His wife Deborah, standing behind him, massaged his neck and shoulders. He leaned his head back into the maternal comfort of her breasts. She smelled fresh, of soap and perfumed body lotion. Although not drop-dead gorgeous, she was attractive. Tall, tanned, and athletic with green eyes and ebony hair, she’d always drawn second glances.
“I’ve told you before,” she said softly, “you’re too damned wrapped up in this earthquake and tsunami business. Let it go for a while. Let’s spend a week or two at the coast.”
“One dream, maybe a couple, I could understand,” he said, ignoring her suggestion. “But the same one over and over again, once or twice a week, each more explicit. It bothers me.” He paused. “No, it doesn’t bother me, Deb, it terrifies me.”
Low-angled morning sunshine streamed into the breakfast nook, illuminating a constellation of tiny dust motes in a shimmering light show. Outside, towering evergreens and verdant rose bushes, alive in an explosion of late-spring blooms, added to the already bucolic mood of the day, a mood that escaped Rob.
“It’s a reflection of how tied up you are in your work,” Deborah said, her words more forceful now. “You really need to get away, and I mean for more than just a weekend.”
“I can’t. You don’t understand. This dream—this nightmare—I can’t ignore it. Intellectually I know I should. I’m a scientist, for Christ’s sake. But it’s almost like there’s a message in there for me.” He placed his hand on Deb’s and swiveled to face her. “But you’re probably right. I’ve somehow managed to wind myself around the axle worrying about stuff I don’t have an iota of control over.”
Deborah seated herself across from Rob. “Tell me again about the dream,” she said, her voice quiet once more, seeming to reflect genuine interest and concern. It reminded Rob of why he loved her, at least one of the reasons. Her support of his endeavors remained a constant in their relationship, even though she’d staked out boundaries beyond which she would not allow him to venture. Deborah, the practical. Deborah, the level-headed.
He drew a deep breath and looked out the window, squinting into the brightness of the rising sun. After several moments, he turned his gaze back to Deborah.
“It’s vivid,” he said. “I wouldn’t even call it a dream anymore. It’s like being embedded in a terrifying virtual reality. I’m on the coast. I can’t identify the town. It doesn’t matter. It could be anyplace between Vancouver Island and Cape Mendocino. It’s everyplace. Every town. They’re all under the gun. The quake hits, the ground heaves and pitches like swells in a heavy sea. There’s no permanence or solidarity to anything. You might as well be trying to cross the Columbia River Bar on an air mattress. The shaking, violent, like nothing you’ve ever felt or could even imagine, is unrelenting.”
He ceased speaking and stared out the window again. Deborah rested a comforting hand on his forearm. He placed his own hand on hers and resumed.
“Cracks spider web across the ground. Fissures, like crevices in a mountain snowfield, open. Buildings slump and collapse. There’s an explosion. A gas line rupture maybe. Finally, after a minute or two, the convulsions diminish. People stagger into the streets. They’re dazed, injured, confused. A few realize what has happened and begin to run toward higher ground, away from the ocean. They know what’s coming.”
“The tsunami.” Deborah had heard the narrative before. Her voice sounded far away.
Rob nodded. “We’ve tried to hammer it into the heads of coastal residents that the only warning they’ll get before a huge tsunami slams in is an intense, prolonged quake. That they’ll have only a matter of minutes to escape to higher ground before the ocean surges inland. It won’t be like a tsunami generated by a distant quake, like in Alaska. We’ve had those before. You know, when you get several hours to prepare and then the surge ends up being only a couple of feet high.”
Deborah furrowed her brow. “You said only a few people ran?”
“Maybe it’s the ‘Can’t Happen Here Syndrome.’ People find it hard to believe their homes, their businesses, even their lives are in acute danger and can be snatched away just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Or perhaps they’re in shock or just too damned stunned to understand what’s happened, what’s going to happen.”
He tried his coffee again and this time managed to swallow a sip.
Deborah rose from her chair, walked to the window, and adjusted the plantation blinds to deflect the sunlight knifing into the room. She sat again and waited for Rob to go on.
“One or two people point toward the ocean,” he said. “They realize the surf has receded to a point they’ve never seen before. Offshore sandbars and rock formations are exposed. Dogs begin to yowl. Now a handful of additional residents realize the danger. They begin to run and walk rapidly away from the beach. A few jump into their cars.”
“They’re not supposed to do that,” Deborah interjected, “try to evacuate in their vehicles.”
“When do folks ever do what they’re supposed to? In a sudden crisis, they forget or panic.” Rob gazed straight ahead, his eyes focused on a photograph of the Oregon coast on a peaceful, sunny day—the coast that had been his Mayberry growing up as a kid. Now it had become his Banda Aceh in-waiting. Banda Aceh, where the Sumatran tsunami of 2004 had washed away tens of thousands of lives in a matter of minutes.
He continued speaking. “Anyhow, once the automobile exodus begins, it dawns on more and more people that the two-minute warning for their lives has sounded.”
“Two minutes?” Deborah’s voice registered surprise.
“A metaphor. Football. Maybe they’ve got ten minutes. Fifteen at most. Whatever it is, they freak out. Suddenly the street is clogged with cars, SUVs, and pickups. But they can’t go anyplace because fallen trees and power lines have blocked the roads.
“They look back toward the ocean, but nothing is there, save for sand flats and a thin, white line of surf on the horizon.”
“The tsunami?”
Rob tried to answer, but his voice cracked.
Deborah waited.
“It doesn’t come in like a huge breaking wave, like those Hollywood tsunamis,” he said, finding his vocal footing again. “It floods in like a massive tidal bore, rushing across the beach, surging over berms and seawalls, thundering up streets and sidewalks, swallowing everything in sight. It’s thirty feet deep, maybe fifty or sixty, I can’t tell. It blasts inland, a swirling gray-green cesspool of debris, choked with vehicles, logs, pieces of homes, people. There’s no sound, but there must be. I just can’t hear it. Maybe that’s for the better. But I know it’s there. The roaring water, screams, car alarms, the death rattle of a community . . .” His voice faltered.
“It’s just your subconscious stressed out, working overtime,” Deborah said. “It’s not real.”
“That’s the problem, Deb. It is real. At least the threat is. That’s what nobody wants to believe. If the earthquake and tsunami hit tomorrow, given the state of relative unpreparedness in the Northwest—compared to say, Japan—the death toll would dwarf Katrina or 9/11. That’s pretty damn real.”
“Still, your dream is just that, honey, a dream,” Deborah reminded him.
“Is it?”
“You tell me. You’re the scientist.”
“But I’m not a psychoanalyst.” He toyed with his coffee mug. “Do you think I need to see a shrink?”
“I think, like I said, you need some time off. Let’s plan on spending a few weeks in late June and early July at the beach place, okay? We can take the plane, so if you need to, you could fly back to Portland for a few hours if any important business arises. It’ll be great, honey. We can play golf, fly kites, go crabbing, take in a Fourth of July parade, or maybe just hang out and turn into beach Buddhas.”
“Yeah, the kids would love that,” Rob said, with more sarcasm that he intended.
“The kids will love it because we’ll threaten them with boarding school in Tanzania if they don’t,” Deborah retorted.
He smiled at her. Her quick wit and sense of humor marked another reason he’d fallen for her, long before he found out something else about her: that she came from money. That of course, had set more than a few tongues wagging when they were dating. People couldn’t believe he’d actually been smitten by the woman, not her money.
Even after they were married, he’d never asked how much. He knew only that it amounted to enough they could afford things such as a beach home and an airplane. Hardly trappings within reach on a geologist’s salary.
Only after they’d dated for almost a year did he find out she came from a family descended from the Bishops who’d built the Pendleton Woolen Mills into an international powerhouse. The iconic shirts and blankets from the company had helped create an obviously healthy trust fund for Deborah.
He and Deborah didn’t flaunt their wealth—well, her wealth—but they did enjoy it. A second home in the quiet little coastal town of Manzanita. A membership in Oswego Lake Country Club. A Cessna T182T Turbo Skylane hangared at the Hillsboro Airport just west of Portland. The four-seat, single-engine craft proved perfect for short family trips, and invaluable for Rob’s business, the Oregon Geophysical Consortium, of which he was founder and president.
“Okay,” he said. “Manzanita. A few weeks around the Fourth. Sounds great.” Yet it didn’t, though he couldn’t pinpoint why. Something about the idea gnawed at him, like a tiny sound you hear in the dead of night but can’t identify. Like a warning light deep in your psyche that flickers red then fades before you can fully grasp the meaning of it.
Had there been something in his nightmare—a signal, a sign, a forewarning—that had slithered from his conscious into his subconscious and now hid there like a parasitic tick? Something ethereal that had fled the logic and reality that come aborning with wakefulness? He’d read somewhere that we all have dreams every night but don’t remember most of them after we arise.
But what did it matter? He dealt in hard science, not metaphysics. Deborah more than likely had nailed it, as she often did. His dreams sprang from his obsession with work. They were post-cognitive, not precognitive. They linked to the past, not the future. Bolstering his wife’s theory, he remembered exactly when his dreams, his nightmares, had begun. The first of them, like an incubus from the deep, had burrowed its way into his sleep a few days after he and Timothy had returned from their spring-break trip to the Ghost Forest.
Still, the nighttime journeys of his mind nagged at him. While he didn’t deem himself religious, he often found wise counsel from a long-time friend, Lewis Warren, a retired Episcopal bishop. Lewis, over the years, had become a sort of father figure to him, always ready to discuss anything—science, history, politics, morality, sports—not just religion, which in fact, they rarely talked about.
Rob considered their discussions refreshing, lively, and informative. Lewis proved to be one of those rare individuals: a well-read intellectual who remained eminently approachable and understandable. He also played a decent game of golf, and Rob more often than not found himself donating to “Lewis’s Ministry,” whatever that was, when they played for a dollar a hole on Manzanita’s little course.
“I need to spend some time with Lewis,” Rob said to Deborah, who had busied herself stuffing breakfast dishes into the dishwasher.
“Golf or jabber?”
“Jabber, as you so eloquently put it.”
“Yeah, well he’s good at that. I always thought of him as a bit of an egghead, though.”
Deborah had him pegged. Lewis read voraciously, often on topics of philosophy, psychology, and neurobiology, not just religion.
“He might be able to bring some objectivity to my situation.”
“I can’t?”
“You can, and I value that. But, as you always tell me, it doesn’t hurt to get a second opinion.”
“That’s in reference to doctors.” She wiped her hands on a dishtowel.
“Lewis is a doctor. And he always seems to be able to take a universal view of things. You’re probably right, Deb, the preoccupation with my work is getting to me. I’m thinking Lewis can probably validate that.”
“Ah, ha,” Deborah said, shaking a finger at Rob in mock reprimand, “that’s just your way of getting cheap counseling.”
He smiled. “I don’t consider it cheap. Lewis can be a pain in the ass, not to mention a bit obtuse at times. Anyhow, I’ll get in touch with him first thing when we get to the coast.”
Chapter Four
Shack
Atlanta, Georgia
Friday, June 5
ON GOOGLE, SHAWN McCready typed in the name carefully, making certain he spelled it correctly: Alexis Tamara Williamson. He’d known her as Alex, but that had been twenty-five years ago, when they’d been lovers. No, they’d been more than that. They’d been engaged, and she’d given herself to him fully, body and soul, as they say, to be his forever wife. Young and full of himself, however, he’d thrown her overboard. Looking back through a framework crafted not only by time, but by maturity and experience—though he knew even now some people would argue the maturity point—it had been his greatest failure.
Back then, though, it had been a different world for him, one he ruled. As a shit-hot pilot in the U. S. Air Force flying the fastest fighter in the world, the mach two-point-five F-15, and owning and driving a ZR-1 Corvette, once at 170 mph on an empty stretch of I-64, he’d made the very conscious decision he needn’t be reined in by a wedding band. There certainly were plenty of other women in the stable, or, as they were derogatorily referred to by the guys in the squadron, “pussy on the hoof.” So many women, so little time.
It had been a good life in those days, or so it had seemed, and he’d earned his nickname, Shack, on a couple of levels. On one, because he’d been the best damn pilot in the First Fighter Wing, rarely missing the target bulls-eye, or “shack,” with his missiles and bombs on training runs. On another, because he’d found it almost too easy to “shack up” with some of the more attractive amateur camp followers who hung around air bases. As a six-foot blond ‘zoomie,’ he’d been to young ladies like ‘hunny’ to Winnie-the-Pooh.
In retrospect, and to be blunt, he’d been largely a self-serving asshole during the first half of his Air Force career. Not that a lot of young fighter jocks weren’t. In spite of his ego-driven shortcomings, however, he had at least managed the verisimilitude of a highly successful officer, making wing commander before retiring as a bird colonel with twenty years. Still, the second half of his tenure in the military had been marred by two failed marriages. Since the collapses had been primarily on his shoulders, he perhaps hadn’t been able to distance himself that far from the “self-serving asshole” stage.
Now, unable to adjust to the relative stability of civilian life, he’d blown through three jobs in just five years. He’d discovered work in the private sector to be unfulfilling and lacking excitement.
Not that he believed it would really help—he took a dim view of anyone prying his head open and peeking under the hood—but he finally decided to meet with a counselor. Probably can’t screw me up any worse than I am. The counselor turned out to be a little doughboy of a man with oversized spectacles that made him look like an owl, and who cleared his throat a lot and said “hmmm” about every ninety seconds.
“YOU MOVED AROUND a lot in the Air Force?” the counselor had asked.
“PCS’d about every two years.”
“PCS?”
“Permanent Change of Station.”
“So there wasn’t much geographic stability in your life?”
“I never owned a home.”
“Hmmm,” Doughboy mumbled, then continued. “I’m wondering how you felt about being, well, shall we say, a vaga
bond?”
“It was just part of Air Force life.” Obviously this doofus has never been in the military.
“That’s not what I asked. How did you feel about it? Name an emotion.”
“Multiple choice, okay? Give me some options.”
“I’m on your side, Mr. McCready. Help me out here. I just want to know how you felt.”
“Jesus. Okay, restless. I felt restless. In truth, I probably wouldn’t have minded a little permanence in my life. You know, being able to make a commitment to someplace or someone.”
Doughboy glanced at some papers on his desk. “Were you in combat?”
“Yes. Operations Deny Flight and Joint Endeavor in the Bosnian War. I was flying out of Aviano Air Base in Italy then. Later, after Air War College, I was a squadron commander at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.”
“The assignments you had were exciting?”
“There were very few dull moments.”
“Hmmm.” The counselor adjusted his glasses and squirmed in his chair like a muffin stuck in a baking tin. “The Air Force pretty much took care of everything then?”
“Except for a wife.” Shack meant it to be funny.
The counselor merely flashed him a wan smile. Eventually the session got around to Alex.
“It seems as if something about your relationship with Alex bothered you more than any of the others?” Doughboy said.
“I guess.”
Doughboy cleared his throat and waited.
Shack picked up on the cue. “I didn’t then. But looking back, I feel badly about how I treated her.”
“You regret it?”
Shack nodded. “But truly, and I’m sure it’s a failing I have, I’ve never been much into feelings.”
“Feelings can be the fuel to reach a resolution about this.”
“Resolution isn’t something I’ve had much of in my life.” Shack paused, then lowered his voice and spoke haltingly. “I’ve probably just avoided it.”
Cascadia Page 4
