Crawford Kilian - Tsunami - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

“That’s all you’ve heard? After almost two months?”

“Donnie dear, it’s more than we’ve heard from you until today.”

“Do you think Steve is dead?”

What else can I think?” She shuddered a little. “Well, you turned up at last, so perhaps he will too. Now let me catch my breath. Geordie fusses so if he thinks I’m upset.”

“Go on back downstairs. We’ll talk to him.”

Geordie Kennard was almost as tall as his grandson, and very thin. Unkempt white hair fell thickly over his freckled forehead. At ninety-four he wore glasses, but only to conceal hearing aids; his eyes were a clear blue. Like his grandsons, he had a big nose and a slightly protruding lower lip.

He sat in the library, the largest room in his second-floor suite, in a leather armchair. On a little table beside him were his five-o’clock whisky and a long Cuban cigar. The room was comfortably dim, aromatic with tobacco smoke. It was furnished with Edwardian heaviness except for an Apple V computer beside a big roll-top desk.

“Come in and shut the goddamn door,” he barked. “It’s cold out in that hall. Hello. That Kirstie? You’ve lost weight. Samuel says you sailed up the coast. That right?”

“That’s right, Grampa.”

“Used to do that sometimes, when I was younger. Only we used the fastest goddamn boats we could find. Don ever tell you I was a rumrunner?” he asked Kirstie. “Those were the days when I was young and stupid. My dad finally retired just so I’d have to take over the business and quit risking my ass. Sit down! Have a drink.” Puffing his cigar, he poured them each a sizable glass of neat Scotch from the bottle beside his chair.

“I hear there’s a lot of forest fires down in Washington. That true?”

“Yes. All the way down the coast, until about Mendocino.”

“We had such a dry winter, we had fires in January. Jesus Christ. Some of ‘em are still burning, too.” He took a deliberate sip. “We lost some good timber on Vancouver Island and up the coast. Not that it matters.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?” Kirstie asked.

“The goddamn business has gone belly-up, that’s why,” Geordie snarled. “No demand. Most of the lumber we had stored, these goddamn socialist unions just took over without so much as asking.”

“What unions?” said Don. “Do you mean the local councils?”

“Yeah, that’s what they call themselves. A bunch of reds, just like the dumb assholes I used to run out of my camps back in the old days. Well, they got what they want now. Everything gone to hell, all the industries bankrupt, and the forests burning down.” He smiled. “Y’know, I just hope to hell I hang on a little bit longer. With any luck at all I’ll be around for the end of the world. Wouldn’t that be a shame, to drop dead just before the end of the goddamn world, and miss it?”

Don smiled. “You may think it’s bad around here, Grampa, but to us Vancouver looks like paradise. We’re fighting to stay alive down in California.”

“Well, you’re here now. Your mother is really relieved. What are you gonna do with yourselves?”

“We’re not staying. We’re going back to San Francisco.”

“What? Why?”

“You might say we are very involved with people down there,” Kirstie said. “We can’t just walk away from them.”

“Huh. Why’d you leave, then?”

Don took a deep breath; he had not expected to face this moment just yet. “Grampa, I want the Rachel .”

Geordie gurgled with sardonic laughter. “You want Rachel , huh? What for, and what price?”

“I want to take her down to Monterey and salvage a half-million tonnes of gas and oil. I need a big, powerful ship that doesn’t need a big crew, something that can haul a barge with a submersible down the coast.”

“A submersible?”

“The tanker’s capsized in about a hundred metres. We need to go down in a submersible, cut a hole in the tanker’s hull, and rig a pump to get it to the surface. Then we haul it in barges to San Francisco.”

“That’s a fortune in fuel. How come somebody else isn’t salvaging this great tanker of yours?”

“Most of the professional salvage operators are dead. Anyhow, the Monterey area is being run by some general who doesn’t seem interested in trying to get the oil out.”

“Jesus Christ on a crutch, boy — who’s in charge down there? What’s happened to the government?”

“The government is gangs of soldiers and black marketers. The local councils who are running things sent us here.”

“The locals. Like the ones we got here, right? You’re working for those assholes, and you want me to give you Rachel . I’d rather tie on a tin beak and peck in the shit with the chickens.”

Don met his grandfather’s pale blue eyes for a moment and glanced away. His hands felt light and shaky. He took a deep breath.

“This is a deal I’m looking for, Grampa, not a present. And if you only dealt with people you liked, you’d have been pecking in the shit with the chickens a long time ago. Now, do you want to deal?”

“What’s your offer? It better be a good one.”

“Give me Rachel and six months, and I’ll come back to take over the business.”

Geordie laughed, almost silently. “I just got through telling you there isn’t any business. We’re broke, if that means anything.”

“It doesn’t mean a thing, Grampa. You’re one of the richest bastards in British Columbia, and you know it. You’ve got ships, sawmills and the pulp mill. You’ve got more hydro power than most cities have these days. Broke my ass.”

Geordie placidly puffed his cigar.

“What you haven’t got,” Don went on, “is markets. The markets will come back, and they’ll go to whoever holds on to some physical plant, whoever gets transport going again. It might as well be KenFor.”

“Well, I’ll certainly drink to that. But you tell me where the markets are.”

“California. Maybe Oregon and Washington too, after all the forest fires. The locals in California are looking after a couple of million homeless people. We’ve got to get people back on their feet, working, producing, growing. The oil from the Sitka Carrier will get us through the worst part.”

“What if the government gets back to normal too? Suppose they kick your precious locals right in the ass and tell us to get lost? They weren’t too keen on importing our wood before this all started.”

“We’ll smuggle it in if we have to. You used to run booze into the States; it’d be like old times.”

“Christ, you’re even dumber than you look. I can just see you tryin’ to outrun the Coast Guard with a log boom tied to your ass.” But he was smiling. “I just don’t like the idea of playing footsie with all these goddamned radicals.”

“You leave that to me and concentrate on getting rich. Do we have a deal?”

“Jesus, listen to you talk. ‘Getting rich.’ How come the high and mighty scientist wants to get down in the gutter with his old granddad?”

“I can’t do oceanography without money, Grampa. If I’m running KenFor, and KenFor’s making money, I can steal enough to do some science on the side.”

“That makes sense. Okay, buster, you got a deal.”

Early the next morning, Don drove one of the other family cars — a Honda Accord — over Second Narrows Bridge into North Vancouver. Burrard Inlet, the city’s great harbour, was covered by a tangled mat of debris formed by the flooding of the low-lying shore. At the far end of the inlet, east of the bridge, four or five freighters rode at anchor; but no ships moved in the harbour.

Taking the first exit from the bridge, Don drove to the light-industrial zone behind the waterfront. He parked in front of an anonymous cinder-block building, got out, and tried the door. It opened.