I wondered how I might get out of this place. Though the electricity had gone out, there was that big streetlight right outside, and its light was coming through the holes in the roof. There were flames in several spots around me, though I couldn’t hear them crackle.
I remembered I was strong. I remembered I should be helping. Well, there was no helping the girl beneath me. I had helped Lanette by telling her where Mookie had been the last time I’d seen her. And look at what happened. Lanette had left. Maybe I should just fend for myself, huh?
But then I thought of Claude. I should find him and help him. It seemed to me it was my turn.
I took a shuffling step, now that I had a purpose. My left leg hurt very badly, but that was hardly a big surprise. Didn’t make it hurt any the less, though. I looked down unwillingly, and saw there was a cut in my leg, a very long slicing cut down the side of my thigh. I was terrified I’d see another splinter protruding, but I didn’t. I was bleeding, though. Understatement.
I took another step, over something I didn’t want to identify. I could feel my throat moving and I knew I was making sounds, though I couldn’t hear them, which was fine. They were better unheard. The beams of the streetlight that came through the roof had a surrealistic air because of the dust, which swam and floated in their light.
I stepped carefully through debris where there had been order just minutes before; the dead and dying and terribly injured where there had been whole clean living people. My leg collapsed once. I got back up. I could see other people moving. One man had gotten to his knees as I neared him. I held out my hand. He looked at it as if he’d never seen a hand. His eyes followed the line of my arm up to my face. He flinched when he looked at me. I figured I looked pretty bad. He didn’t look so great himself. He was covered with dust, and he had blood flowing from a deep cut in his arm. He’d lost the sleeve of his coat. He took my hand. I pulled. He came up. I nodded to him and went on.
I found Claude in the far aisle of the church, where I’d last seen him talking to the sheriff and the minister. I’d been closer to the bomb on the east side of the church, but the sheriff and the minister were dead. One of the big bar-shaped lighting fixtures had fallen from the ceiling and hit them square. They’d been much the same height. Claude must have been a step ahead of them. His legs were under the long heavy bar and he was lying on his stomach. His hands and arms and the back of his head were covered with white powder and debris and dark red blood. He was motionless.
I touched his neck, couldn’t remember why I was doing that, and began to push the long lighting fixture that was pinning his legs. It was very heavy. I was in terrible pain, and wanted desperately to lie down. But I felt there was something wrong about that, something bad, and I had to keep on pushing and pulling at the light fixture.
I finally got it off Claude’s legs. He was stirring, heaving up on his arms. I made a connection in my mind between the flashing blue light and Claude. I saw a group of lights swinging around catching millions of dust motes, thought it was in my head. But I gradually worked out that these were flashlights in the hands of rescuers.
It seemed to me they would want to move the most seriously injured first; at the same time, I had to admit, I really wanted to go home and shower. Maybe an ambulance would drop me off at home. I was sure sticky and smelly, and I was so sleepy. Maybe Claude and I could drive together, since we lived side by side. I knelt down by him and leaned over to look in his face. He was in agony, his eyes wide. When he saw me, his lips began moving. I smiled at him and shook my head, to show I couldn’t hear. His lips drew back from his teeth, and I knew that Claude was screaming.
Oh, I had to get up again, I realized wearily. I made it, but I was pretty sick of trying to walk. I shuffled a few steps, saw an upright figure ahead of me in the uncertain gloom. He swung around, and my eyes dazzled in the sudden blast of the flashlight. It was Todd Picard, and he was talking to me.
“I can’t hear,” I said. He ran the flashlight up and down my length, and when I could see his face in its glow again, he looked sick.
“I know where Claude is,” I said. “You need him, right?”
He illuminated himself with the flash. “Where-is-he?” Todd mouthed. I took his free hand and pulled, and he followed me.
I pointed down at Claude.
Todd turned in another direction, and I could see his hand go up to his mouth, his lips moving; he was screaming for help. Claude was still alive; his fingers were moving. I bent down to pat him reassuringly, and I just fell over. I didn’t get back up.
I don’t remember being loaded onto the stretcher, but I do remember the jolt of being carried. I remember the brilliance of the lights of the emergency room. I remember Carrie, all in white, looking so clean and calm, and I remember her trying to ask me questions. I kept shaking my head, I couldn’t hear anything.
“Deaf,” I said finally, and her lips stopped moving. People were busy around me; there was near-chaos in the hospital corridor. Since I wasn’t the most seriously injured, I had to wait my turn, and that was fine, except I couldn’t have any pain medication until Carrie had looked me over.
I blanked in and out, waking to see people moving up and down the hall, gurneys rolling past, all the doctors in town and most all the medical personnel of any kind.
And then, very oddly, I felt fingers on my wrist. Someone was taking my pulse, and while that was not so extraordinary, I knew I had to open my eyes. With an effort, I did. The detective was bending over me. He was so clean.
I could not hear much, I found, but I could hear a little, and I could lip-read.
“Is your head hurt?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly, every word an effort. “My leg is.”
He looked down. “They’ll have to stitch it up,” he told me, and he looked very angry. “Who can I call for you? Someone should be here with you.”
“No one,” I said. It was an effort to talk.
“There’s blood all over your face.”
“The woman next to me was…” I couldn’t think of decapitated. “Her head came off,” I said, and closed my eyes again.
When I opened them some time later, he was gone.
I hardly woke up when Carrie stitched on me, and it was a surprise to find myself in the X-ray room. Other than these travels, I was out in the hall all night, which was fine. All the rooms were filled with the more seriously injured. And I could tell by the constant flow of ambulance personnel that some people were being sent to Montrose or Little Rock.
Carrie came by and shook me awake every so often to check my eyes, and the nurses took my pulse and blood pressure, and I wanted most of all to be left alone. Hospitals are not places for being left alone.
The next time I opened my eyes, it was daylight. I could see a pale watery morning through the glass doors of the emergency room. A man in a suit was standing by my gurney. He was looking down at me. He, too, was looking a little squeamish. I was really tired of people looking at me that way.
“How do you feel, Miss Bard?” he asked, and I could hear him, though his voice was oddly beelike.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to me.”
“A bomb went off,” he said. “In Golgotha Church.”
“Right.” I accepted that as the truth, but it was the first time I had thought of the word bomb. Bomb, man-made. Someone had actually done that on purpose.
“I’m John Bellingham. I’m with the FBI.” He showed me some identification, but my brain was too scrambled for it to make sense.
I absorbed that, trying to make sense of it. I thought that since Claude and the sheriff were down, the FBI had been called in to keep the peace. Then I cleared up a little. Church bombing. Civil rights. FBI.