The Yellowstone Conundrum (49 page)

 
Jared Hastings’ shoulders slumped, melting in front of her. Betsy hugged him as Cameron and a throng of townspeople went by. “If we’re wrong, we’ll pay you back,” she paused. “If we’re right, then it won’t matter much.” 

 
It was a lifetime’s effort to run a supermarket in a rural town; dependent on everything; supply, manpower, expenses to meet revenues—which in the supermarket business was about a 1% profit—utility companies made more profit than supermarkets. Stripping the shelves clean would mount to $20,000 or more.

  
Chinka chinka chinka 

 
The white ash had started to turn to small pieces of blackness.  The townspeople managed to set up a relay; canned goods of all kinds; meats, vegetables, tuna, anything bottled, medicines, bottled water, pasta, propane gas tanks from the exchange out front, pain relievers, toothpaste, toilet paper, feminine products—got to have tampons even when the world is coming apart—lighter fluid and matches, candles, then the Cokes and related bottles; batteries of all sizes. Cam couldn’t help it, but he wasn’t going to stop anyone bringing a snooter along; wine and booze were also brought aboard.

 
In ten minutes Don’s Supermarket in Wright, Wyoming had been properly looted; no money taken from the cash registers. While some meat had been taken, it was only a day’s supply; the rest would rot. Bitsy stood in the parking lot as black ash started to drop on everyone’s shoulder. 

 
“Mr. Hastings, you need to come with us. If you don’t, you’re going to die here tonight.”

 
“This is my life,” Jared Hastings had the deer-in-the-headlight look. His wife and children were back at their home, locked in the darkness. He continually ran his hand through his thinning hair in a what-am-I-to-do mode, totally lost. He was wrong about his original estimate; he only had a day’s worth of kerosene for the generator.

 
“Bitsy!” shouted Cameron from across the lot.

 
“Mr. Hastings, please; come with me,” Betsy urged.

 
“I—I—can’t,” he replied simply, courageously. He couldn’t leave his family and what was left of his business, even in the face of probable death.

 
“I understand sir,” Betsy kissed him on the cheek, turned and ran to the cab. She’d tried but he had relieved her of all responsibility.

 
At eight fifty-two on the evening of February 20
th
a caravan of thirty-two vehicles, including a Peterbilt with a loaded fifth-wheel pulled out of Wright, Wyoming heading east along with 65% of the town’s full-time population.   Stars could be seen through the front windshield; everlasting pitch dark behind. The agreement was that they would drive until they thought it was safe. If anyone ran out of gas, they would leave their car where it stood, and join another group. If the “stuff” they’d brought with them wouldn’t fit, it would be discarded along the way. 

 
By the time they reached state 450 headed toward Newcastle they were moving at 45 miles an hour, just about ten miles per hour faster than the ever-expanding Black Cloud was spreading to the south and east.

 
Betsy hit Cameron on the arm, just because. “Thank you, Cameron.” For the eighth time in six hours she began to cry again.

King County Public Library

Third floor “Living Room” Seattle Public Library, Rex Sorgatz photographer 21 October 2005.

Building designed by Rem Koolhaas

  From the third floor “Living Room” area Ray and ten of the thirty-plus collection of office workers, tourists and people-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time analyzed the 5
th
Avenue entrance area.  

  I
t was very dark in the huge library; no lights in the building, no lights in Seattle. Ray knew people by shapes. Reflecting against the latticework of the Library’s façade was some light. As a group, they stopped and walked toward the 4
th
Avenue side of the building, then toward the Spring Street side. Two catty-corner blocks away the 1201 Third Avenue Building, once the tallest building in the city, now second to the 76-story Columbia Center, three blocks to the south. Fire engines could be heard. Light from the fire sparkled and bounced off the aluminum and glass skin of the Library.

 
“Look!” the voice came from a woman he couldn’t see directly because of the darkness. Across the street from 1201 was the luxurious Fairmont Olympia Hotel:

  It was also on fire.
Both fires were at the street level; both set by marauding gangs. Not a person gathered in the darkness for one second believed that the Seattle Public Library wouldn’t be a target. The lowlife toilet bowl shit-scums were out to burn Seattle down.

 
“That’s not going to happen here,” Ray said softly.  “This building is not going to go down. We don’t have much time. We have to secure this entrance,” Ray turned to the 5
th
Avenue doorways; and then we have to go downstairs to the second floor to secure the entrance to the parking decks on Spring Street.

 
One of the beautiful things about the Library’s design was that the skin of the building was all aluminum and glass and in most places around the building, was offset by twenty feet or more from the actual walls. Unfortunately, the Seattle Library, as unique as it was, was subject to the same restrictions on its budget as every other city and state faced; manpower was the easiest item to fix in a budget. Do we need full-time security guards? How many staff? Isn’t the library built to virtually run itself?

 
Ray looked at the 5
th
Avenue entrance from a military standpoint. The entrance was narrow, through a set of six doors, which fed into three lanes of electronic scanners.  All but the center doors were closed. Someone entering through this entrance was immediately faced with a “go straight” toward the back of the room; “go down” a double escalator (non-functioning) to the first floor and a second “go down” to the “open air” auditorium constructed between the third and second floors.

 
“I have to go downstairs to check on the first floor; John, you’re in charge,” the urgency in his voice unmistakable. “Block that entrance however you can! But, this is the way I’d do it.” Ray began to speak quickly to John Banner, 42, balding, Winston smoker, was in Seattle for a week from his hometown of Sacramento, staying at the Hyatt because he’d won a free trip for accumulating reward points on his Hyatt Gold Passport card; only to have his stay upgraded to participate in a new show called
The End of the World as We Know It
. 

Escalator from first to third floors.

   Banner was nodding his head. Ray’s suggestions made sense. Ray turned to Diane Bryant, 45, an attractive brunet but stern-faced, who was also paying attention. Diane had made her way from Redmond, almost making it to work as an investment banker for Bank of America at the Columbia Towers before having to abandon her 2012 BMW near the Two Union Square building and started to walk to work. Cell phone didn’t work; there were no lights; it was raining, but at least she had her umbrella. She was a classy lady who could handle four-inch heels, but not necessarily for such a distance.

 
“Everyone, you don’t have much time,” Ray struggled not to return to Fallujah but his brain was pinging bad times.  “Find something you can use as a weapon!”

 
Ray turned and headed down the escalator. It was a long fucking escalator and Ray wished it was working.

 
“Ray!” came a shout down at the end of the tunnel, normally lit a pretty yellow—another feature of the library that involved the visitor’s other senses. There were red tunnels, blue tunnels and the yellow escalators. Hurrying as he could, Ray sensed that Molly and/or the folks below were in trouble. 

 
“What!” he shouted.

  “There’re people outside!
The bad guys are here! Not many, but some!” she shouted.

 
Out of breath, Ray arrived at the first floor. There was still the second floor entrance to the parking garage to be checked. Molly had overstated the size of the crowd, but there was no mistaking it. A number of shitbags were slouching down 4
th
Avenue, peering into buildings, seeing if there was anything to steal. There was no time and so much to do.

 
“Molly—Janice! “He motioned to the two of them. “Here’s the deal. This entrance is too difficult to protect,” Ray turned and was impressed that the entrance area had pile of shit against the doors and the security wand-through areas; a brief, very brief smile cracked his brain as he saw material from the English as a Second Language (ESL) kiosks, chairs and desks jammed against the doors; also that they’d used the Information kiosks.

 
“Great job everybody!” he shouted, then to Molly and Janice. “Over there,“ Ray pointed toward the elevator banks; to either side were the emergency stairwells red lights lead to white lights which lead to jump out of the aircraft into the freezing water. “I need for a number of your people to be walking back and forth, carrying something that looks like it might hurt, or might be a gun.  When the shit hits the fan and they start breaking into the door, run like hell for the stairwells.

 
The stairwell doors opened into the stairwell from the outside.

 
“I want a lot of you up on the second floor already.  Find something; a bar, a rack, I don’t know what, when your brave friends from the first floor come up the stairwell, you then need to make it like your last stand. Throw whatever you can into the stairwell. This has to be more than just annoying for them. You have to drive them back down the stairwell, so that they’ll have to come up the escalators,” Ray paused. “You have to hurt them because they will be trying to hurt you. You have to hate them.  You have to have the anger; it’s-me-or-them attitude,” he explained. “It doesn’t matter that you’ve never hit anyone in your life. If you don’t succeed they will kill you,” Ray said simply. “People, I don’t know how else to explain this to you!”

 
There wasn’t anything else to say. Everybody scattered to what they thought they could contribute to. It was amazing.  It was shit or get off the pot time. Find something you could do; didn’t matter that you’d never been in a fight in your life. People were coming to hurt you. 

 
In the meantime Ray had to check on the Spring Street parking lot entrance and figure a way to help these poor people.

 
You’ve been a soldier, dude. They haven’t
. In fact, there are days, sometimes weeks, have gone by when you haven’t been able to tell the difference between reality and dreamland.

 
The VA had been good to him; so had the Army. He wasn’t alone. The dreams he had; the ones that all of fucking sudden dropped him into what felt was like a mixture of gaming and sheer terror; those were real. 

 
Get to work, soldier!