She hoped his calculations had been on the money.
“A brick shithouse!” she repeated.
Another window blew out, letting in the hot, moist Missouri air, and Marcy began to pray. Jason lay stunned on the grass with the telescope partly under him. There was a horrific noise and vibration as if a thousand semi trucks were thundering past at once, all blowing their horns. He could feel the vibrations on his insides, as if his internal organs were shaking themselves apart. Earthquake, he thought. He was a California boy and he knew.
And he knew it was a bad one.
Cracking noises split the air like gunshots as tree limbs snapped. There was a tremendous crashing overhead as a huge elm branch snapped off high up, bouncing off other branches as it fell, and Jason hunched into his shoulders as it smashed to the ground just a few feet away, its jagged butt-end driving into the turf like a spear, the leafy end still tangled in the tree above.
Jason tried to stand and was thrown down before he could even rise to one knee. He gulped in the air and found that it tasted of sulfur—he had been so astounded by the force of the quake that he had forgotten to breathe—and then he belly-crawled the few feet, through a rain of fallen branches, to the brink of the mound. Below, the earth was heaving up in long rollers like the Pacific rolling onto the shore at Malibu. Here and there deep cracks gouged their way across the fields as if a savage giant were slashing at the soil with a knife. The earth moaned aloud as the giant struck again and again. But it was at the row of five houses that Jason stared. He couldn’t see his mother, but was relieved to see that the house was still intact. The windows were broken out and the old brick chimney had sprawled across the roof like a fallen prizefighter, but the building was still standing. Which was more than could be said for the other neighbors. Their houses were brick, and any Californian knew that masonry was death in an earthquake. Two of the houses, including the Huntleys’, were already piles of broken brick lying beneath shattered roofs. And as he watched the Regans’ house swayed and fell, collapsing into its basement, tearing away the metal roof of the carport from its supports and dragging it into the pit with a screech of metal. Jason couldn’t see Mr. Regan, though the old man had been in the carport just moments ago.
There was an explosion a scant hundred feet from his mother’s house, the sound buried beneath the roaring and moaning of the earth, and then water and white sand were blasted into the air, followed by a plume of water higher than the roof of the house. Jason wondered dazedly if the geyser came from a broken water main—but no, this was the country, there were no water mains here. There was a horrific noise as a slippery elm, fifteen feet away on the right and sixty feet tall, pitched over the edge of the mound and flung itself downward like a javelin.
And then Jason cried out in fear as his own house gave a lurch and fell, dropping with an audible crack onto one corner. A rain of chimney bricks spilled from the roof. The old frame house had been built on little brick piers, and the heave of the earth had walked the house right off its foundation. Another geyser burst out of the cotton field, and then another. And then another geyser burst up from the Huntley house—but this wasn’t water, it was a bubble of fire, blasting up from beneath the broken roof. The Huntley’s propane tank, couplings shattered, had ignited. Jason’s heart leaped into his throat. He tried to shout a warning, but it was lost in the groaning of the earth.
The last of the five houses shattered as the earth gave another wrench. Cracks tore across the surface of the ground. Sulfur tainted the air. Jason’s stomach turned over as he felt a new element enter the earth’s motion—he felt as if two strong men were kicking him at once, and in different directions. It was this that brought the Adams house down. The old farmhouse swayed back and forth, as if to blows, and then there was a rending and cracking of timber, and the roof spilled into the backyard, taking most of the house with it. Terror roared through Jason like a flame. He screamed and again tried to stand. The earth flung him down, pitched him down the slope. For a whirlwind moment he felt himself falling free. He screamed again and came to an abrupt stop, brought up short as he fell into the limbs of a scrub oak. Branches slashed at his face. He clawed his way through the branches, slid another ten feet down the slope, was caught by more brush.
And suddenly the earth fell silent. Jason’s inner ear spun in a giddy circle and he bit back nausea. He shouted, was surprised to find he could hear himself. “Mom!” he yelled. “Are you okay?” There was no answer. He looked wildly for the path he’d ascended by, but it was buried in broken timber, so instead he ran straight off the edge of the mound. He clung madly to branches to steady himself as he tried to scramble directly down the sides, but the mound was too steep, and there were too many uprooted trees, fallen limbs, and tangled brush for him to make any kind of swift progress. He heard someone shout below—a male voice calling for help. He shouted in answer as he dove through the trees. And then he came to a clear area, where he could get a good view of what was going below, and stopped to orient himself.
His heart almost failed him, and his knees threatened to give way. He had to clutch at a tree limb to keep from falling.
The broken houses were plain to see. The Huntley place had turned into a torch as a jet of propane consumed the entire property. The dog Batman wailed from amid a cloud of black smoke that roiled into the sky. Another fire was rapidly building in the ruins of another house, the one at the west end of the row. The tumbled, broken mass of his own home had partly fallen toward the Huntley ruin, and was dangerously close to the flames. It was clear that Jason had to get his mother clear of the wreckage before fire consumed the whole street.
In the field beyond the house, a dozen geysers spat water and white sand into the sky. Some had built up cones of sand around their bases. But it wasn’t the geysers, or even his wrecked home, that held Jason’s gaze.
It was the levee to the east.
The long green wall had been breached in at least two places. The water that poured through was not coming gently—it didn’t run through, it wasn’t as if a jug of water had been spilled in the kitchen and was gently emptying itself on the floor. The water jetted through, with the entire great weight of the river behind it. It was as if a thousand high-pressure hoses had been turned on behind each breach. Mist boiled upward from the two breaches as the brown water poured onto the laser-level fields below. In the midst of all this, between the two breaches, was Eubanks’s cop car, which sat motionless atop the levee as if trying to make up its mind what to do. And below, a tiny figure amid the giant water plumes, Muppet was struggling to right his overturned ATV.
“Run!” Jason screamed. “Run for it!” He didn’t know who he was shouting at—Muppet, his mother, Mr. Regan, maybe even Batman the dog.
Everyone. Everyone run.
Terror launched him down the mound. Branches lashed his face as he fell as much as ran down the mound’s steep face. As he ran he caught brief glimpses of the catastrophe from between the trees… Muppet getting on his ATV and beginning his race with the advancing water… a huge chunk of the levee, tons of stone and concrete, breaking away in the torrent, carried into the field by the powerful flood… Eubanks hesitantly backing his car away from the widening breach…
And then Jason ran head-on into a tree limb and knocked himself sprawling, the air knocked out of his lungs. “Run,” he urged weakly, though he knew no one could hear him. Over the Niagara roar of the breached levee he could still hear the faint hornet buzz of Muppet’s ATV. He sat up, breath rasping in his throat, and felt his heart sink as the sound of the ATV faltered. His head spun. He batted aside leaves, peered between the wrecked trees, and saw that the little vehicle had run as far as it could, that it was stopped at the edge of a crevasse that lay across its path and was too wide to drive across. Muppet’s green helmet turned to gauge the approaching water, and then he dismounted the vehicle and took a few steps back so as to run at the breach and leap across. His sneakers splashed in water that was already ankle-deep.