by Bobby Akart
The quake managed to reverse-engineer the entire forty-second floor. Ceiling and wall finishes were falling apart. Electrical fixtures were torn away from their mounts, leaving dangling wires hanging from the ceiling like snakes in the trees of the Amazon rainforest. Water flowed from all directions as the high-pressure fixtures cracked, sending streams of fluids across the room. Any building material not welded to the physical structure of the skyscraper was no match against the violent grip the quake had on it.
Jack crawled through the broken glass without regard to the wounds his hands were suffering. He was desperate to reach the upper body of a man covered by a collapsed section of wall. When he arrived, he dropped his chin to his chest, dejected at the death of another human being at the hands of the quake.
“I’ve got one over here!” shouted Tony from across the room.
Jack managed to get to his feet, only to lose his balance and fall hard onto his knees. He tried again but slipped on the wet marble floor. It was a fruitless exercise until the earthquake stopped. He crawled toward Tony’s voice. It was almost pitch black in the room except for the ambient light put off by two emergency exit signs dangling from the walls leading to the elevators.
“No! No! No!” Tony began to shout as Jack crawled through the debris.
“What is it?” Jack asked.
“Help me lift this marble.”
Jack crawled alongside his brother-in-law and saw the problem. The woman was flat on her back, barely breathing, but a wholly intact slab of granite had toppled off the wall and crushed her from her rib cage down.
The three-quarter-inch slab was roughly four feet by eight feet. It easily weighed four to five hundred pounds. The two guys tried to lift it, but the slab wouldn’t budge. Tony frantically cleared some insulation and drywall off the surface of the granite, not that the weight of the debris made a measurable difference. They tried again, to no avail.
Jack lay on his belly and ran his arm under the slab. There was lots of moisture. He pulled his hand out and rubbed his thumb across his fingertips. It was warm and sticky, clearly not water. Blood, and lots of it.
“Tony, it’s not gonna matter.”
“We gotta try to save her,” he insisted.
Jack leaned down to whisper to the woman, “Ma’am, can you hear me?’
Her breathing was shallow, and she stared upward, but she didn’t respond. Jack felt for a pulse. It was weak.
“Jack? What if we find a way to pry this off?”
“It’s too late for her,” he said in a dour manner.
Before Tony could argue his point, a massive explosion could be heard echoing through downtown St. Louis. The sky lit up momentarily as if the backstage lights of a Broadway production had suddenly been turned on. Sparks flickered into the air.
More explosions and more sparks. Jack and Tony crawled toward the windows to look toward the river. A substation and its transformers were self-destructing in East St. Louis on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. It looked like a New Year’s fireworks show was underway, but that was not what caught their eye in the brief illumination provided by the fires.
The Gateway Arch was bending and bouncing like a Slinky on a pogo stick. The structure, designed to withstand an earthquake, according to the attractive young tour guide, was now being put to the test. The giant wedding band built to fit the ring finger of Gargantua’s bride was being forced down only to spring back into shape. Shaken like Jell-O dumped out of its mold, it quivered under the enormous forces rolling just below the planet’s surface.
Loud cracking noises split the air like metallic cannon fire. There was an earsplitting tearing sound, and then suddenly, the apex of the arch started to crumble away. Section by section, the stainless-steel exterior flew to the ground, and the carbon-steel structure, the engineering marvel that it was, allowed gravity to pull it apart. Within thirty seconds, all that was left standing were two bony fingers where each side of the arch rose out of the ground, one flipping the bird to the north and the other toward the south.
“Hey,” began Tony. “I think it stopped. It’s over.”
Well, sort of.
Chapter Twenty
Friday, December 21
Top of the Met
One Metropolitan Square
St. Louis, Missouri
A chandelier hung perilously from a single strand of wire over their heads. The thin copper ground began to fray under the strain of holding the all crystal and polished stainless-steel fixture in place. Much like the building they were standing in that was fighting to hold itself upright, the chandelier swayed ever so slightly in the aftermath of the earthquake that had ravaged the earth along the New Madrid fault.
Jack and Tony stood in unison and wiped the dust and debris off their suits with their bloodied hands. Jack winced as a shard of glass embedded farther into the palm of his hand during the process. Despite the cold temperatures that had invaded the building when the windows imploded, he was sweating profusely. He pulled off his jacket, turned it inside out, and wiped off his face and hands.
“Are you hurt?” he asked Tony, who was picking bits of glass out of the palms of his hands.
Tony shook himself and ran his fingers through his hair. “Freakin’ glass stuck me everywhere. My face feels like it was peppered with pea gravel.”
Jack buried his mouth and nose in the pit of his elbow and approached the outside edge of the building. There was a slight breeze adding to the chill in the air. A curtain from one of the lower floors lifted slowly into the dark sky before being whisked away to the south. His eyes followed the billowing panel until it disappeared.
“No power anywhere,” he observed.
Tony arrived at his side and studied the landscape the best he could in the dark. “Man, there are fires everywhere.”
Just as he completed his statement, an explosion could be heard in the distance. Their heads snapped in that direction, only to see thousands of sparks float into the air at the source.
“Transformers,” commented Jack. “I saw the substation across the river from the Arch blow apart. These fires may have also been caused by gas line or propane tank leaks.”
Tony swung around and faced the remains of the opulent banquet room. He squinted his eyes to assess their situation. Then he remembered his iPhone. He pulled it out of his pants pocket, swiped his thumb down the screen to bring up the device’s control panel, and tapped on the flashlight icon. The fifty lumens provided by the phone was equal to a small flashlight, but in the darkness it illuminated the entire room.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed as the devastation revealed itself.
Jack walked ahead of Tony slightly and assessed the damage. He furrowed his brow as his eyes caught a glimpse of the dead bodies who’d succumbed to the crushing weight of the falling granite or who’d been struck by the flying debris. He retrieved his jacket off the floor and fumbled through its pockets until he found his phone.
The guys, with their flashlights leading the way, searched for any other survivors first. They walked gingerly on the water-soaked marble, being careful not to lose their footing. They checked under the bar and in the banquet servers’ workspace behind two swinging doors that were remarkably still in place, swaying in the breeze emanating from outside. Other than the victims they knew about already, it appeared everyone else had managed to get into the central hallway leading to the fitness center on the other side of the forty-second floor or toward the fire escape.
Tony inched closer to the pile of rubble created when the ceiling and contents of the upper floor had fallen into the banquet room. “Of course these walls held strong.” He slapped the granite dividing wall separating them from the exit.
“We’ll dig through this,” Jack said encouragingly. “I don’t see any steel girders or anything else immovable.”
Tony wasted no time. He set a chair upright and propped his cell phone against the back so the light could shine on the rubble. Jack did the same, and the two men began
to pull away large pieces of insulation and ceiling drywall.
Over the next several minutes, a space had opened up at the top of the pile, providing access to the center hallway of the building.
“Want me to shimmy through it?” asked Tony, the smaller of the two men.
“I think it’s too unstable,” replied Jack. “Trust me, I wanna get out of here, too. I think we’ve got time.”
Tony nodded. “Help me with this hunk of flooring.”
He and Jack each grabbed an end of the concrete aggregate slab reinforced with rebar. After a count of three, they lifted it. The men both groaned, as did something outside the building.
“Did you hear that?” asked Tony as they set the chunk of concrete to the side.
Jack had already grabbed his phone and used the light to walk toward the jagged remains of the windows. “Yeah, I did.”
He inched close to the outside edge of the building, using the aluminum window frames as a guardrail of sorts.
“Can you see anything?”
Jack leaned forward and allowed his head to breach the plane of the building. A gust of dust-filled wind smacked him in the face. He hurriedly looked straight down and quickly snatched his head and shoulders back into the room. He shook his head side to side, admonishing himself for such a foolish move.
He stepped a few paces back into the room. “Not really. There are car lights on, and I can hear alarms blaring.”
CREEEAK!
“There it is again!” shouted Tony, who rushed to Jack’s side.
The two men stood side by side, waving their hands in front of their faces as debris continued to swirl in the air around them.
Suddenly, an explosive roar was heard. The sound was gradual at first and then gained in intensity. It resembled a passenger airline buzzing over the top of your head. Then loud pops mixed in with the roar.
That was when the first of the dominos fell. Throughout downtown St. Louis, the structural integrity of the tall buildings failed. Residential high-rises and office skyscrapers began to collapse into themselves.
The men were enthralled by the falling structures they could only hear and not see. The screams of their fellow man and cries for help rose high into the air, sending chills up their spines.
CREEEAK!
“That’s close!” yelled Jack as the carnage continued to unfold below. Seconds later, it was One Metropolitan Square’s turn to be part of the macabre game of skyscraper dominos.
Below them, the twenty-three-story Broadway Tower fell over into the building across the street. The steel and granite listed toward the north ever so slightly until gravity began to pull it across Pine Street into the adjacent building known as St. Louis Place.
Located at 200 Broadway, and directly across from the entrance to the Met, St. Louis Place was a uniquely designed structure. It shared the corner of Pine and Broadway with the other two skyscrapers. To differentiate itself from the others, the architects had designed it with a large opening on the street corner such that the upper floors were supported with a single steel and concrete beam stretching sixteen stories until it reached the upper floors.
While this structural support was designed to hold up the building under normal circumstances, it was no match for the massive weight of 100 Broadway when it crashed into it. Imagine a four-legged stool holding up a hundred tons of building and then one of the legs gets kicked out from under it.
It happened in just seconds. Just like that.
Broadway Tower toppled across Pine Street and crashed into the south side of St. Louis Place, effectively kicking out the fourth leg of the stool. When this happened, St. Louis Place fell across Broadway and crashed into the lower half of the Met. The impact was felt throughout the building, especially at the top.
Jack and Tony were knocked to the floor. The building swayed back and forth as if it too would topple over. As it did, they began to slide along the wet marble.
“My god, Jack. Is the damn thing gonna fall over?” asked Tony as he scrambled onto his hands and knees and made his way toward the center of the building.
Jack, who was closer to the window opening, was having a difficult time. It was if he were being pulled out by the gnarly fingers of a demon crawling up the side of the building. Just as he’d manage to get onto all fours, he’d slip backwards.
“Go! Hurry!” Jack yelled as he began to panic. He was being pulled toward the edge because the Met was in fact teetering. Furniture, broken dinnerware, and bottles of liquor were all sliding toward the front edge of the building as if being drawn by a massive magnet.
Tony continued to crawl up the slight incline and arrived at the rubble blockade first. He turned his flashlight toward Jack to light up the path. “This way!”
“I see you. Just dig us out!”
Tony drew upon what was referred to by scientists as hysterical strength. There were urban legends of a mother going toe-to-toe with a polar bear in Northern Quebec to protect her son. A twenty-two-year-old woman raised a BMW off her father when it had toppled off a car jack. Teenage sisters hoisted up a toppled tractor to save their dad.
Tony’s adrenaline increased exponentially. Norepinephrine released directly into his muscles, giving him brief but superhuman strength. Without Jack’s help, he began to toss large hunks of concrete flooring off the pile like they were throw pillows.
Jack clawed his way to the pile of rubble just as the building began to tilt farther. The two men worked independently of one another to frantically create an opening they both could fit through. Within minutes, as the steel structure of One Met began to strain, Tony led the way through the hole and cleared the way for the huskier Jack to shimmy through as well.
Once in the center hallway in front of the bank of elevators, they scanned back and forth until they found the entry doors to the emergency stairwell.
“There!” shouted Jack. He wasted no time in moving over fallen debris toward the west side of the building adjacent to the fitness center.
They burst through the steel doors into the concrete fire escape just as a loud rumble echoed through the stairwell, preceded by a cracking sound. Along the wall, stress fractures appeared. Tiny hairline splits ran up and down the walls until fragments of concrete began to fall off. The sound grew louder, and the walls began to break apart.
One Metropolitan Square was splitting in half.
Chapter Twenty-One
Friday, December 21
One Metropolitan Square
St. Louis, Missouri
The men burst into the stairwell. The emergency lighting had failed. Parts of the upper floor had collapsed through the door leading to the stairs and crumbled downward, making their footing treacherous. Armed with their iPhone flashlights lit up, they began to race against time in an attempt to descend forty floors before the Met was ripped apart.
The air in the completely concrete stairwell was permeated with gray, powdery dust, making it nearly impossible to take a deep breath. Jack covered his mouth and nose by burying his face into the pit of his elbow. However, this slowed his descent.
Tony, who was younger and more agile, was grasping the handrail with his right hand and used his left to hold the flashlight. He was able to take two steps at a time and race around the U-turn landings at each floor exit. After the first five floors, Jack was losing sight of Tony, who was descending at a much faster rate.
“Jack! Come on!”
Jack tried to respond, but it resulted in a coughing fit. “Having. Trouble.” Cough, cough. “Breathing.”
“Okay,” Tony shouted up to him. “We’ve got this. I’ll come back up to help.”
“No!” Jack shouted in protest. “I’ll be behind you. Keep going.” He began another coughing fit.
As instructed, Tony continued downward until he reached the thirtieth floor, where their firm’s offices were located. He shouted up to Jack, who was still moving slowly but efficiently down the stairs.
“I’m at thirty! I’m gonna make sure eve
ryone got out!”
Tony didn’t wait for a response, so he didn’t hear Jack tell him to wait. Instead, impulsively, he pulled the emergency exit door open and entered the hallway near the bank of elevators. He began to race down the south corridor toward their offices, when the east side of the Met began to crumble away.
After the adjacent building crashed into its base, the east side of the Met began to fall apart from the ground up. First, the spacious thirty-thousand-square-foot lobby and retail space, which had been filled with the debris from St. Louis Place, was further cut off as the fascia of the building fell away before landing on top of the sidewalk. When this happened, more of the east façade, made up of granite, began to peel the face off The Met in chunks.
Gradually, the façade disappeared floor by floor, and as it fell, the interior floors began to fall apart. Inch by inch and then foot by foot, the reinforced concrete separating each floor crumbled before breaking lose and crashing to the ground below.
Tony was running full speed toward their offices when he saw the side of the building disappear in front of him. He slid to a stop and lost his balance, landing on his backside. The floor continued to be devoured like Pac-Man chomping pellets.
He scrambled to his feet and began running back toward the bank of elevators. He glanced over his shoulder as the building disintegrated. He made his way to the stairwell, slamming the door open and almost knocking over Jack, who was about to open the door on the other side.
“Jesus!” shouted Jack.
Tony didn’t explain. He grabbed Jack by the arm and tugged him roughly toward the stairs. “We gotta go! It’s comin’!”
“What’s coming?”
“Nothing but air, man! Run!”
Jack sensed Tony’s urgency and forgot about his difficulty breathing. The sound of the building breaking down and falling allowed him to conjure up a visual to accompany Tony’s words. He had no interest in surfing on a concrete slab thirty floors to his death.