The Second Intelligent Species: The Cyclical Earth (3 page)

Beth looked up at me and I down to her. The sound increased to a deafening thunder below our feet.

“Earthquake.” Beth grabbed me by the arm.

I could see over the hedges into the next lot, where she couldn’t. I saw the first ripple move the land. Then we felt it hit. The earth convulsed in a way I didn’t think was possible. I would guess about a seven or eight magnitude earthquake hit our small town. I had no way of telling for sure its actual size.

Dust was emanating from the field adjacent to our property. The trees along the property line were shaking and losing their leaves. It was like Fall came and went all at once. The walls of our house flexed as the earth under it moved side to side. With each convulsion I expected the hundred-year-old two-story home to collapse.

I had lived there twenty-five years. We’d had an earthquake of about four point five on the Richter scale, eighteen or nineteen years ago. It rattled the windows and spilled my coffee. The
water in the fish tank splashed around, and that was the extent of it. This one knocked Beth and me right off our feet. The earth was moving so violently that we slid along the ground enough to get grass stains on our clothes. We crawled up to the road to see down towards town. Power poles were snapping off. Sparks from the downed wires were dancing as the wires whipped. You could smell the electricity in the air. We could hear every window in town breaking, every car alarm was going off. Our attention was drawn to a loud cracking sound resonating from the back of our house. It was the sound of the back half breaking away from the main portion. Because the structure was built on a hill, when the smaller half broke away, it rolled down to the very spot Beth had been only moments ago. Thankfully, she had moved. The last time I saw the clothesline, it was being surrounded by a cloud of dust and what remained of the roof.

The tremors seemed endless. Besides the rumbling, car alarms, glass breaking, and dogs barking, the fire siren could be heard blowing a half-mile away. This rural town was the last to have one. They kept it for tradition only.

Breathing became difficult due to all the dust that had drifted from the collapse of our back addition. Insulation and dust drifted with the wind like the smoke of a campfire, always in the direction where you are standing.

After what seemed like a set of about three or four smaller earthquakes, all larger than the one I had experienced before when I was younger, everything just rumbled. I can’t be sure how long we sat along the road looking and waiting for it to subside.

Beth was crying and shaking, and I was just kneeling, wondering what to do. I couldn’t think from all the noise. I was experiencing sensory overload. What could I do? My house was broken in half, and the last remaining power wires in the country were lying on the car and truck. As I looked down the street I could see everyone else’s home had taken as much damage as ours had, some maybe more.

We waited for the tremors to subside completely before we attempted to get to our feet. They decreased in magnitude, but the rumbling remained.

I felt Beth release my arm as feeling came back to my fingers. “Nick, there’s not supposed to be earthquakes around here. Not this big. What to hell was that? Nick… the kids.” She reached for her phone and struggled to push the same buttons she had pushed a hundred thousand times before without thinking. “I can’t get a signal. I’ll have to use the one in the house.” Again we were the last people in New York to have a landline. “Sally should be home from school by now, shouldn’t
she?” She looked at her watch. She turned to run into the house.

“Wait a minute,” I shouted. “Don’t go in there until we check the place out. I don’t think the rescue could get to us even if they wanted to. There are too many poles and lines in the road.” The utility company was slowly eliminating them and replacing them with Tesla poles. T-poles delivered electricity to homes from a greater distance without the need of wires. Our town would need only five but I guess we were last on the list. People were slow to change in these areas. “This is going to take a long time to clean this up, maybe now they’ll do away with them.” I took her hand and led her up the steps. “C’mon, let’s get your phone… go slow.” I was looking for structural weaknesses in the walls.

The back half, where the kids’ rooms are—correction, were—fell off and collapsed. Thank God they all moved out a year ago and it was just Beth and me. From the kitchen I could see right out into the back yard. Getting to the phone was not a simple task. Every dish and glass that we had in the cabinets was on the floor, directly in our path. The table and chairs were tipped over and shifted to the north end of the kitchen. The floor had sunk nearly three feet. The foundation near the back half had crumbled away.

I finally reached the handset and lifted it to my ear, “This phone’s dead too, and all the power’s out.” I guess I could have told her that before we went into the house, but with all the confusion, I never thought about it. I was too busy watching the utility poles fall into the middle of the road. My mind had not put the two together.

In an outburst of desperation, Beth cried, “We can’t do anything here. Let’s go check on the kids. We’ve got to do something… Can we move the car or the truck?”

Both vehicles were unapproachable due to potentially hot wires. Just because there was no power in the house didn’t guarantee there wasn’t juice outside. I didn’t want to take that chance. I had to come up with a plan to calm her down. “We can walk down to the fire house. They’ve got radios, and it’s an emergency shelter. Plus they’ll need every swinging dick they can get hold of.” I guess I could have spared her from the “fireman talk.” I had been a fireman for fourteen years in the same volunteer fire department. I guess it never really leaves your blood. My training kicked in. “Get all of our pills. We may be there a couple days. They’ll have food and water. Plus they’ll need the help. Get whatever else we’ll need for two days. We’ll be back by then; the insurance people will be next, then the carpenters. I’ve been meaning to remodel just one more time before I sell the place anyway.”
I tried to reassure her but she was focused on the kids.

She threw some underwear, socks, our pills, and one change of clothes in her small travel bag. I threw some of my underwear, socks, deodorant, disposable razor, both our tooth brushes and toothpaste into a small backpack. “I am going to bring my kit with me.” She had a trauma bag she carried everywhere.

“They will have all that down there. It’s just one more thing we’ll have to carry. We need to walk a half a mile to get to the fire station.”

“I’m taking it and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

She grabbed her phone, and I grabbed my hat, backpack, and her bag, and we started to walk down to the station.

Chapter 4

The Fire Storm

Vigilantly we made our way around power lines. Some of them were still live and dancing along the ground, lighting the grass afire where they landed. Looking at them hurt our eyes, like looking at a welder’s flash. I took Beth by the arm. She was so busy trying to get a signal on her phone that she narrowly avoided live wires. We walked up to Tom and Linda, my neighbors of fifteen years. I could see them standing outside surveying the perimeter of their home. Their property sustained severe damage. Their chimney had fallen and landed on their new hybrid SUV. It was one of the first vehicles to use the tesla poles as a source of energy, with a hydrogen backup. A big tree in their back yard had landed on their house, collapsing their roof down to the first story.

“Is everyone O.K.?” Beth asked. She walked over to Linda, who was crying and bleeding slightly from the bridge of her nose. Beth reached into her trauma bag and placed a folded bandage on her nose, tilted her head back, and said, “Don’t worry, it looks a lot worse than it is. You might need to
get glued back together, but I can’t do that here. You don’t want a scar do you?”

While Beth tended to our neighbor’s nose, I turned to Tom and said, “Tom, we’re heading to the fire department, why don’t you and Linda follow us down?”

“We’re going to church to set up the shelter there. I’m sure a lot of people will need a place to stay tonight. This town is going to need all the shelters it can get.”

Something caught my peripheral vision. It appeared to be a dark thundercloud, but I’d never seen one like this before. It rolled with an orange glow to it, and it was moving fast. I noticed a grey fog coming from town. It was moving closer in rolling sheets. The closer it got the more I could tell it was smoke. I’ve never seen smoke do that before. Ribbons of smoke came down from the sky.

How could that be?
I was confused. My past training told me that smoke goes up. I turned to find Beth.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she shrieked. She was looking past the smoke into town. She could see fires starting.

Linda screamed and ran into their garage that seemed to have escaped damage.

Beth dragged me towards a junk car that Tom was preparing for the demolition derby at the county fair.

Suddenly, I heard my neighbor Tom scream. I turned as we were running to see two ribbons of smoke rising over his back. He was swatting at his back as if hot bees had just stung him.

Then the Martin’s dog got it too. I heard him yelp. He ran across the road with smoke trailing behind him, his tail tucked under his legs as he ran. That’s when I noticed the BBs. There were thousands of burning BBs bouncing off the road like hail. Everything started to catch fire. I heard more screaming, though I’m not sure who it was.

Beth’s yanking me into the car woke me up. I was in a state of utter disbelief. “What to hell is going on?” Beth asked as she slammed the door on my leg.

I pulled it away to let her shut it fully. I couldn’t answer. I felt burning on my neck. I swatted at it as if a bug were there, but this was fire. The burning remained as the embers melted into my shirt and could not be shaken free.

“I have no idea, but if we stay here we’re going to die.” The leaves that were caught in the old car’s windshield started to burn.

Beth screamed and grabbed me. “Don’t let me burn alive. Nick!”

I turned in my seat to see what she screamed at. I looked out the window and saw Tom on fire, running into his house. The shrubbery on the side of the road was ablaze.

We saw a car slide off the road in an attempt to dodge wires, the tires screeching as it slammed into one of the last remaining utility poles. The occupants were able to get out of their vehicle, but as soon as they stepped out, they jumped right back into their burning car.

There was smoke coming into the car that we were in. Its paint was starting to burn, and the air was getting very warm and smoky inside.

“Nick, do something, hurry, I’m scared, Nick please.” Beth was so afraid, and so was I. I didn’t have a plan and thought we would both die in that car. We coughed to the point that unconsciousness could soon follow.

I looked out the window through all the smoke and I saw a place where there was none. Down near the water leading into the culvert under the road, there wasn’t smoke, but steam. There was water in that ditch.

I opened the door and yelled, “C’mon.” I stepped out into a rain of fire. I had Beth’s arm and was pulling her out. That’s when she pulled back and slipped free.

The embers had already started to get down my neck and the back of my pants where my plumbers crack is. They burned like hell. I wasn’t in the mood to argue at the time. I reached in the car, grabbed a handful of her red hair, and pulled her to the door.

I yelled in the loudest most convincing voice I had. “Look, it’s wet and cool in there. It’s our only chance. C’mon!” My neck and back were burning. I just wanted to get to the water. The little BBs of molten material were burning my wrist too, as they got in under my watchband. I took it off and threw it, along with my backpack. My hair not under my hat was smoldering. I grabbed Beth’s arm and gave it a yank, she slid out of the car to her feet in one fluid motion. We both ran screaming towards the culvert. Even the pockets of my jeans were catching those little BBs. You couldn’t escape them. I looked back at Beth, and her beautiful red hair was ablaze. I reached out and threw her towards the culvert. We both hit the water at the same time. We skipped along the surface like two stones thrown by a child. We rolled around splashing water on each other.

This put the fires out, but the air was chokingly hot. Our breaths were taken inches from the water. Beth scrambled up into the culvert. My nose was right up her ass, pushing her into the tube even further. She was screaming and kicking all the way, but my ass was the last thing that was out in the fire, so naturally I insisted. I splashed water on my neck, she splashed it on her head and everywhere else where we burned, my pockets, my neck, down the crack of my ass, in her cleavage. We burned all over. We inched up into the culvert,
only about three feet in diameter, and then we reached a T in the tunnel. I just followed Beth. She led us to the good air, and deeper water. That’s what saved us. We were in an area with enough oxygen to live, and the water kept our bodies cool.