Desolation Read online

  DESOLATION

  M.L. Banner

  DESOLATION is an original work of fiction.

  The characters and dialogs are the products of this author’s vivid imagination.

  Most of the science and the historical incidents described in this novel are based on reality,

  and so are its warnings.

  Copyright © 2014 by M.L. Banner,

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Cover Art: Damonza.com

  Editor: Karen Conlin

  Formatting: Polgarus Studio

  Toes in the Water Publishing, LLC

  DESOLATION (n)

  A state of complete emptiness or destruction.

  Synonyms: bleakness, starkness, barrenness, sterility, isolation, & loneliness

  Anguished misery or loneliness.

  Synonyms: misery, sadness, unhappiness, despondency, sorrow, depression, & grief

  Prologue

  How our world ended

  10 Days After Event (A.E.)

  In a matter of minutes, for most of us, the world changed from one of privileged ambivalence to one of daily survival of the fittest or the luckiest. A few of us even expected this apocalyptic replay. History treated the giant solar storm known as the Carrington Flare of 1859 as an unnoticeable blip, largely ignored on its lengthy timeline of misery: the earth lost only a few lives and most telegraph lines. History now bears witness to what is simply known as The Event, when ten days ago a similar sized solar storm changed everything. In an instant, the entire world’s technology was zapped out of existence. All our knowledge is but a fading memory, once stored in physical books, later transferred to servers and democratized for every person through the likes of Wikipedia, but now erased forever. Computers and other internet devices have been rendered as lifeless as the corpses that are piling up in every city. There is no power running to our homes, and likely will never be again in our lifetimes. Without power, we are cut off from life-giving water; hope for a few may bubble up from the ground’s natural streams, but will probably shrivel up in time. All vehicles, except the rare antique coaxed into temporary service, are dead; transportation for those who survive in the coming days will be as it was for our earliest ancestors, on foot. Our global communications and instant access to information have been reduced to the distance our voices will carry through the air’s random currents. The world’s losses have already been enormous; my fear is it will get worse.

  The story that history will likely never fully remember is the rapid deterioration of the earth’s magnetosphere, our only defense from the sun’s invading army of solar storms. Like the Spartans who succumbed to the short spears and arrows of Xerxes’ Persian horde at Thermopylae, we too will be no match for the sun’s infinite volleys from her unending quiver. Solar flares are her arrow’s poison tip, assailing the earth’s dwindling inhabitants with ten times her normal radiation, bringing with it a slow extinction to all who draw breath. The shafts of each arrow are her coronal mass ejections of plasma and electromagnetic material that continue to produce electrical discharges to anything conductive, making even the seemingly benign deadly.

  Yesterday, one of my captors was electrocuted simply by sticking his head into a metal trough filled with water. His herky-jerky death throes generated laughter from men who wear machismo and lust for murder like old clothes.

  In spite of three generations of Thompsons prepping for the end, I wasn’t fully prepared. This has put in jeopardy my future and that of my friends, Bill and Lisa King, and their kids. My heart breaks at the sadness they must feel upon realizing the permanence of their separation from their youngest daughter, Darla, or their only son, Danny. Assuming they are not already dead, realistically, there is too much distance and too much violence separating them in the Midwest from their parents and older sister, stuck in Rocky Point, Mexico during a family vacation. I am tortured daily by the King family’s desolation and my inability to uphold a three-generation-old vow to protect them. How could I be so foolish to think the other cartels wouldn’t find out I was dealing guns to El Gordo’s Ochoa cartel? El Gordo’s men abducted me—I guess for my protection—and have treated me well, but I am still a prisoner here, indentured to fix and post-prep his ranch against the sun for as long as he wishes. But, the longer I am here, the more my prospects for continued survival, and those of the Kings, diminish.

  The prospects for the rest of the world are bleaker. Unless the sun abates her war on us, our entire environment will completely change. Certainly, this is a world-wide calamity that will kill most of the world’s population within a generation.

  But there is Cicada. Started almost 150 years ago by my great-grandfather, Russell Thompson, it may offer earth its only hope for survival, assuming it is able to endure the desolation of the collapsing world around it.

  These are the new realities of our existence. The quicker we come to terms with them, the quicker we can focus on living … or on dying.

  Maxwell J. Thompson

  Max put down his pen and grimly examined his hand-written pages. He folded them and put them in a small bag containing the only belongings he could call his own, in hopes of one day adding these pages to those already written in the leather-bound journal his great-grandfather started. He would have to get back to Rocky Point. Not just for his sake, but for the Kings’. That would be his primary focus now.

  Part I

  10 Days A.E. (After Event)

  “The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.

  Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation;

  I am alone.”

  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  “It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that when we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, of poverty and misery, the end of all things, or their extreme—then rises in our mind the thought of God.”

  Vincent van Gogh

  1.

  Deadly Waters

  Rocky Point, Mexico

  A loud screeching cut through the raw morning air, rousing Bill and Lisa King from a fitful sleep of restless nightmares.

  The uproar was one more in the endless list of sounds they had never heard before, which made up their life after the apocalypse. It wasn’t the frightening death-throe-screams that followed distant gunshots across the town’s estuaries, or the constant electrical buzz that filled the atmosphere all around them. This sound was a monstrous and powerful outcry immediately outside their beach home.

  Bill sprang out of bed, a .45 in his hand, ready to bring death to some poor S.O.B. who was probably just hungry and looking for food.

  “What is that?” he bellowed.

  “Don’t know, but it’s close,” Lisa shouted barely loud enough to be heard, flying to the window, scarcely touching the carpet.

  Impossibly, the roar grew louder. Its deep, penetrating tones were undaunted by their walls and attempts to muffle the assault to their eardrums. It sounded like some angry mechanical leviathan, tearing at the sand and coral with its metal claws.

  Standing at the window, Bill pried open the blinds, his jaw dropping farther with each inch revealed. The source of that racket was worse than the prehistoric monster he imagined.

  “It’s a cruise ship?” He blinked, transfixed in disbelief. His wife’s eyes mirrored his distrust.

  The dark behemoth was a passenger ship but no less terrifying than a T-rex might have been, made malicious by the green auroras illuminating its hull, as though it were belched out of the depths to destroy them. It crept up onto their beach, slowly pushed by some invisible force, inten
t on burrowing a bloody trail to town.

  The screeching persisted for what seemed an endless amount of time, until the beast ran out of inertia. The high incoming tide deposited it less than one hundred meters from their property.

  When the dreadful noise ceased, the relative quiet made the constant thrumming sound of the wind-driven sand drubbing the home’s windows and outside walls sound louder. The hulk lay unmoving, as if asleep, and they stood motionless for fear of waking it.

  The light from tonight’s auroras was bright and pulsating, outlining the massive vessel’s form. Out of the water, it looked much taller, not listing as expected but sitting upright almost as if it were properly parked in the port five miles up the coast. Each spectral blast of green revealed more of the ship’s evil presence. A fire on the port side, evidenced by blackened scarring, made it appear that the devil’s own giant hand had reached out from the ship’s bowels, leaving molten prints burned into its hide from the first row of balconies up to the silent chimney stacks. When the pulsating light ebbed, shadowing the ship in a momentary darkness, it almost looked like a normal cruise liner awaiting tourists that would never come. For a ship normally carrying a couple thousand crew and passengers in its belly, there were no signs of life.

  “Where are all the people?” Lisa spoke his thoughts.

  The Kings shuffled outside to get a better view, unconcerned about sporting only their undergarments. There were others outside as well, on their patios, even the Smiths whose house had burned down next door. All gazed at the silent giant.

  Each pulse of the auroras manifested the ship’s malevolence. The ship then seemed to take on a more ethereal profile, like a hologram that appeared to throb with each auroral pulsation or gust of wind. This was more than a reflection of aurora light off the ship… It was conducting electricity.

  A scream startled them, tossed about in the wind’s riptides. The shadow of a female form sprang from the void of a doorway, darting along the jogging track located near mid-ship. The shadow raced faster as if chased by something unseen. Another terror-filled scream broke free from the winds. Their eyes followed her as she ran toward the bow of the ship and leaped, choosing death over whatever heinous sprits possessed the liner. When she hit the sand below, she came to rest in a small, dark heap. No more protests or screams.

  “My God. She jumped,” Lisa yelped, and galloped off toward the ship.

  “Wait, Lisa!” Bill shouted. “Don’t go on the beach!” His words couldn’t stop her. Lisa was going to try to save that woman.

  “Lisa, no! The ship … It’s … you’ll be electrocuted!” Bill shouted between each breath as he raced toward her, arms and legs pumping, fearing he wasn’t going to reach her in time.

  Another, different scream forced both their heads up, slowing their progress. A second cry of pain then accompanied the first: a hellish duet serenading the evil ship. They saw two others, also attempting to assist the jumper. One appeared to be convulsing, yet fixed in his or her tracks, and the other simply fell over, dead.

  Lisa froze, then Bill; now next to each other, both paralyzed by fear.

  “It’s the ship! It’s a natural conductor.” He paused to take in several gulps of air. “It induces current from the CMEs hitting us, causing electrical discharges to the water and sand.” He paused again. “My guess is anyone on moist sand will get a nasty jolt of electrical current. Anyone in the water … well, you just saw.” Both Bill and Lisa quickly confirmed they were on dry sand and then looked back at the killing field ahead.

  There were others on the beach, all much closer, but all standing still, unsure what to do next.

  A bolt of blue-green lightning erupted from the hull and exploded forward, headed inland. Its bright tendrils opened up, reached out, and struck each person near it.

  The Kings’ own neuro-electrical currents discharged then. They fled the other way, for home, panic propelling them at an unnatural speed.

  2.

  Life and Death

  “Push, mija," Maria's sister said strongly.

  Now having been in labor for eight hours, Maria was more exhausted than she had ever been in her life. A multitude of candles splashed light around the room enough so that she could see her husband, Miguel, her sister, Lita, and a cousin whose name floated away just out of reach, in the haze of her tired mind and body. As a midwife Lita had brought dozens of babies into the world, she said, in conditions worse than this. Maria could imagine. After all, they were only without electricity. Thanks to Miguel they had many supplies, while most others around them were not so fortunate.

  In the days since Los Diablos Verdes—what everyone in Rocky Point called the green clouds in the sky—had first appeared, many had died or sickened around them. The first few days’ fires burned hundreds of homes and most of the marina area, killing hundreds. Then many more became sick from drinking bad water or having no water at all. Their pipes were silent as were the water trucks and all other vehicles since the power went out. Even with water, many were now starving. The stores had been picked clean days ago. A careful few with small wooden boats were able to get fish from the sea, but countless others died from in the electrified waters. Like stray dogs, neighbors were no longer worried about neighbors; they were concerned about themselves and their own families. Every person was on their own now and each couldn’t depend on others. Yet, their house had all the food and water they needed and more.

  Miguel is so smart and knows everything was the one clear thought out of the few that bubbled to the surface of Maria’s watery mind, her chestnut-colored face scrunched in utter concentration, her brow a washboard of wrinkles.

  “Push, mija!" Lita yelled this time, afraid the tequila she had given Maria to dull the pain was working too well, pulling her mind toward sleep.

  Miguel, on the other side of the emotional scale, was beside himself with anxiety. Maria was bearing their only child in their home rather than at the medical center; their power was off; and their city was dying around them. Max had predicted something bad was going to happen, and he couldn’t have been more correct. Furthermore, Max gave them their supplies. His fear now turned to what would come next, in the coming weeks, when others found out that they had so much food and water.

  He knew most of his neighbors, but what about the others? When others found out he had all this, wouldn’t they try to take it? How could they be safe once their baby was born? How could he possibly protect them? He thought about the gun Max gave him, which was hidden from his wife in the closet. Maria, who saw goodness in every soul, would never agree to his having one. Could he even use it if he had to?

  “She’s coming, mija. Push!” Lita yelled again.

  “¡Ya!” an exhausted Maria retorted.

  “Miguel, more towels!” Lita bellowed her midwife orders. He jumped, attempted to move forward, and promptly fell flat on his face, blocking his fall with his hands just in time to keep from breaking his nose or chipping his teeth. Only his pride was bruised. He leapt up, grabbed two towels, and handed them to Lita who hadn’t noticed a thing.

  A baby’s cry, raspy from nine months of amniotic fluid, sang out. Hello, world.

  Hello, dying world.

  3.

  Feed My Children

  East of Joliet, Illinois

  “Where is my damned breakfast?” he shouted.

  Thomas, always the first responder to his whims, appeared at his door straightaway and gave it a tentative push before entering. “Sorry Teacher, but the cooks and hotel workers left days ago. It’s only us now. I made you a chicken sandwich,” he said, his voice rising, offering what he hoped would be pleasing. “It’s dry, because we had to toss out all the stuff in the dead refrigerator.” Thomas presented the platter confident at least the chicken in the sandwich was still good. The hotel’s refrigerator had been nothing more than an oversized cooler after the power went out; their attempts to coax a few more days of chill out of it were less effective every time they opened it. Yesterday they h
ad declared the many-thousand-dollar commercial refrigerator officially a dead hunk of metal. Thomas smartly thought to cook all the meats while they still had some bottled gas. But without refrigeration, the mayo and dairy products had gone bad a few days ago and had to be thrown away. More troublesome, though, would be the next few days. That was all the time their group had, based on the remaining cooked meats and canned food, before they would need to scavenge for more food elsewhere or move on. He didn’t even want to think about what the hundreds of followers outside were going to do.

  On the platter rested a plate with a sandwich, a few pickles, some potato chips, and a glass of warm water. Ice was a luxury that wouldn’t exist until winter came or the power was back on. The Teacher took to it like a half-starved lion gorging itself on a wounded doe. “You are a good servant, Thomas.” In the middle of chewing a big bite, he asked, “How many in our group are here?”

  “Well, Teacher, some of these have left too. There are still about fifty. And …” Thomas trailed off, considering the words he had practiced.

  “And what?” Teacher asked, his words slightly muffled by a mouthful of chicken sandwich.

  “Well, there are maybe three hundred followers outside the hotel, camped on and around the grounds. They are waiting to hear from you. They are scared about the sky and waiting for you to tell them what this means and what they are supposed to do next. Many are saying this is Armageddon and you are the Second Coming. Also, many are wondering if we are going to continue to go west or stay here. But, if we stay here, we will run out of food soon.”