Hawaii, the most isolated archipelago on earth, has never been more alone. Residents are unexpectedly cut off from power and the rest of the world without warning, left without imported resources and thousands of stranded tourists.
Sheba, a volca...
Ups! Gambar ini tidak mengikuti Pedoman Konten kami. Untuk melanjutkan publikasi, hapuslah gambar ini atau unggah gambar lain.
1
Black Fields
Sheba rode down the broad dirt road, pedaling against twenty mile-per-hour winds beneath the unrelenting summer Hawaiian sun. She made sure to keep in the middle of the road to avoid riding over the larger rocks distributed along the road's edges and toppling over in consequence. Her eyes squinted against the gusts of wind in a futile attempt to keep the sun and debris from flying into her eyes as she scanned the area she used to frequent several times a month.
It was one of the most desolate places on Earth, not a tree to be seen for miles. The road was caged in by nothing but fresh fields of pahoehoe lava rock gleaming in the sunshine. There was no discernable variation until you reached the pacific to the far left and Kilauea on the nearby right; it seemed like an unlikely place to find a living thing, let alone a whole community of stubborn hermits slinging rental bicycles and live lava tours to mainlanders. Sheba gave a small smile at the thought of her friend, Harrison, who lived with a handful of other people in a collection of self-sustaining mobile homes parked in the lava fields.
Harrison was an odd character, a brilliantly paranoid man in his mid-thirties who'd moved out to Kilauea's lava fields in his mid-twenties from New Mexico after being fired from his gas station job. His move to the big island was placed on blind faith, he'd never been to Hawaii before, but he packed his belongings into a single box and left the mainland for good. In a lot of ways, Harrison was the exact opposite of Sheba, who'd meticulously planned her life years in advance and thought things out extensively before exercising them.
Sheba had decided she was moving to Hawaii, either Maui or the big island, when she was seven after her first visit with her family. Then, she decided she was going to study volcanoes when she was eleven after she visited Mauna Loa for the first time. After that, Sheba decided she would live further inland to avoid tsunamis and mosquitos (maybe) and gauged insurance and housing prices at eighteen. Finally, Sheba went to the University of Colorado at Boulder, got a bachelor's in geophysics, and used a faculty contact to get a job in Hawaii at twenty-two. Aside from a few minor hiccups along the way, Sheba had followed her plan with relative ease and reaped its benefits until very recently.
About three months ago, ships and planes stopped arriving in Hawaii. Now food, fresh water, medicine, and fossil fuels were hard to come by after a mere twelve weeks of isolation and Sheba could only watch as the island community came apart like meat in a crockpot. By the end of the third week without any sign from the mainland, Sheba had noticed a shift in her next-door neighbors, a new air of hostility she hadn't been met with the entire four years she'd lived in the neighborhood had quickly replaced the fear and confusion they felt initially after the cut-off. People Sheba had once considered to be friends, families that'd had her over for barbeques, were suddenly withdrawn and passive aggressive towards her in a way that brought her back to middle school over a lack of resources in their new uncertain reality; not that she could blame them, it was terrifying being like this.
