by Sweet, Dell
The darkness began to suddenly take on more weight, and the fear that he might be dying settled in more fully with Calvin's other scattered thoughts. A puppy he had had... So real... Its whole body was wagging right along with its tail. It was … was... When? What? Gone... A birthday party... Not his... He had no gift... The sound of the lock clicking shut... Echoing, and then as suddenly as the light had left with the slamming of the door it flared back into existence: A bright ball up near the ceiling. A light to be sure, but unlike any light he had ever seen. It flared brighter... Brighter still, and then he felt himself rise, confused at first and then stepping from the shadows of the room and into the bright lights of a hallway. Panic jumped into him... How could he be walking? How could he be?
He spun, meaning to step back into the darkness, but the darkness was gone. All that remained was the over bright hallway that lead to... Whatever it led to. He couldn't make an answer for it come to him. None at all. He stood briefly, still facing what had been the darkness of the back room, but now was only a smooth white expanse of flat wall, and then he forced himself to turn around... It meant... It meant the end... The end... He slid one foot forward and then the other, forcing himself to walk.
Haley:
She came awake in the dark. She was shivering, the cold of the concrete seeping deep into her body. Her head ached, but when she tried to lift her hands to it she remembered that they were still zip tied behind her back. Boxes tumbled away from her. That caused panic to settle into her for a brief moment until she realized that whatever had happened was over. The stockroom was graveyard silent, a thin blueish line of light seeped under the swinging doors about twelve feet away. Shadows began to emerge from the darkness as her eyes adjusted: Bodies, and then the thick smells of coppery blood and vomit came to her. She fought the urge to gag.
She was convinced she was alone, equally convinced that this was just a trick. She waited, and then waited a little longer, but nothing changed as she watched the line of light under the door. Occasionally it would flicker. Nothing else. She made her decision, carefully got to her feet, and stepped around the bodies to the swinging doors.
The roof was collapsed onto the tops of the aisles. The steel of the shelving units held it suspended there. Most of the emergency lighting was out, but a few lights were still lit: Some hanging by wires into the aisles. The space in the aisles to the roof was tall enough that she didn't have to stoop over as she made her way to the front of the store. She stopped in the darkness at the mouth of the aisle, and looked out through the shattered front windows in front of her. Snow fell on the street beyond the glass. Lightning flashed sporadically in the skies, the sound of thunder sometimes close, sometimes far away: The lightening blue-white flashes of light on the snow covered street.
She waited: For what she didn't know, but nothing came, nothing changed. She stood, listening to the clicking and buzzing from the flickering fluorescent lights of the market. She bumped against the sharp edge of an end cap that had partially buckled, jutting out next to her: Blood trickled away from her arm, rolling to her wrists which were still bound, her hands, swollen, were cold and numb. She turned and used the sharp edge as quickly as she could to cut through one of the zip ties that bound her wrists. Rubbing until one tie flew apart, making a plastic clicking sound as it hit the aisle floor and skittered away. She moved her wrists around in front of her and into the light.
A thin line of blood ran away from the wrist that had been encircled by the tie. Whether from the sharp metal she had used to escape the zip-tie, or the zip-tie itself she could not tell. A few more seconds of careful rubbing with the sharp metal edge and the other plastic cuff fell to the floor. She stood and rubbed feeling back into her hands. They came alive with sharp pins and needles nearly making her cry out. She flexed them, working blood back into them, and looked out at the falling snow. The whole world seemed quieted by it.
She looked around the entire front area of the store. It appeared empty, but it was hard to see anything; there were few lights working. The roof collapse had shortened the entire space, trapping what lights remained working inside the aisles, hanging from their wires. There were no sounds, no movements. She was alone, she decided. She stood for a few moments longer, still rubbing her hands, and then walked past the checkouts, stepped through a shattered front window, and walked off down the street into the falling curtain of snow.
USGS
Alaska:
“What is that?” Mieka Petre asked. He planted one hand on the back of the chair and then leaned forward, staring at the monitor harder.
“The Yellowstone Caldera... That's what I've been trying to tell you. It wasn't there when I left for my break... Uh,” he looked up at the clock. “Fifteen minutes ago,” David Jones said.
“That can't be. Has there been any activity from...” He stopped talking as David called up the log from ten minutes prior. He watched as a small counter measured the sudden change in ground level. He watched the elapsed time. “Christ, Jesus. Eleven inches in twenty-one seconds. That's impossible.”
“Started about five seconds before that... At least on my readout...” David sighed. “The point is it wasn't there, and it is now.”
Other people wandered over from where they had been, zoning in on the hurried conversation, and the edge of excitement it carried.
“I can goddamn well see that, David.” Mieka motioned for David to move, and took his seat, rolling closer to the monitor and watching the counter. “It has to be an error.” He caught a flash from the corner of his eye and turned away from the monitor and faced David. “Who knows?” His eyes rose and took in the half dozen men and women standing around listening to their conversation and watching the monitor. Three of them had their phones in their hands.
“Did any of you make a phone call, snap a picture? I'm telling you right now, I will personally fire anyone who causes a panic over this. This is a bad sensor... We're working on land line reads, we don't even have satellite. A bad read, it has to be. Ground level rise like that takes years, we all know that. It's fact. There has been nothing in the last few days to indicate anything like that coming up...” He fixed a hard look on his face and met as many eyes with it that would meet his own. “No one is leaving until I check their phone. Nobody!” His eyes swept the room. The cell phones vanished. “Who has a different set of readings?”
“I got fifteen,” Joan Allen said in the silence that held the room. Her phone was folded discreetly in one hand, and she slipped it into her front pocket as though she were drying her hands against the fabric of her pocket. Mieka swore under his breath.
“Jesus, Mieka, I just got a read from Long Valley.” This from Jason Lewis.
“What? ...When?” Mieka asked as he turned to face him.
“I was watching it. There was some funny seismic stuff earlier and...”
“And? Get to it,” Mieka shouted.
“And it seemed like it was nothing … There was nothing when I got up to see what you guys were doing... Two feet... Two feet in the last minute!”
Panic gripped the room and voices immediately leapt into hurried conversation.
“People! People! Shut up!” Mieka Petre yelled above the din. The silence was instantaneous. He turned to face Jason. “Up two feet?” Sweat ran freely from his brow.
“Down... Down. It's like it suddenly sunk... Suddenly...”
Mieka waved him off, and turned to face the room. He swiped at the sweat as it rolled into the corner of one eye, stinging.
“What else... Anything else?”
“Seismic... 4.3 … 5.8 … Jesus... Clusters around Yellowstone.” Jane Howe.
One by one everyone had gone back to their monitors. Alarms began ringing in the silence that had descended. First soft chimes then urgent warbles. The entire satellite network was down. They had been reduced to basic land line connections. Slow, they should have had this information sooner, Mieka thought. Much sooner.
“Japan,” Someone called out.
“Off the coast... Chiba... Seismic... It's a big one... A big one... 8.9 … More... More coming...”
An alarm that was mounted partway up the wall above the huge banks of monitors began to bray. Long, strident calls. Mieka turned to the alarm, frozen for a second. It had never been triggered in the ten years he had worked at the Alaska station, never, he had begun to believe it would never be triggered. He thought of it as the Oh Shit, alarm. It was triggered from the central office on the mainland. It was only set off if there was a catastrophic failure of some sort. With the delay because of the land lines he had no way of knowing how late the alarm was. What had already, in all probability occurred.
He turned to go back to his own chair; there were decisions to make, people to notify. Suddenly the floor dropped from under him, and he found himself falling. Before he could reach the floor it suddenly leapt up to meet him, and he slammed headfirst into the polished concrete, nearly losing consciousness.
He regained his knees and tried to brace himself as the floor shook harder still. Blood ran from his hairline, and joined a small trickle of blood from one eyebrow. A second later it ran across his cheek to his chin; dripping to the floor.
He watched the drops hit the concrete; splatter, and he thanked God that he could still see. There was a stabbing pain behind his eyes. He had hit hard, and the shaking building wasn't helping at all.
Screams and yells mixed with the crash of file cabinets and the splintering of plastic as monitors shook apart or crashed to the floor. The air suddenly became clouded with dust as the concrete the room was made from began to shake apart.
Mieka watched as Jane Howe bounced across the floor, her eyes wild, and slammed headfirst into the corner of a desk, sliding underneath; her body suddenly loose, shaking like a rag doll as the jolts hit the building: Her legs jumped up and down. Mieka tore his eyes away. He tried to maintain his position on his knees, the palms of his hands flat, grasping at the concrete, but the constant pounding of the floor against his kneecaps was becoming excruciatingly painful. Reluctantly he dropped back down to the floor, trying to control the drop as much as he could, but he went rolling away to slam into a wall: He felt his ribs break as he hit.
The noise from the earthquake was a constant roar. Screaming, yelling, crying, pleading the constant rain of concrete chunks sounding like hail stones as they fell from the ceiling above. The thickening dust: A roar of something else, wind? ... Something beginning to overtake everything else, closing out all other sounds as he sagged against the wall and tried to hang on. His ribs were definitely broken; it hurt to lift his arms. He could feel the bones grinding together. He knew he was crying out each time they were moved, but he could not hear those cries.
The ribs ground harder, and this time the light dimmed further; he had a harder time opening his eyes. A second later they slipped shut again as the floor suddenly dropped from beneath him once more, causing the splintered ends of his ribs to grind together even harder. He found himself falling as consciousness slipped away from him. The noise increased as he fell and then suddenly it was gone. He fell silently through the darkness.
TWO
March 1st
Watertown New York
Off Factory Square: Joel Morrison
5:00 PM
Joel sat at the bar and watched football on one of the big screen TV's Mort had put in. It was a slow game, he was tired, and his mind kept turning to other things. He couldn't concentrate. Part of the allure of the Rusty Nail was the quiet. After a 12 hour shift at the mill with the constant noise from the huge machinery, the quiet had been nice. But that had all changed once the bar had become popular with the nearby base. He needed to go home. The crowd in the bar was starting to build and the noise was giving him the beginnings of a headache. He caught Mort's eye and went back to his thoughts as he waited.
The Rusty Nail had always been a locals only bar up until a few years back when the economy had taken a nose dive. The nail was wedged up a side street off Factory square. Not exactly easy to find, and that had hurt business too as the old people left and the new people came in.
Mort, Mortimer to anybody that felt like being tossed out on their ass, had nearly lost the small bar and the building above it to the bank. The building above it had six small apartments that Mort had purposely left empty when he had bought the building fresh out of the service thirty years back. Who wanted to deal with tenants, he had said then. But times changed, and so he had sold his house, moved himself into one of the apartments, and then sold the bank on remortgaging the whole building as well as renovating the other five apartments. The bank had come up with a loan that took all of that into account and added a second income source from the apartments that could pay the monthly mortgage and put a good chunk of change into his pocket too.
He had signed on the x, taken their money, renovated the building, moved in the tenants and then taken a hard look at the Rusty Nail. He had decided to completely gut the bar and do it over. He had dumped far too much into the renovations though, including being closed for nearly a full month, and then opened it to find that the economy had taken an even deeper nose dive during those nearly thirty days. The third month into the new mortgage and he had found that he was maybe in a bad spot already.
Joel remembered now that he had sat right at the end of the bar when Mort had talked it over with some others, Moon Calloway, Johnny Barnes, Jim Tibbets, Joel had been welcome to include his two cents which he had declined to do.
“Well, what you do is put the word out to those cab drivers. Believe me, I've seen it. They will have them soldiers down here in no time, even if you are off the beaten path,” Jim had said. Jim was a school bus driver for the north side district and less than a year away from a fatal car accident on the interstate. Jeff Brown, who had been a local football star, was doing ten years up at Clinton Correctional for hitting Jim's car head on drunk and killing him. But that night Jim had still been alive and had wanted to be a part of the New Rusty Nail that Mort had in mind. Something a little more modern. Modern bought the soldiers, but more importantly it also bought women.
“I'm not paying a cab driver to bring me G.I.'s,” Mort had said. “And I know your game. You're just hoping to get laid out of it.”
They had all laughed at that, except Jim who had turned red. But after a few seconds he had laughed too, and the conversation had plodded forward the way bar conversations do.
“Well, you ain't got to pay them exactly, give them a couple beers,” Moon threw in.
“Jesus Christ,” Mort exclaimed. “That's why you boys ain't in business. You think the beer is free.”
“I know it ain't free, Mort,” Jim said. “But it don't cost you that much. You get it wholesale.”
“Wholesale? I drive right out to that wholesale club and buy it by the case most of the time just like everybody else. Cheaper than them beer guys, except draft, of course. That ain't free. You got to pay the yearly club fee. You got to pay them taxes to the feds. You got a lot you got to pay for. Some fuck crushes your can you're fucked for that nickel. Jesus... wholesale my ass. It ain't no bargain.”
“Yeah? ... Let's see,” Moon starting writing in the air with his finger. You get it for let's say six bucks a case, I know that cause that's what I pay out there too. So six bucks divided by 24 is,” he drew in the air for a few moments, erased it, and then started over. “How the fuck do you do that, Joey... The six goes into the twenty-four? Or times the twenty-four?” Moon asked.
“Uh, it's a quarter a can,” I had supplied.
The argument had raged on from there. Once Moon found out he was paying a buck fifty for a can of beer that only cost a quarter he was pissed off.
In the end Mort had talked to a couple of cab drivers. Free draft beer one night a week if they bought soldiers by all week long and told as many others as possible about the place. Within two weeks Joel hadn't recognized the place when he had come by after shift to have a couple of beers. The soldiers drank a lot of beer, the ban
k mortgage got paid, and life was fine. Except for the fights, Joel thought, but you can't load young guys up on alcohol and not expect trouble. Especially when those young men were just waiting on the word to go and maybe die in another battle that remained undeclared as a war. High stress levels meant heavy duty unloading. The M.P.'s got to know the place as well as the soldiers did.
“Joel, you ready?” Mort asked now.
Joel smiled. “I was thinking back...” He had to shout to be heard. Tomorrow his voice would be hoarse. “This place was empty! … Yeah... One more then I gotta go,” Joel agreed.
Mort leaned closer. “Gov'ment tit. I know it, but screw it. It's all the Gov'ment tit. Road and Bridge projects. Job centers. One way or the other it comes out the same. Even them subsidies so the paper mills can still run. It's all the Gov'ment tit, ain't it, Joel?”
“It is,” Joel shouted. He nodded. It was. This town would have dried up years ago without it. Mort left and then came back a few moments later with a fresh beer.
“Vacation?” Mort yelled.
Joel nodded. “Two weeks of silence,” He shook his head at the irony and Mort's laughing agreement was drowned out by the noise.
“If I don't see you, have a good one,” Mort said leaning close.
Joel nodded. “I will.” He raised his glass and then tossed off half of it. A few moments later he was outside on the relatively quiet sidewalk punching numbers into his phone, calling for a cab. The night was cold, but the cold sobered him up. It seemed nearly capable of washing away the smoke and noise from inside the bar. He stood in the shadows beside the door waiting for the phone to ring on the other end. The door bumped open and Johnny Barnes stepped out.
