Rockfall

by William Allen

  I endured the ensuing horror and awoke with a gasp, clutching at my dead loved ones only to find my hands empty. Always empty, no matter how hard I tried. If anyone in the house had noticed my cries, that next morning they were too polite to say anything.

  With the rain persisting, after I finished the morning milking and Marta supervised the egg patrol, Mike and I took the time to conceal his load of rifles in the hay barn. In addition to the haul Mike had already detailed, I noticed he had two more AR-15s, a pair of Saiga shotguns converted to the box magazines, and some kind of FN-FAL variant in 7.62x51mm with a giant, claw-mounted telescope that looked capable of seeing life on other planets.

  And we humped case after case of ammunition. After the last gun ban scare, Mike had picked up thousands of rounds of ammo for greatly discounted prices, and he never sold any of it. Most was sealed in old .50 caliber metal cans, but some of the Soviet-era stuff came still packed in cool-looking wooden crates.

  “Just how many rounds do you have?” I finally asked after shifting what seemed like my fiftieth metal ammo can.

  “No clue,” Mike admitted. “Every time I see a good sale, I jump on it. Need some for those oddball calibers I’ve picked up over the years.”

  Mike and I had very different views on firearms. I looked at them as tools, while Mike saw them as toys. Well, I liked to shoot too, so I can’t complain but for Mike, I think it was the joy of collecting. To his credit, Mike never bought showpieces. If something was too valuable or fragile to take out to the nearest gun range and blow through a box of ammo working out the kinks, then he wasn’t interested. He might have a rack of those M-1 carbines, but he also had ten or fifteen thousand rounds of .30 caliber carbine rounds stockpiled for them as well.

  For me, I took a different approach. For rifles, I owned a few rifles chambered in 30-06, a Marlin 30-30 lever action I used as my saddle rifle, and few squirrel rifles in 22LR. For close-in defense, I had a few pistols in 9mm like the little KelTec pocket pistol, and revolvers in .357 Magnum. I did own an AR-15 but seldom shot it, preferring the feel and recoil of the larger rounds. My background as strictly a deer and rabbit hunter growing up influenced my selections, just like Mike’s time in the Army colored his preferences.

  “You think going back is the right move?” Mike asked as I helped him reload their bags in the SUV and the truck. I still had hay down the back of my shirt, plastered there with the mixture of sweat and rain, and I bit back my frustration with the weather and the heat. My brother deserved my honest answer.

  “Not really,” I conceded, “but you gotta look at the long term. If you drag up now, that’s going to make getting another job in teaching that much harder. Just work out that week and get the hell out of town. For all our projections, they are just conjecture. When the situation gets really bad around here, I don’t know that we will have a whole lot of warning. You get that itch you’ve talked about, just grab Marta and the kids and burn rubber.”

  I wasn’t just being paranoid. Even with the news being heavily censored, we could tell from the Sunday morning reports that things out west might be even worse than we’d first thought. We had to read between the lines, but I was pretty good at picking up what they weren’t reporting. This time, I didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to put things together.

  No sports scores. There had to have been at least ten games scheduled for Saturday, but nothing on the local or network news about how the Astros or Rangers were doing. I really hoped neither was on a road trip out west, but there was no baseball talk at all. I hadn’t watched a game in years, but when I was in my twenties, I’d been an avid Astros fan. Biggio, Berkman, and Bagwell might never have won a World Series, but they gave me hours of entertainment as I enjoyed their exploits. The idea that the new crop of players, who I couldn’t even name, might have also died in this catastrophe added another level to my misery.

  More than the lack of any sports news though, I found the weather report even more disconcerting. The weather report only covered regional weather, and that was all on the East Coast, which had suffered an unusually high tide. Right, I thought back about my bathtub theory. All the seas and oceans of the world was being pushed around by that impact. But that was the extent of the story. Not even the Weather Channel had radar or satellite images west of the Rocky Mountains, and what they did show was thunderstorms and rain. Everywhere. It was raining everywhere they showed on the screen, from central and eastern Canada to all the way down to Mexico.

  “You good with Wade and Dorothy bringing visitors by?” Mike asked. After my scandalous admission the night before, I’d left any other planning up to Mike. I’d been embarrassed by my outburst, but judging from Wade’s expression, he at least knew a little bit more about my background than I’d ever shared. I wondered if Mike had clued him in or if he’d just done a little internet research after I bought the property.

  “I meant what I said,” I replied, backing what I’d said earlier. “You know it as well as I do. We need more warm bodies to work this place. That greenhouse requires two, maybe three people working it full time if we are expecting to produce anything,” I explained truthfully. “That’s not even taking security into account. You sure none of your other Army buddies are interested in joining us here?”

  “Sadly, I didn’t exactly stay in touch with a lot of folks after I got out. Bart was the best of the bunch, and the only ones I’d allow around my wife and kids are all two or three states away. I still think teaming up with the neighbors is the best bet.”

  “And I agree. I just wish the old Bonner place had sold. Be nice to have somebody watching our southern flank,” I lamented. The next property to our south had gone on the market a few months back after the elderly owner moved into a nursing home in Woodville, and so far they had no buyers. Mabel Bonner hadn’t wanted to go, but her kids insisted, and then they’d hung a huge asking price on the ninety-acre property.

  The old farmhouse was said to need a lot of work and the two ponds required cleaning desperately, but the fields were still in decent space despite the depredation of the feral hogs digging up the grass. I’d considered making an offer on the land, but after talking to their agent and seeing the list price, I knew we weren’t going to be able to come to any kind of arrangement.

  “Nah, not likely. Probably get some city folk moving out to the country, trying to recreate their McMansion out in the Piney Woods,” Mike observed. “First thing you know, they’d be moving to get a Homeowners Association started. Or a country club.”

  I shook my head at Mike’s irreverent humor. After our blowup in the wake of the Tractor Supply fiasco, we’d mended our fences and reconciled. The idea that Marta and I would have to sit on Mike’s heroic tendencies made me laugh, but I never shared the contents of that conversation with my brother.

  Because of the weather, Mike and Marta decided to head back while it was still daylight, and all too soon, we said our goodbyes, shared out the hugs, and they were driving out the gate. As punishment for his lack of respect for bathroom breaks, Mike was relegated to Daddy Duty all the way home, driving the SUV with Tommy and Tamara’s car seats as his little passengers. Now he got to listen to their complaints and bickering for the entirety of the trip.

  I stood out on the front porch and waved until they disappeared from sight, then took a seat in one of the rocking chairs and watched the rain fall. I was alone again, and I wondered if my ghosts would leave me be this night. I knew the last forty-eight hours had left me emotionally exposed and feeling raw, but I worried the worst was yet to come.

  I wanted to watch the sun set, but the clouds never let up and before I knew it, day rapidly turned to night and the rain never stopped. As I sat there watching the rainwater overflow the catchment basins set up at the corner of the house, I wondered I would ever see another sunset, or would the rain continue until the whole world drowned.

  With that depressing line of thoughts populating my head, I decided to go watch a little TV before trying to get some sleep
. I hoped the television programmers showed a little restraint this evening. I liked Kevin Costner as much as the next guy, but I had a feeling any network that dared to replay his merman fantasy might end up disappearing into one of those Black Sites the CIA was so famous for operating on foreign soil. I was so not in the mood.

  Tomorrow was Monday, and I had a business to run and clients to counsel. For some reason, I wanted to get in there and listen to the problems of other people. Maybe hearing their woes would take my mind off all the existential worries swirling in my brain.

  WEEK TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The next week passed fitfully, and I felt like I had a spot in the cheap seats as an empire crumbled, watching the world rapidly losing traction against the force of the meteorite strike. If you went by the media reports, recovery efforts were in full swing out west, but cracks rapidly formed in the walls of disinformation. I listened to the Amateur bands every evening, but the sound quality continued to deteriorate into hissing and static. At first, I wondered if the federal government had some new jamming technology in play, but one of the old school radio operators opined the high amounts of ionizing radiation, ash and particulates in the air were having some impact on wave propagation. That explanation made me go back to wishing the feds were messing with the transmissions.

  What I managed to decipher filled me with mounting dread. Most preppers don’t want to ever see the scenarios they prep for come to pass. Nobody who has home insurance wants to see their house burn down. Well, except maybe those people who can’t make their mortgage payments. That idea got me to thinking that many of the people out looting and setting fires did so because they felt like they had nothing to lose.

  In the places where National Guard troops were available to assist the police, the looters were dealt with harshly, but the soldiers couldn’t be everywhere, and the rioters learned the new limits and how to circumvent them. Where that violence did recede, I had a feeling the forces of chaos, those who felt like they had nothing to lose, were simply laying low. Waiting for their next moment to strike.

  As I’d feared, Monday saw a new Executive Order signed, limiting bank withdrawals to three hundred dollars for personal accounts. The president wisely decided to leave business accounts alone for the moment, as otherwise the economy would have shut down shortly thereafter. He issued an order directing all facets of the Stock Market under U.S. purview and all commodities trading to shut down for a “cooling-off” period while the damage assessment took place. This didn’t directly affect the rest of the world’s stock exchanges, of course, but they took the hint. The Japanese Nikkei Index or the Chinese exchanges in Shanghai or Hong Kong, which usually at least got a mention in the global markets, seemed to have disappeared. Bloomberg and Fox Business News, I noticed, were both off the air.

  None of the newsreaders commented on the absence of the foreign markets, but I did notice quite a bit of chatter praising the president’s common-sense approach to the economic issues. Since his party had a better relationship with certain networks, I wasn’t surprised, but they acted like the man had cured cancer, when in reality, any first-year business student could have pointed the need for cashflow in an ongoing enterprise. Companies needed access to their money to pay salaries and purchase stock, if nothing else. This didn’t stop the protesters from coming out in force, waving their banners and throwing their rocks and glass bottles.

  I also picked up rumors of something happening on the border, but I saw nothing mentioned on the news. Just some reports from one of the HAMs, commenting on military convoys headed to the Arizona border. With the tent city outside Phoenix continuing to grow every hour, I assumed it was related to this occurrence. I was wrong, but didn’t find out the truth for quite some time.

  As for my work, I stayed in the office every day that week, as the courts were closed and my probate hearings were reset. Instead, I experienced a sudden spike in business later in the week as the chronic procrastinators in the community felt compelled to get their affairs in order. I ended up staying late three of those evenings, drafting wills for people that should have been done years ago but they’d never gotten around to it. I deposited the fees for this work into the business account, and then I quickly withdrew the cash as soon as the checks cleared. I hated letting the tellers at the bank know my affairs, but I also didn’t want to let my cash reserves drop too low, either.

  On Wednesday, the sheriff reappeared at his office, or at least, I saw the customized Ford Expedition the county bought for the man, parked in his personal parking space. I never saw Sheriff Landshire in person, and his deputies never got out of their cruisers as they resumed patrolling the streets of New Albany. I imagine Buddy Cromwell, the Chief of New Albany’s miniscule police force, might have had a few cross words with the county commissioners, but nothing was ever reported in my hearing. As an outsider, my access to the local grapevine was still tenuous. I resolved to check in with Wade over the weekend to get the scoop.

  By Friday, I was on pins and needles as I waited to hear from Mike. I tried calling him on the drive home that evening, but I couldn’t get my call to go through. I knew this was the last day of classes for him, but I couldn’t remember if he said he had more administrative responsibilities that would keep him in Fort Worth. By this time, cell service was more or less restored, though for some unexplained reason the dead zones in the county grew to about twice their previous size.

  No explanation from my cell company regarding this recent failure, and no grace period for making payments either, I was informed in a wordy but somehow terse text message from my service provider. They weren’t affected by the president’s temporary moratorium on utility and tax payments in the Zone areas. That was both the first indication of utilities I’d seen mentioned, and the first reference to the devastated five Western states as simply “the Zone”. They were even thorough enough to put the new label in quotes, and then provided a brief description of the affected areas.

  The five Disaster Zone states were officially Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California, but areas in other states were becoming entangled as well. The president quietly added Nevada, Montana, and Idaho to the Disaster Zone designations, even though they were supposedly unaffected by the quakes. This was done, so the press release claimed, ‘to expedite the temporary relocation of residents from those areas so affected’. I wondered about this, and I also couldn’t figure out why FEMA had chosen the cities they went with for these displaced persons facilities.

  Okay, Phoenix made sense. It was more or less on a straight shot from Los Angeles and San Diego, and the sprawling city in the desert had a large infrastructure to call into service. The same with Denver. But Minneapolis? Sure, large city with resources perhaps equal to those of Denver, but why pick a sanctuary so far to the east? I felt the answer was right on the cusp of discovery, so I left the question to percolate while I finished the drive home. At least the rains had stopped for the time being.

  Five days of near-constant rainfall filled all the nearby reservoirs and turned the gently flowing creeks into raging torrents of runoff. I’d rapidly fished out my water turbine using the front-end loader on my old Massey Ferguson when I finally realized the danger, and I hoped the device would still operate. Assuming the rains stayed absent long enough for the water level to fall. The rushing water already undermined the bank of the creek on one side, the unrelenting force cutting into the side of the small hill like a razor blade.

  Once I pulled into the circle in front of the house, I debated leaving the Subaru out or storing it in the garage. Garage, I finally decided, and pulled the old car into the stall reserved for its use. I had ordered a number of replacement parts for the ten-year-old vehicle, and I wasn’t sure I could even install the parts correctly, but better to have than not. Plus, I’d purchased them used from a wholesaler in Beaumont, so I’d gotten a good deal when I hauled them home. He’d thought I was in the auto restoration business after I did a similar order for th
e farm truck and my pickup. Just my packrat tendencies, and having a nose for a good deal.

  Once inside, I nuked a bowl of chili left over from the night before and retreated to my office. I alternated between watching the news and glancing at the stack of monitors arrayed across the back of the desk. It looked like something from a prison movie, where the guards could watch the inmates via closed circuit tv. That was the idea, anyway. Other than the camera at the gate, I seldom used the others to save on their batteries, but given recent events, I was glad for the extra security.

  In addition to the CCTV camera I had on the call box at the gate, Mike and I had mounted similar wireless cameras to the corners of the house on two sides with a view of the fields, and then installed another pair of cameras on the big barn and the back side of the machinery/trailer barn to give us coverage in all four directions. There were obvious blind spots, of course, like the walkway intersection where the corners of the stables, hay barn, and garage met, but I’d installed another camera up on the side of the second story of the hay barn that looked down on the ten-foot-wide crossroads. I used that route all the time, and I already had a plan for how to seal it should the need arise.

  While my eyes might have been moving back and forth between the different monitors, my fingers were otherwise occupied as I kept pressing redial on my phone. Each time, the call would simply fail, and I would try again. When Mike finally picked up, I almost hung up on him out of habit.

  “What you know good?” Mike asked, his tone ringing with frustration.

  “Not a darned thing, since I can tell you’re on your house phone,” I replied irritably. “Decided to stay?”