The Last Nightingale (2 page)

Then abruptly, the ground's vertical movements slowed.

All movement stopped.

Quiet descended . . .

And within seconds, everything was shrouded in a deathly silence. The air felt like a thick wet blanket that did not transmit sound. There was nothing reassuring in the absence of noise.

The silence lasted for eight or nine slow heartbeats.

And then a deep rumbling began. A pulse throbbed, far beneath the earth's surface. It was indescribably deep, so low on the tonal scale that he felt it in his bones and deep in his chest. For an instant, his memory flashed a boyhood image of putting his ear to a railroad track, listening for the vibrations of a faraway locomotive. Except now there was no track and no train. This rumbling sound was wrong, completely out of place.

It was then that the first burst of real
fear
stabbed through him, stronger and colder than anything he had ever felt. It cut through
his training, his life experience, and at that moment, if the rolling earth had allowed him to climb to his feet, the fear would have owned him and sent him screaming into the night. His instincts already sensed what the rest of him was about to learn.

When he glanced down Mission Street, he stared into an impossible sight—a massive surge of energy was running toward him, underneath the surface of the earth. It hurtled through the ground like a wave of curling surf.

Solid earth was rolling like the sea itself.

His brain seemed to freeze while the invisible monster shot toward him and trailed upheaval in its wake. Brick storefronts buckled and exploded. Granite paving stones blew upward like kernels of popping corn. By the time the energy wave hit him, Blackburn was a paralyzed statue of astonishment. The wave tossed him into the air. When he landed and the street curb crashed into his ribs, the blow knocked all of the wind out of him. Then he could do nothing more than lie helpless: ten seconds, twenty seconds, fighting the sensation that he was drowning on dry land.

He rolled onto his hands and knees and managed to take a clear breath, but by then the invisible wave was long gone. The din of destruction overpowered his hearing. Behind him, the roof of the post office was gradually collapsing, and those sounds were only part of a much larger chorus. In all directions, buildings of every size were still shedding their stone exteriors like giant reptiles casting off skin. The ones that collapsed upon themselves expelled thick clouds of dust out the windows and doorways, coughing their guts into the streets before they died.

He turned his head in a circle and caught shadowy glimpses of Armageddon. Never since losing his wife and child had Blackburn felt the overpowering need to cry. Now the choking sobs took him as if they had only been gone for a day. He cried out in wordless despair. It was several seconds before he regained control and strangled the feelings back down. The noises around him diminished at the same time that he managed to squelch his own outcries. In a
self-conscious flash, he felt thankful to know that even if anybody was awake and looking out of their window and right at him, they were certainly far too distracted to have noticed his slip of emotion.

Meanwhile, another eerie silence was returning to the ruined landscape. It felt especially unnatural, because people should have been calling out, screaming in pain or crying for help. But instead there was a complete absence of voices.

He realized that survivors had to be out there: random miracles, mixed in with the rubble. They were scattered underneath the ruined buildings all around, just as surely as the silent dead were buried alongside them.

But still nobody screamed. No voices at all. Only the random sounds of falling debris punctuated a silence that was as deep and cold as the black waters of the bay. Blackburn had no idea how long it took him to stagger a block or so, but it was only then, after that much time, that the sounds from victims finally begin to drift up from the giant piles of rubble. The first cry that he heard was a long, ghastly wail. It started low, then quickly rose in pitch, like the sound of a distant hunting dog.

That initial outcry triggered a ghoulish chain reaction—other victims quickly sounded out from hidden and entombed places. Their voices carried a tone that Blackburn had never heard in his twelve years of hardscrabble police work. He knew the desperate sounds might as well be the wail of graveyard ghosts.

When a terrible scream sprang up through a rubble pile directly in front of him, he couldn't help himself. He abandoned the trip back to the station and began clawing his way toward the trapped victim.

Just as he closed in on the anguished sounds, he glanced up from his work and saw the first living person since the earth had attacked—a healthy-looking young man was scrambling across the rubble. He looked like he was running from a rabid dog.

“Hey! Over here!" Blackburn bellowed to the man. "Police! Help me dig!”

When the man ignored him, Blackburn bellowed in his strongest voice, "I said
police,
damn it! Stop right there!”

The fellow scuffed to a halt. For an instant, the young man swung around and stared straight at Blackburn, eyes like saucers. He paused there, just long enough to adopt an attitude and make a decision. Then he spun on the balls of his feet and disappeared.

Blackburn swore in frustration. He resumed digging and didn't bother to call for help again. Within a few moments, he managed to pull a large man free. The victim was bleeding from several wounds and seemed too injured to get very far. The man immediately began to wail in a thick Greek accent, "My wife! Where she is? My wife!”

Blackburn could only holler for him to stay put until someone could carry him out of the area. Then he stumbled away in search of the next buried victim. In the space of a few moments, screams were beginning to rise from everywhere, and there was still no able-bodied help to be seen.

It only took another couple of steps for him to reach the next source of cries—children, clearly, two of them—their shrill voices penetrated his bones. He abandoned himself to such a fury of digging that he did not feel the skin shredding from his fingers and his palms. Any object that his hands could latch onto was hurled to the side, in movements that he repeated over and over while the dust-filled air seared his lungs.

But soon, in spite of all the distraction, he noticed a new smell in the fouled air.

Smoke. Oily and thick, the source was somewhere nearby. He resumed digging, but within moments, the screams of the other trapped victims began rising higher. By now these people smelled the smoke too, and they grasped what it meant for them if they failed to get out of the path of the fire. Every breath that he took held less usable air. He began to go light-headed. His body started to fail him, in spite of his determination. His hands became clumsy paws. His thoughts ran thick. He tried to force his memory to tell him what he was supposed to be doing. He got no answer.

It was the feel of a tiny hand that brought him back. He had opened up a pocket of space that held two small girls, perhaps six and seven years old. They pounced on him, crying out in a language he couldn't identify while they grabbed at his uniform sleeves to pull themselves free.

He saw that both girls were bleeding, but before he could think of how to help them, they scrambled over him and scurried away, hand in hand, shrieking in panic. There was nothing else he could do for them. More trapped victims were calling out everywhere around him and his strength was quickly draining away. His only choice was to get to clearer air, and to gather reinforcements at the station: men, tools, water. Water most of all.

When he finally made it far enough up Market Street to a spot where random air currents had carved a trough of better air, his thoughts began to clear. He felt some of his strength return. But when he stared through the faint light at the place where he knew City Hall was supposed to be, the sight stopped him in his tracks.

Only a few days before, a fellow officer named Leonard Ingham told of a nightmare that had kept him up for hours; the entire city was wiped out in one massive conflagration. Blackburn remembered laughing at Ingham and chiding him for spending too much time around the Gypsy fortune-tellers down on the waterfront.

But here he was, staring at the spot where the high-domed City Hall was supposed to be, and most of it was reduced to rubble. The great dome's steel frame remained standing, but it had shucked most of its limestone covering, just as Ingham described. Worse, with all of the early morning cooking fires that had been burning at the time that the quake struck, the massive blaze that Officer Ing-ham's dream had predicted was certain to be close behind.

Blackburn hurried over to the ruined building. A dozen or so able-bodied officers were clearing space for a makeshift command center out on the broad front steps. In their midst was Police Chief Dinan, pacing back and forth, bellowing orders at anybody within earshot. The chief had already spotted him.

"Sergeant Blackburn! Thank God you're alive!”

“Yes sir, I was almost back here when it—”

“We need a man with your strength!”

“I'll do whatever I—”

“Most of the City Jail inmates are still under the building! We've opened a passage down to their cells. Check ‘em out one by one. If they're dead, leave them. Any that are injured too bad to work, leave them, too. Round up everybody else at gunpoint and march ‘em all down to Portsmouth Square!”

“Portsmouth Square? Sir, that's a long way from—”

“Shoot any man who breaks ranks!”

“Sir, there are already fires. Maybe we could draft the prisoners to work the hoses?”

“What are they going to
do
with the hoses, Sergeant? Use ‘em to beat the flames out?”

“What?”

“A runner from the waterfront just came up—every water main in the city is busted. There's not gonna
be
any water for these fires. But you can bet there'll be bodies to deal with. There are exactly two graveyards on this peninsula, and both of them are full. So you march those men down to Portsmouth Square and start digging trench graves!”

The chief grabbed Blackburn by the lapels and drew him close enough to blast him with a hoarse whisper. "We've got
plague
down in Chinatown, you understand me? And now the rats will be coming up out of every busted sewer line! Think about that, will you? You want to know how important this is—even though we've only got one motorized patrol car, it's not gonna do anything but ferry bodies down to you. That means our rescue work is all gonna be on horseback or most likely on foot, hear me? Just so you can get the bodies we send you into the ground, fast as you can.”

The chief dropped his voice again. "And make sure to cover them too deep for the rats. We can rebury everybody later. Somewhere off the peninsula. Oakland, maybe.”

Blackburn felt a flicker of worry that Dinan had gone over the deep end. "Chief, if you mean the Black Death, I've never heard about any plague in San Fran—”

“You weren't
supposed
to hear!" the chief bellowed. He forced his voice back down to a croaking whisper,
"Nobody
was, except a few of us! We've been hoping that those few cases that have come up were brought directly in, but that the plague itself isn't really here. Nobody knows for sure. And now you can keep quiet about it too, or I swear I'll bury you right along with the—”

“Yes, sir! I'll go right now!”

“You sure as hell will if you want to stay upright, Sergeant! And mark me, now—these inmates, tell them you've got orders: If any man even
looks
like he might try to run, you're gonna
shoot him down).”

Blackburn hurried to comply. But there was hardly time to get down into the cell area and holler for the attention of the captive men before the next big aftershock struck, thirteen minutes after the initial wave.

Just when he announced to the inmates that he had a proposition that could get them out of their cells, the earthquake rolled through with a force that dropped all of them to the floor. The basement area was claustrophobic, making this second quake feel much more powerful than the first. Blackburn was sure that if it didn't subside within twenty or thirty seconds, the rest of City Hall would collapse into the basement and make a grave for all of them.

Luck gave them a nod; this shock wave faded quicker than the first, and when he was able to pick himself back up and peer through the dust, he realized that his sales pitch to the men could not have had a better opening. He saw the same death panic in their eyes that he had felt inside of himself. There was no need to use force. He asked for volunteers and got a general show of hands.

They all smelled the thickening smoke.

He and his two officers were so heavily outnumbered that they had to move with great care in hooking up their chain gang. It used
up valuable time to get the men organized by height, for equal stride length, and then shackled into teams on long leg bindings improvised with sections of wagon harness. The sun was well over the horizon by the time the big sergeant and his young patrol officers marched away with their twenty-five conscripts.

By now massive smoke columns were rising up in every direction, joining together high over the city in a ruinous pall that blocked out most of the daylight. The three officers marched their charges into what was becoming artificial twilight, armed only with a rifle and a double set of sidearms for each man. Blackburn had instructed them to make it a point to look like they were itching to use their guns, and for a while at least, the simple theatrics worked. The trembling "volunteers" felt less fear of marching deeper into the burning city than of the bullet in the back they were convinced any man would receive if he attempted to escape.

At 8:14
A.M.,
another powerful aftershock set everything to rattling, and this time it was too much for dozens of the city's brick and stone buildings; they finally shattered and crumbled into the streets. Block after city block began to take on the appearance of a rubble-strewn artillery field.