Monument 14 Read Online Free PDF Page B

heavy, rolling, clanking sound.
    “What’s that?” Max stammered.
    *   *   *
    Three heavy metal gates were rolling down over the gaping hole at the front of the store. One, two, three, side by side they descended. The two on the sides covered the windows. The center one was a bit bigger and covered the entire space of what had been the sliding doors.
    The gate was perforated so we could still get air and see out, but it was kind of scary.
    We were being locked in.
    The little kids lost it. “What’s happening?” “We’re trapped!” “I want to go home!” That kind of thing.
    Niko just stood, watching the gate come down.
    “We should like get something under it. To like wedge it open,” Jake shouted.
    He grabbed a shopping cart and rolled it forward, under the central gate.
    But the gate dropping just pushed the cart out of the way.
    The three gates settled with a heavy CLANK that rang with finality.
    “We’re locked in,” I said.
    “And everyone else is locked out,” Niko said quietly.
    “All right,” Jake said, clapping his hands. “Which one of you little punks is gonna teach me how to play Chutes and Ladders?”
    Alex came up beside me and tugged at my shirt.
    “Dean,” he said, “wanna go to the Media Department with me?”
    *   *   *
    All the bigtabs in the Media Department were dead, of course. They ran off the Network, just like our minitabs. But Alex found the one old-fashioned flat-screen TV. It was hung down low, near to the floor, off to the side.
    I’d never really understood why anyone would want to buy a plain television, when bigtabs were only just a little more expensive and you could watch TV on a bigtab and use it to browse and text and Skype and ’book and game and a million other useful things. But every big store kept a couple televisions on display and now I knew why. They worked without National Connectivity. They were picking up some kind of television-only signals. And though the screen was kind of grainy and stripy at times, we watched eagerly.
    Alex turned it to CNN.
    The rest of our group filed over, drawn, I guess, by the sound of live media.
    *   *   *
    I expected the story of our hailstorm to be all over the news. It wasn’t.
    Our little hailstorm was nothing.
    There were two anchors working together and they explained it very calmly, but the woman was shaken. You could see she had been crying. Her eye makeup was all smeared around her eyes and I wondered why nobody fixed her makeup. It was CNN, for God’s sake.
    The man in the blue suit said he would repeat the chain of events for anyone just joining the broadcast. That was us. He said a volcano had erupted on an island called La Palma, in the Canary Islands.
    Shaky, handheld images of ash and a fiery mountain appeared on the screen behind the anchors.
    The woman with the bad makeup said that the western face of the entire island had exploded with the eruption of the volcano. Five hundred billion tons of rock and lava had avalanched into the ocean.
    They didn’t have footage of that.
    Blue Suit said the explosion had created a “megatsunami.”
    A wave a half a mile tall.
    Moving at six hundred miles per hour.
    Bad Makeup said that the megatsunami had grown wider as it approached the coast of the U.S. Then she stopped talking. Her voice caught in her throat, and Blue Suit took over.
    The megatsunami had hit the Eastern Coast of the United States at 4:43 a.m. mountain time.
    Boston, New York, Charleston, Miami.
    All had been hit.
    They couldn’t estimate the number of fatalities.
    I just sat there. I felt completely numb.
    It was the worst natural disaster in recorded history.
    The most violent volcano eruption in recorded history.
    The biggest tsunami in recorded history.
    They played some footage.
    It played so fast they had to slow it down so you could see what was going on.
    From the street, a shot of the Empire State Building and a tall cloud drawing closer and closer, frame by frame, but it