The Tsunami Countdown

THIRTY-NINE

11:41 a.m.

6 Minutes to Second Wave

Given all of the obstacles they had encountered up to this point, Kai had no reason to expect that their luck would improve. Even if they simply found a jack and managed to pry Brad and Mia out from under the steel beam, there wouldn’t be time to escape to a taller building. They would all be caught in the ten-story condominium when the next tsunami hit. But on seeing the scuba shop, he felt a rush of optimism. If he could find what he needed in the ruined shop, they might be able to buy themselves more time.

That depended, of course, on the condo building withstanding another tsunami impact. Kai had no illusions about their chances, but the only other option was to leave Brad and Mia to their fates, and he wouldn’t even contemplate that.

Lani, Teresa, and Tom went with Kai to search. He had considered sending Lani and Tom toward high ground on their own, but at this point the thought of Lani fending for herself was frightening. Kai wanted her with him where he could keep an eye on her. And sending Tom off by himself, injured, seemed like a poor idea. Besides, Kai needed their help to gather supplies. They would have to survive with whatever they could carry in one trip; they wouldn’t have time for a second.

When they got outside, Kai divided up the group, dispatching Teresa on a search for as many car jacks as she could find. At least two, maybe three, if she could carry them. Tom and Lani would accompany Kai to the scuba shop.

The street by the condo looked like Sarajevo during the worst years of the Balkan war. Pieces of wood, metal, concrete, vegetation, and, worst of all, human bodies littered the pavement and sidewalks. Cars and other vehicles had been thrown into every conceivable orientation, many of them smashed beyond recognition. One car, a Mini, defied gravity, hovering twenty feet above the ground, skewered like a kebob by a steel pole jutting out of the second story of a building.

Most surprisingly, several people wandered the streets unscathed. Kai supposed he shouldn’t have been amazed—if he had survived, others would have as well—but the utter devastation made it difficult to believe anyone else had lived through it.

An Asian woman babbling in a language Kai didn’t recognize led a boy of about ten toward a hotel and disappeared through the front door. Several teenagers emerged from another hotel and began running wildly in the direction of the mountains. Two people on a tenth-floor balcony about two hundred yards away waved to them.

A man, sopping wet and completely naked except for a pair of running shoes, darted up to them and said, “Where’s Emily?”

“Who?” Kai said, dumbfounded.

The naked man grabbed Kai’s shirt and yanked Kai toward him. “Emily. Have you seen her?”

Kai looked at the others, who were as shocked as he was. He shook his head, and without another word the man released him and kept going down the street, peering into every open doorway and window. Kai could only guess that he had been caught by the tsunami with his girlfriend or wife or daughter. The scope of the tragedy continued to grow in Kai’s mind.

“Don’t stop to talk to anyone else,” he said, and the rest of them understood what he meant.

They just didn’t have time to help others. It was now the law of the jungle: every man for himself. The thought that civilized behavior could degenerate so rapidly was sobering to Kai, but reasoning with panicked people or guiding them to safety would keep them from saving the people they loved. None of them was going to let that happen. No more needed to be said.

Leaving Teresa to rummage through the cars, Kai and the others sprinted to where he had seen the scuba shop. As they got closer, Kai could see more clearly the extensive damage to the building that housed the store. He wasn’t encouraged by its condition.

He ran through the door to find the interior completely gutted. None of the store’s original complement of supplies remained. Instead, it had been replaced by junk swept inside by the wave: chairs, garbage cans, and minor bits of scrap littered the floor. The only recognizable bit from the shop was a Professional Association of Diving Instructors plaque that had been nailed to the wall.

“No!” Kai cried in frustration. “There’s got to be something!”

He began to toss the refuse around, looking under it for the scuba tanks and other equipment that he had imagined would be their lifesavers. But with each piece he threw aside, his hope ebbed further.

Then Lani pointed at something Kai hadn’t noticed in his frenzied search.

“Dad. There’s another door.”

Along the back wall of the store, a large plywood sheet had been slammed against the wall, covering the door. Only a sliver of the door and the doorknob showed. Kai pulled the plywood, which had dug into the Sheetrock, and it clattered to the floor, revealing an undamaged handle. He pushed the door open, and his effort was rewarded.

The plywood had kept the back room of the shop from getting washed away. At the opposite end of the room stood a metal emergency door that was still intact. It opened outward, so the receding water hadn’t been able to push it open.

Nevertheless, the room was still wet from floor to ceiling, which explained why it had come through the tsunami relatively unscathed. If the room had been watertight, the pressure from the water outside would have been far greater than the air in the room, and the water would have blasted the doors inward, sweeping everything away. But something had equalized the pressure, and Kai saw the source: a rivulet of water drained through a three-foot-wide hole near the floor where the pole propping up the Mini had initially penetrated the building.

Kai had hit the jackpot he desperately wanted to find. The room was a tangled mess of air tanks, hoses, buoyancy compensators, weight belts, and everything else needed for diving. Kai stole a look at his watch. Five minutes.

“Okay. We’re going to be out of here in ninety seconds. We need three air tanks, three octopus air hoses, and some nylon rope. Make sure the hoses have two regulators on them. There are six of us.”

“You mean we’re going to scuba dive?” Lani said.

“Get to work,” Kai said, picking up the closest air tank and screwing a loose air hose onto it. “It’s Brad and Mia’s only chance. We can’t get them out and up to a safe height in another building in time. We’re going to have to ride out the next wave. That’s why we need the rope.”

Kai saw Tom following his lead, screwing a hose onto another tank.

“You’ve done this before?” Kai said.

“I’m certified. Logged twenty hours.”

“Good. Make sure it’s pressurized. We can’t come back if we find out the tank is empty.”

Lani returned with a yellow nylon rope. Given the number of loops, Kai guessed it was about a hundred feet of line.

“This is the only one I could find.”

It would take too long to tie one long piece of rope.

“See if you can find a dive knife and masks. And a flashlight or two would come in handy.”

While Lani searched, Kai took a third tank and attached the last hose, activating the pressure gauge. Empty. Damn!

He tossed it aside. Tom carried over another tank.

“It’s the last one,” he said. “The valves on all the others are snapped or bent.”

Kai screwed the hose on quickly, praying that the gauge wouldn’t be in the red.

The gauge read two thousand pounds per square inch. Full. Thank God.

“I got a knife!” Lani said with joy.

“What about masks?”

“They’re all smashed, but I did find a flashlight. It works.”

“Good. We’ve got what we came for. Let’s go.”

Kai picked up two of the tanks and staggered under the sixty-five-pound load, while Tom carried the third with his good arm.

As Kai ushered Lani and Tom out, he spotted something else: a yellow package about the size of a large watermelon. It had a red handle on it and the words PULL HERE TO INFLATE. It was an old life raft.

Despite the raft’s apparent age, the CO₂ cartridge seemed to be new. If they couldn’t get a helicopter, maybe they could float out on one of the waves. It wasn’t a great idea, more of a last resort, but it was better than swimming. Kai pointed at it.

“Lani, can you carry that too?”

“I think so,” she said. She hoisted the raft into her arms, and they scrambled out of the store.

Teresa tried for a car jack in the first car she saw. The door was smashed in, so she reached into the open window and pulled on the trunk release.

Nothing happened. She tried again, with the same result. She ran around to the back and kicked at the trunk a couple of times, but it wouldn’t budge.

She didn’t have time to keep trying on one car, so she ran to the next one, an overturned Chevy with a crushed roof. This one looked even less encouraging. She skipped it.

Finally, she found a car that seemed promising. A minivan lay on its side, the rear window gone. She wriggled through it and examined the floor that was now on its side. The third row of seating was still in place, so she had to get that out of the way. She found the release handle, and the bench seat dropped away, almost falling on her. She pushed it against the second row of seats, leaving enough room to get at the floor covering.

Teresa pried the soaked covering off and saw what she was looking for. A gleaming copper-colored car jack was screwed into the floor pan next to the skinny spare tire.

The jack was held in place by a wing nut that was normally easy to twist off. But while it was being tossed around, the minivan’s frame had bent, tightening the nut. Teresa tried with all her strength to turn it, but it wouldn’t move. She needed some leverage.

She snaked back out of the van and looked around for anything that could be used as a lever. Ideally she would miraculously find a pair of pliers on the ground, but that was wishful thinking. Instead, she would have to make do with what she could scrounge from the area immediately around her. That happened to be a metal chair leg. The smooth round caster still dangled from one end of it. She twisted the caster until it popped out of the leg. She also picked up a heavy piece of broken concrete to hammer the chair leg with.

When Teresa got back in the minivan, she carefully placed the chair leg on one side of the wing nut and braced herself against the vehicle. She made sure it was not on the bolt itself. One wrong hit, and it would bend hopelessly askew.

Teresa reared back with the concrete block and whacked it against the end of the chair leg. She felt the nut give way. In two more taps, the nut was loose enough to unscrew by hand. When it finally came off, she fumbled the jack, and it fell to the ground.

As she bent to pick it up, she heard movement outside the car. She assumed Kai had returned from the scuba shop.

Teresa emerged from the minivan triumphantly holding the jack and jack handle above her head.

“I got one!”

But instead of Kai, she found a scruffy man with a patchy beard. The smell of alcohol wafted through teeth yellowed from years of smoking. His soiled T-shirt couldn’t hide the enormous gut protruding over his low-hanging shorts.

“Damn looter!” he said, slurring his words. “I knew I’d find some out here.”

Teresa lowered her hands to show she wasn’t dangerous. She had dealt with patients like him many times at the hospital.

“I’m not a looter.”

“You look like a looter to me. Tearing through someone’s car. Stealing their stuff.”

“I need a car jack to help—”

“Don’t give me that crap! I seen it on TV. I know what to do with people like you.”

She hadn’t noticed what he was carrying in his right hand. He raised an automatic pistol and pointed it at her.

“Sir,” she said, “listen to me—”

“You come with me and we’ll find the police. They’ll sort you out.”

“A tsunami is coming!”

“Yeah, I bet you’re glad it came. That way, you can take whatever you want.”

“Sir—”

“Police!” the man began to yell. “Police! Looter! Police!”

“Do you see any police around? There is another tsunami coming.”

“Do you think I’m stupid? Police!”

As he continued to yell for the police, Teresa saw Kai, Tom, and Lani coming toward her from the scuba shop.

“Kai! Get back!”

The man spun around to see who she was yelling at. He raised the gun even higher as if to threaten this new group with it. Kai and the others were nonplussed at what was going on. All they saw was a grubby-looking man holding a gun in his hand. They stopped abruptly.

The man, possibly unbalanced by his quick movement, possibly on purpose, pulled the trigger. A crack ripped the air, and the bullet whizzed by Kai’s head, pinging off a piece of metal behind him. The three of them hit the ground.

This man was obviously unhinged. Trying to reason with him would just make things worse, and any further discussion would eat into the precious time Teresa had to somehow pry Mia free. The man was a danger not just to her but to her daughter. She didn’t hesitate; with the man facing away from her, Teresa swung the heavy metal car jack with both hands and bashed him in the back of the head.

The effect was instant. The man dropped the gun and fell to his knees, where he swayed groggily. Teresa picked up the pistol, ejected the magazine onto the pavement, and threw the gun into a pile of debris. The man pitched forward and lay on the ground, still conscious but moaning.

“Bitch,” he slurred in a low rumble. “You hit me.”

Teresa waved to Kai.

“Come on! I got a jack. Let’s go.”

“What happened?” Kai said, rushing up to her. “What the hell is going on? Who is that guy?”

Teresa, shaking from the rush of adrenaline, stared at the prone man.

“I’ll tell you later,” she said. “Let’s go get Mia and Brad.”