Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  The wardroom was hot and smelled of pea soup. Don walked unsteadily to a table and sat down, leaning on his elbows with his hands on his face. It occurred to him that his brother might be dead, far away on the ice. He began to shudder.

  Owen handed him a plastic tumbler with two fingers of brandy in it. Don took a small sip and felt a little steadier. He saw that the wardroom was crowded with scientists and technicians, all of them too busy to greet him with more than a nod or wave. Charts had been taped onto bulkheads, showing the California coast in detail. A loudspeaker was linked to the radio shack. The men and women in the wardroom were very quiet as they scrawled lines across the charts based on reports that came over the loud-speaker. A rough picture was emerging.

  Tsunamis had travelled up the Gulf of California, between Baja and the Mexican mainland, and had swept over the low-lying Imperial Valley. El Centro and several other farming towns were under water. San Diego and La Jolla had been flooded, but the coast around San Clemente had escaped. Long Beach and Wilmington were in ruins. The waves had bypassed Los Angeles’s western beaches and densely populated shoreline, but from Topanga to Malibu the coast highway and hundreds of houses had disappeared.

  The small towns and cities from Santa Barbara to Big Sur were silent. So were Carmel and Monterey. The 500,000-tonne tanker Sitka Carrier, preparing to offload a cargo of diesel fuel and gasoline at Moss Landing, had gone down in Monterey Bay. Santa Cruz, and the north end of Monterey Bay, had been flooded up to three kilometres inland.

  Details were clearest about the Bay Area. The waves had destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge and virtually all of the San Francisco waterfront. Seiches in the bay were scouring out the landfill on which thousands of houses had been built. Fires were spreading across San Francisco, Oakland and Tiburon. The huge tank farm in Richmond, storing millions of tonnes of oil and gasoline, had been flooded. Many of the tanks had been breached and were on fire; the northeast corner of the bay was covered with a burning slick. The wind from the west was confining most of it to the Richmond shoreline, but the outgoing tide was drawing the slick towards San Francisco and the Marin shoreline.

  A chlorine spill in Oakland looked really bad. Two policemen in Piedmont had reported seeing a greenish haze spreading across the freeway towards the hills on the east. That meant that scores of thousands of people in the path of the chlorine cloud were almost certainly dead.

  North of California, the waves had done relatively little damage on the steep, thinly populated coast. A ham operator relayed a report from Oregon that several fishing ports had been seriously hit. No news had come from Washington, British Columbia or Alaska.

  “Pretty goddamned depressing,” said Owen. “It’ll be even worse when we get in and people start looking for their families.”

  “Yes.” Don knew that Owen was divorced; his wife and two daughters lived in Chicago now.

  “Kirstie should be okay.”

  “God, Owen, I hope so. She was supposed to be in the city today, at a conference of climatologists. She could be fine or she could be dead.”

  “She’ll be fine. I’m certain of it. But I’m worried as hell about all the people at PIO, right on the waterfront.”

  “I’ll bet they got out in time,” said Don. “They’re plugged right into the Hilo tsunami alert system, so they’d have known as soon as anyone. They would have moved fast.”

  Owen nodded.

  “Even if the Institute is wrecked,” Don went on, “we’ll be back in business right away. There’ll be a hell of a lot to do.”

  “I know. But we may be way down the priorities list. Think about the economic impact of all this, coming on top of a depression. The government will be scraping around for money just to pay its own people, let alone us. The insurance companies will be wrecked, the banks will start failing — can you imagine how many mortgaged houses must have been smashed into kindling today?”

  “And all the computers have been haywire for months,” Don added. “Still, they’ll have to do something. They can’t just let everything fall apart.”

  *

  Ultramarine hove to a few kilometres northwest of the Golden Gate and waited for sunrise. Don slept for a few hours and woke gritty-eyed and sluggish. His head hurt. The air smelled sour and strange.

  The lights were on in the wardroom, but he found no one there. Don got a cup of coffee and took it with him to the bridge.

  Bill Murphy was there, red-eyed and hoarse from staying up all night. Owen, by contrast, was freshly showered and shaved, and seemed relaxed and casual. On deck below, most of the rest of the crew and scientists were lined up along the port rail, looking at the Marin coast.

  “My God,” said Don.

  The sea was strewn with wreckage: lumber, trees, an almost-intact shingle roof, a capsized fishing boat, tangled masses of yellow nylon rope, carcasses of cows and sheep, a man’s naked body caught in the branches of a floating oak. Here and there, the flotsam was thick enough to form islets. Oil slicks gleamed in long streaks across the choppy grey water. Despite the westerly wind, the air was sour and heavy.

  The Marin shore, five kilometres to the west, showed the scars of the tsunamis. All the lower slopes had been scoured clean of life; bedrock gleamed wetly. Above the scars, houses stood undamaged along tree-lined roads.

  “They haven’t had a big wave since midnight,” Bill rasped, “and the seiches in the bay have died down. But the slick is all over the northeast corner, and across to Marin, and up into San Pablo Bay. Lot of fires in the city.”

  “Anything from PIO?” Don asked.

  “Uh-uh.”

  The ship picked its way inshore, steering around islands of debris; a lookout in the bow used the ship’s phone to guide Bill through clear water.

  Don went outside as Ultramarine entered the Golden Gate. Grey sky hung low over the sea. The two peninsulas faded into mist not far to the north and south; over San Francisco, smoke coiled up into the overcast. It was fairly quiet, except for the drone and thump of the engines, the susurration of water against the hull, and the distant white noise of the city.

  Just to the right of the ship’s course, the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge rose above the incoming tide. The roadway it supported ran out from the steep bluffs of the Presidio, between the twin orange pillars, and ended in ragged steel and concrete. Support cables trailed into the water. Steel had twisted, concrete had shattered, but somehow the structure held together.

  A line of surf showed where the north tower lay beneath the surface. On the gouged bedrock of the Marin Headlands, the northern end of the roadway lay twisted and shattered.

  Straight ahead, Alcatraz stood out clearly against the smoke cloud of the burning slick; the hills behind Berkeley were just visible through the tattered edges of the cloud.

  Don turned to look at the San Francisco shoreline again. The old bastion on Fort Point was gone; on the muddy slopes of the Presidio, soldiers and civilians wandered without obvious purpose. Beyond the trees and red-tile roofs of the Presidio itself, more smoke rose in streaks of black and grey, white and yellow. Don saw a helicopter rise from somewhere inside the army base and vanish into the smoke.

  The surface of the water was a matted mass of uprooted trees, capsized sailboats, oil drums, furniture, tires and corpses. Despite the lookout, Ultramarine kept striking debris. The smell in the air thickened into a smoggy stink.

  Now they were within the bay, and keeping well offshore. Although he had the harbour to himself, Bill Murphy kept Ultramarine moving dead slow. The ship crept south along the ruined docks; apart from the broken concrete pillars of the Embarcadero Freeway, Don could see little of the city through the thickening haze of smoke. Beyond where the Ferry Building had been, the smoke was a solid black wall, blotting out everything on the far side of the bay. Coughing, Don went back up to the bridge.

  “Looks really bad,” Bill said. “I don’t think we’ll find much left of PIO.” He picked up a microphone.

  “This is Bill.”
His voice echoed from loud-speakers all over the ship. “I want everyone below decks. Everyone. Secure all portholes and ventilation.” He put the mike back on its hook and tugged his baseball cap lower over his eyes. He crossed himself.

  Darkness fell over the ship. Smoke swirled in grey cones in front of the spotlights, and the foghorn blatted every few seconds. Bill watched the radar and sonar screens; their green lights were reflected in his eyes.

  One of the Bay Bridge’s huge concrete footings loomed through black haze; the roadway above was only a darker smudge. Don went to the starboard windows.

  The footing was pitted and scarred for almost ten metres above the surface of the water. Deep cracks ran through the concrete; fragments of wood and plastic had been forced into them, and hung like moss.

  “That high — this far inside the bay — ” Don shook his head. “There won’t be a thing left of the Institute.”

  PIO’S buildings had stood on China Basin Road, near Pier 48. Dozens of pilings still jutted from the water, but the Institute’s converted warehouses were gone. Where they had been, oily water reflected the orange glare of the burning city.

  “Well, well,” Bill muttered. Owen stared out the windows, expressionless.

  A low, dark peninsula stood beyond the ship’s bow: the naval shipyards at Hunter’s Point.

  “Maybe the navy will take us in,” Owen said quietly.

  While flotsam thumped against the hull, the ship crept south. It was still several hundred metres from the north side of the shipyards when everyone on the bridge could see that the docks were wrecked here as well. The seiches had swept back and forth across the low peninsula of Hunter’s Point, turning the machine shops and dry docks into rubble.

  Bill and Owen spoke together for a few minutes, quietly and gravely. Then Bill ordered the anchors dropped. He picked up the mike.

  “We’re going to anchor here and assess the situation, people. If it’s at all possible, we’ll ferry you ashore in the Zodiacs. I know you all want to get to your families as soon as possible, but I’d like some people to stay aboard for a day or two.”

  “Company’s coming,” said Don.

  A small motorboat was approaching across India Basin; behind it was a high wall of rubble where Innes Avenue had been, and beyond that the long hill with the housing projects that were the heart of the Hunter’s Point ghetto. As the boat drew nearer, the people on the bridge could see that it carried four young men. All were black and all carried rifles.

  Chapter 5

  The old woman lay on the wet blacktop of the school’s playing field. Her skirt and sweater were muddy and sodden. Kirstie lifted the old woman’s head, and held a styrofoam cup of water to her lips.

  “I’m not thirsty, thank you,” the old woman whispered.

  “All right, then. We’ll have you inside soon. The doctors will take a look at you, and then off you’ll go to a nice warm bed.”

  “What’s your name, dear? Are you from England?”

  “My name’s Kirstie Kennard, and I’m from Aberdeen, in Scotland. And what’s your name?”

  “My name is Susan Smith. I live at ten-twenty-five Francisco Street. Where am I?”

  “Just a couple of blocks from home, Mrs. Smith. At the school up the street.”

  Kirstie glanced across the crowded field, over the crude shelters made of plastic sheets or slabs of plywood. The school was on the east side of San Pablo Avenue, and the disaster zone started across the street. From there to the bay, a distance of nearly two kilometres, almost every building had been damaged or destroyed. The old woman had been pulled from the ruins of her home and carried on the shoulders of two nameless men, men who had waded knee-deep through oily mud to bring her here.

  “I’m cold. I don’t feel well.” Her breath rasped in her throat. She found Kirstie’s hand and squeezed it. For a long time she lay still; at last Kirstie put a hand gently on the woman’s narrow chest, feeling for a heartbeat. Beneath the skin she felt only the sharp ends of broken ribs. The old woman had died.

  Rain pattered again on the plastic sheeting just above her head. The air stank of smoke and wet ashes and excrement. All around her, people lay or sat on the blacktop. Most of them were hurt; many were dying. Susan Smith had been the fourth person to die in Kirstie’s company in the last two hours. The schoolyard buzzed and hummed with voices: screams, shouts, weeping, laughter.

  Standing up, Kirstie signalled to two black women standing in the school’s main doorway. They came over, lifted Susan Smith’s body onto a stretcher, and carried it around the building to the growing pile of corpses.

  Kirstie went into the school for a drink of water. The halls and classrooms were filled with more people, mostly children, awaiting emergency surgery. Some cried out and wailed, but most were strangely quiet, even those who lay by themselves along the side of the main corridor. Above them, on the walls, were construction-paper murals of tulips and raindrops; in the middle of the floor was a thick trail of mud and blood.

  Someone was screaming in the cafeteria, now being used as an operating room. A young medical student in jeans and a blood-spattered apron came out of the cafeteria and looked around. He saw Kirstie and waved her over.

  “Doing anything important?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay, you can go to this address.” He ripped a paper tulip from the wall and scrawled on it. “It’s a medical-supplies warehouse. Grab all the sulfa drugs and dressings you can carry. Somebody brought in some backpacks, okay, I think they’re behind the reception desk up in the school office. Fill ‘em up.”

  “How do I get into the warehouse?”

  “Uh, you may have to break in, okay, but we need the stuff. You’ll find the dressings in big boxes near the rear door. The drugs are in a locked room between the warehouse and the front office. The key to the room should be in the top right desk drawer in Ken Berkowitz’s office, okay, with a red Dymo tape on it.”

  The young man turned and pushed through the swinging doors back into the cafeteria. Fluorescent lights, powered by a portable generator, glared over a dining table where four men held down a writhing, shrieking girl while a fifth man bandaged her arm.

  “Oh, and morphine, okay?” added the young man over his shoulder.

  “O-kay,” Kirstie murmured, feeling both relief and guilt at escaping from the schoolyard. She found the backpacks, by a cupboard containing a flashlight; if she had to go into a darkened building, the light would be useful. Going outside, she looked around for Sam and Einar, and spotted them by their yellow ponchos.

  “I need you two,” she said. They followed her out of the schoolyard and down Francisco Street.

  “Where are we going?” Sam asked. She told him; he whistled.

  Walking across San Pablo and down to University was easy enough; the waves had been less than knee-deep when they reached San Pablo, and had left only a scatter of rubble. But the farther west they walked down University, the harder it became. Most buildings had collapsed into piles of masonry and splintered wood. Cars were tumbled and scattered, their interiors packed with mud, across streets and sidewalks and parking lots. The Southern Pacific Railway station, an old tile-and-stucco landmark, had vanished; where the building had stood, a derailed train lay toppled on its side.

  The streets were swamps; in some places, the asphalt had been torn off and the underlying gravel scoured out, leaving waist-deep gullies. Fires burned in the ruins. A hotel, big and massive enough to have survived the waves, was now only a smoking shell.

  Kirstie and Sam and Einar were not the only ones floundering through the rubble. Dozens of people were picking over the remnants of jewellery and grocery stores, or wandering aimlessly. One old man, in a long overcoat and mud-caked trousers, carried a new waffle iron in a string bag as he high-stepped through the mud.

  “No cops,” Sam said as they paused beside an overturned Chevy pickup. “Where the hell are the cops?”

  “Some are taking people to the hospitals,” Kirs
tie answered. “I think a lot of them with families just took off for home. I don’t blame them. We had some firemen working across San Pablo, but they all left in a mad rush — something about a chlorine spill in Oakland.”

  Sam touched her arm. “Are you serious?”

  “Well, of course.”

  “How big would a chlorine spill have to be, to draw firemen away from this?”

  “Pretty big.”

  Through a gap in the smoke overhead, a helicopter chattered south at low altitude. “Bloody television,” Kirstie muttered. “They were circling around the school like vultures this afternoon, but would they land and help? Now they must be looking for something even worse.”

  “Is that where we go?” asked Einar, pointing to a two-story cement-block building half a block away.

  “I think so.”

  The front entrance was buried behind drifts of twisted metal and shattered wood, including a part of a sailboat’s hull. Carefully, they worked their way through the adjoining parking lot to a side entrance. It was a glass door and had been smashed open.

  “Looks like someone got here before us,” said Sam quietly. He rubbed his beard. “A building full of drugs. Mmmh.” He looked at Kirstie. “I think you maybe ought to stay put until we check out the inside.”

  “Don’t be so bloody chivalrous, Sam.” Kirstie got the flashlight out of her backpack and stepped through the aluminium doorframe. Water was ankle-deep inside. The entry led up two steps to a corridor; she squelched up and found it lined with offices, most of them unlocked.

  Sam and Einar followed her in. The three of them moved slowly; their only illumination was from the flashlight, throwing a restless yellow ellipse on floors and walls. After looking into the first office, Kirstie turned to Sam and whispered in his ear:

  “Someone’s been in here, all right. Maybe they’re still here.”

  The office had been ransacked: desk drawers ripped out, house plants knocked over, filing cabinets dented. Kirstie swung the flash around, and changed her mind: not ransacked, just vandalized by someone feeling very frustrated. Maybe the key to the drug room would still be in Ken Berkowitz’s desk.