Crawford Kilian: Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

The traffic thickened and slowed as she reached the bridge. Six lanes of trucks and cars and motorcycles were moving at walking speed. Jockeying from lane to lane, she managed to move relatively quickly. But as she neared Yerba Buena Island, where the western half of the bridge ended, the traffic came to a complete halt.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Kirstie muttered. People were leaving their cars — not to continue on foot, but to walk to the north side of the bridge and cluster along the railing.

They were looking for the tsunami, waiting for it; some even had cameras slung around their necks.

Trapped, Kirstie got out of the Volvo and walked across two lanes to the railing. Just to her right was the steep, rocky slope of Yerba Buena Island; to the north was the straight edge of Treasure Island, a navy base built on a precise rectangle of fill in the middle of the bay.

It was 12:23. The city looked normal enough, half-hidden in veils of rain and mist. A stiff breeze blew from the west. The surface of the bay was a dull grey, flecked with wind-driven whitecaps. Not far to the west, a big fishing boat was moving north between the footings of the bridge. Farther away, tugs hooted along the San Francisco waterfront, and a couple of freighters were pulling away from their berths. Lights flashed and winked on the streets of the city: the white of car headlights, the red and blue of police cars. The distant wail of sirens was almost lost in the normal deep rumble of the city.

Kirstie looked down again and saw that the fishing boat was moving surprisingly quickly; then she realized that it had turned around and was pointed south. The current was pulling it stern-first. And the footings of the bridge were exposed; two metres or more of crusted barnacles and weeds showed above the choppy grey water. She looked directly below her and saw bare rock and mud where water had been moments ago.

The normal white-noise rumble of the city changed pitch, deepened; from the west came a series of low, hard concussions. The bridge began to tremble in response to each of them. Beyond the city’s northern skyline, a pale mist rose against the darker overcast.

That’s the wave, Kirstie thought wonderingly. The spray from the wave, and it’s rising as high as the hills.

Then the wave itself came into the bay.

Nothing so large should have moved so swiftly. It looked to Kirstie like a snow-streaked black moraine, a long, steep ridge that must have been well over fifty metres high, spanning the Golden Gate. It grew taller, steeper, gliding under the roadbed of the bridge, exploding in twin geysers against the towers. It was just beginning to break as it struck the Marin shore and blew apart into an enormous burst of whiteness.

“Thousand one; thousand two—” Kirstie whispered to herself, counting seconds as she watched the shock wave moving towards her at the speed of sound, a sharply defined curve on the surface of the bay.

When the sound blast struck the bridge, Kirstie clapped her hands to her ears and screamed with pain. She dropped to her knees, seeking the shelter of the railing; dimly she noticed other people staggering under the impact of the noise. Part of her was terrified, but another part kept her watching through the open grid of the railing, observing, estimating, even predicting.

The wave rebounded through the spray, away from the Marin hillsides, smashing again at the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The southern end of the wave bounced off the San Francisco shoreline and pulsed out into the channel. The tsunami peaked in the centre of the Golden Gate, just east of the bridge, reaching a height near its original maximum of fifty metres. The wave had lost its sharp definition and was now a shapeless mass wrapped in mist. As it spread north and south and east it looked more like fog than solid water.

Kirstie could see nothing of Marin; Sausalito and Tiburon, and Angel Island, were lost in billowing clouds of spray. But along the San Francisco waterfront the tsunami was moving with what seemed, from a distance, to be an eerie slowness. Its true speed was probably over a hundred kilometres per hour, for it overtook a police car that was hurtling south along the Embarcadero.

The bridge under Kirstie’s feet began to shudder; flakes of grey paint and orange rust fluttered down from the upper deck. The roar of the wave had been relatively quiet after the first sound blast, but grew louder again as the tsunami ran south along the waterfront.

Docks snapped away from their pilings; one of the freighters tilted and capsized. The other ship was swept over the docks and struck broadside against the concrete pillars of the Embarcadero Freeway.

A long segment of the freeway toppled into the wave. Moments later the Ferry Building disintegrated, and the wave rolled over it. From some other building, fire spurted in a burst of orange, vivid against the grey and white of the wave. Through the thickening mist, Kirstie could glimpse tentacles of the wave reaching up the hillside streets.

In the bay itself, the tsunami was a chaotic mass of foam, five to ten metres high except where it rose higher on crossing shallow water. It ran south under the western end of the Bay Bridge, engulfing the fishing boat Kirstie had seen a few moments before. The bridge swayed and groaned under the blows to its footings.

Below her, Kirstie saw the water steepen as it neared the shore of the island. Then, a breath later, it struck and exploded. She spun and lunged away, too slowly. Water crashed over her with enough force to fling her hard against a car. Fist-sized chunks of rock clattered down around her, bouncing off the cars and trucks.

Gasping, she staggered away from the car. The water was ankle-deep, mixed with stones and mud hydraulically blasted from the side of Treasure Island. People were wading through it, or crawling, or lying motionless.

Wiping mud from her face, Kirstie marvelled that her sunglasses were still in place. She made herself walk back to the railing. Below, several metres above the normal level of the bay, brownish-grey water boiled past under the bridge. The spray was clearing over much the bay, and she could see the Golden Gate Bridge. As she watched, the roadway broke from the north tower and dropped into the water. The north tower of the bridge was tilting. The tilt increased and then the tower fell into the water. Gouts of spray shot up and sank back.

“The bugger is going to seiche,” she muttered. “It’s going to seiche.”

Kirstie waded to a woman lying face down nearby and helped her get to her hands and knees. Blood-streaked mud covered her face; the woman moaned and coughed. Kirstie tried to talk to her, but the roar of the wave, pouring back down the hillside and running under the bridge, obliterated all other sounds. The woman stood up and staggered to a yellow Rabbit. Ignoring Kirstie, she got in and started the engine.

People were moving all over the bridge: helping each other, driving away, walking slowly towards the tunnel to Oakland or back towards San Francisco. One man directed traffic around abandoned cars; three others were pushing those cars to the sides of the pavement. A few more cars arrived from the city and roared through without stopping, their drivers and passengers looking terrified.

Wondering if she were in shock, Kirstie started the Volvo and drove. The station wagon bumped over the gravel and rocks left by the wave. The windshield was cracked, and the hood and fenders were scratched and dented. Off to her left she saw seething white water where Treasure Island had been. What she could see of Berkeley seemed all right, but to the southeast a huge column of smoke was rising into the rain. Fires burned at the Army Terminal, a sprawl of docks and warehouses on the Oakland waterfront; an odd, greenish-yellow cloud was spreading from the Terminal across Oakland towards the hills to the east.