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 seen 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.
“We can’t let these people have time to think. Amy, it was okay earlier, you did the right thing letting people leave. We couldn’t have handled hundreds of them. There’s not enough food in town. But now it’s late. These people are wired, but they’re exhausted. They’ll fall asleep at the wheel. They’ll run over people on the road. So we need to keep them here. Wear them out. They can sleep in the morning, and by then we can figure out what to do next. But we can’t let any more of them leave tonight.”
“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:
“Danielle Adelman,” Amy interjected, “you are injured and this can wait until morning. I’m totally okay with the macho bit, it’s kind of cute, but this isn’t the time.”
Wulf Gunnar ambled up, crumbs of what looked like Sun Chips in his beard. Danny had never noticed before that the old man’s long nose changed direction three times along its length.
“I’ll go with you if I can carry that nice little Winchester,” Wulf said.
Danny smiled. “My old man’s sixty-three: custom twenty-six-inch barrel, squared receiver face, lapped bolt lugs. Field true for five hundred yards. That thing is a legend. You can’t have it.”
Amy was fuming. She tried one more time: “Do not ignore me! It would take the two of you a week to search this place, by which time the National Guard will have come and gone.”
Danny turned back, and now her face was serious and cold. The bravado was gone. “The National Guard is in a desert seven thousand miles away.”
With that, Danny called for the attention of all present and began to outline her plan.
Those who could sleep, let them. Those who could not, let them work. Danny chose the workers from those who least appeared to have lost their minds. Very few to select from. Danny picked Wulf. They would work in pairs to search the outlying neighborhoods while the rest of the survivors
organized the dead into rows along the sides of the street. Amy could keep that bunch going while Danny was gone, with Troy to assist. She didn’t expect much from Amy’s work detail, but the survivors couldn’t be allowed to spiral into complete shock and become incapable of caring for themselves—or worse, start looting. There were too many, few as they were. Danny started to introduce herself to Patrick and Weaver, but they already knew her name.
“We met at the greasy spoon,” Patrick interrupted. “You’re Danielle Adelman. I’m Patrick Michaels—” Here he paused, as if expecting Danny to recognize the name, but there was no flicker of recognition. “And this is my partner, Weaver Sampson. We never moved the RV.”
Danny shook his hand.
“Consider yourselves deputies of the Forest Peak Sheriff’s Department. We’ll skip the oath of duty for now.”
Danny deputized Wulf as well, refused once more to give him a gun, and the four of them picked their way around the corpses down Main Street to the Sheriff’s Station.
They would need radios, flashlights, gloves, and some cans of spray paint, of which Danny always had a supply, confiscated from the local graffiti artists. Mostly friends of Kelley. Weaver and Wulf dragged the people who had died inside the station out to the sidewalk, arranging them in a rough line along the foundation. Patrick wasn’t any help with the corpses, so Danny had him collect the materiel while she checked the radio again. There were a couple of units down in the valley that still had someone on radio duty, but they didn’t know any more than she did.
“Only that the dead outnumber the living,” a shaky-voiced cop in Artesia told her.
There was some small comfort in the fraternity of law enforcement, knowing she wasn’t the only one in the world on point. With regret, Danny signed off.