Yael Dragwyla and Rich Ransdell First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 6,100 words

http://polaris93.livejournal.com/

The Eris War

Volume II: The Dragon from the Isles

Book 1: Independence Day

Chapter 11: The Day the Music Died

Sure enough, the next thing we caught was a broadcast on Channel 28 from KSRT, a local station. The
announcer, a short, bouncy young lady, her bright blond hair in a bouffant hairdo that was essentially a
bubble composed of hair, air, and about ten pounds of expertly applied lacquer, was interviewing Dr.
Wesley Aimes, a member of the biology department at UCSB. “What exactly do you think the ultimate
ecological impact of all this on our country and the world will be, Doctor?” she was asking him.
“Hmmm. Well . . . Those film-clips that just came in – do you think you could show those while I
comment? They’ll illustrate the points I’d like to make better than I could do by myself.” he said. Aimes,
who was dressed in a rumpled brown suit, had taken off his suit-coat and now began to loosen his gray-
and-blue striped tie – he looked as if he were a little ill and maybe too hot from the studio lights.
“Sure! – Could we have those – thanks!” said the bouncy little announcer, who looked young enough
to be one of Aimes’ second-year biology students, in spite of her job with the station, which would have
required her to be at least 28 or so. Her demeanor was far too cheerful for the horrendously tragic events
she and her colleagues were chronicling today.
Now the screen was showing a scene somewhere along the Columbia River in eastern Oregon. There
were streams of panicked, ill, injured, and dying deer, birds, and other creatures staggering out of the
fringes of the desolated areas east of Mt. Hood, approaching a town on the Oregon side of the Columbia.
Occasionally a limping, burned, bleeding bear, wolf, fox, wolverine, or weasel appeared among the many
deer and other herbivores coming toward the town, paying no attention whatsoever to the animals that
would normally have been their preferred prey other than doing what they could to stay out of the way of
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the latter. The long, non-human exodus also included countless dogs, cats, pet birds, and other domestic
animals. None of the refugees seemed to take much notice of any of the others, their only concern to get
as far away from the terrifying things happening behind them as they could, and make for somewhere safe
as quickly as possible. Along with them, often in the midst of a group of exhausted, terrified animals,
usually walking or driving along the roads but sometimes coming overland, were human refugees; often
these were accompanied by their dogs, horses, cats, ferrets, pet birds, reptiles, and even odder pets.
“As you can see,” Aimes was saying voice-over this scene, “in the immediately affected areas,
organisms of all kinds, not just humans, have been hit hard by the eruptions in Washington and Oregon and
their aftermath. I’m reminded by what we’re seeing here of a study on the probable aftermath of all-out
thermonuclear war called The Final Epidemic that was put together by a number of physicians, such as Dr.
Helen Caldicott of Australia, astronomer Carl Sagan, the American pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, and
numerous other experts. As they said, after even a limited nuclear war, the survivors – assuming there were
any – would be pretty much on their own, because there’d be nobody outside the areas hit by the bombs to
help them for a long, long time – if ever. If help ever did reach them, any would-be rescuers coming into
the blast areas from places that had not been hit by nuclear or thermonuclear devices and other types of
weapons of mass destruction would have to travel into the target areas, somehow surviving intense
radiation and many other kinds of hazards to reach the survivors. When they got there, survivors in the
blast area would be suffering from crippling, agonizing injuries, or sick unto death from fallout and,
perhaps, the use of biological or chemical weapons, as well. As you can imagine, the probability of
survival in such a situation, at least beyond a short, agonizing time, would be extremely low.”
At first, what we were seeing belied his words. The studio was now showing clips of spectacular
rescues of whole groups of wild or tame animals taking place in or near towns along the eastern reaches of
the Columbia and up into Idaho, as conducted by the US Forest Service, the ASPCA, and other public and
private agencies, and individual members of local communities. They could have been reruns of the clips
we’d watched earlier of just such rescue efforts at The Dalles.
But then the scene shifted. Now before us were events taking place along Oregon’s coast and in the far
northern reaches of Vancouver Island, BC and the Strait of Georgia next to it. Here were long, bloody
stretches of water filled with whales, dolphins, seals, and great sharks who had been caught on the fringes
of the initial catastrophic event in Western Washington State. Indians, Forest Service personnel, Canadian
Mounted Police, US Coast Guard personnel, and numerous others, working from boats ranging in size from
kayaks to Coast Guard vessels, were trying to shepherd the animals, many of whom had suffered ghastly
injuries, to safe – well, at least, safer – water. Trawlers worked along with them, scooping up porpoises
and sharks in their nets and towing the animals out to sea, away from the area. One fishermen, working
with colleagues out of what might have been a tuna-boat, suddenly broke down weeping as a diver in a
wet-suit, swimming beside the nets in which the fishermen were towing two porpoises and a shark,
gestured to indicate that one of the porpoises and the shark had died and should be cut loose.
Everywhere the blood-stained sea was filled with the floating bodies of dead fish. One man on a Coast
Guard vessel grimly held up one such fish so the camera could get a good picture of it: great, gaping
wounds covered its sides, as if it had been simultaneously burned and scraped raw by a grater, and there
was something funny about its eyes. Aimes, who apparently was listening to a sound-track that had come
in with the films, explained voice-over that the dead and dying fish in the area had been burned and blinded
by acids released into the sea from the collapse of the Puget Sound basin, as well as stunned senseless and
scraped raw by concussion and blast effects.
The scene switched to a site on the Columbia River next to Pendleton, Oregon. A man with tears in his
eyes and a huge, triumphant grin on his face was holding up a little gray cat with white boots, a dark blue
collar, and a heart-shaped tag who had apparently swum halfway across the Columbia from the other side
before being rescued by the man, who, hoping to help rescue survivors from the other side, had been out on
the Columbia in a Zodiac. The camera followed him as he brought the cat to shore on the eastern bank of
the river, fighting turbulent currents thrown up by the tremors coming ever faster from the direction of Mt.
Hood. Beaching the zodiac, he carried the cat, who clung to him like a frightened child, toward a group of
tents where people waited to help survivors, human and otherwise, who had made it across the river.
“Don’t you feel that using all these resources to tend to a bunch of animals is a bit wasteful, Dr.
Aimes? Wouldn’t those resources be better spent to aid human victims of today’s events?”
“My dear young lady, please think! In the first place, how many human beings are going to make it
out of the affected area? Maybe not that many. In the meantime, tons and tons of supplies of all kinds –
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medicines, food, clothing, whatever might be needed – is being delivered to those aid-stations by
helicopter, plane, and truck arriving every few minutes from all over the country. We have more than
enough resources to go around some twenty or a hundred or a thousand times over for every man, woman,
and child lucky enough to escape the disasters that have wrecked the Pacific northwest. The real problem
is getting those supplies to where they’re needed, at least in time to do some good. In the meantime, there
are a lot of people there who want to do whatever they can to help, including using their own personal
resources to feed, house, and treat survivors. At this point, most of those survivors aren’t human – the
great bulk of them that have made it to these islands of safety include deer and other wildlife of all kinds as
well as horses, cattle, pigs, and so on that people have brought with them when they fled the endangered
areas. More supplies are being donated or brought in by truck or by air all the time, so much that at this
point there’s more than enough to go around for all these refugees, both human and otherwise. And that
will probably continue until the last survivors from the areas affected by the disaster who can do so have
managed somehow to make it to aid-stations of the sort we’re seeing here.
“Now, as far going in to the disaster areas themselves to aid any survivors there – no, I’m afraid that
just isn’t possible. Except for fools and heroes like that splendid woman from Salem we heard about earlier
today, the one who single-handedly brought a hundred or two hundred survivors from southern Washington
State to safety in Oregon before she herself was killed, there just isn’t going to be anyone going in there to
give aid to whatever survivors are still left in Western Washington or anywhere near Mt. Hood. It’s just
too damned dangerous!
“That’s why this reminds me of those horrifying scenarios that Caldicott and her colleagues included
in The Final Epidemic – whoever, whatever is still alive in there, human or otherwise, they’re on their own.
Normally, when disaster strikes, great numbers of medical and other emergency personnel from the UN and
its member countries, along with the Red Cross and, if necessary, the National Guard or other military
agencies, are able to reach the affected areas and start helping survivors within hours of the onset of
whatever disaster has occurred.
“But in this case, it’ll be months, if ever, before wholesale rescue expeditions of that sort can be
mounted to the affected areas The things that are now going on in Washington State – and not just
Washington! Did you hear the latest reports about Northern California?”
“No, what, Doctor?” said the bouncy little blond, whose plastic, sunshine-bright cheer was beginning
to fray noticeably around the edges.
On the screen, Humane Society and Forestry Service personnel were now working with injured
animals, trying to calm them down and get them into pens where they could rest, be fed, and have their
injuries treated. A dejected-looking grizzly, who made no effort to attack the men and women working
with him, was being gently urged into a hastily set-up enclosure that had been created from some sort of
kit by Forest Service people. Some distance away, two men were trying to lead a bucking, rearing buck
deer toward a pen.
“Hmm. Well, apparently the San Andreas fault – which isn’t really a true earthquake fault at all; it’s
simply the seam where two tectonic plates, the North American plate and the Pacific Plate, bump up against
each other – the San Andreas plate discontinuity is starting to show some alarming activity about 200 miles
south of Mt. Shasta. We may have something interesting starting up there in a little while . . .”
Kathy and I stared at one another. “Oh, shit, that’s somewhere up around Sacramento!” I exclaimed.
“The San Andreas runs all the way down the state!”
“No, not exactly,” Kathy said uneasily. She didn’t look quite as alarmed as I felt – but that wasn’t
saying much. “It starts somewhere near Point Reyes – that’s on the coast just above San Francisco – and
then it curves east, running down through the Central Valley to the border, coming out in the Gulf of
California, where Baja splits off from the rest of Mexico. The thing is, it’s about a hundred or two hundred
miles east of us here, something like that – damn, I wish I remember more from those geology classes I
took way back when,” she said, a little sheepishly. “Anyway, while they’ve been expecting the Big One to
hit Los Angeles any day now for the last hundred years – as far as the Bay Area goes, I’d say they just had
their Big One, earlier this morning, wouldn’t you? – the two sections of the San Andreas, the one running
from Fresno north to Point Reyes and the other running south from Fresno to Baja, seem to be somewhat
independent of each other. Big quakes in one section doesn’t seem to trigger anything in the other, at least
not directly – though of course over time, tension building up along one section and surrounding areas
might end up causing a quake somewhere in the other one.”
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“Yeah, well, there’s always a first time, darlin’,” I told her. “But I ain’t gonna worry about it until it
happens. We’re gonna have plenty of our own problems to take care of right here and now, and we’ll just
have to take it as it comes, won’t we?”
“Yep. I – whoo! Will you look at that!”
“That” was what seemed to be a pool of black ink flowing along the ground somewhere near Pullman,
Washington, according to Aimes.
“What the fuck is that?” I said, almost spooked out of my skin. “It looks like . . . Jesus, it’s spiders!”
Sure enough, Aimes was saying, “— apparently triggered something like a mass stampede of black
widow spiders native to the region, all fleeing eastward! They’re saying here . . .” Hesitating for a
moment to listen to the sound-track, he continued, “Would you believe they’re saying here that these
spiders are so stunned and sick you can pick them up in your hands and they won’t bite? See there!” On
cue, the scene changed to show a short, slender man in Forest Service green, stooping down by one flank of
the viscously flowing black river of spiders, scooping up several of the creatures in one gloved hand and
staring at them in wide-eyed fascination. The camera moved in for a close-up of the man’s hand and the
exhausted motes of life it held. Just as Aimes had said, the spiders sat quietly in the man’s hand, not
moving much, here and there one of them occasionally extending a tentative leg toward a neighbors and
then slowly pulling it back. I don’t know bupkis about black widow spiders, but it was instantly clear that
these poor creatures were tremendously dazed and disoriented, so much so that they lacked all will to react
much to anything around them.
Once again the scene changed, to a panorama of deer and horses staggering slowly out of the
devastation along roads that had been so heavily damaged by the quakes that had shattered the region this
morning and so covered with rocks, dust, and dirt in the aftermath that they could barely be seen. Then we
were once more seeing shots similar to ones we’d seen earlier, showing animals of all kinds swimming the
Columbia, rescuers in boats and on the eastern bank of the river pulling them to safety. Aimes was
commenting on the fact that the rescuers may have needed to do the rescuing – which, for the time being,
made them feel they had things under control and kept their minds off the possibility that their own homes
and lives might soon be threatened by eruptions of the sort that had occurred earlier in Washington, not to
mention the earthquakes produced by those eruptions, some of which they had already experienced – and
so these rescue efforts were no waste at all, but rather a very real therapy for people in areas neighboring
the devastated regions. Suddenly, he said, “Hold it! Something – yeah, that’s the one! Okay, this will give
everyone a much better idea of the sort of troubles we can expect as a result of all this . . .”
On the screen, in a location somewhere close to Pendleton, birds began to fall out of the sky. Soon a
rain of dead and dying birds filled the air. People were running out onto lawns, into streets and fields, to
see what was happening and do what they could to help the birds, which included starlings, owls, hawks,
countless songbirds of all kinds, even an occasional eagle. Some of the birds were, save for their gasping,
wheezing attempts to breathe, apparently all right, or at least unmarked. Others bore bloody wounds and
the marks of burns. A few were no more than charred bundles of bones and feathers – these last fell from
much greater heights. Aimes explained, voice-over, that these last had probably been pushed far up into
the sky by eruptions below them, which would account for their horrible condition; then, depending upon
the vagaries of the wind, they had fallen to earth in various places. In this case, they had fallen among
flocks of birds who, though unmarked themselves, had probably been caught in updrafts of egregiously
toxic gases belched out by the erupting volcanoes and the collapse of Puget Sound, and had been poisoned
by the gases in those updrafts, many of them fatally. Beyond physical proximity at the time they fell to
earth, however, the two groups of birds had nothing much to do with each other, and probably originally
came from widely separated areas.
“With so many birds in the area dying or dead, now,” Aimes was saying, “not to mention what’s
happened to the bats living in the region, we can expect massive blooms of insects of all kinds, especially
flies and other flying insects normally eaten by bats and birds . . .”
Once more the scene shifted. Now we were looking at vast clouds of insects falling from the sky in
areas such as Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Calgary, in Alberta Province of Canada, and Pendleton, Oregon.
Unlike the birds we had just seen, most of these insects were alive, though often dazed, disoriented, their
movements uncertain and chaotic. In many places thick blankets of flies, cockroaches, midges, gnats,
crickets, grasshoppers, and numerous other insect species covered the ground. The stridulations of
countless crickets filled the air as the studio techs suddenly mixed in the original soundtrack that had come
with the films.
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The scene shifted again. We watched a black cloud of bees descend on Coeur d’Alene –
“Uh-oh, those aren’t native bees,” I said. “Betcha they’re from Eastern Washington State’s campus in
Spokane – they had this project going there to study African and Africanized bees and see if they couldn’t
be tamed down some. Kept ’em in a hothouse all year around. Native bees wouldn’t be up and about this
early in the year, not in numbers like that! They have to be escapees – and those six-legged little sons of
bitches would as soon sting as eat, from what I’ve heard.”
Wherever these bees had come from, though, they didn’t seem to be interested in stinging – or much of
anything else. Coming across a large cottonwood tree, they alighted on its branches and huddled there in
great dejected clumps, behaving not like any bees I’d ever seen, African or otherwise, looking for all the
world as if they were convinced the end of the world had come and they were simply waiting for the final
curtain call. A beekeeper, completely covered in a protective suit with a heavy veil covering the facial
area, was approaching the trees. He needn’t have bothered with the moon-suit – or anything other than his
birthday suit, for that matter. He was able to walk right up to the bees and scoop some of them up in his
hands. The bees sat unmoving in his hands, their wings motionless, heads down, like survivors of some
apian Auschwitz. Voice over, Aimes was commenting, “. . . African bees, apparently escaped from a
research station at the University of Washington’s Spokane campus. However, they appear to give no
danger to anyone here – the beekeeper is saying that they seem to be totally inert, without any initiative, so
traumatized by whatever they’ve been through that they do nothing but sit unmoving on whatever surface is
available, tolerating even relatively rough handling by the beekeeper. Normally, African bees . . . ”
“See?” I said, grinning. “I was right. – Though like the man says, these bees don’t seem to be acting
much like they normally would.”
“I wouldn’t either, if I’d just been through what they must’ve been,” Kathy told me. “Hey, look at the
owls, will you!”
Now the screen showed a group of men and women who, owls perched on their shoulders, were
uttering strange, weird cries. They were standing among large trees; every second, more and more owls
were flocking into the area, clustering about them, fluttering down to land on the ground at their feet.
Behind them were several Forest Service vehicles, their drivers standing by the open doors of the vehicles’
cabs as if waiting for the men and women to them to be driven away.
Aimes was saying: “— Okanogan National Forest, the western edges of which are apparently burning
in what is certain to become a catastrophic forest fire, one likely initially touched off by red-hot lava bombs
thrown out from Mt. Hood or, it is barely possible, by the overturning of a Coleman lantern or stove in the
aftermath of the earthquakes that hit the area this morning. The men and women you see there are
members of various Native American peoples of Eastern Washington, who have come in here to . . . I guess
to coax the spotted owls who live here out so they can be taken away to a place of safety. And as strange as
it may seem, they appear to be successful – look at all those owls! I can hardly believe what I’m seeing . . .
”
More and more owls fluttered out of the trees, landing at the Indians’ feet. Finally, saying something
to the owls in an unknown language, the Indians turned and began to walk toward the Forest Service
vehicles waiting for them some distance away, the owls perched on their shoulders remaining in place, the
rest of the owls, fluttering and hopping along the ground, following in their footsteps. Eventually the
Indians and all the owls that had followed them – and none seemed to be left behind – had boarded the
vehicles, the doors closing behind them. The vehicles started up and began moving, heading east. The
camera in the news van that followed panned briefly around from east to west until it was focused on the
great dark clouds of smoke and ash now filling the western sky like the walls of Dis, moving relentlessly
east toward Idaho. Then it turned back to the Forest Service vehicles again, remaining focused on them.
Aimes commented, “Apparently they’ve had no problems getting the owls out, even though they’re wild
animals and ordinarily don’t take much to human beings. The Native Americans who actually coaxed them
into the Forest Service trucks and vans say that the owls understand when it is time to do things differently
– that they somehow managed to communicate to the owls what the situation was and what the owls
needed to do to survive. I don’t pretend to understand it, but it’s very real.”
The scene changed again. “All right,” said Aimes, “this is what I was talking about earlier when I
mentioned The Final Epidemic. As you might imagine, available medical facilities on the perimeter of the
disaster area were so unprepared for what has occurred here, and have been so overwhelmed by the vast
flood of survivors pouring out of Washington State, that survivors who have managed to make it to such
refuge areas are getting very short shrift, and will continue to do so for quite a while until help can arrive.
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Here, we’re looking at a field just outside of Moscow, Idaho, where both injured and able-bodied survivors
from Washington State have been taken to await help that is supposed to come in the next few hours from
federal sources such as the United States Army, as well as units from Alberta, Canada, National Guard
units from various states, and so forth . . . ”
If anything, he understated the seriousness of the case. Here, on a broad, gently sloping meadow not
far from the city of Moscow, Idaho, the burned, maimed, and dying from eastern Washington State had
been laid out on the ground on blankets and sheets carried out there by local citizens. Ambulances stood by
in the distance; from them emerged men and women carrying blankets, stretchers, First Aid kits, and a
wealth of other equipment. Even so, for every one of the victims that could be helped by the approaching
medical teams, there were twenty, thirty, or more who would have to do without until outside help could
arrive. Crying children and weeping, screaming adults, dazed and unable to help themselves or anyone
else, wandered, wild-eyed and distraught, among those who, living and dead, lay on the ground. One
young man, wearing only a pair of shredded trousers and a burned zori on one foot, suddenly began to yell
something and, running toward an approaching paramedic, began striking out wildly at the other man. The
paramedic nimbly danced back out of range. The screaming man followed him, still trying to hit him.
Within a few seconds the paramedic had moved backward until he was even with two other paramedics
who, quickly closing in around the hysterical survivor, pinioned his arms and injected him with something
before he was really aware of what they were doing. Within a short time he was swaying on his feet, and
then the paramedics were gently lowering him to the ground, where he went limp and then began to snore
as one of the paramedics who had corralled him took off his own jacket and gently laid it over the man.
The scene shifted to a similar facility at Boardman, Oregon, right on the Columbia, then to one in
Bridesville, British Columbia, then to others in Idaho, Oregon, Canada. Everywhere it was the same: the
locals were caring for the survivors as best they could, tenderly helping them to pallets laid out in fields, on
parking-lots, in playgrounds and municipal parks, doing what they could for their injuries, which were
often hideous, trying to give comfort to those whose spouses, children, parents, or friends, whom they had
brought here, had just died of their injuries. Oh, yes, bad as the grim scenarios he had laid out for us were,
Aimes had definitely fallen far short of the catastrophic reality. There were far too many of the injured and
destitute, and, at least so far, until supplies finally arrived from outside, far too few resources to help them.
Paramedics and nurses moved among those lying on pallets on the ground, performing triage to determine
who could be helped, who could not – those who would recover without help over here, those who would
die no matter what was done (or were already dead) over there, those who needed and would benefit from
treatment in the middle, sorted out into groups from least to most in need of that help. Even then, there
were far too many of those remaining in that middle group for the pitiful medical resources available to
treat them. Doctors were trying heroically to perform complicated abdominal, neurological, or other
surgery in tents hastily erected over the patients, in an environment virtually devoid of the opportunity to
enforce proper sanitation or carry out appropriate antiseptic procedures. Under conditions that would have
made Civil War field medics blanch with horror, they set compound fractures and stitched up gaping
wounds in the middle of dirt fields under conditions in which stopping the flow of blood as quickly as
possible was of far greater importance than trying to keep wounds clean. After all, it could take days to die
of blood-poisoning, and in the meantime, the powerful antibiotics to cure it were being airlifted in by the
Army, the Air Force, the Canadian military, and the National Guard – but it took just a few minutes to die
of exsanguination from a torn artery.
And then the rains, scions of “volcano winter,” began to fall. Filthy-dirty black rain, loaded with ash
and God alone knows what other detritus from the eruptions and fires, soon began to turn those hastily set
up refugee stations into seas of mud. Ambulances, supplemented by ordinary citizens driving automobiles
and pickup trucks, began to load up refugees to carry them away to hospitals, school auditoria, private
homes, and other places where, at least, they would be out of the rain, dry, and relatively warm. But there
were so many refugees, and so few vehicles, relatively speaking, available to do the job, that most of the
injured, those who could not move to shelter under their own power, would be left lying in those muddy
fields, in that cold, dirty rain, perhaps for hours. By the time they, too, could be taken to shelter of some
kind, if only in the form of prefab huts and tents erected in the fields for them, many of them would be
dying of pneumonia.
A further problem was how to provide clean water and food fore everyone, though the need for food
wasn’t nearly as immediate as that for water – food, too, would have been airlifted in long before the need
for it was desperate, but water was another matter entirely. So was sanitation – men and women were
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hastily digging trenches in the ground for refugees to use as latrines until porta-potties could be set up or
the refugees taken to places with indoor plumbing. But, as Aimes said, it was like King Canute trying to
stem the tide with a yell and a wave of the hand: so many people had to go now, especially the small
children among the refugees, and for many of them, the only place available for such use was the ground
where they stood, or, at best, nearby bushes or ravines. As a result, the cities and towns and villages to
which the refugees had come would be very, very lucky to escape major epidemics, and many of the
injured refugees themselves might die in the next few days as a result of gangrene and infections due to the
utter lack of sanitation in the areas where they lay, unconscious or moaning in agony, on tarmac or bare
ground.
And now snow was beginning to fall in many of these places –
“Oh, Christ, let’s watch something else, I can’t take this any more!” Kathy moaned.
“I agree, darlin’. Here, give me the remote so I can play with it for awhile,” I told her in a half-assed
attempt at lightening both our moods, holding out my hand.
“Here,” she told me wanly, handing the gadget to me. I aimed it at the TV and pressed the channel
button –
“— NBC news, with Peter Jennings, bringing you the latest on the tremendous, horrifying events that
have wracked our world since around 4:30 a.m. Pacific Coast time, when the detonation of a thermonuclear
bomb in Puget Sound in Washington State took place. That event resulted in the collapse of the Puget
Sound basin, which in turn set off eruptions among the volcanoes of the Cascade mountain range as well as
numerous catastrophic earthquakes throughout America’s West Coast.
“As we reported earlier, for those of you who hadn’t tuned in then, there appears to be a brand-new
volcano in the region of Sutter’s Creek, California, which, like Mexico’s Mt. Paricutín in the early 1940s,
began erupting in a flat, open field, spewing out hot ash and rock and beginning to build what may
someday be a new volcanic mountain. Scientists from the University of California at Davis are on their
way to the site to observe first-hand what is happening there, and seismologists and volcanologists from
around the country will be keeping a close watch on the new-born volcano, which right now is only a foot
or so high, but could possibly grow into a very large mountain indeed over the next few weeks or months.
Apparently, because of the tremendous jolting that California’s San Andreas fault received this morning as
a result of the eruptions in Washington and Oregon states, a slender but extremely hot plume of magma has
forced itself to the surface there at Sutter’s Creek from deep in the earth below, giving birth to the volcano.
We will report any new developments associated with that volcano as soon as we receive news of them.
“We are also trying to find out more about two other eruptions which have apparently taken place this
morning, one in Yellowstone Park, Wyoming, involving the so-called ‘Yellowstone Dome,’ a large mass of
magma lying close to the surface in the northwest corner of the state of Wyoming, and the other in Long
Valley, California, close to the Mono Lake area. More on that soon.
“In the meantime, the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, California reports that the
strange celestial displays reported in many areas of the world yesterday evening and last night, which
included a massive meteor-shower and even impacts of what were probably very large meteorites in areas
such as Sidney, Australia, Bangkok, Thailand, and many other places around the world, leading to great
destruction of property and much loss of life, was due to debris accompanying the asteroid which impacted
our East Coast late last night. The beautiful, fantastic sky-glows and other displays seen in the heavens
yesterday throughout the Western Hemisphere and in many areas of Europe, Africa, and Asia, which many
observers thought heralded the end of the world, were apparently by-products of gas and dust preceding the
asteroid into our atmosphere. The question is: will there be more such heavenly visitors impacting our
world? Many are terrified that the bolides impacting many parts of the world yesterday and the comet that
struck Washington State this morning won’t be the last. At this point, no one is sure that there won’t be
more, but many scientists feel that new impacts are unlikely, at least for the time being.
“Still more troubles continue to plague both the Atlantic and the Pacific Basins this morning. Gigantic
tsunamis have already battered Guam, Midway, the Hawaiian Islands, and many other areas in and around
the Pacific Ocean, and others have swamped the coasts of France, Spain, Morocco, the western Sahara, and
Mauritania, as well as our own New England Coast, the southern coast of Greenland, the western coasts of
Ireland and the United Kingdom, and the coastal areas of Canada’s Maritime Provinces. More are likely to
be on the way if the earthquakes that have continued to jolt both of America’s coasts since early this
morning don’t stop soon. Scientists feel that there is a strong likelihood of more quakes and aftershocks
over the next several days. Coastal warnings have been issued throughout the countries of the Pacific Rim
 Day of the Dragons
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 8 of 8

and the North Atlantic to get to high ground and remain there as long as there is danger of tsunamis, though
some regions in the area are more at risk than others. In particular, the eastern coastlines of the Japanese
archipelago, the Hawaiian group and most of the other Pacific islands, and the west coast of Alaska are at
serious risk for tsunami damage. Other areas, such as the coast of Southern California, are shielded from
the main body of the Pacific by offshore islands and for that and other reasons may escape significant
damage from such sources.
“In the meantime –”
“Fuck this!” I said, hitting the POWER-OFF switch on the remote. Jennings’ voice cut off, and the
picture, rapidly dwindling to a dot, winked out.
“Rich, what about the – the strikes on our cities? What’s happened to the rest of the world?” Kathy
asked me. Her face drawn and pale, she looked as if she’d just heard our whole world had been destroyed –
which, indeed, was just what was happening out there.