Tertiary Effects Series | Book 2 | Storm Warning Read online

  STORM WARNING

  BOOK TWO

  of the

  TERTIARY EFFECTS SERIES

  William Allen

  All Rights Reserved

  © 2019. All Rights Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction and no part of this story is intended to depict real persons, living or dead, or any actual locations. The use of some place names is purely fictional and any similarity is purely coincidental.

  Copyright 2019. All Rights Reserved.

  Malleus Publishing Edition

  Editing services provided by Sabrina Jean of FastTrack Editing

  Cover Art provided by Debbie at Covercollection.com

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  DEDICATION

  This book is, as always dedicated, to my family and friends who made it all possible. A special thank you to those friends who helped with their time and effort by helping out with the first draft by their suggestions. This is for you guys.

  M.C. Allen

  Leslie Morrison Bryant

  Clarke Ferber

  Yalonda Butler

  Kimberly Anne Kelly-Sydow

  Tina Watson

  Veronica Smith

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  Brief Description of the Husband Clan and Relations

  PROLOGUE

  Ever wonder why it is always a phone call in the night? Whether it is the police, calling to notify you of a loved one’s death a thousand miles away, or a frantic law partner freaking out over a last minute snag that might derail a multi-million dollar settlement, or laughably, a call warning about the end of the world. They all come after normal business hours, and they all end up giving you a knot in your stomach that won’t go away for those endless hours as you wait for the crack of dawn, and at least a semblance of a return to sanity.

  After I got that call from my brother, passing on a warning about a rogue meteorite strike in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of China, very few nights passed where I didn’t still feel that knot clenched tight in my stomach. Was it stress, or a dread premonition, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that on top of all my other concerns, that dark foreboding stayed with me. We’d come from pioneer stock, and my purchase of the rundown Ferguson farm meant an opportunity for me to return to my roots.

  My parents never used the word ‘prepper’ or ‘survivalist’ and I doubt my father even knew the meaning of the word, but he was a man who was born in the late stages of the Great Depression. That meant my childhood was spent in a variety of pursuits unknown to my more urban friends and coworkers. I learned to plant and tend a garden, work on engines large and small, and recycle and reuse every small piece of equipment or mechanical part until the metal wore out. I was introduced to the driver’s seat of a thirty-year-old tractor long before my contemporaries ever thought about operating a car or truck, and I was barely a teenager before I began hardening my body tossing fifty and hundred pound bales of hay that would stagger many grown men.

  I never thought I would seek out such a challenging lifestyle once I got off the farm, but when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped at the chance. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t return to the old community where I grew up, and instead, I bought the property in a neighboring area. Having repurposed my law practice already, I carefully introduced myself into the local legal landscape. I found less friction there than I did in other areas. For small towns in East Texas, newcomers went through a gradual process of acceptance, so I figured I’d be treated like a local in another forty or fifty years.

  With my brother Mike’s warning, using a codeword from our childhood, I jumped into disaster-mode. As my family gradually began to trickle in, we’d stayed at that level of readiness ever since. Over the years, we had created protocols for many different kinds of emergencies, from short-term inconveniences to civilization-threatening levels, but for me they were merely plans prepared and filed away. I never thought we would be activating any of them beyond the hurricane or pandemic ones, though the EMP plan had been updated and added to over the years as tensions in the world waxed and waned. Now we had a meteorite hit, a catastrophic rockfall, spawning a cascading series of disasters in its wake.

  Strangely, the Federal government had remained silent about the actual triggering event. Focusing on the earthquakes, accompanying tsunami, and a growing list of volcanic eruptions all around the Ring of Fire and beyond, the Federal Emergency Management Agency addressed the symptoms but ignored the actual cause of the disasters. The president almost immediately announced a State of Emergency and enacted certain elements of Martial Law in the areas directly affected by the various disasters. This scared a sizeable chunk of the unaffected population, but at least so far, the man seemed to be defying the pundits’ predictions of an overreaching Federal bureaucracy trying to disarm the population and institute some kind of police state. Or at least, that was the impression I received from the heavily censored national news media and the reconstructed, and neutered, Internet.

  Still, NASA was silent. And so were the many observatories, both public and private, when it came to the possibility of a meteorite strike starting this whole thing. My brother Mike seemed upset by the censorship and the lack of an explanation, but we had plenty of other things weighing on us as we adapted to the nearly constant rainfall and prepared for the likelihood of a long winter followed by a damp, cool summer.

  For the moment, all our attention lay on the massive Category Five storm, Hurricane Debbie, that was bearing down on us like the wrath of an angry God. On step at a time, as I urged my friends and family. At least this time, we’d received a storm warning, but none of us could comprehend the level of destruction now coming our way.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The storms finally passed, as all storms are wont to do, but we still spent three days down in the shelter as the winds howled and the rain struck the oversaturated earth in great sheets.

  We had prepared as best we could for the hurricane, which meant work that had taken place years, not hours, before the first tornado warnings began to sound like air raid sirens in New Albany. That right there was a secret to preparedness that many of the latest gadget fans and “cool” systems junkies never seemed to appreciate. Make your plans in advance, test and adjust them for flaws, and stick to them. That was the core
principle of preparedness, as well as stocking up on bullets, beans, and band-aids. Our family had a hurricane survival plan, and we intended to stick to it.

  I alone, out of all the adults, braved the wind and rain, mixed with a bracing dose of intermittent hail and the bands of terrifying lightning, to dash out once a day to the small barn to milk the cow. It wasn’t any particular special flavor of bravery on my part, just more of a recognition that I both knew where everything was located and I didn’t have any immediate family to worry about me. To their credit, Mike and Pat both tried to take a turn, but I explained it was simply easier for me to handle the chores.

  We decided to keep our milk cow and the yearling calves stalled in the barn for the duration along with the horses, so someone needed to feed the small herd and relieve the cow’s stress by draining her milk, lest she go dry on us. That was another one of those forward-thinking plans, since you couldn’t hope to stock enough powdered milk to last indefinitely.

  On the soggy morning of the fourth day I was back at the barn, seeing to our menagerie of farm critters. Maisie the milk cow was always seen to shortly after dawn, and I fed her a little grain in the milking stall before I washed down her bag with the mild soap we used. The soap was a diluted version of the old frontier standby of lye mixed with an aloe vera base for softness. Marta had bought it from some online vendor after running her own tests on the mixture, finding it was surprisingly efficient at knocking out common forms of bacteria while also remaining somewhat pleasing to the touch. It was something we could make at home if needed, since we had the ingredients and almost as important, the recipe.

  Grabbing my little wooden stool, I scooted closer and set to work.

  As I sat there stripping the milk from her udder, I started thinking about our milk production. With this many kids on the farm, I revisited the idea of getting a second milk cow into production, then started trying to figure out how to find the breed I wanted in the right price range. Along with the providing strong bones for growing children, I was considering how to start making our own cheeses if the supply in town started to become scarce.

  The sound of something, likely a tree limb, slamming into the side of the barn brought me back to the present, and I was glad the noise hadn’t spooked the cow into lashing out. I’d been kicked by bigger cows when I was a boy, but it still didn’t feel good. Like getting punched in the face. By a twelve-hundred-pound gorilla.

  “Good girl, Maisie,” I crooned with praise, setting the milk pail aside. I stroked the side of the Angus and she rewarded me with a swipe in the face with her filthy tail, and I swear she looked back and grinned after she did it. You normally didn’t see Angus milk cows in the United States, but Maisie was actually quite a sweet-dispositioned member of the breed, a former 4H calf that had been raised by one of the local kids as a show heifer. She’d been treated more like a pet than a walking chuck roast, and it showed in her easy nature around humans. She was bred back to Bubba, one of our Angus bulls, and I intended to keep her on in her current capacity since Tommy and Tammy adored her and continued to make sure she remained a spoiled, not-so-little princess.

  After dumping the bucket of milk out for the hogs, since I didn’t want to burden the electrical system with running the chiller, I rinsed out the stainless-steel container with a dose of chlorine water and replaced all the gear until next time. After that I saw to the chickens, noting the reduced egg production in the waterproof journal we hung on a peg just inside the fortress of poultry. Yes, maybe Mike and I had overbuilt the thing, but darned if it wasn’t still standing despite the worst the winds could conjure this side of a tornado.

  On the positive side, I also made a point of identifying three of the older hens that had gone broody. Whether it was wishful thinking or the work of one of our roosters was too soon to tell, but more chicks would be a bonus worthy of sacrificing some eggs in the short term. I’d have to make sure our resident egg wrangler, Tammy, knew of the situation.

  By the time I got back to the mudroom, I was soaked through my rainproof jacket and pants, so I stripped down to my athletic shorts and t-shirt before re-entering the house. With the lighting turned down to the bare minimum, I made it to the basement door with only one misstep, and I didn’t think I’d managed to draw blood when I barked my shin. I didn’t even bobble the egg basket once.

  “All done?”

  Nikki’s question made me offer a tight smile to my sister as I eased past her going down the stairs.

  “Done. Even picked up a few eggs.”

  “What’s it looking like out there?”

  “You tell me, sis. You’ve got the radio.”

  The weather radio, with its pathetic little built-in antenna, only picked up static unless you set at the top of the stairs near the door into the kitchen, but we had more volunteers than we had time slots to fill. The stairs, after all, offered the illusion of open space if nothing else.

  “Shush. You know what I mean,” Nikki replied with a dour tone as she held up one of her hands to block my face. A mannerism from her childhood that made me grin inside. Just another example that we really never grow up, just get older.

  “Storm front has splintered, remnants have moved on up into Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma, but the weather report doesn’t tell us squat about what’s happening right here.”

  The news, though spotty and no doubt heavily censored, only fed our growing sense of depression. Reading between the lines, I sensed that Hurricane Debbie had changed the very shape of our state and the Gulf Coast in general while we stayed hunkered down in our bunker.

  Sensing Nikki’s frustration, I tried to bolster her a bit.

  “Still raining, but the clouds are breaking up a bit. I’ll bet we have sun peeking through before this evening.”

  “So we can get out of the shelter?” Nikki asked hopefully.

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” I agreed. “Still need to be on watch for tornados, though. I’m sure Mike will want everybody to continue sleeping downstairs for the next few days.”

  Nikki nodded thoughtfully.

  “Hard to see a tornado coming at night,” she commented with a sad smile.

  “Anything useful on the broadcast this morning?”

  “Not much,” Nikki conceded. “Red Cross is out working the refugee camps. National Guard is still up and working the cities, but they aren’t talking any specifics. No locations, and no numbers.” She paused, then added her thoughts.

  ”This isn’t like any other hurricane I’ve ever been through, Bryan. Not just bigger, but the way the government has handled the whole thing. I understand holding off giving the worst news to avoid a panic at first, but not even filling in the little pieces will have everybody’s imagination working overtime.”

  “Maybe the governor and his people don’t know the full extent of the damage either, Nikki,” I responded with a touch of exasperation in my voice. Not much. I was the oldest, and accustomed to acting as the sounding board for my younger siblings. Sure, I didn’t know anything more than Nikki, but we all had our accustomed roles, and mine was the wise elder sibling.

  “Do you really think that?”

  “I’m not saying I think that’s the case, but it’s possible. Any mention of FEMA yet?”

  “Not a peep,” Nikki replied tightly, and with that, she stuck the earbud back in her ear and gave me another imperious wave of the hand.

  As dismissals go, it was pretty clear if a little rude. However, I knew Nikki, and I suspected she was trying to distract me from my own grim concerns. My sister evidently wasn’t happy with what little she was hearing, and at the same time, she was worried about what she might find out.

  Nikki’s apprehensive mood reflected the general attitude of the adults trapped in the shelter. Not because of the tight confines though, I didn’t think. No, it was more the lack of news and the restlessness of people who were accustomed to hard work, either physical or mental. Sitting around reading from our small library or working out in the
closet-sized gym clearly wasn’t providing enough diversion.

  Not everything was grim, however. The adults all pitched in to help entertain the children, and I got to spend more time with my nieces and nephews, as well as getting to know Billy and Lisa. I think trying to keep the youngsters occupied lent itself to boosting our own moods. Conscious of the limited power we had in our battery banks and hesitant to use any of our diesel to run the backup generator, Mike and I decreed only one movie per evening on the sixty-inch television. Pat and Mike hauled the flat screen down from the living room and installed the monstrosity in the common room of the shelter, then organized the voting for which movie we would be watching that night. Just the politicking and maneuvering amongst the pre-teen crowd provided a dose of restrained entertainment for the grownups. I say restrained only because it was by quiet consensus that we decided we didn’t want the kids to know how funny we found the whole process.

  So, we played a lot of cards, and dominos, and made fun of each other as we stopped to count up our bids on our fingers. We worked our way from straight dominos to 42, then switched over to hearts, Old Maid, and finally, an endless variety of poker. This wasn’t anything like in a poker tournament you might catch over on ESPN 2 or a similar channel, with hours and hours of uninterrupted gameplay, and the seats switched out from time to time as other duties required. For most of us, this was simply a way to pass the hours, and we used matchsticks of no particular value to measure our success, or lack thereof.

  Once again, Pat cleaned up at poker because no one could tell if he was bluffing because, of course, the guy wrote the book on maintaining a poker face. Only his wife could break his concentration, and Nikki seemed to relish distracting her husband with seemingly innocent comments that all married people could interpret as much more salacious references.