The Great Big One

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by J. C. Geiger

  Cover art © 2021 by Dana Ledl. Cover design by Angelie Yap.

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: July 2021

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Geiger, J. C. (Jeffrey Clayton), 1979– author.

  Title: The great big one / by J. C. Geiger.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2021. | Audience: Ages 14 & up. | Summary: Seventeen-year-old Griff has grown up in the shadow of his twin brother, Leo, and their prepper community, but hearing a radio broadcast of strange, beautiful music compels Griff to decide if surviving is truly living.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020041108 | ISBN 9780759555396 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780759555389 (ebook) | ISBN 9780759555372 (ebook other)

  Subjects: CYAC: Survivalism—Fiction. | Brothers—Fiction. | Twins—Fiction. | Bands (Music)—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.G448 Gre 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041108

  ISBNs: 978-0-7595-5539-6 (hardcover), 978-0-7595-5538-9 (ebook)

  E3-20210603-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  OVERTURE ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ANDANTE TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  SCHERZO FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  SIXTY-NINE

  SEVENTY

  SEVENTY-ONE

  SEVENTY-TWO

  SEVENTY-THREE

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  SEVENTY-SIX

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCOVER MORE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For Emily,

  who lights the lamp and weathers the storms

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  OVERTURE

  For all at last return to the sea—

  to Oceanus, the ocean river, like

  the ever-flowing stream of time,

  the beginning and the end.

  —RACHEL CARSON, The Sea Around Us

  They’re playing our song.

  Can you see the lights?

  Can you hear the hum?—

  —ISRAEL NEBEKER, “3 Rounds and a Sound”

  ONE

  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—