This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
Well, at first, it was more like the ground cantankerously growled, then it groused, then it grumbled, and then, after several hours of geologic griping, it finally shook for 30 seconds. Birdfeeders swayed. Carelessly constructed Jenga towers collapsed. A few Precious Moments figurines tipped over and chipped in their glass-enclosed wall units.
This all understandably worried Seabreeze Ridge’s residents, who were quite unaccustomed to the earth beneath their feet doing anything other than standing perfectly still. But then nothing happened, so people chocked it all up to larger than usual explosions at a nearby rock quarry.
What came next quickly revived that concern before transforming it into fear: the ground began to rise.
It started subtly enough. Potholes widened. Trees, lamp posts, and stop signs tilted slightly. But then things got more serious. Over the subsequent week, house foundations cracked, water mains and sewer lines burst, septic tanks overflowed, electrical lines stretched and broke. Whole swaths of the neighborhood began to lose power. At this point, many residents had left voluntarily, though the county had yet to implement a mandatory evacuation.
People started to pay attention. Obviously, the residents were justifiably worried that their neighborhood was coming apart before their eyes, but scientists and TV vans soon flooded the scene to try to figure out what the hell was going on. Boy, were they in for a show.
Rosa Alarcón, a 23-year-old Colombian immigrant, had returned home after an all-day shift waitressing in one of Downtown Miami’s upscale steakhouses. She was exhausted. Dealing with an arrogant, occasionally handsy C-Suite clientele was difficult enough, but the hour and a half commute back to Seabreeze Ridge through Miami’s glacial rush hour traffic made it significantly worse. However, the tips were good and her family needed the income, so she made the three-hour roundtrip drive every day.
Despite the occasional brownouts and a growing exodus from the neighborhood, the Alarcones had not yet committed to leaving Seabreeze Ridge. For one, they didn’t have anywhere else to go. All their belongings, all their savings, hopes, and dreams for a better life were tied up in their single-story house. Besides, the family had weathered natural calamities, civil war, and violent crime in Colombia. America was the land of opportunity, a refuge against instability and the looming possibility of disaster that shadowed them back in their home country. Surely, nothing here could compare with what they had experienced before emigrating.
Rosa was at the kitchen sink, engrossed in the task of washing a pile of dishes, when she glanced out the window overlooking the backyard. Squinting through the setting sun’s dying light, she noticed that a five-foot Bulge—think of something Winnie the Pooh might live in—had formed just outside the patio. She frowned.
“¡Mami!” she cried over her shoulder. “¡Ven por favor!”[1]
“¿Qué necesitas, hija?”[2] responded María Marta Alarcón. Her middle-aged mother walked into the kitchen from the living room, where she had been helping Quincy, Rosa’s 10-year-old brother, with his Spanish homework.
“¿Por qué construyeron una lomita en el patio?”[3] asked Rosa.
“Amor, no tengo idea de lo que hablas,”[4] replied María Marta.
She joined her daughter at the window where the two women watched in shock as the little Bulge grew before their eyes into something seemingly alive and hungry. Its base steadily expanded until it reached the concrete patio, splitting it with a loud crack. María Marta screamed in fright.
“Pero ¿qué es esto, Dios mío? ¿Qué está pasando?”[5] María Marta was shaking, eyes wide and horrified as the house began to tip at an alarming angle.
An intergenerational firmness took hold of Rosa—an ineffable instinct that told her all was lost and they needed to run—the same impulse that informed her parents it was time to leave Colombia, the very same one that drove her grandparents from a war-torn interior to Cartagena, and the only reason her family hadn’t been eradicated a century earlier.
Rosa grabbed María Marta by the shoulders and stared into her eyes.
“Mamá llama a mi papá y a Quincy y empieza a recoger sólo lo que necesitamos llevar, no tenemos mucho tiempo, debemos irnos rápido,”[6] she calmly informed her mother.
The Alarcones rushed around the house stuffing photo albums, family heirlooms, passports, and jewelry into suitcases and bags as furniture crashed down and skidded across their floor around them. They ran out the door with barely enough time to turn and see the roof cave in as the Bulge continued its ominous rise behind the ruins of the life they had managed to pull together in their adopted country. Quincy cried silently, but the three adult Alarcones stoically marched him down the street and away from the spreading destruction.
Within an hour, the Bulge had grown to 30 feet tall, its base taking up the Alarcones’ entire block. Houses slid off their foundations and collapsed. Fires erupted as gas lines broke and candles, hot plates, and electric stoves tipped over. And yet the Bulge continued to grow. At 9 PM, it stood 50 feet tall and flattened an area four blocks wide. By now, the country had cut off the water and gas mains and began a mandatory evacuation of all remaining Seabreeze Ridge residents in an attempt to contain the catastrophe’s worst effects. At midnight, the Bulge was 80 feet high and covered an area of 12 square blocks. By the time the sun rose at six in the morning, it topped up at 135 feet with a base measuring a full square mile. South Florida’s newest and most dramatic topographical feature was clearly visible to the office workers settling into their desks along Brickell’s shoreline.
Florida’s piercing morning sunlight crested over the Everglades and shone on a devastated Seabreeze Ridge. With a building code designed to weather hurricanes, not earthquakes, every structure in the neighborhood had been flattened. Roosters and ibis picked over the smoldering remains of 15,000 residents’ earthly possessions, what little generational wealth they had been able to accumulate as they worked back-breaking agricultural and service jobs.
Thanks to the evacuation order, no one was killed, though three meth labs did explode. Incredibly—in the most literal sense of the word—the Poultry Point nuclear power plant reported absolutely no damage whatsoever, as it barely resided within the Bulge’s periphery. It just listed at a seemingly harmless seven-degree angle, sending wheeled furniture, janitorial carts, and crocodiles sliding slowly into the southwest corner of the facility.
But help was on its way. 400 miles to the north, policymakers in Tallahassee were laser-focused on the all-important task of figuring out how to make money from this disaster.
[1] “Mom! Come here please!”
[2] “What do you need, daughter?”
[3] “Why did you build a little hump in the yard?”
[4] “Girl, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
[5] “My God, what is that? What is happening?”
[6] Mom, get dad and Quincy moving and only grab the essentials. We don’t have much time, and we need to leave right now.”
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