by Lou Cadle
It was a relief to make it to the car and get Mr. Witherspoon settled in the passenger seat. “Don’t walk farther than you have to. Drive up to the emergency entrance and both of you get out. Let the security guy park your car, okay?”
From the driver’s seat, the pregnant woman nodded. “Thank you,” they both said, together.
“Be safe,” he said, and with a wave turned and jogged back across the lot to the door. He shoved the trashcan back in place and ran up the stairs past his own floor and to the fourth. Only as he pushed through to the floor did he stop to think he should have detoured to get his cell phone from his locker. Damn.
He found Meggy in the big conference room, which was also a first aid station at the moment. There was a young women in an aide’s smock with bandages on her head, another nurse attending to her. An older woman sat with a handkerchief dabbing at her eyes. An elderly man was fighting to catch his breath as Meggy and two other staff members hovered nearby.
When Meggy saw Bash, she stepped away from the man. “I was starting to worry about you.”
“I had a medical situation down on my floor.”
“Anything serious?”
“A patient’s wife thought she had gone into labor.”
“Good grief.” Meggy shook her head. “Everything okay?”
“I got them headed to the hospital,” he said. “What’s going to happen now?”
“I called admin. A structural engineer will be here about 3, we’re closing down most services until then. We already sent most of the support staff home. What I’d like to do the rest of the day is, first, get these people out and, second, have a meeting with professional staff, review emergency procedures.”
“Okay,” said Bash. “What can I do to help?”
She tapped her tablet with a stylus as she thought. “We’re okay here. I know it’s a big favor to ask, but can you run out and order food? Most people will have missed lunch.”
“For how many?”
“Twenty-three. So maybe five or six pizzas, or fifteen big deli sandwiches sliced in half, something like that? Real food, in any case, not just dessert. I hate to ask you, but the few support staff left are swamped.”
“No problem. Want me to take petty cash or charge it or what?”
“Can you pay for it, and put in for reimbursement?”
“Sure? What’s the timeline?”
“I doubt we’ll be ready to sit down an meet for an hour.” She glanced at her watch. “Better make it 3:30 to be safe. That’ll give me an extra half hour to get organized and I can get us all out of here on time.”
“Great. I’ll clean up my treatment rooms better, order food about 2:30, then run out to get it.”
“Thank you so much,” she said. “I hate to impose.”
“No imposition. You’re sure I can’t do anything to help here?”
“No, we got one patient to the hospital. Ashleigh there is cut, and her cousin’s going to come get her. The gentleman is a patient, mesothelioma, and the upset lady is his wife. He refused hospitalization. A daughter is on her way to fetch them, and he says he will get himself on his oxygen back home.” She shrugged and her lips tightened, conveying a good deal to Bash — the elderly man was likely a terminal patient who had made his end of life choices, and the crying wife was upset with more than the earthquake.
He took the time to run down to his locker and grab his lunch and cell phone. He powered up the phone and saw the message from Gale, which was a relief. He hadn’t been worried very much about him — there hadn’t been a cacophony of ambulances arriving at the hospital, which Bash would have heard from so near, so he thought probably no one in town was seriously hurt. He started to punch in a message but then hesitated, he wasn’t entirely sure why. It was mean to let Gale worry longer than he needed to. But he was embarrassed about seeming weak and whiny this morning, and he didn’t want to emote all over the text message now, too. He erased the message he had begun, and typed in just I’m ok and sent that. He didn’t want to think about his personal problems right now.
He ate his healthy low-cal lunch alone — he’d skip the food at the meeting — then cleaned his treatment rooms to his usual standards. Trevor had left a coloring book, so Bash took that to the front desk and put a sticky note on it. When the treatment rooms were spotless, he ordered pizzas and left to pick them up, passing a crew of three men outside in putty-colored overalls picking up glass. You had to hand it to the administration here, Meggy and the facility administrator, Joanne. They ran a tight ship. In two days at the outside, he predicted, they’d have the glass replaced, the building’s integrity confirmed, and everything would be running smoothly once again.
The pizza place smelled like heaven. This calorie-watching was tough on him. He loved food and missed being able to eat rich foods. Pizza would be cheating, but if he held it to one slice that wouldn’t be too awful, would it? He’d just have a small salad for supper, to make up for it. The counter clerk slapped a bell, called his name, and Bash paid for the stack of five extra-large pizzas. He picked them up with an oof. They were surprisingly heavy. He had to set them on his car’s roof while he cleaned a space for them in the back seat. Gods, those clothes from Macy’s he was going to return, purchased in an attempt to improve his mood — had to get them back to the store soon, or they wouldn’t take them at all. He was a bit of a pack rat, if he didn’t keep after himself, and he’d have to clean out his car soon. This weekend, he promised himself.
The drive back to the clinic was slowed by the start of school traffic, temporary 20 mph signs slowing him down, crossing guards stopping him, and double the normal number of cars, with parents going to pick up their youngest children. In a little bit, high school seniors would be adding their cars to the mix. He was a few minutes late for the meeting when he pulled into the staff lot at work. He opened the back door of his car to retrieve the pizzas, and the second earthquake struck.
He knew immediately that it was something else entirely from the earlier quake. First there was a great sound, like a million pieces of Styrofoam being ripped apart at once, or a distant train wreck, at the same time both low and loud and full of squeaks and creaks. And then the earth beneath his feet lurched, and as suddenly was gone from underfoot, and he felt himself falling. At the same time, a flock of birds whirled overhead, screaming, screaming. A giant snapping sound came at the same time he hit the ground, hard, on a hipbone.
He found himself lying on his side on the asphalt, looking out beneath his car at the nearly-empty parking lot. The earth was rippling like an ocean, waves of asphalt coming at him. He flinched. Then he realized nothing was coming at him. It was an illusion of the ground pumping up and down, in literal waves. The asphalt split apart at a nearby wave peak as he watched. His car bounced on its shocks and he yanked his head back from the edge of it, fearing he’d be brained. Fighting his way to his hands and knees he crawled away two feet from the open car door before the shaking forced him to lie flat again, on his belly.
A hard shock shook him so that he was rolled involuntarily over onto his back. In the sky, the screaming birds wheeled, turning the blue sky black for an instant. A hundred car alarms shrilled and honked. Out on the street, there were drivers laying on their horns. The sound of cars colliding, metal on metal. And the roaring beneath him continued, an angry giant coming awake. The cacophony was maddening, like nothing he’d ever heard before. The ground kept rolling, as if an angry fat guy was jumping up and down on a waterbed beside him. His hands grasped at the ground, trying to find purchase, but there was nothing to hold on to and he was shaken, like an abusive father shakes a baby to death, unable to do one thing to protect himself.
Still the ground rolled and moaned. It was Northridge again, from his childhood, but Northridge times ten or fifty or a hundred. His head smacked against the pavement, and he saw a burst of light. Sit up, sit up, he told himself, but the best he could manage was to roll over to his belly, brace his palms on the ground, and lift his h
ead clear of the pavement. To his left, a thousand tinkling bells went off and he looked over to see the clinic being shaken apart, the last of the glass raining down out of the windows, shimmering in the afternoon light, steel supports bending and twisting, the roof coming down to rest at an angle. Meggy, he thought, with a wrench. The rest of the staff. The men who had come to check the building. All inside.
And still the earth shook. It went on forever and ever, long enough for him to get religion, to lose religion, to know he was going to die, and to think a hundred times of Gale. In his mind he apologized to his husband, he called out to him, he raged at him for putting them in this hellhole, be begged forgiveness for every stupid thing he had ever said or done, he told him he loved him. He told him to live. Live, he thought. Live, Gale. Please live. I’m so sorry I didn’t call you.
His eyes burned. The air stank of sulfur, he realized, as the shaking barely paused before it intensified yet again. As he stared toward the clinic, a light pole at the edge of the parking lot bent in half, and a Mini halfway across the lot jumped like a kangaroo, coming down three feet away from where it had been. The whole world was coming apart.
He felt himself floating out of his body and saw himself from above, a frightened man clinging uselessly to the ground, a man whose ass was widening with encroaching middle age, whose fingers tried to dig into the surface of the parking lot. Poor thing, look at him, so scared. And then his consciousness zoomed down and slipped back into his body and he felt the shaking easing off. Easing off more. A final hiccup, and the world came to a rest.
Holy fuckoli, Batman, now that was an earthquake. He started laughing. But he clamped down on it right away, knowing it for hysteria. He didn’t have time to be hysterical. He didn’t even have time to worry about his husband. He was a nurse. He had to try and save lives.
And I’m alive. I’m alive! He felt great giddy relief and joy at the thought. Had it struck five minutes earlier, or thirty seconds later, he probably wouldn’t be. His sunglasses had been shaken off his head early on, and he found them an arm’s length away and pulled them back on his face. He grabbed the car door, pulled himself up with it, and slammed it. He began to run for the half-collapsed building but, after two steps, though better of it and went back to open his trunk. He had to mutter instructions to himself to help himself focus.
First, push aside the disaster survival kit, might need that later, grab the old plaid wool blanket and toss it out, and now dig underneath empty plastic grocery bags to get to the spare tile well. He snatched up the jack and tire iron, tucked them under his arm, and slammed the trunk. He took up the old blanket and draped it over his shoulders.
The trip across the parking lot, clean and barely six months from its last resurfacing, was like a trip across a land-mined war zone. The asphalt had buckled and split in several places, and the surface was no longer even. A great hand had shaken the surface like a bedspread and not bothered to smooth it out afterward. He hopped over peaks and jogged where he safely could. A twisted light pole — the very one he had seen fall — sputtered with electrical sparks and he detoured well around it.
The driveway that circled the clinic was less damaged than the parking lot. When he reached it, he had to stop to look at the fallen glass, which had splintered and scattered out past the edges of the drive. Steel columns remained upright, the beams stretching between them. A few sections of the top floor were recognizable as straight lines, but they were now down at the level of the second floor, pancaked. Every single bit of glass had fallen from this side of the building, a flat side, hundreds of panes. Dust hung in a cloud over the wreck of the building. Past that, he could see the rounded side of the building had taken less damage. As he moved into the dust cloud, Bash started coughing.
He put down his paltry set of rescue tools and stripped off his scrub shirt. Underneath, he wore a plain white t-shirt. He stripped that off and tied it around his face as a mask, then pulled his scrubs back on and picked his way over the debris in the drive.
Though the building was altered beyond recognition, he knew about where he was. The main entrance was over there, the visitor’s lot in front of it, with only one car left in it, luckily. The conference room, where he thought everyone in the building had been when it struck, was at the rear of the building, to his left, where it had overlooked the next building.
He made his way around the building, calculating his best chance of finding survivors. They had been on the top floor, at least. Bottom floor this side, and they’d be smashed under tons of fallen building. He stepped around a file cabinet that had launched itself out of the building but somehow landed upright. It seemed barely damaged.
As he reached the end of the building, his heart fell. The side of the building facing the street, with the rounded curve of glass, was still standing nearly to the top. Everything else fell off toward the staff lot. If there were survivors, they could be under the debris of the roof, or they might have rolled down into the real mess at the edges in this direction, or they were dead somewhere — anywhere — in that mess. At the far front end of the building, there was a section of the first and second story that looked almost intact. Something from the roof — a big air conditioner or heater, maybe — sat precariously balanced half on and half off that little intact section. He tried to think of what had been in that area, couldn’t, then shook off the thought. Rescue: that was what was important.
He could imagine Gale screaming at him for trying to do this alone, without equipment, without much training. But he couldn’t sit and wait. And wait for whom? It was him or nobody. A single glance down the street told him what the rest of the town was like. Buildings were down, cars were wrecked, water gushed down a street from a broken water main. In a town of 45,000, probably a third were dead or seriously injured, and anyone left trained to effect rescue was as likely to be among injured as not. Those few who were alive would not need to look further than their own noses for work that had to be done. No one was coming soon to help him here, and five minutes work right now might matter to someone’s survival.
He needed both his hands, so he set his jack and tire iron down outside of the debris field. They looked pitifully small compared to the tons of stuff that had to be moved.
He waded into the debris, climbing carefully on hands and knees, trying to get up to the top of the mess. A section of drywall slid under his right knee, and he could do nothing but freeze until it quit sliding. He edged to the left until he found more stable purchase on a beam. His heart was pounding hard — had been pounding hard all along. He realized he felt sick from the constant rush of adrenaline, almost poisoned by it. His mind cast over his schooling, trying to remember how many minutes of the hormone the body could supply before it merely ran out, or when all the available receptors would fill up in his brain and fear would max out. It was a pleasant distraction from where his mind wanted to go, which was thinking about being crushed to death.
If he found someone hurt, it was only four blocks to the hospital. Maybe he could find some uninjured bystanders and have them carry someone over. He was higher up now, and he looked over in the direction of the hospital — and saw nothing. It was an seven-story building, and he knew where it should be, but it wasn’t there.
Brick. Shit, the hospital was brick. He realized it was gone. Collapsed. He saw a denser cloud of dust where it had been, though he couldn’t see the collapsed building itself. Between him and the hospital, the parking structure and two other medical buildings had also sustained serious damage. Facades had peeled away. Roofs had collapsed. There was orthopedics, across the way, also badly damaged, the roof fallen into the center of the building, the edges intact. His building and the others in the complex, unusable. But the hospital — it was just gone. Who was going to take care of the injured? And where?
He heard a voice, behind him, and to his left.
“Help,” it said clearly, if faintly. “Help me.”
“I’m here,” he called. “Hang on, I’ll be
right there.” The dust was settling, so he yanked his makeshift mask down around his neck.
He followed the beam back and then had to leave it to move toward where the voice had been. “Say something.”
“I’m here,” the voice said. It wasn’t ten feet away, but look at he might, he couldn’t see a person-shape among all the building debris. Gingerly, he picked his way closer.
“Again,” he said.
“Bash?”
Someone who knew him. His heart leapt in joy. “Who is it?”
“Suze. I’m right here, looking right at you.”
He looked toward the voice and finally made out her face, filthy with dust, half-hidden behind a grid of small orangish PVC pipes, maybe part of the sprinkler system. He couldn’t help but smile in relief at finding a survivor. “You’re going to be okay.”
“What happened?”
“Earthquake, honey. I’ll get you out.” He hoped he wasn’t lying.
“But what happened?”
“Is your head okay?”
“My head’s fine. My leg hurts. I can’t move it.”
Bash tugged at the grid of pipes, gently at first, then harder, but they wouldn’t budge. He traced them back to where they disappeared under a section of roof. Anything he tried to move could send more debris cascading down. What he needed was a saw, a chain saw, then he could cut out sections of the piping. This way, it was like playing a game of pick-up sticks, a very dangerous one where dislodging a pile of sticks could mean death for them both.
But he had to try something. He grabbed the pipes and began wriggling them back and forth, back and forth, trying to ease them out from whatever pinned them. After a few seconds, they began moving and suddenly he felt a give and was able to slide them away to the left, away from her face. A hand came out and he grabbed it. “You’re fine, you’re good.”
“How is everyone else?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll get you out of there, and you can help me find the others.”
