Inside Straight

He woke around dawn to the loudest sound he’d ever heard. It was like a couple of freight trains, loaded up good and heavy with taconite ore, colliding head-on in the middle of the room. Over and over and over again. It shook the house so badly that he almost tumbled out of bed. Instead, the bed just collapsed underneath him.

A whump, and then from the floor, Hardhat yelled: “Ouch! God-fucking-damnit!”

Back home in Minnesota, summer thunderstorms were nothing special. But this was different. First off, thunder was never this loud. Plus, there wasn’t any lightning. The house just kept shaking, shaking, shaking. And for another thing, a bad storm came with clouds so thick they turned the sky to ink. But he glimpsed sunrise peeking over the Hollywood Hills as the blinds danced and shuddered over the window. Something dusted his face when he opened his mouth to ask Hardhat about this. He tasted grittiness on his tongue. Plaster, raining down from the ceiling. Boy howdy, was this weird!

Tornados could be pretty loud. Maybe they were inside one, and the whole house was whirling away like in that scary movie with the flying monkeys?

“Um,” Wally had to shout over the rumbling, “strange weather we’re having.”

“Weather? It’s a big, motherfucking”—just then it stopped—“earthquake.”

And then it was quiet again, at least compared to the sound of the house shaking apart. New sounds floated through the near silence. Creaking, as the house settled, punctuated with sudden cracks like gunshots. And a little fainter, but still nearby, moans and groans.

The floor shifted a little bit each time a new gunshot crack ripped through the house. More plaster sifted down, getting in Wally’s eyes. He rolled off the mattress and climbed to his feet. The blinds came clattering down in a tangled heap around his feet when he pulled the cord to raise them. The glass in the window was cracked, but it hadn’t shattered. Outside, plumes of smoke and dust threaded the hills and canyons, lofted skyward on the beeping of car alarms and the barking of terrified dogs.

Hardhat joined him at the window. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and camel. What a clusterfuck.”

The floor shifted again.

Hardhat rattled the doorknob. “Door’s stuck. Piece of shit.”

Wally tried the door. Yep. It was wedged in the door frame good. “Some folks might wanna stand back.” Wally gave the stubborn door a good yank. The doorknob snapped off in his hand, but otherwise the door didn’t move.

Hardhat laughed. “Smooth move.”

Wally stuck two fingers through the hole where the doorknob had been, braced his feet on the floor, and pulled. The door screeched open a few inches, gouging the floor, then cracked in half when it got stuck again. Wally gave up and smashed the two halves of the door into the hallway.

Apparently they weren’t the only ones having trouble. People pounded on doors up and down the hallway. Wally worked one side of the hall, shoving the doors open. Hardhat worked the other side, prying them open with a glowing yellow I beam that he wielded like a crowbar.

Halfway up the hall they met up with King Cobalt. He seemed to be enjoying himself as he ripped the door frames apart with brute strength. Even tossed out of bed early in the morning, he still wore his Lucha Libre mask. Wally wondered if he ever took it off.

“I guess we work pretty good together, hey?”

King Cobalt shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me. I like smashing stuff.” His tone suggested that this was the end of the conversation. Maybe he was black underneath that costume, like Stuntman.

I’m darker than all of them, though.

One by one, people assembled in the big TV lounge on the first floor. The bamboo floor had buckled and warped, and a couple of ihumb-thick cracks in the walls ran from floor to ceiling. The flat screen TV had jumped its mounts on the wall, and was lying facedown on the floor.

Matryoshka took a head count while two of the camera guys went off to disconnect the gas and turn off the water. He came up short until Earth Witch stumbled through the front door. Wally noticed a pile of bricks strewn across the U-shaped drive. Apparently the chimney had collapsed. And from the trickle of blood on Earth Witch’s forehead, she’d been out there when it came down. Sweat streaked her face. People cleared a spot for her on a sofa. When she plopped down, Wally saw dirt on the soles of her feet, the palms of her hands, and crusted under her fingernails.

Jade Blossom said, “Well?”

“This quake was strong and very deep,” Earth Witch said, “and it caught me by surprise. I was sleeping.” She looked around the room. “I couldn’t stop it, but I did my best to weaken it. I might be able to damp down the aftershocks a little bit.” Earth Witch said this last with her eyes closed, like she was ready to take a nap.

Just then another gunshot crack echoed through the house, making the walls shake. The cracks in the walls widened a little bit, as more plaster sifted down to the floorboards.

Wally jumped.