by Peter Hernon
Holleran scanned the data with increasing skepticism. It had started eating at her even as she watched Prable’s video. The relationship between earthquakes and such phenomena as solar storms, the tides, and gravitational pull was simply too remote and unproven for her to take seriously. She’d never been able to buy into such theories, which were far outside the scientific mainstream. She found herself sitting there wondering how a man of Prable’s brilliance could have gone so far astray from his original discipline of geophysics. The waste of it all saddened her.
One of the files contained his analysis of stress buildup along the fault. Holleran found that data far more interesting.
Using two-dimensional computer graphics, Prable demonstrated how ground in the seismic zone had experienced a gradual uplift that started approximately a hundred miles north of Memphis. In one three-hundred-square-mile sector, the ground had risen as much as seven centimeters over four years. That was a huge, rapid change. The computer’s graphic presentation of this deformation was outstanding. It showed a dome-shaped uplift, which strongly suggested large, horizontal movements deep underground and a buildup of tectonic strain energy.
Holleran switched to a file named: Earthquake Projection Data.
For the rest of the long night, she pored over Prable’s computer analysis of an earthquake risk along the New Madrid Seismic Zone. She was impressed by his marshaling of facts. It was an amazing compilation of data, seemingly disparate, but all focused on a single seismic event.
He’d even provided a statistical analysis of the probability of a major quake on the New Madrid Fault. It was crucial information, for without a probability assessment—an indication of the odds of a quake happening—a prediction was meaningless. Holleran doubted such an assessment was remotely possible based on the data he used, most of which she found seriously flawed. With the exception of uplift along the New Madrid Seismic Zone, it seemed to her the assembled facts had little if anything to do with seismology. She found herself repeatedly questioning his conclusions and much of his data.
Holleran sat in front of the computer monitor, fighting the onset of a headache and wondering if his terminal illness had made Prable irrational, even slightly crazy. His earthquake data, in her opinion, had little or no validity. It was almost pseudo-science.
The one exception, the fact that troubled her, was the degree of deformation he’d found north of Memphis. She hadn’t been aware of that. It was quite large. She was sure seismologists at the University of Memphis—they had several good ones—were tracking it. She’d met one of them, the head of the university’s earthquake center. He was considered the country’s leading authority on the New Madrid Fault. She couldn’t remember where they’d met. Probably some conference. She’d try to run down his name and call him in the morning or send an E-mail.
It was hopeless trying to find it now. She’d been up too long without eating anything and was starting to have trouble focusing.
Holleran was beginning to understand Prable’s last comments on the video—his apology for what he’d done to her. He’d left her with a real mess on her hands—and a disturbing memory. She could still see the look of fear on Prable’s face when he described what might happen on the New Madrid Fault. His fear was genuine.
Holleran downloaded his data onto a disk. She’d been up for twenty hours. Her entire body craved sleep. When she could think more clearly, maybe she could sort some of this out.
NEAR MAYFIELD, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 10
5:00 A.M.
THE ALARM NEXT TO ATKINS’ BED JARRED HIM awake. He could smell the aroma of strong coffee. Within five minutes, he met Ben Harvey in the kitchen. They drove to the hills where they’d seen the strange lights the night before. They got out there just as the sun was coming up. A thin sheet of ice covered the ground and trees.
Atkins wanted to make absolutely sure no power lines or underground cables were buried nearby. They slogged up and down the steep, frozen hillside, their boots crunching through the crusty ice. Atkins was looking for any sign of fissures or grabens, places where the earth had given way to form sinkholes. He didn’t spot anything unusual in the topography.
Harvey urged him to have breakfast and wait for the sun to melt the ice. He’d heard on the radio that driving conditions were treacherous. But by 6:00, after thanking Harvey and his wife for their hospitality, Atkins was heading back to Memphis in his rented Jimmy. He kept the speed under twenty miles an hour on the ice-covered blacktop.
Atkins had a hard time focusing on the road and his driving. He kept thinking about the lights and a possible explanation. If it wasn’t a shorted-out electric line, what about swamp gas? That was probably a stretch, but escaping gas sometimes emitted a shimmery glow that could be detected at night. The problem was he hadn’t smelled anything out in the field. He wondered if some kind of strange electromagnetic discharge might be another possibility.
He didn’t have any good answers. Not about the lights. Not about the rats that had swarmed over his four-wheel-drive in a field or about all those dead frogs and snakes at Kentucky Lake.
Before he left for Memphis, he’d left a message for Walt Jacobs, telling him about the lights and asking him to pull together all of his seismic data on the New Madrid Fault. As soon as he got back to the USGS’s offices at the University of Memphis, he’d make arrangements to send someone to Harvey’s farm with a camera. He might even go himself and take another look around. If he did, he’d make sure he brought along a good set of topo maps to check the ground elevations.
After half an hour of white-knuckled driving, Atkins passed a sign for the turnoff to Reelfoot Lake. He was passing right through the center of the New Madrid Seismic Zone.
It was a constant struggle to keep the Jimmy on the road. Even the lightest tap on the brakes sent the back end sliding sideways. He crept up to a rural intersection and pulled to a stop. A Tennessee Highway Patrol car, blue lights flashing, was blocking the highway.
The trooper rolled down the window and waved to Atkins.
“Road’s closed ahead,” he said. “Got a bridge that’s solid ice. Had a bad accident up there couple hours ago. A man’s dead.”
Atkins explained that he was with the U.S. Geological Survey and was in a hurry to get to Memphis.
“This is important,” he said. “I’m willing to take my chances.”
“Sorry, no can do,” the trooper said. He was polite but firm.
There was a truck stop and diner across the road, a white prefab building with a red awning over the door and three sets of gas pumps. A few cars and pickups were parked on the gravel lot.
“Why don’t you get something to eat,” the trooper said. “Irma does a damn good breakfast. We ought to have the road open in an hour or so.”
Atkins nodded and pulled onto the lot. A few years back, he probably would have argued with the cop. His temper had been an issue with Marci, his last steady girlfriend. They’d had an on- off relationship for nearly two years. A long time for him, the longest since he’d lost Sara. He’d come close to falling in love with Marci. Maybe he even had and hadn’t realized it until it was too late. She was a lawyer. Petite, long brown hair, a lovely woman. They’d met on the racquetball courts at the YMCA in Reston. She’d finally walked out on him, and he didn’t blame her. She was tired of his temper tantrums and sulking moodiness, but mainly tired of him not being there. He’d gone to Ankorah after an earthquake. When he got back to their apartment three weeks later, she was gone. She’d taken only her clothes.
“I recommend her apple pie,” the trooper called out.
Atkins smiled tightly and waved. As he got out of his car, he looked across the road. An old church with faded white paint and a tall, graceful steeple was set back from the intersection. A small home, also made of white clapboard, stood next to it. The parsonage. A cemetery wrapped around the church, a fenced yard with hundreds of gray, weather-beaten headstones that tilted at odd angles.
Atkins heard a dog barking. The
animal, a black Lab, was standing on the front porch of the parsonage, head back and howling. As Atkins watched, the big dog began pulling at its chain. Straining to break free, it jerked and tugged so hard that it fell over. The dog got up and lunged again, the chain holding it back. The animal’s piercing bark was like nothing Atkins had ever heard. It looked frantic to free itself.
The front door opened. An elderly man wearing a blue sweater and holding a newspaper stepped onto the porch to see what was wrong. The dog instantly turned and hurled itself at him, knocking him down. The man fell hard as the dog kept trying to break its chain.
Atkins ran to help. So did the trooper. A woman opened the door and had to slam it shut when the dog charged her. The old man managed to get up on his knees, grab the chain, and pull the Lab over on its side. He unfastened the lead from the collar and the dog was off the porch like a shot. It was acting crazy. There was no other way to describe it.
Dumbfounded, Atkins watched the animal race across the open field behind the church when the ground began to shake. A mild jolt, quickly followed by a stronger one. Instinctively, Atkins began counting: one, two, three. Four seconds before the shear waves arrived. The earthquake’s epicenter had to be close. It was a good shake, one of the strongest he’d felt in years.
The ground rocked for over ten seconds. At least a magnitude 7, maybe more, he figured.
Atkins looked out at the field behind the church and couldn’t believe his eyes. The undulating ground was moving from left to right in an S wave. It was headed in his direction. Transfixed, he watched it roll toward him—ground, trees, church, the parsonage riding up and down on its crest as it swept by. The wave knocked him off his feet. He’d been on solid earth one moment, in the air the next.
The trooper had fallen to his knees. He pointed across the road to the church.
“There goes the steeple!” he shouted.
Toppling over, the gilt cross going first, the steeple snapped off at the place where it was attached to the roof. Atkins watched it fall. Then the ground began to heave again. There was a deep rumbling, far off, but building louder. Then the earth erupted in geysers of sand and water. Dozens of blowholes spouting muck twenty feet into the air.
Atkins knew immediately what was happening. Liquefaction. The ground had suddenly liquefied or turned to quicksand. He’d never actually seen it happen before, but this was a textbook example, taking place right before his eyes. A stunning display. The force of the earthquake had blasted up a mixture of foul-smelling water, sand, lignite or “brown coal,” and other debris from deep in the ground. As he watched, amazed, four or five separate geysers ripped the cemetery open. Clods of muddy earth, bits of wood and peat were blown into the air. Caskets were pushed up to the surface. Entire coffins lay exposed. Some with only the tops or sides or a smashed end visible, poking up through the ground. A few lids had sprung open. Bodies had pitched out. Skeletons. It was horrific.
The trooper shouted, “Do you hear that?”
The ground thirty feet from Atkins opened with a tearing sound and just as quickly slammed shut again. It cracked and groaned like an ice floe breaking up. The grinding noise was loud, unnerving. The fissure was four or five feet across and could have been several hundred yards long.
There was another good shake, less intense than the first. This one shattered the diner’s hand-painted plate-glass window. Customers began pouring out of the place.
Atkins ran to help the old man, who was still lying on the front porch of the parsonage. The house had been pushed off its stone foundation and was listing on its side. The crevasse left a jagged crack in the ground that crossed the road at a right angle, splitting the pavement in a wide gash. The offset was a good two feet.
Atkins got the man under one arm, while the trooper took the other. The man’s wife had come out to help. Both of them were dazed with fear. The woman said he was a Baptist minister. They both kept staring at the cemetery, eyes clouded, uncomprehending. The ground was littered with fragments of broken caskets, pooled muddy water, and bones.
It took nearly an hour of trying before Atkins finally managed to get through to Walt Jacobs’ office at the University of Memphis. He made the call from the diner.
Jacobs, who’d arrived back in Memphis late the night before, gave him the news. The earthquake was a magnitude 7.1, the biggest quake on the New Madrid Fault in 104 years. The epicenter was about thirty miles northeast of Reelfoot Lake, but the seismic energy had radiated due south. Memphis had taken a solid hit.
“We’ve got some damage here,” Jacobs said, struggling to regulate his voice. “The reports are just starting to come in. Sounds a lot like Northridge. We’re going to have some casualties.”
KENTUCKY LAKE
JANUARY 10
6:22 A.M.
MOST MORNINGS STARTED EARLY FOR LAUREN Mitchell, well before six, and this one was no exception. Even though they’d had an ice storm the night before, the white bass were running in the main channel and there were some die-hard fishermen who put on insulated snowmobile suits and went out after them in bass boats. It didn’t matter how cold or wet it was. Someone was always out on the water.
Lauren was getting ready to check the fingerlings in the minnow tank when the first sharp jolt knocked her to the floor. Her feet came right out from under her and she went down hard, barely getting her hands up in time to break the fall.
Another hard shake was followed closely by two more, each more powerful than the other. The dock lurched up and down, straining the mooring cables until they creaked and vibrated. Fishing rods, reels, and other gear crashed down from their pegs and shelves. Lauren waited until the wild seesaw motion slowed before she went outside on the deck.
In a matter of seconds, the lake had changed dramatically. The water churned with whitecaps. Lauren hardly recognized it. She’d never seen the normally placid water so rough, not even during the recent spells when big waves were running. It was boiling out there.
Lauren had to grip the railing hard when the dock began rocking again. Water washed over the walkways. For a moment she wondered if the marina was going to pull apart or collapse. That was the first she realized what was happening: they were having an earthquake. And, by the feel of it, a damn good one.
Thank God her grandson, Bobby, had already left for school in Mayfield, she thought. The boy liked to hang out on the dock in all kinds of weather. If he’d been on one of the narrow walkways that separated the boat slips, he might have lost his balance and gone into the water.
It would have been a good time for that geologist to be here. When this was over, maybe she’d give him a call in Memphis. If they were looking for reasons why all those animals were going crazy, they had their answer now. She remembered the frozen frogs and snakes. Somehow they’d known what was coming.
She wished suddenly that her husband Bob were still alive. Maybe he could have made some sense of all this.
God, how she missed the man. She’d never gotten over his death.
Lauren had bought the boat dock nearly twenty years earlier using insurance money she’d received after her husband and fourteen other men were killed in a coal mine accident. They were working in the Golden Orient, the deepest, most deadly mine in Kentucky. A cave-in on level 15 had trapped Bob and the others fifteen hundred feet underground. It took six weeks to get the bodies out. They found all of them in a twenty-foot-long section of tunnel. The air had probably given out in about an hour. Everyone, her husband included, had suffocated, but not before many of them had scribbled notes to their wives and loved ones on scraps of paper and stuffed them in their pockets. She kept Bob’s note framed on her dresser. There were only seven words: I LOVE YOU GOD KEEP YOU SAFE.
A year after Bob’s death, Lauren bought the dock and marina. She and her grandson lived on a two-hundred-acre farm about two miles away. They had a stable and three horses. It was a good life. The dock was making a little money. Lauren couldn’t complain. Her parents had recently moved to Heath, n
ear Paducah. She was living on their farm. Her dad had decided to move into the city when it got too hard to climb up on a tractor. Her mother hadn’t minded at all. She’d jumped at the chance to leave the country.
The dock was still bumping up and down in the rough water. Lauren got a pair of binoculars and focused on the big dam that loomed two miles in the distance. It stretched nearly a mile and a half across the north end of the lake. Kentucky Route 41, a two-lane blacktop, ran right along the top of it.
Lauren couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Huge waves were slamming up over the rim of the dam. It looked as though the water was washing right over the highway. She’d never seen anything like that before.
SANTA MONICA
JANUARY 10
8:49 A.M.
ELIZABETH HOLLERAN HAD GOTTEN UP MUCH later than usual. She slipped into a pair of khaki chinos and a denim shirt and went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. She normally drank decaf, but not this morning. Groggy with fatigue, she needed a jolt of the real thing. She’d crawled into bed shortly after 3:00 a.m., then had awakened twice, unable to sleep, too agitated by Otto Prable’s video and the data she’d seen at his office.
Holleran was trained to be extremely skeptical about any purported earthquake prediction. It was an inbred, almost instinctive defense mechanism. There were too many well-meaning incompetents. Too many psychics. Too many wild-eyed quacks ready to come out of the woodwork and forecast a big quake. She’d come by her skepticism naturally. Her father was a retired biologist who’d taught at Northwestern for nearly thirty years. What she knew about the rigors of the scientific method and self-discipline she owed to him. He’d trained her to rely solely on her own observations and verifiable facts; nothing else mattered. Nothing.
Holleran wanted to go over Prable’s data again and examine it carefully with all the critical skepticism she could muster. She wanted to do her best to find the holes that would quickly disprove it. There was bound to be a miscalculation or false assumption on his part, but it might take her days of hard work to ferret it out and she didn’t have any time to spare.