The Trip to Raptor Bluff

by Annie O'Haegan

  **********

  Dakota gradually became aware of a bustling noise originating from a short distance away. She was lying on the floor of a very large room. There were dozens of others in the room with her, most of them sleeping on the floor, while others cried or spoke to each other in whispers. What little light illuminated the room came from a single, battery powered lantern placed on the floor just outside a wide doorway. She felt she would die of thirst and patted the ground around her in search of her backpack. It was right beside her. She sat up and drank two bottles of water before it occurred to her that she might still need to ration it. Her arm stung, and she remembered cutting it as she jumped away from the dead man’s bloated body. The events of the day flooded her mind and she tried to will away the macabre images. She needed to do something, anything, to move her thoughts in a different direction.

  She had no memory of what had happened since the kind doctor shook her out of her stupor. Try as she might, she could not remember being led into the room where she now sat. It felt strange to her, being inside a building with tiled floors and artificial light, and to hear human voices around her. It felt strange because the smell of death still permeated the air. It was everywhere.

  Rising stiffly, she stepped carefully among the sleeping people and into a dim hallway. A room across the corridor was brightly lit with standing light fixtures, and cries of pain came from within. Peeking through the open door, she saw a makeshift surgical ward with harried doctors and nurses rushing among the moaning patients. In a smaller room next to that, men and women in medical scrubs slept on rubber mats laid out on the filthy floor. She recognized one of the sleeping staff as the man who had found her earlier.

  “It’s two o’clock in the morning. You should be resting,” came a soft voice beside her. “I’m Cara, one of the doctors. Aren’t you the girl who Doctor Clifford found wandering in from the Drowning Fields?”

  When Dakota looked at her in confusion, the lady said, “Our teams didn’t get here until late yesterday afternoon, not long before you arrived. This place was already full of survivors who found refuge on the upper floors right before the tsunamis came in. Lots of others began arriving from other hotels when they realized medical help was here. They all came in from the beach. As far as we know, you are the only poor soul who walked in from the east.”

  “There will be others. I was a day ahead of my mom and two other girls.” Dakota pictured her mother’s weak and complaining team trying to walk the same horrific journey from the bridge to the coast. They would make it. They had to make it.

  The tall woman standing beside her looked as though she could fall asleep on her feet. She slumped against the wall and said, “We don’t have much in the way of supplies right now, but we are expecting more airdrops soon. Come with me and I will see if I can find you something to eat.”

  “I need to use a satellite phone, please! I need to tell my grandfather where everyone is. There was a whole group of us traveling together and we all split up into teams.”

  “I’m sorry, but we only have one satellite phone with us and the battery died. The charger is solar powered so we can’t recharge it until the sun comes up, and even then, we need it full time to communicate with our home base and other emergency groups. We are desperate for supplies, and there are critically injured people here who need to be evacuated. We aren’t even allowed to use the phone to call our families.” Cara saw the look of despair sweep across Dakota’s face and squeezed her shoulder. “Like I said, we are team zero and we barely got ourselves and a few food and medical supplies here. We are expecting lots more help tomorrow, though. We will find a phone for you.”

  Dakota was checking the pockets of her dirt encrusted clothes for the slip of paper with her grandfather’s phone number on it. There was nothing in her pockets but the balled up napkin she had used over and over to stifle her gags during the hike through the tsunami wreckage. The slip of paper must have fallen out unnoticed when she took out the napkin. “Never mind,” she said miserably. “I lost the number. I have to wait for my mom to get here tomorrow.” She looked around her at the swept but still dirty floors. People had done their best to move out the tsunami filth but without water or manpower to clean, the floors were covered in grime. “Where are we?”

  “We are standing in what used to be the ground floor of the Oceanfront Hotel. Come on, you have to eat something. We have enough water and military MREs to get us through the night.”

  A young man wearing scrubs popped his head into the hallway and asked, “Cara, what are you doing still awake? You should be sleeping. We need you rested when you come back on shift.”

  “I’m fine, Cara,” said Dakota. “I have some food in my pack, but thank you.” She walked away quickly so Cara wouldn’t notice the trembling that started in her knees and was working its way up her body.

  **********

  The sound of helicopters overhead woke Dakota at dawn. She drank a bottle of water and opened the bag of nuts. The previous day’s events began to play in her head and her appetite fled. She needed something to keep her busy.

  When she stumbled into the hallway, men and women in military uniforms, their arms laden with brown cardboard boxes, were scurrying about. A teenage boy in dirty jeans and a torn sweatshirt approached her and said, “I am so glad more help is here. I was getting really worried that we would run out of water again.” He gestured to a lone case of bottled water a few feet away. “That’s all we have left.”

  “Clear the hallway, please,” said a chunky woman dressed in military fatigues. Her voice was curt but her smile was friendly when she said, “Get out of the way or make yourselves useful. We could use some help getting supplies in from the beach.”

  “I can help,” said Dakota, eager for the distraction.

  “I’m Jason,” said the young man as they followed the woman through the building’s west entrance. The doors and windows were gone and the floor was covered in piles of seaweed, grime covered trash, and sand. “My parents and I were visiting Mom’s sister in Northern California, and she told us that we couldn’t go back home to Indiana without seeing the Oregon coast. We were planning to spend one night here and then head north. The gods must have been with us because we had barely pulled in to Port Fortand before the ground started shaking.”

  “I’m Dakota…”

  “Kids!” barked a balding man in uniform. “The motorized rafts landing on the beach directly in front of us are bringing in supplies from the ship. Do you mind helping those soldiers clear a wider walkway to the front doors? When the path is cleared, you can help us bring in boxes. Put anything marked with a red cross in that stack to the left. Everything else goes to the right. Stay away from the airdrop zone at the south end of the beach.”

  The once pristine beach was littered with debris of every type and shape, and the ocean itself held mountains of floating trash. A swarm of uniformed personnel was clearing the detritus to widen a sand pathway from the water’s edge to the hotel’s main entrance. “At least the air smells clean out here,” sighed Dakota. “How many people are in the hotel?”

  “Hundreds. When the hotel rooms filled up, people started crashing in the conference rooms on the ground floor. The really injured people are in rooms at the very end of the hallway so we won’t hear their yells. There’s a whole room full of little kids who got separated from their parents, too. Volunteers from among the survivors are helping out with them.” Jason interrupted his story to point at a portable toilet being unloaded on the beach. “Oh, thank god! My parents were telling everyone to use containers for their waste – bags, bottles – anything but the hotel toilets, but no one listened and they used the toilets anyway. Now the toilets are filled up but can’t be flushed. Some of them are overflowing. The whole floor where my family’s room is smells like an outhouse.”

  “I was wondering about that. I really need to go.”

  Jason nodded towards a large piece of tin siding tipped against a pile of boards abo
ut fifty yards away. “Go in there and I’ll keep a lookout. I started going there yesterday when we ran out of bags.”

  Jason wasn’t the only person who had used the area for a bathroom. The ground under the makeshift roof was covered with feces and bits of paper, and the air was fetid with the smell of human excrement. Dakota squatted in the sand and thought, “We are living like animals, and it is starting to feel normal.”

  Jason and Dakota worked with the soldiers, clearing rubble and helping them lay down wide pieces of plywood to form a walkway from the beach drop-off zone to the hotel’s entrance. Jason gestured to a group of soldiers rushing to enlarge an improvised landing site beneath a hovering helicopter. “Now they can start evacuating the worst of the injured. Most of them were inside buildings or close to buildings when the earthquake happened. There wasn’t a lot of time to get people out of the rubble before the first tsunami came in.” Jason’s face took on a look of horror when he whispered. “Everyone panicked when the tsunami alarm went off. People were trying to run on broken legs; people were screaming for their kids… A guy from this hotel was shouting for everyone to come inside and get on the top floors, but too many people didn’t listen. They went for their cars or tried to run east through the town, but the first tsunami came through so soon after the quake. They couldn’t outrun it.”

  “You saw the tsunamis come in?”

  “From a seventh floor balcony at the back of the hotel. There were so many people still outside when the first wave poured in. It was horrible, Dakota. The water was pushing cars and boats and buildings like they were plastic toys. And it was moving so fast! Now the doctors and nurses have started calling everything east of the beach the ‘Drowning Fields’ because no one on the ground, even if they were in cars, had a chance.” He shivered at the memory and said in a hushed voice, “The only person I know about who survived the tsunami itself came in late yesterday afternoon. The poor guy was drifting in the ocean on a piece of plywood, stark naked and covered in salt. The doctors said the power in the tsunami stripped the clothes right off his body. I have never seen a sunburn like that in my life.”

  “I walked across the Drowning Fields to get here,” said Dakota. “There are dead people everywhere.”

  Jason stopped working and stared at her with a look between puzzlement and horror.

  Dakota dropped her eyes and shook her head. “I can’t think about that right now. I don’t know why I told you.”

  They were interrupted by a young soldier who arrived carrying a heavy pack filled with water and food. “Time to eat, you guys.” He handed them each a bottle of water and a sealed brown bag. “Here is a MRE for each of you.”

  Dakota tore into a packet of chili with beans. She groaned with pleasure as she put the cold food in her mouth with the plastic spoon that came in the bag. “Real food! I have been eating power bars and candy bars since Saturday.”

  “These aren’t bad,” Jason said as he opened his packaged meal. “Especially when you haven’t eaten in three days. I ate cold spaghetti last night and it was the best food I have ever tasted.”

  “You didn’t have any food for three days?”

  “Where were we going to get food? All the stores and restaurants were wiped out by the tsunami. That left only the vending machines on the hotel’s top floors, and they were smashed in and looted on the first day. No one ate for three days unless they had a private stash, and there was no water, either. When the water heaters and toilet tanks in the hotel ran dry, we just went thirsty.”

  “Toilet tanks? Are you serious?”

  “People gotta drink, and that was the only water in the place. Anyway, people acted like freaks when the water and MREs came in with the medical staff yesterday afternoon. I saw some lady grab MREs from a couple of little kids. She said her own kids were hungry. The military wasn’t here yet and one of the doctors had to stand on a table and threaten to hold back food and water unless everyone shut up and got in line. Then he let all of the kids go first.” He lowered his voice and said, “I’m so glad more supplies came in today, but I’m even happier to see the soldiers. My parents were getting worried by the way people were acting, like it was going to get dangerous. They were right. After the food riot last night, we decided we needed to stay in our room until someone came in to restore order.”

  “Well, it looks like other people feel safer, too. There are lots of us on the beach helping out the soldiers.”

  Jason and Dakota turned their heads towards the hotel entrance when they heard a piercing whistle. A man in hospital scrubs was waving his arms and shouting, “People, we need a couple of runners over here to unpack medical supplies and organize them for the staff!”

  Dakota jumped to her feet and tucked packets of dried banana and raisins from her MRE in her pocket. “I’m going to help. I need to stay closer to the hotel anyway so I can watch for my mom.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Jason, trotting to catch up.

  The exhausted doctor who had summoned for help smiled briefly before he showed them a large pile of haphazardly stacked boxes marked with red crosses. “We are running out of everything and there are not enough medical personnel to unpack these supplies. I need you to open the boxes and stack things by type, OK? Start by putting all the boxes of medicines and drugs on the right side of the door, and everything else to the left of the door. Then I need each of you to take a pile and break things down into categories; organize surgical gloves together in one place, bandages in another, needles in another, and so on. Once everything is separated, stack the boxes along the wall where the medical staff takes their naps. Oh, and we need alcohol wipes, gauze bandages, and surgical tape immediately. Hand those to anyone in scrubs as soon as you find them. Look for surgical masks, too. If there is more than one box, start passing them out to the military personnel first, then to anyone else who wants one. The stench from the Drowning Fields will become unbearable before the day is out.”

  Jason and Dakota toiled through the afternoon, sorting, stacking, and delivering boxes of medical supplies. While they worked, military personnel cleared the ground floor of tsunami debris and arranged standard areas for dispersing food and water. A long table was set up in the middle of the lobby where lines of people signed their names to survivor lists and filled out forms for nearest contacts. “There are people everywhere trying to find out if their families and friends survived,” whispered Jason. “I still can’t wrap my mind around any of this.”

  “I need to go out back and see if I can find my mom’s team,” said Dakota. “They should have made it down Hammer Mountain yesterday and will be crossing the Drowning Fields today.” Her worry had mounted as the hours passed, and by late afternoon she was having difficulty concentrating on anything but her mother’s safety.

  “Don’t go out there without surgical masks,” warned a soldier who saw them heading towards the hotel’s rear exit. “You think the smell is bad in here, just walk five feet out the back door.”

  Even through the masks, the smell of death was overpowering. Jason had to rip off his mask to vomit. “You walked across the whole thing?” he gasped in between gags. His eyes poured water and he began to vomit again.

  Watching Jason vomit started a gag reflex in Dakota and she began to vomit also. “It wasn’t this bad yesterday,” she wheezed.

  “What is this, a retcharama? A barfathon?” asked a male soldier. He was leaning against the wall with his surgical mask raised to uncover his mouth, holding a bottle of water in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  Jason’s shout of laughter came out in the middle of a very loud gag, and the resulting sound was something between a screech of pain and a howl of hysteria. Dakota began to giggle and the soldier’s shoulders started shaking with mirth. “I took a psychology course in college where the instructor showed our class a slideshow of people in distressing situations. For some reason, we students started to laugh. Every picture he showed us was worse than the last, and by the end of the slideshow,
the whole class was roaring with laughter. Laughter in the face of distress is always inappropriate, but there must be something in the human psyche that makes us laugh at the worst of times.” He sighed deeply. “And this is most definitely the very worst of times.”

  The sudden melancholy in the soldier’s face brought Dakota’s fear for her mother rushing to the surface, and her laughter quickly turned to sobs. “My mom and two teenage girls are trying to cross the Drowning Fields!” she cried. “It was almost too much for me to walk through yesterday, so I don’t see how they can make it!”

  The young soldier’s weary eyes came alive with worry. “Why didn’t you say something? We need to get to them before the sun goes down. Come with me. You need to tell Colonel McCoy what you just told me.”

  Half an hour later, Dakota, a dozen soldiers, Jason, and Jason’s parents made their way east across the Drowning Fields. All of them spent the first few minutes gagging or vomiting. When darkness began to fall and the difficult walking became almost impossible even with flashlights, the soldier in charge reluctantly told Dakota that they had to turn back for their own safety.

  “What if their water is gone?” cried Dakota. “We can’t just leave them out there!”

  “Wait!” said Jason’s mother. “I heard something! I think someone is calling for help! They must have seen our flashlights!”

  All movement stopped and the next distant wail sounded eerily from across the hideous expanse. Dakota’s knees gave out and Jason’s father caught her before she fell. It was Lucy screaming for help.

  Lucy, Kate, and Sarah

  It took them until early evening to descend the eastern slope of Hammer Mountain, and the sun was too low in the sky to consider walking through the blighted landscape to the coast. They trudged in aghast silence towards what remained of the bridge. Lucy hoped that an extending edge of concrete would at least offer scant protection from the elements, but the area underneath was too crowded with wreckage. Kate climbed the supporting man-made hill and shouted for Lucy and Sarah to follow. “It will be cold up here but there is no hope of finding anything dry enough to burn in a fire,” she said as she pulled a warm jacket and a heavy sweatshirt from her duffle bag. She tossed the sweatshirt to Sarah, who was staring dead-eyed into the distance. Sarah pulled on the sweatshirt without a word of thanks and turned her back.