Rumbling Earth

A Story by sinfulThoughts

On my way home, I pondered what I could do for the people in Japan. I'm halfway decent with words so I decided to dedicate a story to them.

She feels the earth shake. Lightly first, like during all the others she felt in her life. As it gets stronger, she feels a pang of fear, despite the training and exercises she attended since she had been a little girl back in school.

And then the ground is pulled from her feet, she finds herself thrown to the floor, the building groaning in pain as it is beaten again and again. Glass shatters and she hears screams from the street. She hides under her office desk, it’s legs sliding over the floor and she clings to one of them, hugging it, as if the little bit of metal and wood wold be the only thing that separates her panic filled life from death.

The silence is deafening as the the quake ends. She leaves her little shop and steps out on the street, her face pale and dark eyes wide open in shock as she tries to understand what she sees. Others, neighbors leave their houses, their faces showing the same confusion and astonishment she feels.

Survivors.

The sirens grab her heart and draw the blood from her face. She knows the sound, it was part of each and every exercise she attended in her 45 years in this town. But this time it makes her run, grabs her deep, animalistic instincts and before she realizes what she is doing she scrambles down the street. The calm voice from the speakers tells her to go for higher ground, but there is none in sight. She sees other people run and age old instincts make her follow the herd. She hears voices, shouts, turning into screams and then she hears the word.

Tsunami.

Cold panic threatens to grab her as she runs down the main street, eyes darting to the left and right, frantically searching for the higher ground the voice continues to tell her she needs to reach. The voices behind her change in intensity, she can’t understand them but she doesn’t has to, in order to know what it means. A quick glance over her shoulder makes her stop.

She sees the roof of the house move, as if it would be pushed by a giant, gentle hand. It turns, slowly, almost gracefully, and as she sees the sign on it’s roof, she realizes her shop is following her. She watches it for a second or two, her mind unable to understand what she is seeing, until somebody is grabbing her hand and pulls her with him.

They run, the voices behind them screaming until they get silenced by the roar of the approaching apocalypse. The man pulls her into a door and they stumble up the stairs, two stories, until they reach his apartment.

He stands at the window, his body tense as he can’t pull his eyes from what happens outside.

She sits in a corner, her arms hugging her knees as she tries in vain to block the events from her life. He cries out and she looks up, tears blurring her view as they watch her shop move by the window, the sign on it’s roof in an odd angle until it tumbles and vanishes.

And then it is all quiet. She looks at him, and slowly rises to stand next to him, staring out of the window for an eternity, the soft sobbing sounds of her despair joining the wet gurgle of water below them.

They wander the desert of ruble and debris for hours and hours. Each aftershock stripping away what has remained from her confidence and strength. The small ones, almost too faint to be noticed, make her flinch. And every now and then a big one shakes her, making the rubble groan and shift, and she screams each time, fists pressed against her ears, knowing another body has been crushed.

Others join them and finally they meet the old man, sitting on a mud covered piece of metal that once had been a car. He listens to a battery operated radio and as they approach, they understand and the whispering voices ebb as they hear the news from the nuclear plant, 10 miles up the coast.

And she hears the other word, a word that makes makes every person on the islands shiver, ever since the two bright lights appeared on their sky almost 70 years ago.

Fallout.

She falls on her knees and her sobbing scream startles the ones with her as she mourns the world that has been taken away from them.

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Please pray for her.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t know her.

Please spend a minute to think about what you can do for her, will you?