Hayward's Reach

NaShoStoMo #27 - The Great White Spot

              The storm slowed over Hawaii and continued to absorb water and energy from the environment.  When it began to move again, it was twice the size it had been before. It approached the coast of California, driving in swells of water which damaged anything along the shore, turning any building on the coast to splinters. The forty-foot swells had never been seen and thrashed the coast, drove water into the streets of both Los Angeles and San Francisco. People who did not believe what they had heard about Hawaii re-evaluated and began to run for their lives. How could they have known?

              The roads to the mountains were jammed with cars and trucks. The storm was inexorable. When it reached the coast, the winds were in excess of two hundred fifty miles per hour. Nothing made by man could withstand such winds. Skyscrapers lost windows, cars were flipped and carried for miles, trees uprooted, homes swept away by winds, rain and waves. When the storm reached the mountains, everyone's hopes rose, even as people ignored the carnage. The mountains would break the storm, it would run out of energy and die.  

              Instead, it did the unexpected. It turned south, but did not die.

              It rode the mountains south, destroying the San Francisco Bay Area, and everyone in it. Heading South, Los Angeles was the next major metropolis to be swept away. The storm was being fed by the Pacific and kept moving south. As the edge of the mountains receded, the storm proceeded East into the Gulf of Mexico and continued to grow. Most of Mexico to the borders of Costa Rica and South America were completely inundated by water.

              Refueled by the heated waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the storm's power increased and with its increased size it affected the Southern mainland states and basically erased them, from Nevada to Florida. Nearly one third of the population of the United States was destroyed in the first forty hours of the Last Storm of the Century. Nearly all of Mexico, and Costa Rica had been decimated. Tens of millions were believed dead. 

              As the storm pulled away from the United States, its size increased again, absorbing water from across its entire area, and energy from the very warm waters of the Atlantic, it swept across the Southern tip of Europe, but even that tiny brush destroyed most of the UK, Greece, France, Italy and all of the Mediterranean. At this point, emergency signals criss-cross the globe with everyone trying to determine where the most need for service would appear next.

              It didn't matter.

              The storm grew larger and more powerful, as it recrossing the Pacific. It would become immense and unstoppable. It was considered such a threat, militaries threatened to throw nuclear weapons into the heart of the thing. A great carrier attempted, since it had been caught in the wake of the storm to tried to use a nuclear device, but it had no effect. The storm had simply grown too large to do anything. 

              People fled where ever they thought they could go, but climate models had begun to reveal a startling truth. The storm was so large now, it could feed from any ocean, any where, at nearly any time, until it ran out of energy. Climatologists theorized it would become a permanent fixture on the face of the planet.  Those climatologists called it, The Great White Spot. It swept across the Earth over twenty five times before stabilizing at its current size of one quarter of the globe.

              Sergei listened to the radio until the signals grew less and less. Communications from the ground lasted two years, but by the year 2099, there had not been a single radio message he could detect anywhere on the planet. He held out hope that somewhere, somehow, mankind had survived. Until the cloud cover broke enough to see the planet.

              Until today. Then he wept like a child.

              The mountains were gone, ground away by the five hundred mile an hour winds. The Rockies, the Appalachians, The Himalayans had been scoured from the planet. Nothing made by man had survived. Even the best made skyscrapers had been worn away to nothing. The Earth was a smooth and uniform brown. He stared looking for any landmarks. Nothing remained.

              Sergei lasted a year eating the stored food onboard the ship. The satellite could keep him alive alone for five years, easily but his mind was shattered by what he saw. In order to cope he used climatological models from weather satellites under his control to determine the Great White Spot would last for another twenty years, reducing the earth to little more than a windswept ocean in that time. He then found out that without land, the storm might never stop.  

              Sergei Balmasov, the last Human being left alive anywhere opened the bottle of vodka he carried aboard all those years ago and drank a toast. He finished the bottle in about an hour. He set all of his notes into the computer and set a radio broadcast into space repeating what he learned about Humanity during their last days on Earth. He stepped into an airlock without a suit closed the door behind him. He held his breath while he cycled the lock and jumped out into space, with his dying breath he chose to look upon the Earth.

              His message to anyone who might one day come across our blue planet was a tombstone marker. "Here Lies the final resting place of the Human race. We saw the future, but could not embrace it, until it embraced us. May God have mercy on our souls."

The Great White Spot   © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved