Natural Disaster (Book 2): Quake

by Lou Cadle

  An aftershock hit and he froze, glancing around for someplace to dive under, but there was only the bed, too low for a grown man to crawl beneath. He braced in the closet doorframe, knowing it for poor protection, and waited there, tense and poised to run, as the house rattled around him.

  The rattling quieted and he felt the tension ease out of his body. Bash stepped back into the room and, with a crash, a chunk of ceiling fell. He heard the rending sound of splitting wood and a beam began to fall.

  Bash leapt to the side with more agility than he knew he had. The shattered beam fell, barely missing him. It was still attached at the far end of the room. It left a triangular space with just enough room for him to crawl through. Looking out at the crushed bed, he realized how close he had come to dying.

  Shakily, he stood, gathered up the suitcase and pillowcase — screw the passport, he wasn’t staying in here one second longer. He could hear the girls calling to him and he hurried back through the house to the window. A new crack bisected the window glass.

  “We were worried,” Haruka said.

  “We heard the crash. You hurt?” McKenna asked.

  “I’ll live,” he said “Glad to see you didn’t take my car and go joyriding.”

  “As if,” she said.

  “Let’s get home and make something great for dinner.”

  “Maybe we should go by the hospital? You’re bleeding.” She pointed to his head.

  He touched his head and looked at his fingers. Blood, yes. He swiped his palm across his head and looked again. It wasn’t much. “I can fix myself up at home just as well.”

  “If you say so,” said McKenna. “By the way, I hate that skirt you brought.”

  He shook his head at her. “Deal with it. Let’s take your firewood with us.”

  “We’ll get it. You just sit in the car and rest.”

  He was relieved that by the time the trunk was loaded, his adrenaline shakiness has ebbed. He was able to drive the girls home.

  Back at the house, he set them to the task of trying to get a fire going in the hibachi with the wood while he doctored himself. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle. He had been lucky, he knew, and he swore to himself never to enter a damaged building again.

  Moving between the kitchen and emergency supplies still in the garage, he looked through their food and tried to some up with an interesting meal. He finally decided on canned ham, one of the last bits of meat in the emergency supplies, and if they had a fire, he’d even make a glaze from canned pineapple in syrup. If not, cold canned pineapple on the side. Canned peas with baby onions, which would taste much better warm than cold. After his close call this afternoon, he wanted a decent meal. If the girls could get a fire going in the hibachi, he’d heat the peas. Otherwise, more cold mashed potatoes. It’d be a feast compared to some of their meals.

  When Gale got home and got a look at his bandaged head, he demanded to know what had happened. When he learned Bash had gone into a wrecked house just for clothes, he freaked. It took many minutes to reassure him that no, he wouldn’t do anything that stupid again. If the girls weren’t around, the argument might have gone on for longer.

  He called everyone to dinner and was pleased to see McKenna arrive in the skirt. “You look lovely,” he said.

  “Well, you could have died getting it for me,” she said.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” he said, not wanting her to set off Gale again.

  “So not to wear it would make me some kind of ingrate,” McKenna said. “Please pass the peas.”

  He was almost full after the meal. That feeling lasted about a half-hour, and then the hunger crept back. By the time he was in bed, it was a vicious burning in his belly, and he could easily have eaten another whole meal just like dinner.

  “Hunger sucks,” he said, punching his pillow.

  “I know, hon. Go to sleep and you won’t feel it,” said Gale.

  Eventually, he did.

  Chapter 16: Gale

  The media visit had worked, Gale thought, and with a vengeance. That Friday, a crew comprised of state, federal, and Red Cross workers descended on them just before 9:00 a.m.. With only about 13,000 people left in town, and over 60 new staff and volunteers, it assayed out to a new relief worker for every 200 citizens. Helicopters discharged staff, equipment, and more staff, all morning long. There were new medical workers, communications workers, counselors, administrators, and a structural engineer.

  It didn’t take long that morning for Gale to realize he was living inside one of those Chinese curses, like “be careful what you wish for,” though, come to think of it, he didn’t think that one was actually Chinese. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, willing an encroaching headache away.

  Megan and Kay walked up to him, Megan red-faced. “They’re telling me I’m doing it all wrong!” she said.

  “I know.” It wasn’t the first such complaint he’d heard. “I think they’re late for their annual sensitivity training update.”

  “It’s not funny,” she said. “Vinya was in tears.”

  “Damn it.” Oops, had he said that aloud? He had to be more circumspect than that. “I’ll talk to her.”

  Kay waved it off, saying, “We have that covered. You talk to them.”

  “I will.” He needed to somehow get control of this, or the situation would deteriorate quickly. “You know, though, that the Red Cross will be doling out money. That’s nothing to sneeze at.”

  “What good is money?” said Kay. “Can you eat it? Can it keep you warm?”

  Megan said, “It’s not as if our ATM cards work. I’ve heard a rumor that the whole country’s banking system is screwed up from this. “

  With City Hall a shambles, Gale wondered, was someone out there recording his automatic pay deposits every two weeks? As far as he knew, all city operating funds were frozen, or spent.

  Jeanine came over to join them, interrupting his meandering thoughts, and said, “Megan, George is on the radio. Or Gale, maybe you should take it. Seems someone ordered him off the channel.” She darted a hostile glance over to a Red Cross worker.

  “Gals, realize, we’re late to the assistance table here. After more than a week, we may be getting one of the less trained, less experienced teams. The experts are probably all in St. Louis or Memphis. In any case, we’ll have to figure out a way to work together.”

  Megan, still flushed with anger, said, “But they’re trying to take over! We had it under control. We’re getting things done, our way, and they have all these — “ she waved her hands around, searching for a word. “Procedures,” she said, over-enunciating every syllable.

  “I know,” he said. “I’ll….” He really didn’t know what to do first. The head Red Cross person, a high-energy older woman named Phyllis Hambrick was over at the hospital, possibly driving them nuts, too. “I’ll talk to George first.”

  He got on the radio and said, “George, it’s Gale.”

  “What the heck is going on up there?”

  “We got some new help. There’s a team of government staff and volunteers from the Red Cross now.”

  “Who don’t know their heads from their patooties,” said George.

  “I’m sorry. I should have warned you before they came in. I think they have their own protocols and regulations and ways of doing things. Over.”

  “We have ours too. We’ve been getting by.”

  “We have. You’ve been great, you and Marilyn both. I don’t know what I or this city would have done without you.” That wasn’t just appeasement. He meant it. “Can you lay low for a little bit?” He hated to ask it. “I mean, just stay off the airwaves, take an hour break or so, and I’ll get it sorted out. And.” He reconsidered. “F — scratch that. Come in here, both of you. We’ll meet face to face and deal with it right now. Can you get here?”

  “We’ll be there in a half hour. Out.”

  It was not a fun half-hour. Of course, there hadn’t been any fun at all in days, just putting out figurative fire afte
r fire, working with too little equipment, too few staff, and impossible challenges, but his staff had been getting along all right, with damned few arguments between them, even though they were worn to a frazzle. Citizens were getting angrier, though. Inevitably, that anger spread to his staff.

  And so the stress levels were rising faster, as people who had once been friends and neighbors turned on the very people who were sacrificing sleep and sanity to help them. He wished, selfishly, that Evelyn had lived and this was her problem.

  But it wasn’t. It was his.

  He got on the radio to Flint and Dan and invited them to the meeting as a courtesy. Flint said he might send someone to listen in. Dan just said, “Nope. Let me know if anything changes on my end.” Gale tried to get the Red Cross supervisor on the radio. When he couldn’t, he decided to drive over and haul her back.

  “Kay, you’re in charge. I want most of these newcomers at the meeting. Get them gathered and tie them to seats if you have to.” Kay was good, but he missed Angela. He hadn’t seen her for days, now. Where the hell was she? Dead? Trapped somewhere? No, by now, if she were trapped, she’d have died. Lost? Murdered? Ran away? No time to worry about that, either. He made his way to the hospital and hunted down Ms. Hambrick.

  Forty minutes later, he was looking out at a sea of faces at the EOC. The ones he knew were lined with stress, topped by greasy unwashed hair, and there was more than one set of arms folded stubbornly across the chest. These were mightily irritated people.

  The new relief workers, on the other hand, were well-scrubbed and energetic-looking. They were curious, not pissed. But that probably wouldn’t last for long.

  He turned on the bullhorn someone had found for him several days ago, but that he had seldom needed to use. “First, we want to thank our new team members for showing up and taking some of the load off our shoulders. There’s not a worker here who isn’t tired and ready for a break. So, welcome, and thank you, especially those of you who are volunteering to help complete strangers.” He put down the bullhorn and applauded. The more polite of his staff joined him, but no one would call the sound enthusiastic.

  “And if I haven’t said it enough in the past week, let me tell the city staff that you’ve been wonderful. You’ve taught yourself brand new areas of expertise and gotten competent on the fly, under the toughest of conditions. You’ve helped keep your neighbors fed and housed and safe. With our terrific Fire and Police Departments, we’ve rescued who we could. And we’ve done as well as is humanly possible with burials, being respectful but also taking care of public health by expediting the burial of so many thousands of our friends and family.”

  “So now we all — the new and the old — have to learn to work together. The new people have their ways. The staff have their own. We need to remember that the most important thing is keeping as many people as possible safe, dry, fed, and healthy. There’s so much to do in recovery, and we’ll be working together not just for days, but for months and years. Rebuilding a city this torn is a long-term job. We need help. We need money. We need expertise. We have a lot of that available, now. There are people here who know the city and what our neighbors want and need. There are people here who know disaster relief inside and out. Please, let’s work together.”

  He hesitated. “I know there’s some resentment building up today. I know that’s normal, too. I’ve had disaster training, and I promise you, every local group hates the new people at first.” There were a few chuckles, mostly from the out of towners. “And I know that no one who hasn’t lived through two huge quakes, and a hundred aftershocks, and the death of people they care about, like Evelyn, and the disappearance of others, like Angela, can’t quite understand what it feels like to experience all that and work long hours and try to fuel that effort with sleeping on the cold hard ground and too little food.

  “I know it doesn’t feel like we have time to spend at a long meeting right now, but I want to call you up and have you talk about what it has been like for you — either here in the thick of it, or preparing to come in to help. “ He glanced out. “Oscar, you’re an eloquent guy. Come on over here and say something.”

  He let Oscar talk for almost ten minutes, then thanked him and called up an EPA worker with a lanyard around his neck who talked about the chemicals in the river and trying to protect people against long-term effects, which he understood was not at the top of their minds right now. He talked about years it would take to clean up the river, and what measures he’d like to put into place now, and how if they skipped over this work now, they’d regret it five or ten years down the road, when their kids started getting rare cancers.

  Next Gale called George over and handed him the bullhorn. Back and forth, using a full hour he would have loved to use in some other way, letting a few people from each side talk. He learned something about his own people. Vinya had lost a sister in the first quake — but until now, he hadn’t heard her say a word about it. George referred to his days in cryptology back in the service — Gale hadn’t even known he was a veteran.

  “Can I ask all of us — old and new — to come together in a spirit of harmony. We all want the same things — the most people alive, the most people healthy, the most people fed. We want our city back, as soon as we can have it, and our homes, whole once again. The people who arrived this morning want that. They do want to help. What I’d love to see is some assumption of good will on everyone’s part, appreciation for what the other guys knows, and cooperation. And a chance for my staff to work a few eight-hour days for a change. Come talk to me if you have individual issues. Now let’s all get back to work.” He turned off the bullhorn. “George, if you and Marilyn can come over here, I’d like to introduce you to some radio people from the Red Cross.”

  He started with them because he knew how to approach this one meeting. All he had to do was show George some of the bells and whistles on the radio equipment being set up, and he knew George’s curiosity would overcome his resentment of being supplanted as the lead radio guy for the town. After ten minutes, he was able to leave George and Marilyn and the two guys, both volunteers who had flown in that morning, geek-chatting their way to cooperation.

  The next two hours he spent reassuring people, one by one, group by group, acting by turns as mediator and supervisor, grateful disaster victim and no-nonsense leader. He tried to remind himself to listen rather than let his mind wander to his to-do list, which only got longer as he dealt with the human element, and to thank people profusely.

  He really just wanted to be efficient, to get things done, already, and forget all the massaging of egos. But the way things got done, he knew, was to first massage the egos, and once everyone was well-massaged, feathers unruffled, they’d be more likely to work well. In some cases, he succeeded. In some cases, he gave himself a “D” on his work. With Vinya, he wasn’t sure she’d come out of her hurt mood for several days.

  By mid-afternoon, he was desperate for someone to come and massage his own ego and unruffle his feathers. His face ached from forcing smiles and concerned, interested, listen-y expressions onto it. He wanted a vacation, a month’s vacation. But even a day. Bash had gotten a day off, why couldn’t he? He recognized the inner tone of that question as a whiny child’s, and he tried to shut it down.

  As the sun inched down toward the horizon that afternoon, his shoulders were hunched, his smile felt strained, and his head was pounding. Did they have some Vicodin at home, or anything stronger than aspirin? He wanted to knock himself out. Go home, choke down more potato flakes, and sleep for ten hours without moving.

  But he couldn’t. He still had to help get the new people set up with a place to sleep. They’d brought blankets and cots for a hundred, so he set Oscar’s teenagers to setting those up. The rain had backed off yesterday, but it was still cold. Was it November yet? He honestly couldn’t remember. Without TV news, the internet, or an office calendar, a person lost track. But what were day and month names anyway? There was only each challenging hour
, and the next, and the next.

  Once the cots were half set up, he realized he’d need another shelter, a tent or roof. What he really needed was a Quonset hut, now that autumn was full upon them. He needed to ask — uh, he wasn’t sure who to ask. Corps of Engineers seemed overkill for such a minor request. He’d ask around these Red Cross people how you could get one.

  The cots got his own staff off the ground, too, which he was grateful for, though he wondered if wind whistling under a cot was really any warmer than just lying on the ground. Not for the first time — hell, not for the first time that day — he realized how lucky he and Bash were to have a standing house.

  When the head state guy had to repeat something he’d said three times for Gale to understand it, Gale said. “I’m not tracking. I’m sorry.”

  “You must be exhausted. Not what you thought you’d be doing when you signed on as City Manager, I’m sure.”

  “I’m not even the City Manager. I’m the flippin’ Planner. My worst worry ten days ago was trying to convince people to toughen earthquake standards in our zoning laws.”

  “I think they’re convinced,” he said, wryly.

  “Will the state adopt the California standards now, you think?”

  “If they do it fast, before they forget. The dollar figures for the loss will convince where warnings didn’t. It’ll cost — hell, we don’t know — say thirty billion dollars in just our state to minimally rebuild. It would have cost a fraction of that to retrofit, and nothing at all to mandate safer new construction.”

  “Where’s all that money going to come from?”

  “It’s not. I mean, we don’t have it. The federal government doesn’t have it, and they can’t charge a 10% extra income tax across the board next year, can they? People in Vermont or New Mexico won’t stand for that. The stock market has taken a terrible hit, and insurance stocks are — well, you don’t want to know. But you know who’s probably the most worried?”