Ash: Rise of the Republic by Campbell Paul Young Read Free Book Online Page B

things
off.
    “Ok folks, first thing, thank you for coming
this morning,” I began, “it’s important that we get on the same
page here. As you’re all probably starting to realize, this is bad.
Things are much worse than they were saying on the news
yesterday.”
    “The scientific community has known about
Yellowstone for a long time. There is a tremendous body of evidence
suggesting it has blown regularly over the past several million
years. The USGS has had sensors all over that thing for years. We
went over one of their reports when I was in school – damage
estimates were high but fairly localized. The fact that there is
now two feet of volcanic ash on the ground in Central Texas makes
it clear that that report was naïve at best. Hell, it might have
just been intentional bullshit. The fact is, this thing is probably
going to end up being a global disaster. Think nuclear winter;
think starvation; think extinctions.”
    “What the fuck are you talking about?”
growled a fat man sitting a few feet away. Richard Werner, the
neighborhood asshole, six feet of selfish, sweating, unnecessary
rage. The one man in the neighborhood who could be counted on to
complain about anything, up to and including children riding their
bikes in the street. When we had first moved in, there was a
neighborhood pet: an old white tailed doe that a little old lady
down the street had raised from a fawn. She would wander from yard
to yard, eating corn out of peoples’ hands and generally delighting
the neighborhood kids.
    One afternoon, Werner’s offspring, a fat
little sociopath named Robert, held out a handful of corn for the
poor deer. When she walked up to him he cracked her in the head
with the ball-peen hammer he had concealed behind his back. Luckily
there wasn’t much strength behind the blow so it only dazed her.
She reared up in surprise and kicked him in the chest, knocking him
to the ground. The elder Werner, having watched this display from
his kitchen window, stormed out of the house with a single shot
.22. He walked right up to the docile animal and shot her in the
eye. She immediately dropped to the ground and began twitching and
flailing her legs, attempting to flee.
    He stood there with his son for a few
minutes, laughing as she struggled on the ground, and then slowly
walked back inside. He returned a few minutes later and shot her
several more times in the body. He then handed the small rifle to
his son and let him finish her off. To his surprise, the
neighborhood shunned him for this behavior. He could not understand
why people were upset that he killed an animal that had threatened
his son. He really never understood what he had done wrong.
    Now, he was sitting across from me on a
wooden chair that threatened to collapse under his bulk. His face
was an unhealthy burgundy. Sweat was forming on his forehead due to
the army surplus NBC suit he had stuffed himself into. His portly
twelve year old son sat next to him, a miniature version of his
father. Their faces shared a gloating condescension.
    “I’m sure the ash will stop soon,” he
continued, surprised to be the center of attention, “That thing was
on the other side of the country, I’m sure the government will have
it sorted out in a few days”
    “What I’m trying to tell you,” I replied,
calmly, “is that if we’re getting this much ash down here, this
thing is much bigger than the government. There is no way they are
prepared for this. If that thing pumped enough material into the
atmosphere for it to fall down here, it’s going to block out the
sun, maybe for a long time. It’s going to raise the albedo of the
planet. By that I mean that it’s going to reflect too much heat
back into space and things are going to get cold. Plants won’t be
able to grow, animals aren’t going to be able to eat, and a lot of
people are going to get hungry. Not just here, everywhere. Hell if
it’s big enough it might even change the composition of