Earth's Survivors Apocalypse (5 page)

“And did he get us heated sidewalks?” Adam asked. He looked at her google eyed and she had to laugh.

Owning a car in New York was a tough proposition, Adam thought. They didn't have one, but it would be nice. That way Tosh could drive home from work instead of the Subway, and a long walk through a bad neighborhood.

Adam's job was steel work. He was picked up every morning and dropped off again. For him a car or a truck would be a luxury. To her it was really a necessity. A necessity he was trying to work out, but it was tough to do.

First you had to be able to afford to buy a car. Then you had to pay nearly as much for insurance as you did for the car. Then you had to pay for a place to park it. If you were stupid enough to leave it on the street it would be towed, stripped, stolen, or get so many parking tickets it wouldn't be worth owning. So you needed a parking place, and that would set you back five times what the shit box car you had managed to buy had cost you. Adam knew, he had checked into it. He sighed now thinking about it.

“Stop worrying about a car,” Tosh told him.

“I wasn't,” Adam told her.”

“Oh, so you're going to start lying to me now?” Tosh asked him.

“No,” Adam admitted. “Just pisses me off. I see these people that are on welfare driving a Cadillac and I got to say,
what the fuck!
I mean we work hard. We really do. I don't like seeing you have to walk.”

Tosh laughed. “Baby, it's a handful of blocks.”

“Uh huh, and you nearly bust your ass walking them,” Adam said.

She laughed again.

“Oh that's funny that you might slip and bust your ass?”

“No,” She giggled. “Adam, God forbid the sidewalk that slapped my ass. I believe you would kill it, but I'm never gonna hit that sidewalk 'cause you're always going to be there to catch me.”

“Huh,” Adam said. He laughed a little.

“Well, you will be and I know it. So it doesn't matter,” Tosh said. “And besides, I like this... I like this walk every evening with you.” She slipped her arm further through Adam's own, and huddled closer to him. “And it keeps my ass nice and firm, “ she whispered as she leaned closer to him. She laughed and Adam broke into laughter with her. A skinny kid in a hoody, passing by them shrunk away from them, his eyes suddenly startled wide.

“Hey it's just laughing, Cousin. Ain't gonna rob you.” Adam told him.

“Baby,” Tosh said.

“I know... I know,” Adam told her. He left off and turned away from the kid who seemed about to break into a run.

“Sometimes it isn't about black and white,” Tosh told him. “Sometimes it's about you're a very big man and when a man as big as you does something as simple as laugh a little loud it scares people.”

“Well that's funny because it's been about black and white for as long as I can remember,” Adam told her.

“Baby?” She waited until he looked down at her.

“It's true... Now stop... This is something I enjoy. Don't spoil it.” She held his eyes until he smiled at her.

Their combined laughter faded into the gray of the evening as they moved off down the street.

USGS Alaska:

10:15 PM GMT March 1
st

“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. All the 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.

KATIE

March 2
nd

Market Place: Old Towne: Early Morning

“I don't give a fuck what you think, girl. Get that fuckin' money in the bag, and get it in the bag now.”
He shifted away, leaning back from Katie, but with the mirrored sun glasses it was hard for her to tell whether he was still looking at her or away from her. The drawer had hesitated opening, the reset from switching to emergency power, just a sticky register, something, she had tried to explain it, but he had taken it personal. Like she had meant to have it happen. Thankfully it had opened immediately the second time. She picked up her cash drawer and dumped it into the green plastic garbage bag he held. The ground trembled a little under her feet causing her to sway, and they both paused, waiting...

There had been earthquakes. A few aftershocks in between the major jolts, and then the power had gone out. This was, Katie hoped, only a tremor.

It had been the new assistant manager's bright idea to stay open. To be a gathering place for people in the neighborhood until someone in charge showed up. It was three A.M. and no one in charge had shown up. Twenty minutes ago three people had walked through the front door: All dressed in military fatigues; all wearing the mirrored sunglasses and some sort of scarves or bandannas tied around their heads and below their noses. Hair, eyes, all the features you could look for and remember were gone. They would probably never get caught, there was nothing to remember. Never mind the fact that the alarms were out, the cops hadn't been seen for hours, and they were robbing the market in the middle of some kind of disaster. Katie only hoped they made it fast and didn't hurt anyone. The oldsters, her nickname for the older folks that lived in the area, couldn't handle a lot of shock. Already some of them were overly frightened and shaking.

Her eyes swept around to the other two. The one guy seemed slightly heavier through the upper body, but the fatigues were out sized, so it was hard to tell. The last had a deep booming voice that he had only used once when they had come into the market, kicked the chocks that held the automatic doors open out of the way, and announced the robbery. None of the three had spoken since then.

There were twenty-eight people in the market, mostly the oldsters from the Old Towne neighborhood who had come to the market area because the lights were still on, and there were other people there. Old Towne was a far suburb of the city of Manhattan. Some young couples lived here, but getting into and out of the city was sometimes too much and before you knew it a face you had gotten used to seeing was gone. The oldsters with their pensions and fixed incomes stayed. The commute into the city, as rarely as they had to make it, meant nothing to them. Crime was usually low, it wasn't a bad place to live.

A tremble passed through the floor once more; weaker than the last. It felt like a heavy truck passing over a bridge, no more than that, she thought.

Three earthquakes had hit so far, each one stronger than the last. Katie herself had watched the lights of Manhattan dim and then wink out. All of those tall buildings that had lit up the sky over Harlem every night for as long as she could remember, gone in the wink of an eye. The flat screens that hung above the checkouts had winked out, and the two televisions at the front of the store that were on every hour of every day blacked out, and then came back with snow and static. The skyline had lit back up, but it was flickering in places.

Katie had grown up in the Grant projects over in Harlem, and up until a few weeks ago she had still made the trip back and forth every day, but she had found a place, a small walk-up, not far from the market. It was okay for now. And living in Old Towne suited her, or had. She didn't know how this was going to change the equation.

The power had not come back on in Old Towne. The lights were running by generator. The generator was necessary for the meat department at the back of the store. It wouldn't run forever, but it was on now keeping the meat freezers, and the cold cases working; running the low powered emergency lighting system inside the market.

The robber that had been in front of her moved down the line to the next register when the shaking stopped, bag in hand. The other two stood silently at the front of the store, some sort of rifles with clips held in their hands, watching, Katie supposed, through their mirrored lenses.

The man with the bag had reached the end of the line when a much heavier earthquake hit and things began to tumble from the shelves, falling into the aisles. Above her she watched the ceiling lift from the painted cinder block walls, and then slam back down once more. One second she had been looking outside at the massive bare limbs of the oaks that lined the other side of the street, and the next she had been looking at the backside of the corrugated panels that made up the roof of the market. It had happened so fast that she wondered to herself if it had really happened at all. The thin steel roof trusses that held the corrugated panels twisted as the roof slammed back down, squealing as they did. It seemed impossible to her that they could continue to hold the roof.

Her eyes swept quickly around the inside of the market. Most of the oldsters were screaming, cowering where they stood, trying to melt into the floor, but a few were standing stoically; watching parts of the ceiling begin to fall. Katie held the side of the dead conveyor belt in her checkout lane as the floor rose and shook. The robbers scrambled to stay on their feet, the stock tipped and tumbled, rolling across the floor.

The looks on some of the oldsters faces said,
“I knew this is how it would end,”
and Katie believed in that split second that they really had known all along that the world would come to an end in Old Town's Market Square just like it was right now. They had been children playing in the school yard, young lovers chasing after one another through the tall grass, parents seeing their child off to school on that first day: Pensioners walking to the box to get their check as the little girls that lived next door played hopscotch on the sidewalk; old folks coaxing the cat into the house through the back door, and they had known. They had known all along. Her eyes swiveled back to the front of the market, and that was when the roof at the front of the store collapsed. The robber, the one with the bigger upper body screamed and jumped back, and Katie understood then that
he
was a she. Her scream seemed like a signal to everyone, and a fraction of a second later they were all, oldsters, employees and robbers, running for the back of the store as the ceiling of the market collapsed onto the tops of the aisle shelving. The lightweight steel girders grinding and screeching as it came down.

The doors to the back stock room slammed open and the crowd poured into the rear storage area, coming up against the stacks of boxes and crates, and stopping. Just that suddenly the situation had changed. They were no longer running for their lives, they were being herded like cattle by the three and their waving, motioning rifles, holding the doors open, pushing the stragglers, cut and bleeding, into the area as the last of the shaking stopped. Large clips depended in a curve from those rifles, Katie noticed. They were in their hands, but they also had other weapons slung upon their backs by straps that looked every bit as capable as the ones they held in their hands. The one with the thicker chest, the one who at least screamed like a woman, kicked the doors shut and they stood, choking and sneezing as the thick clouds of dust swirled and billowed in the emergency lights.

Outside:

The old Chevy began to rock on its springs, lunging first right and then left. It took a harder lunge to the right, and then jumped forward and slammed head on into the side of the building.

“Fuck, Calvin. Fuck,”
the woman driver screamed. She held a rifle with a long banana clip that slammed into the ceiling. Her finger squeezed the trigger tightly for just a brief second and spat a burst of bright white light and noise; a jagged hole appeared in the roof of the car.

“Bitch, what the fuck
?” Calvin screamed as he tried to roll with the shaking car, hanging onto the dashboard. The four in the back added their own comments, and in a second the entire car erupted into cursing and yelling. The ground movement tossed the car once more, picking it up and slamming it sideways into a truck that had slid over three spaces. The screech of grinding metal and breaking glass silenced the screams and yells from the car. The car bounced away from the truck, jiggled from side to side and then settled onto the ground; one tire flat, the nose bent upward.

“Get out... Get out of this motherfucker,”
Calvin screamed. Bricks and pieces of concrete block began to tumble from the roof line as the main wall of the market bulged out and the false roof structure that fronted the store titled backwards and fell into the store space. A few of the huge glass windows that fronted the market cracked with loud audible clicks: Spiderwebs running like bolts of lightening top to bottom, and then shooting off to the sides. Huge walls of glass that were now held together only by the aluminum frames they rested in.

“Jesus... Jesus, those bitches will go... I know it,” one of the men that had been in the back seat muttered, as he tumbled from the car and staggered away. One tall window groaned, splinters of glass shooting onto the sidewalk, and the front passenger side of the car, and then collapsed in a small pile onto the concrete as if to prove him right. Screams surged out from inside the store mixing with their own. A thick cloud of dust billowed out through the opening. The glass glittered like gemstones in the sparse light from the interior of the market.

“Out... Out!”
Calvin yelled. A small section of brick bonded to concrete block fell over and crushed the nose of the car, pinning it to the ground. Steam erupted from the buried nose of the car and rose into the cold air, mixing with the dust as it did. Calvin skipped backwards, the hard heels of the combat boots he wore getting little purchase on the asphalt. He fell backwards with the momentum, his hands splaying behind him, immediately cut on the glass and other debris that covered the asphalt. He wrenched himself forward and began to pluck at the pieces embedded in his palms. His eyes rose and swept across the others as his fingers worked.
Murder, Shitty, Chloe, Tammy,
he ticked off the faces mentally
.
“Who? “ he asked. His quick head count had come up short.

“Rosie,” Tammy said. She was a thin girl with a shock of kinky pink hair. The name was picked up by the others.

Rosie had been in the front with him. She had been the one that had shot through the roof of the car. She was nowhere to be seen. Calvin stood, dusted his bleeding palms against his fatigues and walked around the edge of the car. Rosie's boot clad feet protruded from under the car. Not moving. A pool of spreading blood seeping past the wheel that rested partway onto her body, and out into the lot. He stopped. “Rosie's done up,” he said aloud. He raised his eyes from the pavement as a gunshot came from inside the market. He swore to himself. “Better see what's happened inside. Stay right here,” He frowned as a second shot rang out. “Fuck... Listen,
if it goes bad, get the fuck out
... Just run.” He waited for Murder to nod. Murder was his first. The one he trusted the most. He trotted toward the front entrance, his rifle in his hands, safety off.

The Stock Room:

Things moved fast after the doors swung shut. The one with the thick chest tore off her bandanna and shook her head as if to get the dust out of her hair. White-blond hair flew about her face. She bent over a second later and vomited. Katie smelled it on the air instantly, and fought the gag reflex that started in her own throat. A few of the oldsters didn't make it, and the small floor area was covered with sprawled and bent double bodies a second later as more became sick. Katie kept her eyes on the three. A second later the other two tore off their bandannas, and Katie's heart sank.

The one with the deep voice spoke again: A tall pimple faced white boy, Katie saw. He couldn't be more than fourteen. “Get these,” he said, as he passed long pieces of plastic to the other two. The plastic made no sense until a few seconds later when the other two began slapping the zip ties around one of the oldsters wrists and tugging another through the first before pulling them tight.

“Oh God. Don't do that to me,”
Annie, one of the new clerks screamed. She bolted forward as if making a break for the now closed stock room doors, and Katie watched as the pimple faced white boy raised his rifle. He squeezed the trigger once. Annie collapsed to the floor in mid stride, like a kite that had spilled all of its air at once. One leg spread before her, the other at an angle behind her. Her body skidded along the floor an inch or two and then stopped. She sighed loudly. Her mouth was closed tightly in a grimace as she slowly tipped over to the floor. Her eyes were open, and for a second Katie thought maybe she was seeing, but then something in them shifted, and she knew she was gone. Katie turned away as a few of the oldsters began to mutter between themselves, a few others began to cry. Jason, the new Assistant Manager, stepped forward.

“Listen,” he began in a loud voice. “I don't know who you people think you are, but you've killed someone now...
Killed someone!
” He stopped and looked incredulously at the three who stood closer to the doors. His eyes cutting down to Annie and then up once more. The pimple faced boy raised the rifle once more, Jason opened his mouth, and the boy shot him in the chest before he could say another word.