THE LIGHT SHOW—THE PULSING HUES WERE almost psychedelic—kept blazing in the sky. If anything, the colors were more vivid as Atkins held the gas pedal to the floorboard of Lauren’s aging Chevy Blazer. It was hard not to stare at the dazzling spectacle as he pushed the speed over seventy miles an hour on the two-lane highway, ignoring the icy patches as he covered the last ten miles into Mayfield.
They were in extreme southwestern Kentucky, about thirty miles from the Tennessee line and another 120 miles due north of Memphis. The Mississippi River was just to the west. Atkins was glad he’d put Kentucky Lake far behind them.
“What about those lights in the water?” Elizabeth asked. She hadn’t been able to get them out of her mind.
Neither had Atkins. “My best and probably wrong guess is that some hot gases are venting from a deep fracture in hard rock maybe fifteen or twenty miles down,” he said. “It could be some kind of hot phosphorous that’s reacting with the cold water.”
“Or maybe radon,” Elizabeth said. The inert gas was radioactive. Its sudden release was a recognized precursor of big quakes, but she was unaware of anything in the literature that described such a large venting.
“Who knows?” Atkins said. “It’s got me stumped.” His heated-gas theory didn’t satisfy him. The subject was one of the first things he wanted to discuss with Walt Jacobs or Guy Thompson as soon as he could raise them on his cell phone. He’d tried repeatedly during the last hour. So had Elizabeth. The reception kept breaking off.
Elizabeth had leaned back in her seat with her arms folded, trying to keep warm. The Blazer’s decrepit heater, even on full blast, put out only a trickle of warm air. She touched Atkins’ hand.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you back at the dam,” she said. She’d been wanting to tell him that.
“Forget it,” Atkins said. “You were right back there. Sometimes I can get a little obstinate. The next time, just tell me to count to ten and keep my mouth closed.”
Elizabeth smiled, and Atkins realized how good it felt to be with her. Just sitting next to her gave him pleasure. That feeling—the joy of simply being in a woman’s presence—had been missing from his life for a long time. He was looking forward to getting to know her better.
They pulled off at the Mayfield exit. Atkins rolled up to a railroad crossing just as the red lights started flashing and the metal gates clanked down. A whistle blew far down the tracks. As the train rounded a curve, they saw the bright headlight of the diesel.
“He’s really highballing,” Atkins said as the freight train roared past them, the wheels banging on the rails.
The crossing blocked the main road into Mayfield. The town looked deserted. The rotunda of the courthouse and a church spire loomed in the darkness.
Later, Atkins remembered having had the presence of mind to check his wristwatch when it started. They both heard a deep, low-pitched rumble, the sound blotting out every other noise, even the rolling clatter of the freight train. The noise seized control of their brains, nerves, senses. Invaded them and drove out everything else. Stronger than thunder, the roar seemed to rise straight from the ground.
It was 2:16 A.M. Atkins scribbled the time on the palm of his hand with a ballpoint.
Elizabeth looked at him. They both knew what that sound meant.
“This is it,” she said.
The rumble kept building in intensity. Atkins had heard about the loud ground thunder once before, in Armenia in 1988. A magnitude 7.8 that leveled four cities. Survivors recalled that when the rumbling stopped, a moment of calm followed. It was like the eye of a hurricane before the shaking started.
Atkins tried to break it down into science. The sudden compression in the ground also compressed the air, causing the noise. The stronger, more violent the compression, the louder the sound.
It occurred to him at that same moment that they were much too close to the railroad tracks. He slammed the gear into reverse and floored the Blazer, the tires squealing on the pavement as he backed away.
The train kept passing in front of them, a blur of boxcars, gondolas, tankers. Then with an explosive burst that startled him, Atkins was driven upward in his seat so hard his head slammed into the roof.
“It’s coming,” he shouted to Elizabeth, who was trying to hang on to her seatbelt shoulder strap.
The Blazer was pitched up and down in rapid, bone-jarring movements. The left door sprung open, and Elizabeth almost fell out. Atkins pulled her back inside.
“Oh, yessssssss!” she said. “This one’s real.”
They were shaken from side to side, the heaving ground slamming them together hard, shoulder to shoulder. The Blazer rocked back and forth, then up and down. The entire chassis was swaying.
“This is a magnitude 8 for sure,” Atkins shouted.
Elizabeth said, “More.”
Atkins had backed up about twenty yards from the railroad crossing before the earthquake hit. He realized it wasn’t far enough.
“Get out!” Atkins yelled. They were still dangerously close to the train. Many of the derailed freight cars and tankers had been thrown on their sides. Still coupled together, they were writhing like a dying snake, metal grinding on metal.
Atkins and Elizabeth both staggered out of the Blazer and were instantly knocked down by the wavelike ground motion. Atkins recognized the P waves. Shooting up from the deep earth, the first seismic waves to hit after an earthquake struck, they were capable of traversing both the mantle and crust.
Atkins had experienced strong shaking before and knew it was only starting. They hadn’t seen the worst of it.
He laid out the sequence in his mind. They were feeling the P waves, which had the strongest velocity and speed of all seismic waves and were the first waves a seismograph recorded. They resembled sound waves and could boom like thunder when they hit the surface. They spread out as they moved up through the ground, pushing and pulling at the rock.
The slower, harder-hitting S waves would arrive next, a series of violent sideways movements that sheared the rock at right angles and could knock hell out of the ground and anything standing on it.
The P and S waves were called body waves because they originated in the body of the rock deep underground. They moved up from the hypocenter of the earthquake to the surface.
A second group of waves, surface waves, followed the body waves. These were the real killers. Slower moving than the P or S waves, they were the last to be picked up by a seismograph. They were named after the two men who discovered them: Love, a mathematician, and Rayleigh, a physicist. Their motion, which resembled waves rippling across a lake, was confined to the ground surface.
The Love wave moved the ground from side to side in a powerful whipsawing action that destroyed the foundations of buildings. They arrived before the Rayleigh waves, which resembled waves rolling across the ocean. The Rayleigh wave made the ground billow, rocking it up and down in a series of rapid undulations.
The two groups of waves, body and surface, created an incredibly powerful one-two knockout punch.
Atkins’ only thought was to get farther away from the wrecked train. Some of those cars were probably loaded with oil, natural gas, or some other inflammable chemical.
Supporting Elizabeth by the arm, Atkins managed to stumble forward a few steps before the next strong shake knocked them down again.
“Try to crawl,” he said.
The ground was still moving in sharply defined waves. These were probably S waves, Atkins thought. The freight cars were swinging out in an arc, fanning back and forth in rhythm to the ground’s wildly oscillating surface motions. Atkins glanced back just as a boxcar whipsawed across the road and flattened the Blazer.
The ground shaking had intensified. The rapid back-and-forth undulations were remarkably powerful.
Atkins smelled something. Three oil tanker cars were burning. Black smoke climbed high over the trees.
Another tanker blew in a bright flash of fire.
“We’ve got to get away from here before the whole thing goes up,” Atkins said.
Supporting each other, sometimes crawling, they moved away from the wrecked train. The ground was still heaving, the jolts so severe and frequent it was impossible to stand.
“Listen,” Atkins said.
A new sound.
The earth had started to rip apart in a fissure that cut across the railroad tracks and swept up into Mayfield. Atkins had seen the ground do the same thing three days earlier during the magnitude 7 quake, but it didn’t compare with this. As rocks moved and sheared apart deep in the ground, a huge trench was forming, opening up right before their eyes. As the earth split open, the noise was deafening.
Atkins tried to get his bearings. He looked toward the town and saw the church spire rocking back and forth, silhouetted against the black sky. Worried the earth was going to rip open right under them, he got back on his feet and helped Elizabeth stand up. Just as they were getting used to the left-right ground movement, the seismic waves changed direction. The shaking, stronger than ever, shifted to right-left. Atkins guessed they were starting to feel the surface waves. It was hard to distinguish among the different waves when you were caught up in an actual quake.
“John, look!” Elizabeth said. She’d dropped to one knee to keep her balance.
He turned as the ground broke open under the upended train and swallowed a string of boxcars.
Four or five cars just disappeared.
The foul odor that poured from the opening smelled like sulphuric acid.
Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the earthquake was over.
The fissure slammed closed, the sound reminding Atkins of an avalanche only more abrupt, the rumble of snow crashing down a mountainside. It left a jagged scar with a two-foot shelf, or offset. It was as if a carving knife had ripped long slashes in the ground.
Atkins’ wristwatch showed the shaking had lasted four minutes and five seconds. Elizabeth agreed with that time. If it was anywhere near accurate, it had to be a record.
The main thrust, Atkins guessed, had driven one side of the fault sharply upward. He figured this “hanging wall” was considerably higher than the other side of the fault.
“I think there was some strike-slip displacement,” Elizabeth said. This was horizontal, or back-and-forth, movement along the fault. The direction of the slip had followed a left-lateral motion, meaning each side of the fault had moved left relative to the other.
Freight cars and tankers littered the tracks. Some were piled on top of each other, crushed and flattened. Another tanker blew up, an orange-white ball of fire shooting high into the sky.
Keeping their distance, Atkins and Elizabeth cautiously moved around the end of the train. They needed to get to the Explorer, which Atkins had left parked at the Mayfield High School about five hours earlier. It was only a few blocks away.