Nick and Viondi stood by the Oldsmobile. The car was in the crevasse, pitched over at an angle of maybe forty degrees, rear wheels still on the road with the tail in the air, the grille rammed into the side of the fracture. The front wheels hung in air. Something had cut Viondi, and blood ran down his face— the car had an air bag only on the driver’s side. Nick and Viondi had got out of the car by climbing over the front seats into the back, and then leaving the car by the back doors, from which they could take the long, nervous step to firm ground.
It was hard to say how deep the crevasse was. The water table was high here, and water had filled the crack to within ten feet of the surface. The water was far from still— a storm of bubbles rose to the top, and foam was beginning to gather in stripes on the surface.
“Earthquake, I guess,” Nick said, gazing down. His heart still throbbed in his chest.
“New Madrid fault,” Viondi said. “Shit.” He wiped blood from his face. “I gotta get back to St. Louis. Gotta get to my family.”
“At least my family’s well out of it.”
Viondi gave him a quick glance, blood dripping down his face. “You sure about that?”
Nick hesitated. “The earthquake couldn’t hit Toussaint that hard.” He hesitated. “Could it?”
“We get out of here, then we’ll know.”
Nick looked at the car. “Wherever we go, it’ll be on foot.”
“Give me the keys.” Viondi opened the trunk, took out Nick’s suitcase, his own box of clothes, and the silver samovar, which he jammed down on top of his clothing.
“You’re not going to take the samovar, are you?” Nick asked.
“Shit, man, it’s solid silver. I’m not gonna leave it in an abandoned car in Buttfuck, Tennessee, that’s for sure.” His grim look grew more thoughtful. “Besides, if we can find drinkable water, we’re going to need something to carry it in, and this is all we’ve got.”
“Let me try to stop that bleeding before we go anywhere. I’ve got some Band-Aids and stuff in my bag.”
There was nothing to clean the wound with, so Nick ended up using one of his T-shirts. He had some disinfectant cream, which Viondi patiently let him smear on the cut, and then he tried to close it with the adhesive strips. The cut was big, and blood kept pouring out while he was working, so Nick ended up using three different strips to try to hold the edges of the wound together. The adhesive strips, which he’d bought on sale, were what used to be called “flesh,” meaning a light tan color intended to blend in with the skin of Caucasians, and it contrasted strangely with Viondi’s black skin.
The strips also had little green dinosaurs on them.
At least they stopped some of the bleeding.
“I guess we might as well go,” Nick said. He put his satchel on his shoulder, picked up his soft-sided suitcase, then turned north.
“Hold on there,” Viondi said. “We ain’t going north. There’s nothing there— we’re miles from the highway or any big towns.”
“There were some farms,” Nick said. “And that restaurant.”
There was anger in Viondi’s look. “You want to bet that restaurant ain’t floatin’ down the Hatchie by now? And those farms— whoever lives there ain’t gonna be in any better shape than we are.” He pointed south, across the crevasse and the soybean fields. “Memphis is down that way. It’s a big city. We can find a tow truck there, and people to help us.”
Nick was confused. “How are we going to get over the crack? I can’t jump that.”
Viondi slammed the trunk with his big hands. “We got a bridge right here.”
Nick was dubious, but Viondi put down his box, put one foot on the rear bumper, and climbed up onto the trunk. Nick held his breath, expecting at any second for the car to pitch nose-first into the crevasse, but all that happened was that the back of the car sank under Viondi’s weight. Viondi crawled onto the roof, reversed himself, then slid his legs down the windscreen and onto the car’s hood.
“There,” he said. “Now pass me the box and the bags.”
Nick put a foot on the rear bumper and passed Viondi their gear, and then Viondi belly-crawled backward down the length of the hood until he could stand on the other side of the crevasse. “Your turn,” he said.
Nick felt his stomach clench. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
He crawled slowly over the car, his heart giving a leap every time it shifted under his weight. But the bridge remained in place, and when he backed his feet to the broken pavement on the other side of the crevasse, he felt his breath ease.
Viondi handed him his suitcase. “Let’s get moving,” he said.
A shadow fell across the sun. Nick looked up, and was surprised to find how much of the sky was now covered with dark cloud.
“Maybe it’s going to rain,” he said.
And then he followed Viondi down the lonely, broken road.
*
The interior of the Gateway Arch was airless and musty and at least a hundred degrees. Sweat dripped from beneath Marcy’s Smokey Bear hat, and her thighs ached. She’d been going down stairs forever.
“Careful,” she told the people behind her. She pointed her flashlight. “The rail here is a little shaky.”
There were 1076 steps altogether, one of those facts that Marcy had been obliged to memorize as part of her job. She hadn’t bothered to count them as she descended, and she was glad. She didn’t want to walk to the point of utter exhaustion and realize that there were still 600 steps to go.
The monumental skeleton of the arch loomed around her. Massive I-beams, giant stanchions, cross-braces of steel. The stair that wound its way down the arch rested in part on the framework itself, and wasn’t going to move unless the arch itself gave way.
So far the stair had been safe enough. It was the little things that had been damaged. About two-thirds of the light-bulbs had shattered, leaving the stair a passage through gloom and shadow. The handrail had given way in places, and Marcy cautioned her visitors about putting their weight on it. Some of the smaller fixtures had fallen— bits of steel mesh, some cable, the lighter crossbraces. These could be worked around, with care.
“Take your time, now,” she told her people. “We’re not in any hurry.”
She’d given one of her two flashlights to the Japanese man, and told him to keep to the rear of the column. Marcy kept the elderly lady right behind her, so that she could keep an eye on her, be certain not to overtax her, and make sure she wasn’t about to drop dead of a coronary.
Marcy came to a landing, peered at the next flight of stairs, decided to call a halt.
“Everyone catch your breath,” she said.
Simply catching one’s breath was hard enough inside the stainless steel shaft. The heat was almost overwhelming.
Everyone clustered onto the landing. Supported by massive crossbraces it was clearly safer than the stairs themselves. “How much farther do we have to go?” a man asked.
“I don’t know,” Marcy said. “I’ve never done this before.”
An aftershock slammed up through all the girders and beams and almost threw Marcy to her knees. She clapped hands over her ears as the metal around her began to shriek as if in pain. Something fell, somewhere, with a loud clang that echoed forever in the curving metal stairwell.
“I can’t take it! I can’t take it!” Marcy heard the words as though they came from far away. She looked up to see a man’s distorted face, eyes so round that his irises stood out as tiny dots in a lake of white. “I want to take the elevator!”
It was the same man who had panicked just before entering the tram. He lurched on the landing, knocking into people bodily, and then he spun about, shoved aside the Japanese man at the tail of the column, and began to run up the metal stair in the direction of the observation deck.
“No!” Marcy shrieked, and lunged after him. She was not going to lose another one. Her shoe caught on a stair riser and she fell face-first on the metal treads, but her outstretched hand caught the panicked man’s pants cuff. Marcy snarled as she clenched her fist around the fabric and pulled. The man was off-balance on the quaking stairway and fell. “Get back here!” Marcy yelled, and climbed up the man’s body, putting all her weight on him as the man thrashed beneath her.
“I can’t take it! I can’t take it!” the man shouted.
Marcy straddled the panicked man and punched him in the face with her flashlight. “Shut up!” she shouted. He began to scream, a strange, scratchy wailing sound, as inhuman and metallic as the scream of the arch under tension. “Shut up, motherfucker!” Marcy hammered him with the flashlight again, then a third time.
The aftershock faded. The metal shrieking of the arch died away, and the man’s screams faded at the same time. Marcy stared with fury into the panicked man’s bloodstained face.
“I want to go to the elevator,” he said.
“No way, asshole,” Marcy said. “I’m not having another damn deserter.” She grabbed him by his collar and hauled him to his feet, shoved him down the platform. “You walk ahead of me,” she told him. “Now march.”
Ten minutes later they shouldered open a bent metal door and stepped out into the concourse. Marcy gasped in cooler air, took off her hat, wiped sweat from her forehead. She heard moans of relief from her tourists.
The huge underground room was a mess. The glass ticket windows had gone, and the ticket counters leaned at strange angles. Displays had toppled, signs had come down, light fixtures had shattered. The floor was littered with tourist brochures, tickets, guidebooks, maps, and broken glass.
Marcy had never been so glad to see a wreck in her life.
She stepped aside and let her visitors file out of the stairwell. The elderly lady stopped for a moment, fumbled in her pocketbook. “I just wanted to say thank you,” she said.
Marcy stared in surprise as the old lady held out a ten-dollar bill.
“No thanks, ma’am,” she said. “We’re not allowed to take tips.”
Carrying her two flashlights, Marcy found her French party in the middle of the concourse, shouting at each other as usual. The heart attack victim lay on the floor, conscious but showing little interest in his friends. Other casualties lay nearby, maybe thirty of them. Some of them were very bloody, some unconscious. A number were covered in what looked like gray brick dust.
Marcy saw no one in green uniforms, no Park Service people at all. She glanced around her in shock. Could they all have run away? All of them? Had Evan started a panic?
She turned at the sound of shouts and saw two of her colleagues carrying an unconscious woman down the stairs from outside and onto the concourse. Marcy’s head lurched as she saw blood pouring from a wound in the woman’s lower leg. Marcy ran and helped carry the woman to an empty space on the concourse floor.
“Where is everybody?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”
“Parking structure collapsed,” one of the park rangers said. He was gasping with the effort of carrying the injured woman. “There are dozens of people in there. We’re trying to dig them out.”
“We’ve got this one,” the other ranger said. “Get out there and see if you can help someone else.”
Marcy cast a last look at the bleeding woman and sprinted for the wide stair. The parking structure adjacent to the Gateway Arch was several stories tall and held hundreds of cars. If it had collapsed, there was no telling how many people were trapped in the rubble.
She ran out into the open and into a hot wind that blew burning cinders across her path. Heat flared on her exposed skin. Her feet slowed as she stared in horror at the wall of fire blazing on the other side of Memorial Drive.
Half the city seemed ablaze, everything from the tallest structures to the smallest heaps of rubble. She held up a hand to shield her face from the heat, and her palm turned hot. Clouds of black smoke curled up between her and the arch, obscuring its gleaming stainless steel skin. Hundreds of people swarmed across the highway toward her, crossing the park as they tried to get away from the fires. Others had collapsed on the grass, exhausted simply by the effort of getting here.
Marcy kept trotting toward the parking structure. Most of the trees that lined the walkways had fallen, and she had to keep zigzagging around fallen trunks and limbs.
She glanced in the other direction, saw another cloud of dense smoke, growing from roots of flame, in East St. Louis. The Casino Queen, the huge riverboat that fed the East St. Louis economy with its gambling income, was lying on its side in the river. Its ornate smokestacks had fallen, and the gingerbread on its balconies was broken. A few people were seen clinging to the part of the boat remaining above the water.
St. Louis’s boats hadn’t fared much better. The excursion boats Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher had been moored for the evening on the landing right under the Gateway Arch. Only Becky Thatcher seemed reasonably intact: Tom Sawyer had sunk at its moorings, and Huck Finn drifted downriver, trailing its mooring cables in the water. All had lost their stacks.
Marcy swerved around a fallen tree and came within sight of the parking structure.
It looked like a crater of the moon. A hideous pit filled with broken concrete and mangled steel.
Smoke burned Marcy’s eyes. She slowed, gasping for breath.
“Evan!” she shouted. “Damn you!” And then, though her feet felt as if they weighed a hundred pounds apiece, she went down into the pit to rescue her visitors.
*
A neighbor girl knocked on the window of the BMW. Charlie looked at her in some surprise. The electric window wouldn’t go down, because he didn’t have the ignition key, so he opened the door.
The air smelled of smoke from the houses that were burning.
The girl was maybe fifteen and lived next door. Charlie saw her and her friends from his deck all the time. Charlie tried to remember her name.
“Are you all right, Mr. Johns?” the girl said.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Everything’s fine.” He thought about Megan in the master bedroom, and his mind shied away from the thought.
“Fine,” he repeated.
“My dad says we shouldn’t go into our houses,” the girl said. “In case there’s another earthquake.”
“Earthquake,” Charlie repeated. It was an earthquake, he thought in surprise.
For some reason he hadn’t even considered earthquake. He’d seen public service announcements on television every so often, usually late at night, but none of the locals seemed to take earthquakes seriously, and he didn’t either.
Besides, everyone knew that earthquakes only happened in California and Japan.
“We’re going to pitch a tent in the backyard and camp,” the girl said. “We have a spare sleeping bag if you want one.”
“No,” Charlie said. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
“We were wondering if we could get some water from your swimming pool.”
Charlie blinked as he processed this strange request. He couldn’t make any sense out of it. “Fine,” he said finally.
“Thanks, Mr. Johns. See you later, okay?”
“Fine,” Charlie said again.
He closed the door. Now the BMW smelled of burning.
He looked at the cellphone receiver he’d thrown down on the next seat, at the red lights winking. He picked it up again. He tried to call emergency numbers and nothing worked. He tried to call Dearborne, because Dearborne had been at the country club and perhaps hadn’t realized they were all rich.
The phone didn’t work. He threw it on the passenger seat in disgust.
Earthquake, he thought. His mum and dad would think it very strange when he told them.
McPhee’s house was burning by now in a very lively manner. The neighbors had saved some of the furniture, which was all over the lawn and street, but could not save the house. There was a huge pall of rising smoke over downtown Memphis, as if a lot of things down there were burning.
Charlie realized he was hungry.
Too bad, he thought, that the caterers were going to be late.