*
Charlie Johns belly-crawled from his house as it rocked beneath him. He crossed the portico, tumbled down the stairs, and lay on the hot front walk gasping for breath. The earth heaved under him. Megan’s car, in his driveway, was jumping up and down in place, as if it had suddenly been possessed by the spirit of a pogo stick. In fact, all the cars on the street were jumping up and down.
Charlie’s head swam to the echo of thunder. There was a stench in the air. He closed his eyes and gasped for breath. He thought his head was going to explode.
The earth’s motion ceased, but it was some minutes before Charlie could move. He opened his eyes— the sky was full of murk— and he tried to sit up. His head spun and he had to close his eyes again until the spinning stopped.
He wondered if a bomb had gone off. Or a tractor-trailer rig filled with liquid natural gas. The bad smell made him think it must have been gas.
Charlie opened his eyes. His house was before him, strangely shrunken. Part of it seemed to have collapsed. The big oak tree in the front lawn had split in half, raw white wood showing, but it still stood. The garage had fallen on his car. The ornamental brick on the front of the house had peeled off and lay in little dusty piles. All the windows were broken and the yard was littered with cedar shakes fallen from the roof.
He couldn’t believe it. He had paid a lot for that house. It wasn’t supposed to just fall down.
The sounds of shouts and screams came dimly to his ringing ears. He looked left and right, saw more ruin. All the houses on his quiet, expensive Germantown road were damaged. Windows gaped. Trees had fallen across hedges and rooftops. Chimneys sprawled across lawns. A three-story brick house, two doors down, had simply collapsed into a pile. Porches had fallen, and roofs leaned at strange angles. Stunned people lay stretched on lawns. Some people, somewhere, were calling for help.
Charlie stared dumbly at the carnage. It must have been a big bomb, he thought. Terrorists. No— probably the U.S. Air Force had dropped a bomb by accident. He would be able to sue for damages.
Megan’s BMW 328i, he saw, sat in his driveway with its hood and windscreen covered in cedar shakes from the fallen garage. She would be happy, he thought, the car hadn’t suffered much more than a few nicks.
Megan.
She had been in the shower, he remembered. She was going to shower, and then they would make love on his big king-sized bed, and then they would open a bottle of champagne and wait for the caterers to deliver his canard a la Montmorency and Megan’s croustades aux crevettes, and they would celebrate the fact that they were both very, very rich. While he waited for Megan to get out of the shower, Charlie sat in the front room to listen to the financial reports on CNN.
And then the bomb, or whatever it was, had gone off.
Charlie wondered where Megan was. Perhaps she was still in the shower.
He tried to get to his feet. His head whirled, and his stomach was tied in knots. Vomit stung the back of his throat. He took a few steps to the house and leaned on one of the portico’s pillars, but the pillar swayed as he put his weight on it, and he saw now that the portico was no longer attached to the house, it had taken a few jumps onto the lawn, and there was a yawning two-foot gap, studded with nails, between the portico and the house proper.
“Megan?” he called. “Are you in there?”
He walked across the portico, feeling planks sag beneath his feet, and stepped across the gap between the house and the portico and into the front hall. Inside was a shambles: every shelf fallen, every glass object broken, the furniture moved around as if scrambled by a giant. The bottle of Moet had fallen from the bucket and rolled across the hall from the spilled ice.
“Megan?” he called.
He went to the back hall and looked down it. It was dark. Charlie flipped the light switch and the light did not come on.
There was a little closet off the back hall where the water heater and the furnace boiler were located. The door was open, and the water heater had fallen out and was sprawled in the hallway like a drunken sailor. Water spread across the thick carpet.
Charlie ventured down the hall and stopped before the water heater. He saw that the flexible metal gas line had been yanked taut when the water heater fell. He could smell a whiff of gas.
“Megan?” he called. “Are you there?”
He wondered if he should call a repairman, but then decided that the gas maybe couldn’t wait. He leaned forward and turned the gas tap off at the wall.
Then he went back down the hallway, picked up the phone, and tried to call 911. The phone line was dead.
Charlie returned to the water heater and looked at it a while. He took a big stride and stepped over the fallen water heater, then continued down the hall to the master bedroom. The wet carpet squelched under his shoes.
“Megan?” he called. “Love?”
Everything leaned at a strange angle here, and it seemed to Charlie as if he were walking downhill. The house seemed partly to have fallen into the cellar. The doorframes were very crooked. The water from the broken water heater was all running ahead of Charlie, down what had become a slope.
He paused at the door to the master bedroom. He was afraid to look inside.
Maybe, he thought, he should try calling 911 again.
“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.