When the signals finally faded and flickered out, Al Augustus turned up the lights in the room. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said softly, “like you, I am horrified by what we have just witnessed. Our prayers and our assistance must be offered to the surviving families of those who have perished in this terrible tragedy. Our nation and all our allies and friends are facing a time of great peril. And we have a long night ahead of us.”

AFTER SEVERAL ANXIOUS MINUTES, Manuel crawled slowly out of his trench. He looked below them toward the coast in awe. A crown of steam and water rose majestically in the air, then rushed outward. He was awestruck. For that one moment, he had been given, as it were, a ringside seat to witness the power of creation itself. He had seen what no other man had ever seen, and he had lived through it.

The water moved at ferocious speed. Banks and brokerages, oil companies and movie studios, hotels and restaurants, department stores and car lots, government offices and churches, along with schools and beautiful homes were now at the bottom of an ocean of water. The rich and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the weak, all met the same fate. The primal forces of the universe were totally unimpressed by human wealth and prestige. The forces of nature showed no mercy for the vanities of man.

Before Manuel realized what had happened, the ocean waves were breaking against the sides of his mountain. The waters rushed onward and crested just below him. But since there was nothing to the west to hold them there, the boiling, frothing waves of seawater poured back into the ocean basin, dragging everything solid with them and leaving behind mountains of dead fish, animals, people, and a horrible layer of crude oil mired with twisted and mangled masses of steel and concrete that had once been a great city.

Suddenly aware that other dangers were to be expected, Manuel crawled back over to Cathy and the boys. One by one, he helped them, drenched and shaking, out of their hiding places. As the five of them clung together, the ground began to shake. Violent movements of the earth’s crust had been set in motion. There was a rolling and twisting of the land, then a terrible crash and splitting open of the earth, from Baja, California, south of the Mexican border, north through the San Francisco Bay.

As they huddled together in a circle, Cathy sobbed quietly, “Manolo, we’ve lived through the worst of it. We’re not going to die now, are we?”