respiratory illnesses our citizens are suffering, as well as the probability of new forms of cancer we expect to crop up as a result of the eruption.”
He finished his briefing and opened up the floor to questions.
“Dr. Lynch, how soon do you expect your scientists to reach ground zero, and why has it taken so long to get there?”
“We didn’t want to send people into harm’s way until we were reasonably sure the danger of a secondary eruption had passed.
“And while Yellowstone is still an active volcano and therefore we can never be absolutely certain it won’t blow again, we can be confident that any such future eruptions are years away at least.
“We’re now confident we can say that because the magma levels appear to be dropping. The ash being emitted from the mouth of the volcano has slowed to a trickle and is being scattered to the winds.
“Until now we’ve been unable to traverse the roads, and we’ve held our people back.
“Now, though, we’ve deemed it safe enough to get a handful of scientists in there to see for themselves exactly what’s going on at ground zero. They’ll be able to tell us things our instruments can’t tell us. Like the extent of the destruction and the state of the magma within the core.”
“Dr. Lynch, are you saying they can now drive up to ground zero? Isn’t the ash still on the ground?”
“Yes. Yes it is. But since it’s no longer falling we can now begin to clear the roadways without the expectation they’ll be quickly covered again.
“Our teams will try to access ground zero from four different directions, in groups of twenty scientists and data specialists on each team.
“They’ll be going in hazmat suits on full oxygen in four-wheel drive vehicles. Preceding each convoy will be a snow plow to clear the roadway ahead of them.
“Once the roads are clear of ash the scientists will work for short periods of time, as life in the bunny suits will be quite unbearable. They’ll be changed out every four hours.”
Jenn turned off the radio. She had the answer she’d been looking for.
The Yellowstone Event quite literally sickened her. It made her nauseous to think about it. To talk about it. And certainly to listen about it on the radio or watch it on TV.
She wished she and her children could just go back in time. Live in another era. Any era, it didn’t really matter.
As long as it was free of the pain and destruction that Yellowstone wrought.
She woke up that morning listening to the roof creak and moan under the weight of the ash.
As she had pretty much every morning for the previous ten days.
She made a point to clear the roof again, lest the ash do permanent damage.
It certainly wouldn’t do her or her family any good for the roof to collapse under the tremendous weight, or for it to crack and allow future rains to come dripping into the house.
The last time she’d gone up, terrified of slipping and crashing back down again. The slick ash and sloped roof made for a dangerous combination.
Her youngest, Samson, had defied her orders to stay indoors.
“If you’re going out there, so am I,” he adamantly told her. “If you fall off, I’ll be there to catch you.”
He underestimated her body weight and overestimated his own strength. She was a slight woman, but still heavier than an adolescent boy, and in free fall would have crushed him.
She chose not to get upset, for that would only aggravate the situation. And she was a mother who tended to encourage initiative instead of squashing it.
She chose to compromise.
“You can come out and watch, from a distance. If I get injured you can run to Mr. Jacob’s house for help. But under no circumstances are you to try to catch me if I fall.”
He hesitated before accepting her terms.
“Take it or leave it, Samson.”
He took it.
Of course, she had no plans to even climb the roof this time, but she didn’t tell him that.
The previous time she’d cleared the roof, a few days before, she was halfway through, precariously perched atop her roof with a snow shovel, when her neighbor Mr. Jacobs saw her from the window of his own house across the street.
He rushed over, helped her down, and showed her a better way.
He showed her how she could tie a rope to a brick and then toss it onto the roof, a section at a time, and drag it back off again.
“The ash on the roof will cushion the brick’s impact and prevent it from causing any damage.
“When you drag the brick off, it’ll catch in the ash and pull a good bit of the ash off with it.”
It took a bit of practice, but the method worked splendidly.
It worked on this particular day as well.
In an hour the roof was clear and no longer in danger of collapsing.
She even allowed Samson to help in the process.
After being cooped up in his house for ten straight days, he was a kid in paradise.
A very dirty paradise, but a paradise nonetheless.
Chapter 38
By the time they were finished, though, they’d been outed.
Meadow and Autumn stood in the picture window, hands on hips and scowls on faces, ready to call their mother to task.
They intended to demand of her why Samson was allowed outside to “play,” although he certainly wouldn’t describe it as such.
They wanted equal opportunity to get out of the house for a bit.
Yes, they were girls.
Yes, they normally had an aversion to getting dirty.
But this was different. They’d been cooped up too. And they’d be willing to get a little dirty… and to do a little work… in order to get out of the house temporarily.
They caught Jenn’s eye and glared at her.
“Uh oh…” she said to her son.
“Uh oh what, Mom?”
“I think we’re busted.”
Samson looked at the picture window and saw his siblings standing there, obviously furiously unhappy.
He could have done many things.
He could have turned his back and pretended he hadn’t seen them.
He could have made an Academy Award-worthy gesture of wiping the sweat
from his brow to show them this wasn’t play, this was definitely work. And that the last thing they wanted was to be a part of the brutal slave labor his mother was forcing him to do.
He could have waved at them and gone back to work.
Those all would have been reasonable actions under the circumstances.
But Samson was a mischievous lad and never passed up an opportunity to antagonize his sisters.
He put down the brick and placed his thumbs in his ears, then wiggled his fingers while crossing his eyes and sticking his tongue out at the girls.
If that’s all it was, it wouldn’t have been so terribly bad.
Jenn had seen her son make the same gesture to his sisters a dozen times before.
This time, though, he went one step farther.
A bridge too far, as it were.
He added one straw too many to the burdened camel’s back.
He turned around, his back to the sisters, and shook his backside.
Then he turned and blew them a kiss, then pointed to the same backside.
His signaling to his sisters a suggestion they should kiss his butt was too much.
An infuriated Meadow opened the door, ready to lay into her mom and demand to know how her little brother could spend his last day on earth taunting them so.
Samson, realizing he’d pushed his luck way too far, hid behind his mother.
Jenn headed Meadow off at the pass by sweetly calling out, “You girls want to come out and help?”
All transgressions were instantly forgiven.
Even Samson might be allowed to live another day.
As long as he could avoid the girls until they went to sleep and then pushed every stick of furniture in his room against the bedroom door.
Autumn stepped into the conversation.
“Can I pound him with the snow shovel first, Momma?”
“No, honey. Maybe later. But the shovel might not work as well with blood all over it.”
Meadow asked, “What do you want us to do, Mom?”
“Well, they said on the radio that they’ll be around with dump trucks to start clearing the ash away once it stopped falling.
“But they’ll only pick up the ash in the street.”
“So we have to shovel it all into the street?”
“Yes.”
“But there’s so much of it.”
“I know, honey. There’s way too much to do in one day. But the sooner we get after it the better.”
“Is that the only shovel we have?”
“No. There’s another snow shovel in the garage, as well as a regular shovel. Take your pick, and when you get tired of using one shovel you can swap out shovels with someone else.
“Sam, I have a special project for you. Can you handle a wheelbarrow?”
Autumn was having none of that.
“How come pea brain gets to push the wheelbarrow?”
“Honey, don’t call your brother a pea brain.”
“How about dufus head?”
“Not dufus head either. And he gets to push the wheelbarrow because he’s way stronger than you.”
Samson said, “Yeah! You and your little spaghetti arms can’t push nothing!”
“Can too! I can push you down if you don’t shut up, dinosaur breath!”
Jenn rolled her eyes.
“You two, please stop. Fighting isn’t going to help get the job done.”
She turned back to Autumn and said, “I’ll tell you what, honey. I’ll fill up the wheelbarrow and you can see if you can push it to the street. If you can, you and Samson can take turns. If you can’t, no more complaints. Fair enough?”
“Okay…”
After that things went fairly well.
Jenn used one snow shovel to carry a shovel full at a time from the driveway to the street.
Meadow used the other snow shovel, and Autumn used a spade, to fill up the wheelbarrow and Samson’s red wagon, from the ash-covered sidewalks.
Samson spent his time shuttling the wagon to the street, where he dumped his load onto a growing pile. By the time he took the empty wagon back to his sisters, the wheelbarrow was full and ready to swap out.
By the end of three hours they all looked like the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins.
They were all exhausted, and they were all famished.
They were nowhere near being finished.
But they’d made a sizeable dent.
Chapter 39
Back in Germany Wayne and Julie Hamlin were taking a day trip to the city of Trier, in the Eifel region.
Trier is one of the oldest cities in Germany, having been founded in the 4th century B.C. It’s also the birthplace of Karl Marx, a German philosopher and one of the founders of Marxism.
These days the Eifel is known for its castle tours along the River Mosel and for the rich bold wines it produces.
It’s one of the most beautiful regions of Deutschland and one normally very friendly to Americans.
Normally.
But not today.
Today Wayne and Julie took in the 2nd century Roman baths and the Porta Nigra, an original city gate built around 170 A.D.
The Porta Nigra (Latin for black gate) was named for the dark stone which makes up its composition. It had a second, more formal name which was lost in time, and locals refer to the gate simply as “Porta.”
It’s not uncommon for protestors of various government policies to gather at the Porta Nigra to carry signs and to further their causes by role-playing and using loudspeakers to sway others to support their positions.
It helps that Porta Nigra is immediately adjacent to Trier’s Centrum, and the noise made by the protestors often spills over into the shopping district. There, tourists are sometimes caught up in the protest activities, though few are swayed to the protestor’s line of thinking.
Most tourists are there to see the sights of the ancient city or to purchase a beer at the three-story McDonald’s restaurant in the town square. Very few of them get involved in the back and forth between feuding political parties.
Wayne, though, stopped to listen to the protestors because they were talking about him and Julie.
Most Americans and British citizens who haven’t actually visited Germany don’t know it’s very easy to communicate with the Germans.
Since just after World War II ended it’s been federal government policy in West Germany (now in Germany) that all high school students are required to take two years of English.
Virtually all of today’s German citizens, other than the very old and very young, have therefore been exposed to a limited amount of the language.
Also, Deutsch is a very easy language to learn, as languages go.
An American visiting the country who knows a limited amount of German, speaking to a German who knows a limited amount of English, can usually converse easily with just an occasional stumble.
It helps to point a lot and throw in some hand gestures.
As he and Julie walked down the ancient steps of the Porta Nigra toward the Centrum Wayne could very clearly hear protestors complaining about Amerikaner coming to their land in droves to escape their broken country.
And how it wasn’t fair to the locals.
The German parliament, the Bundestag, had approved an initial group of 100,000 open-ended visas to help the United States cope with their Yellowstone refugee problem.
After all, though they’d had some… problems… in the past, Germany had been one of America’s best friends and allies since the close of World War II.
They’d served as NATO partners for years to provide mutual defense first against the Soviet Union, then against Russia and the old soviet bloc states.
They’d been key trading partners for decades and stood side by side in almost every NATO and United Nations issue.
No, the problem wasn’t that Germany had agreed to accept 100,000 Americans looking for a place to permanently relocate.
Rather, the problem was that the Bundestag wa
s negotiating with the United States to accept a second wave of 100,000 more.
And many German citizens saw that as being too generous.
The conservative wing of the Bundestag in recent years had been infiltrated by extremists.
These were white nationalists. Those who affiliated with the Nazi Party or one of its off-shoots.
That was problematic, because since the close of World War II the Nazi party had been banned in Germany.
So were certain symbols which tended to infuriate some individuals and cause great pain to others.
Portraits of Adolf Hitler, copies of Mein Kampf, the swastika, and symbols of the Waffen SS and Gestapo, for example.
In recent years such prohibitions were relaxed for the sake of keeping the peace as young nationalists took to the streets singing Nazi war songs and daring the polizei to challenge them.
Wayne felt a slight shiver go up his spine as he saw the protestors, bearing banners announcing themselves as the New Nazi Party, proudly flying the Nazi war flag.
He started to walk over to remind them what happened the last time Germans gathered under such a flag.
He wanted to.
He felt a duty to.
But Julie wouldn’t let him.
“Let them be. Stay out of it.”
“Honey, I don’t want to settle here, only to have to resettle again later on if these animals take control of the country again.”
“They won’t,” Julie said. “There are too many people left with memories of what happened last time.
“They’ll keep it from happening again. We’re guests here. It’s not our place to get involved.”
She took his hand and led him away.
He let her, and hoped she was right.
Chapter 40
Wayne and Julie were luckier than most American refugees fleeing the states.
Since they already had visas for Deutschland and had visited several times over the years, they weren’t considered refugees in the same class as the 100,000. The 100,000 were issued special German passports which were brown in color instead of blue.
The Yellowstone Event: Book 6: The Aftermath Page 12
