Moonseed (46 page)

There was a boom, like remote thunder.

They stared at each other.

Cecilia said, “What the hell was that?”

Joely laughed. It can’t be. Not right on cue.

They went to the window. Cecilia, as a permanent employee of Virtuelle, had a corner office, of course, up here on the third floor. The biggest window faced west, toward the Puget Sound.

The day was clear, if oddly smoggy. They had a good view of the campus. On one of the neat squares of grass a cat was standing. It was facing north, standing oddly, with its legs apart…

Far to the west, over the ocean, there was a giant electrical storm raging. It was a bank of thick black cloud, roiling, spread right along the horizon.

There was sheet lightning, cracking in the gaps in the cloud, and what looked like fireballs, tossed into the air like popcorn. Ball lightning, maybe.

“I think it’s a quake,” Joely said. “A big one.”

“Oh, you’re an expert,” Cecilia said.

“That black stuff could be dust, thrown up by the quake. The rock shears, the water vaporizes…You get a build-up of electricity…” She glanced around the campus. “These buildings—they conform to the California building code. Right?”

“This isn’t California.” Cecilia looked confused. “How would I know?”

“Well, they look like tilt-up construction to me.”

“Is that bad?”

The thunder was replaced by a low rumbling noise overlaid by a crackle, a series of short bangs that sounded like gravel on a tin roof.

Joely listened intently to the low-frequency rumble, fascinated. She knew what that was. She was
hearing
the shortest-wavelength seismic waves, listening to the vibration of the Earth itself. The longest waves, with a period of an hour or so, corresponded to the whole Earth’s resonant frequency, and were much too low-frequency to hear.

The planet was ringing like a bell.

Now, above the storm, there was a strange cloud formation. Something like a smoke ring, Joely thought, a loose band of fluffy white. Maybe that was the acoustic pressure wave, rising up toward the stratosphere. The satellites would detect it later, a displacement of the atmosphere’s layers by a mile or more.

Now Cecilia was starting to sound nervous. “What’s going on? Are we safe here?”

“I don’t know. That storm front must be hundreds of miles long.”

“But we’re safe, right?”

Of course not. “…Yes. I guess so.”

Cecilia was silent.

On impulse, Joely reached out and took Cecilia’s hand.

Joely thought of the cat. Animals knew how to brace themselves like that, standing with their legs apart, crossways to the shock.

That cat is smarter than I am, she thought.

Now there was movement.

A couple of the pine trees at the edge of the campus tipped up, locking their branches together like clasping hands. When they sprang apart, their trunks cracked, and burst into showers of matchwood.

Another line of trees, closer, popped out of the ground, roots and all, like wooden rockets.

Incoming, Joely thought.

“Holy shit,” said Cecilia…. And then it hit.

It came in a second, without warning. The floor just disappeared from beneath her, and she was thrown into the air—like a kid in her father’s arms—her nose was inches from the ceiling…Then she fell, landing heavily on her back.

An instant of stillness. Something falling to the floor with a soft explosion, maybe Cecilia’s pc monitor. Glass, she thought, and she closed her eyes.

She’d had Cecilia’s hand wrenched out of her grasp in that first moment. She opened her mouth to call her.

Slam,
under her back.

Again she was thrown into the air.

She landed with a grunt, on her front this time, mercifully clear of furniture.

And now the ground was pitching. She lay flat, spread-eagled, trying not to be turned over. It was like being on a violent sea, she thought—but not quite, for the motion was compound, shaking her up and down and side to side. More
as if she was a flea on the back of a dog, shaking after a swim.

She was surrounded by explosions. The window burst, creating a new hail of glass fragments over her neck and head. The wall cracked with a report like gunfire.

Then the whole building
fell,
just like that, dropping through several feet, and she landed hard on her front again.

There was a grind of metal, the soft crump of fresh explosions. That open car lot on the ground floor must have collapsed. The building was now a storey shorter than the architects had planned it.

More booms. Smoke, curling into the window. That would be gas tanks going up, in the crushed automobiles beneath.

Cecilia’s Toyota 4Runner. Her pride and joy, paid for by the company. Even now, lying here in her own blood in the middle of the greatest damn earthquake since Cecil B. de Mille, Joely found room in her head for a touch of spiteful joy at that.

The floor was still shaking, but maybe not so violently. She got to her knees. She turned, looking for Cecilia.

Cecilia’s pc lay smashed on the floor.

It occurred to Joely that with the intranet destroyed, so was all the work she had done here; she had no hard copy, anywhere. Nothing to say why she had made her way here, today of all days. All those E-mails, lost like dreams, forever unanswered.

If this is the end of us, she thought, we will leave less behind us than the citizens of Pompeii. So much of what humans had created in the last few decades had been, when you got to it, just electronic patterns, stored on some tape or chip or disc somewhere. And when the power failed…

She saw a pair of legs, dimpled with cellulite, protruding from a too-short skirt. The edge of the stone desk top, still in one piece, had come down just above that skirt. Joely
could see there was only a couple of inches clearance between the sharp rim of the desk and the floor.

Just a couple of inches, into which a human torso had been crammed.

There was blood seeping out under the desk, thicker and darker than Joely had imagined. Jesus. She felt bile rise at the back of her throat.

She looked for the door. It was on the other side of the desk, and she wasn’t sure if she could make it that far. And even if she could it looked as if it had buckled in its frame. No way to get that down except with a fire ax.

She made her way to the wall, and grabbed onto the window frame. A shard of glass stabbed her arm, but she ignored that. She stood, the floor still trembling beneath her feet. She looked out.

The campus was demolished. Most of the buildings had simply fallen apart, she saw, like card houses, their prefabricated walls lying smashed on the neat patches of grass. One other building, still intact, had tipped over.

She wondered if the ground had dipped already, the way the scientists’ models said it would. Was she below sea level yet?

The horizon was just a blur of smoke and fires and electrical sparking, against a continual crackling noise. There was a kind of dome of a greenish luminosity, she saw, gathering in the air above the cloud.

There were wide ravines, scratched at random across the ground. From a couple of them, fire was spurting. Gas mains, maybe. One of the fissures was
closing
again; and somehow that was more disturbing than anything else.

She couldn’t even tell where the level was, so broken up was the ground.

She could see nobody moving. There were a few splashes of color that might have been people, or might not. No sign of rescue, not so much as a TV news heli.

And the quake wasn’t done; she could see a
wave,
maybe twenty feet high, passing through the ground itself, its crest sending chunks of shattered tarmac feet into the air.

But the shuddering of the building seemed to be subsiding.

My God, she thought. I might live through this yet. What a story I’ll have. Book deals, syndication, TV movies flashed through her imagination. She wondered if there was a webcam in the office.

The dominant noise changed, to a whooshing like a wind blowing through trees.

And now there was something emerging out of the smoke bank, to the east. Like a new cloud, wide and dark and rolling, laced with fire.

Oh.

It was water. A wave, surging out of the Sound, as if Puget was no more than a tipped-up bathtub. Burning oil had spilled over its surface, probably from the storage tanks at the docks. Earthquake cocktail, she thought.

The wave had to be a hundred feet high.

Waves like that could travel a hundred miles an hour; she could never outrun it. Not even in Cecilia’s Toyota.

Blood dripped into her eye from a wound she hadn’t noticed. She was lucky as hell to have survived this far, she thought, and then she laughed at herself.
Lucky?
She was the girl from LA who had to move to Seattle in time for the Big One.

The floor started to move again. She clung to the window frame, trying to stay on her feet. This was an up-and-down whiplashing that no building was going to be able to withstand. More cracking sounds, as the walls broke open, letting in the daylight—a stink of sulfur—and she was thrown to the floor, which was splintering under her.

The ceiling came crashing down at her…. But, before the ceiling debris reached her, the floor fell away.

She was falling through the stories, arms and legs limp, pursued by a shower of debris. Maybe the building itself
was falling, even as it fell to pieces all around her, as the ground flexed, giving up its stored energy.

A last moment of daylight, before a rush of heat, and a wall of water that slammed her sideways—

In Star City, Moscow, Russia, Henry Meacher watched the destruction of Washington State on CNN.

There were few pictures coming out of the area itself. Nobody left alive to send any, of course.

The best images came from the satellites and the Space Station: the band of smoke and flame laced along the western seaboard, the sea churned to mud and froth for hundreds of miles from the coast. You could pick out the cities by their dull burning glow, Seattle and Tacoma and Olympia and Vancouver, as far south as Portland. The experts said it was a series of firestorms that would not burn themselves out for many hours.

It would be a spectacular sight at night.
Keep tuned, folks.

The economists speculated about the impact on the world’s economy of the loss of the Seattle region, Boeing and Microsoft and…The tame scientists, gabbling at each other, blamed the explosion of Mount Rainier for setting off an earthquake which had been overdue anyhow. And the wilder ones blamed Rainier itself on the bizarre infection the commentators were calling Moonseed.

Evidently, the whole of the locked subduction zone had given way.

There seemed to have been sympathetic earthquakes in Chile, causing severe damage there. The rest of North America seemed to have been spared, but unusual wave motions had been observed on the Great Lakes and other large bodies of water, in some places violent enough to tear boats from their moorings.

And in Alaska, hit by two earthquakes, the Yakutat
glacier had changed its direction and was spilling ice slabs into the sea.

Henry wondered how much longer news like this would remain free and uncensored.

Henry pulled out his laptop, and checked the data against his predictions. The spread rate of the Moonseed, from both primary and secondary infection sites, had reduced drastically as the Moonseed had sunk into the crust. Nevertheless events were unfolding much as he’d expected.

It had taken some thirty days for the ocean crust to be breached, around seventy for the first deep breaches at the continental margins to be achieved, like the one which had caused the Seattle event.

But this was just the start. There would be an escalation of such gigantic seismic events, from now until—

Well, he thought, until the end.

Time to act, Henry thought. If not now, never.

The telephone started to ring.

And when he put the phone down again, he knew that, finally, there would come a day—in mid-August, just a week from now—which would be his last on Earth, perhaps forever.

38

He slept badly, with disturbed dreams.

There was a knock at the door, repeating gently.

He didn’t know where the hell he was, or what time it was.

He looked for his watch, and couldn’t find it, but it was useless anyhow as he hadn’t reset it since Houston. He pulled a towel around his waist and padded to the door.

Standing there was a doctor—it was obvious that was what he was, a little guy in a white coat with a black bag—and Geena, his ex-wife. Geena was wearing some kind of blue coverall and carried a little bag of groceries.

“You didn’t used to have to knock,” he said hoarsely.

“Different days, Henry. Can we come in?”

“Oh, shit,” said Henry, remembering. “You’re wearing a flight suit, aren’t you? It’s
the
day.”

Geena grinned, perhaps with a little malice. “The Russians say we are to share a great honor, this day,” she said.

Geena and the doctor bustled into the room. Henry backed off, and retreated to the bathroom. A last refuge of privacy.

He had spent his last night on Earth in Leninsk, the city that had grown up on the back of Baikonur Cosmodrome. They had arrived late. This was what they called the cosmonauts’ hotel, the
Kosmonaut,
a low, modern building screened by what looked like elm trees—
karagach,
a young Russian told him. His room was a tiny suite, a doll’s-house Hilton of a thing, with a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom.

The room was like something out of the 1950s: carpets, net curtains, a fridge. Nothing inside the fridge but Diet Coke, labeled in Cyrillic. The bath had taps and a showerhead. But there was no plug—not in the hand-basin either—and the ceramic was cracked and stained.

Now, when he lifted the toilet lid, the ancient ceramic was so dark he couldn’t see the little puddle of water at the bottom. He had to admit it took a little willpower to lower his butt once more to this cracked Russian po.