Matt de la Peña - The Living

Soon as the announcement ended, the hysterical voices of passengers were all around Shy and people were crying and anxiously punching numbers into useless cell phones and holding each other and shouting demands at Shy and Kevin, and all Shy could do was stand up and ask everyone to remain calm and line up, like they did when he’d led them through the safety exercise, but how could anyone be calm after what they’d just been told?

Shy imagined his mom.

His sister and Miguel.

His grandma.

But he no longer needed to worry about his grandma, because his grandma was dead.

And would he be dead, too, if he was back home? Had the cruise ship saved his life? Maybe the captain was right to have them sit out here and wait. Maybe there was nowhere else to go.

Shy helped herd all the passengers into theater seats, and then he hurried back to the balcony. Carmen was still there, now huddling against the wall and crying into her hands. He leaned over the railing to call down to her, but just as he opened his mouth, the giant movie screen flickered into a grainy picture above the crowded stage.

Everyone turned to it.

Carmen pulled her hands away from her face, looked up.

A mess of war-zone-like footage came into focus. Shot from a helicopter. It was hard to tell what they were seeing at first, but gradually it became clear.

The words “San Francisco” appeared at the bottom of the screen, but it didn’t look like San Francisco. It looked like a foreign city that had just been bombed. Or CGI in a movie. Leveled buildings reduced to hills of concrete and protruding metal stakes. Thick clouds of dust rose off the wreckage and smoke billowed from fires that burned over the caved-in streets. And everywhere the camera went it showed overturned cars, motionless bodies pinned underneath or hanging out of busted windshields. And in the background the Golden Gate Bridge was no longer a bridge but a mess of hanging cables and two crumbled sections that ran straight down into the bay.

The audio kept cutting in and out, but Shy was able to make out some of the information as they cut to footage of other devastated sections of San Francisco.

It hadn’t been just one earthquake but several, leveling the entire coast of California and Washington and Oregon and Vancouver, and they were already estimating over a million deaths.

There had been four major quakes, the two most devastating centered just outside Palm Springs and along the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the coast of Washington State. The most powerful offshore quake had struck just west of Morro Bay, which Shy knew was in California. What he didn’t know was how far out into the ocean “offshore” was.

Shy was so stunned by what he was seeing and hearing his whole body started shaking.

The picture cut out for several seconds, and when it came back they were showing aerial footage of Riverside, where a huge chasm had opened up along the 91 Freeway, massive fires burning on both sides, but there were no fire trucks on the scene, the red-eyed reporter explained, because all the firehouses within a hundred-mile radius had been taken out by the earthquake. And then a shot of downtown Los Angeles, where only a few buildings still stood and everywhere small fires burned and the Santa Monica Pier had collapsed into the ocean and the famous Ferris wheel had snapped in half and lay crushed on its side, people trapped underneath, and the beach stretched out incredibly far now, the tide so low it didn’t even look real. Shy remembered seeing footage of a beach in Thailand that had looked like that just before it was hit by a tsunami. Did that mean they should expect a tsunami?

Shy’s legs grew so weak he had to squat down and hold on to the railing.

The Hollywood sign had missing letters and those that remained were in flames, and the 405 Freeway was full of gaping holes, people stranded on concrete islands, waving for help from the tops of cars, and hundreds of yachts from the marina were beached and lying useless on their sides.

It was definitely the “Big One.”

What Shy had been hearing about ever since he was a little kid. The crowd inside the theater, realizing the same thing maybe, grew so hysterical it was no longer possible for Shy to make out any of the audio, but he could still see.

The picture cut out for a few seconds, and when it came back it was an aerial shot of a huge black smoke cloud smothering all of Orange County, and in the gaps of the smoke you couldn’t see houses or buildings but flames. A shot labeled “Seattle” showed the Space Needle in pieces in front of leveled downtown buildings, fires raging up and down every street, and the famous marketplace had been ripped from its foundation and heaved into Elliott Bay.

Shy’s throat closed up completely when the Mexican border flashed onto the screen, a stretch just east of the ocean that he didn’t recognize right away because there was no longer a physical border, there was only fire and rubble and a few tiny dots that were people wandering aimlessly, and border patrol trucks abandoned with their doors still open. And then they cut to a part of San Diego just north of Otay Mesa engulfed in flames, Shy’s heart pounding and his body shaking, and then the picture cut out again and this time it didn’t come back.

The entire theater was in a frenzy.

People shouting and crying and holding each other.

Shy glanced down at the stage, searching for Carmen, but she wasn’t there anymore.

He looked all around, finally spotting the back of her head as she hurried toward the theater exit. He motioned to Kevin that he’d be back and then he took off after her.

Shy raced down the stairs and into the hallway, his mind flooded with all the awful things he’d just seen. Fallen buildings and fires and dead bodies. He had no idea how to process any of it.

He stopped in the hall, spun around searching for Carmen. It was all that seemed to matter now. Just find Carmen. Make sure she’s okay.

He shouted her name.

Nothing in return but the sound of the storm and the movement of the ship.

Then he spotted the glass doors sliding closed on the other end of the hall. Doors that were supposed to be locked because of the storm. And only crew members knew the code that opened them.

He took off in that direction, punched in the code and hurried through the doors himself, back out into the storm.

“Carmen!” he shouted over crackling thunder.

The rain was lighter now, but the wind was the strongest it had been all night. He had to lean into it to get all the way out onto the deck. He moved cautiously around the covered pool and Jacuzzi, eyes darting every which way, the destruction he’d just seen still stuck in his brain. And Otay Mesa. His family.

He climbed up onto the stage, moved through the empty outdoor café, searched behind every bar and busser station, every doorway, sprinted up and down every stairwell.

But there was no sign of Carmen anywhere.

He needed to get back to his group of passengers in the theater. It wasn’t right to leave Kevin in charge of everyone.

An awful thought crept into Shy’s head, and he hurried to the ship railing and peered over at the ocean below. It was even rougher now. Choppy whitecaps and aimless head-high swells that crashed into the side of the ship from every angle. Streaks of lightning flashing from above.

Carmen wouldn’t jump, though, he promised himself. Even if she knew her entire family was gone. She wouldn’t do that.

As Shy pushed away from the railing, a different voice came over the PA system:

“ Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I need every passenger and crew member to remain in their muster station, sitting down, with their life jacket securely fastened. We will be encountering extremely rough seas ahead. I repeat, this is your captain speaking. All passengers and crew members must be seated with their life jackets securely fastened. We are working to regain satellite contact and get more information, but our immediate concern is for your safety.”