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What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?
Genre : Apocalypse, Fantasy, Superpower, Action
Tag : Misunderstanding, Secret Organization, Wolrd-Freezing, Super power
Chapter 14 : Calamity (2)
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[Time remaining until the Great Freeze: 14 Days]
[Location: Arlen's Apartment, 4th Floor - West Jakarta]
[Time: 07:05 AM]
The world shaking like it was a fluid.
Arlen curled into a ball in the corner of his room, his arms wrapped tight around his head. The concrete floor beneath him rolled like a waterbed.
The sound was the worst part. It sounds like a scream, the high-pitched screech of steel rebars grinding against concrete inside the walls.
CRASH.
His "Fortress of Cans" collapsed. Hundreds of tins of corned beef and tuna rolled across the tilting floor, clattering like hail. His bookshelf tipped over, spilling reference books and novels into the mess.
"Stop. Stop. Please stop," Arlen begged, his eyes squeezed shut behind his gas mask.
He felt the building sway. He was on the fourth floor. If the foundation snapped, he would ride along the building down into a pile of rubble.
He looked at the wall opposite him. A hairline crack appeared near the ceiling. It grew, zigzagging down the plaster like a lightning bolt. Dust puffed out from the fissure, filling the room with a white haze.
He couldn't stay in the corner. The fear of the unknown was stronger than the fear of death.
He crawled.
Dragging himself across the moving floor, he reached the window. He grabbed the edge of the mattress he had taped up and pulled back the plywood just an inch.
The street below was a blur. The asphalt rippled. He saw a streetlamp sway violently before snapping at the base, crashing onto a parked car.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the rolling stopped.
[Time: 07:10 AM]
The silence that followed was heavy, ringing in Arlen's ears.
He pulled himself up, his legs trembling so hard he had to lean against the wall. He adjusted his gas mask, breathing heavy, ragged breaths.
He pushed the mattress aside. He needed to see.
Jakarta was broken.
A thick blanket of grey dust rose from the ground, obscuring the streets like a sudden fog.
Through the haze, he saw the silhouettes of ruin. The three-story shophouse across the street, a bakery he visited yesterday. Was gone. The top floor had sheared off and collapsed into the street, crushing the awning below.
"It's over," Arlen whispered, clutching the window frame. "The earthquake is over."
But then he looked up.
The violet sky was no longer empty.
Now, it's look like its bleeding.
High above the dust clouds, dozens of bright orange streaks slashed through the atmosphere. They looked like falling stars, beautiful and terrifying.
They were the fragments. The debris field from the collision in the Pacific was finally raining down.
Siii-uuuuh.
The whistling sound pierced the air.
Arlen watched a fireball the size of a microwave scream down from the clouds. It didn't hit the ground. It slammed into the side of an office building two blocks away.
BOOM.
There was no delay. The impact blew out the entire third floor of the office. Glass, concrete, and burning furniture erupted outward in a shower of sparks. The shockwave rattled Arlen's window, cracking the glass pane he was looking through.
"No..." Arlen stepped back, his heart hammering against his ribs. "It's not over."
Another streak tore through the sky. Then another.
They were falling everywhere. Random. Merciless.
One landed in the canal, sending a geyser of steam and muddy water shooting fifty meters into the air.
Another hit a power substation. A blue-white explosion lit up the dust cloud, followed by the buzzing death of the local power grid.
The lights in Arlen's apartment flickered and died.
Darkness swallowed the room, leaving only the apocalyptic orange glow from the burning city outside.
Arlen stood in the dark, watching the meteors rain down like judgment. And the her realize, He was just a man in a tin can, waiting to see if the next rock had his name on it.
***
[Location: The Lab, Apothecary's Private Bunker - South Tangerang]
[Time: 07:10 AM]
The floor of the laboratory was slick with spilled chemical agents.
Apothecary gripped the edge of her steel desk, her knuckles white, as the final tremors of the "Pacific Rolling" quake slowly faded. The overhead lights flickered violently, oscillating between sterile white and emergency red.
Around her, equipment worth millions was in ruins. Beakers lay shattered, centrifuges had toppled over, and the server racks were screaming as their cooling fans spun to maximum velocity to handle the heat.
But Apothecary didn't look at the mess. She righted her overturned chair, sat down, and began typing with trembling fingers.
"Bunker Stabilization System active," she muttered, her breath hitching. "Structure holding."
She diverted her attention to the main monitor, which displayed the external camera feeds from the surface.
The view outside was a nightmare.
The sky over South Tangerang was being torn apart by streaks of fire.
Siiiuuuu... BOOM.
She watched a fireball the size of a minivan slam into an elite housing complex two kilometers away. The explosion was pure kinetic energy, flattening an entire block in the blink of an eye.
"Surface impact confirmed," she whispered, her eyes recording the destruction with cold, scientific detachment. "Structural damage extensive. Casualties... incalculable."
But then, she shook her head.
"Not this," she scolded herself.
"These rocks are just scratches. The real wound is deeper."
Apothecary killed the external feed. She didn't need to watch buildings fall. She needed to see what was happening underneath them.
She accessed the Deep Earth Seismic Network. The illegal array of sensors Frostbite had tapped into years ago along the Ring of Fire. Frosbite give it to her along many network he have.
The graph on the screen made her blood run cold.
The seismic lines didn't flatline after the earthquake stopped. They spiked so quickly.
The shockwave from the Pacific impact hadn't dissipated. Its traveling through the earth's crust, searching for a release valve.
"Magma displacement..." her eyes widened. "The shockwave is shaking the magma chambers like a bottle of soda."
She zoomed in on the Northern and Eastern sectors of the archipelago
.
The status indicators for the volcanoes in those regions were shifting rapidly. From YELLOW (Caution) to ORANGE (Warning), and finally blinking RED (Critical).
* Mount Pinatubo (Philippines): [PRESSURE: 400% > CRITICAL]
* Mount Taal (Philippines): [CHAMBER INTEGRITY: FAIL]
* Mount Rabaul (Papua New Guinea): [SEISMIC SWARM DETECTED]
* Hunga Tonga (Pacific): [STEAM DISCHARGE: MASSIVE]
The meteor impact had cracked the tectonic plate they all shared. The pressure was building, looking for the weakest point to burst out.
"They are unstable," Apothecary realized the true horror. "The plate is fractured. It's a chain reaction."
She checked the data for Mount Krakatoa and Merapi in Java.
Status: DEFCON 1. The ground there was vibrating violently, but the plugs were still holding. They hadn't blown yet, but they were awake.
Apothecary looked at the digital clock on the wall.
07:15 AM.
She looked back at the pressure graphs for the Philippines and Papua. The lines had already breached the upper limit of the simulation.
It wasn't a matter of "if" anymore. It was a matter of "when."
"Three minutes," Apothecary whispered, her voice choking.
"Maybe even less."
She grabbed her emergency microphone, her palms slick with cold sweat. She couldn't stop it. She could only watch the countdown reach zero.
Apothecary smashed her hand down on the emergency broadcast button. The red "ON AIR" light flashed.
> [USER: APOTHECARY]: ALL STATIONS. IMMEDIATE ALERT. <
Her voice cracked with a mixture of fear and adrenaline, booming into the headsets of the distant Pillars.
> [USER: APOTHECARY]: The meteor impact was just the detonator. The shockwave has destabilized the Ring of Fire. The volcanoes in the Philippines and Papua are erupting NOW. Multiple VEI-6 and VEI-7 events simultaneous. <
She watched the seismic readings for Yellowstone spike on her secondary monitor. The American supervolcano couldn't handle the global vibration.
> [USER: APOTHECARY]: And the big one is waking up. Yellowstone is critical. I project a full super-eruption in T-Minus 30 minutes. The ash cloud from Asia will hit Jakarta in two hours. The temperature goes down, begins today. SEAL YOUR INTUKES. NOW. <
Within seconds, the acknowledgment lights flickered green on her console.
Deep in his bunkdf, Viper bellowed orders to re-engage hydraulic locks, preparing for tectonic violence worse than the first wave.
In his server room, FrostBite slapped the master switch for his air filtration system, sealing the external vents before the deadly ash arrived.
In the Sanctuary, Seraph smiled beatifically at the massive screens, raising her hands as if welcoming the news. "The purifying fire begins," she whispered to her followers.
They were ready.
***
[Location: Arlen's Apartment, 4th Floor - West Jakarta]
[Time: 07:18 AM]
Arlen terrified writer huddled under a heavy wool blanket, clutching a tactical flashlight like a lifeline.
The apartment was pitch black, save for the orange flashes of meteor impacts outside filtering through the taped-up window.
The air was thick with concrete dust from the earlier quake, clogging the filters of his gas mask.
Every muscle in his body was tensed, waiting for the next tremor, the next explosion.
Siiiiiii-uuuuhhhhh.
The sound cut through the rumble of the burning city. It was closer than any of the others.
Arlen scrambled backward, pressing his back against the load-bearing wall near his kitchen, instinctively trying to get as far from the window as possible.
"Not here. Please not here," he begged into his mask.
The universe didn't listen this time.
It hit the building at 07:18:35 AM.
A meteorite fragment, roughly the size of a refrigerator and traveling at hypersonic speed, slammed directly into the 8th Floor of the 10-story apartment complex.
There was no explosion in the traditional sense. It was a catastrophic transfer of kinetic energy. The impact vaporized the concrete walls of the 8th floor instantly.
CRUNCH-BOOM.
The sound was indescribable, it's the scream of tortured metal and the roar of pulverized stone.
Arlen was lifted off his feet. The shockwave slammed him against the kitchen cabinets. Pots and pans rained down on his helmet.
The building screamed.
With the structural integrity of the 8th floor gone, the physics of gravity took over. The 9th and 10th floors, no longer had anything to support them.
They fell.
It was like an instantaneous pancaking. The top two floors crashed down onto the ruin of the 8th, which in turn smashed through the ceiling of the 7th, and then the 6th.
Down on the 4th Floor, Arlen felt the world end.
The ceiling above him groaned, bowing downward under unimaginable weight. Dust blasted out of every crack in the walls, filling the room with a choking miasma that turned his flashlight beam into a solid white bar.
He curled into a fetal position, covering his head with his arms, screaming soundlessly into his mask as the building above him was meticulously erased.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
The impacts vibrated through his bones. He felt the floor beneath him buckle, tilting precariously. He slid across the living room, slamming into his overturned sofa.
Then, as suddenly as it started, the crushing noise stopped. It was replaced by the sickening sound of settling debris, the groan of rebar and the shifting of countless tons of rubble.
Arlen lay still in the dark, gasping for air. He was alive.
He clicked his flashlight around. His apartment was a wreck, buried in dust, but the walls held.
He didn't know it yet, but he was no longer in the middle of the building.
Above his ceiling, on what used to be the 5th floor, there was now only a mountain of broken concrete that used to be floors 6 through 10.
Arlen was now living in the penthouse of a ruin.
›› To Be Continue ‹‹
—KS