by Lou Cadle
Her upper body was tucked into a free space in the debris. From the crotch up, she was unpinned and uninjured, as far as he could see. Merely dusty. Her legs were underneath fallen debris, he hoped not crushed. Or gone — he flashed on blood pumping out of severed legs and forced the image out of his mind. He held her hand up to the light, pressed the fleshy part of her thumb, and was relieved to see quick capillary refill. “I don’t think you’re bleeding.”
“It hurts.”
“I know.” He studied the situation some more. “Look, I think I can crawl in there with you, if you don’t mind my butt in your face for a moment.”
“As long as you can get me out, I’ll even kiss it.”
He barked a laugh. “Hang on.” He pushed at the debris above her, testing it for stability. He didn’t want to get in there, bump into something, and bury them both. Once he was as certain as he could be that it was safe, he wriggled forward to drop over the lip of the space she was in and he eased himself down on her — well, half on her and half next to her. “Sorry,” he said.
“I’m fine. And it’s your knee in my face, not your butt.”
He rolled more weight off her but there wasn’t room for them to be side by side. “Move my knee to where you can stand to take weight.” He felt her take hold of his calf and shift it.
“Better,” she said. “What do you see?”
“I’m waiting for my eyes to adjust to the light,” he said. He should have grabbed the flashlight from his glove compartment.
“I have a lighter in my pants pocket,” she said.
“No no no,” Bash said. “There could be pockets of gas. I’m seeing better now. Give me a second more.”
His eyes were adjusting, and he could see where her nearer leg, the right one, disappeared into to the debris. He reached a hand down and slid it along the top of her leg. There was space at first, then it narrowed down. From her knee down, she was pinned. He prodded at the lowest spot he could reach, but she made no protest. He pulled his hand out and looked at it. No blood.
“I’m moving around you.” He twisted himself until he was splayed across her lower body, reaching for the other leg. There was more space there. It was as free as far as he could reach. And to the left, there was more empty space still. He wriggled backward and levered himself out of the space.
“I think your left leg is going to be easy to free. Your right, that make take some time. Here’s what I want you to do. Really slowly, wiggle your left leg toward the left. There’s some extra space there, and you might be able to get it out yourself.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure about the space. I couldn’t get down to your left foot. Does it feel pinned? Does it hurt? Numb?”
“I think it’s okay.”
“So try and get it out on your own. I’ll be right back.”
“No!”
He paused and smiled at her. “I need something to help us. It’ll only be a second.”
As fast as he could do it safely, he scrambled back to where he had left the tools.
“Hey!” a voice called.
He looked up to see a man jogging toward him.
“You a doctor?”
Bash shook his head. As the man neared, he said, “I’m a chemotherapy nurse.”
“I need some help over here. There’s someone hurt.”
Bash felt torn. He’d be needed in a hundred places at once right now, but he could only be in one. “Very next person, I promise. I have a trapped nurse I need to get out first.” And if her injuries weren’t too severe, there’d be two of them to help other people.
“He’s bleeding.”
Shit. “Okay, here’s what you do. Find a clean cloth, and press down on the bleeding. Keep it under pressure.”
“Someone is doing that already.”
“Terrific. Where are you? I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He pointed. “The green Toyota over there, smashed into the light pole.”
“I won’t be long,” Bash said, and he turned back to the collapsed building. The jack slowed him down, but he was figuring out how to navigate the debris better, too. A few more times for practice, and he’d be scampering up and down like a monkey.
He made it back to Suze.
“I did it!” she said. “My left leg is out.”
“Fantastic.”
“I tried to push with it to get my right leg out, but I can’t. It’s really pinned.”
“Good job.” He handed her the jack. “Take hold of this.” When she had it, he handed down the tire iron. “And the handle. Don’t drop it.”
“I won’t,” she said peevishly.
Probably a good sign that she was her usual self. “I’m coming down.”
One again he wriggled his way toward where her leg disappeared under the debris. “Jack,” he said, reaching his hand back.
“Forceps. Scalpel,” she said, mimicking a surgeon, then “oh shit,” as she must have thought of the possibility of what a scalpel might be used for at this moment.
“You’re going to be fine,” he said, jamming the jack into the space by her leg. No, that was too far back. He had to have space to work the handle. He reached his hand back again. “Handle, Suze.” When he had it firmly in hand, he worked it into its slot and pumped the handle until the jack slowly rose. When he started to feel resistance, he stopped and wriggled forward to check the jack.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to try and relieve some of this pressure. I have no idea what’ll happen, so be ready for anything.” He hoped he didn’t bring a pile of debris down on his own head, trying this. He could be making his own tomb. “We’ll go slow. If you think you can move your leg, do it. Take the first chance you get.”
He began to pump the jack handle again, slowly and steadily. A snap made him stop. He heard tiny bits of gravel or debris rolling downhill. He glanced back at the light behind him, hoping it wasn’t the last look at sunlight he’d ever see. “Anything?” he called back.
“Still stuck.”
“I’m trying again,” he said, and he pumped the handle once more, twice, and Suze’s knee shot back and smacked him in the nose. “Ow!”
She crowed with joy. “I’m alive, I’m alive.”
“I think you broke my nose.” He touched it gingerly. No, not broken.
She pounded on his butt. “Damn! You did it!”
“Stay still, for pity’s sake. Let me out of here before the world crashes down on my head.”
He cranked down the jack until he could get it out and passed it back to her. She was laughing in hysterical relief. Bash crawled backwards until he could lever himself out once again, and then Suze passed him up the jack and handle. He didn’t want to lose them. If they worked once, they would work again. “Can you use the leg?”
“Yeah, I can move it. The foot’s a little numb and it really hurts along my shin. I think it’ll be okay.”
“Bend your knee and bring it up to the light so I can see.”
She did, holding her leg in place at the thigh. Bash raised her pants leg and saw a dark line, bruised already. It was going to hurt. She’d probably limp for a while. But there was barely any blood. “Move your toes?”
“Yeah, I can, I think.”
“You’re going to be fine.” This time, he felt more certain. He wished he knew more about crush trauma, compartment injuries, and how to treat them — especially without a hospital. Without drugs. Or an x-ray machine. Or any equipment. The reality of his situation came home to him.
“I know, I am fine.” She was still giddy with relief. “I don’t think it’s broken.”
“Suze,” he said, serious. “There were twenty people with you in that room. You’re the only one I’ve found.”
She sobered. “Are they — ?”
“They might be dead. They might be trapped. We need to find the survivors, before nightfall. I have to go over to a car wreck on the street for a second, but you start looking for them, okay? They’re up the hill
of debris, I think, over here to your right.” He yanked the t-shirt off from around his neck. “This is all I have for you to clean your face with.”
“Okay, okay. Go on. I can get out by myself.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Be careful. We need to help our friends, but we need medical workers, too, Suze. The hospital is gone, and we both need to stay alive.”
“What you do mean, gone?”
“Just what I said, gone. You’ll see, when you look over there once you get out. I’m sorry, but I’m going to leave you to do it on your own. I have to see about this accident,” he said, and worked his way back down to street level once again.
Chapter 4: Gale
Flat tire, he thought, as the car lurched to the right. His foot automatically went for the brake pedal and he steered to the right. Then ahead, not five car lengths, a power pole came crashing down onto the street, crushing an SUV’s roof. He braked fully, and his car kept rocking, and that’s when he knew for sure. Earthquake. A big one this time. Looking to the right, he saw another power pole waving, and he inched the car forward and back into the center lane until he was as far from it as possible. It put him closer to the downed lines, which were probably live. He shifted into park, then took his hands off the wheel and watched the world go mad.
Everything was shaking, and then shaking more. This wasn’t like the earlier quake. This was serious. With every few seconds — he thought to look at his watch — something else came down, the windshield like a movie screen showing a Hollywood disaster movie. A restaurant sign crashed spectacularly down, glass spraying for dozens of yards. Facades peeled off strip mall stores. People who had missed being hit by that debris were thrown to the ground. A few fought their way back to their feet but were thrown down again. Ahead of him in the crushed SUV, there was no motion. He feared whoever had been in there was dead.
Another power pole fell further down the road, and the line snapped, sparking and whipping around, slithering across car roofs and the sidewalk. A woman in a red Ford leaped out of her car, and the line danced across the car as she was shutting the door. She jerked and her hair instantly burst into flames. She fell, out of his line of sight, surely dead. The power lines stopped slithering, the power gone from them.
And still the earth shook. Where his car rested was still up a few hundred yards up off the lowest river bottom land, but down there, it must be shaking harder, the sandy ground liquefying. He checked his watch again, struggling to read it while being bounced about, and it turned over another minute. The quake had been going for at least a minute — meaning it was a really big one. Behind him, he heard an enormous crash in the distance as something came down, a building probably, from the sound. If the Walmart, there must be — what? — hundreds of people in there right now. A thousand?
He should feel something more, panic, or horror, or fear for his own life, but he felt only numb as he rode out the last seconds of the earthquake as it tapered off. When it was done, he glanced at his watch again. Another minute had ticked off, so the quake was somewhere between 2 and 3 minutes of shaking. The magnitude was going to be really big, somewhere between 8 and 9, he thought.
All around him, people were injured. He stepped out of the car to look behind him and saw what the crashing noise had been — the interstate overpass, two blocks back, had completely collapsed. Anyone under there was dead. He turned. The SUV — maybe someone could be saved in there. No. He had to ignore that, ignore all of it. He had a job back at the EOC. The normal human reactions, to help, to run from the car and ask strangers if they were okay: those had to be quashed. In the long run, keeping the city’s infrastructure up and working would save more lives than anything he could do right here in the next ten minutes. It went against every human instinct toward decency, but he got back in his car, put it in gear and drove around the fallen power pole and the crushed SUV and towards downtown.
The pavement was buckled and cracked in many spots, but he was able to steer around the worst of it. Stopped cars were the bigger hazard, many sitting in the travel lanes, some with doors open, their drivers gone. In some, the driver seemed in shock, sitting still and doing nothing; in others, a parents was leaning back over the seat to check on kids. Soon his head was hanging out the window as he shouted at people to clear the road for emergency vehicles. It seemed to take forever to get them moving, and he got a lot of angry and defensive shouts back, but as long as they moved, he didn’t care how irked they were at him. He had the oppressive sense of seconds ticking by, and unimaginable hours of work that all needed to be done right now, this very instant.
He drove through a landscape that at first looked a bit like the video of Caruthersville had looked, a river of water from broken mains, some downed houses. But as he drove down the hill toward downtown, he could see the damage on the river bottom land was much worse. Whole blocks had been turned to rubble, with a building standing here and there or sometimes just a single wall in a whole block. Many two-story frame houses had the upper levels collapsed into the lower level. Every single brick house had been turned to rubble. After two or three minutes of hard shaking, that was no surprise to him. Water from broken mains ran past him, seeking lower ground. He thought about the drinking water in his trunk and realized it could mean life to him, to Bash, while others might die from drinking contaminated water. He had no doubt it would be weeks before safe water was running out of taps again in this part of the city, maybe months. Not that there would be all that many intact houses with taps left if it were working. What a horrible mess.
He pulled out his cell phone and texted Bash, but it didn’t go through. Again, he felt the urge to turn his car and drive out to Bash’s clinic, but he clamped down on that desire, too. He had a job to do, a crucial job. He turned the phone off, conserving the battery, which might have to last him a week or more, fumbled for his charger and plugged it in to the dash. He punched the radio on and set it to scan. Local stations would be out, but he’d probably catch a St. Louis station. The radio found a signal.
An announcer was saying, “The President was in a staff meeting when he was informed. He immediately canceled his meeting and began making calls to the FEMA director and six governors. A White House official said everything possible was being done…”
He half-listened, hoping for something certain, a number maybe, a magnitude. Then he shook his head at himself. Whatever the number was didn’t matter. The situation was whatever it was. Having someone call it a 7 or 8 or 9 didn’t change what he had to do next.
The road worsened as he approached City Hall. He was driving at a crawl. At one point, he came upon two cars nose-down into a broad crack in the road and decided to back up and take another street. The next street over was no better, nor the next, but on that one, the sidewalk was buckled but clear, and he drove up onto it to get past the bad patch, crunching over a patch of broken glass. His teeth rattled as he came hard off the curb, and he shoved the car into park as he opened the door to lean down and look down at his tires. All intact and inflated. He drove on.
He passed the fire station, a concrete and steel building. It was standing but many cracks showed in the concrete. One body lay under a blue tarp, and four uniformed fire fighters were pulling debris off a fire truck half in, half out of the bay. He hoped they were going out for the windshield survey of the damage once they had it out. That was their job, and he’d have to trust them to do it right.
As he turned back onto the block where City Hall was, Gale’s stomach sank. The brick building was badly damaged, despite having been retrofitted. A whole exterior wall was gone, office furniture still tumbling out of canted floors, pipes and wires stretching out of the hole and lying along the wreckage. The facade had rained down heavy slabs that would have crushed anyone beneath them. A patch of the street in front of the building was gone, and in its place, a half-circle of sand. Holy shit, he realized, it’s a sand blow. He’d read about them but never seen one, except pictures of excavated ones from histor
y. It had come right through the pavement or maybe the front lawn of City Hall and left a big patch — maybe forty yards in diameter — that went from the far sidewalk and all the way over to the front of City Hall and disappeared under the rubble. It stank vaguely of sulfur.
He rolled up his window and parked the car well outside of the sandblow. As he approached City Hall, he could see the whole building was canted. Liquefaction, he thought; this whole left front quarter has sunk into the ground.
There was no way he was going to be able to get into the Emergency Operations Center. It was gone, and the supplies and generators and radio equipment might well be buried and out of reach.
What to do? Should he dig through the rubble and look for survivors? Try and find Evelyn? He counted rooms. Her office wasn’t among the worst damaged. Maybe she’d survived. But where were the survivors? It had been ten minutes since the quake, he thought, maybe more. Surely there’d be someone crawling out of a door or milling around outside.
As he had the thought, there was a crash of glass, and a wheeled office chair came sailing out a front window upper story window, the window on the central hallway.
He jumped back.
A head appeared. Angela’s. “Hey!” he called up to her.
“Gale, is that you?” She leaned forward. Her hair was covered with dust.
“Be careful of that broken glass in the window frame.”
“I will. How should I get out of here?”
“Stairwell?”
“There’s both blocked.”
“Is Evelyn there?”
“Hang on.” Her head disappeared, then reappeared. “No, but I sent someone to look.”
“Can’t you get out the fire escape?”
“It’s gone. Fell to the ground along with the back wall.”
“How about rope or — no, wait, there’s a fire hose? In a case? Clear all that window glass out, every single bit first, and then maybe you can use the fire hose as a rope.” He tried to think if they had emergency fire ladders anywhere inside, those foldable metal things, but if he hadn’t thought to get one, he doubted anyone else had. Two staircases and a fire escape had seemed like plenty of ways out.