by Ray Garton
“Sounds like the storm is worse,” Emilio said, listening to the noise outside. “How long does one of these things last, anyway?”
“I don’t know.” She took the blanket to the couch and spread it out over Sheriff Kaufman.
His face was a lumpy collection of small wounds, but they were clean. He stirred occasionally and Fara suspected he was awake, but he kept his eyes closed and said nothing. He didn’t have a fever, but he was feeling cold.
“If that’s not warm enough,” she said, “let me know and I can put some coats on you.”
Fara was wearing her own coat now because it had gotten so cold.
“Are you sure you don’t want a coat, Emilio?” she said. “I can probably find something for you in the closet.”
“No, thanks. When I’m anxious like this, I always feel hot. If I had a coat on, I’d be burning up.”
There was more gunfire in the building, some of it machine gunfire.
“Where the hell is Corcoran?” she said. “He’s been gone too long. He’d better get back before Ollie, or—” She stopped and listened as more rumbling and crashing came from the front of the hospital.
“Another tree?” Emilio said.
“No, that just sounded like . . . something collapsing.”
“Yeah. This building.”
Eddie Loomis lay screaming in the water in front of the dead, black Springmeier Neuropsychiatric Hospital, but no one heard him.
He’d been in the tree for a long time, listening to the creaking and crackling sounds coming from the trunk as it was battered by the wind. The sounds came and went and didn’t sound too severe, so he’d stayed there and kept scanning the long-dead parking lot through his infrared goggles, looking for movement or something suspicious. He hadn’t seen any since the shooting outside had stopped and that had been hours ago. He was cold and wet and his ass ached from sitting on that branch, but he was determined to follow Ollie’s orders and do his job, which was to sit there and keep watching until they came out of the hospital and headed for the fence. Then he was to climb down and join them. Ollie was the father and brother and coach and friend he’d never had and Eddie wanted to make him happy and help him get his homeless friends out of there.
He’d been sitting there with his left arm hooked around another branch next to him, hanging on tightly as he listened to those creaking and crackling sounds, when he realized the sounds weren’t stopping and the tree was moving in one direction.
He started shouting, “Oh, shit!” over and over again when he saw the broad concrete steps that climbed up to the hospital’s entrance and then the building itself growing larger and realized the tree was going down.
Eddie had frantically started to climb down, but immediately knew that was pointless. With both feet on a branch, he’d launched himself away from the tree as hard as he could. The sound of the tree crashing through the front of the hospital was like the end of the world as he flew through the air, buffeted by the powerful wind, flipping head over heels at some point, all sense of direction gone.
When he made contact with the ground, all he knew was the pain that exploded in his right leg. He could not move the leg, and even moving other parts of his body intensified the pain. It filled his head with explosions of reddish-purple light and moved up his leg like a hot, electrified spike, so excruciating that he was no longer aware that he was screaming.
He lay there alone, screaming in the six inches of water that stood in the old parking lot, as sounds of further collapse continued to come from the damaged building.
Latrice lost consciousness, but it didn’t feel like she’d been out long. It was like several consecutive frames had been cut from a movie, making it jump ahead in time just a little in a split second.
She’d been standing in Giff’s living room watching the chaos and violence.
Giff and the sheriff ’s deputy were still fighting on the floor, but now the deputy had the upper hand and was hunched over Giff, pounding on his face like he was tenderizing a steak.
Miguel was trying to make Mia stop using the fireplace shovel to stab and beat Marcus, who was a bloody, twitching mess. He kept shouting her name as he grabbed her arm, then she would jerk her arm away and go on bludgeoning Marcus until he grabbed her arm again. Without warning, she turned around and lunged at Miguel, rising up from Marcus’s body like an angered cobra and striking by leaping onto Miguel with a shrill scream, knocking him to the floor. Then she took the shovel to him, first pounding his face with the flat back of the spade, which made an ugly, thick, clanking sound against his skull. Then she turned the shovel over in both hands and stabbed with the sharp, straight edge, concentrating on his throat and neck.
And through all of that, Latrice heard another sound, one she did not recognize. It was a high, quavering wail, like an animal in pain, or sick with rabies, or both. Seconds after she recognized it as her own miserable voice, it was all swallowed up by the roar of an approaching monster that stomped on the house with a giant foot made of wood and bark and slapping, clawing branches. The world went dark and fell in on top of them.
That was when everything blinked out for a moment.
Next thing Latrice knew, she was flat on the floor, facedown, coughing because of the dust that filled the air. There were still small sounds of collapse around her. Something made of glass broke.
From somewhere in the house, someone was howling in pain, the voice rising to an agonizing cry. A child cried, and some distant part of Latrice feared for that child’s safety but was unable to voice that fear or act on it.
Someone in the darkness—it sounded like the sheriff ’s deputy—laughed long and loud, then said, “Oh, man, fuck me, I am havin’ the weirdest fuckin’ night,” and continued laughing.
She tried to get up on her hands and knees, but something big, solid, and heavy prevented her from rising more than six inches off the floor. She crawled forward and was able to move freely. When she tried to get on hands and knees again, she succeeded, and she kept moving forward, shoving things aside when she could, moving around or over them when she couldn’t, but moving slowly.
Somewhere in the collapsed beams and crushed walls and broken furniture, she heard the deputy shout, “Now I gotta get outta this shit? Oh, fuck! Why can’t something be easy tonight, goddammit?”
The wind and rain were now inside the house, blowing things around and getting Latrice wet. But she kept moving forward, arms and legs shaking, muscles aching, and the inside of her head burning a deep-red rage.
What had begun as Tropical Storm Quentin made landfall as a hurricane and swept through Humboldt County like the rage of an angry deity and laid waste to neighborhoods and malls and bowling alleys and schools and churches and anything else that stood in its path.
Roofs were sheared from buildings large and small and trees and power poles were tossed around like Tinker Toys, flung into homes and shopping centers and churches. The storm surge took out most of the Eureka-Samoa Bridge, all of the Railroad Bridge, and both the North- and Southbound Highway 101 bridges that crossed the bay.
A category 4, Quentin made landfall at Eureka and pounded and slashed and ripped its way northeast, and as it moved on, it left nothing in its wake untouched.
In a quiet, darkened office, a man seated at his desk placed a call, then turned his chair around to look out the window at the sparkling view of San Francisco on a stormy night from the thirty-second floor of Four Embarcadero Center.
It was a spacious, expensively decorated office with lots of onyx and chrome, but the always shiny surfaces were dulled now by the lack of illumination. The only light in the office was a gentle, golden glow that came from behind the large corporate logo on one wall. It was a brass representation of the atomic symbol in which the oversized nucleus was the planet earth with a large gold V emblazoned on it.
The tinny squeak of a voice at the other end of the line came from the small cell phone the man held to his ear.
“Yes, our informati
on says the storm is moving northeast and it’s on its way out of Eureka.”
More tinny sounds from the phone.
“I think we should get a team in there immediately and clean up this mess while we can. It’s a disaster, but it can be handled if it’s handled immediately. . . . Good. Do it now.”
He severed the connection, then turned his chair around and stood. He slipped the phone into his pocket, walked around his desk and crossed the room to a small closet. He got his coat and put it on.
He could go home now. He was done for the day.
51
For the first time since he was small boy, Dr. Jeremy Corcoran wet himself. He stood in the black corridor with his back pressed against the wall, unable to see anything in the dark. Wind howled down the corridor like angry ghosts, much louder and stronger since the loud rumbling he’d heard in the front of the building earlier. He was paralyzed with fear, unable to move, barely able to breathe, and his bladder, which he hadn’t even known was full, suddenly released and he felt the hot urine run down his thighs.
Only a minute earlier, he’d been waiting in what he was almost certain was a restroom. He’d paid little attention to anything in the old hospital that he did not use himself, and the only bathroom he used was the one in his quarters. But after being ejected from his quarters into the darkness of the corridor, he’d panicked. He’d walked and jogged along the wall, never losing touch with it, keeping one hand on it at all times, sometimes stopping to listen when he heard something close. When he’d heard footsteps hurrying toward him, he’d panicked and started groping for a door, any door, and he’d gone into the first one that came long. He’d assumed it was the restroom because of the tile wall, but it didn’t matter. He’d stayed there, just inside the door, for a long time, waiting, listening, trembling, trying not to breathe too loudly, trying to will his thundering heart to calm down. After hearing nothing for a while, he’d opened the door and listened, then stepped outside and listened. Nothing. He’d continued again, hurrying back the way he’d come, back toward Fara’s office. Until he’d heard something within the wind, movement that was steady and human, and . . . a voice. He’d frozen again and pressed his back against the wall.
And now, having wet his pants, he tried to determine if the sound warranted such a response. Was it just the wind?
He heard a gunshot somewhere in the hospital—there had been a few of those—and the clatter of detritus being blown along the corridor floor by the wind. He thought he’d heard the slap of bare feet on the tile and the secretive grumble of voices. But now, all he heard was the wind.
He continued along the wall, more cautiously now, and thought about what he would do once he got back to the safety of Fara’s office. He would get out of here. Somehow. He would pay money to someone to drive him away from Springmeier. He would scare someone into doing it if he had to, telling them that if they stuck around, they’d be cleaned up with the rest of this mess once Vendon’s team of problem-solvers arrived. He would threaten someone if he had to, steal a car, but he was getting out of and away from that building no matter what, storm or no storm.
Shouting. Someone was shouting angrily farther down the corridor. No, it was two voices. And footsteps running in the dark. Toward him. It was two men, and they were fighting. One seemed to be chasing the other, then they would stop and the shouting would go on. After some sounds of struggle, the chase continued, coming closer to Corcoran.
He pressed himself against the wall again and stopped breathing as they came closer. They stopped and began fighting again, shouting about something that made no sense to Corcoran. They were right in front of him now, in the dark, hitting each other and shouting at each other like children, moving around as they struggled, until—
—they slammed directly into Corcoran and he screamed.
In a hoarse voice, a man said, “Hey, who’s this? Huh? Who’re you?”
Corcoran slid along the wall to his left, trying to get away from them and move along, trying not to whimper, although small sounds were coming out of him involuntarily as he sidled along the wall. But they were aware of him now.
Two hands slapped onto his body, groping for purchase until they clutched the front of his corduroy coat.
“No,” Corcoran said in a high, breathy voice. “No, please, no.”
“I got him!” the man shouted. “I got the son of a bitch! This is the cocksucker! He’s the one, I bet! Motherfucker!”
The man slapped Corcoran’s face once, then again, repeatedly, back and forth, and Corcoran began sobbing as he slid down the wall, trying to block his attacker by lifting his arms.
Another hand grabbed Corcoran’s hair and pulled him away from the wall, flinging him to the floor. Corcoran immediately began crawling on hands and knees, even though he was no longer sure in which direction he was going. He just wanted to get away.
He crawled as fast as he could, nearly panting as he heard them closing in again.
“Where the fuck you think you’re goin’, asshole?” one of them said as he jumped on Hal’s back, straddling him like a horse and flattening him to the floor. “Come on, boy, giddy up!” One hand grabbed Corcoran’s hair while the other hit him repeatedly about the neck and shoulders. “Come on, there, boy, whatcha waitin’ for, anyway?” the rider said.
When the other man kicked Corcoran in the face, the world cartwheeled a few times and he found himself teetering on unconsciously. Blood ran from a cut on his upper lip and dribbled over his mouth and chin.
The rider got off of him and kicked him in the ribs. Both men were talking now, ranting about something Corcoran had done, or was going to do—none of it made any sense and he couldn’t follow it, anyway, because they were both kicking him now.
He felt a final surge of fear and panic and he willed himself to move, to flee. With speed that surprised even him, Corcoran rose up on hands and knees, then screamed his rage as he began to hit back, flailing his arms indiscriminately, hitting and scratching as he got to his feet, then ran forward. He stumbled, but he kept running.
They stayed with him. One of them shouted, “You wanna play, dickhead, huh? Is that it? You wanna play?”
One of them tripped him and he fell hard. His chin hit the floor and started bleeding. Then both of them were on him, but they didn’t just hit him.
Corcoran felt something hard and sharp pierce the flesh of his back just below his right shoulder blade. He let out a long scream of fear and pain that became words.
“Help me somebody! Help! Please!”
But that hard, sharp object stabbed into him again. And again.
They laughed and cursed him as they rolled him over onto his back. One of them straddled his legs and began to stab him repeatedly in the abdomen and chest.
Corcoran could not scream anymore. He could only make an involuntary grunting sound with each thrust of the weapon. He felt his blood leaking out of him, soaking into his clothes, warm against his skin.
He wondered how all of this would be reported in the media just a couple of seconds before he died.
52
Latrice’s right hand ached from pounding it on the steering wheel of her Highlander, but she was only vaguely aware of it. Her windshield wipers made rapid smacking sounds as they swept back and forth at top speed and the wind jostled the SUV as she drove, but all Latrice could hear was the grinding of her own teeth.
She had crawled and climbed out of Giff’s demolished house, reminding herself over and over that she wasn’t in a nightmare. But that was what it had felt like, a frustrating nightmare that was enraging her, making the inside of her skull vibrate with anger. Crawling through the rubble and climbing over beams and collapsed walls, soaking wet from the rain, she’d tried to ignore the agonizing screams of one of the children coming from somewhere in the wreckage.
Instead, she focused her thoughts on her own children and her mother waiting for her at home, probably worried sick, maybe following coverage of the hurricane on the news. Tamara
and Robert were the reason Latrice had come to Eureka, especially Robert. If it weren’t for them, she wouldn’t have to crawl out of a tree-crushed house in a hurricane. She’d be safe at home, warm and dry, nice and relaxed in front of the TV, or sitting at the kitchen table talking quietly with Mama over tea. The kids should be in bed now, but they weren’t, she was sure, because Mama hated to be the villain by prying them away from the TV and making them go to bed.
If it weren’t for Robert’s mystery condition, she wouldn’t have needed that five thousand dollars Leland had promised her. It would have been useful, sure, but it wouldn’t be so desperately needed. She would have been able to pay so many bills with that money, would have been able to get some nasty, tenacious bill collectors off her back, have some much-needed repairs done on the Highlander and around the house. But it would have to go toward whatever tests Robert was going to need. And medical costs were so outrageously high that even then, five grand probably wouldn’t be enough.
If she’d never had the kids, of course, her life would be very different. Less stressful, for one thing. She wouldn’t be under such a load of debt. She’d have more time—hell, nothing but time for herself. And most important of all, she would not have to crawl out of the remains of a demolished house in a fucking hurricane! She would have a life, her own life, and she could do just about anything she wanted. She’d have no one to worry about but herself.
She’d thought of all the money and time spent catering to them, wrapping her whole life around them. Then what does Robert do? He gets sick with some kind of mystery illness and she would have to spend even more money on him.
“Little shit,” she’d muttered. “Don’t know who the fuck he thinks he is . . . like I got nothing better to do with my goddamned time and money . . . Jesus Christ.”
