Michael Collings - The Slab

Bits of stucco flaked off the side of the house as they passed, a dust-brown scuff of snow that caught in their hair and settled on their clothes.

The ground was still shaking when the five of them clustered in the center of the back yard, far from trees, power lines, anything that could crash down upon them and injure or kill them.

The ground still jerked back and forth as if it were electrified.

Perhaps sixty, perhaps as many as ninety seconds had passed.

A whining howl rose, banshee-like, from somewhere inside the house, just as the window of the boys’ bedroom exploded, frosting the ground below with fragments of glass.

“Crud! Cruuud!” Will shook off his mother’s grasp and bounded toward the house. Willard reached him before the boy could cover more than a few yards, threw his arms around Will’s chest, and began pulling him back toward the others.

“No, Will. You can’t!”

“But it’s…”

Another sound rose behind Willard. One even more horrifying that the dog’s cry.

“Mommmy! Daddy!”

Staggered by the voice, Willard caught Catherine’s eyes just as she started forward, whispering, “Sams!”

Even as he shook his head, even as he gestured for her to stay with Burt and Suze, even as he shoved Will, Jr., toward her, even as one part of his mind screamed “Sams is dead! You know he’s dead! It can’t be him!” another part-a stronger, more desperate part-responded to his child’s cry instinctively, impulsively, and he raced toward the house, unconscious of the fact that the ground beneath his feet was abruptly solid and unmoving, and threw himself through the open window frame, impervious to the savage pain as broken shards sliced his arms and thighs.

Catherine knew Sams was dead, had seen his tiny body in the horribly white coffin as they had closed the lid and hidden him forever from her sight. She knew that she had seen the coffin lowered into the gashed earth and knew that whatever was left of her baby lay there, unmoving, unbreathing, unable to love her or call to her.

She knew all of that.

She knew it, and knew that Sams could not possibly be inside the house…and knew that Willard had to find him, bring him out, rescue him and return him to her.

She sank to her knees and clutched feverishly at her older children. The pulled closer to her, trembling and crying in hope and terror and confusion and despair.

“Willard!” she screamed. Then: “No, Willard!” just as somewhere within the bowels of the house, beneath the remains of slab that had shattered and disintegrated under the force of the earthquake, a gas line ruptured, two bits of metal collided with sudden violence, struck a spark, and-even as the side wall of the house began crumbling and sloughing away, detached from the rest of the structure by the earthquake’s fury-sheets of fire erupted from every window, every doorway, every crack, and the house burst into flames.

From the Tamarind Valley Times, 30 August 2010:

TEMBLOR STRIKES VALLEY;

SEVERAL INJURED, ONE DEAD

The 4.5 quake that rumbled across Tamarind Valley yesterday left minor structural damage behind, although several injuries were reported and one death resulted.

Willard Huntley, 38, was killed when the gas line beneath his home burst, presumably as a result of the temblor, and exploded, destroying the house. He is survived by his wife, Catherine, and three children.

The Huntley home was the only one seriously damaged in the quake which, though mild according to the Richter scale, nevertheless continued for over a minute, causing pictures to fall from walls and items to tumble from shelves in stores across the Valley. Authorities are unsure why the Huntley home was so severely effected when others nearby were not. In one home not a block away, a single vase fell unbroken from a piano, the only result of the quake.

Tragically, the Huntleys were still recovering from the sudden death of their youngest child a month earlier. Samuel ‘Sams’ Huntley, 2? was found…

The Day After, 30 August 2010

If Only…

Catherine and the children were not present the next day when investigative units from police, fire, and county inspectors’ departments sifted through the wreckage of 1066 Oleander Place. The family had been driven away a few hours after the quake by her parents, Howard and Eleanor Prinz, and were now in her childhood home in Santa Barbara, physically unharmed but in deep shock. Two physicians remained in the house rest of that afternoon and well into the evening.

The police team, led by forensic specialist Emily Naples, arrived first on Monday morning. A short time later, Jorge Garces and his group, representing the Tamarind Valley Fire Department, drove up Oleander Place and, watched by small clusters of neighbors in front yards along the way, parked behind the police vehicle.

As luck would have it, Edgar Sai was assigned by the city engineers’ department to represent them. He parked several housed further down Oleander and walked slowly up the hill toward the remains of 1066. He stood for a moment just outside the police tape surrounding the front yard, then shook his head sadly, sighed, lifted up the tape, and moved toward the blackened skeleton of wood and ashes.

“How’s it going Em?” he asked as he was greeted by Naples.

“Not much left of the place, is there?” she gestured to the fire scorched concrete and the scattered clumps of what once were roof beams, interior wall supports, and outer walls. “Fire department says it was a gas leak but it sure must have burned hot. Nearly everything inside’s destroyed.”

“They got Huntley out yet?”

“Just left in the coroner’s van. What was left of him. A few bones mostly. It must have been like an incinerator in there.”

“What about the others?”

“What…?” Naples, shook her head as if to clear a moment of confusion. “Oh, yeah, the child.”

“And the dog.”

“That was the first report,” Naples said, “immediately after the first squad arrived yesterday. Mrs. Huntley was nearly hysterical-which makes perfect sense, considering what had just happened-and rambled on for a while, something about a child. And the oldest kid was crying about his dog, said he knew the dog was trapped in the house.”

Sai shook his head sadly. “Must have been tough.”

“Yeah, anyway, the squad found the husband right away, he must have gotten trapped in the back of the house. They searched but didn’t find any other remains.

“Then it turns out that the family had lost a kid about a month ago, SIDS or something, so apparently Mrs. Huntley imagined that she heard the child’s cry, or hallucinated it in the fear of the moment. Something like that.

“The kid’s dog will probably turn up. It must have been terrified by the earthquake and ran away. Someone will track it down.”

Sai didn’t answer, except to say, “Let’s get on with it, all right?”

They shuffled through what had been the family room, observing, measuring, picking up a bit of litter here and there and sniffing it.

“Morning, Em, Ed,” Garces said as he ducked under a couple of charred beams and approached them.

They returned his greeting. Tamarind Valley was a small place. The various investigators knew each other well enough from meeting at scenes of fires, murders, burglaries, and the rest.

“Found anything unusual?” Em asked, mostly pro forma, since it was pretty clear already that the true culprit behind the death and the conflagration had been Nature in the form of an earthquake.

“Actually, yes. I was just coming out to see if Ed had arrived yet. You both should see this.”