John Barnes - Directive 51

“I guess not. I’ll be a lot happier if this facility can serve as a dorm for the emergency management team. There’s a lot of unused space at St. Elizabeth’s right now, with the offices that have left and DHS not yet fully moved in, so we have the room. And it’s relatively easy to protect the grounds.”

“You’re expecting trouble?”

“Should I stop expecting trouble right now, when so much of it just arrived?” Cam permitted himself one of his little, tight-lipped smiles. “Every time we did a simulation or a game-out of any widespread, multiple-path emergency, the Red team always hit us with an assassination, or a kidnapping, or general bad stuff happening to the critical personnel in Blue. And when Red didn’t do that, the refs did—‘the physicist you need is trapped on a collapsing bridge,’ that kind of thing.

“I don’t want to lose anybody. So if you can, see if you can talk your guy into moving down here; I wish we could give him accommodations as good as he has up in Chevy Chase, but he’s going to be losing those within a week anyway no matter what, and we might as well move him while we’re still fairly sure of having some motor vehicles running.”

“Makes sense. I just don’t want to think about trying to persuade Lenny to accept being dependent at all—he’ll hate that so much.”

“Don’t we all?” Cameron asked. “All the—”

His phone rang; he spoke for just a moment and then said, “More mess. The meeting will start late because I’ve got to run to another one; I’ll be back with you in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, enjoy lunch and have brilliant thoughts that solve all our problems.” He trotted away.

Since she was last in line, Heather sweet-talked the lady and got two sandwiches to take home for Lenny.

Cameron Nguyen-Peters slipped into the small room and said, “I have just a few minutes but I’m told this is urgent?”

“We think so,” the tall man with narrow shoulders and thick glasses said. “I’m Dan Tyrel, your NOAA liaison. Weather forecasting. This just came in from Navy radiofax; they’ve been loaning us computers and satellite links from the Atlantic fleet, so we can still do some weather forecasting.”

He held up a piece of paper; Cameron looked and saw an immense white pinwheel in the Gulf of Alaska. “Big storm, that’s all I see there.”

“That’s the first major winter storm. We’ve been in Indian summer the last couple weeks. When that comes across it will bring high winds, blowing snow, the works,” Tyrel, the NOAA liaison, said. “A little early this year but not unusually so.”

“We’ve put an alert out on KP-1 and Radio Blue and Gold,” the short black man beside him said. “I’m Waters, your Agriculture liaison, and I bet you didn’t know you needed one.”

Cam nodded. “Well, now that you mention it, it’s obvious. How bad a storm are we looking at here, and what will it do to us?”

Tyrel said, “Snow in the Rockies and maybe the Great Plains, freezing rain in the Great Plains and the Upper Midwest, and cold and very wet wherever the main track exits the continent, on the average that’s the Chesapeake Bay area, but it could exit as far north as Maine or as far south as Georgia.”

Waters jumped in. “With snow over frozen ground, and the farm machinery not running, winter wheat will be a problem; some of it won’t get planted even though we have seed, unless we can maybe get some of the urban refugees out there planting with pointed sticks in the next thaw. The feedlots are so dense that pigs and cattle can probably keep each other alive just from body heat, if they can find enough food for them. Poultry factory systems have to be heated in cold weather, so we’re losing a lot of chickens and turkeys in the Midwest in another day or two. We can put word out for pre-emptive slaughter but they may not have workers to do it, and we don’t have the facilities to can or preserve most of the meat.

“The biggest impact is on range cattle, and that’s huge, because the ranchers in the Mountain States were one of our best hopes of feeding everyone in the next few years. A mild wet winter, that would have helped immensely. As it is—well, there’s just not time to bring all the cattle and sheep in. No way. And we’re going to lose some ranchers, besides some cattle; some of them will get caught out in that, trying to save their stock, and when they do, we lose a skill and knowledge base that took decades to build.”

“How many more storms like this, this year?” Cameron asked.

“Maybe as few as three, maybe as many as nine, winter storms come in on that track every year,” Tyrel said. “Some that just give everyone a cold, snowy day, some that are bad like this, now and then one as bad as the Blizzard of ’86.”

“I don’t even remember that one.”

“ 18 86,” Waters said. “Destroyed the cattle industry for a decade afterward, put an end to the cowboy era. We lived through the one in 1978 because we had helicopters and snowmobiles.”

“What are the odds of anything that bad?”

“This storm, not at all.” Tyrel shrugged. “Not even close for size. The next one or the one after that, god alone knows.”

Cameron stared into space. From now on, I’m going to appreciate every bite of every steak. “And we don’t have anything that can help?”

Waters said, “The carriers don’t have hay and the planes don’t dare touch down on land, so we can see how bad it is but not help.”

“How long before this hits?”

“Idaho and Montana by Friday,” Tyrel said. “The East Coast, maybe as soon as Sunday, maybe as late as Wednesday. You’ll need to have everyone indoors by then.”

Cam shook his head. “I don’t know if we could do that if we had three to five months . Is there anything about this that’s positive?”

“It’s almost certain that no storm after this will kill nearly as many cattle, or sheep, or ranchers for that matter,” Waters said. “But that’s because you can only kill something once.”

The sun through the windows of the old Cadillac was warm and pleasant, and Jason and Beth awoke slowly, stretching and yawning, pushing the piled coats and sweaters off themselves. Jason said, “Good thing we slept long as we did—it’s actually warm in here. Look at that, the sun’s halfway up the sky, must be ten o’clock.”

“Well, babe, I was totally tired. A gang rape and a twenty-mile walk is like, exhausting.” She glanced at him, and said, “Hey. Don’t you start being all sensitive about it.”

“I just figure you’re in some weird kind of denial about things. They also killed all our friends.”

“And broke my wrist,” she said. “I was hanging on to the shed door trying to keep them from dragging me out, and one of them whacked it with a rock. So you think I should just sit down and cry?”

“Just seems… I don’t know, weird… I mean—”

“Jason, babe, I promise that as soon as I stop needing to be on top of shit, I will break down all over the fucking place. In fact I pretty much guarantee it. In fact right now I am doing my fucking level best to not just lose everything and cry the rest of the day curled up in this old car. In fact you’re not helping me get through this shit, and in fucking fact I wish you’d play along and help me out. ’Kay babe?”

“Totally,” Jason said. “Sorry if I—”

“Apology accepted. Now, as my asshole Uncle Billy always said, open an extra large can of shut the fuck up. What’s for breakfast?”