Quake

by K. R. Alexander

  “Wow, it’s good to see you.” Someone running over.

  I squinted to make out his face. “Do I know you?”

  “Here, I have water.”

  “Water?” Again, I could have burst into tears and flung my arms around someone. “Thank you so much—” Cough.

  He grabbed my elbow, like he thought I’d fall, then slung a school bag off his shoulder. “I’m Trent. Trent Vacarro?” Like a question. “You probably don’t know me from…”

  “Coffee shop?”

  “Uh…”

  “School?”

  “Yeah.” He sounded relieved.

  Vacarro? I was usually good with names—feeling guilty if I didn’t admit I couldn’t remember someone. Even the whitest lie made me sweat. I’m such a bad liar, Kimberly had to coach me about ditching a high school boyfriend. I’d had every intention of telling him I didn’t want to keep seeing him because he was boring and had no interests besides video games. What I ended up saying was we weren’t a good fit and I didn’t have time to see him because I went straight to the stable after school most days. I don’t think I’m a mean person. It seriously hadn’t crossed my mind to be anything but honest with him until Kimberly drilled me.

  So I didn’t say an honest, “I’ve no idea who you are. Give me the water.” Even though it was my first impulse. I didn’t say anything.

  He was talking about the streets, how everything was down. “At least leaning, windows blown out. Splits down the centers of buildings. You must live by the park. It’s so good to see you.” He pulled a stainless steel water bottle from the bag.

  No one had to tell me this was bad, or resources were going to be limited. I took the tiniest sips from that bottle, rinsed my mouth, spat, then drank. It was already half drained, presumably from his having made use of it because his face looked clear, graphic T-shirt shaken out. To me, Seattle in April is not T-shirt weather.

  I wore jeans that were a size too big and a plain, V-neck knit top, pink with a pattern of running horses across it, and thick socks; blobbing around at home and sending funny videos to my brother clothes. Not out meeting guys clothes. Not a speck of makeup, which would only have made more grit cling to my face anyway. Nor had I had a haircut in the past year, at first putting it off, then by necessity, meaning my short style was now past my shoulders and not a style at all. Then there was the foot situation. Maybe I needed shoes even more than water.

  Besides shoes, none of this was taking up time in my thinking space. But it came home when my knight said if I would lie down, he’d trickle water into my eyes. If we tried it standing up, it would turn me into a mudslide.

  “You have to shake out your top to clear the dust,” he said, “and it still itches like hell.”

  “Thanks for saying that,” I panted. “Itching was the least of my worries. Now…”

  “Power of suggestion? Sorry. I’ll turn my back if you want to air the shirt, then we’ll wash out your eyes.”

  I meant to tell him he didn’t need to do that, but, taking the bottle, he turned to wait for me. There were people all over the park through dust; hurt, trying phones or trying to help, or just sobbing or in shock. Still, it was a kind gesture.

  “Thanks,” I said, pulling the shirt over my head, eyes shut tight as a new shower of dust and grit bloomed around us. “Do we share a class? Sorry I don’t remember.” I flapped the cotton, trembling, and yanked my bra to dislodge more debris. It wasn’t all brick and plaster dust. Splinters an inch long and shards of glass flew.

  “You’re a year above me,” he said. “Plus English while I’m in film studies.”

  “Then how do you know my name?”

  He chuckled. “All the guys know your name.”

  “Yeah, right.” I snorted, brushing myself off with the shirt, shaking my head, afraid to touch my hair in case I impaled either scalp or fingers on glass. I could hardly get a date in this town. I’d know if I were the talk of campus.

  “Anyone paying attention,” he rushed on. “I see you around. It’s nothing.”

  Now I’d embarrassed my literal one friend in the world. “Thanks for seeing me around. I don’t know what I’d do without that water. Why do you have your bag?”

  While I put the shirt on, then gave my jeans the same treatment, he explained how he’d been sorting through his school junk and throwing out last year’s notes when the quake hit.

  “I rent a room a block away. Got under the desk, held onto the bag, and next thing I knew the whole side of the house was jerked over. I just grabbed what I could and got out. Everyone in the house was okay. I thought … get to the park. Open space, out of the debris, and, sure enough, looks like this is where everyone is coming. It’s a nightmare out there.”

  “I can’t get a call through. Does your phone work?”

  “Don’t have it.”

  “At least you have sneakers. Okay. I’m dressed. Thanks, uh, Trent?”

  “Yeah, middle name, Trenton actually, but I go by Trent. My mom’s tribute to where I was born—when I was supposed to be born in San Francisco.”

  I laughed. “I bet that’s a good story.” Then realized I’d laughed, and he was, and felt guilty, even monstrous—laughing while people were literally screaming in pain nearby, and feeling kind of fluttery meeting his eyes. It was a relieved, grateful, want to hug you feeling that distracted from my own issues of the moment. Plus something else I couldn’t pin down.

  We found the least glassy area we could, below trees, and I lay on my back, turning my head to one side, then the other, while Trent dripped water over each eye. After this help, we sat against a madrona, trying to figure out what we could do. Without gloves or masks, for me not even shoes, how were we supposed to dig people out without succumbing to dust and injuries?

  “I can do CPR,” Trent said. “You’re not hurt, are you? So let’s see what we can do for people already at the park until any emergency crew can reach us. That could be hours. Or…”

  “A long time.” I was finally able to look at him clearly, meet his eyes at close range with dust settling, but now smoke from unseen fires in the air. The first thing that struck me was how much he looked like me. Not like me like that. Like me as in big jeans and T-shirt, scruffy, hadn’t shaved in two days, hadn’t meant to be anyone’s knight today.

  Trent was one of those scrappy college guys, with narrow face and long limbs, who maybe hasn’t come into his own yet. But I bet he also had one of those faces that stays looking young for decades, smooth and elfin like a comic book character. Tanned complexion, shaggy black hair and uneven stubble, arresting eyes: a sort of light green-gray type, weirdly pale in his face. Or could be the intensity of his stare that made me notice.

  Cute knight with shining water doing a good deed? Or campus stalker who singled me out after the biggest disaster this city had ever seen? I try to give people the benefit of the doubt.

  “What we need more than CPR right now is water,” I said. “Let’s find a working tap.”

  “Pipes will be broken. But people have been hoarding water bottles. Not every building is leveled.” We stood as we talked.

  “We’re not going to loot homes.”

  “That’s not looting,” he said. “That’s like … grabbing a bandage in someone’s house when someone on the sidewalk is bleeding.”

  “Yeah…” Trying to think about that but distracted.

  “How bad was your place? Any chance of shoes?”

  “Probably not.” Then I realized what was going on. That feeling of him being here, of the water bottle, sitting close, all of it. I started to speak, lump in my throat, gulped. “Thanks for… I haven’t seen anyone this close in weeks. I didn’t even think about the virus.” Glancing at the bottle in his hand.

  “Me neither. But I’m not sick. Also…” He looked around. “I don’t think it’s our biggest priority right now.”

  I started forward, hesitated, but Trent could see how I’d been moving. He took a step and hugged me. Again, my eyes flo
oded and I shut them, so grateful for the touch, feel of someone else breathing, I could have wept.

  Now wasn’t the time. We were able-bodied, drinking from the saucer and all that.

  “Okay,” I said, meaning to let go but still hanging on, his chest firm and arms welcoming as a down blanket around me. “Let’s see what we can… Jackson?” One hand on Trent’s back, I squinted in what seemed to be smog below sunlight. “Jackson!”

  Most fellow students lived on campus, while other friends like Vi were scattered in various neighborhoods, but here, miraculously, was someone I did know in Capitol Hill. A strapping guy, straightening up from helping an older man with an apparently broken leg lie back on grass with others, Jackson stood out.

  “Brook?” His face brightened when he spotted my wave and started over. There was blood down his sleeve and temple, but it didn’t seem to bother him. “You’ve no idea how good it is to see you.”

  My knees were shaking, having to lean on Trent. “I have a pretty good idea.”

  Trent had turned his head, arm around my back. He wasn’t looking at Jackson, suddenly tense, catching his breath. I also looked west, diagonally past Jackson, the direction of downtown and Puget Sound, then the Olympic Peninsula, then Pacific Ocean beyond. People were screaming, ground shuddering below our feet; something changed in the air, some noise or pressure that I had no time to think about or pin down.

  Jackson heard it too, or saw the looks in our eyes, stopping short of us.

  “Oh, my God,” Trent whispered just as I saw and clutched him tighter.

  It wasn’t an aftershock from the Megaquake. It was a wall of water.

  Chapter 4

  Crash—Jackson smashed into us with the ocean. Trent’s arms already around me, Jackson grabbing us both, we catapulted across the park, slammed along by a solid front door torn off a house. It seemed like that door was clubbing us on the way. In hindsight, it probably saved our lives—that and keeping the kind of grip on each other that allows adrenaline-fueled mothers to lift cars off children.

  Roar in my ears, churning blackness with eyes shut tight, lungs tearing, flying through a whole world that used to be somewhere else, now boiling around us. From shattered glass and coffee mugs to bathtubs and SUVs, and tens of thousands of people and animals, alive and dead, I don’t think there was anything but Atlantis that wasn’t in that water.

  Worse than the biggest tsunami. I’d heard the occasional comment about the Megaquake and how the whole Northwest Coast would eventually “drop” into the Pacific when the Cascadia subduction zone shifted in its next multi-hundred year cycle. But who ever thinks they’ll be here for it? Or realizes how fast it can happen?

  That’s what we’d thought about the virus months ago. Five months for a million people to die. Were we matching that in five minutes?

  I don’t know much of what happened through that water except holding on and dark and knowing, knowing, I was going to die. This was dying. It was over. I held Trent with both arms in spinning black, feeling just as much inside a crushing tornado as a wave, so consumed by terror there was no life flashing before my eyes or regrets or anything. Terror and hold on and going to die. Going to die in someone’s arms, which was something. At least isolation was over. Maybe not worth it, but over, just like us. We were all over, the world over, gone.

  When my head cracked through the surface it was like a fresh explosion, as if going through glass, a shock and expulsion of water from my lungs at the same moment. Something had hit me, crashing in from the side to bludgeon us while that door still pinned against Jackson. It was a big, two-seater baby stroller, the sort with lots of foam padding and rubber, bashing my ribs and Trent’s arms as we were driven to the surface in a swirl of debris.

  Spray of water, suck of air, one glimpse of light, the padded handle of the baby stroller banging my head into Trent, roar of water drowning out screaming, crushing in. Then gone, ripped under by the current, struck constantly by so much around us it was like being in one of those ball pits in kiddy playhouses, every inch of you hitting or being hit by something else. Sharp and smooth, yielding and solid, keeping pace and flashing past, often other people grabbed at us, only to be yanked away.

  We struck a car with knees and thighs, Trent and I, spinning all three of us in a cartwheel, losing our protective door, then to crash into a solid metal wall, vertical, moving with us, taking a moment to understand it was the bed of a pickup truck. Again, we were sheltered, hurtling along in that truck, clutched together, drowning, but, for one more minute, alive.

  A dog crate crashed into Jackson’s back, a tree or post of some kind smashed the truck, only brushing my arm when a few more inches would have smashed me. Everything in seconds, jolts and feelings, a hailstorm, mostly unknown, all of us kicking, trying to get back to the surface, but also cling to that truck.

  Black and white stars exploded in my eyes, lungs on fire, feeling no other pain. So I’d made it a few minutes. Still going to die.

  The truck flipped, flinging us downward, not up, probably due to another car or tree smashing its nose down below us and making the truck spin like a hamster wheel.

  Pitched downward, still holding on, still kicking, spinning and spinning, not sure which way was up anymore, explosion of white stars, had to breathe, had to take in something, had to try, air or saltwater or fire, going to drown, hold on.

  Spinning, stars, so, so cold…

  Chapter 5

  “Brook?”

  Lungs and throat burning, I was coughing, spewing water, barfing up an ocean along with an ocean floor, mud and vegetation and debris down my throat, before I was even fully awake.

  “Turn, there you go—” Trent pushed me around, hitting my back. Everything still dark, only flashes of color. I heaved and clawed for something, not sure what, only knowing that I had to get up to breathe, up to the air, out of this freezing, salty, filthy water full of broken glass and leveled buildings, dead rodents and dead people.

  Horrified, still vomiting and bleeding, tasting blood and acid in the salt and dirt and fish and gasoline and paint thinner, I fought onto my hands and knees.

  “It’s okay, Brook. I’ve got you, I’ve got you…” He was coughing too, but he must have already been throwing up, now clutching me on his knees. Others were coughing and gagging around us but I couldn’t see them. “Get it all out, it’s okay.”

  Barfing things I didn’t know anyone with a mouth smaller than a hippopotamus could swallow, I finally gripped something solid and pulled myself onto … a bookshelf. It lay facedown in mud and debris of a street. We were still in the city. I’d been sure we’d been washed out to Lake Washington, so, so sure I was going to die, already dead, I didn’t even know what to do now, didn’t feel alive at all.

  We’d lost Jackson. Then was he…?

  I clawed up onto wood to sit on the back of the shelf, all my fingernails broken off, blood trickling down both arms, shirt torn and dangling in soaked, bloody fragments, socks gone, hair plastered around my face, which felt tender and swollen, so cold we might have ridden an avalanche here.

  Trent was there with me, pressing tight on our bench, holding on.

  Other survivors were coughing or sobbing around us, but … not many. When I could finally blink and look up to hazy afternoon light, I found the rubble of a flattened city, nothing but mounds, heaped cars, often upside down, and only a few people moving. Most of them were not.

  Shivering violently, limbs numb, I turned away, face in Trent’s shoulder, so beyond able to help, to find water or make anything better, I didn’t even remotely feel in that moment like one of the “lucky ones.”

  Again, I couldn’t breathe. I clung to Trent, his hands at my back and head, pulling me in, shivering together. I would have just sat there, crying until the sun set and we all died of exposure or injuries, but I heard steps, someone running through sludge, and a barely familiar voice, “Brook!”

  It was Jackson, who’d been there all along, I soon learned, only
he’d gone looking for help while Trent had done CPR on me.

  “Get up,” he said as soon as he’d bent to hug me—while I was a total mess, relief of seeing him not only alive but up and moving as great as if my own family had appeared. “Everyone, come on. Who needs help?”

  Which was how we started moving, how we found Ramak and the others, and how I soon learned that we weren’t in Seattle. We’d traveled at least six miles before the water had leveled and washed us back into Bellevue. Now we had to get out.

  Chapter 6

  The next hours were as much a blur as the water. Almost as if we were still in that wave, still drowning, deaf and blind. Shock, cold, eventually pain, all piled up until there wasn’t any room for memory.

  It helped to do something, move and get others moving. I had a nasty cut across the top of my shoulder and many scratches, worse bruises. I don’t know how. Guardian angels, Mom would say. But I wasn’t the only one. Trent, Jackson, and a dozen people we soon found and joined were also all right. Many, many more were not. All of us who were able helped those who weren’t. With arms over shoulders, children carried, and an old woman clinging to Jackson’s back, Trent and another man carrying a third on a stretcher made of a closet door—any way we could. I wore the stretchered man’s shoes while holding onto a young woman with a crushed leg, blood running from her head, almost insensible as she hopped along.

  Down streets of rubble and over mountains of debris, through water sometimes reaching to our waists, floating with everything from children’s toys to live snakes, we gradually made our way to a concert hall with the whole stage area still intact and above the water, though most of the ceiling and the balconies had crumbled.

  Until sunset, we helped people to the stage, lying out rows of those who couldn’t stand, going back out with those who could to help and scavenge. Somehow, it started to feel like enough. No doctors in our crowd, but two nurses. No dry wood, but butane stoves and other camping gear in the ruins of the nearby mall. It was harder to find water in bottles that hadn’t been destroyed, but we kept searching until the light was gone.