The Travelling Man (21 page)

Lesnar felt himself go lightheaded and he watched on in shock as Grange started to levitate up off the floor. The man’s body was rock still as he rose and Lesnar felt an excitement to match Bobby’s.

Suddenly, all of the light bulbs in the office exploded, one after the other. Bright bursts of electricity sparked in the air as glass showered the floor. Then the large window detonated and large shards rained down upon them, except for Grange. The jagged glass pieces decapitated the air around him but none struck his still form.

Lesnar felt the earth start to rumble and shake beneath them. His apartment building sat above the mine, architecturally sound and built with a potential collapse in mind. The building trembled and various clutter fell from shelves and smashed upon the floor. The whole world now started to shake around them and Lesnar could hear the thunder beneath the earth as great fissures opened up. The alarm siren cranked into life as the air was shattered, with the shrill noise audible even over Grange’s earthquake. He could vaguely hear the screams of men as they ran blindly in panic. He tried to remember how many men were currently under the ground but gave up as he looked out through the glassless window and saw the desert floor torn open and huge chunks of red dirt falling in.

Lesnar shuddered as he pictured the men below being buried alive, their lungs filling with red sand as they suffocated; he couldn’t think of a worse way to go.

He heard a sound emanating from Grange for the first time and he looked over at the man. Grange’s face had changed from serene to a picture of strained exertion. His cheeks were puffed red and sweat ran from his brow and dribbled down his nose. His arms slowly rose up from his sides and stretched outwards his hands upturned and trembling. He opened his mouth in a silent roar and Lesnar could see the tendons in his neck straining desperately as his entire body shook violently, and then Granton broke.

CHAPTER
14

q
uarantined

St Mercy Hospital had serviced Granton for almost as long as the town had stood. It had grown over that time as the town swelled around it. It housed 76 beds and was the largest employer in Granton. On the day of the quake there had been over 200 people in the building when the ground had opened up beneath it. The place had not been built with an earthquake in mind and, as such, it had collapsed like a pack of cards burying the most vulnerable members of Granton into the desert ground.

Most of the staff and patients had never known what had hit them. One minute the world was shaking around them, and the next they were sucked into the ground in a fireball of steel and glass.

Tom Lassiter had just been given the thumbs up from his surgeon as he lay unconscious in his bed. He was deemed out of the woods after the shooting, which Dr Wood privately deemed a major miracle given the man’s injuries. The man - who had once sworn to become a detective and solve the cases that left children like he had once been, without a parent and without answers - never saw the light of day again. Mercifully, he never woke from his medically induced coma as the building folded around him and he was plunged into the darkness for ever more.

----------

Cassie’s world turned into a hellish nightmare in record time. Everyone in town had been solely focused on the aftermath and not the cause. Most people thought that it had been an earthquake of sorts, and a lot of people thought that the mine had dug too deep or in the wrong place. She found it hard to even begin to calculate their losses, both the town and her personally. Word soon spread that the hospital was gone and Tom along with it.

She had spent the immediate aftermath unashamedly checking on her own family. Her home was further out of town and she had found that the street had got off relatively lightly. Windows had blown and some trees had fallen, crushing cars and roofs. There was some structural damage that varied from minor to major and her heart had been still in her chest as she’d approached her own house. It had leapt into life again when Ellie had burst from the front porch and ran into her arms. Her mother hadn’t come out after Ellie and Cassie had immediately feared the worst. Her mother wasn’t a young woman anymore and the destruction of the quake had flattened most of the town.

“Ellie, where’s your grandmother?” Cassie had asked, fearing the answer.

“She’s lying down and she won’t get up,” Ellie had said in a regressed baby voice that was obscured by her sucking on her thumb, which was a childish act that she had used for many years.

She had managed with great difficulty to stand Ellie back down on the sidewalk and made her promise to wait while she went in the house to check.

The house had been damaged significantly and there was a multitude of memories strewn about the place as cabinets and shelves had fallen in the quake, heaving out their contents without much care. Precious photographs and irreplaceable objects lay smashed and broken and Cassie stepped over the mess quickly. She found her mother lying on the kitchen floor. A pillow had been placed carefully under her head and there was a blanket draped lovingly over her. Ellie had obviously tried to move her but had been unable to and so she had tried to make her grandmother comfortable even though she clearly wasn’t moving.

Cassie knelt down to her mother and took a cold, dead hand in hers. Her mother’s face seemed peaceful and there was no visible sign of injury. It would appear that the old woman had perhaps suffered a heart attack or maybe a stroke; whatever it had been, it had been quick and appeared painless. There was at least some comfort in that, however small. Given their current predicament, she had little choice but to leave her mother in the kitchen. The town had fallen and God only knew who was left standing. There would certainly be no one at the other end of the phone if she tried to put out a call. Granton General Hospital had disappeared into the earth and, presumably, taken with it most of the town’s medical staff. There had been unsettling noises coming from the house as Cassie had stood inside wondering what to do. She was suddenly struck by the notion that if the building collapsed around her then poor Ellie would be left totally alone.

She lifted her mother’s small fragile frame effortlessly and carried her out into the backyard. She’d laid her down on the lawn and fetched Ellie from the side of the home. She’d retrieved a shovel from the garden shed and dug a grave in the ground. It had been hot and sweaty work but she’d felt more at ease as her mother was laid to rest in the only home that she had ever known.            

For the past 72 hours she had been charging around town putting out metaphorical, as well as real, fires. There was massive damage around the town square with most of the stores damaged beyond repair. There were several long cracks in the road, some as deep as five or six feet wide in places and disappearing into the darkness below. A gas line had ruptured and Maple Street, which included Glenn Jordan’s Diner, had burnt down in the subsequent fire. The volunteer boys hadn’t managed to put out the blaze before it had spread too far and the area had been abandoned.

As far as she could tell, those that had been injured had all been scooped up and she had organised the Town Hall to act as an additional triage centre for those superficially wounded. She thanked God that so many of the walking wounded injuries seemed to be non-lethal, meaning that they could be handled. Unfortunately, there was currently no accurate way to calculate the number of fatalities as there had been such cataclysmic damage. Buildings had either collapsed in huge mounds of rubble, burying who knew what or who underneath, or else they had been burnt to the ground, possibly cremating their owners. The likely death toll was still too big for her to get her head around and so she concentrated on the here and now, helping who she could, however she could.

Despite the unknown total body count, there had still been plenty of corpses to litter the once clean streets of Granton.   

Rosie Dawkins had suffered what had turned out to be a stroke, brought on presumably by the stress of her back garden opening up and swallowing her pint-sized dog, Mitzy. Rosie was a big girl, clocking in at a little over 300 pounds and little Mitzy had been her only friend and companion. Cassie had seen the hole in the back garden first hand and she had just managed to pluck the small dog from a short ledge where it had been balancing. It was a small miracle, but right now Cassie was taking any one that she could get.  

Wade Crow was a local youth who seemed to be more in trouble than out of it. He was a pimply kid of 19 and when Art Barrett’s electrical store had its windows demolished by the quake, young Wade had made a beeline to grab what he could carry from the window display. Unfortunately for the kid, only the bottom half of the window had fallen out, with the top half still held precariously in place. When Wade had been struggling to lift a 55” Plasma TV out of the gap, he had bumped the frame causing the top piece of glass to fall and slice the top of his head clean off. Old Cary Borage, who had been helping evacuate diners from Glenn Jordan’s place before the fire had taken a firm grip, had seen Wade. When he’d spoken to Cassie, he had told her that the kid had been stumbling around in the middle of the street with the top of his head missing and grey brain matter showing. Cary had said that Wade had said something aloud to do with the real color of daisies before he’d collapsed down dead.

Johnny Lincoln had run a small gardening business. He held the town contract to maintain the public areas around the square. He was a short, happy man in his late forties with a large and proud handlebar moustache that always reminded Cassie of the video game character, Mario. She often saw him pushing his gas mower around the lawns, puttering away with headphones jammed permanently into his ears. He always had a big grin and a wave for her whenever she passed and he was man who seemed more than happy with his lot in life. She’d come across his body on the square where he had been working. A hole, maybe four feet wide by about six feet deep, had opened up behind him and he had stepped back into the opening. His body was lying on its back and his trusty mower had followed him down and landed full on his face. When she’d found him, the mower had still been running and the sharp metal blades had been scraping against the bone of his skull, having already shredded the soft flesh.    

Cassie grabbed a beer from the fridge in her kitchen and rubbed the bottle on the back of her neck for a little comfort, trying to pretend that it was still cold. She had managed to dig out some old camping supplies from the back of the garage and had made a perfectly passable meal on a small single gas burner stove. Ellie had been upbeat and Cassie couldn’t help but feel pride that her own father’s strength still pumped through all of the Wheeler women.

Kevin had been circling Granton and making notes, as even the radio seemed to be down. Whatever had caused the ground to rip open had unleashed some kind of electrical interference that was disrupting any effective communication. When he’d returned he’d told her flat out that the road in both directions was completely impassable. According to him, there were larger craters the further out of town you headed and he had yet to find a way out in order to get help.

She had spent the last couple of days with a new partner in tow. Matt Kravis had been at her side throughout the cleanup and various rescue attempts. She had wanted to question him about his presence in Granton amidst such chaos, but once again events had overwhelmed them.

She wandered upstairs and cracked open Ellie’s door to get a peek at her daughter. Now, in these quiet moments, she couldn’t put off thinking about Ellie’s condition any longer. Cassie wanted to believe that Ellie’s state of mind and look of general health must be some kind of indication, but she didn’t quite dare to think positively. Apart from Ellie’s slight tendency for over tiredness, you wouldn’t know that she was ill. Her next stage of treatment would be outside of Granton, but now that they were cut off she shuddered to think of those particular implications.

“Hi, Mom,” Ellie yawned from the shadows of her bed.

“Hey Ellie-Belly, you should be asleep by now.”

“Is he your boyfriend or a suspect?”

“Who?”

“Matt.”

“You mean Mr. Kravis.”

“He said to call him Matt and you’re avoiding the question.”

“No. I’m a Mom and a Sheriff and exercising an executive prerogative to not answer such questions,” Cassie smiled.

“Well, I don’t think that he’s a bad guy,” Ellie said with the assuredness of an 11 year old.

“Oh, you don’t, do you?”

“Nope, he’s a little shy, but I think he’s a good guy.”

Cassie had to admit that he was a quiet and odd man, but she had to admit that his help had been invaluable. He had been calm under pressure and very resourceful. They had pulled four kids out of a collapsed tree house and he had provided adequate first aid to various cuts and bruises with a tender touch. She had heard several bouts of stifled giggles emanating from the kids and Kravis certainly seemed to have a way with the children. She firmly believed that a child possessed the most accurate of all lie and bullshit detectors and their intuition was normally on the money, especially now that Ellie had given her seal of approval.

The guy was currently sitting downstairs nursing a beer. He didn’t seem to be much of a drinker which was fine in her book. He was quiet and she knew that he had a story to tell, one that her instincts knew was relevant to what was happening in Granton. It was a story that she wanted to hear as a woman, a Sheriff and a mother. Her gut was telling her that the quiet man sitting at her kitchen table just might hold some, if not all, of the answers.   

The power was off across town, all of the phone lines were down and there was no cell reception for some reason. She desperately wanted to call in emergency help, but for now there was no way to contact anyone, and for now they were on their own.

----------

Gilbert Grange sank into himself and allowed the lapping waves of healing to wash over him. He had never been so close to his own mortality before and the amount of energy that he had expended had left him dangerously exposed.

He was vaguely aware that he wasn’t alone but he paid little attention to the buzzing gnats that tried unsuccessfully to bother him. He desperately needed this time to heal and to regroup his senses.

He wandered the plains of his own existence deep within his mind where the very core of himself lived. The world was a long empty horizon here. Ghosts of time and mortality passed like wisps of shadow around him as he walked, slowly at first, before gradually gaining momentum and a little strength.

The ground beneath his feet shifted from grains of slipping yellow sand to firmer, darker earth. Piece by piece, rocks rolled and formed into boulders that gently bumped into each other until sloping edges started to grow and reach towards the sky. The flat empty path that he walked began to shift and become a valley as hills grew into rising mountains.

He had never been this close to the end before. Causing the tectonic plates to shift and open great chasms around the town, effectively sealing Granton off from the rest of the world, had taken almost all of his remaining strength. He was vulnerable now and it had been eons since he had last been so; it wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

Again, he felt the annoying buzz of the mortals around him, pawing at his ears for attention and he had to fight hard to resist the temptation to smite them out of existence. He still needed mortals to carry out his wishes. Monkeys made eager hands, after all.