Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Of massy iron or solid rock with ease

Unfastens: on a sudden open fly,

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,

Th’ infernal doors, and on their hinges grate

Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook

Of Erebus.

Mexico City September 19, 1985

The bed shakes.

The shaking merges into her dream, then her waking thoughts: The bed is shaking.

Nora sits up in bed and looks at the clock but has a hard time focusing on the digital numbers because they seem to be vibrating, almost liquefying, in front of her eyes. She reaches over to steady the clock-it’s 8:18 in the morning. Then she realizes that it’s the side table that’s shaking, that everything is-the table, the lamps, the chair, the bed.

She’s in a room on the seventh floor of theRegisHotel, the gracious old landmark on Avenida Juarez near La Alameda Park in the heart of the city. The guest of a cabinet minister, she was brought down to help him celebrate Independence Day, and she’s still here three days later. The minister goes home to his wife in the evenings. In the afternoons he comes to the Regis to celebrate his independence.

Nora thinks she might still be asleep, still dreaming, because now the walls are pulsing.

Am I sick? she wonders. She does feels dizzy, nauseated, all the more so when she gets out of bed and can’t walk or even stand, as the floor seems to be rolling beneath her.

She looks over to the large wall mirror across from the bed, but her face doesn’t look pale. It’s just that her head keeps moving around in the mirror, and then the mirror bows and shatters.

She throws her arm up in front of her eyes and feels little shards of glass hit her. Then she hears the sound of a hard rain, but it isn’t rain-it’s debris falling from the higher floors. Then the floor seems to slide like one of those metal plates in a funhouse, but this isn’t fun-it’s terrifying.

She’d be more terrified if she could see outside the building. See it literally waving, see the top of the hotel bend and sway and actually smack the top of the building next door. She hears it, though. Hears the wicked, dull crack, then the wall behind the bed falls in and she opens the door and runs into the hallway.

Outside, Mexico City is shaking to death.

The city is built on an old lake bed, soft soil, which in turns sits on the large Cocos Tectonic Plate, which is constantly shifting under the Mexican landmass. The city and its soft, loose foundation sit just two hundred miles from the edge of the plate, and one of the world’s largest faults, the giant Middle American Trench, which runs under the Pacific Ocean from the Mexican resort town ofPuerto Vallarta all the way toPanama.

For years there have been small quakes along the northern and southern edges of this plate, but not near the center, not nearMexico City, which the scientists refer to as a “seismic gap.” The geologists compare it to a string of firecrackers that have exploded along both ends but not in the center. They say that sooner or later, the center has to catch fire and explode.

The trouble starts about thirty kilometers beneath the earth’s surface. For countless eons the Cocos Plate has been trying to sink, to slide under the plate to the east of it, and on this morning it succeeds. Forty miles off the coast, 240 miles west ofMexico City, the earth cracks, sending a giant quake through the lithosphere.

If the city had been closer to this epicenter, it might have held up better. The high-rise buildings might have survived the high-frequency, rapid jolting that happens near the actual quake. The buildings might have jumped and landed and cracked, but held up.

But as the quake moves from the center its energy dissipates, which, counterintuitively, makes it more dangerous because of that soft soil. The quake fades into long, slow rolling motions-a set of giant waves, if you will, that get under that soft lake bed, that bowl of Jell-O the city is built on-and that Jell-O just rolls, rolling the buildings with it, shaking the buildings not so much vertically as horizontally, and that’s the problem.

Each floor of the high-rises moves farther sideways than the floor below. The now top-heavy buildings literally slide out into the air, knock heads and slide back again. For two long minutes the tops of these buildings slide sideways, back and forth in the air, and then they just break.

Concrete blocks fall off and tumble down onto the street. Windows burst; huge, jagged pieces of glass fly into the air like missiles. Interior walls collapse, support beams with them. Rooftop swimming pools crack, sending tons of water to collapse the roofs beneath them.

Some buildings just snap off at the fourth or fifth floors, sending two, three, eight, twelve stories of stone, concrete and steel slamming into the street below, thousands of people falling with them, buried under them.

Building after building-250 of them in four minutes-collapses in the quake. The government literally falls-the Secretariat of the Navy, the Secretariat of Commerce and the Secretariat of Communications all topple. The city’s tourist center reads like a roll of casualties, name after name-the Hotel Monte Carlo, the Hotel Romano, the Hotel Versailles, the Roma, theBristol, the Ejecutivo, the Palacio, the Reforma, the Inter-Continental and the Regis all go down. The top half of the Hotel Caribe snaps off like a stick, dumping mattresses, luggage, curtains and guests through the crack and onto the street. Whole neighborhoods virtually disappear-Colonia Roma, Colonia Doctores, Unidad Aragon and the Tlatelolco Housing Project, where a twenty-story apartment tower collapses on its occupants. In a particularly cruel twist, the quake destroys the General Hospital of Mexico and theJuarezHospital, killing and trapping patients and desperately needed doctors and nurses.

Nora doesn’t know any of this. She runs into the hallway, where room doors that have fallen in look like cards in a sophisticated house of cards that has started to collapse. A woman runs ahead of her and presses for the elevator.

“No!” Nora yells.

The woman turns and looks at her, wide-eyed with fear.

“Don’t take the elevator,” Nora says. “Take the stairs.”

The woman stares at her.

Nora tries to remember the words in Spanish, but can’t.

Then the elevator doors slide open and water pours out, like a scene from a bad, grotesque horror film. The woman turns around, looks at Nora, laughs and says, “Agua.”

“Vamos,” Nora says. “Vamonos, whatever. Let’s go. Come on.”

She grabs the woman by the hand to try to pull her down the hall but the woman won’t budge. She yanks her hand back and starts to press the elevator’s Down button again and again.

Nora leaves her and finds the exit door to the stairwell. The floor ripples and rolls under her feet. She gets into the stairway and it’s like being in a long, swaying box. The force knocks her from side to side as she runs down the stairs. There are people in front of her now, and behind; the stairwell is getting crowded. Sounds, horrible sounds, echo in the confined space: cracking, breaking, the noises of a building tearing itself apart-and screams-women’s screams and, worse, the shrill keening of children. She grabs on to the handrail to steady herself, but it’s moving, too.

One floor, two, she tries to count by the landings, then gives up. Is it three floors, four, five? She knows she has to go seven. Idiotically, she can’t remember how they number their floors inMexico . Do they start on ground and go first, second? Or is the ground floor the first, then second, third, fourth…?

What does it matter? Just keep moving, she tells herself, then an awful lurch, like a ship rolling, slams her into the left wall. She keeps her balance, gets her feet under her again. Just keep moving, just keep moving, get out of this building before it comes down on top of you. Just keep going down these stairs.