Chapter 25
The garage went next, or what was left of it. I heard it before I saw it, a deep grinding crack that ran through the slab like a rifle shot, and then a diagonal fracture opened across the concrete wall wide enough for me to slip my hand through. My workbench tilted, and a row of wrenches I had owned since my apprenticeship slid off in a clatter and disappeared into the dark under the floor. Thirty-four years of tool-and-die, and the tools went the way the key had gone, without ceremony.
Marlene made a sound beside me, not a scream, something smaller, and I turned in time to see her patio door shatter. It did not break the way glass breaks when you throw something at it. It broke under a twist, the whole frame torquing as the ground under her patio shifted, and the tempered glass crazed white and then fell in a glittering sheet across the patio stones. The stones themselves were already tilting, one corner dropping toward the void, and her rose bushes leaned over the edge like they were trying to look down into it.
Then the trucks came. I heard the sirens first, far off, and then the cul-de-sac filled with light: a fire engine, a utility truck, a second sheriff's cruiser, all of them nosing in as close as the deputies would let them. Men in turnout gear came up the street at a run and stopped at the tape Bennett was already stringing, and one of them shouted something about a gas line that nobody answered, because there was no gas line to worry about. What was under our street was older and worse than gas.
Vasquez came back to us. Her flashlight was in one hand and her radio in the other, and her face was calm in the way that people get calm when the worst part is already happening and panic would only waste time. She did not reach for her cuffs. She did not read me anything. She put one hand lightly on my elbow and one hand on Marlene's shoulder, and she guided us both toward the pavement the way you guide people away from a fire, steady and without hurry, talking the whole time in a low voice about where to step and where not to step.
"This way," she said. "Stay on the asphalt. Don't stop for anything in the yards."
I wanted to go back for the photographs in the hall closet, for my father's watch, for the coffee can of cash I kept in the garage for emergencies. I said so, and Vasquez shook her head without breaking stride.
"Nothing in either house is worth your life tonight, Mr. Calloway. The ground is still moving. Walk with me."
Behind us the white privacy fence gave a long groan, the sound of plastic and posts giving up all at once. It snapped at the center post, the same post Marlene and I had fought over, the one that sat two inches on my side of the survey pin, and the whole run of it folded forward and vanished into the earth. It did not fall over. It went down, straight down, as if the ground had opened a mouth and swallowed it whole. One minute there was a fence between my yard and Marlene's, and the next minute there was a trench of black mud and a silence that seemed too big for a suburban street at night.
Neighbors were gathering at the barricade in bathrobes and coats, holding phones up to record, asking deputies questions nobody could answer yet. A woman I had known for twenty years grabbed my arm and asked if it was an earthquake, and I told her no, it was older than that, and she looked at me as if I had started speaking another language. Marlene stood beside me on the pavement with glass dust on her shoes and mud on her knees, and when a paramedic tried to separate us to check us over, she shook her head and stayed where she was, close enough that our shoulders touched.
Vasquez finished her radio call and came back to us. "You are both victims here," she said, and she said it clearly, loud enough for the neighbors to hear. "Nobody is under arrest. Nobody is being detained. We are getting everyone off this street tonight, and we will sort out the rest in the daylight."
I believed her. For the first time that day, I believed somebody in authority, because she was the first person in authority who had looked at the hole in the ground and called it what it was instead of finding a form to cover it with. The fence was gone. The line was gone. And Marlene and I stood on the pavement together, two people whose houses were sinking behind them, with nothing left between us at all.