Natural Disaster (Book 2): Quake

by Lou Cadle

  “We can just hang out somewhere,” McKenna said.

  “Not alone. Either we find some of your friends who have their parents at their house, or at a tent city, or….” He trailed off, thinking of possibilities.

  “We could go to the hospital again,” McKenna said, hopefully.

  “Maybe,” he said, remembering Bash’s unwillingness to traumatize them with more blood and guts. He probably should check in with Bash and they could figure out together what to do with the girls. There might be something innocuous for them to do there, or they could simply sit with visitors and read books, under the eyes of many responsible adults. At worst, he’d take them back to the EOC and set them to entertaining the littler kids there. Somehow, he had to keep them out of harm’s way and with adults who could protect them. He had no illusions. He knew civil disorder would increase. They were lucky looters had held off this long.

  He radioed Kay to tell her of his detour. She said, “We can do without you, no offense, for a little while. Everything does seem to be under control for now.”

  He signed off and drove the girls to the hospital. It was much more organized there, too, than it had been in those first chaotic hours. There was a designated waiting area of folding chairs, parking spots marked off with spray paint, a person in a police auxiliary vest directing traffic, and not quite the jam of patients he had seen before. They had customers, it looked like, but they were arriving mostly on their own, walking wounded rather than serious injuries being brought by ambulance. The seriously injured were evacuated by now — or dead. He parked half a block down the street, where he could see rubble from the hospital being taken away in dump trucks and taken down toward the river to shore up the levee. Bodies were still being removed at the wreck of the old hospital, blue body bags lined up on a sidewalk, and someone walked along the row, unzipping them one by one, maybe to try and identify them. Other people were going through equipment as it was uncovered, salvaging what they needed for the field hospital.

  He and the girls checked in at reception then sat to wait for Gale to get free. In a few minutes, he came over, snapping gloves off, and gave them all a big smile as they stood. “Come to take me to lunch?” he said.

  McKenna snorted. “Like where?”

  “Oh, a picnic, I guess, would be the most exciting option.”

  Gale said, “Tell him your news, McKenna.”

  “They found my mom. I talked to her!”

  “Really?” Bash glanced at Gale and Gale nodded. “I’m so happy for you. No, don’t hug me until I ungown.” He untied his gown and slipped it off.

  Gale said, “And her mom knows she’s with us, and she says it’s fine.”

  They exchanged a glance over McKenna’s head, as Bash gave her a hug.

  Gale confirmed, “Really fine.”

  McKenna was no idiot; she caught what he was trying to say. “She’s no bigot.”

  “She said it was fine if we were Jewish Martians even,” said Gale.

  Bash laughed.

  “That’s not quite what she said,” McKenna pointed out.

  “I was just making a joke for Bash,” Gale said, a little embarrassed. The mom had been very good, really, and he shouldn’t be indicating anything else in front of McKenna.

  “I mean, she wouldn’t have had the idea of sponsoring an exchange student if she were a bigot, right?”

  Gale had no doubt there were exchange student families who were homophobes, but he made a pleasant noise of agreement. He asked Bash, “You haven’t had lunch yet?”

  “I’m tired of salami and cheese, and that’s what we’re down to at the sandwich shop. Also, the owner showed up and demanded we sign IOUs for the food, and that pissed me off, considering how many others in town are pitching in for free. I think I’d rather starve than promise to pay him.” He patted his belly. “I still have a little extra to live off of here.”

  Gale said, “Hon, you need to e — “

  And, with a shriek of noise, the second big quake hit.

  Chapter 11: Bash and Gale

  The noise was fearsome to Bash, a low-pitched metallic screech, like a freight train taking a curve too fast, but an octave lower. He felt adrenaline flood his system. A powerful jolt rocked him. He saw the rows of empty folding chairs fall as one, their crash a descant to the bass scream of the earth.

  Haruka has been knocked to her knees. That looked like a smart place to be. As the ground jerked again beneath his feet, he dropped to a sitting position, laced his hands behind his head and leaned forward, making himself as small as possible, protecting neck with his hands. The earthquake noise itself, from the ground, lowered in pitch and lowered, away from that horrible first sound, and finally fell to the lowest end of his hearing range. But he could feel the sound, still, vibrating his bones and clenched teeth.

  Gale and McKenna were sitting on the ground, now, too. They were all as safe here as anywhere, Bash realized, and he glanced up to make doubly sure that nothing could fall on their heads. Behind him he heard a whumph as the big tent collapsed. Turning his head, he could see it covering people and tables and beds and all, a lumpy ruin. Probably the least awful roof to fall on your head, though, and better than a brick building; he doubted there’d be serious injuries from it unless someone had been pitched off a stretcher. He curled up again and rode out the quake.

  Inside his mind, part of him was thinking, timing it, planning what to do when it stopped — and part of him was a terrified animal who wanted to run off in a blind panic. He had treated a farmer the first day that had been trampled by his own cows as they did just that. At this point, he sympathized with the cows. He wanted to bellow and stampede.

  A woman started screaming and kept screaming, which wasn’t helping her one bit. Nor was it helping his nerves. He wished she’d shut up. As the ground gave a particularly sharp jerk, a man somewhere close said, “Well, fuck this,” like you’d say just before deciding to back up to detour around a traffic jam. But there was no way around the quake. There was only forbearance.

  Still the shaking went on. Distant low booms sounded, like in a TV report from a war zone. Falling buildings? Something in the earth itself? Bash didn’t know. He was glad it was someplace else, whatever it was.

  There were sobs and moans coming now from several people as the quake went on, seeming endless. Jerk, roll, jerk, over and over, long enough to give him a touch of seasickness.

  When it finally stopped, there was a second of stunned silence, then cacophony erupted as a hundred people started talking or crying or calling out for loved ones all at once.

  Bash leaned over and reached to Gale, grazing his knee with shaky fingertips. “You okay?”

  Grimly, Gale nodded. He stood, pulled out his radio and moved off from the crowd noise, shouting into the radio.

  “You two girls?” Bash said to them. “Are you hurt at all?”

  “No,” they both said. McKenna said, “I’m glad my mom is somewhere else. Somewhere safe.”

  “Yes. And you’re safe, too, now. It’s over.” He stood, brushing off the seat of his scrub pants.

  Gale was calling into his radio, “Roger that. I’ll be back as soon as I can. No idea how the roads held up. It might take a few minutes to get back.”

  He looked across at Bash. They wanted, like everyone else, to connect, to get some comfort from those they loved. But they both had to get to work.

  “What about the girls?” Gale called.

  “I’ll keep them. It’s safe here,” Bash said. “As safe as anywhere.”

  “We can help again,” McKenna said.

  Gale hesitated only for a second, raising a hand in farewell, then turned and ran off down the street.

  Bash turned back toward the tent and saw chaos, as people crawled out from the edges and three dozen pairs of hands tried to do different things all at the same time, pushing the tent’s edges about.

  “Wait!” he yelled. “We need that tent. Don’t rip it!”

  He said to the g
irls. “Help me out, okay? We’ll try to get this organized. Each of you run to a corner of the tent, there and there.”

  It took almost ten minutes of screaming at dazed people to turn the chaos into useful action, but finally he had a row of twenty-odd people folding the tent back with care. Ten minutes later, the tent was a neat burrito of fabric, and the patients and staff were all clear of it. Sonja was only working nights now, so Dr. Liz Eisenstein was here running the place days, and she directed triage of the newly injured while he tried to put the field hospital back together. There’d be seriously injured people coming in soon, and they had to be ready for them.

  He set the girls to righting chairs and fallen equipment and picking up. Some tables had collapsed, boxes of supplies had been flattened, and many small items were scattered about the cracked asphalt. Instruments had hit the ground and would need re-sterilizing. He checked on a staff member who was still sitting on the ground, holding her neck.

  “Are you hurt?” he said.

  “My neck’s killing me,” she said, trying to get up.

  “No, wait. Let me find a collar for you.”

  “I’m not that hurt.”

  “Sit still,” he ordered and made eye contact with her to make sure she obeyed.

  She nodded.

  “And don’t do that — don’t nod or shake your head or move it at all until we have a doc see you.”

  He went off in search of a cervical collar and was back in no time. He had to slap her hand to keep her from helping him put it on. “Quit that. You just went from staff to patient. Now lie down if you want, but carefully. I think I saw the orthopedist earlier. I’ll get him over here.”

  He stood and hunted for a glimpse of the girls, saw them still working at cleanup, and went to hunt down the doctor.

  An ambulance siren sounded in the distance, coming closer.

  Oh man, he thought. Here we go again.

  Gale was having problems getting back to the EOC. The roads were buckled in new places, and the routes he had gotten used to weren’t clear. He had to try four east-west streets before he could get through, and his path led him by the police station. He decided to pull over and run in. A few officers were trotting out to their cars then tearing off, sirens wailing, to deal with crises.

  Gale poked his head in the chief’s office, where Flint was barking orders at someone over the radio. When he was done, Gale said, “What’s the worst news?”

  Flint tossed his hands up in exasperation. “We probably haven’t heard it yet. So far, a new levee breach is the worst I heard.”

  “Damn.” Gale shook his head. “Anything else need attention? No? Let me know if it does. I’m at EOC in five if you need me.” He left and drove the block to the fire station, saw them gearing up for more rescue work, decided not to check in there, and went on to the EOC.

  What had been left of City Hall after the first quake had fallen now, and what had once been a pretty building of age-dark bricks was nothing but rubble. He hoped none of his people had been nearby when it had gone down.

  As with the hospital, their shelter tent was down, but his people were already working to put it back up.

  “No, this support is bent. We need tools to put it aright — like a vise and a wrench,” one of the husbands was yelling.

  Kay was on the police-fire radio. “Here he comes,” she said, and handed him the mike.

  “Gale Swanton, over,” he said.

  “Gale, this is Dan. The water tower is down, over.”

  Oh, shit. He couldn’t think of what to say for a moment. “Anyone hurt by it?”

  “No, but it’s breached. The last of our water supply is gone.”

  Gale took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay. There wasn’t that much left anyway.”

  “There’s none now. The hospital was using that and they’re already screaming for more. We have to get water in here, and damned fast.”

  “FEMA’s going to focus on the big cities first. Even more so now, I’m afraid.”

  “And there’s another levee breach, on the north end of town.”

  “I heard.”

  “We should redeploy everyone we can toward that. My guys need to find the injured and deliver them to the hospital, so they can’t get on it. But all the earth moving and construction equipment, we need to divert that to shoring up the levee.”

  “Check,” Gale said. He saw Kay pointing frantically toward the east. He looked and saw water — river water — creeping toward them. “Uh, Dan? I think the river’s going to get us. Your building too. It’s coming up fast.”

  “Damn.”

  He could smell the river now. And sulfur, always that background stench of sulfur from the bowels of the earth. Gale thought about getting sandbags, then he thought, no. Who knows what the next quake would bring, or the next. Sandbags wouldn’t stop the river for long. “We need to set up someplace else,” he said to Dan, deciding as the words left his mouth. “The EOC is moving. And you should too.”

  “No, we need our equipment,” said Dan. “It’s all right here. But what about the police station?”

  “The river’s going to get up to them too, I think.” And it was creeping up faster now. He could smell the awful water, the deep scent of sewage with a sharp, bitter chemical scent riding over that. “They’ll have to move. This isn’t safe.”

  “Even the jail?” Dan said.

  Kay, listening, said, “Oh, God.” They exchanged a glance. The jail was two levels, one underground. He couldn’t think of an alternative jail site anywhere in town.

  “I’m signing off to warn Flint,” said Gale.

  “No. I’ll do that. You’re closest to the river. Evacuate.”

  “We’ll set up by the Walmart,” Gale said. There was an open field there, a commercial property that had been for sale the whole time he’d lived here. They could use that as their new home base.

  “Good. Out.”

  Kay was calling to the others about the plan. Everyone went into action, picking up blankets, sleeping bags, and tossing them onto benches to keep them dry. They let the tent fall back to the ground for the moment.

  Gale yelled, “Everybody with a car, get it. Drive it up here, over the grass, get as close as you can.” He said to Kay, “We need to save these records too.” Every paper he had been using to organize the recovery he couldn’t bear to lose. There was no way to replicate some of this information, like the tax list with dead and living recorded and the maps.

  As Gale sprinted for his own car with a half-dozen others, he saw a backhoe operator pulling his rig past. Gale waved him to a stop. “I need your help.”

  “I need to go check on my family.”

  “Fine. Just make it fast, please. There’s a levee breach. See the water?” He pointed east. “We need to get that levee shored up, or we’re going to lose all of downtown. Can you get that out request out to the rest of the heavy equipment operators?”

  The man nodded grimly and drove off.

  He hoped the man would call for help, and soon. He couldn’t spare a moment to organize that himself right now. He tried to think through where all his missing department chairs were working out in the city. He’d have to leave word where the EOC had moved to, make sure his people had all survived the second quake, reprioritize. They had to make a big sign to leave here, for staff and citizens both, and he regretted not pushing for more radios from FEMA so that everyone on his staff had one. He’d been counting on them getting cell service back soon, but he knew that would be delayed again.

  As he got in his car, the urge washed over to him to just leave. Drive to Bash, pick him up, drive cross-country if need be, walk when the car got stuck in some ditch, head west and out of this mess. Instead, he steered his car across the grass, back to the EOC, and he started loading boxes and stacks of paper into the back seat. Communications equipment went in the front. He never had emptied his trunk of his personal supplies, but he managed to tuck a few smaller items in there, too.

&nbs
p; He was relieved to see one of his staff driving up a big pickup truck. Staff and family members were packing blankets and food into their cars. They tossed office furniture into the bed of the truck, with an effort hauled the generator up, threw in the emergency lights and cords. A man leapt up into the bed of the truck with two blankets and stuffed them around the lights.

  Two of his staff were wriggling the big iron grill out of the ground. He almost stopped them, but no, they would need to eat, and if damned FEMA dropped nothing but rice on them, they’d need to be able to turn it into edible food by boiling. And possibly they’d need to boil water to make it safe to drink. Water. Where the hell were they going to get water enough to keep all these people alive?

  He said to Kay, “Where’s your car?”

  “Wrecked — smooshed. I’ve been walking to work.”

  “I’ll clear out my passenger seat.”

  “No, I’ll walk out of the way of the water. I’ll grab a ride from someone along the way if I can. I’ll just walk straight up Center street. Get going and claim us that spot. We’ll get all the gear loaded, don’t worry.”

  “We need to leave a sign here that says we’re going to set up by the Walmart.”

  “Right. I’ll do that next.”

  “Do it quick. Stay out of that river. It’s dangerous.”

  Gale wanted to be five places at once. But once again, he had to delegate. And trust that Dan and Flint would do their jobs, too. The priority for him now was, set up the EOC in the new site, get back in contact with his missing department heads.

  Whatever new problems the second quake had brought, number one on the priority list would be getting potable water. They’d be twenty thousand dying people in three days without water.

  Bash was back on triage. A row of cars, ambulances, and a fire truck were lined up at the curb, discharging people with serious injuries. He pointed two paramedics carrying an open fracture straight to the orthopedist then leaned into the ambulance to check their second patient.

  One paramedic called back, “We lost that one. DOA.”