19
The Big One
The ship emcee came on over the intercom again, his normally enthusiastic voice now slow and measured: “Ladies and gentlemen. There has been a major earthquake east of Los Angeles.”
Shy looked around at the gasping crowd.
“A catastrophic earthquake. We’re still gathering information at this time, but we’ve been informed that its size is beyond anything previously recorded on the Richter scale. The epicenter appears to be near Palm Springs, but the effects are much more widespread, reaching all the way into Mexico.”
Shy gripped the railing.
If the earthquake affected Mexico, it affected San Diego, too. Which meant Otay Mesa.
His body went cold as he thought of his family.
“We have been advised to discontinue the voyage until we regain satellite connection. Again, ladies and gentlemen. Approximately thirty-five minutes ago, a catastrophic earthquake hit California and we have been advised…”
Shy only caught bits and pieces of the rest of the announcement. Something about connecting to a news feed. About passengers remaining in their muster stations and the threat of rough seas. Mostly, though, Shy tried to make sense of his own jumbled thoughts.
An earthquake in California.
Off the Richter scale.
It was the “Big One” everyone had always talked about.
And how bad was “catastrophic”? Did that mean everyone was dead? Was his family dead? Had all the buildings been leveled? He tried to imagine his street back home. His high school and apartment complex. The hospital where his mom and sister sat waiting for the medicine to fix Miguel.
Shy’s breathing started going way too fast, like he was hyperventilating. Because his thoughts now turned to the ship. All the way out here with no protection. The storm tossing them around and the waves growing and what did the emcee mean by a threat of rough seas? Wasn’t it rough already?
Shy kneeled down and tried to calm his breathing but he couldn’t. They had to hurry and get to Hawaii. Or turn around and go back home. They couldn’t just sit out here in the middle of the ocean; they had to do something.
Soon as the announcement ended, the hysterical voices of passengers were all around Shy and people were crying and anxiously punching numbers into useless cell phones and holding each other and shouting demands at Shy and Kevin, and all Shy could do was stand up and ask everyone to remain calm and line up, like they did when he’d led them through the safety exercise, but how could anyone be calm after what they’d just been told?
Shy imagined his mom.
His sister and Miguel.
His grandma.
But he no longer needed to worry about his grandma, because his grandma was dead.
And would he be dead, too, if he was back home? Had the cruise ship saved his life? Maybe the captain was right to have them sit out here and wait. Maybe there was nowhere else to go.
Shy helped herd all the passengers into theater seats, and then he hurried back to the balcony. Carmen was still there, now huddling against the wall and crying into her hands. He leaned over the railing to call down to her, but just as he opened his mouth, the giant movie screen flickered into a grainy picture above the crowded stage.
Everyone turned to it.
Carmen pulled her hands away from her face, looked up.
A mess of war-zone-like footage came into focus. Shot from a helicopter. It was hard to tell what they were seeing at first, but gradually it became clear.
The words “San Francisco” appeared at the bottom of the screen, but it didn’t look like San Francisco. It looked like a foreign city that had just been bombed. Or CGI in a movie. Leveled buildings reduced to hills of concrete and protruding metal stakes. Thick clouds of dust rose off the wreckage and smoke billowed from fires that burned over the caved-in streets. And everywhere the camera went it showed overturned cars, motionless bodies pinned underneath or hanging out of busted windshields. And in the background the Golden Gate Bridge was no longer a bridge but a mess of hanging cables and two crumbled sections that ran straight down into the bay.
The audio kept cutting in and out, but Shy was able to make out some of the information as they cut to footage of other devastated sections of San Francisco.
It hadn’t been just one earthquake but several, leveling the entire coast of California and Washington and Oregon and Vancouver, and they were already estimating over a million deaths.
There had been four major quakes, the two most devastating centered just outside Palm Springs and along the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the coast of Washington State. The most powerful offshore quake had struck just west of Morro Bay, which Shy knew was in California. What he didn’t know was how far out into the ocean “offshore” was.
Shy was so stunned by what he was seeing and hearing his whole body started shaking.
The picture cut out for several seconds, and when it came back they were showing aerial footage of Riverside, where a huge chasm had opened up along the 91 Freeway, massive fires burning on both sides, but there were no fire trucks on the scene, the red-eyed reporter explained, because all the firehouses within a hundred-mile radius had been taken out by the earthquake. And then a shot of downtown Los Angeles, where only a few buildings still stood and everywhere small fires burned and the Santa Monica Pier had collapsed into the ocean and the famous Ferris wheel had snapped in half and lay crushed on its side, people trapped underneath, and the beach stretched out incredibly far now, the tide so low it didn’t even look real. Shy remembered seeing footage of a beach in Thailand that had looked like that just before it was hit by a tsunami. Did that mean they should expect a tsunami?
Shy’s legs grew so weak he had to squat down and hold on to the railing.
The Hollywood sign had missing letters and those that remained were in flames, and the 405 Freeway was full of gaping holes, people stranded on concrete islands, waving for help from the tops of cars, and hundreds of yachts from the marina were beached and lying useless on their sides.
It was definitely the “Big One.”
What Shy had been hearing about ever since he was a little kid. The crowd inside the theater, realizing the same thing maybe, grew so hysterical it was no longer possible for Shy to make out any of the audio, but he could still see.
The picture cut out for a few seconds, and when it came back it was an aerial shot of a huge black smoke cloud smothering all of Orange County, and in the gaps of the smoke you couldn’t see houses or buildings but flames. A shot labeled “Seattle” showed the Space Needle in pieces in front of leveled downtown buildings, fires raging up and down every street, and the famous marketplace had been ripped from its foundation and heaved into Elliott Bay.
Shy’s throat closed up completely when the Mexican border flashed onto the screen, a stretch just east of the ocean that he didn’t recognize right away because there was no longer a physical border, there was only fire and rubble and a few tiny dots that were people wandering aimlessly, and border patrol trucks abandoned with their doors still open. And then they cut to a part of San Diego just north of Otay Mesa engulfed in flames, Shy’s heart pounding and his body shaking, and then the picture cut out again and this time it didn’t come back.
The entire theater was in a frenzy.
People shouting and crying and holding each other.
Shy glanced down at the stage, searching for Carmen, but she wasn’t there anymore.
He looked all around, finally spotting the back of her head as she hurried toward the theater exit. He motioned to Kevin that he’d be back and then he took off after her.