Gregg Hurwitz - Minutes to Burn

The bulldog's barks continued, adding to the pounding in Savage's head.

"Shut the fuck up!" he yelled, his voice still glazed with sleep.

A truck rumbled by down on the street. The dog let loose with a fresh flurry of barks. With a grunt, Savage swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. The room swam around him, but he fought it back into focus. It felt as though the bulldog were inside his head, each bark echoing against the walls of his skull.

Savage rose and stumbled to the window. He tried to slide it open, but it wouldn't budge. Outside, the wind sucked at the pane. The street and buildings were drab gray, as if bled dry. To the sides of the road rose drifts of snow sheathed in ice, spotted with mud and brown splashes of road water. The joys of Billings, Montana, in the winter.

Standing guard on a porch three houses up the block, the bulldog stared at Savage, tongue lolling. Savage eyed the dog angrily. "That's right. Just shut up. Lemme go back to sleep."

The dog bolted forward, straining against its metal chain and howling.

"Goddamnit!" Savage yelled. He banged the sash, but that only caused the dog to bark even louder. "YOU GET THAT DOG TO SHUT THE FUCK

UP!"

A beefy man strode through the front door of the house, stopping just behind the frenzied bulldog. "What's your problem, pal?"

Savage yanked the window, but it slid up only a few inches. He leaned over so he could shout through the small gap. "That fuckin' dog has woken me up every morning this week! You'd better-" He threw his weight against the window, but it refused to budge any further.

The beefy man threw his arms up in the air. "It's eleven-thirty!" he shouted.

Savage leaned over and dug through the pile of clothes beside his bed until he unearthed his alarm clock. It read 11:17 A.M. He threw the clock against the wall and returned to the window. The dog was practically bouncing up and down at the guy's feet.

"I don't give a shit what time it is!" Savage yelled. "Get your dog a muzzle or I'll shoot the thing!"

The beefy man held out his arm and slowly extended his middle finger, then turned and headed back inside his house. Angrily, Savage returned to bed, pulling the pillow back over his head. A wave of nausea swept his stomach, and he realized he desperately had to piss. The bull-dog's barks were even louder now that the window was edged open. They penetrated the pillow, his head. He tried pressing his hands over his ears, tried humming loudly, tried tying an old sweatshirt around his head.

Finally, he snapped upright again, hurling the pillow at the wall. He crossed the room quickly, throwing open the doors of his gun cabinet and removing an air rifle. The ammo drawers were stuffed with different rounds. He started digging. A bunch of. 22s clattered to the floor like brass rainfall. Buried beneath a stack of Sig Sauer cartridges was a box of tranquilizer darts, left over from an elaborate prank he had pulled during downtime on a tour of duty.

He slid a dart in the chamber, stormed to the window, and smashed the left lower pane with the end of the air rifle. He took careful aim. The bulldog snarled and growled, bounced and barked. Savage sank the dart into its neck and waited. The bulldog swayed on its feet, then collapsed flat on its stomach, the bloom of the dart waggling in the breeze.

A moment later, the beefy guy came out to investigate. He crouched, leaning over the fallen dog. Savage couldn't resist a smirk.

When the guy rose to his feet, his eyes were lit with rage. "You motherfucker!" he screamed. "I'll rip your fuckin' eyes out, you stupid-"

With a grimace, Savage slid a second dart into the chamber. He snapped the rifle up against his shoulder, eyed the sites, and fired. Beefy guy looked down at the dart in his thigh with shock. He stepped forward once, paused, and stepped forward once more. He fell to his knees, then slumped over next to his dog.

Savage returned the gun to the cabinet, relishing the silence of his apartment. After a satisfying piss, he stuffed a sweatshirt in the broken pane, filled a coffeepot with water and drank from it, then fell back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He closed his eyes. The peace was divine.

He was just drifting off when he heard the sirens.

22 Dec 07

Rex Williams banged through the screen door into his front yard with his white pajama pants aflutter, a mobile satellite phone pressed to one ear, and a nine-foot rainbow boa constrictor wrapped around his left leg. "Do you really think we need that many people?" he barked into the phone. "Three, four, maybe, but I mean, seven soldiers! What am I, Salman Rushdie?"

His lank, jet-black hair hung medium-length, darting down to the back of his shirt collar, and swept hastily to one side in the front. His eyes were almost hypnotically intense, a dark brown that looked black in dim lighting. As usual, he was unshaven, an even sprawl of stubble covering his cheeks and his too-strong chin.

Donald Denton chuckled on the other end of the phone. "They only travel in groups. I guess it's a half platoon, the smallest unit they use for international outings. I still can't believe we're getting you down there at all."

Rex was the preeminent complex plate margin ecotectonicist specializing in South American sites. The New Center for Ecotectonic Studies, of which Rex and Donald were Co-Chiefs of Research, focused on the interaction of tectonic movements and ecology, examining how earthquakes impacted flora and fauna. It had been established to contend with environmental fallout from the Initial Event, a massive earthquake that had occurred on March 3, 2002. Registering 9.2 on the moment magnitude scale, the quake had ruptured the tectonic plates near the Ecuadorian coast along a 307-kilometer length. The resultant high rates of plate motion, unprecedented since the Precambrian era more than six hundred million years ago, accounted for massive and recurrent after-shocks.

For the last five years, the region had been plagued with earthquakes in excess of the usual frequency and intensity, perturbing other stress fields and causing rumblings for thousands of miles in every direction. In Ecuador, an earthquake registering approximately six on the moment WW magnitude scale occurred on average once a week, with M=3 or M=4 events registering almost daily. This scale, which measures both the energy release and amplitude of earthquakes, replaced the Richter in the early 1990s.

The fourteen large islands, six small islands, and forty-some islets that compose the Galapagos Archipelago-Rex's principal area of expertise-could not have been more precariously located given the increase in seismic activity. Nine hundred and sixty kilometers off the coast of Ecuador, the Galapagos sit dangerously close to the triple junction of three tectonic plates. Perched high on the north edge of the Nazca plate a mere one hundred kilometers beneath its junction with the Cocos plate, the islands had been regularly rattled by the earthquakes that accompanied the upwelling magma from the rift. The sea floor continued to spread along this seam, the Galapagos Fracture Zone, driving the Nazca plate southward. To further complicate the tectonic regime, a north-south running chain of undersea mountains, the East Pacific Rise, spread the ocean floor in similar fashion one thousand kilometers west of the Galapagos, pushing the Nazca and Pacific plates apart and shoving the Nazca plate east beneath the South American continent. There had been six centimeters of eastward displacement in November alone.

Rex and Donald's colleague, Dr. Frank Friedman, had gone to Sangre de Dios, the westernmost island of the Galapagos, at the end of October, prompted by troubling reports of increased microseismicity from the island.