Walter Williams - The Rift

“Megan?” he called.

He took a breath and looked around the corner into the master bedroom.

Acid flooded into his throat, and he turned away and fell to his knees and vomited.

Directly above the master bed and bath was the deck, with the hot tub. This was convenient, because the spa shared a lot of the plumbing with the master bath.

But the hot tub, which weighed over a ton when full, had gone through the deck, and everything was wet and Megan was dead and she was lying beneath the tub and there was no question that she was dead and the room was wrecked and the water was red and Megan was dead beneath the tub.

Tears stung Charlie’s eyes. He got off his knees and went down the hall as fast as he could, stepping over the water heater and almost running until he got to the front room. He picked up the phone again, but the phone was still dead. Glass crunched under his feet as he ran for the front door, and then he crashed down because he stepped into the gap between the house and the portico, and he fell hard and felt a bolt of pain as nails tore at his shin. He jumped upright- nails tore at his trouser leg-and hobbled forward off the porch. He ran to the middle of the lawn and then stopped, because he didn’t know where to go next.

The brick house that had fallen down entirely was on fire, big leaping flames jumping through holes in its curiously intact roof. Another building, across the street and two houses down, was also on fire, though the fire seemed to be confined only to one corner of the building. Smoke poured out the broken windows, but Charlie could see no flames.

People were in the streets running. Charlie recognized one neighbor, who looked at him and waved.

“Come on!” he said. “McPhee’s on fire!”

Charlie stared after the neighbor as he ran. This was ridiculous, he thought. He was not the fire department. Someone should call the fire department.

He could feel the warm blood as it ran down his wounded leg.

He remembered that Megan had a cellphone in her car, so he walked to the BMW and opened the door and slid into the front seat. The car smelled securely of leather and Megan’s perfume. He took the phone from its cradle between the two front seats and tried to call.

Nothing. Nothing but a distant hiss.

“Megan,” he said, “are you there?”

*

Damn, she thought. Guessed wrong.

She should have read the earthquake report.

Major General Frazetta looked cautiously from beneath the dining room table. Took a breath. Took another. Waited to make sure that her words wouldn’t turn into a shriek that she’d felt bottled up in her throat as the world shattered around her, as she felt their new house try to shake itself to bits, and then she shouted out, “Pat! You okay in there?”

From the room that Pat had designated as his workshop came the sound of something heavy shifting, of things tumbling to the floor. “Think so,” came the mumbled answer.

Jessica crawled from beneath the table, noted as she rose to her feet that her house had been ruined, and then made her way through the wrecked living room and hall to Pat’s room. Pat was trying to get his lanky body from beneath one of his worktables that had fallen across him. Jessica helped to lever the table back upright- tools and bits of fragrant wood clattered on the floor- a fallen mandolin sang a plaintive chord- and then Pat got cautiously to his feet, brushed dirt off his shanks.

“Nothing broken, I think.” He gave a ragged grin. “Thanks for the warning. Gave me time to duck.”

Jessica had recognized the quake’s initial strike- the primary, or P wave- the jolt that felt like a giant fist punching the house from underneath, that set the plates and saucers leaping on the kitchen shelves. She knew that the P wave was only the fastest of an earthquake’s many weapons to travel through the earth, that the P wave would be followed by the shearing force of the slower secondary, or S waves, and then by the madcap dance of the Rayleigh and Love waves that could churn the earth like ocean breakers or spin objects in wild circles like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the fair.

And she knew, as soon as she felt the incredible force of that first jolt, the P wave that lifted her from the floor of the house and almost threw her through the kitchen window, that within seconds she would be experiencing all four kinds of movement at once. And so she dived beneath the solid dark wood shelter of the dining room table while shouting at Pat to take cover, that the big quake had come at last.

Only to have her words devoured by the express-train sound of the quake, by the shattering of glass and the crashing of shelves…

The mandolin sang again as Pat rescued it from the floor. “I’ve got to get to headquarters,” Jessica said. “The road is likely to be a mess. It might take two of us to get through- can you drive me in the Cherokee?”

“Sure.”

She looked at her watch, passed a hand over her forehead. It was just after five-thirty, and the quake had lasted more than ten minutes. My God, she thought, the quake hit during rush hour. Millions of people caught on the roads, on or beneath bridges and overpasses as they fell… And with all the rivers in spring flood, too.

“Go start the Jeep,” she said. “Put the chainsaw in it. I’m going to change- put on my BDUs.”

Damned, she thought, if she was going to confront a major national emergency in torn pantyhose.

*

The earthquake must have gone on at least ten minutes.

Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch still stood above the Mississippi. If the old man had still been alive, Marcy Douglas would have kissed him.

One of the Frenchmen had suffered a heart attack. Everyone else had been so preoccupied during the quake that no one had noticed him until after the arch shivered to the quake’s final tremor. The Frenchman was pale and glabrous and his lips were turning blue. Marcy’s colleague Evan was giving him CPR. The victim’s friends milled around loudly explaining the situation to each other in French.

Hot prairie wind blasted through broken windows, and only partially cleared away the smell of vomit. Several people had come down with motion sickness, including one little boy who had thrown up what looked like an entire bucket of popcorn. The arch did not normally move much- it would sway less than an inch even in the highest wind- but things were obviously different when bedrock was jumping around.

Marcy crawled to the station from which she controlled the tram, and used the telephone to call Richards, her superior, down on the ground level.

“We need to get paramedics up here,” she said. “We’ve got a medical emergency.”

“Good luck,” Richards said. His speech was fast and breathy, as if he’d just run several miles. “There must be hundreds of casualties in town. The ambulance crews will have plenty of people to treat without climbing the Gateway Arch.”

“What should we do?”

“Get your casualty down here. Our generators have kicked in- the trams’ll work. Then get everyone else down to ground level as soon as you can.”

“Can you send some people up to-”

“No. I’m not sending anyone up there!”

“But-”

“Besides, you can’t believe how many people we’ve got hurt down here.”

Marcy replaced the phone receiver, gripped the console, and carefully steered herself to her feet. A powerful wind blew through the shattered windows, flooding the observation deck with heat and dust. She walked with care- it felt as if she were stepping on pillows, expecting the floor to leap at any instant- to where the Frenchman was lying in the midst of a group.

“How’s he doing?” she asked Evan.

Evan was in his late twenties, a white guy who had lived in Missouri all his life. “He’s breathing all right,” he said. “I think he’ll be okay if we can get the parameds here.”