“Easy, son,” came the voice of the man holding him down. “It’s me… Mr. Haussman from across the street. Don’t worry, we’ll get your parents out.”
“God, look at him,” a woman said as people played their flashlight beams across his tattered pajamas. “He’s bleeding pretty badly. I—Oh, my Lord! Look at his arm!”
Lewis rolled onto his side to see what she was pointing at. A piece of glass as big as a baseball card was sticking out of his upper left arm. He didn’t even feel it. He didn’t feel the arm at all.
“My Mama’s trapped,” he said, and a shadow reached down and jerked hard, pulling the shard from his flesh. “Please help her.”
The woman choked and turned away as Lewis stared at the blood squirting furiously out of his arm where she’d removed the glass.
“Dammit,” Mr. Haussman muttered. He ripped the rest of Lewis’ pajama shirt off and tied it just above the squirting blood. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital.”
“My pickup truck,” said Mr. Cornell, the next door neighbor. “We can put him in the back of that.”
“Get it,” Mr. Haussman said, and Mr. Cornell went charging off.
“My parents…” Lewis said, trying to get up, only to have Mr. Haussman push him back down.
“We’ll get them out,” the man said, then turned to the others, specters behind the beams of their flashlights. “Can somebody get into the house and look for the Cranes?”
The ground shook again, everyone reacting loudly, one lady even moaning as if in pain.
Several men ran toward his house, Lewis noted with relief. “What’s happening?” he asked, grabbing Mr. Haussman’s shirt-sleeve.
“Earthquake, son,” the man said, tightening the knot on his makeshift tourniquet. “A big one.”
“I-I smelled g-gas,” Lewis said, trying to rise once again.
“Gas?” Haussman looked alarmed. “Oh, no.”
He lowered Lewis to the ground and stood, directing his beam at Mr. Cornell in the pickup truck next door. “George!” he shouted, “don’t start the—”
A monstrous explosion turned the pitch night into bright day. Lewis, propped up on his elbows, watched a giant fireball engulf his house, Mr. Cornell’s house, and the pickup truck itself.
Agonized screams tore the air. Burning men ran from his house; Mr. Cornell was a fiery, writhing twig in the cab of his truck. Lewis lay stupefied as smoldering debris fell all around him, his mind frozen in pain and horror.
He was a child, but he understood that he had just lost everything … that the love and protection of home and family were gone forever. Fires crackled and raged barely fifty feet from him, causing sweat to spring out of every pore, and making the grass, already slick with his blood, become slippery as ice. Both elbows glided out from under him. Flat on his back, he stared up at a starfield that was startlingly brilliant and cold and very far away.
Lewis Crane was alone.
BOOK ONE
THIRTY YEARS LATER
Chapter 1
THE NAMAZU
Slivers of first light poked through the crack around the flap of the tent, and Dan Newcombe, stretched out on his cot and naked except for his shoes and his wrist pad, tried even harder to stop the numbers. They’d been scrolling through his brain for forty-eight hours, keeping him awake and growing edgier by the minute.
Close by, someone began to pound a vent into the ground. The numbers in Newcombe’s head shattered with the harsh metallic clank of each blow, re-formed before the next strike of the mallet, shattered again … until he couldn’t tolerate it for another second and jerked to a sitting position, plugging his ears with his index fingers. No good; he couldn’t keep that sound out and the numbers were still running through his head. Worse, another person was starting on a vent, pounding out of rhythm with the first.
Newcombe got up, walked to his workstation, and turned on the lantern; it barely lit the two chart tables covered with electronic gear, and he glanced at the faceted, jewel-like knob on its top. Dull green. The damned lantern needed recharge. And he needed light, lots of it, now. In a world of lies, he was getting ready to bet his life on the truth. And truth demanded light. He hated lies, which meant he hated the way Lewis Crane did business. But even Crane had to appreciate the truth on some level, because he, too, was betting his life, along with the lives of at least a hundred others, maybe even thousands of others, on Newcombe’s calculations. Crane always thought big.
Newcombe picked up the lantern, carried it to the tent flap, and stuck it out. Immediately pulling it back inside, he blinked at the blinding light it gave off. When he’d adjusted the brightness, he placed it back on the chart table and noted with satisfaction that every corner and fold of the tent was fully lighted, especially the herky-jerky little lines of the seismos. Those lines were a language to him, a language he could interpret like no other human being alive. He trusted seismos. Unlike people, they were dependable, always truthful. They treated every man, woman, and child the same, never changing their readings because of the skin color or gender or age of the reader.
He juiced the computers to a floating holo of seventeen seismograms hanging in the air before him in alternating bands of blue and red; their little white cursors registered the beating heart of the planet.
Heavy seismic activity was crying out on all seventeen graphs, which meant that everything ringing this section of the Pacific Plate was in turmoil. He could sense it right through the floating lines. He knew Crane, wherever he was, could sense it, too—only Crane didn’t need any instruments, just his uncanny instincts … and that dangling left arm of his.
Today could be the day.
Newcombe activated Memory with the lightest touch on the key pad, and the graphs replayed the history of the last eighteen hours. His eyes widened at the sight of perfectly aligned seismic peaks in five places on all seventeen screens. Foreshocks.
He tapped Crane’s icon on his wrist pad and asked loudly, “Where the hell are you?”
“Good morning, Doctor,” Crane said warmly, his voice coming through Newcombe’s aural implant in dulcet tones. “Fine day for an earthquake. Perhaps you should join us for it. I’m down at the mines.”
“I’ll be there in a little while,” Newcombe said, tapping off the pad, disgusted that Crane could sound so hearty, happy even, at such a moment.
He stared at the graphs, back now to current readings and still screaming turmoil.
“And I thought the Moon had set.”
Astonished, Newcombe whirled toward the sound of the droll, sexy voice of the only woman who’d ever challenged his mind, heart, and body at the same time. “Lanie!” he exclaimed.
“In the flesh, lover,” Elena King said, smiling broadly, her sunblock-coated lips gleaming.
Even wrapped head-to-toe to protect herself from the sunshine, she looked appealing and provocative. And despite the opaque goggles covering her eyes, he could tell she was eyeing his nakedness with a mixture of desire and humor. Newcombe felt almost giddy and rushed across the tent to her.
“Oh, Lanie,” he said, dragging her against his body for a long, intense hug. He gently thrust her to arm’s length for a quick inspection, removed her floppy hat and tossed it over his shoulder, then pushed her goggles up like a headband behind which her thick, wavy black hair cascaded down her back. Looking into the hazel eyes that had entranced him for years, he slowly pulled her close again and lowered his head for a lingering kiss.
Savoring her lips, Newcombe realized he’d like nothing better than to lose himself in this woman. But there were the seismos. There were the numbers. And this could be the day. Reluctantly, he broke off the kiss, murmuring, “How did I get so lucky? What brought you here?”