Chapter 14
Quake

It was not unexpected, but when the foreshock arrived at its prescribed time, Sarah, Bernard, and Alice were filled with fear, as they all felt a sinking feeling deep within their hearts and minds knowing what was to come. The interval that followed seemed interminable, as the earth around them tensed its telluric muscles preparing to spring into life with a violence heretofore unknown. It was not worth counting, since whenever it arrived would prove the most unkindest cut of all from the ostensibly nurturing Mother Earth, full of her inscrutable motives and half-glimpsed notions of truth that had such grave consequences for those who dwelled upon her surface.

There was not even a jolt, per se. When the earthquake arrived, there was nothing at first; in the minds of the three presently awake on their lofty perch, the awareness that something was happening failed to arise in them altogether. This idea took four more seconds to penetrate their minds, and then they all collapsed as if struck by a thunderclap.

The vibration could not be experienced as a mere movement of the earth, no matter what intellect told them. This was a sensation that demanded to be mainlined into the brain, anxious to have its jarring and impossible weight to crush down upon their fragile skulls and to shatter them like crystal caused to oscillate at its resonant frequency. It did not merely snap their bones in half with force, it rent their minds into senseless fragments that could only detect a fraction of the magnitude of the cataclysm that was going on around them.

In a scene straight from the nightmares of impressionable children, the ground beneath them buckled and tore apart, splitting to create a trench that extended nearly 300 miles along the surface of the planet. Far below, the water flooded into the resulting gap, and the line in the water pointed directly toward the city in accusation. San Francisco had cracked like a piteous diorama wrought in porcelain that had been subjected to a display of fury without equal. The gash continued right through the streets, appearing as an open wound in the bedrock into which the pavement had simply sunk without argument, incapable of resistance. It was not out of the question to suggest that the mere presence of this trench was sufficient to drive anyone mad who did not look away with sufficient rapidity from its gaping maw that might as well have led directly to the depths of Hell.

Throughout this initial time of terror, the shaking itself did not cease, but after the first 10 seconds or so, the onlookers were inured to it despite their scattered wits. It was 50 seconds of eternity later when the oscillation finally ceased, but they had felt it so deeply that it felt as though their cells had not stopped vibrating with the ground and were still jostling with unbelievable energy. This exhausting and incomprehensible emotion that contained too much shock to be fear or pain was the only thing they had left to experience, since surveying the already ruined landscape was no comfort and hardly impinged on their awareness. All remained still, as if waiting to see what form the next plague would take in its descent from the heavens.

Sarah was the first to spot it: the minor flames that had come out in the initial wave of destruction had licked their way onto a network of walls and roofs that were easily consumed, and had grown in size. No longer mere sparks, mighty flames had arisen from the wreckage and begun the laborious task of reclaiming the creations of mankind for the use of the gods.

It was at this moment precisely that the comatose man awoke. Having remained dormant throughout the entire initial phase of destruction, he awoke fully at the first instant that the sparks leapt onto their media of distribution and prepared to invade every quarter of the city in their insufferable arrogance; his eyes snapped open and he came back to the world after having undergone the first part of his trial. He knew at once all that had transpired, for the evidence of it still lay before him in grim testament to the hurt inflicted upon the earth, no matter if it was a kind of revenge for man’s folly or had no intent behind it at all. His understanding of the physical changes was complete. The malicious fire posed a difficulty which he was only half-ready to deal with; still, it was not conceivable that he could concede and let it defeat him, nor could he propose to stop it completely, but he must come to know it in some greater degree lest he lose all the rest of the knowledge that he had gained while traveling in the lands near the bank of the river of death.

The fire was spreading. Its long arms embraced the landscape in a carefree manner, effortlessly widening over greater and greater gaps like a giant, expanding organism which survived by feeding on wood and the liquid fuels stored in factories and homes. Its ochre extrusions formed countless intermediate shapes between its frightful apparitions, seeming to simultaneously contain all the demons and monsters that were within the capacity of human imagination to discover and all those that were not. Its ostentation was no true show of malice, however, but a mere self-deceit on the part of the viewers, fueled by the tendency to seek patterns in the truly unknowable vagaries of the world. Light from the blaze reflected off the clouds and created an eerie glow that spread far beyond the region directly over the city. Alice was suddenly reminded of the Tunguska event, even though she knew that it would not have happened until two years after the current catastrophe; some object thought to be extraterrestrial had caused an explosion and imbued the sky with a unearthly glow, apart from flattening countless acres of trees and emitting a deadly radiation. She had always secretly thought that there was some beauty in that tragedy, for the night sky shone for months thereafter with a luminosity sufficient to read outside by the light of the stars.

In the initial chaos, the people in the city had been almost forgotten by those on the opposite shore, but quickly their mournful cries were felt if not heard by those standing on the knoll. The helplessness and utter despair of those trapped within the city were palpable and incredibly painful for anyone who had any compassion at all. At the collapse of the tenements which held hundreds of people, the outcry was considerable, but no help could be lent to those already entangled within the bowels of the poorly made edifices; they were condemned to death for their poverty and low standing in life, and now they would be burned among the cheap lumber that was as good as kindling in the sizeable blaze that had begun.

At 8:14, a major aftershock struck, shattering more buildings and only encouraging the spread of the fire that was rampant by this time. Its hunger for additional conquest led it to more and more districts of the city, until the entire scene looked like a painting straight from among the depictions of the end times by those artists haunted by the possibility of that all-devouring death that was so closely in contention with life.

With his telescoping contact lenses, Bernard watched one desperate botanist, afraid of losing the multitude of rare species cultivated in her laboratory, run back into a burning building to save her many specimens. Such seeming madness, he reflected, was solely dependent on the ideology of the watcher; if his genetic models were capable of being destroyed, he might well go to similar lengths to protect them, for they had irreplaceable value in a way that another person might never understand.

At last a fleet of ships, comprised both of those that had been nearby and those that had to be called via circuitous telegraph messages that bypassed the damaged local lines, rushed to the aid of the city’s denizens in characteristic efficiency. Various troops had been released by the military to deal with the problem, yet they had little success. Still, their attempts to help were at the least appreciated by the city-dwellers who were receiving no succor from other sources, in light of the looting and the danger that was a result of the harsh rule of law, the order from the Mayor to shoot looters on sight.

Throughout the events that were unfolding, the four watchers had all remained silent, but now they looked at one another and, wordlessly rising, moved to the raft that Alice had finished the night before. The journey over sea would be ironically calm in light of the roiling waters that had filled the Bay only a short time before. It was unclear what they could do that would be of use, but they were nevertheless on their way, in the hope that some good might be done.

The first to break the silence was Sarah. “Well, I suppose I had better make some introductions. I’m Sarah, these are Bernard and Alice. And you are...?”

“Michio,” he replied. E-mail: vokuro@adelphia.net