“A doctor. I attend to the people of the Blackfoot Federation in this country.”
“I don’t know your name.”
“Sinopa, I am called.”
“Sinopa. I have not heard that before.”
“It is given on occasion to a small female newborn of our people. It means kit fox in the Blackfoot tongue.”
Liz managed a smile for the tiny woman with the bold moniker.
Chapter Fifty-Three
At mid-morning on May 2, night descended on Kansas City, the sprawling pioneer town crowding the Missouri and Kansas Rivers. Automatic photosensitive relays engaged on light towers above the vast railroad switching yards just north of the Missouri from downtown. Standing before an upper floor span of plate glass in the offices of Midland Research Group housed in the newly constructed Bess Truman Tower, Winnie Deschaines witnessed the rail yards brighten to white pink under the glare of hundreds of mercury vapor lamps nested in the light towers.
For half an hour, she and coworkers had left their work untouched to track the approach from the west of a mountain of hideous weather. In the recesses of her memory, Winnie unearthed Dust Bowl newsreel footage from the Dirty Thirties, grainy moving images of hardscrabble Texas and Oklahoma panhandle farms scoured by grit and buried by raging windblown soil off the drought-dry southwestern plains. The arriving menace appeared identical to the Depression-era dusty villains of the old celluloid films. The Platte County communities to the north, I-70 westbound, and Overland Park and Swannee to the southwest disappeared beneath the towering black front.
Darkness clamped tight about the city as battalion after battalion of tiny volcanic ash flakes swept west to east along the boulevards. Sheets of dry, dead volcanic sleet filled Winnie’s vision, backlit by the rail yard lights across the river. Employees at the windows backed away from the glass, afraid of the dangers that the gray matter might pose.
Voltage dropped suddenly and lights everywhere across the metropolis lost brilliance, cooling to anemic red. The suburbs and neighborhoods within Winnie purview soon cascaded into darkness. The Bess Truman Tower plunged to black for a few seconds, but emergency backup systems brought power up rapidly.
“Time to go,” yelled a superior from a corner office. If you want to get home, you had better leave now. We don’t want anyone stranded out there in that mess.” The floor emptied within minutes.
In the parking garage below ground level, Winnie freed the door locks on her Jeep. A well-dressed man stepped forward from behind a pillar, someone who must have had clearance to be in the catacomb.
“Do you have pantyhose on?” the stranger said in a brusque tone.
“What?” Winnie turned to face him, knowing fully well what he had said. She prepared to utilize her considerable self-defense training to protect herself.
“You’ll need something to put over the car’s air intake. Pantyhose will do just fine. If you open the hood, I’ll show you where to put it.”
Across Broadway Bridge over the Missouri River, Route 169 ran dead level between the rail yards and old municipal airport. Traffic inched along in volcanic hail as drivers struggled in near zero visibility, windshields smeared with a sludge of wiper fluid and rock dust. Minutes into her twelve-mile commute, cars, trucks and commuter buses about her began to slow, sputter and die, the engines starved for air or robbed of electrical pulses to fuel pumps and fuel injectors by the conductive properties of molten rock dust.
Half a mile east of the campus of Park University in suburban Parkville, Winnie’s auto engine lurched spasmodically and shut down. The starter motor could do nothing to turn the car over and get Winnie on her way again. Stepping out of her Jeep, she was swallowed by the stone blizzard. A single breath doubled her over in a coughing fit. Burying her face into her blouse was her only means of filtering the air enough to quiet heaving lungs.
For the first time since leaving the office, the talons of living fear sank deep into her being. She had just a single mile to go to reach the safety of her home, but McKay Hall on the college campus was half that distance away. She decided to make for the Victorian belltower landmark on the low steppe above Parkville village. If only she could see it.
A guardrail marked the way on the opposite side of the road. Winnie reached it, kept a hand on it for reassurance, and paced into the pale. Head down, face stuffed into her garments, she pushed along quickly until the guardrail came to an end. Ahead, visibility now down to yards, she sensed a mammoth silent form in the rock fog. A few feet more and the apparition resolved into a head-end locomotive of a freight train. It was motionless on the mainline tracks through town, its massive diesel heart dead.
Estimating distance, Winnie left what she thought was the highway right-of-way and ascended a slope, kicking four inches of ash aside with each step. A lamppost materialized, something familiar. She could just make out another post, lining the drive into the college, and went to it.
Cut limestone blocks, stacked precisely, heralded century-old McKay Hall. Winnie found a portal and stairs descending a few steps to a wide door. The dull glow of emergency lighting guided her into the building. A push of her hand and the door creaked aside. Winnie stepped no further, eyes fixed on a sea of human heads.
Crowded among bank after bank of student postal boxes were young people, all kneeling on the painted cement floor, hands folded in prayer.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Pelee had been hoarding sunflower seeds for months. Before leaving for school, she and her father planted hundreds of seeds in plots surrounding their cabin, seedbeds that Pelee had spaded up the day before. The planting completed, father and daughter washed their hands and walked the length of the village green to The Key, the colony’s school.
Abel dropped Pelee off and turned toward First Day Hall to chase down Bobcat, but he paused on the green to contemplate a schizophrenic sky vault. To the south and stretching to the infinite western horizon, a cloak of slate gray opacity hung in the troposphere and draped the plains. North of the ugly curtain, a brilliant, delightfully warm and cloudless blue day greeted Abel. The demarcation line between the sky colors was hard-edge honed and ruler straight on its march to western infinity. The divide seemed to hover a stone’s throw south of Independency compound.
Bobcat balanced on the edge of his seat in the second floor studio, obsessing over images on the monitors above the studio’s state-of-the-art editing board. Abel pulled up a chair next to his friend. Bobcat barely acknowledged his presence.
“It’s like 9/11, wouldn’t you say, Bobcat?” Abel baited Bobcat as he made himself comfortable.
“It really is, just like back in ‘01,” admitted Bobcat. “People have been coming and going all morning. Everyone is hypnotized by this.”
“What’s the lead?”
“Everything, man. The mountain states have disappeared. The vice president is missing, his plane presumed down somewhere east of Denver. Other planes are missing all over the west. Ash is falling everywhere in the plains, ungodly amounts of it.”
“Why aren’t we getting it here, Bobcat?”
Bobcat swiveled in his chair and glared, his eyes burrowing into Abel’s head. “Did you have a look out west?” Bobcat queried.
“I did,” Abel said, nodding. “Bizarre! The sky is divided right down the middle. That’s got to be volcanic ash just to the south.”
“That’s exactly what it is.”
“How come we’re dodging it here?”
“We have so far, and the only reason is because of the jet stream. It’s right over us, keeping weather and the ash some miles south, I guess. We may not be so fortunate for long.”