Natural Disaster (Book 2): Quake

by Lou Cadle

  He saw the smoke of the morning trash fire from a distance. They were making people separate out trash — anything that could be burned was being burned. But since there was plastic in there, and they didn’t want people to breathe those fumes, they had put it as far away from the residential areas as they could, right at the edge of where the river was lapping up into the lower part of town. Dan had said it would also give them a way to put it out, too, if it got out of control. Two fire fighters with respirators and hand pumps stood guard over the fire.

  He dropped by the police station and caught Flint on his way out the door. “Your equipment is coming,” he said. “Bullets, they can get us. Water?” He shook his head.

  “Maybe it’ll rain more, like the forecast says. A lot more would be great.”

  “A month from now, and we’ll be thinking about snow.” What a terrible image.

  “I forget you’re not from here. We seldom get snow. We get sleet.”

  Was that any better? “Two months earlier, and the bodies would have been smelling worse.”

  “Bad enough as it is. Glad burying’s your job and not mine.”

  “Speaking of which, I have to go check with my people on burials.” And everything else.

  He drove back to City Hall. A bulldozer was there, pushing bricks down the street. Every street had, at its lowest end near the river, a pile of debris they’d shoved in place with bulldozers. The debris piles backed up the levees and replaced breached levees on the north side of town. Ron Woodham had been very good in offering his equipment.

  He had shaken Gale’s hand when they met again. “I guess you’re going to say you told me so.”

  “No, sir. I’m going to say I’m glad you’re alive and thank you very much for the equipment and men.”

  “But you did tell me so.”

  “Earthquake prediction’s a fuzzy thing. I could have been off by 200 years, just as easily,” he had said, and they had gotten on with business.

  The bulldozing had to be done with care because there were still bodies in the collapsed buildings. A rescue worker worked alongside the dozers, body bags ready. All over town, slowly they were clearing out the last of the dead, following the markings the search and rescue teams had painted, and sometimes finding unpleasant surprises where none had been known and marked. On certain blocks, you could smell the decomposition, a rich smell, sweet and bitter and indescribably awful. Once you got a snootful, you smelled it for hours.

  Gale did not envy the bulldozer operators or those scooping up the decomposing bodies. Among his requested equipment from FEMA yesterday had been more respirators. He hoped they’d come this afternoon.

  And at some point, not too long off, they’d run out of diesel and gasoline, and this equipment and the cars would all sit dead in the streets, so much useless metal. Diesel had to last until the final body was buried.

  As he walked through the lawn to the ECO, yet another aftershock hit. He muttered curses at the earth under his breath. He stopped walking to jot a note to himself: Ask FEMA if the USGS has any idea why this increased shock activity today.

  Kay was manning the EOC radios. She handed him another stack of messages, mostly reports from his department heads. He was standing there, at the edge of the tent, going through them, when yet another aftershock hit. As it faded, a starling fell like a rock to the ground near his feet.

  Kay and he both stared at it. It lay there, panting, its black sides heaving in and out.

  “What the hell?” Kay said.

  “Is it the sulfur fumes? Or something worse coming off the river?” he asked, feeling cold fear at the thought. If so, he would he have to evacuate the EOC right now, to protect his people. And evacuate the lower town and the people living there. As if things weren’t bad enough.

  She stood, walked out of the tent, and tilted her head back. “Look up there.”

  Gale stepped to her side. Overhead dozens of birds were wheeling in interlocking circles, all sorts of birds, not just the same species flying in formation. It was a crazy ballet he’d never seen before.

  Kay said, “Do they know something we don’t?”

  Slowly, a few birds here and there found spots on tree branches. Then another small aftershock hit, just a tiny one that lasted no more than three seconds, but the birds that had just roosted lit out for the sky again. Gale said, in awe, “They’re exhausted.”

  “What?”

  “The aftershocks. They won’t roost during them, and so they’ve been flying all morning, and this guy fell out of the sky from exhaustion.” He looked at the starling on the ground. “He’s catching his breath, see?”

  As they watched, the bird staggered to its feet and waddled off, still too tired to fly, but uninterested in staying quite so close to humans.

  “Holy crap,” said Kay. “But I get it. I’m starting to feel that way myself. If flapping my arms would get my fat ass off this shaky ground, I’d be flying, too. So what’s up with all these shocks?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But it makes me nervous.”

  “Me, too.”

  At lunch, the staff shift change happened, like clockwork. He still had most of those people he had started with that first full day, and he was proud of them for not leaving. Some townsfolk who had lost their homes had strapped backpacks on and hiked off to the west, trying to get past the ruined roads and to someplace safer, some town with plentiful water and food. They had even seen strangers coming north. Flint had the Guard stationed on the south road, hurrying the strangers through town. They didn’t need more refugees straining the limited resources, and they couldn’t even spare a bottle of water for those begging for it. Flint had found it possible to harden his heart to their pleas. Gale was glad he wasn’t the one having to do that.

  They had heard via radio that cities like Rolla and Columbia, the nearest sizeable cities that were out of the worst of the damage zone, were also suffering from severely strained resources because of refugees. In those cases, food and water could arrive on highways from Kansas City and points west, so the big problem there was housing. Public buildings there were like Houston’s Astrodome after Katrina. There were more refugees this time, and there were fewer places to house them. People were being bussed to Kansas City, to Indianapolis, to Cincinnati, even to Chicago, George had told him. He wondered if it helped build sympathy that those towns had felt two minutes of shaking themselves, if far less intense than what had been felt here in the heart of the seismic zone.

  He read a written summary of funerals and burials, which were moving along more quickly now that everyone in town had the experience of smelling rotting bodies. There were double and triple funerals, burials of whole families without funeral or mourners, and careful note-taking for each of the town’s three cemeteries, so that if someone wanted the bodies moved later, or cremated, they could be located. Many townspeople had donated garden rotary tillers, tractors, and shovels to speed the grave-digging. It didn’t take many whiffs of decomposing flesh to motivate those donations.

  He was moving on to talk to his shelter co-chairs when Kay shouted his name. “Radio for you.”

  He turned, went back and took the radio from her.

  “George here, Gale. I have that woman you’ve been looking for.”

  “What woman?”

  “The mother of the girl you have. McKenna Lind. Her mother is Donia Lind, right?”

  “Yes, yes! Is she — “

  “Safe and sound. Or rather safe, if not entirely sound. She’s in a Rolla nursing home, overflow from their hospital, with a badly broken leg. I can have her on radio any time you say.”

  “Thank you. Thank you, George. Does she know her daughter is safe?”

  “I believe so. I passed the message along, at any rate, through my radio buddy there.”

  “If you don’t mind, tell your contact 90 minutes from now they can talk on the radio, and apologize to the mother for the delay.”

  “Will do. See you then. Over and out.” />
  He was smiling and Kay said, “Good news?”

  “For one family, yes, the very best.”

  “Lucky them,” she said. Like almost everyone, Kay had lost someone — an aunt and a disabled cousin, in her case.

  Gale went through the remaining staff meetings as quickly as he could, made sure his walkie-talkie was charged, told Kay he could be reached on it at any time, and drove home.

  When he got to the house, he knew immediately something was wrong. The front door was wide open. The garage door was open. Tools were off their pegs and scattered on the floor.

  Sick with fear, he jumped out of the car, yelling, “McKenna? Haruka?” He ran in the front door and saw more damage, items knocked off shelves. He stuck his head in the kitchen and saw it was entirely trashed. Cabinet doors stood open, the food cabinets empty, the grocery sacks gone. The back door to the deck was wide open. This was not aftershock damage.

  He spun and ran down the hall, calling the girls’ names again.

  When he heard his name being called softly in return, he felt dizzy with relief. “Where are you?”

  The linen closet opened and the McKenna crawled out, shedding a blanket. Then Haruka unfolded herself from behind McKenna and edged out. McKenna said, “Some guys. Two guys broke in.” Her voice was shaking.

  “It’s okay. You’re fine,” he said, going to her. He pulled her up into a hug and she clung to him.

  Haruka stood but gave off a “don’t hug me” vibe. He smiled at her. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Afraid. Afraid they could find us.”

  McKenna disengaged and said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? For what?”

  “I should have fought them. They stole the food, didn’t they?”

  “It’s fine. You shouldn’t have fought them, and food can be replaced.”

  “No it can’t. You talked about it last night, how it’s a problem now. I was too scared to fight them and now we’ll starve.”

  “We won’t starve. You did the very best thing by hiding. All I care about is that you’re both okay.” But if these guys were still in the neighborhood, looting empty houses…or looting houses with people inside…. “Hang on,” he said to the girls. He grabbed his handheld radio and told Kay, “I need a police car at my house, now, right now, emergency. He rattled off the address. “Unmarked would be best. No sirens.”

  “We’re safe,” he told the girls, wondering if they were. “Let’s shut all the doors again.”

  The three of them shut the house back up tight. He opened every closet and looked under both beds, to make sure no intruder was still inside. The front door was where the thieves had broken in, and it was askew, refusing to shut well enough to lock. He’d need to fix that, or nail boards across it before they could sleep tonight.

  A green sedan pulled up out front while he was examining the door and he jogged out to greet the cop who stepped out, relieved to see it was one he recognized. He explained the situation and that the looters were probably still nearby, maybe only a door or two down. The cop radioed in for help, and Gale returned to the girls.

  They were in the kitchen, already cleaning up the mess.

  “Everything’s gone,” McKenna wailed. “All the food.”

  “I hated that oatmeal anyway,” he said.

  She shook her head at him, seeing through his attempt to shake off the loss. The truth was, they couldn’t afford to lose any food. “Let’s check the garage,” he said.

  Gale thought maybe he was missing some tools, but he couldn’t see at a glance which. He went straight over to the emergency stores in the big trashcan and opened it up. He breathed a sigh of relief. “Look, they didn’t even find this stuff,” he said to the girls. “And I still have a little food and water in my car, still. We’ll be fine.”

  “Really?” said McKenna.

  “And better still,” he said, remembering why he was here in the first place, “We found your mom. She’s alive.”

  “Seriously?” McKenna’s face lit up. “You’re not lying to me?”

  “No, I’m not lying. And you can talk to her on the radio in — “ he checked his watch “ — about thirty minutes.” But first he had to deal with the situation here. “Let’s clean up a little more and then go talk to her.”

  “Is she here?” said McKenna. “In town?”

  “No, she’s in Rolla, but she’s okay.”

  “I am very happy for you,” said Haruka.

  McKenna said, “Yes. Thank you, me too. I mean, I’m relieved.”

  Gale said to Haruka, “And I bet she can phone to your parents in Japan from where she is.”

  “Do you think this is true?” said the girl, her face shining with hope.

  “I’m pretty sure of it,” Gale said. “Now you two help me find, somewhere in this mess on the floor, a hammer and my coffee can of nails so I can get the front door secured.”

  They made quick work of nailing the front door shut, and the three of them wrestled a heavy sideboard in front of it, too. Try getting in there, assholes. By the time they were done, it was time to get to the radio, and so he left a note on the windshield of the unmarked police car, telling the officer how to get in touch with him at the EOC. He’d figure out later if the cops had caught these looters or not.

  He felt he’d been awfully lucky that the thieves hadn’t found the stash of emergency food, and that the girls hadn’t been harmed. They could have been killed or raped. He supposed they couldn’t be left alone now at all, and he was glad that school was starting the next day so at least part of the day they had guaranteed adult supervision.

  But what about the rest of the day? How did real parents juggle all this stuff? Of course, real parents, in the States at least, typically didn’t have to worry about the decay of civil order at this level.

  The three of them arrived at George and Marilyn’s. All five of them stood in the basement while George got through to the ham operator in Rolla, who had gone to the nursing home and set up there, some sort of relay that George tried to explain but was beyond Gale’s understanding. Gale stood tense, waiting, but not as tense as poor McKenna, who was bouncing on her toes and seemed ready to snatch the microphone from George’s hand.

  At long last, a female voice came over the radio. “McKenna, honey, are you there?” then “What? Oh, over.”

  McKenna stepped forward to the microphone and said, “Mom?” then she burst into tears and couldn’t say anything at all for several seconds.

  George said “over” for her.

  “I’m here. I’m here, McKenna. Over.”

  George said, “Give her a second, over.”

  “We’ll be together soon, I promise,” said the mother.

  McKenna pulled herself together. “I know. But I thought you were dead.”

  “I know, I was awful worried for you, too. But I’m fine. And you are okay, and Haruka isn’t hurt?”

  “She’s fine. She’s standing right here.”

  “Tell her I talked to her parents today, just an hour ago. They know she’s alive.”

  Haruka gave a quick nod. The girl didn’t show a lot of emotion, Gale thought, but having gotten used to her quiet ways, he could see she was feeling the news deeply. He felt a little embarrassed to be witnessing all these emotions and backed off a few steps, giving the girls a little more space, ending up next to Marilyn.

  The woman was wiping at tears on her face with a dishtowel and gave him a sheepish smile. She whispered, “A happy ending is good every once in awhile, isn’t it?”

  He nodded and stepped closer to her to speak softly. “Without you and George, they couldn’t be doing this, you know.”

  “Oh, pooh,” she said, brushing it aside. But she looked pleased.

  “We can’t keep talking forever,” McKenna’s mother was saying. “But we’ll see each other soon. And maybe talk again before that.”

  “Gale says the cell phones will work again. And he had mine charged from his car, for when they do.”r />
  “Good.”

  Gale stepped forward again. “I’d like to talk to her when you’re done.”

  “Gale says he wants to talk with you. I’ll see you soon, Mom. I love you.” McKenna handed over the microphone.

  “This is Gale Swanton, Ms. Lind,” he said. “McKenna and Haruka have been staying at my place. Our house made it through the quake safely. Over.”

  “I’m so grateful to you,” the woman said. “I can’t have her here, and I can’t even move on my own yet. Can I impose on you to hang on to my girls another day or three, until I make some sort of arrangements?”

  “I’m happy to.” He looked around at his audience and thought, well, I don’t like the public nature of this, but it has to be said. “I think you should know, Ms. Lind, that I’m gay. The girls are living with my husband, Bash, and I. They seem to have really taken to him. But if you have a problem with that, tell me, and I’ll find them another place to stay. Over.”

  She was laughing when she came back on. “You think I give a crap about that? I’m grateful to you for caring for them, and I don’t care if you’re gay or black or Jewish or Martian, for that matter, as long as they’re safe and fed. Besides, this way, at least I know you’re not sex-criming them.”

  Gale felt a twinge at the word “safe,” thinking about the breakin and the danger that had put the girls in. He wasn’t about to mention it, though. The woman had enough worries, and he wasn’t about to add to them by telling her about details that were out of her control. “The roads out are getting cleared, slowly but surely,” he said. “As soon as we can make arrangements, we’ll get the two of them to you.”

  McKenna got to say goodbye one last time, and then they signed off. She politely thanked George and Marilyn and beamed at Gale. “I feel a lot better now.”

  “So do I,” he said. For her sake, and for himself, having official permission to have the girls in the house.

  He thanked George and Marilyn and took the girls out to the car. There, he hesitated.

  “The thing is, I don’t want you alone at home,” he said. “Not now. Not after this morning’s breakin.”