Coasting
1
Bad-weather sensors and alarms on buoys in the Atlantic Ocean were storing data on a system of unparalleled size, but the warnings went unheeded.
Those operating the stations were long gone, dark halls abandoned. Most coastal areas had emptied out right after the war. Storm surges, tidal waves, and horrible flooding forced the tourists and vacationers to leave, but there were still people surviving here. They were the longtime residents who had stayed for Hurricane Camille in ‘69 and again for Andrew in ‘92. These die-hard survivors abandoned their homes for nothing. And now, they were leaving.
The ocean was telling them there was a monster on the way, though it was over two months before the season officially started. Some of these residents held hopes of returning, but most suspected there would be little to come back to. They had seen the signs.
Before, they might have had three or four days of warning. Now, they had one day if they were alert, and only a few hours if they weren’t. The times of city pumps and mandatory evacuations were gone, but the natural warnings were abundant. Flocks of brightly colored birds that normally spent a few days in the area kept going, their cries upset. The surf was growing steadily rougher, pushing further onto the debris-littered beaches despite no visible storm clouds. The wind threw out sudden downdrafts and heavy rain bands that caused sensors to reach seventy before settling back down to thirty-five. The barometers were dropping sharply, the tides almost impossible to distinguish as the rough surf rolled further inland, and animals began to beach themselves. It was enough to convince even the most foolhardy. Sharks, whales, and dolphins, all panic-stricken, were willing to suffocate themselves on the beaches rather than to face whatever was coming. This was no tropical depression, and alert coastal survivors raced to get out of its path.
However, some people had no idea danger was once again approaching. Large parts of Georgia, made oceanfront property during the war, were underwater, and Valdosta, where the crack had split the land, was full of people who had been on the road for the holiday. Stuck with no way to go forward and no way to go back, they had little understanding of the ocean’s dangerous fury and the cost of the lesson was high. The group of survivors in Valdosta only numbered a hundred, but they were unrelated families who could have repopulated the entire country without any fears of inbreeding. Their laws might have been drastically different, their future waiting for them…
Out in the toxic waters of the Gulf, a monster had honed in on American soil. Hurricane Amanda, as it might have been called if anyone had been left to name it, was bigger than any storm on record. It surged due north, powered by a hot ocean current and violent winds full of radiation. It had churned for weeks, drawing smaller storm systems in, and at its peak, the outlying winds were sustained at three hundred miles per hour, with gusts upwards of three hundred seventy-five. The storm surge was twenty-five feet high in places as it pushed into southern Georgia, and ten inches of rain fell from the angry sky in the first hour. If satellite pictures could have been accessed, they would have shown a storm that, at its height, covered over half the United States, with rain bands touching both Mexico and Canada.
Amanda rolled northwest as she came ashore, submerging whole towns and leaving an immense path of destruction in her wake. The parts of the Bahamas, the Florida Keys, and Cuba that survived the war were destroyed–flooded with high water that receded slowly, reluctantly giving back only half of what it had taken. The war had raised ocean levels as much as ten feet globally, and those lands already at or below sea level were wiped off the map by Hurricane Amanda, becoming a part of the vast, angry ocean.
Nearly no one survived in these isolated havens of “fun in the sun,” yet not all the victims came from the land. Boat after boat was flooded, rolled and sank, including battleships and Coast Guard vessels, which, having survived the bombs, could only drift on the tides without their engines and compasses. These people joined the millions of others already under the salty waves.
The eye of Hurricane Amanda hit Valdosta, Georgia head-on and came inland like a wall of liquid destruction, leaving not a single structure or tree for ten miles. Had anyone survived, they would have been shocked to discover a seven-hundred-foot-cargo ship sitting evenly atop a school building half its size. Upon closer inspection, they would have discovered that it was not a container ship, but a former battleship that had been designated as a floating hospital and the debris littering it were crushed cars and homes that it had picked up while gouging through the land. The USNS Comfort had crossed the oceans on thousands of missions of mercy, but its days were over now, gone like the police, 911, lotteries, and elections. Gone like Hollywood, American Idol, and the entire west coast. The survivors, the war’s desperate refugees, now have only the simplest of goals. They want to live, to continue, and if enough of the right people can find each other, they might stand a chance.
Hurricane Amanda did give the remaining survivors one benefit. It brought in warmer air from the south, where there was less grit in the sky to block out the sun’s rays, and for the first time since the war, it began to feel like the season it was.
The downside was that with these fresh winds came violent storms. Mother Nature was still furiously venting her rage, and America’s losses continued.