Up The Tower by J.P. Lantern Page A

woke into chaos. Everything in the broken basement was moving.
    He spun upward, standing quick. There was a sudden and loud crack behind him. Where his head had been, a crag of shelf rock was.
    Very suddenly, with a disconcerting amount of certainty, Gary realized he was probably going to die.
    There had never been a more motivating thought in all his life.
    With an agility he didn’t even know he had, he ran up the wall beneath the hole in the ceiling, grabbing exposed pipes to pull himself up to the surface. He barely even noticed the pain from being caught under the rubble. These were aches, scrapes—all things he could live with.
    Out on the street again. The concrete swirled and erupted. With a titanic moan, an enormous fist of earth rose up nearly twenty feet and buried two unlucky, drunken sods into the ground.
    Trapped underground. The terror of it. He would not cope with such a fate. He swiveled, he shuffled, looking for a plan.
    Where was the woman he stopped? Where was the gangster?
    He hadn’t known she was a gangster, of course...but she was black, and had one eye, and all that cheap pneumatic tech besides. That was what gangsters looked like.
    And where was Ana?
    The ground moaned again, pushing up underneath him. Oh, god. There was no time to focus on such things—not even the love of his life. More chaos all around him. Generators tumbled out from windows and exploded. Shrapnel fired everywhere, breaking windows, busting pipes open. The flying metal cut down people running and screaming in the streets.
    Gary did the only thing he knew to do in such an overwhelming situation.
    Hands up to the air, legs powering away across the tumultuous ground, he screamed.
    No words, no attempts at word. Just sound; primal sound. Something to the tune of “Ahhh.”
    Scrambling into the street—the concrete rolled like ocean waves—he passed several other people doing the same thing he was. This made him feel better, and he only screamed the louder. Together, they were accomplishing something! Their fear surely would save them. A building—or a collection of buildings all built on top of each other—toppled in front of him. He screamed, and the people next to him screamed, and they abruptly changed course to the semi-same direction to the East.
    The Dam! Yes, they were going there. It was high up and very sturdy because it held back the waters of the Mississippi. That was a good place to go.
    Where was Ana? Still on his mind. Always there. That was her place. Was she all right? Had she figured out how essential it was for her to get to the Dam?
    If she died—so many people were dying.
    If she died...Gary didn't know what he would do. His heart would be broken. Broken! He had planned on spending the rest of his life in love with her, whether she knew it or not. She needed to know. He deserved her knowing.
    The quake seemed to gather itself somewhat—concentrating its force. The earth still moved, but it seemed more in the process of adjusting rather than exploding upward as it had before. Cars sunk into the roads around him, and long sections of pipe pushed up through the skin of the concrete like a bad doctor's needles.
    And then a building was pushed up, cast out from its foundation like a rotten tooth and poured out onto the street and buildings around it. Dust showered over Gary. Rocks landed like rain. He ran adjacent to the fall, blind in the dust.
    Ground still mixed under his feet, but turning through one corner and then another, following the crowd, he got out of the dust. The Dam showed in the distance—more buildings had fallen, showing where it was from blocks away. Gary ran to it—stepping over the fissures of the ground and hopping up on cars, screaming all the way. If he stopped screaming, it was only to catch his breath. This happened often.
    He needed to get in shape, dammit. If he got out of this, shapes would be got into, by God.
    Stone fell from the Dam like scabs shedding off skin, like labels