The Chase (Isaac Bell 1)

The rock of the San Andreas Fault, whose walls had been grinding against each other for millions of years, abruptly split apart as the North American Plate under the land and the Pacific Plate beneath the sea unleashed their grip on each other and shifted in opposite directions, one to the north, the other to the south.

The unimaginable force raged toward the helpless city at seven thousand miles an hour in a disastrous spree that would leave monumental death and destruction in its wake.

The shock wave struck with savage swiftness. The pavement of the streets running east and west began to rise and crest before falling into troughs, as the quake rolled relentlessly forward and sent block upon block of tall buildings rocking and swaying like willow trees in a hurricane. Wood, mortar, and brick were never meant to withstand such an onslaught. One by one, the buildings began to crumble, their walls falling and avalanching into the streets under a cloud of dust and debris. Every window in the stores along the avenues burst and shattered onto the sidewalks in a shower of jagged shards.

Huge five-and ten-story buildings in the downtown business section toppled in a horrendous crash that sounded like a cannon barrage. Chasms opened and closed on the streets, some filling with groundwater and spilling into the gutters. The rails of streetcars and cable cars were twisted and bent like strands of spaghetti. The most violent shocks lasted for slightly more than a minute before diminishing, although smaller aftershocks continued off and on for several days.

When the full light of day showed through the chaos, all that was left of a major city of tall buildings, comprising a vast number of stores, offices, banks, theaters, hotels, restaurants, saloons and brothels, houses and apartments, was now a hundred square miles of jagged mounds of shattered masonry, splintered wood, and twisted iron. Though they’d looked substantial, most of the buildings were not reinforced and fell to pieces before the earthquake was thirty seconds old.

The city hall, the most impressive edifice west of Chicago, sat smashed and destroyed, its cast-iron columns lying shattered in the street. The Hall of Justice was a skeleton of mangled steel girders. The Academy of Sciences gone as though it had never stood. The post office was still standing but effectively demolished. The Majestic Theater would never stage a show again. Only the redoubtable six-story Wells Fargo Building had refused to tumble down despite a ravaged interior.

Thousands of chimneys had been first to fall. None was built with an earthquake in mind. Reaching through and high above the roofs, unable to bend and sway and with no support, they shuddered, then fractured and fell through houses and onto streets that were already clogged with debris. Later, it was determined that over a hundred people died from being crushed in their beds by falling chimneys.

Wooden two-and three-story homes leaned drunkenly in all directions, twisted on their foundations and tilted crazily in grotesque angles. Oddly, they stood intact but had shifted as much as twenty feet off their foundations, many across sidewalks and into the streets. Though their exterior walls were intact, their interiors were devastated, floors having collapsed, beams ruptured, the furniture and the inhabitants ending up crushed and buried in the basement. The cheaper houses in the poor part of town had collapsed in a pile of splintered beams and siding.

Those who had survived the earthquake were frozen in stunned shock, unable to speak or conversing in whispers. As the great clouds of dust began to settle, the cries of those who were injured or trapped under the fallen structures came as muffled wails. Even after the main force of the quake had passed, the earth still shuddered with aftershocks that continued to shake walls of brick onto the streets, causing their own tremors and strange rumbling sounds.

Few cities in the history of human civilizations had suffered as much devastating destruction as San Francisco. And yet it was only the opening act of an even-worse scene of disintegration that was yet to come.

THE SHOCK

hurled the bed Isaac and Marion were occupying across her bedroom. The apartment house around them rumbled and shook in a series of convulsions. The noise was deafening as dishes crashed to the floor, bookcases collapsed and the books scattered, pictures were slung off the walls, and the upright piano rolled like a boulder down a mountain across the slanting floor only to fall into the street because the entire front wall of the apartment house had detached itself from the rest of the building and cascaded in a flood of rubble onto the street below.

Bell grabbed Marion by the arm and half carried, half dragged her through a hail of falling plaster to the doorway, where they stood for the next thirty seconds while the horrendous noise became even more deafening. The floor moved like a stormy sea beneath their feet. They had barely reached the temporary shelter of the doorway when the great chimney at the top of the roof toppled and fell crashing through the two apartments above and smashed through the floor not ten feet away from them.

Bell recognized the bedlam as an earthquake. He had endured one almost as bad as the one that destroyed San Francisco while traveling with his parents in China when he was a young boy. He looked down into the pale face of Marion, who looked up at him, dazed and paralyzed by shock. He smiled grimly, trying to give her courage, as the shock waves tore the floor in the parlor from its beams and sent it collapsing into the lower apartment. He could only wonder if the occupants had been killed or were somehow managing to survive.

For nearly a full minute, they kept on their feet, clutching the doorframe, as their world turned into a nightmarish hell that went far beyond imagination.

Then slowly the tremors died away and an eerie silence settled over the ruin of the apartment. The cloud of dust from the fallen plaster ceiling filled their nostrils and made it difficult to breathe. Only then did Bell realize that they were still on their feet, clutching the doorframe, with Marion wearing a flimsy nightgown and him in a nightshirt. He saw that her radiant long hair had turned white from the plaster’s fine powder that still floated in the air like a mist.

Bell gazed across the bedroom. It looked like the contents of a wastebasket that had been dumped on the floor. He put his arm around Marion’s waist and pulled her toward the closet, where their clothes still hung on hangers, free of the dust.

“Dress and be quick about it,” he said firmly. “The building isn’t stable and might collapse at any minute.”

“What happened?” she asked in utter confusion. “Was it an explosion?”

“No, I believe it was an earthquake.”

She stared through the wreck of her parlor and saw the ruined buildings on the other side of the street. “Good Lord!” she gasped. “The wall is gone.” Then she discovered that her piano was missing. “Oh, no, my grandmother’s piano. Where did it go?”

“I think what’s left of it is down on the street,” replied Bell sympathetically. “No more talk. Hurry and throw on some clothes. We’ve got to get out of here.”

She ran to the closet, her composure back on keel, and Bell could see that she was as tough as the bricks that had fallen around them. While he put on the suit he’d worn the night before, she slipped into a cotton blouse under a coarse woolen jacket and skirt for warmth against the cool breeze blowing in from the sea. She was not only beautiful, Bell thought, she was also a practical, thinking woman.

“What about my jewelry, my family photos, my valuables?” she asked. “Shouldn’t I take them with me?”

“We’ll come back for them later, when we see if the building is still standing.”

They dressed in less than two minutes, and he led her around the gaping hole in the floor made by the fallen chimney and past the overturned furniture to the front door of the apartment. Marion felt as if she were in another world, as she stared out into open air where the wall once stood and saw her neighbors beginning to wander bewildered out into the middle of the street.

The door was wedged tight. The earthquake had shifted the building and jammed the door against its frame. Bell knew better than to attack the door by charging against it with his shoulder. That was a fool’s play. He balanced on one leg and lashed out with the other. The door failed to show the least sign of give. He looked around the room and surprised Marion with his strength when he picked up the heavy sofa and shoved it against the door like a battering ram. On the third thrust, the door splintered and swung crazily open on one hinge.

Thankfully, the stairway was still standing, winding its way to the floor below. Bell and Marion made it past the main entrance and found a high mountain of debris piled outside the apartment house, thrown there when the front wall crashed and buried the street. The front section of the structure looked as if it had been sliced clean by a giant cleaver.

Marion stopped, her eyes welling with tears at the sight of her mother’s piano sitting smashed on the crest of the rubble. Bell spotted two men making their way down the street through the wreckage on a wagon drawn by two horses. He left Marion for a few moments, walked over and conversed with the two men as if striking a deal. They nodded and he came back.

“What was that about?” asked Marion.