LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation

by Bryan James

  In the north, the historic city of Victoria, perched delicately on the tip of Victoria island, staring across the straight of Juan de Fuca at the smaller town of Port Angeles in Washington, was utterly removed from the map, along with its American counterpart across the strait.

  The San Juan Islands, Whidbey Island, and half of the Olympic National Park, located on the peninsula that protected Seattle from the Pacific, were covered in water and followed by a wave that hit like a runaway freight train.

  The wave barreled through the narrow channel, focusing its massive strength even more as it was compressed into the narrows, then shot from the mouth of the passageway into the network of bays and inlets that dotted the entire region. The brunt of the wave’s force, by sheer happenstance, had hit the island chain directly to the west of Mike, Kate, Ky and Romeo. Like a massive bulldozer, it took with it millions of years of geological evolution, and reduced entire islands and peninsulas to reefs and sandbars.

  As the water pushed deeper into the bays, its power reduced slowly, but its consequences were dire. The plate upon which the entire Northwest was located had shifted, and it was still moving. The water rose as it was pushed inland, flooding valleys and widening existing rivers slowly as the churning water forced its way upstream. Entire towns ceased to exist.

  In Seattle, the water rose to cover Pike Place Market, and flooded inland across the scene of the battle at Seatac, taking more than a million burned corpses with it. The Space Needle was rocked from its foundations, spun sideways in the angry waters and blasted further inland.

  Although much of the fortress had relocated away from Seatac and further inland to consolidate supply routes, the remaining humans gathered together at the runways had been overcome before they knew what was upon them. Dozens of planes were destroyed and, as the quake continued, the runways were torn asunder, rendered unusable for the distant future, as the materials needed to repair them were unobtainable in this, the new world.

  Further south, the foothills of the Coastal range met this giant and they failed. Water poured around the edges and through shallow valleys, concentrating the raw force of the surge and pushing the wave up the Columbia River valley. Portland was washed into the rivers that split the Emerald City through its core. Soil and foundations, already loosened by the earthquake underneath crumbling buildings, rushing into the water. Sky scrapers fell in the surging floods, entire city blocks disappearing.

  In San Francisco, the wave crested beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, slamming against its worn supports with such force that its decrepit wires finally tore free, sending its platforms and cables to the ocean below.

  Giant redwoods swirled in the tumultuous churn, and buildings that had once dominated a bustling skyline succumbed to the dual torture of the earthquake and the tsunami, disintegrating into cement and metal debris. Alcatraz saw the sunset of its last days before becoming a part of the ocean’s depths.

  The wave continued down the coast—from as far north as Vancouver, to as far south as Mexico. Cities disappeared. The Golden Gate Bridge toppled into the bay beneath, leaving only tall red spires standing lonely in the middle of a vast new bay. Redwoods toppled beneath the ocean’s wrath; the sturdy agricultural backbone of California’s verdant valleys filled with seawater.

  American geography as it was known ceased to exist. A new map had been created from the ashes of the old world, and those who had survived this, the second apocalypse of the new age, had more to look forward to.

  From space, the vast destruction was inconceivable. Even amidst a world in which nuclear weapons and fallen, the damage wrought by the shifting of the continents was unimaginable. Had anyone been alive to view the satellite photos or to Tweet pictures from the international space station, the world would have groaned in awe. As it was, the single dead astronaut, who had long since perished from a lack of food, saw nothing of the world’s collapse from his floating crypt, as he floated gently above the ruined nation.

  ***

  “Sir, please speak into the clown’s mouth.”

  Her voice was infused with a frustrating amount of static, but I didn’t care. I knew what I wanted.

  “Triple cheeseburger, large fry, and a huge ass chocolate milkshake, please.”

  The order popped up on the screen and I sighed in contentment. The smell of greasy food washed over me as I inhaled.

  “That’ll be seven bullets and a case of penicillin. Please move up to the second window.”

  Her nasally voice was dissonant now, and I frowned.

  Bullets? Drugs?

  Whatever. I was starving.

  The overweight woman in the striped shirt looked at me with the deep eyes of the soul-deprived as she leaned out, the bag already clear with oil stains. I could see the yellow cheese leaking from the wrappers. A french fry stuck out of the top of the bag, begging to be eaten.

  I reached for the food, mouth watering.

  “Mike!”

  No. Shut up, you horrible thing! I needs the meat! I craves it!

  “Mike!”

  The drool had puddled underneath my mouth and I shook my head in disorientation.

  “Wake up! We need to get out of here, now!”

  Kate’s voice pierced the dream and I shot up, or rather sideways. The room was shaking so severely, it felt as if we were on a boat in troubled seas.

  It was an earthquake. And it was huge.

  She pulled me away from the tangled sheets and I made my way across the floor to the exit, following her and Ky. We had slept through the short, late autumn day, and poured into the twilight of the setting sun, sprinting barefoot away from the cabin and onto the small expanse of grass nearly a hundred yards away.

  The earth wasn’t shaking, it was undulating. Like the back of an enraged beast, it shook itself as if staggering to rise. Stunned, we stared out over the vista that had so enchanted us when we arrived.

  The rolling hills were a picture of madness, trees jumping from the ground and crevasses opening and closing with the folds of the earth. The small two-lane roadway closest to us was nearly unidentifiable, and vast swathes of trees were simply disappearing into the tumult. Further out, the solid, defined corridor of highway that was I-5 had disappeared, covered by darkness and debris. As we stared, I opened my mouth to curse, but we were thrown to the ground violently as another tremor crashed into us.

  Powerful waves of earth were pulsing under our feet, rippling along the ground, underneath the cabin behind us, and on up the rise into the foothills and mountains behind. Clouds of dirt and rock were jettisoned into the air, angrily clawing against their forcible eviction.

  I don’t know how long we lay there, but it felt like an eternity. The ground heaved and rocks fell. Trees splintered and the earth split. We could hear the world shaking itself to pieces, and it sounded as if it would never end.

  The first support beam to crack was a gunshot of splitting wood, as the huge overlook deck tilted wildly to the side and came falling to the earth. The windows of the main living area fell in shards to the ground, and I heard the loud hiss of air as a truck tire was ruptured by something—likely a shard of rock or glass.

  The side of the house that I had been sleeping in only moments ago sheered off from the main area like a piece of butter cut in half by a hot knife, crashing to the driveway and folding into a new shallow gutter of dirt that had shot through the earth from the mountain behind.

  “Mike!”

  Ky was scared, and I put my hand out, finding her back as we all lay flat on the grassy earth, hoping against hope that the planet didn’t decide to open a massive grave underneath us as we took the most basic shelter imaginable.

  “Mike, look!”

  She wasn’t just scared. She was looking at something as she spoke, pointing into the distance.

  I lifted my head, tilting awkwardly as I sought to make sense out of the calamity. I could see vast, growing patches of darkness in the distance, farther westward and as close as the interstate. They were
slowly creeping east, seeping toward us like vast, malicious spots of dark ink.

  “What is it, I can’t make it…” But then I understood.

  It was seawater.

  The Pacific ocean was coming toward us as a massive tsunami—likely connected to the incredible upheaval we were enduring—pushed billions of tons of ocean inland.

  I could see the wall of dark water now. Trees and cars were caught in its fury, and the flooding that lay on the earth now was only a prelude.

  As the shaking finally began to subside, and I heard another part of the house behind us crash to the ground beneath a large rock fall from the hillside, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the disaster ahead.

  The sea rolled into land relentlessly and effortlessly, a wall of unperturbed death that stretched a terrifying distance to the north and south. All we could see was water, backlit by the dying sun in the far distance. Trees and houses and roads and grass and power lines—seemingly all that remained of our fragile humanity’s perch on the earth—all fell beneath the crushing weight of billions of pounds of seawater. Seawater that only minutes ago had likely been thousands of feet deep and had been rudely pushed to the surface of a tranquil sea by the massive shift of the earth’s plates far below the waves.

  The ground began to grow still, with small tremors rattling the destroyed home behind us. In the far-off distance, I heard a deep rumble that felt as if the very core of the earth were rupturing. I had been in enough disaster movies to know that noises like that didn’t bode well at all.

  “Will it come this far?” asked Ky. After all we had been through, the kid didn’t scare easily, and I could tell she knew how serious this was. Our special health circumstances wouldn’t save us under a wall of water like that one.

  “I can’t tell,” I said, squinting into the last rays of sun, willing my eyes to correct for night vision before they were ready.

  “It looks like it’s about a hundred feet tall,” said Kate, staring as the horror continued to roll inland.

  Water was now pushing underneath what remained of the tree line that Ky and I had practiced at earlier, pushing through the evergreens like oil through the large fingers of a wooden giant.

  The sun dipped beneath the horizon and a small blue flash hit my eyes before the twilight came. The earth stopped shaking at long last, the tired ground heaving one last time and then stopping suddenly, as if it had finally made its point, and was content.

  The surge continued to push inland, but was slowing as it reached the higher hills below us. The wall of water had buried the interstate, a cold, merciless killer bent on aggression and subjugation. A small boat was tossed across a steel sign post, and cars disappeared under the onslaught. But the ridge of earth that bordered the eastern side of the corridor slowed the advance, lessening the volume of sea water as it pushed inexorably forward and closer to us.

  Behind the wave, the sea looked calm and placid, as if nothing had, or was, happening. The dying rays of lingering sun glimmered on the surface of this mockery of peace as the killer wave began to die a slow death against the rocky hills that sat below us, the water lapping uncomfortably close to the access road to the cabin.

  “Is it still coming?” Ky asked, staring at the wave as it pushed itself along, as if surfing on the flat expanse of the storm surge, the frothy advance of muddy water that pushed out ahead. The wave was rapidly dying as it tried to climb higher and came against the sides of the foothills. Two implacable forces of nature pitted against one another for a brief moment.

  “No,” I said, almost whispering as my breath squeezed out of my lungs, unable to believe the sheer power that the earth had just pushed upon us as the land and the sea had seemed to reach out for us in anger or frustration. “I think it’s receding.”

  In the growing twilight, my eyes were adjusting quickly, and I saw the wave flatten finally, turning the entire valley laid out before us into an inland sea with gently lapping waves. Floating debris littered the vast expanse of water, and only a few treetops pushed through the deceptively calm surface of the Pacific.

  “Well, you don’t see this every day,” Kate said, pushing herself into a seated position and wiping her brow with a dirty hand. “It looks like the Pacific Ocean just expanded.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  New day, same stupid shit...

  The destruction was nearly absolute.

  As the sun set beneath the sullen sea and the shadows lengthened, our eyes could pick out the details from our perch above the debris. The land had simply been swallowed.

  The small winding road that led from our high ground met the two-lane highway two miles distant. The highway, while torn apart at regular intervals, was only partially submerged by the seawater surge. The pressing water had stopped its invasion as it reached the far shoulder, as if the concrete line were a boundary over which it dare not pass.

  Beyond that road, between the smaller highway and the interstate corridor, where once there were tall evergreens and rolling hills that dropped gently toward the larger highway and the sea, was now a swath of watery nothing.

  Although the water had receded slightly, the interstate remained covered, with the tops of the remaining trees barely visible, but noticeable enough to trace a new river above the asphalt below. Beyond this, as the land had dropped toward the sea over a space of possibly ten long miles, was ocean. Gently lapping waves, white tips barely visible in the gloom. In the far distance, the spot of lonely land that had formerly parted the ocean from the small bay closest to us—Whidbey Island by name—was all but gone. Small peaks from larger hills emerged from the ocean, trees barely distinguishable on the peaks, swaying slightly in the wind as if nothing had occurred. And indeed, for those trees, merely feet in some cases from the water line, nothing had.

  The earth lay in tatters around us. In some places, islands of calm remained, where evergreens still stretched languidly toward the dark sky. In other places, the earth was torn open, rocks visible beneath yards of yawning dirt.

  Trees, many felled from the roots, lay strewn about the torn earth as if having lain too long in the path of an angry giant. Dirt still clung to the wide, dark roots of the larger plants, and the thick smell of earth was everywhere, as if the planet itself had been cut deep by a series of otherworldly knives.

  “I can’t …” Kate started, standing shakily and pushing a strand of hair from her face before exhaling. “That was … unbelievable.”

  “You okay, kid?” I asked Ky, who was sitting, stunned, in front of me, eyes glazed and staring.

  “What … what was that?” she asked quietly. I took a breath and looked upon the wreckage of the cabin. Two sides had crumbled to the ground, sheered from the main structure as if by large scalpels. The deck had, of course, collapsed. Surprisingly, the core of the building, built around an old stone fireplace, remained largely intact. Whether it was safe or not was a larger question, but the roof remained.

  “It’s called a tsunami. It’s a tidal wave,” I said softly, putting my hand on her shoulder. “They’re usually caused by large, underwater earthquakes. In this case, the earthquake we felt must have been very close to the shore.” I squinted into the distance, noting that the water had not started to recede in several places—that it was, in fact, still advancing at others.

  “In this case, the entire damn plate might have shifted down.” I muttered, wiping a shaking hand across my brow.

  In the distance, I heard the sound of thunder and groaned. We didn’t need rain to add to our misery.

  “Let’s head inside,” I said, looking hopefully at the cabin’s remains. Sadly, I noted the large solar water heating array, mangled and crushed beneath the weight of the master bedroom.

  “Kate, why don’t you take Ky inside and check out the food, make sure it’s okay and start prepping to leave. I need to check the truck. Or what might be left of it.”

  I tried to keep my voice light. If the truck was totaled, we were going to be significantly inconvenienced. Althou
gh looking out over the new terrain, it appeared that we might do better with a boat.

  “Will the water go away?” Ky whispered, still staring. “How can we … the trees and grass and roads, they’re just … gone.” Her last word was barely audible.

  “It depends,” I said, starting to walk back uphill. “Romeo!” I called once, and he returned from investigating the utterly fascinating clod of dirt that was alluringly hanging from the root of an upturned tree.

  “On what?” she asked, standing numbly as Kate pulled her up by one arm.

  “If the earth slipped down at the same time the water rose up, parts of the shift could be permanent. Earthquakes are caused by shifts in tectonic plates—really by the pent up energy being released as plates move under one another. If the plate that we’re on shifted down, then the water might stick around permanently. We might have seen the emergence of a new bay. We’ll have to see.”

  Kate pulled her arm up and gave me a look. Ky needed to take a rest. I nodded.

  “Romeo, let’s go.” He bounded forward, toward the back of the cabin, where rocks and debris had accumulated in the driveway that looped between the rear door and the steeply sloped rock ledge behind. I sighed as I took in the truck’s condition.

  Shit on a stick.

  But it could be worse. Front two tires flat, punctured by rock shards from a shattered piece of basalt near the cab. Not too bad.

  Windshield crushed and windows blown out. Unavoidable, really.

  Boulder comically perched in the bed. Funny.

  But problematic.

  The side of the bed had been nearly flattened, pushing the other side out in a half-moon crescent around the huge piece of angular stone. The damn thing was the size of a Fiat. The rear axle groaned under the weight, and the wheel-wells were nearly touching the rear tires. I rubbed my jaw, thinking about the options available.

  We could try to back it up until the truck bed was on an incline in reverse, using gravity to pull it off. The problem was the front tires. We couldn’t jack it up with the boulder on it, and we couldn’t back it up with the tires out.