The Last Gasp, page 46
Coogan admitted he hadn’t. ‘No sweat to us. All we need to know is that they’re the bad guys, Gene, and we’re the good—’
His attention was caught by a staff sergeant further down the column who was standing on the lip of the trail and staring down intently at something in the dry creek below. The two officers went to look. There wasn’t much to see, but it was odd: an area of some dark grey oily sludge on the sandy bed with bits of what looked like charred and twisted metal scattered about. Some of the surrounding brush, Coogan noticed, had been scorched to blackened stumps.
Major Coogan raised his eyebrows quizzically and looked at Captain Hance. Together they turned to look up the sheer hillside behind them. The Mission Task assigned to 92nd Marine Corps at such short notice had just taken on a more daunting prospect than either expected.
7
A wick floating in a bowl of oil provided a dim flickering glow, illuminating the crudely carved walls that sloped up to the conical roof. In the centre of his cell, Pastor Eldritch sat crosslegged on the sandy floor. From outside, in the tunnels hewn out of rock, came the low drone of chanted litany: the inner circle of adepts now preparing themselves, waiting for the Final Ascent. The Pastor knew it was bound to come one day, so when he was awakened shortly after daybreak and received the report from Vance (US) and Owen (US), relayed to them from the observation post, it came as no revelation. It would not be long now. Soon men with weapons would come to destroy, in the same way they had with their blind stupidity destroyed the earth. Let the earth perish, and let the species that had destroyed its own habitat perish with it. Pastor Eldritch had no fear for his own fate; he rejoiced in the certainty of what was to be. His own mortal body, the selfish ego that was ‘I’, had no meaning for him. It was merely a transient vessel composed of random uncountable atoms that would continue after ‘death’ to circulate endlessly throughout the universe, and – eventually, inevitably – form part of another consciousness.
From somewhere out there, dispersed across a billion light-years of space, the ghost of his atoms would witness the end of the breathing planet.
In the meanwhile, everything had been prepared and was ready and waiting for Optimum Orbital Trajectory. He was the one to lead the way to destruction.
I am become death, the shatterer of worlds . . .
The chanting died away as he appeared in the doorway.
Pastor Eldritch gave no word or sign. He moved slowly past them with his crippled, lurching walk, the chosen eleven of his most faithful and devout disciples. There had been twelve, until his favourite son Karl had failed in his mission and never returned to the Mothership.
Led by Fang (China) and Val (Russia), they followed the Pastor along the tunnel lit by caged wall-lights. These eleven had been specially chosen and trained to participate in the final act: a secret ritual unknown to those still asleep in the dormitories above them at ground level, their fellow adepts, oblivious of what was to take place and blissfully ignorant of their future. Which didn’t exist.
When the inner disciples were gathered together, silent and kneeling, Pastor Eldritch spoke softly, reminding them that very few were as fortunate as they, in having been given a purpose and the heaven-sent opportunity to achieve it.
‘We do not fear death,’ he told them, ‘because death is merely a passing phase; exchanging one form of existence for another. The stuff of our being cannot be destroyed, only that which is the selfish ego. So when we renounce the self, the ego, our identity, death has no meaning for us. Instead it is the gateway to everlasting life.’
A gateway they were about to enter.
Ascendant!
After his blessing, the disciples assembled in the main chamber directly above the abandoned mineshaft. The chamber had once housed the winding-gear which raised and lowered the cages. In this space were nine large spherical tanks containing liquefied propane gas under extreme pressure; the walls were seven inches of solid steel to guard against explosion.
Propane was the gas used by the Messengers to carry out the ascendancy programme of pyro-assassination. Highly flammable and volatile, liquefied gas has an auto-ignition temperature of 480º C, but under full pressure, the combustion level of the inner flame reaches temperatures of 1,480º C.
Four of the adepts had donned harnesses with portable cylinders. At a signal from Pastor Eldritch, they opened the valves and lit the nozzles. Jets of searing fire with a white core spewed across the chamber. Two of the adepts spun the exit valve on one of the large spherical tanks, emitting a blast of pure liquid propane. In less than a second, this had been ignited by the fiery jets and the chamber was filled with a billowing cloud of incandescent gas and white-hot flame, consuming everyone there in a single scorching blast.
The process, once begun, was unstoppable. The fireball of heat trapped in the chamber raised the temperature of the propane inside the remaining eight tanks. As the temperature rose, so did the pressure. When both pressure and temperature reached the critical point of auto-ignition, the tanks would erupt, and not even seven inches of solid steel could contain it.
In the dormitories above, the first thing the sleepers knew about it was a distant rumble and a vague shudder from below. There was no time to get out of bed, no time to even think as a whoosh of heat like a giant blowtorch swept along the corridors and blew the doors off their hinges.
Then the eight tanks went critical—
—and erupted—
Instantaneously, the temperature inside the underground chamber exceeded 1,000º C. The chamber itself acted as the casing of a bomb, confining and concentrating the extreme forces of heat and pressure. Iron girders supporting the tunnels turned white and writhed in the heat. The hewn walls ran with molten threads of silver and copper.
And still the temperature continued to rise until it reached its peak of almost 1,500º C.
Rocks became incandescent. Cracks appeared and split into jagged fissures. The walls of the chamber gave way as the pressure and heat surged upward. In a matter of seconds the eruption broke through, taking with it the stockade and its wooden buildings, the compound, blasting everything in an angry funnel of flame and smoke into the overcast sky.
Half a mile below the summit, grinding slowly up the narrow hairpin trail, it seemed to Major Coogan that a volcano was erupting. The ground beneath the Humvee started shaking and suddenly rocks were showering down from out of the sky. Coogan stared through the windshield, craning upwards to see a halo of blood-red fire and curling black smoke outlined against the massing storm clouds.
Jesusholymaryjoseph.
It was an image of the end of the world: a vision Major Sam Coogan would never forget to his dying day.
8
It was Eliot, the Weavers’ cute little cross-breed terrier, which sounded the alarm. Marian and Don Weaver were finishing a late Sunday breakfast at a few minutes after ten-thirty. Don was looking forward to watching the game on television later in the afternoon, his team Miami Marlins against the Atlanta Braves. Marian, who had recently had knee surgery, would be happy with her puzzle books, in between clipping saver and bargain coupons out of the magazines stacked by her recliner.
On retirement they had moved to this quieter gated community for over fifty-fives in Tamarac, East Broward County, a mile or so north of the Sawgrass Expressway – only a ten-minute drive from their former home. Both enjoyed living in southern Florida; they were acclimatised to – and prepared to put up with – the extreme summer heat, although Marian came to dread the onset of the hurricane season more with each passing year.
Eliot was usually a quiet, well-behaved dog. As soon as he was settled down with his blanket and bowl of water in the shaded area of the screened-off porch overlooking the front lawn there wouldn’t be a peep out of him. So his agitated yelping brought Don hurrying to the door, wondering if the animal was distressed, or maybe even hurt.
Goshdarn it! Somebody’s crashed into my car—!
Straight away Don realised it couldn’t be, because surely he would have heard the smash, the crump of tortured metal. So why was the car tilting sideways, front and rear wheels on the passenger side sinking into the ground?
Don raised his hand to quieten Eliot down, and the yelps subsided into a mournful whimpering. Sliding open the screen door, Don saw what had happened. He froze and drew in a sharp, shocked breath. Where once there had been a neat rectangle of trimmed lawn, there was now a gaping hole. The edge of the asphalt driveway was crumbling and falling into it, as was the low picket fence, and the sidewalk beyond, and so was his Chevy Malibu.
All of it was being sucked underground.
Don thought about stepping through the screen door, and then wisely decided against it. The paving slabs bordering the lawn were buckling and tilting, and even as he watched, a whole section of the path he would have set foot on a minute ago vanished. The hole was creeping – no, faster than creeping, surging – towards the house, like a hungry monster with an insatiable appetite, gulping everything down into its black maw.
Next item on the menu was the Chevy Malibu, which rolled onto its roof and disappeared. What was left of the driveway followed it. The rapidly widening chasm was now so near that Don could see into it, and he knew he was staring down into a sink-hole. Hurricanes apart, this was every Floridian’s worst nightmare. In the past, whole streets had been swallowed up; one minute, people had been sitting at their kitchen tables, or in their living rooms watching television, sleeping in their beds; the next they had vanished through a hole in the earth’s crust, never to be seen again.
Large tracts of land in the state – thousands and thousands of square miles – comprised a thin layer of soil on a bed of calcium carbonate limestone. When attacked by erosion from sulphuric and nitric acids in rainwater, the limestone was dissolved away, leaving cavernous underground chambers half a mile or more deep. Over time, this process would leave a few slender columns supporting a tenuous crust of soil and plant life. Under the weight of buildings, concrete roadworks and sewerage systems, the fragile limestone columns would eventually fracture and give way, resulting in voracious sinkholes like the one that had appeared in Marian and Don Weaver’s front lawn.
Luckily for the Weavers, Eliot had warned them in the nick of time – lucky for Eliot too. Don grabbed him from his blanket, ran indoors and through to the kitchen where Marian was loading up the dishwasher. Opening the back door and pointing with his free hand, Don cried, ‘Outside, honey. Now!’
Together they went through the rear screened-off porch and out onto the sloping lawn, Marian with her two artificial knees leaning on her husband for support. They could feel the earth shuddering under their feet. Halfway up the lawn, Don looked over his shoulder. His and Marian’s house was diminishing, becoming physically smaller even as he watched. The windowsills were now at ground level. Then the windows themselves slid out of sight. Next, the guttering sank lower until it was level with Don’s eye-line. In a few minutes that too vanished, and all that remained of his house above-ground was the roof. Like the upper bridge of a ship sinking beneath the waves, the roof was the last to go, and in no time at all it too was gone.
Don and Marian stood hand in hand looking through the thin air at where their home had been, to their neighbour’s house across the quiet suburban street. Don was seventy-two, Marian was seventy-four, and suddenly they were homeless.
9
The sinkhole that opened up in the front lawn of the Weavers’ home at 4139 East 45th Street, Tamarac, in November 2025 was not the first to have occurred; but it was the beginning of what was to become an ecological disaster on a scale and severity never seen before in the state of Florida.
It would also have a devastating effect on the Florida Keys, the chain of atolls stretching from Key Largo to Key West, as the toxic seawater ate them away to little more than corroding lumps of coral, like tiny stumps of rotten teeth.
But this was yet to happen, sometime in the future.
2030
1
1
Sometime in the future had arrived.
The man, woman and boy strolled along the broad strip of dazzling white sand. They wore facemasks and protective PVC coveralls, with bright orange compressed-air cylinders slung on their backs. The line of empty-eyed concrete towers had once been busy tourist hotels; they were now derelict and vandalised, had been ever since the southern half of Florida collapsed and Miami Beach was evacuated.
The ocean to their right was a toxic cocktail of high acidic saltwater, with methane and sulphur belching from its surface. It was this lethal combination that formed the unbreathable atmosphere at the tip of southern Florida.
Chase stepped over one of the heaps of decaying seaweed that straggled along the beach as far as the eye could see and held out his hand to steady Cheryl. Following on, the slim fifteen-year-old boy, almost as tall as his father, leaped it and bounded up the shallow slope of sand, not even breathing hard. ‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you,’ Dan asked, ‘when it was a holiday resort?’
‘Couple of years before you were born. Your mother and I drove down from New York and stayed for three days.’ Chase studied the row of concrete hulks through his curved faceplate. He pointed one out. ‘I think that could be it: Holiday Inn, Collins and 22nd Street.’
He linked arms with Cheryl as they walked towards the low wall separating beach from road, their coveralls crackling as they moved.
‘You think anyone still lives here?’ Dan asked curiously. His thick black hair sprouted in clumps through the mask’s nylon webbing.
‘I don’t think they’re allowed to any more. This far south of Florida and to the west are designated Official Devastated Areas. They say the pollution in the Gulf is even worse than on this coast.’
‘It would have been great to visit New Orleans.’ Dan sighed. ‘I’ve seen old movies of the French Quarter. It looked fantastic.’
‘About five years too late, sorry to report,’ Cheryl said. ‘Downtown New Orleans is solid algae bloom feeding off industrial sludge; the rest of Louisiana is buried in protozoic slime. You can forget Basin Street, Dan.’
‘Everything I want to see isn’t there any more,’ the boy complained. ‘I suppose the Grand Canyon has been filled up with junked cars and Yellowstone Park is a refugee camp!’
Chase and Cheryl failed to crack a smile; Dan’s sarcastic observation might be closer to the truth than he realised.
It was only thanks to an odd geophysical quirk that Miami Beach was still here at all. It was essentially a deep spit of sand, impervious to the assault by acid corrosion that had devastated much of the state. Across the intracoastal waterway which divided Miami Beach from what had formerly been the ‘mainland’, the underlying limestone structure had been eaten away – first by acid rain, a combination of sulphuric and nitric acids – and then the encroachment of seawater, its acidity boosted by twenty-five per cent since the Industrial Revolution. The problems with both rain and seawater were caused by the same villain responsible for the planet warming up: the burning of fossil fuels.
The thin crust on which most of Florida was built literally melted away, leaving vast empty caverns and tenuous pillars of limestone which were unable to support the highways and buildings above them. Everything below Lake Okeechobee, from Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast to Boca Raton on the Atlantic Seaboard, had gone, dissolved in acid soup.
Further south, what used to be the Everglades was now a toxic swamp comprising two- or three-mile-long low-lying mounds of rotting vegetation with mangrove trees and diseased palms sprouting out of them.
The native freshwater alligators which had populated the Everglades had been all but wiped out, and in their place a mutant breed of giant alligator was evolving. These 35-foot-long beasts were not just adapting to but thriving in this new harsh environment. As the climate warmed and humidity increased, anacondas from Central America had migrated north to the swampland, relishing the 50-plus degrees centigrade all-year temperatures.
Miami itself had been wiped off the map. Its population of 2.3 million residents had fled north to the parts of Florida still habitable. Many of them weren’t welcome, being of Cuban descent; they had migrated unwillingly into Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.
From the highest point on the beach, Chase, Cheryl and Dan paused and looked out to sea. There was no horizon, just a thick milky mist through which the blurred disc of the sun could be dimly perceived. Chase shaded his eyes and wondered which presented the greater menace: the acidic ocean, the toxic atmosphere or the raw sunlight. As the oxygen content thinned, so too did the ozone layer in the ionosphere, allowing deadly cosmic rays and ultraviolet radiation through. Quite a range of options, Chase thought. You had the choice of being poisoned, fried, getting skin cancer or suffering genetic damage – or maybe go for broke and get the lot.
Back on Collins Avenue they walked past the broken shop windows and through the looted debris covering the pavements. Grass and weeds flourished in the crumbling concrete. Their yellow half-track with the faded MIDNITE-NET logo on its doors was in the parking lot of a shopping mall on 29th Street. The vehicle was powered using solar panels – this far south, and in the new subtropical atmosphere, the internal combustion engine couldn’t be relied on; it had also become necessary to use chemically fuelled aircraft because of the number of jet- and piston-engined aircraft that had started crashing on take-off and landing, starved of oxygen.
As Chase reached up to the recessed handle of the cab a shiny crease appeared in the body panel, inches away from his hand. The reverberating crack of a rifle shot echoed back and forth between the buildings.
