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.”
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Talking to me like I’m four years old.”
“Sorry.”
I shouldn’t have snapped at him. He was only trying to help. But I couldn’t muster an apology for it, and he didn’t act like he needed one, so I just walked beside him and tried not to notice that we were moving through water. It was higher even than earlier that morning—it was at the very doorstep of the shelter when we arrived.
Nick was right, they were moving people out.
Emergency personnel directed human traffic, and the bulldozers and tow trucks had cleared another lane of traffic to the interstate leaving town. It moved in a steady flow if not a heavy one—ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, and the occasional bus somebody scared up from a schoolyard or Greyhound.
They made up a caravan that moved in lurches. Park, load. Creep forward to the onramp. Follow the arms of the policemen and -women in their wet blue uniforms. Slow but steady. Running the race, if not winning it.
“Harry?” I called over the low-buzzing din. “Harry? Are you here?”
I thought of my cell phone and remembered it was dead and wouldn’t be of any help to me. I turned to Nick and said, “He’s a tall guy with white hair, wearing—I don’t remember. I can’t remember what he’s wearing—but he’s in his sixties, maybe. Real good shape though—thin, but on the tough-looking side. I think he used to be a boxer or something. He told me once but I don’t remember.”
“All right, I’ll keep my eyes open.”
Before I could holler too much more, Harry found me first. He got a good handful of my arm through the crowd and tugged, commanding my attention and Nick’s too—since Nick was still moving in “protective alpha male” mode.
“There you are!” he said, and Nick figured out that this was the guy we were looking for.
“You’re Harry?”
“I’m Harry. You two looking for me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Trying to find you.”
“Well I’m trying to find your brother. Have you seen him? Crazy little bastard took off looking for you here. I tried to keep tabs on him, but you know what he’s like once he’s got some stupid idea in his head.”
I don’t know what my face told him, but it gave him an inkling that all wasn’t well with the world. This would probably have been a good time to burst into tears again, but it didn’t happen.
“What’s going on? You’ve seen him.”
I nodded and tried to answer, but nothing came out. Nick took over. “We’ve seen him. He helped us out of trouble, and it cost him.”
Harry went still as a statue, then changed his mind and opened up that impressive, long-armed wingspan of his—herding us both off to a corner where we were out of traffic’s flow and could construct the illusion of privacy. “Where is he now?”
Nick answered again, and it was just as well. “Somewhere underneath Broad Street. He’s gone, man.”
Harry exhaled through lips pursed in the shape of an O. “Oh. Okay. Oh. Are—are you sure?”
My turn to talk and nod. “Pretty damn sure. We were stuck down there, under the city—there was a tunnel, the old underground, you know?” I was babbling again, but it wouldn’t slow down so I let it flow. “We were down there because there were things down there—we saw them, and we were going to stop them from coming up underneath the city, out of that old building down there on the corner, which you can’t see from here but that’s okay because it’s not there anymore anyway. And Malachi helped us get out after the floor collapsed, but then he went back in because, I don’t know why because, but he was trying to help, or trying to make up for it all, that’s what he said. And he lit the fuse on the shells and—”
“Wait, artillery shells? Where did you get your hands on—”
“No, fireworks shells. Big ones, though. We stole them from the ball park, and we were going to set them off down there and close the tunnel because you have to bury them—you have to bury them again, it’s the only thing that’s ever kept them down and quiet. You have to bury them,” I said again, because hearing myself pronounce the refrain made the story something I could process.
“It was my fault,” I tacked on at the end. “Harry, don’t be mad at him, it was all my fault.”
“Not mad at him, not mad at you,” he told me, trying to smooth it over or soothe it down. “Not mad at anybody. Calm down, okay? Calm down.”
“Okay, I’m calm. I’m perfectly calm; there isn’t anything left for me to be. But it’s time for you to get out of here. You were here for him, and for me. But you should go now. They’re still coming and we’ve all got to leave—we’ve all got to move.”
“To where? Where are you going to go, Eden? What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Out, I guess. Home, eventually—someplace the river can’t catch me. Isn’t that what’s important right now? Just get away from it. Do you see where it is? It’s coming for us, and it won’t stop, and we’ve all got to get out of its way.”
“It’ll go down eventually, darling. TVA will fix the locks and the rain will end, and everything will go back down to normal.”
“No. I’m leaving. I want away from it. I want to be done with it, and with those things that won’t stop coming. And, Harry, when people see them—when people here at this shelter see them? And it won’t be long, you can believe me when I tell you that. When people see them it’s going to be fucking panic, do you hear me? There won’t be any more of this organized retreat, tidy like this. It’s going to be pandemonium. Chaos. It’s going to be screaming and running and dying. That’s what it’s going to be. They want out, and they want up, and they are coming.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve completely lost me.”
“You’ll catch up, whether you want to or not. You’ll find out. You’ll see.”
“All right, I’ll see, then. You—damn. You look like hell. Let’s get you inside and cleaned up, straightened up. Maybe get you a cookie or something, some orange juice.”
