The air aboveswarmed with thousands of frightened birds. Huge flocks of them swept from tree to tree, abandoning their perches, filling the sky like a living cloud, casting a dark shadow over the land. But the sky was bright and cloudless. There seemed to be no wind. Despite the lack of wind signs bent back and forth. The ground itself began first to shudder, shift and then break up. A huge section of sidewalk pushed up from the ground more than ten feet and toppled into the street. The sound was deafening and the thunderous crashing enveloped him as trucks flipped over and street lamps, telephone poles, and houses fell. Fires had already broken out all over the place. They illuminated car crashes, flattened buildings, the earth roiling and rolling like an angry sea. The quake roared on and on, a monster that gobble everything in sight. Then no streetlights, no traffic lights, no street signs. Houses were crumbling. Above the road he heard people running, tripping, falling rolling. Glass broke, walls fell, restaurants disappeared. Car dealerships were shallowed. Apartment complexes collapsed, roads became ribbons of asphalt and mud. Office buildings stood at jagged angles, then slowly toppled. The earth continued to shift and roll, but he just kept going. Through his blown-out window he saw people running, heard them screaming, saw their gaping wounds and their blood. His heart sank as he saw the steeple of the church. It had to be less than six hundred yards away, but the earth was still churning. Things were still crashing. Huge trees fell and dragged power lines into the street. One car was visible in a crater in what used to be a parking lot. The bottom of the car was flat on the ground, all four tires blown, axles broken. Two bare human legs protruded from under the car. Buildings all along the other side of the road were simply flattened. By now, Main Street was rubble, the house tiled this ways and that, front lawns a disgrace, plaster gnomes and plastic flamingos cast down like the fallen idols of a kitsch-enriched Babylon. He could see vast cracks in the earth with the flimsy remnants of the plasterboard strip-mall buildings sticking out of it. These were not fissures, there was nothing irregular about them; nothing arbitrary. They were elegantly shaped, carving arabesques in the pavement, and everywhere joining up, so that within moments the entire street looked like an immense jigsaw puzzle. The ground shook afresh and pieces of the jigsaw fell away, leaving holes three, four, even five feet across in a dozen places.
“When the first shocks hit, we knew what was coming. There was nothing we could do. In the middle of the city, you are never safe: you are always close to a wall, gas pipe or rolling vehicle. We stayed still, then watched, as the city we knew crumbled beneath us. Monuments fell, trees were uprooted and a network of cracks ran through every wall, road and marble facade.”
An apocalyptic earthquake will level the cities of the Earth in hours, then burn the remnants in the following days. Buildings fall as the ground beneath them liquifies. That initial shock destroys bridges,
roads and lines of communication, which prevents the medical and fire services responding. Power lines and gas pipes are severed.
Thereafter, a series of aftershocks hits the city, again and again, until only rubble is left. In the days after, fires spread. With no communication and impassable roads, response is nearly impossible.
Note that, according to modern seismology, a global earthquake is impossible. But Caspian's powers exceed those of science. Scientists will be baffled by an earthquake that shakes the whole world.