Rockfall Page 3

  That meteor was estimated at twenty meters long, weighed about 10,000 tons, and was traveling at a little more than 40,000 miles per hour when it had detonated with the force of a five hundred kiloton explosion. I wondered how big this one would have to be, to cause the seismographs to register it as a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Longer than two Gerald Fords, I mused again before getting back to the topic on hand.

  All that violently displaced air, shoved aside by the unimaginable force of the impact, would create one hell of a fierce shockwave. Thinking about the distances involved and quickly checking the speed of sound, I remembered securing the windmills and relaxed. Not much else I can do, I realized. Then I thought of Wade and reached for the house phone. As my nearest neighbor and closest friend in the community, he’d been in the back of my mind the whole time.

  “What? Who is this?”

  “Wade, it’s Bryan,” I replied, trying to remain calm as I spoke. “I take it you haven’t heard the news. About the earthquake in China?”

  “Bryan, it’s almost three a.m. You know I never make it past the local news,” Wade complained. “Why should I care about an earthquake on the other side of the planet?”

  I paused, weighing my next words carefully.

  “Wade, it might be an earthquake, but it also might be something else. I don’t want to discuss it right now, but you might want to batten down the hatches. Get your rubber boots on and hop to it, neighbor.”

  After a long pause, Wade asked another question.

  “I’m guessing this can’t wait ‘til daylight?”

  I could hear Wade groan as he levered himself up in the bed. I knew Wade worked hard every day, and his job as a building contractor involved as much physical labor as it did brain sweat over every kind of rule and regulation governing his trade.

  “If it is something other than an earthquake, then no.”

  I could hear more motion on the other end of the phone as Wade eased a door shut in the background. That meant his wife, Dorothy, was home asleep. And I felt a small surge of guilt at calling at this unholy hour. Like my brother-in-law Patrick, Dorothy worked a crazy rotating schedule, this time for the last full-service hospital in Jasper. Wade must be trying to avoid rousing her. I knew Dorothy was a hard sleeper, but she had a hard time getting back to sleep if disturbed.

  “Care to give me a hint what’s got you spooked?” Wade asked, and like I knew him and his family, Wade knew me as well. I was never one to play practical jokes, so the man was taking my words at face value.

  “I’d say prep for possible high winds, for sure. Possibly heavy lightning, maybe some hail, and watch for signs of tornados,” I replied, trying to regain my calm.

  “Seriously? So, look for most of the bad things from the Old Testament except for the locusts and the boils,” Wade jabbed back, his voice still groggy but growing more wakeful as he had a chance to engage his brain. Wade Husband was a good, God-fearing, Church-going man. He might curse, but he never took the Lord’s name in vain and he tried to live his life as an example to his kids. He never tried to press his faith on me, and I respected his faith just like he respected mine. Honestly, in this neck of Texas, there’s not much difference between Baptist and Methodist.

  “That’s about right,” I replied, my voice low and serious. “I don’t know what, if anything, will happen, but it is liable to hit soon, Wade. Two hours or so. I just wanted to give you the chance to button up over there. I’ll come over after sunup to give you the details.”

  “So this windstorm could hit in the next few hours?” Wade interjected, worry threaded through his words. “And you don’t know how strong it might be? Shoot, Bryan, I could lose the whole corn crop, and it won’t be ready to pick for another month.”

  “Wade, I’m in the same boat. But there’s no guarantee anything will happen. This is just my fear talking, but I thought you’d want to know.”

  “How certain are you about this?”

  I sighed.

  “I trust the source. My brother’s friend. He stayed in when Mike got out. I’ve met him before and he’s not a practical joker.”

  Picking my words carefully had become second nature after the Snowden mess came out. Everybody with any sense knew the government monitored all our calls, and had been doing so for some time. I didn’t want to get Bart in trouble for sharing news that was almost certainly a closely-held piece of intelligence. This new administration leaked like a sieve, but only at the bidding of the Party.

  All the eavesdropping these days was done by computers, and likely search terms triggered by top secret algorithms. Cell phones were easy pickings, and they had all kinds of little features like remote-accessed GPS and recording functions that had terrorists and criminals quaking in their boots for a time. Sadly, this same technology could be turned to whatever group the Federal government decided might be a threat. With this new president only a few months into his first term, people already worried about who he would go after first on his Party’s enemies list.

  Landlines like we were using had at one time been thought to be safe from all but mechanical tapping, but recent rumblings cast this assumption into doubt. In addition, anything remotely computer-related, including your internet searches and library usage, were subject to being parsed and audited by Homeland these days.

  As long as you kept your conversation generic or used terms that weren’t highlighted, the odds of tripping a deeper search were thought to be dramatically reduced. Big Brother was always listening. Thus Mike’s use of the nonsense combination of words to substitute for meteorite. Rock Fall.

  “Should I get the family up?”

  I thought about that for a second. Following my lead, Wade had gone ahead and built a tornado shelter of his own. Doing the work himself and using his own equipment and leftover lumber, rebar, and concrete, the job came in on time and well under budget. I’d been there too, for a few days anyway, to lend an extra hand.

  “Wade, I just don’t know, but if it was me, yeah. You still got some time, so wake them up slowly, but they can go back to sleep in the shelter.”

  Wade grunted his agreement and his thanks, and I replaced the handset in its cradle. I wondered if my neighbor would heed my warning, or would he go back to sleep and wait to get the story later. My money was on him staying up to at least close his own window shutters and make sure the windmill didn’t blow away.

  No, he’d get Dorothy and the kids up, then send them to the shelter. Given some of his comments over the years, I suspected Wade had a bit of the prepper gene running through his DNA. Like the old song by Hank Williams, Jr., A Country Boy Can Survive, and Wade was country to the core. Country don’t mean stupid, as my father always reminded me.

  I, of course, tried to keep all my own precautions under wraps. I liked to think I was the gray man, after all. Wade might suspect, but I took pains not to leave a paper trail.

  Trying to get Wade and his family out of my head, I booted up the internet. I started hitting my bookmarked sites, checking to see if anyone else was talking about the earthquake, or anything else. I lurked, not bothering to log in, and just a simple review of the headlines let me know the cat was already out of the bag. Or at least, people were beginning to wonder.

  At one of the sites, I saw half a dozen ‘meteorite’ threads going strong. No one had any concrete news, but rumors were hot and heavy as speculation ran wild. Everyone had word of the China Sea earthquake, but now I was seeing mention of suspected volcanic activity, but no definitive report that an impactor had struck the ocean about three hours earlier. The location sounded correct, but nobody had pictures or videos yet, and all the talk amounted to little more than speculation. From the comments, I figured the roads in certain areas were already abuzz with vehicles like my brother, heading for their bolt holes.

  “Shit,” I murmured, feeling more certain than ever now that this was a real event. Funny, the talking heads on television were stilling droning on about the cataclysmic earthquake and the humanit
arian crisis in China, the Philippines, and the other surrounding nations. Nothing about a meteorite, and strangely, zip about a tsunami threat. After the 2004 earthquake and subsequent loss of life from just such an event, I was beginning to smell something fishy in the reporting. Well, more than the usual drivel.

  “Has the government already instituted censorship?” I wondered out loud. “Or are they just not getting it?”

  Finally, I decided it was too soon to tell, and I went back to the internet forums. I had three sites up at the same time, switching back and forth between the first pages, and then I realized I was missing something. I didn’t know all the handles of the posters on any of these sites, but eventually I pieced together what was bothering me.

  Two of these sites, one started by a right-wing conspiracy group and another, featuring more of a traditional Libertarian stance, allowed members to identify their home states. This was a voluntary thing and I knew some of the more security conscious members flat-out omitted this part of their profiles or posted erroneous states. Still, I didn’t see some of the usual night owls posting their usual stream of snarky comebacks or using the ‘eyeroll’ function.

  Checking quickly, I concluded nobody identifying themselves as being in Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, or even Alaska had posted a comment in the last two hours. Now, this was late, even for the West Coast, but the night owls tended to populate these sites. I knew then that something terrible must have happened.

  It was after four a.m. before I saw the next news update. I knew I’d been right, but the confirmation made my heart hurt anyway.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The windstorm proved to be anticlimactic when it blew through, but I didn’t know that when it started. Seeing the numbers start to climb in the wind gauge, I shut down the electronics and headed downstairs, refilled coffee mug in hand. I kept the battery-powered weather radio with me, but left the volume turned down low as I sat in my downstairs fortress of solitude and thought about what needed doing next.

  Despite my anxiety, I didn’t bother cracking the shelter door and instead, sat in my recliner in the recreation room and tried to digest everything I had on my laptop pertaining to meteorite threats. Over the years, I’d downloaded dozens of articles, but my main thrust of the research had to do with nuclear winter and how it compared to the effects of an impactor’s strike. Admittedly, I was fixated on man’s self-destructive tendencies, not Mother Nature’s cold indifference, but we all have our blind spots.

  After I couldn’t take the waiting anymore, I peeked through the upstairs door to see the main floor still standing. The sounds of the wind had already died down even as I stood there, my ears cocked like a puppy. Okay, dodged that bullet, I realized with a sigh as I stuck my tablet under my arm and walked back to the kitchen.

  Having lost much of its punch crossing a big chunk of the Pacific Ocean and half the North American continent, the shockwave still managed sustained winds of over sixty miles per hour. That was from the records kept by my weather station, operating on six D-cell batteries, and I knew the fields would be littered with blown-down corn stalks. That was a problem for later, I decided, as I headed for the breaker boxes in the utility room. Commercial power was still up, I noted. No breaks in the line, I was pleased to see, which saved me from having to flip the switches to my backup power supply.

  As soon as I clicked on the living room television, I could tell something had changed while I was out of touch. Flipping from channel to channel, I saw someone was feeding more details to the networks about this catastrophe. The newsreaders now confirmed the supposed earthquake’s epicenter, still a grotesque red circle, blood red, resembling a great wound in the surface of the planet. On each channel, colorful graphics tried to convey the exact location of Ground Zero to American viewers who still couldn’t distinguish between the Korean peninsula and the Japanese islands without the helpful little arrows. Judging from their proximity to the zone, I thought morbidly, maybe learning the location of those countries would become a quiz question in a history class rather than world geography.

  Still, no one used the word meteorite. Not the blank-eyed newsreaders, and not the talking heads they dragged out of their beds at this time of morning to pontificate on their own pet theories. Everything from global warming to commercial fishing zones became fodder for this crew of so-called experts, as they worked to come up with an appropriate sound bite to fit the occasion. The newsrooms had their chosen commentators, and these people knew if they couldn’t come up with something provocative, then the news vultures might not call the next time they needed to fill some airtime.

  As they continued to chatter, I noticed when the idea of a tsunami seemed to occur to several of the speakers almost magically, and I knew someone in the booth was feeding them information though their carefully disguised earpieces. Suddenly, the level of tension ratcheted up, just in time for the next commercial break.

  After the advertising for Medic Alert bracelets, the latest miracle mop, and genuine Gold certificates ended, I watched with rapt attention as a twenty-something in a mustard-colored blazer read from a press release from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This bland-looking youth recited FEMA’s official position, urging all citizens on the West Coast to remain in their homes and await further developments. ‘Don’t clog the vital thoroughfares and public transportation system at this time’, he warned, ‘as emergency services may have need of those resources’.

  He reminded me of Kevin Bacon’s character in Animal House, reassuring the citizens in an ever-increasingly panicked tone that all was well, even in the midst of a riot. After completing the forty-five second announcement, the junior manager stepped back from the podium and the cameras cut back to the hosts sitting in their network offices. I noticed that none were on the West Coast.

  If there was a tsunami bearing down on the coastal regions of California, Oregon, and Washington State, then those not already on high ground were doomed. As the minutes ticked by with no further developments, I began to suspect the federal government had already written off those areas. Leaving the television running, I went back to my laptop to discover my internet connection was down.

  That happened sometimes. Our local network wasn’t exactly robust. No telling what that wind blew down, or which towers were out of service. Then I checked my cell phone and I found I couldn’t access my internet browser there either, and e-mail was down, too.

  In the time it took me to check the routers in the office and then upstairs, confirming I was well and truly isolated from the internet, the Emergency Broadcast System kicked in, the loud, strident siren shaking me to my core. “Shit,” I muttered as I hurried back down the stairway, and into the living room to see a new newsreader on the current channel. I managed to catch him in the middle of his first sentence as he announced a Tsunami Warning was in effect for the entire West Coast, and to listen closely for local developments as a massive evacuation effort was underway. ‘Tune in to your local TV or radio’, he reminded everyone, ‘to find the schedule for transport to the nearest relocation center’.

  So, Big Brother was reporting Big Waves. Finally, I concluded. Television remote in hand, I quickly ran through the news networks and discovered something that reinforced my earlier fear. After that official announcement, you would expect the networks to switch to their field reporters on assignment or local affiliates in the affected areas. Anytime we’d had a hurricane, tornado or earthquake in the past, that was the norm. With this news, you would expect a stand up in front of some LA landmark theatre, or reporters using the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop for a report. Depending on the network and the party in office, you could count on either a story about orderly lines of grateful citizens being transported to a sunny vacation spot, or concerned faces decrying fascist, heavy-handed cops ordering undocumented citizens-to-be into stinking dump trucks, and zealous reporters protesting this forced deportation into the hellish Sonoran desert.

  Yes, I was a cynic, but t
his is my story, so deal with it.

  Instead, I saw more of the same. Studio shots of panels discussing the latest press release, and promises of more breaking news after the next commercial. Fed up with the blather, I left the muttering TV in the background and moved to my office, where I turned on another television, muted the sound, and fired up the HAM radio receiver.

  The HAM actually belonged to Mike, but he’d left it here after being denied, yet again, permission from his homeowners association, to erect a radio tower in his back yard. I kept telling him to just run a line in his tree, but the boy sometimes just don’t listen to good sense.

  Anyway, I had his HAM radio, a nice Kenwood system he’d cobbled together out of three different rigs purchased at various estate sales over the years, and all I had to do was go out to the nearest windmill and hook up the antenna again. I might be lacking in technical skills, but this was something Mike had taught me to do.

  Using a flashlight, I managed to get the right cables attached to the correct connections, turned the retaining bolts without incident, though I did take an extra five minutes to look over the structure of the mill and the surrounding yard. I see tree limbs down all over, and I make out at least one board blown loose from the machine shed, but otherwise the structures appear to have weathered the first big blow.

  Shucking my boots, I headed back to the desk in my office and fired up the HAM radio. I ignored the headset this time, since there’s nobody in the house but me at the moment, and so I tuned in to one of the first channels I always check. The static and distortion were things I’m accustomed to, though they seemed stronger this time, but the sound of crying over the radio threw me off at first.

  I listened, and I began to unravel the real news of the day. Things are worse than I thought. Much worse.

  Reports came in sporadically, but the truth was plain to discern. No one was talking about a meteor, not yet, but the secondary effects proved to be as terrible as I’d feared. The earthquakes I’d dreaded, or at least, the first wave, had already struck.