Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

by Jackson Ford

  Amber

  It’s almost midnight when the helicopter drops them on a vacant patch of land next to the Interstate, a few miles from Bakersfield. The cameraman turned out to be right. The town itself got hit, but not quite as badly as Los Angeles, a hundred miles south. The freeway is still mostly intact, despite being clogged with hissing, honking lines of trucks.

  She barely remembers the questions Molly Zuckerman asked her. She got real vague about the soldiers not letting them enter the stadium, confused about what she saw, unsure. The reporter, Zuckerman, got more and more exasperated – especially when Matthew flat-out refused to answer any of her questions.

  The whole time, Amber had been alert for a change in the chopper’s direction – any sign that the government had figured out where they were. It hadn’t come. Which either meant they had agents waiting for them in Bakersfield… or they’d gotten away clean.

  The chopper touches down a hundred yards from the 5, dry grass waving in the rotor backwash. “Are you going to be OK?” Zuckerman says, as she leans across to pop the chopper door. “I hate leaving you like this.”

  She doesn’t sound like she hates leaving them. But there’s no trace of betrayal in the woman’s voice, no sense that she’s waiting for a dozen government agents to spring their trap.

  “We’re good,” Amber replies. “We’re gonna try our luck with the trucks.”

  Zuckerman nods, distracted, and slides the door back. The roar of the rotor blades fills the cabin. The pilot doesn’t even look at them, and Miguel the cameraman is playing with his phone. If there are agents ready to spring a trap, this little news crew is doing a good job of hiding it.

  With a final, weak smile for Zuckerman, Amber climbs out. Matthew is right behind her. They run bent over instinctively, only straightening up once they’re clear of the chopper. It lifts off with a dull roar, turns back towards LA.

  Amber comes to a halt, scanning every patch of ground she can. Beside her, Matthew has picked up on her anxiety. But there are no shouts for them to stop, no phalanx of black-clad agents. Nothing but the wind, and the resigned honking from the convoy of trucks on the Interstate.

  Matthew takes her hand. “That was smart.”

  “… What?”

  “The interview thing. It was smart.”

  She gapes at him, trying to remember the last time he praised her. Can’t do it. She gets that same burst of ridiculous pride, the same as when the professor at the museum told her she’d raised a hell of a kid.

  He’s calm, and she’s in control. All she has to do is keep him this way. And she can do that, no sweat.

  The ground is less torn up here than it was in Los Angeles, as if the quake’s effects petered off the further north they got. It starts to slope before it reaches the freeway. Matthew and Amber have to scramble up the last part, hands digging into the dusty soil. Of course, Matthew could probably create a set of steps if he wanted, Amber thinks. She yawns suddenly, then runs a dry tongue over her lips. There was some water in the chopper, plus a bag of opened potato chips, but it wasn’t close to enough.

  The line of cars and trucks extends into the distance in both directions, the highway clogged, everyone trying to get out of California. The traffic is hardly moving, and the air is thick with the stench of exhaust fumes.

  “Go ask them if they’ll take us north,” Matthew says, gesturing to the trucks.

  Amber does so, buoyed by her sudden good mood. She and Matthew aren’t the only ones out on the blacktop. The gaps between the massive trucks are filled with people – mostly other families, it looks like, dragging their possessions in wheeled cases or pushing them in shopping carts.

  She tries the cars first, the SUVs and Priuses jammed between the trucks. But they’re all full, heaving with families and belongings. No room. The few that Amber does find with space shake their heads, giving furtive glances at their door locks.

  They need to get out of here. There might not have been agents waiting for them when the news chopper dropped them off, but their luck won’t last long.

  She starts to work her way down the line of trucks, craning her head to talk to the drivers. Same result. They’re even more rude than the people in the cars. One of them openly laughs at her – a man with a fat, jowly chin and sunburnt arms. “Everybody wants a ride out of Cali, darling.” He looks her up and down, smirking. “You ain’t even in the top ten.”

  She turns away, a dull anger throbbing in her chest. She’s almost tempted to tell her son to teach the man a lesson. Instead, she keeps walking. All she needs is another angle, that’s all.

  Except Matthew is getting more and more antsy, his shoulders tense, which worries her more than she dares let on. What she wouldn’t give for their pickup. Still somewhere in the Angeles Forest, she supposes. Her son’s mood weakens her resolve. Maybe they should head into town, find a car of their own there…

  The next driver is a woman, arm dangling out window of her rig. She wears a green muscle vest, and her thick left arm and shoulder are covered with tattoos. Her face appears to be carved from granite, but she has the most incredible red hair, frizzing out around her skull like a lion’s mane.

  “How many y’all got?” The woman says, when Amber approaches her. Her accent is bizarre – a weird blend of Deep South and North Dakota.

  “Just two. Just us.”

  The woman considers, then jerks her chin. “OK, come on. Ain’t got all day.” She reaches around, popping the passenger-side door.

  Amber gapes, unsure she even heard right. Matthew doesn’t hesitate. He darts around the fender and scrambles up into the vehicle.

  The truck’s cabin stinks of cigarettes and grease. There’s junk everywhere: leftover takeout containers, magazines, at least three laptops. Behind the two bucket seats, there’s a small sleeping area, a thin mattress under a mess of blankets. A mini-fridge, a tiny, crud-encrusted stove.

  “Wouldn’ta let you in if there was more of you,” the driver says. “Cab’s cramped enough as it is. Jocelyn.” She thrusts a meaty hand at Amber. Her skin is as ridged and hard as old wood, and she makes a point of shaking Matthew’s hand, too. He’s turned on the charm again, and he gives her a huge, toothy grin.

  “I’m Denise,” Amber says. “This is Mikey.”

  “Denise and Mikey. Well, Denise and Mikey, looks like today’s your lucky day.” Her smile is a little embarrassed. “Although to be honest, I wasn’t going anywhere. Been sitting in this tailback for hours. Every truck heading down to LA is getting turned back, unless it’s hauling food or whatever – goddamn miracle the freeway’s still working, although God knows, it’s gonna be one hell of a bumpy ride.” She frowns. “No luggage?”

  Amber’s mind blanks.

  “Our house fell on it,” Matthew says solemnly.

  Jocelyn barks a laugh. “Is that so? Maybe your day ain’t too lucky after all.”

  Matthew nods, like it’s no biggie. “We need to go north.”

  “Chose a good truck, then. That’s where I’m headed. Not that I could turn around if I wanted to right now.” Jocelyn nods towards the back of the cabin. “Make yourselves comfortable. There’s plenty water if you want it. I’d go easy on the food, though – I only packed enough for one, and it’s not like I had a chance to resupply in LA. Oh, hey, traffic’s moving again. How about that?”

  She puts the truck in gear with a thick clunk, and they start to edge forward.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Teagan

  “OK, hold on,” I say to Mia, trying to keep my voice as steady as I can. “When you say destroy the entire western seaboard, do you mean that like in a figurative sense, or…?”

  “But you can’t,” Mia murmurs, almost to herself. “It’s not possible. He’d have to… I don’t get how…”

  “Hey,” Africa says. “Mia. What is Cascadia?”

  “It runs all the way up to the PNW,” she says, distracted.

  “PNW?” I say. “Like Pacific North-west?”

  Somet
hing in Mia’s eyes clears a little. Like she’s back on solid ground, so to speak.

  “I’ll show you.” She beckons us, darting around the boxes. Africa and I exchange a look, then follow.

  Mia is already moving between the tables, slipping through groups of scientists. When we catch up to her, she’s unrolling a map of the US across one of the tables. “Hold that,” she says, pointing to a curling edge. Africa complies, giving me another confused look.

  “Hey, Mimi, everything OK?” The question comes from an older man in a sweat-stained T-shirt, a plus-size version of the one the kid – Matthew – was wearing.

  “Not now, Arnie,” Mia says.

  “You sure? Who are your fr—?”

  “I said, not now.”

  Arnie gives us an odd look, but moves off, clearly thinking he has more important things to do. Oh, buddy. If only you knew.

  Mia clicks her fingers at me, still looking at the map. “I need a pen.”

  “Um… what?”

  “A pen. Something to draw with.”

  “Here.” Africa hands her a black Sharpie. God knows where he got that from.

  Mia pulls the lid off with her teeth, leaving it in her mouth as she draws a line on the map. It’s in the ocean, hugging the west coast, starting near the top of California. The line runs up alongside Oregon and Washington State, before crossing into Canada and finishing up by Vancouver Island.

  “This –” Mia spits out the pen cap “– is the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The fault line I was talking about. It’s where the Juan de Fuca and North American tectonic plates meet.”

  I stare at the line. “That’s… long.”

  “Uh-huh,” Africa says. “Why this one? Why this fault?”

  Mia’s eyes meet mine, and it’s not hard to spot the doubt in them. It’s a doubt I’ve seen before, plenty of times – hell, the China Shop crew had it, back when Tanner first introduced us. It’s even worse here, though: Mia might only be a volunteer, but she lives in a world governed by science. If she’s going to go along with us, she’s going to have throw most of that out the window.

  “Let’s say I actually believe you,” she says. “And I’m not saying I do. I don’t even know why I’m showing you any of this. But if this kid can actually do what you say he can – and I’m not saying he can – then what I want to know is why.”

  “Forgot the why,” I say. “Focus on the what. What did you guys talk about at the museum? This Cascadia thing?

  “We talked a little bit about the San Andreas, but yeah, it was Cascadia –” she taps the line “– that he was interested in. He asked all these… all these questions about it. And we were showing him maps, and seismic data and…” She trails off, squeezing her eyes shut. As if she can’t believe she could have been so stupid.

  “What happens if he triggers it?” I say quietly.

  Her brow furrows. “I already told you. The whole western seaboard goes down.”

  “Yeah, but what does that mean?”

  “What do you mean, what does it mean? It’s the Cascadia fault. What do you think it means?”

  “We don’t live in your world, Mia. Just lay it out for us.”

  “Live in my world?” She stares at us, genuinely shocked. “You’ve got this massive, massive fault line off the coast of California, that you live with every day, and you don’t know what it is?”

  “Mia!”

  “All right, look. The Juan de Fuca plate, here –” she taps the area to the left of the line, in the Pacific “– is slowly sliding under the North American plate –” tap-tap on the right of the line, her fingernail on LA “ – and all this energy has been building up for hundreds of years.”

  “OK,” Africa says slowly. “But what does it matter? They slide under, so what? Why does that make an earthquake?”

  “Because of the craton.”

  I tilt my head. “The what now?”

  “The North American plate isn’t just a single, uniform slab..” She draws a big, messy circle in the centre of America. “Here. It’s a big mass of rock that was formed maybe three billion years ago, and it’s geologically stable. Think of the plate as being really thick in the middle, and thin at the edges.”

  “Which is why we don’t get quakes in Ohio,” I mutter.

  “Uh-huh. And the craton stops the edge of the plate from moving too far. So—”

  Africa rests his oversized knuckles on the black line. “Ya, but the other plate still slides under, yaaw? So what?”

  A flash of irritation in Mia’s eyes. “These aren’t, like, smooth sheets of paper. They’re rock. They’re uneven. They’re crunching and grinding and going every which way. Except the thin edge of the North America plate can’t really move very far because of this solid mass of rock behind it, so there’s all this pressure building and building.

  “The leading edge? Us? We’re getting pushed upwards. A little bit at a time. And there’s a lot of trapped energy down there. If it gets released…”

  I hadn’t realised how pale her face had gotten, but I sure as hell see it now. “The entire coastline would drop six feet, and shoot west thirty,” she says. “All in a matter of minutes. Everywhere, from Mendocino to Vancouver.”

  She swallows. “It’s what we call a full-margin rupture. And it’s going to make all of this, all of LA, look like nothing.”

  “How?” Africa says, voice very low.

  “Easy. LA was an 8.3. If Cascadia ruptures, like you say it will, we could be looking at anywhere from an 8.7 to a 9.2. Maybe even more.”

  It’s times like these when I really wish I knew nothing about earthquakes. I’d rather be ignorant. Unfortunately, I’ve learned quite a bit of scary shit over the past couple of days, and there’s one little fact that is conveniently popping to the front of my mind now. Every time you go up a point on the Richter scale, the fault releases thirty-two times more energy than before. And over a much bigger area.

  A 9.2… Holy shit.

  Holy flying shitballs.

  Africa has his hands out in front of him, eyes closed, like he’s trying to wrap his head around it. “Wait, wait. So full margin rupture happens, the whole coast just… goes to the west?”

  “It’ll shatter the coast like a broken mirror. Massive cracks, roads destroyed, more than what happened in LA – hundreds of towns and communities completely cut off. And that isn’t the worst of it.”

  “How in the hell is that not the worst of it?” My voice has gotten almost as high as Mia’s when I showed her my PK.

  “The fault line is under the ocean. The amount of water it’ll displace… We’re talking a tsunami bigger than anyone has ever seen.”

  “You’re saying the west coast is going to get shaken to pieces… and then get hit by a tsunami as well?”

  “Us, and Japan.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I feel like I’m in an earthquake now, the ground shifting under my feet. “What does Japan have to do with anything?”

  “This much energy, the tsunami will go in two directions. It’ll annihilate the east coast of Japan. Hawaii. Maybe even Taiwan and the Philippines, not to mention just about every other Pacific island in the way. We’re talking hundreds of thousands dead in a day. More.”

  We all fall silent, looking down at the map. There’s plenty of noise around us, a shifting crowd of people, a whole chaotic city. But right now, all I can focus on is that line. The little black line that runs from California to British Columbia. It looks like nothing. Completely inconsequential. But it’s like a small lump under your breast, or a cough that won’t go away.

  It seems impossible that humans still live on the coast. Next to this… this thing. How did we not know about this? Mia’s right – it’s crazy that we hadn’t heard of it. That we just went on living our lives, unaware that the earth could lash out at us at any moment.

  My eyes go wide. “No, hang on. Just hang on a second. This line is in the ocean.”

  “Ya. So?” Africa says.

>   “Well, he can’t…” My brain is mush, making my thoughts hard to put into words. “I think he has to be in contact with the ground to set off a fault.”

  “How do you know, though?”

  “It was on the footage, when he set off the first quake.”

  “There’s footage?” Mia says.

  I ignore her. “He kind of… he crouched down, or knelt down. He put his hand on the ground.” The more I speak, the more excited I get. “Even if that isn’t true, I’m pretty sure he’s got a range for his ability – and it probably can’t reach all the way down to the seabed. So we’re OK!”

  I look between them, surprised they aren’t getting this. “Well, it’s not as if he’s gonna go scuba diving! He’s like four years old. If he can’t get close to the fault under the ocean, he can’t trigger it. Yes? We’re good. We’re in the clear.”

  Mia does not look like we’re in the clear. Mia has her hands to her face, pressed to her eyes.

  “What?” I say. Please let it be nothing. Let her have realised she left the oven on at home before the quake. Or that she forgot to pay her taxes. Let it be something normal.

  Mia looks sick. Like she’s about to hurl. “The ETS zone.”

  “The what now?”

  “Episodic Tremor and Slip. An area between the locked zone and slip zone where the mantles meet.”

  “Oh, great. I’m so glad you cleared that up.”

  “Look, fault lines aren’t uniform. The pressure varies depending on where you are. There are parts where you get these long, drawn-out quakes – episodic tremors. We can’t usually feel them, but they actually increase pressure on the locked zone – the part of the fault that can’t move any more. If Matthew can create a big tremor in one of those zones, he could trigger the big one.”

  “Could?”

  She gives a helpless shrug. “Maybe, yeah.”

  “But even if he go this BTS zone…” Africa says.

  “ETS.”

  “Ya. Even if he gets to it, it’s still out sea?”

  “… ETS zones extend under the North American plate. He’ll be able to reach them on land.”

  “OK. Fine.” I lean on the table, arms akimbo, like a general considering battle plans. I can’t afford to panic now, or even show it. “Right now, we don’t know where he is. He might have left LA already. But we know where he’s going to be.” I look at Africa. “Yes? Back me up on this.”