Stormworld

by Brian Herbert

  As she sputtered protests, the minister and two deacons forced her into an off-road vehicle and blindfolded her. In the middle of the night, they drove her to a wilderness area and dumped her out into the snow beside a logging road, throwing a heavy parka, a flashlight, and a pack of supplies after her.

  The Faithfinder had shouted at her, “If God wants you to survive, if thou art truly a chaste woman in heart, you will survive.” He and his companions then drove off, leaving her in the forest, dimly illuminated by a rarely-seen moon, piercing through the cloud cover.

  Shaking with anger and shivering in the cold, Peggy had bundled up as much as possible and put the pack on. Then, saving the flashlight battery as much as possible, she had followed the tracks of the vehicle in the snow, thinking she might find her way back out—until a sudden snowfall hit.

  CHAPTER 3

  Abe Finds Peggy

  Early the following morning, Abe activated a melter to clear the exterior blast door of the seed repository. Poking his head out of the bunker-like facility, he saw an unfamiliar shape on the nearby hillside, covered in snow. Perhaps a hundred feet upslope at the edge of the forest, he made out a bump of icy whiteness with branches and fir boughs sticking out of the top. Had a tree fallen over?

  As part of his normal security detail, he marched through the deep snow to investigate. Plodding up the slope, he came to the mysterious form, and catching his breath, he cleared snow away and broke into a makeshift enclosure. Inside, he saw a human figure in a dark blue parka, lying on a silver-colored thermal blanket. A woman. She wore insulated clothing, but had no sleeping bag.

  She was facing toward him, her eyes closed, and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing. Clearing away more branches, he crawled into the shelter. Removing one of his gloves as he knelt by her and touched the carotid artery on her neck. It pulsed.

  “Miss!” he said in a loud voice, “Miss! Wake up!”

  She did not respond. Concerned, Abe wondered what to do. He couldn’t leave her out there, and her prospects were not good if he took her inside the seed repository. Director Jackson did not like intruders, and had already ordered the execution of four men who had ventured into the surrounding clearing and nearby forest, citing security concerns and lack of resources to house and feed strangers. “We must protect the seeds at all costs,” he had said repeatedly, as he ordered Jimmy Hansik to dump the men in the woods and leave them for animals to tear to pieces. The security of the seeds was Benitar’s catchall excuse, justifying anything distasteful that he wanted to do.

  Abe picked her up in his arms. She was not particularly heavy, but having lost so much of his own weight and strength, he struggled under the burden. With considerable difficulty, he carried her inside the seed repository, closing the heavy blast door behind him. Her face had turned a pale shade of blue. She seemed to be in a coma, and would have died outside anyway. Without a doubt, Jackson was going to say she should have been left outside, but Abe couldn’t do it.

  Dreading the trouble he would be in, he made his way along a corridor. At this early hour, no one else was up in this section. After laying the woman gently on his own bed, he went back outside and destroyed the lean-to, scattering its parts so that no sign of it remained. Then, just as the snow began to fall again, he scooped up her backpack and other personal articles, and sought shelter in the bunker.

  This time Benitar Jackson awaited him at the bed, having seen the activities on a security camera. Though Abe sympathized with the Director, at times the man seemed like a textbook case of paranoia, always on the lookout for traitors on his staff, and for mobs of people he feared would come and break into the repository, stealing the seeds that were more precious to him than anything. In a world of finite resources, Jackson said that “seeds” (a catchall word that included the tubers, roots, and bulbs he stored) had become the most rare and valuable items in existence, more dear than gold, platinum, or any other of the other articles that men had always valued, throughout history. With the terrible events that had occurred all over the world, he was right about this, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier to live with the man, and work with him.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Jackson demanded. His hands were inside the deep pockets of his stained smock, and Abe knew he always carried a gun in one of them.

  “Showing a little human concern, something you should understand.”

  “Our seeds are for all of humanity,” Jackson snapped. “Isn’t it human to preserve them?”

  Ignoring him for the moment, Abe wiped melted snow off the woman and removed her jacket, gloves and boots. Everything was wet. “I’ll get Belinda in here to dress her in dry clothes,” he said.

  “For what? Her execution?”

  “You might want to rethink that,” Abe said, placing a hand on her protruding belly. “Looks to me like she’s pregnant.” At that very moment, as if emphasizing his point, he felt something kick against his palm, a tiny fetus speaking out in the only way it knew how.

  CHAPTER 4

  Peggy Keeps a Journal

  As days passed, Peggy exercised regularly, at least as much as she could, considering her condition and the spatial limitations of the facility. She developed a routine of walking rapidly through the areas of the seed bank that were not off-limits to her, a route of perhaps a quarter mile. She tried not to think of how much she felt trapped in this windowless bunker, essentially sentenced there against her will, and how claustrophobia had always been one of her biggest fears. Desperately, she wanted to leave, to get back out into the open air, but circumstances did not permit it. She had to think first of her baby’s welfare, and not of her own.

  Each afternoon, Peggy made entries in a journal, sheets of lined paper in a spiral ring notebook that she found in a seed-bank office and slipped into her clothing, beneath a sweater that Belinda had given to her. On her first writing foray, Peggy came up with only a few sentences, but soon found herself filling pages on both sides and flipping sheets of paper quickly as she scribbled. Using three colors of ink from different pens, depending upon her mood, she wrote in blue, green, or red. Her feelings were new to her since she had never been pregnant before, but she thought her child might like to read these entries someday. As the words flowed before her, she began to feel free to say whatever she pleased on the pages. It was an escape from confinement of sorts, and she loved the new time alone, in which she basically talked to the pages. Committing her innermost thoughts to words, she described the seed bank employees, the routines they followed, and the eccentricities of their personalities.

  She always wrote in the privacy of her tiny (though unlockable) sleeping room, then hid the journal afterward behind the bed. There, low on a wall by one corner, she had found a loose metal plate that someone had used to cover an apparent construction defect, using screws that didn’t hold in the concrete when she pulled at it. Behind the plate, a small, dark hole opened up that she couldn’t see the end of. The precious journal fit in there easily, and she put it in a thick plastic bag in an effort to protect it from any moisture that might be in there, or rodents. Then, like a prisoner in a cell tunneling a secret escape route, she jammed a table against the plate to hold it against the wall, thus enabling her to get into and out of the compartment at will. Most of the people in the seed bank would not like what she had to say about them. Director Jackson, in particular.

  I promised myself that I won’t go crazy here, she wrote in one of her first entries, but I hate this place and the people in it, even the ones who are nice to me. Some days are worse than others, as my emotions fluctuate wildly. Often I can tell how bad, or how good a day is gong to be, based upon how I feel when I get up and start to move around. I always eat breakfast in the concrete-walled employee cafeteria: imitation eggs and sausages, and other foods from cans and shrink-wrap packages—with all portions strictly controlled, because supplies are dwindling. During breakfast, I continue to gauge my mood, trying to be upbeat. But with the chemical and psychi
c turmoil going on inside me, that is not always possible. Whenever I feel especially anxious or depressed, I find that I can’t talk with others at all, not even with Abe Tojiko, who has been so nice and helpful to me. I try not to offend anyone, and particularly the Director of Operations, Benitar Jackson. What a strange, aggressive man he is; I can hardly see the good in him that Abe points out. I’ve figured out Jackson’s schedule and I take every effort to avoid him.

  Two weeks into her narrative, Peggy’s personal observations and feelings took a backseat to events outside the seed bank and around the world. In one of her entries she wrote: An F-5 tornado has just passed within a mile of here—Abe and I saw it on the projection screen in the weather room. Remote sensors report the base was more than half a mile across—something I would have thought impossible. Watching it on the screen gave me an unreal sensation, as if it was only a scary movie, or a bleak news report about some far off place, not Western Washington. Winds registered at 304 miles per hour! Conelrad says the main highway to Seattle is impassable, with roadways ripped up, choked with debris, and a main bridge destroyed.

  Just then she heard a noise, and looked up. Of all the sleeping quarters in the seed repository, only Director Jackson’s room could locked. She had jammed a towel under her own door for privacy, to make it stick a little if anyone tried to get in, but Abe pushed it open with only a little difficulty and stepped into the room. He wore a long-sleeved blue shirt and jeans.

  Quickly, she closed the binder and let it fall behind the bed.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, “I knocked, but didn’t hear any response. The surveillance system has been breaking down, and the Director wants to know where you are at all times. I was told to …” The slender man scowled. “Say, what were you doing there?”

  “Nothing,” she said, feeling her face flush hot.

  He nodded, but had seen something.

  “It’s just a journal,” she admitted.

  “You’d better hide it well,” said Abe.

  Peggy nodded. “Don’t tell anyone, OK? You can read it if you want. Well, I’d rather you didn’t, but you’re the only person I trust here, and I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of saboteur or spy or anything. If you have to read it, go ahead.”

  He grinned. “Does it say you think I’m cute?”

  With a gentle smile, Peggy said, “Maybe, and maybe not. Maybe I said you’re overbearing, and I can’t stand you.”

  Abe looked hurt. “But you trust me?”

  “Mostly, though you may be a bit naive when it comes to assessing Jackson. I suspect he’s darker than you want to admit.”

  Abe nodded. “Perhaps.” He paused, smiled tentatively. “It’s nice to hear that you trust me, because I do care about you.”

  “A woman’s feelings are complex, especially when she’s going to have a baby.”

  She searched his eyes, saw kindness there.

  “No, I didn’t write that you’re cute,” she said, “though come to think of it, you are, kind of. With all the stresses we’re under, I haven’t had time to think about such things, and I’ve already had a bad relationship. Her eyes misted over. “I just want my baby safe.”

  “I know, Peggy, and I’m here for you if you need me. Just let me know what I can do.”

  “Thanks, you’re a big help.” She smiled shyly as she watched him back out of the room and close the door. She jammed the towel back under the door, more tightly this time.

  Using green ink for no conscious reason, she continued writing in her journal, setting down information she had learned in the seed bank’s weather room: I can’t believe how bizarre the weather has become. Abe and Belinda told me that catastrophes started occurring after the deep ocean current failed, causing serious climatic changes. Last week it was 137 degrees Fahrenheit in Madrid, and two days later it dropped to 21. Now it’s 14 degrees in New York on August 20! The tropics are sweltering through deadly levels of heat and humidity—142 degrees in Caracas with 99% humidity, 138 degrees in Djakarta, 136 in Kuala Lumpur. People are still dying. It’s beyond comprehension.

  Abe says he used to think the Pacific Northwest was somehow immune, even after the deep ocean current failed—that for a while it wasn’t that bad here, though cool—a high of 39 degrees last July 4th. Still, we weren’t having the 250 mph winds hitting South America and the floods inundating Europe and Asia. Then it all changed and we got it as bad an anyplace in the world.

  In the last two months, Pacific Northwest weather has been the worst in recoded history and totally unpredictable. Intense snowstorms are followed by record high temperatures that melt everything, causing landslides and floods. The forest is torn up out there, and now the snow is coming down again, driven sideways by 150 mph winds. Conditions can’t get any worse, can they? It just has to get better. It just has to, with me being seven months pregnant. How could the climate change so fast, and what is going to happen next?

  Oh God, please save my baby.

  CHAPTER 5

  Benitar Considers the Fates

  Benitar Jackson hated to sleep.

  Before the weather catastrophes that stormed through his every waking moment and thought, he used to be able to avoid bad dreams, by always awakening the moment one of his slumber stories went awry, as if an alarm had gone off in his head. Now each time he drifted off to sleep he went directly into a nightmare realm and could not escape from it, a plight that ran parallel to his conscious life.

  “Get out of here!” he raged in a recurring dream, yelling at his entire seed-depository staff, and the intruder, Peggy Atkins. Holding a handgun inside the bunker, he heard the raging tempest outside, a war zone of ferocious winds, brilliant explosions of lightning and a cacophony of thunderous, shaking blasts, like bombs exploding.

  Night after night, he had variations of this dream. In the most recent version he brandished the gun at them. “Get out or I’ll shoot you! You don’t appreciate what I’m doing here, what’s at stake. You want to feed any animal that comes our way but I tell you over and over, we can’t do that. Our lives only mean something if we save the seeds!”

  In the dream, the faces of Abe, Peggy, and the others were frozen masks of fear. He opened the door and ordered everyone out, then slammed it shut and turned, thinking he was alone inside his precious seed bank. But a dozen children stood around him, all with the faces of the people he had just sent to their deaths. “Murderer,” they whispered as they pointed at him. “Murderer!”

  As if condemned to repeat the scene in various forms, Benitar Jackson backed against the door, and once more he seemed to feel the cold hardness against his backside. In the children, he saw hatred and loathing; their little faces were hard and purposeful, dancing toward him. “Call me what you want,” he screamed, “but I can’t feed all of you!”

  “Murderer!”

  Abruptly, Benitar awoke and sat straight up on his bed, rubbing his eyes in the darkness. “They don’t understand,” he moaned. “They’ll never understand me.”

  Unable to return to sleep he remembered when he was a small boy, sitting with his father Avery Jackson on the bank of a river, watching the surface burn from a witch’s brew that finally caught fire. His wealthy father had owned one of the many factories that lined the shores of an Ohio river, but one day he’d had enough of the hypocrisy, and began to wonder who was watching out for the quality of the environment around them. He became what the bosses called a turncoat, a whistle-blower to the media and the government, and it had cost him his job. Sadly, his warnings had come too late, and the fires had started anyway.

  “Son,” his father had said to him in the eerie glow from the surface of the river, “you can make a difference. This didn’t have to happen. We live in a world where everyone thinks they can do as they please to the environment and it won’t make any difference because it will never catch up with us. Each person is so small and insignificant, after all, and the world is so big. But what if that is multiplied by billions, and everyone behaves carel
essly?”

  Owing to his youth and inexperience, Benitar had not come up with an answer, and had just watched the river burn with its hypnotic glow.

  “Promise me, my son, promise me that you’ll make the world a better place than it was when you found it. Put yourself in a position to make a difference. The future will depend on you and people like you, to make up for the past.” Despair had filled Avery Jackson’s voice.

  From that early age, as Benitar watched the oily red and yellow flames boil across the river, and saw the foul smoke smearing the evening sky, he had vowed not to let his father down. No matter what.

  Now he found himself on a bed in the nightmarish, seemingly impossible future, a sweating and terrified man wondering how things had gotten so badly out of control, and if he could do anything at all to restore the balance. Sometime long ago, an American politician whose name he could not remember had said that extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice. The comment had made Benitar think, as he applied it to his own goals. Extremism in the defense of the seeds and the planet was no vice, either. He could, and should do anything to protect the seeds. Anything. He would kill every employee in the facility if they got in his way, and the desperate woman as well. His job would be a great deal harder if he had to go it alone, but he had the knowledge to perform every task they did, down to the last detail. He had made certain of that.

  He had been hoping to keep this staff intact until the climate stabilized, but he didn’t know when that would ever occur. If he died before they did, they might pervert his purpose, and he could not tolerate that. He couldn’t fail his father.

  In his ragged, fatigued mind, he was coming to the inescapable realization that one person had a better chance of saving the seeds than six. Thinking of Peggy Atkins, he felt a rush of rage. Seven. And if she gave birth: Eight. Benitar felt his jaw clamp and his body tense. Why hadn’t Abe allowed Peggy to die out there? The handgun sat on a table near the bed.