Emmy Laybourne - Monument 14

Niko was eating alone.

I should have invited him to sit with Alex and me, but by the time I’d gotten the slushies made, and remade in Chloe’s case, the pizza was done. I was hungry enough to forget my manners.

Alex and I wolfed down our first pieces of pizza. The square, heavy Pizza Shack pizza had never tasted so good. I licked the red sauce from my fingers and Alex got up to get us seconds.

By the time he came back, though, I was watching Josie.

She was sitting sideways in her booth, with her back to the wall. Mrs. Wooly had wiped her face and hands clean, but Josie still had dried blood on her arms and her body and the space blanket was sticking to it in places. She was still wearing her old clothes. I felt bad for her; here we were all having a nice pizza lunch, and she was clearly still back on the bus.

I took my pizza over to her and sat opposite her in her booth.

“Josie,” I said quietly. “I got some pizza for you. Come on, Josie. Food will make you feel better.”

She just looked at me and shook her head. One of her giraffe hair bumps had come unrolled and the hair was sort of listing and drooping over, like a broken branch.

“Have one bite,” I bargained. “One bite and I’ll leave you alone.”

She turned her face toward the wall.

“Well, it’s here if you want it,” I said.

Astrid slid a large tray with some Sicilian pepperoni out of the oven. I was still somewhat hungry, so I went to the counter.

“Like pepperoni?” she asked me.

My heart was pounding.

“Yeah,” I said. Suave.

“Here you go,” she said, putting one on a paper plate.

“Thanks,” I said. Real suave.

Then I turned and walked away.

And that was my second conversation with Astrid. At least this time I responded.

I was walking back to my booth when we all heard the rumble of a machine. A heavy, rolling, clanking sound.

“What’s that?” Max stammered.

Three heavy metal gates were rolling down over the gaping hole at the front of the store. One, two, three, side by side they descended. The two on the sides covered the windows. The center one was a bit bigger and covered the entire space of what had been the sliding doors.

The gate was perforated so we could still get air and see out, but it was kind of scary.

We were being locked in.

The little kids lost it. “What’s happening?” “We’re trapped!” “I want to go home!” That kind of thing.

Niko just stood, watching the gate come down.

“We should like get something under it. To like wedge it open,” Jake shouted.

He grabbed a shopping cart and rolled it forward, under the central gate.

But the gate dropping just pushed the cart out of the way.

The three gates settled with a heavy CLANK that rang with finality.

“We’re locked in,” I said.

“And everyone else is locked out,” Niko said quietly.

“All right,” Jake said, clapping his hands. “Which one of you little punks is gonna teach me how to play Chutes and Ladders?”

Alex came up beside me and tugged at my shirt.

“Dean,” he said, “wanna go to the Media Department with me?”

All the bigtabs in the Media Department were dead, of course. They ran off the Network, just like our minitabs. But Alex found the one old-fashioned flat-screen TV. It was hung down low, near to the floor, off to the side.

I’d never really understood why anyone would want to buy a plain television, when bigtabs were only just a little more expensive and you could watch TV on a bigtab and use it to browse and text and Skype and ’book and game and a million other useful things. But every big store kept a couple televisions on display and now I knew why. They worked without National Connectivity. They were picking up some kind of television-only signals. And though the screen was kind of grainy and stripy at times, we watched eagerly.

Alex turned it to CNN.

The rest of our group filed over, drawn, I guess, by the sound of live media.

I expected the story of our hailstorm to be all over the news. It wasn’t.

Our little hailstorm was nothing.

There were two anchors working together and they explained it very calmly, but the woman was shaken. You could see she had been crying. Her eye makeup was all smeared around her eyes and I wondered why nobody fixed her makeup. It was CNN, for God’s sake.

The man in the blue suit said he would repeat the chain of events for anyone just joining the broadcast. That was us. He said a volcano had erupted on an island called La Palma, in the Canary Islands.

Shaky, handheld images of ash and a fiery mountain appeared on the screen behind the anchors.

The woman with the bad makeup said that the western face of the entire island had exploded with the eruption of the volcano. Five hundred billion tons of rock and lava had avalanched into the ocean.

They didn’t have footage of that.

Blue Suit said the explosion had created a “megatsunami.”

A wave a half a mile tall.

Moving at six hundred miles per hour.

Bad Makeup said that the megatsunami had grown wider as it approached the coast of the U.S. Then she stopped talking. Her voice caught in her throat, and Blue Suit took over.

The megatsunami had hit the Eastern Coast of the United States at 4:43 a.m. mountain time.

Boston, New York, Charleston, Miami.

All had been hit.

They couldn’t estimate the number of fatalities.

I just sat there. I felt completely numb.

It was the worst natural disaster in recorded history.

The most violent volcano eruption in recorded history.

The biggest tsunami in recorded history.

They played some footage.

It played so fast they had to slow it down so you could see what was going on.

From the street, a shot of the Empire State Building and a tall cloud drawing closer and closer, frame by frame, but it wasn’t a cloud—it was a wall of water—and then the image went blank.

A beach and you’re looking out at the water, only there is no water, just a boat stranded about a mile out into the ocean bed and you hear a voice praying to Jesus and then the image is shaking, shaking, and a wave so high the minitab can’t see the top thunders up. Then darkness.

Chloe said she wanted to watch kid TV. We ignored her.

Bad Makeup said the National Connectivity was down because three of the five satellite centers had been located on the East Coast.

Blue Suit said the president had declared a state of emergency and was safe at an undisclosed location.

We watched, mostly in silence.

“Turn it to Tabi-Teens ,” Chloe whined. “This is bo-ring!”

I looked at her. She was totally clueless. She was listlessly picking at a label stuck on the minitab counter.

None of the little kids seemed to understand what we were learning. They were just kind of slowpoking around, hanging out.

I had to keep watching the TV. Couldn’t think about the kids.

I felt gray. Washed out. Like a stone.

Bad Makeup said the megatsunami had triggered severe weather conditions across the rest of the country. Her voice caught on “rest of the country.” She mentioned storms called supercells, sweeping across the Rockies (that was us).

I looked over at Josie. She was watching the screen. Caroline had crawled onto Josie’s lap, and Josie was stroking Caroline’s hair absentmindedly.

CNN showed more footage from the East Coast.

They showed a house carried up the side of a mountain. They showed a lake full of cars. They showed people wandering around half naked on streets in places that should have looked familiar, but now looked like locations from war movies.