The Great Big One

by J.C. Geiger

Genres: YA Coming of Age

Synopsis

With natural disasters and nuclear war threatening their small town, two twin brothers find themselves enraptured by mysterious music that could change the course of their lives. Everyone in Clade City knows their days are numbered. The Great Cascadia Earthquake will destroy their hometown and reshape the entire West Coast—if they survive long enough to see it. Nuclear war is increasingly likely. Wildfires. Or another pandemic. To Griff, the daily forecast feels partly cloudy with a chance of apocalyptic horsemen. Griff’s brother, Leo, and the Lost Coast Preppers claim to be ready. They’ve got a radio station. Luminous underwater monitors. A sweet bunker, and an unsettling plan for “disaster-ready rodents.” But Griff’s more concerned about what he can do before the end times. He’d like to play in a band, for one. Hopefully with Charity Simms. Her singing could make the whole world stop. When Griff, Leo, and Charity stumble upon a mysterious late-night broadcast, one song changes everything. It’s the best band they’ve ever heard—on a radio signal even the Preppers can’t trace. They vow to find the music, but aren’t prepared for where their search will take them. Or for what they’ll risk, when survival means finding the one thing you cannot live without.

Release date: July 13, 2021

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 384

Sample

THE OCEAN SENT MIXED SIGNALS.

It loved your precious heart; it meant to kill you.

The Pacific had given Clade City a gorgeous scribble of a white-sand beach, a lighthouse fine enough to stop your breath, and waves that drummed the shore like the world’s oldest song. The town clung to the sea the way a barnacle cleaves to a humpback’s belly, hanging windswept on the western edge of America with fisheries, state-of-the-art research facilities, and seaside tourist shops. Their town existed because of the ocean; the ocean would destroy them.

Every child in Clade City by about the age of six—old enough to read past the silent T in tsunami and pronounce evacuation—knew their days were numbered.

It was the only reason Griffin Tripp agreed to hang the siren.

“It’s beautiful,” his brother, Leo, said. “Just wait until you see it.”

A siren was not the music Griff wanted to bring to his hometown. The ocean’s song was reminder enough. The distant tide sang through the brothers’ open bedroom window in brief, foggy summers, and raged on the battered jetties in winter. It whispered in the hollow mouths of shells in their mother’s Main Street collectibles shop, which, at dusk, reflected the lighthouse in its tall windows. The beam seemed to grow solid in the low drizzle and swung like a ghost ship’s golden boom, tacking in the wind.

WHOOMP!

When he’d been a boy of nine, music already deep in his bones, Griffin had imagined a sound to go along with the light. He’d lie in bed, watch the golden splash on his window, and whisper, puffing his lips—

Whoomp, whoomp—

The lighthouse was Griff’s favorite part of Clade City. It felt safe.

The ocean was tricky. Romantic. You could harness it with a surfboard. It sang and dropped gifts at your feet, some all the way from Japan—license plates, fishing floats like opaque crystal balls. The gifts were stolen. It sank ships and ate their treasure. And just as tourists harvested shells, the ocean harvested tourists. Plucked them from rocky outcroppings like grapes. Put them in the headlines, never returned the bodies.

Dogs, children. It didn’t matter.

In bed at night, Griff listened to the ocean’s heartbeat, watched the lighthouse flash. It needed a sound.

Whoomp, Griff exhaled.

Leo, across the room, would say:

“Stop talking to yourself.”

It was hard to explain he wasn’t talking to himself. He was vocalizing for the lighthouse. That sounded strange. It’s hard to keep secrets in a shared bedroom. Harder if you’re a twin. A twin who shares your full biological curvature, slim eyebrows, fingernail moons, wide lips, angular chin. Same distance from nape of neck to shoulder blade.

Also, a mirrored internal circuitry. A twin innately knew the profane sewers and dreamy air ducts of your mind. Possessed the same map and skeleton key to every secret desire and absurd belief. Like the day in their father’s truck, listening to the radio stations, when Leo said:

“Dad, can you tell Griff the music doesn’t come from the lighthouse?”

They were eleven then.

Griff’s cheeks burned because he had assumed something that—once brought into the daylight of rational conversation—made no sense whatsoever. A collection of old radios and tape decks once glimpsed in the lighthouse keeper’s quarters had conjured a belief, planted a childish seed that, untended, had developed into a full-bloomed thought system Leo had somehow been able to see and expose. It was likely Leo had just—a moment before—confronted this same false belief in his own mind, and thus felt qualified to expose Griff to their father.

“No one broadcasts from the lighthouse,” their dad said. “That’s just old equipment.”

“I know that,” Griff said, staring at his feet.

The trouble with being born second.

Leo had maneuvered himself—in utero, likely with elbows and illegal kicks and eye-gouges—to the front of the birth order, saw the light three minutes earlier, and had seemed to be ahead ever since. When Griff turned seventeen, Leo was already seventeen and three minutes.

The first morning of their junior year, in their father’s truck and on the way to K-NOW Radio, Leo was in the front seat as always. He was wearing the camouflage coat their father had given them to share and which Griff had worn exactly once. Leo was talking to their father about who would hang the siren.

“I’m happy to go up and rig it,” Leo said.

He glanced back at Griff, like he was sniffing for competition.

Griff tried to want very few things.

He’d learned to keep his sparse wants behind a set of imaginary white bricks in his mind, which he morticed into a barrier late at night, lying and waiting for sleep, sometimes still giving his breath permission to whoomp, whoomp, whoomp. Currently, two wants behind the wall. A late-night radio show, and the desire to know her better.

Would not name her, even in his mind. Not with Leo here.

Leo would intercept the thought like a rogue signal on their dad’s transistor. Her name, so energetically palpable and electric in his mind—Griff suddenly became aware of how badly he wanted those two small things, so that the police lights flashing near the station seemed to be for him—a thought crime, all this wanting.

K-NOW 1590 AM Disaster Preparedness Radio stood at the western edge of downtown, a small glass box of a building on wooden stilts. Out in the front lot, leaning on his cruiser, Officer Dunbar. The man was white, stout, and hairless as a bar of soap. Full uniform, face splashed in emergency colors.

“What’s with the lights?” Griff said.

“Look at him,” Leo said. “The star of his own tiny crime drama.”

Griff laughed.

“The story of one bald man,” Griff said, doing a voice-over.

“On a quest for purpose,” Leo said. “Searching for a killer. Or a friend.”

“Be kind,” their father said. “Think charitable thoughts.”

Charitable! Of all the words. Charity, Charity, Charity—Griff gripped the seat, put the word out of his mind. Could his father see behind the wall?

They got out of the truck.

Dunbar and his father met with an elbow bump. The pandemic had erased handshakes from the Lost Coast Preppers. Nearly the whole Junior Prepper crew was there, in the parking lot. Dunbar’s son, Jonesy, wore a camo hoodie and sunglasses, chewing and spitting sunflower seeds. Beside him, Slim. Also just starting their eleventh-grade year.

“Where’s the gear?” Slim asked.

He was summer-tanned, rubber-banded together with nervous energy. Without tools to cling to, Slim’s hands fussed and pinched and rubbed at the air. Dunbar pointed at the battered brown pickup, boils of saltwater rust over the wheel wells. In the bed, blue tarp lashed down and cinched tight. A tiny blade of yellow, shining from inside.

That was it.

“Scruggs is already on-air,” Dunbar said. “Where’s your boy?”

He was asking about Thomas. When they all turned to look at Griff, he felt a jolt of otherness. He was out of uniform. The lone jeans. Them: camo and Carhartts. Their haircuts, defined by clipper guards: Leo a number 6, Jonesy and Slim a number 3, Dunbar was a zero—the inevitable endgame of the clipper countdown. All but Griff wearing bulky paracord bracelets around their right wrists, just in case they suddenly needed an emergency bow-stringer, tourniquet, or horse halter.

Griff shrugged. Cotton jeans growing heavy in the drizzle.

The group perked up, attuned to the approaching sound.

Cherrrreeeeeereeeeup—che—che—che

“Here he comes,” Jonesy said.

The ThunderChicken—a powder-blue Thunderbird renamed for its preternatural fan belt squeal—came screeching past their mother’s shop, Shoreline Gifts, and blasting past the so-called Barmuda Triangle: the Drift Inn, the Sea Shanty, the Longhorn Pub—

CHEEREEREEREREREEEEP!

The Thunderbird bounced into the station’s parking lot. Music spilling from the windows. AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Thomas belted the chorus, beat on the wheel. Smiled up at them. He’d timed that. He hand-cranked up his window and stepped out in full camouflage. Boots, shirt, pants, belt. Griff laughed.

God—were those camo socks? It was impossible to know if Thomas had done this ironically.

“Good morning, Thomas,” Dunbar said.

“Good rising, Officer,” Thomas said, squaring up with him. “No mourning here. We’re saving lives. So how about ‘good rising’?”

They did an elbow bump.

“I’ll consider it,” Dunbar said.

Thomas got away with more. He’d designed their famous Early Alert Response System (EARS) for the Great Cascadia Earthquake. It had taken months in his basement workshop. When Thomas committed, he was in it down to the socks.

“Let’s get it done,” Leo said. “Who’s going up?”

Dunbar pulled around the bucket truck. One of those long-necked service vehicles recruited to repair snapped power lines and rescue treed cats.

“How about Mr. Blue Jeans?” Dunbar said, looking at Griff.

This was dreadful.

At a workshop over the summer, Griff had successfully tied all twelve knots in a survival knot workshop and earned the unfortunate reputation of being good with his hands.

“He’s good with his hands,” Dunbar confided.

“They can both go,” their father said.

Leo shot Griff a look, like it was Griff’s fault. A sharp, snapping sound. In the pickup, the blue tarp sheeted up in the wind, a great glistening sail as Slim and Thomas pried off straps and bungees.

“Look at this sweet beauty!” Thomas said.

Big. The siren filled the truck bed. Screaming yellow. When they stood it up, it was taller than his father. Cubed stump of a base, skinny neck. The mouth of the siren was square and toothless and wide enough to swallow a boy whole.

It took five of them to carry it to the bucket truck.

“Thing’s heavier than our piano,” Leo said. “Goddamn.”

“Oops!” Dunbar said. Dunbar did not take the Lord’s name in vain.

Dunbar, Griff, Leo, and Slim squeezed themselves into the bucket, which was like a high-walled white garbage can.

“Couldn’t we have gotten a crane?” Slim asked.

“The crane’s down at the deuce,” Dunbar said.

Highway 2 carved delicate switchbacks eastbound through the Coast Range—the only way out of town. For years, it had been shedding pavement the way a dying glacier calves ice, losing great chunks of itself in flash floods and mudslides—described in Clade City parlance as “dropping a deuce.”

The bucket truck jerked as it rose, wobbling, into the air. The siren slipped in Griff’s hands. Top-heavy. Griff and Leo shouted, pulling it back upright.

“Why are we doing this?” Griff said. “On the first day of school?”

“That’s why,” Dunbar said.

He pointed south down the coast, to the Ruins. Though the ocean took regular nibbles of beaches and tourists—that was the time it took a bite. In 1964, the most devastating tsunami in US history made landfall in Clade City. Ocean waves got to 150 feet. Over a dozen people died.

That had been nothing. The big one, they’d been told, would knock San Francisco’s bridges into the sea. Make Seattle skyscraper stew. Claw every small, scrappy town from the Pacific Coast. Flick Clade City from the map like a crumb hanging on the corner of God’s Mouth.

“Get her up, boys!”

Without a crane, they had to lean way out. The slipping center of gravity made the bucket tip. Griff’s stomach sloshed, flipped. He stepped wrong. His foot screamed under the weight, slipped with a squeal, and the whole yellow monster canted left, numb fingers screaming on the brittle housing.

“Damn it, Griff,” Leo said.

As a group, they gathered their footing. They slipped the Thunderbolt’s base over the pole. It slid home with the metallic scrape of a blade.

Back on the ground, Griff looked up. They’d stapled the bright yellow siren to Clade City’s skyline.

“Are we going to give it a spin?” Leo asked.

“Of course,” their father said, walking toward the ladder. “Griff? You’re staying down here?”

Griff nodded. He just wanted to get to school.

The rest of them climbed the rungs to the radio tower. With Leo far away, behind glass, he allowed himself to want.

He closed his eyes in the drizzle. Wet, cold.

Charity Simms. A person who understood music.

He pictured their drive home, after the show in July. She’d asked him to ride home with her. Him, specifically, when she could’ve asked Leo or Thomas. Windows down, ringing ears. Wind whipping their hair like a wild storm. Her smile made something warm bloom in his chest when she lifted her gaze from the road and put it on him. The Martian-green glow of the dashboard, counting mile markers and willing them to freeze, asking that winding highway to please spool out and become a runway to the whole big world she talked about finding—

The siren shook him.

rrrrrrREEEEEREREREEEEEEEEEEE

The brutal sound shaped the air, made his shirt hum on his damp skin. It was a soft noise, at first. Like an old door opening on rusty hinges. As it grew louder, the inner parts of his ears itched. He pictured the siren like a flood. Rushing through streets. Dripping from the eaves. It washed over the lighthouse, threatening to topple it.

Griff’s breath caught.

What if the siren stopped it? Shattered the old Fresnel lens, the way a sudden jolt can shock an old heart to stillness.

Flash again, he thought. Flash one more time and I’ll get to see her again.

Wanting something badly made death seem imminent. The disaster would surely happen now. The ground would choose this moment to shake and liquify and swallow him whole.

The lighthouse flashed.

Griff whispered to himself—

“Whoomp.”

It felt like a prayer.



GRIFF CAUGHT A GLIMPSE OF CHARITY AT LUNCH—IN THE CAFETERIA’s long, tray-clattering line—white skirt, black top, and hair in loose, dark ringlets. Brown skin. Tall. It was her. Real. She looked better than he remembered, which he’d hoped would not be the case.

It made it less likely she’d sit with them.

“Think she’ll come?” Thomas asked.

In a slight smile, Thomas revealed that he knew everything. If Thomas knew, Leo knew. Griff’s cheeks burned; he had no chocolate. Chocolate helped sometimes, with a sudden rush of nausea and anxiety. The bite into a stiff, bitter bar of 70 percent dark could provide momentary reprieve, but all he had on his tray was a floury, floppy rectangle of cafeteria pizza. His existence seemed to coalesce there—hopeless, limp.

“Charity!”

His voice. Like the thought had gone bolting out of his own mouth—but it was Leo speaking. His brother stood, waving her over.

And she was coming.

Charity left a table of empirically more attractive people. Surfers, and others with unquestionable athletic gifts. She came to their table.

“My concert people!” she said.

Her posture, shoulders back, arms out. A hug, already? Leo stepped up first. When it was Griff’s turn—ah, the smell of her! It whipped up warm like July, turned the blank sky to a bowl of stars and campfire ash, ringing ears, and the buzzing didn’t stop when Charity sat. They put words to the feeling, patching memories together, reconjuring the night of the show.

“—the path, coming out like, how does this barn even exist!”

“—that was just the opening set—”

“—I can’t even talk about the encore,” Charity said. “It might be too soon.”

“Double encore,” Griff said.

Leo sang a few bars from the final song—

I can’t see what it will be—

“Stop now,” Charity said. “You are dismantling me on the first day of school. I cried for like three weeks. I almost didn’t go to that show.”

She’d come alone.

Griff and Leo had spent a significant amount of time investigating the universe’s mysteries. This was one of the greatest.

Charity Simms, a girl apparently dripping with friends, invitations, opportunities, had driven two hours to a show by herself. Griff had spotted her, studying the tour art pinned to the barn’s exterior wall. Out of context—she’d looked like a familiar stranger. Someone he’d once met in a dream.

Thomas said it first:

“That’s Charity Simms.”

She’d been in Clade City since eighth grade. Griff remembered her arrival. The glittery, shooting-star popularity of the new kid—rocketing through the collective imagination of the school—maybe she’ll be my best friend, maybe we’ll fall in love—and of course Charity had found a superior group, some thrilling lover. Griff had stopped paying attention. It was as if she had vanished, and reappeared that night at the show. It killed him, knowing the months and years they’d been sharing classrooms and hallways.

“How are you, Griff?” she asked him.

Griff looked up at her.

“We hung the siren,” Leo said, cutting him off. “Did you hear it?”

“You hung that horrible thing?” Charity asked. “I hate it.”

“It’s not supposed to sound good,” Leo said. “It’s supposed to keep us alive.”

“They actually got it from right here,” Thomas said. “Down in the boiler room. They had that sucker rigged up during the Cold War for duck-and-cover Tuesdays. My dad still remembers crawling under his desk and cursing the Russians.”

“What’s it for now?” Charity asked. “Like an air-raid siren?”

“The earthquake, mostly,” Griff said.

“And here we thought fear was a thing of the past!” Thomas said. He did a great Mid-Atlantic accent, like a black-and-white-TV news anchor.

“That camo, Thomas. I didn’t know you guys were so serious,” Charity said.

“I’m in it for the radio show,” Griff said.

“Yo,” Thomas said.

Griff and Thomas high-fived.

“You’re getting a radio show?” She smiled. “On the disaster channel?”

“Yep,” Thomas said. “K-NOW Disaster Radio, late night. Griff and I will rock this sleepy little town to its core.”

Thomas clenched his fist as if crushing an aluminum can.

“Really?” Leo said. “That’s the secret plan? A graveyard radio show no one listens to?”

“I’ll listen,” Charity said.

“Our fans don’t even know they’re fans yet,” Thomas said.

“Speaking of the siren,” Leo said, “you know Thomas invented EARS.”

“Thomas invented ears?” Charity said, pinching her lobes. Unattached.

“The Early Alert Response System,” Leo said. She stared back. “EARS. For the Juan de Fuca Plate?”

Charity shrugged.

“Oh man.” Thomas palmed his forehead. “What’s the musical equivalent? That’s like—you don’t know the Beatles. Paul McWho?”

“The Cascadia Quake?” Leo said. “The big one?”

“The Rolling Whatsits?” Thomas said.

“I know about the impending tsunami,” Charity said. “I just forgot the fault line’s special name. I’m reminded regularly—I didn’t grow up here.”

Charity was looking at them differently. Whatever spider thread of a miracle had pulled her softly to their table was fraying. Griff could feel her about to stand up and float away.

“Did you see our water balloons?” Thomas asked. “The ones that said Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean. My idea.”

Not helpful.

“It’s real,” Leo said. “The quake is going to happen.”

Charity looked across the cafeteria.

Past dozens of tables, buzzing conversations, two people alone.

Slim and Jonesy. She nodded toward them.

“True. But also—with every piece of camo, every hung siren and awareness campaign, you’re all drifting closer to the Lonesome Table of Scary White Boys.”

They assessed their fate in silence.

Jonesy ate his pizza with a stabbing motion, like it wasn’t dead yet.

Slim was doing what? Stroking or—whittling, of all things. Whittling wood in front of God and everybody. Griff could attest that Slim was an artful whittler, cute animals and such, but did not think his repertoire would impact Charity’s opinion.

“And poor Thomas in camo socks. You boys might already be too far gone,” Charity said.

“I may be invisible,” Thomas said, “but I can still hear you.”

“It’s just a phase,” Griff said. “Remember in eighth grade, how he wore suits and carried a pocket watch?”

Charity squinted.

“Ohh,” Charity said. “That was you, Thomas?”

“The Amazing Thomas to you,” he said.

“And the semester he made balloon animals and dressed like a clown?”

“Wow,” Charity said. “When I moved here I thought the town was full of weirdos. It was just Thomas in different costumes.”

Griff laughed.

“So, Charity,” Leo said. “How was the rest of summer? Still making music?”

Just like that, Leo cut in. Dropped the survival talk. Quick pivots. A master of the jibe—moving to catch someone’s full interest, to get himself, eventually, where he wanted to be.

Charity shrugged.

“I had a few projects fall through,” she said. “People flake. Stunning how folks cannot follow through. Do you have this problem? That’s why I drove to the show by myself. I was like—to hell with those who cannot execute a plan.”

“I follow through,” Leo said.

“We do,” Griff said. “Maybe we should see more shows together.”

“Maybe we should have a band,” Charity said.

“Us?” Thomas asked.

Charity shrugged.

“Y’all play piano,” she said to Leo and Griff. “You’re good. I can sing. Thomas, what can you do?”

“Make balloon animals and drop sick beats.”

She laughed.

Thomas covered his mouth, made a few bass thumps, worked his hand like a DJ.

“That’s terrifying,” Charity said.

“He’s got great recording gear,” Leo said.

Charity raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“Yeah,” Griff said. “Like a total recording studio down in the Rat’s Nest.”

“In the what?” Charity asked.

“Very exclusive,” Thomas said. “I’ll see if I can get you in.”

“He’s good with sound,” Leo said.

“Well, I’m serious,” Charity said. “What else is there to do? We live in Clade City.”

“Okay,” Leo said. “We’re now a band. The four of us.”

Leo stood and high-fived each in turn, pinning them down into the plan like spokes in a wheel he’d built. But it still felt good. He was a master of certainty. Always the one to harvest wisps of late-night dream talk and bring the idea into daylight. Leo could turn a fantasy into a list and draw the map to get there.

So he led the conversation. Set their first date for a practice.

Here was the problem: Griff had dared to want something.

When they left the lunch table, Charity was walking with Leo.



BACK HOME THAT NIGHT, GRIFF WAS IN THE BATHROOM. LEO WAS summoning him to practice.

Da dun!

C-sharps. The call from the Knabe piano. Another gauntlet. Another contest. Griff had just finished showering. He could hear the key-strikes through the drywall. Leo must’ve heard the water turn off. He went to the mirror, thinking of Charity. How she’d walked off with Leo.

Griff wiped the condensation from the mirror and relaxed his features.

Let his brow drop. Lips fall naturally.

When he looked at himself this way—straight-on—he saw Leo.

It was a habit, making himself ugly. Griff sucked in his chin. Puckered his lips. Showed imperfect bottom teeth and a whale of a tongue, crinkled his nose until the reflection fit.

Da dun!

The sharps struck the door like thrown knives.

It was from one of the pieces they were meant to learn for the winter concert. Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Strikingly beautiful, playful, and equally challenging to play with four hands as with tw. . .