The Second Intelligent Species: The Cyclical Earth Read Free Page B

sat along the road looking and waiting for it to subside.
    Beth was crying and shaking, and I was just kneeling, wondering what to do. I couldn’t think from all the noise. I was experiencing sensory overload. What could I do? My house was broken in half, and the last remaining power wires in the country were lying on the car and truck. As I looked down the street I could see everyone else’s home had taken as much damage as ours had, some maybe more.
    We waited for the tremors to subside completely before we attempted to get to our feet. They decreased in magnitude, but the rumbling remained.
    I felt Beth release my arm as feeling came back to my fingers. “Nick, there’s not supposed to be earthquakes around here. Not this big. What to hell was that? Nick… the kids.” She reached for her phone and struggled to push the same buttons she had pushed a hundred thousand times before without thinking. “I can’t get a signal. I’ll have to use the one in the house.” Again we were the last people in New York to have a landline. “Sally should be home from school by now, shouldn’tshe?” She looked at her watch. She turned to run into the house.
    “Wait a minute,” I shouted. “Don’t go in there until we check the place out. I don’t think the rescue could get to us even if they wanted to. There are too many poles and lines in the road.” The utility company was slowly eliminating them and replacing them with Tesla poles. T-poles delivered electricity to homes from a greater distance without the need of wires. Our town would need only five but I guess we were last on the list. People were slow to change in these areas. “This is going to take a long time to clean this up, maybe now they’ll do away with them.” I took her hand and led her up the steps. “C’mon, let’s get your phone… go slow.” I was looking for structural weaknesses in the walls.
    The back half, where the kids’ rooms are—correction, were—fell off and collapsed. Thank God they all moved out a year ago and it was just Beth and me. From the kitchen I could see right out into the back yard. Getting to the phone was not a simple task. Every dish and glass that we had in the cabinets was on the floor, directly in our path. The table and chairs were tipped over and shifted to the north end of the kitchen. The floor had sunk nearly three feet. The foundation near the back half had crumbled away.
    I finally reached the handset and lifted it to my ear, “This phone’s dead too, and all the power’s out.” I guess I could have told her that before we went into the house, but with all the confusion, I never thought about it. I was too busy watching the utility poles fall into the middle of the road. My mind had not put the two together.
    In an outburst of desperation, Beth cried, “We can’t do anything here. Let’s go check on the kids. We’ve got to do something… Can we move the car or the truck?”
    Both vehicles were unapproachable due to potentially hot wires. Just because there was no power in the house didn’t guarantee there wasn’t juice outside. I didn’t want to take that chance. I had to come up with a plan to calm her down. “We can walk down to the fire house. They’ve got radios, and it’s an emergency shelter. Plus they’ll need every swinging dick they can get hold of.” I guess I could have spared her from the “fireman talk.” I had been a fireman for fourteen years in the same volunteer fire department. I guess it never really leaves your blood. My training kicked in. “Get all of our pills. We may be there a couple days. They’ll have food and water. Plus they’ll need the help. Get whatever else we’ll need for two days. We’ll be back by then; the insurance people will be next, then the carpenters. I’ve been meaning to remodel just one more time before I sell the place anyway.”I tried to reassure her but she was focused on the kids.
    She threw some underwear, socks, our pills, and one