Rise Again
Page 9
“Don’t like surprises, right? I know the feeling. And loud noises, and people raising their voices.”
All true, but Danny wasn’t in the mood to chat about the personal legacy of combat. She flipped the switch for the ceiling fixtures, rows of sickly tubes pinging and flickering before they flooded the interior with cheap government-issue light. Her eyes contracted painfully.
“You’re the only other person I seen alive since this afternoon,” Danny said, and found her keys in their snap-down pouch. She unlocked the cell and threw the door open. “How come you’re not dead?”
Wulf scratched his chin, considering the question as he strolled out of the cell. He looked around at the corpses.
“Lemme have one of them rifles you got. The Winchester Model 70.”
“No.”
“I heard a whole shitload of screaming and running around. Then your buddy the dog doctor said she had to go find you. She run off out the back. That was when it was still daylight, sun over that way. These ones run in and fell down a minute later. It got real quiet after that. What the hell happened?”
“Come on.”
Danny led the way toward the back door. Wulf crossed over to the communications desk and picked up a pile of loose paper.
“Your buddy said this here was yours. She read it, and she said you better ought to read it yourself.”
He handed the paper to Danny. It was Kelley’s note. Danny’s eyes unexpectedly stung with tears. Her lip trembled. This wasn’t the time. Not now. She took a few hard breaths, stuffed the feelings down, and carefully folded the pages until they would fit in her breast pocket. She buttoned the pocket, careful not to look at the note, careful not to see the looping Kelley handwriting. She went straight out the back door, where the exterior area light was blazing down on the dumpster and the parking spaces. Nick’s motorcycle was there, and some civilian’s car with the door open. No bodies. Danny was holding her breath again. She focused on breathing, on denying the madness of the situation.
It was like a raging river. She had to stay on the shore. If she went in past her ankles, it would sweep her away. Wulf trod along behind her, impassive. With the bush of hair and beard and his barrel chest with drooping, crooked shoulders, he did look like a bear. And smelled like one. She’d smelled worse on occasion, though, and Danny would take his company over a carpet of corpses any time. So she welcomed the old ruin of a man that followed her down the alley, then up Pine Street past a heap of bodies that had accumulated at the corner. The whine of distant horns was fainter. Maybe the batteries were dying. Danny noticed there were no dogs barking. You could always hear a dog or two in Forest Peak. They must have fled earlier in the day. She remembered seeing dogs running up Route 144.
In silence the two survivors continued toward the gymnasium, picking their way through the carnage on Main Street. How could nobody else have survived?
Hours earlier, Patrick and Weaver had been arguing in the motor home about whether to stay in Forest Peak or try the back road. Then the screaming began. They stopped bickering to watch a very tall man sprint past the windows, his arms held up almost straight over his head. The locals scattered at his approach. The tall man ran full-tilt into the low fence at the far end of the parking lot and did a spectacular forward flip, landing on his back. Then he lay there motionless. Patrick almost laughed, but it would have been a laugh of hysteria.
The screams were coming closer. Weaver went for the door of the motor home to see what was going on, but Patrick had, for once, held him back by sheer force of will—and by the sleeve, which he pulled on until the stitches began to pop. Weaver stayed where he was, and they watched the terrified people rush past in ever-greater numbers, charging nowhere at top speed, then falling. Many of them didn’t fall, but ran into the woods or down the road. But again and again someone would flash by, full of life and animation, then abruptly crash to the ground like a cast-aside rag doll, where he or she would lie twisted and motionless.
Patrick at first thought they were being shot, maybe by a gunman on one of those flat Old West–style roofs on Main Street. But there wasn’t any blood, no jerk of impact—these people simply dropped. There was no human expression in their faces as they ran, only animal terror, mouths stretched open. A man in jeans that hung almost to his knees ran for the side door of the RV, yanking on the handle as if to tear it off the hinges. But his mind was gone. He didn’t even attempt to work the latch, but clawed at the door until he fell dead. Patrick thought that he personally was going to have a seizure and die himself: His heart was racing and sweat poured freely down his back and sides. His mouth was so dry he could hear his tongue rasp against his teeth.
“It’s like there’s an invisible hammer hitting them on the heads,” Weaver said. He locked the door and set the chain and went around securing all the RV’s windows and the front cab doors. Then he pulled all the curtains except the windshield and suggested they move back to the lounge area and wait for the screaming to stop. They waited there in the overstuffed captain’s chairs, in the dark, with the air hot and still inside the motor home. There was a fly buzzing around, making a circuit from the windshield to the back bedroom in long looping courses. Its outboard-motor hum could be heard when there was a lull in the cries outside.
Every few minutes someone would run right into the RV, clapping against the aluminum skin. The glassware in the bar racks would jingle. Patrick didn’t know if these runners were falling dead or scrambling back up to keep on going. A million thoughts swarmed through his mind, none of them about Weaver, which was rare. Maybe all he’d needed was a real crisis to stop him fretting about the petty insecurities in his life. This would make a great movie of the week, he found himself thinking. Talk to the people he knew at Lifetime, maybe.
Weaver was sitting there looking timeless and rugged and strong, eyes reflecting the light. He could have been watching a bluejay instead of the end of the world. Patrick was determined not to think out loud, just in case Weaver snapped and left to join the running and screaming and Patrick was left alone in the dark motor home. So he studied the custom baseball stitching that ran along the arms of the captain’s chair. The sun was slanting toward the trees on the mountain ridge above them when Patrick fell asleep.
It was dark when he awoke, and the side door of the RV was standing open. Patrick could see the dim blue rectangle of moonlight on pavement. He got rushed by panic; his heart went through the roof. He clattered down the steps and out into the world, forgetting his fear of the dead, the maniacal running people.
But it was so quiet. There was no screaming, no thunder of feet slapping the asphalt. Nobody except him.
This is it. This is really alone, he thought.
There were dark blotches on the ground all around the parking lot. The dead. It was like one of those dim Civil War photographs of the aftermath of battle they used in Ken Burns documentaries.
“Weaver?” Patrick called, but so softly he could barely hear his own voice. Then he heard a scraping sound. Held his breath. It was the sound the Mummy’s feet would make, dragging across the stone floor of his tomb. Patrick backed away from the RV. The sound was coming from behind it.
Weaver’s silhouette emerged from the dark bulk of the vehicle, hunched over. He was dragging a corpse away from it.
“Weaver,” Patrick whispered. Weaver heard him this time. He let the corpse’s arms drop and stood up, wiping his brow with his palm. “Hey,” he said.
“What are you doing?”
“Moving these bodies so we can get the bus out of here.”
“Good idea.”
“You want to help?”
“Not really.”
“There’s gloves under the sink.”
“You okay?”
“You?”
It wasn’t a question that required an answer.
A moment later another voice rang out in the night air: “Hi, are you alive?”
It was the woman in the white doctor’s coat Patrick had s
een earlier, the one who had been wrangling the baby goats. He recognized her at a distance by the faint moonglow of the coat against the shadows and the way she picked her way among the corpses, arms held up in a sort of “jazz hands” position—it was precisely the way she moved through the pen full of animals.
“I guess,” Weaver said.
“Have you by any chance seen the sheriff?” she asked.
“Not since the chili contest,” Patrick said. “Like ten years ago.”
“Oh,” the woman said, slumping inside her coat. But as quickly as she registered sorrow, she came back:
“I’m Amy Cutter. Local vet. If I was the coroner I’d be rich right now.”
Patrick didn’t know whether to laugh or vomit. In fact he could have gone either way. But Weaver smiled, and that was enough. The living were all members of an exclusive fraternity, it seemed.
After that they started to make progress of a kind. Amy knew where to find the big knife switches that turned on the parking lot lights, and how to light up the inside of the gym, and that there was a phone in the coaching office in the gym. The phone didn’t work, to nobody’s surprise. But the light was a tremendous relief. Amy opened the double doors at the side of the gym, then returned to Patrick and Weaver.
“I think we better set up some kind of relief station. That’s what Danny would do. She’s the sheriff. A friend of mine. There’s a lot of people wandering around out there, a lot of people didn’t die. But I’m worried some of them will if we don’t get them inside where there’s no cliffs to fall off in the dark. That’s what Danny would do.”
So they went down Main Street with keychain flashlights and called for people to come down to the gym. It was difficult to raise their voices above speaking volume in the presence of so many dead: Maybe it was some ancient human instinct. But out there in the dark there were people alive, climbing warily out of cars, emerging from doorways, stirring in the street where they had been cradling the heads of the people who had died in front of them, their loved ones, faces they knew in life. Amy took charge of them all. There was reeking meat-scented smoke coming out of the Wooden Spoon. Nobody wanted to go inside to find out what it was. Nobody did.
Inside the Quik-Mart, Weaver gathered a trash bag full of junk food from around the cash register, while Patrick filled a Graco double stroller with cases of bottled water. He didn’t know where the babies from the stroller had ended up. What happened to the ones that couldn’t run? He pushed the thought aside.
At the back of the store, concealed by the shelves of brightly packaged rubbish he wasn’t supposed to eat, Patrick found a teenage girl with blue-streaked hair and a boy of around ten, both clutching the corpse of a woman who must have been their mother. It smelled as if she had soiled herself upon death. Patrick simply reached out and took the girl’s hand and she followed him, meek and glassy-eyed. The boy followed her, looking back once at the dead woman as if to be sure she was going to stay where she was.
“You push this water cart, okay?” Patrick said, and the boy took command of the stroller. It would have been faster to push it himself, but Patrick didn’t want the boy looking back at his mother again. These young survivors were probably even more shell-shocked than Patrick was, having lost someone before their eyes, but they couldn’t kneel there mourning all night while the dead cooled. They had to live.
So the living had gathered in the gymnasium. Patrick and Weaver sat in the gymnasium bleachers on either side of the blue-haired girl and the ten-year-old boy, and passed a bag of M&Ms back and forth, eating one at a time by unspoken treaty. The girl emerged from her trance very briefly and said to Patrick, “I seen your TV show.”
She didn’t say if she liked it or not, but lapsed back into brooding silence. They had probably been sitting there for half an hour when the sheriff walked in with a big, shaggy derelict at her side.
The basketball court was lit up bright as midday on the moon. There were several dozen living people in there, locals and outsiders, shoes squeaking on the waxed wood floor as they paced around, waiting out the long night watches. There was a portable shortwave radio with a crowd around it, like an illustration from a vintage phonograph advertisement. It found ethereal voices speaking urgently in foreign languages. Elsewhere in the room, someone was sobbing, someone weeping softly, someone praying to hayzucreesto.
A few people conversed in low voices. A baby cried once, then went back to sleep. The sounds echoed in the rafters. Amy was refilling a coffee urn set up on the floor, flanked by heaps of junk food from the convenience store. There were rows of water bottles and two-liter fizzy drinks and a tower of white Styrofoam cups. It could have been a town meeting without the furniture. Even with the poor state of her brain, Danny could see the survival rate wasn’t good, if this was everybody who had made it through the disaster. Wulf, interested as always in the immediate need, headed straight for the food.
Amy turned around when she saw Wulf go by. Her face lit up when she recognized Danny, and she beamed that big immodest Amy smile. She was even going to holler her delight, then recalled the gravity of the situation. Instead she waved and trotted over to Danny and threw her arms around her and squashed her in a desperate embrace. Danny put her arms around Amy, and the human contact reminded her how tired she was, how bone-tired and worn out.
“You look even worse than before,” Amy whispered.
“Slept in my clothes,” Danny said, and headed for the water. She drank an entire bottle in ten loud swallows, the cold liquid spreading through her belly. She needed to pee and she needed to wash the filth and blood off herself. Having Amy there gave Danny a little permission to think of her own needs, at last.
Amy was right beside her, serious: “Your head is covered in blood. I didn’t see it at first. Are you okay?”
“No,” Danny said. Amy prodded the gash in Danny’s scalp and it flared pain. Danny swiped the offending fingers away. She could hear the ocean.
“Sorry,” Amy said. “Between the glassy eyes and the ostrich egg on your head, I think you might have a concussion. Maybe you should sit down.”
“In a minute,” Danny replied, and limped toward the restrooms.
“I’m so glad you’re not dead,” Amy called after her. Danny shrugged as if to say, “Of course,” but there wasn’t any feeling behind the nonchalance. There wasn’t anything but being alive. Just like the old days, the little voice said. She remembered being presented with the Key to the Mountains, and wondered where it was. Not around her neck anymore. Somewhere in the woods, probably. Ten thousand years from now some archaeologist could dig it up and wonder what the hell the thing was for.
By the time Danny had limped out of the darkness, the majority of the survivors had already left town: some on foot, some in vehicles, on up Route 144 toward Big Bear. Weaver had shown them on his topographical chart how to get up over the crest of the mountains and down toward Scobie Tree, after which they were on their own. They took cars and trucks from the northern end of town, away from the massive jam of cars on the way to Los Angeles. Lots of survivors in each vehicle, crammed in as if they were on a school field trip.
All of the stray children they could find went with the convoy; only Blue Hair and her brother remained behind in town. The rest just wanted out of there. Since the main convoy left, more groups followed them in vehicles to which they had located the keys, regardless of provenance.
Danny’s return found fewer than 150 living strangers in town, and very few locals seemed to have emerged from their burrows. It was this latter consideration, as well as a desire to stem the flow of people into a completely unknown situation in the outside world, that drove Danny’s plan of action when she returned from the ladies’ room and heard Amy’s narrative of earlier events in town. Danny huddled with Amy and one of the local firemen, Troy Huppert, and explained her idea.
“There’s no point,” Amy said. “Let’s all just sleep on the floor for a few hours.”
Danny shook her head.
“The more of them that leave, the more capability we have to cope, though,” Troy said. “Remember that snowstorm in ’07? Fewer than thirty people stranded in town for four days, and we were about ready to throw a Donner Party by the time the snowplows finally got here.”
Danny looked around at the survivors in the gym. Some of them were drifting closer, wanting to listen in. Others most emphatically didn’t want to know. But with Troy’s huge boots and yellow fireproof pants, Danny’s ruinous sheriff’s uniform, and Amy’s doctor coat, they were the center of gravity in the room. Rescue, law, and medicine, all in one place. Danny wondered if they’d have as much pull if these people knew they were actually looking, respectively, at a probationary trainee from East Los Angeles, an alcoholic, and a horse doctor. Troy was a diligent guy, but he was also the newest firefighter in town and the most recent resident. It occurred to Danny that since the disaster, Troy might now be the only firefighter in town.
Danny dropped her voice, almost whispering: “Troy, I lost hundreds of people out there. My job is to keep people safe, and I lost hundreds. And Christ only knows how many died on the way up here. You know what I heard on the radio?”
“What.”
“Nothing. We have no idea what happened to cause this, or how big it is. It could be they’re picking up the pieces and in a couple days it will be right back to business. But I heard a couple of things that make me think it’s the Gulf Hurricane, times ten, everywhere in the entire country.”
Troy fell silent, considering the possible scale of the disaster beyond the mountains. Now Amy was pleading with Danny—not her best mode of expression, in Danny’s opinion: