There was the ominous odor of electricity scorching plastic.
The cable whipped the air, performed wild contortions for a few seconds before it reared its crackling hot head and plunged into the water.
Sixty-five out of sixty-six persons experienced the silent, slamming death of electrocution — thirteen thousand volts seizing the legs, at a stroke invading every extreme, overpowering the capacity of the heart, the brain. Done in little more than a flash.
The sixty-sixth person standing in the water was Spider Leaks. He saw the people around him go rigid, saw their mouths open for screams that never came out, eyes bulging as though to pop from sockets. Spider didn’t know then why it happened to everyone except him. Not until they had all collapsed did he realize that his rubber boots had saved him. Damn good old knee-high boots that he’d needed on his previous job at the car wash. Because they made walking heavy he hadn’t worn the boots yesterday or the day before and he almost hadn’t today. His regular working shoes, his only pair, had dried hard and too stiff to put on.
More explosions now. Sputtering bursts in a back room. Circuits shorting out. Forty-two twenty-amp fuses blowing, the main distribution panel spitting sparks.
Then nothing, not a watt of power.
Lights off, refrigeration off, everything.
The electrically controlled steel gates released and fell, covering the entire face of the market, as well as the side and rear exits.
For a long moment everything was still, everyone remained absolutely in place, breaths held as though movement even that slight might set something off or cause imbalance.
Rumbling in the ground beneath the market, like peristalsis in a huge bowel.
The market itself, with its more than ten thousand items, had suffered relatively little damage until now. Some gallon containers of milk had fallen and split open, causing a slick mess. Here and there a few cartons and cans had tumbled from the most precarious stacks, such as cans of Bumble Bee chunk white tuna that had plunked to the floor, some landing so they rolled down the inclined aisle.
But for the moment, stillness. And in it, surely amplified, disbelief and terror.
A glass jar fell. Bing cherries in thick syrup made a blood-red splash. Which seemed to cue the start.
Outside, the bluff separated further from the mainland, forming an abyss forty feet wide and three times that deep. At the same moment the body of the bluff gave way, sank a hundred feet, the height of a nine story building.
For those within the supermarket it was as though they had been flown into a deep air pocket. But that helpless dropping sensation was completely out of context here. The market by its proportions defied such treatment. It seemed to tear at itself, lurched, heaved every which way, gyrating laterally as it plunged.…
An eleven-year-old boy who nearly always had to be bribed to eat any kind of vegetable was killed by broccoli. The one-pound package of it, frozen hard as a brick, was flung out of the freezer case. It struck the boy in the back of the head.
A thin woman was pierced through, back to front, by a broken spearlike bottle of diet cola. Almost deliberately, it seemed.
A man wearing prescribed dark glasses was smashed to death between the eyes by an aerosol can of window cleaner. The container, if purposely aimed, could not have been more dead center on target.
One brand of soups that had always dominated its section by occupying all three tiers of shelves took off and, at incredible speed, momentarily swarmed about an older woman before attacking her like red-and-white bees. The woman never knew what hit her.
Another woman, younger and shapely, was struck by a twelve-pound frozen turkey, the sort considered more desirable, with artificially induced larger breasts. The cold, dead bird, thrown hard like a fleshy stone, caught the woman mid-chest, crushing her.
In the specially appointed alcove where liquor was sold hundreds of bottles buffeted and flew about, smashing against one another. The carpet in the alcove was immediately sodden. Three customers and a clerk were badly wounded by glass, but they died from inhaling such a concentration of alcohol fumes.
In the fresh meat department two knives honed razor sharp jumped from their brackets and cut across the air to sever the main arteries in the forearm and thigh of a butcher. Accustomed as he was to the sight of blood, he could only scream while his own quickly spurted the life out of him.
Shelves were left bare. Everything shot or tumbled or slid off. Some people were buried beneath tons of canned goods. The bakery and delicatessen counters overturned. The entire contents of the meat, dairy and other open cases bolted up and out.
Shopping carts became angry, lethal vehicles that rammed mid-air into people or mowed them down at high speed.
For those few moments in the Seaside Supermarket life and death played turnabout. More than ten thousand items were animated into what seemed a retributive frenzy, as though they took this opportunity to spend their wrath on creatures who normally swallowed them and used them and took them for granted.
At the end of the drop, on impact, all the floor-to-ceiling windows along the front of the store shattered. Hunks of heavy-gauge glass burst out. Shards of it shot through the air like shrapnel.
The drop and its consequences killed sixty-two.
One was the check-out girl Felicia Artez, who had taken a break and was in the employees’ toilet with Warren Stevens’ younger sister, Lois. In that privacy Felicia has passed over the speed to Lois — twenty Ambars, yellow-coated ten-milligram tablets. Sixty dollars’ worth. That much because they were, as Felicia explained, long-ball hitters. Meaning they took her up, leveled off after a while and then came on strong again, distributing their effect over six to eight hours.
Lois transferred the Ambars from the plastic vial into a small cotton pouch. She undid her jeans and placed the pouch inside her bikini panties. She patted, flattened it so it didn’t show.
Meanwhile, Felicia had gone into the toilet booth and was using a foot to work the flushing lever when it happened.
Water belched up six feet from the bowl. Felicia had no chance to grab on to anything. She slid against the smooth inside wall of the booth, went up and hit the low ceiling.
Lois, who had been using the wash basin, clutched its under edge. She was shaken but unhurt. She called to Felicia. No reply. The booth door was bolted from inside. Lois retrieved an overturned paper towel receptacle. She stood on it to look over the top of the booth.
Felicia was bent front up over the toilet bowl, legs and arms at awkward angles, like a tossed rag doll. Her head hung limp by its own deadweight in an impossible position, twisted completely around.
Frank Brydon, who had stopped in at the market only for some Mexican beer, was reaching into an upright beverage cooler when it happened. He used the cooler, with both hands got a good grip on one of its permanent wire shelves, managed to shove his legs with pressure against the thick frame of its opening and hunched his head as much as possible. Bottles banged around inside the cooler, striking his arms and shoulders and grazing the top of his head. The full-length cooler door slammed at his back and side. But he managed to hang on.
For a moment Marsha Hilbert was weightless and then let down hard. The beautiful motion picture star slid unbecomingly about thirty feet to the facade of a check-out stand, probably would have been hurt but for some packaged loaves of spongy white bread that cushioned the impact.
Elliot Janick was flipped end-over-end into a refrigerated case. Inelegantly, the famous filmmaker replaced ham, bologna and other cold cuts. The uncomfortable frosty confines of the case protected him.
When Warren Stevens, the bear killer, was thrown down, he doubled up, knees tight to chest, making as small a target as possible. He was pelted by, among other things, jars of baby food.
Gloria Rand, the fifty year old who looked thirty, was in the fresh produce section. She put her hands tight over her face. Heads of cabbage and cauliflower, eggplant and honeydews whirled around her like taunting satellites. She ended u
p wedged against the base of a large bin that had contained a special on early, tasteless strawberries.
Ex-convict, box boy, Spider Leaks was almost killed for the second time in less than three minutes when the front windows shattered. A chunk of glass came down like a guillotine within inches of his head, and another smaller piece sliced some skin from the round of his shoulder.
Judith Ward and Marion Mercer had just chosen identical things they might claim they had cooked from scratch. Packages of frozen noodles Romanoff, asparagus soufflés, and an assortment of homemade tasting cupcakes. Judith and Marion wouldn’t be seeing one another again until Monday, because Marion had to drive up to Bakersfield for an overnight visit with her sister-in-law. It would be another long, lonely weekend. Marion would phone, she promised. They headed for the express check-out. Suddenly, they were clutching one another. Their arms were wrapped and their legs overlapped. They took the shock together.
Amy Javakian got a bloody nose from a hit, like a punch, from an airborne potato. It knocked her down but not out. Her first thought was to somehow protect her unborn child. She remembered from something she’d read that to relax was best. She ended up among some cartons of macaroni, noodles and dried beans.
Amy’s husband, Peter, took some painful knocks but was not badly injured. He found himself jammed against a magazine rack beneath a pile of paperback books and egg-shaped containers of panty hose. Some of the hose had popped out right before Peter’s eyes and looked like bunched up patches of shriveled skin.
Emory Swanson, the insurance man, could have gotten out in plenty of time — if he had left the market as soon as he was told it didn’t carry the brand of toasted coconut chips his wife, Eleanor, wanted. However, Emory, in his fashion, had to get away with something. He helped himself to a bag of Pennsylvania pretzels that had been baked in Glendale, and he nibbled those as he strolled the aisles. On the lookout for something likely. Capers? Anchovies? Tobler chocolate? He settled on Ultra-Brite toothpaste. He had a way with toothpaste. He opened the flaps of one end, inverted the carton and let the tube slide into his jacket pocket. He then put the empty carton back into place on the shelf, and that was that.
When it happened, Emory survived because he got sandwiched in, surrounded tightly by three other people, who absorbed the danger. Two of the three were killed by well-known nationally advertised flying objects.
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People wanted to see it.
Traffic was barely moving on the Coast Highway. A number of drivers had pulled over to park so they could get more than a passing look. Cars were backed up for miles in both directions.
The state highway patrol got things moving. They promptly cleared and closed that section of highway, a six-mile stretch. Northbound traffic was rerouted via the Crown Valley Parkway. Those headed south had to use Laguna Canyon. Only residents of the area with proof of that fact were allowed through the police blockades.
The rain was persistent as ever. Actually it seemed to be coming down harder, streaking, and the wind made conditions worse. It had started getting stronger earlier that afternoon and by now it was almost up to gale force. It was the sort of deceitful wind that alternately lulled and gusted, blowing from seaward or down coast from the north or frequently, as though to demonstrate its perversity, from both directions at once.
The rain tatooed on the yellow raingear of the highway patrolmen.
The time was five-fifteen.
The rain rat-a-tat-tatted a slightly different sound on the beige-colored waterproof “turnouts” of the firemen. Four firetrucks — pumpers — had come from Laguna Beach. The Orange County Fire Protection Department had dispatched an aerial unit, more commonly known as a hook and ladder. Because the bluff was partly within the limits of Laguna Beach, that city’s fire chief was in charge of the operation.
Fire Chief Croy.
His white helmet stood out. Only a chief could wear a white one. Other fire officers had red helmets and ordinary firemen wore black.
Chief Croy and his officer assistant, a man named Pinkett, stood on the shoulder of the highway, apart from their men, who had hurried and now had to wait for orders.
The chief was a thick-trunked man around five eight. He appeared strong, body and face. The butt of a filter-tipped cigarette, extinguished by the rain, was in the left side of his mouth — not forgotten, a comfort. He was a no-hands smoker.
He walked along the roadside and tried his best to conceal his incredulity. The whole goddamn bluff had broken away and dropped. Now it was like an isolated mesa a thousand feet long by a thousand wide, and there on its far edge was the supermarket.
Chief Croy called for and got a pair of binoculars. He focused on the front of the market. Through the rain, through the market’s steel gate he saw people inside, like prisoners, close up to the grillwork, gazing out, some waving frantically as though fearing they might be overlooked.
How to get to them?
“We got the aerial,” Pinkett reminded.
“Yeah.” Croy thought about it. “What’s the lowest angle we can get on it, thirty or what?”
“About thirty.”
Croy through more about it, grunting as he did. The aerial truck could be brought right to the edge. Its ladder could be extended sixty-five feet. At an upward thirty-degree angle that would just about put the tip of the ladder over the bluff. In this rain and especially with the wind that ladder would be swaying like a reed, and even if a man did manage to hang on all the way to the top, from there he’d still have to shinny down a hundred-fifty-foot line. Croy decided he sure as hell wouldn’t want to try it. He also knew if he asked for volunteers he’d get them.
“Think of any other way?” Pinkett asked.
“Could be.”
Croy went to his municipal car, a bright red Buick. He lighted a fresh cigarette and got on the radio phone. He called the Marine Corps air station at El Toro, ten miles away.
The flight officer told him, “We’re grounded here, not putting anything up.”
Croy explained the problem in detail.
The flight officer told him, “Hang on.”
Croy assumed permission was being asked from higher up — anyway, advice.
In a couple of minutes the flight officer came back on. “What’s the minimum you need?”
Croy told him.
At that moment Captain Dodd arrived on the scene. Dodd was area commander of the highway patrol, headquartered in Santa Ana. A tall man, about six four, he had just turned fifty. He could quit anytime he wanted, was already in five years over the twenty required for retirement.
When Dodd saw the situation he seemed more angry than anything else. He mumbled to himself. He wasn’t wearing any boots. He was the only man there without boots. And when Chief Croy went over to him, Croy noticed a snag tear in the back shoulder of Dodd’s raincoat. Evidently Dodd wasn’t personally prepared for such an emergency, Croy thought.
The two men exchanged nods and each other’s names for hellos.
Captain Dodd was told the plan.
He made no comment, glanced dubiously upward, then down to the market, then turned his back to the wind.
“Not much daylight left,” remarked Chief Croy.
Twenty minutes later two helicopters came from inland, over Sheep Hills, low, noisy. They were HSL-l’s with twinbladed, tandem rotating propellers fore and aft. The sort of choppers that had been used in Vietnam to evacuate casualties. These two might very possibly have seen action in Nam the way they were camouflaged, splotched green, brown, yellow. They were piloted by Marine Corps officers and each carried a contingent of six Navy medical corpsmen.
The choppers swooped out over the ocean at an altitude of a thousand feet, made a wide banking turn, descended to five hundred and came back, flying south to north, for a look at their objective: the paved open area of the supermarket’s parking lot.
“Those guys got balls,” Chief Croy said.
Captain Dodd went closer to the edge of the brea
kaway to better examine it. He mentally bet it would still let go some. No telling how much or when. If the men in the choppers did what was expected of them, the rescue would take an hour, two at most. No more than two. Night was due at eight, and darkness would come even earlier because of the rain.
The choppers were coming in now. From seaward, one after the other. The closer they got, the more evident it was how little control the pilots had. The wind was fighting them, blasting from every which way.
The choppers gave up on two approaches before committing to a set-down. They hovered above the parking lot, reacting more like lightweight insects than heavy machines. They floundered, spun, bobbed.
Finally, one of the choppers managed to touch down.
The moment its landing gear came in contact with the blacktop a sheet of wind, more violent than any before, wrapped itself in under the chopper, and, at the same time, another powerful gust smacked it from starboard. The chopper was scooped up, flipped over on its side and for a moment was suspended mid-air.
The second chopper was about fifty feet higher and fifty away from the first, normally a safe distance. A tremendous gust caught it head on, forced its nose straight up.
Then, as though within the power of a pair of giant, invisible hands, the two choppers were slapped together. The explosion was instantaneous, a brilliant orange-and-red billow. Parts flew and fell and the fuselages of the two craft, melted together by the fiery impact, smouldered on the parking lot. No survivors.
Chief Croy went and sat in his red car.
After a few minutes he reported what had happened to El Toro.
The flight officer asked twice if there were any survivors. Out of habit he said, “Thank you, sir,” when he clicked off.
Captain Dodd got into the chiefs car.
“Fucking wind,” Croy said.
Dodd agreed.
“Got any ideas, Dodd?”
“A possibility.”
“We’d be over there by now if it wasn’t for the wind.” Croy’s cigarette between his lips went up and down in cadence with his words.
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