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Message-ID: <30529asstr$991354204@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
From: "Al Steiner" <steiner_al@hotmail.com>
Subject: {ASSM} NEW: Aftermath by Al Steiner - Epilogue - 1/1
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 20:10:04 -0400
Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail
Approved: <assm@asstr-mirror.org>
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d

AFTERMATH

EPILOGUE







October 17, Impact +370 days
El Dorado Hills, California



"Are you okay Brett?" asked Doreen Rowley, the twenty year old wife of Pat.
She was sitting on the left side of the helicopter as it idled on the
ground, and had been most of the way through the pre-flight checklist when
she noticed her instructor rubbing his knee and grimacing.

"A little bit of an ache," he said dismissively, taking his hand away and
shrugging her question off.  "Nothing that I can't handle.  Now how about
you finish up the pre-flight so we can get up in the air?"

"Right," she said, her face a little concerned.  She dutifully went back to
work however and soon the checklist was complete.  Doreen was the fourth of
his student pilots since the official merger of the Garden Hill and El
Dorado Hills communities three months before.  She had just finished ground
school and this was to be her first trip up in the air where she would get
some stick time.

In truth, his left knee, the one injured in the Second Battle of Garden Hill
(as Matt, their official historian called it), was throbbing painfully and
had been all morning.  It was the barometric pressure.  Renee had told him
and the others with bone injuries that many times.  The weather was going
through some changes as the cloud cover above was running out of
precipitation to drop on them.  Windstorms and rainstorms swept in and out
now, sometimes with terrifying power, and the barometer rose and fell with
the advance and decline of these systems, making everyone edgy and
compressing nerve fibers in those that were vulnerable to such things.
Currently the barometer was on the rise though the sky was just as cloudy as
it had been since the impact.  It was in fact one of the most rapid rises
yet recorded and it was creating an ache unlike any he'd felt since the
first post-operative weeks after the surgery.  He tried his best to ignore
it, for the most part successfully.   "So," he asked Doreen, giving one more
rub of the area.  "I'm all set to take off then?"

"Yes," she told him.  "Everything checks out."

"Are you SURE?" he asked, deliberately injecting a note of skepticism into
his tone.

The old instructor's trick worked on her for only a second.  She looked down
at the checklist in her hand, trying frantically to spot something that she
might have forgotten to check on it.  Seeing it however, she knew that she
had covered everything.  Her face took on a more confident expression.  "I'm
sure," she told him.  "You're ready to fly."

He smiled.  "Almost got you with that one, didn't I?"

While she laughed he throttled up the engine and then lifted off, rising
into the air.  Doreen was actually one of his better students and he thought
she would have no trouble at all picking up the mechanics of flying.  As his
experiences with Jason had taught him, the younger members of society, those
that had grown up with Nintendo and PlayStation, tended to be much easier
taught.  The two students that he had been forced to wash out so far had
both been in their thirties.

Brett brought them up to an altitude of 3000 feet, taking them well out over
the Great Central Valley.  Though the cloud cover was still with them and
though monster storms sometimes rolled in and dumped inches of rain in
little more than an hour, the constant fall of raindrops was now a thing of
the past.  The weather itself had grown steadily colder over the past few
months - they were lucky if they reached 45 degrees during mid-afternoon
these days - but the average day brought them nothing more than a light mist
of drops.  Sometimes they didn't even get that and it would be possible to
go outside without rain gear on.  The cessation of the rainfall - aside from
creating problems gathering dishwashing water, laundry water, and bathing
water - had had a dramatic effect on the view of the valley below them.
Where once there had been a virtual sea of water more than a hundred feet
deep, there was now endless swampland and wide, surging rivers running
through mudflats and the mounds and mounds of debris left over from the
initial flooding.  Thankfully the millions of bodies had all decomposed by
now, leaving nothing more than bones scattered among the remains of cars,
the uprooted trees, and the piles of smashed concrete.  The residents of
Auburn had taken to picking through this debris in order to survive, at
least that was what recon flights of the area had shown.  What they were
finding to eat in all of that was the subject of often intense speculation
in the executive council meetings.

"Let's head a little to the south," Brett told Doreen, "and then we'll have
you take over and try some turns.  Sound good?"

"Uh... sure," she said a little nervously.

"Relax," he told her.  "You'll do fine."

The aircraft they were in was not the MD-500 that had helped them win the
war against the Auburnites.  With its rotor blades failing, several major
engine components well past their useful service life, and no replacement
parts on the horizon, the machine had been honorably retired and relegated
to museum status behind the El Dorado Hills elementary school buildings.  In
its place the merged communities now possessed a Bell JetRanger - the
civilian model of the helicopter that Brett had flown for the Sheriff's
Department - and an old Vietnam era Huey that had been refurbished and
returned to service as a firefighting helicopter shortly before the comet
impact.  Both helicopters had been discovered by recon flights from the
MD-500 - the Bell from a small municipal airport outside of Reno and the
Huey from a National Forest station outside Angel's Camp.  Both had been
stored with a fairly good inventory of spare parts and components, enough to
hopefully keep them in the air for as long as there was a fuel supply for
them.  Currently Brett was flying the Bell, which had duel controls for the
ease and safety of teaching.  It was the Bell that also was used for
short-range recon missions and small lifting.  The Huey, a large,
maintenance intensive, duel engine job, was used only for heavy lifting or -
if they were to go to war again - for transporting large numbers of troops.
So far, the former job was all that had been required of it.

Brett, as fond as he had become of the MD-500 during the Garden Hill days,
loved the Bell almost physically.  It was the aircraft that he was most
familiar with, that he had accumulated the most hours in over the years.  He
liked the responsiveness of its controls and even the clattering racket
caused by its tail rotor.  The quiet that the MD-500 had produced with its
NOTAR system had always seemed unnatural to him.

"Okay, let's have you take the controls and take over straight and level
flight for me," Brett said as they moved south over the flooded and smashed
city of Sacramento.

"All right," she said, putting her hands on the collective and cyclic and
her feet on the pedals.

He talked her through the switchover and a moment later the aircraft was
hers.  Nothing dramatic happened.  As long as she didn't move anything, the
aircraft would continue on its course.  As soon as it soaked into her mind
that SHE was in command, he talked her through her first turn.  As most of
his students did the first time, her hands were a little too light on the
controls, so afraid was she of being too heavy on them.  It took her a
minute before she actually got the machine to change direction.  Once she
began to practice though, she caught the hang of it real quickly.  Inside of
ten minutes she was turning and banking with ease, able to level them within
five degrees of a particular heading and able to maintain her altitude
within a hundred feet or so.  By the time twenty minutes had passed, she was
able to maintain altitude perfectly and put them within a degree or so of
the requested heading.

"Very good," Brett told her, absently rubbing his knee again, trying to
massage away the ache.  "Very good indeed for your first time up.  Why don't
you spin us back around to 10 degrees and we'll head on back.  It's your
aircraft until we get ready to descend."

"My aircraft," she said, savoring the words.

Ten minutes later she handed control of the helicopter back to him, allowing
him to descend towards town.  They passed over the defensive bunkers on the
outer perimeter, bunkers which had been built by work crews shortly after
the community merger and which were staffed by an elite cadre of trained
guards supervised by Chrissie.  The guards in those bunkers were all
equipped with fully automatic rifles and had plenty of ammunition to burn if
needed.  The extra weapons had come from pillaging partially flooded police
buildings in Reno, Sparks, and several smaller towns both in California and
Nevada.  The ammunition had come from a storage warehouse much further away.

A routine radio check-in occurred when they were spotted and the three
guards below waved up at them in a friendly manner as they flew over the top
of them at 1500 feet.  They were given clearance to land the aircraft and
Brett circled around the elementary school once to get the feel of the wind
and to get a read on the altitude.  The constant barometric changes of late
meant that the altimeters of all of the aircraft - which operated by
measuring barometric pressure - were off by an unknown amount at any given
time.  Since it was only a small amount it didn't matter terribly much in
flight but it did make landing a tad tricky at times.  Still, Brett was a
veteran of such post comet idiosyncrasies and he touched down neatly, right
in the accustomed spot, between the Huey and the twin engine Cessna that had
been scavenged from the Cameron Park airport.

It was the Cessna that provided the long-range recon of the area.  With a
range of more than 1000 miles, Brett, Jason, and Pat had flown as far as
Boise to the northeast, Salt Lake City to the east, Las Vegas to the
southeast, and San Diego to the southwest.  What they had found in all of
these places was starkly depressing.  The constant rainfall of the first six
months post impact had drowned the desert and flatlands.  All of the cities
and towns in this area were flooded out and choked with mud, the only
residents left, small groups of disorganized survivors, probably living off
of the meager pickings left over from the collapse of civilization.
Circling such places showed evidence of crude defensive walls built around
enclaves, signs that the groups were constantly fighting among themselves.
This was the view they had in all of the major desert cities: Reno, Salt
Lake, Boise, Las Vegas.  Los Angeles and San Diego were simply not there
anymore, the very landscape that they had once stood upon washed clean of
the towering high-rises, the endless subdivisions, and the millions of
people that had once lived there.  It was only in the mountain areas, high
above the floods, outside of the mudslide areas, that any sign of
organization existed.  Here, near the communities of Nevada City, Alturas,
Murphy's - tiny towns that had managed to roll through the earthquake
intact - were places similar to El Dorado Hills or Auburn found.  Circling
such areas showed unmistakable defenses and inhabited buildings.  In several
cases the people themselves had been spotted.  Review of videotapes made on
the overflights had shown buildings where food was being stored, pens where
animals were being kept, even greenhouse type facilities in Alturas.  In
contrast to the depressing views of the cities, the few thriving mountain
communities brought hope; hope that there might be a future to the human
race after all.

"Okay," Brett told Doreen once the rotor was in the neutral position and the
engine was throttled back down to idle.  "Go through the shut-down
procedure."

She did so, performing each action on the short checklist without problem.
The rotor spun down to a halt and the engine died with a last whine, leaving
only silence behind.  They both unstrapped from their seats and stepped out.
Brett's leg gave a strong protest when he placed weight upon it.  Christ, he
thought, it was really hurting today.

Sherrie, Paul's second wife, came walking out from the small maintenance
shack where the aircraft supplies were kept.  Her job in town was to keep
the various planes and helicopters of the El Dorado Hills Air Force fueled
and ready to take off at a moment's notice.  She also oversaw the
maintenance on each one, although others did the actual tasks.  It was a job
that she was very well suited for.  She had had a baby less than four weeks
ago and was still slightly pudgy with postpartum fat.  She was also limping
quite badly on the leg that had been shot in the First Battle of Garden
Hill, much worse than normal.

"Hey Sherrie," Brett said as he limped over towards her.  He gave her a
smile that one gives to others that are sharing their exclusive misery.
"You too huh?"

"Yes," she groaned good-naturedly.  "It's killing me today.  I don't think
its ever been this bad before."

"The barometer is surely going crazy on us, that ain't no shit," he replied.
"I guess because it dropped so low during that last storm."

"Go get a couple of Naprosin from Renee," she suggested.  "I did and it took
the edge off a little."

"Maybe I will," he replied, intending to do just that.

Sherrie turned her attention to Renee, who was standing shyly next to her
instructor.  "So how'd you do?" she asked her.  "You didn't crash my
chopper, I can see that."

"It was really cool," she beamed.  "The bomb!"

"And we're going to do a lot more of it tomorrow," Brett reminded her.  "So
why don't you go get your notebooks and head on home.  I want a three page
essay on the physics of ascent and descent before we lift off."

"Awww," she groaned.  "Not more homework."

"More homework," he confirmed.  "And no bitching about it or I'll give you
even more."

"All right," she said, exaggerating her annoyance.  She headed off to the
main bank of classrooms, whistling as she went.

Brett looked over at the empty parking spot on the other side of the twin
engine plane.  It was for their smaller recon plane, the former Highway
Patrol Cessna 182 that had been next to the MD-500 in the Cameron Park
hanger.  "Jason still out on patrol huh?" he asked.  "I'd of thought he'd be
back by now."

"He said they were going to shoot some film of the Tuolumne forest area.
Our maps are a little vague on that part of the foothills."

"Oh," Brett said, nodding.  "I guess that will take a while then.  I'm
telling you, you give that kid an assignment and he certainly takes it
seriously.  How much longer until the 182 goes down for a thorough?"

"Another twenty hours or so," she told him, knowing the answer without
having to look at her books.

"Good enough," he said.  "Hopefully Jason will have the map done by then and
we can start concentrating on recovering that jet fuel from Winnemucca.  I
know it isn't going anywhere, but I just don't like leaving those tanker
cars sitting there."  He was referring to another group of tankers and
boxcars that had been found sitting on a cut through some hills outside of
the small, demolished Nevada town.  Three of the tankers were full of jet
fuel bound for a military base in Nebraska.  The logistics of getting it
back to El Dorado Hills were something that was still being worked out.

"Well," Sherrie told him, "I'd better get the Bell gassed up and ready to
roll.  Any problems with it?"

He assured her that there were not and they said their goodbyes to each
other for the moment.  While Sherrie limped off towards the fuel truck,
Brett limped off towards the elementary school.

He found Renee, their resident doctor, inside one of the classrooms.  The
room was decked out with anatomical posters that had come from her former
office and the blackboard was filled with drawings of the human circulatory
system.  At the desks, watching her lecture on anatomy and physiology, were
three men and six women from town, the first class of the El Dorado Hills
School of Medicine.  It had been decided even before the merger of the towns
that the perpetuation of specialized knowledge such as medicine, piloting,
and mechanics, would be the most important goal.  In the world that was
forming in the wake of the comet, knowledge and skills would be power.  As
such, Brett was teaching people to fly and the basics of military tactics,
Steve Kensington was teaching engine repair and basic engineering skills,
and Renee was teaching medicine.  Stacy, Jason's first wife, was sitting in
the front row, staring intently, her stomach already starting to swell with
her second pregnancy.  She was the star pupil so far, having been liberated
from the kitchen on the basis of her extremely high test scores on the
general knowledge exams that had been given.

Renee, seeing him standing in the doorway, paused in her lecture and offered
him a smile followed up by a questioning look.  He asked if he could have a
word with her for a moment and she excused herself.

"Knee bothering you?" she whispered when she reached him.

"You must be psychic," he said.

"I must be," she confirmed.  "Is it bad?"

"As bad as it's ever been.  How about kicking down some of that Naprosin you
gave Sherrie?"

She pulled a prescription pad from her pocket and wrote "Naprosin - 2 tabs"
on it.  The reason for the pad was that a few people in town had been
helping themselves to some of the drug supplies - particularly the
painkillers and the Valium derivatives.  This had prompted the ruling
committee to place all pharmaceuticals - over the counter and otherwise -
under lock and key, releasable by the supply staff only on written order
from the doctor.  This did not include the alcohol and marijuana supply,
which was releasable by a mere order from the ruling committee.  "Are you
flying any more today?" she asked him.

"No," he told her.  "We've wrapped it up until tomorrow.  Unless of course,
someone attacks us in the meantime."

She laughed a little.  "I guess we'll just have to take that chance."  She
scribbled a little more on the pad.  "I'm adding a couple of Vicodin for you
too.  I couldn't give Sherrie any of that because she's nursing, but you're
not lactating currently, are you?"

"I don't seem to be," he said with a grin.

"It must be nice to be a man," she said, rubbing her own swelling stomach a
little.  She tore the prescription off and handed it to him.  "See you at
dinner tonight."

"Right," he told her, taking it.  "Thanks."

It took him the better part of ten minutes to get the supply clerk to get
his pills from the locked room.  Once they were handed over he washed them
down with boiled water from the dispenser in the hallway.  He then made his
way upstairs - wincing at each step on the risers - to the main office where
the ruling committee met.

The office was not terribly opulent by any means.  It had once belonged to
the principal of the school and it retained much of its original
furnishings.  Pat, Bonnie, and Paul, the committee members, were sitting
around the desk having an informal discussion about initiating contact with
Auburn.  It was an old argument and one that they never seemed to make much
headway on.  Of course the change in government there had long been noted.
It was not hard to notice that the women were the ones with the guns now and
the men were the ones scavenging in the mudflats of the valley for whatever
it is that they looked for there.  Auburn was watched very closely by El
Dorado Hills.  Recon flights during the day were contacted three times each
week - always by approaching from the east, as if they'd come from Garden
Hill - and night flights were conducted weekly.  So far it did not appear as
if the women were planning any kind of military operation soon, but you
never could tell.  Bonnie was of the opinion that contact should be made,
just in the interests of being the neighborly thing to do and perhaps to see
if any sort of trade could be worked out.  Pat and Paul however, were both
opposed to the contact on the grounds that they didn't want to have dealings
with a community that treated one sex as slaves.  Sometimes they argued
viciously about this for hours at a time.

Currently the discussion was much lower key.  They were sipping out of
glasses of boiled water with lemonade powder in it and behaving almost
calmly.  They looked up at him as he entered and he told them that unless
they had something else for him to do today, he was going to go home and lay
down.

"The leg bothering you?" Bonnie asked, noting how he was carefully keeping
his weight on the right one.

"You could say that," he agreed.  "Renee cut me loose some pills for it.  I
want to see if I can sleep it off."

"Sure," she said after receiving no dissent from the other members.  "Take
the rest of the day off.  You're not the first one being bothered by the
barometer today."

"It really is spiking, isn't it?" Paul, whose job it was to keep an eye on
such things, said.

"It really is," he agreed.  "I'll catch you later.  If you see Jason when he
comes back, will you have him stop by my house on his way home?  We need to
go over the lifting procedures for the Huey some more so we can get that
fuel lift figured out."

"I'll tell him," Paul said, "but that might be kind of late.  He stays here
until almost 9:00 some nights working on those maps."

"Well, I'll probably be up," Brett said.  "The baby, you know."

"Oh, we know," they all echoed.  All of them were living in houses with
infants.

He bade them farewell and headed back downstairs, exiting the school by the
side door and limping his way out to the street in front.  Fortunately, the
house he shared with his three wives was relatively close by, less than
three blocks in fact.  The streets were damp as he made his way home but the
precipitation was non-existent, not even a mist was falling.  The wind was
icy and moving at a fairly good clip from the west.  It seemed almost dry
outside, though very cold.  Brett pulled his coat a little tighter and soon
he was home.

The house that he and his family had been assigned was a two-story, four
bedroom that had probably been pretty expensive before the comet.  He
entered through the unlocked door and stepped into the formal living room,
where the previous day's laundry was hanging amid dry linen placed there to
absorb the excess moisture.  He wound his way through all of this and into
the family room, which was modestly, though tastefully decorated with its
original, pre-comet furnishings.  Chrissie was sitting in the recliner, a
paperback book folded open in front of her.  Her walkie-talkie sat next to
her on the endtable.  In her arms was three month old Laura - named for her
maternal grandmother who had been shot to death a year ago.  It had become
somewhat traditional in town to name children after parents that had died in
the impact.  The boys were generally named after the father's father and the
girls after the mother's mother.  Chrissie had her shirt unbuttoned and her
bra pulled up.  Laura was suckling contentedly at her right nipple, drawing
the life-giving milk from her mother's body into her own.

"Hey babe," Brett hailed, walking over and kissing her lightly on the mouth.
He then leaned over and kissed the infant's head as well.  Laura stopped
sucking long enough to give him a toothless smile and then she went right
back to work on the engorged nipple.  "What're you doing home?  Just feeding
or are you here for the day?"

"Just feeding Laura," she said.  "I still have tomorrow's roster to do and a
training rotation to schedule for."  She gave a crooked grin.  "It'll be
nice when Shellie pops out her little package and gets her milk.  Then I
won't have to keep coming home every four hours to feed the machine here."

"I heard that," said Michelle, emerging from the bathroom.  Like roughly
three-quarters of the childbearing age women in town, she was well knocked
up.  Nearly six months along now, her stomach had gotten huge.  "And if you
think I'm gonna stick a baby on each of my tits, you're out of your freakin
mind.  They'll suck me dry."

"I love it when you talk like that," Brett said, kissing her.

Michelle was currently pulling a shift as the mother of the family.  Since
Chrissie's position was much more important than Michelle's - who was a mere
guard supervisor - Michelle was allowed to stay home each day and take care
of Laura.  She offset these duties with Maggie, who was one of the guards
and who was three months pregnant herself, on a rotating basis.  It was
somewhat of an unconventional arrangement but it was a somewhat
unconventional world these days.

Michelle plopped herself down on the sofa next to Brett and immediately
snuggled up to him.  After the routine questions about why he was home so
early and how his day had gone, she began nibbling on his neck, giving soft
sucks and kisses that soon had him to a full erection.

"You guys," Chrissie said, feigning exasperation.  "Don't do that in front
of the baby.  Go in the bedroom for Christ's sake."

"I think she's got a good idea," Michelle said, nibbling a little on his
clavicle.  "Care to join me Brett?"

"We already did it this morning," he reminded her, playing hard to get.

"And we'll probably do it tonight too," she said, giving his erection a
squeeze through his pants.  "Now I know why Chrissie was such an animal
while she was pregnant.  Now let's do it."

"If I must," he said, faking a sigh.

They retired to the bedroom and did it.  It was up to its usual standards of
excellence.

After, as he lay curled up next to Michelle's swollen body, feeling the
perspiration drying on his skin, he was just starting to drift off to sleep,
the combination of Vicodin and sex putting him under.  Just as the last
plugs of consciousness were being pulled free, just as his breathing took on
the slow, regular patterns of slumber, a commotion from outside jerked him
back upward.

"What the hell?" asked Michelle, who had heard it as well.

It was the sound of voices raised in excitement.  Many of them.  They were
loud enough to be heard even through the double-paned glass of the house's
windows.  This particular part of town was densely populated, with no
unoccupied houses on the street at all.  It sounded like all of their
neighbors were standing outside and babbling.  Individual words could not be
made out due to the glass and the sheer number of speakers, but something
had obviously riled up everyone.

"I'd better see what's up," Brett said, pulling himself free of the covers
and rolling out of bed.  His knee was only throbbing distantly now, thanks
to the pain medicine, but his mind was a little groggy.  He picked up his
jeans and sat down to put them on.  As he was doing this, a loud knock came
on their front door.

"Who is it?" he heard Chrissie call from the living room.  A voice muttered
something excitedly in return.  This was followed by the sound of the door
opening and a faint, female voice telling Chrissie that she HAD to come
outside.  She HAD to see, and quickly.

"Oh my god!" he heard Chrissie exclaim.  "I have to get Brett and Shellie!
They HAVE to see this!"

Brett and Michelle shared a look, wondering if there was some kind of
trouble.  Obviously something strange was going on out there.  But what?
They both continued to dress.  Brett made sure that his gun was strapped on
to his waist.

The door to the bedroom was ripped open a moment later and Chrissie stood
there, her face flushed and excited, Laura dozing in her arms.  "You have to
come see this," she said.  "Hurry, come outside."

"What is it?" Brett asked.

"Just come on!" she said.  "You have to see it for yourself.  Hurry, before
it goes away!"  With that she rushed out of the room once again, heading for
the front door.

Brett and Michelle exchanged one more look and then threw on the rest of
their clothing.  They hurried through the house and out the front door.

The first thing they saw were the neighbors.  They were gathered in the
street outside, everyone from every house up and down the block, nearly
sixty people in all.  They were looking skyward and pointing.  The next
thing that they noticed was that the light was brighter than normal.  It was
almost as if...

"Look at it," Chrissie said, laughing delightfully.  "Isn't it beautiful?
Isn't it the most wonderful thing you've ever seen?"

Brett and Michelle looked skyward, off to the southwest.  There, about
midway in the sky, a break in the clouds had magically opened, a brief rip
caused by the intersection of two weather patterns perhaps.  Visible in that
small break, which encompassed less than a single degree of the sky, was the
sun.  The big, bright, orange ball that gave life to the planet hung there
in the hole, shining in all of its glory; a sight no one had seen now in
more than a year.

"The sun," Brett whispered, staring at it in awe.  It really was a beautiful
thing.  He could feel its warmth upon his face, could feel the way his eyes
tried to avert from its brightness.  Surrounding it was the brilliant blue
of the sky.

"It really is still there," Michelle said beside him.  "It really is."

"And maybe things really will be all right," Brett replied, still staring.

The break in the clouds would last for less than ten minutes before the
curtains of cloud cover closed it back up again.  But later that day there
would be another opening, and the next day there would be yet another.



THE END



+++++





AUTHOR'S NOTE


And so this very long, very detailed story of the aftermath comes to a
close.  When I started this story way back in October, I had only the
vaguest idea of where I would be taking it and I had NO idea how long it
would eventually end up being.  And, while my early hopes of pumping out a
chapter a week as I did during "Doing It All Over" turned out to be na ve, I
do like to think I maintained a fairly consistent pace throughout.

I would like to take this oppurtunity to thank, once again, the literally
thousands of people that have emailed me with encouragement, ideas,
criticisms, even hostility during the construction of this story.  It is for
you that I have carried on with this story and once again you have instilled
me with the confidence I require to keep writing.  Many have said that the
emails are the only payment the Usenet author gets.  While that is certainly
true in this case, these emails represent much more to me than just words on
a screen.  With them I am told over and over again that I CAN write and that
I do have a future with the written word.  As to what that future will be,
time will tell, but I now can be certain that there is one there and that I
have made my mark on the literary world in at least a minor way.

Many of you, in these emails, have expressed the hope that I continue with
this plotline forever, or at least for many more chapters.  In fact, I have
left the narrative open enough so that the thread can be picked up again at
a later date if I so choose to do that (and more than likely, I probably
will).  But for the time being, I have told the story I set out to tell and
it is time for me to step out of the Aftermath world for a while and step
into some other worlds.  For those of you out there who write, you'll
understand how I feel perhaps.  A writer's mind feels trapped if confined to
one storyline, one plot, one set of characters forever.  I honestly don't
know how Tom Clancy and other such writers who always use the same story
with the same people, can do it.

Just one more note on technical things and I'll leave you for now.  I have
been reading the discussions that go on in the alt.sex.stories forum and
have noted that several people have questioned whether or not the impact of
such a comet would cause the sort of destruction described in the story.
Others have speculated much about whether or not civilization would survive
on the east coast of the United States, or in Europe, or in other places
(the Midwest was mentioned quite a bit).

Just for clarity, I researched comet and asteroid impacts extensively before
writing the first chapter.  This research was done in various scientific
journals and publications, NOT on the Discovery Channel and The Learning
Channel between commercials for Miss Cleo the psychic friend.  Everything
that I read assured me that the effects that I described from a comet of
that size and composition moving at that velocity and impacting in the ocean
would be a near extinction level event for most species on the planet,
including homo sapiens.  The tidal waves (not wave) rushing out from such an
impact would be hundreds of feet in height while in the open ocean and would
move at near the speed of sound until such time as they hit something.  They
would sweep through every ship afloat, be they in the open sea or near the
shore, and would rise to nearly a mile in height when they encountered a
continental mass, at which point they would wash nearly a hundred miles
inland and then rebound back the other way.  These waves, though they would
start at the point of impact, would eventually wash through every ocean on
earth as they bounced back and forth and would probably continue to batter
the coastlines of every landmass for the better part of a week.

The rain itself is another effect described in nearly every publication that
I read.  It was noted time and time again that a land impact, while
devastating locally, would probably not cause a collapse of civilization,
but that an ocean impact would be hundreds of times more devastating because
of the GLOBAL rainfall that would result from the heat of entry boiling away
seawater into the atmosphere.  This rain, I was assured, would last for
months, possibly even a year or so, and that a new ice age would probably
result from this.  This means that every low-lying area on Earth would be
flooded and washed out.  The vast majority of the cities on this planet are
near the ocean or rivers (as I mentioned in Chapter 1).  All of them would
be flooded or completely destroyed.  Without the cities we have lost most of
our planetary population.  We have also lost our governments, our abilities
to communicate and trade, and our abilities to produce food and goods.
Military bases are rarely located on high ground so they would mostly be
flooded out, their weapons, aircraft, etc, buried.

My point to all this is that I stand by the details that I described in the
beginning of the story and that I would like to assure the readers that I
did not just pull them out of my ass - there is scientific basis to them.
The other point is to reiterate that EVERYTHING is destroyed, not just the
west coast of the United States.

So that is my tale and I'm glad you have all enjoyed it.  Until we meet
again,


Love to all (and good sex),

Al Steiner
May 31, 2001
Placer County, California, USA

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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