Andy had always been proud of his wiry, taut physique, and sure, the London Fire Brigade had a fitness requirement, and the Search and Rescue Team an even stricter one, but his new comrades-in-arms were made of sterner stuff than he. They were tempered and honed, forged in heat and disaster; he, at twenty-two, was still a shapeless, molten mass.
“Your first time’ll hit you like a brick wall,” Les said. “When your time comes, it’ll be beautiful. It’ll make this feel worthwhile.”
Mike, the chief officer from Leicestershire, had the new recruits stand, starkers, on the table. Andy thought about how unattractive the men were around him, how warm the air was in the room, how this humiliation was nothing. He unbuttoned his shirt and unbuckled his pants. The table was dotted with beer and coagulated fat. Andy had shaved his chest recently, but not recently enough: small sprigs of blond hair sprouted, making him look dewier than ever. Other inductees were older and had barrel chests of hair. Andy stared at the ceiling, where cigarette smoke accumulated, tinting the plaster gray. Other inductees hunched to obscure their tackle, but a few had accepted the futility and let everything hang, arms spread like they’d burst that way from the womb. Andy was surprised to see how pale they all looked under the hazy yellow lights, proof that they were unready for the world.
“If you fall backward right now,” Mike asked, “would you trust your brothers to catch you? On the count of three.” Andy had done this exercise before — usually with clothes. But that was the point. If you couldn’t trust your crew naked and ashamed — whom could you trust?
“Three!” Mike said, and Andy fell. For a moment, his body rejected this new vertigo; it wanted to stay upright, but even before he’d tilted thirty degrees, hands cradled his calves. Andy kept his body rigid and locked his knees. If you’re going to save me, you’ll have to save me as I am.
“I’ve got you,” Colin said. Anonymous hands supported his weight. Trusting these men wasn’t something he could simply choose to do or not to do. Either they would save him, or they wouldn’t. So be it. If they were going to let him down, he hoped they would do so gently, but just in case, his body tensed for the hard fall.
Fifty Hours after the Earthquake
Andy’s legs grow numb. Everyone’s restless. Men walk up and down the aisle, swinging their arms. Any energy they had at Tikar had worn off by Maliya and by Gandhidham completely dissipated. It reminds Andy of a school trip. Once the initial raucousness fades into fatigue, all that remains is the want for home.
Les rifles through his bag. He could probably do it blindfolded. “My first time, I was completely out of sorts,” he says. “I mean, we’re set up for earthquakes and fires and all that, but in Mozambique, it was floods, and I didn’t bring a pair of macs. My boots got so swollen that my feet didn’t fit.”
He takes out his hammer, cuts through the old grip tape with a pocketknife, and peels it back like a banana skin. He finds the edge on a new roll and rewraps the handle, rotating the hammer, flattening the tape with his thumb.
“When we arrived, we rode motorboats up the river, and I’d see huts along the shore that didn’t look too bad. Then all of a sudden, we crested, and the river opened up onto a lake that used to be a town. Nothing but dead animals floating in the water. Chickens and pigs and cows, rotting.
“I went to a collapsed schoolhouse. I was thigh-deep in mud. It was warm like pudding. I felt like I’d pissed my pants. All I saw was little bodies. They looked like they was made from mud. But you’d touch one, and the mud rubbed off, and you saw skin. The bodies were warm from it. The stuff poured out of their mouths.
“And then I heard someone gasping. Real faint, like I was imagining it. In the corner, a chalkboard had toppled against a wall. When I moved it aside, there was a little boy in an air pocket. He’d managed to keep his head above the water. I dug around him with my hands until I reached his knees, and when I pulled him out, the mud gurgled, like it didn’t want to give him up. And for a moment, it all made sense. All the medical training, all the workouts. Everything.”
“Did it make you feel better?” Andy asks.
Les restashes his hammer. “Almost.”
Mike briefs them on the chain of command: although they are working under the auspices of the Indian Army, they are to take directions only from him or Colin. They will deploy as soon as they set up camp, so they need to be ready at a moment’s notice. Bring any problems to his attention immediately. Take the time to make sure that their packs are fully stocked and set to go.
“Let’s calibrate our watches,” Mike says. He stands at the front of the bus, shifting his weight as if he’s lived his entire life at sea. “On the count of ten, it’ll be ten thirty.” Andy holds out his watch, his finger on the button. “We should be there at any moment.”
Fifty-Nine Hours after the Earthquake
As Andy steps off the bus, his body cracks. They are in a large green, next to what’s left of town hall. It must have once stood three stories high, but now it’s an outcropping of timber beams and broken doors. Wires dangle, as if reaching out for attention.
He takes in a deep breath and coughs it back out. Too much dust. Others clear their throats and spit. The air roils overhead from the earthquake. The breeze creates swirls. Andy wants to slip a mask over his face, but sees no one else has, so he doesn’t.
One team is dispatched to where live contact has been reported, but Andy gets volunteered to set up camp. Fine: there’s work to be done. He drives metal spikes into the ground. Hitting the hammer against the metal, the sharp ting it produces, eases the crimps in his body. Gets the blood flowing. Andy strips to his T-shirt. Steam sizzles off his skin. During drills, the team constructed camp in under twenty minutes, but those were practice conditions, where the aluminum support poles sunk easily into green turf and held fast. Fresh air, the sun at their backs, Colin standing off to the side with a stopwatch. “Let’s pick it up, men!” Andy could secure a spike with just two strikes; now it takes five before the dry clay and dead grass give way.
Mike meets with the interior minister and the state police chief. The chief strides around as if the situation were well in hand. The brass bars on his epaulets are shiny, his mustache is ruler trimmed. Two Indians soldiers carry cartons of bottled water, followed by another with two red petrol cans. Other soldiers mill about, awaiting orders, their uniforms the color of the earth, their skin like strong tea. The police chief points at Andy and waggles his fingers, as though shooing away a gnat.
As Andy wonders what the policeman said, his hammer glances off the head of the spike and smashes his left thumb. He brings his fist to his mouth. Fuck! He sucks his thumb. It tastes of iron and two days’ worth of dirt. The nail is unbroken, and only half of it is purple, but when it throbs, each throb is a sparkler of pain.
He’d injured this thumb four years ago during training. During his search-and-rescue obstacle course, he tried to climb the three-meter vertical wall and, halfway up, lost his grip. He landed with his thumb beneath his body, and it wrenched away from the rest of his hand, and as he rolled on the ground, Reg, the drill leader, called him a cunt, a weakling, not fit to rescue a cat from a tree. That night, he could have cried about it — the pills the med officer gave him were a step above Panadol — but he wanked off to Reg’s face moving closer and closer, repeating cunt, cunt, cunt, until Reg was whispering in Andy’s ear. As Andy came, he tilted his head on the pillow to let the word leak out. The next day, hopped up on painkillers, hand taped and immobile, the world unbearably bright, he returned to training and stared down Reg, and Les called him a stubborn fucker.