Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  That office was two doors up the hall. It hadn’t been touched. The desk looked as if its owner had just stepped out a moment before; papers were strewn over the desk, and a brown-paper lunch bag sat beside colour photos of two small girls and their attractive mother.

  The key with the red Dymo tape was easy to find. Kirstie took it and went out into the hall, where Sam and Einar were waiting. She patted Sam’s arm and went on down the hall to the locked door of the drug room.

  Someone had obviously tried to break into it, using a hammer: the grey paint on the steel door was chipped away in little circles and crescents. Silently, Kirstie unlocked the door. Warm, stale air puffed out.

  It didn’t take long to find the sulfa; the morphine, though, seemed to be in a padlocked cupboard.

  “What now?” Kirstie hissed.

  “Wait,” said Einar. He took the padlock in one big hand, and tugged at it. Then, gripping it with both hands, he put one foot up on the steel door of the cupboard and pulled.

  Something snapped metallically. Einar grunted and pulled again, twisting. The hasp came away from the door, and he pitched backward across the room.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Sam. “Did you know you could do that?”

  “I think maybe I can do it. No harm to try.”

  They were talking normally now, relieved and surprised, as they took box after box of morphine and methadone ampoules out of the cupboard.

  “My God,” Sam chuckled. “If we’d done this two days ago, Einar and I could’ve retired to Rio. Son, you’re wasted in astrophysics. You should’ve been a burglar.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” said an unfamiliar voice. Then, unnecessarily: “All right, everybody freeze.”

  Kirstie saw Einar spin round, and heard a thump. The intruder cried out. Another thump followed, and then a second voice yelled out incoherently.

  She swung her flashlight to the doorway. Lying in the hall was a young man with blood on his lips. Just beyond him was Einar’s broad back. The Icelander turned, holding another young man in a half nelson.

  “Oh jeez, oh shit, man, my arm — hey, easy, we’re not doin’ anythin’, honest, shit, my arm. Please.”

  Kirstie walked quickly to the doorway, keeping the light on the young man’s face. “Shut up!” Her voice sounded shrill in her own ears, but he obeyed. “Sam, you’d better search him.”

  “He’s got a knife.”

  “What about his friend?”

  “A gun,” said Einar. “He dropped it. I kicked it into the room.”

  “Good, got it,” Sam said. “What the hell did you do to him?”

  “I threw the padlock.”

  Kirstie stepped closer to Einar’s prisoner. “I take it you two were looking for drugs.”

  “Uh, well, yeah. So?”

  She fought down an urge to kick him. “Sam, give me the gun.” She studied it for a moment: a snub-nosed revolver, finished in dull blue. It sat in her hand, heavy and ugly. She turned the flashlight back on the young man, who looked terrified.

  “Now listen to me. You and your friend are going to help us get this stuff to where it’s needed. If you try anything, I’ll shoot you. Do you believe me?”

  “Yeah, yeah, Christ.”

  “All right, then. Sam, get the other one up.”

  They filled their backpacks and then emptied the plastic bags in the wastebaskets to use as sacks. Leaving the room, Kirstie locked it. The five of them went to the storeroom at the rear of the building, and found big boxes of gauze and bandages. When everyone was carrying as much as possible, they went back out the side door.

  The grey afternoon was dimming into dusk. The two would-be looters looked small and almost pathetic, skinny men with long wet hair and sodden denim jackets.

  “Right,” said Kirstie. “Let’s get back to the school.”

  “Hey, lady,” said the unhurt one, “you gonna walk up the street with a gun on us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thass ki’nappeen,” the other one mumbled. Fresh blood oozed from his split lips.

  “And if I shoot you, it’ll be murder. Get going.”

  With their arms full, Sam and Einar and their prisoners made slow progress. The streets were deserted now. The fires were spreading, and a sullen orange glow shimmered over everything. The noise of burning was loud. Smoke was thin at times, then thick, as gusts of wind blew in from the bay.

  Kirstie looked over her shoulder and saw an enormous cloud, black laced with orange, blotting out the western sky. Its base blazed hot yellow, and it seemed to extend far to the northwest. What could be burning like that, out on the water? A ship?

  She was stepping on a fallen telephone pole when a growing rumble from behind made her pause. Before she could turn, the pole heaved beneath her feet and toppled her backward into black, stinking water. It washed over her, carrying slimy lumps of debris.

  Gasping, Kirstie fought her way back onto her feet. The water was receding already, but the four men were clambering onto cars. She waded towards them.

  “Come on, come on!” she shouted. “It’s not much of a wave, then, is it? Let’s go.”

  Sheepishly, the men slid down into the water. A storefront crashed noisily into the street, exposing a show room crowded with refrigerators and ranges. One of the looters staggered and cried out.

  “Jeez, I just stepped on a dead body!”

  “Go on!” Kirstie shouted.

  It was full dark by the time they reached the school. With lights glowing in its windows, it looked warm and welcoming in the black-and-orange night. An ambulance parked nearby flashed red and blue, and the plastic shelters in the schoolyard reflected the colours.

  “About time,” grunted the medical student when they met him in the hallway. “I thought you weren’t coming back. Thanks.” He looked curiously at the gun. “What’s that for?”

  “Persuasion.”

  “Huh.”

  “Doc — can you do so’thin’ for my’outh?” asked the injured looter.

  The medical student looked dispassionately at him. “Wait your turn.”

  Kirstie handed the pistol to Sam, who delicately unloaded it before stuffing it in a pocket of his windbreaker.

  “Look,” said the medical student, “you’re soaking wet and you look bushed, but can I ask you and your friends for one more favour?”

  “Sure,” Kirstie nodded.

  “We got over fifty people too hurt to be moved, even if we had someplace to move ‘em to, okay? And we got maybe a hundred other injured and three hundred with nowhere to go, most of ‘em relatives of the casualties. We got to start feeding these people.”

  “You want us to scavenge food for five hundred people?” Kirstie said, slowly and incredulously.

  “Grab everyone you can find to lend a hand. Try the Co-op supermarket or wherever, okay?”

  Kirstie sagged against a wall. “Oh God.”

  A few minutes later, she and Sam and Einar and fourteen other people were walking through the darkened streets. Candles burned in a few houses, but most looked deserted. From one pitch-black house, though, music blared; shadowy figures stood on the front porch, smoking dope and giggling. In a dark back yard, a dog howled.

  Above the housetops to the west, fire pulsed under orange-and-black clouds of smoke. Fine soot stung their eyes and tasted bitter.

  Kirstie, Sam and Einar led the others up several blocks to the Co-op. It was a big building, part of a chain of consumer-owned supermarkets in the Bay Area. They were surprised to see its beige facade was glaringly illuminated by floodlights from a big white van parked near the entrance. Across the sides of the van was written: KSRA ACTION NEWS — All the News for Sacramento!

  A reporter stood on the sidewalk, with a cameraman and sound girl behind him, and a cluster of uniformed National Guardsmen between him and the entrance to the market. The reporter was interviewing their commanding officer, a young lieutenant who looked self-conscious. Standing around the van were dozens of civilians, most of them shouting
angrily.

  “I realize it seems unfair,” the lieutenant was saying to the reporter, “but our mission here is to protect property. It’s other people’s job to look after persons in distress. I’m sorry if that disappoints some of these individuals, but that’s our job.”

  Kirstie shouldered past a guardsman and tapped the lieutenant on the arm, ignoring the news crew.

  “Lieutenant, I must insist that you allow us into the market.” He gaped at her, startled as much by her Scottish-schoolmistress accent as by her boldness. “I have to feed five hundred homeless and injured people.”

  The young officer’s girlish mouth set hard. “I have my orders, ma’am, and those orders are to prevent looting. The Office of Emergency Services will be in action here as soon as possible, and that means your people will be looked after. Now would you please move on.”

  “I will not move on.”

  He turned and walked stiffly away; Kirstie would have followed him, but the reporter turned his attention to her. He was a boyish, curly-haired man in baggy jeans, a leather coat and rimless glasses.

  “You say you’re trying to feed five hundred people? Where are they? What kind of shape are they in?”

  She hesitated, imagining the effect of TV cameras and inane questions on the people in the schoolyard. They’d gone through enough without having to entertain viewers sitting comfortably in undamaged homes far away.

  “Many of them are badly hurt, even dying,” she said at last.

  The reporter put down his microphone, and his cameraman stopped taping. “My name’s Jason Schwartz, KSRA News. Could we see these people? Maybe interview some of them?”

  “I don’t think that would do much good, Mr. Schwartz. — No, wait a moment. If you’ll help us, you can interview anyone you like.”

  “How?”

  “Take us somewhere, where there’s food. A market, a warehouse — I don’t care. And help us bring the food back in your truck.”

  “Are you asking us to help you loot some unprotected store?” grinned the cameraman.

  “No, to help us feed some unprotected people.”

  “Why not?” asked the sound girl. The reporter nodded slowly.

  “I can see the humanitarian angle,” he said. “Sure. We can only take three or four of you, though.”

  “That’s fine.” She told the volunteers to go back and help get the cafeteria ready; then she and Sam and Einar climbed into the back of the van. The cameraman got in behind the wheel and doused the floodlights on the roof; the guardsmen were left to protect the Co-op in almost total darkness.

  “Never seen anything like this,” Jason Schwartz said over his shoulder, one arm resting comfortably on the sound girl’s shoulder. “We got tape you wouldn’t believe. We came on down Interstate Eighty into Richmond, and boy, you should’ve seen those tank farms burning!”

  “It was really, you know, far out,” said the sound girl. “Like almost a religious experience, you know?”

  “Shut up, Michelle. Listen, if we get a chance before the chopper pickup we’ll run some of that tape for you guys. Just un-fuckin-believable. These big, big, orange flashes, you know, and the stuff pouring like lava down into the bay, sort of like the last days of Pompeii, you know? Wow, and we got really, really close; there wasn’t any police or firefighters there. I seriously think we got a chance for an award.”

  They had turned south onto Sacramento and were driving past block after block of two-and three-story apartment buildings. Candles glowed dimly in many of the windows. The only stores they saw were small convenience markets and corner groceries; most had been looted, except for a few guarded by armed civilians.

  Then they were in Oakland; the apartment buildings here were older, taller and grimier, interspersed with used-car lots and funeral homes and Polynesian restaurants. To the south, fires reflected pink and orange off the low overcast, silhouetting the high-rise towers of downtown Oakland. A few fires burned just ahead, but no sirens wailed and no one moved in the streets. All the apartment windows were black.

  “Christ!” The cameraman jammed on the brakes, too late, and the truck bounced over two bodies in the middle of the street.

  “Fred, Fred, stop!” yelled the reporter. “That’s hit-and-run, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Shit, Jason, they were already dead. Look, oh God, the whole fucking street is full of ‘em.”

  He slowed to a stop. In the truck’s high beams, the street and sidewalk ahead were littered with bodies. They lay in heaps and singly; their clothes looked strangely tattered and discoloured, and their skins were mottled. A black woman had fallen from the door of the taxi she’d been driving. Her face was puffy and looked scarred. Two dachshunds lay stiffly beside a boy of nine or ten. The air was sharp with the smell of chlorine.

  “Like Jonestown,” Jason whispered. “Jesus. Fred, get your camera.”

  “My eyes sting. I think we should get outa here.”

  “The hell with your eyes. C’mon.”

  Kirstie and Sam and Einar talked quietly while the others got their gear together.

  “This is the chlorine spill,” Sam murmured. “God knows if it’ll get thick again. A shift in the wind and we could all be dead.”

  “Oh God,” said Kirstie. “That’s why their skin is like that, and their clothes are in shreds. It was raining. Some of the chlorine must have formed hydrochloric acid.”

  “It could start eating the hell out of our tires,” Sam murmured. “We’d better get out of here while we can still move.”

  “There’s a supermarket on the corner,” Kirstie said. “If we’re quick and lucky, maybe we can get what we need.”

  She turned and started walking quickly towards the supermarket. Behind her she heard Sam and Einar following, and Jason’s voice as he improvised a report. Fred’s floodlights threw her shadow ahead of her.

  The supermarket’s entrance was piled with dead people, men, women, children, lying among spilled shopping carts and scattered groceries. Their faces were puffy, mottled and contorted in the light of her flash. The doors to the market were open, but barricaded by corpses.

  Kirstie stopped. The men caught up with her.

  “I can’t go in there,” she said. “I’m sorry — it’s — I’d have to — ”

  “We will go around,” said Einar. “In the back.”

  There were all coughing: pockets of chlorine trapped between buildings were embittering the air. At the rear of the supermarket, an alley led to a loading dock. Two men in blue coveralls were curled up on the dock; their eyes glinted in the beam of the flashlight.

  “Ho-ho,” Einar said.

  Backed up to the loading dock was a big truck; on its aluminium sides were the words NORCAL WHOLESALERS — THE BEST FOR LESS! Einar ran up some cement steps to the dock, stepping lightly over the dead men, and shone his light into the rear of the truck. “Ho-ho,” he said again.

  “What is it?” Sam called in an urgent whisper.

  “This truck is almost full. Mostly canned food.”

  Kirstie wanted to howl in triumph; instead she gasped and wiped her watering eyes.

  “Can you drive it?” she wheezed. The alleyway lit up as a burning apartment building collapsed suddenly in a whirl of sparks. Einar leaped down, ran to the cab, and pulled out the body of the driver.

  “Yes. Let us go.”

  “Let us go then,” Sam echoed hoarsely, “when the city is spread out like a patient chloroformed upon a table.” He and Kirstie climbed into the cab.

  “That is not an accurate quote,” Einar said, starting the engine.

  “Shut up and drive.”

  The headlights glared. Einar swung the truck up the alley, turned left, and left again onto Sacramento. Jason was standing before the market’s plate-glass windows, illuminated by Fred’s lights. Einar honked the horn and braked beside them.

  “We have got some food now,” he called down to them. Fred had already started taping the truck; he followed Jason around to Kirstie’s side
of the cab and grinned excitedly at her.

  “Far out,” he coughed. “Listen, give us a fifteen-second clip and then we’ll follow you back to your people.”

  “Well — ” Fred’s light was an added injury to her streaming eyes. Jason asked her a few questions, and she coughed her answers. “Now we’ve got to go. The school is at Francisco and San Pablo in Berkeley. Thanks.”

  “Thank you. See you there.”

  The truck raced north on Sacramento, but had to detour west, just inside Berkeley, to avoid a fire in the middle of the street: an office building had exploded nearby, scattering burning fragments across several parked cars which had then caught fire. Sam fiddled with the truck’s radio, picking up bits of news bulletins through heavy static.

  “The President has declared the states of California, Oregon and Washington disaster areas, and vowed tonight to visit personally the worst-hit areas such as San Diego and San Francisco …” “… says there is no cause for panic and the National Guard is on duty in the stricken areas. General Ernest Miles, commander of Fort Ord, has declared martial law in the Salinas-Monterey area. No word as yet on whether Sixth Army Headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco plans a similar declaration for the Bay Area … ” “ … reports of looting in the Los Angeles area are exaggerated, the city’s mayor says. The power is still out in most of the Southland as far east as Palm Springs, and hospitals using backup generators are reported running short of fuel.”

  “Jesus, what a day,” Sam said. “I feel like I accomplished something. I stole a bunch of drugs, kidnapped a couple guys, and hijacked a truck. And got on TV. Maybe we ought to make a career out of this, Kirstie.”

  She laughed, and then couldn’t stop. Bent over, she gasped and howled. Sam started laughing too; even Einar chuckled.

  They got back onto Sacramento and rolled north into thickening smoke. Einar slowed at Sacramento and University, and they looked west towards the Co-op. It was on fire. A few people moved back and forth before the flames, but they didn’t seem to be guardsmen. Farther west, the fires had coalesced into an orange blur.