The Big One Hits California

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I am living in SF with my wife, Angela, attending SF State’s MFA program,  when a massive Category 11 super quake, the dreaded Big One,  destroys the city and most of California.  Including causing the Central Valley to be flooded as the land sank creating a huge inland sea stretching down the entire Central Valley.  Most of the Bay Area is flooded leaving the hills as islands in the new sea.  A monster 500-foot-tall tsunami sweeps through the Bay Area destroying all the bridges, freeways, and BART Tunnel.

Within hours there is complete and utter chaos.  Nothing works, all communication and power are out and all transportation is down.  Without power, the cities run out of food, fuel, and resources within days.  The Federal response is incompetent. 

Within a month millions of people had died.  I told Angela as soon as I saw the extent of the damage that we had to flee the city.  We got in our car and we drove as far as we could get.  We ended up holed up in Sebastopol with my brother Roger and his family.  It took us a day to get there as there were numerous impromptu roadblocks by various self-appointed civil defense forces.

 Fortunately, Angela and my Military and Defense IDs were good enough to get us through. We eventually joined up near Sebastopol with a group of families fleeing the city and exchanging stories.  The wildest one was that the private zoos and public zoos had all failed to prevent the real dangerous animals from escaping and that lions and tigers were hunting down survivors.   And those mountain lions were roaming the streets as well as hunting people.

We had run out of gas near Roger’s house and joined the group.   As we started walking towards Roger’s house, we saw in the distance a lion eating a dead person.  He looked at us and went back to eating.  I got a piece of wood and using some of the left-over booze made a torch and we walked with our flaming torch until we finally reached Roger’s house at about 7 pm.  His house had sustained some damage but was okay so he took us in.  My brother and his wife had not been heard from.  

The radio news was very disturbing.  Chaos everywhere. The bridges had all collapsed shortly after we had left in a second aftershock and SF was on fire as were most cities.  Sebastopol was burning as we left it.   Rumors of wildlife attacking refugees were common.  I told Roger we had seen a lion nearby. 

Roger thought that we could stay at his place as he had lots of food and water.  There was a well on the property and his generator would work for a few more days.  The internet was working, surprisingly.  I got online and sent an e-mail letting people know we had survived and we sent an e-mail to Tom and Inga.  Phones were down as were conventional TV and Radio.

One of the snippets we saw on the internet was that Congress had voted to suspend the constitution and appoint a military commission to rule in its place.  Biden had fled the country as mobs were descending on the WH demanding that something be done.  The collapse of California had shocked the world.  The inability of the USG to do anything to help also shocked the world.  

US Troops were being rounded up to go to California. Conservatives were demanding that California be left to die as they saw it as God’s will.  Liberals were demanding that the government bring the troops home to deploy to California. Reports from California continue to get grimmer and grimmer.

The collapse of California had a ripple effect as the US split into four new republics and the rest of the world did nothing to help the US other than demand repayment of debt.   The world economy had essentially collapsed with the collapse of the 5th largest economy in the world.   The US, now split into four new republics, two of them government by militant fundamentalists, threatened to launch a nuclear war if any other country sent in troops.