Baja Zuma

Chapter 7

LAUREN'S P.O.V.

It had been a long, tiring day. I was happy to retire to my room, which seemed untouched by the earthquake, and sit on my bed, the top level in the bunk I shared with Dani, to do some journaling. It was easy to predict that some day soon Dani would open the drawer in my roll top desk to "borrow" some money, and no doubt to update herself on whatever I had added to my so-called personal journal. I say this because there was that time when Dani had come into our room not expecting I was home, and went through my desk contents item by item while I watched silently from the bunk. I pretty much figure this is a regular hobby for her. Mom and Dad's bank had given me a piggy bank shaped like California when I opened a savings account, and Dani had puzzled out that by pressing a thumb on Oakland and twisting counterclockwise, the bank split into two parts, giving access to the coins and bills in it.

I got an idea on how I could have a little fun with Dani, who I knew had a crush on our neighbor Ricky. So I wrote in my journal—

Hung out with Ricky this morning before I had to leave for Thousand Oaks. We did some skateboarding on the street, holding hands whenever we weren't on our boards. Ricky told me how much he likes me. He also confided how much he HATES it when Dani hangs out with us. "Dani is such an immature little brat. How can you stand to be her sister?" Ricky said to me. I was kind of shocked to hear this from him. I defended Dani as being a decent kid, but Ricky didn't buy that idea at all. He truly sees her as a pest. He will never be her friend.

I had some ideas on what to write in my journal entry after that to lay it on even thicker, but my eyes wouldn't stay open, so I set my journal on the corner of my bed, turned off my light switch, and climbed the steps back up into my bunk. I smiled in the darkness of my room over my mental image of some wax museum depicting Dani tumbling off a skateboard, her butt making hard contact with the ground.

Wooziness set in. Time passed—I'm not sure just how much time. My bed felt wobbly, swaying gently at first, then more forcefully. My bedroom walls rumbled and joists in the attic creaked. With an ear-shattering BOOM the ceiling and roof caved in, a funnel of dust swirling around my body supine on the mattress. I wanted to flee to safety, but I could not will myself to do so. I lay there paralyzed with fear, staring up at the overcast sky glowing gray in the night from Malibu's lights.

Soon I glimpsed a head move into the field of view I had through the gaping hole in our house. A human head... and yet NOT truly human because it was a thousand feet above me and nearly touching the cloud deck. The size of this monstrosity, my God. Ghoulishly lit from below by city lights, the face was one I knew from somewhere—though not on this gargantuan scale. It was a virtual twin of Mr. Schnickenstein, our music producer. With a waxy, spotty death pallor, the face turned down toward our house—toward me. In seconds movement of the shoulders and upper arms told me that the monstrosity was taking a slow, ponderous step up our hillside, though the rest of his body was hidden by the still-standing bedroom wall. The house undulated as the temblor from this footstep—a million tons worth of footstep—swept through the ground under it. Schnickenstein was the cause of the earthquake I was experiencing, and the ongoing destruction of our house!

The behemoth paused after the step up the Malibu hillside, now nearly straight above me in the patch of sky I could see from my bed. The top of his head was now obscured in the cloud base, the clouds looking somehow dry—more like plaster dust than water droplets. A sudden bolt of lightning from the cloud seared its way into his face, exposing a spot of pale yellow skull bone, spewing drops seemingly of melted wax out of the wound. One of his eyes liquified and gushed down his cheek, a gory rain of hot wax about to fall on me as I lay here exposed to open sky.

"NO! STOP IT! GO AWAY!" I screamed with all the strength I had in my lungs.