Wave (36 page)

Then the wave surged forward. It was not a “surfer’s curl” with a little crest at the top. It was as ugly as the destruction it promised—a hurried, disorganized rise, as if the Atlantic Ocean were being pushed forward by the hand of God. The deafening roar that accompanied it was like something from another universe. The wave climbed the slant of the beach with no effort, enveloping and moving swiftly over the dunes.

The first line of resistance came in the form of an eighteen-mile row of homes. Many were large and majestic, and far too old to put up any kind of a fight. The wave slammed into them with an intensity their designers had never anticipated. A beautiful Victorian in Loveladies, built in 1911 and lovingly maintained by all three of its owners, folded as if it had been gut punched. In Beach Haven Terrace, a modest Cape Cod that had been purchased a few months earlier by a 62-year-old widower rose off its foundation and cruised into the home next to it, immediately reducing them both to a chaos of shattered boards. In Holgate, a spidery construct of studs and windowless frames that would have been a three-story home in a few more months bent forward in a respectful bow, creaking and groaning before it disintegrated.

Water gushed down access paths and alleyways. It poured onto Atlantic Avenue and Ocean Boulevard, wiping out thousands of Japanese black pines that had been planted soon after the storm of ’62 in the hope that their fast-spreading roots would hold the ground firm in the event of some future catastrophe. Telephone poles snapped like twigs, leaving behind jagged stumps. A rusted pickup truck on Passaic Avenue in Harvey Cedars was scooped up and carried some seventy feet before first striking a flagpole then rolling side-over-side until it landed on someone’s front porch. In Brant Beach, the observation deck behind the Mancini Municipal Building exploded in a shower of timber, with one lengthy, creosoted four-by-four effortlessly impaling the windshield of an unmarked police car.

In Ship Bottom and Surf City, hundreds of residents watched in terror from their vehicles as the Atlantic Ocean rose up and over homes, businesses, and roadways. Suddenly it was no longer theoretical, no longer merely a news report—it was here, and it was real. No cameras, no reporters, no fifteen minutes of fame. Just tons of water rushing at breakneck speed and filling every available opening.

The first wave would not reach these unfortunates, but that didn’t stop the fear from escalating out of control. Cars at the back of the line swerved to the shoulder and accelerated, colliding with others who had the same idea. Tempers flared and obscenities were screamed, but there was no time for confrontation. Some drove onto the sidewalks as the scene degraded into a bumper-car mentality, property damage no longer a concern. A man in a silver Volkswagen Jetta who had deviated from Long Beach Boulevard to take Central Avenue cut a path across nearly a dozen lawns before finally colliding with a mailbox at the intersection of Central and 2nd. It was a federal crime, but he couldn’t have cared less. In spite of the damage to his crumpled front end, he kept going.

Inevitably, through a combination of horror, adrenaline, and paralysis, the already sluggish traffic came to a near halt in the confusing layout where Long Beach Boulevard met Route 72 and headed west. As the bone-chilling sight of homes and businesses being consumed by the sea unfolded behind them, many people abandoned their useless vehicles and began running. Those who still maintained an ounce of consideration pulled over first, some into the Mobil Station or the Ron Jon, others into the Eckerd or the B & B. One woman, small and mousy-looking with pulled-back hair, got out of her car and stood crying in the road. The man stuck behind her, with his very pregnant wife in the passenger seat, opened his window and hollered at her to get back in and keep going. When it became clear she wasn’t listening, he got out, ran over, and slapped her across the face. Rather than snapping her back to reality, this caused her to crumple to the pavement as if she’d been shot. She curled up in the fetal position, crying even harder. The enraged man shook her violently. When she didn’t react he dragged her to the grassy margin on the shoulder, then returned to her car and, depressing the gas pedal, sent it into the parking lot of the Quarterdeck Inn.

As the first wave receded, it brought miles of debris with it. Couches and tables floated alongside books and toys, mattresses and boxes. Strips of aluminum siding and sheets of paneling drifted like tea leaves, intermingling with nondescript chunks of sheetrock and splintered pine studs. Priceless personal items, on their way to being lost forever, bobbed on the surface—photographs, greeting cards, letters. A silver cigarette case made in 1827, passed down in one family through six generations, would tread water throughout the day until finally, shortly before five o’clock and almost ten miles out, it dipped under the surface and see-sawed lazily through green-tinted space, past the reach of the stippling sunlight and downward into eternity.

As the second wave arrived, it brought the debris back with it. The shattered glass and broken timber became weapons—projectiles as deadly as anything the world’s armies had in their storehouses.

This wave was considerably larger than the first, and it rolled over the beaches with even greater ease. It smeared all remaining structures from the first line, then went to work on the next. The old Coast Guard Station at Barnegat Light trembled violently, as if it were a living thing wracked with fear, before breaking apart in hulking sections. In North Beach, a recently built, multimillion-dollar home with dozens of skylights held out with considerable valor, flooding all the way to the second floor before imploding from the sheer weight of the acquired water.

Businesses along the main strip were not spared. The concrete building that housed Murphy’s Market in Beach Haven managed to remain standing, but the monstrous gush that blew through the back forced the store’s contents out the front, pouring them into the street. A few doors down, Kapler’s Pharmacy spewed its contents in similar fashion, decorating the intersection with vaporizers, toothbrushes, and plastic peroxide bottles.

The water-wall slid across Long Beach Boulevard and into the parking lot of the Acme where BethAnn Mosley and Jennifer King worked. It toppled light poles and flipped dumpsters, driving one of the latter into the glass front of the Beach Theater next door. A lone trailer that had been parked alongside the supermarket tipped over slowly, crashing through the cinder-block wall. In Ship Bottom, Pinky Shrimp’s Seafood Company, not much larger than a two-car garage, folded like a figure in a child’s pop-up book. Its chimney, with the word “seafood” printed in bold white letters down one side, collapsed almost gracefully into the raging current.

The second wave claimed the first human casualties. An elderly couple who had heard about the oncoming disaster only fifteen minutes earlier gripped each other in wordless terror as their Impala was plucked from the road and driven sideways into a rocky outcrop featured in a miniature golf course. The car crumpled like a beer can, squashing the occupants and, mercifully, killing them instantly.

Closer to the Route 72 intersection, an unemployed man in his early thirties who had been a thorn in the side of local police for years and, on this day, had tried to clean out as many cash registers as possible was running for his life, his pockets dribbling loose change and bills of various denominations, when he was swept off his feet. He was a strong swimmer and tried desperately to follow the movement of the current, but he went under after becoming entangled in a stray fishing net. As he tried to free himself he was struck by a wooden pallet that moved through the water like a torpedo. It removed his head in a messy, bloody explosion; his decapitated body would never be found.

At precisely the same moment, a woman who had taken a motorcycle from a neighbor’s garage found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time as the Ship Bottom water tower buckled and fell onto the gas station through which she was taking a shortcut. One resident who would ultimately escape to safety and had witnessed her gory end would spend almost a full year in therapy in an attempt to purge the ghastly image of her body being flattened, then cremated when the station’s pumps exploded in flames.

When the second wave finally withdrew, it dragged more debris into the ocean along with nearly forty bodies. The pandemonium that ensued was near apocalyptic. Those who’d retained some hope of reaching the mainland via their cars and trucks up until now threw the doors open and hit the ground running. A young mother who had suffered two harsh pregnancies and was about as thin as a whip clutched her bawling children under her arms, stumbling every few minutes from the physical demands for which she simply was not equipped. She begged for help but received none. There were no civil authorities left, and no helicopters dared risk landing, for they would be swamped in seconds. She and the others were on their own.

With almost all the structures between the Atlantic Ocean and Long Beach Boulevard gone, the third wave traveled forward unabated, tearing up miles of roadway and smashing homes and businesses with sickening efficiency. The man who had made the fateful decision to climb to the top of Old Barney for the purpose of filming this historical event lost control of his bladder as the famous structure shuddered violently. Dropping to his knees, the digital camera clattering as it fell from his pudgy hand, he prayed in earnest to a God he had long ignored. A few hundred yards away, the gift shop known simply as “Andy’s” was pushed off its foundation and into the bay, where it sank like a wounded ship. The death of the nearby Mole Hole was considerably less dramatic—the agitated ocean simply overwhelmed it, erasing it as if it hadn’t existed in the first place.

Rick’s American Cafe split in half horizontally—the pink bottom was washed aside, leaving only the light blue top to float for a few moments before going under. In High Bar Harbor, the Viking Village disappeared in a matter of seconds. At the Harvey Cedars Marina, the five remaining boats slammed together and shattered into small pieces. Back in Ship Bottom, three people squirmed their way onto the floating roof of what had been the Drifting Sands Motel, hoping to ride it out until the horror was over. Instead, the third wave flung the roof through the giant, pastel-colored facade of the Ron Jon surf shop.

At the southern end of the island, the wave struck the trailer park that BethAnn Mosley had called home for so many miserable years. The homes were broken off their flimsy foundations and swept together in a macabre domino effect. Adelaide Foster, the elderly woman BethAnn had left behind, was polishing her beloved carnival glass with a cotton cloth when she heard something. Her knees popping painfully, she shuffled across the beaten carpet to the east-facing window by the door and parted the curtains just in time to see the Hudsons’ trailer, which had been on the other side of the dirt road, riding crookedly toward her, roof first, atop seven feet of pale, churning water. She opened her mouth to scream, then was abruptly cut off.

The third wave pushed on greedily, tearing apart thousands of homes on the island’s overdeveloped geography. Back on Route 72, the wave reached the base of the Causeway. More terrified residents found themselves caught up in the raging flow, paddling madly. They would learn the hard way that a great percentage of tsunami victims perish from drowning after being struck by objects pulled loose and carried by the wave. A heavyset, balding man managed to reach the surface before a spear-shaped strip of wood from a telephone pole shot through his neck. Another man, a lifelong fitness buff in his late fifties, managed to make his way halfway up the first segment of the Causeway, to Cedar Bonnet, before a wrought-iron guardrail was thrown from the water like a Frisbee and met the back of his head, knocking him unconscious. Moments later the ever-progressing current found and claimed his body.

The third wave also triggered hundreds of explosions. The saltwater ignited power substations, massive transformer boxes, and python lines with 11,000-volt charges running through them. Hundreds of propane tanks feeding houses and barbecues popcorned all over the island. An underground fuel reservoir at Harvey Cedars Auto somehow caught a spark and blew through the water like a miniature bomb, sending up a sixty-foot flame column along with two pickup trucks and a ’69 Mustang whose transmission one of the mechanics was rebuilding in his spare time. The force of the blast left a crater thirty feet in diameter; no trace of the building that once marked the location would ever be found.

One by one, the other stations went, along with gas lines and more above-ground propane tanks. The water spread burning fuel everywhere; cars, homes, even the floating debris were suddenly ablaze.

The third wave retreated at exactly 12:04. Six minutes later—at 12:10—the fourth and most deadly wave rose over LBI. Smaller waves would follow in the coming hours, but with relatively little effect. This was, in every sense, the moment of truth.

The wave was more than an ocean swelling; it was like a life force created in Satan’s workshop for the sole purpose of obliteration. From Barnegat Light to Holgate, the island was first shadowed and then hammered by a 27-foot-high mass of churning green fluid. Within it, like chunks of fruit in a Jell-O mold, was the wreckage of what once was Long Beach Island.

The wave reached over the previous killing fields as if they weren’t even there. The man who had idiotically gambled his life on the safety of Old Barney screamed until he could scream no more, his bulging eyes frozen on the sight of the colossal wall of water carrying a yellow bulldozer, obtained from God-knows-where. As the wave tossed it into Barney’s base, the grand old structure lingered for a final, defiant moment, then gave a slow bow and crashed into the water.

Next the wave leaped across the main island and engulfed High Bar Harbor, tackling the homes as if they were cardboard boxes. More sparks, more explosions, more cars tumbling into Barnegat Bay. In the meantime, at the island’s other end, the Forsythe Wildlife Refuge was completely submerged, killing thousands of piping plovers and destroying their nests. Nearby, TC’s Surfside Deli had disappeared, as had almost every home in Holgate. The house Bud and Nancy Erickson had happily occupied for so long was now nothing but a water-filled basement and a few stubs of foundation block. Million-dollar homes in Loveladies and North Beach were no more. In Beach Haven, the consumer Mecca known as the Schooner’s Wharf had been reduced to floating piles of junk. LBI T-shirts and hats drifted through the water with seashell nightlights and necklaces.