Chapter One
Jack’s head was aching. She knew if she didn’t get some rest soon that she would be useless and useless was not something she could afford to be; not now, not ever again. Life had changed so drastically, so quickly. And it was still changing; growing more dangerous as each day passed and since there was no changing that fact all that was left was to face head on in hopes of she and her little sister surviving.
The world has been experiencing one disaster after another for months. It didn’t take long before some people began to wonder if it was Armageddon; weird cults started to spring up garbling together all sorts of science fiction and out of context Biblical scriptures to prove it and gain followers. And if it wasn’t Armageddon, they thought it was a more mundane end of the world scenario. Either/or to be honest. It definitely was the end of the world for a lot of people.
There are too many beginnings – each country and person having their own – but Jack had a pretty good idea of what started the roller coaster the world was now on. Russia and China had decided enough was enough of mucking up each other’s plans to take over the world and decided to collaborate. As allies they entered the Middle East, crushed most of the regimes comprising the Caliphate that had taken over the Region, and as had been done several times before in history, replaced the Caliphate with secular regimes who were amendable to playing the game the Russo-China way. The two super powers then divvied up the region between them while the rest of the world quivered wondering what came next. That pretty much put a chokehold on the world’s economy.
What came next was that Russia exerted a lot of influence and control in South and Central America; and China did likewise only in Asia and Africa. The US Dollar, after experiencing a brief surge as investors hunted for a safe haven to escape to, went into free-fall as people realized there was no escape for anyone at that point. Of course there were repercussions. You can’t remove a major cog in a piece of machinery and expect the gears to continue operating properly. Within months the rest of the world was experiencing economic collapse. If you listened to most people, they believed the so-called elites of the world to be masterminding the chaos and blamed the rich for the straits they found themselves in. However, the reality was that the “elites” were just as confused and panicked as the rest of society, wondering how their carefully crafted plans and enterprises could be failing as miserably as they were; they put the fault on the entitlement crowd who wanted something for nothing and benefits without risk. It became tedious listening to both sides blame the other, especially as it didn’t change the fact that the majority of the world was in a bad way.
And then, as the world was bickering and throwing words in a prelude to throwing bombs, the unexpected happened, something not even the elitist of the elite were prepared for. Truly a worst case scenario.
With almost no warning Laki, the Icelandic volcano, erupted in a near repeat of its 1783 eruption. It developed over a hundred craters all of which were spewing hot ash then molten lava. The volcano kept going for days and the longer it did the more the talking heads on television spoke about things like sulfuric aerosols and volcanic weather patterns and scientific terms that both confused, then frightened, a lot of people.
In the midst of trying to determine the effect Laki would have on the economic depression the world was already suffering, Mount Baekdu in North Korea where it bordered China awakened and blew its top. When it went it threw over 1000 times more ash into the air than the Icelandic volcano eruptions though it lacked the lava features.
The airline industries of most countries were already grounded. And a good thing too because three weeks later something truly catastrophic happened. Four major volcanos went off like the world was belching, one right after another; Vesuvius then Stromboli then Etna and lastly Santorini. None of them were as bad as they could have been, or even as bad as Laki and Baekdu, but the point was that string of eruptions began with little real warning; and, since they’d been quiet for so long population centers had encroached into unsafe proximities. The people near Vesuvius died in their beds. By the time Santorini blew they died in the streets trying to escape. Think the horror of Pompeii only captured by thousands on social media as they tried to leave behind something of themselves besides ash.
No one has been able to explain it yet except for a few freaked out conspiracy theorists on late night radio shows like Coast to Coast, known for its weekly dose of doom porn. Their explanations didn’t really have a lot of basis in fact but in theory, hyperbole, and hysteria. Essentially, people talked because they were afraid. The theories they came up with were supposed to help them manage their fear, give it some kind of structure that could be dealt with constructively; however, more often than not all they did was scare themselves more. Truth is stranger than fiction and if they had been given a glimpse of what was coming many of them would have refused to accept it as reality.
What really caused panic and threw both China – already having trouble dealing with the eruption of Baekdu – and Russia into a tizzy is when the supposedly long dormant and thought to be extinct Ararat volcano blew. It blew so violently in fact that its ice cap was completely obliterated as was the peak nearest to it known as Little Ararat. It was thought at first that a nuclear detonation had occurred and in fact Turkey believed that so readily that it activated its nuclear arsenal and launched a counter strike on several of its neighbors. That didn’t do anything but add to the nightmarish chaos.
The world was in so much shock it didn’t even react to the eruption of Kilimanjaro. What’s Africa after all? But they sure sat up and noticed when Krakatau and Tambora blew because the combined effect created immense tsunamis that took out the naval presences there that were protecting the international envoys that had gathered to try and hash out some kind of peace agreement before things got worse.
Shock. There’s no other word for it. Already the weather was changing and there were all sorts of documentaries being broadcast on “The Year Without A Summer,” an historical event that took place in 1816 that caused unprecedented illness and famine as a result of a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil caused by a severe volcanic eruption.
When Mount Fuji went in Japan the world barely had the energy left to whimper. It took Bezynmianny – a volcano in Kamchatka, Russia that had been erupting almost constantly since it had reawakened in 1955 - and Klyuchevskaya – located on the Russian coast where it meets the Bering Sea and which had started its last eruption cycle in 2007 – to begin erupting more fiercely, before Russia finally refocued its energies on something other than world domination.
Some in the US, ignoring the cataclysmic reality the world was facing, were gleefully rubbing their hands together at the catastrophes that their enemies had been experiencing. It was payback time; if they wanted aide and assistance then they’d have to come crawling on their hands and knees. Some even claimed it was God showing the US favor. However, those with more commonsense were sticking pins in maps and predicting that Illimani and Katmai in Alaska were next. They weren’t wrong. Anchorage was the first major US city to be all but destroyed by the volcanic dominoes. There were some people with commonsense that had started to plan and prepare for what seemed inevitable. A multi-year, world-wide catastrophe that would likely be a turning point in the human race if not a near extinction level event.
The next volcanic domino to fall was Mt. Ranier followed quickly by Mount St. Helens, both of which proved to be heartbreakingly destructive, killing tens of thousands of those that had hung on to the fatal idea that it couldn’t happen to them. Then Lassen Peak, the southernmost volcano on the Cascade Ridge began to rumble to life after several decades of quietude. From that point people wondered what would be next, the volcanos of Mexico or the super volcano under Yellowstone?
But even in the midst of such world changing catastrophes, people face their own personal world-changing events. The end of the world would have been easy and soon over. Less suffering that way. For those waking up after the end of the world as they knew it and finding they were still alive, that was the real catastrophe.
Jack shook her head, momentarily clearing it of all of the flotsam that tried to panic her. She looked at her little sister, trying to desperately to imitate how their mother had dealt with her. Reluctantly, Lena finally crawled into the tent and did as she was asked to do. In no time Jack heard the young girl’s breathing settle into the deep rhythms of sleep and it was with some relief that Jack could finally lean over and have the silent cry that had been pent up all day. It had been a little over a week since the cop and social worker had come by to tell them that their parents’ bodies had finally been officially identified among the dead of the multi-vehicle pile-up on the interstate. There had been a backlog in the coroner’s office and it had taken longer than it should have.
This was the Deep South; ice wasn’t supposed to be on the road, but it was. Someone driving an SUV had hit a patch of black ice doing at least 70 miles an hour. Careening out of control they banged into several cars and a semi, creating a chain reaction of massive proportions. A total of forty-two vehicles had been involved resulting in multiple fatalities. Their parents had been driving Jack’s mini cooper to save on gas. The mini cooper had been something her dad had found at an auction and they had spent a couple of months making it road worthy right before Jack graduated from high school.
Because of spikes in fuel prices that had accompanied the international economic instability, the mini cooper became the family’s go to car for most of the traveling they did … especially long distance travel which is what their parents had been doing. They’d had no choice but to travel almost two hours to get to a private practice that would accept their family insurance so that their Mom could see a doctor. State Troopers had found the mini cooper’s license plate amongst the debris littering the highway. The mini itself had apparently disintegrated during the impact so it had taken a while to confirm what Jack had known in her heart as soon as her parents had never called to let her know they were safe. Jack had then been forced to deal with lots of official paperwork and during that discovered that Mom was a lot worse off than her parents had been letting on.
“Am I supposed to find comfort in the fact they went together?” Jack wondered for the eleventy-dozenth time. “Because if I am … I don’t.” But the cause for her tears that night wasn’t the loss of her parents but a different straw in the load Jack was carrying.
Jack was about to start crying again when there was a loud knock on the backdoor.
ns 15.158.61.44da2
