by Bobby Akart
Jill didn’t care. Like a crazed lunatic, she began to pound the inside of the wall until it began to fall inward in large chunks. She abandoned the candlestick and began to kick at the wall. Then she turned around backwards, held the conference room wall with her elbows, and forcefully mule-kicked the lower part of the drywall opening until it was open to the other side.
She stuck her head through the wall and screamed out her children’s names. “Emily! Tate! Are you in here?”
She could hear the moans of people in the theater and a few muffled cries for help. She called out their names and focused on listening. The chaos outside the building was louder than the voices trying to respond in the rubble. She looked back and forth, using her flashlight for illumination. She hoped to see the kids or a better way to enter the theater than the present option.
Because the rows of theater seats gradually dropped to a pitlike area in front of the stage, her elevation in the conference room was about eight feet above the sloped floor below her. To complicate matters, there was ceiling debris, as well as the foam-covered drywall she’d just demolished, in the aisleway. It didn’t leave her much of a landing area once she jumped.
Her first hurdle to overcome was the sixteen-inch-wide space to squeeze through. Her birthing hips, as her ob-gyn called them, made her far too wide to pass through head-on. Her voluptuous chest, as her husband liked to call her breasts, would have to be mashed down for her to slide through sideways.
So Jill turned sideways, held in her breath, pulled her right breast as flat against her chest as she could, and forced it through the opening. Once the stud wall was wedged into her cleavage, she repeated the process, this time holding her left breast tight against her chest as she pushed her way into the theater.
Now that she was in, she had to find a way to safely jump down.
Whomp!
Another car fell on top of the ceiling, and the explosive sound was deafening inside the confines of the theater. She heard screams emanating from the stage area.
“Emily! Tate! Can you—arrrgggh!” Jill lost her focus, and her feet slipped off the ledge created by the hole in the wall. She fell sideways toward the theater floor, crashing first on top of the drywall pile, and then she rolled over, slamming a row of seats with her back.
She lay there for a moment, allowing her breath to come back into her lungs and her mind to assess whether any of her parts were broken or badly bruised. After a quick self-examination, she used the seat armrests to push herself up. She walked down a couple of rows over the debris until she found her cell phone lighting up the bottom of a seat cushion.
Jill carefully stepped over the debris, moving gingerly down one row after another until she reached the pile of collapsed ceiling and stage parts that covered most of the lower seating area.
“Emily? Tate?”
She no longer yelled their names. No. She asked, almost begged, for them to respond. She couldn’t imagine they were underneath all of this destruction. She directed her light toward the stage. It, too, was littered with parts of the building.
Tears began to stream down her face. This was where her son would’ve been seated during the rehearsal. She looked back to the stage. That was where her daughter would’ve been showing how her practice and hard work was paying off as she danced and sang and recited her lines for the Christmas presentation.
She was unsure of what to do, hesitating for just a moment. Then, without warning, she almost died.
Whomp!
Chapter Twenty-Four
Friday, December 21
One Metropolitan Square
St. Louis, Missouri
“Seriously?” asked Jack as he caught up to Tony. His tone of voice was matter-of-fact, drawing a chuckle from his brother-in-law.
“We need a plan B,” replied Tony.
“No shit. There has to be another way.”
“Follow me.” Tony led the way up the stairwell past the dumbfounded people who stood staring into the abyss. He presumed they were waiting to be rescued. He didn’t want to take the time, nor was he inclined to explain to them the building was about to collapse. He made his way to the sixth-floor emergency door and opened it for Jack.
Once they were both in the center hallway, Tony wandered for a few seconds, glancing down at his cell phone twice. The side of the building was completely gone, leaving partial sections of offices dangling over the edge of the structure.
“The light is draining my battery.”
Jack walked away toward the elevator doors. “Hey, find something to pry these doors open.”
“Whadya thinkin’? Slide down the elevator cables like Spiderman?”
Jack tried to force his fingers between the middle of three sets of elevator doors. “No. Think about it. People have to be able to escape from an elevator through the roof. Emergency service personnel have to be able to climb up or down to help them. I’m thinkin’ there are ladders attached to the walls of the elevator shaft.”
“Hell yeah!” exclaimed Tony. “You’re right. Hang on.”
He powered on his flashlight again and walked down the center hallway. He located the fire extinguisher and the box affixed to the wall with a glass door marked IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS. Instead, he broke the wire holding the flat piece of eight-inch-long steel designed to gain access to the fire alarm. He hustled back to Jack’s side with the tool and a fire extinguisher under his arm.
“Try this.” He handed Jack the tool.
With his fingers, Jack separated the elevator doors just enough to wedge the tool in between them. Then he pushed hard to force a four-inch gap to appear. When it was open enough for the fire-extinguisher to fit, Tony shoved it between the doors at the base.
“Good work,” said Jack. “Now, each of us take a side and pull the damn things open. I understand why they make it difficult, but gimme a break.”
Each of the guys grasped the side of the elevator doors and pulled in unison. They got to a point where the doors finally gave way and opened fully, exposing the elevator shaft interior. Jack used his phone to light up the inside.
“Here we go,” he said, pointing to a ladder just to his right. He leaned in slightly and looked to his left. There was a second ladder attached to the wall.
Jack moved his phone so the flashlight pointed downward. The fifty lumens didn’t provide sufficient light to see the bottom, but there didn’t appear to be anything obstructing them.
“Works for me,” said Tony. “Listen, I’m gonna let the others know. We’re first, though. Okay?”
Jack nodded in the dark. “I get it. We got one shot at this. We led them to an escape. Now it’s on them.”
Tony darted for the emergency stairwell. He hollered for the evacuees and explained they’d opened the elevator shaft to access the ladders. He was back within twenty seconds.
“Let’s go,” he said when he arrived.
“Where are they?” asked Jack.
“Thinkin’ about it, I guess,” Tony replied. He stepped into the shaft, clutching the sides with a death grip. “This doesn’t require groupthink, people. Run for your damn lives. Right?”
Jack shrugged. “Agreed. Down we go.”
The two men moved slowly and carefully at first, ensuring they had a proper footing on the ladder rungs as they climbed down. One floor after another, they got closer to the bottom. As they passed the second floor, they heard voices and shouts from above. At least some of the other evacuees were following their lead.
“I feel cool air,” announced Tony as they approached the bottom. Just as before, he was well ahead of Jack.
“Don’t overshoot the ground floor!” Jack shouted down to him.
“Whadya mean? The ground is the ground.” Tony kept going.
“No! This leads to the underground parking.” Jack stopped at the elevator doors where two of the cabs were parked. He pulled his phone out again and illuminated the back of the third door. A large letter L reflected back to him. He stepped off the la
dder onto the roof of one of the cabs. “Come back.”
Jack dropped to his knees and fumbled around for the latch to the emergency access installed in the ceiling of the cab. He flipped a latch and turned the handle, causing the door to slam toward the inside, swinging violently on its hinges.
“Shit,” he muttered as he discovered the cab’s doors were closed. He’d left their tool five floors up, and he didn’t want to fight through two sets of doors to get out. He sat back on his knees and shined the light toward Tony. “Try the door on the top. See if we can get out that way.”
Tony hopped onto the top of the cab, causing it to bounce up and down somewhat. “Whoa!”
“Careful!” Jack shouted at him. Then Jack’s elevator cab shuddered under his feet. This was followed by concrete dust and debris raining on top of his head. “Hurry!”
Tony fumbled with the latches but eventually got the ceiling hatch open. “Bingo!”
Jack didn’t hesitate. He stepped off the roof of the cab and grasped the ladder. He walked along the eight-inch wide I-beam to cross over to where Tony waited on the roof of his cab. He reached out his hand and helped Jack on top.
Jack exhaled and looked into the cab. “I’m over this shit. How ’bout you?”
The building shook again, causing the cab to lurch upward slightly and then drop again until the brake caught it.
“Ya don’t have to tell me twice,” quipped Tony as he dropped feetfirst into the interior. He stood to the side and waited for Jack to join him. They exited the elevator together and entered the lobby of the Met, which now resembled a landfill.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Friday, December 21
USGS
Golden, Colorado
“St. Louis has been hit the hardest, mum,” shouted Oliver as he cupped his hand over the telephone to prevent bursting out the eardrums of the person on the other line. “There are eyewitness accounts of liquefaction along both sides of the Mississippi. It’s widening.”
As the ground shook, the resiliency of the river’s banks, its strength and the stiffness of the soil were lost. As water rushed in to fill the voids left by the unstable conditions, the ordinary solid material began to liquify into a muddy, almost quicksand-like dirt.
Imagine standing next to the water as it laps on the shore of a beach. As it washes over your feet, they gradually sink below the sand and eventually disappear from view. Like quicksand, liquefaction changes the composition of the soil such that heavier objects sink into it.
That was what was happening to St. Louis. Brick by brick. Building by building. As the earthquake forced underground water and liquified sand to the surface, the massive structures built along the river began to lose their structural integrity and collapse into the earth.
Dr. Lansing had a full house now, including off-duty observers standing at the rear of the room, ready to jump in if somebody needed a break. Within fifteen minutes of the earthquake, the world’s media was abuzz with the news. Her team had raced back to work to assist.
She rushed across the operations center and tapped one of the geophysicists on the shoulder. “Do we have the NSA satellite access?”
The young man nodded and pointed at his monitor. Minutes after contacting the USGS director in Reston, he’d made arrangements for her to tap into the national security satellites over the Central United States. Despite the dark conditions, the extraordinary technology could zoom in and read the license plate of an automobile headed home from work in St. Louis, if there was one.
“See if you can identify any lateral spreading,” she instructed the man.
She was concerned about the river expanding into the voids. Rivers were alive. Water was always looking for the lowest point in whatever surface surrounded it. Bends in the rivers resulted in the banks eroding and pushing outward over time as a part of their natural evolution. A slight curve becomes a noticeable bend. A bend becomes a horseshoe. A horseshoe longs to connect one side to the other to create a lake. If you were able to view a time-lapse video of the Mississippi River over the last three thousand years, its shape would twist and turn like an angry snake.
The extent of lateral spreading, the cracking and movement of the ground toward natural deformations like rivers and streams, would provide Dr. Lansing some insight into the magnitude of the earthquake as well as the location of its epicenter. She knew the New Madrid fault like few other geophysicists in the world and had studied thousands of scenarios. Her boss, and ultimately the White House, would be looking to her for answers.
She took a deep breath and exhaled. She paused for a minute to process what was happening. She recalled the day she had been accepted into the earth sciences program at Missouri-Columbia. An obscure news article had caught her eye. FEMA had identified four hazards in the U.S. that would be categorized a catastrophic natural disaster.
They were a category five hurricane hitting Miami, bigger than Andrew in ’93, she presumed. A major hurricane hitting New Orleans, which happened in ’05 after she’d finished graduate school. A significant earthquake hitting LA, and a giant earthquake hitting the Central U.S. in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.
The often-used phrase “it’s happened before and it will happen again” certainly applied to earthquake activity. During the winter of 1811 through 1812, when the three M7+ quakes struck the sparsely inhabited frontier along the Mississippi River, the landscape changed dramatically.
The surface of the planet had slipped deep under the settlement at New Madrid, opening up chasms and cracks across the region. The Mississippi River was diverted in several places, filling the disappearing ground with its waters. Liquefaction threw trees to the ground and landslides into the river. The widening rift along the fault created magnificent waterfalls.
Meanwhile, new lakes, such as Reelfoot in upper West Tennessee covering twenty square miles, were created. Existing lakes were turned inside out as the liquefaction process created holes in the earth’s surface, spewing volcanoes of sand and water into the air. Unsuspecting travelers heading toward the Gulf of Mexico were swamped by the tsunami-like waves traveling along the Mississippi.
The earthquakes’ tentacles were far-reaching. New Yorkers were jolted out of their beds. Church bells rang in Charleston, South Carolina. People in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, were knocked off balance. President James Madison felt the tremors in the White House and recounted his experience in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.
Dr. Lansing had studied the history. She devoured every family letter, obscure news article, and geologic study she could find regarding the NMSZ. This fault was considered the least understood seismic zone in North America, and her warnings generally fell on deaf ears.
Her frustration with politicians almost cost her her job a few years ago when a contingent of congressmen toured the NEIC facility in Golden. She’d implored them to insist upon infrastructure improvements to the NMSZ not unlike those along the West Coast. She’d referred to an M8 earthquake or greater as a very real possibility during their lifetimes.
When one congressman referred to an earthquake of that magnitude as being fictional and an overhyped demon that would cost the American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in needless infrastructure improvements, her boss gave her the look, and the conversation was over. It was Dr. Lansing’s one and only foray into the political arena.
She did find allies, however. One of the congressmen took her pleas to heart and contacted the Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium, or CUSEC. Their board of directors included top-level personnel in the divisions of emergency management for all states adjacent to the NMSZ. Their mission closely aligned with Dr. Lansing’s goals: the reduction of deaths and economic loss resulting from earthquakes in the Central U.S.
The movers and shakers at CUSEC, pardon the pun, were tapped into the political apparatus within the halls of Congress. Their lobbying efforts resulted in programs like the Great ShakeOut Earthquake Drill held annually. Dr. Lansing no longer had to fight the bureaucracy
within the USGS. She now had an outlet to make a difference.
Now, unfolding before her eyes, the worst-case scenario had arrived. She’d sensed it was coming. She’d alerted her boss, who didn’t want to create an unnecessary panic so close to the holidays, especially on a busy Friday. Besides, he said, statistics showed there was only a one-in-ten chance of an M7 or greater.
Well, one was more than none.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Friday, December 21
Halloran Centre
Memphis, Tennessee
Jill sensed the motion from above although she never saw the minivan coming before it landed nose first into the front-row seats of the Halloran. She leapt backwards and fell into a handicap-accessible seat in the sixth row. Somehow, she had the presence of mind to bring her knees into her chest. As the minivan fell sideways on top of the pile, it gradually crushed everything beneath it and tilted over so that the frame fell hard to the carpeted surface just where she had been standing seconds earlier.
Jill let out a primal, throaty scream that pierced the air inside the theater. She began to sob uncontrollably as she assumed Tate was among those buried beneath the pile of debris and then smashed further by the falling two-and-a-half-ton vehicle.
She screamed his name in despair. “Taaate! No! Please, no.” She began to sob, and then she heard something.
“Mom?”
It was Tate’s voice.
Emily joined in. “Mom! Mom! We’re back here!”
Tears that came from desperation and hopelessness soon turned to joy.
“Kids? Are you okay? Where are you?”
“We’re at the back of the stage,” replied Tate. “We’re trapped. Stupid cars have been falling on us.”
Jill spontaneously slapped the bottom of the minivan with the palm of her hand as if she were giving it a spanking.