The Survivor Chronicles: Book 1, The Upheaval (10 page)

He had been so focused on making it to the other side that he hadn’t noticed the increasing darkness seeping across the sky to devour the light. A myriad of rainbow colors radiated from the place where the sun had been, but even they were starting to fade away. It was astounding, beautiful, and utterly terrifying. “It’s the end of the world,” Carl muttered.

John intended to argue with Carl, to tell him not to say something like that, that he was completely wrong, and that he didn’t know anything. John couldn’t find the words though because he didn’t think they were true. It was all just too crazy, just too much at once for Carl to be wrong. This was insanity – complete and total insanity – and they were stuck smack dab in the middle of it.

The Toyota with the young mother stopped beside them, she didn’t speak as she hit her horn and then climbed out of her car with a barked command at her children to stay inside. Carl’s hand was shaking as he leaned over and clicked on the radio. They sat silently, listening to the hideous static, clicking, whistling, and strange, almost guttural noises that erupted from it.

Carl turned through the stations but nothing changed. Clicking the button, he switched the frequency to AM radio, but they were only met with the same eerie sounds. Carl switched it off. Another truck appeared, followed closely by a small Dodge and then a Ford, apparently the “let’s all cross one at a time” thing had gotten old, and smaller groups had elected to go. Either that or they had seen the eerie eclipse and had decided that quick escape was more necessary than consideration and patience.

“I don’t know what to do,” John glanced at the woman beside him as she spoke.

“None of us know what to do,” he told her.

She stared at him with glazed eyes before she began to nod. He was about to ask if she had any family she could go to when he felt a small quiver in the road again. He stared at the pavement as if that would somehow give him the answers he sought. “Aftershocks,” the woman told him. “I studied abroad in Japan for a year; we’ll probably get them for awhile.”

“Oh,” John said dully. “So it was an earthquake?”

“What, did you think it was a tornado?” the woman quipped.

Carl snorted with laughter while John just shook his head. “I… don’t know. I don’t know what any of this is.”

She was silent for a minute and then her shoulders slumped. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be snippy. I’m just… terrified.” Her gaze darted worriedly to the car and the children pressed against the passenger side windows. “But yes, it was most definitely an earthquake.”

The truck and two cars made it across the bridge and continued onward. A minivan, SUV, and another car appeared at the top of the bridge as the earth began to shake harder. John rested his hand on the side of the truck, bracing himself as the aftershock rumbled across the land. Give him a blizzard or a hurricane, he was used to those living in the northeast, but this unsteadiness beneath his feet thing was freaking him out. He kept expecting the ground to split apart and swallow him whole and he couldn’t wait for it to stop.

If it ever stopped. Five seconds in, and it was still rolling. The realization that it may never cease was even worse than the fact that this may be the end of the world. He didn’t think he could handle it if the ground never stabilized again. He didn’t exactly like the idea of spending every minute of the rest of his life struggling to keep his balance, and terrified that he might just fall into a steaming hole that suddenly opened beneath him one day. It would be a hideous way to spend the rest of his life, and though he was certain that things would at the very least never be the same again, he intended to live for a lot longer. He was too young not to.

Then the small tremors became a sudden, splintering upheaval which staggered him back a good three feet before he was thrown backwards against the truck mirror. The rigid metal bit into his back, his teeth clenched as he fought back a cry of pain. Like a wave cresting toward shore, the ground rose up a couple of feet and rolled toward them from the direction of the bridge. John did a strange stuttering step as he tried to decide if he should attempt to outrun the rolling earth, or stay where he was. In the end, he didn’t have a choice – it was moving too fast for him to escape it.

Grabbing hold of the mirror, he wrapped both his arms around it in a bone-breaking bear hug that nearly tore it from the truck. He was tossed into the air as the ground threw both him and the truck upward. He shouted and closed his eyes as the truck began its downward descent. A silent prayer echoed through him that the truck would come back to solid ground, and not just tumble into an oblivion that would devour him. He had a brief flash of falling forever, of the center of the earth becoming an all-consuming black hole. Or worse, that he would fall in but continue to live until his body finally gave way to dehydration. Those days would seem like an eternity, but this fall already seemed like it was lasting forever, and he was afraid to open his eyes and look around him, afraid that he was already falling into nothing.

Then the truck crashed into the ground with a loud bang, and a groaning of brutalized springs, tires, and struts. His teeth jarred in his head; his ribs were bruised from the impact of the mirror smashing against them. He stood, fearful to see the destruction the wave may have just unleashed upon the already decimated area.

It was a loud creaking, elongated groan that caused his eyes to fly open. He spotted Carl first, as he stood across from him, hugging the driver’s side mirror. Carl’s face was pale, his watery gray eyes held John’s for one poignant breath. Then, ever so slowly, Carl’s head turned toward the one place that John couldn’t bring himself to look, as the loud screech of metal twisting violently echoed across the open chasm beneath the bridge.

Finally, unable to deny it any longer, John turned toward the bridge. The rolling wave had caused a large fracture to appear at the foot of the structure, a zigzagging pattern that grew larger the longer he stared at it. Beneath the weight of the metal, with a collection of vehicles still on top of it, the bridge began to give way.

The steel was folding, bending in on itself like an accordion. John had pictured it just dropping away, falling straight down into the canal and being swallowed within the swirling waters of the Atlantic Ocean, instead of this collapse toward its center. It almost felt like the bridge was collapsing that way in order to ensure the entrapment of the vehicles upon it as the SUV, and car, disappeared into the center of the asphalt, metal, and concrete.

The driver of the minivan had realized what was happening and hit the gas; John stared into the man’s horrified face as he tried to outrun the certain death trying to ensnare him like a Venus flytrap. He had a sudden flashback to the days when he had watched The Dukes of Hazzard with his dad, when he had marveled over The General Lee’s flying leaps into the air. The minivan was no orange Charger, but for that brief, heart-stopping second when its tires left the ground and it soared into the air, John was certain that it was going to make it. That the minivan had just made the awe-inspiring leap of a flying car in the space of a miraculous instant.

Then it began to fall.

But it didn't fall onto solid ground, didn’t even catch a part of the pavement of the highway. It simply fell away into nothing. Because there was nothing beneath the vehicle anymore.

John tried to look away from the driver’s eyes, but he found all he could do was watch as the man fell to his untimely death. The bridge and van vanished with an echoing, gruesome crash that signified more than just human death, but an end to life as he had always known it. The collision of metal and earth echoed through the air, loud and imposing, and seemingly never ending as it resonated across a land John no longer recognized.

John was shaken, torn between tears and screaming in horror. It took everything he had to lift his head and stare across the empty gap that had once been the Sagamore Bridge. He was now able to see the crowd gathered on the other side, and though he couldn’t make out their features, he sensed the finality enshrouding the people still trapped over there. John couldn’t shake the feeling that though they hadn’t fallen away with the bridge, the collapse had signed their death certificates as surely as it had the people that had been traveling upon it at the time.

And then he realized something else was wrong. The falling vehicles hadn’t been accompanied by a splash upon hitting the water.

John swallowed heavily; he forced himself to look down. Where the water of the canal had once churned with rapid currents and swirling blue water, there was now nothing. The wreckage of the bridge lay a hundred feet below him on the muddy and rocky bottom of the nearly empty canal. His mind spun. He couldn’t comprehend what his eyes were seeing; he simply didn’t understand what could possibly have happened.

And then the woman who had spent a year in Japan whispered one single, terrifying word. “Tsunami.”

CHAPTER 8

Mary Ellen

Newport, R.I.

Mary Ellen took a terrified step back as the dogs continued to stare unwaveringly forward. Though the animals were looking at the house, Mary Ellen had the unsettling feeling that they were actually somehow seeing through the building to the ocean, and perhaps even to something beyond the ocean; something that none of them could see.

She yearned for them to do something, anything, just as long as they finally freaking reacted. This waiting was driving her crazier than the whole rocking, shaking, splintering earth had. At least then she hadn’t had time to think, hadn’t had time to wonder about her future.

Now, every horrifying image she had ever seen or imagined about crazed animals was running through her mind. Not a single one of them ended well.

Her hand clenched around the gun, her fingers stroking the durable metal. She’d never held a gun before, never even imagined a time when she would have to, but she knew that if it became necessary she was going to shoot it, and she would kill something with it. She just hoped it wasn’t a dog.

Then the dogs were moving, as one they were running forward.

“Moogie,” Rita whispered forlornly.

Mary Ellen wanted to tell her “screw Moogie,” but the words froze in her throat as the dogs raced toward them. She didn’t know what they were going to do. Were they just going to plow into the building like the birds had plunged into the ground? Were they going to ram repeatedly into it? Were they going to come barreling through the large picture window and start trying to tear them all to shreds?

Then the dogs split into two groups, in one fluid motion they broke apart around the house, moving past and out of view. Mary Ellen was curious about what they were doing, but she couldn’t bring herself to look. She was terrified the animals had just plunged over the cliff and into the ocean.

She remained unmoving. Why had they done that? What had driven them to do such a thing?

Unlike her, Al didn’t hesitate to move to the back of the house. He was gone for a few minutes before returning. Mary Ellen didn’t ask; she didn’t want to know. It was childish, it was cowardice, and she didn’t care.

“Moogie?” Mary Ellen winced at the hideous name. Rita’s lower lip began to tremble as Al shook his head. “Why…why would they do that? What made them do that?”

“I don’t know,” Al told her.

“What could possibly be so bad that they would do that?”

That was the question Mary Ellen didn’t want to have answered. What could be worse than everything else that was happening? What could be so bad that it was driving animals to kill themselves? She shuddered, a chill of foreboding crept over her skin, causing goose bumps to break out as she surveyed the carnage of the birds littering the ground.

“I don’t think we should stay here.”

“You want to go out there!?” Rita demanded in response to Al’s statement.

“I don’t want to go out there, but I don’t think we have much of a choice.”

“We can stay here. Someone will come to help us.”

Al shook his head. “I think there are far too many people out there who are going to require help. It could be a long time before anyone comes for us.”