The Yellowstone Event: Book 6: The Aftermath Page 3

  With no power they had little to do other than rake and sweep the ash into piles and try to find a way to dispose of it.

  Supermarkets were looted and all shelves were emptied within hours.

  That first night the riots started, and got progressively worse on each subsequent night.

  During daylight hours residents hunkered down, afraid to go out lest their own belongings and supplies would be looted.

  The murder toll that first night was 110, mostly by shootings.

  The second night the number of murders rose to 230, and the bodies were left in place. The city deemed it too dangerous for coroners to go and pick them up, and the morgue was full anyway.

  After the number rose to over 500 the third night the mayor directed the coroner and firefighters to pick up the bodies, but only during daylight hours, and turned the professional basketball arena into a temporary morgue.

  On the fourth day the power finally came back on.

  Television service soon followed, but was hit and miss. Only one channel came in, the picture cut in and out, and the sound didn’t work at all.

  The dazed citizenry, therefore, could be forgiven if they didn’t understand why the Speaker of the House was standing at a podium in front of a group of reporters and… celebrating.

  But celebrating he was. A handful of other congressmen standing behind him were as well.

  Never mind that Speaker Tom Sigmund had just been informed the nation lost several millions of its citizens, either to death or mortal injuries.

  Never mind the landscape of the United States of America was forever altered, or that many more millions of people would likely die from starvation in the coming months.

  “It appears the explosion is over, and is not as bad as the most dire of predictions. There has been a tragic loss of life. We’ve lost a lot of our citizens, and we have a rough road ahead of us. But the worst is over and by God, the United States is still standing. Nebraska, by God, is still standing!”

  Ah, there it was. Now it made sense.

  For he was the senior representative from the Great State of Nebraska.

  The same Nebraska that many scientists claimed would be blasted to dust when Yellowstone erupted.

  He was, as pretty much every other man and woman with the title “United States Congressman” in front of his or her name, just watching out for his own.

  In prior days he prayed each and every day for his own family and friends, and the constituents who’d kept voting him back into office every six years for the better part of three decades.

  Truth was, he didn’t give a diddly damn for those lost in the explosion, so long as the people he cared about were still around to fawn over him, to reelect him, to tell him what a great man he was.

  None of the people standing behind him at the impromptu press conference were from states in the danger zone. They were all east coast or west coast representatives of his own party.

  They should have been holding their own press conferences, commiserating with the nation. Mourning the loss of their fellow Americans. Providing guidance and hope for the survivors.

  But they were celebrating too.

  Later they’d claim their rather glib and slightly jovial behavior was rooted mostly in relief. Relief that the blast, as bad as it was, was decidedly smaller than many scientists had predicted.

  “We lost a lot of lives,” one would later state in a town hall meeting. “But it could have been so much worse. We were grateful we didn’t lose millions more.”

  A certain element of American citizens is incredibly naïve. They are the Americans who fall for a candidate’s obviously false promises. They elect leaders believing their claims they are running “for the people, to my own detriment.”

  Those Americans believed the politicians when they claimed they were celebrating a lower-than-expected loss of life.

  The majority of Americans who saw the spectacle, though, used their heads. They saw the celebration for what it really was.

  And what it really was, was a group of slimy bottom-feeders who were glad that the blast had finally occurred, and that their respective states were relatively unscathed.

  And that now that the blast was over, the graft could begin.

  For their states’ populations were now ensured a share of the millions of new taxpayers who’d be fleeing the outer evacuation zones over the coming months.

  With them they’d bring booms in dozens of new industries, and a big shot in the arm to many other established industries.

  Each new venture, each fledgling new enterprise, was an opportunity for lawmakers to take kickbacks to grease wheels and make things happen.

  Every new wind farm, every new desalination plant, would require approval by the committee which oversaw the funds, who would gladly accept monetary kickbacks before approval was granted.

  The same was true of seaweed processing plants, which would become a big thing as the nation struggled to find new food sources.

  A hundred other cottage industries would crop up as well. And on all levels of government, politicians saw new opportunities to do what politicians have always done… enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense and the misery of others.

  It was the American way.

  Chapter 7

  Rocki had survived the throes of labor and childbirth three times in her twenties.

  She’d survived a horrific accident in her forties when a deer the size of a Buick tried to jump over her car and didn’t quite make it.

  She’d made it through a ruptured appendix and a diseased gall bladder and a bout of double pneumonia that plagued her for the better part of a year.

  None of that compared with the pain she was feeling now.

  Now that would have been bad enough by itself. Every muscle in her body hurt. Every bone, every blood vessel, every hair on her head.

  But the pain gods decided that wasn’t enough.

  In addition to the pain, they cursed her with the worst case of confusion she’d ever experienced.

  It was worse than the worst hangover. The worst case of medicine head. The worst case of dizziness.

  Worse than all of those put together.

  Rocki wasn’t sure if she was dead or alive. Conscious or knocked out cold. Awake or dreaming.

  Asked her name, she wasn’t sure she’d guess right given three tries. And not sure either whether her mouth could move enough to provide an answer anyway.

  The last thing she remembered… someone, she wasn’t sure who, was asking how far it was to the next town. He… or she, whoever it was… said they were down to a quarter of a tank of… something.

  She’d checked their GPS and saw that they were just a few miles south of Hays, Kansas.

  Something grabbed her attention before she could relay the information.

  A brilliant flash of light through the windshield.

  Her mysterious companion must have seen it as well.

  She got the sense of stopping short, like her companion slammed on the brakes. Probably blinded by the flash.

  Everything went black at that point, but she got another sense.

  One that didn’t make any sense. Not at all.

  It was an odd sensation. Almost as though someone picked up the vehicle they were in and tossed it through the air, like a child’s toy.

  The vehicle they were in… she struggled to remember what it was, exactly. A train car, maybe?

  No, that wasn’t it. Her companion appeared to be driving it. He seemed to have a steering wheel in front of him of some type.

  Him… yes, she was pretty sure it was a him.

  Maybe.

  She rolled very painfully to her left side.

  Something sharp poked her in the ribs.

  She was covered in dust, but didn’t seem to be crushed.

  Her vision was coming back to her, but at an agonizingly slow rate.

  Everything she took in was fuzzy… severely out of focus.

  Was this what
it was like to be blind?

  What if it lasted forever?

  Could she crawl out of… wherever she was… to safety, if she couldn’t clearly see two feet in front of her face?

  She heard a groan to her right. Maybe ten feet away, maybe farther.

  Without thinking she mouthed a name… Darrell…

  Obviously her subconscious was much brighter and in much better shape than she was at the moment, for her brain knew the name she couldn’t muster on her own.

  Darrell… was he her husband? Her lover? Her significant other?

  Or was he merely her driver? A casual acquaintance and nothing more?

  Whatever or whoever he was, he didn’t answer.

  She tried again, only noticing the second time how weak her voice was.

  How dry her throat was.

  How raw it felt as the air rushed through it.

  “Darrell? Are you there?”

  Her companion coughed. Weakly at first, then mightily as he tried to speak.

  It was a full-throated cough, though. Nothing weak about it. Instinctively she took that as a good sign. Instinctively she knew this… person… whatever or whoever it was… wasn’t hindered by damage to his or her lungs.

  Then came a few words.

  And her heart melted as tears came to her eyes.

  “Honey, are you okay?”

  The voice sounded familiar. Her subconscious recognized it as someone close to her, even as she didn’t have a clue what name to attach to it.

  Was this familiar voice attached somehow to Darrell, the familiar name? The name she couldn’t yet attach a face to?

  She assumed she was the “honey” of which the man spoke, though she still was unsure of her own name.

  She took a chance.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m okay. I think. I hurt everywhere, but I don’t think anything is broken.”

  “Can you see?”

  “Everything is fuzzy and gray. I’m afraid to move because I don’t know what’s beyond my reach. Are you badly hurt?”

  There was a pause.

  She got the sense he didn’t know the answer to her question. That he was just now taking inventory of his injuries so he could provide her a proper answer.

  He spoke slowly, as though selecting his words carefully.

  “I can’t see anything. Not even my hand in front of my face. It’s all black. I don’t think anything is broken, but my leg is bent beneath me and I’m pinned beneath some rubble.

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “No. I don’t. I think something big exploded in front of us. I saw a bright flash of light. Then we seemed to be swept off the road. I guess I lost consciousness after that.

  “Do you know how long we’ve been like this?”

  “No. I’ve been awake for hours, I think, unable to see, unable to move. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She couldn’t answer because she didn’t know.

  Instead she started to softly sob.

  Chapter 8

  For months before the eruption the United States government scrambled to build its food stores by buying over ten million tons of grains and beans.

  From anyone who had it.

  Even China and Russia.

  That went against the grain (no pun intended) of many patriotic Americans.

  But it was what it was.

  It also didn’t make the U.S. any friends around the world, for agricultural futures went up like a rocket and the whole world started paying more.

  Of course, most of those nations relied heavily on a stable dollar, for their own exports to the states of all other commodities pretty much kept their own economies afloat.

  Government warehouses were filling up all over the country.

  Well, all over except for the Yellowstone area.

  No one knew for sure when the eruption would come; therefore no one knew for sure whether there was time to stockpile enough food and fuel to keep the survivors surviving for two years.

  But that was the government’s goal: two years after eruption.

  It was just simple math, really.

  A team of the best and the brightest scientists available estimated the number of dead at twenty five percent of the population in the first year.

  Ten percent more within the following four years; mostly due to suicide, respiratory distress and various cancers.

  That was roughly a sixty five percent survival rate, or roughly two hundred eleven million Americans.

  None of the arable farmland in the nation would be viable for at least five years.

  And it would take an awful lot of food and water to support two hundred eleven million people for five years.

  It wasn’t just the food.

  For months the government had been buying up half the bottled water produced in the nation, from Maine to Oregon, from North Dakota to south Florida.

  They stored it on military bases outside the evacuation zones by the millions… not millions of bottles, but millions of pallets.

  They knew that every fresh water source from coast to coast would be covered with ash, and would therefore be poisoned.

  The Department of Defense positioned portable desalination plants every hundred miles or so along each coast.

  It would take ocean water, purify it and remove its salt, and make it drinkable.

  The plants wouldn’t keep up with the demand, though, and that’s where the bottled water came in.

  Hopefully it would fill the gap until seven monstrous desalination plants came on line in four years: three on the west coast and four off New England and the Carolinas.

  That’s where some scientists broke from conventional thinking.

  “By that time the rivers and streams will have rid themselves of most of the ash,” they said. “The land will be healing. Plants will start growing again. The permanent desalination plants will no longer be necessary.”

  No one knew who was wrong and who was right.

  All they knew was that the federal government had to make things right, for ignoring the Yellowstone problem for many decades.

  Indications were that congress knew they’d been caught with their pants down.

  They couldn’t go back and change anything.

  But by God, they’d do what they could to save as many lives as they could. They owed the nation nothing less, and the public would accept nothing less.

  Money was no object. A usually-frugal congress would spend whatever they had to spend to keep Americans alive.

  And, of course, their under the table kickbacks went up a proportional amount.

  Naturally.

  Oil and gasoline too were things that had to be stockpiled.

  For many years the nation had stored vast amounts of oil in what they called the strategic oil reserves.

  It was meant for the next world war, when it could be assumed normal shipments of oil would be disrupted. Or cut off completely, if we happened to go to war with one or more nations we once bought oil from.

  The thinking was that the United States could survive Yellowstone on oil pumped out of the ground in Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska.

  Texas sweet crude all by itself would keep the nation running at almost full capacity, provided the refineries in Corpus Christi and Galveston only went down occasionally for routine maintenance.

  The reserve being full to its 713 million barrel capacity would be an added insurance policy.

  Paradoxically, fuel usage was expected to rise, despite scientists’ dire prediction that twenty five percent or so of America’s drivers would perish in the early weeks of the catastrophe.

  Presumably they’d take twenty five percent of the vehicles with them.

  The problem was that the nation’s survivors would be very mobile in the months immediately following the event.

  Millions would move to Alaska. And for every citizen who moved up to the last frontier, a truck would soon follow with his or h
er belongings.

  Not all of them would come from the evacuation zones.

  About a third would move out of perfectly good houses in the safe areas and would turn their houses over to the government.

  Those houses, in turn, would be reoccupied by other families.

  In some cases families relocated clear across the country.

  Scientists expected gasoline usage to rise fifteen percent the first year before tapering off in the second and getting back down to pre-Yellowstone Event levels the third year after eruption.

  Of course, that was all guesswork.

  Actual usage might be far less.

  Or far more.

  Everyone pretty much agreed that the shortfall between what was in the reserve and its capacity needed to be filled prior to the eruption just in case the scientists were wrong.

  That shortfall represented just over two hundred million barrels of oil.

  Again, money was no object.

  Congress had already accepted that for the nation to survive they’d have to increase the national debt substantially.

  Most of the OPEC nations understood that the world economy depended in large degree on the strength of the dollar.

  They’d resist the urge to jack up prices and take advantage of the United States in her time of need.

  They agreed to raise prices no more than five dollars per barrel. That was roughly what they expected to spend to make two mothballed refineries operational again and to drill thirty more wells.

  It was rather odd that the United States’ two closest allies in the region, Qatar and Saudi Arabia cast the only two votes against the agreement.

  The global stage is constantly changing.

  Apparently one never can tell who their friends are when they’re in a critical time of need and have a devastating volcanic eruption lurking just over the horizon.

  One thing the Congress of the United States is good at, though, besides graft and corruption, is remembering slights.

  More than one congressman, more than one senator, made mental notes to find a way to get even with the kingdoms as soon as it was feasible to do so.