Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Read online

  Except for security officers in ponchos, crash helmets and goggles, the campus was almost deserted under the cold February rain. It reminded her of real Vancouver weather, while Vancouver itself was enjoying its sunniest winter in years. The rain made her homesick — not for Scotland, but for Vancouver, Don’s home town. Apart from a couple of brief jobs and one unhappy family reunion, they hadn’t been there in seven or eight years. In retrospect, though, it seemed like a lost paradise where no one ever heard of shakeouts, and climatologists didn’t worry about the political aspect of their work. Perhaps she might even persuade Don to move back there for a year or so. Good God, his grandfather Geordie must be nearly a hundred years old by now; he couldn’t be such a dragon any more. Even if he were, he couldn’t last much longer. And Don’s mother Elizabeth was a dear woman who deserved better treatment from all her men.

  Poor Don, she thought. He really had his knickers in a twist about his family. The Kennards had been in British Columbia since the gold rush of 1858; one of Don’s great-great-grandfathers had founded a logging dynasty that was still powerful politically and economically. David Kennard, Don’s father, might have become provincial premier if he hadn’t died of a heart attack. Don and his brother Steve had been in high school then; they’d gone to university, graduate school and careers in science, abandoning the family business and what was left of the family.

  She half-envied Don; her own parents had died when she was young, and she’d grown up like a gypsy among various distant cousins. It would have been marvellous having bloody great battles with parents, instead of the absent-minded affection of cousins. Yet she’d grown accustomed to the pleasures of independence. Don had married her on the understanding — even stronger on her side than on his — that they would have no children, set no suburban roots. They had lived and worked all over the world, enjoying each other without hindering each other. Sometimes Don’s quietness and stubbornness drove her mad, but she knew they were only aspects of the strength she had relied on from the start. And he still had a talent for surprising and delighting her.

  She reached the parking garage, which looked bleak with its surrounding flowerbeds full of dead plants, and ran up three flights of stairs without even breathing hard. Jogging in the Berkeley hills had its hazards — she had to run at night, of course, to avoid the UV, and some of the neighbours’ dogs were really vicious — but at least she’d stayed in shape. Not many people realized she was all of thirty-four.

  Before getting into the old orange Volvo station wagon, Kirstie checked the new lock on the gas cap. No one had tampered with it. A week before, with three days to go before her next gas coupon could be used, she’d found the tank siphoned dry.

  Gas rationing had at least reduced traffic problems; she was on the freeway, bound for the Oakland Bay Bridge, within minutes. The rain and UV had kept most hitchhikers off the streets as well. Sometimes they threw rocks or bottles at cars that didn’t stop for them; often, they robbed the drivers who did.

  She saw she’d missed the top of the noon news, but switched the radio on anyway. The announcer’s voice was so excited that she glanced at the dial, thinking it had been turned to one of the rock stations. It hadn’t.

  “ — warning was delayed by poor radio conditions and disruptions in ocean cable systems that may have been caused by the tsunamis themselves. The tidal waves are expected to reach the San Francisco area by twelve-thirty this afternoon and they may go on for several hours. Persons living in low-lying areas along the coast are advised to be ready to move to higher ground if necessary. The waves are not, repeat not, expected to affect communities inside San Francisco Bay. Back with more tidal-wave stories after these — ”

  Kirstie spun the dial: country & western, rock, rock, a rabid right-wing commentator. Static buzzed behind everything.

  Her first thought was about Don: but he should be safely at sea, where tsunamis were unnoticeable. Then she decided to keep going, to cross the Bay Bridge and get home to Berkeley. She glanced at the dashboard clock: twelve minutes after noon. She would be on the bridge in five minutes or less, across it in ten more. The announcer had said the waves wouldn’t cause problems within the bay, but she had heard too many stories from Don and his colleagues about what could happen when a seiche got going in an enclosed body of water. As long as she was across the bay and well away from the water —

  The traffic thickened and slowed as she reached the bridge. Six lanes of trucks and cars and motorcycles were moving at walking speed. Jockeying from lane to lane, she managed to move relatively quickly. But as she neared Yerba Buena Island, where the western half of the bridge ended, the traffic came to a complete halt.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Kirstie muttered. People were leaving their cars — not to continue on foot, but to walk to the north side of the bridge and cluster along the railing.

  They were looking for the tsunami, waiting for it; some even had cameras slung around their necks.

  Trapped, Kirstie got out of the Volvo and walked across two lanes to the railing. Just to her right was the steep, rocky slope of Yerba Buena Island; to the north was the straight edge of Treasure Island, a navy base built on a precise rectangle of fill in the middle of the bay.

  It was 12:23. The city looked normal enough, half-hidden in veils of rain and mist. A stiff breeze blew from the west. The surface of the bay was a dull grey, flecked with wind-driven whitecaps. Not far to the west, a big fishing boat was moving north between the footings of the bridge. Farther away, tugs hooted along the San Francisco waterfront, and a couple of freighters were pulling away from their berths. Lights flashed and winked on the streets of the city: the white of car headlights, the red and blue of police cars. The distant wail of sirens was almost lost in the normal deep rumble of the city.

  Kirstie looked down again and saw that the fishing boat was moving surprisingly quickly; then she realized that it had turned around and was pointed south. The current was pulling it stern-first. And the footings of the bridge were exposed; two metres or more of crusted barnacles and weeds showed above the choppy grey water. She looked directly below her and saw bare rock and mud where water had been moments ago.

  The normal white-noise rumble of the city changed pitch, deepened; from the west came a series of low, hard concussions. The bridge began to tremble in response to each of them. Beyond the city’s northern skyline, a pale mist rose against the darker overcast.

  That’s the wave, Kirstie thought wonderingly. The spray from the wave, and it’s rising as high as the hills.

  Then the wave itself came into the bay.

  Nothing so large should have moved so swiftly. It looked to Kirstie like a snow-streaked black moraine, a long, steep ridge that must have been well over fifty metres high, spanning the Golden Gate. It grew taller, steeper, gliding under the roadbed of the bridge, exploding in twin geysers against the towers. It was just beginning to break as it struck the Marin shore and blew apart into an enormous burst of whiteness.

  “Thousand one; thousand two — ” Kirstie whispered to herself, counting seconds as she watched the shock wave moving towards her at the speed of sound, a sharply defined curve on the surface of the bay.

  When the sound blast struck the bridge, Kirstie clapped her hands to her ears and screamed with pain. She dropped to her knees, seeking the shelter of the railing; dimly she noticed other people staggering under the impact of the noise. Part of her was terrified, but another part kept her watching through the open grid of the railing, observing, estimating, even predicting.

  The wave rebounded through the spray, away from the Marin hillsides, smashing again at the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The southern end of the wave bounced off the San Francisco shoreline and pulsed out into the channel. The tsunami peaked in the centre of the Golden Gate, just east of the bridge, reaching a height near its original maximum of fifty metres. The wave had lost its sharp definition and was now a shapeless mass wrapped in mist. As it spread north and south and east it looked
more like fog than solid water.

  Kirstie could see nothing of Marin; Sausalito and Tiburon, and Angel Island, were lost in billowing clouds of spray. But along the San Francisco waterfront the tsunami was moving with what seemed, from a distance, to be an eerie slowness. Its true speed was probably over a hundred kilometres per hour, for it overtook a police car that was hurtling south along the Embarcadero.

  The bridge under Kirstie’s feet began to shudder; flakes of grey paint and orange rust fluttered down from the upper deck. The roar of the wave had been relatively quiet after the first sound blast, but grew louder again as the tsunami ran south along the waterfront.

  Docks snapped away from their pilings; one of the freighters tilted and capsized. The other ship was swept over the docks and struck broadside against the concrete pillars of the Embarcadero Freeway.

  A long segment of the freeway toppled into the wave. Moments later the Ferry Building disintegrated, and the wave rolled over it. From some other building, fire spurted in a burst of orange, vivid against the grey and white of the wave. Through the thickening mist, Kirstie could glimpse tentacles of the wave reaching up the hillside streets.

  In the bay itself, the tsunami was a chaotic mass of foam, five to ten metres high except where it rose higher on crossing shallow water. It ran south under the western end of the Bay Bridge, engulfing the fishing boat Kirstie had seen a few moments before. The bridge swayed and groaned under the blows to its footings.

  Below her, Kirstie saw the water steepen as it neared the shore of the island. Then, a breath later, it struck and exploded. She spun and lunged away, too slowly. Water crashed over her with enough force to fling her hard against a car. Fist-sized chunks of rock clattered down around her, bouncing off the cars and trucks.

  Gasping, she staggered away from the car. The water was ankle-deep, mixed with stones and mud hydraulically blasted from the side of Treasure Island. People were wading through it, or crawling, or lying motionless.

  Wiping mud from her face, Kirstie marvelled that her sunglasses were still in place. She made herself walk back to the railing. Below, several metres above the normal level of the bay, brownish-grey water boiled past under the bridge. The spray was clearing over much the bay, and she could see the Golden Gate Bridge. As she watched, the roadway broke from the north tower and dropped into the water. The north tower of the bridge was tilting. The tilt increased and then the tower fell into the water. Gouts of spray shot up and sank back.

  “The bugger is going to seiche,” she muttered. “It’s going to seiche.”

  Kirstie waded to a woman lying face down nearby and helped her get to her hands and knees. Blood-streaked mud covered her face; the woman moaned and coughed. Kirstie tried to talk to her, but the roar of the wave, pouring back down the hillside and running under the bridge, obliterated all other sounds. The woman stood up and staggered to a yellow Rabbit. Ignoring Kirstie, she got in and started the engine.

  People were moving all over the bridge: helping each other, driving away, walking slowly towards the tunnel to Oakland or back towards San Francisco. One man directed traffic around abandoned cars; three others were pushing those cars to the sides of the pavement. A few more cars arrived from the city and roared through without stopping, their drivers and passengers looking terrified.

  Wondering if she were in shock, Kirstie started the Volvo and drove. The station wagon bumped over the gravel and rocks left by the wave. The windshield was cracked, and the hood and fenders were scratched and dented. Off to her left she saw seething white water where Treasure Island had been. What she could see of Berkeley seemed all right, but to the southeast a huge column of smoke was rising into the rain. Fires burned at the Army Terminal, a sprawl of docks and warehouses on the Oakland waterfront; an odd, greenish-yellow cloud was spreading from the Terminal across Oakland towards the hills to the east.

  She got off the bridge onto the East Bay Freeway. The mud flats that ran beside the freeway were deep under water, and as she approached Berkeley she had to drive through flooded stretches. Just as she reached her exit and turned off, she glanced in her rear view mirror and saw what looked like a tidal bore sweeping up the freeway and mud flats from the south. It was the seiche, a tsunami trapped within the bay. The long hump of grey foam and black water extended across the bay and well inland.

  Slamming the car into first, Kirstie accelerated up Ashby. A roar grew behind her; the seiche was coming fast. Glancing back, she saw it engulf three, four, six cars, one of which was flung spinning into the air.

  San Pablo Avenue: once across it, she knew, Ashby began to rise a little. The wave, now only a metre high, hissed into the intersection and paused.

  A few blocks farther on, Kirstie realized that she was clutching the steering wheel so hard that her hands hurt and that she was still in first gear. She made herself slump back in her seat. Up ahead, the Berkeley hills looked comfortingly close and high, but she did not want to go home to an empty house. Turning left, she drove into a neighbourhood of small apartments and stucco houses, west of the Sacramento Avenue BART station. On a street lined with dead palm trees, she parked in front of an old Hollywood bungalow. The rain was getting heavier. She locked the car and ran to the door of the bungalow.

  Sam Steinberg opened the door as she came up onto the little porch. He was a small, lean man in his forties, with a wrinkled, deeply tanned face above a bristly black beard.

  “You look like hell,” he said. “Come in.”

  The living room was small but snug, with bookshelves lining the walls. The furniture was nondescript: a couch, a couple of easy chairs, a small desk, all utilitarian. Sam Steinberg was a bachelor with little evident interest in physical comfort or in aesthetics.

  “Do you know Einar?” Sam asked. A blond giant rose from one of the easy chairs and gently took her hand.

  “Einar Bjarnason,” he said. “How do you do?”

  “I’m Kirstie Kennard,” she said faintly. “You’re Sam’s graduate student?”

  “The one and only,” Sam grunted. He tossed Kirstie’s raincoat over a pressback chair while she kicked off her sodden boots. “All the others have found safer advisers. Einar’s too crazy to be scared.”

  “No, I am not too crazy.” Einar’s white teeth flashed in his sunburned face. “When I finish with you, I go back to Iceland. We do not have shakeouts.”

  “A primitive people, the Icelanders.” Sam sat her down on the couch. “What’s up? I thought we were supposed to meet up in my office.”

  “Don’t you know about the tsunami? I was on the Bay Bridge when it came in. And then there was a seiche. The whole bloody bay is just sloshing about with huge waves, like water in a bathtub. M-my God, you mean you didn’t know?”

  “We’ve been sitting around all morning doing physics,” Sam said. “Is that why the lights are off? We thought it was just another damn thunderstorm.”

  “Sam, have you anything to drink in this house?”

  She drank two beers as she told them what had happened in the last hour and a half. When she was through, Sam asked:

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “At sea, in Ultramarine. He’ll be fine. They won’t even have noticed the tsunami out there.”

  “Good. Hope he doesn’t worry about you.”

  “I suppose he might, if he knows what’s happened. With radio communication being so unreliable, they may all be as blissfully innocent as you two.”

  “We are neither blissful nor innocent, after what we worked on this morning and what you told us now,” Sam grunted. “Come and help fix lunch before you’re completely bombed.”

  Sam refused to talk shop or even to discuss the disaster while they ate. He launched into a diatribe on the sad political level of current American movies. Einar argued with him, manifestly unworried about annoying his adviser.

  “Have you seen this bloody thing called Gunship?” Sam demanded. “It was on cable all last month again. It’s turning into a damn cult movie, like The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  “It is only a cowboy movie with helicopters,” Einar said.

  “It’s a pornography of violence. What Gunship says is that this country hasn’t learned a goddamn thing. Don’t examine your motives, put your trust in guns and more guns, and kill everybody you can because maybe they’ll kill you. And the guy who made it is a millionaire because he peddles that crap.”

  “Anyway,” the Icelander said, “it is not on cable now. Nothing is on cable anymore.”

  “It’s an ill solar wind that doesn’t blow someone some good,” Sam said. “Okay, enough — looks like we’d better get out and see what we can do to help. The authorities are probably a little overstrained.”

  They walked out into wind and spattering rain, and headed west. Sirens screamed everywhere. The wind smelled of smoke. A surprising number of people were on the street, or standing on their porches watching the smoke rise in the west. Kirstie realized they were mostly black; in her own all-white neighbourhood, up in the Berkeley hills, people went out only after dark these days.

  Ambulances seemed to be concentrating a few blocks away, around an elementary school at San Pablo and Francisco. The seiche wave had come across San Pablo, right to the edge of the blacktopped schoolyard; across the street, people were carrying casualties out of the flooded buildings, wading through the mud left behind by the wave, and putting them down gently on the blacktop.

  Teenaged blacks were stringing ropes across basketball courts and hanging tarpaulins and plastic sheets from them, improvising shelter for the injured.

  Kirstie paused as they were about to enter the school building. The air reeked of smoke and excrement. She touched Sam’s arm; his dark eyes looked into hers, and she saw something gentle, powerful and sad in them.

  “I’m sorry — I’m scared,” she mumbled.

  “Of what?”

  Two orderlies carried out a screaming, blood-splashed man with a sodden red bandage where his right forearm had been.

  “Of — that.”