Pressure (Book 1): Fall Read online

  Pressure

  Book One: Fall

  By Jeff Thomson

  Copyright 2018, Twisted Synapse Books/Jeff Thomson

  Library of Congress

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental - except for the politicians, but nobody likes politicians, so to Hell with them.

  The town of Gunters Gap, Oregon, is strictly a creation of the author’s imagination. He has taken liberties with the town of Medford, Oregon, and for that he is sorry. The people are wonderful and don’t deserve to have their home town destroyed in the way it has been in this volume and will be in future volumes of this tale, but again, this is a work of fiction.

  The same should be said to those who reject any political or religious idea with which they disagree. Not all of the viewpoints contained herein are the author’s. You may disagree with them, as is your right, but if you reject the entire book because it doesn’t mirror your exact belief system, then you’re missing the point. Literature - even of the pulp variety - is supposed to expand your horizons. If you can’t separate the real world from the fiction world, then you need to get a life.

  This book is dedicated to my Mother, the Librarian, and to my Father, the Good Man, who taught me that I have value.

  ONE

  “Not that the story need be long,

  but it will take a long while

  to make it short.”

  Henry David Thoreau

  1

  Truck Stop

  North Platte, Nebraska

  Charlie Rhodes, age 35, stumbled out of his truck and into the predawn darkness, after struggling into his pants, shoes, and jacket in the cramped confines of his sleeper cab, and stuffing the tangled riot of dark brown hair under his baseball cap, with its faded US Coast Guard emblem. He was still half asleep, three-quarters stiff from sleeping on a metal slab topped with a pathetically thin mattress, and fully in need of two things: a bathroom and coffee, not necessarily in that order.

  For the first, he could have exercised that right of all beings capable of peeing while standing up and simply let it flow upon the asphalt, but, (a): it was really damned cold out and shrinkage could become a factor, and (b): that microwave burrito he had for dinner last night might make things a little messy if he didn’t find an actual toilet, and (c): he had to go into the truck stop to get coffee anyway. So off he went, travel mug in hand, staggering and slipping on the uneven, icy tarmac.

  He sniffed the cold air: diesel and urine, garbage and unsettled boredom. Maybe that last was just him, just his own sense of self pity. Or not. Had Charlie been capable of higher brain function, he might have lamented his lot in life as an over the road truck driver, but he wasn’t, so he didn’t. Also, who would have cared? He didn’t. Really.

  He stuck the mug under his arm and stuffed both hands into his jacket pockets, pulling the garment in close around his freezing torso. It was cold enough to make his ears and the skin of his cheeks hurt, adding to the surly mood into which he had awoken.

  Winter, he thought. I hate winter. He stared up into the clear, starry sky. Glancing off to the west, in the direction he’d be heading when he finally got around to driving, he could see a line of darkness extending along the horizon to the north and south. Clouds.

  Shit, he swore to himself. That means snow. Merry fucking Christmas.

  It wasn’t actually Christmas - not yet, anyway. That was still three days off, but whether it was today, or two days from now or a week from now, made not the slightest bit of difference. It’d be just another day on the road.

  This particular day on the road, he wore black cargo pants topped by a black tee-shirt, emblazoned with a bold, twelve-pointed, red asterisk. This was one of roughly two dozen tee-shirts he possessed, all of which presented a vague literary, film, or music reference. The current example would only be understood by devotees of Kurt Vonnegut, jr., and Charlie had no problem with that. The asterisk was the author’s representation of an asshole, from his novel, Breakfast of Champions. It fit Charlie’s mood.

  Fashion and obscure references notwithstanding, the only thing not weather-related going through his head at that moment was a zombie-like intonation of one single word: COFFEE . . . This is presumably why he didn’t feel the seismic tremble of the ground beneath his feet.

  2

  Epicenter

  Denali, Alaska

  Thirty-three minutes earlier and roughly twenty-five hundred miles away, while Charlie was studiously observing the inside of his eyelids, a massive 8.6 earthquake ripped its way along the Denali Fault, centered eighty-one miles southwest of Fairbanks, Alaska. It lasted two-point-eight minutes - an eternity, in seismic terms. The geologic mayhem tore south and east along the fault line at a whopping seven thousand miles an hour, toppling trees, causing landslides, wrecking roads and buildings and people in both Fairbanks and Anchorage, one hundred and seventy-six miles to the south. As if the western United States shuddered at the carnage, tremors rumbled southward and eastward through Juneau, Vancouver, B. C., Seattle (where people were heard to say it was like somebody dropped one of those amusement park wave machines into the middle of Lake Union), Portland, Oregon, and Eureka, California, finally ending with a 4.9 shaking of the San Andreas in San Francisco. Windows rattled as far East as Fargo, North Dakota, and in Nacogdoches, Texas, the waters of the Attoyac Bayou sloshed around for almost thirty minutes - all courtesy of the so-called “ripple effect.”

  In 1964, when the Big Alaskan earthquake and its resultant tsunami wrecked a significant chunk of Anchorage, the tremors were felt as far away as Florida. It had happened before.

  It was happening again.

  It had begun.

  3

  Volcano Observatory

  Yellowstone National Park

  Jasmine Margaret Jones, called Maggie by her own choice ever since she left for college at seventeen (because she hated the saccharine sound of the name “Jasmine,”), now age 21, observed the pointed, squiggling lines zip across the paper feed from the seismometer with a frisson of excitement. She knew she shouldn’t, knew that the Yellowstone caldera experienced roughly two thousand such events a year, making this a nonevent at the Volcano Observatory, where she was doing her graduate work in Volcanology, but she couldn’t help it. She loved volcanoes. She always had, and suspected she always would. And this was exciting.

  That it was also her first night watch in the Seismology Center, and that this was the first earthquake she’d been through in it, no doubt contributed to the novelty. But that didn’t mean she had to let her supervisor, Professor Rick Golatta, know about her increased pulse rate, or the tingling sensation she felt running up and down her spine, or the mildly erotic thrill she couldn’t quite ignore. He had already shown himself to be a bit of a jerk and a lot of an octopus by all the times he’d put his calloused hands on her un-welcoming body. And this was only her second night at the Park!

  “Looks like about a 2.9, Doctor Golatta,” she said, keeping her voice even.

  He came up from behind and once again placed a hand on her shoulder. “What type is it?”

  “Tectonic,” she replied, leaning forward to get out from under his touch. “Short, spiked waves with a brief period, indicating the cracking of rock,” she added, knowing he expected her to.

  Unfortunately, the move exposed the small of her petite back, and he took full advantage of the opportunity to slide his hand along her tingling spine down to a point that was far too close to her butt than was strictly appropriate. She said nothing. That same butt had been worked fairly off at the University of Utah to get to this place, and she was not going to spoil all that effort by stirring up an harassment
controversy on her first night watch. #Me Too, was a fine thing, and long overdue, but that didn’t change certain facts to which she had become all-too aware.

  She’d gotten more or less used to this kind of treatment. More or less. She was beautiful and she had a great body. This wasn’t egotism (well, maybe a little) just an acknowledgment of certain facts, based on the observation of other people’s reactions. Purely scientific - or so she told herself when catching herself admiring herself in the mirror. Too much of that might be great for her ego, but it didn’t do squat for her own esteem.

  She was what most people would consider a hottie: fact. Everyone had told her so, from the sleazy neighbor who used to watch her sunbathing in her childhood back yard, peering over the fence and salivating whenever she applied tanning lotion, to the Track and Field coach, rumored to be a lesbian, who always seemed to be around when she needed help getting stretched out, and through all the dozens of little boys who followed her around like lovesick puppy dogs, the looks of adoration on their faces making her slightly nauseous. Uncomfortable fact. With her blonde hair that saw nothing in a bottle beyond shampoo and conditioner, her athletic and toned body, her long legs and (even she had to admit) really nice butt, the social life of first high school, then college, then grad school had been a tutorial on getting hit upon. The boys in high school with their clumsy attempts to complement her, visibly blushing whenever she cast her direct, steel blue eyes on them, had turned into the guys in college, whose comments had ranged from the sublime (“Gazing at your glorious body is like gazing at a beautiful sunset,”) to the cliched (“If I said you had a beautiful body . . . ”) to the directly obscene (“Do you want to fuck? Please say yes.”).

  Grad school, where she thought things would be different, more serious, and far less of a party atmosphere, with far fewer attempts to get her into bed, had been no different at all. Professors wanted her, fellow students wanted her, guys on the street gawked at her, tossing whistles and crude comments like confetti. Even women hit on her, all the time.

  She was neither a virgin, nor a prude - far from it. She liked sex, same as the next girl, same as anyone who wasn’t doing it wrong, she supposed. She’d had sporadic boyfriends and (though she kept this a deep, dark secret) had even experimented with another woman, one far-too drunk evening during Spring Break in Cabo San Lucas. It had been fun. All of it had been fun, albeit in an offhand way.

  Sex to her was like playing tennis, which she enjoyed, but not enough to do it all the time. It could be fun, it was great cardio, and it served as a really good way to relieve the stress of academic life. But it did not supercede that academic life.

  She could imagine that if she looked up the word driven in the dictionary, she might very well find her own picture. Her goal, her mission, the driving force of her very existence was to become a volcanologist, and no man, certainly no woman, and absolutely no roll in the proverbial hay would stop her from achieving it.

  “And what--,” Doctor Galotta started to say before being interrupted by a squawk from the radio.

  “Center, this is Shintake, over,” came the crisp voice of Matsuro Shintake, a Japanese geologist she’d briefly met as she was checking in yesterday afternoon. He spoke English with only the barest hint of an accent. Except, or so she’d been told by Suzie - whatever her last name was (there were so many people Maggie felt sure she’d need a roster just to keep track of all the names) - on the few occasions he drank alcohol, when he would seemingly lose the ability to pronounce the letter “L”. She wasn’t sure she believed Suzie Whatshername, because it seemed so racially stereotypical, but that was just a random thought, and it hardly mattered.

  The wandering hand disappeared as her supervisor walked across the room to the communications console. He picked up the handset and barked, “Go Shintake.”

  “At the Old Faithful Visitor Center,” the static-enhanced voice said. “The geyser has missed twice.”

  Maggie looked at the frowning Professor Galotta, and raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “Old Faithful has stopped being faithful,” he said.

  4

  Truck Stop

  North Platte, Nebraska

  Charlie’s cold feet, clad in tennis shoes and negotiating the ice and potholes of the parking lot toward the welcoming light of the North Platte, Nebraska truck stop without any help from Charlie’s brain, paid no attention to the 2.3 tremor beneath them. Truth be told, even if the alpha waves within his skull had not been all but flat-lined, he probably still wouldn’t have noticed it, raised, as he had been, in California. Anything less than a 4.0 wouldn’t have been worth the expenditure of electrical discharge at his synaptic connections. So on his feet trod, toward light and warmth and coffee.

  His eyes, however, did notice the stick-thin form of someone standing in the dim glow of the doorway. Girl, his brain said, and so she was. Nothing short of hysterical blindness would have caused him to miss that.

  Her eyes, peeking from within the confines of her worn parka’s hood, contacted his and said hello. Her mouth said, “Excuse me, sir, but (blah, blah, blah). Could you spare some change?” She had an actual story to tell, as did all such persons begging money at truck stops, but the details were just so much Peanuts adult-speak to Charlie: Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa.

  He gave her five bucks and headed toward the door.

  Sucker, he said to himself, knowing full well he wouldn’t have given a dime if it had been a guy. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” he said aloud.

  To which she replied in what seemed at the time to be a left-field non-sequitur: “Maybe the world will end and we won’t need money anymore.”

  He paused with his hand on the door, tossed the word “Yeah,” back over his shoulder, then proceeded inside, vigorously shaking his head as if to clear the absurdity. There’s my daily dose of crazy, he thought, as the harsh florescent light assaulted his eyes, bringing tears and blurred vision to them. He wiped them clear with the back of his hand, located the coffee area off to the right, and made a beeline.

  Along the wall were arrayed seven urns, in front of which stood a middle-aged man in rumpled clothes and easily identified as another truck driver. He stared blankly at the selections. They ranged in strength from decaf to high-octane, and included three flavored varieties. For Charlie, the decaf would have been pointless, he didn’t want his heart to explode, so the high-octane was out of the question, and he would rather jab his thumb directly into his eye than drink that flavored crap, but the man appeared confused by the multiple choices.

  For Christ’s sake, just choose your poison and move on, Charlie thought, irritated by the fact that the man’s indecision blocked his access to the Dark Roast coffee he so desperately needed.

  It was just the same at fast food places, he mused. Every McDonald’s, every Wendy’s, every Taco Bell, was like every other McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Taco Bell everywhere. The menu didn’t change. Ever. So why in the Hell did he always seem to get stuck behind people who stood there and stared at the unchanging menu as if they were seeing it for the first time in their lives? This was America, and in America it was statistically impossible for anyone to have not gone to every one of the fast food places more times than could be calculated by existing technology. So why in the fuck could people not make up their fucking minds in the blink of an eye?

  The same could be said of the coffee bar at this truck stop. Every truck stop of this type had the same goddamned coffee selections as every other goddamned truck stop of this type. Yet here he was, faced with the irritation of a truck driver with a decision-making disorder.

  His way impeded, Charlie went to the island sitting off to the left, half dedicated to the accouterments of granulated cream and sugar, stir sticks, and an additional assortment of creamers in tiny, sealed cups. The other half of the island offered hotdogs, which had probably been slowly cooking of all night long, and were, in any case, far too disgusting to contemplate at that early hour.

  Popping the top
off his travel mug with a practiced thumb (presumably the same he might have used on his eye) he would have added cream and sugar - the only way he could tolerate the swill that passed for coffee in those places - except for the ever-so-helpful truck stop employee who hovered directly in his way. This never failed. No matter the time, which was now zero three eighteen, no matter the location of the truck stop, be it North Platte, Nebraska, or Peculiar, Missouri, or Weed, California, or Lake Lottawatta, Oklahoma, this seemingly interchangeable attendant managed to position his or herself firmly in front of whatever coffee-related thing Charlie needed. In this particular instance, the representative sample of attendant humanity happened to be a somewhat rotund, frizzy-haired brunette woman of that indeterminate age between late twenties and mid thirties, wearing a maroon smock, emblazoned with the truck stop logo.

  “Good morning!” she exclaimed with far more enthusiasm than should be allowed in polite society, especially at that ungodly hour. “How are you?”

  “Ask me after I’ve had some of this,” he replied, indicating his empty mug. She laughed with the same fervor, but remained stubbornly and obliviously in his way. Realizing the futility of moving the overly cheerful obstacle, and still blocked by the trucker with a decision-making disorder, and feeling the continued pressure from his bladder, he turned without further comment and headed for the mens’s room, pushing down the angry feeling slowly growing in his brain.

  In the “little trucker’s room,” his jaundiced eye noticed that the place had apparently not been cleaned in some time. Perhaps since Reagan, but maybe not. Wet, crumpled paper towels were strewn all over the counter and littered the floor, which bore the tarmac-slop dirt of dozens (maybe hundreds) of footprints. Off to the left, opposite the counter, a revolting glob of chewing tobacco sat splattered in the bowl of one of the urinals. The entire place smelled of stale urine.