The storm and something else. Something new was happening. Even over the sound of the rain and the wind, he could hear shouting.
Chapparal had once covered the hillside, but it had been ripped out to get the ground ready for sodding in planting. In two months it would be a handsome park, to compensate condo owners on the convex side of the curve for missing the ocean view on the concave—would be if any of it remained for two months. But the water was seeping under the plastic. Each drop carried one grain of dirt an inch or two. Many drops had carried much earth, and the cohesion of the soil was almost gone.
In spite of the best efforts of the men frantically battening it down, the wind lifted a corner of the plastic. Five men rushed to fight it back where it belonged; the wind tugged at the places they had left. It bellied the edges between the stacks of cement blocks and the drums of wall-finishing that weighted the plastic down, and the plastic tore; and the whole hillside began to slide. A crack opened. One of the men saw it and yelled; the others saw it, and ran. None of them was caught, but the hill was on the move.
The foundations had gone down to bedrock, and they held. It did not matter. All they accomplished was to create a holding pond for the fluid mud. Earth and plastic, barrels and cinder blocks all slid together. They filled the lower floors of the condo with gluey mud and spilled over to block the freeway cut.
The workmen stared, astonished, at the building still standing and the giant crane poised over their heads. Each j one was certain that it would fall, but it did not.
But in the dammed freeway cut, a pool of water was forming.
Boyma stared, paralyzed with fear. He thought the crane was his enemy; he did not notice the row of temporary power lines. The crane swayed but remained erect; but the mud pulled the lines down with a rattle of artillery fire and great flashes of light.
"Now they've done it!" Boyma shouted. He was beside ( himself with rage at "them"—whoever they were—at everybody! There was no one to yell at. Even his driver was gone, ordered to carry orders to the top of the hill. Boyma wanted to get out of there, to his comfortable home where he could change his clothes and plan his retributions—and wanted it soon, because he saw that a pool of water was forming along the freeway. He opened the door of the car to yell for his driver.
The men on the hill saw him and waved madly, but Boyma paid no attention. He shouted furiously as he stepped down into the water. The fallen power lines lay no more than twenty yards away in that same stream; and when he stepped into it he died.
The most violent earthquakes in the history of the United States stopped clocks in Boston, set bells ringing in Norfolk, Virginia, created large, permanent new lakes in Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee and destroyed 150,000 acres of forest. The epicenter was in New Madrid, Missouri. There was not many human deaths. There were not many human beings in the area, and especially there were no large buildings to fall and crush them, since the shocks began in December, 1811. Now millions of people live in the affected region. Many live and work in vulnerable high-rise buildings, and almost none of them have any idea that they are at risk.
Monday, December 28th. 5:50 PM.
What Rainy had expected to find at the Bradison house had not been very clear. The phone had rung, to signify that it was working again, and it was not Meredith but Sam Houston Bradison himself, demanding they come over to see the governor. He sounded peremptory and hurried. He'd been trying to get through for hours, he said, and did she know where Dr. Sohderman was so he could come too? At that point there was some slight embarrassment in Rainy's mind at how to explain that she knew very well where Dr. Sonderman was, and she had failed to get clear just why the governor was going to be at the Bradison home. Nevertheless, they obeyed, driving with as much speed as they could manage with caution, and as much caution as they could afford with speed; the rain was only occasional now, but the streets were still as likely to be flooded as not.
By the time they got there it was late. She half expected the governor would have been and gone by then, but apparently he was having his own troubles with the storm. What was happening was that a young black girl was dusting end tables while Meredith was straightening the books on the shelves. Sam Bradison himself let them in through the kitchen, where he was busily washing dishes and putting them away. Obviously the governor had not yet arrived, and, obviously, what Rainy found herself doing very soon after that was pushing a vacuum cleaner over somebody else's carpet. It was not what she would have chosen, not least because Tib had been drafted into the kitchen with Sam Bradison, and she could not hear what they were saying to each other.
Not that she could hear much of what anybody else was saying, over the noise of the antique Hoover. She was not even aware that Meredith had left the room at first—no doubt to flap over the bathrooms or the halls. The little girl was talkative enough, but not directly informing. She did not appear to know who the governor was, much less why he was coming. She managed to convey that her daddy was asleep somewhere in the house after a hard day of shoveling mud, along with Meredith's grandson, and that she didn't think much of Meredith as a housekeeper, but Rainy had already formed her own opinions of that. She pushed back an armchair to get at the accumulated pencil stubs and cigar ash underneath it, reconsidered, and carefully pushed it back again. By the time she had gone over all the exposed surfaces Meredith was back.
"I guess we're as ready as we'll ever be, " Meredith said, surveying the room with satisfaction. "You're really sweet, Rainy—and Afeefah, of course!"
"You would have done it for me," Rainy lied. "You don't get the governor coming every day. Speaking of which—"
"Yes?"
"Well—what is this going to be?"
Meredith sat down on the couch, pushing a scrap of paper Rainy had missed underneath with her foot. "It's all Sam's idea," she said. "I don't always understand Sam's ideas. Afeefah? That's good enough, honey. Why don't you just sit down and rest for a while?"
The little girl frowned. "Got to do the windowsills yet," she said. "Lady? You going to give the lady the thing that came for her?"
"Oh, good heavens, thank you, Afeefah. Of course! Now where in the world did I put that?" She stared around the room as though it were someone else's, then disappeared down the hall. Rainy sighed and got up to help Afeefah with the windowsills.
By Rainy's calculation the governor was now more than an hour late for whatever it was he was late for, and she was beginning to get hungry. Or else she was about to start her period. Or, most likely, both.
Rainy was uneasy in her mind, and she hoped that was the reason; she was not sure just what she was uneasy about. Her—she said the word to herself again to get used to it—her lover, the Herr Doktor Sonderman with his middle-European ways, was probably not the reason. He had been very silent all day, and withdrawn except when they were making love; something was on bis mind, and it was trying to be on hers too, if she had only known what it was. She relished the chatter of her housecleaning associate because it took her mind off that unfocused concern. Afeefah was seven years old and in her last school she had been in the top ten in her class. She didn't know what she would be in her new school, because she didn't yet know where they were going to live, but she wasn't worried. She was going to be a nurse when she grew up, that was why she was so good at cleaning, because that was mostly what nursing was, wasn't it? Unless if she got a scholarship, she explained, which she probably would do, in which case she would be an obstrician and help people have babies. And it was all right that Rainy was white, although her dad didn't like her getting too close to white people, because that was mostly because her mom had been white and she tooken off. It seemed unlikely that any seven-year-old really had that much to say about her life, but Afeefah showed no sign of stopping until Meredith came back into the room. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I put it away where I wouldn't lose it, and I forgot where. But here it is. Goodness! Are those sirens?"