Rolling Thunder Read Online Free PDF Page B

it stretched from eastern Montana to the parts of Florida outside the Red Zone, and north to the Truce Line that bisected the former states of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.
    Over the northern horizon would be East America, hugging the Great Lakes, from Minnesota to New York, reaching up to Maine and south to Maryland.
    North America had been chaotic for years, and was only now mostly settled down. There had been mass migrations of whole classes of people who no longer felt welcome in their home regions, and some who were actually in grave danger. The worst was in Idaho, where thousands of people had vanished in a few bloody White Purity weeks. Elsewhere, Blues had moved to the coasts, Reds had moved to the middle, and everybody who could sneak out before the DMZ was established had fled from the Red Zone, which extended from Florida to Chesapeake Bay.
    Washington was inhabited again, and north of that things were as close to back to normal as they would ever be. But to the south, up to fifty miles from the ocean that had turned from friend to mass killer in only a few hours, there was very little civilization.
    Now the land was going, too. If you knew just what you were looking for, you could see it with the naked eye, in the former barrier islands now awash in seawater after half a century of global warming. Florida was a lot skinnier than it had been. The Gulf Coast towns had been crawling inland and northward for decades now as block after block, street after street, the waters advanced, and people built anew on what had been the edges of the city. New Orleans was gone.
    In the Pacific, El Nino, the little boy, had become a teenager with a severe attitude problem. Melted Antarctic ice had resulted in local cooling and sinking of waters that meant the seasonal streams seldom reached where they used to. Fisheries had died out or moved, devastating the economies of western South America. Air temperatures and wind patterns had changed, resulting in an average yearly increase of up to fifteen degrees, regionally, as far north as Oregon. Pismo Beach, that furnace I’d recently escaped, used to be pleasant, or so I’m told. Now it sweltered in the summer, with even worse temperatures inland.
    The parts of the Amazon rain forest that had not already been cut down withered and died when the rains didn’t come.
    Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes now hit the Atlantic and Gulf coasts at the rate of four or five a year. Pacific typhoons were even worse, and there were a lot more of them. Japan was hit by climatic Godzillas several times a year.
    Sea level had increased twenty feet since my grandparents’ day. Twenty feet wasn’t much in Pismo Beach, where the land rises rapidly from the sea. But in the Ganges delta, along the Mississippi and the Amazon, and in countless floodplains around the world, the teeming populations had been relocated at great expense, and over a billion people lived in temporary camps now twenty years old and more. Much of Earth’s most fertile land was now under salt water.
    Then there was the tundra. Melting ice was one thing; it raised sea levels and disrupted ocean currents and weather patterns. But in Siberia and Alaska and Canada there had been millions of square miles of tundra, frozen ground. It was frozen no longer. Most of it was melted now, which sounds like a good idea, except all that tundra held billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane.
    Populations, human and animal, had shifted north and south to cooler climes. Thousands of species had gone extinct in the last decades, and many of the larger African mammals now survived only in big reserves in North America and Asia.
    Poor old Planet Earth.
    On the other hand, it’s an ill wind indeed that blows no good. The Amazon and Indonesian and Southeast Asian rain forests are pretty much gone, but parts of the Sahara and the Australian outback are now getting forty or fifty inches of rain every year. Ultraviolet-resistant crops thrive where there