by Lou Cadle
And all this makes you appreciate how fragile life is. How many lives were lost today? What southern turn of the EF5 might not have killed me and Felix, too? You’re fine one moment, and the next moment?
Uploading and signing off while I see if I—if we—can help anyone here. People, appreciate the life you have right now. And love your roof and walls, even. You should be glad you have them.
Chapter 12
Sherryl was back in Jim’s room at the care center. Down the hall, there had been panicked sounds as the second tornado went through town, but it had missed the home by a good distance. She hadn’t even heard the wind.
She lay on her belly on his bed, her arm hanging over, stroking the bit of Jim she could feel. He hadn’t said a word since she got back. She didn’t think he was conscious.
“Ma’am?”
Glancing up, Sherryl saw a nurse’s aide in a flowered uniform at the door, peering at her over the pile of fallen walls and ceiling.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Hardly a bruise.”
“Is—?” The aide searched for the right way to ask it. “There’s a patient in this room?”
“My husband.” She shook her head. “There’s nothing you can do for us.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” She backed up, then hesitated, as if thinking about coming in.
“Don’t worry, please,” said Sherryl. “Help those who can be helped.”
Without another word, the aide was gone.
Sheryl bent back to her vigil. She pressed her hand against Jim’s chest and held her breath, waiting for the rise of it, or the fall, or the rattling feeling she had felt when he breathed a few minutes ago.
But there was nothing.
“Jim?” she said.
Nothing.
“Honey?” She closed her eyes and tried to feel with something other than her hand, some inner sense—was there any hint at all that he was still here? Or that he had gone?
There was nothing. She wanted something metaphysical or magical, but there was only the bare bed under her, and the smell of ruined wood and urine.
And poop, she realized. That was new.
Didn’t they say people did that at the end? She’d never seen a death up close, so she didn’t know if it were true or not. She’d had a cat once, a stray who’d adopted her, who she’d put down at the vet’s, but the vet had politely covered the lower half of the cat with a towel when he had euthanized him.
“Jim?” she said, feeling more and more certain he was gone. The cat had had an easier time of it, she couldn’t help but think. There was no movement under her hand at all. Just the pajama top, tacky with blood. “I hope I did the right thing. I hope you didn’t hurt too badly.”
She let go of his body and rolled onto her back, easing the strained muscle. She checked her watch. It was less than an hour after the first tornado had hit. If he had been in pain—and she couldn’t lie to herself and say he had not been—at least it had been for less than an hour.
What had killed him? Did something crush his chest? Did he bleed to death? Damage his heart? Had he had a heart attack from fear?
She hoped fear hadn’t killed him. Even more, she hoped that he had known she was with him.
She hoped most of all that she’d see him again one day in a better place.
Her hand was stained with blood. She wiped it on the mattress, but that didn’t help much. It was already dry.
An urge to go into the bathroom and wash it off made her shake her head at herself. There wasn’t going to be running water here.
It’s time to go.
First, there was the work of digging her bag out from the pile of debris. She methodically pulled and pushed and wiggled it.
She saw her bag and Jim’s foot at the same time.
Wasn’t there a pulse you could feel for in the foot? She checked for one, but felt nothing. His skin felt cooler to her. That sign of death hurt her and reassured her in equal measure. He was gone—feeling no pain. He was really gone. And she was alone.
She found her bag half under the bed and pulled it out. Her car keys and cell phone were in her jacket pocket. Her bag was right here. She felt around under the bed to make sure nothing had fallen out of it, then checked inside the bag itself. Wallet, book, appointment book, sunglass case. If there was anything missing, it wasn’t important.
She stood and dug her knuckles into her back, trying to ease the pain there, reaching as far around as she could reach. She was going to have to baby that—and if her house looked like this, she wasn’t going to be able to. Picking up wreckage was going to be on the agenda for the next several days.
So. See if I can get Greg on the phone and make sure he’s still okay. Drive to my house, if I can get there, and check it. Call the funeral home, or drop by, if either one is still standing, and make arrangements for Jim. Tell the receptionist here that there’s a body, where it is, who it is, and have her tell that to whoever recovers bodies in this situation. Then go and help whoever needs help in town, starting with Greg, and then their—no, not their any longer, not with Jim gone—her neighbors, and any friend who asked. Then everyone else, help anyone who needed it.
Her organizing this list of things to do was a way not to think of Jim, she knew. But these were all things she did have to do. And she’d hold to them to avoid thinking too much of how Jim had passed and to avoid worrying if she’d done the right thing or not.
Even if she hadn’t, it was impossible to change now.
She turned her back on the pile of rubble that had killed her husband, and she walked out of the room to start her final stage of life. A new stage.
I’m a widow now.
*
Greg spun in a slow circle, looking everywhere around the big empty lot that had been Central Elementary. The school was now a pit in the ground. Behind him was the basement corridor, open to the air. Over there, to the north, would be the larger pit that had been the cafeteria.
Except for those two holes, he had a hard time figuring out what was what. With houses scrubbed out of existence, and with debris scattered about, it was hard to even guess where the block ended. The prowl car was not where they had left it but a couple hundred yards to the east, on its tires, but looking as if it had been in a serious wreck.
Didn’t matter. He wasn’t driving anywhere. He was hunting for Holly.
“Holly!” he called.
If the car had gotten moved east, maybe she had, too. Or maybe he should look south. She’d gotten pulled out of the hallway toward the south. He skirted the edge of the building’s remains to the south, calling her name.
Every time he saw a big sheet of wood or drywall, he grabbed the corner and flipped it over, dreading what might be underneath. When he grabbed a piece of aluminum sheeting and sliced his palm, he remembered he still had the pink gloves.
He put them on and heaved the metal up, then over.
There was a small body underneath.
“No,” he whispered. But then he saw it was a boy.
He wanted to leave him, but if someone else found Holly, hanging on to life, he wouldn’t want them to do that. He’d want them to help. He knelt down among the broken bricks and wet papers and gingerly touched the boy. He was face up, and his face was cut up badly. Greg tried for a pulse and got nothing. Rested his hand on the chest and felt no movement. The boy was dead.
Holly.
He stood and called her name again. If the boy had come out of his basement corridor, she might be near. Greg mentally marked the piece of aluminum and plotted out a quarter circle, south and east of that. He’d walk in arcs, out from the boy’s body.
“Officer!”
He looked over toward the voice. One of the parents or teachers was stumbling out of the open stairwell.
“I’m missing two students.”
A teacher.
“There’s a boy over here,” he called back. “But he’s—” Greg stopped himself as a child clambered up on hands and knees behin
d the teacher. He looked to the teacher and shook his head.
Her hands flew to her mouth.
Greg turned back to his own search.
“What should we do?” she called.
What should they do? “Be careful. Don’t let any of the kids pick up something dangerous and get cut.”
“But,” she said, and trailed off as she took a good look around herself.
He couldn’t spare time to comfort her or advise her. She was going to have to figure things out for herself while he searched for Holly. He went on, kicking aside lighter trash, working out from the boy’s body. Each arc was more steps, back and forth, across his quarter-circle of land.
His radio crackled, but he ignored it. His gaze was fixed before his feet, hunting, looking for any sign at all.
A muddy scrap of material that might have once been white caught his eye. He bent down and picked it up, but it was a towel. Her shirt was white. Her skirt, a plaid, was gone, probably a mile from here by now.
That reminded him of the tornado, and he looked out east. It was much farther away now. The damnable thing.
I’m going to find her.
He kept pacing his search area, back and forth.
Bending down, he pushed over a wooden futon, parallel slats that had somehow made it through their journey in the tornado.
And dropped to his knees when he saw a severed human arm.
He choked and spit bile to the side. Tenderly, he reached down but could see that it was too big to be Holly’s.
It’s someone’s.
That person wasn’t a somebody any longer.
He heard his name, and realized it wasn’t the first time it had been shouted.
Reluctantly, he turned.
Massey. Vaguely, he realized it was good he had made it through okay.
Holly. The thought wouldn’t leave his mind. She was the one fixed point in a mind twisted by fear and horror.
“Hey, what are you doing over there?” Massey yelled. “We have injured people.”
“My daughter,” he managed to say, before his throat closed up.
“Aww, shit,” said Massey. “I—” He shook his head. “I have to help these people.”
Greg nodded.
“I’ll call the chief.”
Greg turned back to his search. For long minutes he looked, straining his shoulder once as he pushed aside a sofa, catching a piece of metal on his shin and cutting himself another time. He found another dead dog. No more bodies or body parts, thankfully.
“Holly!” he called out for the hundredth time.
He refused to think any thought but this: He’d find her. If he had to look for a week, he’d find her.
But it didn’t take a week.
Chapter 13
The sun had come out, perversely, illuminating a scene of destruction that reminded Greg of old films he’d seen of Hiroshima. It was about to fall behind another squall line in the west when he saw her.
He didn’t think it was her at first. The little dirty body lying on its side seemed too small.
But when he fell to his knees by it, he could see it was Holly. She had on the white uniform blouse, the pink flowered underwear, and the wispy brown hair.
The vision went blurry, and he realized that he was seeing her through tears. He dashed them aside and bent to her, afraid to touch her, terrified to know.
He touched her legs—so cold!—and took her hand to give it a soft squeeze.
“Daddy’s here, sweetheart. I’m here.”
He shouldn’t move her, he knew, but her face was smashed up against the back of an easy chair lying on its side. He had to see her face.
Gently, trying to keep her spine as straight as possible, he rolled her onto her back.
Her forehead was covered with blood.
A mewl escaped him. “Holly, Holly, honey, wake up.”
He pushed her hair away from the blood, and he saw a fresh welling of blood come out of a line in her forehead.
If it’s welling, she’s still alive.
Hope soared in his chest. He ripped off his uniform shirt and yanked off his T-shirt. Folding it, he pressed the cleanest side against the cut. With his left hand, he held it there while his right hand searched her muddy neck for a pulse.
His hand was shaking. He took a deep breath and willed himself to get control. For her sake, he had to snap to and let his first-aid training take over.
Finally, he felt it—a weak pulse in her neck.
“Thank you,” he said, to whoever might be listening out there. “Thank you for my baby’s life.”
Okay, he had risked enough damage by rolling her over. No more of that. He had to get her onto a back board.
He looked around himself. He had about a thousand items to choose from—plywood, chunks of fence, aluminum siding from metal buildings, an old-fashioned sled.
Digging around the debris, he found some heavy-duty electrical wire, and used it to lash his T-shirt to her forehead. Then he took up his uniform shirt and thrust his arms through the sleeves.
From his backboard choices, he selected a chunk of wood that had no nails sticking out of it, one not much bigger than Holly herself. He had to clear out a flat space next to her on the ground. He wished for a helper, but he knew Massey had his own hands full—and a wash of guilt came over him at the thought that he had left his partner alone to deal with the aftermath of the tornado.
Glancing around, he saw no one closer than a hundred feet—and most of them were combing through the debris, too. Over at the school, a fire truck pulled up. Good. Medical care.
He eased Holly onto the backboard, then wrapped her on with the rest of the wire, around the shoulders, then the waist, the hips and finally her knees. There was plenty of wire left over. He tried to break it, but it was impossible, so he wrapped it several times around the board and her ankles, until there was nothing left dangling for him to trip on.
He squatted alongside the stretcher and pushed his hands beneath it, at her shoulder and hips. Then he stood as smoothly as he could, lifting her.
It took forever to walk back to the school, trying not to stumble on the hundreds upon hundreds of bits of junk on the ground.
As he drew near, he saw several familiar faces—kids and teachers, the receptionist, and one of Holly’s friends from the neighborhood, a boy named Jorge. Massey was working with a firefighter to haul people out of the pit in the ground that had once been the cafeteria.
Greg went to the fire truck, shouted, “Triage?”
“You have an injury?” A male EMT with a stethoscope around his neck climbed out of an open door and approached.
“My daughter.” He could hear his voice break, feel his self-control hanging on by a thread. “Please.”
“We’ll take care of her.” The EMT clapped him on the shoulder.
Greg eased her to the ground. “Will you take her to a hospital?”
The man held up a finger and began to examine Holly’s still form. A distant part of Greg’s mind knew what he was doing at most points—checking vital signs, looking for injuries hidden to the eye. The last thing, he cut through the wiring around her head and lifted off the blood-soaked T-shirt.
The EMT finally looked at Greg. “You did fine with first-aid,” he said. “I’m going to clean and bind the cut, and she’ll go with the next load of kids.”
Greg swallowed. “I want to stay with her.”
“Until we go, sure you can,” the man said. “But we’ll want to transport the maximum possible, so no ride-alongs. You understand, right?”
Greg nodded. The logical part of him understood. The parent part wanted to curl himself around Holly to protect her and never let anyone take her out of his arms.
“You got her!”
Greg turned at the voice. Massey, carrying a limp boy in his arms. Massey waited while a firefighter walking just behind got a limping adult settled on the ground and covered with a reflective blanket, then Massey handed the firefighter the child, who
stared vacantly into the distance, awake, but as responsive as a rag doll.
“Shock?” Greg said, of the boy.
“Maybe,” said Massey. “No obvious injury. But how’s your daughter?”
“Alive,” said Greg.
“What happened to her?”
Greg told him.
“Wow, man. You’re lucky she survived.”
Greg didn’t feel lucky as the EMT finished bandaging Holly and then tied a red triage tag around her arm. Red meant severe, transport first.
Massey said, “The chief wanted to talk to you.”
Greg shook his head. He couldn’t think of that right now.
“I’ll try to get her on my radio,” said Massey.
Greg watched the EMT check under Holly’s back, feeling maybe for nails on the board or damage to Holly. He stood, feeling helpless. She was so still. So fragile and small and hurt.
He wanted to ask the EMT, will she live? But he couldn’t risk hearing the wrong answer. And the red triage tag told him enough. Not hopeless, because that’d be a black tag, but critically injured. And unconscious was never good.
The limping adult was being checked by the firefighter. He snapped a cold pack, handed it to the person and grabbed a green triage tag off the EMT’s batch. The adult wasn’t going to be helped any more than that—not anytime soon, not with that tag.
It finally registered with Greg that the adult was the principal of the school. His attention still half on Holly, he knelt down by the principal and said, “Are you okay?”
“Scratched up a bit, bounced around.”
“Did you—” Greg cleared his throat. “Did you lose many on your side of the building?”
“A lot of injuries. Cuts, one open fracture they pulled out first, some smashed fingers and hands. How about your side?”