Life played equally cruel tricks, it seemed. People would come into your life, bask in the reflection of your heart and soul, then walk on and sometimes disappear.
“We lost him,” Nordhausen said with resignation heavy in his voice. “Win, lose or draw, we lose Kelly in this mess. I’ll be damned if I know what happened this time. But we’re going to have to face it and let it go.”
“No, we’re not, going to simply let it go.” There was a hard edge of determination in Paul’s voice. He had been thinking deeply about the event for the last three days. The chaos sweeping the nation after Palma sent them all into near survival mode, but he had managed to keep his head focused on the problem and things were slowly falling into place in his mind.
The great destructive waves could not harm them here on the Pacific coast, but the tsunami caused by Palma sent ripples of panic clear across the country. It was a heavy blow. Boston was destroyed. New York City was still under ten feet of water in most low lying areas. The waves swept right over Manhattan, thirty to forty feet high in places, and only those well above the flood tides in the high buildings survived—too few, as the catastrophe struck early in the morning, at 4:11 Eastern Standard time. Most of New Jersey was inundated. The ocean surged up the Delaware Bay and delivered a death blow to Philadelphia and Newark. The Delaware Isthmus shielded Washington D.C. for a time, but the great tide surged up the Chesapeake Bay as well, eventually flooding the nation’s capital, with great loss of life. Every bridge on the Potomac was down and the capital was isolated, though news feeds from overflying helicopters showed that neither the White House nor anything else on Pennsylvania Avenue survived intact.
In Virginia, the navy base and city of Norfolk were utterly destroyed, and the waters reached as far inland as Richmond. In the Carolinas, Raleigh was spared, but Charleston destroyed, and every city in Florida was virtually wiped off the map when the awesome power of the ocean swept completely over the peninsula in places! The average elevation of Miami was just six feet, and no more than a ground level of 26 feet at its highest location. The initial wave approached a hundred feet in height there. Some of the sturdier concrete buildings remained in the larger cities, but millions died in that state alone.
It was just too much for the nation to take. Panic spread across the continent as people in the heartland and Midwest instinctively went into survival mode and began stripping the shelves bare in markets and stores. The entire national transportation system ground to a halt. Food and fuel were no longer being delivered through most of the central states. Communications were spotty, though Atlanta based CNN was still on the air chronicling the disaster.
The ocean surge even swept into the Gulf of Mexico, swamping hundreds of production platforms and flooding major portions of Houston and New Orleans. Pipelines were wrecked, and no oil was reaching the southern states at all. Within 48 hours people had drained every last drop at service stations and, though the waves of destruction did far less damage there, the entire Gulf coast was evacuating inland.
FEMA was overwhelmed and no aid was reaching survivors virtually anywhere in the damage zones. And after the food and fuel ran down, Paul knew that it would not be long before the power would go off. Rolling blackouts were already sweeping the nation, even in places far removed from the destruction, like Chicago. Husan Al Din, who’s name meant “The Sword of the Faith,” had struck a fearsome and near fatal blow—if indeed he was the man responsible for the catastrophe. His only assumption had been that the Assassin cult had found some way to restore the man to the continuum, and assure his birth. That failing they had managed to find another terrorist to do the job.
On the Pacific coast the infrastructure remained intact and the abundant natural resources allowed for a brief interval of near normalcy. There was a measure of panic buying, but the national guard had imposed a modicum of order, particularly in California. Some places fared worse than others. There was a day of shocked numbness as people watched their television screens, dumbstruck by the scale of the devastation back east. It seemed that almost every family had lost a relative or friend in the disaster. Maeve, god bless her, had lost her mother that morning, and she was now reeling from the double blow in loosing Kelly as well, not to mention the impending collapse of social governmental infrastructure throughout the nation.
Then, as stories of evacuation, shortages of essential supplies, and growing civil disorder crossed the airwaves, people came out of their homes to scavenge the stores for things they thought they would need. Food was at the top of most people’s list, and panic buying started to gain momentum a day ago. The situation in Los Angeles was deteriorating, with crime and looting slowly getting out of control, particularly in the poorer neighborhoods. The constitution was suspended there, and martial law declared by order of the new acting president, the Speaker of the House, who had been safe on vacation in Hawaii.
Here in San Francisco there was still civil order, and civil liberties, though people went about their business with an edge of fear. The roads were drivable, though busier and more jammed than ever, even with gasoline approaching twenty dollars a gallon and nearly impossible to find. Hotels remained open, drawing on emergency supplies stockpiled in the event of a major earthquake. People were weeping in the lobbies, and thousands of tourists from the east coast lamented the loss of relatives and real estate. The banks were still operating, trying to manage a mad rush by thousands trying to get cash when the credit and debit card processing systems collapsed. Most schools and businesses closed their doors in shock, but retail outlets were open, making a hefty profit in sales. The restaurants and markets were open as well, selling off the last of their food before it spoiled, with prices quickly doubling, then tripling overnight. The meal Paul and Robert were sharing tonight had cost them over a hundred dollars for a plate of fried rice, a noodle dish with vegetables, and two beers.
Nordhausen gave Paul a confused look. “What are you saying? Palma happened, Paul. The whole eastern seaboard is a flooded wreck—all the way from Miami to Portland Maine. Kelly couldn’t stop them and they must have figured out some way to run another intervention that would save their damnable terrorist. Husan Al Din was born, and the bloody radicals got their revenge for that Navy Seal Mission in Pakistan when they bagged Bin Ladin. Then this Paradox thing wipes the slate clean, Kelly and all.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Paul. “Because if Kelly failed in his intervention then there was no reason for him to be exposed to Paradox.”
“Well it damn well took him before,” said Nordhausen. “If they reversed our intervention and restored the Palma event to the Meridian, then Kelly was fated to die, right? Graves never has a reason to come back and save him, for God’s sake. You explained all this to me a hundred times.”
“Yes, I know I did, and that logic was good in accounting for Kelly’s jeopardy at this moment on the continuum. But think, Robert. He wasn’t on this side of Palma when all this happened. He was over ten thousand years in the past! In that instance Paradox may not judge him harshly, right? Yes, Kelly could not be explained alive here in our time after Palma, but Paradox doesn’t have to account for his presence in that segment of the continuum.”