Rockfall

by William Allen

  Since I presumed they had armed guards at the doors, I expected there was more to the story, but again, little ears were listening so I let it go for later.

  “And done,” Pat announced, setting his tools aside. “Much better with the AA batteries over those darn CR123As.”

  “Why is that?” Beatrice asked, her curiosity piqued.

  “Well, when you go to the pharmacy or to the grocery store, you ever see any of them hanging on the racks by the checkout counter?”

  “Uh, no?”

  “But you see row after row of AA batteries, right?” Pat explained, and the light dawned on Beatrice’s face.

  “So, easier to get replacements, then. Got it,” the older lady nodded, and I knew she did. Beatrice might not be a full-blown prepper, but she got the idea that simple was better, and getting replacement AA batteries was simpler than getting the other type.

  Once the show was over, Nikki ushered the children out of the room for a few minutes while the grownups got together to update everybody on their progress with the hurricane emergency plan. I could tell Pat was impressed at the work output in such a short period, and Mike and I gave fair credit to Nancy’s contribution.

  “So where is this paragon of heavy equipment operation?” Pat asked, glancing around as if the woman was simply occupied elsewhere in the house.

  “At work,” I explained, then I went on to let everyone know we would have a new worker, two really, starting tomorrow. Beatrice was excited at the prospect of having more help with the gardening, and I went on to talk about our expanded greenhouse plans.

  Pat soaked it all in like he’d been here the whole time. He listened closely as well while Marta detailed the state of our medical supplies, highlighting what we had, what was still needed, and finally what remained on our wish list. He nodded along, and then rattled off a list of antibiotics, pain meds and other goodies he’d carried out while making his exit from government employment. He neglected to explain where he’d acquired the night vision goggles, which I knew retailed for around nine thousand dollars in the civilian models when I’d priced them before. No, I’d paid hundreds for Gen 3 night vision rather than tens of thousands. I had money, but I didn’t have federal-budget-type cash.

  Finally, the conversation wound down and I got to the question I’d been waiting to ask.

  “From your ear to the ground in the state capitol, Pat, what is FEMA bringing to this hurricane prep party?”

  “Not a blasted thing, near as I can tell,” Pat replied, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. “I heard some folks grumbling how they felt like the president was leaving us out in the cold because he hadn’t carried any of the Gulf Coast states in the last election, but I don’t think that’s it at all.”

  “What then?” Marta asked, irritation in her voice at the idea of being ignored in such a situation.

  “They don’t have anything else to send, do they?” Mike replied before Pat could open his mouth. “FEMA was only designed to handle one disaster at a time, and then, mostly coordinating with the state offices anyway.”

  Pat bobbed his head slowly.

  “That’s what I was getting to. The president needs the energy production we offer, both in Houston and all along the coast. He wouldn’t be leaving us hanging if he had a choice.”

  “And we’re on our own,” I added, looking around and catching the eye of each person gathered there at the kitchen table. “We’re going to have to be our own safety net, folks. We feared this day would come at some point, and going forward, our success or failure will be in our own hands.”

  With that somber thought, the group turned to grilling Mike and I about our adventures in town that day. I let Mike tell the story, that being one of his many skills, but I ended the conversation with the admonishment from Lieutenant Bastrop to keep my head down and avoid the sheriff’s attention. This revelation didn’t do anything to lighten the mood of the room, but we were far enough down the road to realize, I hoped, that soon enough we would have more enemies than just a pissed-off Mother Nature.

  Mankind, after all, was as natural as anything else in the world, and few things were more deadly.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Hurricane Debbie was a Category Five hurricane when her leading edges came ashore just north of the Houston Ship Channel, tearing a strip off Galveston that might rival the infamous hurricane of 1900. At least as far as property damage, since the island was all but completely evacuated this time around. The National Guard went door to door, stuffing civilians on buses and shipping them out. To where, I wasn’t sure, since the radio reports didn’t elaborate and the television coverage completely glossed over that part of the operation.

  We had no way of judging the severity of the damage inflicted on Houston itself, but I had a sinking fear the city would be rendered largely uninhabitable. The idea filled me with a sick dread I tried to hide from the rest of my family with varying levels of success.

  We got our wayward niece Mary and her husband Charles in just hours after the first bands of intense rain hit the area, and as the winds intensified, the house began to creak ever so slightly.

  “Wind speeds must be up over eighty miles-per-hour,” Mike observed. “What’s this roof rated for, anyway?”

  I had to laugh, and Pat joined in with a short chuckle. We were sitting at the kitchen table, along with Charles, playing poker and listening to the weather station on the handheld radio. We’d taken down all the antennas, secured the standing structures to the best of our ability, and removed the exterior-mounted security cameras. All of the solar array, including the mounting brackets, had been squirreled away in three different barns to make sure some of them survived the hurricane, and we’d been on battery power for two hours now after the commercial power lines went down. We only had a circuit for emergency lighting and the freezer still active.

  Despite the battery-powered clock reading three o’clock in the afternoon, with the heavy shutters in place, the kitchen took on a decidedly gloomy atmosphere. Of course, when I’d peeked outside just twenty minutes ago, the hour might as well have been three a.m. with the dome of roiling storm clouds perched atop our small part of the world. Pitch black outside, like looking up at the world from the bottom of the ocean. Given recent events, that thought chilled me to the bone.

  “Well, I wanted to get the one twenty mph-rated metal roof, but you said it was too expensive, so I settled for something less,” I lied, watching the eyes of the other two men widen a touch at this revelation. “Can’t recall what the manufacturer warrantied this one for.”

  The roof was actually designed to take winds up to one hundred-and-forty miles-per-hour, but Mike couldn’t resist stirring up the boys. And me? I was his enabler, so shame on me as well.

  “Raise a buck,” Pat said, peering over his cards as if nothing was wrong, and I imagined he’d been this way even while waiting out a mortar barrage.

  I then glanced over at Charles, who was sweating bullets. I knew it wasn’t from our high-stakes gambling. Or at least, it wasn’t from the card game going on.

  “Fold,” Charles said when the bid came to him, dropping his cards on the table. “And I’m out. You guys are crazy. I’m going to check on Mary.”

  “Charles, we’re just funning you,” I admitted, setting aside my own cards. “And I think it’s time we joined the rest of the crew downstairs.”

  Quarters were tight in the basement shelter, and I was about to open up the second half of the shelter area, what Mike and I referred to as the bunker area, to alleviate the crowding once the four of us moved downstairs. That part, built adjacent to the conventional basement and with the concealed blast door and the closed air circulation system, was rated for a group our size even without counting the basement area itself. We could house twenty people for up to six months if the bunker needed to be sealed, but none of us wanted to burn through resources that might be needed later.

  The droning of the radio in the background suddenly faded t
o static, and I cast a look in Mike’s direction. He frowned, then reached over and switched off the battery-powered radio.

  “They probably lost their tower,” he said softly. “I think we should retire to the Lair.”

  That’s what Pat had called it, the Lair, since the Batcave was already taken, and I saw the young man’s fleeting smile at Mike’s words, but Charles didn’t get the reference. He just looked concerned, and I wondered if the man might be claustrophobic. Beatrice admitted to having a wee bit of a problem with being underground, though not strictly a problem with enclosed spaces, and Pat had already administered a mild sedative for Marta’s mom.

  Once we decided to move, the exodus quickly came together as the last of the lights up top were extinguished and I checked the doors to ensure all the bolts were thrown. My neighbor Wade might have thought the doors were a bit overboard when we’d installed them, but I explained that after living in Houston, fire-resistant metal doors gave me peace of mind. Home invasions remained a thing in the bigger cities, and since I worked in town, I’d explained to Wade, I wanted to have a house to come back to at the end of the day.

  Steel framed, with double deadbolts and interior hinges meant the three exterior doors from the house would be breach-resistant, but somebody determined could always get inside. This house wasn’t designed as a castle with a moat and twenty-foot-tall stone walls, but by using a layered defense, including the front gate and the now-dismounted cameras, one could make their home fairly secure against intruders. The doors were there just to buy us time to react.

  Thinking about the security of the house got my mind off the thoughts of the destruction going on outside. Destruction I couldn’t do anything about. From the last television images of the storm coming ashore, hurricane force winds were reported as far away as Corpus Christi to the west and over to Biloxi in Mississippi in the east, making this a true monster of a hurricane. Maybe not a Cat 6, but I worried that the storm formation might stall and continue to build, becoming a permanent fixture over the area.

  Only Mike knew my real fears of this occurrence, since he shared them. With all of the extra heat energy pumped into our biosphere by the Rockfall, we had already witnessed the effects every day for months with the rain, but this gigantic hurricane finally showed us in this area of the world, just how much damage the planet had sustained. A little over a week ago, I’d been listening to the BBC and overheard a terrifying confirmation as British researchers submitted a paper verifying the existence of half a dozen hypercanes rotating through the Pacific Ocean. Through satellite monitoring, the meteorologists had confirmed the theoretical as real when they’d tracked this series of self-sustaining hurricanes that might well prove to be permanent fixtures in this changed world. I’d hastily recorded the story segment and played it back later for Mike, and then Marta and Nikki. Mike had admitted the math was beyond him, but the idea that these beasts truly existed made the idea of Hurricane Debbie sticking around for days, if not weeks or months, all the more terrifying.

  For now, though, all we could do was sit in the dark and wait for the sun to return. My family had prepared as best we could for a disaster, but instead we got an end-of-civilization happening. I wasn’t a particularly religious individual, had in fact gone through a phase when I actively cursed God, but as I sat there in the dim space I’d carved out of a hole in the ground, I prayed. Not for myself, but for the family and friends around me, and especially for the children.

  I would never see my son grow up, and I would never see my wife’s smile brighten a room, and it had taken me years to come to grips with these truths. Now, the idea that these nieces and nephews of mine, or even Billy and Lisa, not of my blood but of my clan, would never see the stars again filled my heart with an anguish I didn’t know I still possessed. So I prayed, and hoped this storm would pass.

  But all the while, I knew in the back of my mind that even if, no, not if, when the rain stopped falling and the winds ceased their howling, we still had worse to face. For we had to survive the coming cold of what promised to be a terrible winter, and then the chill summer that came after.

  But we would fight. And pray we were strong enough to see our children survive.

  AFTERWARD

  For my readers,

  If you’ve gotten this far, then you have my sincerest thanks. If you liked the story, please leave a review. Four and five-star reviews are the lifeblood of Indie authors, after all. Stay tuned, as Book Two is already under way and should be out in the next few months. This is planned as a three-book series, but I’ve said that before and ended up writing seven, so don’t hold me to that number. We’ll just see how much trouble I can inflict on the Hardin family.

  Writing a book is sometimes a slow, slogging process as an author translates inspiration into production, and this one took longer than most. I had the idea that later became Rockfall many years ago, and I jotted down a few lines before realizing this was a story I wasn’t good enough to tell. Not then, anyway. I felt like I needed some time to work on my writing and develop my skills more as a storyteller. Hopefully, I’ve grown enough as an author to now do this story justice.

  This book is the first installment of the Tertiary Effects series. This is not a story about a meteorite impacting the ocean, causing massive tidal waves, or tsunamis, and thus wrecking the Pacific Basin. Those are Primary Effects. This is also not a story about the earthquakes and landslides spawned by this collision. Those would be considered Secondary Effects. Instead, I am telling a story here about the Tertiary Effects, the long-term effects that are caused, or initiated, as the result of that catastrophic rockfall. My characters in this story live on the other side of the world from the massive devastation, but their lives are nevertheless turned upside down by this catastrophe.

  I know many of my readers are members of the prepper community, and I admit to possessing many of those same tendencies. I routinely stockpile batteries, bottled water, and easy-to-prepare foods in the pantry. Disaster is only just around the corner, and that can mean anything from a loss of employment to a catastrophic illness to, well, an asteroid hitting the planet. All these things happen, and the only difference is a matter of degree. For me, I always keep a cautious eye on the Weather Channel, as the Gulf of Mexico frequently seems to be looking to reclaim my part of the Texas coastline.

  The Southeast Texas setting for this series might be familiar for some who have read my Walking in the Rain series, just a little further south and east of Nacogdoches. I no longer live in that area, but after having spent the first seventeen years of my life there, I still consider it home. However, for readers who are interested, there is no Albany County in the state of Texas. There is an Albany, TX located in Shackleford County, but that is the only similarity. No, New Albany and Albany County are entirely fictional and are the products of my imagination. I wanted to have a blank canvas to work with as I created a small-town in an out-of-the-way county adjusting to living in a slow-motion decline, while dealing with the predatory impulses of a corrupt lawman and an increasingly lawless population.

  For the curious, the main character in this story, Bryan, is not modeled or based on me. He’s younger, prettier, and in much better shape. Like with my location, though, I am still guilty of co-opting people and families from my own memories to help populate my stories, and yes, there really was a family modeled on the Husband family. They had twelve kids and were our neighbors when MC and I were growing up. I ended up having to prune their family tree back a bit here, as the sheer numbers originally conceived left me constantly having to check back with my cheat sheets.

  And finally, for critics who dismiss Bryan’s homesteading preparations as being farfetched or fancifully unrealistic, all I can say is I’ve recently looked at land prices in that area, and you can afford eighty to one hundred acres of farmland for what an half-acre might cost you in the River Oaks area of Houston. What you spend your money on is up to you, but I can still remember hearing how much one of my previous bosse
s paid for his latest sports car, and realizing that his toy cost more than my house.

  If your goal is to live a quiet country life and ensure your family is protected, then is that really all that extravagant? Again, thanks for spending time with me and keep an eye out for the next book in this series.

  William Allen

  August 2019

  Table of Contents

  DAY ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WEEK TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  WEEK THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  WEEKS FOUR and FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  AFTERWARD