It began as a distant rumble, a freight-train-bowling-down-the-tracks growl that escalated into an ear-drum shattering roar before the three of them quite registered what they were hearing.
Then the walls shimmered, the shade on the floor lamp beside the armchair began swinging back and forth, slightly at first, then more and more rapidly, until it was vibrating so rapidly that it seemed more likely to disintegrate than to stop. The lamp itself began rocking, swiveling on its base until with a clattering of smashing bulbs it crashed against the floor.
“Earthquake!” Catherine yelled.
In the kitchen, cabinet doors flew open and plates, saucers, glasses cascaded onto the floor, shattering into glistening fragments.
From the back of the house they heard two children screaming.
Willard spun Catherine and Will around, almost shoving them as he yelled, “Outside! Get in the middle of the yard. I’ll get the others.”
Before they began moving, before he finished speaking, he was running toward the hall, struggling to keep his footing as the floor quivered and thrust beneath him.
He bounced once off the walls, stumbled around the corner that led to the back bedrooms The house was still trembling as if it were itself terrified of what was happening. The roar became even more menacing.
Suze and Burt were huddled in the doorway to Suze’s room. All of the other doors were closed but shaking so violently in their frames that they threatened to burst open.
“Daddy!” they screamed in unison.
He grabbed Suze up in one arm and gripped Burt’s hand.
Behind him, shards of drywall from the ceiling clattered to the floor, breaking and bouncing as if they had a life of their own. Somewhere, a window shattered.
“We can’t stay here,” Willard yelled above the booming of the quake. “This place is falling apart.”
Hauling Burt behind him so rapidly that the boy’s feet barely touched the roiling floor, he crossed Suze’s room in two strides, let go of Burt-who nearly tripped but managed not to-and opened her window with a single thrust, then popped the screen out with a second. Before it struck the ground, he had lowered Suze out the window until she was on her feet, then yelled, “Meet Mom out back!” and grasped Burt’s arm and began boosting him out the window as well. By then Suze was beyond the corner of the house and out of sight, and Burt was halfway there when Willard crawled out the opening and ran alongside the house, grabbing Burt up as he ran.
Bits of stucco flaked off the side of the house as they passed, a dust-brown scuff of snow that caught in their hair and settled on their clothes.
The ground was still shaking when the five of them clustered in the center of the back yard, far from trees, power lines, anything that could crash down upon them and injure or kill them.
The ground still jerked back and forth as if it were electrified.
Perhaps sixty, perhaps as many as ninety seconds had passed.
A whining howl rose, banshee-like, from somewhere inside the house, just as the window of the boys’ bedroom exploded, frosting the ground below with fragments of glass.
“Crud! Cruuud!” Will shook off his mother’s grasp and bounded toward the house. Willard reached him before the boy could cover more than a few yards, threw his arms around Will’s chest, and began pulling him back toward the others.
“No, Will. You can’t!”
“But it’s…”
Another sound rose behind Willard. One even more horrifying that the dog’s cry.
“Mommmy! Daddy!”
Staggered by the voice, Willard caught Catherine’s eyes just as she started forward, whispering, “Sams!”
Even as he shook his head, even as he gestured for her to stay with Burt and Suze, even as he shoved Will, Jr., toward her, even as one part of his mind screamed “Sams is dead! You know he’s dead! It can’t be him!” another part-a stronger, more desperate part-responded to his child’s cry instinctively, impulsively, and he raced toward the house, unconscious of the fact that the ground beneath his feet was abruptly solid and unmoving, and threw himself through the open window frame, impervious to the savage pain as broken shards sliced his arms and thighs.