This Deep Panic

by Lisa Stowe

  Michael launched forward. Ethan saw his hand go to a jeans pocket and come out with a knife.

  Spike’s fists came up, but Ethan got there first. With a quick raise of the arm and twist at the waist, Michael hit the ground and Ethan held the knife.

  “Enough!”

  Silence fell heavily, as if they all held their breath.

  Ethan turned in a slow circle. “Everyone’s scared. Whether you think you’re too tough to admit it or not. We don’t need this kind of shit.”

  Michael got ponderously to his knees, and then slowly to his feet. “Right. Here comes the motivational speech. We all have to pull together. We stick together and we’re going to be fine.”

  Ethan took one step forward, pushing right into Michael’s space and grabbing the front of his shirt. “No we’re not okay and no we’re not going to be fine. Two kids are dead, you piece of shit.”

  He released his hold on the shirt, pushing back as he did, so that Michael stumbled.

  “You’re going to pay, asshole,” Michael said, his brown eyes shifting from one kid to the next. “I got you now. Teachers can’t touch kids, beat ‘em up.”

  Ethan threw the knife as far as he could into the trees. “You want to be a tough guy, go ahead. Just not here or I’ll build us a road out with your fat ass.”

  Michael simply stared at him.

  “Mr. Reynolds?” Payton’s voice was as timid and meek as a little girl, breaking through the testosterone drama. “Should we, kind of, leave?”

  “How do you ‘kind of’ leave?” Jennifer asked, wiping tears away. “Either you leave or you don’t. Besides, we can’t do either until you have some better shoes.”

  “I didn’t bring extra,” Payton said, her eyes tearing up again.

  “But I know where to get some,” Jennifer said. She looked around the group with defiance in her green eyes. “And before any of you say anything, Amy would have been the first to offer to help someone. We need to start thinking of ourselves. Not the ones who have died.”

  With that, she headed for the bus.

  “Wait!” Ethan broke eye contact with Michael and caught Jennifer’s arm. “It needs to be done but I’ll do it.”

  Jennifer hesitated. Pale, and with dark circles under her eyes, she looked too frail to even contemplate what she was doing, let alone accomplish it. But Ethan knew by the tight jaw that her teeth were clenched, that her mind was made up.

  “I mean it,” he said, and then raised his voice. “Finish gathering gear and checking out injuries. We’re heading out.”

  He left Jennifer and reentered the bus, now shifted more to the side from the aftershock. It rocked as he stepped in, and he moved gingerly through the wreckage. When he reached Amy’s body, he struggled to remove her hiking boots. Rigor had set in and her feet didn’t want to bend.

  Payton’s words diffused his anger as quickly as water poured on a campfire. He still steamed, but the flames were out. He shouldn’t have let Michael get to him. These kids needed him to be calm and in control. And it shouldn’t have been a scared teenage girl who came up with the solution to Payton’s need. It was his job to fix things, to keep them safe.

  The boots wouldn’t come free. Thinking of Payton and her silly ballet slippers, he gripped Amy’s ankles and pulled hard turning his head as if that would deaden the sound of small bones breaking.

  He hoped Jennifer was right. That wherever Amy was, she’d understand.

  3

  Sharon must have slept because when she stirred into awareness, it was light outside. Yet nothing had improved with that light. The world was still destroyed. She was still alive. The vape shop still smoked. A light drizzle still fell, misting across her windshield.

  The highway was frantic with activity though, jammed with vehicles trying to get somewhere.

  At least until the aftershock hit, and then all the frantic activity became chaos.

  Cars were thrown against each other, the last remaining wall of the vape shop came down with a crash of shattering bricks, and Sharon was thrown around inside her car like dice in a cup.

  She hit the steering wheel and pain was white-hot with the struggle to breathe. A second wave of the earth tossed her against the center console. She was weightless and meaningless and without control. But through the pain, exhilaration burned. This was it, finally. Her death. Now, in this moment.

  Until it wasn’t.

  Until everything stilled and motion stopped and she was bruised and breathless but with a heart still beating.

  Until she climbed out of the car, now dented from where it had been thrown against a concrete parking post.

  What kind of sick universe kept tantalizing her with near-death moments? Rage unfurled. Probably the worst recorded earthquake in generations and it failed to kill her. An aftershock failed to kill her. She pulled in a ragged breath and screamed until her throat burned and she tasted blood.

  And no one noticed.

  She staggered against the front of the car, chest heaving. Fury so burned through her that her skin was hot with it.

  She would gladly grab the ending that these people fled from and yet it escaped her. She swallowed and her throat ached with the pain of her screams and the pain of her soul.

  Her chest hurt from hitting the steering wheel and she rubbed the bruised skin. And then realized she was rubbing her breast. The one killing her slowly. She dropped her hand and snorted. As if rubbing would make that pain go away.

  With nothing else to do, she got back in her car. And of course the engine started right up. Another sign that Sultan wasn’t the place for her. She stared out the cracked windshield at all the cars jammed together in the road, struggling to get away.

  An odd calmness settled over her. She couldn’t just sit and wait for death to find her. She had to seek it. And so she worked the car through debris and out to the highway.

  The road was backed up, bumper-to-bumper, cars angled across lanes, some crumpled against each other. Power poles were down and lines crossed the road like tangled yarn after a cat had been at it. But there were no sparks, no flame, no electricity to arc, and people simply drove around shattered poles and over and through lifeless wires. Sharon chose east only because there was a small opening in the traffic.

  While drivers around her blared horns, screamed at each other to get out of the way, tried to use their vehicles as battering rams, Sharon sat calmly. She plugged her iPod into the console and turned up the volume when A Deep Slow Panic by AFI came on. Enveloped by the music, she sat encapsulated in her metal cocoon. While others fought to go, she carefully and serenely inched her way forward when space opened up.

  Yesterday morning, before the quake, she’d walked away from her home. Left the place wide open and unlocked. Full of things that a week ago had been valuable, both in money and in memories. Value that she couldn’t take with her, that no longer meant anything. Not even the memories. She’d left her purse, her identification, everything that defined who she was. Everything, that was now nothing.

  The lyrics of the song spoke for her, putting into words the deep awareness of being consumed from the inside, of the engulfing panic that had no words. If an earthquake couldn’t take her away forever, what else could she do? Sit here in that panic?

  She needed to find that end, where she no longer dreamed. No longer thought. No longer existed.

  Sharon gripped the steering wheel and inched forward again. Taking, in increments, her road to nowhere. As she neared the edge of city limits, a siren blared, loud enough to be heard over the iPod. She paused the music and cranked down the window. The siren continued. And continued. She knew instantly what that meant. The Culmbak Dam above the city. The quake must have damaged it.

  Another chance. Death by drowning.

  Drivers around her became more frantic. More cars tried to escape by force. Sharon smiled. She started the music again and continued inching forward. It didn’t matter now if she made it out of town or not. It didn’t matter where on the
road she was when the water hit. It only mattered that she placed herself in the direct path of the flood from the breaching dam.

  Something in black caught her eye. An old woman stood still on the side of the road. Her very stillness, surrounded by panic, made her unusual. A long charcoal gray dress hung loose around her thin frame and she held a tall walking stick. Sharon stared. For some reason the woman reminded her of herself. And then she realized there was no panic on the old lady’s face. She wasn’t begging for a ride from people and there was no terror, no visible desire to get out of harm’s way.

  Fascinated, Sharon paused the music again and leaned out.

  “We’re going to die, you know,” she called to the old woman. “The dam has been breached. When the siren blows it’s a half-hour warning.”

  The old woman made her way to the side of Sharon’s BMW and stood there with one liver-spotted hand on the window edge. She said nothing. Her eyes were so black the pupils were indistinguishable from the irises. Deep wrinkles made fissures of age down her face.

  “Hop in if you want to wait with me,” Sharon said. “Might as well be out of the rain.”

  “You’re inviting me in?” The old woman’s voice was deeper than Sharon expected, scratchy and abrasive.

  If a raven had a voice, this would be it. “Sure, why not? But I’m in no hurry to get out of town. And it looks like none of us are going to make it anyway.” She twirled her hand in a circle, showing the traffic jam surrounding them.

  The old woman cocked her head to one side. The odd movement was like she listened to something else. After a brief moment she nodded. “I have work to do first. Then we’ll see.” She moved around the front of the car and to the side of the road.

  “Take your time,” Sharon called after her. “I’ll be right here. At least until the water hits. Then I’ll be dead.”

  What would drowning be like? She drew in a deep breath and held it until her lungs burned with a crushing weight, then exhaled explosively. Would she die from breathing water or from being knocked around in the car as the flood hit? She would be terrified, that was a given. Would she fight to survive? That was more doubtful. Moments of terror versus weeks of being killed slowly. She’d made a choice, but she imagined her body would instinctively fight that choice when the moment came.

  Sharon looked out the window but there was no wall of water racing down the side streets. When she tuned back, the old woman was gone. Sharon scanned the chaos but couldn’t pick out even the tall walking stick.

  A loud crash made her jump. Up ahead a bright red Ford F350 must have decided to make its own path. It had just slammed into the back of a small car. As Sharon watched, the truck backed up and then hit the car again. With each impact the car was shoved more to the side, until it was pushed into a small Fiat. Both then were shoved off the pavement and into the grassy shoulder. The truck took advantage of the opening to move ahead. It jerked forward, she heard metal on metal, and saw the backup lights come on again.

  Horns honked around her. People wanted to press forward, to move into the open slot the truck created. As if a few feet forward would make any difference. There was a small jerk and her car bumped forward. Automatically, Sharon’s foot came down on the brake and she stared into the rear view mirror. Some sort of Volvo was pushing, urging, forcing her to take those few feet of forward momentum so precious to them.

  If she’d been able to pull off to the side, she would have. Let them have the openings, let them strive and hope and think they were going to make it. She’d just wait. She saw now that it had been a mistake to get into traffic rather than staying in the parking lot. But there were cars on both sides of her and the Volvo once again nudged her forward.

  Sharon stepped on the brake harder and put her hand out the window, flipping off the driver. She saw an older woman behind the wheel, mouth open in a circle as big as the huge earrings she wore.

  Let them strive, Sharon thought, resting her elbow on the window’s edge. In the midst of all the fighting for movement, she felt detached and oddly at peace. This was her time, her last few moments. She’d chosen this. While others around her fought to get free of what was coming, she embraced the end.

  What would her last thoughts be? Would she flash back on her life, like she’d heard happened? Would she remember those who had left her in one way or another? Would she decide, too late, that she wanted to live a few more weeks?

  A man ran by her car, obviously deciding he had a better chance on foot. Maybe he did, she thought. The bright red truck’s backup lights came on again. Sharon sucked in a gasp. The driver hit the gas and the truck flew backward into the man.

  The driver either didn’t know or didn’t care because the truck moved forward, dragging the man as it pushed another car aside and into a third. The man come free of the trailer hitch and fell boneless to the ground.

  He was clearly dead. Blood spread slowly across pavement full of white shards of bone. One arm, palm up, was too far away to still be attached.

  This was what death looked like. At least for that stranger. The method she’d chosen would, by drowning in the coming flood, be just as violent in its way.

  Yet that poor man hadn’t chosen this. Without understanding why, she got out of the car, ignoring the honking of the Volvo. Carefully, she picked her way around cars until she reached the man’s body. She was barely aware of the truck, gunning its engine and continuing its attack. After all, what would it matter if the driver ran over her, too?

  The man’s brown eyes were open and the light rain washed across them. Not widened in terror, just open. She searched his eyes for knowledge, some moment of awareness that this was the end, forever imprinted on his face. But there was nothing.

  He was maybe in his thirties. Brown hair, cut short and neat. Jeans. A black tee shirt that had ‘Clanadonia’ stenciled under the photo of a man in a kilt. If she’d passed him on the street a month ago, she never would have given him a second glance.

  But now he’d gone into nothing, as if showing her what was to come. And she realized she loved him. Just a little. Just enough to fill her heart, to grieve. To wish she could trade places with him, to wish she could have saved him by offering herself in his place.

  She went to step closer and her boot slipped slightly. Glancing down, she saw she stood in his blood, already thickening, even in the drizzle.

  “He’s dead, lady,” some guy shouted from a car. “You can’t do anything. Just get out of the way.”

  Sharon didn’t even glance at the person. Instead she bent over and rested her hand on the man’s chest, where his heart no longer beat but where warmth was still there, under her cupped palm. The stillness would be hers, soon, when her heart stopped.

  If only she could stop it now, give her pulsing heart and pumping blood to this man. Hot tears for this stranger filled her eyes, burned down her cheeks.

  As she moved to straighten, she saw the wedding ring. A plain silver band. Someone had loved him in life. She held his hand a moment, as his skin cooled beneath hers.

  Until her end, she would mourn this one who wasn’t ready, who would never have chosen to breathe his last.

  Sharon headed toward her car, then realized it meant nothing, just like all her other possessions. She’d once been so proud of that BMW. Loved driving it, showing off its immaculate midnight blue waxed gleam. It was a status symbol in a town of farmers and trucks and old beaters.

  She walked back toward the bridge over the Wallace River, weaving around all the blocked cars. More people were leaving vehicles now, running breathlessly for higher ground. Sharon made her way around the end of the bridge and half-slid, half-climbed down the short embankment to the area where fishermen would park their trucks and trailers. From there she walked calmly to the water’s edge.

  She wanted to see death coming. She wanted to be one of the first taken by the water.

  Up above, the bridge and the highway was a mass of movement. Sharon wished all those panicked people luck. Sh
e sat down cross-legged on the wet ground and felt the butt of her slacks soak up the water. The drizzle was thickening again to rain and she listened to the quiet, peaceful sound of drops pattering around her, of the soft murmurs of the little river moving over rocks.

  It was a good place to wait for the water to get loud and hungry and demanding.

  4

  Ramon watched the small clinic in Sultan. Most of the building had collapsed, but a corner had been shored up for patients. It was early morning, the rain had eased to a drizzle from heavy, sullen clouds, and exhaustion lined the faces of those surrounding him. He waited, part of the huge crowd that spilled and overflowed the torn up parking lot. Ben was next to him, standing protectively over Alegria who sat on a curb at his feet. Ramon had managed to scavenge a folding chair and Marie rested in that, watching him silently. She was pale, her dark eyes wide with fear. He squeezed a piece of paper tightly in his fingers, as if he could make things move faster. The small scrap had a number written on it and once that number was called, his nieces would get help.

  They had spent the night working their way along devastated back roads, avoiding the highway, jammed with vehicles with nowhere to go and no way to get there. June and the girls had slept fitfully while Ben and Ramon took turns throughout the long night driving the truck. Artair helped with running the winch when they needed to clear a path.

  Just as they’d crossed into Sultan, just as Ramon drew in a breath feeling like they were finally going to be okay, the aftershock had hit. But Ben had just kept his foot on the gas, had just kept going. Only once had the truck slid as the road bucked under them. And now they were finally at the partially standing clinic.

  June and Artair crossed the parking lot to the local pharmacy, also only partially standing. Ramon hadn’t asked what mission June was on since they’d already stocked up on supplies. He had too many other things on his mind, like his exhausted and injured nieces.

  No one seemed to know how far the quake had reached, but he’d heard the talk around him. Everyone knew it was devastating. No cell service or electricity. Even Ben’s radio in the truck simply blasted the emergency broadcast warning. And there were no military rigs, no signs of National Guard, and no local police.