Mabel saw New York City ahead in the distance. There was the Empire State Building, there the Statue of Liberty, there the World Trade Center, looking just as she’d imagined them, but poking out of a landscape tilted at forty-five degrees. Somewhere out there her daughter would be going to JFK to meet her parents and introduce the boy she was going to marry. …
Flaps were sliding from the wing’s trailing edge. The plane lurched and shuddered, and Mabel’s cards flew like startled butterflies. She felt the plane surging upward, pulling out of its dive.
Far above, black clouds ran like a curtain across the sky, faster than the plane, sparking with lightning as they moved. Lightning everywhere. An enormous bolt struck the Statue of Liberty and played along the grande dame’s upraised torch Then lightning struck the plane.
Beyond Ocean Boulevard there was a bluff. At the bottom of the bluff, the Pacific Coast Highway, and then the sea. At the edge of the bluff the bearded man watched the horizon with a look of surpassing joy.
The light had flashed only for a second or two, but blindingly. Its afterimage was a blue balloon in the bearded man’s field of view. A red glow… strange lighting effects outlining a vertical pillar… He turned with a happy smile. “Pray!” he called. “The Day of Judgment is here!”
A dozen passersby had stopped to stare. Mostly they ignored him, though he was a most impressive figure, with his eyes glowing with happiness and his thick black beard marked with two snow-white tufts at the chin. But one turned and answered. “It’s your Day of Judgment if you don’t step back. Earthquake.”
The bearded man turned away.
The black man in the expensive business suit called more urgently. “If you’re on the cliff when it falls, you’ll miss most of Judgment Day. Come on now!”
The bearded man nodded as if to himself. He turned and strolled back to join the other on the sidewalk. “Thank you, brother.”
The earth shuddered and groaned.
The bearded man kept his feet. He saw that the man in the brown suit was kneeling, and now he knelt too. The earth shook, and parts of the bluff fell away. It would have carried the bearded man with it if he hadn’t moved.
“For He cometh,” the bearded man shouted. “For He cometh to judge the Earth…”
The businessman joined in the psalm “…and with righteousness to judge the world, and the peoples with His truth.”
Others joined. The heaving earth buckled and rolled. “Glory be to the Father and—”
A sharp sudden shock threw them to the ground. They scrambled back to their knees. The shaking stopped, and some of the group hurried away, looking for cars, running inland.
“Oh, ye Heavens, bless ye the Lord,” the bearded man cried. Those who had stayed joined in the canticle. The responses were easy to learn, and the bearded man knew all the versicles.
There were surfers out in the water. They had floated through the violent upheavals. Now they were invisible in a blinding curtain of salt rain. Many of the bearded man’s group ran away into the wet darkening. Still he prayed, and others from the apartments across the street joined him.
“Oh, ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him forever.”
The rains came hard, but just in front of the bearded man and his flock a trick combination of winds drove a clear path that let them see down the bluff to the deserted beach. The waters were receding, boiling away to leave small things flopping on the rainy wet sands.
“Oh, ye Whales, and all that move in the waters, bless ye the Lord…”
The canticle ended. They knelt in the driving rain and flashing lightning. The bearded man thought he saw, far away, through the rain and beyond the receding waters, beyond that to the horizon, the ocean was rising in a hump, a straight wall across the world. “Save us, Oh God: for the waters are come in, even unto my soul,” the bearded man cried. The others did not know the psalm, but they listened quietly. An ominous rumble came from the ocean. “I stick fast in the deep mire, where no ground is; I am come into deep waters, so that the floods run over me.”
But no, the bearded man thought. The rest of that psalm is not appropriate. Not at all. He began again. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”
The water rushed forward. They finished the psalm. One of the women stood.
“Pray now,” the bearded man said.
The noise from the sea drowned out all other words, and a curtain of rain swept over them, warm rain to hide the sea and waves. It came in a rush, a towering wall of water higher than the highest buildings, an onrushing juggernaut of water foaming gray and white at the base, rising as a green curtain. The bearded man saw a tiny object moving across the face of the water. Then the wall swept over him and his flock.
Gil rested face-down on the board, thinking slow thoughts, waiting with the others for the one big wave. Water sloshed under his belly. Hot sunlight broiled his back. Other surfboards bobbed in a line on either side of him.
Jeanine caught his eye and smiled a lazy smile full of promises and memories. Her husband would be out of town for three more days. Gil’s answering grin said nothing. He was waiting for a wave. There wouldn’t be very good waves here at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach, but Jeanine’s apartment was near, and there’d be other waves on other days.
The houses and apartments on the bluff above bobbed up and down. They looked bright and new, not like the houses on Malibu Beach where the buildings always looked older than they were. Yet even here there were signs of age. Entropy ran fast at the line between sea and land. Gil was young, like all the young men bobbing on the water this fine morning. He was seventeen, burned brown, his longish hair bleached nearly white, belly muscles like the discrete plates of an armadillo. He was glad to look older than he was. He hadn’t needed to pay for a place to stay or food to eat since his father threw him out of the house. There were always older women.
If he thought about Jeanine’s husband, it was with friendly amusement. He was no threat to the man. He wanted nothing permanent. She could be making out with some guy who’d want her money on a permanent basis…
He squinted against the brilliance. It flared and he closed his eyes. That was a reflex; wave reflections were a common thing out here. The flare died against his closed eyelids, and he looked out to sea. Wave coming?
He saw a fiery cloud lift beyond the horizon. He studied it, squinting, making himself believe…
“Big wave coming,” he called, and rose to his knees.
Corey called, “Where?”
“You’ll see it,” Gil called confidently. He turned his board and paddled out to sea, bending almost until his cheek touched the board, using long, deep sweeps of his long arms. He was scared shitless, but nobody would ever know it.
“Wait for me!” Jeanine called.
Gil continued paddling. Others followed, but only the strongest could keep up. Corey pulled abreast of him.
“I saw the fireball!” he shouted. He panted with effort. “It’s Lucifer’s Hammer! Tidal wave!”
Gil said nothing. Talk was discouraged out here, but the others jabbered among themselves, and Gil paddled even faster, leaving them. A man ought to be alone during a thing like this. He was beginning to grasp the fact of death.
Rain came, and he paddled on. He glanced back to see the houses and bluff receding, going uphill, leaving an enormous stretch of new beach, gleaming wet. Lightning flared along the hills above Malibu.
The hills had changed. The orderly buildings of Santa Monica had tumbled into heaps.