Undefeated, page 22
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I love montages in movies. The music, the sweat, the persistence, the victory. Like Rocky’s cinematic evolution from out-of-shape palooka to lean, trim, hard-punching heavyweight. The next two weeks of my life were like a montage with the sweat and the persistence but the victory…not so much.
I practiced tai chi on the beach and that definitely improved over the two weeks. My walks became longer, the weights I could lift at the gym went from three pounds to five…because I am a machine.
But I wasn’t jumping around on the top of museum steps. I wasn’t jumping anywhere. Or doing any fast movements in general. In triumphant montages people tend to get faster. I got slower.
I didn’t paint a nursery either. No overalls with a splash of paint on my big belly.
But Mulberry did find the necessary parts and made a crib. That did something to my heart. Made it beat a little different. When the father of your baby builds a crib—that’s the feeling Hallmark is constantly trying to capture. The warm fuzzies swarm the room, an army on a mission.
Mulberry stands back, hands on his hips, admiring his handiwork. “What do you think?” he asks. It’s set up next to my bed, the little mattress covered in a sheet with yellow duckies marching across it.
“Looks great,” I say. Blue, sitting next to me, taps his snout to my hip as if he agrees.
Mulberry turns to me and grins. “I’m so excited.”
“Me too,” I admit. “I’m really getting ready to meet this little person.”
My hand falls to my belly and my son—our son—moves. Mulberry steps closer. “May I?” he asks.
I take his wrist and place his hand where the baby is shifting. Mulberry’s smile grows. “Thank you.” He says it so quietly I almost don’t hear. “Thank you,” he says again, a little louder. And his eyes rise to mine. “For giving me this—for making me a dad.”
Tears well in my gaze and I shake my head, not able to look at him anymore. “I didn’t do it on purpose,” I say, trying to make a joke, but Mulberry won’t let me.
“You could have chosen not to continue the pregnancy. I would have understood. But you’ve gone through this, you’ve made yourself vulnerable. And I want you to know I appreciate that. I know how hard it is for you.”
We are standing close, his hand on my belly. I force myself to meet his gaze. And then I’m rising up on my toes, putting my hands on his shoulders, and kissing him. It’s sweet and salty with my tears.
Mulberry’s hand slides around to my low back and his other cups my cheek. The kiss is gentle and slow. As if we have all the time in the world to be together. As if Robert Maxim’s deadline hasn’t reached its end. As if he doesn’t even exist. And it’s just me and the father of my child kissing after he built our son a crib.
A boom, like a giant explosion in the distance, sounds. The ground shakes and we both stumble, catching each other. Our focus turns to the window. A deep rumbling comes from the earth. “What is that?” I ask in a whisper, as if I don’t want the monster shaking the world to hear me.
Outside the sky is still robin’s egg blue, the ocean glinting in all its glory, the sun shimmering and dancing on the swells. “I don’t know,” Mulberry says. “Let’s find out.”
His hand drops to mine and he twines our fingers. Blue follows as we move out into the hall. Dan’s voice comes over the speakers.
“This is Dan Burke. That sound we all just heard was an underwater volcano about forty-five miles east of here erupting. We should expect a tsunami and possibly more eruptions. So please stay indoors. I’ll update as we have more information.”
Mulberry squeezes my hand and starts moving toward the elevators. Dread pools in my low belly. We head down to the operations room, five stories underground. The room is buzzing. The large screen that takes up the entire front wall displays a satellite image in black and white. At the center a cloud expands—growing and tumbling on itself. It looks like a nuclear blast.
The rows of stations, each with their own screens, are full. This room, the nerve center for Joyful Justice’s missions in various parts of the world, always reminded me of NASA’s headquarters—Houston, we have a problem…
All eyes of Dan’s team follow us as we move toward the spiral stairs leading up to his office—the glass box that overlooks the space.
We don’t bother knocking, just push in. Dan sits at his desk, which faces out on the operations center. He’s got four monitors on—one shows the volcano eruption, another is a feed of code that means nothing to me, one is split into camera views of outside, and the last one is a bunch of open windows that, again, mean nothing to me.
“Hey,” Dan says without looking up. “This is bad.”
“Talk to me.” Mulberry pulls up a free chair and sits. I keep standing, Blue by my side.
“The explosion—it’s caused a massive lightning storm. It will probably reach us.” Dan points to the monitors filled with images from outside. The horizon is a dark mass of clouds, struck through with lightning. “The ash will be here very soon. And of course, there will be a tsunami any minute.”
“We’re in a mountain,” I say. “So we should be fine, right?”
Dan shakes his head. “A lot of our food is grown outside. Our solar and wind power sources are outside. Ash will likely cover the entire island. It will destroy drinking water. We have extra supplies, but they won’t last more than a week or two. And I’m not sure what the lightning will do to our systems. The tsunami could flood the garage and destroy our vehicles, not to mention the power generators on ground level—we have backups on the top of the mountain so power should come back on quickly. The planes may be toast, though. They are in the hangar but the waves could wash everything away—it’s the flattest part of the island. And we could lose our internet.” He says this last part as if he’s just told us we may have to put down the family dog.
Dan sits back and turns to me. His skin is pale and his mouth is pinched. “And this may just be the first eruption. The instruments on the volcano were destroyed by the blast. I’m in the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program computers, monitoring their Slack channel. They are freaking out.” He gestures to one of the windows on the fourth monitor where a chat conversation pings. “Scrambling to figure out what’s happening.”
My eyes are drawn to the surveillance cameras of our exterior. The monitor is split into a grid, three images on top and three on the bottom. They all show the east side of the island.
The mountain goes straight to the sea on the east side—the beach is on the west. There is a walking path that circles the entire mountain, cutting through vegetation and rock on the east side. In storms, waves often hit that rocky mountainside, spraying up dramatically—but never getting close to the path. At least not that I’ve seen.
The three cameras on the top row provide different angles of the narrow dirt track—an overview from a wide angle lens, then two smaller views, one over the entrance to the path from our mountain refuge, and the other over the curve of the path where it disappears around the east side of the mountain.
The bottom three capture the shoreline. One is an overview, which appears to be mounted just beyond the path and shows a wide angle of the shoreline and the horizon. Then two closer angles similar as above—covering the two curves of the mountain where it plummets into sea. So that no one can sneak onto our shores without being caught on camera.
There are more camera angles Dan is not presently displaying. I glance up at the large screen that takes up the front of the command room. There are dozens of camera boxes on one side that can be accessed as needed.
We can watch our destruction from every angle.
Despite the storm on the horizon and the unseen eruption beyond, the sea doesn’t look turbulent—the sun still hits it, shimmering and shining. The vegetation undulates in a gentle breeze. But the lightning and ash cloud on the horizon portend disaster. A shiver runs down my spine.
Everyone I love dies.
My hand falls to my belly. Mulberry catches the gesture and shifts to better face me. I’m still standing while the two guys sit. “Sydney, we will be okay.”
I shake my head. “I know I’ll be all right.” My hand lands on Blue’s head. He will be too.
As I stare at the large screen in the control room beyond the glass wall of Dan’s office, the satellite image of the storm seems to come alive, the rising ash twisting and turning. A sonic boom so loud it reaches us in the depths of the earth hits. The ground shifts and I stumble, catching myself on Blue. Mulberry reaches out and pulls me onto his lap. The glass walls of Dan’s office vibrate. The front panel cracks. The rumbling keeps going.
I put my arms around Mulberry, holding on. His arms come around my belly. The chair shifts on its wheels, rolling back and forth, our combined weight not enough to hold it in place. Blue drops to the floor, flattening himself. He slides back and forth.
Below us people grip their desks, or hide under them. The only sound is the deep groaning of the earth. My gaze rises to the screen again. It’s shaking but I can still see the ash and lightning. It reminds me of the hallucinations that live inside my mind. But this is most definitely real…or I’m still in a coma.
I squeeze Mulberry, feeling the solidness of him. No, this is real. This is really fucking happening.
The rumbling slows, begins to fade.
“Shit,” Dan says, his voice almost reverent. His gaze is on the cracked glass.
“Maybe we should get out of the glass box?” Mulberry suggests.
“Yeah,” Dan says, his voice distracted. He looks around, searching for something. His gaze lands under his desk. His lips press together and he shakes his head, then looks at Blue. “Can you get that for me?” he asks.
Blue stands, carefully, and comes to Dan’s side. “My mouse,” he explains. “Hard to do anything with this fucking cast,” he says in explanation… Blue dips under Dan’s desk for a moment and returns holding the wireless mouse gently in his jaw.
Dan takes it, wipes it off on his shorts, and then clicks around, bringing up a new camera angle—it fills the screen that used to have the chat on it. A full view of the horizon, the storm…the rising and swirling ash cloud, lightning piercing through it.
“Look,” Dan says, pointing to one of the smaller camera boxes displaying the shore below the path. Water recedes, baring the rocks—black and shining wet. It keeps going, exposing the bottom of the shallow bay inside the reef. My gaze flicks back to the wide angle Dan just opened. The ocean is pulling back from us. I swallow, fear gripping my throat.
Dan picks up the phone on his desk. “This is Dan Burke, we have a tsunami approaching the east side of the island. Everyone stay inside.”
The water fades into the distance. Anticipation tingles over my body. It’s going to come back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“A tsunami will hit us in the next few minutes,” Dan warns over the intercom system. “Stay inside. Engineering team, prepare for power loss and flooding in the lower control rooms.”
Blue lies flat on the floor, his ears pinned to his head, close to my feet. I’m still sitting on Mulberry’s lap, his hands on my thighs. My eyes are riveted to the screens. The cameras display in full color, but the day has turned to grayscale.
The bay is empty and the control room is absolutely silent. There is nothing we can do now. We just have to hope our systems can survive the impending destruction.
Movement in the distance makes me squint at the screen. My focus is on the wide view that shows the horizon—the storm clouds in the distance, and the empty bay in the foreground.
A white line thickens, coming fast. “Tsunamis are not just one wave,” Dan explains in a whisper, as if he doesn’t want the ocean to hear us talking about it. “But a series of waves. They can move at speeds of up to five hundred miles per hour.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?” Mulberry asks, his breath brushing my shoulder.
“No,” Dan answers. “I’m known to spout facts when I’m nervous.”
“I’ve never heard you do that before,” I say.
“Not sure I’ve ever been this nervous…”
The white line thickens into a wall of frothing water. It looks so powerful—a foaming monster racing across the seabed, eating up the space between us.
My body tenses the closer it grows. One of Mulberry’s hands shifts, reaching to rest on the lower side of my belly as my own hand comes to rest on top. We hold our son between us as we watch the wave break over the reef, reconstitute itself on the other side into a foaming mass and then crash into the side of the mountain on the island’s east side.
It surges over the vegetation at the foot of the mountain, then washes over the cameras below the path, creating a momentary view of chaos and then blackness. The water keeps rising, flooding over the path and climbs further up the mountain, before falling back onto itself. But more waves follow, the foaming sea appearing to claw at us, desperate to get in.
Then everything goes black.
Mulberry’s hands tighten on me, so I know I’m still here. Still alive. This is not the darkness of unconsciousness.
“The backup power will come on soon,” Dan says.
Blue’s nose taps my knee and I reach out and pet his head.
Sitting on Mulberry’s lap, his breath on the back of my neck, Blue leaning his weight against my leg…I feel held. In this powerless moment where there is nothing I can do to change fate, I know that I am not alone.
A hum of power and then the lights come back on. The giant screen at the front of the control room flashes blue and then green as it tries to restart. A rainbow wheel flickers to life and turns.
“I’m guessing our internet line is cut,” Dan says. “Can’t imagine the cable survived. Our solar-charged backup batteries are at the top of the mountain so we should be good for days power-wise. And our internal network will work so our cameras should come back on. We just won’t have internet until I get the sat link up and running.”
Without the cameras’ multiple views of the outside world, it starts to feel like we are underground. Almost like we’ve been buried alive. I shift, uncomfortable, ready to get back to where I can see the world with my own eyes instead of through a lens.
Mulberry clears his throat and my eyes are drawn to the crack in the glass panel that fronts on the control room. An ugly fissure runs from top to bottom. “Should we get out of the glass box now?” Mulberry asks, again.
“Let’s just wait a second,” Dan says, his focus on his rebooting computers. “Let’s see if the computers come back online and tell us anything.” So we wait. Tension torques in my body as we all watch the monitors, waiting for the connection to be restored.
I swallow, trying to control my anxiety. We are stuck, locked away. Am I still in a coma?
I have to stand up. Mulberry’s hands fall off me reluctantly as I rise.
Blue moves with me as I pace the length of the office. Below us, Dan’s team are all as focused on their own computers as he is on his. The shared screen at the front of the room flickers and then stabilizes.
“The internet is gone,” Dan confirms. “But our internal network is still up so we can see our cameras. The ones that survived, anyway.”
I pace back toward the door, unable to stand still, needing to get out of here.
When I turn back, Dan has the camera boxes back up on his screen. I squint at them. What am I looking at? Blurry globs of brown-gray dot the lenses—it feels like viewing the world with dirt in my eyelashes. And the light is so strange, like a strobe light. “The ash,” Dan says. “And lightning.”
I swallow, that sense of being buried alive rising up my throat again. Blue’s nose taps my hip. I move closer to the monitors. The path is still obscured by swirling, foaming water—it just keeps trying to climb the fucking mountain. Trying to get to us.
Except it’s not personal. We are just here while it’s happening. Not everything that happens to us is about us…my hand comes to my belly again. The stark reality is that we have so little control. We humans spend our lives trying to decide our fate, when really, fate doesn’t even exist. Life is just a series of chaotic events—one of which kills you.
“Water breached the vents,” Dan says. “The original design prepared for a tsunami, but this is a thirty-foot monster swell; we are going to have a lot of damage. The batteries have a lot of storage capacity, so power should stay on. But this lightning…I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Dan types on his keyboard. My gaze rises so that I’m looking through the cracked glass at the large screen below. The wide angle image is up again. Ash rains down from a black sky. Lightning shivers over the world. “I’m not going to be able to get a satellite link until the ash storm stops,” Dan says. Mulberry stands, his energy matching mine. We can’t just sit here watching anymore. “I’m not hearing back from Selena,” Dan says, referring to our head of engineering.
“I’ll go upstairs and check on the battery station, talk to her in person,” Mulberry says.
“I’ll come,” I say quickly, ready to be above ground level.
“Let me try the walkie talkies,” Dan says. He picks up a small black box I hadn’t noticed before and speaks into it. “Selena, come in.”
The only response is a crackling. “Maybe it’s your unit,” Mulberry suggests.
“No, it’s the distance and all the solid material between us. Without internet our units depend on radio signals alone and that won’t work now. Shit,” Dan says.
“I’ll go,” I say quickly. “We should all go, right? Am I the only one who thinks the crack in the glass is ominous?”
“This structure is very secure,” Dan says. “It won’t collapse; what we need to worry about is flooding and fires.”
“Comforting,” I say.
Dan ignores me. “There are more walkie talkies on the couch,” he says, pointing to the black leather slouchy monstrosity that takes up most of the back wall of his office. A walkie talkie charging station with six units rests on one cushion.
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