8.4

by Peter Hernon

  Off to the left, the sky glowed a dull orange. A big fire. She started heading in that direction. There were bound to be firemen and police there. She was angry with herself for being so foolish. She should have listened to the woman at the car rental agency and not tried this at night.

  She made sure the doors were locked. She had to slow down again when a car cut in front of her. A slender youth smiled at her from the sidewalk. He wore baggy pants and a baseball cap with the brim bent up. She passed two more men, wearing hooded sweatshirts. One of them gave her the finger.

  Don’t panic, she told herself. Whatever happens, don’t get out of the car.

  Something heavy banged against the front bumper of the Taurus and careened off to the side. They’d hurled a trash can at her. Holleran smashed through some more cans and kept going.

  They were trying to close the street, lining up side by side and forming a human wall. She punched the accelerator and headed straight for them. A few had to dive out of the way. She heard their obscene shouts.

  Gripping the wheel, she sped through an intersection. Missing a turn, she backed up and went down another street. She was trying to get closer to the fire. The flaming sky was brighter, but she was lost in a maze of side streets and cul-de-sacs.

  She saw headlights up ahead. Two cars with their doors open were sideways in the street. Six or seven men and women were standing there, arguing. Holleran slowed down.

  More rocks hit the car. A man put his grinning face up to the window and shouted, “Stop, bitch!”

  Holleran banged up on the sidewalk. As she went around the stalled cars, more rocks rained down on the roof and hood. When she tried to turn back onto the street, the rear tires got hung up. They’d dropped into an open drain. The tires spun, burning rubber. She threw the gears into reverse and began rocking the car back and forth, trying to free the tires.

  The man who’d screamed for her to stop had a brick in his hand. He tried to smash the driver’s window, hitting the glass again and again. It shattered but didn’t break. Holleran buried the gas pedal. The tires spun free, the car swerving as it roared back into the street.

  There was more traffic up ahead. The street widened to four lanes. The vapor lights were working. A major intersection. Police cars were clustered on the parking lot of a convenience store. She pulled up next to them and turned off the engine. She sat there breathing deeply. Her hands were shaking.

  She smelled smoke from the fire. She was very close to it.

  A cop came around to her window.

  “You all right?” he asked, stepping back to stare at the car. “Where did that happen?”

  “Back there,” Holleran said as she got out and explained.

  Looking surprised, the cop said, “That’s Melrose Gardens. You were lucky you got out of there in one piece tonight. Everybody’s out on the streets since the quake. We’re getting a lot of calls.”

  “I didn’t see any police,” Holleran said.

  “You got that right,” the cop said. “No way are we gonna go in there without lights and a lot of backup.”

  Holleran looked at him more closely. He was young, maybe early twenties. He looked scared, and she realized what was frightening him. They’d come close to the collapse of law and order, the prospect of mobs roaming the streets.

  “What’s on fire?” she asked, putting those troubling thoughts out of her mind. The wind had changed. The smell of smoke was very strong.

  “An old meat-packing plant,” he said. “A couple blocks that way.” He pointed with a long-handled flashlight. “Gas line broke or something. It’s been running at five alarms all afternoon. They’re letting it burn itself out.”

  Holleran looked at the convenience store. The plate-glass windows were shattered. She saw two cops with radios walking around to the back and headed that way without thinking much about it. She needed to walk, get control of her nerves.

  She could imagine sitting in front of the fire with her dad and older sister back in Chicago. Her mom in the kitchen, getting dinner ready. “Let me tell you about Memphis. You won’t believe what it was like to drive there.” She’d describe her arrival in the city. Her father would shake his head and sip his Manhattan. He’d tell her she needed to get a handgun and learn how to use it. It had become gospel with him. He’d even offered to buy guns for Elizabeth and her sister, Mary. And pay for the shooting lessons. Before the day ended, he’d wind up raking over the Democrats and President Nathan Ross, all liberals, and the news media until her mom told him to calm down. Her father was Irish and weepy emotional. He’d cried openly the day she’d scored her first soccer goal. She was in first grade, and it was the last game of the season. Mary was a lawyer, who’d sailed through Duke law and was working for a small but good firm in L.A.

  Elizabeth pictured telling them what had just happened and almost smiled at the prospect. It was so unreal.

  “I wouldn’t go back there, miss,” the cop said, hurrying after her. “Couple kids were looting the place after the earthquake. When a cruiser pulled up, they bolted. One of ‘em didn’t make it out.”

  Elizabeth went just far enough to look around the side of the building. Five or six cops were back there with flashlights pointed at a window. A heavyset teenager in a white wind-breaker was lying spread-eagled across the broken sash. He wasn’t moving.

  “Where were you trying to get to?” the cop said, still trying to be helpful.

  “The University of Memphis,” Elizabeth said.

  “That’s way across town,” the cop said. “You really got yourself lost.”

  Elizabeth nodded, half listening. The sight of the dead looter didn’t bother her nearly as much as something else. She’d noticed the cracks in the foundation of the store. Some of them were more than six inches wide. They were huge. Bigger than anything she’d seen in Los Angeles after the Northridge quake.

  KENTUCKY LAKE

  JANUARY 10

  10:50 P.M.

  THAT EVENING LAUREN AND BOBBY MITCHELL HAD a late supper—cornbread, baked ham, fruit salad. Bobby’s favorite meal. He’d been working so hard lately around the boat dock, never complaining, that she wanted to reward him.

  They lived in a two-bedroom ranch house with cedar siding set back on a hill a couple miles from Kentucky Lake. Bobby took care of their two quarter horses, Sam and Rob Roy. He did most of the work in the stable, cleaning out the stalls twice a day and laying down fresh hay before he left for school and, again, after he finished his homework in the afternoon.

  As she set out the dinner plates, Lauren had the radio tuned to a station in Memphis. It was a call-in show, and they had a man on from the University of Memphis, a geologist. They were talking about the earthquake.

  Memphis still wasn’t anywhere near back to normal. Parts of the city remained without electricity and water. It looked like the final death count stood at thirty-nine, including seven bricklayers who died when a wall fell on them. A section of the I-240 freeway had collapsed at Union Avenue, crushing a beer truck and its driver. An old warehouse filled with paint was still burning on Cotton Row on Front Street near the river.

  The geologist mentioned that the quake’s epicenter was near Mayfield, Kentucky.

  “Grandma, we’ve played them in basketball,” Bobby said. The small town was only thirty miles to the west.

  “Shush. I’m trying to listen, son.” The man was talking about aftershocks.

  There’d been a couple of them, nothing severe, but definitely noticeable. Strong enough to keep her on edge.

  “The biggest we’ve had so far was a magnitude 3.2,” the geologist said in his slow, soothing Southern accent. “The activity appears to be subsiding—at least as far as the bigger aftershocks are concerned. But we could feel minor shakes for weeks, maybe months.”

  Lauren figured they’d been lucky. Their dock and home had only minor damage. A couple of broken windows. Some cracked plaster and maybe a chimney that would need tuck-pointing. Some neighbors hadn’t been so l
ucky. There were a lot of damaged foundations and broken sewer and water pipes. A farmer over in Campbell, the county seat, had his whole barn collapse. It fell down like a cardboard box.

  The damage had been far more severe across the state line in northeastern Tennessee. There’d been reports that people had actually seen the ground moving like the waves of the ocean. She still had trouble believing that.

  Lauren went to bed about an hour later. As she did every night, she lay there thinking about her husband. There were moments, especially as she waited in the dark for sleep to come, when she had to fight back her anger at him for getting himself killed. He’d promised he was going to quit the mines, promised it again at breakfast the morning of the cave-in. He’d said he’d had enough. And then he left for work at 5:00 in the morning carrying a thermos of hot coffee and a lunch pail and never came back.

  She couldn’t help the way she felt, blaming him for leaving her without a husband. She needed him.

  Later, when she tried to remember what happened, piece it all together in the right sequence, she couldn’t recall exactly what had awakened her. She didn’t think it was the aftershock. Not at first anyway. For some reason she woke up and glanced at the clock on her nightstand; it was just after two in the morning. She heard the furnace kick on. It was cold, below freezing.

  She’d started to drift off again when the ground began to shake. Her four-poster bed jostled on the hardwood floor, rocking sideways. She sat bolt upright. A framed photograph of her husband fell over on the dresser. Dishes and coffee cups fell from open shelves in the kitchen, shattering onto the floor.

  Lauren slipped into a sweatshirt and pulled on a pair of jeans and boots.

  She thought the big aftershocks were supposed to be over. This was definitely one of the stronger ones.

  Bobby hurried into the hallway with a flashlight. It was the first Lauren realized that their power was out.

  “Grandma, my Michael Jordan poster fell down,” he said excitedly. The poster over the bed was his most prized possession. He wasn’t frightened in the least. This was fun.

  The horses were whinnying and snorting out in the stable behind the house. The quake had spooked them. Lauren went to the back door and looked up at a beautiful, starlit sky.

  “Listen! What’s that sound?” Bobby had put on his school jacket and was standing next to her on the porch.

  She heard the deep rumble. The pounding of rushing water. She realized immediately what it was. What it had to be. They’d opened the discharge gates at the dam.

  It took a moment for that to register. She’d lived near the lake two years and they’d never come close to fully opening the gates, which regulated the flow of water into the Tennessee River and drove the huge hydroelectric turbines.

  The river levels were already at flood stage. The Tennessee was dangerously high, so why were they releasing water? It didn’t make any sense. It would only put a lot of extra pressure on the already weakened levees.

  Lauren flung on a coat and told Bobby to go back to bed.

  “I want to go with you, Grandma.”

  “No way, Jose,” she said, scooting him back to his bedroom. “You go to sleep, and that’s an order. I’ll be right back.”

  LAUREN drove onto the dam—Route 641 crossed right over it—and stopped at the first overlook, one of several places where motorists could pull off the two-lane road and admire the view of Kentucky Lake. There was no traffic at that hour.

  Lauren got out of her pickup. There was a strong, cutting wind off the water. She hardly recognized the lake. Whitecaps were running four and five feet high, the action as rough as during the earthquake two days earlier. Spray flew up as the waves hit the broad, curving wall that plunged vertically to the water. The crashing sound was barely audible over the roar of the water pounding through the dam’s open gates.

  The huge gates—a row of twelve, each the size of a tractor trailer stood on end—were on the opposite side of the dam about midway across the lake. That’s where water was released into the Tennessee River, and where the control house and generators were located. At that point, the dam was more than two hundred feet high.

  Staring into the blackness of the lake, Lauren saw the lights of the marinas flickering along the far shore. Her own dock and boathouse were up a long cove that ran back about two miles from the dam.

  The cold spray stung her face. She got back into the pickup and drove to the powerhouse. To get there, she had to go to the far end of the dam, turn off on a service road, and double back through a series of curves that ended at the parking lot. On the riverside of the dam now, she got her first look at the massive gates. The lake water was ripping through them in long, white plumes, thundering down thirty feet into the wide canal that fed the Tennessee River.

  The powerhouse, a three-story building made of gray stone, was built on a shelf close to the riverside of the dam. On the front of the building that faced the highway, the word KENTUCKY was spelled out in big red letters. The facility regulated the flow of water through the locks, which powered the dam’s hydroelectric generators.

  Lauren parked. She knew one of the engineers there, Tom Davis. He was a hydrologist with the Tennessee Valley Authority. He and his wife lived up the road from her. They’d built a log cabin with a monster deck. They all went to the same church. United Methodist. Lauren recognized his pickup. Another car was next to it.

  The lights were on inside the building. Lauren went into the control house, a room with large windows that overlooked the river. No one was there. She heard someone climbing up the ladder-like stairway that descended to the lower levels, where the dam’s mechanical works were located. She’d taken several tours of the place. You could actually get inside the inner walls.

  Tom Davis came up the metal steps. His face was ashen. Mouth slack.

  “Tom, what’s going on?” Lauren asked.

  He walked past her to a panel of gauges. Spotlights illuminated the open gates and the torrents of rushing water.

  “We almost lost her,” he said, leaning on both hands against the control panel. “I swear to God. We almost lost the dam.”

  Lauren stared at him. Her legs felt unsteady.

  Tom Davis kept talking in the same low, almost sleepy voice. Lauren wasn’t even sure he knew she was standing there.

  “I was up here when that last quake hit.” He turned toward her, and Lauren saw the bright glitter in his eyes. “I heard one of the walls cracking from the strain. An inner wall down by the waterline.”

  Lauren leaned against a counter and let it hold her up. She wanted, needed, to sit down. The only chair was the raised stool at the control panel. Tom Davis was gripping it hard.

  “I opened the gates to get the level down,” he said, his voice soft, almost inaudible. “We’ve got to get the pressure off the wall. I don’t know how much longer the dam can hold.”

  Two men hurried up the stairway from the lower level, their boots clanking on the metal steps. They wore hard hats. One of them was talking on a cell phone. They stopped in their tracks, surprised to see Lauren.

  “Lady, you’ve got to leave,” one of them said. He wore a windbreaker. His close-cropped black hair was streaked gray at the temples. A big guy in a white shirt and tie at 3:00 in the morning. Broad shoulders. He looked to be in his early fifties.

  “I don’t think so,” Lauren said. He reached for her arm, his jaw set. She pulled away from him.

  “They’re with the Seismic Safety Commission,” Tom said in that same strangely detached voice. “They’ve been out here looking at the dam since the first quake. They came straight over after that aftershock.”

  The man in the windbreaker shot him an angry glance and told him to keep quiet.

  “You have to leave,” he repeated to Lauren.

  “Don’t even try to lay a hand on me,” she said.

  The other man had put the cell phone in his pocket. He was younger than his partner, a little shorter. “He wants the gates closed,” h
e said. “He wants it done now.” He sounded as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just said.

  “Do it,” barked the man in the windbreaker, turning to Tom Davis.

  “Who the hell are you?” Lauren said.

  “Shut the goddamn gates!” the man shouted at Davis, getting right in his face.

  “You want to lose this dam?” Davis said. He was about sixty years old, a small man with glasses and thinning hair. He gripped the back of the stool as if his life depended on it. “You want to take responsibility for that, for what will happen?”

  “Shut the fucking gates! That’s a direct order.”

  “No,” Tom Davis said in a slow, steady voice. “I want that in writing.”

  Lauren saw flashing lights outside. Two highway patrol cars had pulled into the parking lot. Men started piling out. Doors slammed.

  Three troopers entered the powerhouse. They wore gray jackets with black belts over the shoulders and Smoky the Bear hats.

  “Get this woman out of here!” the man in the windbreaker snapped. His voice was high-pitched and hoarse, almost a scream.

  The trooper glanced at Lauren. She knew several state police officers, but not him.

  “Are you the guy with the earthquake safety commission?” the trooper asked. The man in the windbreaker showed him an ID.

  Turning to Lauren, the trooper said, “Ma’am, you’ve got to leave this building and get off the dam.” Even as he spoke, he was opening the door for her.

  “They want Tom to close the gates,” Lauren said, trying to explain what was happening, what was at stake. She felt light-headed, breathless. Then angry at the strong-arm police tactics. “The dam has been damaged. He’s afraid it will give way unless the water’s released to ease the pressure.”

  Saying nothing, the trooper led her outside and told one of his men to escort her off the dam. Immediately.