“If I don't,” Mort said leaning close.
Mike nodded. “I will.” He raised his glass and then tossed off half of it. A few moments later he was outside on the relatively quiet sidewalk punching numbers into his phone, calling for a cab. The night was cold, but the cold sobered him up. It seemed nearly capable of washing away the smoke and noise from inside the bar. He stood in the shadows beside the door waiting for the phone to ring on the other end. The door bumped open and Johnny Barnes stepped out.
“You ain't calling for a cab, are you?” Johnny asked when he spotted him.
Mike laughed and ended the still ringing call. “Not if I can get a free ride from you.” Mike told him.
“Yeah, you were always a cheap prick,” Johnny agreed. “Hey, I heard you're heading into the southern tier tomorrow?”
“Two weeks,” Mike agreed as he levered the door handle on Johnny's truck and climbed inside. His breath came in clouds of steam. “Get some heat in here, Johnny.”
“Coming,” Johnny agreed. “Man, I wish I was you.”
“Me too,” Mike agreed.
Johnny laughed. “Asshole, but seriously, man. Have a good time. You gonna hunt?
“Nothing in season... Maybe snare some rabbits. Not gonna be a lot this time of year.” Mike said.
“Maybe deer,” Johnny offered. He dropped the truck in drive just as the heat began to come from the vents.
“Probably, but they'll be out of season. Rabbit, and I got freeze dried stuff. Trucks packed, which is why I didn't drive it down here.”
The truck drove slowly through the darkening streets as the street lights began to pop on around the small city: The two men laughing and exchanging small talk.
Seattle: 6:00 P.M.
Jessie Chambers sat slumped against a wall in another alley off Beechwood Avenue; Seattle's red light district. He had been dead for over six hours. The money from the wallet had allowed him to indulge in his habit for over forty-six hours with no sleep. The last injection had killed him.
The Cocaine he had purchased to mix with the Heroin had been cut with rat poison, among other things, so that the kid who had sold it to him could stretch it a little further.
The constant hours of indulging in his habit would have killed him anyway, but the addition of the rat poison was all his overworked heart could stand, and it had simply stopped beating in protest.
The alleyway seemed to dip and then rise sharply as a sudden, strong vibration shook the area. The shaking lasted for mere seconds. Dust raftered down from the sky, shaken from buildings. In the silence alarms brayed, and glass shattered, falling to the streets below. Gunshots punctuated the silences in between the screams, yelling.
Billy Jingo found himself rolling across the alley and nearly slamming into the opposite wall. He held himself steady, fingertips outstretched, until the shaking stopped: Unsure where he was or why he was there.
As his mind began to awake he remembered Jon punching him earlier. Nothing specific besides that, but it was enough to draw some conclusions as to where he was. It didn't explain the shaking that had awakened him. He looked off down the alley where a bum, or maybe a hype was resting against the wall, slumped over. Maybe, Billy thought, the bum had tried to awaken him. He made his feet and staggered past the bum to the mouth of the alley, looking out at the street. The bum was still sleeping when he looked back. The more he looked at the bum the more he thought he might be a crack head, maybe even a heroin addict. Those fuckers could crash out anywhere, oblivious to their surroundings, he reminded himself. He stepped onto the sidewalk, and then glanced back once more, wondering if he should repay the favor and wake up the now sleeping bum, hype, whatever he was.
No, he decided. He focused his eyes, stretched his arms and legs, flexed his fingers and decided he was pretty much okay. As he started back down the street, he suddenly found himself thrown to the sidewalk as the earth began to shake and heave violently once more.
Behind him the street began to shake harder, cracks appeared in the alleyway where Jessie's body lay and threaded their way out into the street. Far off in the distance the earthquake shook harder at the epicenter, small booms coming over the sound of destruction as the time wore on. Nearby a building succumbed to the vibration and toppled over into the street clogging it from side to side. Cars rocked on their tires shifting violently from side to side, sometimes bouncing off in one direction or another, or slamming into a nearby car or building.
This time when the silence came the sounds that it carried were different. Weeping from the piled remains in the street. The zap and crackle of power lines as they danced in the street like charmed snakes without their handlers.
A harder jolt hit and the cracks opened wider, some swallowing whole sections of rubble as they did. Jessie's body slumped over and then tumbled into a chasm that had opened next to him. Almost as quickly the chasm closed as though it had never really been there at all. The shaking slowed and then stopped and the silence fell once more.
Billy managed to get to his feet, staggering at first, pulling deep lungfuls of air, but getting his feet under him. Blood ran into his eye from a cut on his forehead, but he was otherwise okay. He waited for his panic to abate, his breathing to slow, and then he moved off at a fast run along the Avenue: Heading for home.
New York: Harlem 9:00 pm
Tosh made her way down the sidewalk. It was icy, and so she was careful where she stepped. Adam walked beside her. He seemed to have no trouble walking on the sidewalk, ice or not. He had lessened his stride to stay beside her as they walked.
“Okay?” he asked now.
Tosh laughed. “Damn slippery,” she said. Almost as soon as she said it she felt her right foot take off on some black ice ridged up against a subway vent. Almost as quick as that happened Adam had her elbow, holding her safely.
“Tosh,” Adam told her. “You got to be careful... The baby.” He sounded reverent.
“I know about the baby, Baby,” She laughed. “And I am being careful. This damn sidewalk is not cooperating. Why doesn't Harlem have heated sidewalks like some of those places over off Park?”
“Ha,” Adam told her. “We ain't getting no heated sidewalks ever. Are you kidding?”
“Hey,” Tosh told him. “We got Bill Clinton over here.”
“Uh huh. And he can fall and crack his white ass too, cause he ain't got no heated sidewalks either.” He shook his head and laughed. It was funny to see a man as big as Adam laugh, or shake his head, or really anything. He was the sort of man you looked at and saw violent things coming from. Nearly three hundred pounds, over six feet, and muscular from a ten year stint in prison. And he had that way of looking at someone, any someone, but men in particular, that made them walk away from him. With women it did something else, and Tosh watched out for that too, but Adam had no eyes for any other woman. She was it and she knew it; didn't have to question it.
“The day Harlem gets heated sidewalks is the day that they'll put another black man in the white house.”
“Baby we got that,” Tosh told him. She had reached a section of walk that was shoveled and clear of ice both. A rarity after a heavy snow fall.
“And did he get us heated sidewalks?” Adam asked. He looked at her google eyed and she had to laugh.
Owning a car in New York was a tough proposition, Adam thought. They didn't have one, but it would be nice. That way Tosh could drive home from work instead of the Subway, and a long walk through a bad neighborhood.
Adam's job was steel work. He was picked up every morning and dropped off again. For him a car or a truck would be a luxury. To her it was really a necessity. A necessity he was trying to work out, but it was tough to do.
First you had to be able to afford to buy a car. Then you had to pay nearly as much for insurance as you did for the car. Then you had to pay for a place to park it. If you were stupid enough to leave it on the street it would be towed, stripped, stolen, or get so many parking tickets it wouldn't be worth ownin
g. So you needed a parking place, and that would set you back five times what the shit box car you had managed to buy had cost you. Adam knew, he had checked into it. He sighed now thinking about it.
“Stop worrying about a car,” Tosh told him.
“I wasn't,” Adam told her.”
“Oh, so you're going to start lying to me now?” Tosh asked him.
“No,” Adam admitted. “Just pisses me off. I see these people that are on welfare driving a Cadillac and I got to say, what the fuck! I mean we work hard. We really do. I don't like seeing you have to walk.”
Tosh laughed. “Baby, it's a handful of blocks.”
“Uh huh, and you nearly bust your ass walking them,” Adam said.
She laughed again.
“Oh that's funny that you might slip and bust your ass?”
“No,” She giggled. “Adam, God forbid the sidewalk that slapped my ass. I believe you would kill it, but I'm never gonna hit that sidewalk 'cause you're always going to be there to catch me.”
“Huh,” Adam said. He laughed a little.
“Well, you will be and I know it. So it doesn't matter,” Tosh said. “And besides, I like this... I like this walk every evening with you.” She slipped her arm further through Adam's own, and huddled closer to him. “And it keeps my ass nice and firm, “ she whispered as she leaned closer to him. She laughed and Adam broke into laughter with her. A skinny kid in a hoody, passing by them shrunk away from them, his eyes suddenly startled wide.
“Hey it's just laughing, Cousin. Ain't gonna rob you.” Adam told him.
“Baby,” Tosh said.
“I know... I know,” Adam told her. He left off and turned away from the kid who seemed about to break into a run.
“Sometimes it isn't about black and white,” Tosh told him. “Sometimes it's about you're a very big man and when a man as big as you does something as simple as laugh a little loud it scares people.”
“Well that's funny because it's been about black and white for as long as I can remember,” Adam told her.
“Baby?” She waited until he looked down at her.
“It's true... Now stop... This is something I enjoy. Don't spoil it.” She held his eyes until he smiled at her.
Their combined laughter faded into the gray of the evening as they moved off down the street.
USGS Alaska:
10:15 PM GMT March 1st
“What is that?” Mieka Petre asked. He planted one hand on the back of the chair and then leaned forward, staring at the monitor harder.
“The Yellowstone Caldera... That's what I've been trying to tell you. It wasn't there when I left for my break... Uh,” he looked up at the clock. “Fifteen minutes ago,” David Jones said.
“That can't be. Has there been any activity from...” He stopped talking as David called up the log from ten minutes prior. He watched as a small counter measured the sudden change in ground level. He watched the elapsed time. “Christ, Jesus. Eleven inches in twenty-one seconds. That's impossible.”
“Started about five seconds before that... At least on my readout...” David sighed. “The point is it wasn't there, and it is now.”
Other people wandered over from where they had been, zoning in on the hurried conversation, and the edge of excitement it carried.
“I can goddamn well see that, David.” Mieka motioned for David to move, and took his seat, rolling closer to the monitor and watching the counter. “It has to be an error.” He caught a flash from the corner of his eye and turned away from the monitor and faced David. “Who knows?” His eyes rose and took in the half dozen men and women standing around listening to their conversation and watching the monitor. Three of them had their phones in their hands.
“Did any of you make a phone call, snap a picture? I'm telling you right now, I will personally fire anyone who causes a panic over this. This is a bad sensor... We're working on land line reads, we don't even have satellite. A bad read, it has to be. Ground level rise like that takes years, we all know that. It's fact. There has been nothing in the last few days to indicate anything like that coming up...” He fixed a hard look on his face and met as many eyes with it that would meet his own. “No one is leaving until I check their phone. Nobody!“ His eyes swept the room. The cell phones vanished. “Who has a different set of readings?”
“I got fifteen,” Joan Allen said in the silence that held the room. Her phone was folded discreetly in one hand, and she slipped it into her front pocket as though she were drying her hands against the fabric of her pocket. Mieka swore under his breath.
“Jesus, Mieka, I just got a read from Long Valley.” This from Jason Lewis.
“What? ...When?” Mieka asked as he turned to face him.
“I was watching it. There was some funny seismic stuff earlier and...”
“And? Get to it,” Mieka shouted.
“And it seemed like it was nothing … There was nothing when I got up to see what you guys were doing... Two feet... Two feet in the last minute!”
Panic gripped the room and voices immediately leapt into hurried conversation.
“People! People! Shut up!” Mieka Petre yelled above the din. The silence was instantaneous. He turned to face Jason. “Up two feet?” Sweat ran freely from his brow.
“Down... Down. It's like it suddenly sunk... Suddenly...”
Mieka waved him off, and turned to face the room. He swiped at the sweat as it rolled into the corner of one eye, stinging.
“What else... Anything else?”
“Seismic... 4.3 … 5.8 … Jesus... Clusters around Yellowstone.” Jane Howe.
One by one everyone had gone back to their monitors. Alarms began ringing in the silence that had descended. First soft chimes then urgent warbles. All the satellite network was down. They had been reduced to basic land line connections. Slow, they should have had this information sooner, Mieka thought. Much sooner.
“Japan,” Someone called out. “Off the coast... Chiba... Seismic... It's a big one... A big one... 8.9 … More... More coming...”
An alarm that was mounted partway up the wall above the huge banks of monitors began to bray. Long, strident calls. Mieka turned to the alarm, frozen for a second. It had never been triggered in the ten years he had worked at the Alaska station, never, he had begun to believe it would never be triggered. He thought of it as the Oh Shit, alarm. It was triggered from the central office on the mainland. It was only set off if there was a catastrophic failure of some sort. With the delay because of the land lines he had no way of knowing how late the alarm was. What had already, in all probability, occurred.
He turned to go back to his own chair; there were decisions to make, people to notify. Suddenly the floor dropped from under him, and he found himself falling. Before he could reach the floor it suddenly leapt up to meet him, and he slammed headfirst into the polished concrete, nearly losing consciousness.
He regained his knees and tried to brace himself as the floor shook harder still. Blood ran from his hairline, and joined a small trickle of blood from one eyebrow. A second later it ran across his cheek to his chin; dripping to the floor.
He watched the drops hit the concrete; splatter, and he thanked God that he could still see. There was a stabbing pain behind his eyes. He had hit hard, and the shaking building wasn't helping at all.
Screams and yells mixed with the crash of file cabinets and the splintering of plastic as monitors shook apart or crashed to the floor. The air suddenly became clouded with dust as the concrete the room was made from began to shake apart.
Mieka watched as Jane Howe bounced across the floor, her eyes wild, and slammed headfirst into the corner of a desk, sliding underneath; her body suddenly loose, shaking like a rag doll as the jolts hit the building: Her legs jumped up and down. Mieka tore his eyes away. He tried to maintain his position on his knees, the palms of his hands flat, grasping at the concrete, but the constant pounding of the floor against his kneecaps was becoming excruciatingly painful. Reluctantly he dropp
ed back down to the floor, trying to control the drop as much as he could, but he went rolling away to slam into a wall: He felt his ribs break as he hit.
The noise from the earthquake was a constant roar. Screaming, yelling, crying, pleading, the constant rain of concrete chunks, sounding like hail stones as they fell from the ceiling above. The thickening dust. A roar of something else, wind? ... Something beginning to overtake everything else, closing out all other sounds as he sagged against the wall and tried to hang on. His ribs were definitely broken, it hurt to lift his arms. He could feel the bones grinding together. He knew he was crying out each time they were moved, but he could not hear those cries.
The ribs ground harder, and this time the light dimmed further; he had a harder time opening his eyes. A second later they slipped shut again as the floor suddenly dropped from beneath him once more, causing the splintered ends of his ribs to grind together even harder. He found himself falling as consciousness slipped away from him. The noise increased as he fell and then suddenly it was gone. He fell silently through the darkness.
THREE
KATIE
March 2nd
Market Place: Old Towne: Early Morning
“I don't give a fuck what you think, girl. Get that fuckin' money in the bag, and get it in the bag now.” He shifted away, leaning back from Katie, but with the mirrored sun glasses it was hard for her to tell whether he was still looking at her or away from her. The drawer had hesitated opening, the reset from switching to emergency power, just a sticky register, something, she had tried to explain it, but he had taken it personal. Like she had meant to have it happen. Thankfully it had opened immediately the second time. She picked up her cash drawer and dumped it into the green plastic garbage bag he held. The ground trembled a little under her feet causing her to sway, and they both paused, waiting...
There had been earthquakes. A few aftershocks in between the major jolts, and then the power had gone out. This was, Katie hoped, only a tremor.
It had been the new assistant manager's bright idea to stay open. To be a gathering place for people in the neighborhood until someone in charge showed up. It was three A.M. and no one in charge had shown up. Twenty minutes ago three people had walked through the front door: All dressed in military fatigues; all wearing the mirrored sunglasses and some sort of scarves or bandannas tied around their heads and below their noses. Hair, eyes, all the features you could look for and remember were gone. They would probably never get caught, there was nothing to remember. Never mind the fact that the alarms were out, the cops hadn't been seen for hours, and they were robbing the market in the middle of some kind of disaster. Katie only hoped they made it fast and didn't hurt anyone. The oldsters, her nickname for the older folks that lived in the area, couldn't handle a lot of shock. Already some of them were overly frightened and shaking.
Earth's Survivors Box Set [Books 1-7] Page 4