Earthquake Terror

by Peg Kehret

  Abby was asleep. Wearily, Jonathan crawled into the shelter and lay beside her.

  The sun was low in the sky. Where were Mom and Dad? They made it off the island but that didn’t necessarily mean they had made it to the hospital. It was twenty miles from the bridge to Beaverville and that road could be as impassable as the road between the bridge and the campground.

  He had not found a smashed car on the island, but maybe the car was smashed somewhere else. Or maybe it was at the bottom of the Tuscan River.

  If his parents could send help, they would. Jonathan knew that. He also knew they might not be able to send help, and if that were so, Jonathan must somehow help himself.

  I need to make a signal that can be seen from the air, Jonathan decided, some sign that we’re here. That way, even if Mom and Dad haven’t made it to town yet, someone in a plane might spot the signal and realize we need help.

  A fire, perhaps? Smoke would be seen a long way off, and a fire would be noticed even after dark. He had learned in Cub Scouts how to create sparks by rubbing stones together. He could gather twigs and start a fire.

  He crept out of the shelter without waking Abby, and quickly gathered a pile of dry leaves. It was easy to find twigs for kindling and he soon had a tepee of twigs built over his leaf pile. But as Jonathan bent to pick up a larger branch, he realized how dry the forest floor was. There had been no rain for months.

  He couldn’t build a fire, not with the forest so dry. One wayward spark and the whole island would go up in flames. Jonathan kicked his pile of twigs and leaves, scattering them in a circle.

  He needed a clearing. He needed a big open space where he could take large sticks and spell out H-E-L-P.

  The lakeshore! There was a wide stretch of beach between the end of the trail and the edge of the lake. It would be perfect. He could make the sign and start a fire, too, to draw attention to the sign. He would build the fire close to the lake, and put wet sand all around it to keep it from spreading.

  Jonathan scooped up some of the dry leaves and twigs and stuffed them into his backpack. He gathered an armload of inch-thick sticks, for firewood.

  He hurried through the woods toward the lake, following the path he had cleared earlier when he and Abby returned to camp. Alone, he covered the distance quickly.

  He saw the big redwood tree that he and Abby hid under during the earthquake. Just beyond it, he saw water.

  Jonathan stopped and stared. The earthquake hadn’t hit until he and Abby were far down the trail, well away from the lake. He shouldn’t be able to see water already. Yet there it was.

  Jonathan dropped his sticks and plunged through the brush until he reached the big redwood. He scrambled up on the trunk and stood, looking across what had been the trail.

  The lake was different than before. Closer. Water now covered the forest floor where he and Abby had first struggled to walk. Broken branches bobbed on the surface.

  Jonathan slid down the far side of the redwood. Splash! His feet landed in an inch of boggy water. He slogged forward, curious to see where the water came from. Had the earthquake rearranged the lake?

  He continued walking until the water was ankle deep. Then he climbed partway up a maple tree and looked west. With so many trees down, the forest was not so dense and he could see clearly. What he saw sent chills down the back of his neck.

  The sandy beach was underwater. The junction of stream and lake, where he and Abby played sink-the-ships, was underwater. And a large portion of Magpie Island was underwater.

  The lake was much bigger than it had been before. It was far larger even than it got in winter when the Tuscan River was at its deepest.

  In his mind, Jonathan saw the layout of Magpie Island as it looked on the map. It sat in the middle of the wide Tuscan River. One small stream, Magpie Creek, flowed across the island into Magpie Lake, and then flowed out the other side where it rejoined the Tuscan.

  If Magpie Lake was suddenly expanding, the river must have changed. What had happened? Had harmless Magpie Creek suddenly overflowed its banks?

  Jonathan watched the water inch closer. What if the earthquake had created a natural dam of fallen trees? What if the Tuscan was flowing into Magpie Creek and from there into Magpie Lake, as it always had, but no water was flowing out on the other side? There would be no place else for that water to go except to overflow on the island.

  Jonathan took a step backward. How big would the lake get? How long would a dam hold?

  How close to the campground would the water come?

  Magpie Island was only a few miles wide and the only bridge connecting the island to land was broken.

  The Tuscan River was a huge river—big enough for houseboat rental companies to flourish. If it was now flowing into Magpie Lake, the lake might get big enough, deep enough, that the whole island would eventually be underwater. Magpie Island would disappear, possibly forever.

  Water lapped at the tree trunk below him. Jonathan stared down at it. The lake was definitely moving toward him.

  Jonathan climbed down the tree and sloshed through the woods toward his sister. He could not spell out H-E-L-P, when there was no longer any land between the lakeshore and the woods.

  He needed someone to talk to, someone who could give him some advice. He needed to tell someone that Magpie Lake had overflowed its banks, and he and Abby were trapped in its path and he wasn’t sure what to do next.

  The thought of tidal waves jumped into his mind. He remembered pictures on the classroom bulletin board of a tidal wave following an earthquake. In Jamaica, he thought. His teacher had talked about an earthquake in Alaska, too, where parts of the ocean floor rose fifty feet.

  But Magpie Island was sixty miles from the ocean. Surely a tidal wave wouldn’t surge that far upriver, causing a flood, and wiping out everything in its path.

  Would it?

  Jonathan wished he had been more interested last year when his teacher had talked about earthquakes. Mrs. Higgins had even offered a chance to earn extra credit by doing a report on earthquakes, but it had been in the spring, at the start of baseball season, when Jonathan didn’t have a lot of extra time.

  He took deep breaths, trying to stay calm. Surely help would arrive soon. Even with the bridge out, Mom and Dad would make sure that he and Abby were rescued. By now, rescuers were probably on the way.

  Maybe we’ll have to be airlifted in a helicopter, Jonathan thought. That would be exciting.

  He didn’t care how they got out. He just hoped it would happen soon. If it didn’t, and the water kept coming . . .

  Jonathan ran faster. He couldn’t just wait for rescuers to come. What if the water got there first?

  Abby was awake when he returned to the shelter.

  “Where’s my drink?” she asked.

  Jonathan opened the backpack, threw out the dry leaves he had gathered, and gave Abby one of the two remaining juice packs.

  He had planned to save his parents’ juice until he was desperate, but Abby was thirsty and she would be certain to have a tantrum if she didn’t get something to drink.

  I’m desperate now, Jonathan thought. The river is flooding and half the island is underwater.

  And Abby can’t swim.

  He opened the last juice pack and carefully poured some into his cupped hand for Moose, who lapped it eagerly.

  Jonathan drank the rest himself as the thought repeated itself in his brain. Abby can’t swim.

  Trees float.

  He had seen whole logs riding on top of the water in Lake Washington when he visited his cousins in Seattle last year.

  We need a raft, Jonathan decided. He would lash some saplings together and make a raft.

  Jonathan found four young trees of approximately the same length. One at a time, he dragged them to the clearing near Abby. After breaking off as many limbs as he could, he lined the trees up, side by side. If he could hold them together, they were wide enough for Abby to lie on. He’d give anything for the coil of clothesline
that he knew was just inside the door of the camper. He needed to tie the trees together. But how?

  He picked up one of the thin branches he had snapped off and stripped all the leaves from it. Then he tried to wind the branch around two of the trees, but the branch kept breaking. It wasn’t going to work.

  What he needed was rope or wire or even some long strips of a sturdy material.

  He remembered the awning. Quickly, he returned to the flattened camper and tugged on the yellow canvas that stuck out from under the tree. He braced his feet and pulled as hard as he could but the awning did not tear.

  Jonathan wiped the sweat from his forehead on the bottom of his T-shirt. He fingered the T-shirt fabric. He could tear it into strips but he knew it was not heavy enough to hold the trees together, once they were afloat.

  Forget the raft idea.

  “I want to play school,” Abby said. “I want to be the teacher.”

  “Okay.”

  “Get out your songbook,” Abby said. “We’re going to have music class.”

  Jonathan sat on the ground and pretended to look at a songbook. He would keep Abby happy while he tried to think what to do next.

  Abby began. “Itsy-bitsy spider went up the waterspout.”

  Jonathan joined in. He felt as if he were having a dream. He and Abby weren’t really sitting alone in the wreckage of Magpie Campground, next to what used to be their camper. There wasn’t really river water creeping like a cat across the forest floor toward them, getting deeper by the minute. The whole situation was unreal.

  “Down came the rain,” Abby sang, “and washed the spider out.”

  Jonathan wished she had chosen a different song. He wasn’t too eager to think about anything, even a spider, getting washed away.

  Abby rocked from side to side as she sang her favorite song. Her shadow rocked with her across the ground.

  The sun was low in the sky now. Dad had said he would be back by dinnertime. But Dad didn’t know there was going to be an earthquake.

  “Up came the sun . . .”

  Thud.

  Jonathan stopped singing. “What was that?”

  “And dried up all the rain,” Abby trilled.

  “Shh! Be quiet a minute.”

  “I’m the teacher,” Abby scolded. “You can’t quit singing in the middle of the song. You have to mind me and we haven’t finished our music lesson.”

  Thud.

  There it was again. It came from behind them, from the west.

  This time, Abby heard it, too. Her bossy expression vanished. Fear made her voice soft. “Is it the earthquake again?” she said.

  “I don’t think so.” Jonathan stood up. He walked a few yards, and then scrambled up on a large fallen tree. He looked around, trying to figure out what the noise was.

  Thud.

  That time, he saw where the noise came from. To his left, one of the toppled trees shifted, bumping hard against another tree. Beside the two trees, brown leaves from the forest floor floated slowly toward him.

  Water trickled around the tree’s roots and inched closer. How could the water be so near already? It was less than half an hour since he’d seen the water’s edge, several blocks down the trail. If it had moved this far so quickly, across the whole width of the island and with all the fallen trees and debris in its path, it wouldn’t be long before it swept across the campground, covering the entire island.

  Jonathan slid off the tree and hurried back to Abby. “We’re going to sit on top of the redwood tree,” he said.

  “I want to finish my song.”

  “We will. But we have to get as high as we can. The lake’s flooding. I’m going to push some smaller trees over next to this big one, to make steps. Then we can climb up them, and sit on top of the tree.”

  The trees he had tried to use for a raft were too small. He grabbed one of the alders he had used for their shelter and pulled it past the redwood roots.

  “You’re wrecking our house!” Abby cried.

  “I have to. It’s faster than finding new trees for the steps.”

  Something in his voice quieted her protests. She sat silently and watched.

  The redwood had no branches for about twenty feet above the roots, so he was able to pull the alder parallel to the trunk. When it was as close as he could get it, he dragged the other two alders over. He positioned one of them next to the first, and piled the other on top, creating a step. It was hard work and when they were in place, the step they provided was less than two feet high. He needed a lot more than that if he expected to get Abby on top of the redwood.

  There wasn’t time to construct adequate steps. “Abby,” he said, “we are going to climb up those roots.”

  Abby gave him an astonished look. “How?” she demanded.

  “We’ll use the roots like rungs on a ladder. You go first. Hang on tight to a root and I’ll help you get your feet up.”

  “We can’t do that. It’s too high.”

  “I know it’s high. That’s why we have to get up there.”

  “I’ll fall.”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll stay right beneath you, to be sure.”

  “I don’t want to climb up there.”

  “Neither do I but the river has flooded and the water’s coming this way and we need to get as high as we can.”

  “How could the river flood? It hasn’t rained all summer.”

  “Maybe the earthquake shifted the water’s path. Or maybe trees fell and created a dam and so the water flowing into the lake has no way to get out. I’m not sure what is causing it, but I do know the water is coming this way and we can’t just sit here and wait.”

  As if to prove him right, a tongue of water licked out from under the tree. Abby stared as the dry ground grew damp.

  “I don’t like the water,” Abby said. “Make it go away.”

  “Let’s start climbing,” Jonathan said.

  He guided Abby to the base of the roots. “Put your hands up as high as you can reach and find a place to hold on,” he said.

  Abby put her hands up and felt for something to grasp. Her fingers closed around a piece of root.

  “Hold tight and I’ll lift your feet up,” Jonathan said.

  He put his hands on Abby’s left ankle and directed her shoe to a large root that was thigh high. He put her second foot beside the first one and pushed on her bottom while she straightened her legs.

  Abby clung to the root. “Good,” Jonathan said. “That’s really good. Now put your hands up higher again.”

  Abby let go with one hand, keeping her face pressed close to the roots. Her fingers slowly explored the bottom of the tree.

  “Go left,” Jonathan said. “There’s a big one above you to the left.”

  “Which way is left?”

  He tapped her left ankle. “That way.”

  Her hand moved left until her groping fingers closed around the big root. Her right hand followed. Jonathan again found a higher place for her feet and helped her straighten her legs.

  This put Abby high enough that now he needed to start his own climb. It was going to be tricky to hang on himself and still help her move upward but he didn’t see any other choice.

  Abby stretched her arm up, feeling for another handhold. Her fingers knocked small clumps of dirt loose and they tumbled down, hitting both children on the heads.

  “I’m getting dirt in my hair,” Abby complained.

  “So am I. It doesn’t matter. Keep climbing.”

  “My arms are tired.”

  “Mom and Dad will be really proud of you for doing this.”

  Abby’s hand found another root. “I’m ready to move my feet,” she said.

  Jonathan leaned into the root system, hoping his feet would not slip, and let go with his hands. Once again, he was able to lift Abby’s feet, one at a time, and position them on a higher root.

  “We’re almost halfway there,” he said. “We’re going to make it.”

  “Halfway!” Abby wailed. �
�Is that all? I can’t do this; it’s too hard.”

  “Would you rather drown?” His own fear and fatigue cut his patience short.

  “No.”

  “All right, then. Keep climbing. Pretend you’re the itsy-bitsy spider and you’re climbing up the waterspout.”

  Root by root, they inched straight up the bottom of the tree. Balls of dirt continually rolled down on top of them. One caught Jonathan in the eye just as he looked up to see where Abby’s hands were. He blinked furiously, trying to wash the dirt away but his eye felt scratchy and irritated. He kept it closed, hoping the moisture would build up enough to cleanse his eye.

  “I’m ready for you to move my feet,” Abby said.

  “Just a second. I have dirt in my eye.” He wished he had some water to splash on his face and rinse out his eye. What a joke, Jonathan thought. Here I am frantically trying to escape the water and at the same time wishing I had some.

  After a minute or so, the eye felt better. Squinting to protect his eyes from more dirt, he found a higher spot for Abby’s feet and then hoisted himself up another notch.

  He was about six feet off the ground now and Abby was another four or five feet above him. He leaned his head back, trying to see what Abby was doing with her hands. If they could just make it to the top of this tree, they would be safe from the rising water for a long time.

  “Keep going,” he called. “You’re doing great!”

  Below them, Moose whined. I’m sorry, Jonathan thought. I don’t want to leave you behind.

  Maybe, after he and Abby got on top of the tree, Moose would be able to climb the roots, too. If I call him and encourage him, he might make it.

  With her next step up, Abby was high enough to see over the redwood’s roots. When she saw the squashed camper, she gasped. Clearly, she had not understood until then the magnitude of their loss.

  “Raggedy’s killed,” she cried and burst into tears.

  “Hang on,” Jonathan said. “I’m going to move your feet again.”

  Abby continued to weep for her lost doll. Jonathan let her cry. He didn’t have time or energy or patience to try to calm his sister. He was too busy trying to save her life. He positioned her feet a notch higher.