Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in an oversize leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap advertising our favorite Mexican masked wrestler, El Santo Junior. Jolu is Jose Luis Torrez, the completing member of our foursome. He went to a super-strict Catholic school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn’t easy for him to get out. But he always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. He liked his jacket because it hung down low — which was pretty stylish in parts of the city — and covered up all his Catholic school crap, which was like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with the truancy moblog bookmarked on their phones.
“Who’s ready to go?” I asked, once we’d all said hello. I pulled out my phone and showed them the map I’d downloaded to it on the BART. “Near as I can work out, we wanna go up to the Nikko again, then one block past it to O’Farrell, then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere in there we should find the wireless signal.”
Van made a face. “That’s a nasty part of the Tenderloin.” I couldn’t argue with her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits — you go in through the Hilton’s front entrance and it’s all touristy stuff like the cable-car turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the other side and you’re in the ‘Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker, hard-case pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person in town was concentrated. What they bought and sold, none of us were old enough to be a part of (though there were plenty of hookers our age plying their trade in the ‘Loin.)
“Look on the bright side,” I said. “The only time you want to go up around there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to go near it until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG business call a monster head start.”
Jolu grinned at me. “You make it sound like a good thing,” he said.
“Beats eating uni,” I said.
“We going to talk or we going to win?” Van said. After me, she was hands-down the most hardcore player in our group. She took winning very, very seriously.
We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win the game — and lose everything we cared about, forever.
The physical component of today’s clue was a set of GPS coordinates — there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku Fun Madness was played — where we’d find a WiFi access-point’s signal. That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFi point that was hidden so that it couldn’t be spotted by conventional wifinders, little key-fobs that told you when you were within range of someone’s open access-point, which you could use for free.
We’d have to track down the location of the “hidden” access point by measuring the strength of the “visible” one, finding the spot where it was most mysteriously weakest. There we’d find another clue — last time it had been in the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurant in the Nikko hotel in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by Japan Airlines, one of Harajuku Fun Madness’s sponsors, and the staff had all made a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. They’d given us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi made from sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell like very runny dog-droppings. But it tasted really good. Or so Darryl told me. I wasn’t going to eat that stuff.
I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone’s wifinder about three blocks up O’Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy “Asian Massage Parlor” with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network’s name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.
“If it’s in there, I’m not going,” Darryl said.
“You all got your wifinders?” I said.
Darryl and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, being too cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate little directional fob.
“OK, fan out and see what we see. You’re looking for a sharp drop off in the signal that gets worse the more you move along it.”
I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone’s toes. A female voice said “oof” and I spun around, worried that some crack-ho was going to stab me for breaking her heels.
Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had a shock of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with big sunglasses that were practically air-force goggles. She was dressed in striped tights beneath a black granny dress, with lots of little Japanese decorer toys safety pinned to it — anime characters, old world leaders, emblems from foreign soda-pop.
She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew.
“Cheese,” she said. “You’re on candid snitch-cam.”
“No way,” I said. “You wouldn’t —”
“I will,” she said. “I will send this photo to truant watch in thirty seconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it’ll be all yours. I think that’s more than fair.”
I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb — one with blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. “Who are you supposed to be, the Popsicle Squad?”
“We’re the team that’s going to kick your team’s ass at Harajuku Fun Madness,” she said. “And I’m the one who’s right this second about to upload your photo and get you in so much trouble —”
Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notorious for its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick’s block off.
Then the world changed forever.
We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every Californian knows instinctively — earthquake. My first inclination, as always, was to get away: “when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.” But the fact was, we were already in the safest place we could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the road where bits of falling cornice could brain us.
Earthquakes are eerily quiet — at first, anyway — but this wasn’t quiet. This was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder than anything I’d ever heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove me to my knees, and I wasn’t the only one. Darryl shook my arm and pointed over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising from the northeast, from the direction of the Bay.
There was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, that spreading black shape we’d all grown up seeing in movies. Someone had just blown up something, in a big way.
There were more rumbles and more tremors. Heads appeared at windows up and down the street. We all looked at the mushroom cloud in silence.
Then the sirens started.
I’d heard sirens like these before — they test the civil defense sirens at noon on Tuesdays. But I’d only heard them go off unscheduled in old war movies and video games, the kind where someone is bombing someone else from above. Air raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made it all less real.
“Report to shelters immediately.” It was like the voice of God, coming from all places at once. There were speakers on some of the electric poles, something I’d never noticed before, and they’d all switched on at once.
“Report to shelters immediately.” Shelters? We looked at each other in confusion. What shelters? The cloud was rising steadily, spreading out. Was it nuclear? Were we breathing in our last breaths?
The girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore ass downhill, back toward the BART station and the foot of the hills.
“REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY.” There was screaming now, and a lot of running around. Tourists — you can always spot the tourists, they’re the ones who think CALIFORNIA = WARM and spend their San Francisco holidays freezing in shorts and t-shirts — scattered in every direction.