by Lou Cadle
A woman called over. “What’s wrong? The cell calls aren’t going through at all now.”
One of the office workers answered her before Mausch could. “Too much traffic.”
Mausch muttered, “Or a tower is down. Or more than one.”
Overhead, a news helicopter skimmed over them, blowing their hair and clothes.
“Great, and now they’ll say, firefighters fiddle while Rome burns,” said Kane.
“Yeah,” said Mausch as if he didn’t really care about that. He was looking southward, shading his eyes with a hand, and Chad could see that he was thinking out a strategy. In another minute he came to a decision. “This is how we’ll do it. No, wait.” He turned to Francie who was still scanning with the binoculars. “What do you see?”
“I think we’re going to have chemical contamination from the pulp mill. There’s a train off the tracks, but the cars look like stock, not tankers.”
“Small favors,” muttered another firefighter.
Francie lowered her voice. “I can see a few people floating in it. Bodies, I’m afraid.”
Mausch took out his own radio. “Mausch here,” he said. “Why isn’t that last engine out of here yet?”
A delay, then a voice. “Working on it.”
Chad glanced around the town. No sign of fires at least. Not yet.
Mausch called them to attention and gave out orders in a voice firm but pitched low enough to keep the civilians from hearing. “First rule. Don’t die. Don’t get hurt. I won’t lose any of you, and injured rescuers help no one. We’re going to have to stay on foot to help folks. If there’s a big backwash at some point, or a second wave, get out or up onto something stable, something big and heavy, not just a dumpster or car. You can see how cars are floating. Stay well away from them until they settle. Don’t wade into anything deeper than your knees. Watch out for debris. You won’t be able to see anything under the surface. Get the walking wounded out, get them to—well, hell” he said. “First aid center, where’s that?”
Francie recited two addresses, both underwater now. Under mud.
“We’ll coordinate a new address with the police, some place up the hill. And transportation to Vancouver’s hospital if need be. And a temporary morgue,” he added grimly. “Get yourself ready. Except for Francie and Chad—you two wait a second.”
When the rest had gone back down the stairs he said to Chad, “You’ve had first aid and CPR, right?”
“And CERT, plus a bunch of FEMA CEUs on line.”
“Good,” Mausch said. “Be honest, both of you. You willing to work together?”
“Sure,” said Francie.
“Of course,” said Chad, his heart speeding up at the thought that he’d actually be able to do something here, something real and useful.
Mausch looked seriously at him. “You do everything she says, rescue and medical both. She’s the EMT. You’re under her command.”
Chad nodded.
“Then let’s go see what the windshield survey has to tell us, and we’ll get everyone deployed,” said Mausch, and they climbed down off the roof.
15
South flank of the mountain. 8:30 a.m.
Jim Vang had never been so bored. He didn’t know this level of boredom was possible without it becoming a fatal condition. He was megasuperultra bored. His boredom had reached such height and breadth, it needed its own zip code. He needed to scream to release the pressure swelling inside his skull or his skull would surely explode.
Another breakfast went on and on while he was thinking this, this time a breakfast of transparent noodles and morel mushrooms they had found on their daily nature hike, a hike which was starting to feel to Jim like one of those recurring nightmares that you can’t explain and haunt you for long minutes beyond waking, tainting your whole day with a cloud of misery. But this wasn’t a dream, or a game, or a movie. It was his life, his boring, sucky life.
The rice noodles with morels sat in his bowl, a breakfast that had everyone around the table smiling but Jim. To him, the food tasted like old socks and cardboard. He wanted a McMuffin, and the last thing he wanted to do was smile.
Jim hated everything, hated these noodles, these trees, hated the sky beyond them that had finally cleared to blue this morning but was still a hateful thing. He wanted his friends, his games, television, funny Youtube videos, a telephone he had permission to use once again. All left behind, hostages to this terrorist called “family time.”
“I can’t stand this,” he said, standing up. “I have to—” He flung his hands up while his mother and sister stared at him. His father’s usually stoic expression turned to a frown. For his father, this was a demonstrative moment. “I need to be alone,” Jim said, keeping his voice calm only by a great effort. “I’m going on a walk.” He left the table and walked to the fire road. His father called his name, but Jim pretended not to hear and marched down the road.
When his family was out of sight, he felt a bit of tension leave him. Maybe he only needed some privacy. Maybe he needed to hide behind a pile of rocks and jack off to relieve some tension. But not this close to the family. No, very bad idea.
He walked all the way down to the turnoff from the larger forest road then turned on it toward the last campground they had tried but found full, however many eons ago that was. The elevation dropped and he found it easier to jog down the road than to walk it. He wasn’t any kind of a jock, but the running felt good, and he opened it up, liking the feel of gravity pulling at him. He gained speed until he was almost losing control, eating up the ground, his arms whirling to keep balance.
When he started panting, he kept going. Only when his lungs were burning painfully in the thin air did he stop. He didn’t know how far he had come. When he turned around to look, the road behind him surprised him with its steepness and its length. The turnoff to their campsite was nowhere in sight. Too late, he realized he’d have to go back up that hill, too. Unless he was willing to keep running down it for miles, and then hitchhike to Seattle or San Francisco and become a street kid.
And he wasn’t willing to do that. His family didn’t beat him or make him wear dresses as punishment or chain him to the hot water heater when they were unhappy with him. They weren’t awful. They just weren’t who he wanted to be with right now.
He just wanted…. Shit. He didn’t know what he wanted. No more wildflower hikes. To play a game on his iPod. A phone call from one of the guys. A computer to log onto. Such small things. Such important things.
The last time he had even talked with Tommy had been the day of school, waiting for the bus, wondering aloud together where Chee was.
“He be lagging on us,” Tommy had said, scrolling through texts on his phone.
“It’s that girl.”
“That Rosie girl? Major biyatch, she.”
“Yeah,” said Jim, though he really didn’t know her well enough to say if she was a bitch or an angel. Chee having a girlfriend was weird for all of them. Between that and the last couple weeks of Jim being grounded, it felt like their group was falling apart. And with summer coming, he worried they’d drift further apart.
A tough-looking black chick walked by smoking a cigarette. Tommy did a complicated thing with his eyebrows that said, “I’d take some of that.”
“Me nyuam laib,” said Jim, shaking his head.
“What’s that shit you say?”
“It’s Hmong. Little gangsta girl.”
“Xactly. They the best.”
“Go on over, then. You and Chee can take them to a club, catch a movie, the four of you.”
Tommy laughed without humor. “Uhuh. Like I have money for that.”
Jim let his gaze drift across the street to a crowd of younger kids walking by. “What’re you doing this summer?” he asked Tommy.
“Working at the restaurant. Wiping tables and shit.” He put away his cell phone. “All the shit jobs, that’s for Tommy. And hardly any money for it. Just the tips I can steal.”
&nb
sp; Steal? What if he got caught? “That sucks.”
“How ‘bout you?”
“Stupid camping trip with my family in a week. Gotta act all nice, maybe they’ll let me out by July. If I’m lucky.”
“We need to hang when they set you free. I’m off work Mondays.”
“Yeah, good.”
“Sometimes I hate my family.” Tommy said it without shame.
“I know you do,” said Jim.
“My father doesn’t get it.”
“No.”
“It’s all this home country bullshit, you know?”
“Believe me. I know.”
“Nah, you don’t. Your parents mostly grew up here. They speak English. My mother sounds like some comedy movie Chinawoman, ten words of English. They still back in China, in their heads.”
“Yeah? You get some blindfolded shaman dude cutting up chickens and ringing bells over you last weekend? I did.”
He snorted. “Only chickens we cut up, we stir-fry.”
“Look at all these white kids,” Jim said, casting his glance over the knots of white students waiting for the bus, talking about whatever. “They don’t know.”
“Don’t know shit,” Tommy agreed.
The bus came and they got on. Chee never showed. As he had been doing every day for two weeks, Jim took out the twisted cotton bracelet the shaman had given him and put it back on before he got home. Since he was pretty sure no demon really was trying to steal his soul, he saw no reason to wear it except to calm his father.
At Tommy’s stop, they bumped hands goodbye. And that was the last time he had seen any of his friends. Since then, he had been a prisoner of his family.
Jim was brought back to the present day by a truck engine, a diesel roar in the distance. He heard the noise change pitch and fade away. He realized that must be nearly at the campground already. Shit, he’d come that far? He turned around and looked up the slope, sighing at the idea of the hike ahead of him. But he had no choice.
That’s what he hated most, feeling like he had no choice in anything. How far away his eighteenth birthday seemed, when he’d have lots of choices. Being an adult meant you never had to do anything you didn’t want to do. Jim couldn’t wait.
He looked down at his wrist. The shaman’s braided bracelet was still there. He peeled it off and put it in his pocket. He could be free of that one thing, for a while. One reluctant step at a time, Jim trudged back up the slope of Mt. Hood.
^ ^ ^
The Mountain, late morning.
Deep inside the central vent, the magma moved. A plug filled the vent, but it was starting to give at the edges after hours of pressure. Hundreds of tons of upward pressure made hairline fractures appear in the old rock. Infinitesimally, the cracks widened. Not enough yet.
But soon.
16
Camas, Washington. Morning, June 14.
Chad and Francie weren’t yet to their assigned streets when they stopped to help a family trudging out of the mud. A mother held a screaming toddler, and a six-or seven-year-old boy was coated up to his waist, struggling alongside his mother through the last of the mud, looking miserable. Chad waded out and picked up the boy and carried him out to clear pavement, to the exhausted thanks of the mother.
“Is anyone hurt?” asked Francie, who held the large first aid kit she had taken along. First aid, evacuation, light search and rescue: that was their mission.
The civilians all shook their heads and Chad and Francie moved on. When they had passed beyond the hearing of the muddy family, Chad said to Francie, “Everyone looks like some horror movie character, Invasion of the Clay Man, or something.”
The level of the mud in the streets wasn’t falling fast, and neither of them could figure out why. The lahar had washed in and stopped, so why wasn’t it washing back out? There was, in effect, a new murky pond covering the low areas of town. When he first stepped into it, he was shocked at how cold it was. It smelled like dirt, like the worst case of mold ever, and it carried a faint chemical smell, too. Chad hoped that whatever chemical that was wouldn’t give him cancer ten years down the road. All sorts of rubbish stuck out of the mud, splintered limbs, cars that had been shifted several feet before being set back down any which way on the street, bits of lumber, dead animals, and one boulder the size of a SUV.
They encountered a stunned older couple who had some minor cuts, and Francie treated them the best she could, washing out the cuts with the two of the four bottles of drinking water they had brought, then using antiseptic wipes, then plastering gauze over all, telling the people to do it again once they had access to water or got to a first aid station. They moved on up the hill.
The radio crackled twice with a general announcement. First, the location of the new triage/first aid center, which Chad committed to memory. The second time, the radio reported that drinking water may have been compromised. Do not drink from the tap.
“Great,” said Francie. “Water is going to be a problem.”
“Yeah, you used half of what we had on that couple.”
“And didn’t get the injuries near clean enough. Nobody here has ever dealt with this before. We didn’t know. It’s not just us with a problem. Everybody from the station is out on the streets without enough water.”
When they got to their assigned section of town, Chad insisted on taking the first aid kit from Francie. “I’m taller,” he said. “And I might need to hold it open while you get something from it. You keep the radio.”
Francie agreed, and they waded in deeper and began to quarter their streets, looking for people who needed help. A few people came up to them, a few more yelled questions out of windows, and some seemed to take comfort from their presence on the street. They told everyone not to drink from the tap.
But this was nothing like Chad had imagined firefighting to be. He had imagined fires, of course, not floods, but even in rescue work, his mental image had been of a frenetic television-show pace. This was slow, careful, as routine as putting cans on the Safeway shelf. Slap on a Band-aid, move on, talk, move on.
Just before 11:00, at a wide intersection where the street toward the river dropped off, they saw their first dead person.
Francie spotted it first and waded further into the muck.
“Francie, wait,” Chad called, as she passed beyond the knee-depth limit they’d been told. Wasn’t she supposed to be supervising him, making sure he didn’t mess up? Not the other way around. When she turned, he saw that she was carrying a small human form, a kid, struggling to lift it free of the sucking mud. He went to help her. As he got deeper into it, the mud dragged at his legs. Francie must find moving even harder because the mud hit her above the knees. Chad took the child from her—heavier than expected because of the mud—and to a raised cedar deck attached to a house. He eased the child down, cradling the head until it came to rest on the deck.
Francie knelt beside him. She scraped mud off the still, small face. As she did, the features of the child came clearer, maybe nine years old, maybe a girl. The mud made it impossible to tell for sure. Francie cupped her fingers and scooped a handful of mud out of the child’s mouth. “Jesus,” she whispered. She pressed her head down on the small muddy chest, listening. She dug more mud out of the child’s mouth. “I’ll need more water.” She glanced around. “Find a bucket or something. Get water from one of these spigots.”
Tearing his gaze away from the small body, Chad forced his legs to move. He ran up the walkway to the house, splashing mud, and pounded on the door. No one answered. He slipped around the house and saw a shed, small, weathered, wooden, in need of a coat of paint. He sprinted to it and yanked on the door. Chad was willing to bust down the door if he needed to, but when he turned the handle, the door of the shed opened. He spotted a battered metal watering can, grabbed it up, and took it to an outdoor water spigot that barely cleared the level of the mud. The water came out clear. He wondered if it would stay that way, and for how long. The water treatment plant was on l
ow ground, and maybe that was why the radio had said the water was bad. Chad shook his head. The extent of the disaster was coming home to him in stages. What he was doing felt slow and plodding, but he really was in the midst of a bona fide disaster, here. This wasn’t TV. It was real. He realized he was trying not let his mind rest on the image of the muddy kid lying, so still, up on the deck.
He rushed the filled can back to Francie who was sitting back on her heels, pulling off her purple medical gloves. “It’s no use. She’s gone,” she said, “But thanks.” Her face was bleak. She yanked on fresh medical gloves, pulled work gloves over them, then touched the child’s arm where she’d tied a black plastic strip that meant she was dead. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Should we leave her here?” Chad asked, looking at a couple walking past, holding matching suitcases on their heads. They didn’t seem to notice the dead girl. The little body lay in his peripheral vision. He didn’t want to look right at her. He didn’t know her, but she was someone’s little girl. Whoever it was would be devastated by it. If they weren’t dead themselves. What if she was local, and they just happened by and saw her lying here?
Francie said, “I wish we had a blue tarp to cover her with. But we’re not doing recovery. We should focus on saving who we can. I’ve radioed in the location of the body. I’m sorry to leave her, but we don’t have the time to deal with the dead yet, not if there’s anyone we can help.”
Chad knew she was right. They walked away from the dead child.
Chad carried both the full watering can—he’d get it back to the owners later if he could—and the first aid kit. They moved down a new street and turned away from the river. When they were far enough north to see where the mud stopped a few blocks up, a motion in the mud nearby caught Chad’s eye. His heart leapt. “There’s something moving.” He strode over toward it, having to get right up to it before he could see it was a dog. A very wet, unhappy-looking small dog, paddling furiously to keep his head above the flood.
Chad set down the watering can and grabbed for its collar. Missing, he took another step and grabbed for it again. This time he snagged the collar, pulled it over, and the dog tried to climb up his arm before he could get a grip on in. “It’s okay fella,” he said soothingly, which calmed the dog not at all. The claws scrabbled for purchase, and Chad felt one clip his arm and tear the skin. A chunk of cedar or redwood fencing was floating a few steps away. He made for it and, holding the dog by its ruff, put it and the first aid kit down onto the fence. The fence wobbled under the weight. Chad grabbed at the edge to stabilize it.
