The Tsunami Countdown

by Boyd Morrison

  Instead of following the receding water down the steps, Kai opened the door leading to the tenth-story condos, the only dry floor left.

  “What are you doing?” Brad said.

  “With all that debris outside, Mia and Lani are going to need shoes.”

  “You mean, we get to bust down some doors?” he said, a little too delighted at the prospect of Kai’s proposed thievery.

  “This building won’t be here in an hour, so we might as well help ourselves. Teresa, you stay here with Tom and Jake. Lani, you and Mia come with us.”

  “I want Mia to stay with me,” Teresa said with a hint of fear.

  “She needs to try on the shoes,” Kai said calmly, trying to ease her mind. “And I need Brad to help me break down the doors. If Reggie gets my message and sends a helicopter, someone will need to run up to the roof as fast as possible to flag it down. It’s okay. We’ll be right back.”

  The hall was dark from the lack of power, so Teresa held the fire door open while Tom and Jake went to the mid-story landing to get a better view outside. Kai walked down the hall to the first condo door on the left, 1001, facing the ocean to the south. He lashed out with a kick, but the solid door just rang from the impact.

  “Let me try,” Brad said.

  Brad threw his weight into a kick, and the door frame cracked. Two more kicks, and the door swung open with a crash. Kai shot him a curious look.

  Brad shrugged. “Karate classes,” he said.

  They passed a kitchen in which the sink was piled high with dishes and entered a living room that held little more than a massive leather couch, a coffee table littered with issues of Maxim magazine and Xbox controllers, and a big-screen television. Kai immediately thought, Bachelor pad, but they headed straight to the bedrooms and looked in the closets anyway. Just as he thought: all the shoes were men’s size twelve.

  Frustrated in their search, Kai and the others emerged into the hall for another try.

  “Any luck?” Teresa said.

  “Dude’s apartment,” Brad said.

  “The water’s down to the sixth floor now!” Jake yelled from the stairwell. He and Tom followed the water farther down.

  “This is taking too long,” Kai said. “We need to be ready to run once the water reaches the bottom. Let’s try two apartments at a time.”

  Brad nodded, and this time they both kicked open the door of condo 1002, directly opposite 1001. It opened right away. Brad proceeded to the next condo with Mia while Lani followed Kai into 1002, the expression on her face betraying her tension.

  “Remember,” Kai said, trying to lighten the mood, “we’re not looking for cute strappy heels. Just sneakers.”

  She gave him a look that said his attempt at humor was not well received.

  The patio door to the balcony was wide open, as was the custom in Hawaii, to let the breeze ventilate the condo. Kai heard Brad yell from the adjoining condo’s patio door.

  “Looks like a family lives here! We might get lucky.”

  “Mine too!” Kai yelled back.

  Lani had already made her way into the bedroom and was rooting through the closet.

  “Find anything?” Kai asked from the doorway.

  She held up a pair of white sneakers. The rest of the shoes were either high heels or sandals.

  “Are they your size?”

  “Close enough,” she said.

  “Okay, put them on.”

  Kai went back to the living room to let Brad know they’d found some. When he got there, he heard a strange hissing sound coming from the direction of the balcony. The high-pitched whine of escaping gas was unmistakable, and was soon supplemented by the roar of fire. Kai dashed out onto the balcony to find out where it was coming from. He skidded to a halt at the railing when he saw what was causing the noise.

  Directly in front of him, the twenty-story high-rise to the north obstructed The Seaside’s view of the mountains. On the ninth floor of the structure, a giant propane tank jutted out of a window. The tank had apparently plunged through one side of the glass building and then got stuck in the side closest to The Seaside. A jet of gas six inches across shot out of a hole at one end, where it instantly transformed into a blazing torch.

  “Brad, get out of there!” Kai yelled.

  “What happened?” Brad said, racing out to the balcony to see what he was talking about. “Oh my God!”

  The propane tank had probably been ripped from its spot at a gas station and pierced the high-rise while being swept along by the water. Then any spark could have set it off. The receding water had left it hanging high and dry in a corner of the window, with no chance that it would be doused before the next wave came in. It could blow up any second.

  “It’s going to explode!” Kai shouted out the door of the apartment. “Run!”

  “Mia!” Teresa said from the stairwell.

  Without answering, Kai ran back to the bedroom and grabbed Lani’s hand, yanking her to her feet without letting her finish tying the other shoe.

  As they ran out, Teresa flashed past the front door of the condo, headed for Brad and Mia.

  “Teresa! Come back!”

  She ignored Kai and flew through the door of the next condo down to find Mia. Lani and Kai ran across the hall to condo 1001, and Kai slammed the door behind them. He pushed Lani over the couch and dove after her. As they hit the floor with a thud, the tank blew up.

  Despite the several walls separating them from the tank, the noise from the blast assaulted Kai’s ears. The building shook from the impact. The door to the condo was ripped from its hinges, flying over them and out the window. Kai instinctively covered Lani with his body. Pieces of debris and shrapnel from the tank peppered the wall. A tremendous heat wave singed the hairs on Kai’s arms. He felt a sizzling burn crease his thigh, and he screamed in pain. A chunk of white-hot metal ricocheted off the wall.

  “Are you okay?” he said to Lani as the noise subsided.

  “Oh my God, Daddy!” Lani said, pointing at his leg. “You’re bleeding.”

  Kai looked at his pants. A five-inch gash ran laterally across his thigh. Blood dripped from the wound, but it wasn’t deep. The shrapnel had just grazed the skin. A few inches to the left, and it would have gone right through his leg, tearing through the femoral artery.

  “I’m fine. It’s nothing to worry about.” Once the adrenaline was gone, Kai knew the pain would come, but it didn’t look like he’d bleed to death, so he ignored it. “Are you okay?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” Lani said. “But where are the others?”

  “I think they were in the other apartment.”

  They ran back into the hall, and the sight that greeted them was appalling. Part of the hallway wall on the north side had disintegrated, spilling bits of plaster and drywall all over the floor. Through the doorway of the facing condo, they could see that the entire northern exterior wall had been shattered. Visible out of that gaping hole, the remains of the high-rise burned, covered with what was left of the liquefied propane. One half of the high-rise simply wasn’t there anymore. A jagged wound was carved out of the other half, but it wouldn’t last long. As Lani and Kai watched, the remaining steel and concrete buckled in what seemed like slow motion, and in a hail of dust and a low rumble, the building collapsed into the water below.

  It was like seeing their fate played out in front of them. The building they were standing in was stronger than the one that had collapsed, but Kai was worried now that it also had sustained significant structural damage.

  He and Lani began yelling for the others.

  “Brad! Teresa! Mia! Jake! Tom!”

  Kai heard coughing from the stairwell and ran over to it. The fire door was off its hinges, but the building had shielded the main stairwell from significant damage. The stairs to the roof were a mangled mess of twisted railings and pulverized concrete.

  He looked down to see Tom peering from the doorway on the eighth floor. Tom’s face was contorted in a rictus of confusion and ago
ny. With his right hand he held his left arm, which hung at a grotesque angle at his side. His complexion was ashen.

  “Tom!” Kai said. “Where’s Jake?”

  Tom nodded toward the hallway. “In there. I think he’s dead!”

  Kai wanted to comfort him, but they didn’t have time. There were only fifteen minutes left before the next tsunami.

  “Are you sure?” Kai said.

  Tom shook his head. “No, but he’s not moving.”

  A yell came from the other end of the hallway.

  “Kai! Help!”

  It was Teresa.

  “Teresa! We’re out here.”

  Teresa poked her head out of the condo Brad had been in. The look of alarm on her face was enough to tell Kai something terrible had happened.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “It’s Brad and Mia. The wall fell down. They’re trapped.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  11:34 a.m.

  13 Minutes to Second Wave

  The stairs leading to the roof of the flat-topped Moana tower in the Grand Hawaiian were steep but wide. Normally, the access was strictly limited to hotel employees who needed to maintain the rooftop air-conditioning units, but Max was forced to herd the guests up the steps. The only good news was that they had just one floor to climb. Max conferred with Bob Lateen before deciding that, one at a time, Max and Adrian would carry each of the eight disabled veterans remaining in the restaurant. Some of the wives—none of them under seventy—volunteered to help, but Max was afraid one of them would fall, and he didn’t need any more problems than he had already.

  In the meantime, Max asked all of those with cell phones to try calling the police, fire department, or anyone else who could send a helicopter to rescue them. Of course, he could go up to the roof and try to flag one down, but that would delay the movement of the disabled guests. He asked three of the ladies to leave their husbands to signal for help by waving a tablecloth.

  It took two minutes to get the first wheelchair-bound guest up and situated comfortably on the roof—much more time than Max had expected. At that rate, it would take over fifteen minutes to get them all up, so he decided to send the elderly who could walk up the stairs first.

  While Adrian finished helping those guests up the stairs, Max went to the window to look at the devastation below.

  The streets were unrecognizable. A steady stream of water flowed back toward the ocean, dragging all kinds of flotsam with it. It would be only a matter of minutes before the land was completely drained.

  He could clearly see the skybridge now. A huge gash in the roof exposed part of the walkway to the bright sunlight. Max couldn’t see the piece of debris responsible, but it must have been something big. Anything large enough to leave that mark could have easily torn the sky-bridge from its moorings. As it was, the bridge appeared to be hanging by the thinnest of threads. Anyone willing to cross that would have to be pretty desperate, he thought as he made his way back to the stairwell.

  Rachel reached the sixth-floor conference center. The sky-bridge in front of her looked like it had been blasted by a truck bomb. Every shard of glass had been torn out of the windows, exposing the walkway to the ocean breeze from floor to ceiling. The skybridge itself was tilted at an extreme angle, with the beach side higher, as if the wave had pushed up one edge but couldn’t wrest it from its steel cables.

  The midday sun poured through the hole in the sky-bridge roof, illuminating the sorry state of the floor itself. Like every other surface the tsunami had touched, a fine layer of soupy silt coated the decking. In many places, holes had been punched through the floor as well as the ceiling. Fifty feet below, the outflow of water was now only ten feet deep. They were lucky the skybridge was still there at all. It certainly wouldn’t stand up to another onslaught of water.

  As Rachel approached the bridge, the family appeared on the other end of the sixty-foot walkway. They heaved visibly from the exertion of racing down twenty flights of stairs. The father carried a small girl, while an eleven-year-old boy and another girl several years younger than the boy leaned on their mother. All three kids had their mother’s black hair and lean figure, but their light-mocha skin was obviously a combination of their parents’ complexions. The man, slightly jowly, towered over them. His shirt draped over a beer gut past its infancy.

  The family hadn’t started across the skybridge yet; they were terrified by the creaking structure. The railing along the beach side of the slanted walkway had been ripped off and rested atop the railing on the other side.

  Rachel yelled down the hall, “I’m the hotel manager! My name is Rachel Tanaka! Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” the father said.

  “What are your names?” In her line of work, Rachel found that it always made things go more smoothly if she knew the names of the people she was dealing with.

  “I’m Bill Rogers,” the father of the three children said. “My wife is Paige, and my kids are Wyatt, Hannah, and the little one is Ashley.”

  “Is it safe to cross?” Paige asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said. “The incline is going to make it difficult to get across. Bill, can you get down the stairs in your tower?”

  “No,” Bill said. “I checked. It’s totally blocked by that barge.”

  “Then you don’t have a choice. You’ll have to come over here.”

  “Maybe we should just stay here. That bridge looks rickety.”

  “We’re trying to get a helicopter to come to our rooftop—”

  “Then we can do the same thing in this tower.”

  “That won’t work,” Rachel said. “There’s nowhere for a helicopter to land on your roof.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Wyatt said. “Remember that big spike on the top of the building?”

  “Then we’ll just go back up to the top floor and wait until this is over.”

  “Look,” Rachel said, “I don’t want to frighten you more than you already are, but there are more waves coming, and they’re going to be much bigger than the last one. Maybe even taller than this building. We need to get out of here.”

  They still hesitated.

  “Come on! We don’t have much time left!”

  “But how do we get the kids across?” Paige said with a slight accent suggesting a Caribbean Island origin. “I’m not letting any of them cross on their own.”

  “And it’s too shaky for you to all come at once,” Rachel said.

  “I’ll come back and get them,” Bill said.

  “That will take too long. You see that water going out? That means another wave is coming soon. We have ten minutes at most.”

  “We don’t even know if the bridge is strong enough,” Paige said.

  Rachel looked at the slick floor of the skybridge and realized she’d have to go out there if she was going to save those children. Her maternal instinct overrode the fear she felt.

  “How about if I come and meet Wyatt halfway and bring him back with me?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she kicked off her shoes and stepped onto the bridge. Her arm span was wide enough that she could keep hold of one pillar while she inched along to grab the next one. She made her way carefully, keeping her toes along the edge for more grip.

  “See,” she said. “It’s still sturdy enough. Come on, Wyatt. Come to me.”

  Bill and Paige exchanged looks and nodded.

  Paige held Wyatt’s shoulders. “Can you do this, Wyatt?”

  Wyatt looked scared, but he nodded.

  Paige hugged him. “Okay, but if it’s too hard, you come right back.”

  Wyatt grabbed one of the floor-to-ceiling pillars and pulled himself toward Rachel.

  “Come on, honey,” Rachel said as she continued edging across. “You can do it.”

  Wyatt gingerly pulled himself along. When he was almost to Rachel, the skybridge creaked ominously. He stopped, and they all held their breath. The creaking subsided, and Wyatt continued to make his way until Rachel took hi
s hand.

  “Great job, Wyatt,” she said. “Now hold on to me.”

  Wyatt nodded again. Rachel had Wyatt hold on to one pillar, and when she had safely grabbed the next, she pulled him with her. They paused when they heard another shriek of grinding metal. Paige covered her mouth in terror, but there was nothing she could do to help them without endangering them further.

  The grinding stopped, but it was another reminder of how precarious the walkway was.

  As they proceeded across, Rachel and Wyatt got into a steady rhythm. They had reached the last pillar when Wyatt suddenly slipped on the muck as he was moving from one pillar to another. Both his feet flew out from under him and he went down, pulling Rachel down as well.

  Shouts of “No!” came from the other end of the walkway.

  With one hand, Rachel clung to the bottom of the pillar with a fierce grip. If she let go, nothing would keep them from sliding to the opposite side of the skybridge. Only the pillars on the other side would stand between them and a six-story fall to the water below.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  11:37 a.m.

  10 Minutes to Second Wave

  The conditions at Wheeler Army Airfield were spar-tan, but Reggie Pona had power for his laptop and an Internet connection, thanks to the Air Force’s backup electrical system. As soon as power had been lost from the island’s main plants, the base’s own generators had taken over. Reggie had been able to outrun the first wave and had finally gotten in contact with Renfro at Hawaii State Civil Defense, which sent one of the trucks evacuating from Pearl to Wheeler to pick him up. In the chaos, HSCD had gone thirty minutes before realizing that they weren’t getting updates from the PTWC anymore. When they finally called the Alaska warning center, Palmer immediately took over updating the Pacific nations about further tsunami readings, including the Miller Freeman’s DART buoy. While Reggie was en route, the DART buoy had registered a third wave at the height that they had projected an hour before. It would be two hundred feet high when it hit Honolulu.