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Nick had me, and he held on to me, and he lifted me out. I scraped my back on the window frame and was pulled into the gray-white day outside. It was cool there, and raining again, like it had been for days.
19
Drop by Drop
We staggered into the street and dropped ourselves down behind the nearest vehicle—a blue and tan Ford Explorer, circa 1994. It’s funny, the details you remember afterwards. It’s funny the way the small things that you might have overlooked—that you should’ve overlooked—stick in your head, like your brain is looking for something else to think about.
Anything else.
I looked down at our ankles and there was more water, coming up still, and coming up slowly. Unstoppable. Like the things underground. Looking up, above our heads—it was more water, in drips and drabs, not firmly resolved to rain but too heavy to stay aloft. And I was wrong about the sky, about my first impression of it. It was yellowed then, more than a gray-white.
It looked sick, the color of an almost-healed bruise.
Looking across, there against the vehicle—I saw water running down in rivulets, creeping its way down to splash on the road. There was a scratch, too, made with a key or heaven knows what. It was shaped like bird, sort of—like a kid’s version of a bird, a flappy M shape as it flies away into a background made with crayons or watercolors. The cheap kind, in rainbow colors on a plastic palette.
Around us the water pattered down but we didn’t hear it. We saw it bubble and bead and drop. All we could hear was the pounding, firing, pulsing of the contained blast—and after it, the crumbling fall of the building above it; and after that, the settling of the earth in sliding clumps into the tunnels. Filling them up. Covering them up. Like I’d planned.
Like I’d planned, but not like I’d expected.
“This wasn’t what I meant,” I said, leaning my head against the Explorer.
Nick slid down beside me to sit there, even though the water was there and it was filthy. He sat beside me and put an arm around me and I was mostly just stunned and listening, waiting.
But after the last of the settling, and the last of the cracking boards folding in upon themselves, there was no sound at all except for the hissing of water filtering down to where the fireworks sparked, here and there, under the leftovers. There wouldn’t be any cries for help. I knew that already. I knew he was dead. I felt him leave, and now I wanted to feel him come back. But there was nothing.
Also, though, there was no crawling, shoving, climbing of dead things. None of that either.
“It worked,” Nick said, as if that made everything okay.
“Who cares?”
“You do. It worked,” he said again, trying to pull me up.
I didn’t exactly fight him over it, but I made him work for it. When I was on my feet, toes pruning in the disgusting water, I answered him. “It worked. But it shouldn’t have . . . it shouldn’t have cost that much. ”
He braced himself like he thought I was going to start bawling again, but I didn’t. I was calm, because there was nothing else left inside me. I’d burned the rest of it out, or burned it off, and used it up.
“Look, I’m really sorry about . . . him, and everything, but we’ve got to get moving. We should go to the Read House. We need to—”
“What?” I interrupted him.
“Clean up. Regroup. ”
“There’s more you mean to say, isn’t there?”
He ran one hand across his forehead, moving the dirt-dreaded hair back above his eyebrows. “They’re still coming—the ones up above here. You know he didn’t bury but some of them. They’re going to need help getting people out, moving people away. They know it at the ball park now, too. If we hadn’t left when we did, they would’ve flown us out shortly. ”
“How do you know that?”
He cocked his head towards the park. “I don’t know it, but I suspect it. Bits of things overheard, you know. They were trying to empty the place. And now they’re going to try to empty the Read House. It’s a tiered approach to evacuation, they were calling it. Getting the population out in stages. ”
At the risk of changing the subject, I said, “Harry. We’ve got to go find Harry. I have to tell him so he can leave—so he can get out of here before it gets any worse. Harry won’t leave without him. ”
The last of it came out in a babble, but Nick was patient with it and nodded as he started to lead me back up the street to the hotel. “Good idea. Good plan. ”
“Not a plan, really. ”
“Good start of a plan. It’ll get us moving, anyway, and we’ll figure out the rest when we get there. We’ll figure it out. Come on. We’ll figure out something. ”
