Quake

by K. R. Alexander

“Let’s catch up. Everyone seems to think we’ll find people in North Bend by tonight. I’d trade Thanksgiving dinner for a bucket of water and a bar of soap right now.”

  “I’d have to think about that one…”

  We descended the stairs but I stopped Trent at the bottom while I was still one up and he stood on the soaked rug. The whole place already smelled of mildew.

  When he looked back, I met his lips. Trent raised his hands to touch my face, mouth closed in a gentle kiss. Five seconds and he pulled back, smiling.

  At the doorway, I took his hand, making us pause one more time. “Hey? The way the world is getting on our case lately? At least we have love in this fight. Seriously, the way people are coming together and helping each other and…” I glanced down at our hands, a fresh lump in my throat. “That’s big, Trent. It’s bigger than any virus. Bigger than any earthquake.”

  I’m not sure he was convinced by my sappiness. “We’ll have to hope it’s big enough.”

  Chapter 12

  We reached North Bend before dark without seeing another human being, though plenty of disoriented deer, raccoons, coyotes, birds, and other critters who seemed as bewildered by the silent interstate as we were.

  Out of the valley, we finally escaped water damage, finding easy going returned to I-90, but also mammoth splits in the road from the quake. Not so much that people hadn’t been able to flee this way. Somehow, for some reason, they’d come to North Bend.

  Except … they hadn’t.

  The seven of us stood at the Exit 31 overpass, looking to gas stations, fast food joints, and the North Bend outlet mall, some recognizable for the businesses they were, but still totally lost by the Megaquake, and there was not a sound but the breeze, not a motion but the odd bird.

  “Damn … they’re only missing the tumbleweeds,” Jackson said.

  No one answered.

  It was a breathtakingly beautiful spot, clouds lifted but still capping Mount Si straight ahead, fluffy gray edging the tops of mountains in all directions. North Bend, famed for the filming of Twin Peaks, for astonishing annual rainfall, and for being the gateway into the Pass through the Cascade Mountains, dividing east and west parts of Washington state, was a ghost town.

  We turned as one, watching the flight of a helicopter breaking the hush, flying many miles away to the south.

  Hard to break a sweat in a rocking chair, as my grandmother would say. I looked at Ramak. Not like he’d been elected Commander in Chief, but he was the only person it occurred to me to look to.

  “What now?” I’d been afraid of my voice being a shout in the stillness. Overcompensating meant the words came out little better than a squeak. I swallowed.

  “We search,” he said, turning back toward Mount Si. “In two groups to cover more ground. Be careful. Don’t take risks climbing rubble you can avoid. Call out for people, see if you can find survivors, a generator, radio, anything useful. If not… We’ve got an hour of good daylight left. We’ll find a place to stay again, then do a better search for supplies in the morning.”

  “Then what?” Jackson asked. Even he looked glum. “Hell, I thought the place would be hopping. If the road is clear enough to get people east, why isn’t anyone in to help yet? I mean, fuck it, they could get emergency vehicles as far as the valley, send out aircraft from there, do something…”

  “We don’t have answers to that.” Ramak still scanned the dead scene below. “But we’re here to find them. A radio.” He took in a breath as if with fresh conviction. “Some people still have battery-powered radios. In a shop or garage, or a car. If you can find a car in a driveway with the keys at hand, just one car radio could give us a world of information.”

  Smart, I hadn’t thought about cars. Ramak got several nods in reply, Jeff’s assurance that we’d find something, and we walked back to the ramp to make our careful ways into town.

  I followed Ramak. Maybe we should have considered how we would be split up based on … I don’t know. Speed of pace? But I couldn’t help it. I’ve always been a sucker for a uniform. Not that Ramak was wearing one—light rain jacket and slacks with street shoes. He didn’t need to. Like his commanding voice and military posture, I could see one on him anyway.

  Again, he hadn’t talked much all day. Christine and Nazia were getting along. Jeff and Jackson had talked sports or Jackson had walked with Trent and I, talking about movies. That was where Trent lit up. Unfortunately, like his interest in snowboarders, I didn’t get a lot of what he was talking about. I knew as much celebrity gossip as the next college girl, but I haven’t the faintest idea what film won the Academy Award for best cinematography in 1979. So Trent was going on about Néstor Almendros and I was thinking, Who the hell is that? Because, even if you do know the film Days of Heaven, and you know some older famous directors or actors or whatever, who knows the name of the cinematographer?

  At first it was like, Wow, he’s really into this. Then it was like, Sorry, I don’t speak your language—failing at the whole conversation. Then it was adorable.

  We all know those people who have a thing. Like they collect Corgi stuff, or they have a period in history that they know all about, or they’re a great home-baker and obsess about the perfect chocolate layer cake. I discovered on that long walk to North Bend that I might have as great a weakness for a starry-eyed fanatic as for a uniform. It helped that I’m actually interested in movies, but Trent made these people fascinating anyway. Like Allen Daviau. Who’s ever heard of Allen Daviau? Cinematographer on E.T. and sounds like an interesting guy, but who knew? And now I’m wanting to see films that Roger Deakins was DP on, but a few hours ago I didn’t know who Deakins was, or what a DP was either.

  This is the sort of thing we miss when we’re locked up and don’t get to hold hands and kiss and hug and just be people together, I kept thinking in those last couple hours. Even my blisters burst and we’d had more snacking and sips of water to keep us going today. It was good and it was sad at the same time. The same for all this time, really—sad but good. Okay, maybe Jackson was a little high-strung for me, and Trent was a little young. But as a triangle? It was almost surreal how we were all meshing and rolling along, forgetting for just a minute about the end of the world.

  Then, here we were, facing down ruins and what felt like picking through a graveyard, choosing teams without meaning to.

  Trent and Jackson followed where I went, so it was the four of us walking carefully through the cracked outlet mall parking lot, the other three across the street.

  Even those of us uptight about things like littering and looting were beginning to take such matters in stride. The outlet mall was a cornucopia of supplies, from shoes to outdoor outfitters to an entire outlet devoted to chocolate and candy apples. Vast quantities of all of this was destroyed, buried, or otherwise inaccessible without heavy machinery. It was not, however, ruined by flood waters.

  I was able to worm my way in and liberate a whole gift basket while the three guys held up a support beam at the chocolate store, snapped and caved in with the quake. Thrilled both by my mighty heroes and the rewards, I was even more excited to see what I’d snatched: calories. Truffles, peanut butter balls, pecan caramels, dark chocolate mints, chocolate and caramel pretzel popcorn, and more. We did not stop or pass go. Knowing we could get more and share with the others at a later moment, we tore into that thing like a shoal of piranhas. Even Ramak didn’t mention saving for a rainy day.

  Munching chocolate and popcorn, we poked around everything that looked outdoorsy or homey, seeking a lighter, camp stove, radio, batteries, anything like that. We grabbed warm winter coats for the night, but had to give up with anything more, including finding any humans. No bodies, either, as far as we could see or smell in the outlet mall. Because of the lockdown few businesses remained open. Nothing here would have been considered essential, so the place had probably been empty when it hit. Before we totally lost light, we had to make our way to a neighborhood.

  Thankfully, we didn�
��t have to pass another black night; the other team whipped our butts when it came to productive searching. Their side of the street featured those service stations and fast food, but also a partly destroyed Safeway and…

  “Jackpot!” Christine shouted when she saw us crossing the street.

  Jeff was waving a glowing flashlight. Nazia held up both hands in a triumphant gesture. It turned out, they didn’t carry any food besides canned soup. They’d been to a hardware store.

  “Oh, man,” Jackson said slowly. “Round one to Team B.”

  “Bet they didn’t get truffles,” Trent said from the corner of his mouth.

  Jackson gave him a high five.

  “Is that a radio?” Ramak hurried forward. He insisted on opening the tiny travel radio, batteries included, right there to get the thing on, wasting the last light. Then we couldn’t get the thing to pick up a clear signal anyway.

  “Of course, radio towers down, and no one in Seattle transmitting,” Ramak muttered over it. “It might not be powerful enough, same with cars, but let’s keep trying and move it around. Stop the dial if you hear the faintest hint of a voice. It might get something from north or south, or out toward Yakima.”

  Yakima was a long way, with the Cascades between, but no one said anything. We were too glad of the hardware store. They informed us that we could get into part of the grocery store, and showed off three flashlights and a camp lantern, as well as a handful of pocket lighters of the sort displayed by checkout, and we reached for them like kids for candy. You’d have thought Christine was passing out hundred dollar bills. Crazy, really, how fast priorities can change.

  We walked on into town, finding another business complex to the right, a neighborhood to the left, then the main street beyond. The sun was setting by then. We called out and shone lights around with no answer. No roar of a generator, no flicker of light, no hint of a voice. Only a few cats darted here or there.

  Nazia did finally catch a hint of a voice on the radio and we strained to listen. Now leaving the dial, we kept moving the thing, aiming the antenna different ways, walking all over with it.

  I was holding it over my head, thinking of rooftops, when, “There!”

  Ramak, with a light, rushed to join me on a sidewalk corner. Nazia tipped her head. The three of us listened, holding our breaths.

  A male broadcaster’s voice. Some sort of news, yes. But the words…?

  “There are…” Static. “Before…” Static. “At this…” Static.

  I eased my hand around just a bit, tipping the antenna. It did seem to help the higher up it went. “You take it,” I almost whispered, still struggling to hear.

  Ramak was around six feet tall, with long arms to add even more lift to the little radio. He moved up right in my face, taking it from where I already held it to keep the signal, then inching higher.

  More stray words, everyone gathering around, then all static.

  “Upstairs,” I said.

  Ramak nodded. “But structures are unstable.”

  “Some were all right in Issaquah,” Jackson reminded him. “This way. Old bunch of houses but we’ll find another neighborhood if they’re all caved in.”

  “Do you think we can start a fire?” Christine asked with a shiver.

  “What do you expect us to do?” Jeff asked. “Heat chicken soup before we eat it? Picky-picky.”

  They laughed at that and Jackson said, “Sure we’ll start one. We’ll put ourselves up in the Ritz tonight.”

  We set off to find our Ritz, radio still aloft.

  Chapter 13

  I don’t know if it was a well or some of the city pipes had survived. One way or another, our Ritz proved itself not by strong staircase or radio signal, but by running water.

  We managed to find two old houses that hadn’t been shaken right off their foundations and looked safe enough to try, one tiny rambler and one almost as small, but two-story with a caved in porch and useable side door.

  With the discovery of a functioning bathtub in each, only Ramak and Jeff were left to worry over getting the radio up to the attic.

  Possessed of one mind, the rest of us raided kitchens for the biggest pots we could find, cleaned away plaster and glass where needed, filled the soup pots, then brought them to the fire that Jackson had blazing. We dug a fire pit in the weedy lawn and gravel between the two houses, built up the sides with stones, and collected armload after armload of wood debris from trees and houses all around.

  With a flashlight on the counter, aimed into the broken mirror, I filled the tub with several inches of cold water, then a couple pots once they finally reached near a boil. The bath remained shallow and cool, but bliss all the same. Soap, towels, disposable razors, basic first-aid care like antibiotic cream and ibuprofen were all in that little, 1970s, smashed bathroom. Truly our Ritz.

  I didn’t linger. Between the cold and rather creepy sense of isolation there in the dark with just a flashlight, remembering months of alone time, I wanted back to the guys, a touch, body warmth, more than I wanted a soak. I drank straight from the cold tap, washed and scrubbed with a washcloth, shampooed my hair three times, shaved legs and underarms, and rinsed as well as I could with dunking, cloth, and faucet. Then up to dry with towels inclined toward plaster dust no matter how much they’d been flogged, while Trent was eagerly waiting with the next pots. I drained and rinsed out the bath and started it running again, letting him in the bent door with a towel around me.

  “What about ladies first?” I asked.

  He had oven mitts on a pot and hurried past to dump it in. “The girls have staked out the other one.”

  “Any radio update?”

  “Who cares?” He kissed me, both of us laughing.

  “Who knew water could be so intoxicating?”

  Trent dropped the hot pot into the bath and wrapped his arms around me, mitts and all, really pressing in. His tongue was hot and insistent on my lips, which I parted for him, opening mouth and lifting hands to loop around his neck—close, warm, more, yes, please, finally, more… He was all there was left for just a minute, like finding food and water. Maybe this was better. Maybe this was even more important.

  His greasy hair and prickly beard reminded me that I just rid myself of all the horrors in that flood and probably shouldn’t reintroduce them.

  I shoved his chest, stepping back and hitting the counter. “Social distancing,” I snapped and again we laughed. “At least until soap builds a future between us.”

  “Do they have deodorant here?”

  “Are you implying anything?”

  “I was thinking of myself, but the more the better.”

  I giggled and pushed him again. “They do. And razors and toothpaste. Haven’t found a new toothbrush but I’m looking. I love these people. I’m so grateful, even if they don’t know it. Go get another pot.”

  I longed for his touch, couldn’t stop thinking of him as I slipped on the trail shoes and ventured out to leave him alone. Couldn’t wait to see the transformation.

  While more pots of water warmed, Jackson had spread a huge quilt over the middle of the family room carpet, pushing back a coffee table and chair. The sliding glass door had split right out of the back wall and smashed on the aggregate patio, leaving the whole wall open to the mild night. At least it felt like spring now, the only real trouble without a wall being the insects attracted by the camp lantern on the coffee table. Jackson was gathering provisions, coats and clothes in here, starting at one corner of the quilt to set everything out, taking stock.

  When he saw me, he started explaining how we could get all we needed from the outlet mall, but had to be careful. It was all sensible and real world. And I so, so didn’t give a damn.

  I found a dusty kitchen towel to rub my hair, standing at the missing wall, trying to see stars through dense evergreens out back.

  “You can clean your wounds. Try to soak them in the soapy water,” I said. “It helped my shoulder. And there’s ointment. I’ll put it on you
r back.”

  “How about your own?”

  “I already patched up mine. Blisters burst, feet clean.” I turned as he stepped up to me. “It’s no exaggeration to say, all things considered, I couldn’t be better.”

  “I know how to make you even more better.” He grinned as he reached both hands to my bare shoulders, avoiding the cut, while I rubbed at my head. He leaned in to kiss my forehead, chapped lips gentle. The gesture startled me, both action and feelings from it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Jackson kissed my lips, would have welcomed him. But this was so sweet, so intimate in a not sexual, not threatening way, it nearly made me choke up.

  As I lowered my hands, just looking up at him, he stroked his own down my neck and along my bare skin. Fingers and thumbs pressing in, he kneaded across muscles I hadn’t known were so bunched up, down the point of my shoulder and back to my neck in a gentle rhythm.

  “You’re right.” I shivered. “That is better.”

  “Turn around.” He leaned close as he spoke, as if murmuring a secret.

  I turned, facing out the open wall into darkness of a hauntingly silent April night. Splash of water and voices of the others came only faintly.

  Jackson’s lips brushed the back of my neck along with four-day beard, giving me a start and fresh shiver. He pulled away the kitchen towel, kissed my damp hair, and massaged down neck and shoulders again, digging in just a bit. The sensation was warming and tingling at once, soothing so I could have melted at the first blow. I longed to reach to steady myself on the doorframe, shut my eyes, rock in place with him, but the doorframe was gone, only jagged wood and plaster. I kept still, so still it seemed I was listening for our heartbeats to sync.

  Jackson stepped in closer, unusually silent, all about the feel as he rubbed down my back to the edge of the towel. I lowered it without thinking, no sense of being self-conscious. I pulled the tucked-in part, letting cotton slide down my ribs. His strong hands followed, sure and slow and comfortable, as if they did this all the time. I suppose massage was part of his work. Still, there was something so incongruous about the idea of his work, it left me catching my breath to be able to picture him for the first time as a healer, an intimate stranger capable of silent compassion. Here was the other Jackson. I wanted to know both sides better.