How it all happened…

chapter 12 from Truncated: Apocalyptic and Loving It!

So here’s what happened.

I’d read an article a while back about a guy who was shooting his pistol on a lake for kicks, just plinking at fish. Well, a car was driving down the road at the opposite side of the lake at fifty miles per hour. One of the bullets ricocheted off of the water and splattered the brains of the driver who was moving perpendicular to the bullet. Now, it may not seem like much, but a lot had to take place for that to happen. The bullet had to hit the water in such a way as to lift the bullet to the correct height. The driver had to leave his house at exactly the right moment to cross the path of that bullet. Maybe he would have been okay had he not dropped his car keys. The time he spent picking them up was what brought him to a rendezvous with lead. Or maybe he didn’t drop his car keys, and would have lived had he dropped his car keys, and the time it took to pick them up would have made the bullet pass harmlessly in front of, or behind, his car. And then something had to move in the water at just the right time to make the shooter pull the trigger at that exact moment. Maybe, the boat rocked down. Or up. To the perfect level. There had to be the right amount of gun powder. Bullet weight. Wind direction. Barometric pressure. The pure impossibility of it. The ridiculousness of it all. The sheer chaotic randomness. But sometimes things just line up. As though they were meant to be.

Well what lined up for it all to happen was the same as the bullet to the driver’s head scenario only at a much larger scale. It’s hard to pinpoint what came first because there’s always the dropping of keys analogy, and so these things were maybe on a collision course since the beginning of time. A butterfly farted in the mid Eocene epoch and all of that. One couldn’t help but wonder if there was a cosmic design to it, all due to its complexity and timing.

The plague that visited us wasn’t really a plague, but more of a sever and sometimes deadly flu and it had ravaged mostly the East Coast after some monkey in Southeast Asia fucked a mango or something and created a flu unlike witnessed since the Dark Ages. The spectrum of antibiotics and antiviral medications was dwindling like the ice flows were due to global warming. What used to work, simply didn’t anymore. Or at least not for everyone.

The majority of the infected people were quarantined to as far as Michigan, because the symptoms were so easily recognizable due to the purple blotches that appeared on the neck and face. Some died and some lived and while the plague was spread throughout the world, it wasn’t the epic killing machine the Bubonic plague was. Most people lived through it, but old folks and the already ill went down without much of a fight. The rest would sit in confinement for the next several months. Or right until what happened really started getting started. Because while what happened, had happened over a relatively short time, it appeared to have happened suddenly.

Flights had stopped to curb the flu spread. States were setting up roadblocks to keep out the infected. And travel to and from countries was severely restricted.

But while the plague was a pain and you didn’t want the infection, it wasn’t what happened. It only fueled the fires of what happened like the wadded newspaper that helps get the fire started. The lack of antiviral medications necessary to halt the epidemic was in short supply. But some people got it and others didn’t and it seemed like the people who got it were well off.

A growing animosity towards the wealthy came after the global mortgage meltdown, where more and more skeptical eyes were cast their way. The separation of wealthy, and not, continued to widen not only in financial fact, but in idea. People assumed that if someone had more than them, that they got it through ill gotten gains and not hard work and a bit of luck.

The fighting and rioting that ensued for the medications led to the mob hijacking armored transport trucks, and then to military intervention. It wasn’t until the world scientists figured out how to mass-produce the meds that everyone else figured out that the shortage was caused by an American drug company that was intentionally lowering production for profit enhancement. That company was forthwith burned to the ground.

It was like a storm. One that raged inside more than out. A storm that had caused an unease. The one where if you sneezed, you thought you might be next, that you might die, that the horrors of the past were to be visited upon us again, even though everything seemed to be going so well, and that that couldn’t happen in the modern age. But a storm was also brewing in the Atlantic. And the Caribbean. And in Mexico. And in the China Sea. And in the Midwest.

I wasn’t exactly green so to speak, but I put my plastics in the proper container provided by the city for trash day, I didn’t take long showers, and my car was pretty friendly on gas. I wasn’t a tree hugger until the neighbor’s tree saved me from Phil and Helen. I’m not even sure people were completely responsible for the warming. At the scale it happened, nature must have been doing its own thing, oblivious to the humans it took billions of years to create.

The first hurricane to hit New Orleans was only a Category two. There was a Category three licking the west side of Mexico, while a Category four was building off the east coast to let North Carolina and Florida know that it still appreciated them. That storm was about as bad as it could get. The flooding. The devastating winds. But mostly the duration. It hovered there tearing at the South like a slow moving excavating wheel in a mine, grinding and chomping until there was nothing left.

It was bad, we thought, until the Category two that hit New Orleans was followed up in good fashion by a Category five, bringing with it, hundred and fifty five mile-per-hour winds. Cuba was leveled and New Orleans would never be New Orleans again. It would be a swamp with floating debris and an underwater grave for hundreds of thousands of people who thought the levies would hold. They didn’t. They didn’t do a thing to slow the wreckage.

With travel severely restricted from the purple spotted flu epidemic, the economy was suffering. And the people who needed help were not getting it. Americans who used to be there for Americans were now corralled by guarded borders and grounded planes, and nobody was helping anybody. Surrounding states were inundated with state-to-state refugees who were quarantined in camps. People were informed that it was because of the flu epidemic. But, in general, people only want to help people as much as they have to, and after a while it gets old. We have our own families to look after, after all. And having hundreds of thousands of people pour into your state is a lot of have to. The people who didn’t want to stay in camps went into the wilderness where they were either captured, or died from the elements, or if they were violent, killed. It was another layer. A strange un-American feel. Camps. Not with Indians this time. Not with Japanese. But anyone. Race, gender, or age, didn’t matter. Us.

The Rocky Mountain range formed a guide of sorts between warm air from the south and cool air from the north. Essentially the Rockies funneled these two harmless temps together, but once these relatively different temperatures met and mingled, you got a tornado. This particular year, the year it all happened, there was a more severe disparity in temperatures for some reason.

Tornado ratings go from a one to a five. Sometimes I would watch these storm chasing shows where these guys would try and drive close to tornados and get readings for some scientific data that I could never figure out why they needed. They said it was to be able to track tornados and giver earlier warnings, and in so doing, save lives. It was a noble cause, but I think they just liked the adventure of it all. The danger. The pure awe of it. Once the tornadoes started, we lost ten of these storm-chasing groups in the first few weeks.

Normally, the mobile home parks would be devastated during a storm season, but ironically it was the larger cities that took the hit. There was Raleigh, Lexington, Louisville, Birmingham, Little Rock, and Jackson, and Dallas. A few cities in Florida that I’d never heard of. All leveled. The weather channel showed maps that looked like a video game of swirling red blotches that were actually tornados dancing across the green digital layout of America. Once proud cities were spread across the expanse. The way these tornados ran them over, it looked like an angry child mowing over his toys, scattering them into highways of carnage, curving towards the horizon. Phone-video footage of roaring winds and flying cars had become blasé. There was just too much of what was transpiring in your eyes and ears at all times. There was nothing but destruction. It fueled the unease. Some future dread. Some smallness that was crinkling in like foil over the soul, telling you you’re nothing.

As the world was transferring resources away from gasoline and into more green electric style transportation, the oil producing countries were in the grip of death throws. For whatever reason, these countries were controlled by rich powerful men who didn’t mind that the rest of their countrymen were tiring of their state of impoverished affairs. The constant threat of violence from radical religious groups. The weight of wealth disparity. The growing tension between neighbors. The influx and outpouring of refugees who needed a new home in places that didn’t want them. And didn’t have the resources to support them. Small scuffles at first. But to hurt a man, you must hurt his wallet. And the wallets were the pipelines and refineries. Learning over time, not to try and fight head on, these growing bands of guerillas used storebought drones to fly-in explosives. When one fire was put out, another would start. Refinery employees were captured, but mostly murdered. And oil production was all but halting over the world. Fueled by the success of the groups in the Middle East, Venezuela went next, even one refinery in Russia, and somehow one in China.

Here in America, we had the Eco Boys. A radical hippie eco-terror squad. Seeing the success of the terror groups in bringing the Saudi royals to their knees, they devised a plan to take care of the gas guzzling global addiction of refined fuel forever. They would make those Escalades and Suburbans immovable tombstones of a bygone era. Headstones on driveways of the SoCal dream.

It wasn’t that hard. Over time, every portion of a refinery needs to be reconditioned. The caustic chemicals, incredible heat and the wear and tear of ocean air all contribute to the rapid decline of pipes and mechanical sections. When it comes time to shut down a section and refurbish it, the refinery will hire pipe-fitters, craftsmen, welders, painters and then mass amounts of safety personnel to keep watch on the men working. There are tanks and pipes filled with every kind of acid and methyl-ethyl death imaginable. One tiny leak of hydrogen, when coming in contact with a hot pipe, has a flash point so low it will ignite, and under high pressure it can cut a man in half. There were a thousand ways to die in a refinery, not to mention the characters they hired to work these shutdowns. Sure there were the pros, but to fill the labor and safety-watch posts, all you had to do was have a pulse. It also helped if you had been out of prison for at least a week and had passed a drug test.

So they were more than happy when a group of college educated lads hired-on to be safety watches, which gave them access to the entire refinery. These kids had clean records and times were tough so it didn’t seem a stretch for these young guys to be looking to earn an easy buck. They were in three refineries in Long Beach and Torrance, four in Texas and three in Louisiana. That pretty much covered most of the fuel being refined in the states, give or take a few refineries.

They tried to limit the loss of life that would be impossible to avoid altogether, but as good as their intentions were and as educated as they were, they should have used a little more common sense.

The bombs they smuggled in went off in the hydrogen units and the hydrofluoric acid units in the refineries that had them. The chain reactions were so devastating that the anarchy of toxins flung into the air were more caustic and harmful to the environment than the refineries would have produced in a thousand years of refining.

Two Eco Boys died in the explosions, one due to a malfunction, the other didn’t account for the extra two inches that his hard hat added to the top of his head, which he hit in a full run against a low hanging pipe, knocking him back where he tried to steady himself and then fell on the detonator. Hundreds of innocent men were killed, and the fumes killed hundreds more in the outlying areas located in poorer communities around the refineries.

As stupid as the Eco Boys were, they were also very effective. With what had already happened in the Middle East and South America, this catastrophic loss of fuel created another ripple effect felt around the globe. There was none, zero, zilch, gas being refined in America. Or anywhere else for that matter. We were the world’s consumers. The great buyers. We created the wealth around the world through shopping. Simply shopping. And now that had stopped. Completely. America was in a state of shock. This confusion about what was happening. And why. Was this the end of the world? God’s second coming? Some biblical revelation? It was getting bad. The infighting. The mistrust. Churches filled, while shopping malls emptied. And the stock market tumbled until it just shut down to limit the hemorrhaging. There was panic at the banks. People running for their cash. A small exodus that turned viral. Once vibrant cities feeling like prisons. This couldn’t be happening.

Then the earthquakes hit. Just two. One in Northern and the other in Southern California. The one in Northern California was a lights out San Francisco gangbuster. They know how to put on a good quake up there. Oh, it took that nice bridge down too. It’s kind of hard to fight fires and evacuate wounded, let alone operate the heavy equipment necessary to dig the thousands of trapped people out, when there was no fuel to speak of. Most of our fuel reserves were in crude oil, not nice processed ninety-two octane or diesel. What refineries were left, tried to make what fuel they could, but couldn’t even scratch the demand. Food couldn’t get in and people couldn’t get out. Hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans were stuck in that giant cemetery. And help wasn’t on the way. The military was spread thin. Not just dealing with the blossoming Middle East crisis, but with the destruction that was happening all over America, such as, helping to stem the growing epidemic of hurricane and tornado survivors. Storms hadn’t even stopped and Houston was under water. Again. The riotous mayhem that the San Franciscans inflicted on each other was less than human and really helped put the Darwin cycle up into fourth gear.

The quake that hit us down here was off the coast of Laguna Beach. A solid seven on the Richter. It was severe enough to give us a mild tsunami, but luckily most of Laguna Beach is on higher ground and the angry waters simply lapped up a few hundred stores and homes, took out boats in Dana Point Harbor, and then retreated back to whence it came. Sure, there was home damage all across the beach cities and inland. Sure, some taller buildings around Orange County collapsed. Sure, there was some freeway damage. Sure, lights and electricity went out for a period of time. But what was more disturbing was what was happening to the people. Once smiling happy shopping thriving souls were turning into something else.

A bigger problem than the big earthquake and her aftershocks, if there could be a bigger problem, was the nuclear power plant located on the beach of San Onofre. There was a rather large radiation leak after the core had cracked open. It had been decommissioned years ago, but the nuclear material was still in there and we still had the generation that grew up getting Chernobyl pictures crammed down their throats of babies with flippers instead of arms and legs. Cute little white seals that gave the most constituted individuals nightmares for months. They tried to fix the leak, but radiation is a funny thing, it lingers and waits and mutates you to death. So notwithstanding, people wouldn’t go near the place and left in droves. Wind blows in several directions here. And you couldn’t predict which direction. When it hit your face, you wondered how much radiation you were getting, not if.

Looting and rioting had started slow. Small patches across the nation. Other countries were in the full throws of civil wars. Religious factions fighting religious factions. Ideas fighting ideas. But not down in Southern California. At least not immediately. We were too civilized. Too smart. Too wealthy. Nothing could penetrate that armor. Humans really only need a few things in order to live. Air. Water. Food. Shelter. It’s remarkable in its simplicity when you thought about it. We had conquered nature. We grew plants to eat. Animals to eat and drink milk from. We had lovely homes. Electric, self driving cars. We were warm in the winter, heaters blasting, keeping us cozy. Air conditioners in our cars, offices, and homes, to keep things comfortable. And with the comfort being the first things to go, people focused on water and food. We looked around our neighborhoods. Green, inedible lawns. Decorative trees that bared no fruit. A water faucet that gave water from some magical place, that could magically stop as it did when the big earthquakes hit.

Finish chapter 12 from Truncated: Apocalyptic and Loving It!

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