The Quake

Chapter 12

Erin drummed her fingers nervously on the carseat. They were driving through a dystopian version of her hometown. Downed power lines. Half Broken trees. The once cleanly paved highway 38 with its perfectly drawn yellow line was cracked. Thank god for offroading tires. None of the buildings they passed had survived. Loose boards littered sidewalks. Building faces melted downward revealing the bare brick underbellies that were now cracked and unstable.

Tyler parked outside the front entrance of what used to be Jillian's café. Elkton's main business district, when they arrived, was crowded with lost looking people. Jillian's giant pie sign lay in the middle of the road, broken in half with its electrical guts hanging out for the world to see. "What are they all doing?" Erin asked.

Cars parked haphazardly lining the street, as if the shop owners had arrived to view the catastrophe, then paused in shock. Two medium sized dumpsters stood out front and center stuffed full of god knows what. "They're doing their best," Tyler answered. He slipped out of the car to join the crowd without checking that she followed.

Her heart throbbed in her throat. Elkton was small and the business district was even smaller. Even so, she couldn't follow him yet, needing a moment to fortify herself to interact with the mass of people here. She wondered how many people had been inside of the buildings when they began to fall. From here, safe inside of the car, it looked like as many people as had been in the bar last night. She was too far away from them to pick Drew out of the crowd, but he had to be there.

She recognized the leftovers of Drew's salon right next to Jillian's. Hesitantly she exited the vehicle, cuddling her bag like a security blanket. Erin cautiously approached the sidewalk. If she could just focus on medicine like she had earlier, it might go ok. She breathed in through her nose and out of her mouth.

Erin first approached a red-haired woman separated from the group, sitting here in the middle of the street clutching her arm. She looked vaguely familiar and was staring at the crumbled walls of the cafe. "Want me to take a look at that arm?" Erin crouched down beside her, perching on one hand so she wasn't kneeling on the wet pavement.

The woman's eyes were glassy, and her breaths puffed out shallow clouds into the cold air. Erin didn't know her, didn't know what she'd lost today, but her arm appeared to be hurting, and Erin knew there were bandages in her bag. The woman shrugged her shoulders but otherwise didn't move. Taking that as consent, Erin proceeded with palpating the arm.

This was the first patient she'd seen without Tyler there to break the tension. Surprisingly, seeing to this comatose woman was much easier than evaluating a squirming cat, and not nearly as heavy as a pregnant elk. Erin had her patched up in no time.

She was about to stand up to find Tyler again when the woman spoke. "They're still in there." She said in a dead voice, stopping Erin cold.

"They who?" Erin asked. "Where?"

"Eddie and Georgia were helping me with the morning rush." Her voice was rough and scratchy as if she'd wasted it screaming. "Eddie was on the grill. Georgia went to the freezer." The woman rubbed her forehead with her good arm. "I managed to drag Juniper out of the window after the ceiling fell on her. We watched the sign fall on top of her car and bounce into the street." Erin wanted to cover her ears against the litany of terrors the woman, who she now suspected was Jillian, recited. "They're still in there, Eddie and Georgia."

She picked up the first bit of board that she could lift and dragged it to the side. Then went back for another. Jillian's was right next door to Drew's salon. What if he was one of the unlucky ones trapped? Panicked and cold, she scrambled faster. Her breaths scraped out of her throat like icepicks. She struggled to lift a metal pipe holding down a large piece of plywood, her neck twinged with the effort. That's when Tyler discovered her. "What are you doing?" he demanded. "I left you five seconds ago."