Quake

by Patrick Carman

  “What’s a demolition drone?” Faith asked. Whatever it was, it sounded bad.

  “This is how they level zeroed cities. These drones are bombs, Faith.”

  The drones were six feet across, sleek and narrow like a disk, controlled by a series of six propellers.

  “So you’re saying they’re about to take Portland, Oregon, off the map?” Faith asked.

  Dylan shook his head, ran a hand through his thick black hair. “And the Koin Building right along with it.”

  Dylan took the two-way radio out of his pocket again and called Clay.

  “You need to get your people out of the city,” Dylan said. “As fast as you can. We think they’re planning to level it.”

  “Roger that,” Clay answered. His voice was small and static filled. “We have an escape plan; don’t worry about us.”

  The first detonation took place a few seconds later, about ten blocks away. They felt the earth shake underfoot as a skyscraper plunged to the ground in a pile of rubble.

  “What if they hit a building and we’re under it?” Faith asked, thinking of the worst-possible scenario. She could see the tons of concrete and rebar crushing Dylan in her mind.

  Dylan looked around the corner once more and saw that half a dozen drones were coming down the alley from each side. They stopped moving forward and began spinning in a wobbly circle like dinner plates balanced on a pole.

  “I think we better go,” Dylan said, cracking his neck to one side and then the other. “These things are about to blow.”

  There was no time to run and the place they were hiding in was about to be blown to smithereens. Faith grabbed Dylan by the shoulders and pulled him in for a last kiss before all hell broke loose. She felt their combined power course through her like rocket fuel and saw, in her mind’s eye, the peak of the mountain.

  “Time to blow our cover?” Faith asked as she pulled away.

  Dylan nodded and despite the risk of what they were about to do, he smiled. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

  “Let’s see if we can get them to follow us,” Faith said. “Keep them away from the Koin Building.”

  The words barely escaped her mouth when the first detonation hit. Within a few seconds, a dozen more explosions rocked the base of the building they’d been hiding near. As it started to crumble, Faith and Dylan pulsed, flying up as buildings collapsed all around them.

  As soon as Faith cleared the tallest building and found herself in the open air of blue sky over Portland, she searched for the Koin Building. It was easy to spot from overhead because it was the only pink building in the city.

  “There,” Faith yelled. Dylan spotted the Koin Building and they both surveyed the situation. Drones hovered in the thousands, clustered together like flocks of crows. They descended around buildings in clouds, blowing them up with terrifying efficiency. Everything underneath Faith and Dylan was being leveled.

  “We don’t have much time,” Dylan said. “There’s too many of them. It’s happening too fast.”

  Faith looked to the river and saw a rusted-out tanker moored to the dock. It was bigger than anything she’d tried to move before, but she’d felt her powers growing and thought she could do it. If Dylan could hold an entire prison in the air, she could move a ship out of the river and slice it through the sky. She closed her eyes and focused her mind, but the first thing she saw was home: Timberline Lodge, and the jagged peak that towered above. She opened her eyes and stared at the ship, focused on its rusted metal surface with a crushing gaze. Dylan had started picking up debris and hurling it with his mind, taking out one or two drones with each effort. When the drones exploded in midair it was like a fireworks display of color and light as one would blow up another and another, taking out twenty or more in one cloud of explosions.

  The tanker rose out of the water like the remains of a dinosaur dripping with mud and water, a metal beast in the shape of a great knife that could cut through buildings. Faith aimed it along a line of hundreds of drones and moved the ship like an arrow. It cut through clusters of drones, shards of metal peeling away until the ship was torn asunder, raining down metal on the fallen city below.

  There were still too many drones to count, and they continued moving across the city in a wave of violence.

  “There are too many!” Dylan yelled as he came alongside Faith. “We can’t stop them all.”

  Faith thought of what this would mean as she looked down at a zeroed city on fire. They would forever lose contact with Hawk. They would never find Jade. And Hotspur Chance would very likely destroy half of the American population. She thought of the mountain peak once more—she just couldn’t get it out of her mind—and then she took Dylan’s hand.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “It’s big. Trust me?”

  Dylan squeezed her hand tighter. “What is it?”

  Faith didn’t answer. Instead she closed her eyes and thought of Timberline Lodge, the place she wished she could call home. In her mind her gaze lifted to the massive peak and she spoke.

  “Move.”

  Far off in the distance, the mountain began to quake.

  “What are you doing?” Dylan asked.

  Faith squeezed Dylan’s hand tighter still, every ounce of the power they shared focused on the mountain.

  And then the unthinkable happened.

  The top of the mountain, the peak she loved so much, broke free and lifted into the air. It was so far away they couldn’t see it happening, not yet.

  “Let’s move around to the other side,” Faith said, drifting toward the Koin Building. As the mountain moved, Faith and Dylan passed over the crushing power of drone explosions, until they were the only things left standing between the Koin Building and total annihilation.

  “Faith,” Dylan said. He could see the top of the mountain coming, and it took his breath away. “This is insane. You can’t be doing this.”

  “We’re doing it,” Faith said. “It’s both of us. We’re doing it together.”

  Explosion after explosion rocked the city below as the onslaught moved within ten city blocks of the Koin Building. Faith and Dylan landed on the roof and watched as the mountain settled in overhead, casting a massive shadow over all that lay beneath it.

  “This is incredible, Faith,” Dylan said, awestruck by something this big in the air overhead.

  The bottom of the peak released rocks and dirt like rain on a broken city as Faith slowly lowered it. Like a great cloud of darkness, it descended. Faith didn’t drop it all at once; she moved it slowly, into the first explosion and beyond. As the base of the mountain came even with the roof of the tower where Faith and Dylan stood, thousands of explosions erupted. They sounded as if they were coming from underwater as the mountain shook. The sheer supremacy of this thing coming down from the sky blotted out everything it touched.

  When it came to rest over the city, Faith looked up at the peak with its sharp lines of stone and ice.

  “It’s almost like being home again,” she said.

  Dylan just shook his head in disbelief. “Almost.”

  The two-way radio came to life with Clay’s chipmunk voice.

  “You guys really know how to blow your cover in style,” he said, laughing. “We got out into the foothills in time. Thanks for the warning.”

  “Glad you’re okay!” Dylan answered. “We’re on top of the tower, heading in.”

  “Better hurry. No doubt this place will be crawling with Western State military in no time. Get out of what’s left of the city fast.”

  They arrived at the base of the Koin Building and tried the first door they came to. It was locked, not surprisingly. A lot of urban buildings were locked up and deserted when the last group of people left. Portland had been, Faith remembered from history, one of the earliest pilot cities and had emptied out almost overnight. The Western State held lotteries with the biggest western cities. If a city could agree to come in all at once, its residents were given a better set of buildings to live in, more bonus coi
n for buying merchandise, guaranteed employment. All of Portland, at the time nearly half a million people, had fit into one-twentieth of the space it had occupied outside the State.

  They circled the building searching for a way inside as Faith searched for any kind of heat signal that might represent a person moving around.

  “Would the old alarm system still go off if we broke a window?” Faith asked anxiously. “Or is this one off the grid completely?”

  Dylan didn’t know. “I wish Hawk were here. He could tell us.”

  All the doors were locked at the street level. Peering inside, they saw that there was power from the old grid lighting exit signs and small corridor lights.

  “Aren’t we past the idea of keeping a low profile?” Faith asked. “Let’s just throw something heavy through a window.”

  Dylan wasn’t so sure. He looked toward the peak, squinting into the sun.

  “I know we just dropped a mountain on Portland, so it’s kind of obvious we’re here, but I think that’s all the more reason to lie low. If the Quinns are anywhere nearby, they might come looking for us.”

  “That would be bad,” Faith agreed.

  They milled around, searching for a broken window they could climb through and getting more frustrated by the second. These old buildings were airtight, frozen in time.

  “Clay, how are you guys getting into buildings?” Dylan asked, using the two-way.

  A few seconds passed and then Clay answered, “Hang on.”

  They waited, Faith growing more impatient by the second, and then Clay was back.

  “Doors will set off an alarm if you break the glass, but the windows should be fine. They’re double pane, but you should be able to punch through one.”

  “Is it worth risking the pulse being detected?” Faith asked, opening and closing her fist at the excellent thought of putting it through a plate-glass window.

  “It’s so fast, just a blip. And you’re down low surrounded by buildings—that’ll cut the signal for sure. I think you go for it.”

  Faith didn’t need to be told twice. She nodded and walked to the closest window she could find.

  “I’m sensing you want the honors here,” Dylan said. He didn’t have to wait for an answer. Faith reeled back and punched the glass, hitting it as hard as she could with a balled-up fist.

  Nothing happened.

  “Step aside, little lady. I got this.” Dylan’s arms flexed as he pumped his fist, and then he let fly a punch that shattered the glass into a million little squares.

  “I weakened it for you,” Faith said. “It was ready to blow.”

  “Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Dylan joked, flashing one of his million-dollar smiles in Faith’s direction.

  They climbed through the opening, kicking bits of broken glass onto a carpeted floor inside, and found themselves inside a uniformly boring office. Light streamed over rows of cubicles, each with an empty desk and a matching chair. Old computers and printers remained, boxes of office supplies that had never made it out the door, a golf putter that someone had left behind, a Starbucks cup.

  “I’d have gone to the Western State if this was where I locked and loaded every day,” Dylan said. “Talk about depressing. At least we don’t have a nine-to-five desk job anytime in our future. Things could be worse.”

  “Maybe they abolished all cubicles in the States, but I doubt it,” Faith halfheartedly agreed, thinking the exact same setup had probably been replicated a million times over inside the world of the States.

  When they reached the lobby the elevator wasn’t in service, so they started up the switchback service stairway on their way to the eleventh floor. When they rounded the corner for floor number six, they took a short break and Dylan saw a vending machine through the security glass in the landing door.

  “Wait here,” Dylan said.

  “Dylan, don’t—” But it was too late; Dylan was already through the door and it was shutting behind him. Faith didn’t see why she should wait, so she grabbed the edge of the door and swung it open about the time Dylan put his fist through the glass of the vending machine.

  “That right hook of yours is going to get us into trouble if you’re not careful,” Faith said, but she was also interested in what the vending machine had to offer. Her stomach growled.

  Dylan ripped open a box of Mike and Ikes and poured seven or eight of them into his mouth. They were hard as rocks, but they still tasted pretty good. He opened a Snickers bar and touched it with his fingers.

  “It looks okay,” Dylan said through a slurry mouthful of Mike and Ikes.

  “I’m pretty sure the half-life of chocolate and peanuts is nowhere near forty years. Don’t do it.”

  But Dylan took a bite anyway, made a weird face, and then kept chewing.

  “I think I’ll stick with the gum and the Life Savers,” Faith said, pocketing a packet of each.

  Dylan thought better of the candy and left it behind, but he did take a bag of pretzels before they went back to the stairs.

  “These can’t go bad, can they? I mean, they’re basically twigs.”

  Faith didn’t answer as she motioned for Dylan to close his mouth and quiet down.

  “If someone is on this floor they definitely know we’re here, fists of fury,” Faith said.

  Dylan chewed as fast as he could and swallowed hard.

  “Let’s just go. No reason to wake an urban zombie if there’s one living in this building. We don’t need that kind of distraction right now.”

  Faith leaned in and kissed Dylan. His lips tasted like candy and she lingered.

  “Okay, give me one of those Mike and Ikes. It’s been too long, even if it is petrified.”

  They continued their journey up to the eleventh floor, pausing twice to kiss the candy flavor off each other’s lips. Dylan knew the door when they saw it, because it had a Star Trek symbol knocker.

  “Let me guess,” Dylan said. “You don’t know who Spock and Captain Kirk are?”

  “Ummmm.”

  Dylan shook his head. “It’s a good thing your kisses taste so sweet. You’re not so hot in the retro nerd department.”

  “You’re spending too much time with Hawk,” Faith said. “It’s turning you into a dork.”

  The geeky banter was helping Faith feel better and more herself, less focused on all the bad things that had happened. It made her feel guilty, as if she should be sitting in a room crying all day instead of eating candy and kissing Dylan.

  “No way this door is going to be unlocked,” Faith said. “Do we break it down?”

  “I have a sugar high going,” Dylan said. “Let me see if I can do it without using a pulse.”

  Dylan moved to the other side of the hall and bolted for the door, shoulder lowered. The door jamb cracked but didn’t break, so he tried again. This time the door flew open and they entered the most unique apartment either of them had ever seen. It was sleek and open, with floor-to-ceiling windows that seemed to go on forever covering the back wall. The floor was white tile. A few pieces of modern furniture dotted the space, but the room was mostly filled with hip-high platforms holding different pieces of technology hardware. There were placards that described what sat on top of each platform.

  “This guy really was loaded,” Dylan said as he looked around. “It doesn’t look like he even lived here. It’s just a space to keep a collection of stuff and throw a party once in a while.”

  “This one has electric power,” Faith said, picking up a gray cord and dangling it like a tail. “Talk about ancient. Can you imagine having to plug our Tablets in? That would be . . . weird.”

  They searched the room and found more computers with cords. Half a dozen Mac models, lots of old PCs, and a whole wall full of Tablets.

  “Check it out,” Dylan said, his eyes lighting up. “An iPad.”

  “First-generation Tablet,” Faith said, also feeling a slight pang of nostalgia for something so old and foundational to her way of life.

  “
That Steve Jobs guy was a genius, no doubt,” Dylan said, mesmerized by everything he saw.

  “There,” Faith said, reaching out and taking a Tablet with a dust-covered black casing. It was four by six inches, thin, not bad to look at. “This is it. The Tablet Hawk said we’d find.”

  Faith looked at the expansive window and knew that if the Tablet still worked, it would have been charged by the solar energy over these many years. She found a button on the top edge and pressed it, holding for a few seconds. The screen came to life.

  “I hope it has a better shelf life than a Snickers bar,” Dylan said. They moved to the leather couch together and let the sunlight warm their faces as the Tablet booted up. Faith ran her forearm across the glass screen, wiping away dust that had gathered for decades.

  “I can’t believe all this stuff got left behind. It’s crazy,” Faith said. “I guess even the super rich had to leave things behind when they transitioned into the States.”

  “As I recall, Paul Allen was worth like a trillion dollars. This was probably one of twenty places he owned. A guy like that? He was part of the problem. Who needs twenty houses and warehouses full of possessions? Rules are rules with the States—you get one bag, period. This guy had more important things to carry.”

  “He probably filled his one bag with diamonds,” Faith said, thinking as she often had about what she would take inside if she had only one bag. “Books. I’d take books. Those are the real treasures.”

  “Nice view,” Dylan said. “Maybe we should move here when we finish saving the world.”

  Faith had closed her eyes, letting the sun wash over her, but her eyes flashed open at the idea of living in the city. She hoped he wasn’t serious.

  “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to go back to the lodge. The mountains agree with me.”

  Dylan nodded. “We can come down here and get candy on the weekends and play video games on these old computers.”

  “And search for zombies and watch Star Trek reruns,” Faith added, starting to see a distant future in which happiness in silly, useless things might be found after all.