The Persistence of Memory: America Under Attack

Part Ten

The voices that I had assumed were a part of my dream were still speaking when I woke up and started remembering what had happened.

"...can move him until he wakes up. It's too risky," a woman said.

"We can't stay on the ledge. It could slide away any second," a second voice said. This one was belonged to a man.

Someone slapped my face hard enough to get my attention and pried my right eye open. I shook my head and blinked my eyes open to find a man and a woman kneeling beside me.

"There you go, son. Wakey wakey. Time to get up." A man in his forties with a short grizzled beard tapped my face a couple more times. "Can you move?"

I started to answer, but instead of words a scream of agony erupted my lips. The woman had grabbed my arm and pulled it free from the bike wheel. It felt entirely wrong.

"Whoa," the bearded man said as a slight tremor shook the ground. "Sorry 'bout this, son. No time for pleasantries." He scooped me into his arms like I was an infant and carried me up the steep slope. The pain in my arm and shoulder took my breath away and the white flashes returned, blocking out my view of the azure sky and what must have been a zillion birds of all kinds flying in the same direction.

Every step the man took jarred my body with a new wave of pain. Thankfully, it only took a couple of minutes to reach more stable ground. He set me on my feet and I promptly fell to knees and vomited.

The woman knelt beside me again and put her hand on my shoulder with exaggerated gentleness. "You're ok. I don't know how, but you are ok. I'm going to have a quick look at your arm now. This is gonna hurt, but try to hold still. Hold him Jimmy."

The bearded man crouched by my good arm and grabbed me in a bear-hug. This time, I didn't scream when the woman squeezed my arm. I growled through clenched teeth.

"I'm going to lift your arm nice and easy. Don't fight it," she said, as if I could have if I'd wanted to.

She took my wrist and pulled my arm tight, pressing down on my shoulder. The bone popped back into the socket, immediately dropping my pain level from agony down to a mere eight out of ten.

She handed my backpack to Jimmy and stood up.

"Yours, I take it?" Jimmy asked. "I'll carry it, son. You're in no shape."

The woman's name was Virginia. She was plump with curly blond hair and friendly face. She and her husband Jimmy had watched the bridge collapse and the highway disappear in the landslide. They lost sight of Susan when her end of the bridge crumbled and fell, but I had landed on a ledge of ground that hadn't slid with the rest.

When the quake hit, Susan and I had only been about two hundred yards from the crest of the hill. The lay of the land was such that we were at the top edge of the area affected by the landside. If we had gone another thirty yards past the off-ramp, we would have been able to watch it happen without getting caught in it.

I looked back over the devastation for any signs of Susan or any possible avenues of escape she could have taken, but I saw nothing that gave me even the slightest cause for hope. Some sections of the ground still slid and shifted, and another tremor rumbled through the ground as I searched. I had no choice but to leave her.

"Come on, Son," Jimmy said. "Let's get somewhere a little safer. The next quake could be worse." He and Virginia headed west away from the highway. The birds were all flying in that direction, too. Maybe they knew something I didn't.