The War of Immensities by Barry Klemm

flashed
on her screen. Desperate for any distraction, she checked
immediately—the red indicator said it was urgent anyway. The
message was from the laboratory upstairs and from Pepe, who was on
duty.
    “We got a hit!
Canary Islands. 1342 hours. Single shock at 6.5. Details
follow.”
    The details
never followed. Jami was already out the door and bolting up the
stairs.

*

    Beneath the
cliffs on the western side of Isla Gran Canaria, the fishing fleet
wheeled in wide arcs as they hunted for the shoals of pilchard
swept southward on the current. At Las Palmas, the capital, there
was a large trawler fleet that hunted Hake and bulk catches of
Sardines, but here on the rugged west coast of the island the
villages went out trailing nets from their small sailboats as they
had before the Spanish came, while above the cliffs the women and
old men tended the crude vineyards and tomato plantations. In
groups of several dozen, these fleets rode the cold waters of the
current, hardly ever out of view of the rugged headlands that
usually towered above the waves.
    Today the sea
was calm, flat, and the air breathless, as if waiting for the
disaster to come.
    Forced to their
oars, the fishermen were unhappy, for they had noticed that the
flocks of sea gulls that daily escorted their boats were missing,
as if there was no air up there to support them. The fishermen
looked about anxiously, and some, disturbed by voodoo demons, had
refused to sail, and others went back disgruntled. Those that
remained watched the signs, unnerved but unable to identify the
warning signs. The day was all but over when the sea began to
boil.
    The turbulence
rapidly expanded outward from a single point as if a vast maelstrom
was forming and the panicking men turned their boats landward as
the huge ripples surged by them. Then the fish that had evaded
their nets began to float to the surface belly up, and steam
started to waft from the water until they were engulfed in a
sauna-like fog. Deep down, some thought they saw the red glow, and
then there was no more, then the surging sea was upon them.
    Those fishermen
further away first noticed the waves rise and then saw the
mysterious fog emerging rapidly far out, and they rowed furiously
to safety, if safety it was. In the villages along the coast, the
earth shook and houses tumbled, landslides blocked roads and then
the fog doused them all in black rain.

*

    It was like
someone had crept into his camp and punched him, in the stomach and
the head, and Brian rolled frantically, ignoring the pain and
nausea, to strike back and defend himself. But there was no one
there.

*

    In a room at
the Shamrock Hotel in Bendigo, which was as far as the train could
take them that night, Chrissie awoke with a scream as a blinding
flash struck her eyes so violently that it sent a sharp pain
coursing though her bloodstream.
    In the bed
across the room, Lorna was also doubled up in sudden pain. “Bloody
airline food,” she muttered.

*

    Kevin Wagner’s
unconscious disturbance came to an end with such a violent
convulsion that it set off the alarms and brought the crash cart
team running, only to find him normal, and at peace for the first
time in thirty-five hours.

*

    At Fairhaven,
Joe Solomon had been sedated and there was no monitoring equipment
to record his disturbance, nor its sudden cessation.

*

    And neither was
there any telling which of Andromeda Starlight’s hallucinatory
dreams suddenly stopped being about moving and instead became about
being still.

*

    Padre Miguel,
who ran the mission station in the hills above Playa de la Nieves,
felt the tremor and prepared to move the patients outside but
already it was over. He walked out and saw the strange cloud rising
over the sea. In fact at first he felt relieved—the entire island
was a massive extinct volcanic cone but that wasn’t the direction
from which the cloud arose. It was plainly over there, far out to
sea—where there was nothing but the Atlantic Ocean.