It was strange. That was her first reaction. Very strange. You counted on the world to be solid and dependable, but then, suddenly, the world shook just enough to remind you that you lived on a blue marble flying through space, and that blue marble had various flaws and imperfections, and it was silly to imagine it would always be stable.
Except that’s what you thought. That’s what everyone thought. Until you didn’t.
The floor began to heave and move and the walls, even these huge stone walls, she realized, had started to shake. It went on and on. Probably it was only a few seconds, but it felt like a million billion years, everything shaking and dancing, and for the tiniest instant she nearly convinced herself the wind had caused everything. Strong winds, very strong winds. But the shake came up from the ground, you felt it in your feet and in your guts, and the magazine was made of stone. Rock. Dirt. Wind couldn’t do much to it.
Then everything became quiet. Supernaturally quiet. That was the strangest thing of all, she thought. She looked around, her headlamp catching the expressions of people near her. Some looked scared; others looked bewildered. Mr. O’Connell held his hands in front of him like a person walking down a dark hallway. And Bob Worm, the giant Bob Worm, had turned crazily into a karate stance, ready to combat whatever came at him. It made her smile to see him, because only Bob Worm would figure you could karate chop a tremor, and she kept her headlamp beam on him for a three count.
And then someone screamed.
Azzy ran at the first tremble. She didn’t think about it, didn’t evaluate her options, but ran instead. As simple as that. As animal as that. Her whole impulse, her whole desire, was OUT.
GET ME OUT.
The powder magazine made her claustrophobic to begin with, reaaaallyyyyy claustrophobic, and she couldn’t stand thinking about all the weight around her. All the stone and dirt. It was like being inside a grave, an enormous grave, and she hated everything about it. She didn’t care how cold it was outside, or how hard the wind blew; she wanted to be anywhere but inside the powder magazine.
Added to that, of course, the entire structure danced. It moved. What was that? she wondered as her legs began to pump and move her toward the door. She didn’t examine the angles or decide consciously on a best plan. She ran. Like a deer at a rifle shot. Like a horse at a snake. If it were possible, she would have kicked up her feet like hooves and tried to kick the stuffing out of the magazine. Because she didn’t like the magazine. Not a bit.
And she sure as heck didn’t like the shake.
Then it all became a little like a slo-mo sequence in a cheesy movie. She saw people near her turn, or look up, or hold out their hands to balance themselves, and she nearly knocked over Harry Cameron, the kid who kept playing the circle-finger-punch-in-the-shoulder game, on her dash to the door. But the door canted sideways a little, moved, and doors, particularly stone doors, did not do that in her experience. She kept running. And her legs felt funny because the ground underneath her moved. It moved. It swayed, she thought, like a magic carpet might sway if you tried to stand on it and run, but she kept going, feeling a little dizzy as she went, and then the bright rectangle of the door began to close.
How? How did the door close? That was impossible. The door didn’t have a door, which sounded peculiar, even to her — a door without a door? — but it was simply an opening into the magazine. It was not a true doorway with a closable door. She ran at it anyway, ignoring the critical part of her mind that thought she might be making a mistake. Someone behind her screamed, a girl, a shrieky girl’s voice, and that only made her run faster.
When she hit the doorway, she felt like a fish rising, like a fish going up in the water column, hooray, food, safety, escape, and she glanced up at the late-afternoon light and missed entirely the block of granite that had chosen that precise instant to fall free from the overhead structure. It had been resting in the same spot for about a century and a half, waiting, on the top of the powder magazine. Grass had grown on the uphill side, but water had trenched around it, creating a tiny ramp beneath it, so that when the tremor hit the building it was just enough to get it moving. It tipped forward and rolled, but even then it would have stopped if it hadn’t been near winter. The soil on the downhill side had turned icy in the late-fall weather, and the rock, once moving, slid forward with increasing speed.
It leaped off the roof and skidded out for a half foot until gravity took it and smacked it earthward. Then it fell.
It weighed seventy-four pounds, and it hit Azzy with such force that she did not feel it. Then more rocks fell — not that she noticed; she was finished noticing things — and the doorway began to close, stone by stone, like tremendously large bits of sand falling through an hourglass and filling up the bottom globe.
SURVIVAL TIP #2
* * *
During a cave-in, or if you become lost in a cave, conserve your light. Turn off flashlights when you are not moving, and use only one at a time. Form a chain of people following the one with a flashlight. If you’re using a headlamp, use the lowest-output setting. Remember: darkness in underground caverns can be absolute. When most people think of “the dark,” they usually imagine they can see something. That is not the case underground. Nothing will be a greater blow to group morale than darkness. Light is essential and is as valuable as water or food in these instances.
Bob Worm listened to the last stones fall. It was intense. Everything had gone from zero to one hundred in seconds. Someone had screamed — was still screaming, as a matter of fact — and someone had just disappeared under rocks. Azzy, he thought, though he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure of much, truthfully, except that the entire powder magazine had nearly collapsed.
Dust everywhere. And far away, like water turning off in an apartment above you, the stones continued to trickle down. More dust. It looked like a cheesy haunted house with all the dust swirling around.
“Hey,” someone called. “Hey!”
But the person didn’t say anything afterward. They just said Hey.
Bob Worm didn’t trust himself to move. He didn’t want to move. Movement meant jeopardy, and he didn’t want to take so much as a step. Things could still fall, he knew. Things could all fall down, just like the nursery rhyme went — ashes, ashes, we all fall down — and blundering forward would only put him in more peril.
Besides, he wasn’t entirely sure where forward might be.
Locating forward meant understanding where backward was, and he couldn’t be sure of that, either.
“Hey,” the person kept yelling. “Hey.”
A snow globe, Bob Worm thought. That’s what it reminded him of now. A snow globe, only it wasn’t gentle white snow that fell, but dirt and pebbles and stones. Lots of stone.
Slowly, slowly, moving his head only, he looked to his right. That was where the scream came from. He saw Sandy Bellow on her knees, her hands up to cover her face, her mouth a siren. She screamed like an air-raid whistle from one of the old WWII documentaries he liked to watch. Her voice went on and on and on.
“Quiet,” he whispered.
She kept going.
“Quiet, Sandy. You’re not helping,” he said.
She looked at him. Her eyes had bugged out — he had always thought that was just a phrase, but he knew better now — and her mouth kept moving around the scream as if her lips wrapped around the sound as it passed.
Sam Harding got to his knees slowly. A stone had knocked him off his feet. A big stone. It had rammed into his right shoulder, nearly breaking it, and it had skinned flesh from his ear. He couldn’t really think straight, couldn’t assess what had happened. First there had been a shake, then everything had let loose. He had never been in an earthquake before; he wasn’t sure he had been in one now. If this magazine still had some gunpowder left in it, it could have been an explosion for all he knew.
“What was that?” he asked, not really expecting an answer.
“It was an earthquake,” someone said.
“Are you sure?”
“How do I know?” the person replied.
It was Bob Worm talking.
Sam nodded. The rock had taken his glasses from his head, he realized.
“IS EVERYONE OKAY? IS EVERYONE HERE?”
That was Mr. O’Connell. That was him shouting.
“Azzy …” Bob Worm said, but didn’t finish his thought.
Everything appeared cloudy, Sam thought. He couldn’t get a good look at anything. Dust swirled in the dimness and little specks of stone and dirt continued to fall. He felt something hot and bright on his bicep, his right bicep, and when he looked down he discovered the stone had ripped his sleeve away. Blood dripped from his arm. His skin looked like it had been run back and forth on a cheese grater. He wiggled his fingers to make sure they still worked. They did, but slowly.
“Azzy …” Bob Worm said again.
What about Azzy? Sam thought. He couldn’t focus. The dust was disorienting. It was almost possible to imagine up was down, and down was up.
Then Ms. Carpenter appeared out of the dust, her face stretched tight with worry, her eyes blinking.
“Sam, you okay?” she asked quietly.
He nodded.
He wasn’t okay, but he nodded anyway. He wasn’t sure why, but he suspected it had something to do with Azzy. He was okay compared to Azzy. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did.
“Bob, you okay?” she asked Bob Worm.
Bob nodded. He didn’t say anything.
“That was an earthquake,” Mr. O’Connell called. “It had to be. That was an earthquake!”
Ms. Carpenter bent close and looked at Sam’s arm.
“That must hurt,” she said.
Ironically, it hadn’t hurt until she said it must. Then it hurt like the devil. He felt it pulsing in time to his heart.
“It hurts a little,” Sam said.
“We’ll look at it in a second. First we have to check on everyone, okay? Just hold on a second. I know you’re in pain.”
She left. The dust took her. Yes, it was dreamlike, Sam admitted. The effect would be almost too cheesy to use in a movie, but it worked here. Imagine Dracula going back into his grave, or down the stairs into the dungeon. It worked like that.
Whoever had been yelling Hey! finally stopped.
That was a relief, Sam thought. He needed to look down at his arm again, but he didn’t really want to do it. He didn’t want to see it. He worried he was mangled, and mangled bad. He had once brought a robin into the house after a UPS truck had hit it. The robin had jumped around, obviously in shock and alarm, but it kept fluttering futilely in circles. The broken wing dangled from the root of the intact wing like a balloon tied around a kid’s wrist. It was horrible to look at.
He didn’t want to see that.
“Everyone is accounted for except Azzy,” Ursula whispered to Eamon O’Connell. They stood slightly removed from the group of students they had gathered in front of them. For reasons she did not entirely understand, Ursula found it easy to be calm. At least to sound calm. Inside, her stomach felt anything but calm.
“Is she …?” Eamon started to ask, but didn’t finish the sentence.
“No way to know. She ran outside.”
“Did she make it?”
Ursula shrugged. She had been shrugging a lot in the past three or so minutes.
“Of all the places to be during a quake,” Eamon said, “this might be one of the worst.”
“If we stay calm, we’ll be all right.”
“Maybe,” Eamon said. “Yes, yes, sure. Sorry. Yes, we’ll stay calm.”
“We should talk to them.”
“We will.”
“You should,” Ursula said. “This is your project.”
“You know we might be trapped in here?” he whispered.
“We might be, but we don’t know yet. We’ll have to see. Sam’s arm is bleeding pretty badly. He’s a risk for shock.”
“Is anyone else hurt?”
“Nothing too serious. Bumps and bruises.”
Ursula watched Eamon nod. She wondered if this was the moment when she should reach over and slap him. Wake up, she wanted to scream into his face. But she doubted that would instill confidence in the kids. He seemed foggy and unsure of what came next.
Then the ground began to shake again.
Someone — Sandy — let out a giant scream. It went up and down Ursula’s spine and rang some sort of internal bell. It made everything horrible. If she could have thrown a tomahawk of silence in that instant, she would have done it. But she couldn’t and Sandy’s voice went up and up and up until it could have been a genuine siren cranked to report the tremor.
The room shook. A gazillion pounds of rocks and dirt on a small island in Maine rocked up and down like the back of a shying horse. Ursula didn’t move except to bring her hands out in front of her. Her eyes passed over the students and their eyes passed back at her and everyone exchanged a look as if to ask, Is this really happening?
But it was happening. The rocks began sliding again, shifting, and Ursula heard the grating sound and thought of molars. Big teeth. Teeth grinding at night — a gnarly, horrible sound. Dirt fell through the roof and landed in pitter-pats of soft sighs. The floor continued to buck and sway until finally the room quieted and the only sound left in the world was Sandy Bellow screaming her fool head off.
“Stop, Sandy,” Ursula said.
Sandy didn’t stop. Sandy kept screaming, higher and higher, until finally Mary Eihorn took a step toward her and slapped her straight across the face. Then the sound stopped. It stopped and left nothing in its place.
“We can’t get out,” Ursula heard Eamon say behind her. “We’re trapped.”
The next tremor came as Mary Eihorn was handing a stone to Harry Cameron. Harry was supposed to hand it to Sandy Bellow, who handed it to Bob Worm, who lobbed it about a dozen feet to the left of the doorway. A daisy chain. A chain gang. Mary couldn’t remember the proper name for it, but her family had always made a chain when they had to bring cordwood in for the winter. It was the best way to move a lot of little things with a minimum of effort. It could almost be fun, she knew, but that was on a bright fall day when you had an apple pie baking in the house, the good smells drifting out to you and making you happy to be busy. Apple days, her dad called those kinds of perfect New England days. They had spent a lot of apple days passing wood hand-to-hand into the basement.
But the powder magazine was a different story.
She stopped for a moment when the tremor came. It was less definite than the earlier two. It passed quickly, like summer thunder going away over the mountains. The ground shook and chattered. No, it wasn’t like summer thunder, Mary thought. It was like a giant walking slowly away, each footfall becoming softer with distance.
“That was another tremor,” Harry Cameron said, his hand out to receive the stone Mary had ready to give him. “An aftershock.”
Everyone had stopped, she saw. Even Mr. O’Connell and Ms. Carpenter had stopped tending Sam. They had Sam stretched out on the floor, a couple jackets underneath him. They had borrowed her headlamp so they could see his wounds. Only one light among them, Mary knew. The rest of the stuff — headlamps, water, food, even a satellite phone — waited for them out by the tents. No one had thought there was any need to bring a headlamp on a quick excursion to see the powder magazine.
Now they knew better.
“Stay calm,” Mr. O’Connell said. “That’s just an aftershock.”
“I hate it,” Sandy Bellow said.
“We should be okay now,” Mr. O’Connell said. “That should be the last of it. If anything else comes, it will be softer.”
“What about tsunamis?” Harry asked.
Mr. O’Connell didn’t answer for a second. They all listened to the last tiny tremor move off still farther. A few small rocks, pebbles, really, fell onto the ground from the roof above.
“I doubt tsunamis are an issue here,�
� Mr. O’Connell said carefully.
“Why not?” Sandy asked. “We’re on an island, aren’t we?”
She said “aren’t we” with enough venom and scorn to make Mary’s hair stand up on the back of her neck. She tried to feel sorry for slapping Sandy earlier, but she simply couldn’t. That girl deserved to be slapped about every ten minutes.
“We’re not at the edge of a geological plate,” Ms. Carpenter said. “We’re in the center of a plate. To get the really big waves, you need a huge upheaval down deep. I don’t think what we experienced is on that scale.”
Just enough to lock us into a vault underground, Mary thought. Just that.
“Let’s keep moving stones,” Mary said, handing Harry the stone she had been holding since the tremor started. “Let’s control what we can control.”
It was almost entirely dark. The last rays of twilight came in through the slots that looked out to the sea. The light lent everything a hazy, imperfect outline. One of the slots had shut, collapsed from above with the weight of the shift. Only one slot remained, but it appeared sturdy and solid and at least, Mary thought, they wouldn’t have to worry about suffocation. That was off the table. But everything else was on the table: no food, no water, no consistent light, no latrines, no anything.
Those items were very much on the table.
She worked another five minutes, trying to be smart about which rocks she removed. The trick, she knew, was to have a plan for the removal. If you simply grabbed any old rock and passed it backward, then you might inadvertently work against yourself. Rocks could slide and fill in empty spaces. This job was like Jenga, the game in which you kept carefully lifting off pieces of wood and placing them on top, creating a tippy, unstable tower. Her headlamp would have helped a good deal to determine which rocks to select, but she had to be satisfied to squint in the near darkness and do her best. They needed to use the headlamp on Sam. Sam was pretty messed up.
Cave-in Page 3