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My new book is based around the federal reaction to a Richter 8 earthquake that wrecks the Mississippi valley. Here’s part that is excerpted on my website. It’s a long excerpt; this description of the aftermath of the earthquake in Memphis is about 2/3 of the way down.

http://enemiesforeignanddomestic.com/FESP.htm

Both men heard the zipper of the tent slide open, and turned that way. Jenny emerged, still wearing the brown camouflage trousers, but with a green wool military sweater for a top.

“The baby’s sleeping?” asked Carson.

“Yes. At least she’s taking the instant milk, and keeping it down.”

“Did we wake you up?” asked Doug.

“I slept a little. I was listening to your story.” She sat down on a folding chair between the men. Teenaged Zack was still snoring softly in his sleeping bag, blessedly oblivious.

Carson said, “There’s hot water in the thermos. You want something?”

“Hot chocolate?”

Doug went to a box and returned with a brown paper pouch. He tore it open and made the cocoa, mixing it in a mug on the table. Jenny sipped the warm liquid and stared into the space between the two men. Her long blonde hair, mussed and matted on top, spilled across her shoulders in the absence of the fur hat. Her bangs hung almost to her honey-colored eyes. She spoke quietly, because Zack and the baby were still sleeping. “I found something in one of my pockets.”

Jenny placed a small Ziploc bag on the table. Inside of it was a thin black rectangle: a pocket-sized notebook. Carson opened the plastic bag, withdrew the spiral-bound booklet, and opened it. She looked at Doug and said, “I’m glad you got away—that was an incredible story. It brought back a lot of my own memories. Do you guys want to hear it?”

Carson nodded, and Doug said “Sure.”

She sipped her cocoa, then took a deep breath, and began. “You were describing the January earthquake. I was already away from Memphis for the second one, but I was there for the first. My family lived in Germantown, that’s between where the two rivers almost come together. The Wolf and the Nonconnah, like you were saying. It’s about twenty miles southeast of downtown Memphis. That meant it was one of the only ways out of the city when the bridges went down. Our house shook but it didn’t fall down, thank God. We had some cracked walls, but we were lucky: a lot of houses did collapse. It was Saturday morning, or I would have been at school. My school pancaked…so we were lucky it happened when it did. In Germantown, the earthquake shook us around and broke some things, but I didn’t see it kill anybody. Not directly. Roads were buckled and cracked all over the place, so you couldn’t drive very far without making a lot of detours. The main thing was the gas and electric went out, and the water. That was all right at first. We’ve had tornados and ice storms that knocked out the power. We weren’t too worried. It always came back on in a few hours…or at least by the next day.

“Only this time, the power didn’t come back on. Not a blink, nothing. The whole system was down—telephones, cell phones, ATM machines, gas stations—everything. On the second day, when we were lined up at the Safeway supermarket, that’s when it started to get crazy. Police were there, trying to keep order, but the store employees said you had to pay with cash money. But the ATM machines didn’t work, so how could you get cash? People who didn’t have enough cash started to get angry, real angry.

“By then the refugees from Memphis were starting to walk out to Germantown. I’d been waiting in a line all the way around the block with my father, and then these people walking out of Memphis just started cutting the line, and pushing right to the front. Mostly black people, and Germantown is mostly white. It got ugly fast. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and yelling.

“People started saying we were stupid to wait while everybody else cut the line, and then they started pushing inside too, and the police gave up. What could they do? Shoot everybody? The police were a joke, useless. We waited in that line for six hours, my father and I. We were probably about number five hundred in the line to get inside the Safeway, and then the mob just pushed ahead of the line anyway. The supermarket was stripped bare to the walls by the time we got inside. There was nothing left. Nothing you could eat or drink, anyway. We felt like fools for wasting half of a day waiting in line, but who could you complain to? Nobody. We were fools, for acting civilized.

“We figured the electric company would get the power back on in a few days, or a week at most. Water became a big problem in a hurry. Our neighborhood was on city water, and it stopped during the earthquake. We were lucky because we had a swimming pool, so it wasn’t so bad for us. It cracked during the quake, but it still had a few feet of water at the bottom. We shared it with our neighbors on each side of our house; we let them dip it out with buckets. We used our propane grills for cooking, and for boiling the water to drink.

“And then on the third day more and more refugees started coming. That was Monday. Little groups at first, then big crowds, and then just continuous, like a parade. Mostly blacks from Memphis. Lots of them were pushing shopping carts full of stuff. Their own stuff or looted stuff, who knows? Our street was only one block off of Poplar Avenue, it ran parallel to it. Poplar’s a big street; it goes all the way into Memphis, and the other way it goes out to the country. We had a lot of people walking through our neighborhood. I mean, thousands, like a stadium letting out.

“At first, folks came up and knocked on the door, fairly polite, asking for water and food. They thought we were rich or something, because of our neighborhood. Somehow, they found out we had a swimming pool, and they wanted water. That sounds pretty reasonable, but then some of them started sitting all over our yard. At first we hoped they were just ‘resting’ but then it went from a few people to dozens to hundreds. We had whole families sitting all over our yard, camping out almost. Then our car disappeared. We could only fit our Expedition in the garage, so our Acura was parked in the driveway. Then it was gone, and the people sitting all over our yard just shrugged. They didn’t say anything; they just glared at us like we caused the earthquake or something. I peeked out through the curtains—only my father went to the door to talk to them. On the third day the refugees went right into our backyard too, and then we couldn’t get water out of our own pool. We were too afraid to go outside, not even in the backyard to get water. I was never a racist, I had lots of black friends at school, but this was different. I was scared to death every minute. The people outside didn’t seem grateful for the water, they seemed more angry. Resentful, I guess because we had a little swimming pool.

“In the afternoon of the third day it started raining hard, cold hard rain, and people started banging on our doors. Women. There were men too; in fact it was mostly men outside. I think they sent the women knock on the door, just to play on our sympathy. They were pleading for us to open up, and let them come inside and get some shelter. They said they had babies and children with them, please God have some mercy and let them in! And about then there were some loud bangs around the neighborhood, and I just knew they were gunshots.

“My father didn’t have any guns. He didn’t believe in them, can you believe that? Didn’t believe in them! That’s like not believing in rocks, or hammers or knives. He didn’t believe in guns! Well, some of our neighbors must have believed in them, because we started hearing gunshots, and it was pretty obvious that no matter what happened, 911 wasn’t coming, not with the phones out. The police were not even a factor. I don’t know if they all ran away to look after their own families, or maybe they were guarding something more important than our street. Whatever it was, we never saw them around our neighborhood after the second day, during the riot at the supermarket. After that, they evaporated. Disappeared.