“Loud,” Wendy whiner spoke up. “It was so loud.”
“The pressure, don’t forget the pressure,” Adina said. “One second it was rumbling, the next as the blast winds hit, all I felt was pressure like my head was going to explode.”
“Until it reversed,” the father of the little boy, Duncan spoke. His name was Tim. “It blasted one way and sucked back. When it did, it took every ounce of my breath away. I couldn’t breathe.”
Mark had been listening, he spoke up. “Was it a nuke? I mean, that sounds like a thermobaric bomb. Did anyone see the mushroom cloud, thermos wouldn’t have a mushroom?”
Van shook his head. “I didn’t see much.”
“I did,” the raspy voice spoke up.
I looked across the basement to the man who sat next to another person. I had yet to determine if that person was male or female. They huddled under a blanket, their face blackened with open red sores.
“I did,” he said. “I resolved myself to die. I perched myself right at my window in this building to watch the world end. I knew not to look at the flash. That flash brought an eerie silence, then all hell broke loose. I saw it rolling in, not flames or fire, but debris, carrying like a tidal wave. I stopped looking and ducked down. I didn’t expect to make it. I really didn’t. Once it swept back out and I could breathe, I saw my apartment was destroyed and that was when I looked out.”
“You saw it?” Mark asked. “You saw the mushroom cloud?”
“Two. They weren’t next to each other and I could only see the tops, but I saw them,” he answered.
The moment I heard that he saw two, I was instantly sick to my stomach. I excused myself and went to the cooler to check on Macy. I didn’t need to hear the stories. I wasn’t ready. Not yet.
“Take a break,” I told Ted. “I’m back. You can go out there.”
“I’d rather not,” Ted replied.
“I don’t blame you.” I walked over to my daughter who was reading out of a book that seemed to big and too advanced for her. “Hey,” I sat down next to her. “What are you reading?”
“Joan gave me this book. She had it in her purse. It’s for a young adult. She’s says I’m almost a young adult.”
“That you are.” I ran my hand through her hair. “Are you understanding it?”
“It’s hard to see the words in the dark. It’s making me tired.”
“You sleep then if you want.”
Macy nodded and closed the book, looking up to me. “Mom? What are they like?”
“The new people? Scared like us.”
“Are they hurt?”
“Yeah, baby, some are hurt really bad.”
“Do we know how to help them?”
“Not really. But … the good thing is one of those people is a nurse. She’s out there.”
“So, she can help them all?” Macy asked.
“I don’t know, Baby.” That was the best answer I could give her. I pulled her closer hoping my embrace, having me there, would help her rest. “You know,” I whispered. “You are so brave through this.”
“No, I’m not. Not really. But what choice do I have right now?” She rested her head against me.
So smart, so mature, so right.
She didn’t have a choice, none of us did. We could whine, cry, get angry, but it wouldn’t change anything.
We were there. In that basement. The world as we knew it was gone and there was nothing we could do but sit there.
FIFTEEN – WARRIORS
The first four hours in the cooler after the bombs dragged by. It was us six, behind the safety of that door, counting down the minutes until we opened it to release the build up of CO2. It didn’t matter that we heard the rattling and banging or that we felt the vibration of the ground shaking out of control.
Somehow, it just wasn’t real. I thought it would only become real once we emerged and went topside.
That wasn’t the case.
It was real the moment those nine people came down into the basement.
They brought the reality with them.
I didn’t know all their stories or whereabouts when the bombs hit, but they had to have been close, yet all of them had varied injuries.
Van, Adina and the mom with the baby seemed okay. Wendy Whiner or rather Beth, did have a head injury. Adina had said, if she could she would have sutured the wound. Beth also probably broke her collar bone. It was hard to tell. Adina assured us her pain was real.
As if we were the privileged ones, we stayed in the cooler, not that there was room for the others, but it seemed as if we marked our territory.
While the first four hours had dragged, the next eight to ten hours flew by.
We took turns helping Adina, refreshing the water, getting her bandages.
I grabbed one of the bulk cans of chicken noodle soup and was able to give everyone soup and crackers. It wasn’t much. The next day we’d have a plan. Joan said she’d work on the food part, she wanted to so she could focus on something.
Sometime in there, we all dropped off falling asleep.
I dozed off, the day had caught up to me. I didn’t dream of the bombs, I dreamt about waiting to watch my favorite TV series. I woke with a crick in my neck from the way I sat with Macy. Carefully I slid her from me and rested her on the floor and I stood up.
It wasn’t as quiet as I thought it would be. The sounds from outside the cooler had increased. Moans, whimpers and coughs.
“Can’t sleep?” his whispering voice asked as Mark walked into the cooler.
“Actually, I did,” I replied and stretched. “You?”
“No. I was helping out there.” He pointed back. “Thought I’d get some sleep or try.” He looked down to his watch.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Three am,” he answered. “Twelve hours. Twelve hours ago it all happened.”
“It seems like longer.”
“Unfortunately, yeah.”
“Get some sleep. I’ll go out and see if they need help.”
Mark walked to the far side of the cooler.
“Hey,” I called out to him. “How are they?”
He shook his head.
I didn’t smell it when I was in the cooler, but the second I stepped out into the main basement area, the sour foul smell carried to me. It took me off guard for a moment. The basement was dimly lit with those little table lanterns. I saw Van and Adina sitting on the floor by the freezer across the room.
“Thought I’d offer my help,” I said, approaching them.
“It’s quiet now,” Adina replied. “But soon it won’t be.”
“You should get some rest.” I joined them on the floor.
“I keep telling her that,” Van said.
“I’ll rest soon. Some of these folks ... they just need care and compassion.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I mean … there was no fire, right? Why does Jeff have burns? He was looking out his window. And the other guy, he looks bad.”
“He is bad,” Adina said. “The boy Duncan, he has burns, too. They’re flash burns. From the flash. Boris, the man you said is bad was on the bridge. I don’t know how he managed to stumble back, but he did. Tim and his son helped him. His clothes are burned to his back.”
I closed my eyes and cringed. “I didn’t realize it was that bad.”
“It’s that bad,” Adina replied.
“How did they know to come here?” I asked.
Van replied. “It was one of the few close buildings still mainly intact. There are others, yeah, but this was closest. They also said they saw us.”
“We went down into Samo’s basement,” Adina explained. “But it was falling down on us, and we knew we had to leave. We covered up with moving blankets. Tim, Duncan and Boris were covered with beta particles when they came into this place. I had to do my best to clean them. We took clothes from employee lockers.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Beta particles?”
“When a radioact
ive weapon detonates on the ground it sends the debris up,” Adina explained. “The debris comes down like snow and it is filled with radiation. Deadly ash snowflakes.”
“They never mentioned that on the news,” I said. “You know a lot.”
“Not by choice,” Adina replied. “It was part of a course we had to take at the hospital, especially when dealing with radiation, you learn a lot about it. I worked oncology at Children’s.”
“Oh my gosh, that is a hard job. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “I met wonderful people and saw a lot of miracles.”
“You think we’ll see a miracle here?” I asked.
“I think some …” She glanced over toward Boris. “Are too far gone for a miracle. Maybe for the rest of us there is hope.”
“The rest of us?” I asked.
“We’re close, Henny,” Adina said. “To ground zero. Ground zero has the highest levels of radiation. Don’t kid yourself into thinking there is none here. We may be sheltered from some, but not all. You can’t smell it or see it, but it is cutting through us all. Some more than others. We may feel fine now, but in a few days, a week, we won’t. It’s hard to say. People react differently to radiation. The older you are, the less your body absorbs. In Hiroshima some wandered ground zero and never got sick, some were miles away and died. There’s no telling what will happen, but make no mistake, the radiation threat is real.”
The news was horrifying to me. I heard about radiation, but when she spoke of it, it was harsh. “Is there anything we can do?” I asked.
“Yeah, actually, there is medicine that counteracts it, blocks it. It helps flush it out of your system. It’s out there. It’s in the hospitals around here. In a day or two we’re gonna need to make the hard choice to go get it. If we don’t …” Her head turned suddenly to the sound of violent regurgitation. She hurriedly stood up with an ‘excuse me’ and made her way to Boris.
I watched as she aided Boris who choked, coughed and vomited while she tried to give him comfort. She didn’t finish the ‘if we don’t’ part and I was glad she didn’t.
“You okay?” Van asked.
“Yeah, I am. Wasn’t expecting to hear that.” My eyes strayed to the mother holding her baby. “That poor woman with the baby.”
“Yeah,” Van said. “A newborn. She said he was born a week ago.”
I gasped. “She has to be so scared. She looks tired.”
“Henny …”
I slowly stood. “You know what. I may not be able to help medically, but I can help her.”
“Henny, listen …”
“No, it’s okay. I’m just gonna give her a break.” Without saying more, I walked over to the woman who sat nearer the stairs. I could see the baby was swaddled, not in a blanket but a tablecloth. She had one of those table lanterns on a box right by her head. Her eyes looked so big with the contrast of the light and her dirty face.
“Hey,” I said crouching to her. “You look tired.”
She only stared at me.
“Van said your son is a week old. I have to say, he is really good.”
She closed her eyes briefly and nodded.
“If you want a break,” I said. “I can hold him so you can sleep.”
She slowly shook her head.
“Why not. I’ll stay right here. Right next to you.” I extended my arms. “At least move this little lamp so you can close your eyes and I can hold …”
My hand touched the lamp and that was when I saw.
The baby wasn’t swaddled with a tablecloth, it only covered a knitted blanket that came over the boy’s head.
The blanket was dark, almost crusted. But that wasn’t what made me stop and freeze.
The child.
She held him close, almost hiding him, but I could see.
It was briefly, but it was long enough.
There was a reason I never heard the child cry. It wasn’t because I didn’t notice, it was because he never did. He never cried once.
The baby’s eyes were partially open, as was his mouth, she had him curled into her chest and to the blood stained shirt she wore.
Even in the dark I could see there was no movement or life in that baby, and more crushing was not only the collapse of the left side of his face, but the deep indentation of the part of his head that pressed against his mother’s breast.
Pressing my lips together, I set down the lantern. “I’ll let you … I’ll let you be.” I stammered the words, then I hurriedly stood and rushed away from her.
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I ran to the rear of the basement and to the other room down there. The entire short run was riddled with the vision of that baby as my stomach churned and twisted.
No sooner had I made it to the loading elevator section, I heaved outward, vomiting what little contents remained in my stomach.
‘Oh God, Oh God,’ I thought, half bent over grabbing onto my knees, trying so hard not to throw up again. That poor woman, that child.
I breathed heavily seeing that baby was soul crushing, it was a shattering of any optimism I could have had.
“You alright?” Van asked as he joined me.
“Can I be alone?” I asked, staring down to my own puddle of regurgitation.
“She won’t put the baby down.”
My stomach wrenched and before I knew it ... splash! Another puddle formed at my feet out of my control, vomit blasted from my mouth.
“Can you blame her? She’s destroyed,” Van said. “I tried to stop you. To tell you. But you were already over there.”
I took a few breaths. I still had that gagging feeling, my salivary glands were in full force, fighting the retching with an over production of saliva that poured from my mouth.
“When?” I asked. “When did he …”
“When we were running.” He paused. “She dropped him.”
With another, “Oh God,” I inched away, and my stomach twisted the last bit out as I held on to the wall for support.
“Adina couldn’t save him. She tried. I’m sorry. We should have told you,” Van said.
I wanted to scream. Just the thought of her running with that baby, so desperate to save him only to drop him was more than I could handle.
“What are we gonna do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Van replied. “We don’t have the heart to take him from her. Do you?”
I slowly turned around, running the back of my hand over my mouth. I slowly shook my head. I didn’t. I didn’t have it in me.
It wasn’t something I wanted to think about any more. Not even a day had gone by and already without even leaving our sanctuary we were faced with the horrors of what had transpired.
If there was so much pain, suffering and heartbreak in the basement, I didn’t want to think about what was above, let alone face it.
SIXTEEN – SLOW TICK TOCK
There was no day or night, there was only the hours that passed by. Some slower than the others, and each hour bringing something different.
One thing hadn’t changed, Ezzie continued to hold her baby. The infant she bore a few weeks earlier was still cradled in her arms. I couldn’t even imagine the horror of what she felt. Scared, young, wanting so much to protect her child but being the person responsible for his death. It had to be crushing.
She hadn’t eaten or moved from her spot. She hadn’t even gotten up to go to the bathroom.
I hadn’t spoken to Joan yet about it, maybe she could talk to Ezzie. But to do what? We weren’t going to be able to bury him. Were we to wrap him in a garbage bag and put him out like trash?
As tiny as his body was, in the twenty-four hours since the bombs, I could smell his decomposition. But that was the least of the smells.
It was horrendous and It was only one day.
Everything we smelled was related to sickness or injury. Smells, Adina said would eventually ‘go away’.
Then Adina mentioned to me that she thought that room, the back room that
led to the loading lift, or whatever you call those elevators that rise to street level, she thought it would work for the bodies.
Bodies.
Not one, not only the infant, but others. Who?
Boris was bad. That was a given.
In the twenty-four hours that followed he declined rapidly, spurting out occasionally with lucid moments about his time on the bridge.
We were closer than we hoped.
He insisted the fire hit the bridge. There were some arguments to that. One thing everyone could agree upon, Boris, Tim and his son, Duncan, had been exposed far too long.
Boris was already showing signs of sickness when he came into the basement, his vomiting and his hair was falling out in clumps. Tim and his son hadn’t shown outward signs until the twenty-four hour mark. Then they started to get sick. It was mild, a headache, not wanting to eat. Fighting not to vomit. A fever.
Their wounds seemed to get worse overnight.
It was gut wrenching to think that another child was going to suffer.
And Jeff, the window guy. That small burn on the side of his face went from red to purple and glistened in the candlelight.
They were the first, they had been really exposed.
There were so many people in the basement, a part of me felt guilty for not wanting to give them names. When I did that, I made them real.
It wasn’t at all what any movie depicted, or any experts told us to prepare for. I envisioned if I were in a shelter we’d be safe, fine, like we were in the early hours in that cooler.
Now, not only were we surrounded by the darkness of the basement, we were encased in the darkness the bombs had brought upon us.
And it was just the beginning. Only one day.
I wanted to run. I wanted to get my daughter and run. It wasn’t safe, I knew the first chance I got, I was taking her and leaving.
Where we would go? I didn’t know.
The time in the basement would be tedious, as if somehow that notion never crossed my mind.
It was far too early into the crisis for any person to have any job. Although, Joan seemed to always be counting and saying she was going to organize, and I would be the one getting the food. I think that had more to do with possessiveness over feeling like being the bomb shelter cook.
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