Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“ No !” I screamed. “Not in there! Stay out in the open, lie down!”

Curtis was a sleek, dark missile as he leaped at Glynn and caught the tail of her shirt in his teeth. He pulled fiercely, and she stumbled out of the door and down the one granite step. He knocked her to the ground and leaped on her. I started for both of them.

It hit then.

You seldom hear them, all the experts will tell you. You will, of course, hear the roar and crashing of falling masonry and collapsing beams if you are near man-made structures, and you will hear the whipping and long, tearing cracks of trees splitting, and the thunder of their falling, and later you will hear the shrieks of car and house alarms and the icy crystal tinkle of shattering glass, and even later you will hear the fire and rescue alarms, and perhaps the cries of those who still live. But you will not, in all odds, hear the quake itself.

But I heard it. I knew in that moment that I was hearing the very voice of the snake, and I know it now, though I am told over and over that I could not have. The quake was deep in the earth; its hypocenter was almost as deep as the Loma Prieta, and that was the deepest ever recorded on the San Andreas fault. No man-made drill has ever reached that black depth, where the earth is no longer solid. I heard its deep-buried war cry, like the long bellow of a great distant steer, and I felt its indrawn breath even before the ground began to move. In the instant that I felt my body come down over those of Glynn and Curtis, I thought, this is what T.C. means. This is what he hears; this is what he feels.

The shaking began then, a violent, furious, side-to-side heaving as if something unimaginably huge had taken the earth in its fist and shaken, and then the ground rolled like the sea, and we were flung from side to side so hard that we ended up on our backs, fully ten feet from the place we had hit the ground. I remember lying there with my arms stretched out over my daughter and the dog, watching the air thicken rapidly with swirling dust so dense that I saw the sun grayly, as if through morning fog, and felt a great hot wind driving particles of grit and bark and pinecone into my face and mouth. It was so strong a wind that even in that moment of blank terror I wondered at it. I had never heard of an earthquake wind. Only later did I hear someone saying that in the mountains the quake had been so severe that the whipping treetops stirred up a wild windstorm before they began to come down.

When they did begin to fall, the noise of their dying was louder than anything that had gone before: the long, shrieking cracks, the snap, the whistling of the hot wind, the great, following booms of their collision with the ground, the sighing rustling of their last limbs and leaves and needles as they settled into the treacherous earth. On top of their death cries came a long, shuddering, rattling thunder; I thought, idiotically, of the great elephant stampede in Elephant Walk . Elizabeth Taylor, hadn’t it been? Whipping my head to the side I saw that the lodge had settled in upon itself like those buildings you see demolished on TV, by implosion. The dust was now blinding. The screams of the redwoods went on and on.

Somewhere in there, the rolling and shaking stopped, but the trees did not. I became aware gradually that I was screaming at them, a high, endless dirge of fury: “You will not! You will not! By God you will not, you will not…”

I saw the one that would finish us. It was falling directly over us, slowly; so slowly that it seemed to have been filmed in slow motion. It came down and down, its scragged top denuded of needles, growing larger and larger. Still I howled in my rage, “You will not …”

Something like a great, black, scratching, spurring pterodactyl settled down over my face and then my body, shutting out the dust and the light and the sound of everything but my voice, still screaming invective. I waited for the darkness to swallow me, but it did not; there was a gigantic, shuddering thud, larger than any that had gone before, and a screech of tearing metal, and a great whistling of limbs, and the little knives of needles and branch tips cutting my face, and a great, diffuse weight sinking onto my body. But no more darkness came. There was a last thud, and the earth shook with it, and then there was silence. Nothing more. Just sun and dust and silence.

Much later, I don’t know how long, I felt a tentative squirming beneath me, and heard my daughter’s muffled voice crying, “Mama? Mama!”

The redwood had come down sidewise across us, its top striking the Mustang. The Mustang had flattened, but it had held enough to take the main weight of the tree. The pterodactyl I had been its outer top limbs; they had been small enough so that they cut my face and tore my pantsuit to shreds, but their combined weight had not been enough to hurt me badly. I pushed the branches off me, stood up on shaking legs, grabbed the longest one and pulled. It lifted, groaning, off Glynn and, beneath her, Curtis, just far enough for them to wriggle free. They did not, though; Glynn lay there looking at me with great, empty eyes, and even Curtis was still. I could see his eyes though, dark and bright, moving restlessly about him, and see his doggy, panting pink grin through the gray mask of dust that he wore. Glynn wore one, too. She was a gray child, a daughter of dust.

“ Move !” I shouted, and she did, wriggling out like a snake, and Curtis followed her, shaking himself so that dust flew and needles sprayed around him.

I let go of the branch and it snapped back, and I sat down hard on the ground and closed my eyes. Later, they told me I could not possibly have lifted the branches, but I simply looked at them in their ignorance. I could have lifted them with one hand; the rage was that strong. I could not even tell where I left off and that red, boiling rage began.

Like the quake, the rage ended suddenly, too, and I simply sat on the ground with my daughter kneeling beside me and Curtis at her side, nosing her all over, nosing at me. I did not open my eyes. Later, in a moment, I would get up and we would go away from here. They were not hurt. I was not hurt. We would go away, we would go home.…

“Mama,” Glynn was shaking me. “Mama, Aunt Laura! Help me get Aunt Laura out! I can hear her.”

I could too, then. She was crying softly, from the heaped, dust-swirling mess that had been the lodge. We could not see her, the dust still swirled so thickly, but I could follow the sound of her, and led by Curtis, we ran to the pile of rubble and leaned down to it.

Like us, the treetop had saved her. The treetop and the doorframe, hewed all those years ago from thick, solid Western pine. It still stood, like a ruined but not vanquished arch of a fallen Greek temple, and beneath it, under tangles of bare black and green, Laura lay huddled on her side, her eyes screwed shut, crying.

She lay in a fetal ball, wrapped in her arms, and also like me, she was completely whitened with leprous dust, and runnels of shocking red blood cut down her face and arms, from the little knives of the needles and branch tips.

“My baby,” she sobbed. “My baby, oh, God, Met, my baby.”

It was a kitten’s sound, with no breath behind it. I reached in among the branches and lifted her to her knees. Still, she cried. Still, her arms wrapped her stomach. Still, her eyes were shut tight. Glynn and I pulled the branches off her and stood her up between us, and I looked her over sharply. I could see nothing amiss but the scratches and the dust.

“Can you talk?” I said. “Open your eyes, Laura, and look at me. I think you’re okay. The tree took the weight of the house off you. Open your eyes!”

She did, looking at me with white-ringed golden eyes. Her pupils were black and huge, but her breathing seemed all right, though shallow and very slow. Shock, almost surely; I had had all the right Red Cross courses. But nothing else that showed. Perhaps, after all, we would be all right.