by John Varley
“Don’t worry, I can handle it. As long as it doesn’t bother you.”
In response, she hugged him tighter. He smelled the shampoo in her hair, breathing deeply.
“I’m so scared about tomorrow,” she said.
“I’m nervous, too.”
Without his even thinking about it, his right hand had strayed down the smooth curve of her back. She didn’t protest, so he gently rubbed her back. He wanted her so badly. He wondered how she would react if he offered to massage her. He would start with a foot rub…
They held each other for a time he couldn’t measure, and then the bed started to shake. They both sat up quickly. They were bounced around, but not violently. It was mostly a side-to-side motion. He could hear things rattling in the bathroom, but no sounds of bottles smashing. The drapes were swaying, and he heard boards creaking in the walls and floor.
“Tremor,” he said.
“Should we get outside?”
“It doesn’t feel like a big one.”
Suddenly the bedroom door flew open and Addison was standing there in her nightgown. The bright shaft of the hall light pinned Dave and Karen like convicts escaping prison.
“Daddy, I woke up and the room was shaking…”
She trailed off when it registered that her mother was in the bed with him. Karen pulled the sheet up to her chest.
“It’s okay, Addie,” Karen said, and patted the bed beside her. “Come sit with us and calm down. It’s going to be okay.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Mother,” she said, backing out of the room. “It wasn’t a big one, and it’s over. G’night.” She started to shut the door, then turned back. “I love you,” she said, and smiled.
Once more back in the dark, they both lay back side by side and laughed.
“I thought the earth was supposed to move at the end of lovemaking,” she said.
She was lying on two pillows with her arms above her head. He took the edge of the sheet covering her and pulled it down to her waist. She made no objection, so he pulled it all the way off her. She kept looking at him as he gently put his hand on her flat belly and slowly, slowly moved it down into the fine blonde hair.
She moaned softly, and rolled over on top of him. She straddled him, holding herself up on her arms, and they looked at each other from a few inches away. Then he rose to her lips and they kissed. Karen knew how to make a kiss do the work of a whole bottle of Viagra. Not that he needed it.
They pressed close and began to move, and a little while later the earth moved, again, but this time it might not have registered on the UCLA seismometer down the hill, though it must have been a close thing.
CHAPTER TWELVE
People often say, afterward, that the earthquake “sounded like a freight train.” They say the same thing about tornadoes, too. Dave could testify that it hit like a freight train. If there was a warning, a slight shimmy or shake, he slept through it. What he recalled was waking up in midair.
He didn’t think he actually fell back onto the bed. It was more a case of the bed rising to hit him.
It happened in absolute blackness. The power died in the early seconds.
He bounced again, totally disoriented, unable to tell if he was on his back or facedown until the bed hit him again, on his right side. He reached out and felt Karen, tried to grab her, lost her, flailed wildly, and found her again. He held on to her arm and pulled her to him. She was screaming, but he could barely hear her for all the other sounds. She clung to him and they were hurled to the floor.
He had a blanket in his other hand and he tried to pull it over their heads as Karen clung to him with her arms around his waist. They were being pelted with objects thrown from the dresser.
He could hear the closet doors banging against the walls. The shelves in there collapsed, spilling many years’ accumulation of junk on top of the clothes that had fallen to the floor.
He heard glass shattering from the direction he assumed was the bathroom, and figured it was the big mirrors in there crashing to the tiled floor.
All these more distinct sounds played out against the background of the entire house groaning in protest, as every nail in every board squeaked and squealed inside the walls, above the ceiling, and under the floorboards. It was almost as if the house were being twisted, back and forth, as well as bounced up and down and shaken side to side. Everything was moving in every direction it was possible to move, and it simply would not stop.
It felt like it went on forever, but they later learned it was just over two minutes. The moment the motion slowed down, Karen tried to get to her feet.
“Addison!” she cried out.
Dave held firmly on to her arm and she fell back at his side.
“Just hang on,” he said.
“But Addison—”
“I know, I know, but you won’t help her if you trip over something in the dark and break your leg. I can’t see a damn thing.”
“I can’t either.”
“So help me find the bed. I think it’s over this way…”
They groped around and quickly found it. He moved alongside until he came to a lamp lying on the floor. His knee dug painfully into something sharp, but he ignored it and felt his way to the nightstand, which was lying on its side. He found the drawer, which had slid open at some point. He felt around on the floor until he found the 4-cell Maglite he always kept there. He found the button and pushed it, and the beam hit him in the face. He blinked, and turned it away.
They were both silent for just a few seconds, taking it all in. The chandelier had gouged a big hole in the mattress. There was a crack running along the ceiling, and several pieces had fallen out. There was a crack in one wall. Half the contents of the closet had managed to make it into the room. It looked as if the closet had been put on spin cycle, like a washing machine, and anything that would fit had been thrown through the door.
Neither of them lingered. He got up and grabbed his pants and pulled them on quickly, found his slippers and stepped into them.
“Don’t go out there barefoot,” he cautioned Karen. “There’s going to be a lot of broken glass.”
“I came in here last night without any shoes.”
“Then let me clear the way. It’s only been a minute; Addison is going to be all right.” He made himself believe that, as the alternative was too awful to contemplate.
The beam of light from his flashlight was like a solid object, as if a film crew had fogged the room before the cameras rolled. It was dust, coming from everywhere. He had to step up onto an overturned sideboard and then down on the other side. Addison’s room was impossibly far away, at the end of the hall.
“Shine a light on the floor back here,” Karen said. He did, and she picked her way through the debris. He gave her his hand and pulled her up on the sideboard.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, pointing at his knee. There was blood soaking through his pant leg, and he could feel some trickling down his shin.
“It’s not bad.”
“Shine it in there.” He stopped and did as she said, illuminating her bedroom, which was even more a shambles than his. But there was a pair of shoes close to the bed. They were high heels, which was ridiculous, but better than nothing with all the sharp edges lying around. She slipped them on and followed him down the hall.
Addison’s door was jammed shut. He put his shoulder to it, and it didn’t budge.
“Addison! Addison! Are you all right?”
There was no answer. Karen began shouting her name as he hit the door again. It moved slightly. Once more, and it slammed open. He’d been afraid something had fallen to block it. But it was just the door frame that had been twisted out of whack.
He swept the flashlight beam over the room.
Addison had long been a trinket collector. Two whole walls of her room were shelving he had put up to hold her various collections. Much of it was glass or china, most of it breakable, and all of it was on the floor in multicolored heaps.
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Instead of just pinning or taping posters of Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron and the other usual teenage suspects to the wall as Dave had done at her age, Karen had insisted they be professionally framed, complete with glass, and hung. Every one, perhaps two dozen of them, was on the floor now.
Addison’s bed was a frilly white thing with a canopy. It was still standing, undamaged. Her dresser was overturned, clothes spilling out of it.
Dave saw all that in a few seconds. What he didn’t see was Addison.
“Bathroom?” he suggested. Karen hurried off in that direction, calling her daughter’s name. He went to the closet and looked in there, saw chaos similar to his own closet but with a lot more clothes and tons of old toys. Again, no Addison.
He left the closet and turned around in time to see her crawling out from under the bed. She looked dazed and her face was pale, but she wasn’t crying.
“Karen, here she is!” he called out, and knelt beside her.
“Honey, are you hurt? Let me see your eyes.” He didn’t see any obvious damage, but he was worried about concussion. Her pupils looked normal.
“Daddy, you’re bleeding,” she said. Karen was beside them now, and they hugged each other. Karen was crying. He felt like crying, too, but he didn’t have time for it. The room started to move again.
“Let’s get under the bed!” Addison shouted. “It’s safe under the bed!”
He was actually thinking about it, though he wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but the shaking lasted only a few seconds, and was not severe.
“Aftershock,” he said.
“I think I’d like to go see if Ranger is all right,” Addison said, and burst into tears.
The horse was badly shaken, but Dave ran the flashlight over him and didn’t see any major injuries. It looked like he had been knocked down, and a few bales of hay had fallen on him. A lot of it was clinging to his back. Maybe it had kept him down, or maybe he was just unable to get to his feet while the shaking was going on. He was stalking in circles within the confining space of the garage, looking wild-eyed. Addison started to go to him, but Dave held her back.
“Addie, I want you to be absolutely sure he’s not going to panic and hurt you before you try to get close to him.”
“I’ll be all right, Daddy. He knows me.”
“I’m not sure he does, right now.”
“I’ll be careful.”
They watched as she moved toward the horse in small steps, talking quietly to him. Each time around he eyed her, but he didn’t seem ready to go to her yet.
“I need to get a halter and lead rope on him and get him out of here,” she said. “I think he wants to be outside as much as we do.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Stepping outside the house had been an amazing experience; he hadn’t realized just how tense he was until there was no longer a roof over his head. It felt so good to stand on the patio—which had a crack running through the concrete toward the pool—and look up at the moon.
He manually opened the driveway gate and stepped out onto the pavement. There were no lights on anywhere on Mockingbird Lane. The big houses loomed in the moonlight, everything eerily silent except the quiet trickle of running water. He aimed the light down and saw one of the gutters was filled with water that was carrying a lot of debris in it, both natural and man-made.
He smelled pool chlorine and realized what had happened. Somewhere up the street somebody’s pool had cracked, and it was all running out to the street.
He went over to the west, looked down into the valley at Beverly Hills. It was filled with dust, but he could see the flicker of a fire in one of the houses.
He pointed the light downhill to the east but it was still dusty and he couldn’t see anything. He went back up the driveway and saw that Addison had a rope on Ranger and was walking him in circles.
“He’s calmed down a lot,” she said. “Can I take him out on the road? He really wants to keep moving.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. At least not until we find you another flashlight.”
“That’s what I’m after,” Karen said. He found her beside the Escalade, which was partially buried in garage junk. The whole vehicle had crept along the concrete until the driver’s side was banging against the garage wall and the rear had crunched into the garage door, buckling it outward.
Unable to reach and open the tailgate, Karen had opened the right rear door and was pulling out boxes, trying to get to where they had stored two lanterns. She had already removed the other 4-cell Maglite from under the seat and set it on the floor beside her. She was an incongruous sight, dressed in a nightgown and red high heels, bent over and burrowing through their carefully packed gear.
She glanced at him, and then at the flashlight on the floor.
“Give that one to Addison,” she said. So he took the light to his daughter and waited until her circling brought her near him.
“You can take the horse out onto the street, but don’t go farther down than the Greenbergs’ house, and don’t go so far around the curve uphill that you can’t still see our house. Walk him, don’t ride, and keep that flashlight on the ground. No telling what might be in the street.”
She nodded, and went down the driveway and then down the street.
He turned away and walked back to the patio. He encountered Karen crossing from the garage with an electric lantern.
“I’m going inside to get some better shoes and clothes,” she said.
He swept his flashlight beam over the outside of the house. He was surprised to find that only two of the big glass floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the patio had broken. Both of the sliding doors had sprung, but they would probably go back in their tracks easily enough.
He headed toward the southern edge of his property, at the edge of the hill, intending to look at the city.
His first thought: the plains of Mordor.
Dust still hanging in the air obscured everything on the flatlands except some of the tall buildings on Sunset, farther south on Wilshire, and west in Century City. Not a single light shone in a single window in any of them. If not for the bright moon hanging in the west he probably wouldn’t have seen them at all.
Beneath the dust there were hundreds of orange lights flickering, like lava boiling up from the ground. At first he thought it might be lava, that the earth might have opened up along the fault lines and was now spewing molten rock directly into the city. But it was nothing as cataclysmic as that, though it was bad enough. It was houses on fire.
With the electrical grid so erratic, and in some places almost nonexistent, people had looked to other alternatives. Those who had kerosene lamps and the fuel to put in them used them. Others used candles.
Karen joined him at the edge of the hill.
“Dave, Addison says we should…My God, there’s fires everywhere. Where are all those people going to go?”
“Sleep outdoors, I guess. I’ll bet a lot of them won’t be too eager to sleep indoors for a while, anyway.”
“I know I wouldn’t. Um…Addison says there’s something we should see.”
“Is she—”
“She’s okay. She came back with the horse and gave him something to eat.”
They started for the driveway. Karen was now dressed in a pair of white Reeboks, a pair of loose slacks, and a blouse that looked far too fancy for the situation, but everything she had of a practical nature—which was only a few changes of clothes—was packed away.
“What is it, Addison?” Dave asked.
“Just come and look, Daddy.”
They followed her out the gate and down the hill. Five houses down, almost where Mockingbird Lane intersected Doheny, Dave began to see what Addison had wanted them to see, looming out of the darkness.
The ground had cracked and slid, with their side now about three feet lower than the other side. There was a gap about two feet wide. It ran the width of the street and into the lawns on either side. On the north it ran beneath a house, which
had shifted badly. On the south side the crack had missed the house there, running along the east side of it and then out onto Doheny, where it looked like it crossed the road, but his flashlight wasn’t powerful enough to see that far. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if there had been a landslide there where the crack entered the hillside. He suspected there would be more, both uphill and downhill.
He cautiously moved toward the edge and shined his flashlight down into the crack. It was not too terribly deep, and narrowed the farther down it went, but it was deep enough.
“I guess you know what this means,” he said.
Karen sighed. “It means we won’t be leaving today.”
From up the street, they heard a woman screaming for help. They hurried in that direction. Rounding the corner, they passed several houses on their way uphill. A man came from his driveway. Dave knew most of his neighbors downhill, at least to say hello to, though they didn’t socialize. Uphill he only knew his immediate neighbors, and he didn’t know this man.
“Is your family okay?” Dave asked him as they got nearer.
“Yes, thank God. There’s a lot of damage, but all we have is a cut where my wife stepped on something on her way out. Do you know the people at the end of the road? It sounds like it’s coming from there.”
“No, I don’t, but I guess we’d better go see.”
“I’ve got to take care of my wife first. I just located the first-aid kit. Have you got any phone service?”
“I haven’t even tried. I’d be surprised if we did.”
The man looked very worried.
“I need to get in touch with my son in Pasadena,” he said. “I need to see if he and his family are all right. I don’t think I have enough gas in the car to get over there. You wouldn’t happen to have any gas for sale, would you?”
“Sorry,” Dave said. They left him and kept going up the hill. The woman had stopped screaming, but Dave could hear voices up ahead.
“Dave!” Karen gasped. “Dave, look!”
She was pointing off to their left. They had been hugging the right side of the road, stepping over cracks in the pavement here and there, nothing like the monster down below but enough to trip over if you weren’t careful. Now he joined his flashlight beam to Karen’s, and saw a big bite had been taken out of the pavement.