plunged. The pier and boat slips had disappeared.
Bobby put his arm around her waist. They held each other, not speaking, staring dumbly at the sunken restaurant and dock. Everything they’d worked for, the sixteen-hour days, her savings. It was all underwater. Their insurance wouldn’t come near paying for the loss.
Staring at the wreckage a few minutes longer, Lauren took the boy by the hand and walked back to the car.
“We’re going home,” she said. Maybe she could think there, figure out what they’d have to do to survive and how she could find out about her parents, whether they were still alive. She was so tired. All she wanted to do was lie down and let sleep come.
Lauren finally felt the emotional release. Living through all this wasn’t easy. She whispered a quick prayer of thanksgiving to God for sparing Bobby. She’d lost her son, daughter-in-law, and husband, and didn’t want to lose her grandson. She couldn’t begin to think about how she’d survive if something happened to him. So far, they’d been incredibly lucky. If she found their home smashed to pieces, it wouldn’t matter.
On the way home, she stopped at Goode’s Convenience Store. It was just off Route 641 near the western side of the lake.
The front windows and the glass door were shattered.
Elizabeth knew Vern Goode and his wife, Gloria. Vern also had a gun-and-ammo business and did a brisk trade during the hunting season. The metal, prefab building had two sections—one for the convenience store, the other for the gun shop.
Lauren told Bobby to stay put. She slipped Lou Hessel’s .357 magnum into a jacket pocket. She didn’t like the feel of the place.
“Vern,” she shouted, gripping the heavy pistol in her pocket. “You hear me, Vern?”
No one answered, so she stepped inside the convenience store. The exterior of the one-story building was in fairly good shape. The walls were bowed out slightly, but that was about all. It was different inside. Shelves were knocked down, and part of the ceiling had fallen. The light fixtures dangled from wires. Almost all of the merchandise was missing—canned food, soft drinks, bread, milk, liquor.
She walked next door to the gun shop. The door hung open on broken hinges.
“Vern, it’s Lauren Mitchell,” she called.
She slowly stepped inside. The gun cases were smashed. Everything in the shop had been removed—the rifles and shotguns that had stood in racks behind the front counter; the boxes of ammo; the pistols that had been displayed in glass cases. The cash register.
She took a couple of steps and stopped. She was standing in something sticky. It was dark in the narrow store. Lauren opened a window blind and in the thin light saw a dark stain that had spread out on the floor from behind one of the counters.
“Vern!” she shouted. “Gloria. Anybody here? Please come on out. It’s Lauren.”
She moved toward the counter, one cautious step at a time. The black stain looked like a puddle of motor oil.
Lauren peered around the counter. Vern Goode and his wife lay face-up on the floor. Both had been shot in the head.
Lauren leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
Someone had killed them for the guns and ammunition. Lauren didn’t doubt it for a minute. A weapon was worth its weight in gold now.
She wondered how long they’d been dead. She wanted to bury them and look for the daughter, but there wasn’t time. It was getting late in the day, and she wanted to be back at her home before the sun went down.
If there was trouble, it would come in the dark.
NEAR BLYTHEVILLE, ARKANSAS
JANUARY 14
6:05 A.M.
THE SUN WAS BARELY UP WHEN ATKINS AND Elizabeth got a shortwave transmission from Walt Jacobs in Memphis. He told them that Paul Weston had arrived at the earthquake center with two other members of the Seismic Safety Commission. They’d come in a National Guard helicopter provided by the governor of Kentucky. That same chopper was headed their way to pick them up.
Thirty minutes later, a UH-1 Huey with Kentucky National Guard markings landed near the creek bed. Carrying only their portable seismograph and laptop, Atkins and Elizabeth were happy to get off the ground. Some of the dogs had gotten bolder during the night and were moving back into the open.
As soon as they were airborne, the pilot motioned them forward to the cockpit. The crew chief, a young corporal with a blond mustache, gave them headsets so they could talk over the droning roar of the engine.
The pilot explained that Jacobs had a message for Atkins: he wanted him to enter a building on the Memphis riverfront and retrieve data from an array of seismic instruments set up in the basement and on the roof.
Atkins let that thought register. He’d forced himself to enter dozens of earthquake-damaged buildings since Mexico City. It had never been easy.
“It’s the headquarters for some travel agency,” the pilot said. “The Blake Building. It’s at Main and Vance Street, facing the river. Landing anywhere near it’s going to be a bitch. That part of the city is pretty torn up.”
Atkins remembered Jacobs talking about the building’s unique construction, how it had been specially designed to withstand earthquakes. Its “base isolation” technology relied on shock absorbers made from a rubber and lead composite that were shaped like an accordion and placed in the foundation and at key joints; they allowed the building to remain nearly stationary while the ground moved beneath it. Because of its potential survivability during a big quake, the building’s owners had agreed to let the university’s earthquake center equip it with an array of seismographs and other instruments. It even had a GPS satellite receiver anchored on the roof.
The helicopter wouldn’t be able to wait for them, the pilot explained apologetically. They were under strict orders to return immediately to Kentucky as soon as they put them on the ground. They were assigned to a medevac unit that had been working around the clock ever since the earthquake.
The flight to Memphis took forty minutes. They flew straight down the Mississippi, which had spread out three and four miles in places, swollen by the flood. Atkins knew it was going to get worse; as soon as the massive surge from Kentucky Lake hit the Mississippi at Cairo, it was going to blow out a lot of levee walls.
“Maybe I better prepare you for this,” the pilot said as they approached Memphis. “A lot of the city is pretty much gone.”
They saw the distant wall of black smoke long before they had Memphis in view.
“Those are mainly gas and oil fires,” the pilot said. “A lot of pipe lines cross the river around Memphis, ten or eleven of them. They all broke and some of them are still pumping out gas and oil. The river’s an inferno. It’s burning from Mud Island thirty miles downstream. Oil storage tanks blew up. They’re still going off like torches. You gotta be real careful flying down there.”
Sitting on a bench seat, Elizabeth looked out a porthole and recognized the familiar S bend in the river, the beginning of the sweeping curve the Mississippi made as it passed Memphis. She’d first seen it as her plane from Los Angeles made its landing approach. That seemed like months ago.
Moments later, she got an up-close look at the city. The panorama of destruction was unlike anything she’d ever seen in the United States. All three bridges across the river, the Interstate 55, I-40, and the railroad bridge were down; some of the massive concrete pilings were still standing, but there were gaping holes where the decks had buckled and fallen into the water.
The Mississippi was on fire below the smashed I-55 bridge; that’s where the oil and gas storage terminals were clustered on the Memphis side of the river. The burning tanks were throwing shafts of black, billowing smoke a thousand feet into the sky.
Hugging the Memphis shoreline, the pilot pointed out a heavily damaged building. “That used to be the Pyramid,” he said.
Atkins had never seen the city’s distinctive convention center and sports arena complex. Shaped like a
