CHAPTER 8: AFTERSHOCK…

Envy watched Douglass tense in another full-body contortion, glanced at Rusty, who was still dancing the, ‘Fuck You Mother Earth, We Survived!’ dance, glanced at the boulder that had stopped fifteen feet away, and said, “Rusty! Grab Douglass, we gotta get on the other side of that boulder.”

For his part, Douglass was writhing in obvious pain.

Rusty stopped dancing, still breathless in excitement. “What?”

“Grab him!” Envy snapped. “There’s gonna be another one.” She jabbed her finger at the boulder. “And that is coming our way.”

Rusty glanced at the doctor, glanced at the boulder, and returned his attention to the doc with a facial twist that said that he didn’t think that would be such a bad thing, after all.

“Right now!” Envy said, grabbing Douglass by the arm and tugging. He was too heavy to drag more than a few inches by herself before the friction from the bushes brought his shuddering body to a halt.

Rusty glanced again at the boulder, saw that she was now in the line of fire, and hastily ran down to help her. He threw the squirming man over his shoulder like a sack of guns and started charging up the hill so fast that Envy had trouble keeping up. They were a good twenty feet above the boulder before Douglass started screaming again.

“Put him down!” Envy cried. “It’s happening aga—”

The earth under them shuddered with a violence that knocked the big man and his burden to the ground with hammer-to-anvil finality. “Captain, I think this one’s bigger than—” Rusty began, his voice much less enthusiastic than before. He was cut off when one of the falling rocks brushed his head as it tumbled down the hill and Rusty went totally still and limp, his body rolling like a sausage, whereas Douglass just screamed and screamed…

We’re gonna die here, Envy thought, clinging to the ground and desperately watching the hill above them for rocks. Boulders that had been in the same place for millennia were being dislodged and tumbling loose, pocking black gouges into the frozen blueberry bushes where they bounced.

Then, up ahead, she saw a big one, a rock that could have filled up her entire front driveway, bouncing like a rubber ball down from the peaks up above, straight at them.

“Rusty!” she cried, “rock coming!”

Rusty was out like a light. Douglass, who was closer, was still thrashing wildly. On all fours, she grabbed one of Douglass’s flailing arms and tried dragging him out of the way of the massive chunk of granite. He actually kicked her. Kicked her. As she was huddled there, the wind knocked out of her from his blow to her solar plexus, the doctor started thrashing again, sobbing and begging for God to save him. Breathless, Envy glanced up at the oncoming boulder, knowing she couldn’t make her limbs move fast enough get out of the way in time.

The rock—which was approximately the size of a house—hit the slight bump of an outcropping directly up the hill from them and bounced, hurling into the air and leaving her an unmistakable feeling of presence between her and the sun as it sailed only ten feet over the top of them before hitting the ground a hundred feet down the hill to continue its downward tumble.

Shit, Envy cried, flattening herself back to the mountain as the big boulder plunged down into the riverbed below. She lay there as the terrifying shaking went on and on, not looking above her, figuring the house-sized rocks would either kill them or they wouldn’t, and there wasn’t anything a five-foot-four monkey could do about it.

This time, the shaking lasted hours. So long, in fact, that, by the time it was over, the riverbed below was completely packed with boulders and the river itself, which usually bounced happily over the comparatively tiny rocks, was backing up in several places, filling the valley above it with ice-cold springwater.

There goes the road out, Envy thought, grimacing as she hesitantly got to her feet and surveyed the wreckage below. The road that had once been a winding snake through the valley was now alternately covered with water or broken into so many chunks that it looked like river ice during Breakup. She could even see her truck, upside down, resting amongst the boulders at the bottom of the hill.

Envy glanced at her companions. Rusty was bleeding from the gash in his temple and Douglass had gone eerily still and quiet about an hour ago. Neither one was moving. She swallowed hard, suddenly hoping very much that her two companions had survived, because after something like this, she was pretty sure they were going to be some of the only ones who survived, and she didn’t want to be alone in the world. It was a weird, dumb thought, but the moment she had it, she realized that as many times as she got a helicopter to drop her off in the middle of the Bush so she could hike back to civilization alone and prove her mettle against Nature, this was different. There wouldn’t be anyone to hear her near-death stories when she wandered out of the woods. There would be no wide-eyed looks of wonder, no murmurs of, ‘Wow, how cool!’ It would just be her, and, by herself she was boring.

Still not willing to get back to her feet, she crab-crawled over to Douglass, who was closest, and grabbed his shoulder. “You okay?” she called. “You get hit by a rock?”

Nothing. He was breathing and his face was covered in moss and detritus and sweat and scratches, but he was obviously not coming back for some time.

She gave the rest of his body a cursory glance, but saw no blood or protruding bones, and went on to Rusty.

The big man had come to a rest a few dozen yards down the hill, on his side in a near-fetal position, he roll arrested by the angle of his knees. Unlike Douglass, he did not look good. There was blood everywhere, and one of his arms looked bent in a way it shouldn’t have been.

“Rusty!” Envy called, carefully pushing his heavy body onto his back. His face was a sheaf of blood and there was a two-inch gash in his scalp where it had been grazed by the boulder. “Oh shit…Rusty!” She shook him.

The big man didn’t even twitch. She held her ear over his chest, but couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. Most of the blood, she determined, was coming from the gash in his head, which was good…except for the fact he had lost a lot of blood. Envy glanced around, looking for the silver chest that had contained the first aid kit.

She didn’t see it. Everything from their camp—tent, weapons, supplies, duffels—was scattered down the mountainside in a haphazard clump. She found the blanket nearby, but the smaller things, like the fire-starting equipment, the flashlights, and the hatchet—were all either lost in the bushes or buried under the rototilled snowdrifts.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

She found pieces of the tent several hundred feet from where they had staked it into the earth, shredded and unrecognizable, torn apart by the lichen-riddled boulder that had been fifteen feet above them.

He saved us, Envy thought, glancing back at Douglass’s motionless form, dark and limp on the mountainside. Without the warning he had given them, they would have stayed where they were under the popular assumption that the first quake was always the worst, and the boulder would have crushed them to death on its way to the tent.

Somehow, Douglass had felt those earthquakes coming. She had no doubt about it. How he had done it still made no sense to her, but that he had done it was indisputable in her mind.

Maybe he senses magnetic abnormalities? she thought. She’d heard of dogs who had done the same, like in the big quake in Indonesia that killed over 200,000 people with that tsunami in the Indian Ocean. For months afterwards, there had been stories about people and tourists who had been saved by the agitated pets and livestock that had run for higher ground before the hundred-foot wall of water hit the mainlan—

No sooner had she had the thought of a massive wall of water did Envy’s chest constrict with the foreknowledge that there would be another one, here, and it would wipe Anchorage, Palmer, Wasilla, and the rest of the Mat-Su valley completely off the map. The feeling was so intense that for long minutes she found herself unable to breathe. She looked down into the tree-filled valley, which was even then dominated by a gleaming silver spire of beautifully laced architecture, standing completely unaffected by the terrifying tremblors. If anything, it looked prettier.

Fuck you, Envy thought, willing it to fall over. Just fuck you so hard.

Whatever their goal, whatever their purpose, the towering, glittering edifice seemed like a punctuation of some sort, a big alien middle finger, a clear statement of intent. This place is ours now, it stated, gleaming proud and alien over her home. And not even your biggest earthquakes can topple us.

But she could think about that later. Rusty needed help, and the first aid kid was nowhere to be found.

Because she had nothing else that she was willing to sacrifice, Envy took strips of it back up and wound them around Rusty’s head, hoping for some compression to stop the bleeding. The broken arm—if that’s what it was—they would have to deal with later.

Throughout her ministrations, Rusty remained motionless, maybe even dead. Please don’t be dead, Envy thought. She knew from experience she could survive, but without familiar faces, her shattered home dominated by an alien monstrosity, she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

Finding nothing else she could do for Rusty, she went looking for supplies. She had found a ripped and empty duffel bag, a box of matches—crushed, but still in its plastic Zip-Lock—and a badly scratched buck knife that had been broken at the tip from getting rolled over by a boulder by the time either of her friends stirred.

From the hill a hundred feet above her, the doctor groaned ad rolled onto his side, tucking into a fetal position.

Envy threw her finds back into the useable portion of the duffel bag, tied it shut, and hurried back up the tattered mountainside to the doctor. “You okay?” she asked, kneeling beside him. Douglass’s response was a shake of his head.

“There’s gonna be another earthquake?” Envy asked.

“Earthquake?” Douglass asked, blinking sightlessly at a point over her shoulder.

“Yeah,” she said. “Right after you started screaming, both times, there was an earthquake.”

“Oh.” He sat up and groaned, grabbing his forehead. “Weird.”

“Still can’t see?”

“I see you talking,” he said, not looking at her. “Lots of yellows and blues.”

O-kaaay. “What about the earthquakes?” Envy insisted, more nervously than she intended. “We gonna get hit with another earthquake?” The last one had almost killed her from sheer terror.

Douglass lifted his head and frowned, still staring sightlessly ahead. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You said the earth was screaming, then the screams changed color, then there was a massive earthquake,” Envy said.

“I didn’t feel an earthquake,” Douglass said. He glanced around. “What earthquake?”

At first, Envy thought he was bullshitting her. Then she realized that he had been thrashing so hard for so long that he probably just hadn’t felt it. “Uh…”

“How big was it?” he asked, almost causally. Like it had been some mild 5.0 that had knocked a plant off the windowsill.

“Big,” Envy said. “Biggest ones I’ve ever been in.”

He grunted at that and went back to rubbing his temples and blinking hard. “So, what, like a 6.5 or something?”

“Uh…” Again, she didn’t know what to say. “Well, obviously I’m not a scientist, but if I had to guess, I would say a 12.0 or something like that.”

Douglass choked on a laugh. “Earthquakes don’t come that big.”

“Exactly,” Envy said.

He glanced back at her sharply again, his eyes searching for her face.

“I’m not sure this was an earthquake.” She explained approximately where it fell on the seismic scale, along with how her truck was now upside down in a gulley and the road was a tattered mess.

He took that all in in silence, then grunted and dropped his head back into his hands, staring sightlessly at the ground between his feet.

“Tell me if you hear that screaming again,” Envy said.

Douglass just nodded, his slumped shoulders and hanging head a picture of depression.

“You’re the only reason we’re alive right now,” she added, instinctively trying to make him feel better. “There was a boulder. Took out our tent. We saw you going off again and managed to get out of the way before the second earthquake hit.”

He glanced at her sideways a bit, but said nothing.

Down the hill, Rusty stirred with a loud curse. “Fuckin arm is broke!” he shouted. “Fuck!”

Douglass lifted his head, a small frown on his face. “Is it?”

“I dunno if it’s broken or dislocated, but it looks horrible,” Envy said.

Douglass stood. “Can you…uh…take me down there?”

“Sure. You just let me know if you hear that screaming again, okay?”

He nodded. And, with her help, navigated the clumps of broken and mashed berry bushes to Rusty’s side.

The big man was holding his arm limply to his side, cursing and hissing under his breath.

“All right, where’s the pain?” Douglass asked.

“Shoulder,” Rusty said, through gritted teeth.

“Mind if I feel it?” the doctor asked, holding out his hand. Envy quickly moved the hand—which had been hovering over Rusty’s crotch—to the big man’s shoulder.

Rusty frowned, but nodded.

“He says go for it,” Envy said, lowering the doc’s hand to Rusty’s body.

Immediately, Rusty sucked in a breath through his teeth and groaned, his jaw tightening as Douglass prodded him and asked specific questions about different pain levels where.

“Well, I don’t have an X-Ray on me,” Douglass finally determined, “but I’m guessing it’s just a dislocation. Which sucks for you, but also makes things a little easier.”

Rusty was looking at him suspiciously, that classic Don’t-Trust-the-Doctor look that little kids got when big needles came out of cupboards, “Sucks for me how?”

“Well,” Douglass said, “I’ve gotta get your arm back in the socket, and it’s generally pretty simple, but you’re a big dude, so I might have to try a couple times.”

Rusty shot a nervous glance to Envy, who shrugged. “You wanna use the arm again?” she said.

“Okay,” Rusty said reluctantly.

“Then, uh, Envy, I’m gonna need you to…” Douglass flushed, “help me see what I’m doing here, okay? I need to be on his left side. He needs to be sitting up, shoulders up and back, and his arm hanging loose as he can get it. Then I can take it from there.”

And he did, too. Once Envy got them positioned, in one smooth motion, Douglass twisted Rusty’s arm, made him scream like a little girl, and popped the shoulder back into place.

“Wow,” Rusty said, swinging his arm immediately afterward. “It’s not hurting anymore.”

“Well, go easy on it,” Douglass said. “It’ll probably ache for a little while, and you might find it throbs when it gets cold. Arms aren’t supposed to come out of sockets, you know. You should try to avoid that in the future.”

It sounded like the normal confident chatter from a normal, cheerful doctor in a normal, everyday doctor’s office, and for a moment Envy forgot that they were stranded on a mountainside in the middle of an alien apocalypse. But then she did remember, and she felt her hopes sink once again to that dull realization that her world would never be the same.

The other two seemed to realize it about the same time, because their grins faded and they looked away.

“So, uh, Captain?” Rusty asked, glancing out at the megalith towering over the Mat-Su Valley. “What now?”

“Get ready for a tsunami,” Envy said. “A big one.”