Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  They turned at the south side of the BART station, and were stopped by a pair of Berkeley policemen, one white, one black.

  “Where you people headed?” the black one asked.

  “The school at Francisco and San Pablo,” Kirstie answered. “We have a lot of people to feed.”

  The policemen, who looked exhausted, smiled faintly. “Well, we ain’t supposed to let anyone go west of here unless they’re on official business. But I guess that means you — sure haven’t seen many officials.”

  “Neither have we, except for the National Guard over on University.”

  The policemen shook their heads. “Those turkeys,” the black one said. “I understand they actually opened fire on folks. Shit. The folks had more armament than the soldiers did.”

  “Dear God. When?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  The TV van caught up with them. “They’re with us,” Kirstie said.

  “Okay. Good luck.”

  “You too.”

  They drove slowly west, then jogged south to Francisco. Einar parked where the ambulance had been. The two black women who had been on stretcher duty that afternoon came out of the school building.

  “My gosh, it’s you!” one of them exclaimed. “Where you been so long, honey?”

  “Out shopping.”

  “And look at what you got. Hate to think what the bill must have been. What’s this TV truck?”

  “They gave us a ride down into Oakland.” Kirstie and the men got out. “They want to tape some interviews.”

  “Gonna talk to some angry people, then. There was a gunfight, a real battle, over at the Co-op.”

  “We heard.”

  “They brought back twenty-two bodies, and sixteen wounded.”

  The news crew began taping while people unloaded the truck. Kirstie leaned against the door of the cab as people jostled around her: black faces, brown faces, white faces. Hands reached out for hers.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” someone said. “You done real good.”

  She smiled unsurely, pleased and embarrassed. She thought about the corpses in the silent streets of Oakland and Susan Smith dying long ago in the rain. She wished Don were with her. She wished they were in Vancouver. She wished she could stop shaking.

  Chapter 6

  The little boat zigzagged through masses of shattered lumber until it was alongside Ultramarine. The four black men tied up the boat at the foot of the boarding ladder and trotted briskly up to the deck.

  Bill Murphy met them with handshakes. They looked around the ship with interest.

  “You came through the Golden Gate!” their leader exclaimed. He was a tall, young man wearing a rust-coloured leather jacket and a broad-brimmed black hat. His name was Mitchell Eldon. “Boy, that’s dangerous. Any damage?”

  “No.” Bill looked proud of his answer.

  “Well. Uh, we are here to see what you can supply, like in terms of food, clothes, blankets, medical stuff, like that.”

  Bill’s smile faded. He looked impassively at Mitchell, then at Owen. “I’m not sure we’ve got anything. That’s more the kind of stuff you get from the Red Cross or Civil Defence.”

  “Forget them. They give us nothing yet. Everything is mightily fucked up over there. Nobody doin’ nothing.”

  “Look, uh, Mitchell — I’m willing to help any way I can. But we need the supplies we carry. And I can’t just, you know, hand ‘em over to the first guy who asks.”

  “Captain Murphy.” Mitchell’s voice was gentle. His eyes were masked behind dark glasses. “You see those buildings up there on the hill? That’s the housing project. We got no lights, no water, no food except for what’s left in a couple little supermarkets. We can’t get into the rest of the city ’cause of the fires and floods. We got two-three thousand folks up there with no homes now. Lots of ‘em hurt. Lots of ‘em slept out in the rain last night.”

  Mitchell’s rifle, a .22, swung to point at Bill’s chest. “I am not goin’ back and tell Mrs. Debney I come back empty-handed.”

  Bill stared disgustedly at the muzzle of the rifle. “And I am not going to be dictated to on the deck of my own ship.”

  “Could I suggest something?” Don said. Mitchell and his friends glanced away from Bill, and the .22 wavered. “Let a couple of us go back with you to talk things over with Mrs. uh — ”

  “Mrs. Debney?”

  “Mrs. Debney. Chances are we can help you better if we know exactly what you need, and you know what we can offer you.”

  “Sure, uh-huh. And while you’re talking, your ship sails off somewheres.”

  “Where to?” Don asked, waving to the north and east. Mitchell smiled wryly and nodded.

  “Okay.” Everyone was relieved at the compromise. “You and the captain can come with us.”

  “No, me,” said Owen. “I’m responsible for our supplies.”

  “Right, fine. Let’s go.”

  Six men in the little boat nearly overloaded it. Mitchell settled himself in the stern and whipped the outboard motor into life. The boat moved slowly west across India Basin.

  The seiches had transformed it, churning up an archipelago of sandbars and wreckage where only mud flats had been a day ago. As they neared the shore, Don saw almost a dozen small craft — sailboats and motorboats — anchored in the shallows or moored to the irregular dike of rubble, three to five metres high, left by the seiches.

  “They was floatin’ all over,” one of the young men said. “We went out and brought ‘em in las’ night and this mornin’.”

  “Weren’t you worried about the seiches — the waves?” Owen asked. “It must have been pretty rugged, at least last night.”

  “Aw well, you know, it was kind of fun.” The young man half smiled at the boats and looked up through his sunglasses at the overcast. “It really was fun. Makes a change, you know?”

  Owen glanced surreptitiously at Don, who said nothing.

  Now they could see that men and women were working all over the dike: chain saws whined and snarled, cutting paths through the debris, and work gangs passed salvaged lumber up the hill.

  “No lack of firewood,” Don said to Mitchell.

  “No indeedy.” He brought the boat in alongside an improvised dock, made of six logs lashed and stapled together. “C’mon, you guys are gonna burn bad, we don’t get you indoors.”

  The six men walked rapidly up the path that had been cut through the dike from the dock to what was left of Innes Avenue. The dike had buried the east side of the street, and half-filled the storefronts and empty lots on the west side. As they came through to the street, Owen stopped short and gripped Don’s arm.

  “My God, my God,” he muttered. “It’s all starting to sink in on me.”

  The stink of smoke and rotten mud hung in the air. Fires smoldered in the dike. The anonymous housing projects up the hill looked intact, but Don and Owen could see a solid wall of smoke rising up in the Bayview district.

  Along the half-buried street, young men and women stood guard outside the stores; they held rifles or pistols and looked self-conscious. Work parties were carrying goods out of the stores and up the hill: bedding, tools, bolts of fabric and food. No children were in sight. No policemen or firemen. No obvious officials. The people clearing the stores and working on the dike gave and took orders, laughed and complained, in an atmosphere of bustle and excitement.

  “Why so many guns?” Owen asked. Mitchell shrugged.

  “Just makin’ sure everything goes where it’s s’posed to. We got some mean mothers in the neighbourhood, you know?”

  Don and Owen, with their escort behind them, started up a long flight of concrete stairs. It was slow going up the hill: dozens of people were moving up and down the stairs. All were black; some gave Don and Owen curious glances.

  “Here come supper!” a teenager yelped as he passed them.

  “Get away with you!” Mitchell laughed. Hilarity rippled up and down the stairs. Don grinned; Owen did not.
/>   Tents and lean-tos crowded together on the playgrounds and dead lawns of the housing project, and plastic sheets and tarpaulins were strung everywhere. But not many people were in sight.

  “Where is everybody?” Don asked Mitchell as they walked down a muddy lane between tents and camper trucks.

  “Kids are in the gym at the school. Old folks are lookin’ after the babies. Sick and hurt folks, they’re in the apartments. Everybody else is workin’ indoors or down the hill.”

  “You people really landed on your feet,” Owen said. Mitchell grinned, not very pleasantly.

  “Well, you know, this new president, he talks about ‘dynamic self-reliance.’” He mimicked an educated white accent: “‘We don’t want black people to grow up in a welfare-oriented culture, we want them to be proud and self-supporting.’ What that means is, they got tired of paying to help folks. So we been lookin’ after ourselves, just like the man says.”

  “What can you tell us about Mrs. Debney?” Don asked.

  Mitchell chuckled. “You call her ma’am.”

  They reached the community centre, a low, rambling stucco building. Inside, the noise and smell were overpowering: bawling children, blaring cassette players, dozens of high-pitched conversations, the ammoniac stink of wet diapers. The rooms and offices were dim, lit only by daylight falling through the windows. Mattresses and sleeping bags carpeted the floors, and children bounced happily over sleeping babies.

  Mitchell led them to a big kitchen at the rear of the building. More than a dozen women were working there. Kettles of soup simmered on two big gas ranges; the soup’s aroma mingled with that of baking bread. Dirty dishes clattered in sinks, and everyone seemed to be working hard and having a good time.

  A tall woman was kneading bread dough on a counter-top. She might have been thirty, or fifty: robust, broad-shouldered and handsome. Under her apron she wore jeans and a white jersey that set off the darkness of her skin.

  “Mrs. Debney? These gentlemen, they’re from the ship.”

  “How do you do?” Mrs. Debney kept kneading as Don and Owen introduced themselves.

  “We understand you need food and medical supplies,” Owen said, raising his voice over the commotion.

  “We’re down to twenty pounds of flour, Mr. Ussery.” Her voice was deep and powerful. “I sent some of my boys off to find more, but they haven’t come back yet. Yes, and medical supplies. We got lots of people hurt, lots of burns, broken bones.”

  “What about the government — the Red Cross, the National Guard? Civil Defence? The Navy?” Owen gestured in the direction of the shipyards.

  Mrs. Debney put the dough into a buttered steel bowl, and began mixing a fresh batch. “Nobody’s helping. Navy moved their people out in helicopters yesterday. We haven’t heard a peep from City Hall, or the state government, or anybody else.”

  “That’s incredible,” Owen muttered. “They must be stretched damn thin.”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Mrs. Debney. “All I know is, I got over two thousand people lost their homes, and hundreds hurt, and more coming in every minute. The whole Bayview neighbourhood is burning down. I need help, Mr. Ussery.”

  “But — we’ve only got maybe twenty days’ food for thirty-two people, and some medical supplies, just a little — ”

  “We’ll take it all, and thank you. That’s six hundred and forty servings, more if we stretch it. And the medical things — bandages, drugs, whatever you got. Anybody a doctor?”

  “Yes, and four or five first-aid people. Uh, Mrs. Debney, look — we have to eat too. I don’t know how long we’ll have to stay aboard our ship.”

  “You’re all welcome to come here. Take potluck, and give us a hand. Especially that doctor and those first-aid people.”

  “I can’t order my people to do that,” Owen said. “They want to get home and see their families.”

  “I understand. Just so long as we get some food and medical help, your people can come and go as they please.”

  Owen’s mouth compressed into a tight line. Don said, “Excuse us, Mrs. Debney,” and led him a few steps away.

  “Let her have the food. They obviously need it. We’ll use the Zodiacs to get our people ashore. Mrs. Debney’s people can give us some local support in exchange.”

  Owen looked around the dim, noisy kitchen, and nodded reluctantly.

  “Okay,” he told Mrs. Debney. “We’ll supply our food and medicine, and our doctor. In exchange we’d like some help with shelter for crew members who can’t get home yet.”

  Mrs. Debney turned the bread dough out onto the counter and started kneading again. “All right. Thank you, Mr. Ussery. Mitchell, you see to it.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Get right on it.”

  She smiled. “Well, I won’t keep you.”

  Mitchell, Owen and Don headed back to the stairs.

  “I see why you call her ma’am,” Don said.

  “She’s a pretty smart ole lady,” Mitchell nodded. “It don’t pay to mess with her.”

  *

  Don rode in one of the Zodiacs north along the shattered waterfront. The wind was still blowing from the west, but blue sky showed through gaps in the clouds; the passengers squatted in the middle of the big inflatable boat, trying to shield themselves from the UV. A black from Hunter’s Point sat easily in the stern, guiding the Zodiac with no more protection than a pair of sunglasses and a poncho.

  “This is like old times,” the man remarked to Don. “I used to run one of these when I was in the navy.” He put out a calloused hand. “I’m Chief.”

  “Don Kennard. Good to meet you.”

  “Where you headed for?”

  “Berkeley.”

  “Woo. Good luck. Think you can get across the Bay Bridge all right?”

  “I hope so.”

  Don was looking east, trying to judge what the far end of the bridge was like, when a sudden concussion made him turn to the west.

  They were less than a kilometre offshore, just east of Potrero Hill. The blocks of houses at the foot of the hill were in flames, and the freeway that sealed the hill off from the waterfront was blackened by smoke. Up on the hill, two clouds of debris were gently settling; as he watched, Don saw another cloud shoot up suddenly. Moments later, the crash of the explosion reached them.

  “They’re dynamiting the houses,” Don said. “Just blowing ‘em up, all along the line of that street.”

  “What for?” asked Chief. “Trying to stop the fires?”

  “I think so. Just like the earthquake and fire in nineteen-oh-six. At least it shows that someone’s trying to do something. The government hasn’t just disappeared, the way it has in Hunter’s Point.”

  “If that’s their idea of doin’ something,” said Chief, “I’d just as soon they forget about us.”

  The smoke thickened as the Zodiac travelled north across the muddy bay where PIO had stood. Chief manoeuvred cautiously, almost daintily, through a maze of logs, boards, capsized boats, even furniture. The bodies in the water were past counting. Don saw the other passengers’ face grow drawn and impassive and knew that his own must look the same. He coughed in the bitter smoke.

  In most places it was hard to tell where the water left off and the land began: a seemingly solid mass of rubble would bob up and down as a wave passed through the water beneath it, and many buildings on the old waterfront survived as brick islets. Chief finally found a place where he could bring the Zodiac to shore at a gap in the irregular wall of wreckage. The western approaches to the Bay Bridge loomed through to the smoke nearby.

  “Good luck to you all,” he said as they scrambled ashore. Don shook his hand again.

  “Thanks, Chief. Give my respects to Mrs. Debney.”

  The streets behind the waterfront had always been grimy and decayed; now they were deserted and flooded. The ten passengers from the Zodiac waded ankle-deep through black water. No one else could be seen, and it was very quiet.

  After three or four blocks, th
ey came to a freeway access ramp and walked up it. The freeway itself held a few abandoned cars and trucks — most already stripped — as well as hundreds of people on toot or bicycles, travelling in both directions.

  “Never saw traffic move so fast,” someone said, and everyone laughed nervously.

  The others all had homes in San Francisco; they turned to the southwest. Don said good-bye and turned northeast, towards the Bay Bridge. He walked quickly, head down, but already felt the tingle of sunburn on his face and hands.

  By the time he reached the shelter of the bridge’s lower deck, his feet hurt and he was feeling unexpected awe at the sheer size of the city’s highway system. The bridge extended into a smoky distance; the grade was a steady, seemingly endless uphill climb.

  It was easier for him, he saw, than for many others. Old people and children straggled among the deserted cars. Many people carried heavy bundles, or pushed wheelbarrows loaded with possessions.

  A tall, stocky Chinese man in his twenties fell into step with Don. He looked at the PIO badge on Don’s duffle bag.

  “You a sailor?”

  “Oceanographer.” He put out a hand. “Don Kennard.”

  “Dennis Chang. Hi, good to meet you. I’m a biologist.”

  “Where you headed, Dennis?”

  “Gotta check on my mom and dad. They live in Berkeley.” He looked off to the north and northeast, where a long arm of the burning oil slick extended across the bay from Richmond almost to Tiburon. “Look at that sucker burn. Man, that’s one of the worst parts of this whole mess — we’re losing the energy we need to rebuild.” “They’ll just tighten up the rationing,” Don said with a shrug.

  “Boy, I sure wish I could believe it’d be that easy. I work for an outfit called Neogene. Ever hear of it?”

  “Sure. Down in Palo Alto.” He paused. “Dennis Chang. You don’t work for Neogene, you own it.”

  “It owns me. Anyway, last year we got a contract with the Energy Department to see if we could design a high-quantity methanogen out of E. coli. Put enough of ‘em in a vat and they’ll grow until their tiny little farts add up to lots and lots of natural gas.”