Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  Allison turned off the sound and watched the blinking, fuzzy images. Despite its foul taste, he drank the rest of his beer. As he put down the empty can, he saw’ that his hand was shaking.

  — Oh, Sarah — it’s all for you, for you.

  Chapter 12

  It took less than an hour to prepare Squid and lower it off the rear of the barge. Morrie, more experienced with the sub, sat in the left-hand pilot’s seat. Don kept an eye on the gauges, set along the rim of the glass bubble.

  “Jesus,” Morrie complained, “I put in this great viewport, and you give me solid mud.” They were barely submerged, and the water was an almost opaque caramel colour. Squid’s little electric motor hummed softly.

  “You also put in a beautiful sonar system,” said Don, “and you must have shielded it perfectly. Look — there’s the cruiser.”

  Morrie was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You sure you want to do this, Don? I mean, you didn’t even really ask the rest of us or anything.”

  “They didn’t stop me. They know that if that cruiser keeps shooting, we’re finished.”

  “That’s the United States Navy we’re going up against.”

  “No, it’s a bunch of homicidal maniacs in a big ship.”

  “You look kind of homicidal yourself.”

  Don switched on the outside microphone. A dull thump came from the speaker. Another. The cruiser was launching missiles every two to three minutes.

  “They seem to be manoeuvring in an oval pattern,” Morrie said. “Another few minutes and they’ll be back.”

  “Cut across and we’ll wait for them.”

  “What about their sonar?”

  “Chances are it’s on the blink. Even if it’s working, we’ll just look like floating junk.”

  The water cleared a little; horizontal visibility was almost ten metres. Three or four metres above, the surface was an oily shimmer. The outside microphone picked up a salvo every two minutes, and the steadily increasing growl of the cruiser’s engines.

  “Okay,” said Don. “Start moving us forward.” He switched off the speaker; the sound of the cruiser was coming straight through the hull. The sonar’s liquid-crystal readout showed 100 metres, 80, 60, 40 —

  “There she blows,” Morrie shouted.

  “Get right under their stern.”

  The cruiser’s dark bulk blocked out much of the shimmering glow from the surface. Squid sank deeper. Don and Morrie saw the blur of the huge twin propellers, then felt their turbulence. The sub dipped and yawed, edging forward of the propellers until the cruiser’s hull was a solid black mass overhead.

  Don threw a switch. Compressed air hissed into a plastic float on Squid’s hull. The sub rocked heavily while he counted seconds, then pressed a button.

  The button glowed white under his fingertip, confirming that the float had been released. He looked up through the bubble, and saw the float, a vivid Day-Glo orange, rising towards the propellers. It rose unnaturally slowly, pulling a heavier cable than it had been designed for.

  The cable drum, mounted just forward of the sail, shrieked. Squid shuddered. The roar of the cruiser’s propellers changed pitch; seconds later a muffled thump came through the sub’s hull. The propellers fell silent.

  Morrie looked at Don.

  “Well,” he said, “we got her roped and hog-tied. Now all we gotta do is brand her.”

  Using his manipulator, Don drilled a hole partway through the cruiser’s hull, about ten metres forward of the tangled propellers. Rotating the tool module at the end of the manipulator, he brought an air-driven riveter into position. Morrie, using his manipulator, took an aluminium disc from the basket below the observation bubble. The disc had a flat rim, but bulged out in the middle on one side. While Morrie held the disc against the hull, Don drove a rivet through the rim. Squid glided fifteen metres forward, and the two men repeated the process. Ten minutes after the cable had snarled the propellers, three powerful explosive charges were attached to the cruiser’s hull.

  Morrie steered the sub back towards Rachel and the surface. It was brighter now; when they reached the surface the fog had thinned enough to allow a glare of sunshine.

  Einar and Chief winched Squid aboard the barge and helped the two men out. Morrie checked his watch.

  A moment later three concussions, close enough to feel almost like a single one, struck them. A siren began to whoop in the distance.

  “D’you think we really did it?” Don asked Morrie as the men clambered off the barge and onto Rachel’s stern.

  “We did it,” said Morrie. “Those aluminium jobs are built to be quick, not tough.” He shuddered suddenly and jammed his hands in his pockets. “I just hope we didn’t hurt too many people,” he added hoarsely.

  Chief started the tug’s engines, and Bill Murphy steered cautiously through the fog. Don and Kirstie acted as lookouts in the bows. Through the open windows of the wheelhouse came sporadic thumps and the endless whooping of the cruiser’s siren.

  For the next hour or more, as they moved through the fog, they could hear the sounds of steady destruction: sirens, explosions, the rush and bang of flames. Then Rachel was out of earshot, moving slowly through fog that thinned and thickened.

  “It sounds bad in Berkeley,” Einar told Don as the tug entered the Golden Gate. “The soldiers are pushing east from the freeway, and the militia are retreating to the campus. They think they are fighting maybe five hundred soldiers, with a lot of firepower.”

  “What about San Francisco?” Don asked.

  “The Presidio has surrendered. Many soldiers have gone over to the locals.”

  Don turned to Bill. “Can you take us to Hunter’s Point?”

  “Sure, but why?”

  “To get some help for Berkeley.” Don paced across the wheelhouse, his arms folded and his hands in fists.

  *

  During much of the afternoon, the soldiers had taken cover from the sun; from office buildings around Shattuck and University, they fired at the militia’s defensive positions between Shattuck and the campus. Twice, the militia had tried to rush the attackers’ forward positions; both times the assaults were turned back, leaving dozens of dead and wounded in the square and nearby streets.

  Late in the afternoon, with the sun in the militia’s eyes, the soldiers left their positions and assembled for a full-scale attack on the campus. It started with mortars and recoilless rifles, shattering the militia’s forward positions and disrupting their communications across the campus. Fires broke out; black smoke rose above the tower of the campanile.

  The soldiers, meanwhile, formed into three groups: while the main body stayed on University, west of the square, two other groups formed wings that moved north and south on Shattuck. The wings would draw off some of the defenders, while the main body thrust onto the campus.

  Within a few minutes, the sputtering gunfire from north and south showed that the wings were in position and engaging the militia. The main body, over three hundred men, poured from doorways and alleys onto the sidewalks and sprinted east across the square towards the campus.

  Almost at once, rifles and machine guns opened up behind them. The surprised soldiers slowed and turned; with the sun almost on the horizon, they could not see their attackers. In seconds, fifty or sixty soldiers were dead; the rest ducked into doorways, or ran along Shattuck towards the wings. Enfilading fire from farther down Shattuck cut them to pieces. Retreating towards University, they ran or crawled for cover under heavy fire. No coherent defence developed, only clusters of frightened men shooting blindly into the yellow glare of the sinking sun. Many tried to escape through buildings into nearby streets and alleys; some succeeded, but more were cut down.

  The attack on the campus collapsed into short-lived firefights and panicky surrenders. Running up University came two hundred militia, while another fifty came up Shattuck from the south; most of them were blacks from Hunter’s Point. They disarmed the surviving soldiers and herded them into a parking lot. A
few minutes later the remnants of the wing groups were marched in to join them.

  Mitchell Eldon, commanding the Hunter’s Point militia, found the senior surviving officer in a corner of the parking lot. He was a bearded black man wearing captain’s bars on his filthy fatigues.

  “I don’t exactly know what to do with you, brother,” Mitchell said softly. “You cost us at least a couple hundred dead and hundreds more wounded.”

  “I was carrying out my orders,” the captain said.

  “Well, I expect you will carry out the local council’s orders for the next little while. We can’t massacre you, and we ain’t gonna turn you loose, and we sure as hell ain’t gonna give you free room and board. So I guess you and your boys will be doing some community improvement for a while. For starters, you can pick a detail of ten men to collect the bodies.”

  “Like hell I will.”

  Mitchell reached up and took off the captain’s sunglasses. “How’d you like to run around tomorrow without your shades on, brother? How long do you think your eyes would last?”

  The captain turned and stabbed a finger at the ten nearest men. Mitchell handed him back his sunglasses.

  *

  The crew of the Rachel stayed in Berkeley harbour after offloading the militia. Towing the barge and three sailboats, the tug had brought almost three hundred local militia from Hunter’s Point. Many were ex-soldiers, and some of the older ones were veterans of Vietnam. They were armed with M-16 rides, M-50 machine guns, grenade launchers and bazookas; their ammunition, taken from the Presidio, was almost limitless.

  The crew’ sat in the wheelhouse, talking very little, listening to the buzz and crackle of the radio. The local had devised a crude code, but under pressure of combat the militia leaders were reporting their predicaments in clear. After listening for a while, Iinar got up.

  “I am too worried. I must go to see Sam.”

  “You’re not likely to find him,” said Kirstie. “He’ll probably be with the local executive, wherever they are. The wrong side of the soldiers, anyway.”

  “I will go at least to his house. It is not so far. If he is not there, I come right back.”

  As Einar stepped onto the dock, the popping of distant gunfire sounded clearly.

  “What happens if we lose?” Morrie asked Don.

  “God, I don’t know. Run like hell back to Vancouver, I guess. Or to some surviving local. But I’d be damned angry, after we’ve got this far.”

  “Personally, after what I’ve seen of California so far, I’ll be damn glad to be home again. This is a scary place.”

  “Not as scary as it’ll be if the army wins,” Kirstie said.

  The radio let them follow the soldiers’ assault on the campus and their sudden defeat by the Hunter’s Point militia. Don grabbed Kirstie, hugging her and yelling; Chief and Bill howled at each other, and Morrie slumped relievedly into a chair. In the trailer at the foot of the dock, people started cheering. The twilight turned to darkness, and men and women and children seemed to materialize out of the wreckage zone, laughing and shouting.

  The Kennards and the rest of the crew joined in the celebrations, drinking neat gin with the harbourmaster and her family. The sky over Berkeley glowed from scattered fires; across the bay, more fires burned in San Francisco.

  Einar appeared out of the darkness, his face grim in the candlelight of the harbourmasters office.

  “What is it?” Don asked.

  “I found Sam. He was shot dead on University Avenue.”

  Kirstie snatched up an empty gin bottle and flung it through a window. The sound of shattering glass was loud.

  *

  With the civic centre burned to the ground, the local executive moved its offices to the high-rise student residences south of the campus; that at least made it easier for Don and Kirstie to commute to the endless meetings that followed the battle of Shattuck Square. Morrie, concerned with Squid rather than the politics of launching the salvage operation, shared Sam’s old house with Einar and walked down to the harbour every night.

  No one knew for sure whether the Joint Chiefs’ coup had succeeded elsewhere; it had certainly failed in central and northern California. But the Bay Area locals were faced with worse problems than ever: most of the city had no electricity at all any more, and those portions that did got no more than thirty minutes a day. The crowded hospitals were turning away the typhoid and typhus cases, and something like cholera was beginning to appear. Antibiotics were unavailable. Yet somehow a kind of calm hung over the region.

  Equipping Rachel for salvage and recruiting a team took longer than Don had expected. Week after week passed while he lobbied the local for one job or another to be done; often he ended up doing the job himself. Even when workers, raw materials and tools were all available, work went slowly: people were too hungry, and often too sick, to work quickly and efficiently.

  After a long night of work on Squid, Don bicycled home, dead tired. It was just past five on a beautiful July morning, and the sun was not yet high enough to be a hazard to unprotected eyes; Don took his sunglasses off and enjoyed the natural colours of the city. Green was rare these days, and all the more precious. Even a patch of weeds gave pleasure through its rank vitality.

  Kirstie was already home, after a night of committee meetings, and as tired as he was; they ate a silent meal of rice and onions, and prepared to go to bed.

  A car horn honked outside, loudly and insistently. Surprised, Don went to the living-room window and looked out. A Ford van was parked in front of the house, the first car on Alvarado Street in weeks. The honking stopped, and out of the van stepped Dennis Chang and his wife Mei Ming.

  ‘“Gene power!” Dennis chuckled as they sat down in the kitchen. Mei Ming set up a two-burner camp stove and proceeded to boil water for tea. “We’ve come all the way from Palo Alto on home-brew methane, the same stuff we’ve got in the camp stove.”

  “It’s weird to be driving,” Mei Ming said. “Sort of like the old days, except there’s no traffic and the roads are getting awful. And Dennis has forgotten how to drive.”

  “Does this mean you’re ahead of schedule?” Don asked. “Just the reverse. I need more help and more time. We thought a live demonstration would encourage the locals to find some more people for us.”

  “What’s the problem?” Kirstie asked.

  “Viability,” Dennis snapped. “After a few dozen divisions, the cultures start to die off. I know what’s causing it, I think. It’s just going to take a few more months to confirm the cause and design a way around it.”

  “How long?” asked Don.

  “It’s almost August now … call it November. By Christmas we’ll have methane to burn. So to speak.”

  “Damn.” Don shook his head. “We’ve been delayed by all sorts of problems, mainly transport. And God knows how much longer it’ll take to get us underway.”

  Dennis nodded. “Tell us about it. We’re short of all kinds of things in Palo Alto — food, drugs, chemicals and fuel.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Mei Ming said. “People are starving. Kids are getting sick and dying. People are killing themselves because they just can’t handle it.”

  “Have you got any gangs?” asked Don.

  “No, thank God,” Dennis answered. “We didn’t even have to deal with the feds the way you people did. Palo Alto’s pretty quiet. But Mei Ming’s right — people are committing suicide because they can’t cope. Whenever it gets me down, I tell myself it could be worse. We could be in San Diego with radiation sickness, or getting butchered in Monterey.”

  “What’s happening in Monterey?” Don asked, surprised.

  “Didn’t you hear? Apparently the army went crazy down there, after the great coup. Deserters were running around all over the place, shooting people, raping, the works. Now they’ve got some soldiers and civilians running things, but it doesn’t seem to be a whole lot better. They have mass executions all the time. The lucky ones get kicked out.”

&
nbsp; “That’s daft,” Kirstie said. “We need every person we can get — even those bloody soldiers who tried to take us over, we’ve got them working. We’ve too much to do.”

  Dennis shook his head, smiling cynically. “The Monterey mob are just looking after themselves. They don’t need a whole lot — hey, what’s that?”

  The wind chime outside the back door was tinkling, without a breeze. The joists beneath the floorboards began to squeak. Then the whole house was vibrating, shuddering. The big kitchen window shattered in a cascade of glass fragments.

  “It’s an earthquake,” Don said. “Quick — out the back door.”

  They bolted out into the back yard and ran round the side of the house into the street. The ground jerked violently; Dennis staggered against the side of the van. A cypress swayed and fell across the driveway with a thump. A low, almost subsonic rumble filled the air; shouting, people began to pour into the street.

  The retaining wall at the bottom of the Kennards’ front yard toppled across the sidewalk, every stone in place, and was partly buried by a miniature avalanche of earth and sod. A moment later, the house crashed in upon itself. Other houses on the street were falling as well, some quickly and some slowly.

  Another shock hit, brief and hard. A long stretch of Alvarado Road cracked and slid about two metres downhill. The surviving houses on the downhill side buckled and disintegrated. Dust rose into the morning sunshine.

  Then it was very still. The only sounds were the hysterical barking of a few dogs and the rattle of loose pebbles. The people in the street stood silently, staring at the ruins of their homes.

  “That was the worst one I’ve ever felt,” Don said softly. “My God, the ground still feels as if it’s shaking. Is everybody all right?”

  “Yeah,” said Dennis, “but it doesn’t look like we’re gonna be able to drive away from here anytime soon. Not with the road like that.”

  It seemed very funny, and they all giggled. Then Don said, “Let’s see who needs help. We’ll be a long time waiting for the local to get here.”