A Distant Eden
Authors: Lloyd Tackitt
A Distant Eden
by Lloyd Tackitt
Copyright © 2012 by Lloyd L. Tackitt. All rights reserved.
First Kindle Edition: March 2012
Cover:
Streetlight Graphics
LICENSE NOTES
All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
To Susan and Cori—without your dedicated support this couldn’t have happened.
This is a novel, but not the usual type. It is a cross between fiction and survival instruction manual. Instead of the usual instructional style of writing about survival, I chose to employ a story about people in the act of surviving. This has the benefit of showing how a particular technique is used while also showing the necessary mindset or attitude of the person who survives. Mindset is possibly 85% of survival and it is difficult to describe. It is easier to show a person shooting another person without hesitation, than it is to explain why it is a stupid idea to let the bad guy draw first.
This style of writing also has some minuses. These characters don’t have the significant psychological flaws that are supposed to make fictional characters interesting to read about. A character with a survival mindset doesn’t wait until the bad guy has him cornered on a high ledge and is hanging by one finger before he finally reacts the right way. In real life those people die, and quickly. The miraculous escape from a cliff hanger situation is just that, miraculous. It only happens once in a million times.
To be a survivor is to think ahead, avoid the cliff and shoot the bad guy the first time you see him. As Roman says, “Shoot first and don’t bother to ask questions later, the answers are always the same, you have food and they want to take it from you.” In here you won’t find weak sister heroes; you’ll find good guys that are almost indistinguishable from the bad guys—because the people who survive will have many of the same traits. They have to because it will be a harsh world. A hammer used by a bad guy or a good guy is still a hammer. Tools are tools, and mindset is a tool. It is the most important survival tool of all. So you’ll see that these characters don’t go through the usual character development arc found in typical fiction. They start off with the survivor’s mindset or they die, they don’t get many chances to learn.
The other minus is this style uses what critics call information dumping. I use it to explain what the world might look like and how to use what you have at hand. It is a compromise between telling too much and not telling enough, a tough balancing act. There are survival techniques, such as disinfecting water with the sun’s ultra-violet rays, or the solar cooker, that are described just enough that the reader can then go on-line and research and get all of the details. The compromise comes from not giving all those details in this book. This is to try and keep the story moving. But there are some fairly long narrative passages used to describe the after-effects of the grid loss, or to explain somewhat simple techniques such as building fish traps.
So, take this for what it is—a hybrid instruction manual-novel with the inherent weaknesses and strengths of combining the two. I fervently hope you never need this information, but if you do, remember this—there is very little difference between how good guys and bad guys act when in survival mode. Don’t let the bad guys have any chance at all. None. You’ll see what I mean.
Thanksgiving Day
Roman and Sarah were happy because they did not know that in less than a month, Roman would be a cop-killer and they would be living day to day in pure survival mode.
This was a rare Thanksgiving with both of the kids and their spouses, all six of the grandkids and their nephew Adrian home for the feast. It was a typical North Texas winter day; cool, and a bit cloudy. Kids were constantly running in and out of the house, and football was on television with the sound low. The remains of the meal were still on the table; way too much turkey and dressing, and far too many pies. The adults were groaning from having, in spite of their best intentions, over-eaten. Few days could claim to be better.
Roman and Adrian were talking about Adrian’s current assignment at Fort Hood. Adrian said, “I’ll be there for a couple of years I think, assigned to that unit that I can’t talk about. We come and go quite a bit so if you call and can’t reach me, don’t be surprised.”
“Surprised?” Roman responded, “Hardly. I know what you do, and I don’t figure to reach you in a hurry. But you know where to get me just about all the time. It sure is good to see you—what’s it been this time, two years?”
Adrian said, “Yes, sir. Last time I was at Fort Dix. So, what are we going to do after the game? Got any plans?”
“Hell with it,” Roman replied. “I’m not waiting on the game; those Cowboys are stinkin-up my living room again. I’m heading out to do some fishing. Got plenty of tackle here. Wanta go?”
“You bet! Where’s the stuff?”
Roman hollered out, “Fishing trip! Who’s coming?” and was greeted with a chorus of eager voices.
It took a while to get everyone outfitted, especially the kids, but soon enough they were all sitting on the riverbank with bait in the water. Roman’s son Jerry poked Adrian in the ribs and asked, “Dad, you still putting food back for the big one?”
Roman nodded. “I was reading an article just this week. Seems that the North and South Pole have a habit of changing places periodically. Actually, it has happened a lot during earth’s history, and it’s not rhythmic, either. It might change five times in a hundred thousand years, then stay stable for a million. No one can predict when it’ll happen again. No one knows why it flips. They know the last one was about eight hundred thousand years ago, but that’s all anyone seems willing to say for certain. No one can guess what will happen to us when it flips again, assuming we’re still here. It might cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, or it might not. It will screw up electronics, I would think.”
Roman’s daughter Shirley joined the ribbing. “Have you ever added up all the various ways that an apocalypse can happen? From listening to you all my life it seems there must be thousands!”
“Thousands? Might seem like that, but I think there are only about a dozen or so likely ways. But there isn’t really any way to count them because there are possibilities that we can’t predict. Things we just don’t know, and can’t know. How do you count those? Suppose that the red tides that you read about mutate and start rapidly reproducing and creating a poisonous gas. That’s more or less how the earth got oxygen, so it isn’t all that farfetched of an idea. But how do you count things you don’t know?
“We know for sure that history tells us there have been numerous mass extinctions on this planet, and to believe that we are safe from more of the same kind of global catastrophe is the type of conceit that made people believe the earth was the center of the universe. I may be off center, no pun intended. Maybe I think about it too much—but it is plain foolish not to give it due consideration.”
Shirley laughed and said, “Calm down, Dad, no one’s calling you a crank. Even if you are one. I was just curious about how many ways humans can be wiped out.”
“I don’t know,” Roman replied seriously. “I hope it never happens. But there are enough obvious ways, and it has happened enough times, that a betting man wouldn’t bet against it. So I read about it, and about survival techniques, and I put away a few supplies; but I keep my fingers crossed that I am wasting my time and my money.
“You kids keeping up with the supplies I gave you? Got them in a cool place? Remember to keep those radios covered up with foil?”
In unison, there was an assenting good-natured groan as his children once again answered in the affirmative, while rolling their eyes.
Roman, completely aware of how they felt grinned happily at them.
~ * * * ~
November 22 to December 21
The sun, a super hot ball of plasma, generates immense magnetic fields that writhe and tangle in constant heaving motion. Some of these magnetic loops occasionally become so entangled that they snap, releasing tremendous bursts of energy. The sun constantly radiates energy and particles in all directions; but the bursts from these localized coronal mass ejections are phenomenal in size and energy.
The earth also has a magnetic field. This field acts as a shield against most of the sun’s emissions. The earth’s magnetic shield causes the sun’s emissions to flow around it, protecting the earth’s atmosphere and surface from being constantly bombarded by x-rays, gamma rays, ions and protons. This magnetic shield is in large part responsible for creating and maintaining conditions favorable for life to exist.
There are giant storms that rage within the sun with vast fields of magnetic lines that war with each other. Occasionally these storms explode from the sun’s surface in fiery arcs, roiling out like colossal bridges for hundreds of thousands of miles. These bursts eject, at millions of miles per hour, dense clouds of electrified gas weighing billions of tons. When they happen to be pointed at the earth they can reach it in as little as fourteen hours, hitting the earth’s magnetic fields like a sledgehammer crashing down on a walnut—blowing the magnetic shield out of its way and bombarding Earth with the dense storm of particles. These storms, on the sun’s scale, are frequent.
The storm particles cause damage to the earth and its occupants. Stroke and heart attack deaths double during solar storms. Human intelligent quotients can temporarily shrink by as much as twenty points. Metal structures have electrical currents induced into them. Radio waves are blocked. Electrical transformers overload and begin to make loud rattling sounds as they heat up and explode.
The earth’s magnetic shield has “cracks” in it that—when conditions are ripe—allow protons and ions to enter inside and build up. This “pre-loaded” condition, when subsequently hit by a strong coronal mass ejection from the sun, magnifies the initial blast. This extra shock can simulate the electro-magnetic-pulse from a nuclear blast, shutting down sensitive electronic equipment.