“What the hell is that?” he said, releasing Ed’s shirt to run to the screen door.
Ed heard the problem a few seconds before he saw it. A thunderous crescendo of sharp cracks approached, violently shaking the tops of the largest trees visible over the row of houses directly behind them. At first he thought it was another wind burst, but the loud snaps sounded more like entire trees falling. The burst of wind that had knocked out their windows was powerful, but it had left little more than leaves and branches strewn across the yard. This was different. Something slower and more deliberate.
Before he fully digested the thought, the top of a young maple tree shook and dropped out of sight beyond his backyard neighbor’s six-foot privacy fence. By the time the sound of the tree’s death reached Ed’s ears, he had figured out what they were up against.
“Get upstairs right now!” he barked at his wife, who reacted immediately, dashing past him for the center hallway.
Charlie glanced at him with a seriously puzzled look. Beyond Charlie, Ed saw the wooden privacy fence disappear, replaced by a solid wall of water. He didn’t stick around long enough to see Charlie’s reaction, but based on the steady stream of profanities catching up to him in the hallway, he figured that his friend had never moved faster.
Ed caught the banister and swung himself onto the stairway, making room for Charlie, who had closed the gap quicker than Ed had thought possible. Both of them paused to look over the railing just as the wall of water hammered the back of Ed’s house, snapping the railings on his deck and exploding through the screen door.
“Get out of there!” said Charlie, pulling him by the arm up the stairs.
A powerful torrent of muddy, debris-filled water slammed against the front door and quickly filled the foyer in a swirling eddy of dirty foam that lapped against the bottom stairs. The volume and speed of the water terrified Ed. In the next five seconds, he watched the water rise halfway up the door, showing no signs of slowing down. Two of his kitchen chairs rushed down the hallway half-submerged, piling up against the door momentarily before breaking loose and spilling through the foyer. The rest of his kitchen furniture had already streamed past in the initial onslaught. Somewhere below, he heard glass shatter over the incredible roar of the unending flood plowing through his house. His wife appeared from his son Daniel’s bedroom next to the stairs.
“You have to see this!” she said, with a look of sheer disbelief.
Ed hesitated, not wanting to take his eyes off the rising water below him. Half of the staircase was submerged.
“Dad! The whole neighborhood is flooded!” yelled Daniel from the same room.
Ed stood up, feeling slightly unsteady. “I’m sure Linda and the twins are fine,” he said to Charlie.
Charlie continued to stare at the floodwaters below. “They were still sleeping when I left,” he replied, nodding absently.
Ed joined his wife and two children at the rightmost, front window of his son’s room, nearly falling to his knees again. A surging mass of murky brown water covered the ground as far as he could see, carrying large branches, pieces of fencing, plastic garbage bins—anything that had crossed its path since striking the shoreline. The maple tree that normally blocked his view of the Sheppards’ house had been knocked into the street, providing his only direct view of the tsunami’s effects.
The Sheppards’ front door had been blown inward by the force of the wave. Water poured into the previously shattered front windows, likely creating the same effect he’d seen inside his own home. A quick, nearly inescapable flood. Water continued to push up against the house, creating incredible pressure along fifty feet of solid frontage, but he didn’t detect any obvious signs of structural failure. He estimated the tsunami’s height to be between five and six feet.
Over a mile and a half inland, the initial wave had retained enough energy to topple young trees and pound open doors, but lacked the punch to collapse homes—so far. Water continued to rush through the neighborhood at an alarming rate, and Ed remembered reading that tsunami waves rarely traveled alone, and the first wave wasn’t always the largest.
“What do you think?” asked Samantha.
“I think we’re lucky we don’t live on the water. I can’t imagine what happened to Higgins Beach,” said Ed.
“Good God,” she mumbled.
“Is my house still there?” asked Charlie from the bedroom doorway.
“I can still see the roof. Take a look. It’s un-fucking-believable,” said Ed, backing away to make room at the window.
“Language,” Samantha warned.
“Sorry about that.”
“I don’t care,” said Daniel.
His daughter Abby, who had moved to another window, said, “Neither do I.”
“Well, I do,” insisted his wife.
“Sounds like you’ve been outvoted,” said Charlie, turning his attention to the scene beyond the window.
Samantha glared at Charlie. “This isn’t a democracy.”
“Neither is my house—holy shhhh—moley!” said Charlie. “The whole fu—farping neighborhood is fu—fragged to shhhhmeg. Damn it. Can’t they just plug their ears?”
Both of the teenagers laughed nervously.
“Can’t you complete a sentence without ten expletives?” said Samantha.
“Not under these circumstances,” he said, turning to face them.
“Look at that,” Ed said, pointing out of a window on the other side of the room. “Water is gushing out of the Fletchers’ windows.”
“The water’s coming out of the top of the windows,” said Samantha.
They looked fearfully at each other and nearly collided running for the bedroom door.
“Shit,” Samantha mumbled, peering around the corner of the door.
The swirling water had climbed three-quarters of the stairway, passing the first floor ceiling level by a few inches. The volume of water pouring into their house through the wide opening created by the shattered slider door couldn’t empty quickly enough through the windows. Ed wondered how high the water would rise within the house. He knew logically that the house couldn’t fill up to the attic like a container, but seeing this frightened him on an instinctual level.
“Shit, indeed,” he said.
“I’d throw a few f-bombs in there for good measure, but the good lady strictly forbids it,” mused Charlie.
“I think the language restrictions have been temporarily lifted,” said Samantha. “Are we safe in the house, Ed?”
“As long as it doesn’t collapse, we’re totally fine—not that we have any other options. The water will start to go down in a few minutes. You’ll see. I bet your house is doing a lot better, Charlie. Only the right side was exposed directly to the surge. Probably pouring in the windows, but not sweeping through like a freight train,” said Ed.
“I hope you’re right, not that it really matters,” Charlie said ruefully. “We’re all totally screwed.”
“How does a tsunami fit into your EMP theory? Can’t offshore earthquakes cause wind gusts?” asked Ed.
“I don’t think so. Maybe the Chinese threw a nuke at Boston and missed, blew up Cape Cod instead. Everything’s coming at us from the south. I think a ten-megaton bomb could cause a tsunami like this,” said Charlie.
Ed shook his head. “You totally just made that up.”
“It’s an educated guess. Sarah Quinn swears she saw a flash, then the wind. Now we have a tsunami? Something big hit us.”
Ed had to admit that none of this added up. A sudden gust of wind powerful enough to knock out windows; electronics on the fritz; tsunami; possible flashes of light bright enough to turn night into day? Charlie was right about one thing: Whatever this turned out to be, they were most definitely screwed. And that was the least of their immediate concerns. Their daughter Chloe had just moved into an apartment on the outskirts of Boston College, with three other sophomores. Boston College was several miles from the coastline, which eased his fear of a tsunami reaching her, but now they had no way of reaching Boston.