Chapter 12

As they approached the house, they saw that at least one window on the second storey had lost its glass. Then they noticed that one of the corner posts supporting the front porch had snapped, giving a strange lean to the whole porch roof. Karl looked at it carefully before stepping onto the porch deck and walking toward the front door.

“We’ll have to get a support under that quickly,” he said in assessment.

“Yeah, I’m surprised that more windows aren’t broken if the quake managed to break a six-inch solid fir post.”

“From the looks of that post I’d say termites had gotten at the bottom of it first. I’m surprised that a porch support wasn’t treated against insect damage,” Karl commented as he reached for the door knob. “As for the windows, they’re all sitting in a channel and resting on glass wool. I imagine that’s what cushioned them from breakage. They have a little clearance away from the log walls, so they shouldn’t be under pressure.”

Although the handle turned, the door wouldn’t move when he tried it.

“Shit, it seems to be jammed,” he growled.

“It’s probably locked,” Ely chuckled. “Didn’t Dad give you a key to the deadbolt?”

“Oh, I don’t even have a deadbolt lock on my door, so I never thought of it,” he admitted, grinning sheepishly as he dug in his pocket, looking for his key ring. “I don’t think I have my keys to this house with me.”

“Here, I brought mine,” Ely pushed him aside and unlocked the door.

As the door swung open, they both leaned forward to look inside. The main floor was largely one big open room, with the exception that one end of the space was closed off from the rest, that portion included George’s bedroom/office and a large bathroom. However, the main living area was a shambles. Broken glass and ornaments littered the floor, book shelves had fallen forward, and furniture had shifted out of place. However, the worst damage appeared to have resulted from some of the plaster having fallen from the ceiling of the kitchen and dining area. Every flat surface in the room was covered with a light coating of powdered plaster dust.

Ely reached around the corner and flipped on a light switch. One lone light bulb had survived and lit an area near the fireplace. That light actually called attention to an area of black soot spreading a short distance outward from the open doors of the hearth. It was almost in the shape of a black hand, complete with fingers, laid over the powdering of white from the fallen plaster.

“Oh my!” she looked upset and moved to step inside.

“Wait,” Karl said quickly, reaching out to take her arm. “If we walk on that dust from the plaster, we’re going to grind it into the flooring and the carpets.”

“Well, what else can we do? Even the vacuum is in the broom closet in the kitchen.”

“Can we get in the kitchen door?”

“Well, it’s locked, but I think I’ve got a key to it too.”

“Good, we’ll close this and go in there. If I remember, the kitchen has a tile floor. At least we won’t damage it as badly if we walk on it.”

“What do you want to do, clean our way forward slowly through the whole house?” she pushed his hand away in exasperation. “I want to see if we can make this place habitable for everyone by tonight or if we’ll have to stay on the boat.”

“I’d say it’ll be the boat for a day or two,” Karl snorted. “But you didn’t even notice the most important thing. We’ve got power.”

“Oh,” she turned and stared at the lone electric light. “We do too.”

Her frown had turned to a smile and she hugged him momentarily.

“So, since you’re the one who insisted we had to put all the feeder lines underground in order to protect them from being knocked out, that just means that you’re a genius. Of course, you did a great job of designing and building the generator and everything else as well. This only proves it,” she laughed proudly. “But, that’s not a surprise; I’ve known that you were brilliant for years.”

“Oh cripes,” he snorted derisively. “Let’s have that key to the back door before I get ill.”

“Oh to hell with that,” she said sharply. “If we stay off the rugs and just walk on the tiles and flooring around the outside edge of the room, we can clean up later.”

She pushed her way past him and began to move along the uncarpeted areas of the floor.

“I want to see how the bedrooms fared,” she announced.

Karl frowned, but followed her. By moving one or two small pieces of furniture out of their way, they were finally able to get to George’s bedroom. When she opened the door, Ely gave a sigh of relief.

“It looks fine,” she said softly. “We can set Dad up in here to write while we work on the rest of the place. Look, his wheelchair is fine and his radios all seem to be okay too. Actually there’s hardly any dust in here.”

“That’s good,” Karl smiled. “Do you think you can keep your dad in here for long? He’ll be out and underfoot as well as in our way if I know him.”

“So what do you recommend, smart ass?”

“Well, we could leave everyone on the boat while you and I start the cleanup. Or we could leave Trudy and the kids with him while the rest of us do the job. I’m sure I could rig up a place for him to sit and write.”

“He uses a word processor on his laptop. All he needs to do is sit down and set it up,” she laughed. “It’s not that, since the power on the boat lets him run the laptop. It’s all his reference material that he’ll want while he’s working that will cause a problem. Getting him just what he wanted out of all these books is what would drive us nuts.”

She gestured one arm toward a wall of books.

“He has dictionaries and thesauruses and encyclopaedias and who knows what else that he uses all the time. Look,” she pointed.

One wall of the bedroom was solid from floor to ceiling with books. Astoundingly, none of them were on the floor and Karl’s curiosity was raised, so he stepped over to look at the shelves. Not only were all the books jammed in quite tightly, but there was lip of about half an inch on each shelf and the shelves themselves were all built of steel that angled back toward the wall slightly.

“Where did your father get these shelves?” he asked.

“Oh, war surplus. I think they came off of a boat that was being scrapped or something,” Ely answered offhandedly. “Let’s see what else is ruined. This room seems fine.”

In the bathroom next to George’s bedroom, they found that there was water pressure, but no hot water. Other than the fact that the floor was littered with Trudy’s cosmetics, that room looked fine as well.

“I imagine Dad shut off the water heater,” Ely commented.

“Well, I know I did,” Karl laughed. “In fact, I shut off the power to the whole cabin, except for the walk-in freezer.”

They moved on to the rest of the house then. George’s stair climber, a gadget that hung on the rail of the stairs, had suffered a hit from a falling statue which was smashed on the upper landing, but other than that the stairway had suffered no damage. Once they were upstairs though, they found that all of the bedrooms were a mess. Plaster had come off of walls, pictures and paintings littered the floor and the ceiling in two of the bedrooms and one bathroom had partially collapsed. There was water damage in two of the rooms and the roof was leaking, so that had suffered damage as well.

Ely was in tears but Karl was quite pleased. He held her in his arms and comforted her for a few minutes.

“It isn’t all that bad kid,” he said soothingly.

“I know, but there’s so much work,” she sighed, as she cuddled in his arms. “I mean my bedroom and David’s bedroom are ruined.”

“Woman, you live with me now,” Karl said firmly. “We’ve got to stop the leak in the roof, but it isn’t all that bad. Almost everything can be salvaged or fixed.”

“Oh, I forgot I was moving,” she laughed through her tears.

“Let’s get some buckets to catch these water drips, then head over to the cabin and find out how much damage we have there. After we know that, we can see if we can raise the boat on the CB and let them know how things are.”

In well under an hour, they were back at the junction of the paths and the small shelter that stood there. Karl had brought George’s wheelchair and stored it inside the shelter so it was out of the wet. Then they set off for Karl’s cabin along the third pathway leading away from the wye.

The rain appeared to be lessening even more and since Karl knew they wouldn’t have to bring George and his wheelchair through this stretch of the path immediately, he ignored any of the smaller rock falls and branches that littered the path. They still had some dead-falls that they had to remove, but they made good time. In less than an hour they were approaching his main worry, the bridge across the gorge where the water from the small lake ran to the sea.

Although the flow of water wasn’t great, the gorge was amazingly steep and quite deep, perhaps fifty feet or more at the point where the bridge crossed it. The bridge had been built by felling two large trees across the gorge, then decking it with creosoted timber. Karl had salvaged and recycled that timber from an abandoned dock on another island. What worried Karl was the fact that the supports for the original tree trunks had only been native stone with very little mortar supporting them.

As they came around the corner before the bridge, they could see that it was still standing, but it too had suffered. A tree had fallen part way across it and now the bridge was supporting the trunk of the tree and preventing it from falling into the gorge.

It had dropped from the side they were on and was resting directly on the bridge, having wiped out a section of the bridge railing along one side. Approximately a quarter of the length of the tree was hanging over the railing on the far side of the bridge, so that portion of the tree was virtually unsupported.

The way the fallen tree sat, Karl knew at a glance that if he simply cut it, there was a good chance of it falling onto the flume that carried water to the generator plant and it might take the bridge out too. Since the flume itself was made up of large size plastic pipe and was several years old, Karl was worried that it might be brittle. He knew that a large object falling on it might shatter and destroy it, cutting off their electric power.

“Son of a bitch,” he growled.

“Can’t we just cut it off?” Ely asked.

While Karl was explaining his concern about the flume, his mind was working rapidly.

“Look, it’s not a huge problem” he shrugged, after a moment’s reflection. “I think I know how to handle this, but I’ll have to check it out.”

Karl bent over to one side to see what the underpinnings of the bridge looked like before they did much more though. That seemed to be solid enough, so he slowly walked out onto the span. Then to Ely’s surprise, he jumped up and down in the middle of the bridge, just short of the first of the branches of the fallen tree.

“You ass!” she shouted loudly. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Reassuring you that it’s still solid,” he chuckled. “However, I took off my pack before I came out here. Would you bring me the flashlight, please? I think everything at the generator shed looks quite good, but I want to check.”

Ely walked slowly out onto the bridge to stop beside him and stare down the ravine. Even in the dim light she could see a spray of water farther down the gorge, so the cover which had hidden the Pelton wheel had been broken away in the quake.

Karl held the light and focussed it on the spray. Ely could see a wheel spinning rapidly, but it was just in the edge of the water flow.

“It isn’t hitting the wheel straight on,” she remarked. “Did the earthquake shift it off center or something?”

“No,” he grinned. “It looks like it’s working perfectly. There’s an electromechanical governor in the generator shed and it adjusts the direction of the flow to make more or less water hit the blades as the power demand varies. Now, if the power lines are okay, we should have electricity up at the cabin. At the worst, I may have to shut off the generator while we string some more wire and reset some breakers, but that would just be for the cabin. I’m happy as hell. If you look closely, you can see a light on the wall of the shed, so I know the generator is still operating perfectly. Of course I knew it was working back at George’s house, but seeing that light burning confirms it.”

He grabbed her in a bear hug, then kissed her hard and handed her the flashlight before going back to get the chain saw and the rope. As he came back, he explained what he wanted to do.

They started by cutting off any of the smaller branches that were in their way, until all that stretched across the bridge itself was the main trunk of the tree. Now it was simply a matter of making sure that as the pieces of the log fell, they didn’t come too near the flume. Rigging the rope around the upper tree trunk that hung past the bridge, Karl had Ely tie it off to a tree on the bank behind them. Afterward he simply had to cut the trunk and the severed section of the tree swung against the rope in an arc that easily cleared the flume. Recovering the rope became the hardest part of the whole problem. Actually it was fully half an hour after he climbed down to untie it before Karl was standing back on the end of the bridge at Ely’s side.

“Okay, smart ass,” she sighed softly. “You got rid of the top of the tree, now what do we do with the rest of it?”

“Well, if you look at it, it’s split where the weight rested on the bridge,” Karl pointed. “The roots are still holding the damn thing on the bank though, so a lot of the weight is on the bridge.”

“Yeah,” Ely almost whispered. “About half of the roots are still in the ground, so what?”

“I’m going to tie a rope around my waist and around the bridge, so that if the bridge jumps back upward after the weight shifts off of it, I won’t fall. Then...”

He was interrupted by a loud crack and the split they had been talking about suddenly opened. As they stared in amazement, the tree split lengthwise for at least ten feet. Then slowly, ever so slowly, the split moved down along the trunk. The main portion of the tree began to droop downward and at the same time the section they had been working on was being pulled across the deck of the bridge taking the broken section of the handrail with it. Karl and Ely both began to walk backward, moving off the bridge quite rapidly. At the same time, they stared in fascination at the moving split and the sliding section of timber. The movement of the tree suddenly accelerated, then with a grinding, growling snap, the butt of the section which Karl had cut slipped off of the bridge and dropped downward. It snapped back against the main trunk, which came to rest with little more than a rustling and crackling sound as it slammed against the side of the gorge. What was left of the tree was now suspended upside down, but braced against the bank, in fact the section that had been resting on the bridge was now jammed into the soil at the base of the bank. Luckily, everything had cleared the flume on its way down.

Karl and Ely stared momentarily, then broke into laughter.

“That’s what I call well done,” Ely grinned after a moment.

“What do you mean?” Karl asked.

“Well, either you had that planned, or you’re the luckiest son of a bitch around,” she chuckled.

“I guess I’m just lucky, because it wasn’t planned,” Karl grinned. “Now let’s see if the rest of the bridge is all right.”

The railing on one side of the bridge had been damaged, but it was only cracked, not broken. The other railing had been broken away completely and had lost a section about ten feet long. Karl tied a length of rope in its place as a temporary measure.

“Texas bluff,” he smiled at Ely. “It looks a lot safer than it is.”

“Oh come on, the bridge is safe enough, but that rope won’t make Keri feel better,” she grinned. “She never did like heights much, which is strange, since she flies a friggin’ helicopter.”

Picking up all their gear, they continued on their way. Once across the bridge, they were walking on a path through tall trees. A few small branches impeded their way, but nothing really seemed to be badly damaged. Unfortunately the day had passed very quickly as they worked and it was almost dusk. The rapidly dimming light wasn’t helped by the falling rain.

Karl paused suddenly, then turned to Ely. He grabbed her in a bear hug, then kissed her hard and handed her the flashlight before setting off along the path again, this time quite rapidly.

“Wait a minute,” she called. “What’s the hurry?”

“I want to see how the cabin fared,” he called back, but not slowing. “If I see a problem, I’ll wait for you.”

She hurried along, and wasn’t really far behind him when they crested the small hill at the edge of a large clearing. In the dim light she could just make out the bulk of a small house across the clearing, but in the dim light it was difficult to even distinguish it from the nearby trees and the sheer rock face behind it. Karl knew his way though and by the time she had reached the front steps, a porch light suddenly came on.

He came around the corner of the house, grinning broadly.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve seen your new house. You just finished it last year, didn’t you?”

“Yeah mostly, I started living in it the year before last, but it wasn’t finished then. I guess you’re right though, it is your first time. Hey, we’ve got power anyway, so we’ll have lights to see,” he crowed. “Now to see what damage the quake did inside.”

Ely pointed. “I see it cracked a window.”

“Yeah, that one, as well as the one in the back door, around the side of the house,” Karl said, as he opened the front door. “If that’s all the damage that was done, I’ll be happy as hell. Windows are nonessentials. It looks like the glass held, even if it’s cracked, so I doubt if any animals got in.”

“Right now the animals would have to be damn tough to slow me down. I want a bath as soon as I can have one,” she laughed.

Inside, Karl turned on a light. The living room opened off a small entryway and the floor was strewn with fallen bits of plaster from the ceiling as well as pictures and other things that had hung on the walls.

It was a large room with varnished log walls and a huge stone fireplace at one end. The glass doors of the fireplace stood half open with the blackened hearth gaping into the room and a fan of soot staining the old Oriental carpet that stretched before the fireplace. A tall book shelf had fallen over, so books were spread far and wide. Meanwhile one cupboard in the kitchen area had a door hanging askew with a few pieces of broken china lying on the tile floor.

“Well, this isn’t bad,” Karl sighed. “A bit of a mess, but nothing that can’t be cleaned up in a couple of hours.”

“Let’s look at the rest of the house before we start,” Ely grinned as he began to pick up things on his way across the floor.

“We are,” he snorted. “I’m just picking up stuff that’s in my way as we go.”

“Ah. Sorry, I guess if it was my house that had been put through a blender, I’d be a bit distracted too.”

“Hey, the house is still standing,” Karl smiled ruefully. “There’s just some cleanup to do. But as you said, let’s see how the rest of the place fared.”

At least this kitchen didn’t have any plaster dust or broken plaster on the floor. The plaster ceilings were cracked in one or two places, but hadn’t fallen down. Meanwhile the walls were all of varnished wood and only the occasional piece of chinking that had fallen from between logs lay on the floor or protruded from spaces in the logs. A few pots had fallen from their hooks on one wall. The fridge gaped wide open and was running smoothly, its light shining on bare shelves. As Karl closed the door, Ely turned on the water at the sink but all she got was a gurgle

“Let’s hope the broken pipe for that is easily fixed,” Karl sighed. “I was looking forward to a nice long bath in my tub.”

“So was I,” Ely smiled. “There’s no chance you just turned the water off is there?”

“Nope. There’s a solar water heater on the roof that heats a mass of stone in the crawlspace under the cabin and I leave the water on to supply the system in case of a minor leak. Maybe the supply pipe is broken, but for now, let’s worry about other things. I hope the larder is okay,” he said, as he walked around the corner and past a set of stairs in order to open a thick door.

The room they entered was lined on two walls with shelves of closed containers and had another door at the far end which seemed to be let into a rock face.

“This opens into a small natural cave that was here before I built the house. I did expand it though,” he explained, checking a pipe that ran along just above the floor on one side and snapping off a switch next to a pair of water tanks. “If there’s no water, I don’t want to burn out an element. At least the electricity was off when I came, so the elements shouldn’t have overheated too much in the short time they were on.”

“I thought you said the water was heated by solar panels?”

“It is, but there’s an auxiliary electric tank as well. The water from the roof panels feeds one tank, which preheats the water for the other. That way I had hot water all the time, even on stormy days.”

“I should have expected something like that. Well everything looks good here.”

“This isn’t what I was worried about. You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he opened the door at the far end of the room and Ely felt a distinct chill.

“Ah, it’s cool in here, that’s a good sign,” Karl sighed.

The walls here were solid rock and the room was huge. Shelves stood on each side and reached well above their heads. On the shelves were boxes and bags, small barrels and varying sized pails as well as several closed cupboards. One more door was set into an insulated wall that stood off to one side. The door was made of metal and looked bulky. On the wall next to it were several gauges and controls. Karl grinned as he turned from looking at them.

“Wonderful. It’s still working perfectly,” he chortled. “I was worried.”

“What is it, a walk-in freezer?”

“That’s right,” he laughed, pulling open the door. “This is the only thing in the house that runs on electricity, but is never turned off. I want the temperature to stay below freezing at all times.”

A large room, perhaps twelve feet square, was lit by a single bulb. The shelves inside were covered with packages, wrapped tightly and covered in frost. He closed the door quickly after Ely had a brief glance around, but even that short time had cooled the outer room and she shivered.

“That’s my deep freeze,” he grinned, closing it again. “There’s probably a year’s supply of food for the five of us in there. Well, along with what’s in this room, perhaps even longer if we were careful. I’ve been hoping the electricity was still working and none of the freezing equipment had been broken. I’d have hated to have to chuck all this out because it was spoiled.”

“I can see why,” Ely shivered slightly. “Did you expect a disaster of some kind? You seem so well prepared.”

“Not really,” Karl laughed, leading her back into the kitchen. “But living here in isolation you get to worrying about something going wrong and not being able to get supplies. I suppose I got a tiny bit carried away with preparations.”

“Well I’m damn glad you did,” Ely laughed. “Did you say this was a natural cave or did you excavate it?”

“It was a little bit of each,” Karl explained. “It was a small cave and I opened it up since the rock was soft. I needed the broken rock for the heat storage unit inside the foundations under the cabin anyway. Like I said, the solar panels heat water that gets pumped down under the cabin into a pipe grid buried in a rock and gravel filled space. In the winter, I can pump water back through it and into the heaters in the cabin. But I’ve got a wood stove and some electric heaters as well.”

Ely broke into laughter. “I want to see everything and we came up here to check it all. How about if we keep going? Besides, I’m getting chilled.”

“Right,” Karl laughed. “Now that I know we’re in good shape as far as food is concerned, I can worry about other damage to the place. But, I guess we should call the boat, George will be worried. The radio is in my office and that’s just off the living room.”

As they came back into the main house, Karl opened a door on the left. “This is the downstairs bathroom...”

He paused instantly after opening the door. They could both hear the sound of gushing water.

“Oh Hell!” Karl said loudly, staring inside.

A hole in the floor gaped before him. Down in the hole, a small boulder lay on the crushed toilet and was constantly washed by water from a broken pipe. He glanced upward at a matching hole where the window had been in the wall and found he was looking at the rock face behind the house. Because of the roof overhang and the proximity of the rock face, hardly any rain came in. However in the vicinity of the hole in the floor, everything was wet from spraying water and littered with broken wood, shattered glass from the window and broken porcelain from the toilet.

“Shit,” he growled. “It’s broken off right at the feed from the main supply line to the cabin.”

“So much for our bath,” Ely laughed almost hysterically, picking up a piece of the shattered porcelain from the toilet. “And your nice indoor toilet. I hope you have an outhouse.”

He didn’t respond. He was leaning into the spray over the hole, trying to see exactly what was broken.

“Look at that, it snapped the handle and spindle right out the shut off valve to this bathroom. I think I can fix that quickly enough,” he grinned up at her. “Don’t despair on that bath yet, Ely. I’ve got a spare valve for this out in the shed and I’d better fix it right now before it does any more damage. Hopefully I can use the pieces of the spare valve in this valve body. If the threads in the old valve aren’t too badly damaged, it will work, but I’m liable to get wet doing it.”

He stood and picked up the flashlight as he went out the door, leaving her standing alone. She looked after him and then smiled at the thought of him repairing the water right away.

“He would want to fix it now,” she laughed softly, talking to herself. “Oh well. While he’s fixing that, I’ll clean up a bit.”

She went back to the kitchen to clean it up first, starting by trying to restore the pots and pans to order. While she was busy there, he rushed past on his way back into the bathroom. In a few moments she heard him call her name and hurried to see what he wanted.

“Ah, there you are,” he grinned up from down in the hole in the floor. “Try the cold faucet on the tub would you?”

She leaned over the tub and turned it on.

“It seems to work all right.”

“Hold it,” he shouted, then he spoke quietly as she shut off the water. “It’s broken the drain as well. Hand me that soggy towel would you? It’s already gotten wet and gone mouldy, so I might as well use it to plug up the pipe. We don’t want to have the sewer gases backing up and stinking us out or making us sick.”

He popped out of sight for a moment, then was right back “I guess we’ll have to wait for tomorrow for hot water our bath. But at least we’ll have cold water in the kitchen for coffee and such.”

“Good,” she grinned as he climbed out of the hole. “But we’ll still have to go outside for a pee, right?”

“Right, unless we use the upstairs bathroom,” he grinned, dusting himself off.” The pipes for that drain still look all right.”

“You bugger, just knowing the toilet was gone and hearing that water running, I’ve absolutely got to go,” she laughed.

“Top of the stairs and around to your left,” he laughed as she scurried off. “I’ll be out back when you get done and I could use a hand.”

Ely heard his voice following her, but she never even slowed down. She’d found the stairs and rushed upstairs to the bathroom, not even bothering to hunt for switches to turn on lights in her hurry.

When she came back down, she could hear him outside and she followed her ears to find him working around the back of the house. She helped as he put a tarp over the hole in the wall and then a piece of rough plywood over the hole in the bathroom floor. It was almost an hour before they got to his den and the radio, since they went back to the kitchen to make a coffee first, but that wasn’t surprising. After all they’d had to clean up more of the mess in order to use the stove, or the kettle, or even to sit down.

“Are you going to call Dad now that we know what’s going on?” she asked as they entered Karl’s den and he began to check the radios.

“The problem is that this morning we ran into the Navy boys,” Karl frowned. “They’ll be monitoring any radio traffic. The only thing that might be safe is the CB’s and even they might be too powerful. I was thinking of signalling them from the cliff.”

“Karl, it’s already dark and we left the boat well before noon, so we’ve been gone for hours. Dad will be worried as hell and monitoring everything. Unless we call soon, Keri is going to talk Dad into letting her swim ashore to come find us.”