The Trip to Raptor Bluff

by Annie O'Haegan

  “If you would put some energy into helping out instead of pouting, Sarah…” started Lucy, but Kate silenced her with a nudge. Lucy squeezed her eyes shut and covered her mouth. “Dakota,” she moaned.

  “Let’s eat and go to sleep,” Kate said wearily as she pulled candy bars from Lucy’s pack. “The sooner tomorrow gets here, the faster you will see her.”

  **********

  Lucy was up before the sun and woke the others as soon as it was light enough to see. “That smell is from the people who died in the tsunami,” she said with deliberate bluntness. Sarah had not made a sound in thirty six hours except to groan and sigh, and Lucy hoped the harsh words would prevent a looming emotional collapse. It worked. Sarah went rigid with dread as she surveyed the endless piles of debris ahead of them. The scene was surreal in the dawn light, with boats sitting on cars, sitting on small buildings. A bus, skewered through the windows by a telephone pole, tipped precariously on top of an enormous boulder.

  “It’s not going to be an easy walk,” Lucy continued, “but imagine being stuck in the middle of this tsunami graveyard after dark. There will be dead bodies lying all around us.” She hurried down the hill with Kate and Sarah right on her heels.

  Kate took the lead when she saw that Lucy was attempting to walk a straight line regardless of the obstacles in front of her. “Pull the neck of your t-shirt over your mouth and nose to filter the smell,” she said. “Follow me. We have a long way to go if we want to get to the beach before dark.” She was making good time as she navigated the clearest pathways and Lucy and Sarah fell in behind her. “Stay away from the swarms of flies if you can help it. That is where the bodies are.”

  **********

  They had been walking for hours and the sun was directly overhead. “This isn’t fair!” sniveled Sarah. “You guys have backpacks so your hands are free. I’m trying to climb over all this stuff with two heavy bags.”

  “It speaks,” said Lucy dryly. “Wait, I mean, it whines.”

  “Shut up, Sarah,” shot Kate. “If you hadn’t left your backpack and duffel bag behind, you wouldn’t be stuck carrying all the water. Besides, we drank three bottles each since we filled them, so there are only seven left. Those bags aren’t heavy and you know it. Give me a break!”

  “You guys need to carry your own water,” whimpered Sarah. “I can’t carry two bags!”

  “Then move all the water into one bag and leave the other behind,” snapped Lucy. “Hurry up, unless you want us to leave you behind.”

  Sarah sighed loudly as she lethargically unzipped both duffle bags and began to move the bottles.

  “Hurry!” cried Kate. “God, Sarah! Do you really want to be stuck out here after dark? I don’t believe you!” Kate quickened her pace and Lucy followed while Sarah bellowed at them to wait up. When Sarah finally had the one bag packed and zipped, she started after them with no thought for where she stepped. Her blood-curdling scream halted Lucy and Kate dead in their tracks.

  “Oh my god! She fell on top of a body!” cried Kate, beginning to vomit.

  Sarah was on her hands and knees, elbow deep in the corpse of a woman whose torso had been torn open by her violent tumble through the tsunami. The dead woman’s milky eyes stared at nothing while mounds of maggots writhed in her mouth, nose, and abdomen. Sarah, still shrieking, fell backwards and began flapping her arms wildly, trying to fling the stinking gore from her body.

  “Sarah no!” screamed Lucy and Kate together. Sarah, who was a good twenty yards behind them, had opened the duffel bag and was pouring their drinking water on her bare arms and wiping at the filth with Lucy’s only clean t-shirt. She had emptied four of their seven bottles before Kate was close enough to kick the duffel bag away.

  Sarah sat two feet from the rotting body with Lucy’s gore-covered t-shirt in her lap. A reeking mass of maggots covered the front of her shirt, and a blackish, foul smelling fluid dripped from her chin and down her neck. Her eyes were glazed and mouth hung slack.

  “Don’t you dare go in to shock!” threatened Kate, wiping the vomit from her lips.

  Lucy had approached and was vomiting, too. Tears streamed from her eyes as she cried, “We are walking in full sun, we are already half dead from dehydration, and we aren’t halfway to the coast yet! How can we even hope to make it without water?”

  “There are three bottles left,” said Kate nervously. She did not like the look of stark panic on Lucy’s face. “We have to go, Lucy. We have to move now!” She walked over to the catatonic-looking Sarah and shoved her hard from behind. “Get up! Get up, Sarah!” When Sarah remained frozen in place, Kate grabbed her ponytail and yanked her to her feet. Sarah yowled in pain but stayed standing. “We are leaving you if you don’t keep up, Sarah!” Kate shouted in her face. “We are leaving you here to die alone and rot like these other zombies. You are going to be a stinking corpse crawling with worms! That,” she said, pointing at the dead woman’s mutilated body, “will be you!” She took the remaining three water bottles from the duffel bag and handed one to Lucy and one to Sarah before tucking the third in her backpack. “When it’s gone, it’s gone.”

  **********

  “I see flashlights,” whispered Kate through cracked and bleeding lips. Their water had run out hours earlier and her dry tongue felt like sandpaper in her mouth. They had trudged mindlessly throughout the afternoon, in full summer sunlight, with Kate in the lead and Sarah stumbling several dozen yards behind Lucy. Sundown felt like a blessing when it finally arrived but did nothing to alleviate their thirst. It was a torment far worse than the buzzing flies and rancid air.

  Lucy peered into the darkness, saw the flicker of multiple flashlights, and began to scream for help. Kate dropped her backpack and staggered towards the lights. Sarah fell to the ground and bawled like a calf in search of its mother.

  **********

  When Lucy awoke on the floor of a hotel conference room, it was daylight and Dakota was sitting beside her with an open bottle of water. “Dakota!” she cried, sitting up and hugging her daughter. “Dakota! I was so worried about you! How could you just run away?” She held Dakota fiercely and cried until Dakota squirmed out of the suffocating embrace.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Dakota said, blinking back tears. “Here, drink some water.”

  Lucy guzzled the water and took a second bottle from Dakota’s hand as vague memories of the night before surfaced. A group of adults and a teenaged boy had found them in the dark. Dakota had appeared right behind them, hysterical with joy. Lucy did not remember the walk back to the hotel, but she did remember being offered water. Everything after that first sip was fuzzy. “Where are we?” she murmured, letting her eyes roam over the crowded room. People were everywhere: some still sleeping, and some sitting or walking about.

  “We are in a beach hotel. The rooms are full of refugees so the medical staff and the military started putting people in the conference rooms and lobby.”

  “Were you able to reach Grandpa? Is he coming for us?”

  “No, Mom. I lost his number, but our names are on the list that goes out to everyone looking for families. I’m sure he knows we are here.”

  “Well, I need to find a phone. Dad will get us out of here today. First though, I need to use the bathroom.”

  Dakota led her outside to a row of four portable toilets standing several hundred feet away from the hotel. There were dozens of filthy people lined up in front of each. Lucy looked around her in disbelief. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “The toilets are new, Mom. They just came yesterday. Up until then, we had to go outside.”

  “This is completely unacceptable!”

  “We have to wait in line like everyone else,” Dakota said patiently. “Hurry up. The lines are getting longer by the second.”

  As they waited in line, Dakota explained that hundreds of people were stranded after the tsunamis washed through town, and most of them had taken refuge in the upper floors of the newest beach hotels. All the rooms we
re full, so any and all available floor space was occupied by people waiting for evacuation. Twelve children under the age of ten had been separated from their parents and were being cared for by military staff and civilian volunteers from among the refugees.

  “I’m helping with the toddlers, Mom. We didn’t even get diapers until this morning. There are also rooms full of people who are really hurt and need to be flown to hospitals, but there aren’t enough helicopters. There aren’t enough doctors, nurses, or medical supplies, either. The tsunamis wiped out the docks so the supply boats can’t get in. See that ship out there? It is full of supplies but everything has to be brought to shore by those little rafts, and it’s really hard carrying heavy boxes all the way from the beach to the hotel.”

  “This is like a third world refugee camp,” was Lucy’s only reply. “The toilets are disgusting. I can smell them from here.”

  “We are lucky to even have toilets,” muttered Dakota, realizing that her mother added nothing but tension to the already harrowing atmosphere.

  Lucy stepped out of the toilet shuddering with revulsion. “This is unacceptable,” she said again. “Come with me. We need to find a phone.”

  “Kate is fine, Mom. She was up early and was helping us with the little kids who can’t find their parents. Sarah was in the infirmary until they figured out that there was nothing wrong with her. They thought she was too hurt to walk last night and that’s why they carried her back to the hotel. She wasn’t happy about losing her cot.”

  Lucy was barely listening as she scanned the ragged crowd for military uniforms. She approached the first soldier she saw and demanded to be taken to someone in charge.

  “I know where the man in charge is,” Dakota said, sending an apologetic smile to the exhausted soldier. “Mom, be nice,” she whispered. “Those soldiers are trying to take care of everyone. Some of them haven’t even been to bed yet. Let’s eat while they are still passing out food and water, and then I will take you to Colonel McCoy.”

  When Dakota spotted Colonel McCoy, he was sitting at a paper-strewn table in a corner of the lobby and talking on a satellite phone. He smiled at Dakota and held up a finger to signal that he would be off the phone shortly. “Glad you made it, Ms. Zeem,” he said when he finished his conversation and rose from his chair. “Dakota was very worried about you…”

  “I need to use your phone,” Lucy interrupted, reaching for the phone with one hand and digging in her jeans pocket for her father’s number with the other.

  Colonel McCoy’s surprise quickly turned to umbrage as he snatched the phone before Lucy could grab it. It began to ring and he answered it, turning his back as he did. “We have at least fifty people in critical condition, and over a hundred with injuries that will become life threatening if we can’t get them to hospitals within the next twenty-four hours!” he barked into the phone. “We need evacuation helicopters around the clock until further notice!” When he turned back to Lucy, he said curtly, “Ms. Zeem, this phone is my only link to our rescue and supply sources. When I have finished making arrangements to get the injured out and critical necessities in, I am happy to let you use it.”

  “You can and will give me one minute to call my father!” Lucy demanded. “One minute is all I need. He can hire his own helicopter to get us out of here. His name is Joshua Zeem, he owns the Zeemercise company - which I am sure you have heard of…”

  “Mom!” gasped Dakota, mortified.

  “I don’t care if your father is the freaking President! This phone is for organizing supply intake and medical evacuations. Why don’t you have Dakota give you a tour of our facility, starting with the orphan care room and the infirmaries? That might give you some perspective.”

  “Wait!” Lucy cried as he stalked away. “He can pay you anything…”

  “Mom!” shouted Dakota.

  Colonel McCoy turned slowly. His face was twitching with disgust when he said, “I have a hotel full of people who have lost their loved ones; I have traumatized children who will most likely never see their parents again; I have injured people with bones sticking through their flesh and we are out of pain medication…”

  “But I have pain medicine!” interrupted Lucy. “In my backpack! I have OxyContin we took away from one of the girls we were traveling with!”

  “You have OxyContin?”

  “I will get it for you right now! I also have tons of candy and power bars to help with the food. Just let me use your phone…”

  Colonel McCoy’s eyes were narrowed in disbelief when he cut her off. “Did I just hear you correctly? Are you really telling me that unless I allow you to use my phone this very minute, you will withhold pain medication from people who are in agony?”

  Dakota stared with incredulity as Lucy crossed her arms over her chest and stated loftily, “That is exactly what I am telling you. I will trade my pain pills for one minute on your phone. Now.”

  “What is your father’s number? I will call him for you.”

  Lucy smiled triumphantly and handed over the slip of paper with Joshua’s number on it. Colonel McCoy strode into a small room across the hallway and disappeared around the corner. A few minutes later, he brusquely beckoned for Lucy to join him. The expression on his face was one of utter contempt. When Dakota followed her in, he put his arm around her shoulders to let her know that he did not hold her responsible for her mother’s behavior. “I put the phone on speaker, Ms. Zeem.”

  “Dad? Dad?” Lucy’s voice broke and she began to sob. “It’s horrible here! We had to walk through miles of dead bodies and now we are sleeping on the filthy floor…”

  “Lucy!” shouted Joshua so loudly that his voice was audible in the hallway. “Shut up and listen to me! Is it true that you have pain medication?”

  “Yes! I have a bag of …”

  “Lucy, you will send Dakota to get that medicine right now. You will not utter another word until those pills are in Colonel McCoy’s hands. Have I made myself clear?”

  “Yes! But Dad…”

  “Silence!” thundered Joshua.

  “Go get it, Dakota! It’s in the side zipper pocket of my backpack!”

  “Wait!” said Colonel McCoy. “We want the candy, too.”

  “Bring the whole backpack!” Lucy shouted at Dakota’s quickly retreating form.

  Dakota returned with the backpack in less than a minute. Lucy unzipped the side pocket and handed the bag of OxyContin to Colonel McCoy, then opened the large compartment to show him the candy and power bars. Colonel McCoy politely asked Dakota to leave the room, turned off the phone’s speaker function, and handed the phone to Lucy.

  “Dad? He has the pills! When can you come for us?”

  Joshua’s voice was smoldering with fury when he said, “Colonel McCoy assured me that you and the students from St. Mary’s are in good physical condition. He also told me that Dakota’s help with the youngest orphans has made her indispensable to those poor children: that she and Kate entertain and comfort them in ways the overburdened military staff cannot. For those reasons, I will not send a private helicopter your way. Colonel McCoy explained the evacuation process to me, Lucy. The sickest people are air-lifted out first, followed by the orphans and the families with small children. Everyone else is evacuated in the order in which they signed the refugee list. I told Colonel McCoy to evacuate Dakota when her name comes up on the list, and to send her to us. I told him to put your name at the very bottom of the list and to keep it there, no matter who signs up after you. You will be the very last person out, Lucy, and while you are there, you will take instruction from Colonel McCoy. I told him to put you to work helping the military and medical staff. If you defy me on this, you will never step foot in my home or my business again.”

  Lucy stared dumbly at the phone, her face draining of color as Joshua continued through clenched teeth. “It sickens me to know that you threatened to withhold pain medication from desperate people because you feel you are too good to suffer hardship with the rest of hu
manity. Where is that Christianity you have been shoving down our throats for the last year? Well, here is your opportunity to practice what you preach. You will stay right where you are and help Colonel McCoy take care of those poor people who lost their loved ones, their health, and their homes. Shame on you, Lucy Zeem! Shame, shame on you!” Joshua hung up the phone.

  “Sit down, Ms. Zeem,” said Colonel McCoy icily. “Let me tell you about the catastrophe our Pacific Northwest is currently experiencing.”

  Chapter 9 The Great Cascadia Earthquake

  Colonel McCoy stood before Lucy with his hands on the table. He leaned forward to emphasize his words when he said, “Ms. Zeem, you walked through the Drowning Fields and saw the horror with your own eyes. Now imagine that same scenario in every coastal city from Northern California, through Oregon and Washington, and up into Southern British Columbia. Those coastal cities, most of which are much larger and more populated than Port Fortand, are going through this same catastrophe. Entire communities - communities full of residents, workers, and summer visitors - are just gone.”

  Lucy nodded blankly, still stupefied after hearing that she was placed last on the evacuation list.

  “We don’t yet know how many thousands died in the tsunamis, or from collapsing structures. Countless others lost their homes, or cannot live in their homes because there is no clean water, sewage processing, or electricity. People cannot even pick up a phone to check on their loved ones because communication systems are down. They are digging through rubble or searching refugee centers for people they may never see again.”