Oh, he was so dead!
Pulling my car up until my front bumper nearly touched his back one, I flattened my palm against the horn and I held it down in one continuous fuck you. I could even see Chad inside his vehicle holding his hands to his ears, and I pictured him laughing. I’d had enough of his bullshit. This was war.
But before I could take matters into my own hands, I felt my car jolt like it had been hit by solid steel.
Had Chad backed into me? My god, the dude was just asking for dismemberment. I checked out my driver’s side window, puzzled. Our bumpers were right where I’d left them…still a good inch apart.
Another jolt.
“What the…?”
I checked my mirrors, but there was nothing behind me. And then it started. Violent shaking so intense it scrambled my head with confusion. Then another jolt, but this one unlike anything I’d ever felt in my lifetime. There was the sudden sensation of dropping, as if the undercarriage of my vehicle had completely given way. The swaying walls in the parking garage rumbled and quivered, chunks of concrete breaking free from their berths and crumbling onto the cars below.
“What’s happening?” I cried out, even though I knew full well what this was—a Richter scale-busting earthquake. And I really couldn’t think of a worse place to ride out this once-in-a-lifetime event than in an underground parking garage…with Chad. The standard recommendations of hunkering under a table or taking shelter in a door frame did not apply in this setting. The only thing I could do now was wait for relief… and hope and pray I would still be alive once the earth had had its way.
The sound of ripping steel drew my attention. I swung my head around just in time to see the upper floor near the garage exit come crashing to the ground a hundred feet behind me. I watched in shocked horror as smoke from the collapse billowed toward me like a beast on a rampage. Covering my head with my hands, I closed my eyes as fast-moving projectiles slammed into my car with the force of a bomb.
Only when the wave passed over me did I dare open my eyes. My back window was shattered, and I was blanketed in glass and dust. And still the earth continued shaking. I wasn’t going to survive this. This underground hell would very likely become my grave. Then, in what I believed to be the final moments of my life, I thought of him—Chad—the man I was about to die with. Our feud seemed so childish now, so petty. I wished I could take it all back. Start anew. But we might not have that chance…ever again.
It was his face I focused on seconds before a concrete slab ripped free of its mooring and dropped from the floor above.
• • •
My body settled as the earth ceased its quaking. There was no sound—no feeling. Even the car alarms, going wild a few seconds before the collapse seemed to have stopped with the shaking. It was as if the earth were observing a moment of silence for what it had destroyed. I sat stunned in my car, the strange unnerving silence giving off the sensation of being underwater. I kept my eyes closed, too afraid to face what lay ahead. But as the seconds ticked by, a low buzzing in my ears gave way to an eerie electrical moaning.
Open your eyes, Dani. I had to know what I was dealing with. I had to find my strength.
Reaching up with shaky hands, I cleared the dust from my eyes before slowly opening them to the new world order. Nothing looked familiar. The landscape around me had totally shifted in a matter of seconds, and now I was in a desolate wasteland, covered in destruction. At least I’d solved the mystery of the haunting sound pulsing in my ears—it was the final cries of weakened car alarms dying under the weight of thousands of pounds of concrete.
I shook my head, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Too much had changed in too little time. If I had to guess, the quake hadn’t lasted more than thirty seconds, but based on the total demolition around me, it had been a significant half a minute. Looking out over the ruins of my former life, I now understood what people meant when they said ‘life changes in an instant.’ Mine had—the repercussions of this day, I was sure, would stay with me for a lifetime.
I should have been panicking right now, but I wasn’t. Grateful—that’s what I was. Somehow, amongst all the destruction, I’d been spared. Why? Maybe this was my wake-up call. I’d been handed a second chance to become a better, calmer, more introspective person. I could fall back on the weaknesses that held me back before, or I could look forward with strength and perseverance.
Really, the choice had been made for me. If I didn’t find my inner bravery, I would surely die here in my car…or what was left of it. During those few short seconds of shaking, my Chevrolet had been split in two. Where there had once been a dashboard and an engine, there was now just open space. The beam that had decapitated the hood of my car had worked as a seesaw, and now the mangled wreckage was elevated off the ground. I was still strapped into my driver’s side seat, my legs dangling over the edge like a rider on one of those inverted roller coasters.
There was no safety plan for this, no accompanying handbook. This was all survival stuff—instinctual. If I wanted to get out of this, I needed to think like a wild animal caught in a snare. First things first: did I still have access to all my body parts? Just because I was feeling no pain didn’t mean I’d escaped unscathed. Shock was a funny thing, tricking the body into thinking things were all hunky-dory when bits and pieces were actually dangling off you.
I took stock of my limbs, systematically testing various body parts for malfunction and was relieved to find them responding properly—or that least they were from the waist down. Waist up was another story. Shards of glass were embedded in my skin; I must have looked like a shiny porcupine. Gritting my teeth, I went to work gingerly extracting those I could, even gathering the bravery needed to dislodge the one in my cheekbone. But a particularly jagged blade of glass rooted deep in my left arm proved to be beyond my level of expertise. Plus if it was working as a stopper to prevent an artery from bleeding out, my instinct was to let it stay.
Slipping my right arm out my lightweight sweater, I used it as a tourniquet, tying it tightly around my upper left arm with my teeth. That would have to do until help arrived. If it did. I wasn’t naïve enough to think my apartment complex was the only scene of destruction in this city of millions, nor did I think first responders would head here first. If it was this bad here, I couldn’t help but wonder what a quake this size had done to the rest of Los Angeles. To my students. To my school.
To…Chad.
I whipped my head around. Oh god, how could I have forgotten he was here with me in this wasteland? My eyes darted from side to side. Where was his car? Had he somehow gotten away? And then I saw it… or what was left of it, flattened under mounds of concrete. The plank that had cut my car in two had also crushed his, only it had come to rest vertically—on top of a second beam that had fallen horizontally across the cab of his vehicle. I swallowed back a sob as I realized that no one could have survived that. He was gone, entombed under intersecting planks that had fallen in the form of a cross to lie on top of what was now Chad’s grave.
Shock. Horror. Every emotion grabbed hold as I slowly realized what I’d lost. Chad wasn’t just the man I loved to hate. He was also the man I actually sorta didn’t hate. There—I admitted it. I’d spent countless hours of my life obsessing over Chad for the same reason little elementary school girls the world over called boys names on the playground—I had a crush. Chad was the real reason I couldn’t connect with James. The brawny jerk had hijacked my mind. At work. At play. At sleep. Chad was everywhere. And, as much as I tried to resist the icky attraction, I couldn’t.