Eventually, Charlie came to a clearing with a dusty covering of brittle soil. This is it, he thought. He checked his compass and the coordinates of his map. His stomach began to flutter, accompanied by a clenching of his sphincter and a tightening of his balls. To his right, like a revelation, was the shape of a small, dormant volcano, its rocky sides rising in jagged minarets to the sky.
Charlie threw off his backpack and took out his equipment piece by piece. He turned on the laptop, and an image of Lui appeared on the screen, along with specific coordinates, angles of entry, and depths of charge.
He spent a while comparing the computer simulation with the actual landscape, walking off distances and doing tests of the soil. On the southwest side of the volcano, Charlie went to work. The drill whined like a dentist’s, its three diamond-tipped bits glinting in the sun like bad teeth. He looked at his watch. Wednesday, December 27, three-seventeen p.m. Less than twenty-nine hours to go.
Thursday morning, Grace was awakened at six-thirty by the phone. She had been dreaming of Charlie, and when the ringing sliced its way into her consciousness, her first thought was that he was dead. When she got to the living room, however, it was Ian’s voice emerging from the answering machine, plaintive and petulant.
“Come on, Grace,” he was saying. “I know you’re there.”
She turned the volume down, but the damage was done. Back in bed, she couldn’t sleep. Pictures swirled in her mind: Charlie trekking through the middle of nowhere, without sufficient food or water. With explosives strapped to his back. Charlie stumbling. Charlie falling.
Shit, Grace thought. She took off her nightgown, pulled on a pair of jeans, and caught a glimpse through the open window of the sun rising in the east. The sky was clear as ice; the flanks of the mountains stained rose with spreading light. Tomorrow, she thought, it could all be gone.
Grace walked up Spaulding toward Melrose, listening for even the slightest sign of life. They were reporting violence, but here the street was deserted, with a single car parked at the curb. In the last few days, she had watched her neighbors leaving town, even as her life continued to be possessed by Ear to the Ground. I should call Semel, she thought. When I get back.
Nearly all the stores were shuttered on Melrose, strips of tape X-ed across windows as silent supplication to the gods, or protection against them. Cops stood at intersections, along with members of the National Guard. Grace was surprised to find the Martel Avenue newsstand open, and as she plunked down her fifty-four cents for the Times she wished the proprietor good luck. One section today, twelve pages, with no advertising and no sports or lifestyle sections. Just earthquake news.
When Grace returned home, Navaro was sitting on the front steps having a cigarette.
“Smoke?” he asked her, gesturing with his pack.
“I’ve got my own, thanks.” She shook out a Merit, and accepted his offer of a light.
“I’m surprised you’re still around,” he said.
“What about you?”
“All I got’s right here.” Navaro waved loosely at the building. “Somebody has to protect it.”
Grace almost laughed. “From who?”
“You watch the news? There’s animals out there. Taking what ain’t theirs.” His mouth twisted into a snarl, and all of a sudden Grace could imagine what he must have looked like as a young man. It wasn’t an altogether unattractive picture, and she found herself starting to get drawn in.
“Anybody tries to fuck with this place, they’re gonna get a big surprise.”
He leered at her conspiratorially, before letting his face settle back into a mask of stone. Grace could see him waiting, like a little boy, for her to ask what he had in mind. Give him his thrill, she thought, and smoked for a moment. “Surprise?”
“That’s right,” Navaro said. He raised himself up, and became an old man again before Grace’s eyes. He put one hand on his chest and with the other fumbled with his jacket, removing something from the pocket that looked like a length of iron pipe. The sun glinted off the metal, and she had to squint. Then she recognized a barrel and a chamber, and she realized with a shock of horror that her landlord had a gun in his hand.
By six-forty-five Thursday evening, Charlie had drilled twenty-three one-inch-diameter holes in an octagonal pattern, all seventeen-and-seven-eights inches deep. Twenty-three detonator pins, one in each hole, had been lowered, and held in place with plastique — soft but heavy — and frightening to the touch. It would be the ultimate irony for Charlie to have come this far, and end up as nothing but a fine red mist.
He tried to work slowly, but he was falling behind. In an hour and nineteen minutes, an energy flow would trigger a spark that, unchecked, would sweep across the Pacific and detonate the San Andreas. Charlie couldn’t shake the feeling that things would not be ready in time.
By seven-fifty-one, however, he had finished packing the explosives around the detonator pins and connecting it all to a single fuse. The fuse ran to a digital timer, which — after checking his calculations — Charlie set. By flashlight, he made a final check of his wiring, then stood and admired his work. It was an amazing thing, if you thought about it, that science had brought him here.
Charlie picked up his rucksack and started to run. It was a mile from the jungle back to the harbor. Every few minutes, he checked his watch, but time had become a fluid entity, no longer reliable in any way he could understand. Seconds felt like minutes, minutes like hours. Just a few hours earlier, the reverse had been true, and he wondered if that were also the case in Los Angeles, where the remaining citizens were struggling to prepare for whatever might come their way.
The thought startled him, and he stopped. For the first time, he began to wonder why he had not gone public with the retroshock idea. Los Angeles had been so disrupted — abandoned and dispirited; perhaps and, certainly, hopefully, none of it had been necessary at all. He stood there in the brush, regret palpable on his skin. “Shit,” he said aloud. “I should have told them.” A moment later, the explosives blew.
The blast was like a blitzkrieg. It hit with a percussive thwap that rattled Charlie’s knees and a white burst of light that seared him to the spot. A second later, a hot wind came tearing through the jungle and knocked him to the ground. His head glanced off a piece of rock, and when he touched his brow, his fingers came away with blood.
Afterwards, the silence was the deepest Charlie had ever known. He tore a strip off his shirt and bandaged his head, then shouldered his pack and continued. The crystal on his watch was broken, and its hands had been fused into place by the heat. But Charlie knew he had done everything he could.
AND THE EARTH STOOD STILL
ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, SEVENTEEN EARTHQUAKES disrupted the surface of the earth. The largest was a 3.3 that struck the Philippines, near Manila. In Los Angeles, the day looked like any other: hills standing in stark relief against valleys, ocean, and sky.
All afternoon, the city lay paralyzed by anticipation. People found themselves jumping at every rustle of wind, every barking dog, every creak and groan. As night began to fall, lights flickered in what few inhabited buildings remained, candles of faith against the darkness. It was like Christmas, but with utter lawlessness. An elderly man walking along La Cienega threw a brick through the front window of Ed Debevic’s. Hoodlums got inside the Bank of America at Sunset and Vine but couldn’t figure out where the money was.