After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Nathan wiped at his lips, the cough leaving the taste of blood in his mouth where it had sandpapered the insides of his windpipe. There was no point arguing with Lucy when she was in this mood, and he had to admit to himself she was right, especially if he stopped for a moment to think about the reality of his situation, rather than sticking his head into the past where Cyndi now dwelt. Or by blocking everything else out by elevating less than important jobs to being vital to their continued survival.

  Nathan knew he was sick. His chest had had a background rattle for two days, though he had pushed it from his mind and papered over it with thoughts of Cyndi. His joints were stiff and achy, which he’d told himself was just a reaction to the increasing cold, but if he hadn’t been so set on jettisoning any sense of his own needs from those of the people around him, then he might have acknowledged that the dryness in his mouth was caused by more than just his not having drunk anything for a couple of hours.

  “Okay, okay. It’s just a cold. That’s all. Just a cold.”

  Lucy’s eyes were squinted with the strong transmission of Oh really? “Come off it, Nathan—you might be able to lie to yourself, but I’m far too smart for you to lie to me.” Lucy hooked her hand through Nathan’s arm and began to pull him away from the Taurus.

  Nathan slipped her grip and she yelled at him, but Nathan held up a hand before another cough jumped up his throat. Just shaking his head at his own weakness, he pulled the prop rod from its mount in the Taurus’ hood and let the metal clang down. Then, still trying to catch an elusive breath, he put his arm back through Lucy’s and let her walk him toward the entrance to the trashed Burger King.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been such a grouch,” Nathan managed to say as he leaned on Lucy’s arm. A sudden dizziness, probably caused by the severity of the cough, swam through his head, and he stumbled. That was scary. It was almost like the ground had been rearing up to whack him in the face. Not a pleasant feeling at all… but something odd had happened. Lucy was on the floor next to him. Holding on to the ground like she was about to slide right off of it.

  The cough wasn’t shaking Nathan—it was the ground beneath him. Bucking and yawing, he suddenly felt like there was a soupy sickness running through his innards. Lucy was screaming, and below the yell of her distress was a low rumble. Almost out of the range of human hearing… a rumble that was more a physical presence than a sound. It was boiling beneath the surface of the Shell station’s concrete forecourt. As Nathan looked out through teary eyes, he could see Donie shepherding Tony, who in turn was holding Brandon to his chest, swaddled in blankets, out of the building.

  The building was shaking like the walls were made of paper, not brick. There was a crash somewhere out of sight, and then a rending of metal as the roof over the now defunct gas pumps slid backward on its legs like a stack of playing cards toppling. The crash of it hitting the ground sent a gust of dust and concrete chips over Nathan’s face.

  Tommy was following Donie and Nathan’s boys out of the burger joint, his baseball cap gone—strange, what you think of in a moment’s crisis—but it was the first time Nathan had ever seen the Texan without it. He was surprised how much older Tommy looked with the hat off, revealing a balding head covered in iron gray stubble. Behind Tommy came Dave, panic painting his face with terror.

  Dave got one foot outside the door before the building crashed down around him. He disappeared like a magic trick in a gust of dust, crumbling masonry, smashing glass, and tearing aluminum.

  Tommy was thrown clear, his arms outstretched with trying to make sure in the tumult of crashing brickwork that Donie and the boys were shielded. This had the effect of him barreling into all three of them and sending them sprawling.

  “Daddy!” Tony was yelling.

  The baby was bawling and Tommy had taken a three-brick chunk of masonry in the back of his legs, the projectile having been spat out of the demolition cloud.

  The ground was still thumping up and down.

  Nathan couldn’t move. He was just riding the wave of the world as it rippled and rodeoed, the grinding from the twisting clatter of Colorado’s underlying geology shaking the breath from his lungs and frothing the blood in his veins.

  The Shell station was utterly destroyed.

  As Nathan hauled himself to his feet, the smoke and dust clearing, all he could see of Dave’s body were his jeans and boots sticking out of the rubble.

  Nathan allowed himself just a second to see that both Tony and Brandon were alive and unencumbered by the collapsed gas station. Tony was sitting up coughing and Brandon was still crying in his arms. Their faces were covered in dust in a way that, at any other time, might have looked comical, so caked and pale were their faces. But not now.

  Nathan yelled at them to stay still and ran past Tommy’s groaning form to where Dave’s feet emerged from the rubble, deathly still. There was a Burger King sign digging into the material of Dave’s jeans, but there was no visible blood.

  “Hold on, buddy, I’m gonna get you out of there!” Nathan began getting some purchase on the plastic sign with the aluminum edges. It was lighter than he’d been expecting and came up almost too easily, raising Nathan’s hopes of a quick rescue, but beneath the sign were a whole bunch of wooden struts, ceiling tiles, and a boa constrictor of dead electrical cabling. The cables snaked through the shattered plastic casings of fluorescent lights, which had, in turn, burst open like fat, glass snowflakes.

  Through the wood and the glass and everything else, Nathan could see Dave. His face, like those of Nathan’s sons, was smothered in white dust.

  Nathan reached down through the smithereened tubes and felt at Dave’s neck for a pulse, but he was prevented from registering it as another monster cough doubled him over and threatened to tear the spine out the back of his body.

  As soon as the cough subsided, Nathan was back and reaching for Dave, but it was no longer necessary to find a pulse—the boy’s eyes were flickering and his face was curling up with the first pulses of pain.

  If Dave was in pain, that was a better sign than him not feeling anything at all. Nathan began pulling at a length of pine, thick with dust and sporting a row of rusty nails that were now exposed, trying to release it from whatever it had been fastened to before the earthquake.

  Earthquake?

  The very word felt wrong in Nathan’s mind. Since the crustal displacement had changed the world seemingly forever, there had been many desperate transformations to the natural conditions of the Earth… the bone-breaking winter cold, the sunlight-shrouding volcanic dust in the upper atmosphere shortening the days and clogging the skies… but Nathan had yet to experience an earthquake. The one thing that had been a constant in Nathan’s life so far, however many miles he’d come from his home in the valley outside Glens Falls, was that the ground beneath his feet was solid, and one of the only things that could be relied on to stay the same. And now even that certainty was gone.

  “What…?”

  Nathan snapped back to the present from where his mind had wandered, but his hands continued their autonomic movements, dragging and clawing at the pieces of collapsed gas station covering Dave.

  Dave’s lips moved again, and this time Nathan caught the faintest of words. “My arm… my… arm.”

  Nathan moved two bricks that were holding down a thick, surfboard-sized piece of plasterboard from the Burger King’s walls. Nathan heaved the board away and it slithered down the pile of rubble, dragging a scree of broken glass in its wake.

  Beneath the plasterboard was the blood Nathan had been glad not to have seen around Dave’s legs. A girder, maybe ten feet long and twelve inches wide, iron brown and orange with patches of rust, was pinning Dave’s left arm like a seesaw across a brick pivot. The force of the roof beam landing on Dave’s forearm had snapped it clean across. White bone drenched in redness was sticking out at an oblique angle from his flesh. Blood was welling thickly from the wound around the bones, and Dave was trying to move his shoulder to pull the
arm out from under the iron, but all he was doing was snagging the exposed bone ends against the metal. The girder would have to be lifted.

  Nathan got to his feet, hooked his hands underneath the metal, and heaved. His lungs exploded, his chest rasping and his tongue forced out of his mouth. Bent over, he felt his hands slip from the metal, coming away thick with cold rust.

  “Stop! Wait!” Lucy was beside him, pulling at his shoulder.

  Nathan shrugged her off and yelled, “Get off! If you want to help, get the other end and lift! We can’t leave him!”

  Lucy was back yanking at Nathan’s coat, her fingers digging into the flesh of his arm. Nathan roared in frustration, let go of the girder, and pushed Lucy firmly in the chest so that she sprawled onto her backside, arms and leg splayed. “I don’t care about my damn cough! We’ve got to move the girder. Tommy! Tommy! Help me!”

  He yanked hard, straining and growling with his effort. The girder began to shift.

  “Don’t touch it, you fool! Leave it!” Lucy screamed, pointing past Nathan’s shoulder.

  Nathan finally followed where Lucy’s finger was indicating.

  Cold water splashed over Nathan’s innards.

  A three-foot-high brick pier, which had been kept in place by the girder Nathan had moved, had begun to topple toward Dave’s exposed head and chest.

  5

  A shadow moved out of the reach of Nathan’s field of vision. There was a crunch of feet on glass and metal, and strong hands caught the brick pier with a harsh grunt of effort. The three-foot-high column falling toward Dave’s head slew sideways and crashed into the rubble a good twelve inches from the top of Dave’s skull.

  Freeson Mac was looking down at the dots of blood growing in the center of both his palms where the torn masonry had cut into his flesh as he’d first held and then pushed the pier away from Dave.

  Free took a squint at Nathan and then shifted into position at the end of the girder. “We moving this off his arm or what, Nate?”

  Nathan was still too stunned to move. He felt as if his feet had been glued to the floor, his knees turned to rock. A cough spluttered out before he could form any words.

  They left him there to catch his breath. Tommy brushed past, taking the end of the girder nearest to Nathan, and he and Free took turns lifting each end while Lucy slid a brick at a time beneath it to either side of Dave’s arm so that, as the girder came back down, there was less and less pressure, and then zero pressure on the fracture.

  Donie had crawled through the wreckage to sooth Dave’s cheek, to kiss him on the forehead and tell him, “Everything is going to be okay, baby.”

  Nathan was still frozen while they worked on moving Dave out from under the girder to lay him on the ground, and then cover him in blankets taken from the Taurus to protect him from the cutting wind. In fact, Nathan didn’t move until a small hand slid into his and Tony, face and hair still caked with dust, holding Brandon to his shoulder, looked up and said, “It’s okay, Dad. It’s okay.”

  Wellington had been flattened by the earthquake.

  Where they had seen neat rows of houses coming down off the ramp of the I-85, now there was a desolate field of rubble with slews of wreckage caused by the collapsed dwellings. There were no residents left in Wellington who they could see, all of them having, as in many other towns along the route from Casper, left to go south. The lack of people in the moonscape that had once been a town only added to the desolation Nathan felt inside and out.

  The wind cut across the newly destroyed landscape—flapping dog ears of plastic reaching up through rubble, swirling grit into mouths and eyes, creaking through shifting wreckage. Nathan looked at the broken town like someone beholding a mirror image of themselves, occasionally coughing and hacking up thick phlegm from his ruinous chest. Tony and Brandon sat with him while the others saw to Dave, who was now fully conscious and groaning sporadically on waves of face-creasing pain.

  Free told them that he had been coming down the highway off-ramp when the quake hit. He’d slammed on the brakes and ridden out the shaking with a ringside seat to watch as the town fell over.

  “Ain’t seen nothin’ like that in my life. Don’t want to see anything like it again.”

  When the shaking had stopped, Free had gotten out of the F-350 and jogged to where the Shell station had been chewed and spat out by the Earth’s tectonic nervous breakdown. He’d reached the spot where Nathan had been trying to lift the girder while Lucy screamed at him to stop, and there he’d caught the pier at an angle of forty-five degrees and averted a second disaster.

  Tommy’s leg had been deadened by the flying bricks from the falling building, and there was no way he could have reached the pier in time. As it was, he’d barely limped to the girder, and worked with Free and Lucy to get Dave out.

  Nathan had tried twice to get up to see how Dave was since the others had been tending to him away from the girder, and twice Lucy had firmly pushed Nathan down to the ground and refitted the blanket around his shoulders. “Stay there. We got this,” she’d said with increasing frustration in her voice. And so Nathan had stayed put, with Tony and Brandon next to him, watching as the bright white wrongness of Dave’s compound fractured forearm made his guts ache and his bile rise.

  When Dave was as comfortable as they could make him under the circumstances, Lucy went to the F-350 with Free and brought the truck down as near to the Shell station’s remains as they could. From the enclosed utility body they used for storage, Lucy took Elm’s ledger and the bag of Native American remedies he’d let them take from his home near Chicago.

  Elm was, or maybe more accurately he had been—because Nathan had no idea if he was now alive or dead—a Lakota Indian who’d run a hardware store in Brookdale, Illinois. As well as trading and bartering with people in the surrounding area and suburbs of Chicago, Elm had been an expert in Native American remedies and folk medicine. He’d gifted Cyndi a ledger containing all of his known cures, remedies, and medicaments, as well as a large stock of ingredients to keep them well in the months ahead. It had been Cyndi’s plan to spread Elm’s knowledge far and wide—to get Dave and Donie to find a way to make paper and digital copies of the ledger and disseminate them where they would do the most good.

  Cyndi being shot by Stryker Wilson, instead of Nathan being killed, had put a finish on that notion for the moment, but Nathan was still determined to find some way to spread the word. The ledger had been his trump card to play to get them into Casper… if he’d gotten past the ‘Ev’ry-1-Welcome’ lynching party.

  Lucy consulted the ledger, rummaged in the back, and gave Nathan something to chew on that tasted of strong warming licorice. “Osha root. Chew it. It’ll help, according to Elm’s grimoire.”

  Lucy was a practical gal who hadn’t truly believed in Elm’s Witches-of-Eastwickery nonsense at the start. But as Cyndi had said to her on many occasions when the subject had come up, this had been how pretty much all drugs had started out. Just because they grew in the ground and were picked by hand rather than their same chemicals being cooked up in a big pharma laboratory didn’t mean they were any less effective. Lucy had said finally something about “sticking to her aspirin,” to which Cyndi had said, “made from willow bark,” and that had been the start of Lucy’s conversion. Now she was the go-to gal for Elm’s ledger when a problem arose, and that was why she’d been nagging Nathan about his chest for the last few days.

  If only Nathan had been in the right place to listen to her, he thought, with a bitterness tempered by the taste of licorice in his mouth. If he had listened, perhaps he wouldn’t feel so damn ill right now.

  Lucy knelt by Dave and gave him something from the bag for pain, and then she spoke to Free. Nathan couldn’t pick out what was being said, but Free made a face, shook his head, and then nodded when Lucy pointed at Dave’s arm and made a cutting gesture with her hand that looked like it would brook no disagreement.

  Lucy pulled a bandage from the bag, rubbed an ointment ont
o it, and then said calmly and clearly to Free, “Now.”

  Free bent, took hold of Dave’s wrist, and then pulled. With a shiver of disgust, Nathan watched as the broken ends of the bones slid back into the flesh and Dave screamed a high-pitched yell of anguish. Even Donie, who was resting Dave’s head in her lap, smoothing his forehead, had to look away as the snapped bones disappeared back inside Dave’s arm. When Lucy was satisfied, she made Free hold the arm up while she cradled it.

  “Glad I didn’t get my breakfast today,” Tommy said, plonking himself down next to Nathan on the blanket. He rubbed at the back of his thigh where the brick had hit him, wincing. “There but for the grace of the Big Fella,” he breathed out as Lucy finished tying the bandage.

  “He’s gonna need painkillers, antibiotics, a cast, and a hospital, stat,” Tommy continued, putting his USMC baseball cap, recovered from the wreck of a Burger King, back on his head.

  Nathan felt it difficult to process what the Texan was saying. He was still trying to put the pieces of his head together—feeling guilty because he’d nearly caused a further accident that might have given Dave ever more serious injuries or even killed him.

  Internally, his lungs rattled and popped like an old moonshine still, and his head was rapidly filling with the cotton wool of fever. Added to that, Nathan felt wretched and not a little embarrassed about his pig-headed refusal to listen to Lucy’s warnings right away. And even though she had given him the root to chew on, he’d felt—or imagined, he couldn’t be sure—a change in her attitude toward him. Just the way she’d avoided his eyes had left the warmth out of her usual expression when she’d looked at him. Nathan figured she had the right to be angry and disappointed in him, but it would never match how disappointed he felt toward himself.