StS6 Deep Space - Hidden Terror Read online

  Ed’s mom returned with a handful of candles but trembled so badly Ed had to light one for her. Once it was burning, she turned to Ed and asked, “Can you drive us back to Charlottesville and let us stay at your place?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Martha,” his dad exploded. “We don’t need to do that!”

  Martha turned to her husband, “Jeff, I love you for reasons that are often a mystery. However, I read up on hurricanes and they’re just as dangerous as Ed says. Your orneriness won’t stop a force of nature like we’ve got comin’. Now, you can stay here if you want, but I’d like our son to take me to his place.”

  “Oh, for Chrissake!” the old man said, red in the face. He turned and stormed out of the room toward the garage. A moment later he was back to light himself a candle, then was forced to leave gingerly for fear of blowing it out.

  Ed’s mom turned. “Can I take the candle and leave you here in the dark just long enough to get my suitcase?”

  “I’ll come with you Mom,” Ed said, wondering how much trouble they’d have on the roads. The truck’s pretty sturdy, he thought, maybe we’ll be safe in it even if we get stopped by impassable roads. Then, Should we take some supplies with us in case we get trapped somewhere?

  Back in the bedroom, his mother pointed out a suitcase she’d evidently packed earlier and, once Ed picked it up, she led the way toward the back door with the candle. She glanced back at Ed, “Will we be safe on the road?”

  Ed shrugged, “I hope so. I’m worried there isn’t any place that’s safe down near the coast right now.”

  “We shoulda left when you said,” she said in a worried tone as they made their way through the kitchen.

  We should’ve left before we wasted all that time screwing around with the last two windows, Ed thought, but didn’t say.

  With a sound like thunder, something exploded in the dining room, shaking the entire house. When Ed turned that way, he could barely see in the dim light of the candle. After a moment he realized he was looking at the limbs of a large tree sticking down through the ceiling. One had crushed the table. The words, “Holy shit!” just burst out of him, even though he’d never sworn in front of his mother before. Wide-eyed, he turned to her, “Mom, we’ve gotta get out of here now!”

  She was gaping at the dining room. After a moment she started and said, “I’m just gonna tell Jeff about this,” she waved at the tree, “then we’ll go.” She headed for the garage, leaving Ed in the dark.

  Ed got out his phone and turned on its light. The dining room was a disaster. He headed over to a window to peer out, then remembered they’d boarded it over. He went to the back door instead. The wind was rattling the door in its frame so he decided not to open it until he had to.

  He heard his dad’s voice over his shoulder, “I hear you’re dead set on leaving?”

  Rather than answer, Ed turned the light from his phone to the dining room, making the destruction there evident. Pointing it at the chair at the head of the table, now impaled by one of the tree limbs, he said, “Glad you weren’t still sitting there…” he stopped before he said something about the fact that the limbs looked like they were from the pine tree that stood next to the even bigger sycamore.

  He didn’t think sycamores were as prone to falling as pines, but it could still come down and it was a lot bigger.

  His dad turned to his mother, “We’ve got to stay here long enough to clean up that mess or the water leakage will do even more damage.”

  Evenly, she said, “Jeff, we need to get the hell out of here before that damned sycamore comes down and kills us all. We can fix the house, but we can’t fix it if we’re dead.” She turned to the door, put her hand on the handle, and said, “You ready, Ed?”

  Ed nodded and stepped up behind her.

  When she turned the knob, the door was jerked out of her hand and slammed all the way open and back against the house.

  Ed’s dad shouted over the wind, “Dammit Martha!”

  Ed grabbed a handful of the back of her coat as she stepped out the door. When the wind made her stumble into the porch rail, he was glad he had a hold on her. As they staggered across the backyard to Ed’s rental truck, a bolt of lightning lit a grim scene of black clouds and waving trees. He walked her around to the passenger door and held it open against the wind as she got in. To his surprise, his dad was behind her. The old man got in the truck behind her.

  Keeping a hand against the truck for balance, Ed made his way around to the driver’s door. As he’d suspected, the truck’s driving software refused to drive in the ongoing conditions, so he’d have to drive it manually. I haven’t driven much in good conditions, he thought, so, if I had any sense, I wouldn’t try to drive in a mess like this. Nonetheless, he backed the truck around and headed out to the street. Limbs were lying in the road that he would’ve gotten out and moved on a normal night, but on this night, he eased the truck over them. Fortunately, its big wheels and high torque electric motor were able to do it.

  However, at the end of the block, the Mendels’ huge oak completely blocked the street.

  Ed’s dad leaned forward and shouted over the storm. “I don’t know why you came this way in the first place. Go the other way and take Sawyer Street over to the feeder road.”

  Thinking sourly about his dad’s lifelong constant criticism, Ed backed and jacked the truck until he had it turned around, then headed south on their street. When they got to where the road jogged to the right, he slowed to a stop. A downed utility pole blocked the road there.

  We’re screwed, he thought.

  His mother touched his arm. “If only we’d left when you told us to. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too, Mom. I should’ve been more emphatic.” He started backing the truck around again.

  His dad asked, “Where’re you going now?”

  “Home,” he said. “There’s no place else.”

  His dad said, “You could try to drive between Benson’s and Carter’s houses and over to Sawyer Road. There’s a lot of room between those two houses.”

  Nervously, Martha said, “Should we do that without their permission?”

  “It’s life or death, Mom,” Ed said, rolling down the street and trying to pick out Carter’s place in the dark. “If they get mad about it, I’ll pay their damages.”

  His dad said, “That’s Carter’s place on the right.”

  Ed turned up onto Carter’s lawn, heading for the gap, but then stopped. Benson’s house had collapsed into the gap between the two buildings and there was no longer any passageway. For a moment he wondered whether he could get between any of the other houses, even if he had to drive over their fences and scrape against their walls. But then he thought, If I can’t even leave the block I grew up on, what’re the chances the roads are going to be good enough to get somewhere safe? After a moment he decided the chances were terrible. He said, “I guess we’ve gotta hunker down in the house.”

  His parents said nothing, so he started driving that way. There were a few more downed limbs to bump over than there had been, but they made it back to the house without running into anything impassable. Ed pulled around back and pulled up to put the passenger door close to the back door of the house. His dad got out and started helping his mom into the house so Ed left the headlights on until they got in the door and his dad waved him to come as well. He shut down the truck, slid across the bench seat, and got out the passenger door as well. He staggered through the wind and the rain and the dark, wondering whether he was going to miss the door to the house even though it’d only been about six feet away.

  A lightning bolt lit the scene momentarily and Ed saw his dad standing in the door with his hand out. Ed grabbed his father’s hand and they pulled him in as a team effort.

  Inside, it was hard to pull the door shut again, but he and his dad managed it. Once the door shut, the noise abated slightly. His dad said, “Sorry. You were right. We should’ve left without trying to cover those last two windows.”
<
br />   Ed nodded distractedly, wondering, since they couldn’t leave, if there was anything else they could do to make themselves safer. He turned on his phone’s flashlight and looked over at the dining room that had the tree limbs in it, and therefore a tree trunk over it. Should we huddle next to that tree, counting on it to hold up any others that fall there? Should I have parked the truck in front of the house so it’d contribute some support if the sycamore falls? Should we all hide in the bathroom where the confluence of multiple walls around the small cavity would provide more support if the tree falls there?

  Suddenly, a noise like thunder shook the house.

  Something crashed into Ed like a train, knocking him down and knocking his phone and its flashlight out of his hand.

  Lying on the floor in the dark, he found it hard to breathe. I must’ve gotten the wind knocked out of me, he thought. I hope Mom and Dad are okay. He wanted to call out to them but couldn’t seem to get the breath to do it.

  Reaching up, his hands struck tree bark. Another limb through the ceiling. This one comes right down over me. Must be the one that knocked the wind out of me.

  Another phone flashlight came on. It swept around a moment, then focused on Ed. It moved closer and Ed saw his dad in the reflected light. The old man looked like he was in agony and Ed wondered if he’d been hurt—though everything seemed a little distant and it was getting hard to care.

  His dad cried out, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry… Oh, God! Martha! Call 911!”

  Ed’s fingers followed the tree limb down to where it entered his upper abdomen. They encountered warm thick fluid. I’m bleeding, he thought, surprised.

  Suddenly it hurt. The pain quickly became agonizing but then subsided as Ed’s vision tunneled down.

  His last thought was, Oh, this is how it all ends…

  ***

  AP Chesapeake, Virginia—Hurricane Gareth has dealt a devastating blow to southeastern Virginia. High winds felled thousands of trees, dropped power lines all about the area, and damaged or destroyed uncounted homes.

  Seventy-three fatalities have been reported so far, but Governor Agnos says he wouldn’t be surprised if that number doubles given more time for reporting.

  Vinargy Power says it estimates half a million homes are without power and that it will take weeks to restore service because downed utility poles will need to be replaced and cables put back up.

  The Insurance Association estimates the losses will total more than eight billion dollars.

  The governor has expressed the state’s gratitude to the many thousands of individuals and businesses who are donating both time and money to help those ravaged by this tragedy.

  In an interesting new twist, after several of the designated hurricane shelters were rendered inoperable by flooding, Staze Inc. began setting up blimp-like shelters made of their super-material Stade. A team shows up with water trucks and generators that Staze rented for this purpose before the hurricane. They use the power to blow up enormous inflatable molds that are then “stazed” to become rigid shelters. A crane lifts the shelter allowing them to pull the mold material off of it. Once they lower it back to the ground, crews show up to stretch heavy tarps tautly across the floor so people don’t slip and fall while walking on the slippery Stade surface. The generators remain behind to provide power for the people in the shelter but everything else moves on to set up a shelter in another location.

  For those whose homes were destroyed, Staze is providing sets of Stade panels that can be quickly assembled into livable spaces. “These are intended to quickly give people a place to live while they rebuild,” Staze’s spokesperson said, “Though it should be noted that they are far better than tents. They don’t ripple in the wind, they don’t leak, and they don’t get dirty. They’re strong enough that if a tree were to fall on them, they wouldn’t even notice it. Their insulation value is through the roof. Stade wires reinforcing the glass of their windows make them shatterproof. We believe the houses of the future will have many of these features. Current building codes don’t allow their use as anything but temporary shelters, so that’s how we’re offering them. Each room comes as a lightweight flatpack of four by eight-foot panels, easily assembled by two people because of their light weight and slot and tab construction. This means every room has dimensions on a multiple of four feet. So, a small family that’s lost their home can pick up two twelve by twelve-foot bedrooms, an eight by twelve-foot bathroom, a twelve by twelve-foot kitchen, and a sixteen by sixteen-foot living space. This totals up to a small, 784-square-foot home, though usually a length of four-foot-wide hallway is needed to connect rooms. A larger family can add on more bedrooms and bathrooms. The rooms easily fit together in a number of possible configurations that may be chosen from designs available on Staze’s website or made up by the owner. More or bigger rooms can easily be added on if needed. The temporary shelters will be bolted together but, eventually, permanent homes will be ‘Stade welded.’”

  As Mahesh arrived at work, he felt proud of the way Staze had responded to the humanitarian crisis resulting from the hurricane. Mr. X had been unstinting of the company’s resources. They’d sent enough of the “body bag” type stazers down to the worst-hit areas to outfit every ambulance. They also sent a team of people to train the ambulance crews in their use. The crews were able to staze quite a few traumatized people on site to stop the pain and suffering they were feeling until they arrived at a treatment facility ready to care for them. Having all those patients placed in stasis had significantly eased the burden on local hospitals overwhelmed by the numbers of the injured. Quite a few of the severely injured victims had been sent directly to major hospitals without even unstazing them in smaller local facilities.

  The big blimp shelters had seen heavy use because there’d been so many people rendered homeless that even if the usual emergency shelters—schools, churches, and sports facilities—hadn’t sustained flood damage, there still wouldn’t have been enough room. FEMA had shipped in tents, but the victims much preferred the Stade shelters, so FEMA set up their stretchers inside the blimps—and their tent kitchens and porta-potties outside. The water trucks had not only provided the water that, when stazed, provided flat bottoms in the blimps, but they’d filled big Stade tanks with drinking and cooking water to make the blimps a little more self-sufficient.

  Yesterday, Mahesh had driven down and spent the day helping people set up temporary Stade houses. The flat pack for each room included floor sections that had plywood flooring in them so they were ready to walk on. Those were the only components with any significant weight since the rest of the sections were all air-Stade. This meant it wasn’t difficult to lay out and bolt together the floor segments of the house, putting them in the room-arrangement configuration the homeowner had chosen. Then they slid this entire floorplan into the position the homeowner had chosen on the lot—usually where the Stade house’s sewer outflow pipes could easily drain into existing sewer pipes. Next, they drove stakes into the ground through sleeves attached to the floor segments. Those stopped the house from sliding around. They leveled the house’s floors as a unit by driving big Stade wedges under the low sides. Stakes driven down through holes at the back of the wedges kept them from backing out. Then they put the walls up and bolted them to keep their tabs from slipping out of the slots. As long as it wasn’t windy, one person could lift the flat air-Stade roof segments onto the tabs atop the walls, holding them until someone inserted bolts.

  Voila, you had a temporary home.

  If, someday, you convinced the local government that a house, sturdier than the structure it replaced should pass the building code and be permanent, someone could drill in big Stade screws and weld them to the house to serve as a true foundation.

  Staze also supplied Stade toilets and sinks that fit the assembled kitchen and bathrooms. The toilets used flapper valves instead of traps and, thanks to the infinite slipperiness of Stade, they didn’t need large quantities of water for flushing. The sinks
also had flaps instead of traps but did have Stade screens to catch dropped jewelry.

  Once again, Mahesh had found himself admiring the simplicity, yet amazing flexibility of a Dez Lanis design.

  He felt shocked when he stepped into Staze’s building.

  It felt like a funeral inside, people talking in hushed whispers, several of them visibly in tears.

  What’s happened now?! Mahesh wondered. Stepping over to Arya’s desk he leaned down and quietly asked, “What’s going on?”

  She looked up with red-rimmed eyes, “Ed Nagy…” She stopped and softly blew her nose on a tissue. “You know, the MC for our wedding?”

  Mahesh nodded.

  “He was down helping his parents board up their home...” she stopped to clear her throat.

  An image flashed before Mahesh—the upbeat cheerful young engineer everyone liked so much telling him he couldn’t get his report done.

  Then Arya continued, voice breaking, “A huge tree fell on the house, punching branches through the roof and killing Ed and his mom. Apparently, seeing his entire family dead, his dad committed suicide. With no one to report it, no one found their bodies until now. It’s… it’s just so damned sad. I don’t know many of the junior engineers very well at all, but everyone knew Ed… He was just so likable… so much fun…”

  Ed’s never going to finish the assessment I assigned him, is he? Mahesh thought morbidly. He looked around at the roomful of people, all of them down in the dumps. A good leader would have some inspiring and reassuring words to say, but I’ve never been good at that kind of leadership.

  Ten or fifteen minutes passed while Mahesh tried to come up with a strategy for dealing with this morale crisis. Looking around, he thought the last of their employees had arrived at work and learned what’d happened to Ed.

  Mahesh found himself looking around the room for Kaem, the font of Staze’s ideas. This, despite thinking that this wasn’t the kind of problem he could expect someone Kaem’s age to have a solution for. After all, Kaem had a degree in physics, not management. Mahesh had a business degree in addition to an advanced degree in aerospace engineering and he felt overwhelmed. We need therapists, he thought.