Little Brother

owned by Japan Airlines, one of Harajuku Fun Madness’s sponsors, and the staff had all made a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. They’d given us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi made from sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell like very runny dog-droppings. But it tasted really good. Or so Darryl told me. I wasn’t going to eat that stuff.

I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone’s wifinder about three blocks up O’Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy “Asian Massage Parlor” with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network’s name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.

“If it’s in there, I’m not going,” Darryl said.

“You all got your wifinders?” I said.

Darryl and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, being too cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate little directional fob.

“OK, fan out and see what we see. You’re looking for a sharp drop off in the signal that gets worse the more you move along it.”

I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone’s toes. A female voice said “oof” and I spun around, worried that some crack-ho was going to stab me for breaking her heels.

Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had a shock of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with big sunglasses that were practically air-force goggles. She was dressed in striped tights beneath a black granny dress, with lots of little Japanese decorer toys safety pinned to it — anime characters, old world leaders, emblems from foreign soda-pop.

She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew.

“Cheese,” she said. “You’re on candid snitch-cam.”

“No way,” I said. “You wouldn’t —”

“I will,” she said. “I will send this photo to truant watch in thirty seconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it’ll be all yours. I think that’s more than fair.”

I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb — one with blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. “Who are you supposed to be, the Popsicle Squad?”

“We’re the team that’s going to kick your team’s ass at Harajuku Fun Madness,” she said. “And I’m the one who’s right this second about to upload your photo and get you in so much trouble —”

Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notorious for its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick’s block off.

Then the world changed forever.

We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every Californian knows instinctively — earthquake. My first inclination, as always, was to get away: “when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.” But the fact was, we were already in the safest place we could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the road where bits of falling cornice could brain us.

Earthquakes are eerily quiet — at first, anyway — but this wasn’t quiet. This was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder than anything I’d ever heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove me to my knees, and I wasn’t the only one. Darryl shook my arm and pointed over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising from the northeast, from the direction of the Bay.

There was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, that spreading black shape we’d all grown up seeing in movies. Someone had just blown up something, in a big way.

There were more rumbles and more tremors. Heads appeared at windows up and down the street. We all looked at the mushroom cloud in silence.

Then the sirens started.

I’d heard sirens like these before — they test the civil defense sirens at noon on Tuesdays. But I’d only heard them go off unscheduled in old war movies and video games, the kind where someone is bombing someone else from above. Air raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made it all less real.

“Report to shelters immediately.” It was like the voice of God, coming from all places at once. There were speakers on some of the electric poles, something I’d never noticed before, and they’d all switched on at once.

“Report to shelters immediately.” Shelters? We looked at each other in confusion. What shelters? The cloud was rising steadily, spreading out. Was it nuclear? Were we breathing in our last breaths?

The girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore ass downhill, back toward the BART station and the foot of the hills.

“REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY.” There was screaming now, and a lot of running around. Tourists — you can always spot the tourists, they’re the ones who think CALIFORNIA = WARM and spend their San Francisco holidays freezing in shorts and t-shirts — scattered in every direction.

“We should go!” Darryl hollered in my ear, just barely audible over the shrieking of the sirens, which had been joined by traditional police sirens. A dozen SFPD cruisers screamed past us.

“REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY.”

“Down to the BART station,” I hollered. My friends nodded. We closed ranks and began to move quickly downhill.

Chapter 3

This chapter is dedicated to Borderlands Books, San Francisco’s magnificent independent science fiction