by Kaz Morran
As if from afar, he saw his shoulder crash through a stack of crates. In the jostling rubble, something struck his leg—a shaven head, clenched by tiny hands and still on its shoulders. Debris pelted from all sides. Feet, knees, elbows: no body part would stay on the ground. But Taiyo’s fear had vanished. He held his companion and formed a post-quake plan even as the shaking riled on around them.
He pressed his mouth to the person’s ear and yelled, “Keep against the crate!”
For a moment he lost the person but soon regained his hold around the waist. Compact body. Muscles tense. Nel. He pushed her head below the height of the crate. He knew by her movement and breathing that she yelled something, but the roar of the shaking Earth drowned out the sound.
“Just ride it out,” he shouted, though she couldn’t hear him either.
She must be terrified. Who wouldn’t be? She’ll get through it. Together, we will.
He pictured a stalactite impaling her, and put an arm across the back of her neck. Her body trembled. They locked arms around each other’s waists and intertwined legs. They bounced as one; knotted elbows and knees milling into rock while the world came apart around them.
Crates and lava formations exploded into shrapnel.
Which crate had the helmets?
Nel’s neck felt wet. Sweat coated her skin and soaked through her clothes. Or was it blood? He risked taking a hand off her to grab the flashlight off his belt. He shouldn’t have. A spike in the shaking tore them apart. Their sleeves brushed. Flailing, reaching, their fingers touched, grabbed loose cloth, but couldn’t hold on against the violence. He tried to dig into the ground with his toe and push off, to lunge for her, put a jolt kicked out his foot and he lost her.
Alone and flat out on his back, debris bit into his ear. Something bigger hit his thigh. He couldn’t hear his own cry. Which crate had the first aid? He couldn’t steady the flashlight. A rock pinged his neck. Nel slid back into him. Had she gone limp?
The shaking eased for a second, just to taunt him. Then the intensity returned.
A blow knocked Taiyo off his knees, and something dinged the top of his head, but he kept hold of Nel’s wrist. She bowled him over. To Nature, they were just another chunk of debris, rolling over rocks, obedient to the planet’s seismic whims.
Think!
He really tried to, but his mind as much as his body had been robbed of its agency. What choice remained but to submit?
The candidates had become bugs in a jar. Collected by a curious little boy for his amusement, for rudimentary study. But the boy had grown bored with the specimens’ inactivity. A sociopathic grin had overtaken his squalid little face, and he’d begun to shake the jar.
He moved Nel’s arm to cover the back of his head and neck and did the same to protect her. Her clothes were drenched. His too.
Blood? From where?, screamed the voice in his head. Where’s the wound?
He patted her back and arms, searching while the ground tossed them apart and back together. When a jolt landed his arms and legs back down with a splash, he knew it wasn’t blood. There was too much.
It’s just water.
That sense of relief did not last. The grubby little bastard had left his jar outside in the rain.
28
The Kambi Valley cave system shook for three minutes and 21 seconds, with a magnitude of 7.2, the strongest Australia had ever recorded. No tsunami warning was issued, but it struck right as Cyclone Moana made landfall.
***
The March 11, 2011 earthquake off the coast of Sendai, Japan lasted six minutes and had a magnitude of 9.1, powerful enough to permanently shift Japan’s position on the globe by 2.4 meters and move the seabed fifty meters. It tilted Earth’s axis by 25 centimeters and sped up the planet’s rotation, shortening the length of a day by 1.8 microseconds. The waves of the tsunami topped forty meters and traveled up to ten kilometers into the city.
***
Taiyo thought the tsunami would stop at the seawall. Everyone did. That’s what the wall had been built for.
Mr. Kono, sensing mischief behind those big hafu eyes, had placed sixteen-year-old Taiyo Yamazaki in a desk front row and center. But as the school year neared its end, Mr. Kono lost interest—or maybe he’d given up—in trying to tame his unruly pupil. And so, Taiyo was free to gaze longingly at the clock, and not at the reams of dreary sample questions awaiting rote memorization.
2:38…2:39…2:40…
Taiyo had no friends. The faculty hated him. He didn’t always get good grades, but he knew more than the textbook or teacher. He studied hard, just not the curriculum. University entrance exams weren’t for two more years, but everyone except Taiyo had already begun cramming.
2:43…2:44…
Sakura Kawashima sat two desks over and one back from Taiyo. Her movement drew his longing away from the wall clock. She paused mid-sprawl across the surface of her desk to borrow an eraser and exchange whispers with the girl in front of her. Sakura’s left leg, adorned with black knee-highs, stretched into the aisle and to the floor while her right leg hovered over the seat, dangling a shoe by a toe and hiking the hem of her pleated skirt.
2:45…
It began with subsonic feeling in the gut and grew like a time-lapsed video of roots breaking through pavement. The rumble turned into booms—the sound of bedrock cracking.
No one moved, except Taiyo. He stood from his desk, stunned by Mr. Kono’s non-reaction. His classmates just sat there in their navy blue blazers, their necks sweating in neckties embroidered with the school emblem. Frozen, the students gripped their desks. Their eyes darted between one another and Mr. Kono as they waited for the quake to fizzle or for someone to order them under the desks.
Tremors occurred often. Most were small and could be safely ignored. For the ones that couldn’t, students learned to follow the teacher’s instructions and hide under their desks. What they didn’t learn was how to discern when to take action on their own.
The rumbling swelled into lurching. The windowpanes rattled. In an instant, the students became fleas on the back of a great beast rising from its slumber. Falling dust and clattering desks masked the fear on the youths faces and the whimpers in their voices. But still, no one spoke. Until …
“Taiyo Yamazaki! Sit down right now,” Mr. Kono demanded over the roar.
Taiyo turned from his teacher’s stern face and yelled at the class to get away from the windows. His tone didn’t project authority as much as it conveyed shock at his classmates’ stupidity, but they dove beneath their desks just the same.
The linoleum floor rippled and folded. Desks bucked. Chairs toppled. The blackboard cracked then fell off the wall in slabs. Students lost their grips on the legs of the skittering, dancing blur of classroom furniture, and the ceiling calved, showering the room with white dust and fluorescent tube lights.
When the shaking stopped, Mr. Kono ordered the class outside to a designated area by the baseball diamond. The nurse and office staff, clad in hardhats, darted in and out of the rows of kids as teachers made headcounts. The vice-principal had a megaphone, but his instructions came out more muffled than amplified.
In spite of the bustle and near-freezing weather, things appeared under control. Once all were accounted for and sorted, and eerie calm blew in on the back of a salty gust of cold wind. They should have known it wasn’t over.
The vice-principal ordered everyone to sit down. Down on the wet, frosted dirt. Hundreds of students obeyed, though most took to their haunches instead of their rear ends. Taiyo ignored the repeated order until he’d made a 360-degree assessment.
For a rare moment, the sky above the adjacent base and airfield was silent and empty—a poetic peace in the wake of disaster not lost on Taiyo. In time, the birds reclaimed the airspace over the hibernating rice fields. Sparrows fluttered and cheeped. A pair of hawks made stealthy circles. The crows returned to their usual perch along the nearby fence—a soundproof barrier whose glass and metal guts had been spla
yed in the earthquake—and resumed their cawing.
Sakura Kawashima, from one knee, tapped Taiyo on the shoulder. Squatting, he pivoted on one shoe. He gave her a nod but didn’t speak. He knew whatever people said or did now would be amplified. Maybe that was why, even with hundreds of people and birds around, everything felt so cold and quiet. And lonely.
At first, the aftershock felt like a big old bus idling outside a nearby window. Then it grew as if Taiyo had stepped onboard, and it peaked like he’d popped the hood and leaped up onto the engine. It felt strange to be out in the open on solid ground, safe, and able to witness the shaking rather than be forced to react to it. He heard classroom windows and furniture rattling. Utility poles swayed, whipping up the power lines. A rift as wide as a sidewalk opened across the baseball diamond, cutting clear through the pitcher’s mound.
Perhaps the schoolyard wasn’t so safe. The whole area had been built on top of swampy old rice fields.
While teachers and students mulled around in bewilderment and clenched each other through the ongoing bone-setting of the planet’s crust, Taiyo thought about how stupid it was to wait around freezing his ass off while his parents worried about him and he worried about them.
Dad had drilled it into him: In the event of an emergency, meet at home. Failing that, go to the park. If there’s a tsunami alert, go inland.
He listened. No tsunami sirens.
He got to one knee and scanned for watchful teachers. “I’m leaving,” he whispered to Sakura.
“What?” She didn’t let go of his arm. “What do you mean?”
He pointed his thumb toward town. “When they ask about me, can you tell them I went home?”
“You can’t just go home.”
“I can’t stay here.”
“You have to.”
Taiyo poked his head up above the sea of seated and squatting teens. “I’ll deal with Mr. Kono tomorrow. I’m used to him yelling at me. I can take it,” he said to Sakura without taking his eyes of the teachers.
“What? Don’t be stupid. There’s not going to be school tomorrow. You don’t even know if your house is still standing. There’s a reason they’re keeping us here, Tai.”
He looked down and met her pleading eyes. She looked scared. Terrified. The perceived authority of the teachers gave her a thread of comfort. “They know what’s going on,” she said, now squeezing both his hands. She was freezing. “Everything will be fine if you do what they say.”
If he could just get up and walk away, that thread of comfort she felt would snap. But that’s how the world worked: Knowledge was power, but nobody ever really knew what was happening.
“They think they have a reason to keep us here,” he said. “They also think there’s a reason we’re supposed to walk to school, but you and I both know how good that rule is.”
She looked away and a hint of a sly, almost flirtatious, smile upturned on her lips.
He held her hands a minute longer until she stopped trembling.
Suddenly aware that several classmates had probably been watching him and Sakura holding hands, Taiyo got to his feet. Half ducking to avoid detection, he made one last glance around to be sure he could get away, and then dashed off, hopped the fence into an icy headwind, and continued down the country road at a brisk walk.
“Taiyo! Taiyo, wait!”
Sakura caught up to him at the next block. “If you’re so sure it’s better to leave,” she said between heavy breaths, “then you should have no objection to me coming with you.”
“Do up your coat,” he told her curtly. Despite having run to catch up with him, she was shaking, though not necessarily from the cold. She fumbled with the zipper; her frigid red fingers were useless. Seeing she was fighting off tears, he moved in and did her coat up for her. “This wind is brutal,” he said.
She sniffled and nodded while he warmed her fingers with his breath. Holding hands, they ran the rest of the way past the fields to town. And even when they had buildings around to cut the wind, they kept running hand-in-hand.
They ran past the same houses they always saw, but aside from an old man out with a broom sweeping up shattered roof tiles, the streets were deserted. At first glance, the neighborhood looked remarkably intact. However, like mounting evidence, each out-of-place sight ratcheted the sense of dread in Taiyo’s heart. Cracks in the asphalt, leaning utility poles, protruding manhole covers, blacked-out traffic lights, toppled scooters, and rolling aftershocks emboldened the instinct of flight. That instinct probably saved Taiyo’s life. Sakura would not be so fortunate.
Five minutes from 7-Eleven, the most foreboding of noises began to wail. Taiyo knew the sounds—three or four competed for attention, echoing and haunting the streets. Like the air raid sirens in the black and white museum videos of Sendai’s destruction in the War. But the impending attack would not come from the sky.
Taiyo got his motorbike upright and out of the pile of tipped bicycles, but the engine wouldn’t start. Letting the fluids settle might be all it needed, but it wasn’t wise to wait around.
Sakura dragged out her bicycle. “The key’s in my rucksack,” she said, adding, “at school,” as if to apologize.
Taiyo busted her wheel lock off with one swift stomp.
“I’ll double you,” she said.
“It’s fine. I’ll run beside you to your place, then run home.”
“We don’t know how long we have.”
“Relax. Most sirens are false alarms.” He had no idea if that was true, he just didn’t want her to worry. “And those walls are ten meters high, anyway. I’ll take you home. It’ll be fine.”
“If it’ll be fine, there’s no need to take me home.”
“Look …” he began but had nothing. He realized that nobody except Sakura knew he’d left the school grounds. Now he was worried about Dad and his mother. They might already be home from work. Or they could’ve gone to the school to get him and were freaking out because nobody knew what happened to him. “Okay,” he told her. “I’ll see you in … In a few days, I guess.”
“Okay.” She took off down the street.
He watched her swerve around a fallen fencepost. “Be careful,” he yelled, but she didn’t look back.
He never saw her alive again.
***
Taiyo huddled with Dad and his mother on the balcony. Bundled in their winter coats, they shivered against the darkening snow-swept sky and stared out over the rooftops toward the fishing port. They watched and waited. Nobody said a word. An aftershock broke the eerie silence that had settled over the community and sent every dog in the neighborhood into a fit of barking. Taiyo looked down at the next driveway where a tin-roof carport rattled with the tremor and drew the neighbor’s beagle out to the end of her chain to add howls to the chorus.
Taiyo stopped shivering when he saw the wave. It didn’t look real, but its presence couldn’t be rationalized away. Boats looked impossibly tiny against the looming wall of water. They shot into the air and then vanished. He watched the tsunami wall disappear like the lip of an overflowing sink.
The first row of homes exploded with the impact, then the second row, third, fourth …
The wails of the sirens persisted, their warning unheeded. For those who’d stayed, the decision was final.
The beagle’s howls turned into yelps. Boats and cars, slabs of concrete docks and bridges, solar panels and rooftops, telephone poles and pine trees, and tangles of power lines and fishing nets all gathered in the rushing wave and headed for Taiyo’s house.
The backyard began to fill with seeping water. Taiyo kept his eyes on his disappearing motorbike while listening to the beagle grow more frantic. One by one, the other dogs stopped barking. The water reached the tops of the bike tires. The beagle's yelps became gurgles. The bike disappeared. The beagle went quiet.
The roar of the water extinguished all sound but that of Taiyo’s heartbeat. Water submerged the balcony and tore it from the side of the house. The roof went un
der as well.
Taiyo had no recollection of how long they’d treaded water for, but darkness had fallen by the time the flooding receded enough for them to find the roof.
He huddled with Dad and his mother on the slick, ceramic roof tiles. Accumulating snow on his shoulders, wet and shivering, he tried not to wonder if the rest of the kids had gotten to the roof of the school in time.
He watched the black sky, hoping for a crack to appear in the clouds. It never came, so he imagined an arch of planets low on the horizon streaming from the ocean—Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus—looking closer than ever in the absence of city lights. Uranus and Neptune would’ve been there, too, but invisible without his telescope. He supposed he’d have to get a new one now.
In time, the eastern sky went from black to deep blue. In the distance, he could see flames and billows of black smoke rising from the refinery. Rooftops poked up through the debris-strewn seascape, but not half as many as there should’ve been.
The water level had hardly changed. They still couldn’t see the bottom half of the upstairs windows or where balcony had been.
Taiyo followed Dad into the house anyway. He held the curtain rod above the shattered sliding door of the former balcony, dipped beneath the surface of the water, and emerged inside his parents’ bedroom where the water came to his chest. He’d never been so cold in his life. Numb limbs and a shivering core made it almost impossible to work his legs and arms. Barely a strand of daylight reached inside, but they waded about as best they could in search of supplies, feeling for anything of use. Taiyo found two bags of chips and some leftover New Year’s snacks. The air filler in the packages had made them float up from the kitchen.
