On Shaky Ground

by Nance, John J. ;

  If he had not rushed to the aid of this lady … if he had still been inside …

  At last they were out the door, Mary Louise Rustigan keeping a death grip on her daughter’s hand as they jumped over the rubble, cleared the inside of the sidewalk, and turned to the east, running as fast as their legs could carry them on the bucking surface, running with every ounce of energy possible alongside the store and up Fifth Avenue, back toward the family’s business location, staggering and stumbling but making headway, running from the horror of the store, running for safety, far enough out now to avoid the fate of the young man back at the entrance. From the drugstore across the street a handful of other traumatized Alaskans watched the drama at Penney’s as they hung on. The woman and little girl were directly across from them now, straining to get up the street, being thrown around like everyone else by the heaving pavement. It looked as if they would make it. The two were less than fifty feet from the eastern edge of the store, where they would be out of harm’s way from the falling concrete slabs, clear of the mortar and steel and whatever else was in the structural heart of the walls of the store, walls that were beginning to crack near the northeast corner as the multistory corner itself began to fail, suddenly descending alongside the fleeing mother and daughter, dropping toward the sidewalk just to their right, tons of material in downward motion, propelling another of the concrete slabs down with it, mere feet away from Mary Louise and Bonita, who couldn’t see what was happening above and to their right, as the people in the drugstore watched, transfixed and helpless.

  In his Turnagain Heights home, the walls in front of Warren Hines were undulating in and out as if a platoon of D-8 bulldozers had tied lines on them and were alternately pushing and pulling. This looked like some sort of horror flick. It couldn’t be real!

  The drapes were now airborne, too, in the living room, giving a macabre air to the scene as a thirty-pound stagecoach lamp flew off the coffee table, sailing through the air. Warren didn’t see where it landed. He didn’t have time.

  Responding to the voice in his head, he broke out of his shock and wobbled to his sister’s room. He tucked the screaming four-year-old under his arm like a football and actually bounced off the hallway walls as he tried to get to the front door. The Sidney Lawrence painting in the living room was flying out at a ninety-degree angle when he came within view of it. As he watched, the painting slammed back against the wall, and the canvas slid down and out of the frame. And that, coupled with the realization that his dad’s fireplace of solid Mount McKinley stone was coming apart, convinced him that they were in real trouble.

  Warren began pawing at the front door; but the frame was distorted, and the door was stuck. Every time he pulled on it, it was locked in and crunching against its frame, which had become a right parallelogram, then a left one, back and forth, daring him to yank at the right second.

  Finally, timing his movements, he jerked with all his strength as the wall came through the vertical once again, and the door swung open, almost knocking him down.

  The scene outside looked like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The concrete patio had broken into jagged chunks which were moving around drunkenly, grinding against one another like some sort of jigsaw puzzle in motion. The slabs were huge, and they were dropping. Warren was completely stunned. He was dwarfed by the Brobdingnagian nightmare, but he knew he and Mitzi had no choice but to dive headlong into it. He launched the two of them out the door and onto the heaving surface.

  The trees were in weird motion, tilting seemingly in every direction, and his neighbor’s house was actually sailing toward them! The structure was tilted at a thirty-degree angle like a sinking ship and moving at the two of them, inexorably, and there was nowhere to run.

  Warren Hines decided they were undoubtedly going to die. A cold chill, a sort of maturity beyond his years, took over. It was a realization that quite possibly he was out of options, but it carried with it a determination to make very sure there wasn’t another way out.

  One of the jagged slabs just in front of him had begun to rise. It was, perhaps, ten feet across. Without a second’s hesitation, Warren jumped over to it, still clutching his sister, the two of them brushing for a second a few jagged pieces of their fragmented concrete patio, which were now being consumed by some sort of gigantic pit. Still standing, Warren and Mitzi Hines spent the next few minutes watching an impossible sight as Turnagain Heights rose and fell, tilted and undulated all around them, all of it moving quite madly out to sea, and not a bit of it making any sense. As they rode it, their chunk of ground rose some thirty feet in the air while the rest of the jumbled remains of the neighborhood fell around them in ruins. He had picked the right spot.

  He could hear other people screaming now, not just Mitzi. Amidst the crashing and roaring and tearing sounds—the noises made by rending wood and screaming nails—were the sounds of other humans yelling in panic.

  Still holding Mitzi close, keeping her safe, Warren saw their house in its final agony, tearing apart laterally as if seismic bulldozers were crushing it. To his right a last glimpse of Bob Atwood’s magnificent home met his eyes as the last of the rubble it had become more or less submerged and disappeared.

  And in front of him, about twenty yards away, Warren thought he saw his mother, somehow caught in the midst of what had to be the end of the planet.

  Bob Reeve couldn’t find his pocket watch. He never wore a wristwatch. He used an ornate pocket watch, which was now missing. As he fumbled in his pocket for it, lying on the floor alongside the bar in the wildly rocking building, a pocket watch roughly matching the description of his slid by as the hotel dipped to the west once again. Reeve watched, fascinated, as the watch retraced its path when the floor tilted the other way, sailing past him toward the other end of the bar. Holding on for dear life to his brass footrail with one arm, Reeve calculated with air man like precision the possible return trajectory of the watch and its potential speed of passage, reaching out at exactly the right second to snatch the timepiece as it slithered by once again over the floor of the gyrating Petroleum Club. Sure enough, it was his, and according to its hands, the time was 5:38 P.M.

  Dr. Perry Mead was still clinging to the side of his Land-Rover when something caught his eye in the distance to the west. The new Four Seasons apartment building—just weeks away from opening—seemed to slump. Then, in what seemed like a heartbeat, it was simply not there anymore. All six stories had collapsed in a heap, falling down vertically in a thunderous explosion of concrete dust and rubble in the grip of the heaving and rolling surface of Anchorage. Mead looked again. That was unbelievable. The question which chilled him was simple: Had there been anyone left inside?

  Two miles away from where Dr. Mead stood, his children were struggling for their lives. Paul and Penny had managed to get out first, but what they were plunging into was a nightmare. Penny looked back at one point, relieved to see Perry, her twelve-year-old brother, emerge from the disintegrating house with two-year-old Merrill. But as she watched, a huge crevasse opened up in front of them, a yawning gash, opening wider and wider, blocking their way, and eroding the ground under Perry’s feet as he struggled to get back, teetering, then falling with his brother into the crack. Before Penny could move, she saw the crevasse begin to close, her brothers still out of view, still inside somewhere in that gyrating, grating mass.

  Bob Atwood had also fallen into a huge crevasse within a minute after escaping from his disintegrating house, tumbling to the bottom some twenty feet down and fortunately landing in soft sand. Atwood was instantly aware that he had to get out. Dirt and sand, plants, fence posts, and every other imaginable sort of debris were falling in on him as the shaking and jerking continued.

  But he couldn’t move his arm. Bob Atwood pulled and pulled, yanking hard before his confused senses allowed his mind to provide an answer. His right hand, buried along with his arm all the way to his chest, was still gripping something.

  His trumpet! He still had
his hand tightly around the trumpet, and with the entire world caving in on him and the crevasse about to close, he was trapped because he couldn’t get it out.

  Atwood felt his hand release its grip on the instrument, his fingers relaxing and pulling out of the finger holes. Just as suddenly his arm and hand pulled free, leaving the trumpet behind.

  In the second before Atwood began scrambling out of the would be grave, an overwhelming sense of loss hit him. His magnificent house was gone. He had seen it disintegrate; now he could see no part of it. All his possessions were gone, all his clothes, all his paintings and guns and mementos and pictures.

  But until a second ago, he had still possessed his trumpet.

  Now he no longer had even that. Releasing that prized instrument had been the equivalent of parting with his last worldly possession in a world gone berserk.

  Chapter 6

  Seward, Alaska, 5:36 P.M.

  Dan Seavey was staring intently at a mason jar of silver half-dollars collected by his friend and fellow teacher, who had just made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  “Seavey, guess how much is in that jar and I’ll give it to you!”

  “You mean, exactly?”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  Seavey rubbed his bearded chin and thought for a second. The visage of Seward’s waterfront to the east, right outside the picture window, registered in his peripheral vision, as did the sound of a northbound freight train just starting to move down by the shoreline.

  Seavey sat back suddenly and looked his friend in the eye with a grin.

  “Well,” he began, “I’d say fifty dollars even.”

  The other man looked shocked, then incredulous.

  “That’s exactly right!”

  As the words were spoken, the table began to move.

  In fact, the entire house was in motion, slightly at first, a soft, gentle rocking, as if some giant hand were gently shoving the foundation back and forth. There was no rattling, just the wavelike motion.

  Dan Seavey cocked his head, a perplexed smile on his face.

  “What … is that?”

  The question was matter-of-fact, slightly amused, and very collected. Seward’s climate had presented the Seavey family with all manner and variety of weather in the past year, but the ground hadn’t moved. This feeling was not familiar. Somewhere in the back of his mind, an explanation involving seismic waves was triggered and placed in reserve, but his conscious mind suddenly was open enough to accept any explanation: the heavy freight train moving down by the waterfront; traffic vibrations; some large machine in his friend’s basement. Ideas which later seem silly sometimes rush to the forefront in the split second before logic takes over.

  Before Seavey could pull up a plausible answer himself, his friend filled the void.

  “I don’t know, Dan … but I think it’s an earthquake.”

  The motion was becoming more insistent now, and the fifty dollars’ worth of coins, title to which had only seconds before come into question, began to bounce gently on the tabletop.

  The two men sat and looked at each other in confusion for a moment, the seismic waves continuing to increase in amplitude, now rattling the dishes and glasses in the cupboard.

  Several blocks to the south one of the last customers in the Brown and Hawkins store had completed a small commercial transaction—or so he thought. The man handed Virginia Darling a dollar and three pennies for the can of Red Wing shoe oil she was holding in her left hand. The slightly worn dollar bill, a silver certificate, was placed in her right palm, the three pennies following in succession. As she began to pull her right hand back and extend her left hand with the product, the first P waves flashed beneath the store from the northeast, vibrating the counters and the ceiling boards and the cash register.

  Instinctively Virginia looked around. Her husband was at the back of the store, coming forward, a reassuring smile on his face. Obviously this was another of their periodic shakers, and just as obviously it would be over in a matter of seconds.

  “Earthquake, I guess,” she told the man, who turned to look toward the street through the plate glass windows of the store.

  With the arrival of the first S waves seconds behind the compression wave front, the direction and urgency of the shaking changed, and increased—and increased some more. Fifteen seconds had gone by, and the customer was gripping the counter, trying to stabilize himself against the vibrating floor.

  With each second that crawled by, the shaking seemed to increase. There was a rumble, a roar in the distance that now seemed to come up through the floorboards as the building itself joined in with the sounds of creaking wooden joints and vibrating products on glass-top counters.

  Virginia’s husband was moving faster, headed for her.

  “I think we’d better get out … now!” She moved in response, as did the customer, not remembering their exact footsteps but somehow traversing the distance between counter and front door in a few seconds, spilling onto the dirt street, which was beginning to buck wildly.

  Trees in her peripheral vision were swaying back and forth slightly, and power lines had been set in motion. People from the bank of stores across Fourth Avenue were also rushing into the street, looking puzzled—and scared.

  Still holding on to the dollar and three pennies and the shoe oil, Virginia Darling turned to look at her building, which was suddenly beginning to move.

  “I’d better hightail it home!”

  Dan Seavey jumped to his feet and half wobbled, half ran out the door, down the steps, and into the cool air, now filled with an amazing rumbling noise he had never heard before. His house was a half block away toward the south and the railroad docks—his wife and three young children inside, none of them any more familiar with this phenomenon than he. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew the word “frightening” should apply; but right now it was more exhilarating than scary, and he wanted to share it.

  Seavey tried to get his rubbery legs to run on the bouncing surface of the street, but it was becoming increasingly difficult.

  Dean Smith, the longshoreman at the controls of the gantry crane on the Alaska Railroad dock, had not recognized the vibrations at first. Now he had no doubt. The cold chill of reality pressed in on him: alone, exposed, sitting above a dock built over a deep ocean berth, suspended fifty feet above the concrete—and the damn crane was beginning to move of its own volition. By all rights and previous experience, this should be ending, he told himself.

  Hang on, boy, this will stop!

  But it wasn’t stopping; it was getting worse. The front of the crane, beyond his control, had started whipping back and forth laterally, and suddenly the whole thing was coming off the tracks, one side lifting up off the metal rails, then slamming back down while the other side lifted into the air, higher and higher with each cycle, throwing him around in the control cab, “walking” like some sort of giant metallic spider in a grade B horror movie—walking right down the dock, toward the water!

  That was enough. If he was going to die, he was going to do it fighting.

  Dean Smith ripped open the cab door, gripped the metal rungs of the ladder with all his strength, and launched himself out of the protective cage.

  The drunken motion of the gantry crane had captured Dan Seavey’s attention as he wobbled the last few feet to his front door steps. The crane was getting ready to do something unplanned and potentially catastrophic. Seavey paused, holding on to his hand railing, waiting to see what was going to happen, not spotting the tiny figure of a man suddenly emerge from the control cab, clinging perilously for a moment to a small ladder, as he swung wildly with the huge crane’s gyrations.

  It had taken a few seconds before the Alaska Railroad engineer realized what was happening. His engine had begun swaying on what appeared to be straight and steady tracks, and a cold fear of impending derailment hit him, even though he was moving at only two to three miles per hour. The swaying then became urgent, hysterical vibrations,
bouncing and lurching, throwing him around in the seat and threatening to throw the whole train off the tracks.

  He let go of the deadman’s throttle, hearing the diesel decelerate, the electric power decrease, and the electric motors wind down. The brake lever was in his hand now, and he pulled it, gently at first, bleeding off the air pressure, trying to bring the train to a halt.

  The tracks looked as if they were wavering, and the motion was getting stronger. He had been through many earthquakes before, and they always let up after twenty or thirty seconds. He hadn’t been worried at first, but now he was.

  As he watched in horror, his train still moving, cracks began to appear in the roadbed in front of him.

  L. C. Lamberson had joined the crew of the Alaska Standard for dinner on board before climbing back down the gangplank and returning to his office at the head of the dock. Lamberson was the only supervisor on duty, in fact, the only Standard employee on duty; everyone else had gone home. Twenty minutes of calm had passed as he sat at his desk.

  Like most of Seward’s residents, Lamberson was only mildly impressed when the first waves flashed beneath the Standard Oil dock and office and made their presence known with a slight rocking motion. Obviously it would stop soon. They always did.

  Even the arrival of the surface waves didn’t particularly upset him, though the rumbling and clanking of metal that had begun within twenty seconds shot a supply of adrenaline into his bloodstream. He was, after all, sitting in the middle of thousands of gallons of petroleum distillate fluids such as gasoline and propane and other things that could explode with ridiculous ease.

  When the building and dock began joining in the noisemaking, rattling and squealing, shaking and booming, with things crashing down inside, Lamberson quickly decided this was not going to fit the normal scenario. He came out of his chair and ran onto the dock, glancing first at the Alaska Standard and then to his left at the set of storage tanks on the side of the dock.