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rather sideways. The room was shaking so severely, it felt as if we were on a boat in troubled seas.  
    It was an earthquake. And it was huge.
    She pulled me away from the tangled sheets and I made my way across the floor to the exit, following her and Ky. We had slept through the short, late autumn day, and poured into the twilight of the setting sun, sprinting barefoot away from the cabin and onto the small expanse of grass nearly a hundred yards away.  
    The earth wasn’t shaking, it was undulating. Like the back of an enraged beast, it shook itself as if staggering to rise. Stunned, we stared out over the vista that had so enchanted us when we arrived.  
    The rolling hills were a picture of madness, trees jumping from the ground and crevasses opening and closing with the folds of the earth. The small two-lane roadway closest to us was nearly unidentifiable, and vast swathes of trees were simply disappearing into the tumult. Further out, the solid, defined corridor of highway that was I-5 had disappeared, covered by darkness and debris. As we stared, I opened my mouth to curse, but we were thrown to the ground violently as another tremor crashed into us.  
    Powerful waves of earth were pulsing under our feet, rippling along the ground, underneath the cabin behind us, and on up the rise into the foothills and mountains behind. Clouds of dirt and rock were jettisoned into the air, angrily clawing against their forcible eviction.  
    I don’t know how long we lay there, but it felt like an eternity. The ground heaved and rocks fell. Trees splintered and the earth split. We could hear the world shaking itself to pieces, and it sounded as if it would never end.  
    The first support beam to crack was a gunshot of splitting wood, as the huge overlook deck tilted wildly to the side and came falling to the earth. The windows of the main living area fell in shards to the ground, and I heard the loud hiss of air as a truck tire was ruptured by something—likely a shard of rock or glass.  
    The side of the house that I had been sleeping in only moments ago sheered off from the main area like a piece of butter cut in half by a hot knife, crashing to the driveway and folding into a new shallow gutter of dirt that had shot through the earth from the mountain behind.
    “Mike!”  
    Ky was scared, and I put my hand out, finding her back as we all lay flat on the grassy earth, hoping against hope that the planet didn’t decide to open a massive grave underneath us as we took the most basic shelter imaginable.  
    “Mike, look!”  
    She wasn’t just scared. She was looking at something as she spoke, pointing into the distance.  
    I lifted my head, tilting awkwardly as I sought to make sense out of the calamity. I could see vast, growing patches of darkness in the distance, farther westward and as close as the interstate. They were slowly creeping east, seeping toward us like vast, malicious spots of dark ink.
    “What is it, I can’t make it…” But then I understood.
    It was seawater.  
    The Pacific ocean was coming toward us as a massive tsunami—likely connected to the incredible upheaval we were enduring—pushed billions of tons of ocean inland.
    I could see the wall of dark water now. Trees and cars were caught in its fury, and the flooding that lay on the earth now was only a prelude.
    As the shaking finally began to subside, and I heard another part of the house behind us crash to the ground beneath a large rock fall from the hillside, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the disaster ahead.
    The sea rolled into land relentlessly and effortlessly, a wall of unperturbed death that stretched a terrifying distance to the north and south. All we could see was water, backlit by the dying sun in the far distance. Trees and houses and roads and grass and power lines—seemingly all that remained of our fragile humanity’s perch on the earth—all fell beneath the crushing weight of billions of pounds of seawater. Seawater