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When Patrick was a boy and the siren sounded, he thought of monsters rising from the depths of vast seas and swallowing ships, fire raining from the sky, titanic gods slinging bolts of lightning to the anthill towns beneath.

His thoughts weren’t so different as a man. That sound, it rendered muscle from bone. Squeezed your heart of every last drop of blood.

The door’s window popped on its recoil, his boots hitting the cobblestones in the next moment.

Someone shouted to him, “East mine, Pat! East! ” As though he couldn’t see the frantic crowd funneling in that direction, disappearing down alleyways, shovels already in hand, screaming to the windows above. “East!” they shouted. “Hurry! Hurry!”

How many would be lost this time? Ten? Twenty? Would Gunner be among them? No , Patrick thought, over and over.

He cleared one alley, ran full out down Citadel Street, then Penance.

The siren droned, doors crashed open, and people erupted from the depths of buildings with pails and spades and anything that could break earth.

All of it was carried to the edge of town, to the foot of a yellow hill.

Already there were people racing up its side to the pit above.

Patrick ran to do the same. The people trapped below had minutes, seconds left in the hourglass.

No air to breathe. Just the thin hope that someone would dig deep enough.

Even from this distance, Patrick could see the frame of the pit entrance had caved inward, the ground beneath it bowled.

And suddenly the yellow hill came alive. It shifted, awakening from a long, deadened sleep, shelves of grass sliding away. The entire fabric of the hill distorting before Patrick’s eyes. A wave of black hurtled toward them, flowing from the summit, slipping down, down.

“LANDSLIDE!” Patrick bellowed at the same time as twenty others, fifty.

Patrick grabbed the jacket of a man running by to pull him back. There were already too many on the hill, too many falling as the earth beneath them fluxed. Soon, they’d be trapped, too, devoured by the mud swarming their ankles.

“RUN!” Patrick shouted. For the wall of mud wouldn’t stop there. It would barrage over the fence and through the alleys, through windows and doors. It would buckle walls and bury those, too.

He saw Scottie struck dumb, mouth horribly agape. “Holy fuckin’ God,” he intoned as Patrick grabbed his arm.

“GO!” Patrick begged, pushing, herding as many as his arm span would allow. He shoved them backward until their minds caught up with their feet. Screams rent the drums in his ears. Back over the fence. Fall. Stand up. Run. The roar of a terrible beast intoned behind them, harrying its prey.

And then Nina appeared, sweat slickened and breathing at a tremendous pace. She ran with her skirt scrunched in her hand, toward the landslide rather than away from it.

“Nina!” Patrick shouted. Scrambling for her, through the river of scattering bodies. “NINA! STOP!”

But Nina was now clear of the crush. She clambered over the fence, her dress ripping. She grounded her feet in the grass and lifted her chin, as though the wave of mud about to eclipse her was an old friend and she was there to greet it.

The earth shook.