27- the end of the world
I’ve never experienced an earthquake, but I imagine this is one. Or we could be getting bombed. It kind of feels like it could be that, too. What else makes the ground tremble? Of course, it could be hell opening up under Cadence to swallow us whole. Dust and bits of the Styrofoam ceiling rain down on us, thickening the air further.
The break room feels like a prison cell with no windows. Deno, who is closest to the door, finds the handle in the dark and wrenches it open. This hallway is dark, too, narrow and not open to the public. And like the back of all strip malls, also windowless, leaving whatever is happening outside a mystery.
Lacey stumbles against me. “Let’s get out of here.”
Loud, ominous rumbling shakes The Strip Mall again. I press against the wall for support. The surface undulates like a ship at sea. The smell of something burning flicks on all our panic switches.
“Oh! Oh no, no, no.” Lacey yells. “Fire. This is bad.”
“Stay together.” Deno manages to turn on the flashlight of his phone and shines it into the empty, pitch-black hallway. We stagger through the narrow passage behind the stage, following the emergency lights to the employee exit and the parking lot where the van is parked.
We plunge into the rain and dash for the van. The air is dense and acrid with smoke. We still can’t see much, enclosed by The Strip Mall on one side, thick trees, and dumpsters, but can’t miss the pillars of smoke billowing lighter gray against the night sky. Deno drags his keys out of his pocket and repeatedly hits the unlock button. All three of us climb in the front seats, with Lacey and me crammed together in the front passenger. We’re practically sitting on each other, but I don’t care. Neither does she. We hold each other tight, breathless with fear.
“What about our equipment?” Lacey cries. All our stuff is still in the booth.
“Later.” Deno stabs the key in the ignition, after missing a few times, and throws the van in reverse. His glasses go askew. He rips them off and chucks them to the back of the van. “Hold on.”
He spins the van around and jerks it into drive with a squeal of tires. The van rockets out of the parking lot and onto the road. We’re not the only erratic cars out here. Traffic laws are not being observed. Deno skids around a fender bender and hits the gas, zooming down Dredge Street in the general direction of his and Lacey’s neighborhood.
That horrible, deafening rumbling has eased to the sound of rolling thunder. My fear still rides high. Something is terribly, terribly wrong. We just can’t see what, yet.
I brace a hand on the dash. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. Home.” Panic sends Deno’s voice pitching high.
“Wait. We don’t know—” what happened. And then we round a curve and the trees clear and the valley comes into view. We can see exactly what happened.
Any normal night, we would see Mt. Franklin to our left and Mt. Serenity to our right, with the dam branching off the side of Mt. Serenity, holding back the lake waters beyond. But tonight is not normal. Even in the dark, through a rain-splattered windshield, the huge, inverted V scar stands out on the side of Mt. Serenity. The mountain appears to be halved in size.
My limbs go rubbery as the implications start to dig through my mind. “Half the mountain is gone.”
“It’s…it’s a landslide.” Deno’s foot slips off the gas, sending the van drifting to the shoulder.
There are moments when a thing is too impossible to the eye, too surreal to be true, that all you can do is stare as your extremities slowly go numb.
The mountain, which has been a constant fixture of the landscape since I moved here, is no more. Lights dance at the edges of my vision. There is no air in here. What happened to the air? Nothing. I’d forgotten to breathe. What is causing these sharp pains in my rib cage? It’s my heart breaking for these people, my neighbors, who have lived their last day frightened and suffering and dying in ways my imagination refuses to show me.
My fingertips splay on the glass. The van is too small—why am I always stuck in a van?—to contain this torrent of emotion. I’m all the way across town, and the impact of this horror is crushing me. What must it be like for the harbingers to experience this up close, time and time again?
Deno slams on the brakes a moment before rear-ending an uneven backup of stopped cars. Dozens of headlights point toward a slope of rock and debris covering the road.
“My dad said this could happen. The old miners have always said the mountain wasn’t stable. They said…” Deno’s bottom lip quivers before he sucks it into his mouth and bites down. “My parents—” His voice cracks. He covers his mouth, but the sob slips through.
“Th-they don’t live over th-there.” Lacey is right. But both of their homes are on the other side of the debris field. Hopefully, clear of it. Her body shakes as she holds out a hand. “Cell phone,” she says to me, and I pull it from my pocket and hand it to her. She places a call, and begins to cry as the phone rings and rings and finally goes to voicemail.
My throat clamps shut. Guilt twists my guts like a twirling fork. My house, my family, is safe, all because my dad makes a lot of money and bought a house in the Estates. I press away the need to call my father. By now, he’s in Pittsburgh or almost there. Safe.
“Where…uh, where should we go?” I shouldn’t ask this. Asking any question to my friends, who do not know if their families are safe, is a cruelty right now, but we can’t remain here. The huge fall of rock and earth looks at least twenty feet high. A narrow stretch of it spans straight through the valley, spewing debris nearly straight across to the base of Mt. Franklin. We can’t pass through any of these streets to the other side of the slide, to where Lacey and Deno’s houses lie.
Deno squeezes through a gap in two cars and turns around in a hair salon parking lot. “I think I know a way around.”
“Around to where?” Lacey wails. “Does the van suddenly grow wings?”
All three of us turn around. Behind us is a backed-up Tetris screen of stopped cars. Several are overturned. People are getting out, running erratically. One car is halfway up a telephone pole and on fire. The highway is impassable.
Lacey takes a death grip on my arm. “What if the rest of the mountain goes?”
Deno pins her with a look of pure determination. “Screw the mountain.” He reaches out, squeezes her hand. “We’re finding our families.”
The fight goes right out of Lacey. I hug her as Deno maneuvers the van away from the slide and along the side of the road. He jumps the sidewalk and cuts through another parking lot, into a residential neighborhood. Visibility is crap. The wipers swipe mud and rain and whatever else the wind feels like throwing at the windshield. It doesn’t help that the speed limit is twenty-five and he’s blasting through at fifty.
My face is wet with tears, even though I’m not aware that I’m crying. Reality feels like a thin, insubstantial thing. There is a small, self-preserving slice of me that desperately wants my head to believe we are actors in an action movie. Because the alternative pushes my sanity to the brink. “Do you know where you’re going?” I ask Deno.
“There’s a dirt road up here that leads to one of the old mine entrances in Mt. Franklin.” His jaw is set. “We can get close to the edge of the slide and go the rest of the way on foot. I think I remember where it is. It will hopefully bypass most of the debris.”
I don’t mention how very unsafe this sounds. How much I hate this plan, because, if it were my family down there in the valley, I’d take unwise risks, too. Nothing could change Deno’s course, now, anyway. We bust through someone’s hedges and plunge into the forest. There is a road here. Sort of. It’s full of ruts and rocks and small trees, and it slopes distinctly upward. The aging minivan bounces violently. I drag the seat belt over Lacey and me and click it. Not that it’s going to help us if the van goes tumbling.
“Slow down, will you please?” I grind out, clinging to the handle above the window. “Losing a wheel isn’t going to help.”
Deno expels a harsh breath but slows down. Not a lot, but enough so each bounce doesn’t render us airborne. He nurses the van to a rocky area where the slide pushed debris clear across the valley to the foot of Mt. Franklin. Here, he comes to a stop, unable to go farther. I gaze at the blocked road ahead. If we could continue, we’d wind up in the general area of my development. I’m nearly 100 percent sure the north face of Mt. Franklin—where I live—is unscathed.
“We walk from here.” Deno opens the door and jumps out. “If we just skirt the edge of the slide, it should take us to the center of town. To our…homes.” He doesn’t say families. “Angie, if you don’t want to go…”
Where else would I go at this point? Trudge home alone to an empty, dark house? Roger’s automatic feeder and water bowl will keep him fed and hydrated for at least a few days. And, in any case, I’m not leaving my friends now, when we need to stay together. When I need to stay with them. I look behind me, not for the first time. For something moving in the dark forest. For the Beekeeper who vowed to keep me “safe.” No, I don’t want to be alone.
For an answer, I start walking. So do they.