Everything is Broken Read online

  “Dad—” Russ asked suddenly. “—should we run?”

  “If we do, we . . . we’d be on lower ground. This is the highest ground around here. Don’t think we’ll need the roof . . . ”

  And then the entire town, below their vantage, was engulfed by the sea—except for a narrow, peaked building, close to the submerged highway, where a group of people clung to the roof. The structure was on a rocky spur of land, significantly higher than the rest of the buildings. The tidal wave swept over it—and a few people remained, afterwards.

  Scores of bodies were being whipped about in the white and brown water, entwined with crackling power lines and kelp and carpets . . . The tsunami, grinding everything before it with bladelike pieces of what it had destroyed before, seemed to erase life as it pushed ahead. Russ felt a small blossom of hope when he made out several people climbing from the swamping debris, climbing onto a free-floating wooden two-car garage. Most down there, clearly, would be drowned, crushed, blenderized. But some lived; some struggled free of the vector of chaos . . .

  A mist rose from the crashing of the wave like smoke over a forest fire. Everywhere, dogs barked, birds shrieked, and the hillsides thumped and echoed with sound.

  And piercing through all was the persistent keening of screams.

  The sound of weeping reached Russ through the vastly amplified, basso profundo of the tsunami. He looked down and saw it was Pendra, turned to look at the wave crashing below them, hugging herself and shaking her head.

  “Up here, Pendra!” he yelled. “Better come up here!”

  The tidal wave was rushing up the hill toward them, another great wave close behind it—like great gelatinous creatures charging, crashing into trees and houses, breaking up into competing waves that thrashed back and forth, pitching pieces of buildings. A couple of small boats, a badly broken yacht, one dead horse and an overturned pickup truck, were all tumbled together with the floating roof of a house—and it was all coming up the hill at them, rising, mounting up to make them part of it, an expression of nature, as if the tsunami was a commonplace natural process that was supposed to crush the town into boiling liquefaction.

  Russ watched, hypnotized, helpless, as it came up for them. As the tsunami came on, rearing colossally . . .

  . . . and finally broke, just before it reached the apartment building. Just as Pendra came onto the balcony beside him, shouting but almost inaudible in the massive noise of the displaced sea, the sounds of cars flung to crash through rooftops just about eighty feet below them. Two flowerpots fell off the corners of the balcony, with the reverberation of the tsunami’s slam; a window cracked and dust sifted from the edge of the roof overhead.

  The rapacious wave was collapsing. Still it refused to back away completely. Gray and sickly green and filthy, the ocean raged almost within reach of them. At last it began to suck back, back toward the open sea.

  People were drawn with it—they were some distance away but he saw them clearly, living people thrashing in terror as the wave recoiled. The ocean was swallowing its victims. For a time it roiled restlessly in place, seemed reluctant to pull back.

  Seven blocks from the beach, Chief Tommy’s Motel was a squat building clinging like a barnacle on the side of the hill.

  Nella was in room 22, second floor, thumbing her cell phone, trying Ronnie again, when the thundering and screaming and crashing started.

  She had been trying to get a certain someone out of her head and a certain someone back in. Buff—him she wanted out. She kept seeing Buff dying, something terrible about a big guy like that becoming such a scared little thing and then dying miserably, like a fat puppy getting chased around and killed by a speedfreak with a golf club, something she’d seen a few years before: something else she wanted out of her head. And she wanted Ronnie Burke in, she wanted Ronnie to fill up her whole mind and fill her body and just sweep her out of where she was, because he was the last guy who’d been able to do that for her. He’d been so sweet, like he really did care about her, but later he’d heard someone call her a skank and the day after that he didn’t show up and that was almost a month ago and she’d sent him some text messages but cell phones worked for shit out here—well sometimes they worked, depending on where in town you were, but not reliably like around Sacramento—and every time she thought she’d got him almost agreeing to meet her, then the call got dropped.

  Nella had rented the motel room to stay in, partly to be away from Dickie Rockwell’s bunch and partly to shack up with Ronnie if she could get him to really commit to just coming here and giving her a chance (something was booming and crashing outside) if he would just give her even a few minutes, she might—

  The picture window at the front of the motel room heaved itself inward and sprayed broken glass over her as if the battering ram of muddy water had been deliberately fletched with shards, but she couldn’t scream because her mouth was full of brown water and she was being shoved up against the wall, pressed into a corner, the water quickly filling the room, pouring through the window like a dam’s spillway, turning the motel room into a whirlpool, the water crashing around and rising, rising to her neck, making the TV crackle and the dresser lift up and dance around. The mattress whipped around to suck against the window—and the mattress blocked the window, for a moment, so that the pushing waters subsided to an angry back-and-forthing. Trying to wake up from this nightmare, Nella saw a dead cat swirling, all tangled with kelp and the clothes from her suitcase, her best clothes almost indistinguishable from muddy sand, and then—

  The walls started to crack, and lean bulgingly inward, then outward, then inward, like cheeks inside a panting mouth—and the door just exploded outward, and she found herself flying headlong, her whole body drawn in by an unrelenting suction, her left shoulder cracking hard against the splintered frame as she bounced through. She was swept out, whirled under water into dirty brown darkness . . . then she popped up like a cork into the air, coughing, just another part of the sodden, blended, filthy medium the world had become, ocean everywhere, ocean and debris and a school bus that seemed to be swimming like an orange whale, dragged along in the flood . . .

  The flood.

  The phrase “Biblical Flood” came into her mind, the two words almost shouted in her head, and she remembered Bible lessons with her folks in Winnipeg and how withdrawn and angry they’d been when she’d asked “But how could that happen, if . . . ?” and how they hadn’t let her eat for two days, not anything, to punish her for lack of faith. When she tried to slip down to the kitchen her father caught her, dragged her by the neck back to her room. And now Nella was being hustled by another unstoppable force, as if Papa was dragging her through the filthy roiling water thirty feet deep where the parking lot had been. She felt her bare right foot slapped by what was probably a car antenna jutting from beneath, other cars and vans all crookedly surfacing before sinking again. A blue-haired old lady in a torn nightgown was scrabbling at a floating mattress with long red fingernails, trying to climb onto it—the mattress tipped her back into the water and she sank gurgling and didn’t come back up; the Mexican woman who cleaned the rooms drifted by, face down, the back of her head bashed in, hair matted and wet; the old Indian guy who ran the motel office went by, clinging to a big piece of Styrofoam, staring at her with dull shock but, she realized, almost triumph too, and she looked away from him at the sky to see if God was looking down. She saw nothing but the quite ordinary gray sky, and when she looked back the old Indian guy was gone and she was suddenly aware that the water was cold. She’d been too stunned to notice the temperature before, but she felt as if the uncontrollable chattering of her teeth announced it, and she was sure, now, that this wasn’t a dream, remembering the passage from Genesis about the flood sent by the angry Jehovah that her parents had read to her many times: The Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

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sp; Nella couldn’t think about anything else, after that—there was no room for it. Because a steep wave had knocked her under, tumbling her, and she was choking. She opened her eyes and saw the world had gone brown-black, she was under a layer of obscene chocolate, looking up at a ceiling made of the rippling murk; she was afloat in a lower level of translucent green water, lit by light shafting through breaks in the murk overhead; bits of wood drifted up, and down, and a refrigerator was slowly sinking, its door open, and a ray of light coming through a hole in the surface-scum spotlit a child floating upside down about thirty feet away: a pale-haired girl who must surely be dead, her limp arms splayed; and a little lower, several overturned sedans, seeming colorless, were finding their own level. Blankets swept from the motel had become aquatic creatures billowing like jellyfish. Nella felt she should let go and die but she couldn’t. She kicked and clawed at the water, trying to climb a ladder that wasn’t there.

  Kicking, kicking. It seemed to take forever to ascend into the brown layer, into opacity; pushing splintery debris out of the way, getting tangled with rubber-coated wire, fighting free . . .

  Then she was thrusting her head out of the dirty water, gasping, clasping a floating crate and spitting foulness. The crate was pretty buoyant and she pulled it down between her legs so she could ride it like a horse, keeping her head and shoulders above briny water stinking of sewage and oil. She saw another body floating by, face down—a man, vanishing under waves that twitched every which way. Her teeth clacked like castanets in the cold water, she kicked her feet, instinctively trying to get to the place where the water slapped against the hill above the sunken motel.

  But the sea was still surging, sucking her the other way. Towards crackling, sparking debris . . . she saw an electrical cable hanging down from a leaning pole, the cable wriggling and snapping like an angry snake. She didn’t want to be electrocuted and if she got close enough the water would transmit the electricity and she’d be fried in shit-water.

  She wriggled the crate up, clinging as if it were a beach toy in her bruised arms, and she kicked crazy-hard, rasping out “No no no no no no not gonna no!”—the words almost stuck in her caked throat. Little by little she was making her way through the churning; thrashing along toward a tree to one side of the motel near the hillside, a pushed-over oak tree, some of its roots sticking up at the sky like the tentacles of a giant wooden squid. She was heading for it, trying to keep to the left of a big morass of random floating items: a small car on its side, a couple of spare tires, overturned plastic coolers, and a great deal of jagged timber—

  There was a man in there, a naked man with a spike of wood, a giant splinter, right through his body under his right nipple, and he was feebly trying to pull himself up on a higher chunk of floating wood. He vomited blood and fell back and tried to thrash up again but the turbulent water slapped him down and he vanished in the churning swell—

  Spitting blood herself from a split lip, she looked away, focused on the roots of the oak tree, and kept kicking toward it, past the motel—glanced to one side to see that the top of the motel was covered in brown sucking water but someone was clinging to the 1960s-style sign above the roof: a crying heavyset middle-aged woman with her red hair pasted down; she was wearing only a brassiere, her white ass looking doughy.

  Someone else was screaming, behind Nella, near that sparking cable—and suddenly the scream cut off.

  Then Nella had almost reached those roots, twisting toward the sky, the gray, kelp-twined tree trunk revolving slowly in the water; a naked man clinging, farther up . . . why was everyone naked?

  She saw people watching, up on the hill above her, standing on dry ground up there, on some house’s back deck, about thirty yards over the dirty, invasive new breakers. And she recognized them.

  It was Dickie Rockwell and Mark Sten and the Grummon brothers. They were passing a bottle and laughing at her.

  FOUR

  Only a single building was left standing—partly standing—along Highway One in Freedom, California. It was the tallest building in town, three stories, once housing Ferrara’s Bobbing Buoy Bar and Barbecue. Several walls and a large piece of the roof remained.

  Lon Ferrara, soaking wet, shivering, crusted in salt, was straddling the spine of the peaked roof, his brother and a woman clinging nearby. Ferrara was asking himself if he was dreaming. He was feeling like he was at a significant remove from real. The cold wind, the spray, was cutting at him, but he didn’t feel it much; his hands, clamping the wooden shingles, were just dead things at the end of his arms. The wave had passed over him and had pressed him crushingly onto the roof and then tried to pull him free. Tremendous pressure, but he’d wedged between a drain pipe and a deck post and the roof had been slightly turned aside and a lot of the pressure had been turned from him too and then the water had receded, to just below his perch . . .

  He did feel one thing: the sensation of smallness, of inconsequentiality, was like a big burning hole in his middle.

  The bar was destroyed; the guts of the building had been literally sucked out from under him. He fully expected this roof to collapse too. It was almost all that remained, except the upright teak beams that supported its frame—hard timber extracted from an old ship, the beams had withstood the tsunami, holding the peaked roof over the sun deck. The walls were gone, but the beams, the frame of the building, were still there. The deck itself had washed away in the thunderous surge—the massive wave had been weakened in this area by the rising slope of the sand, the tidal break of boulders lining the beach, the highway, the spur that the bar stood on—and an empty semi-truck that had been passing at just the right moment, right for Ferrara but fatal for the truck, which had been kicked over on its side and spun, slammed into the building housing the Surf Shop and the Gift Shoppe and Amir’s Frozen Yogurt, all of them stoved-in and reduced to floating debris. Amir himself had gone floating by, face down, limp in the agitated surf. A dead sea lion, cloven almost in half, rippled bloodily by, a few yards from Ferrara’s feet.

  The tsunami had boiled past them, Ferrara and Mario and the woman, rising, rising, rising over them as it was forced up the hill by pressure from behind—but after it had crashed over their roof they were still there. And the three of them were still clinging, shivering but holding on when it receded part-way, leaving a great deal of foul water to toss furiously around this little wooden island. The tsunami was reluctant to leave the land, like a swarming army that had captured new ground and was not going to give it up.

  Ferrara heard the cries of people in a building that had stood behind his bar—a two-story apartment building on First Street, made of concrete and redwood, standing pretty stoutly for a while. He pictured the currents, sluicing water invading the house, instantaneous flooding, rip-currents like poltergeists tearing through the rooms. He could hear the faint yells of people smacked against walls, against one another, against tubs and tables—saw someone bashed out through an exploding window. The sea drowning those it didn’t simply pulp first. He heard the creaking crunch of the building collapsing.

  Then there was just the sound of water from back there. Sea noises replacing human noises.

  He glanced over at the woman, clinging not far from him. His dazed mind wouldn’t find her name.

  His brother was there—his stupid brother Mario. He saw Hilly’s body, just below his little wooden island: stuck on a twisted piece of drainpipe, head half torn off, flaccid arms waving in the waves like he was doing a hula.

  Jill was telling Mario—even as enormous waves danced crazily around them, trying to pull down the roof that was the only thing keeping them alive—that they should try to pull others up here with them. That they should help that man who was clinging to a tree trunk, over there, his gasping mouth wide open. But the more people who came up here, the more weight, the more strain on the roof, so the Ferrara brothers ignored her and soon the man disappeared under the waves.

  It would most likely be death to slip under those waves. The
re was no swimming in there—it was like a blender, that churning sea, slashed by blades of splintered wooden edges and jagged glass on broken window frames and pieces of cars. There were oil slicks that would choke you and pull you down . . .

  No, he wasn’t going into that mess for anyone. And no one else was going to be allowed up on this roof. The more people up here, the more chance it might collapse. They might even crowd him off. No, if anyone tried to climb on, he was going to kick them in the face.

  Ferrara simply held on, feeling almost numb with cold; feeling just that one certainty: he wasn’t going to let anyone take anything else that was his . . .

  They sat on the balcony for a long time, in white plastic chairs, Russ and Pendra and Dad, staring down the hill as if someone had slapped them all repeatedly until they could no longer think or speak or move. Sat there, awash in the raw, overwhelming smell of the flooding; watching the waters slowly, slowly recede; looking at a town turned inside out, its interior broken up and scattered below them. Hearing the hissing, the crackling . . .