Peter Hernon - 8.4

His right leg grazed something in the water. Rocks. He touched bottom with both feet and pushed off and managed to grab hold of a tree root that was sticking out of the bank. He held on to it until he caught his breath, then pulled and fought his way up onto the muddy ground, dragging Lauren with him.

Collapsing there, he rolled over on his back and felt his legs start to cramp. Sick to the stomach, he coughed up some water and vomit. His legs cramped, the pain stabbing into his calves like nails. He realized he would have drowned if that had happened a few seconds earlier. He kept looking up at the black sky, his left arm clasping Lauren’s life jacket. He spat up more water. It was good to breathe.

“Are you all right?” Lauren was on her knees, looking at him, her hands cradling his head. She was shivering in the cold air.

He nodded and clenched his teeth against the pain in his legs. The cramps started to ease off.

He saw Holleran. She was hunched over behind them, kneeling on the ground. Water was pouring off her clothing. Her long hair hung limp over her shoulders. She was the first to get up.

“I don’t see them,” she said. “They just disappeared.”

Atkins, still sucking air into his lungs, didn’t understand. Then he realized she was talking about the two boats that had been chasing them. Pulling himself up to a sitting position, he looked out at the lake. The waves were as tall as any he’d ever seen in the ocean. He could hear them beating against the dam, the sound carrying back to them over the water.

The moon suddenly appeared from behind the clouds, a full yellow disk.

THEY walked from the lake to the highway and then in their sodden clothing followed it about a mile to Lauren Mitchell’s marina, where they dried off and huddled in front of a propane space heater. They put on new snowmobile suits.

Atkins knew he needed to do something about the dam, start warning people that the damage was far worse than anyone was letting on. First he called Guy Thompson in Memphis. Thompson was excited. He’d been working with Prable’s earthquake data nearly nonstop for a full day.

“I’ve run his probability assessment over and over, and I’ve got to tell you, John, I can’t punch a hole in it,” he said. “His correlations look right on.”

Thompson had found only one shortcoming with Prable’s projections. He’d made an error in calculating solar activity, one of the indices critical to his prediction of a major earthquake along the New Madrid Fault. He wasn’t to blame for the mistake. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had only recently issued a correction in an earlier projection of sunspot activity.

Prable had based his calculations on a date for a peak flare occurring on or about January 20. That date had now been revised.

Thompson told Atkins the rest of it.

“Peak solar activity and flares will occur later today, John. The projection is for a larger number of sunspots than anticipated. The solar wind’s gonna be howling. Plasma density levels are going to spike. We’re gonna get a real heavy gravitational pull.”

Atkins did some mental calculations. That would be about 4:00 in the morning. He quietly mentioned this to Elizabeth, who just stared at him and nodded. Wrapped in a woolen blanket, she was just starting to warm up.

“So what do you make of this?” Thompson asked.

“I don’t know,” Atkins said. “I wish to God I did.” He was still reluctant to put much credence in Prable’s data. The effects of solar activity and gravitational pull on earthquakes simply weren’t known. It was all new territory.

“Something’s happening in the ground,” Thompson said. “The seismographs are really picking up over in your area.”

Atkins stood by the telephone, aware of Thompson’s silence on the other end of the line. As his mind raced, he felt that someone was sitting inside his body, that someone else was holding the phone. He had a pestering fear about how he’d feel when he was back inside himself again.

THEY’D just taken off from Mayfield and swung out to the east a few miles before the UH-60 pilot pointed the nose of the National Guard helicopter due south and leveled off. It was 12:25 A.M. The sky had cleared. The moon and stars blazed in the darkness. Walter Jacobs and two other seismologists were flying back to Memphis to get more seismic equipment. Jacobs wanted to run some measurements in the coalmine.

Unable to find Atkins after the meeting at the gymnasium, he’d decided to leave without him. This was too important to wait. He wanted to be back at that mine first thing in the morning.

Jacobs and the other two men, both USGS geologists, were seated on benches in the rear of the big helicopter. A crewman, a young soldier bundled in a hooded parka, was up by the closed cargo door, staring out the portholes.

He was the first to notice it—a rippling wave of bright, bluish-red light that seemed to rise out of the ground and hover over the dark hills.

Then the pilot saw it.

“Sweet Jesus,” he announced over the intercom. “Check out the light show off the starboard side.”

The pilot, a retired Air Force major with extensive flying time, barely got the words out. He’d never seen anything like it. Unearthly, strangely beautiful lights pulsing in broad shimmering bands that grew in strength and intensity. Shades of blue, white, and reddish-orange swirling and streaming ever higher in the eastern sky.

“Is that the northern lights?” the crewman asked, speaking into his radio headset.

“No way,” the pilot said, his voice sounding brittle over the speaker. “This is much brighter, stronger. And it’s coming from the east, not the north.”

Walt Jacobs had unfastened his safety harness and crawled up to the porthole. The crewman moved away so the geologist could take a look. The lights were streaking like neon.

“What is it?” the crewman yelled, shouting to make himself heard over the droning rotors. Jacobs kept staring out the porthole.

“What are you seeing out there?”

Jacobs couldn’t take his eyes away from the spectacle. He heard himself say, “Earthquake lights.”

JOHN ATKINS ALSO SAW THE LIGHTS. THEY TOOK his mind off his disturbing conversation with Guy Thompson. The pulsing colors lit up the windows of Lauren’s bait-and-tackle shop, where he and Elizabeth sat near a propane space heater, trying to get the aching chill out of their bones.

The dancing lights arched across the horizon, or moved in zigzag bands of blue, pale white, and orange.

Atkins explained the phenomenon to Lauren. Rarely seen and largely a mystery, the lights were associated with earthquakes. They were possibly caused by polarized electricity in near-surface rocks or by electrical charges in the air. No one was sure. Atkins couldn’t believe the dazzling intensity of the colors. What he’d seen a few nights earlier on that farm near Mayfield didn’t compare to this.

The lights shimmered in brilliant, iridescent waves that shot across the sky in long, streaming bands of color.

The lake was boiling, the waves crashing over the dock and pier, which rode up and down on floating steel drums. The cables groaned loudly. Lauren worried the dock was going to pull apart.

“How much time do we have?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Atkins said, glancing at Elizabeth. If Prable was correct in his analysis, maybe only a few hours. But he still wasn’t convinced that Prable had it right. The effects of solar disturbances and tidal pulls on the earth’s crust had been debated for years—without any clear-cut result. “Maybe we’ll have a better idea…”

Lauren angrily cut him off. “What good are you people? You’re supposed to be experts on earthquakes, but you can’t tell me whether we’re in danger, or how much time we’ve got left. I’ve got two parents living near Paducah. If the dam goes and all that water hits the Ohio, that city’s going to be wiped out. We need to warn them.”