Max had earned Bella's trust through more than one favor, and it wasn't without reason—the man had a genuinely good heart. When disaster struck, his first thought wasn't his house or his livelihood. It was the guy still buried under the rubble—the sucker who'd paid five thousand dollars for a lucky rabbit's foot.
"I'm coming for you! Hang in there, buddy—don't give up, don't you dare give up! I'm coming— I'm coming—"
Max scanned the wreckage around him, searching for anything he could use as a tool. He figured if he were the one buried under all that concrete, he'd have lost his mind by now—so he kept calling out encouragement while he looked.
What he didn't expect was how calm the man's voice sounded on the other end. Like someone who'd weathered much worse.
"Easy, son. Don't worry about me. I've got a triangular pocket of space here—I'm fine for now."
Max had decent connections in the neighborhood, and since his business didn't step on anyone else's toes, he quickly pulled in two neighbors to help. Between the three of them, they dug the middle-aged man free without much trouble.
Despite being coated head to toe in dust and debris, the man carried himself with a composure that bordered on eerie—as if getting buried alive was simply another Tuesday.
This guy. Max stared at him with something approaching reverence. This is the kind of man I want to be. A sky-falling, earth-shaking, not-a-single-damn-given kind of man. Right then and there, Mustache Max set himself a new life goal. His old cheapskate boss could go to hell.
"Whoa—!"
He yelped as a fresh tremor tore through the city. Cracks split the ground in every direction, deep and black and seemingly bottomless. Bloodied survivors poured out of every doorway, and the buildings around Max collapsed in cascading waves of concrete and steel.
He froze. He had no idea what to do.
The middle-aged man, on the other hand, didn't hesitate for a second.
"Run! Find open ground—now! Move!"
Max followed on instinct, and as they ran, he noticed something uncanny: the man seemed to sense danger before it happened. Every wall he passed crumbled a heartbeat after he'd moved beyond it. Every stretch of pavement fractured the moment his feet had left it.
They carjacked a vehicle mid-sprint. The man drove like a professional, weaving through a landscape that was actively falling apart—sinkholes swallowing cars whole, residents disappearing into the earth—and yet somehow, impossibly, the ground always gave way just behind them. Always a step too slow.
This guy is walking good luck. Max watched him the way a man watches a four-leaf clover the size of a house. Why the hell would someone like this need a lucky charm?
The docks were out of the question. Too many vehicles, too many survivors, too much shattered road between here and the waterfront. Driving from the far east side of the city to the far west was a fantasy. They needed another option.
Under the man's near-professional-grade driving, they punched through to a sports complex on the outskirts of the city. The tremors were noticeably weaker out here, the skyline less dense—relatively speaking, it was one of the safer spots left.
"I'm Max," Mustache Max started, catching his breath. "I—"
He stopped.
The man's calm expression had cracked. He was pointing toward the far end of the complex, his finger rigid, his face pale.
"The earthquake triggered a tsunami. Go. Higher ground—now!"
They ran with the other survivors who'd taken shelter at the complex, scrambling up to the three-story building next door—the tallest, sturdiest structure nearby.
More than a dozen people made it to the roof.
From there, they watched.
A wall of water rose to meet the horizon—a wave so massive it seemed to fuse sky and sea into one—and it came for San Francisco with absolute, unhurried certainty.
The skeletal remains of the Golden Gate Bridge were swept away like driftwood. Fisherman's Wharf simply ceased to exist. People, cars, entire city blocks were swallowed whole. The surge rolled through downtown like an invisible hand wiping a table clean, and it showed no sign of stopping.
But the middle-aged man's luck held. The wave exhausted its momentum less than 200 meters (650 feet) from where they stood.
Seawater hammered the walls of the building, shaking the entire structure down to its bones—but it held.
"Are we... are we going to be okay?" Max's voice came out smaller than he intended. "My girlfriend—I don't know where she is..."
He wanted to cry. Looking at the man beside him, he didn't let himself.
"We'll be rescued. Right? The state government will come for us. Right?" He was talking mostly to himself at this point. Half the city government was probably dead—the state would have to send someone. They had to.
The middle-aged man said nothing. He was studying the building, and the more he looked, the grimmer his expression became.
The structure was well-built, yes. But the earthquake had compromised most of the load-bearing supports, and now the tsunami's impact had done additional damage. The exterior was webbed with cracks. It could come down anytime.
Max followed his gaze. His stomach dropped.
"No... no, there has to be something... there's always something..." He murmured under his breath, half-prayer, half-denial—silently begging the man to think of something.
Then he noticed what the man was actually doing.
He'd pulled out a waterproof journal. And he was writing in it.
Max stared. Right now? You're writing a diary entry right now?
He wanted to shout. To let it all out. But he swallowed it down.
"You're really not scared?" he finally managed, louder than he meant to.
The man kept writing without looking up. "Scared? Of course I am. But what good does it do? Just wait. I have a feeling someone will come."
Max looked out at the drowned city. Someone will come. San Francisco was underwater. Who was coming?
Five minutes passed. Five long, suffocating minutes in which the cracks in the walls spread wider and wider.
Then someone screamed: "A boat! There's a boat! Help! Help—!"
Every voice on the rooftop rose together. Even Max hollered until his throat burned.
The middle-aged man alone stayed quiet. He put his journal away and slumped back against the wall, wrung out and weirdly content.
Survived another one. He watched an entire city share in his catastrophic luck, and felt—strangely—at peace with it. A little earthquake, a little tsunami. This is nothing.
As the boat drew closer, Max finally recognized who was driving it—his old cheapskate ex-boss, and his girlfriend standing right beside her.
"Over here! Over here!"
Max's girlfriend quietly exhaled with relief. She'd been worried the whole time—worried enough that, back when Max first came into money, she'd asked Barbara to quietly install a location tracker on his phone. In a disaster this size, she never would have found him otherwise.
Bella had also spotted her former employee. She couldn't see 006 from this angle, though—he was sitting on the ground somewhere on that rooftop, completely out of her sightline.