M.L. Banner
DESOLATION
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
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.
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.”
“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.”
1.
Deadly Waters
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, intent 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.