The final tremor was enough to knock Alexander clear off his feet. He landed on the ground hard, scraping his chin and the heel of his hands in his poor attempt to break his fall. He would have felt embarrassed--only children scraped themselves falling like this, right?--if not for the strangeness of it all. This place did [i]not[/i] get earthquakes of this degree.

As he returned to his feet, he glanced behind him to see water rising from the ground like a geyser, steam beginning to gather at the base, and people swarming together like ants to sugar with their smartphones at the ready. It was just a broken water pipe. People would record damn near anything these days if it'll earn them a viral video on YouTube. How many poor-resolution shaky videos of a cracked road at Las Vegas would pop up on the Internet in the next hour?

Alexander didn't have a smartphone. He couldn't afford one. 

He did not stay long enough to try to figure out what was so special about a broken water main, even with the steam. He kept walking, hoping to not fall on the next tremor, if it ever happened, his vivid memories eating at the back of his mind.

As Alexander walked, he began to suspect that his bus would not show up. Deep cracks marred the roads, some of the older buildings suffered minor damage, and people hustled down the streets in a panic. So he pressed on past the bus stop, dreading the several-mile trek across town to his tiny studio apartment.

Natural disaster did not discriminate. After several blocks, pruned shrubs began to line cleaned sidewalks, more palm trees, and the newer buildings of a nicer neighborhood, but the cracks on the road were just as deep, and the people stumbling out of the surrounding buildings seemed just as startled. As with everything else, Alexander ignored them all. If he stared too long, the gunshots in his mind would get louder, and the pain he remembered from nonexistent wounds would grow more intense.

The devastation was hard to ignore.

Fearing that he would not make the walk home in this condition, Alexander ducked into the nearest business that still had open doors. It was probably a foolish move--why would he risk getting crushed by a collapsing building?--but he needed to get away from the scene outside and catch his breath.

He found himself in a little convenience store, every item imaginable somehow crammed into a few short rows of shelves. The store manager was the only other person in the store, cursing loudly as he struggled to clean up a collapsed freezer full of broken beer bottles, the smell of booze evident all the way across the room.

Alexander ignored that section, instead grabbing a magazine and opening it. The pictures and words blurred on the page; he didn't even know what type of magazine he was looking at. He closed his eyes and could see nothing but desert mountains dotted with sage, the water-parched earth stained with blood, the metallic-sweet scent of death heavy in the air. Alexander opened his eyes and forced himself to keep his breathing even, keep his eyes on the page, and focus on the words. Martha Stewart smiled presumptuously from the page, holding some sort of casserole. Letters on the page spelled out a recipe. Fuck, this wasn't working.