“We should ask you the same question,” said one of the men. “I’m Scott Copeland. Who are you?”
“James Liddle. And that’s Hu Son. And the little girl is Julia. I don’t know her mother’s name. Are they all right?”
“They will be, yes. Sophie’s looking after them. And the teenager too. Looks like you had a rough ride.”
James nodded. “The subway. The last train. Didn’t make it.”
“Yeah, we heard—” The man pointed. “We’ve been following the news. The cellphone towers are down, but Jack’s Walkman has FM. Three trains were lost.”
“Three—?”
“Yeah. Real bad scene at Union Station.”
James didn’t say anything then, didn’t want to say what he was thinking, didn’t want to make the fear real. He realized he was weak. Exhausted. He looked around. They were on a sloping tile surface. The stairwell was a square opening with a few broken steps rising out of the water. “Is this the top floor?”
“No. This was the tenth floor. The top three floors were ripped away.” Copeland’s expression went grim. “That’s where most of the people went. I suppose it seemed like a good idea. It was wall-to-wall crowded. Probably exceeded the structural limits. But, see, the top floors of a building are never the strongest. The lower floors are built to hold the weight of the floors above.”
“You’re a builder—?”
“Architect. I know this building. It’s a good one. Well, it was. We started on the seventh floor, that’s where our offices were. When the water started rising, we moved up to the eighth, eventually the ninth. Had to stop there. The people above wouldn’t let us keep going, said there was no more room.” Copeland sighed and shrugged—a gesture of both sadness and grim irony.
“We’d been shredding old blueprints. We had thirty or forty bins of paper we still hadn’t emptied. When the water broke the windows and started rising inside the building, we emptied all the biggest trash cans, turned them upside down and stuck our heads in to breathe. It was a gamble, but it worked. Each bin had enough air to last ten minutes, twenty if we were careful. And we had, I dunno, thirty bins. I saved my people. Most of them.”
“But you lost a couple…” James glanced toward the broken stairwell, wondering if the bloated cadaver of poor Mrs. Hayes might suddenly bob up on the surface of the trapped water.
Copeland followed his glance. “Yeah. We had some panic. It was pretty bad. We did everything we could.” Copeland was reluctant to explain. “What about you? Down in the subway—?”
James remembered the man who’d tried to take Hu’s regulator. He could still see the man’s startled expression, the sudden horrified realization that he was dying—dying twice, once by drowning, once by knife—and the crushing certainty that this was truly death. James shook his head, he didn’t want to talk about it.
Copeland recognized the expression. “Yeah. Bad day all around.” He straightened. “Let me see if there’s any water left.” He disappeared from James’ field of view.
James concentrated on his breathing for a while. Open air. There was a delicious luxury. How had he ever taken breathing for granted? Finally, he looked around, searching for Julia and her mother. Spotting them, he crawled over on his hands and knees. He still didn’t feel like standing. Julia was clutching her mother, her face buried in her mother’s side, her shoulders rising and falling as if she was sobbing.
“Are you okay?”
“I prayed to God, and he sent you to save us.”
“Well, I don’t know about God, but—”
“No, it was God—”
“Okay. It was God. I’m just glad that you and Julia made it. You must have been scared.”
“No. I knew that God sent you. So I wasn’t scared. I just kept praying and thanking God for sending you to us.”
“Ahh. Well, I guess it worked.”
“Yes. And God will bless you for what you did.”
“Not gonna argue that—I can use all the blessings I can get. I’m just glad you both made it.” James patted her shoulder, patted Julia’s shoulder, but the little girl didn’t look up. James had seen this behavior before; Julia was going to have nightmares. She was going to have some serious post-traumatic stress. And she was going to need some serious therapy. Oh, hell—they all would.
He turned away, crawled back to Hu. The unnamed teenager was sitting next to him, sucking at a bottle of water. He passed the water bottle to Hu; the two of them had been talking, sharing, debriefing each other.
Hu looked to James. “This is Jesse. He’s a student at LACC.”
James held out his hand. “I’m James. I’m glad you made it.”
“So am I, man! That was intense! I am never riding that subway again!”
“I don’t think anybody will,” James agreed.
Jesse waved his arm, indicating the world around them. “How long we gonna be up here, you know?”
James hadn’t even considered the question. He put one hand against a fragment of wall. He raised himself half-up onto his knees—
The hot July sun blazed above. The landscape rippled and foamed below. Everything was too bright. It took a moment for James’ vision to clear, for his eyes to focus all the way to the horizon. And then it took another moment for him to make sense of what he was seeing—all the devastation that surrounded them.
James levered himself to his feet, holding onto the spur of the broken wall. He turned slowly, slowly, shaking his head, saying only, “Fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.” And then, even more sadly, “Oh, fuck.”
They were alone in the middle of a vast brown sea. The water was receding—slowly. But more water was still trying to push in—uneven ripples of the reverberating shockwaves. Everywhere, the water foamed and surged, churning the debris. Things tumbled in the water, all kinds of things, broken signs, buses, cars, trees, the inevitable palm fronds, pieces of buildings, roofs and walls—and bodies. Too many bodies.
The sea of desolation extended north, all the way to the Hollywood Hills. A few buildings stuck their tops out of the water—but not many. To the west and the south, the view was much the same. There was a rise in the southern distance. Baldwin Hills was now Baldwin Island, probably nothing more than a naked lump. The ferocious power of the waves would have scraped everything away.
The rest was mud.
James saw the past as if it were still the present. The riot at the Santa Monica underpass, the old men at the VA Health Center, the carefree golfers, and all the people in all the cars they’d passed, the little boy staring from a car window on Wilshire Boulevard…
How many of them had escaped and how many more had been caught in the overwhelming wrath of the tsunami? It was all unknowable, all washed away too quickly to comprehend.
James tried to imagine—something, anything—a future.
He couldn’t.
It would take months just to catalog the devastation. The scale of this thing—there was nothing left. Nothing to rebuild. The city was gone.
“Fuck,” said James.
It was going to be a long uncomfortable afternoon.
Hu pulled him back down, pulled him next to him. “You okay?”
“No.”
Hu didn’t respond to that. He waited a bit before saying anything else.
Finally, “You kept your promise.”
“I did?”
“You said we weren’t going to die today.”
“The day’s not over.”
“Shut up.” Hu said it gently, affectionately. He took James’ left hand and held it up to admire the gold band on the third finger. He traced it with his own fingers. “But I will say this.” He paused.
“What?”
“This is the worst honeymoon I’ve ever been on—”