Crawford Kilian: Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

“He was right! By God, he was right,” Don whispered.

“ Say again ?” asked Owen.

“My brother Steve is down there, at a research station on the Ross Ice Shelf. He’s been predicting a big quake in the Antarctic.”

“ Well .” Owen paused. ‘ I hope he’s all right . Listen , Don , We’ve got a fix on you and we’ll be picking you up in about two hours — maybe less if thisdamnstormletsup . We’regoingstraighthome .”

“What for?”

“ From what we heard on the radio , San Francisco’s been hit by several tsunamis . Really hit .”

Suddenly, Don felt trapped. Kirstie, he remembered, wasn’t in Berkeley today: she was at a climatology conference — in San Francisco.

The morning session of the conference ended at last. Kirstie Kennard was eager to get out, away from San Francisco University and back to the relative sanity of Berkeley. For the past three-and-a-half hours, she had listened to grown men and women, with advanced degrees, debate whether losing fifty per cent of the ozone layer in six months should be described as “temporary” or “transient” or “short-term.”

Kirstie had kept very quiet except to deal with technical issues. The report which the conference was about to issue was more political than scientific, intended to calm the public yet alarm the government… Kirstie suspected the effects would be just the opposite.

She paused in the lobby of the auditorium to smear a little sunblock cream across her face, pull on her raincoat and gloves, and adjust her sunglasses. Even with the rain pelting down like this, enough UV got through the overcast to start a nasty burn in five or six minutes.

This afternoon’s meeting, she thought as she pushed out the door, would be depressing but funnier: helping Sam Steinberg plan strategy to fight the nonrenewal of his contract. More politics. He was in physics, she just a visiting professor of climatology. But she’d been shoved into helping him. The rest of his colleagues didn’t want to go near Sam, but Kirstie, with just a few more months left in her appointment at Berkeley, could risk contamination.

The poor bugger didn’t stand a chance, of course, not in the present political climate. Sam was a throwback to the 1960s, from his long hair to his romantic leftism. The fact that he was an absolutely brilliant scientist only demonstrated to others than no one was safe from what was called a “shakeout.”

Except for security officers in ponchos, crash helmets and goggles, the campus was almost deserted under the cold February rain. It reminded her of real Vancouver weather, while Vancouver itself was enjoying its sunniest winter in years. The rain made her homesick — not for Scotland, but for Vancouver, Don’s home town. Apart from a couple of brief jobs and one unhappy family reunion, they hadn’t been there in seven or eight years. In retrospect, though, it seemed like a lost paradise where no one ever heard of shakeouts, and climatologists didn’t worry about the political aspect of their work. Perhaps she might even persuade Don to move back there for a year or so. Good God, his grandfather Geordie must be nearly a hundred years old by now; he couldn’t be such a dragon any more. Even if he were, he couldn’t last much longer. And Don’s mother Elizabeth was a dear woman who deserved better treatment from all her men.

Poor Don, she thought. He really had his knickers in a twist about his family. The Kennards had been in British Columbia since the gold rush of 1858; one of Don’s great-great-grandfathers had founded a logging dynasty that was still powerful politically and economically. David Kennard, Don’s father, might have become provincial premier if he hadn’t died of a heart attack. Don and his brother Steve had been in high school then; they’d gone to university, graduate school and careers in science, abandoning the family business and what was left of the family.

She half-envied Don; her own parents had died when she was young, and she’d grown up like a gypsy among various distant cousins. It would have been marvellous having bloody great battles with parents, instead of the absent-minded affection of cousins. Yet she’d grown accustomed to the pleasures of independence. Don had married her on the understanding — even stronger on her side than on his — that they would have no children, set no suburban roots. They had lived and worked all over the world, enjoying each other without hindering each other. Sometimes Don’s quietness and stubbornness drove her mad, but she knew they were only aspects of the strength she had relied on from the start. And he still had a talent for surprising and delighting her.

She reached the parking garage, which looked bleak with its surrounding flowerbeds full of dead plants, and ran up three flights of stairs without even breathing hard. Jogging in the Berkeley hills had its hazards — she had to run at night, of course, to avoid the UV, and some of the neighbours’ dogs were really vicious — but at least she’d stayed in shape. Not many people realized she was all of thirty-four.

Before getting into the old orange Volvo station wagon, Kirstie checked the new lock on the gas cap. No one had tampered with it. A week before, with three days to go before her next gas coupon could be used, she’d found the tank siphoned dry.

Gas rationing had at least reduced traffic problems; she was on the freeway, bound for the Oakland Bay Bridge, within minutes. The rain and UV had kept most hitchhikers off the streets as well. Sometimes they threw rocks or bottles at cars that didn’t stop for them; often, they robbed the drivers who did.

She saw she’d missed the top of the noon news, but switched the radio on anyway. The announcer’s voice was so excited that she glanced at the dial, thinking it had been turned to one of the rock stations. It hadn’t.

“— warning was delayed by poor radio conditions and disruptions in ocean cable systems that may have been caused by the tsunamis themselves . The tidalwavesareexpectedtoreachtheSanFranciscoareabytwelve - thirtythisafternoonandtheymaygoonforseveralhours . Personslivinginlow - lyingareasalongthecoastareadvisedtobereadytomovetohighergroundifnecessary . Thewavesarenot , repeatnot , expectedtoaffectcommunitiesinsideSanFranciscoBay . Backwithmoretidal - wavestoriesafterthese —”

Kirstie spun the dial: country & western, rock, rock, a rabid right-wing commentator. Static buzzed behind everything.

Her first thought was about Don: but he should be safely at sea, where tsunamis were unnoticeable. Then she decided to keep going, to cross the Bay Bridge and get home to Berkeley. She glanced at the dashboard clock: twelve minutes after noon. She would be on the bridge in five minutes or less, across it in ten more. The announcer had said the waves wouldn’t cause problems within the bay, but she had heard too many stories from Don and his colleagues about what could happen when a seiche got going in an enclosed body of water. As long as she was across the bay and well away from the water —