“My lawyers got it, Shack. Relax. Things will work out.”
“They damn well better. After all you did.”
Rob decided to vector the conversation to a new tack, attempting to tamp down Shack’s obvious anger. “Tell me, how are things going there with the cleanup?”
“Okay. Slow. But hey, not without excitement.”
“Tell me.” Rob paced back to his desk and sat.
“Well, a few days ago we had some visitors. Skylar and I were working with a small crew of volunteers. There were maybe half a dozen of us clearing debris off a beach north of town, when these three kids, kind of ratty looking, in their twenties I guess, came out of the forest above the beach and walked down to us. We thought they’d come to help.”
“But they hadn’t?”
“No. One of them brandished a hunting rifle, the other two stalked around trying to look tough.”
“What did they want?”
“Cash, credit cards, watches, rings, cell phones. Anything.”
“Nice. Tell me you didn’t do anything stupid.”
“Me? No. My combat days are behind me.”
The lights in the study blinked off and on once more, then faded away completely.
“Hold on again,” Rob said. He stood and walked to the hall. “Tim, crank up the generator,” he called. He returned to his desk. “Power failure,” he said into the phone. “Go on.”
“So these kids are standing there in their macho, gang-banger mode, when one of them says, ‘What’s that? I heard something,’ and looks back into the woods. Another one of the goons says, ‘Put a sock in it, you moron. It’s probably just a rabbit or ‘coon or something,’”
“But it wasn’t?”
Shack laughed. “Not by a long shot. This huge dog, big as a mobile home, comes tear-assing out of the trees, charges right at the guy with the gun. The kid fires a wild shot into the air, and the dog is on him. Bowls him over like he was a duckpin. The other two pricks take off like scalded cats down the beach. One of them cuts loose with this ripping fart you could probably hear all the way to Astoria. I’m guessing he had to burn his underwear.” Shack chuckled again.
“And the guy with the gun?”
“The dog stood guard over him until this old black dude showed up, his owner.”
“I know him. He’s the guy they call Neahkahnie Johnny.”
“Right. And that’s another story. Anyhow, we, with help from Johnny’s Shetland-pony-sized dog kept the guy face down in the sand until the cops showed up and hauled him off to the pokey.”
Outside, the generator chugged to life, and the lights in the house, a bit dimmer than before, blinked on.
Rob tilted his chair back and put his feet up on his desk “Tell me the other story,” he said, “the one about Johnny.”
“Well, as I’ve heard it, this guy’s been looking for some sort of buried treasure around here for years.”
“Yeah, Johnny was a fixture on Neahkahnie Mountain.”
“So the speculation is that he found the loot, although nobody remembers seeing him on the mountain since last spring.”
“Then why the speculation?”
“People say before the quake the guy didn’t have a pot to piss in. Now he’s in the process of building a house in Manzanita, out of the tsunami zone by the way, that folks say is going to run in the million-dollar range. The thinking is the earthquake and tsunami may have had something to do with unearthing the buried booty.”
“Maybe, maybe not. What’s Johnny say?”
“Not much. Smiles and says he invested wisely.”
“Perhaps he did.”
“I’ve seen the plot of land where the house is going up. Spectacular view from a hillside on the outskirts of Manzanita. There’s a sign on the lot that says THUNDERBIRD AND WHALE. Curious name.”
“Not really,” Rob said.
“Why?”
“Thunderbird and Whale refers to a Native American legend that surrounded a great quake and tsunami that occurred there in 1700. I think Johnny’s trying to tell us, without really telling us, that he found the treasure, at least some it, and it had something to do with either the 1700 disaster, or the most recent one.”
“So the mystery continues.”
“What’s life without mysteries?”
They talked for another half hour before hanging up. Rob invited Shack and Skylar to spend Thanksgiving with them. “If you can stand crooked houses, jammed doors, and leaky roofs,” he added.
“Moot points if you’ve got a six pack,” Shack said. “Three beers apiece, enough to cover my ‘rest of the story’ tale.”
“You’re on.”
“One more thing,” Shack added, “if I haven’t said it before, I want to say it now. Because of what you did for Alex and me—going so far outside your comfort zone, putting your life on the line, losing your plane—you’ll always have the admiration and friendship of this broken-down old fighter jock. Maybe a lot of people dismissed you as a prophet, but I sure as shit will never dismiss you as a hero.”
“Thank you, Shack.” Rob fought to get the words out without his voice failing him.
After they said their goodbyes, Rob sat at his desk listening to the rain rake the side of the house with what sounded like bursts of automatic weapons fire. Deborah slipped silently into the room and walked to his desk. They’d made their peace months ago, Deborah asking for forgiveness for her outburst and abandonment, Rob apologizing for his insensitivity to her fears. A tsunami, he thought, allows everyone to start with a clean slate.
Enticing kitchen aromas trailed Deborah. Baking salmon, simmering pumpkin soup, fresh-cut green beans.
“And squash?” he said, sniffing the air and wrinkling his nose.
“You’ll eat it and you’ll love it,” she said, giving him a playful pinch.
“You’re the boss, buttercup.”
She didn’t respond, and he waited, knowing she hadn’t come upstairs to make small talk.
“You got another request for an interview,” she said after a moment. “A TV station in Seattle called, wants to talk to you about earthquake predictions, mysticism, and dreams.”
“I hope you told them where to go.”
“As politely as possible.”
He had no intention of promoting the popular sobriquet he’d been tagged with: The Oregon Oracle. He was a geologist, and from here on out would discuss only hard science and seismology. He’d already turned down dozens of requests for interviews from media outlets ranging from local radio stations to CNN, the New York Times, USA Today, and Time magazine. He no longer wanted any part of being a seer.
Which brought the mysterious woman Cassie to mind and something he’d been meaning to do for a long time, but had never gotten around to. His intentions had been, as they say, OBE—overtaken by events. The aftermath of the quake and tsunami had overwhelmed him.
He called up Troy University’s website on his computer and searched under Faculty for someone named Cassie. He never had gotten her last name.
Deb looked over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Remember the woman named Cassie I ran into several times before the quake? I told you about her. Tim and I first met her in the Ghost Forest in March. Then she appeared at my news conference. And finally, we crossed paths in Manzanita just a few minutes before the quake.”
“Yes. As I recall, you said she was in some sort of communications program, or doing research with Indians?”
“Strategic Communication was what she labeled her field. But she said she’d become more of a cultural anthropologist and was studying the history of Native American tribes in the Northwest. She also seemed very interested in prophecy.”
“Prophecy?”
“The topic came up every t
ime we met. It’s almost like she knew the subject was, or would become, relevant to me.”
“Was she pretty?” Deb pulled up a chair and sat beside him.
“Why do wives always ask that?”
She shrugged.
“It’s curious you ask that question, because I never figured out the answer. Sometimes, in the right light, she appeared beautiful. At other times, she looked almost ancient.” He paused and thought about it. “No, maybe not ancient. Ageless might be a better word.” He tapped in another entry on his keyboard.
“I wasn’t really worried,” Deb said. She stared at the computer screen. “Did you find her?”
“No. And I don’t think I expected to.”
Deb tossed him a questioning look. “Was she lying about her background?”
“I don’t believe so. Thinking back, she said she was from Troy. Just plain Troy. I assumed the university part.”
“There are lots of towns named Troy in the U.S.”
“True. Anyhow, since she repeatedly brought up the topics of prophets and prophecies whenever we met, I began to think there might be . . . well . . . an alternative explanation regarding who she was.”
Something, a broken tree branch perhaps, slammed against the roof with a hearty thud.
“Are we going to flutter off into Far-Fetched Land again?” Deborah’s tone indicated she meant it lightly.
“Here’s the thing. While the vast majority of us are rational human beings, it doesn’t mean the things that happen to us or around us are rational.”
“Like dreams or visions of earthquakes and tsunamis?”
“Exactly. There are events that occur in our lives we absolutely can’t explain, that don’t make sense, at least to us. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen or that we made them up, or that we’re tripping off into Far-Fetched Land, as you described it.”
“Sorry.” She massaged the back of his neck. “You know I didn’t mean it seriously.”
“I know.” He pecked her on her cheek. “Anyhow, just because things happen that are well beyond our comprehension doesn’t make those events any less real or any less valid than those we can explain. The things that don’t seem rational, for which we have no explanation, are just as much a part of our being as tripping over a rug—”
“—or crashing an airplane into a river,” Deb said, finishing his thought.
“The bottom line is, we’d like to think that we, as humans, are at the pinnacle of intelligence and understanding.” He looked directly at Deb. “But we aren’t.”
She offered an almost imperceptible nod. “So what does all this have to do with Cassie?”
“Cassie is short for Cassandra.” He let his response hang in the air, waiting to see if Deb would pick up on it.
She cocked her head at him.
“Remember your Greek mythology?” he asked.
“Not much.”
“Cassandra was the daughter of the king and queen of Troy. According to legend, she was both beautiful and insane.”
“Insane?”
“Yes, but her perceived insanity was the result of being cursed by the god Apollo, perhaps for refusing him sex. The most common version of the legend is that Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy in hopes it would encourage her to accept him as her lover. It didn’t work. She spurned him.”
“Always comes back to sex, right?”
Rob smiled. “Maybe. Anyhow, Apollo, angered at his rejection, spat into her mouth, cursing her prophecies to never be believed. As it turned out, that included her warning about the destruction of Troy by the Greeks.”
“So you think Cassie is, was, the mythical Cassandra?” The tone of Deborah’s voice betrayed deep skepticism.
He gave Deb a pat on her shoulder, stood, walked to the window and stared out.
“No, of course not,” he said. “That would be impossible, wouldn’t it, in this day and age where everything has a practical, common-sense, scientific explanation?”
Deb moved to stand beside him. “I agree, it would be impossible.” She slipped her arm around his waist. “Kind of like a scientist having a vision of an impending catastrophe.”
He nodded. “Yes, kind of like that.”
He continued to stare out the window. Scudding clouds, like a gray army, swept overhead in a rain-drenched blitzkrieg. A stand of evergreens, in deference to the gale, leaned over hard like tall sailboats in heavy weather. A chimney flue rattled, a pine cone tumbled along the driveway, a seagull, fighting the wind, hovered in place.
Rob watched the seagull for a long time.
The End
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Recommended Emergency Supplies in Megaquake Territory
1. Water for seven to ten days (one gallon per person per day)
2. Food for seven to ten days (non-perishable—you may need a manually operated can opener, too); and don’t forget pet food
3. First aid kit
4. Adequate supply of prescription and over-the-counter medications
5. Moist towelettes, trash sacks, and plastic ties for sanitation purposes
6. Flashlights
7. Adequate supply of batteries
8. Radios (battery-powered or hand-cranked), including NOAA Weather Radio for emergency information. Note: broadcast towers may be down for days or weeks in the wake of a major earthquake
9. Shelter supplies (tent, tarps, ropes, blankets, duct tape)
10. Sturdy shoes, boots, and gloves
11. Dust masks to filter contaminated air (cotton t-shirts work, too)
12. Wrench to turn off utilities such as natural gas or water
13 Multipurpose (A-B-C) fire extinguisher
14. Cash (ATMs may not be working or inaccessible)
Nice to Have, Though Not Necessarily Affordable For Most
1. Portable generator
2. Satellite telephone (land lines and cell phones may be useless for days or weeks after a major quake)
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Author’s Note
I grew up in western Oregon. It seemed, at least in terms of natural threats, a bucolic place in which to spend my youth. For instance, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes there were about as common as the Northern Lights in Georgia. Hurricanes were nonexistent. Such storms are born over warm oceans. If you’ve ever dipped a toe into the Pacific along the Oregon coast, you know it’s water in which Polar Bear Plungers could train even in August.
There were the occasional big winter storms, of course. But they certainly didn’t bear the DNA common to the meteorological monsters that inhabit other parts of the nation. I did, incidentally, experience the Northwest’s “Big Blow” in 1962 that hurled winds over 100 mph into Portland. Scary, but hardly Cat-5 stuff.
We’d get decent snowstorms once in a while, too. But true blizzard conditions were rare (see Northern Lights comment
above).
Earthquakes? I recall a decent little shake in the late ‘40s, but Northwesterners didn’t dwell on such things. After all, we didn’t live on the San Andreas Fault. Like I said, western Oregon seemed to me Nature’s Camelot.
No, we didn’t live on the San Andreas Fault. It turned out, I discovered only a few years ago, something much more threatening lurked beneath us: the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
After I graduated from the University of Washington, life’s events sent me away from the great Northwest. I ended up, not by design, spending my adult years on the East Coast in areas ranging from New England to the Southeast. Still, I frequently journeyed back to the Motherland.
On one of my return trips to the Oregon coast, maybe about ten years ago, I noticed some signs similar to those you see along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts that proclaim HURRICANE EVACUATION ROUTE. The signs in the Beaver State, however, said TSUNAMI EVACUATION ROUTE. Really? My interest was piqued. Not quite to the extent I thought about doing a novel, but I certainly was curious and began asking questions.
Then, a little over two years ago, my brother Rick, who lives part time in Manzanita, put me in touch with a digital news article headlined “Massive Earthquake Threatens Pacific Northwest.” I read and reread the article, stunned by its dire implications.
The material I’d studied about Ebola, in doing research for my novel Plague, was scary. But this stuff about the Cascadia Subduction Zone was even more frightening because it involved something that will happen, not something that might happen, or something that happens only in the mind of a novelist. At any rate, Cascadia (the fault) ignited my imagination.
I did a flood of research before I began writing. It is story and characters that drive a novel, of course, but I wanted to make certain the threats depicted in Cascadia (the novel) were scientifically accurate.
My sources included books, DVDs, articles, research papers, and geologists and seismologists. Some of the more prominent books included:
Cascadia’s Fault—The Coming Earthquake and Tsunami That Could Devastate North America by Jerry Thompson
Full Rip 9.0 by Sandi Doughton
The Next Tsunami—Living on a Restless Coast by Bonnie Henderson
Cascadia Page 25