When she was in place and pulling on the door-handle string, she began to push. First a couple of centimeters, then an inch, then two, then there was daylight, and to her surprise, water began to rush into the bomb shelter. The water—green and brown—was a toxic mix, and it was pouring into Erika’s only salvation from the devastation that awaited her on the other side of the door. Suddenly, Erika felt an immense pain down her lower back, over her butt, and down the back of her legs. She quickly quit pushing, jumped to her feet, and let the force of the water outside slam the door shut again.
Chapter 3
Erika had to react fast. The water was melting her skin! She flipped the table up on its legs and climbed on top to escape the flow of toxic mush that had entered and was aiming to melt her flesh right off her body. The stench it released was incredibly horrible. She stood on the table in awe, but was quick to realize the implications as the back side of her body began to burn with pain. She knew she had to get washed off, but the water had come in much faster than she had realized, and it had filled her cement cavern with a foot of toxic waste.
“Great! Now what am I going to do?” she sobbed, “I’m going to die right here on this table. No! Pull it together. You have to wash this shit off.”
Her survival instincts had begun to kick in again. She remembered the little bottles of water they had kept for certain picky customers. Erika didn’t know if the toxic sludge—that had flooded the landing, the stairs, and had run down to fill the floor area—would eat through her clothes and shoes as well as her skin. It didn’t appear that it had done so yet. Only the skin that had been exposed was enflamed. She stepped off the table into a toxic film that still barely coated the stairs. The cupboard door flew open as Erika tore into it, desperately reaching for a case of small water bottles. She took them to the table. Then she carefully took off her clothes and flung them into the watery abyss below. She was not going to tolerate the threat of any more of that sludge getting onto her skin.
She poured the cooling water over her screaming burns and wondered what they looked like and how bad they were. She would be able to coat some of the burns with the healing power of the little tube of Neosporin, but some on her back were unreachable. She wished her husband was there to rub lotion on her. She remembered his soft touch as he had rubbed sunblock over her sunburned body, but now it was just her. She would have to just leave them to heal on their own.
Once she was rinsed off and had some salve on the throbbing skin, she went to the cupboard that contained the uniforms. She had to stretch out over the sludge in order to reach the fresh clothing. She dressed but then quickly removed the clothing. Her blistered body had flared out at the soft cotton, and it was more than she could take. Erika thought she could just go without clothing, but the cold that was encased in the cement crept up on her until she could not decide which was worse: the cold air, or the pain of the clothing. In the end, she devised a way of wrapping her body in what little gauze she had and the cheesecloth that the chefs had used to supplement the gauze. This gave her some protection and cushioned her body from the rough elastic waistband.
In her new wrap, the pain subsided, and after redressing herself, the warmth began to comfort her again. Her candle was burning low by the time she was done caring for her wounded body. Knowing that she had no way to obtain her lighter, which provided her with flames, she grabbed another candle, a bigger one this time, from the box in the cabinet. When she originally lit the candles, she had used the larger one for the lower area, figuring that she would need that one longer, but her current dilemma had proved that assumption wrong. She was at a complete loss on how to put an end to this nightmare, now that things had managed to become even worse than they were before. She puzzled at why the water did not seem to drain from the lower floor even though there was a drain. Then she realized that the water was more like slime, and it was so filled with debris that it clogged the drain instead of flowing through it.
Erika’s stomach rumbled, and she responded to its needs. She was hungry for something more than fruits and nuts, so she began to search the cupboards for anything else that could be eaten without cooking it. Some dehydrated milk with oatmeal and water became her final choice. She devised a way to heat it in a pot over the candle and ate a dinner of warm oatmeal with a tangerine. She ate, still standing in that toxic film. Her blistered skin was a constant reminder of just how dangerous the water that had run down the stairs and filled her chasm was. After eating, she had nothing to do but think. Standing there, skin burning, she stared into the abyss below. Suddenly, a thought flashed into her mind.
“There was daylight when I opened the door. The whole restaurant was gone. Of course, it was the dam. I bet it broke when the quake hit. The water flooded in. I wonder how much water is out there. Did the water sweep everything away?”
Erika was somewhat correct in her estimation of the problem. She had gone to college, and while she was there, she did a report on the implications of building a new dam by her house. She knew that once the reservoir behind the dam was filled, if anything should ever happen to the fragile structure, a one- hundred-foot wave would descend upon the Capital building in Sacramento within an hour. In its wake, it would leave a disaster area resembling a nuclear catastrophe. The dam had been built despite the demonstrators that visited the building site daily while construction had been in progress.
On that particular evening, while Erika had been at work, the great Mother Earth smashed the dam with her vicious shaking and let the destruction sweep her pestering children away. Hardly anything of a capitol city remained. People, houses, cars, pets, crops, everything had been drowned in water. It unleashed thousands of tons of toxic chemicals that had been stored by humans for various purposes. The sludge that remained ate anything alive that dared to challenge it.
Erika had been saved by that grumbly customer who had sent her down to the shelter for their very best bottle of wine. She was the only one left alive in Sacramento. Her situation was bleak, and she knew it.
“What am I going to do now? No one is ever coming to get me. How would they know I survived? I’m half burned by that slime. I can’t swim through it; I can’t even walk through it. I’m going to die here. I’ll never make it home to my family. Maybe Vince wasn’t even home when it happened. He could be dead too, for all I know. I can’t even sit down!” Erika was frantically screaming and wailing in sheer misery.
Tears rolled down her face, and Erika flopped down on her stomach on the table. Lying on her stomach was fine. Her back was straight, and her body fit perfectly across the table. Completely drained of all will to survive, Erika continued to stare down at the water that now filled the floor area. She desperately wished she could get to the supplies that she had utilized down there. As she stared, the candle that she had lit down there before the water came in began to dance and flicker like a strobe light. One of the empty plastic jugs that had formerly been stacked in the far corner was floating by. Its movements were accentuated by the strobe lighting. As she stared at it, an idea came to her.
“If only I could float on top of that water jug, I could float out of this sludge. Wait a minute… maybe I can. The water delivery guy was going to come tomorrow, and there were even more empties than normal to collect because it was a holiday the week before this. There must be at least ten of those things floating around. But how would I sit on them without getting wet? If only I had a piece of wood to hook them to.”
The implications of her statement clicked as soon as she laid her head back down on the oak table that she had lugged to the top of the stairs before the water came in. She stood up and jumped down to the concrete landing. She placed the table onto its side and began to kick the legs off of it. Once the legs were lying in a heap on the floor, Erika began to wonder how she was going to hook the huge water jugs to the solid oak slab she had created. Before she could attach the jugs, she would have to fish them out of the toxic sludge. How to do that was a mystery in itself. She need
ed a very long pole, but her space was limited to the stairs. She went to the cupboards and began to rummage through them. She did not find a pole, but she found items like the cooking string and a box of duct tape that might come in handy for building her craft once she had obtained the essential materials to make it float.
Erika began to think of the daily operations of the restaurant, and what they would have used that would suit her current needs. She remembered the high vaulted ceiling lavishly painted and the giant chandeliers hanging from it. When dust had accumulated, they had used a giant feather duster hooked to a long pole to reach the otherwise unreachable heights. They had stored the long pole in a piece of plastic PVC piping that had been cut in half and hooked with U-bolts to the ceiling of the shelter over the stairs.
She looked up and saw the familiar tubing. Her eyes lit up, and she ran up to the landing. Standing on her tippy toes, she could just barely reach the PVC pole. She pulled it from its sheath and began to wonder what she could attach to it to make a hook at the bottom. She was at a loss. Finally, she decided that the two-pronged fork they had used for stabbing meat off the barbecue could be bent so that the tongs formed a hook. She took the fork and pressed it against the concrete until the tongs rounded up toward her hands. When she was done, she grabbed a roll of duct tape and attached it firmly to the pole where the duster had formerly been attached.
Now, with her new tool in hand, she was ready to start fishing. She was excited by this new purpose, and it eased the pain of her injuries. She grabbed her candle off the table but then decided she should just light another one. Erika could not afford to lose the only light she had when her lighter lay on the other side of the toxic pond. After she had the additional flame burning, she went down the stairs to the last one not covered by the sludge. She put the candle down on the stair by the cupboard door and began to move the pole toward one of the jugs.
As Erika predicted, ten of the plastic jugs floated in the mush, but only half of them would be reachable. Erika decided she would deal with that issue later. Erika reached out with the pole and began to roll the jug around until she could see the handle. Then Erika hooked the bent fork through the handle and pulled back. It worked! The jug was moving closer. The only problem Erika could foresee was how she was going to pick the jug up when it was coated in the toxic goo. Erika thought fast. She was too excited about getting her raft built to let this problem slow her down. All she had to do was stand up to reach the cupboard that held the box of rubber gloves. She put a pair on and grabbed the jug out of the green water. She put the jug two stairs up from where she sat, so it would not hinder her fishing the next one out, and once she had collected them all, they could be washed later. She pulled the next two jugs out in the same fashion. After some problems hooking the handle, she decided it would be easier to just drag the jug in with the pole.
The rubber gloves worked perfectly at protecting Erika’s frail skin from the burning sludge. On the fourth jug, though, Erika put her hand too far into the water and a drop had burned her arm as it ran down the inside of her rubber glove. She had to remove the glove and get a new one. She also washed her skin carefully with water to avoid further burning. Erika came up with a solution to this problem while she was washing. She went and got one of the long-sleeved cook’s shirts and put it on. Then she held the cuffs while she slid her arm into the rubber gloves. The last step she took was to wrap the area where the rubber glove met the long-sleeved shirt in duct tape. With her arms covered, she could work without the fear of reaching too far into the water or having some of the water run down into her gloves.
The delay that the burning drop had caused was actually a blessing in disguise because all but two of the jugs had floated into the reach of the pole during the cleaning. Before long, three of the last four stairs were stacked with the eight water jugs. Erika rinsed the jugs lightly with as little water as possible because she only had two flats of water left. She had no idea how long it would take her to find more water once she left the shelter.
Now all her materials were together, and she began constructing her raft. Erika’s biggest difficulty was figuring out how to attach the tabletop to the water jugs. She was tired and hungry, so she went rummaging through the goods in the cabinets again. She picked out a peach, an apple, and a banana that were really starting to look gross, but she mixed them with oats and nuts and ate them anyway. She sat down on the top stair to eat. As she ate, she contemplated her dilemmas. She had quite a few rolls of duct tape and figured it would work, but how much would it take? She didn’t want to deplete her whole supply with just this one task.
She moved the oak table flat on the floor of the landing. By now, the sludge had all drained off, and she figured it would make a great area for construction. Erika envisioned a craft kind of like a makeshift pontoon boat. Erika thought the most resourceful way to put it together would be to attach a row of four jugs to one another with the duct tape to form one of the pontoons. She would have to seal the tops up tight so that only the air would fill the space at all times. She covered the opening in the five-gallon jug with the rubber glove and then held it in place with the sticky duct tape. Then she started to attach one jug to another with the tape. Pretty soon, there was a line of four jugs all put together and securely fastened. She laid that one aside and made the next row. Now she had all the pieces to the raft assembled, but how could she put it all together? She thought about just using the duct tape but that would be a whole lot of tape, and it had taken a lot just to connect the jugs together. Her supply was dwindling quickly, and she didn’t know if she had enough. She needed something that, when wrapped around an object, would cover space faster than duct tape, but was waterproof and sticky like the duct tape.
She thought back about when she and Vince had gone skiing. They needed the four-wheel drive that the truck had, but if it was snowing, their gear would get all wet. To avoid this, they had wrapped their gear in plastic bags. Erika dismissed this idea because the plastic bags would only loosely wrap things. She needed to connect the jugs to the table.
It made her feel good to think about her husband. She kept thinking about him and her dilemma. She remembered talking with him about what his boss did when he was driving his truck in the rain and needed to keep his tools dry. He had wrapped them in cellophane. The plastic wrap had formed to the tools and had kept them dry. That was it! There was a whole box filled with individual rolls of cellophane in the cupboard.
Erika ran over to the cabinet and grabbed a roll of the prized wrapping. She laid all the pieces for her craft out together in the way they would be put together. She began to wrap the jugs and the table in the plastic wrapping. She started wrapping the length of it first and then the width, until the plastic wrap covered everything and was holding it together well. She had used every roll, except one, to wrap the craft but knew it was a good investment of resources. Erika was not sure that the cellophane alone would hold her craft together; she would have to use some tape to help it out. She had enough duct tape so that, once she had reinforced the craft in a coating of it, she had four rolls left.
The craft was finished. She took it down to the water for a test float. She put it in the water and the jugs held the table top far away from the toxic sludge. She was triumphant but very hesitant about climbing aboard. Whenever you rode in a boat, especially a raft this size, you got at least a splash of water on you. Usually this was no big deal, and a welcome relief from the summer heat, but in this case it would be very painful. She had protected her arm skin from the burning liquid. She remembered her plastic gloves she had used to reach for the jugs and looked at her craft. That was the solution. She would wrap herself in the same fashion as the boat. She decided a coating of cellophane under a layer of duct tape should be worn over her clothes. That way it would allow her to move around but still protect her from the sludge. She left a gap at the waistline that could be unsealed and resealed so she could still relieve herself.
Her body was complet
ely covered in gray duct tape except for her yellow rubber hands and her completely unprotected head. Finally feeling a little safer, she boarded her raft. She had brought the pole that she had used for fishing out the jugs so she could direct herself around the watery space. It worked perfectly, and she moved with ease. She headed right for the shelf that held the purses. She pulled them off the shelf and piled them in a heap on the raft, and she grabbed a hooded sweatshirt as well. There was nothing else of use above the water, but she thought about the drinkable water and wine that lay below. Just then, her eye caught the gleam of the wine she had stashed by the table before the water came in.
After trying to hook the pole to the milk crate that held the full bottles and pull them directly up to the craft, she found that leaving her head unprotected was a bad idea. The water had splashed as the raft bobbed under the weight of the crate, and even though only a small drop got her, it had burned a spot on her neck under her ear. She had decided that nothing was worth the risk of suffering more burns and left the bottles where they lay (Erika was not aware that the toxic sludge had eaten away the corks in the bottles anyway).
Once she docked her craft at the stairs, she took her reclaimed goods to the top. She went into her purse and got one of her few remaining cigarettes, lit it, took a deep drag, and sighed. She knew she had a lot to do if she was going to escape this dungeon alive. As Erika began to consider what she would need for the long voyage ahead, she thought of food first. There were lots of nuts and oats left; there were also raisins, dried apricots, prunes, and some very overly ripe fruits. She really had no idea how long she had been living on this diet but thought maybe she had been there about two weeks or so. Regardless, she was starting to feel the effects of the lack of proper nutrition; she longed for some protein, but this was all she had. She needed bags to pack her goods in and thought the purses would work well. She would also take one crate filled with the remaining fruit that was actually worth taking.
Day After Disaster, The Changing Earth Series, Uncut Edition Page 3