* * *
She was still trying to process what had happened when the squad car radio squawked into action seconds later. Young Watts was on the other end, and he sounded terrified.
“Sheriff? You’d best get back to town. We’ve got a big problem around the trailer park.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Best you see for yourself. But hurry.”
Janet got into the passenger seat without being asked. Bill spun the car into a screeching turn and pointed it back at town. Even from here on the farthest outskirts it was clear there was indeed a real problem. Half the town sat in darkness, the shadowed area pockmarked with the red flare and flicker of flames. Something exploded, with the
crump
of the bang reaching them a second later. A pall of gray smoke rose before getting lost in the blackness of the night.
Are we under some kind of attack?
Bill didn’t hesitate. He sped along the highway and took the first possible turn-off towards the affected area, throwing the car into the corner so much that the back end started to drift, and he only just managed to hold them on the road.
“Steady on, Bill. The town’s not going anywhere.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
They only got fifty more yards before he had to screech to a halt. There was no road ahead of them, just a gaping hole. The headlights showed only darkness ahead, with no indication of the extent of this new collapse. Bill got out of the car.
“Stay here,” he said.
Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
She got out and joined him. The hole at their feet seemed bottomless, falling away almost vertically below them. Janet felt her head swim, and her legs start to go out from under her. Bill pulled her away, only a foot or so, but enough for the vertigo to subside. Smoke and the smell of burning rubber rose from the hole, but there was no indication what was down there. Janet was still trying to gauge the size of the thing when Bill let out a soft expletive.
She looked up and followed his gaze.
It looked like the whole north end of town was gone. At the farthest part away from where they stood, where the trailer park had been, several fresh fires burned. A scream came on the wind, quickly cut off. There were some trailers remaining, a handful at most, but there had been more than a hundred earlier, most of them with families, with children.
Between what was left of the trailer park and where Bill and Janet stood, the town looked like it had been bombed. It was almost too dark to see, for the street lighting had failed, but there were enough fires to show a vision of hell.
What had once been three neat streets of well-maintained houses and gardens was now a jumble of broken timber, twisted roofing and mangled plumbing. Water sprayed high from burst pipes, small fires burned exposed drapery and bedding and electricity sparked where downed wires slithered like snakes across the rubble. Janet saw what she took to be a doll lying on the remains of a sofa, bent and broken. But it was no doll; it was a child, no more than five years old, neck broken and discarded like a rag by whatever disaster had befallen the town.
She hadn’t noticed that Bill had left her side, and was now on the squad car radio.
“We need backup out here. Everything we’ve got. And call County, the National Guard…anybody you can think of.”
Somebody replied, too faintly for Janet to hear at this distance.
“No…an ambulance and the fire truck won’t be enough,” Bill shouted in reply. “Get everybody out of bed and down here. And do it now.”
The big man was red in the face and shaking, whether in fury or grief Janet couldn’t tell, but he was working himself up into quite a state. Janet was about to head over to try and calm the sheriff when she heard a weak cry, then two more, from her left.
“Help. Please. Help us.”
She picked her way over to the edge of the hole and looked down. It was dark down there, but the glare from the car headlights behind her gave her just enough light to see by. A family of two adults and three kids were making their slow way up the precarious slope. They looked like something from a war newsreel; mud-stained, pale with the wide, unbelieving eyes of victims.
And there was blood. Lots of it.
Just looking down brought back a fresh spell of dizziness. She looked to Bill, but the big man was still on the radio, still trying to impress the severity of the situation on his subordinates. Janet turned her back to the hole and edged down over the lip, keeping her gaze on the wall of earth in front of her face as she went down, her doctor’s instincts overriding all caution. Luckily the ground here was more clay than earth and although that meant it was hard going reaching the family, it meant less likelihood of the ground giving way beneath her. Her feet sucked and threatened to stick. She dug her toes into the thick soil and lowered herself, inch by inch.
“Help,” a voice called out, much closer now. She chanced a look down. She was only a foot or so above the struggling family. She allowed herself to slide down to where the small group still struggled upward.
“Thank God,” the father whispered. “I thought we were the only ones left.”
The man looked near exhaustion. Janet took the weight of a young girl who was slumped, exhausted, against him. That gave the man a fresh jolt of energy, and he was able to free himself and another child from the thick clay. Between them, Janet and the man started to make faster headway, and Bill’s appearance at the top of the slope soon meant they were all able to pull everyone out of the hole and roll aside, tired, panting, but alive.
* * *
It took her several seconds to catch her breath. Bill helped her to her feet, looked her up and down and smiled grimly.
“Looking good on date night,” he said.
Janet looked down. She was caked, from neck to toe, in clinging gray mud.
“You can help me wash it off later,” she said, and turned away as Bill’s mouth fell open in astonishment.
She spent the next ten minutes tending to the family. Apart from superficial cuts and bruises the kids were little the worse for wear, but the mother had a bruise the size of an egg above her left eye, and seemed confused, possibly concussed. The husband had deep lacerations along the back of both hands that she was able to bandage using the first-aid kit in the squad car, and she was just getting round to a nasty gash at his thigh when the first ambulance turned up.
Getting the man into it turned into somewhat of a pantomime as first he refused to leave his family, then the family refused to let him go without them, and the whole thing turned into a shouting and screaming match until Bill finally lost it.
“Just bloody go. All of you,” he shouted, the force of his personality so strong it shocked everybody into obedient silence.
“Nice job, Mr. Shouty,” Janet said as the ambulance, with the whole family crammed inside, headed out.
“Ain’t gonna be a lot of quiet around here tonight,” Bill replied grimly. “Best get used to it.”
* * *
Over the next half an hour they started to get some idea of the scale of the disaster. Janet spent most of the time tending to a steady trail of walking wounded. They arrived in dribs and drabs, picking their way through wreckage and around collapsed ground. Bill was somewhere out in the night with his deputies and three paramedics, assessing the damage and looking for more survivors. Janet felt more tense and nervous with every minute that passed. She tried to keep her mind on her job, to focus on the patients, but the thought of Bill out in the dark, with the chance of a fresh collapse at any time, had her nerves frayed to breaking point. She almost sobbed when the big man walked out of the ruins.
He had three kids with him, all of them in shock. He sat on the squad car hood, more tired than she’d ever seen him, caked head to toe in grime, soot and blood while Janet assessed the kids.
They’ll live. But they might never be the same.
She packed them off in another ambulance before turning to Bill.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
She thought he wasn’t going to answer at first, and when he did, it was in a small, almost childlike voice far removed from his usual confident tone.
“A full third of the town’s gone. Just gone…fallen into new holes. The worst of the damage is over at the trailer park. We’ve got over two hundred folks missing, and that’s over and above the thirty bodies we’ve recovered from what little wreckage was left.”
Two hundred?
Janet’s mind could scarcely take it in. The big man looked ready to burst into tears, and she feared that if he did, she might join him.
We’re not equipped for this.
“We need to get the authorities here in force. And we need them now.”
Bill wiped a hand across his brow, smearing a scar of mud across his forehead.
“I’ve made the call. They say they’re on their way. God knows when they’ll get here though.”
Janet looked around her. The area where they’d stopped the squad car was now a makeshift recovery center, a hubbub of medics, cops and volunteer townsfolk. And patients…an ever-growing body of wounded and shocked.
“I need to get these folks inside,” Janet said. “And if there’s going to be more, we’ll need somewhere with space for them all.”
That seemed to get Bill moving. He stood up, straightened, and was once more the strong cop she knew.
“I’ll get them to open up the church hall. That’s in the area that still has power, so we’ll get heat, running water, and someplace we can get some food into folks. Big enough for you?”
“It’ll do. For now.”
* * *
Bill had the church hall opened, and Janet helped with getting it set up as an emergency center. Supplies were few and far between, even after scavenging what they could from the police department, the supermarket and shops, and Janet’s own surgery. Bill had put out calls for urgent emergency assistance to County but Janet knew all too well the glacial speed at which local, and hospital management in particular, came to decisions, and she wasn’t holding out too much hope of getting any help before morning. She had to make the best of what they had. With over a hundred walking wounded, and more coming in all the time, it was obvious the supplies weren’t going to stretch too far.
That wasn’t the only cause for concern. Many of the wounded had their heads down, hunched over their cell phones, attempting to make calls. Nobody could get a signal. One teenager wailed, inconsolably, as if he’d lost a member of his family. An elderly gentleman that Janet didn’t know said what was on a lot of their minds.
“What if it’s like this all over? What if the whole country, the whole world, is going to pot? Maybe there is no help out there.”
Janet had her hands full, not only with treating wounds, but in trying to calm an increasingly agitated group.
“Can we move them?” Bill asked when she expressed her concerns on one of his return visits.
“What, all of them?”
He nodded.
“I ain’t too happy staying here, what with the possibility of a fresh cave-in at any moment.”
“You think that’s likely?”
“You think it isn’t?”
He had her there. She’d put such thoughts to the back of her mind while treating the wounded, but now that the back of that task was broken, she had time to think…too much time.
“You’ve got a point. I take it you have a plan?” she asked.
“I think we need to evacuate,” Bill said. “At least until we can check that it’ll be safe to return. If I sequester all the school buses, taxis and trucks in the area, we should be able to ferry everybody out at once.”
“Does everybody know?”
Bill nodded.
“I had what men I could spare going round knocking on doors. A lot of them have left already, and the rest know that we’re gathering around here. I just have to round up enough drivers for the buses.”
“I’ll do what I can here to get us ready for moving,” she replied. “Most are mobile enough, and fit to make a journey. As long as it’s not too far.”
Bill whispered, so that only she could hear.
“That’s what I’m worried about. How far do we need to go? I plan to head for the county hospital, as long as we can get out of town without mishap. How’s that for a plan?”
She smiled thinly.
“It’ll do, until something better comes along. A bit like you, really.”
He surprised her by taking her into his arms and hugging her tight.
“Don’t be going anywhere until I get back,” he said, and headed out into the wounded town.
9
Fred was back on a stool at The Roadside, drunk, but not as drunk as he wanted to be. A steady stream of distraught and bewildered townsfolk arrived in search of something, anything, to block out the sights they had just seen. Others had gone to see what they could do to help out at the church hall, and Fred felt a pang of guilt as he watched them leave…but not enough to shift him from his stool. He knew that if he saw even one blonde, he wouldn’t be able to do much except weep, maybe scream. He tossed some beer down after his latest JD and ordered another of each.