old road 9

by M. G. Mclaughlin

In this war there is no climate, only weather

The Republic’s Delta Outpost War Weather Station.

18:30 Zulu time.

Hail Disaster Technicians: Spackle and Fizzy.

Spackle and Fizzy lived off Old Road 9, where 120-foot, antebellum Magnolia trees shaded the rarely used road. The plentiful, never-to-be-forgotten dry Magnolia tree leaves crackled when driven over.

Their house was down a long driveway of pea rock that dog-legged and disappeared behind a tangle of green. The flat-roofed, square, windowless, gray house was greenish with algae, and it looked like a cement bunker. It was. The structure was overgrown and hidden with brush, Kudzu, and dangling Spanish Moss from nearby Southern Oak. Sandwiched between its concrete walls were polarized copper and lithium, and no electronic signal nor magnetic wave could pass through. Signals from inside the bunker were sent by buried cable to an antenna that was half-organic, green fern. Combining organic and inorganic materials for the construction of electronic equipment was the latest in espionage and very hard to detect.

The Great River backed the property and was enclosed by a rusted fence choked with more Kudzu vines. The mailbox was a small beer keg. The simple front iron gate opened automatically, and that was a little unusual for houses along Old Road 9. Most of the people had lived there for generations. Some were servants to the soil, some to the River, and some to the W.W.W. All made their daily bread in mysterious ways. And nobody ever asked what their “way” was.

The nearest town was twelve miles away and had everything a person would want. Spackle and Fizzy made sure the people in town knew who they were pretending to be — an older man and his daughter, who dressed a little spacy. Delta people who made their money in an irregular situation like everybody else. The people around them were on their side, but the less people knew them, the more valuable they were to the war effort. Plus, loose lips and agents from the other side might find out where they lived and kill them.

Security was in every inch of the property covered by cameras and macrocosmic footstep technology. Mines were buried all around. If the house was breached, and weather machine secrets were in jeopardy, the ionic quantum computer in the Quattrocento would blow the house up. The computers and machines were far more valuable than Fizzy and Spackle, two garden-variety weather manipulators who lived and worked on the Great River.   

Fizzy was a five-cups-of-coffee early riser who could work intently till noon before he noticed it was light outside. He was tall, lanky, and slouched over his weather machine. He wore blue reader glasses. Fizzy was the oldest person in The Republic’s weather war department. He still had his hair, teeth, brains, and imagination.

Spackle was mocha-colored with long legs and black wavy hair that always looked coiffured. She was a night person, who got out of bed at noon. Her nickname in the department was Vampire Girl, and not because she worked late at night.

When Spackle entered the control room before noon, Fizzy did a double take. Spackle noticed. “Don’t say it, too early for me. I’m here for your, I hope, glorious day.”

“Our glorious day, Spackle,” he nervously laughed.

She sat with her legs curled up in a swivel chair, hands around a teacup with a dangling string. Finally, Spackle’s brain cells started firing. “I left those numbers and equations like you wanted. Are you ever going to get that Hell Hail program working? HQ wants to cancel it if there is no bang soon, know what I mean?”

Fizzy glanced over, “The departments will be wetting their pants, cause it’s done.

Spackle’s body did not move as her brain waited for more caffeine. “All done, as in you are ready to take it into battle?”

He looked over at Spackle with a sly smile. “Yeah.”

“Yeah, as in, you tested it?”

“Yeah, as in yeah. Last night. Me and the super number cruncher on our side. The infinite of all things ionic quantum computer in the Quattrocento.”

“Tested it? How? Where?”

“The usual. I made a model of the classic mix of the jet stream, polar vortex, water from Ontario, thank you, La Provence, lifted it over the Berkshires, and then split the Commonwealth in two, straight toward you know where…where…” He tried to feed her the glory. “...you take over.”

Spackle wasn’t convinced. “Really. That’s a long way through the commonwealth to keep the elements together, straight and steady is hard to do. To create and control an extreme hailstorm that far east would be quite a feat.”

Fizzy straightened up in his chair. “Pass the corn pone, Bubba. We’re going to set the world on fire!” He chuckled.  “I’m going to take my traditional hot shower before working. You can look the numbers over while I’m gone. When I return all fresh and smelling grand, we can take to the sky like witches!” Fizzy stood and leaned way forward so he could start walking. He used gravity for inertia from a standing start. His legs needed the help/ “As we said years ago in the weather service, “I’ll be back in a flash with thunder, lightning, and mortality.”

When Fizzy returned from his hot shower he had a cold beer in one hand. His stringy brown hair was combed back on his head like thinning wet waves in a storm. His face was shiny and glowed. He wore beltless, loose jeans, was barefoot, and had on a blue cotton shirt rolled up at the sleeves. He flowed into his chair like quicksilver. “What’a you think, Spackle?”

“I looked at the numbers. Yeah, they work. If the other side sees this front coming, they’ll counter with latitude wind shear.”  Spackle stood up and walked to her workstation computer screen. “Time to go to war, Fizzy.”

People who worked in Climate Control and Disposition all had their quirks. Spackle’s was marijuana. Coworkers joked she must have had a hippie in her family hundreds of years ago. She still smoked the flower and rolled two papers together to make one mothership-sized joint. She grew her own; it had been legal for hundreds of years. Her favorite was Sugar Amnesia Gorilla.

Spackle switched off the rear security system and stepped out through the swinging metal door onto a concrete deck with a rusted awning. There were two wicker chairs with small pillows. The table was round, wood, and bulletproof thick. From the rear deck, light reflected off the dark water of the Great River and beyond that distant specks of glare in dark hills.

She fired up the joint and took long, deep drags, waiting for the brain explosion. When the neurons, stimulated by the high THC, released Mad Hatter dopamine stronger than a bad girl’s dream, her powers of concentration and calculation, while stoned, were a Zen archer. One with the target. She could fail, but always redeemed herself with the next, brilliant move. She sucked in more smoke and held her breath, then slowly exhaled her consciousness, focusing on the task at hand. Her mind soared with purple haze Aufklärung.

Holding the joint in her lips, she turned on the security system to the rear deck and went back inside her bunker house. She was toasted walking down the dark hallway to the control room. She sat at her machine and called up the satellites. There was a good reception today. She took another hit on the spaceship and let the blue smoke slowly seep out her nose. Spackle squinted in the smoke and smiled. She laid the joint in a small, baseball glove-shaped ashtray.

Fizzy went back to his screen, hunched over, peering over his glasses, squinting, sallow-skinned. His eyes bounced back and forth between the keyboard and the video screen. He pecked at it with two fingers. “The first order for you, our mistress of mayhem, is to call over some heavy fog from Lake Ontario. You have the element of surprise this morning.”

Spackle blew smoke forcefully out her mouth. “For I shall call forth the devil spirits from the deep and let fly hideous zephyrs. May the weather gods have mercy...mercy...mercy on your soul.”  She took another hit on her joint and held her breath. She laughed and smoke shot out her mouth and nose. Her brain roared. “Excuse me if I kiss the sky.”

Weather Report: Cold morning. Slow-moving dispersed fog. Peek-a-boo blue skies.

The State’s Oswego Outpost #37 Weather Station

19:20 Zulu time

Agent Brad in Oswego.

On the shore of Lake Ontario, in a small house, behind the Walmart Supercenter parking lot in Oswego, New York, Brad sat with his machine. The machine was square, light, and had a handle so he could easily move it around. It only had two buttons to make it work.

Brad was fair-skinned with pattern-balding and thin lips. His machine detected magnetic cloud impulses and false clairvoyant breezes. Brad liked to say with a blank stare, that the machine measured “the weather.” He only had to watch in the morning. The machine produced climate numbers to be typed into small boxes on a little screen. The entire architecture of the system was the input of numbers. Brad always did the numbers straightaway, before the deadline. He was like that.

For some reason, Brad couldn’t sleep that night and got up early in the dark morning, before the birds, to make coffee and sit with the machine on the back porch, legs crossed, and stare out over Lake Ontario. There was a square card table, made with thin tree saplings from Peru, and on the table a pair of official black binoculars he never used.

The machine was silent. Any action, if there was any, was when the sun heated the winds off the lake - less dense material rose, colder, denser material sank under the influence of gravity, thus the transfer of heat and energy, the ingredients of war now.

The small, wavy winds of fog rolled by and Brad knew he could enjoy his coffee,  no need to look at the machine. The machine loudly buzzed when number values reasoned something was suspicious.

Brad was the first line of defense. He monitored values every day. When his day was over, he returned to his watercolors. He painted every place he worked. Upon retirement, he hoped to publish his works in a coffee-table book titled “Water Colors and Espionage.”

When the machine buzzed, Brad thought it was a low battery problem. Then, he glanced down at the readout display and the numbers looked crazy broken. Something inside the machine was whacko shitty. He looked up at the sky with waves of cold air, the ice crystals bent the light in such a way that… a professional like Brad knew what it was. The Republic could suck cold air off the lake and funnel it inland, link latent warm moisture from the Tropics, move the water and air mass into the high atmosphere and produce death below with all kinds of hell. He rushed to his phone inside and fumbled to find the contact number in Mohawk Valley. With a shaky finger, he stabbed at the keypad.

He peered out toward the lake from his living room and the cold, heavy fog blasted through his open door and knocked paintings from the walls. Brad fell onto the couch in the fetal position. Now he knew how a package of peas felt when quickly frozen. The fog engulfed the room, and he was cold and blinded. He tightly held the phone to his ear and yelled at the woman’s voice, “Hello.” “This is Brad in Oswego!  Massive moisture movements! An ocean coming your way. The big one!”

Weather Report: Pleasant late morning. Slight breezes. Temperature rapidly rising.

Weather Outpost #47 Mohawk Valley,

19:52 Zulu time

Undercover Technician Esen Senate

Esen Senate was an agent stationed in Mohawk Valley. She stood with the phone to her ear, trying to figure out what Brad in Oswego meant.

Now she remembered him. He had done that once before. There was fog, clouds, rain, and wind alright, but not the big one. Esen found her weather machine and turned it on. Nothing. It was way too early for any movement of lake breezes. She was 100 miles from Oswego. Maybe Brad was too jacked up on coffee. Maybe living in Oswego got to him.

She quickly called Monty Marlow, the Playboy of Albany ‒ his moniker in the departments. He banged more women than any ten guys. One reason he was assigned to Albany by Headquarters was that nobody had sex there.

Weather Report: Same old, same old, gray-blue sky day.

19:59 Zulu time

Bureau Chief: Monty Marlow

Monty was the weather bureau chief in Albany. The Republic never bothered Albany or tried to disturb it. Keeping Albany the way it was, was to their benefit. 

Monty Marlow was a loveable, charming goofball, and the main reason women slept with him was because he was a loveable, charming goofball. Besides stuffing cuties at symposiums, he had the reputation as a work-shy kind of guy, somebody who got the assignment done with the help of others. He did share the credit, especially with young women, but that was only a pretext to flatter them into sex.

When Monty got the call, he was in bed, alone.

Monty put on his reading glasses to see what button to push to answer his phone. He knew—at this hour—it was not a routine call. Maybe a test from Headquarters. A new directive. That would be the day. He was their forgotten man in Albany.

“Hello. Monty Marlow.”

“This is Esen Senate in the Mohawk Valley weather station.”

“There is a problem with some of the equipment?”

“No. I don’t have my machine on, and I am…”

“Your machine broke!” Monty was standing in his shorts.

“No, the machine is fine.”

“How do you know, you don’t have it on?”

“No, no. Not equipment problems. Something from one of the monitor agents in Oswego.”

“We have one in Oswego?”

“Yeah, right behind the Walmart on the shores of Lake Ontario.”

“He has a broken machine?”

“No. No broken machines.” She paused for dramatic effect and used his first name. She talked in a calm, strong voice that a male would respond to...she hoped.  “Monty…  a massive amount of very cold air and moisture came off Lake Ontario and…”

He interrupted her, “Mohawk Valley station, we’re never sure whose side the French Canadians are on.” 

Esen continued unflappably. “If this is an attack, it could...could rampage across the Commonwealth and head for the holy of holies…”

Everybody knew what that was.

Monty tried to sound like a sane weather scientist, “But that is a long way to shuttle the atmosphere in an orderly, or I guess disorderly, way. The enemy can make it rain and start fires and scare people with thunder, but to keep forces and energies together that distance and bring rain, wind, and maybe killer hail, well....” He surprised himself with the answer.  He didn’t want to sound like a weather nerd. Nerds never got laid.

Esen tried to be as dramatic as she could, trying to act the words emotionally and believably, “I saw the fog with my own eyes...Monty. Better give headquarters a poke. All hands on deck. Man your torpedoes.” Esen realized she was drifting off course. “If you do nothing...you don’t want to be...the one...the one that gets the blame for....” With just the right amount of pleading. “Monty, you don’t want to be… that... one.” She knew the lady killer would ignore anything that sounded like work unless he got laid at the end of the assignment. But maybe this time she got through. 

A sober Monty Marlow. “Thanks.”  He hung up. Monty knew he had to make several calls and dozens of follow-ups. He would write a zillion reports, argue over facts, and then write rebuttal position papers. All work with no help. It was horrible.

By the time Monty contacted his superiors, it was too late.

Weather report: Lazy sky summer afternoon. Scattered clouds. Slight breezes.

The Republic’s Delta Outpost Weather Station.

 21:21 Zulu time.                                

Spackle and Fizzy worked feverishly with their computer screens on cloud formations and transfer of energy motion. They could feel how fast the numbers were crunched from the new ionic quantum computer at Quattrocento.

“Notice the quick response on wind speed, Spackle. Thank you ionic quantum. And thank you Spackle for some of that fine fine, super fine, cold air down. From here I will take control. Down the gut of the shires, as they say.”

“I’m going outside for a smoke.”

Old man Fizzy had it going. The dark winds and skies rolled and churned straight down the Berkshires and veered for Amherst College, where 12 freshmen girls, members of a vegan sisterhood, were pulverized by golf ball-size hail while picking kale in a school garden. The kale grew back.

Then, the war rumbled through the Hampshires and the Great Barrington Bagel Company. A family of twelve Ultra-Orthodox Jews, all dressed in gigantic, black beaver hats and coats, visiting from Brooklyn, never made it into their white SUV. The wind blew and the hail killed with the white mana of death. The heavy rain came again, and bodies floated high in the water from the natural water-repellent properties of beaver.

Even when Commonwealth emergency declarations were broadcasted, the heavy rains, swelled tiny streams to giant water snakes that rampaged through Worcester. Mudslides swept cars away on East Sheffield Road. Sirens screeched, and lightning killed two joggers. High water doomed those who never learned to swim as kids in summer camp.

Storms traveled down through the Commonwealth with isolated incidents of weather-related accidents and deaths ‒ a flash fog and a pileup killed six... Rain washed out a road and four were swept away. Death had no favorites, not even the innocent.

Spackle came back from her smoke break with red, intense eyes.

“Perfect timing, Spackle. I need help lifting the moisture and fog for a good one.”

“Got it.” Spackle sat and swiveled her chair around to her keyboard and the bank of small screens.

Fizzy and Spackle moved the whole atmospheric forces high, off the radar, like a roller coaster gathering energy, this time to freeze all the rain, fog, and moisture into hail the size of baseballs and force them down with heavy winds.

Their weather formations disappeared off the satellite screen. Minutes went by, then ten, and when even Fizzy and Spackle didn’t believe anymore in their voodoo, satellite images appeared and spread and grew in evil dilating colors from yellow, to orange, to red, to purple to black. Random small tornados spun out from the rushing front and touchdown with 200-mile-an-hour winds ripping everything to shreds.

“So Fizzy, what’ s your target now?”

“You know I like historical things. Today it is the historic Capt. Peter Rice House at 377 Elm Street in Marlborough. Thirty miles from your target.”

Spackle slurred her words. “Hatz’a paste worm now.”

When the rain and hail hit the Captain Peter Rice's historical house, the windows were shattered and the flower beds pelted to death. No one was there except the maintenance man, old Mr. McMurphy, who hobbled to the rear covered porch with a bloody forehead, but his dogs didn’t. The eight pugs died valiantly on the front lawn without a whimper.

Fizzy sat up in his chair and turned to Spackle. “The controls are yours.”

“Thank you, Fizzy, for sharing the glory.”

“You deserve it for your hard work and dedication. You know the final objective. They will stall your storm front out over the Charles River for a while, but as soon as you pull the winds to the high cold atmosphere to re-energize...well, it's all over.”

Spackle swiveled in her chair and brought her hands on the keyboard, her eyes bouncing around to satellite pictures, monitors, and hail capacity gauges.

“Where are we?” She pushed a button to get the storm’s coordinates. “We are... over Newton…” She suddenly shouted, “Let’s get high!” Spackle banged hard with her fingertips on the keyboard and then sat back quietly. The entire weather front rose with the jet stream high into the atmosphere. “While this front gains altitude to gather more stones, so to speak...I am going to step outside and refuel for a cataclysm.”

Fizzy looked at Spackle and did not say a word. Death was a female spirit and Fizzy honored that.

Spackle unarmed the alarm for the back porch and went out, the sunlight of the river was more gold than yellow. She fired another joint up and sat back in the quiet. She inhaled deeply and held her breath. After several more hits a profound silence and calm came over her. She was in the zone. One final deep suck of her magic weed and she let it out and prepared herself for what was about to happen. She was at peace with the world and all that she did. She was a weather warrior.

Very slowly Spackle stood, rearmed the alarm, and walked back inside the control room. Fizzy said nothing for the fear of looking a warrior in the face.

Spackle solemnly placed her hands on the controls, took a deep breath, and brought the storm down from the super cold high atmosphere.

Fizzy spoke from the intense silence, “They’re playing a doubleheader at Fenway. Too bad it isn’t the Yankees and only the Bluejays.”

Spackle leaned into the video monitor to get a closer look at the satellite pictures of the target. She pressed the three keys simultaneously with one hand. The churning black and evil gray sky swirled up again and then in slow motion at first, cascaded toward the ground. Thunder sounded and lightning flashed. Spackle was the winged Nemesis, the goddess who enacts retribution against those who succumbed to hubris. She was the dark-faced goddess, the daughter of justice.

In left field, the 37-foot-two-inch high terrace on the top of the “Green Monster” wall in Fenway had a commanding view of the playing field. Those fearless people had their backs to the approaching storm and never saw it coming. The rain downpour was biblical and had only one place to go sweeping everyone off the high terrace of the Green Monster. Washed to their death were proud families holding hands… old timers who still kept score on paper and little boys with baseball gloves and missing front teeth. All were flushed over. In minutes bodies floated together like debris below the Green Monster waterfall.

Spackled clicked the keys and twisted the barometer meter dial with minute hands of skill. Her red stony eyes swirled, bounced, darted, and dashed from instrument to instrument.

In Fenway “The Triangle" is a central field region where the walls form a triangle. A magical 420 feet from the home plate. All the people in the third base box seats raced across the field to The Triangle to make their last stand. Men, women, and children cursed the sky, waving their arms and beating their chests like Celt warriors. The hail, the exact size of a major league baseball, raked back and forth across the people until all were down and bleeding. Only the strong ones rose from the dead and raged to the heavens, beseeching it to kill them too. Smaller bodies floated out toward the center field. Spackle’s finger-tapped numbers and parameters to activate a cold haboob. 

The lucky ones made it to Williamsburg, a name invented by sports writers, for the covered bullpen area built in front of the right-center field bleachers. Red-striped debris floated around the pitcher's mound with bodies from the lower decks.

The lone red seat in the right field bleachers (Section 42, row 37, seat 21) was the marker of the longest home run ever hit at Fenway. To die in the bleacher is to go to heaven. Three men and two women died in the bleacher seat when the hailstorm passed through.  One after the other, their dead bodies were pulled from the seat and a new person sat down to be immortalized in a Fenway death.

Spackle yelped and watched a yellow blob on the screen go purple.

Pesky's Pole is the pole on the right field foul line, the shortest field distance (left or right field) in baseball. The old rallied around Pesky’s Pole and wrapped their one arm around it cursing at the sky. A lightning strike cooked 12 on the spot and blinded many more.

Outside of Fenway, around the statue of Ted Williams, the old guard of people who knew people who had ancestors who saw Ted Williams play baseball on a black and white TV stood silently and died to a person in the rain and baseball-sized hailstorm. Ted would have wanted it that way. He hit from the left side.

Spackle twirled a large red dial to max and LED lights pulsated on the screen.

Above Fenway, the heaviest downpour of rain, thunder and hail suddenly crescendoed by the third base dugout. And just as suddenly, it all stopped, and a little sun broke through some faraway gray clouds. There were only the faint sounds of thunder, sirens in the distance, and the muffled cries of the brave dying.

HQ tunnel Complex, Wizard Island, Crater Lake,

22:44  Zulu Time

Director Of Calamities: Sally Sears

Somewhere in a government meeting, dressed in a gray checkered men’s suit, a young woman assistant to the associate of the deputy director excused herself to the members at the large table, and circled to talk with Sally. All at the meeting knew it was death calling. The young woman leaned into Sally's face, her long brown hair falling like a curtain over their mouths, and whispered. “Minutes ago, in Fenway, a big storm came through in the middle of a doubleheader...344 dead in Fenway.”

Sally, expressionless, whispered to the assistant, “Thank you.” Sally knew all eyes were on her. “Ladies and gentlemen, the war goes on. You’ll hear about it soon enough. The good news is, Boston took two from the Bluejays.”

When the meeting was over, Sally dreaded her death march back to the office. She knew what was waiting for her. She would have 20 office phone calls, 40 texts, and five people standing in her office “needing” to see her immediately. The Fenway incident meant endless meetings on security and tactics on how there were no successful counterattacks; and what did we do wrong, then the blame game started, ending in more meetings and a marathon session to hammer out future action directives.

Sally paused in front of her office, took a couple of deep breaths, and went in. To her surprise, no people waited for her. Security always sends down representatives in bad news situations. Was it THAT bad?

A secretary blurted out, “The storm started in Ontario from Oswego.”

Sally with her head down. “I’m sure glad we all know that now.” She pulled up and thought for a moment. Oswego? How far is…?”

The secretary answered before Sally finished her sentence. “342 miles.”

Sally looked over at the secretary.

 Her name was Stilust. She bought three new outfits a week to stay dressed ahead of the other young women in the building. Stilust smiled, “I knew you would ask.”

“342 miles? That is far apart to generate that much water cold, and wind to deliver a hailstorm to Fenway. Are they sure about all this?”

Stilust blinked, “They?”

“I mean, how is it possible?”

“Miss Sears, are you doubting the incident?” She reached for a Doubting Incident paper form.

“No, I am thinking out loud.” She wasn’t. She was thinking of endless conversations on minutiae. “I’ll be in my office.” She staggered a few steps through the door, closed it, and headed for her chair of enchantment. She had vibrating fingers embedded in the back, plus it had soothing heat and smelled of lavender—Her, bring-back-from-the-dead-tired chair. After five minutes of bliss in her chair, she knew it was time to answer questions, refute charges, make pledges, consol, and harangue. There was going to be a memorial at Fenway she would have to attend. Surely, they were to paint some more of the asphalt parking stalls with the names of those killed by the weather at Fenway. The lightning strikes of ‘04 ‘05 and ‘06 totaled 93 dead. The flash floods of ‘32 killed 14 ball boys (no girls) on National Ballperson Day at the park. Vendors were killed every year, and their names were added to the parking lot spaces next to the stadium. There were no parking numbers at Fenway Park, only heroes’ names painted in the space. True fans knew every named parking space. Fenway strong.

Weather report: Scattered clouds and plenty of late afternoon sunshine. Slight breezes.

The Republic’s Delta Outpost Weather Station. 23:45 Zulu time.

Spackle fell back in her chair and let out a long exhale. She knew what she and Fizzy did would light up the stars with Quattrocento and earn them accolades.

Spackle looked over at Fizzy, whose head was down and asleep. Her fingers cramped from the frantic pushing of buttons and tapping of light pulses. She rubbed them. She looked down at her hands. Hands that mixed water and cold air like Mother Nature to kill.

Photo of M. G. McLaughlin

BIO: Michael has a rich background in the arts, having founded, produced, and performed in an improvisational comedy theater for 20 years. He has had short stories published internationally and has written for television, film, and radio. Currently, Michael escaped from the USA to Mexico, where he continues to live and write.