The men were gone. The sky was gone. The water was gone. Then the pain was gone.
Don came to in chilly darkness, lying on a cold cement floor. His stomach hurt, and when he lifted his head he gasped with pain. It was very quiet.
He got to his feet and groped around in the darkness. In one corner of the tiny room was a big sink, with faucets that worked; he cupped his hands and drank a little water. Feeling his way across mop handles and buckets and shelves full of dusty boxes, he found nothing that might get him through the locked door, or that might be used as a weapon. When they came for him, his one chance would lie in surprise — a sudden assault, maybe seizing a weapon from whoever opened the door, and then somehow getting out of the building and down to the Zodiac.
Kirstie had been right again, as she usually was. These guys were insane, and he’d been dumb enough to think they could be bargained with. He missed her. He missed his mother and brother, too, and Geordie. He remembered the old guy saying he hoped to live long enough to see the end of the world. Well, he had a better chance of that now than his grandson did. Don had a confused, dreamlike memory of Allison ordering Mercer to shoot him. For some reason the moment had been postponed, but surely it would come soon.
After what seemed like a long time, he heard footsteps coming down a flight of stairs and then down a hallway towards him: a single man, walking briskly. The man rapped twice on the door.
“Mr. Kennard? It’s Colonel Mercer. I’m lettin’ you out now. Please don’t try anything, okay? Everything’s cool.” Keys jingled, and the door swung open. Without his sunglasses, the dimness of the basement was bright enough to make him squint. He snorted with amusement at his fantasies of a bold escape. With his eyes, he’d have run into the nearest wall.
“Eyes still hurt, huh? Here’s your shades. You want to come upstairs, have something to eat?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
They went upstairs, back to the same office, past a deserted lobby. It was mid-afternoon. Mercer drew the curtains across the cracked glass in the windows.
“I’m really sorry about all that, stickin’ you down in the closet. Allison was all hot to shoot you, so I thought I better just get you out of his sight for a little while.”
“Thanks. I take it Allison’s calmed down.”
“Wow.” Mercer laughed silently for a moment and then shook his head. “He’s dead, Mr. Kennard. He got ambushed by a couple of crazy dudes he’d been scared of for months. His wife had just killed herself with methadone. Found out she was dying of cancer, you know? He got the message and took off without a bodyguard, and we followed him. Got there just in time to take care of the crazies, but it was too late for Allison.”
Don shook his head, but said nothing. Mercer opened a brown paper bag and produced supper: cans of pork and beans, and metallic-tasting beer. Mercer rattled away while they ate, apologizing for the food, complaining about the shortages and morale problems he contended with.
“Old Allison, he was supposed to be the big leader, you know, the problem-solver. But he kind of turned into the problem, I guess. Just got pushed a little too hard.”
“So you’re in charge now?”
“Kind of looks that way. Allison’s got a friend named D’Annunzio, who’s mostly good for shooting people who can’t shoot back. But he’s off chasing around after Allison’s kid, somewhere south of here. Any luck at all, he won’t make it back. If he does, we’ll put him in a cage. Uh, could we maybe talk about that deal?”
“For the gas and oil?” Don smiled. “Sure. What’s your no-bullshit bottom line?”
“Fifteen per cent, if you give us early delivery on some of that methane you guys are cooking up.”
“Sounds good.”
“Listen, I need something else.”
“What?”
“I need a white dude to run things here. I try to do it myself, somebody’s gonna shoot me in the back.”
“Is that how you and Allison did it?” Don finished his beer and started another. “Why bother? Just elect a local council and let ‘em take over.”
“Urn… well, trouble is, people got used to the army running everything, and then us.”
“You’re saying you guys aren’t ready for democracy yet?”
Mercer laughed. “Let me tell you about the black man’s burden. All these natives here, all they want to do is sing and dance and fool around and maybe settle a couple of old scores with Ole Massa here.”
“We’ll work something out. Maybe get you a transfer to the Bay Area.”
“I’ll pack my bag.”
A couple of hours later, Don rode back out into the bay in the Zodiac. The western sky was a mass of rising storm clouds, black and orange and red. The Zodiac bounced over a light chop, through stray shafts of golden light from the setting sun. Off to the east, the tawny hills gleamed below the darkening sky. He was upwind of the slick, and the air was fresh and cold.
Fifty thousand years, Einar Bjarnason had predicted, until the sun’s heat rose again to normal. Fimbulwinter was on its way: in the Antarctic night, the ice was reaching far to the north. Perhaps it had already killed his brother, as it had killed so many others. Soon, perhaps in months, snow would lie deep and bright across Canada and the mountains of America; it would not melt in next year’s summer, or the summer after. And each winter would add to it, pack it down into glacial ice whose weight would draw it down from the north, from the mountains, spreading, thickening, feeding on itself —
The Zodiac seemed to dip and accelerate. Rachel and the barges, less than a kilometre to the north, tilted towards the east.
To the west, the sea was bunching up, rising steeply and swiftly until the horizon disappeared. Flecks of white glinted near the crest of the wave. In seconds he was looking up at it; then the Zodiac tilted up and rose with terrible speed and silence.
— He was at its crest, and then dropping again. Rachel and the barges had ridden it out as well. To the east, the wave now blotted out the coast in a long line of spray that caught the sun and gleamed with rainbows. A boom rose from the wave, echoed from the shore, and went on for a long time.
Rachel loomed up before him, and he saw Kirstie standing by the rail, casting a line to him. He caught it and made the Zodiac fast. Her hair in the sunset was like fire. Then he was on deck, holding her, rejoicing in her closeness. Rachel came around and headed out to sea, looking for deeper water to ride out the rest of the tsunamis in.
“I thought for sure you were dead,” Kirstie said with her arms around him.
“Not yet,” Don said. “Not for a good long while. Let’s go find Morrie. We’re going to have a hell of a time tomorrow, getting everything operating again.”
About the Author
Crawford Kilian was born in New York in 1941. Raised in Los Angeles and Mexico City, he is a naturalized Canadian citizen living in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, Alice, and daughters, Anna and Margaret. Formerly a technical writer-editor at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, he has taught English at Capilano College in North Vancouver since 1968. His writing background includes two children’s books (Wonders Inc. and The Last Vikings); critical articles on Charles Dickens and the Canadian writer James De Mille; several radio plays broadcast by the CBC; and Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia.