Sophie reached the shrine at 3734 Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee a little after nine in the morning.

She'd hurried through the King's private jets and car collection across the street and the mansion itself, snapping pictures of the pool, the King's costume collection, and various rooms, and now she stood, awestruck, before his tomb, her pilgrimage completed. She stood in the warm sunshine beneath a clear blue sky, pressing her hands together under her chin, her head lowered in prayer. North of Memphis the stainless steel of the Gateway Arch at St. Louis shone bright; river traffic on the Mississippi through both Memphis and St. Louis seemed heavier than usual but was still running smoothly. Reelfoot Lake, created by the great earthquakes of 1811-12 between the cities, was crowded with fishing boats, and the woods where Davy Crockett was once shaken by a 'quake so violent he thought the ground "might take a notion and swallow (him) up, like the big fish did Jonah" were thronged with hikers and campers. An expert on the life of Elvis, Sophie knew nothing of the winter of 1811-1812 when the ground around the settlement of New Madrid just north of Memphis had rolled and bounced for months, jolting Washington and Richmond, 750 miles to the east, Savannah, 600 miles away on the Atlantic coast, and shaking the ground as far as Quebec in the north and New Orleans to the south. Even if Sophie had known that piece of historical trivia, she wouldn't have been concerned; scientists said such 'quakes would not return for another 400, perhaps even 1800, years. But the morning Sophie stood in silent prayer in front of the tomb at Graceland the earth had changed its schedule. Several miles to the north of Graceland, 3 to 12 miles deep beneath a 150-mile stretch of the Mississippi, the earth had pressed together two slices of its crust, unwittingly imitating Sophie's hands squeezed so tight together so far above them. Sophie finished her prayer and stood still for several moments. Then she opened her eyes, looked up, and pulled apart her hands at the moment the earth also chose to rip apart its skin beneath her. Within seconds the Mississippi between Missouri and Kentucky to the north, past Tennessee and down through Arkansas and northern Mississippi, was thrown east and then back west, wobbling southern Indiana and Ohio into jelly. North of Memphis vast chasms opened, sucking in the river and its barges and fishing boats and vehicles thrown off bridges until the chasms closed again and new lakes formed above them. The Gateway Arch writhed and twisted and finally crashed to where the river once had flowed and huge waves buckling the Ohio Valley ran and crashed through Ashtabula to disappear beneath the Lake. To the south, below Memphis, the Mississippi casually shrugged off the constraints of its levees and wandered west to find the channel it had wanted for more than a century. In those few minutes a single Act of God had ruined a century of the works of man; the ground had taken a notion and swallowed it all up, "like the big fish did Jonah."

Far to the west Nicole Scott eased herself gently into her blood-red Jeep Comanche, being careful not to crease her crisp white cotton skirt, and then drove slowly out of her gravel driveway at the usual time. As she'd left the house she'd heard the first radio reports of an earthquake in the Mississippi Valley; funny, shed thought, she hadn't realized they had earthquakes in that region. She'd blown a casual goodbye kiss to her children, seven-year-old Sandy, blonde hair bouncing as she skipped to the sidewalk, and ten-year-old Trish, concentrating hard on being cool and sophisticated, and to her husband, already talking animated business on his car 'phone even before he'd started his bottle-green BMW. Within minutes Nicole slipped her vehicle smoothly into the usual line of familiar faces on the freeway ramp, smiling and waving to drivers she saw each morning, and slid into place in the lines of traffic streaming towards San Jose. Little bumps marking sections of highway concrete presented no risk to her sipping her coffee and powerful air conditioning protected her aftershower freshness. That same reassuringly unobtrusive FM voice she had heard each morning for the past two years guaranteed there would be nothing unusual about the weather: It would be, the mellow voice of morning radio told her, the same as yesterday's, and the same as tomorrow's, a temperature outside of 52 degrees headed for a high of 75 for the afternoon commute, and skies, of course, would be clear; the drought showed no sign of ending. The voice said more reports were coming in about the earthquakes north of Memphis but everything was totally confused, so the station went back to its usual music. Six minutes after Nicole entered the freeway and a few miles east of Highway 101 and her Comanche, thirteen miles beneath the surface and further away from human consciousness, two huge slices of Earth suddenly broke a reluctant embrace. The Pacific plate muscled its way onwards north and west along the Calaveras fault in an explosion of energy which wrenched it from the American plate's grip, ripping them apart at more than a mile a second, triggering sympathetic releases of tensions in the Greenville and Hayward faults to the north. The primary, vertical, wave slammed Nicole's Comanche three feet in the air, splashing hot coffee over her carefully arranged white skirt. Her hands flew upwards from the leather-trimmed steering wheel, her head jerked back, the safety belt bit into her shoulder, and then her face smashed down into the steering column as the Comanche fell back to the shattered highway. In a remaining moment of consciousness Nicole spat five teeth towards her feet and wondered if disconnecting the airbag had been a mistake.

Then the secondary waves arrived, corrugating the land in giant undulations, a colossus shaking a carpet into a new position across its room, some waves chasing each other north, ripping through San Jose and on to Oakland and across the Bay into San Francisco, others roaring south down the Santa Clara Valley, spilling sideways to reshape the Santa Cruz Mountains and Diablo Range, rumbling through the Gabilans and cracking walls around astonished convicts in Soledad. Land to the east of California's Highway 101 was shoved several feet higher, and soon buildings staggered in Los Angeles to the south, Portland to the north, and Salt Lake City to the east. A great crack split the front of Shasta Dam and the pipeline in the Deschutes Valley twisted into jagged shreds. Sandy and Trish screamed as loudly as the other students on their crowded school bus as it bounced and banged along the waves, slamming them against the roof and into seats and on top of each other before tumbling off the highway, rolling topsy-turvy until it slammed on its roof into a chaos of yellow metal, lunch boxes, and a rainbow of T-shirts, jeans, and dresses at the bottom of a narrow ravine. Nicole's husband's BMW had found unusual space that morning on 101 and had reached the 280-101 interchange just as the primary shock boosted the highway more than two feet seconds before the secondary waves twisted and mutilated the concrete ribbons and completed the obliteration of his family. Sediments in the Sacramento Delta and northern San Joaquin Valley liquefied; the California Aqueduct, the critical waterway to Southern California, writhed and jerked like a string of anguished rubber and then snapped in sixteen places. As if revived by the first water it had known in more than a year, the soil around the shattered canal danced to the pulsating rhythms within the earth. The savage, sudden reshaping of the continent and its rivers, the re-arranging of the scenery, the shattering of the wooden box within its tomb, were, indeed, acts truly worthy of God.