Peter Hernon: 8.4

“Look!” Sara cried. The apartment building slowly rotated on its foundation, a twisting half turn. One of the side walls bowed out and the upper floor collapsed with a sickening crash. At first there was an eerie silence. The screams followed, coming from deep in the rubble.

Atkins, Sara, and Garvey ran toward the building. They were still able to enter through the front door, which had been pulled from its hinges. They followed two cops into the lobby. Broken timber and drywall blocked the lobby. Plaster dust kept falling. The police quickly retreated. They’d seen enough.

Atkins and the others started picking their way single file up a broken stairway to the second floor. Inching forward, Atkins heard a whimpering voice. A child.

Atkins lost sight of Sara and Garvey as he made his way toward the child, following the sound of her cries. A girl, he thought.

He found her pinned under a table in a smashed apartment. Atkins froze. Something large and heavy crashed down into one of the upper floors. He figured another section of brick wall had toppled. They were on borrowed time.

He smelled smoke. The smell was faint but getting stronger. Atkins inched his way back into the hallway. The odor was more pungent. He could taste the smoke.

The building was on fire.

Atkins shouted for Sara and Garvey. Sara called to him. Her voice sounded far away, muffled.

He nearly tripped with the child, caught himself, and kept going, groping his way back down the hallway, ducking under fallen I-beams. Black smoke started pouring in on him. He began coughing.

“Sara! Brad! Get out of here!”

He heard Sara. Her voice louder, closer.

“We’re all right,” she said. “We’re trying to find a way out.”

She was behind a collapsed wall, which must have come down in the last aftershock. Trapped in one of the apartments, they couldn’t get back out to the hallway.

Atkins tried to fight his panic.

Sara and Brad were cut off.

“I’ll be right back!” he shouted.

“I love you.” He heard Sara clearly. “Please hurry.”

Atkins managed to get out with the child, stumbling into the bright sunlight. Two men in blood-splattered uniforms, paramedics, ran forward and took the little girl. Atkins looked up at the apartment building. The top floors—what was left of them—were engulfed in flames.

Atkins started back inside.

“¡Señor, no es posible!” A cop grabbed him, pulling him by the arm.

Breaking away, Atkins entered the lobby and stopped in his tracks. In the intense heat, his hands instinctively came up to protect his face. He screamed Sara’s name and heard wood crackling in the fire. A series of small explosions popped like firecrackers on the upper floors, probably canisters of propane gas going off.

Still shielding his face with his hands, he tried to climb the stairs. The cop, a heavily built man with a strong grip, pulled him back.

The building moved. Two men were holding Atkins, the cop and a soldier. Gripping him by the shoulders and neck, they got him outside and pushed him away from the building.

“Sara!”

He kept screaming her name as the burning building folded in on itself.

John Atkins sank to his knees and wept. He was crying when the next aftershock hit, the strongest yet. Two streets over, a ten-story building fell down in a roar of grinding steel and shattering glass. Atkins didn’t notice. He was cursing himself for not having the courage to crawl back into the flames.

A RAP AT THE WINDOW BROKE HIS TRANCE.

Atkins turned and saw Walt Jacobs smiling at him. Jacobs was a round-faced man with an easy manner who liked to smoke a pipe outdoors. He was smoking one now, a bent briar.

Atkins got out and shook his friend’s hand.

“So how did it go?” Jacobs asked. “Did any of those reports check out?”

“I never got that far,” Atkins said. He described his experiences with the rats and dead frogs.

Jacobs frowned. Unmistakable worry showed on his face. “What do you think about that, John?” he asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” Atkins said. “I figured it was something we better talk about.”

Jacobs put his pipe in his pocket. His shoulders were hunched in the wind, his collar turned up. “Let me show you something first,” he said. With Atkins following, he walked to a tourist overlook that offered a sweeping view of Reelfoot Lake.

“Where’s New Madrid from here?” Atkins asked.

Jacobs pointed to the northwest. “About twenty miles as the crow flies.”

The small town across the Mississippi in Missouri was near the epicenter for the three monster earthquakes of the last century. The original settlement lay buried under the river.

Atkins found it incredible that the quakes had created the lake. The gray water spread out before them as far as the eye could see.

“The lake’s twenty miles long and a couple miles across,” Jacobs said. “Covers almost a hundred square miles.”

They stood on a wind-blasted hill. Shivering in the cold, Atkins dug his hands deeper into his pockets. He didn’t know why Jacobs had insisted on the walk. They could see the lake just fine from the front seat of the Jimmy, and he was eager to hear Jacobs’ thoughts about the chances for an earthquake.

Atkins was aware that the New Madrid Seismic Zone was overdue for a magnitude 6 or greater earthquake and that his soft-spoken, cautious friend was worried about seismic data suggesting the fault was becoming unusually active. The New Madrid System included six, possibly seven intersecting fault segments.

“It’s only in the last couple years we’ve been able to piece together what happened up here,” Jacobs said of the 1811-1812 earthquakes. “The last one in the sequence happened on February seventh around three in the morning. It was strong enough to cut across the Mississippi in three places. This ridgeline we’re standing on is actually the fault scarp from that last quake. It crosses two major bends in the river over by New Madrid.”

He handed Atkins a map showing the locations of the epicenters and their dates and the maximum range of magnitudes.

Using more conservative analysis, the first megaquake at New Madrid was between a magnitude 8.1 and 8.3. Other studies put it as high as 8.6. It was the largest quake in the series. All were a magnitude 8 or greater.

The open-ended Richter scale used a logarithmic progression in which an increase of 1 in magnitude represented a tenfold increase in strength. Magnitude 8 quakes were exceptionally rare. Only nine had been recorded in the twentieth century. The largest, a magnitude 8.6, occurred in 1964 in Alaska.

The short, seven-week time frame for the New Madrid quakes left Atkins in awe. A seismic triple play. In recorded history, nothing compared. He was well aware that, after the West Coast, the New Madrid Zone in the nation’s heartland provided the greatest earthquake risk in the United States.

Atkins tried to imagine the tremendous force of a cataclysm powerful enough to cut across the biggest river in the United States and, in the process, create a lake. The earthquakes had literally ripped the landscape apart. He’d never seen country like this. The topography was almost eerie: flood plains stretching out for miles, steep bluffs looming in the distance, the twisting river.

Jacobs pointed out a dark line of tree stumps in the water, not far from shore.

“Those are cypress trees, what’s left of them,” he said. “The quake snapped them off like matchsticks.” Each tree was broken off cleanly at approximately the same place.

“Reelfoot was the name of a Shawnee chief,” Jacobs said. “The Indian name for this country is Wakukeegu, ‘land that shakes.’”