“We’re going to anchor here and assess the situation, people. If it’s at all possible, we’ll ferry you ashore in the Zodiacs. I know you all want to get to your families as soon as possible, but I’d like some people to stay aboard for a day or two.”
“Company’s coming,” said Don.
A small motorboat was approaching across India Basin; behind it was a high wall of rubble where Innes Avenue had been, and beyond that the long hill with the housing projects that were the heart of the Hunter’s Point ghetto. As the boat drew nearer, the people on the bridge could see that it carried four young men. All were black and all carried rifles.
Chapter 5
The old woman lay on the wet blacktop of the school’s playing field. Her skirt and sweater were muddy and sodden. Kirstie lifted the old woman’s head, and held a styrofoam cup of water to her lips.
“I’m not thirsty, thank you,” the old woman whispered.
“All right, then. We’ll have you inside soon. The doctors will take a look at you, and then off you’ll go to a nice warm bed.”
“What’s your name, dear? Are you from England?”
“My name’s Kirstie Kennard, and I’m from Aberdeen, in Scotland. And what’s your name?”
“My name is Susan Smith. I live at ten-twenty-five Francisco Street. Where am I?”
“Just a couple of blocks from home, Mrs. Smith. At the school up the street.”
Kirstie glanced across the crowded field, over the crude shelters made of plastic sheets or slabs of plywood. The school was on the east side of San Pablo Avenue, and the disaster zone started across the street. From there to the bay, a distance of nearly two kilometres, almost every building had been damaged or destroyed. The old woman had been pulled from the ruins of her home and carried on the shoulders of two nameless men, men who had waded knee-deep through oily mud to bring her here.
“I’m cold. I don’t feel well.” Her breath rasped in her throat. She found Kirstie’s hand and squeezed it. For a long time she lay still; at last Kirstie put a hand gently on the woman’s narrow chest, feeling for a heartbeat. Beneath the skin she felt only the sharp ends of broken ribs. The old woman had died.
Rain pattered again on the plastic sheeting just above her head. The air stank of smoke and wet ashes and excrement. All around her, people lay or sat on the blacktop. Most of them were hurt; many were dying. Susan Smith had been the fourth person to die in Kirstie’s company in the last two hours. The schoolyard buzzed and hummed with voices: screams, shouts, weeping, laughter.
Standing up, Kirstie signalled to two black women standing in the school’s main doorway. They came over, lifted Susan Smith’s body onto a stretcher, and carried it around the building to the growing pile of corpses.
Kirstie went into the school for a drink of water. The halls and classrooms were filled with more people, mostly children, awaiting emergency surgery. Some cried out and wailed, but most were strangely quiet, even those who lay by themselves along the side of the main corridor. Above them, on the walls, were construction-paper murals of tulips and raindrops; in the middle of the floor was a thick trail of mud and blood.
Someone was screaming in the cafeteria, now being used as an operating room. A young medical student in jeans and a blood-spattered apron came out of the cafeteria and looked around. He saw Kirstie and waved her over.
“Doing anything important?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, you can go to this address.” He ripped a paper tulip from the wall and scrawled on it. “It’s a medical-supplies warehouse. Grab all the sulfa drugs and dressings you can carry. Somebody brought in some backpacks, okay, I think they’re behind the reception desk up in the school office. Fill ‘em up.”
“How do I get into the warehouse?”
“Uh, you may have to break in, okay, but we need the stuff. You’ll find the dressings in big boxes near the rear door. The drugs are in a locked room between the warehouse and the front office. The key to the room should be in the top right desk drawer in Ken Berkowitz’s office, okay, with a red Dymo tape on it.”
The young man turned and pushed through the swinging doors back into the cafeteria. Fluorescent lights, powered by a portable generator, glared over a dining table where four men held down a writhing, shrieking girl while a fifth man bandaged her arm.
“Oh, and morphine, okay?” added the young man over his shoulder.
“O-kay,” Kirstie murmured, feeling both relief and guilt at escaping from the schoolyard. She found the backpacks, by a cupboard containing a flashlight; if she had to go into a darkened building, the light would be useful. Going outside, she looked around for Sam and Einar, and spotted them by their yellow ponchos.
“I need you two,” she said. They followed her out of the schoolyard and down Francisco Street.
“Where are we going?” Sam asked. She told him; he whistled.
Walking across San Pablo and down to University was easy enough; the waves had been less than knee-deep when they reached San Pablo, and had left only a scatter of rubble. But the farther west they walked down University, the harder it became. Most buildings had collapsed into piles of masonry and splintered wood. Cars were tumbled and scattered, their interiors packed with mud, across streets and sidewalks and parking lots. The Southern Pacific Railway station, an old tile-and-stucco landmark, had vanished; where the building had stood, a derailed train lay toppled on its side.
The streets were swamps; in some places, the asphalt had been torn off and the underlying gravel scoured out, leaving waist-deep gullies. Fires burned in the ruins. A hotel, big and massive enough to have survived the waves, was now only a smoking shell.
Kirstie and Sam and Einar were not the only ones floundering through the rubble. Dozens of people were picking over the remnants of jewellery and grocery stores, or wandering aimlessly. One old man, in a long overcoat and mud-caked trousers, carried a new waffle iron in a string bag as he high-stepped through the mud.
“No cops,” Sam said as they paused beside an overturned Chevy pickup. “Where the hell are the cops?”
“Some are taking people to the hospitals,” Kirstie answered. “I think a lot of them with families just took off for home. I don’t blame them. We had some firemen working across San Pablo, but they all left in a mad rush — something about a chlorine spill in Oakland.”
Sam touched her arm. “Are you serious?”
“Well, of course.”
“How big would a chlorine spill have to be, to draw firemen away from this?”
“Pretty big.”
Through a gap in the smoke overhead, a helicopter chattered south at low altitude. “Bloody television,” Kirstie muttered. “They were circling around the school like vultures this afternoon, but would they land and help? Now they must be looking for something even worse.”
“Is that where we go?” asked Einar, pointing to a two-story cement-block building half a block away.
“I think so.”
The front entrance was buried behind drifts of twisted metal and shattered wood, including a part of a sailboat’s hull. Carefully, they worked their way through the adjoining parking lot to a side entrance. It was a glass door and had been smashed open.