Stormworld

by Brian Herbert

  After closing the door to the cooler, Peggy and Abe parted company, each going to their own small sleeping quarters. Belinda and Jimmy went into the room where they had been co-habiting.

  * * *

  As Belinda Amar drifted off to sleep, she dreamed that she was back in her house again, overlooking Hood Canal. It was a cool, cloudy day like so many others, and she had a good fire going in the green, ceramic-framed fireplace. Her cat Phylum purred beside her on the couch, while her golden retriever Genus snoozed on the floor.

  Looking up from a book on her lap, Belinda gazed around her wonderful little Victorian home, at the expensive art on the walls, and then looked out the window at her classic old Mercedes coupe, parked at the curb in front. She felt fortunate to have so much, and was proud of herself for having earned it all. Her life was perfect, almost untarnished. Focusing back on the book, however, the words began to vanish, sentence by sentence. Anxiously, she turned the pages, one after the other, but all of them were the same, with vanishing words.

  The book slipped from her grasp, thudded onto the floor. Beside her, Phylum had died, and was rotting before her eyes, a horrendous death in fast forward. Belinda shrieked, jumped up, and felt her heart beating wildly. She wanted to run, but through the window she saw something dark and foreboding approaching from a distance. A storm? She also realized that the waters of Hood Canal had turned to ice, and suddenly she understood.

  Stepping back from the window, she saw a massive glacier, like a high, flat, white beast rushing toward her, slabs of ice breaking off the front as it moved. Dazed and helpless to move out of the way, she watched it come toward her, and heard a rumbling, thunderous noise. In a matter of seconds the glacier towered over the small community, crushing everything in its path….

  Beside her, Jimmy Hansik was caught in his own nightmare. He found himself on a tarmac, hurrying toward a large passenger plane that awaited him, with its engines running, Abruptly, Jimmy paused in his headlong rush, as the plane became like a mirror, and on the hull he saw a vision of blue sky and lazy, drifting clouds. Over the whine of the engines, he heard women laughing and an eerie roar of surf, and he saw an oversized reflection of himself in the glassy surface, waving and yelling, “C’mon, c’mon, climb aboard before it’s too late!”

  “I’m coming,” Jimmy yelled. But as he ran, he noticed a curious gray cloud forming before him, a cloud that suddenly mushroomed in height and width, and enveloped him. Instantly, he felt the blinding, freezing sting of a blizzard, and he thought, This can’t be happening to me! It can’t possibly be.

  An indeterminate time passed, with no sensations whatsoever. The next thing he realized the storm had abated and he was buried up to his neck in snow. Struggling to break free, he realized to his dismay that he was frozen in place, and only his eyes could move. Suddenly the whine of the jet became a deafening roar and again he saw his previous reflection in the glassy surface of the jet, looking stricken and yelling at him. “What are you waiting for? You’re going to miss your plane! It’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

  Jimmy tried to yell that he was coming, but the words iced up in his brain and his mouth was frozen solid, open and filled with snow. In helpless horror, he watched the plane taxi away from him slowly. “Wait!” he wanted to yell, but he could make no sound. Tears came and solidified instantly, and the last thing he saw before his eyes froze shut was that magnificent aircraft picking up speed, lifting off, and vanishing into the serene and clear blue sky….

  * * *

  Abe, in his private room, sat at a table, resting his arms on the surface. Feeling despondent, he put his head down on the folded arms and ceased trying to think. Instead, he just let his thoughts drift, wherever they wanted to go….

  His long-dead grandmother, Sophie, came back to him in a vision, her dress and hair blue flames, her eyes yellow. She hovered large before him, as she had in his younger life. “You’re way too soft-hearted,” she said, “shouldn’t have brought Peggy Atkins in from the snow. It only aggravated Director Jackson, tipped the poor man over the edge.”

  Abe saw himself as a child again, afraid to speak to this immense and imposing woman, cringing in her presence and staring at her beefy hand, the one she always used to strike him. Somehow, the words came to him now, for the first time in his life. “I’m not frightened of you anymore, you domineering old hag, and I saved Peggy because it was the right thing to do.”

  “You think you’re in love with her. Is that it?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “Abe, foolish boy, when will you ever listen?” Grandmother Sophie’s eyes blazed hatred and utter contempt. Her mouth, when she opened it to scold him, was like looking into a glowing, volcanic vent. He couldn’t remember her ever saying anything nice to him, not a single time in all the years he knew her, before she died of a well-earned heart attack. She always made him feel bad about himself, and he realized now that she did that to justify her own miserable existence, so that he would need to depend on her.

  At long last, Abe saw himself standing firm against his bête noire, finding the strength he never had before, and he said, “I have no time for you, Grandmother. The world is dying and I refuse to die a coward, or without ever knowing love. Fly away on your broomstick, witch, and never come back!”

  Grandmother Sophie hissed, and yellow flames shot from her mouth, but Abe did not move. In spite of his fear, he did not flinch. And before his eyes, Sophie burned like an incandescent candle—bright blue, yellow and orange—and incinerated herself, since Abe’s fear no longer provided fuel for her evil spirit.

  Relieved, Abe lifted his head from the table and thought, Even now, at the end of the world, it’s not too late to find courage and love.

  Closing his eyes again, he felt the tears for all that might have been. Finally, he got up, went to the bed, and drifted into a dreamless, yet profoundly calm, slumber….

  * * *

  In the pitch darkness of her room, Peggy felt overwhelming exhaustion. On her bed, she leaned back against pillows, and studied the color behind her closed eyes. Pitch black. She tried to visualize something about the future, tried to imagine what it might be like … if any human being had a future. But her mind wanted to go in another direction.

  She recalled being in California, standing on a rocky promontory by the coastal highway, gazing out at the endless sea. But as she tried to bring back details of the scene, the familiar blue of the ocean became black, as did the flowers on the hillside around her and the green grasses. Looking up to the sky, she beheld a baroque sun, with stylized yellow and orange flames slowly curling up and out from the disk, burning in a black sky. As she watched, the moon eclipsed the sun, forming a brilliant corona, but when the eclipse ended she saw to her horror that the sun was dying.

  Peggy wept softly, then drifted into a troubled sleep.

  CHAPTER 14

  She’s So Small and Thin

  Children are not always born at the most opportune of times, nor in the best of circumstances. So it was for the young mother Peggy Atkins, when her baby decided to make its big push for life in the middle of the night. The first thing Peggy realized as she slept was that she felt wet, and she dreamed she was being drenched under a cloudburst, in one of the warm summertime storms that used to occur in the Pacific Northwest, before the eternal snows came.

  But as she lay in bed, layers of consciousness began to unfold in her mind, and she became aware of something confusingly wrong. Rain? Was the weather making a turn for the better? But she wasn’t outside. Abe Tojiko had taken her into the seed bank.

  As her awareness increased, Peggy worried about her baby, and she realized she was lying in a wet bed, with her nightclothes saturated. Startled, she tried to sit up, but stopped when she felt a lance of pain in her abdomen.

  My baby!

  She cried out, and screamed for help. Excruciating pain. She couldn’t stop it, couldn’t slow the baby down….

  Not long afterward, Peggy he
ld little Rosie in her arms, snuggling the child close in its improvised swaddling blanket, a thick white towel. Belinda Amar stood by her, having helped with the birth. Belinda, whose mother had been a registered nurse, had the most medical knowledge in the facility, but said now how grateful she was that there had not been problems, or she might not have been able to handle them. Little Rosie, as if unafraid of the world that lay outside the comfort and protection of her mother’s womb, had surged forward efficiently, making her head-first plunge into the unknown. It had been left to the women to just cut the umbilical cord and tie it.

  But Peggy’s elation was short-lived, as she looked at her child with the new scrutiny of a concerned mother.

  “She’s so small and thin,” Peggy said.

  “Yes,” Belinda said, “you’ll need to give her as much natural milk as you can.”

  * * *

  On the morning of the fourth day after her birth, little Rosie slept fitfully beneath a towel, inside a wooden box that Abe had painted white. She was not doing well, and Peggy felt increasing agitation and frustration at her inability to do much for her.

  The young mother’s breasts were still sore from a feeding an hour before, and she hadn’t gotten used to having to wake up constantly in the middle of the night to keep the sick, irritable baby from crying. Now, despite her fatigue, Peggy couldn’t sleep because of worry. She had produced milk from her own body, but wondered if it was enough, and if it had all the nutrients her helpless child needed.

  Peggy didn’t know how she found the energy to continue, since it was all so exhausting, but she knew she had to, for the sake of her beautiful, innocent daughter. So sweet and frail she was, and Peggy loved her dearly, though she hated the world into which Rosie had been born. So many times in the few hours of Rosie’s life, Peggy had held her close and cried. Now, she felt an overwhelming wave of sadness come over her.

  Wiping tears from her eyes, Peggy reached behind the bed and brought out her journal, then sat cross-legged on the blankets to write in it. She wanted to get down her feelings for Abe, and especially for the baby. What a miracle the little person was, clinging to life each day, showing her grit and determination.

  Moments after the delivery, Belinda had said Rosie looked premature, and Peggy had done the math herself. Never having seen a doctor during the pregnancy, she couldn’t be certain, but Rosie might have been two or three weeks premature. Now, she might be a few ounces heavier than her birth weight; Peggy hoped so, and prayed it was not just her imagination.

  Following a moment’s hesitation, she began to write in red ink, but opened with another subject, before getting to Abe and Rosie: November 28th. This may be the last Thanksgiving any of us celebrate, without any turkey, cranberry sauce, or pumpkin pie. The ones who want to break in have been back every day, pounding on the bunker and testing the perimeter, looking for weak spots and dodging bullets fired at them by Director Jackson and other men he’s allowed to have guns. After the first bloody event, our defenders haven’t hit any of them, as the outsiders are being more careful.

  They have been taunting Jackson by name, making him even more of a madman than he already was, even more paranoid. The Director stays in his room with his guns all day, brooding, and emerging whenever the bunker is under attack, as he storms out and opens fire. It’s become predictable, and I’m afraid I’m not the only one who’s noticed. The outsiders must be charting him, working up a new plan to penetrate the minimal security we have. So far, they haven’t shown any weapons, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get them.

  Looking over at her sleeping baby, Peggy worried more than ever that her precious child was not safe in the seed depository. Sooner or later … She tried not to imagine the horrible possibilities, didn’t want to commit the worst of them to the pages of her journal.

  While Peggy was giving birth to Rosie, the outsiders had made one of their attempts to break in, creating a lot of noise, but not getting through.

  She knew that Benitar was beside himself trying to imagine the ways his enemies might get in, and he was increasingly desperate in his attempt to accomplish what he thought was his holy mission in life, protecting the seeds at all costs. The upper chamber where he kept what he called the “emergency seed evacuation capsule” was yet another weak point against intrusion, because the chamber had an escape hatch in the thick concrete roof—so he must be checking on it constantly.

  But the existence of such a capsule—which the Director supposedly paid for himself—made no sense to the rest of the staff in the repository, because the whole facility was in a bunker, supposedly impregnable against atomic attacks. In reality, the aircraft had to be a personal escape capsule for Jackson, capable of transporting him (and perhaps a sampling of seeds) away for whatever reason he deemed necessary.

  Despite all of the efforts and concerns by Benitar and his crew, Peggy didn’t sense anything holy or sacred about this bunker. Rather, she felt the stench of evil all around, a dark and foreboding presence trying to sneak and batter its way in, intending to kill and destroy everything. She and Rosie were in the worst possible place, facing tremendous danger.

  That morning, Benitar had distributed handguns to Abe and Jimmy. At least that was a small step in the right direction, Peggy thought. But a few guns and limited ammunition against a mob intent on breaking in? It was only a matter of time before they broke through that defective blast door again. The beleaguered defenders didn’t have enough firepower to keep them out forever.

  As the young mother paused over her journal, she became aware of tears falling on the open page, smearing the red ink. The image of Abe came to her, and she thanked God for him. She knew he loved her, not out of desperation, but because he really felt that way, even though he had not put it into words yet, undoubtedly because the continuing crisis prevented clear thinking processes and commitments. She wondered if she loved him herself, but likewise she had not uttered the words, had not dared to do so under the circumstances. It was like a war zone around here, forcing personal relationships to the wayside.

  Finally she put some of her feelings for Abe on the page, then set the pen down and pushed her notebook aside. What a dismal, dead-end place this was to finally discover love, when it was so ephemeral and she couldn’t enjoy it fully. And how unfair it was to her baby.

  She whispered to her sleeping child, “I wish I could promise you a long life, but I cannot. I can only assure you that you have been born into love, and I will protect you for as long as I can. That is all a mother can offer you, and hopefully in the end it will be enough. Oh, Rosie how I wish I could promise more.”

  Sapped of energy, she lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. Presently, the baroque vision of the stylized sun came over her again, followed by the moon eclipsing it. But this time the corona burned and flared suddenly with ferocious brilliance, like a final burst of energy from a dying sun.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Escape Capsule

  Hearing a tremendous commotion outside his room, Abe yanked open the door and hurried into the corridor, carrying the silver-and-black .38 pistol that the crazed Director had given to him. He had heard these sounds before, and knew it was another attempt to get in.

  Abe raced to the bottom of the staircase and looked up at the door, reinforced with heavy planking nailed from the inside. Would it hold this time? To his horror, he saw the thick barricade shake more than ever before, from repeated blows on the other side.

  He became aware of people around him, including Benitar Jackson, who put a foot on the bottom stair and pointed another handgun up at the door. “They can’t get in!” he shouted, but he didn’t sound confident. His dark gaze darted around wildly. The man had the look of madness about him.

  Abe scratched an itch on the back of his neck, felt a raw spot from a nervous habit he had developed in recent days. “I pray that you’re right, but prayers don’t seem to offer much protection anymore.”

  Belinda joined the others, and down the corridor
Abe saw Peggy standing in her own doorway, a rare moment when the doting mother wasn’t holding her baby or otherwise tending to it. “There must be something else we can do,” Belinda said. She looked distraught, and Abe knew why. Only an hour ago, Jimmy Hansik had been found dead in one of the storerooms, apparently poisoned by botulism in a can of salmon. Under the circumstances, with no real doctor in the seed repository, the answer might never be known. Rumors were swirling that Director Jackson had murdered him, and made it look like an accident.

  Abe thought the truth was that some of the cans were outdated, and Jimmy took a chance and lost. Everyone had seen the cans and the expiration dates on them, even slight bulges in some cans that didn’t seem to harm anyone when they ate the contents. It had been going on for months, and Jimmy just got unlucky.

  At Abe’s side, Benitar continued to stare up at the door as it shook, but continued to hold. Gradually the commotion outside died down, and the repository staff dispersed, murmuring uneasily among themselves.

  * * *

  Abe stood in the corridor with Peggy. “Are you getting any sleep?” he asked. Looking up at him, she saw that his face was a strange, anguished mask.

  Shaking her head, she confessed, “Not much. I was just dozing off, trying to take a nap when I heard all the racket.” Behind her, she saw that Rosie had fallen into a more peaceful sleep, despite the nearby noise.

  Peggy noticed Abe’s deep concern that showed in his voice and his unconscious mannerisms, especially in the nervous twitching around his jaw. He still held the .38 pistol, had it pointed at the floor.

  “This is awkward for me to say,” Peggy began, “but I’m afraid I’m not producing enough milk for Rosie. Can you bring me some powdered milk?” She felt a deep, rising panic.

  Grimly, Abe nodded.

  Hearing Rosie stir, Peggy hurried to her and lifted her out of the makeshift crib. So light in her arms. She tucked the towel around Rosie’s tiny form, and saw the sickness from malnutrition in her blue eyes, a malady that seemed to be getting worse.