The Filter Trap (7 page)

A lone Chinook flew across the vast warm waters of the Pacific. From inside, Allan watched the water form an endless matrix of jagged pockets, each sending a collection of all wavelengths at once back at him before tumbling back into the trough. Nothing seemed to have changed in the vast oceans, but Allan knew it loomed in ways yet undiscovered.

How long before the ecosystem changed, before the temperature in the oceans would drop? The older, cooler star might keep the food chain going for another hundred years. Maybe this change would be nothing on a planetary timeline compared to what humanity already wrought.

Allan left the window and looked around the very full cargo bay. The ride reminded him of the jarring torture of a wooden roller coaster, every bump worrying Allan they were about to crash into the waves. The fighter pilots all slept soundly through the chop, issuing silent edicts on Allan’s masculinity. His two pillows, a luxury compared to the pilots sleeping on bags of rice, gave him no comfort.

The major explained it three times before they boarded the chopper. Allan came as talisman, a friendly face so Dr. Tarmor wouldn’t need persuasion from stern voices and loaded AR-15s to come back. Why the sleeping Air Force pilots came worried him. They should be navigating the sky, not dangerous city streets in potentially hostile territory. Could the United States military, larger than the next ten competitors combined, already be stretched so thin in this crisis to commit pilots to ground rescue missions? He comforted himself with an alternative hypothesis: this rescue wouldn’t be dangerous enough to warrant the ground combat skills of the Marines or Army. According to the major, Jill would be waiting for them at the Presidio.

The chopper bucked, at least harder than it had since takeoff, and Nana’s foot slipped, colliding with Lee’s thigh. She opened her eyes directly at Allan. He closed his eyes quickly, hoping she couldn’t see he’d been staring at her, lost in thought.

“Get some rest, Doc,” she said as non-threateningly as possible. “You’re gonna need it.”

Three hours later another jolt woke Allan to stare at the ocean again, involuntarily this time as the chopper banked hard toward the coast. Allan slumped over and up the side wall until he could see out of the circular window. He saw blue for a minute, the ocean, then smoke.

The chopper righted itself and put Allan back on the floor, trapped between two ominously close pallets of bottled water. The canvas strips holding the pallets strained against the sudden turns.

“We’re here, folks,” the pilot’s speaker barked. “What’s left of it, anyway. They told me to drop you off at the Presidio, but I’m not going to be able to touch down.”

“
Drop
is right!” LARS looked down with trepidation. “I haven’t jumped since basic.”

“Aren’t you a pilot?” Allan asked, happy to not suffer his fear alone.

LARS nodded and leaned over to Allan. “I prefer two Pratt and Whitney’s with 35,000 pound-feet of thrust to escort me to the ground, not a big piece of canvas. Pilots only see parachutes when something goes
wrong
.”

Lee rolled her eyes. “Just enjoy the view, probably your last chance to relax for a few days.”

“I have a feeling the view won’t help us relax,” Nana said, pointing at the columns of smoke outside.

SIMI, sensing Allan’s trepidation, tapped him on the chest. “You’ll love it, Doc. I got you, don’t worry.” He grabbed a parachute and brought the harness up around Allan’s shaking legs. A few uncomfortably tight strap pulls later and SIMI bumped his fist on Allan’s shoulder. “Ready!” SIMI put Allan’s hand on the red tab just above his opposite collarbone and lowered his voice. “Just remember to pull this if you want to stay alive, okay?”

Allan, shivering with fear, managed to nod.

The cool fog of the bay whistled in as the back of the chopper opened.

“Ready!” the others shouted in turn and made a makeshift jump line by the window into the sky.

“Drop point, Presidio, thirty seconds,” the pilot advised.

“Let’s go!” Lee shouted at Allan, pulling him into the line behind her. “I saved you a spot.”

LARS, behind Allan, put a hand on his shoulder and leaned in. “She always goes first when we’ve got something tough to do, that way the rest of us can’t back down from a challenge. Now you can’t, either.”

The gaping maw started to look less like sky and more like a smoking patchwork quilt stuck in the San Francisco Bay.

“Hey!” Lee shouted and snapped her fingers in front of Allan’s eyes. “You’ll be fine, just watch me, and when I open my chute you open yours, then grab the handles and pull. You’ll get it, it’s intuitive.” Raising her voice for the others, “If these dumbasses can do it, you can too.”

Lee leaned onto the platform, slowly walking the plank. Beyond her the miasma of colors gave way to individual details, familiar buildings and public parks mangled almost beyond recognition.

“Looks like they put the city through a washing machine then lit it on fire,” LARS said.

“Don’t look at the bay!” SIMI shouted, which of course brought their eyes there.

“What are those, fish?” LARS asked about the many bobbing white objects in the flooded edges of the bay.

“
They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. All foul, all rotting, all dead
,” Lee whispered cryptically.

“What!” Allan yelled.

“She’s just showing off her library again,” SIMI said.

“I get that, the Dead Marshes, but what are those down there?”

“Bodies.” LARS solemnly realized.

“
All dead
,” Allan repeated Lee’s quotation to himself.

LARS nodded. “Victims of the tsunami.”

Lee, almost at the edge of the platform, shifted and pointed at their destination, high flat cliffs covered with tens of thousands of newly minted homeless between the
dead marshes
and the Pacific.

“The Presidio!” she shouted. “If we lose each other watch for my flare!”

“
Candles of corpses
,” Allan mumbled through a shiver. He felt hands at his neck and jerked around.

“Easy buddy,” LARS shouted, pulling Allan’s shirt up over his mouth. “Try not to breathe that smoke.” He leaned to Allan’s ear and whispered, “Or you’ll light little candles of your own.”

“You too?” he asked, acknowledging LARS’s awareness of at least one of Lee’s literary references, despite the latter quotation coming from a popular film adaptation. Allan pointed at Lee’s back. “Does she know?”

“That I like that Hobbit shit too?” LARS gave Allan a friendly pat on the back. “Better to let her think she’s smarter; takes ego and confidence to lead people, eh,
professor
?”

LARS yanked Allan back around to face the smoke and gave him a firm push.

Lee had already jumped. LARS pushed again. Hard. Allan let out the most blood-curdling expletive he could think of and ran straight off the deck.

Allan instantly regretted the bravado, spinning and falling at 120 miles an hour. His eyes struggled to make sense of the jumbled mess. Lee had told him to pull his parachute after her. He tried to find Lee, a speck floating in the maelstrom hurtling up. A large red and white striped ball spun past.

Allan fumbled at his collar for his parachute, but the handle was gone. One of those damn pilots sabotaged him. Panicked and twirling into the earth, he worried he’d fizzle out of existence like a falling star. Why did they bring him? It wouldn’t help to show Jill his dead body. Or maybe it would, if she still hated him. The humor calmed his panic attack.

Breathe. Close your eyes. Concentrate. How good will it feel to remind Jill for the rest of her life that she owes it to you? Save yourself first, hotshot.

Reason revisited Allan. He replayed the instructions of the pilots before the jump. The handle sat on the
other
collar. In less than a second he felt the chute deploy and lift up, slamming his thighs into the thick straps and cutting a deep wedge into some very soft flesh between his legs. He didn’t feel it yet, focusing instead on the worrisome increase in spin.

What had they said? Handles! Allan pulled two large canvas circles and began to unravel his swirl, allowing him to focus on landing. He searched the crowd below for an opening. Thousands of survivors from the tsunami took refuge in the Presidio among uprooted trees and stranded boats washed in from the western cliffs. They looked as scared as he was. Pulling down with all his strength on the canvas loops only delayed the inevitable. Allan’s knees slammed into shoulders wet from swimming through a wall of water only a few hours earlier.

“Are they coming?” asked a ragged, bruised man pinned under Allan.

“I’m sorry, what?” Allan gingerly stood and helped the man to his feet as an anxious crowd turned to face them.

“That was a Chinook. My brother flew one in the Gulf. You’re the Marines, the first in. You’re here to help us, right?”

The man’s lips turned down, realizing Allan’s soft belly and lack of uniform belied his civilian status.

“I’m sorry, we’re here to find a scientist.”

“Those your friends?” a woman asked, pointing behind Allan to a giant red and white parachute drowning in the crowd.

“Yes!” Allan began pushing through the crowd. He jerked back, pulled by his still-attached parachute pack now trampled under many soggy feet.

“Hey!” the man shouted. “Where the fuck you going!” He stomped on Allan’s parachute cords. “We need relief! These people are dying.”

“There were supplies on the chopper,” Allan answered. “They planned to land, but there’s no space.”

“Land where?” the man demanded, grabbing Allan by the collar. “The whole Presidio is surrounded by Army boys with rifles and nobody is letting us back out. There’s no food, and now they’re dropping in fat, hungry desk jockeys? You here to see some real action? Something to brag about when your contract is up? Where were you when the wave hit? I’ll show you what commitment looks like.”

The man pulled his sleeve back, exposing a Vietnam veteran tattoo with the names of several men under a skull and crossbones. He flexed it in Allan’s face, still holding firm to his collar. Others in the crowd shouted their own frustrations at Allan.

Allan crumbled in the duress of the surprisingly strong older man. Twelve years old again, about to be pummeled by the school bully for being first in class, he just mumbled “Not me.”

A fist came through the crowd, landing underneath the man’s extended arm. The vet reflexively released his grip on Allan and stumbled back.

Lee stepped in front of Allan. “Help is coming for you, but
we’re
not it. We’re here for a woman who might know the cause of all of this. Do any of you know where we can find Dr. Jill Tarmor?”

The man so demanding a minute ago fell in line confronted, or comforted by, a real soldier. “Lieutenant, none of us know each other. We’re refugees from the storm, separated from family and friends. We’re
all
looking for somebody. Can you tell us where you came from, what you know, what’s happened, when food and clothes will come?”

Lee looked around at eyes reflecting the dying Sun creeping behind the bay. Britely relished delivering this sort of news back at the base. Lee wished he were here, if only so she’d know what they were allowed to divulge to the public.

“Both coasts were hit by that wave. I assure you help is on the way. We’re here to find an explanation of why so many good Americans lost their lives today. Please help me find this doctor.”

They stared at Lee.

“Help us find our families, food, and drinkable water,” the crowd protested.

The ground grumbled, shoving hard upright, leveling the crowd and then continuing to vibrate unevenly for a few more seconds.

“Aftershocks,” Allan whispered. “I had a feeling this would happen.”

“You want to tell me anything else you have a
feeling
about?” Lee shouted.

Allan stumbled over his words. “If we’re experiencing a loss—no—
different
tidal forces, after all, we’re still orbiting a star, the plates are going to shift as well. The San Andreas has been bottling up its energy for over a century and this would have been the last straw. I’m sorry I didn’t think to mention it before, I wasn’t sure.”

“Listen, Sands, if I wait for everything to be certain in your calculations before you let me know, the only thing you can be certain of is that we’ll all be dead by sunrise.”

Allan didn’t respond to this vaguely threatening statement directly. Instead, his face flattened. “You have no idea if help is coming for these people, do you?”

Another jolt toppled them to the ground.

“Any of your
feelings
know how long this’ll last?” she asked as they sat, absorbing aftershocks.

He shook his head, and a new distraction focused their attention away. They couldn’t hear it, the wailing of the confused crowd being too loud, but the red glow of the flare climbing into the sky illuminated the desperate faces around them.