Tsunami Wake: Post Apocalyptic Thriller (Calm Act Book 4)

by Ginger Booth

  Not everyone knew how a marsh worked, though. Much of our audience lived far from the sea. I explained to them the six foot flow and ebb of the Sound, about twelve and a half hours between high tides. How marshes in other places had a different tidal depth. For instance, as I’d so recently learned, the tides were only three feet on the south side of Long Island, where I’d met the tsunami.

  I told them about the birds and fish and wildlife who made their home here, the deer, raccoons, possums and skunks, and even coyotes, a black bear, and a recent weasel-like animal called a fisher, though it didn’t fish. I showed them the winter guises of raspberry cane and sumac. I explained how the marsh served as a giant buffer, managing storm surges and moderating floods.

  I told them how much I loved this marsh, as I said good-bye to it in my heart.

  The paved path to the food cache crossed beneath the trolley tracks. At that low point, the water hadn’t drained at low tide, and never would again. I didn’t tell the camera about Totoket’s secret food cache, a backup installation these days. Even though it would never be used for that again. I’d wanted to bury Zack here on the hill, not far from the cache. But Delilah chose consecrated ground by the Totoket River, a few miles east of here.

  Come to think of it, that cemetery was sinking into marsh today, as well. I should visit Zack’s grave one last time.

  Kyla cleared her throat to remind me to say something. I grimaced at her and pointed left for Don’s benefit. “Road access that way. This is a paved path through the woods.”

  Don frowned to the left, puzzled. “Why?”

  “Handicapped access,” I lied briefly. “And up ahead, we come out onto the Totoket side of the marsh. Different channel. Tide’s coming in.” Glittering like diamonds in the morning sun, fast water raced in the channel in the distance. “We should turn back.”

  “But if we got cut off here?” Don prodded. “That path to the left would take us back to Route 1?”

  “Back road.” I showed him what I meant on a map on his phone, and marked all the easy exits from the marsh for him.

  As we emerged from the woods, I tried to picture what the Farm River marsh would become. Farm Bay, or perhaps Farm Lagoon. As the tide came in, it became easier to visualize, the tips of grasses sinking into the rising flood. I tried to imagine navigation buoys warning of the shallows over the trolley tracks. The wooden sentinels of the power poles would bear mute testimony for years. Who knew, maybe even the poles would be under water before they fell and rotted away. This week wouldn’t be the end of sea level rise.

  There would be no beaches left, I realized with a start. Not for a long time. Housing crowded close onto the mellow Sound near New Haven. Our narrow strips of beach would all be gone.

  Was this what a one in four chance looked like, for life on planet Earth? Were we closer or farther from the Venus effect boiling our biosphere away? My mind careened away from that bigger picture, too big to deal with, too abstract. My grief at the passing of the Farm River marsh was too fresh and real, my little patch of the planet very much alive and striving.

  A low twanging grew from the tracks beside us. I explained to Don’s puzzled look, “That’s the trolley coming. Chapin must have got it running.” I herded us to the squishy marsh edge, away from the rails.

  Chapin stopped the car and we clambered aboard. He’d sensibly selected one of the open trolley cars for today’s purpose. It featured wooden bench seats running straight across the car. An outside step ran the full length of the car, with hand-holds, for riders to hang outside. I demonstrated how the bench seat backs flipped, allowing seats to face either direction. The pivots were still oiled and flipped smoothly. The car probably hadn’t enjoyed much attention for a couple years. But before that, decades of rail enthusiasts came from all over to maintain and play with these full-size model trains, complete with ads from the 1930’s. That’s when a hurricane destroyed the local shoreline trolley line, never to be rebuilt except for this stretch of museum track, sheltered in the marsh. A lot of love had maintained these cars and tracks. Someone put them away in good order.

  Chapin started up the car again and continued to the far side of the hill, but stopped before testing another wooden bridge over a main channel. Not worth the risk, he and Don concluded. The rest of the trolley’s range was easier to service from a street at the far end of the track. Chapin and an apprentice went out and flipped the electrical guide, the arm that reached the power line above, to reverse the car’s direction. I clambered out and back into the new front, which had been the back up til now.

  “May I?” I asked Chapin with a grin, pointing to the East Haven bound controls. These cars had a driver’s booth at both ends, to drive from the front when headed either direction. Chapin waved me to be his guest, with a flourish.

  “I haven’t done this since I was a kid,” I told Don with a grin. “Don’t worry, there’s not much to it. Go. Go faster. Don’t go.”

  Don clambered in beside me to watch. The control was simple. A drum on a post had a handle sticking straight up near the rim. To open up the throttle and speed up, you pulled the handle one way around the drum, and the other way to slow down and stop. There was probably an emergency brake somewhere, but the conductors never taught me refinements. We couldn’t risk more than 5 or 6 mph on the curving track anyway. With open sides and the strong breeze that reached us even here in the lee of the hill, the modest speed felt exhilarating.

  More of Don’s crew was setting up by the dirt road near the rail plaza. We waved as we passed them. Alex had sent me a text to say he was staying with the Napolitanos – that was their name, with the trolley-side farm – and to leave without him. I didn’t spot him amongst the chickens as we went by. Don took a turn at the controls for the last leg back to the museum. We hopped off the parked trolley car laughing out loud. Kyla captured it all on video.

  It was a wonderful good-bye to my beloved marsh. I wondered if I could ever love the new bay, or whatever it was about to turn into. Maybe not.

  After leaving Don Murray and Kyla, I sat in my car a good 15 minutes sending followup emails and texts. Could we save the trolley cars and rails, maybe give them a lane of Route 1 for local transit? Did we have a plan to protect the reservoir, now that the salt water level was so close to the freshwater lake just above it? Perhaps the East Haven green could be encouraged to become marsh to shield the reservoir? Did we have suburban livestock space to offer the Napolitanos in Totoket? And so on.

  And lastly to Delilah – an invitation to join me and visit Zack’s grave one last time, at low tide this evening.

  I wiped my nose and eyes and headed back to Amenac HQ to start my real work day.

  19

  Interesting fact: There were once nearly a hundred trolley lines in Connecticut. They carried people to work and shop and play. But the masses grew able to afford automobiles, and buses were considered less expensive and more flexible for public transit. The trolleys were left behind. By the 2000’s, proposals to implement light rail transit came at eye-watering prices, in the billions of dollars. Yet these old trolleys had been simple and cost-effective, some built by towns of 5,000 people or less.

  “Dee! Who authorized you to hire a new editor for PR News?” Mangal barked at me from his office door, calling across the thinly attended bull-pit at Amenac HQ.

  Dave dropped his feet from desk to floor with a thunk, and emerged from his office in a hurry, scowling. I was pleased to note that he scowled at Mangal, not me.

  “Morning everyone!” I smiled around the room. “Dave, Mangal. Wanna chat?”

  Dave grabbed Mangal’s elbow. Mangal flinched at the grip on his bruises. Dave threw up his hands in apology, but still waved Mangal firmly into his office.

  I dawdled along behind them, taking time to peel and hang up my top layer of outerwear. I kept my scarf and thin silk gloves. For me, the hardest part of so little heat in winter was losing manual dexterity. I typed all day, or did fine crafting. In the seeping cold, m
y fingers moved like molasses, and bleeding cracks opened along my fingernails. I suspected this was the real inspiration behind the old ladies fashion of wearing gloves all the time. Their fingers didn’t work in the cold.

  I closed Dave’s door behind me softly, and took a seat. “Welcome back, Mangal. You look so much better today.” I apologized for missing the morning, and explained my marsh visit. Kyla would do the first pass at editing her footage into a PR News story. Dave joined me in socializing while Mangal unbent a bit.

  “Getting back to your editor question,” I eventually said, consciously sitting back to open my posture and mind. “Dave and I spoke yesterday, Mangal, after I spoke with you. Division of labor. He’s running Amenac. But he said PR News content was my problem. Yours too, now that you’re back.” I smiled at him. “But that got me thinking. We’re software developers. I mean, to the extent that PR is a mouthpiece for the Resco Raj, yeah, I coordinate those shows. But news on a regular basis? I’m thinking that that’s not us, Mangal. PR could be better than that.

  “But as for authorization, of course I don’t have any,” I continued. “The steering committee decides. I’m developing a proposal. Or rather, Pam Niedermeyer is developing competing proposals. I delegated.”

  Mangal shook his head. “And have you checked back on your delegation?”

  I grinned. “Why, no! Has it borne clever fruit?”

  “Very clever,” Dave confirmed, eyes dancing. “Mangal, that forum is private, you know. Relax.”

  Mangal shook his head harder. “Your mess, Dee. You clean it up.”

  “Will do. Are there any other priorities for me this morning, guys?”

  “That one will be plenty,” Dave assured me.

  “No, it won’t,” Mangal said. “Dee, we’ve had a dozen urgent requests to open up your map beta. And corrections from the alpha users in Nassau.”

  I nodded judiciously. “That was number one on my plate. Well, after I check whether Seabrook has gone meltdown.”

  “Not yet,” Dave said. “No war yet either. So far as I know.”

  “Good. I guess,” I said. “I mean, the suspense is killing me. Are we out of fallout range?”

  “Lot of debate about that on the boards,” Dave replied. “Boston’s iffy. We’re certainly within range of a war between Hudson and New England.”

  “I can’t take the map app from you,” Mangal cut in. “Too much Raj.”

  “I better get busy then. If there’s nothing else?” I rose to leave. “Oh! And I’ll be here through Saturday morning, probably. In Totoket.”

  “Oh?” Dave asked, surprised.

  I guess I hadn’t spent much time in Totoket since moving in with Emmett in Brooklyn. It was Thursday already. Visiting home for four days didn’t seem like such a big deal to me, aside from resenting the rare time I could have spent with Emmett. “Lockdown closed the trains. I hitch a ride back to the city on Saturday.”

  “Ah.”

  Pam Niedermeyer and her editor-wannabes had been busy little beavers in the private forum. Perched on a bar stool out in the brick-walled bull-pit, with a long butcher-block counter to myself, I read up on the proposed evening news lineup.

  That was how Pam set up the contest. Contenders for editor were putting together their evening news lineups. Most of them were just headline lists, but they were invited to expand on those headlines in sub-posts. Research. Sources. Some even had art and video and reporter assets in place, and snatches of script.

  A few editors, pushing their pro credentials, suggested format changes with regular features – weather and alerts daily, and a weekly cycle of regular features, like a spotlight on Jersey, or politics Tuesday, or the weekend food gardener. One proposed to support local and military sports. I was pleased to see that IndieNews, PR’s top competitor, was also well-represented, including a well-considered discussion of combining editorial between our services.

  I loved what I was seeing for the containers, the structure of the proposals.

  I loved what I was seeing for the structure of the contest, too. Pam decreed that entrants collaborate as well as compete. Graphics and video assets were shared in a common pool. Any facts and in-depth reporting were exclusive to whoever contributed it, though, in their own sub-forums. Anyone who used someone else’s assets better credit the original reporter, or Pam chucked them out. A couple lazy plagiarists had already been eliminated. Smart move, Pam. She almost had the contestants working as a single newsroom, vying for best story of the day. That drew out the cut-throats, the cooperative stylists, and the leadership in the group.

  What I found inside the structure boxes worried me. There was some serious journalistic talent on display, and they’d been digging. The biggest common stories were Narragansett, Jersey, and Seabrook, as in, ‘What’s going on that the Resco Raj isn’t telling us?’ Unsurprisingly, they had answers.

  And I wanted to know. I fought temptation for maybe ten minutes, forcing myself to look at the containers, not the content, the headlines and the overall shape of broadcasts. I was shopping for the editor, after all, not the news.

  It didn’t work. I got sucked into the real stories.

  Narragansett was worse than I’d imagined. The islands hadn’t protected the city of Providence. Instead, the shape of Narragansett Bay worked to amplify the tsunami. A wave that hit the coast already 20 feet tall, funneled into Providence at a whopping 30 feet. Boston-Prov had emerged from its epidemic borders after Project Reunion wrapped up, nine months ago. According to one report, General Link hadn’t placed a priority on early warning systems for Narragansett, only Boston. The warning from Cam and me never reached the devastated Narragansett shore.

  Not that an extra minute of warning could have helped much. A tsunami travels at 500 miles per hour in open ocean. It slows down in the shallows, as the wave size grows. But Narragansett was only a few miles north of Jones Beach.

  I fast-forwarded my way through aerial footage of Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, even Hyannis and Chatham on Cape Cod. They were simply gone. Whole communities wiped into broken kindling and sand. Some of the loveliest towns on Earth, not so different from Totoket.

  I hung my head in my hands to pull myself together, and wish them peace. Then I moved on to some ugly video of National Guard troops bullying survivors in Narragansett.

  My eyes narrowed. Bullying? Or herding? I’d been in a riot once. Looking at that footage, I saw an ambivalent scenario, soldiers controlling panicky civilians. During Project Reunion, Emmett was adamant against press coverage when he inserted troops to move people. The optics were horrific, no matter how careful the operation.

  “VETO,” I commented on the clip. “This clip is inflammatory, and violates PR News editorial guidelines. We would not air this.”

  Successfully restored to a more managerial frame of mind, I flipped back to the claim that Link did not prioritize warning systems.

  (1) Can you prove an act of negligence on the part of General Link.

  (2) Can you confirm independently that there were no warning sirens? Anywhere in Narragansett? As opposed to a tragic system failure? Or lack of time?

  PR would not air this story. We would forward to Resco Raj for followup. Give me confirmed facts to pass on.

  I moved on to the Jersey stories, but got buffeted by back-talk to my post. Investigative journalists are an ardent bunch. I could respect that, but I didn’t need to argue with them. I popped back up to the top level to post a sticky announcement right under Pam’s rules of the road.

  Contestants - thank you for contributing here! Skimming through, I see brilliant work. Keep it up!

  BUT. Please note, PR News has an editorial bias, that is not open for debate. We are pro–Resco Raj. We are the mouthpiece of the martial law governments. We extend them every courtesy, every possible benefit of the doubt. We are pro law and order. We promote the belief that people can thrive and make a contribution under new adverse circumstances. We applaud volunteers, successful communit
ies, and heroes. We take a constructive stance on issues. Our viewers leave a news broadcast trusting their government, confident that hard work and playing by the rules will reap benefits.

  I know this bias has limitations. But to get this gig, you need to work within our framework without constant friction.

  - Dee Baker, Hudson Assistant Resco, Managing Director Amenac–PR News

  I stared at my statement several minutes, imagining just how many ways people could take it the wrong way. Then I gave up. There was no right way to take it. That’s what we did here at PR News.

  “You’re starting to turn green,” Mangal commented, gingerly pulling up a high chair beside me. “Have you reached Jersey yet?”

  “No, didn’t make it past Narragansett,” I said. I turned my monitor toward him and highlighted my statement.

  Mangal read my post. “Would you like me to itemize the statements I disagree with?”

  “All of them, at a guess,” I said. “I did ask for confirmation on one story. I said we wouldn’t air it, but I’d pass the complaint to the Raj for action. If I was sure it was true. Accused Link of failing to set up early warning systems in Narragansett, though he did in Boston.”

  “Well,” Mangal murmured, “that’s something, at least. Could you add something about that to this post, though? Not that we tell the audience to trust blindly in the Raj, but that we work directly with the Raj.”

  I considered that, staring at the screen. A counter started ringing up the number of comments my post had generated. I didn’t open them. Always best to decide what I thought before defending my beliefs to others. Mangal didn’t count. His beliefs and mine were one, once. Partners. Though partners don’t always agree.