World Up In Smoke Chapter One

Which Way Is Home?

Each day the smell of smoke had gotten worse and Elaine was no closer to finding transportation than she had been the day before. All airports, including O’Hare and Midway, had been shut down with the first report of the dirty bomb in Norfolk, and rumors were rampant that the District of Columbia had been hit from the Chesapeake side. That was puzzling. The Potomac would have been a better choice for the prevailing winds to carry the radiation toward the Capitol.  No doubt Annapolis, Baltimore and Philadelphia were in for it, and she  watched the panic on U-Tube until her laptop battery gave out. That was yesterday. She did get out emails to Ted and his dad but had no response before the battery failed. Her cell phone was useless; the lines were jammed.

To Elaine’s great relief, the President had given a press conference immediately to reassure the rest of the country that members of the Congress and administration were safe, and government was still functioning. All the armed services were being positioned to keep order. Bombers were on their way to Pakistan to deal with those who claimed to have made the strike, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were meeting to review the potential involvement of two other Middle Eastern countries. Additional retaliatory strikes were likely to occur. There were angry demonstrations from people in the street demanding nuclear annihilation of those countries involved.   

Elaine wondered why it never occurred to the rabid fear mongers that humans all live on the same planet.  What goes around comes around, and if the Air Force was dropping nuclear bombs in Pakistan, the winds would blow the radiation across China and Japan and back across the ocean to the United States. China would not take that quietly. Even limited nuclear activity would affect masses of people, and with two young children at home, Elaine was frantic to get back to Saint Louis and wait for the next political shoe to drop. Hopefully, the government was sticking to conventional explosives. It was hard to breathe much less think in all this chaos.

To hell with her job and to hell with the mortgage, she just needed to gather her family and weigh the options. Ted’s parents were keeping the kids, and no doubt he would be there with them.  Without the ability to contact them, Elaine was feeling very alone. Her focus had changed in the last three hours from getting home to surviving long enough to find another way home, assuming of course that home was still there. The trees of Missouri were in flames, and Saint Louis is known as the city of trees. Even the army was at best containing the burning in locations close to the rivers. In Chicago, some people were collapsing in the streets from smoke inhalation while others rushed to drag them into a building. By and large, people were still pulling together, and that was encouraging.

Along with thousands of others, Elaine was trying to get out of Chicago, and the lines at the bus station were moving very slowly. The Illinois National Guard was keeping the bus routes clear to the interstates. Who would have thought that one could not drive across the flat, treeless countryside of Illinois due to the thick smoke? She had checked out of her hotel and stowed her luggage in the trunk of her car. It was still in the parking garage with nearly a full tank of gasoline, but it was virtually useless. The streets were so clogged with traffic that cars could not get out from the garages into the streets. Cars in the street had been abandoned as their fuel ran out. You could hear the crashes as heavy equipment pushed them out of the way.  


Now the Guard and Chicago police were ordering people out of their cars at gunpoint to clear the streets for emergency equipment. People were frantic and furious. Word in the street was that there could be a dirty bomb coming in on Lake Michigan. The interstate highways were so clogged that traffic was at a virtual standstill. So before she ventured out of the relative clear air and safety of the bus station, Elaine stopped to think through her options.

She had an additional concern because someone appeared to be following her. She hoped she was wrong about that. She could not think of any good reason for anyone to follow her, except perhaps for the computer or phone, both of which were relatively useless at this point. In reverse, she would rather have mugged the fellow for his wrap around sunglasses. Her eyes were red-rimmed and watering badly. His face was obscured by a white mask over his nose and mouth, but then so were the faces of half the population in Chicago. The mask in itself was not sinister.

The man was tall, powerful-looking and conservatively dressed. The most unsettling thing was his business-like appearance. This was no bum, and Elaine was weary of dodging him. She thought about confronting him in the midst of other people, but suddenly a mass of people separated them. In an instant, she yanked off her red blazer and hunkered down behind a pile of luggage, hoping she could throw him off. She was breathing through her red and purple scarf but tried to minimize its visibility.  If he were still around, he might identify her by the scarf. She had dressed colorfully for the podium and the video of her university presentation.

Optionally, Elaine was down to the railroad or to the lake waterfront for a way out of the city. When another group of people milled past her, she ducked in with them covering the bright scarf as best she could while keeping it over her nose and mouth. At this point she was for hiking the distance to the train station even though there was no direct route to from there to Saint Louis. The shoes she had worn for her University presentation were sensible for standing, but too fashionable for a long walk.

Visibility was poor.  The air around her was a pale gray-brown, and in the distance, she could see heavy black smoke and an occasional lick of flames. Chicago was burning again, and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow had nothing to do with it. It was drought, relentless heat and high winds. There were wild fires in nearly every state in the west and Midwest. The attack on Norfolk and D.C. was no doubt timed to occur when the troops were already spread thin in helping fight the wild fires. It would create panic on top of the chaos of people being driven out of their homes. The thought made Elaine so angry that she literally stalked to the train station. If someone wanted to follow her, let him.

As she approached the station, a young national guardsman jogged to meet her.  “Hurry, ma’am” he said as he grasped her arm and marched her in double time toward a track. “The train is ready to pull out, and we need to get you out of here. We’re clearing as many people as we can.”

“But,” she said. “No ticket.”

“No matter, ma’am. Nobody has tickets.  Good luck.”  He boosted her onto a very crowded landing and was gone. The train was beginning to move when someone grabbed her from behind and pulled her off the landing. Every hair follicle rose in an instant, and Elaine felt blind fear and rage, but she was off her feet and air bound. As her feet found purchase, she was still held around the waist by a strong pair of masculine arms.  Screaming in rage, Elaine struggled to free herself.