Between us we’d had fewer hours of sleep in the last few days than we usually got in one night, but our store of common sense hadn’t left us completely.
It was so strange, though—walking up by the interstate, on the gravel shoulder between all the parked cars. Most of them were abandoned, but here and there a few people had set up camp where they’d stalled or run out of gas. If you had a few candy bars in the glove box, you were just about as well off as the people down the hill in the shelters.
The whole thing was creepy. It felt like one of those post-apocalyptic movies you catch sometimes, where all the trappings of civilization are left in place but there are hardly any people.
From our vantage point up by the interstate, we could look down and see how the water was yes, still rising, and yes, still eating downtown a block at a time. And if we looked up to Cameron Hill, which overlooks the interstate from an even higher vantage point, we could see what had happened to more than a few of the car-abandoners.
Cameron Hill used to be a big apartment complex, but it was bought by Blue Cross and scheduled for demolition—making way for new office buildings, I imagine. For now, though, the complex stood vacant and high—really, at the highest point in the city that one could still call “downtown.”
People had climbed the hill and were camping there, too. Even from down at the road level, we could see how windows had been broken out and the empty apartments had been entered. I didn’t know if they still had running water or anything, but it probably beat sleeping all cramped in the car. A big plume of smoke was coming up from the hill, but it looked like a contained sort of smoke, like a bonfire or something. Later I’d learn that the squatters had filled the empty swimming pool with construction debris and lit it like a beacon.
I guess, when it all comes down to it—or it’s all stripped away—we just wander back to that primal assurance. “If I have fire, I’m okay.”
I thought again of the heavy shell I was toting around. The nylon bag seemed to be sloughing off water well enough to keep everything dry. I checked Nick’s bag in front of me, and it appeared to be likewise stable. But seeing it bounce back and forth against his thigh made me nervous.
“We should carry these more carefully, don’t you think?”
He stopped and turned around. “Sure. What do you recommend?”
“I don’t know. Just. Well. We’re banging these things around here and they’re full of gunpowder. Seems like a bad idea.”
He gave me a look like he wanted to argue or fuss, but gave up on it before he started. Instead, he tightened the shoulder strap so the bag stayed in the crook of his waist, under his arm. I did likewise, and tried to hold it steady as we walked—but it wasn’t easy. The road was made for driving, and the shoulder wasn’t made for anything but motor emergencies. This was an emergency if I’d ever seen one, but when you’re on foot instead of wheels the shoulder is rough walking—a minefield of stripped tires, uneven paving, and broken glass.
Sometimes we’d look down below and see things walking in the water. At such a distance it was hard to tell what was what, or who. After a while, we quit looking and kept our eyes on the road in front of us.
When we reached the Martin Luther King Street exit, we used it to walk down from the main road; and the Read House was right there, on the left. It was still busy in a tired, worn out, desperate sort of way. From every window inside faces stared out at the street, waiting for a way out or waiting for the water to come to them.
I stared back at the eyes that settled on me, as if I knew what I was doing.
While we were gone, tow trucks and at least one bulldozer had come through moving the cars. It had to happen eventually; and now there was a lane and a half cleared from the front of the hotel to the onramp at the interstate—heading out of town, not towards the bridges. That way was pretty much clear, at least as far as I could see. The trick was still actually getting the ambulances and buses to the hotel, but it was happening. Slowly, but surely.
“Where are we going now?” Nick asked.
I pulled my attention away from the face-filled windows and looked through and past a mound of overturned cars at the intersection of Broad and MLK. “Over there, at the end of the next block up. It’s right on the corner.”
I dodged a cop with a bulletproof vest bulging under his jacket. “We’re asking everyone to get inside,” he told me out of the corner of his mouth, without slowing down.
He was too frantic for my taste. A glance at Nick told me that similar thoughts were brewing in his head, too.
Another pair of police officers as well as someone in a uniform I didn’t recognize—SWAT? FBI?—came tearing around a corner, waving and chattering into their radios.
Nick took my arm and pulled me back off the sidewalk against the building in order to let them pass. “They’re trying to get everyone inside,” he said, as if I hadn’t heard the first guy. “We’re going to have to get while the getting’s good.”
“Something’s about to hit the fan. Can’t you feel it?”
“Yes, and I’m no psychic. Come on.”
I pulled ahead of him then. I slipped past him and out around the corner where the hotel parking garage was. “Let’s go through—underneath. Fewer prying eyes on the back of the block.”
He nodded and chased me into the dark first level of the garage, then out into the bright whiteness on the other side. Our shoes made scuff marks on the wet cement of the sidewalk, and I’d been right—there weren’t nearly as many people back there. Everyone was concentrating on the front, where people came up begging for food, water, and a corner to sleep in.
We took flight without trouble and without interruption. It was easy to run on the straighter ground, even with the duffel bags and their heavy, illicit contents.
I thought I heard my name.
I looked over my shoulder, mid-step, and didn’t see anybody but Nick. “What?”
“What? I didn’t say anything.”
“Oh. Sorry.” So I kept running.
I could’ve sworn I’d heard it again, but we were almost there.
The next intersection was even worse than Broad and MLK; there had been several wrecks as vehicles tried to ram their way out and failed. You can ram past a couple of cars, maybe, but half the city’s fleet of SUVs proved unmoved by the two sedans that had made a charge for it.
I turned sideways and shimmied my way past crumpled hoods and blown tires. Nick did likewise, and between us, we made our way to the boarded and forlorn little building on the corner.
“I don’t think I’ve ever noticed this place before,” he said.
“It’s been closed up as long as I can remember.”
“What did it used to be?”
I shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. But I got inside around the other way. Come on.”
“Sure. Let’s just add breaking and entering to the list of charges. Swiping these shells has to be some sort of felony, and—”
“And as for the rest, you’re only entering. I did the breaking before you got here. Stop being such a worrywart.”
“I’m mostly worried about what’s waiting in there,” he confessed.
I found my loose sheet of plywood and gave it a good yank, reopening the window I’d used earlier.
“After you,” he said.
“As you like.” I crawled through and onto the garbage inside. The scratching, scraping, dragging, shuffling was louder—much louder than when last I’d visited.
Nick came through behind me.
“Watch your step,” I told him. “I covered the hole in the floor with a bunch of crap, but the floor isn’t very stable, I don’t think. Be careful.”
We set our bags aside and tried to find a sturdy corner to hold them while we moved the pallets and crates around. “I hear them,” he said. “Holy shit, I hear them. You weren’t kidding, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t kidding.”
“They’re right underneath us!”
“I know that, yes. Thank you. What wonderful timing we have. Here—get that end. Help me with this one, it’s heavy.”
He wrenched one arm under a pallet with some chains and equipment weighing it down. “Are you sure? I mean, we’re sort of opening this up for them, aren’t we? Maybe we should pile more shit on, then burn the place down on top of them.”
“I don’t think that would work,” I countered.
“Why not?”
“Because once everything’s burned down, they’ll just shove the ashes out of the way and come out anyhow. We’ve got to bury the fuckers. It’s the only thing that’s ever kept them down and out of trouble.”
“You’ve got a point there. So how are we going to do this? I mean, what are we going to do, treat these things like Molotov cocktails and do a chuck and run? And don’t these canisters say five hundred feet of clearance?”
“Technically yes, but I figure that the five hundred feet thing doesn’t really apply if you set them off underground.”
“You figure that, do you?” He heaved a set of two-by-fours aside and we were almost there, almost done. We almost had the thing open. “Hey, give me that flashlight of yours. You’ve still got it?”
“In my purse, yeah.” I unzipped it and shoved my hand inside. Everything I touched was waterlogged and disgusting; the makeup would be a lost cause, but I didn’t really care. The flashlight was a hardy little bastard, and it was working just fine. I tossed it to him, and he caught it, then flipped it on.
He aimed it down the hole exposed by the missing planks.
“What do you see?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “Not a damn thing. Either they’re not there, or they’re still hiding. But shit, you can hear them, can’t you? That’s amazing—but it might be a trick of the acoustics. If it’s a tunnel, then they might still be a ways off.”
