Double Dose, page 35
He picked his way through the wreckage toward the street to get an idea of what was left of Nespodee Springs. Turned out not a whole lot. The café looked wrecked. He noticed a few people about, but most of the town—Jeff included—had places in the trailer park. He walked down to check on the Thirsty Cactus and found its roof all caved in. Well, shit. He and Benny had downed a lot of beers there, but now the Cactus was dead as Benny.
As he turned around to head back up to the goddess’s place he spotted an SUV stopped in front of it. Looked like the Pendry kid’s. Jeff crouched behind some rubble and watched. Old man Pendry didn’t have to know he was back in town.
After the kid drove on, continuing past without seeing him, Jeff quick-walked back to his truck. The kid could be heading out to find the goddess. He might be worried about her. Jeff wasn’t worried a bit. No earthquake could harm her, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t use a little help if people started bothering her.
When he reached his truck he realized he’d have to drive over a shitload of splintered lumber to reach the street. He could easily blow out a tire in the process and he wasn’t sure his spare was inflated.
Fuck!
Well, better get started shifting the shit.
Becky
NRO was feeding a series of satellite photos to one of the desk monitors at Caltech’s data collection center where everyone waited breathlessly for each new image to appear.
One after another showed further progression of the tsunami as it hit the lowlands of the bioreserve at the northern end of the Gulf and washed away everything in its path, including a small desert town in Baja called El Indiviso. It blasted into the Cerro Prieto surface rupture, widening it and then disappearing into it.
“It’s a miracle!” Pryor said. “The water’s being swallowed by the fault. That’s going to minimize the damage.”
Not to a place like El Indiviso, Becky thought. The little town had been wiped off the map.
The next few photos showed the remnant of the tsunami receding.
“If everything will just hold like this,” Cheatham said, “there should be no more damage.”
Becky wandered to the opposite side of the room where the fallen screen with the seismic sensor network feed had been leaned against the wall. The mysterious sine waves were still running through the lower Imperial Valley. She had a feeling this wasn’t over yet.
And then Hendry called from the station receiving the NRO images. “Doctor Heuser! Something happening here!”
Becky rushed over to where Hendry was pointing a shaky finger at the latest image.
“What is that?”
He was indicating the northern end of the Cerro Prieto Fault’s surface rupture, just west of Mexicali. What—?
“Oh, Christ! Is that water?”
The next image left no doubt. Water was breaking through the surface, extending the fissure northward. Successive images showed the rupture widening and lengthening until the water was flowing freely across the border into the Imperial Valley.
Pryor came up behind her. “What’s happening?”
“The force of the tsunami extended the rupture. The Gulf of California is flowing into the valley toward Plaster City and Dixieland. We’ve got a major disaster on our hands.”
Hendry looked up at her. “How major?”
The repercussions and consequences were just dawning on Becky. “It’s a downhill ride from there. The whole central part of the Imperial Valley is below sea level. That water’s not simply flowing from a higher level to a lower level, it’s got the weight of all the water in the Gulf of California behind it, and the Gulf has the weight of the entire Pacific Ocean behind it! That flow is going to pick up speed and start carving out the sides and the bottom of the rupture. That’s not bedrock it’s flowing through, that’s loose sediment laid down by the Colorado River for ages. The flow will chew it up and spit it out the other side. And the wider and deeper the channel, the more seawater it can deliver.”
Hendry’s voice lowered to a whisper. “They’re fucked!”
“Damn right they are. This could be catastrophic. Calexico and El Centro are next because they’re below sea level—El Centro is way below. We’ve got to let FEMA know. They’re going to have to start evacuating a large part of the Imperial Valley—unless someone can figure out a way to block that channel.”
As people rushed to phones, Becky turned back to the wall monitor and stared at those damn sine waves. Never in all the seismology group’s worst-case scenarios had they imagined a compounding of disasters like this. No one had. And, against all reason and science, she knew those sine waves were somehow involved…somehow behind everything that had happened.
Tom
Tom had piloted the outboard about a mile along the mirror surface when it started to become agitated, first with wavelets, then with definite chop.
“Aftershock?” Lucy said, frowning.
“Unless the last one was a foreshock and this is the main—holy shit!”
The water to the south was rising in a huge swell and racing toward them, a wave from a surfer’s dream.
Tom didn’t know what to do. His first instinct was to turn the boat and flee, but he didn’t think they could outrun it, and even if they could, they’d eventually come to a shore. Or what if it broke on them as they ran?
“Whatever you do,” Lucy said in her flat tone, “don’t turn the boat. Keep us moving and pointed straight at it.”
“But that thing’s gotta be ten feet high!”
“Nose on, we’ll slide right over it. But if it catches us broadside, we’re sunk—literally and figuratively.”
How could she be so calm?
Since he didn’t have a better idea, Tom followed her directions and kept the bow pointed at the wave. As it came at them, he took a deep breath and prayed his bladder would hold. The unflappable Lucy busied herself turning on the shortwave.
And sure enough, just as she said, they slid right over it. Another smaller wave followed close behind but they slipped over that too, like surfers paddling out to where they could wait for the Big One.
The waves then became disorganized, sloshing this way and that as they ran into one another while the quake continued. Out here the water acted as a sort of shock absorber, so he could only guess at the severity of the current tremors on land, but he did notice how some of the graffiti-soaked walls of the abandoned buildings scattered along the shore were tipping and falling. They’d withstood the 7.8 of a while ago, but now they were crumbling. Did that mean this one was even bigger?
He headed for the center of the Salton, figuring the water would be deepest there and harder for the tremors to roil, then idled the engine and waited for calm.
Lucy turned up the radio and they listened. As the waves subsided, the FEMA channel announced that the earthquake center at Caltech had just pegged this new tremor’s magnitude at 8.2.
“That’s huge,” Tom said. “Could this be the Big One?”
Lucy shrugged. “Could be.”
That was when the air changed. No, make that the atmosphere. It filled with a sense of foreboding, of portent. An augury of impending…what? Tom looked around. Nothing had changed—the sun was still high and bright, a gentle breeze rippled the water—yet he was filled with this unaccountable sense of imminent doom.
Lucy said, “We’re moving, you know.”
“Just drifting,” he said. “The breeze—”
“The breeze is coming from the east and we’re drifting toward the east. Does that compute?”
No, it didn’t, and yes, they were definitely moving toward the eastern shore.
“Then it’s a current,” he said.
What was her point here?
“Really?” Another of her patented disdainful looks. “We’re floating on a giant, landlocked puddle, Tommy.”
He got it. “And puddles don’t have currents.”
“Unless somebody’s stirring it,” she said.
Something about her tone. As Tom processed it he noticed how they’d angled to the left and were now drifting north, though the breeze remained from the east. Weird.
And then came this loud, sucking gurgle from somewhere off to the left. He saw nothing. When it came again, he stood for a better look and spotted what appeared to be a hole in the water. But what—?
“Whirlpool!” he cried.
“As I suspected,” Lucy said.
“You suspected? How could you suspect? And why didn’t you say something?”
He dropped back into his seat and jammed the gear/throttle into fast forward. The engine died. Tom screamed. Not a girly scream. A guy scream. But a scream nonetheless.
“You did it too fast,” Lucy said. “Be calm.”
Calm? Easy for her to say. She was never anything but calm.
“What’s happening?” he shouted as he jammed his finger on the starter button.
“I’m just guessing, of course,” she said, adopting that infuriating lecture tone, “but the Salton Sea sits over the southern portion of the San Andreas Fault. It’s not surprising that a high-magnitude quake like the one we just had would involve multiple faults. When I noticed we were moving against the breeze, and in a counterclockwise direction, I figured the San Andreas had opened down below. No surprise a whirlpool formed. They rotate counterclockwise in this hemisphere, by the way.”
The starter was cranking but the engine wasn’t catching.
“I don’t want to get flushed down the San Andreas Fault!” Tom cried.
The engine still wasn’t catching so, logically, he pressed the starter button harder.
“You’re going to drain the battery if you keep that up,” Lucy said.
“Really? Really?” Sudden fury roared through him. They were picking up speed and revolving faster and faster toward the whirlpool’s empty center—circling the drain, as the expression went. The vortex had grown wider and Tom no longer had to stand to see it. “Do you have any better ideas?”
“Well, the first thing I might do is return the gearshift to neutral.”
What? Oh, right. The handle was still in the “F” position. He pulled it back to “N” and mashed the starter button again. The engine caught right away. Their stern was almost to the whirlpool’s sucking maw. They had to move. But, remembering what had happened last time, Tom restrained himself and eased the lever forward. He almost wept when the boat lurched into motion.
As he gunned away from the vortex, he realized that while he’d been so intent on the starter, the surface of the Salton had shrunk and sunk. Significantly. The water’s edge sat lower on the shoreline which was much closer than before. A wide expanse of glistening, vile-looking mud now showed between the sand and the water’s edge.
“Maybe you should slow down, Tommy,” Lucy said. “We don’t want to—”
They were both abruptly thrown forward as the prow crunched against something rough and gritty that stopped them dead.
“—run aground.”
“Sorry!”
The engine was making horrible noises so he threw it into neutral. The water drained away all around them leaving flopping fish and crawling crustaceans and a stench Tom couldn’t believe. He’d thought the ambient odor of the area was awful but this went light years beyond. He tried breathing through his mouth but he could taste it.
“I can’t stand this,” he said, gagging
“Just hang in there. Your nose will adjust after a while.”
“It will never adjust to this.” He pointed toward the near shore. “Let’s go. We can walk.”
“Go ahead. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Lucy—”
“Number one: I’m not stepping in that disgusting mud. Number two: I came here to witness the Void. We still have ten minutes to go before the equinox.”
“There won’t be a Void to witness, Lucy! The Clan—they’re psychos! Delusional! They’re—”
“Oh, look. That’s where all the water’s gone.”
He followed her point to a massive crack in the sea floor, running north and south as far as Tom could see. No wonder the water had disappeared so quickly. Steam rose from the fissure as dying fish flopped all about on the glistening, puddled mud under a bright blue, cloud-flocked sky. The effect was positively surreal, like a Dali landscape.
But that didn’t cancel out the growing sense of doom.
“Oh, listen to this,” Lucy said. “Something about an evacuation.”
She turned the volume knob on the shortwave but nothing happened. She hit it with her palm but still nothing. “Batteries must be shot.”
She held it up to her ear, frowning at first, then her expression growing slack with shock.
Lucy…shocked? What the hell?
In a hushed tone she said, “They’re ordering the evacuation of the whole Imperial Valley. Remember that fissure from the Cerro Prieto Fault that ran into the Gulf of California…the mainshock widened it northward all the way into the valley. The water’s pouring through…the Pacific…it’s flooding the valley.”
Tom fought to process it. “How can that be?”
“I’m thinking this is all part of the plan.”
“What plan?”
“The Clan plan. It’s brilliant in a way—sick, but brilliant. The Visitors left because the trough was drying up. If you want them back, you’ve got to make the place inviting again. So you flood it.”
Tom liked to think of himself as unshockable, but…
“They’re behind these quakes?”
“I think you can bet on it.”
“But there’s gotta be a zillion people living down here, all below sea level!”
“Yeah, there’s that.” Totally unfazed.
And then he realized…
“Oh, shit! Nobody’s farther below sea level than we are right now. We’ve got to get to higher ground.”
“Yeah, we do…eventually. But it’s only eight minutes to the equinox, and the water’s got to flood forty miles through El Centro and Brawley before it gets here. So we’ve got time.”
“You can’t be serious! The car’s over there in Salton City. We need to slog through this gunk to get there, then drive—”
“How do we get around the San Andreas?” she said, the radio still pressed to her ear.
He stared at the long, thirty-foot-wide fissure stretching between them and Salton City on the west shore.
“Oh, shit!” Just then a deep rumbling echoed up from the fissure and vibrated the hull of their beached craft. “Now what?”
Lucy didn’t answer as they both stared at the fissure. Another quake? An aftershock?
But no. Water began bubbling and gushing from the opening.
“It’s spitting it back!” Tom couldn’t help a hysterical laugh that sounded scary even to him. “Must not like the taste!”
But this was good. They could motor back to Salton City.
“I don’t think that’s the same water, Tommy.”
“What? What other water can it be? You don’t think it’s ocean water, do you?”
“If it is, it’s not from our ocean. Look at those things in it.”
Elis
Elis couldn’t help a triumphant smile as he cut the power to the subterranean section of the tower.
“There!” he called to Rhys, still imprisoned by the loyal porthors. “Any new quakes after this will not be my doing. Happy?”
Rhys shouted back, “I’d be happier if no quakes were your doing. Let me out of here!”
“Not yet, my boy. Not yet.”
Word had come via the FEMA channel that the quakes plus a tsunami had opened a waterway between the Gulf of California and the Imperial Valley. A tsunami! Not only had he caused earthquakes, he’d caused a tsunami. FEMA was recommending evacuation of Calexico and El Centro residents to higher ground until the flow of seawater could be stopped. Rhys was so damn worried about loss of life down there, but it wasn’t a terribly big deal to travel just a few miles outside of town to put yourself above sea level.
But the flow wouldn’t be stopped. Once the Void passage opened and the Visitors came through, they’d take over and see to it that the flooding continued.
He checked his watch: just coming up on four sixteen. Five minutes to the exact moment of the equinox. Time to pierce the Veil. He opened the circuit to feed full power to the dome.
Let the fireworks begin!
Kendrick
Jeff cursed steadily as he drove. It had taken him too damn long to clear the rubble blocking his pickup from the street and now he’d lost any hope of following the Pendry kid. He had a feeling the kid knew where the goddess was. Those two were tight. He’d seen that. The goddess had told him not to come along, but he’d find a way to keep watch from a distance, far enough away so she wouldn’t be any the wiser, and close enough to step in should any shit hit the fan.
As he was passing the access road that ran south to the solar array he saw someone jogging along it. He was already past when it struck him: a jogger…all in black…in a skirt. A skirt? Reminded him of the goddess.
He slammed on the brakes.
Naw. Couldn’t be. What would she be doing running through here? Still…only take him a sec to check. Stupid to go all the way to El Centro if she was already here.
He hung a U and headed down the side road. The closer he got, the surer he became that she was the goddess. Then he saw that white patch on top of her head and all doubt disappeared. When she turned and stuck out her thumb, he skidded to a halt.
She was panting when she leaned on his passenger door. “Hey, can you give me a lift—?” She made a face. “Karma?”
“It’s Jeff now.”
“Whatever. You’re supposed to be back in town watching Healerina and the apartment.”
“Ain’t no Healerina no more. Ain’t no apartment neither. Quake took care of that.”
She looked shocked. “Really?”
“Yeah. Pancaked. Where you need a ride to?”
“No way I’m riding with you.”
“But—”
“You’re aunt’s going to be along to pick me up.”
He looked around. “I ain’t seen no one on the road.”
“Then maybe she needs your help. Her bike broke down back by the wind farm.”
