The sun over Miami cast its golden rays upon the bustling city below. At the beaches, tourists baked in the sun. In town, cheaters hoped their spouses weren’t suspicious of the after-hour text messages and swindlers helped vulnerable seniors lose their life savings as drug dealers sold their poison. Over in Coconut Grove residents washed monkey poop off their cars for the millionth time and cursed the day Hurricane Andrew struck and freed the creatures from their prison-like zoo existence.
On Miami Beach, the ground rumbled and then settled. Minutes later, screams punctured the salty air as swimmers, caught in a murderous rip tide, were swept out to sea.
“Momma! Look! The fishies,” a four-year-old yelled. “Where the water going?” the youngster asked with a laugh as she pointed at hundreds of fish left to fend for themselves as the ocean water retreated from the beach like a French soldier running from the German Army.
Momma screamed. She knew precisely what the receding water meant. Scooping her young daughter up, she started to run. Realizing she was still topless, she quickly returned to retrieve her purse and swimsuit top.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck! There’s a tsunami coming,” she yelled to anyone still motionless. “Run for your lives!”
“Momma, you said three bad words,” her daughter giggled as underneath her feet, the Earth decided to assist her departure.
Buildings swayed like palm trees in a hurricane, and a deafening roar of chaos filled the air. With relentless force, a massive earthquake that originated offshore in the Atlantic Shelf propagated its destructive power to the mainland. Flung twenty feet sideways, momma had just enough time to see the concrete wall, used to keep the ocean from flooding Collins Avenue, in her way. Right before her neck snapped from the impact, she hoped her daughter might survive.
Two large cruise ships bobbed in Government Cut as the earthquake persisted. The onboarding terminal flexed and groaned like an old man trying to stand up after sitting too long in front of the television.
“Oh Lord!” a grandmother from Indiana yelled as a series of I-Beams in the roof gave up the ghost and fell, bringing everything that was attached crashing earthward. “God help us,” multiple voices screamed as they and everyone waiting to board a ship were crushed into small, twitching chunks.
Cracks in the concrete sea wall rippled, and the metal gangplanks attached to the cruise ships crumbled like gingerbread, splashing into the water.
“Start the engines!” one Captain yelled. He wasn’t sure if the quake was powerful enough to create a tsunami, but he didn’t want to be in shallow water if one hit. “We need to put to sea immediately.”
“What about the passengers?” his First Officer asked.
“How are they going to board? The gangways are in fifty feet of water now! Get us underway!”
“Sir, we need a tender to guide us out.”
“Screw that! Get my boat out of here!” the Captain screamed, grabbing a set of high power binoculars.
Unsure it was possible to navigate out of the Cut without tender assistance, the First Officer shrugged and gave the orders.
“What the hell?” an attorney in the Greenway and Batterman building, one of Miami’s tallest, screamed as his 25th-floor office slid sideways.
“Holy shit, earthquake!” Carlos Alvarez, a notorious Mexican cartel member and proficient drug dealer, screamed. Unlike his lawyer, Carlos knew instantly what it was. “We need to go!” he yelled over his shoulder as he sprinted toward the exit door. He almost made it, too, but the building swayed and bent. As the bend happened, the floor-to-ceiling polarized glass that made the building an iconic part of the Miami skyline shattered into a zillion tiny pieces. Each piece reflected the golden sunlight, which seemed to mock the dark chaos beneath it. Losing his footing, Carlos flew out the window as the building broke in half. His temporary view of Miami seemed to calm his fear of dying. Across the street a collapsing building fell. He had just enough time to know it was in his way. This was unfortunate for him. Crashing through the glass and concrete, very little of Carlos was left intact when the building he’d been thrown out of crashed to the ground directly on top of his shredded remains.
Panic spread like wildfire as people ran for cover, desperately seeking refuge from nature’s wrath.
Amidst the turmoil, a primal force stirred deep beneath the Earth. For centuries, it had been forgotten by the world above, content to use the Florida aquifers as pathways to the deep ocean. The earthquake woke the ancient beast from its rest. With a thunderous roar, it tore through the ground and emerged from underneath Brickell Key.
The creature, a monstrous behemoth of scales and sinew, rose from the depths, its eyes blazing with primal anger and fury.
Out on the bay, a teenager on a stolen wave runner throttled down from wide open to idle. He turned in his seat.
“Did you feel that?”
“What?” the girl tightly attached to his waist asked.
“Like, the ocean heaved a bit, a weird surge or something.” Then, out of the corner of his eye, the Miami skyline caught his attention. “What’s happening downtown?”
Both turned and saw tall buildings sway and fall. Dust and flames filled the horizon.
“No way, Miami doesn’t have earthquakes!” the girl said, her voice trailing away faintly. “Get me back to shore!” she screamed, pounding the boy’s back in terror. She hit an even higher note when the monster emerged from the rubble that once was downtown Miami.
“What the fuck is that?” they screamed in unison as they suddenly realized that the ocean had been pulling them offshore. Gunning the engine, the young teen made a beeline for what looked like dry land. He was already planning on ditching this girl and trying his best to get to his pregnant fiancé’s house in Hialeah.
On the Rickenbacker Causeway, tourists and locals were in a quandary.
“Daddy? Why is the water doing that?” a young boy remarked, seeing the ocean begin to disappear.
Grabbing his son, a vacationing father and prepper on vacation from Tennessee, shook his head in amazement when his wife asked the same thing. He had an idea about the reason.
“We gotta get to the car. Leave everything! We need higher ground!”
“What are you talking about? What higher ground? The whole state is at sea level!” his wife shouted, unsure why her husband had started running away from the beach.
With his son in his arms, he turned and offered one word.
“Tsunami!”
In disbelief, she turned and looked at the seabed that had begun to appear. As far as she could see, there was no more ocean.
“What was that? And, where is the water going?” three men fishing nearby asked each other as they regained their footing. They furiously started reeling in their fishing lines. Bewildered by it all, they note that their baits skip across the bottom of the now-empty Biscayne Bay.
“Oh my God,” a nearby sunbather muttered as the shaking finally stopped. “What’s happening to Miami?”
“Where are the buildings?” one of the fishermen questions.
All three are stunned when what looks like a monster emerges amidst the rubble.
“Shit”
“Es un monstruo!”
“El Chupacabra,” one man muttered, crossing himself.
“That’s fucking Godzilla, here in South Florida!” another man, closer to the mainland, said, picking up his iPhone and opening the camera app. He had a contact at Channel 4 and was already formulating a dollar figure to charge for the video.
A distant roar building from the horizon filled the air.
Weakened by the quake, the only connection to the mainland, the Rickenbacker Causeway bridge, collapsed into the ocean.
“Dammit! The bridge is gone!” prepper dad yelled. Looking around, he spotted a 26-foot Sea Ray excursion boat tied to an anchor buoy twenty feet from what once was the shoreline. It sat crookedly on the exposed ocean bottom. “Get to that boat! We can hunker down and be ready when the water returns! It might be the only way we get back to Miami,” he yelled, pulling his wife by the arm.
“Are you going to steal that boat?” she shrieked as an unearthly roar hit them both. The monster was impossible to miss. “What the hell is that thing?” she screeched.
Flailing around, obliterating buildings the quake didn’t destroy, the monster tilted its head back and roared. Its body glowed briefly. A wave of energy rippled through the atmosphere, shredding everyone who heard it.
At Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant in Homestead, sirens screamed for attention as the cooling pool canals drained.
“What do you mean, the canals are empty?” the Chief asked the guard who’d called to report what he’d seen. He figured the quake did minimal damage to the reactors, but he knew they needed that water.
“Empty, sir. As in there is no water in them. Could the quake do that?”
Then, realization dawned. He hit a red button on the wall near his desk.
“Attention all hands! Prepare for a tsunami! Control room, prepare for an emergency SCRAM of the reactors!” he yelled into the public address system.
The data the nuclear industry had learned after the Great Tohoku quake and tsunami, the one that caused three of the six Fukushima reactors to meltdown, flashed through his mind.
How high was the wave that hit Fukushima? Forty feet? Fifty? And how fast was it going? He thought, standing to look at the ocean through the bulletproof glass of his office. He rapped the glass with his knuckles. Is this stuff still bulletproof? What about wave proof?
“Oh God,” escaped his lips as the wave grew in the distance.
North of Miami Beach, survivors picked through the rubble of poorly built condos and short-term rentals, looking for loved ones or items they still thought were important. Pausing, a new sound captured their attention.
“Good. I bet that’s the helicopters coming to rescue us,” offered a retired school teacher from Virginia who’d just moved into her ocean-front condo.
Turning to look towards the source of the sound, another neighbor, a retired Navy man in the now-bloodied terry-cloth bathrobe he’d had on when the quake struck, shook his head. He sat heavily on a large piece of building debris. It was not lost on him that dead neighbors lay beneath his feet. Fumbling around in a pocket, he fished out two tiny bottles of Jamison Irish Whisky. When the quake struck, he’d been about to add them to his Kona Coffee. He opened and drained both. Smacking his lips, he glanced around, wishing for more. Shaking his head again, he focused on the fast-approaching dark horizon.
“That’s not helicopters,” he muttered with an ironic smile. “However, it will erase all this pain and suffering.”
“What’d you say?” a neighbor, his arm wrapped in gauze, asked as the earthquake-generated tsunami, a towering wall of water the height of a ten-story building, consumed everything and everyone in South Florida.
The cruise ships, now tumbling end-over-end, crashed into the monster and washed it across the Florida Peninsula, dumping it into the shallow waters off Naples. Getting its footing, the monster stood upright and tilted its head. A series of new sounds caught its attention.
Warning sirens on oil platforms out in the Gulf wailed. It was as if an invitation was being sent across the waves.
