Crawford Kilian: Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

She got off the bridge onto the East Bay Freeway. The mud flats that ran beside the freeway were deep under water, and as she approached Berkeley she had to drive through flooded stretches. Just as she reached her exit and turned off, she glanced in her rear view mirror and saw what looked like a tidal bore sweeping up the freeway and mud flats from the south. It was the seiche, a tsunami trapped within the bay. The long hump of grey foam and black water extended across the bay and well inland.

Slamming the car into first, Kirstie accelerated up Ashby. A roar grew behind her; the seiche was coming fast. Glancing back, she saw it engulf three, four, six cars, one of which was flung spinning into the air.

San Pablo Avenue: once across it, she knew, Ashby began to rise a little. The wave, now only a metre high, hissed into the intersection and paused.

A few blocks farther on, Kirstie realized that she was clutching the steering wheel so hard that her hands hurt and that she was still in first gear. She made herself slump back in her seat. Up ahead, the Berkeley hills looked comfortingly close and high, but she did not want to go home to an empty house. Turning left, she drove into a neighbourhood of small apartments and stucco houses, west of the Sacramento Avenue BART station. On a street lined with dead palm trees, she parked in front of an old Hollywood bungalow. The rain was getting heavier. She locked the car and ran to the door of the bungalow.

Sam Steinberg opened the door as she came up onto the little porch. He was a small, lean man in his forties, with a wrinkled, deeply tanned face above a bristly black beard.

“You look like hell,” he said. “Come in.”

The living room was small but snug, with bookshelves lining the walls. The furniture was nondescript: a couch, a couple of easy chairs, a small desk, all utilitarian. Sam Steinberg was a bachelor with little evident interest in physical comfort or in aesthetics.

“Do you know Einar?” Sam asked. A blond giant rose from one of the easy chairs and gently took her hand.

“Einar Bjarnason,” he said. “How do you do?”

“I’m Kirstie Kennard,” she said faintly. “You’re Sam’s graduate student?”

“The one and only,” Sam grunted. He tossed Kirstie’s raincoat over a pressback chair while she kicked off her sodden boots. “All the others have found safer advisers. Einar’s too crazy to be scared.”

“No, I am not too crazy.” Einar’s white teeth flashed in his sunburned face. “When I finish with you, I go back to Iceland. We do not have shakeouts.”

“A primitive people, the Icelanders.” Sam sat her down on the couch. “What’s up? I thought we were supposed to meet up in my office.”

“Don’t you know about the tsunami? I was on the Bay Bridge when it came in. And then there was a seiche. The whole bloody bay is just sloshing about with huge waves, like water in a bathtub. M-my God, you mean you didn’t know?”

“We’ve been sitting around all morning doing physics,” Sam said. “Is that why the lights are off? We thought it was just another damn thunderstorm.”

“Sam, have you anything to drink in this house?”

She drank two beers as she told them what had happened in the last hour and a half. When she was through, Sam asked:

“Where’s your husband?”

“At sea, in Ultramarine . He’ll be fine. They won’t even have noticed the tsunami out there.”

“Good. Hope he doesn’t worry about you.”

“I suppose he might, if he knows what’s happened. With radio communication being so unreliable, they may all be as blissfully innocent as you two.”

“We are neither blissful nor innocent, after what we worked on this morning and what you told us now,” Sam grunted. “Come and help fix lunch before you’re completely bombed.”

Sam refused to talk shop or even to discuss the disaster while they ate. He launched into a diatribe on the sad political level of current American movies. Einar argued with him, manifestly unworried about annoying his adviser.

“Have you seen this bloody thing called Gunship ?” Sam demanded. “It was on cable all last month again. It’s turning into a damn cult movie, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre .”

“It is only a cowboy movie with helicopters,” Einar said.

“It’s a pornography of violence. What Gunship says is that this country hasn’t learned a goddamn thing. Don’t examine your motives, put your trust in guns and more guns, and kill everybody you can because maybe they’ll kill you. And the guy who made it is a millionaire because he peddles that crap.”

“Anyway,” the Icelander said, “it is not on cable now. Nothing is on cable anymore.”

“It’s an ill solar wind that doesn’t blow someone some good,” Sam said. “Okay, enough — looks like we’d better get out and see what we can do to help. The authorities are probably a little overstrained.”

They walked out into wind and spattering rain, and headed west. Sirens screamed everywhere. The wind smelled of smoke. A surprising number of people were on the street, or standing on their porches watching the smoke rise in the west. Kirstie realized they were mostly black; in her own all-white neighbourhood, up in the Berkeley hills, people went out only after dark these days.

Ambulances seemed to be concentrating a few blocks away, around an elementary school at San Pablo and Francisco. The seiche wave had come across San Pablo, right to the edge of the blacktopped schoolyard; across the street, people were carrying casualties out of the flooded buildings, wading through the mud left behind by the wave, and putting them down gently on the blacktop.

Teenaged blacks were stringing ropes across basketball courts and hanging tarpaulins and plastic sheets from them, improvising shelter for the injured.

Kirstie paused as they were about to enter the school building. The air reeked of smoke and excrement. She touched Sam’s arm; his dark eyes looked into hers, and she saw something gentle, powerful and sad in them.

“I’m sorry — I’m scared,” she mumbled.

“Of what?”

Two orderlies carried out a screaming, blood-splashed man with a sodden red bandage where his right forearm had been.

“Of — that.”

“Come on, Kirstie. You’re needed.”

Without quite willing herself, she walked up the steps and through the door into a dark hallway echoing with screams.

Rain drummed on the bedroom skylights. Robert Anthony Allison woke up and, as always, rolled right out of bed. Shauna, as always, slept on. He went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet, knowing nothing would wake his wife.

How many men, he wondered as he shrugged into his favourite silk robe, how many men had fantasies about sleeping with Shauna Dawn McGuire? Five million? Twenty? He’d done his best to encourage those fantasies: three movies in two years, each a blend of violence, romance and sex that nobody else could bring off. Shauna was a big part of the blend — some of his competitors said he’d still be directing drive-in horror movies without her — but who else could live with a sex goddess and still keep the objectivity a director needed to exploit her properly? Not her last two husbands.

He padded back into the bedroom, studying Shauna’s face. The fantasies couldn’t include her merely human traits: her catatonic style of sleeping, her allergies, her humourless and self-absorbed lovemaking. As a husband he might resent those traits; as a director, his personal feelings never interfered with artistic concerns.

A narrow flight of stairs led directly from their bedroom suite to the kitchen. Allison plugged in the coffee maker and watched the rain slash down. He looked west and north, down the hill to the willows along Escondido Creek, up the far slope to the ridge almost a mile away. It was all his own land. He knew every one of those scattered oaks, right up to the ridge where the land fell away almost vertically into the next valley. He knew the course of the creek, from the pool a mile upstream (on the eastern boundary of his land) to the canyon three miles southwest (just outside his land) where the creek met the Carmel River. At the age of thirty-two, he was landed gentry, just like the rich pricks up and down the Carmel Valley. But unlike them, he had earned his land, over ten square miles of it; the pricks had inherited it from grandfathers who’d paid next to nothing for it.