Read LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation for Free Online

fences shook and the long disused airplanes outside rattled softly.  
    Finally, as the dust began to build in the air, and the smoke from fires rose to the sky, the earth ceased its trembling. Buildings continued to slide from their foundations and cement walls continued to crumble.
    But mere miles off the coast of Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, a new danger was already gathering to strike. Like the angry back of an awakening dragon lurching from the depths of the sea, the wave rose.
    Its peak was nearly seven stories tall, and it drew with it water from the depths of a cold ocean that had been shocked into action by the shifting of the continents beneath its waves.
    It rose quickly and silently. There was no rush of water. There were no screams of terror or flashes of light.
    The only clue as to its new life was on the shoreline of the coast. From San Francisco to Vancouver, the broken earth had its blanket of seawater pulled away. The tidal surges were suddenly pulled back into the ocean, revealing hundreds of yards of sandy ocean bottom as the water shifted to the sea dramatically in what is known as a drawback.
    Had anyone been left alive to watch, this drawback would have been frightening. As if all the water in the ocean were being drained through an unseen and unknown funnel far from the shore. Everything from small fish and crabs and ocean debris to whales and long lost shipwrecks were exposed to the open air of the chilly sunset.
    But had anyone been left alive to watch, they would not have had much time to be scared.
    Approximately three minutes after the sea was suddenly pulled back, the massive wave of cold seawater came into view.
    At first, it appeared to be a trick of the fading light. A rapidly rising horizon beneath a glowing orange and red sun. An inexplicable variation in the landscape that stretched as far as the eye could see from north to south.
    It came toward land at the speed of nearly two hundred miles per hour, energized by the massive disruption of geological forces beneath the surface of the ocean and beneath the crust of the planet itself. As it hit the rocky beaches of the Northwest, it simply obliterated the homes and businesses along the coast. It removed small islands from the map. The wave tore schools and hospitals from their foundations, catching millions upon millions of tons of debris in its terrible wake. Roads and cities and farms and fields were consumed by the water that seemed to have no end—the water that seemed to have risen from hell itself, and could know no equal.
    In the north, the historic city of Victoria, perched delicately on the tip of Victoria island, staring across the straight of Juan de Fuca at the smaller town of Port Angeles in Washington, was utterly removed from the map, along with its American counterpart across the strait.  
    The San Juan Islands, Whidbey Island, and half of the Olympic National Park, located on the peninsula that protected Seattle from the Pacific, were covered in water and followed by a wave that hit like a runaway freight train.
    The wave barreled through the narrow channel, focusing its massive strength even more as it was compressed into the narrows, then shot from the mouth of the passageway into the network of bays and inlets that dotted the entire region. The brunt of the wave’s force, by sheer happenstance, had hit the island chain directly to the west of Mike, Kate, Ky and Romeo. Like a massive bulldozer, it took with it millions of years of geological evolution, and reduced entire islands and peninsulas to reefs and sandbars.  
    As the water pushed deeper into the bays, its power reduced slowly, but its consequences were dire. The plate upon which the entire Northwest was located had shifted, and it was still moving. The water rose as it was pushed inland, flooding valleys and widening existing rivers slowly as the churning water forced its way upstream. Entire towns ceased to exist.
    In Seattle, the water rose to cover