by Lou Cadle
The three of them shook hands, and the police chief marched off.
Dan motioned him along into the firehouse. “Let’s hope there’s not another quake like you promised while we’re in there,” he said.
Gale glanced up as he walked inside. It was such a weird thing about big quakes. In normal life, a roof was comfort, security, safety. It harkened back a hundred thousand years, he thought, was part of the hardwiring of the human mind. Give me a cave; protect my back. But with an earthquake, a roof was death, a wall at your back could easily collapse onto you, and once you’d been in a major quake, standing underneath either made your heart beat faster and your throat go dry. Swallowing past that dryness in his own throat, he followed the chief back to the offices.
Dan handed him a pile of soft material crisscrossed with bright yellow, reflective tape. “They’re school crossing guards’ vests. We got them from the middle school for you. And I have a spare permanent marker here. Figured you could write ‘City’ real big on them. You said you wanted some sort of uniform for your people, right?”
“Right. Thanks for remembering.” He had forgotten himself that he had ever mentioned it. “You’re good at this, keeping the details in your head.”
“Short term memory is pretty good,” Dan admitted. “Didn’t realize how useful it might turn out to be.”
“Thanks for the vests.”
“Also, speaking of markers, we’re going to be marking buildings with paint, number of dead inside that we can’t easily get out, hazards. Standard FEMA marking system, in orange.”
“I have to admit, I don’t remember it exactly. There’s an X and some codes?”
“Right. I have copies of how it’s done, the codes and all. I’ll run one out to you later this morning. The police chief should have his own already, but I’ll make sure of that, too, that we’re all on the same page.”
Gale carried the vests back to City Hall and went directly to the work area, where people who had slept there overnight were stirring. The two little kids were running around a bench. He smiled to see them acting so like kids. It gave him faith that these days would pass, that he’d see a normal world again one day.
“Anybody up for making breakfast?” he said. And he started what he knew would be a long, long day.
By 8:00 a.m., the overnight staff was fed, and more were arriving for the day’s work. There was Kay again, and Sophie and Megan, all people he was coming to rely on.
One of the smaller fire trucks with three workers began working at City Hall, searching for the city manager and mayor and anyone else who might still be alive. His chief of supplies, Jeannine, was hanging out by them, out of their way, but looking for a list of crucial supplies and pulling out any from the edges of debris that she could get to without risking herself. He glanced over from time to time, making sure she wasn’t putting herself into danger, but she was being cautious.
He had Sophie, who claimed to have nice handwriting, print “City” on the back of the vests. He had other people set at various other chores, and the heads of department were sharing out the master list of tasks and copying their own responsibilities. He had to remind them to make paper copies and not to rely entirely on their smart phones or other electronic gadgets.
He was happy to see that everyone in his staff had good shoes today and most had bike helmets or hard hats with them. Many were bringing food from their refrigerators, paper plates, boxes of plastic zippered bags from home, and trash bags. They’d eat well today, trying to eat up everyone’s perishable food before it spoiled. Tomorrow, they’d have to start being more careful with calorie intake. And he had to remember to make sure his staff got to the grocery store and received their bag of food each today. A few of his staff had brought their husbands to lend a hand.
The maintenance worker, Oscar, had brought three teenage sons, who looked like between them they could lift a pickup truck if need be. He got introduced to everyone new and Angela kept track of names for him. He’d have to study the names when he got a spare moment so he wasn’t calling all these new people “hey you” all day.
By 8:45, he had enough people gathered to hold a meeting. He put his fingers to his mouth and whistled and waved Jeanine in from the building, thinking, I wouldn’t mind having a loud silver whistle, and a bullhorn. He made do with his own voice this morning, as he hit the highlights of the assignments for everyone to hear. He told the people who weren’t on shift until 11:30 they could go home and work at their own clean up until then, but only one couple left, apologizing, but saying they had yet to find their dog and wanted to try again. The other second shift people offered to start work early, making it another long day for them.
“I accept. And I appreciate it more than I can say. But after this,” he said, “everybody take their twelve hours off. You need the down time.”
At the end of the meeting, someone requested a moment of silence for those who had died, and he motioned everyone to do so, but while their heads were bowed his own mind was spinning with lists of things to do. He’d honor the dead some other way, later on. For now, he’d honor them by trying to not add to their numbers.
After the meeting broke up, he took individual meetings with his department heads. He and Angela had to fill in two slots with alternatives, as some of their staff had still not returned. First, he got his shelter people together, two people from the Parks department, one of whom had been out supervising groundskeepers when the quake hit and had a set of master keys for parks buildings.
“We need tents,” Gale told him, “the kind of big tents they put up in reserved sites for weddings or big parties. One for here, for us. One to put in every large park for shelter for the homeless. We need to know where all the other shelter-size tents in town are, and we need tools like rakes and shovels, and we need you to dig up a big grill to bring here so we can feed our people, and you need to find fuel — charcoal, downed tree limbs, firewood, whatever. Bring us a supply and lock the rest of it away. When shelter tents go up, someone has to stay with them until they fill up, to make sure they don’t get stolen” After five minutes of listening to their ideas, he broke it off, and sent them on their way, then took his next priority group. It took another hour and a half to get through everyone, and by then there were more people waiting to ask him questions.
By the time they were organized for the day, Angela had another list for him of what h needed to do. “ FEMA wants you,” she said. “I told them 11:00.”
“Ye gods, is it that late?” he said, glancing at his watch. “Let me run over to City Hall and see how the search and rescue is going, then I’ll go.”
“They found Evelyn,” she said. “And the mayor.”
He knew by her voice. “Dead?”
“I’m sorry, Gale.”
“I hope the twins are okay,” he said. “Do they know yet?”
She shrugged. “There really isn’t time, or the personnel. That no one has come to check on Evelyn….” She shook her head.
“I know. We have to trust that people are taking care of each other out there, somehow.”
Another aftershock rumbled beneath them. It was at least the tenth this morning. “Have faith in people out there,” he said.
She gave him a wan smile and he jogged over to City Hall. He found three body bags lined up next to the fire truck and sighed.
He said a few words of encouragement to the staff who were still trying to dig out useful items from the edges of the debris. They had four mismatched chairs. A man — probably one of his staff’s husbands — had a four-by-three wood table upside down and was working at fixing a broken leg with hand tools.
Two firemen were hauling down another body bag. Four lost. He spoke with the rescue workers, thanked them for their help, and checked his watch, feeling the precious minutes escaping from him. He drove to the address Angela had given him for the radio people.
There were few cars on the streets. He saw smoke from a distant fire and thought about how every fire fight
er who was fighting it would not be doing search and rescue. He didn’t envy the fire chief, having to prioritize. Maybe the fire wasn’t in a neighborhood, or threatening other buildings, maybe it was an unimportant warehouse, and he’d let it burn to the ground to keep the rescue going full-tilt, trying to save what injured people they could. It’s what Gale himself would do, but he knew that would drive fire fighters crazy, letting a fire burn. Not his problem to fret over. He had plenty of his own.
He found the address, an older one-story wood house. A big generator was audible from in back. A woman was waiting at the door, and she said, “You’re the City Manager?”
“Yes,” Gale said, realizing he was, now that he knew Evelyn was dead. He introduced himself.
“I’m Marilyn. My husband is George. He’s downstairs with the radios.”
The basement was a single bare room with a row of radio equipment that had to date back at least fifty years, in some cases. He even caught a glimpse of a device hooked to one that he was pretty sure was for sending Morse Code — at least he’d seen such things in old World War II movies.
“I have them on the line,” said George, “It’s 11:02.”
“Sorry,” said Gale, about his tardiness, then he got on the radio. “This is Gale Swanton, acting City Manager,” he said.
“Kansas City FEMA, Regional Administrator Eliza Hayes,” she said. “How’s it going there?”
A dozen chatty replies flew though his brain, starting with “could be better,” but he kept it factual.
“We have — had — forty-two thousand people in the city. We don’t have casualty numbers yet, but we may have as many as ten thousand dead, another ten thousand wounded, most of that walking wounded. We lost our hospital. Do I say over?” This last he said to the radio guy.
George nodded at him.
The FEMA administrator came back. “We’ve found three helicopters to do medical evacuations for your city,” she said, “Coming your way from Springfield right now. “And we’re bringing medical supplies to you on each of the runs. What are your other priorities for supplies?”
“Body bags,” he said. “Over.” He realized he wasn’t organized enough in his mind yet for this conversation. He cast about in his mind for what was small enough to fit into medevac helicopters and was needed most.
“Check,” she said. “What else?”
“Ma’am, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been so busy setting up everything for the city, on no sleep, that I don’t have my head on straight. I need to think, and check again with fire and police, and then I’ll get right back to you. We need a lot. We’re going to need food and water in three or four days, airlifted, if the roads or train tracks aren’t clear by then. I haven’t seen a television, so outside of the few square miles we’ve surveyed, I don’t even know what’s happening out there or how far out roads are damaged. Over.”
“In brief, two million estimated dead,” she said. “Memphis is on fire for at least two square miles, with no way to put it out. We’ve lost 32 bridges across the Mississippi and several on the Ohio. St. Louis is bad. I’ll be honest, a lot of my resources are going to be going to metro St. Louis. I wouldn’t trust the river water, not that I would ever, for drinking. But there are chemical and petroleum tanks leaking into the river upstream of you on the Illinois side. Over.”
“I understand,” he said. “Can I radio you back in a half-hour? Over.”
“My assistant or I will be here,” she said. “Out.”
He turned to George. “Can you get me in touch with the police and fire chiefs? You have those kinds of radios, too?”
“I have everything,” the man said. “I could get you in touch with the International Space Station.”
Gale was pretty sure that wouldn’t help anything. “Police chief first,” he said. Another aftershock rumbled around them and he glanced up, hoping this house wasn’t about to come down on his head. It didn’t, the shock passed, and he said, “And do you have some paper? A pen?”
“Can I ask you about gas?”
“I’m sorry?”
“For my generator. I heard on the radio how they’re going to ration, but if you want me and Marilyn on the radios full time…”
“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll make sure to tell the police chief — no, fire chief — you need more.”
“Twelve gallons a day should do it.”
Gale jotted it down and returned to his list-making.
An hour later, he was headed back to City Hall, with a guarantee from FEMA that supplies would be delivered to the temporary hospital in the evac helicopters. He and the other two men who were leading the city had come up with a list of portable, small, crucial items, including some bizarre part the power company needed that they swore was no bigger or heavier than a generator. After talking on the radio to the power exec and carefully writing down what he needed, Gale had radioed it all back to FEMA, set up a schedule for radioing her twice a day for the foreseeable future, and listened impatiently to five minutes of ass-covering and politicking, rolling his eyes at her need for it. At the end, he was twirling his hand at the radio in a “get it over with” gesture. Finally, the bullshit was over.
He turned to thank George, then said, “Oh. I’m sorry, I volunteered your radio equipment for twice a day. Is that doable?”
“Happy to help,” the man had said. “Either me or Marilyn will be here, every minute. Just ask for whatever you need.”
“I appreciate your service so much. So does everyone in the city.”
Back in his car, he wondering how many local heroes there were making survival possible. Bash was one, too. He’d have to remind him of that, first chance he got. And when this all was over, he’d have to think of some way to acknowledge every volunteer who had kept the city going.
He’d be barely in time to catch the shifts overlapping at City Hall, if he hurried. He hoped someone had organized lunch back there. He was hungry. He felt like he shouldn’t be, that needs like eating and peeing and sleeping should leave him alone for a few days, just until he got a handle on the worst of this, but it didn’t work like that.
At City Hall, he was in luck with food. There was lunch, and people were seated at a dozen office chairs, with four solid tables set up in a “u” holding supplies and, at one end, the food. Other people were seated on the park benches, eating off paper plates. The kids — they were ten of them now, the two little ones from last night, the three teen sons of Oscar, and another five in between — were all sitting on blankets on the ground, making a picnic of it. Making his way to the food, he waved some flies off a pile of boiled ham and made himself a sandwich.
His staff called greetings to him, and one of them stood up to give him her spot on a bench. Most of his pairs of co-chairs were seated together, working over scrawled notes as they ate. He looked around and realized he knew better than half the names now. He’d get them all by sundown, he promised himself, even the spouses and kids.
Angela put down her sandwich and came over to him. She handed him a stack of paper at least twenty pages high. “While you were out,” she said, with a wry half-smile.
“In only an hour?”
“Most popular boy on campus,” she said.
He started flipping through the papers. “You ordered them by priority,” he said. At the bottom of the stack was a note, “Five bodies recovered from City Hall.” He glanced over there and realized search and rescue had moved on. Out there somewhere, if not in his town, in Memphis or St Louis and elsewhere, there were many people lying there pinned hoping for rescue that might never come. His mind flashed on the giant fire in Memphis and he imagined lying, pinned under a beam, smelling the smoke and knowing it was coming for you.
The sandwich turned to ashes in his mouth. But he kept chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing, getting all the food down. If he was running on no sleep, he couldn’t run on no food, too. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood. “Ready for more work?” he said to Angela.
>
“You could sit and have a soda. They’re all warm, though.”
“I’ll sit tonight,” he said. “And you’ll go home this afternoon.”
“For a while,” she said.
“We need to do shifts, too. You’re my co-chair for administration, like every other group has their co-chair. I need you here from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., from now on. So take a break while you can.”
Oh man, what time had he said he’d come for Bash? He completely, utterly forgot. He needed to get him a message. “Does the hospital have a radio yet?”
“Yeah, they’re on the police-fire radio net now, like us.”
He’d radio a message to his husband right after he met with everyone here, he promised himself. “I’ll take off from 3:00 to 4:00, barring catastrophe,” he said.
“Ha,” she said. “Things are going to go wrong, no matter what. Take that hour for yourself, and then go home tonight for a while to get some solid sleep. You have a home?”
“It’s standing,” he said, “But I may sleep in the car in the driveway anyway, in case of aftershocks. How are you? Holding up okay?”
“I’ll catch a nap this afternoon, and I’m sure I can sleep at night here.”
“We both need radios,” he said. “I prefer some separate, short-distance thing, like walkie-talkies, just for you and me, something strong enough to reach from here out to our houses, so we can keep in touch.”
“I’ll tell Megan and Ruth. They’re communications, remember? Keep delegating.”
“Right.” He did have an urge to do everything himself, and as this morning had shown him, that was a pipedream. He barely had a chance to supervise. Shit, the FEMA call, too — he had forgotten. “I have a five p.m. radio call with FEMA,” he said.
“If we get three walkie-talkies, you’ll leave one here, put someone in charge for that hour, and if they need you, they’ll call you. If we can’t find any radios locally, ask for some from FEMA.”
“Good idea. Ideas.” He shook his head, feeling like his logic circuits weren’t working so well any more. He needed sleep, but he’d have to do without.
