Broken Tide | Book 1 | Overfall

by Richardson, Marcus

  OVERFALL

  Broken Tide Series

  Book 1

  By

  Marcus Richardson

  Mike Kraus

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  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

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  Special Thanks

  Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great.

  Thank you!

  Broken Tide Book 2

  Available Here

  Preface

  Mirador de la Cumbrecita

  La Palma, Canary Islands

  Gunter Magnussen planted his hands on his hips and took in the panoramic vista before him. His daughters scampered around him and up the wooden steps to the observation platform built in the shade of a few scraggly pines. It had been a week of beaches, hikes, and sailing—the best holiday of their young lives.

  The rippled canyon vista that opened before him, dotted with stunted trees and shrubs, stretched north of the scenic overlook. The rim of Taburiente, the island’s massive, dormant volcano, rose up all around them.

  “This is the mouth of a sleeping volcano, girls.” he said.

  “Will it wake up?” asked Isla, his ten-year-old.

  “No, dear,” his wife Heidi replied quickly. “We’ve nothing to worry about,” she said, giving Gunter a pointed look.

  He stepped up to the little wooden platform on the edge of the rim and joined his family. A cooling breeze swept in over the dormant volcano’s massive teardrop-shaped caldera. The mid-morning tropical sun was warm, and the promise of afternoon heat hung in the clear, blue sky overhead.

  Gunter sighed and closed his eyes. In a few short weeks, Sweden would plunge into the icy heart of winter once more. He wanted this last hurrah of summer to be special.

  “Do you feel that?” asked Isla.

  Gunter smiled, his eyes still closed. “I feel the sun on my face and the wind in my hair.”

  “I feel the ground…” Heidi said. She put a hand on Gunter’s arm. “It’s moving.”

  “Papa…I feel it, too,” little Una whimpered. The six-year-old, a miniature version of his wife, moved closer to him, still watching the caldera.

  “Girls, girls—it’s okay,” Gunter soothed, moving to embrace his children. “Remember when we got here, the nice park ranger said the ground has been shaking recently?” He turned them around to look at a weathered sign nailed to a stunted pine. “See? It says right there…’the island trembles from time to time, as a result of geologic forces at work under the Cumbre Vieja volcanic ridge…’”

  “Is that smoke?” asked Isla, stepping away from Gunter to lean on the wooden railing around the observation deck. She stood on tip-toes and looked south at the ridge he’d mentioned, sloping toward the Atlantic, some ten miles distant. “It is smoke, Papa!”

  “Is the volcano waking up?” asked Una, tugging on Gunter’s shirt.

  “Smoke?” asked Heidi, stepping closer to her children.

  “Look!” insisted Isla, begging them to come to the railing.

  As Gunter approached, he froze. Jets of white smoke shot into the sky downslope, coming up in three sprays, each about a quarter mile apart. Bits of rock and small trees fell from the sky where they’d been blasted into the air by the escaping plumes. He flinched at the appearance of two more jets of smoke, much nearer their position than the first three. New showers of debris and trees sailed through the air far too close for comfort.

  The sight sent a tremor of fear down the back of Gunter’s legs. “We…we need to leave...”

  The ground trembled more, causing the scraggly pines standing guard over the observation platform to sway, as if in a strong wind. The moving shadows cast by the trees played across his vision in a nauseating pattern. He instinctively put his arms around his children and pulled them back from the railing.

  Down the path, a lone hiker called to them in Spanish, then turned and ran. Shouts from other hikers fleeing the caldera reached them. The observation point was the start of several caldera trails, and it had been fairly crowded on the way up.

  “Come on,” Gunter said, pulling Isla from the edge.

  Heidi leaned close enough for him to catch the scent of her shampoo. “I’m scared...”

  “So am I,” he replied. He swung Isla up into a hug. She squirmed, trying to get back down. “Easy now,” he said in a soothing voice. “Come, let’s get back to the hotel. We can play in the pool.”

  “Doesn’t that sound nice?” asked Heidi with feigned calm, looking down at Una, clinging to her like a baby koala.

  As suddenly as the rumbling started, it stopped. The noise faded, and the smoke dissipated. An unnatural silence made Gunter’s ears tingle.

  “Is it over?” whispered Heidi, already off the platform and tip-toeing toward the path. She started when two people ran by, backpacks bouncing as they raced down the trail.

  Without warning, the ground came alive again. Gunter found himself on the ground with the rest of his family. Isla and Una cried, but their voices sounded muted. The roaring in his ears drowned out everything.

  Gunter stared at the weathered boards of the observation deck while they bent and twisted as the ground under them shifted violently. First one, then a dozen planks sprung from their mounts, which unleashed a hail of splinters.

  The roaring intensified to a rib-shaking thunder. Gunter looked over his shoulder and watched the last few planks of the observation deck disappear into the open maw of the caldera. Wisps of steam rose up in front of them from deep in the sleeping volcano.

  Pine needles and twigs rained down on them as the trees shook. Gunter managed to get to his knees and shepherded his family toward the trail. He had to keep them moving. They had to get off the volcano before the eruption spread up the slope to Taburiente. It might already be too late, but he had to try.

  “Is Taburiente exploding, too?” Heidi asked in a wavering voice. “I thought it was dormant?”

  “I don’t know,” Gunter said, “but we have to move!�
��

  A shadow passed over them and he looked up to see massive clouds of steam billowing into the sky. The downslope eruption on the Cumbre Vieja ridge grew closer, climbing north, heading straight for the main caldera.

  Breaking out into a cold sweat, Gunter lurched to his feet, dragging Isla with him. “Up! Everyone up—we have to go!”

  Heidi grabbed the closest pine tree and pulled herself to her feet. She looked over Gunter’s shoulder and screamed, covering Una’s head.

  Gunter turned away from the steaming caldera and looked south, toward the erupting Cumbre Vieja ridge. He swore in Swedish. Before him, the ridge volcano bisecting the southern half of the island in a north-south line, was shrouded in gray smoke and ash. Jets of fire, bright orange in the gloom, created a border that ran south down the island’s spine, with a perpendicular cut directly below their position. It made a dancing, jagged orange line west, dividing the island.

  Heidi stood in a junction of paths and looked west, the direction most of the other hikers had fled. “Which way do we go?”

  Gunter struggled to remember which way was the fastest descent. There weren’t many options on the teardrop shaped island. Taburiente occupied the rounded northern half, and the now very active Cumbre Vieja ridge ran down the middle of the elongated southern half of La Palma. Gunter and his family were right between both.

  Specks of fire jumped and writhed along the Cumbre Vieja ridge, like fountains at a fancy water garden. Gunter’s chest tightened. Those weren’t jets of water, they were plumes of lava.

  With a tremendous roar that forced him to his knees again, the entire western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcanic ridge shuddered. The ground shimmered like a mirage, and it took Gunter a few seconds to realize the whole side of the island south of the caldera had moved.

  Moving slowly at first, the massive landslide picked up speed toward the Atlantic. Behind and above the giant slab of rock, a waterfall of lava gushed from the wound, filling the deepening void. La Palma had split itself in two.

  “Go!” Gunter yelled, stumbling toward the eastern path. They had to head east, it was their only hope. Afraid of falling on her, he put Isla down and urged her forward. “You have to run, now—run fast!”

  Enormous geysers of black smoke and ash shot into the blue sky before them. Billowing out overhead in the prevailing winds, the plumes merged, creating an enormous, flat-topped cloud streaked with pink lightning. It towered overhead and cast the whole island in sudden twilight.

  Gunter tripped over a tree branch and found himself spitting dirt from his mouth and looking south through the trees at the landslide. The coastal towns of La Bombilla, Puerto Naos, and further down the coast, El Remo, vanished in the racing wall of debris. Tens of thousands of people lived, worked, and vacationed in those towns. In the blink of an eye they were all gone.

  Their hotel had been in Puerto Naos. Gunter threw up his breakfast into the dust and gravel. He pushed himself to his feet, noticing the ground felt unusually warm, now that the cloud above had cooled the air around them.

  The ground rumbled again, and Heidi pulled him forward. “Keep moving!” she cried over the noise. She’d put Una down and the girls ran ahead, hand-in-hand.

  Gunter forced himself to catch up. If they could make it to the trailhead, they could get in the rental car and drive east, away from the eruption.

  Through gaps in the trees, he spied a wall of white sea-foam rise up from the coast where the leading edge of the landslide crashed into the Atlantic.

  Heidi paused to stare, mouth open and eyes wide.

  “Don’t stop!” he called.

  The terrible explosion of water climbed into the air, higher, higher, and higher still as the titanic landslide just kept going, building speed.

  Gunter stared at the sight, breathing heavily and drenched in sweat. His children began to cough from the fine ash in the air. The smoke, ash, and steam all combined to create a hazy atmosphere, obscuring anything more than a mile away in misty fog.

  Then the wall of water at the beach emerged above the haze. And it continued to rise.

  Gunter stared in horror as he realized that the wall of white wasn’t just sea-foam, it was the crest of an enormous wave. A wave that continued to grow and grow and grow.

  He charged headlong down the path, feet thundering off the packed gravel. Heidi screamed for him to go faster and pounded downhill just behind him. The girls sprinted ahead, nimble as mountain goats on the shifting gravel path.

  Gunter glanced back at the wave—it seemed almost half as tall as the caldera itself. “That’s not possible,” he panted, not stopping his flight downhill. The dormant volcano was almost 2,000 meters above sea level. How could a wave be 1,000 meters high?

  They rounded a bend in the path and the haze lifted above the shoreline with the passing of the landslide. The massive wave had dragged away all the water near the edge of the island as it lumbered west, exposing the sea floor well beyond low tide.

  “Lookit!” Una said, pointing a dust-caked finger.

  “Where did the water go, Papa?” asked Isla around a cough. The air had grown more hazy the lower they descended.

  “It’s coming back,” Gunter said, feeling a tickle in his own throat. “And we don’t want to be here when it hits!”

  He turned and bolted down the path. They were halfway down the caldera trail now, and his boots slid on gravel that seemed far looser than it had been on the hike up. He glanced through the trees and watched the stunning progress of the massive wave as it raced away from La Palma. Ash swirled in the air, temporarily obscuring his view, and he coughed.

  When the air cleared, he saw a series of smaller waves, each hundreds of meters high, rise up and follow in the first’s wake. But headed toward the shore. The ocean sloshed along the coast in waves larger than any he’d ever seen before—yet dwarfed by the huge walls of water heading west.

  “It’s a tidal wave!” Heidi yelled, coughing.

  Gunter felt the earth tremble again, the movement strengthening by the second. He looked where his wife pointed and saw a wall of water, hundreds of meters tall, crashing ashore and spreading across the already ravaged landscape. Boulders the size of houses flew in the air and trees splintered like toothpicks before the wave as it traveled uphill.

  He glanced up at the caldera behind them. Smoke and ash billowed up from the awakened volcano, competing with the tangled cloud further south, rising from what was left of Cumbre Vieja. Below them, the water continued to crash through the trees, racing up the steep slopes of the caldera.

  The ground shook and fire exploded into the sky up-slope. Globs of lava fell hissing and sputtering all around them, igniting any trees and grass in their path. Volcanos erupted in front of and behind them. Below them, a tidal wave of gargantuan proportions raced uphill. There was nowhere left to run.

  A hissing ball of lava the size of a grape hit Heidi’s shoulder and her shirt went up in flames. She shrieked and fell to the ground as the girls cried. Gunter tried in vain to help his wife but couldn’t put the fire out. Heralded by a loud whooooosh, a cloud of superheated ash raced down the slope faster than Gunter thought possible. It slammed into them at close to 50 miles an hour, blasted through the trees, over rocks, and instantly surrounded the Magnussen family. The heat was unbearable and the air exploded from a moderately warm 85˚ to almost 1,000˚ before Gunter could react.

  He tried to scream, but his lungs were seared from the inside as soon as he opened his mouth. His last spark of consciousness was to curse the day he thought it would be a good idea to bring his family on holiday to La Palma.

  Gunter Magnussen collapsed over the smoldering corpse of his wife, next to the lifeless forms of his little girls, buried in a foot of ash. A few agonizing seconds later, Gunter and his family took their place among the day’s rapidly growing list of casualties.

  When the water finally receded, several minutes later, the caldera’s southern slope emerged bare, scoured of trees and all vegetati
on. Like the coastal cities erased by the Cumbre Vieja landslide further south, there was no trace left of anyone on the caldera when the ocean retreated.

  Though La Palma lay in smoldering ruins and the rest of the Canary Islands were likewise devastated, the landslide wasn’t quite finished. The series of monster waves it had spawned aimed west, racing the sun across the Atlantic at jetliner speeds. As the mega-tsunami spread out, the entire western hemisphere fell in its crosshairs.

  Introduction

  Water. Graceful, beautiful, it is a vital necessity of life, but it can also be one of the more deadly forces mankind encounters. A human will die of thirst in as little as three days without water, yet less than a foot of moving water can not only knock an adult down but drown them as well.

  When a large body of water moves in one direction, we call it a wave. Waves can range from the gentle ripple created by a child tossing a pebble into a still pond, to the wind whipped fury of a hurricane storm surge.

  Humans have always had a love-hate relationship with waves. Some of us enjoy riding them, turning these beautiful, powerful forces of nature into playthings. On the other end of the spectrum, we call waves that appear at random and reach terrifying proportions rogue waves, long known to sink ships that ply the open oceans and some of the world’s larger lakes.

  Of all the different types of waves, however, none hold more mystique and fascination than tidal waves, known more popularly by the Japanese word tsunami. By definition, a tsunami is a wave of abnormal length and height, often created by an undersea earthquake or some other disturbance. Tsunami has been so ingrained in popular culture in recent memory that people use the word in everyday conversation meaning an unstoppable, overwhelming flood of something.

  Tsunamis caused by undersea earthquakes unleash tremendous destructive power. On December 26, 2004 a massive seafloor quake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia created a tsunami that spread across the Indian Ocean from Australia and Indonesia to India, Sri Lanka, and the eastern coast of Africa. In total, more than 227,000 people died in 14 countries as a result of this monster wave that in some areas reached almost 100 feet high as it came ashore.