The Trip to Raptor Bluff (17 page)

When Abby and Leanna entered the house, Rick had removed the woman from her wheelchair and was sitting on the sofa, cradling her in his lap.  Her eyes were closed and her thin white hair was flattened against her scalp from the long stay on the floor.  Rick gestured at them to come closer and whispered, “The dog’s name is Rambo, and she is frantic that he hasn’t eaten since Saturday morning. She is also looking for her son, James.  She said her daughter-in-law and two granddaughters were in Port Fortand when the quake hit.”

“Does she know what we found outside?” Abby mouthed.

Rick shook his head ‘no’ while he lifted the teacup of water to the old woman’s lips and tried to coax her to drink.  The woman did not respond.

Leanna picked up the trembling terrier and carried him to the kitchen.

Abby followed and searched the cabinets until she found pull-top cans of dog food under the sink.  The dog ignored the food she put down until he had twice emptied the water bowl she filled for him.  “Poor little thing,” she whispered as she reached down to pet him.  Rambo devoured the food and immediately scampered back to the living room and lay down at Rick’s feet. 

“What a horrible thing for that poor woman,” shuddered Abby.  “She’s stuck on the floor slowly dying of thirst while she watches her little dog go through the same hell.”  She realized her hands were sweaty and her heart was racing.  “I don’t think my mind wants to process what my eyes have seen today.  I feel like I’m screaming on the inside - behind a wall of soundproof glass or something.  The scream is there but it can’t get out.” 

Leanna was hugging herself and shaking her head when they heard a deep moan coming from the living room.  Abby tiptoed from the kitchen and saw Rick trying to soothe the pathetic woman sobbing against his chest.  Her stick-like arms were wrapped around his body and his cheek lay atop her thin hair. 

“Is she going to make it?” Abby whispered. 

Rick shook his head ‘no’ and began to gently rub the old woman’s back.  “Find a shovel in the shed,” he mouthed.  “You know what to do.” 

“He wants us to dig a grave for her son,” Abby told Leanna when they stepped onto the porch. 

“Where?”

“Who cares!” snapped Abby.  “Let’s just get this over with, OK?  It will go faster if we can find two shovels.” 

Leanna turned away, but not before Abby saw the tears in her eyes. 

“Hey, sorry, Leanna.”  Abby touched her arm.  “I didn’t mean to bark at you.  It’s just that Rick isn’t going to move until he knows that poor lady is strong enough to be carried out of here, or until she dies.  He told her about her son, I think, and that’s what made her cry.  He doesn’t believe she’s going to make it.”  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.  “It’s just getting to be too much, you know?  It feels like even the air we are breathing is sad.”

“I know.  You don’t need to explain yourself.  I feel kinda like all my skin has been peeled away.  Everything hurts.”  She linked her arm through Abby’s and pulled her away from the house.

There was a large shovel and a much smaller one buried in the scattered equipment beside the toppled shed.  The girls chose a spot at the edge of the lawn where the earth wasn’t too hard.  It was also far enough from James’ body so they didn’t feel suffocated by the putrid smell. 

“I never even thought about this,” said Leanna, wiping the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve.  “How many people are stranded and helpless like that poor woman?  How many people are going to die so miserable and alone?”

“Kick my ass if you ever hear me say a complaining word about anything for the rest of my life.” 

The time slipped by as the girls dug, making the hole long and deep enough for a human body.  Both of them were standing in the grave with only their shoulders and heads showing above the ground when Rick came out of the house carrying the old woman.  Her arms hung limp and her head lolled to the side.  Rambo pranced beside him, yipping and whining.

“She’s gone,” he said with tears dripping from his chin.  “Rambo let me know the second it happened.  The poor little guy is grieving his heart out.”  Rick carefully lowered himself to a seated position at the edge of the grave with the body across his lap.

“We can take her from you, Rick,” Leanna said, beginning to cry herself.  “There should be room for her son in here, too.”  She already had her hands under the frail woman’s armpits and Abby positioned herself to take her legs.

“Be gentle,” Rick said, standing up slowly.  “Her name is Judith.”

“Wait up, Rick,” Abby called as he turned and began to walk towards the car.  “We can help you with James.”  She folded Judith’s hands across her chest while Leanna straightened her clothes.

“No.  I can handle James without your help.  You guys take a break.”

“You are going to lift the car off of him by yourself?” asked Abby, climbing out of the grave and wiping her hands on her jeans. “And who is going to pull him out once the car is lifted?”

“I can use a jack to lift the car.  You do not need to be exposed to anything worse than what you have already seen. Moving James will be a nightmare.”

“Shut up, Rick.  We are helping you.”

James’ torso was crushed from the weight of the car, and the gasses that had built up in his body since the time of death pushed his bloated form into the metal framework.  A cloud of flies lifted as Rick approached and exposed millions of squirming maggots.  Rick took one look at the condition of the body and said, “You two need to find something to cover your mouths and noses.  The escaping gasses when we lift the car will knock you out, otherwise.  See if you can find some dishrags in the kitchen.”  Rambo had followed them from Judith’s grave and was yapping at James’ body.  Leanna retched loudly from a few feet away.

“Leanna, take Rambo to the porch and see if you can calm him down,” Abby said as she darted towards the house for rags.  “Rick and I can handle this.”

Leanna nodded and picked up Rambo, still retching as she walked to the porch.

Rick tied rope around James’ chest, stopping once to vomit. Leanna appeared at the last second, unwilling to let Abby and Rick do the hideous work by themselves.  Once James was free of the car’s weight, the three of them tugged on the rope to drag his body to the grave.

“Rest in peace, James,” Rick whispered as they pulled the remains into the hole.  James’ body fell clumsily in a heap on top of his mother’s corpse. 

“Not exactly a soft landing,” said Leanna between gags, “but I think he understands.”

Something about the dry statement mixed with the gagging struck Abby as outrageously, hilariously funny and she collapsed on the ground in laughter.  “I’m so sorry you guys!” she gasped.  She stood up but immediately doubled over in laughter again.  “I don’t know what the matter with me is!  How can I be laughing at a time like this?” The more she talked, the harder she laughed, and Rick began to laugh, too.  He couldn’t help himself.  When Leanna joined in, hysteria took over.  The three of them howled until they were bent over and holding their sides.

“It’s not funny!” snorted Rick. 

“No it isn’t!” cried Abby, laughing even harder.  “I don’t know where this is coming from!”

“Stop!  Stop laughing!  We don’t want to remember that this is how we behaved at a time like this!” cried Leanna.  She grabbed her crotch to keep from wetting her pants, which made everyone laugh even harder.  Rambo stood at the edge of the grave with his eyes ticking between the three of them.

“Poor Rambo,” said Abby, wiping her eyes.  “He is looking at us like we are crazy.  I think maybe we are a little crazy at this point.  I know I am.”

It was dusk by the time they filled the grave with dirt.  “I can’t think of anything from the house that we need to take with us tonight,” Rick said.  “We have enough food, and I can’t stand the thought of going in there again.  If we have to come back another day, we can.”

“Um, you definitely need to go back inside, Rick,” said Abby, gently taking Rambo from his arms.  “You have to change your clothes.  You still have Judith’s waste all over you and you smell like an old diaper.”

Rick glanced down at his front and set off towards the house.  When he returned a few minutes later, he was wearing a pair of too-short jeans held up by a thick leather belt.  He also wore a clean t-shirt under an open flannel shirt.  He carried a clear plastic bag with a piece of paper inside which he secured to the grave with a fork.  “I noted the date we buried Judith and James, and I left my contact information,” he said.  “If James’ wife and children survived the tsunami in Port Fortand, they will want to know what happened.  There may be others who come looking for them, too.  I also said that we took Rambo with us.”

“I kinda feel like we should say a prayer over the grave,” Leanna said quietly.

“I think Rick holding Judith on his lap and comforting her while she died in his arms is enough of a prayer,” replied Abby.

“I’m with Leanna,” said Rick.  “A few words to acknowledge their lives is the least we can do.”

“Well, why don’t you say one of your Mormon prayers for the dead?” suggested Leanna.  “I mean, I was so wrong to say what I did about your religious beliefs…”

Rick laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.  “For the record, Leanna, I am not a practicing Mormon.  I’m not a practicing anything, truth be told.  My family left the Mormon Church right after my father died decades ago. My mom has a saying that will stick with me for the rest of my life, and I’ll repeat it for you now. She said that any religious belief that exalts itself to the exclusion of other people is a sin against God Himself. I believe in Christ, but I do not believe in religion.”  He walked slowly to the grave and beckoned for the girls to follow him.  He took each of their hands and said quietly, “Go with God, Judith and James, and may you rest in peace together.  We will take good care of Rambo for you.  Amen.”

Ryder was walking towards them on the main road when they exited the farm’s long driveway.  A third dog trotted beside Caleb and Dante.  “Wow, you guys!  I thought something had happened to you!  It’s late!”  Rick’s change of clothes, or the fact that they were empty handed except for a Yorkshire Terrier, stopped Ryder in his tracks.

“The farm belonged to a couple by the names of James and Maria,” Rick said solemnly.  “Maria and their two daughters were in Port Fortand when the quake happened.  We found James dead underneath his car, and his mother, Judith, had been lying helpless on the floor since Saturday.  She died a few hours ago and we buried them together.  Rambo is with us from now on.”  He put Rambo on the ground so the other dogs could greet him.

“Helpless people are probably stranded all over the Pacific Northwest.  I never imagined this in my worst nightmares,” whispered Ryder. 

“Did you find any other farms?” asked Abby.

“There is a farm a couple of miles to the west but the house is old and so unstable that I didn’t dare go inside for fear of the whole thing collapsing on me.  There was no sign of people, dead or alive.  This guy,” he pointed to a medium-sized mixed breed dog, “found me.  His name tag says
Joey
.  He’s joined our pack, too.  The poor animal hadn’t eaten in days.  I fed him about an hour ago.”

“Has it really come to this?” asked Abby.  “Packs of humans and abandoned pets roaming the streets, just hoping to find a way to survive another day?”

Dakota awoke in the yacht to a dense and cloying smell that she couldn’t escape even when she buried her face in the pillow.  The air was heavy with it.  She sat up and glanced at the covered windows, wishing she had raised the blinds the night before to let the sun awaken her sooner.  It was still early morning but she had hoped to begin her walk across the debris fields at the break of dawn.

Her conscience pricked her when she used the yacht’s toilet but she ignored it; the owners would have far worse things to deal with when they reclaimed their boat.  She remembered seeing some plastic grocery bags tucked in a drawer, and filled one with the nuts she found in the bar.  She also drank a full, two-liter bottle of tonic water, knowing she would need the hydration but unwilling to add the extra weight to her already cumbersome duffel bag.

The chilly morning breeze felt fresh against her face when she stepped outside but the sickly smell was smothering.  A natural instinct to distance herself from the vile odor coursed energy through her body as she tossed her backpack and duffel bag onto the car below, then clamored over the railing. She gazed intently at the western horizon, trying to gauge the distance she would have to walk through the seemingly endless piles of wreckage.  A small cluster of the newer, multilevel beach hotels showed on the horizon and gave her a landmark to follow.  She decided that if she really hurried, she could probably make it to the coast by late afternoon.

The walking was treacherous and she had to place each foot carefully to avoid tripping or punching a foot through piles of toxic looking trash.  Moving forward was made particularly perilous by ubiquitous construction materials torn from houses and buildings: boards, beams, roofing, plywood, and bent tin siding protruded from the mounds at odd angles.  In some places, she had to climb over debris heaps that were too difficult to get around.  She quickly learned to seek out the larger pieces of wreckage such as fallen walls or slabs of concrete, as those were the least likely to wobble when she stepped on them.  The weight of the duffel bag made the precarious travel even more awkward.  After a difficult first half-hour, Dakota had a good feel for where to step and she developed a rhythm: look, step, throw the duffel bag ahead if necessary, then look again and take the next step.  She relaxed a little as she began to feel more secure and her pace picked up. 

The sickening smell was heaviest where clouds of flies swarmed and she avoided those spots, although it grew more challenging as she moved towards the coast.  The odor was familiar - clearly that of a dead animal - but there was an odd sweetness to it.  She watched her step and tried not to think about the dead house pets and marine life hidden beneath the ruins.  It wasn’t until she stepped too close to the edge of a long piece of metal siding that she discovered the true source of the smell.  The siding tipped forward, almost dumping her into a pile of boards.  She jumped to the side to avoid stepping on a demolished motorcycle, causing a cloud of flies to lift and reveal the remains of a naked man.  The corpse was a greenish color, especially around his swelling abdomen and upper thighs, and his body was marbled with purple and blue lines.  His nose, mouth, and a large gash in his side were white and pulsing with maggots.  Dakota screamed and leaped backwards, scraping her left arm on the metal siding.  She didn’t feel the cut as she vomited. 

Her eyes swept the landscape for a path free of flies and there was none.  The flies were everywhere, clouds of them for as far as she could see, filling the world with the sound of their buzzing.

She came to understand that every swarm of flies marked the location of a corpse, and that the best she could do was stay away from the largest swarms where multiple bodies likely lay.  She tried to avert her eyes when she could but was unable escape the sudden appearance of a hand, a foot, or a face showing amidst the debris.  When she saw the sandaled foot of a toddler protruding from beneath a pile of scrap, her conscious mind mercifully refused to register any more.

She walked for hours in a state of near oblivion, barely aware that time was passing and that her body was carrying her forward.  When a pair of gentle hands grasped her shoulders and shook her back into lucidity, it was late afternoon.  Dakota looked up to see the face of a haggard looking man dressed in medical scrubs who said, “You are safe, Sweetheart.  You made it.”

**********

Dakota gradually became aware of a bustling noise originating from a short distance away.  She was lying on the floor of a very large room.  There were dozens of others in the room with her, most of them sleeping on the floor, while others cried or spoke to each other in whispers.  What little light illuminated the room came from a single, battery powered lantern placed on the floor just outside a wide doorway.  She felt she would die of thirst and patted the ground around her in search of her backpack.  It was right beside her.  She sat up and drank two bottles of water before it occurred to her that she might still need to ration it.  Her arm stung, and she remembered cutting it as she jumped away from the dead man’s bloated body.  The events of the day flooded her mind and she tried to will away the macabre images.  She needed to do something, anything, to move her thoughts in a different direction. 

She had no memory of what had happened since the kind doctor shook her out of her stupor.  Try as she might, she could not remember being led into the room where she now sat. It felt strange to her, being inside a building with tiled floors and artificial light, and to hear human voices around her.  It felt strange because the smell of death still permeated the air.  It was everywhere.

Rising stiffly, she stepped carefully among the sleeping people and into a dim hallway.  A room across the corridor was brightly lit with standing light fixtures, and cries of pain came from within.  Peeking through the open door, she saw a makeshift surgical ward with harried doctors and nurses rushing among the moaning patients.  In a smaller room next to that, men and women in medical scrubs slept on rubber mats laid out on the filthy floor.  She recognized one of the sleeping staff as the man who had found her earlier. 

“It’s two o’clock in the morning.  You should be resting,” came a soft voice beside her.  “I’m Cara, one of the doctors.  Aren’t you the girl who Doctor Clifford found wandering in from the Drowning Fields?”

When Dakota looked at her in confusion, the lady said, “Our teams didn’t get here until late yesterday afternoon, not long before you arrived.  This place was already full of survivors who found refuge on the upper floors right before the tsunamis came in.  Lots of others began arriving from other hotels when they realized medical help was here.  They all came in from the beach.  As far as we know, you are the only poor soul who walked in from the east.”

“There will be others.  I was a day ahead of my mom and two other girls.”  Dakota pictured her mother’s weak and complaining team trying to walk the same horrific journey from the bridge to the coast.  They would make it.  They had to make it.

The tall woman standing beside her looked as though she could fall asleep on her feet.  She slumped against the wall and said, “We don’t have much in the way of supplies right now, but we are expecting more airdrops soon.  Come with me and I will see if I can find you something to eat.”

“I need to use a satellite phone, please!  I need to tell my grandfather where everyone is.  There was a whole group of us traveling together and we all split up into teams.”

“I’m sorry, but we only have one satellite phone with us and the battery died.  The charger is solar powered so we can’t recharge it until the sun comes up, and even then, we need it full time to communicate with our home base and other emergency groups.  We are desperate for supplies, and there are critically injured people here who need to be evacuated.  We aren’t even allowed to use the phone to call our families.”  Cara saw the look of despair sweep across Dakota’s face and squeezed her shoulder.  “Like I said, we are team zero and we barely got ourselves and a few food and medical supplies here.  We are expecting lots more help tomorrow, though.  We will find a phone for you.”

Dakota was checking the pockets of her dirt encrusted clothes for the slip of paper with her grandfather’s phone number on it.  There was nothing in her pockets but the balled up napkin she had used over and over to stifle her gags during the hike through the tsunami wreckage.  The slip of paper must have fallen out unnoticed when she took out the napkin.  “Never mind,” she said miserably.  “I lost the number.  I have to wait for my mom to get here tomorrow.”  She looked around her at the swept but still dirty floors.  People had done their best to move out the tsunami filth but without water or manpower to clean, the floors were covered in grime.  “Where are we?”

“We are standing in what used to be the ground floor of the Oceanfront Hotel.  Come on, you have to eat something.  We have enough water and military MREs to get us through the night.”

A young man wearing scrubs popped his head into the hallway and asked, “Cara, what are you doing still awake?  You should be sleeping.  We need you rested when you come back on shift.”

“I’m fine, Cara,” said Dakota.  “I have some food in my pack, but thank you.”  She walked away quickly so Cara wouldn’t notice the trembling that started in her knees and was working its way up her body. 

**********

The sound of helicopters overhead woke Dakota at dawn.  She drank a bottle of water and opened the bag of nuts.  The previous day’s events began to play in her head and her appetite fled.  She needed something to keep her busy. 

When she stumbled into the hallway, men and women in military uniforms, their arms laden with brown cardboard boxes, were scurrying about.  A teenage boy in dirty jeans and a torn sweatshirt approached her and said, “I am so glad more help is here.  I was getting really worried that we would run out of water again.”  He gestured to a lone case of bottled water a few feet away.  “That’s all we have left.” 

“Clear the hallway, please,” said a chunky woman dressed in military fatigues.  Her voice was curt but her smile was friendly when she said, “Get out of the way or make yourselves useful.  We could use some help getting supplies in from the beach.” 

“I can help,” said Dakota, eager for the distraction.

“I’m Jason,” said the young man as they followed the woman through the building’s west entrance.  The doors and windows were gone and the floor was covered in piles of seaweed, grime covered trash, and sand.  “My parents and I were visiting Mom’s sister in Northern California, and she told us that we couldn’t go back home to Indiana without seeing the Oregon coast.  We were planning to spend one night here and then head north.  The gods must have been with us because we had barely pulled in to Port Fortand before the ground started shaking.”

“I’m Dakota…”

“Kids!” barked a balding man in uniform.  “The motorized rafts landing on the beach directly in front of us are bringing in supplies from the ship.  Do you mind helping those soldiers clear a wider walkway to the front doors?  When the path is cleared, you can help us bring in boxes.  Put anything marked with a red cross in that stack to the left.  Everything else goes to the right.  Stay away from the airdrop zone at the south end of the beach.”

The once pristine beach was littered with debris of every type and shape, and the ocean itself held mountains of floating trash.  A swarm of uniformed personnel was clearing the detritus to widen a sand pathway from the water’s edge to the hotel’s main entrance.  “At least the air smells clean out here,” sighed Dakota.  “How many people are in the hotel?”

“Hundreds.  When the hotel rooms filled up, people started crashing in the conference rooms on the ground floor.  The really injured people are in rooms at the very end of the hallway so we won’t hear their yells.  There’s a whole room full of little kids who got separated from their parents, too.  Volunteers from among the survivors are helping out with them.”  Jason interrupted his story to point at a portable toilet being unloaded on the beach.  “Oh, thank god!  My parents were telling everyone to use containers for their waste – bags, bottles – anything but the hotel toilets, but no one listened and they used the toilets anyway.  Now the toilets are filled up but can’t be flushed.  Some of them are overflowing.  The whole floor where my family’s room is smells like an outhouse.”

“I was wondering about that.  I really need to go.”

Jason nodded towards a large piece of tin siding tipped against a pile of boards about fifty yards away.  “Go in there and I’ll keep a lookout.  I started going there yesterday when we ran out of bags.”

Jason wasn’t the only person who had used the area for a bathroom.  The ground under the makeshift roof was covered with feces and bits of paper, and the air was fetid with the smell of human excrement.  Dakota squatted in the sand and thought, “We are living like animals, and it is starting to feel normal.”

Jason and Dakota worked with the soldiers, clearing rubble and helping them lay down wide pieces of plywood to form a walkway from the beach drop-off zone to the hotel’s entrance.  Jason gestured to a group of soldiers rushing to enlarge an improvised landing site beneath a hovering helicopter. “Now they can start evacuating the worst of the injured.  Most of them were inside buildings or close to buildings when the earthquake happened.  There wasn’t a lot of time to get people out of the rubble before the first tsunami came in.”  Jason’s face took on a look of horror when he whispered.  “Everyone panicked when the tsunami alarm went off.  People were trying to run on broken legs; people were screaming for their kids…  A guy from this hotel was shouting for everyone to come inside and get on the top floors, but too many people didn’t listen.  They went for their cars or tried to run east through the town, but the first tsunami came through so soon after the quake.  They couldn’t outrun it.”