The Trip to Raptor Bluff (18 page)

“You saw the tsunamis come in?” 

“From a seventh floor balcony at the back of the hotel.  There were
so many people
still outside when the first wave poured in.  It was horrible, Dakota.  The water was pushing cars and boats and buildings like they were plastic toys.  And it was moving so fast!  Now the doctors and nurses have started calling everything east of the beach the ‘Drowning Fields’ because no one on the ground, even if they were in cars, had a chance.”  He shivered at the memory and said in a hushed voice, “The only person I know about who survived the tsunami itself came in late yesterday afternoon.  The poor guy was drifting in the ocean on a piece of plywood, stark naked and covered in salt.  The doctors said the power in the tsunami stripped the clothes right off his body.  I have never seen a sunburn like that in my life.”

“I walked across the Drowning Fields to get here,” said Dakota.  “There are dead people everywhere.”

Jason stopped working and stared at her with a look between puzzlement and horror.

Dakota dropped her eyes and shook her head.  “I can’t think about that right now.  I don’t know why I told you.”

They were interrupted by a young soldier who arrived carrying a heavy pack filled with water and food.  “Time to eat, you guys.”  He handed them each a bottle of water and a sealed brown bag.  “Here is a MRE for each of you.”

Dakota tore into a packet of chili with beans.  She groaned with pleasure as she put the cold food in her mouth with the plastic spoon that came in the bag.  “Real food!  I have been eating power bars and candy bars since Saturday.”

“These aren’t bad,” Jason said as he opened his packaged meal.  “Especially when you haven’t eaten in three days.  I ate cold spaghetti last night and it was the best food I have ever tasted.”

“You didn’t have any food for three days?”

“Where were we going to get food?  All the stores and restaurants were wiped out by the tsunami.  That left only the vending machines on the hotel’s top floors, and they were smashed in and looted on the first day.  No one ate for three days unless they had a private stash, and there was no water, either.  When the water heaters and toilet tanks in the hotel ran dry, we just went thirsty.”

“Toilet tanks?  Are you serious?” 

“People gotta drink, and that was the only water in the place.  Anyway, people acted like
freaks
when the water and MREs came in with the medical staff yesterday afternoon.  I saw some lady grab MREs from a couple of little kids.  She said her own kids were hungry.  The military wasn’t here yet and one of the doctors had to stand on a table and threaten to hold back food and water unless everyone shut up and got in line.  Then he let all of the kids go first.”  He lowered his voice and said, “I’m so glad more supplies came in today, but I’m even happier to see the soldiers.  My parents were getting worried by the way people were acting, like it was going to get dangerous.  They were right.  After the food riot last night, we decided we needed to stay in our room until someone came in to restore order.”

“Well, it looks like other people feel safer, too.  There are lots of us on the beach helping out the soldiers.”

Jason and Dakota turned their heads towards the hotel entrance when they heard a piercing whistle.  A man in hospital scrubs was waving his arms and shouting, “People, we need a couple of runners over here to unpack medical supplies and organize them for the staff!”

Dakota jumped to her feet and tucked packets of dried banana and raisins from her MRE in her pocket.  “I’m going to help.  I need to stay closer to the hotel anyway so I can watch for my mom.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Jason, trotting to catch up. 

The exhausted doctor who had summoned for help smiled briefly before he showed them a large pile of haphazardly stacked boxes marked with red crosses.  “We are running out of everything and there are not enough medical personnel to unpack these supplies.  I need you to open the boxes and stack things by type, OK?  Start by putting all the boxes of medicines and drugs on the right side of the door, and everything else to the left of the door.  Then I need each of you to take a pile and break things down into categories; organize surgical gloves together in one place, bandages in another, needles in another, and so on.  Once everything is separated, stack the boxes along the wall where the medical staff takes their naps.  Oh, and we need alcohol wipes, gauze bandages, and surgical tape immediately.  Hand those to anyone in scrubs as soon as you find them.  Look for surgical masks, too.  If there is more than one box, start passing them out to the military personnel first, then to anyone else who wants one.  The stench from the Drowning Fields will become unbearable before the day is out.”

Jason and Dakota toiled through the afternoon, sorting, stacking, and delivering boxes of medical supplies.  While they worked, military personnel cleared the ground floor of tsunami debris and arranged standard areas for dispersing food and water.  A long table was set up in the middle of the lobby where lines of people signed their names to survivor lists and filled out forms for nearest contacts.  “There are people everywhere trying to find out if their families and friends survived,” whispered Jason.  “I still can’t wrap my mind around any of this.”

“I need to go out back and see if I can find my mom’s team,” said Dakota.  “They should have made it down Hammer Mountain yesterday and will be crossing the Drowning Fields today.”  Her worry had mounted as the hours passed, and by late afternoon she was having difficulty concentrating on anything but her mother’s safety. 

“Don’t go out there without surgical masks,” warned a soldier who saw them heading towards the hotel’s rear exit.  “You think the smell is bad in here, just walk five feet out the back door.”

Even through the masks, the smell of death was overpowering.  Jason had to rip off his mask to vomit.  “You walked across the whole thing?” he gasped in between gags.  His eyes poured water and he began to vomit again. 

Watching Jason vomit started a gag reflex in Dakota and she began to vomit also.  “It wasn’t this bad yesterday,” she wheezed.

“What is this, a
retcharama
?  A
barfathon
?” asked a male soldier.  He was leaning against the wall with his surgical mask raised to uncover his mouth, holding a bottle of water in one hand and a cigarette in the other. 

Jason’s shout of laughter came out in the middle of a very loud gag, and the resulting sound was something between a screech of pain and a howl of hysteria.  Dakota began to giggle and the soldier’s shoulders started shaking with mirth.  “I took a psychology course in college where the instructor showed our class a slideshow of people in distressing situations.  For some reason, we students started to laugh.  Every picture he showed us was worse than the last, and by the end of the slideshow, the whole class was roaring with laughter.  Laughter in the face of distress is always inappropriate, but there must be something in the human psyche that makes us laugh at the worst of times.”  He sighed deeply.  “And this is most definitely the very worst of times.” 

The sudden melancholy in the soldier’s face brought Dakota’s fear for her mother rushing to the surface, and her laughter quickly turned to sobs.  “My mom and two teenage girls are trying to cross the Drowning Fields!” she cried.  “It was almost too much for me to walk through yesterday, so I don’t see how they can make it!” 

The young soldier’s weary eyes came alive with worry.  “Why didn’t you say something?  We need to get to them before the sun goes down.  Come with me.  You need to tell Colonel McCoy what you just told me.”

Half an hour later, Dakota, a dozen soldiers, Jason, and Jason’s parents made their way east across the Drowning Fields.  All of them spent the first few minutes gagging or vomiting.  When darkness began to fall and the difficult walking became almost impossible even with flashlights, the soldier in charge reluctantly told Dakota that they had to turn back for their own safety.

“What if their water is gone?” cried Dakota.  “We can’t just leave them out there!”

“Wait!” said Jason’s mother.  “I heard something!  I think someone is calling for help!  They must have seen our flashlights!”

All movement stopped and the next distant wail sounded eerily from across the hideous expanse.  Dakota’s knees gave out and Jason’s father caught her before she fell.  It was Lucy screaming for help.

It took them until early evening to descend the eastern slope of Hammer Mountain, and the sun was too low in the sky to consider walking through the blighted landscape to the coast. They trudged in aghast silence towards what remained of the bridge.  Lucy hoped that an extending edge of concrete would at least offer scant protection from the elements, but the area underneath was too crowded with wreckage.  Kate climbed the supporting man-made hill and shouted for Lucy and Sarah to follow.  “It will be cold up here but there is no hope of finding anything dry enough to burn in a fire,” she said as she pulled a warm jacket and a heavy sweatshirt from her duffle bag.  She tossed the sweatshirt to Sarah, who was staring dead-eyed into the distance.  Sarah pulled on the sweatshirt without a word of thanks and turned her back. 

“If you would put some energy into helping out instead of pouting, Sarah…” started Lucy, but Kate silenced her with a nudge. Lucy squeezed her eyes shut and covered her mouth.  “Dakota,” she moaned.

“Let’s eat and go to sleep,” Kate said wearily as she pulled candy bars from Lucy’s pack.  “The sooner tomorrow gets here, the faster you will see her.”

**********

Lucy was up before the sun and woke the others as soon as it was light enough to see.  “That smell is from the people who died in the tsunami,” she said with deliberate bluntness.  Sarah had not made a sound in thirty six hours except to groan and sigh, and Lucy hoped the harsh words would prevent a looming emotional collapse.  It worked.  Sarah went rigid with dread as she surveyed the endless piles of debris ahead of them.  The scene was surreal in the dawn light, with boats sitting on cars, sitting on small buildings. A bus, skewered through the windows by a telephone pole, tipped precariously on top of an enormous boulder.

“It’s not going to be an easy walk,” Lucy continued, “but imagine being stuck in the middle of this tsunami graveyard after dark.  There will be dead bodies lying all around us.”  She hurried down the hill with Kate and Sarah right on her heels.

Kate took the lead when she saw that Lucy was attempting to walk a straight line regardless of the obstacles in front of her.  “Pull the neck of your t-shirt over your mouth and nose to filter the smell,” she said.  “Follow me.  We have a long way to go if we want to get to the beach before dark.”  She was making good time as she navigated the clearest pathways and Lucy and Sarah fell in behind her. “Stay away from the swarms of flies if you can help it.  That is where the bodies are.”

**********

They had been walking for hours and the sun was directly overhead.  “This isn’t fair!” sniveled Sarah.  “You guys have backpacks so your hands are free.  I’m trying to climb over all this stuff with two heavy bags.”

“It speaks,” said Lucy dryly.  “Wait, I mean, it
whines
.”

“Shut up, Sarah,” shot Kate.  “If you hadn’t left your backpack and duffel bag behind, you wouldn’t be stuck carrying all the water.  Besides, we drank three bottles each since we filled them, so there are only seven left.  Those bags aren’t heavy and you know it.  Give me a break!”

“You guys need to carry your own water,” whimpered Sarah.  “I can’t carry two bags!”

“Then move all the water into one bag and leave the other behind,” snapped Lucy.  “Hurry up, unless you want us to leave
you
behind.”

Sarah sighed loudly as she lethargically unzipped both duffle bags and began to move the bottles.

“Hurry!” cried Kate.  “God, Sarah!  Do you really want to be stuck out here after dark? I don’t believe you!”  Kate quickened her pace and Lucy followed while Sarah bellowed at them to wait up.  When Sarah finally had the one bag packed and zipped, she started after them with no thought for where she stepped.  Her blood-curdling scream halted Lucy and Kate dead in their tracks. 

“Oh my god!  She fell on top of a body!” cried Kate, beginning to vomit. 

Sarah was on her hands and knees, elbow deep in the corpse of a woman whose torso had been torn open by her violent tumble through the tsunami.  The dead woman’s milky eyes stared at nothing while mounds of maggots writhed in her mouth, nose, and abdomen.  Sarah, still shrieking, fell backwards and began flapping her arms wildly, trying to fling the stinking gore from her body. 

“Sarah no!” screamed Lucy and Kate together.  Sarah, who was a good twenty yards behind them, had opened the duffel bag and was pouring their drinking water on her bare arms and wiping at the filth with Lucy’s only clean t-shirt. She had emptied four of their seven bottles before Kate was close enough to kick the duffel bag away.

Sarah sat two feet from the rotting body with Lucy’s gore-covered t-shirt in her lap.  A reeking mass of maggots covered the front of her shirt, and a blackish, foul smelling fluid dripped from her chin and down her neck.  Her eyes were glazed and mouth hung slack.

“Don’t you dare go in to shock!” threatened Kate, wiping the vomit from her lips. 

Lucy had approached and was vomiting, too.  Tears streamed from her eyes as she cried, “We are walking in full sun, we are already half dead from dehydration, and we aren’t halfway to the coast yet! How can we even hope to make it without water?”

“There are three bottles left,” said Kate nervously.  She did not like the look of stark panic on Lucy’s face.  “We have to go, Lucy.  We have to move now!”  She walked over to the catatonic-looking Sarah and shoved her hard from behind.  “Get up!  Get up, Sarah!”  When Sarah remained frozen in place, Kate grabbed her ponytail and yanked her to her feet.  Sarah yowled in pain but stayed standing.  “We are leaving you if you don’t keep up, Sarah!” Kate shouted in her face.  “We are leaving you here to die alone and rot like these other zombies.  You are going to be a stinking corpse crawling with worms! 
That
,” she said, pointing at the dead woman’s mutilated body, “will be you!”  She took the remaining three water bottles from the duffel bag and handed one to Lucy and one to Sarah before tucking the third in her backpack.  “When it’s gone, it’s gone.”

**********

“I see flashlights,” whispered Kate through cracked and bleeding lips.  Their water had run out hours earlier and her dry tongue felt like sandpaper in her mouth.  They had trudged mindlessly throughout the afternoon, in full summer sunlight, with Kate in the lead and Sarah stumbling several dozen yards behind Lucy.  Sundown felt like a blessing when it finally arrived but did nothing to alleviate their thirst.  It was a torment far worse than the buzzing flies and rancid air. 

Lucy peered into the darkness, saw the flicker of multiple flashlights, and began to scream for help.  Kate dropped her backpack and staggered towards the lights.  Sarah fell to the ground and bawled like a calf in search of its mother.

**********

When Lucy awoke on the floor of a hotel conference room, it was daylight and Dakota was sitting beside her with an open bottle of water.  “Dakota!” she cried, sitting up and hugging her daughter.  “Dakota!  I was so worried about you!  How could you just run away?”  She held Dakota fiercely and cried until Dakota squirmed out of the suffocating embrace.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Dakota said, blinking back tears.  “Here, drink some water.”

Lucy guzzled the water and took a second bottle from Dakota’s hand as vague memories of the night before surfaced.  A group of adults and a teenaged boy had found them in the dark.  Dakota had appeared right behind them, hysterical with joy.  Lucy did not remember the walk back to the hotel, but she did remember being offered water.  Everything after that first sip was fuzzy.  “Where are we?” she murmured, letting her eyes roam over the crowded room.  People were everywhere: some still sleeping, and some sitting or walking about. 

“We are in a beach hotel.  The rooms are full of refugees so the medical staff and the military started putting people in the conference rooms and lobby.”

“Were you able to reach Grandpa?  Is he coming for us?”

“No, Mom.  I lost his number, but our names are on the list that goes out to everyone looking for families.  I’m sure he knows we are here.”

“Well, I need to find a phone.  Dad will get us out of here today.  First though, I need to use the bathroom.”

Dakota led her outside to a row of four portable toilets standing several hundred feet away from the hotel.  There were dozens of filthy people lined up in front of each.  Lucy looked around her in disbelief.  “You have
got
to be kidding me.”

“The toilets are new, Mom.  They just came yesterday.  Up until then, we had to go outside.”

“This is completely unacceptable!” 

“We have to wait in line like everyone else,” Dakota said patiently.  “Hurry up.  The lines are getting longer by the second.”

As they waited in line, Dakota explained that hundreds of people were stranded after the tsunamis washed through town, and most of them had taken refuge in the upper floors of the newest beach hotels.  All the rooms were full, so any and all available floor space was occupied by people waiting for evacuation.  Twelve children under the age of ten had been separated from their parents and were being cared for by military staff and civilian volunteers from among the refugees. 

“I’m helping with the toddlers, Mom.  We didn’t even get diapers until this morning.  There are also rooms full of people who are really hurt and need to be flown to hospitals, but there aren’t enough helicopters.  There aren’t enough doctors, nurses, or medical supplies, either.  The tsunamis wiped out the docks so the supply boats can’t get in.  See that ship out there?  It is full of supplies but everything has to be brought to shore by those little rafts, and it’s really hard carrying heavy boxes all the way from the beach to the hotel.” 

“This is like a third world refugee camp,” was Lucy’s only reply.  “The toilets are disgusting.  I can smell them from here.”

“We are lucky to even have toilets,” muttered Dakota, realizing that her mother added nothing but tension to the already harrowing atmosphere. 

Lucy stepped out of the toilet shuddering with revulsion.  “This is unacceptable,” she said again.  “Come with me.  We need to find a phone.”

“Kate is fine, Mom.  She was up early and was helping us with the little kids who can’t find their parents.  Sarah was in the infirmary until they figured out that there was nothing wrong with her.  They thought she was too hurt to walk last night and that’s why they carried her back to the hotel.  She wasn’t happy about losing her cot.”

Lucy was barely listening as she scanned the ragged crowd for military uniforms.  She approached the first soldier she saw and demanded to be taken to someone in charge.

“I know where the man in charge is,” Dakota said, sending an apologetic smile to the exhausted soldier.  “Mom, be nice,” she whispered.  “Those soldiers are trying to take care of everyone.  Some of them haven’t even been to bed yet.  Let’s eat while they are still passing out food and water, and then I will take you to Colonel McCoy.”

When Dakota spotted Colonel McCoy, he was sitting at a paper-strewn table in a corner of the lobby and talking on a satellite phone.  He smiled at Dakota and held up a finger to signal that he would be off the phone shortly.  “Glad you made it, Ms. Zeem,” he said when he finished his conversation and rose from his chair.  “Dakota was very worried about you…”

“I need to use your phone,” Lucy interrupted, reaching for the phone with one hand and digging in her jeans pocket for her father’s number with the other.

Colonel McCoy’s surprise quickly turned to umbrage as he snatched the phone before Lucy could grab it.  It began to ring and he answered it, turning his back as he did.  “We have at least fifty people in critical condition, and over a hundred with injuries that will become life threatening if we can’t get them to hospitals within the next twenty-four hours!” he barked into the phone.  “We need evacuation helicopters around the clock until further notice!”  When he turned back to Lucy, he said curtly, “Ms. Zeem, this phone is my only link to our rescue and supply sources.  When I have finished making arrangements to get the injured out and critical necessities in, I am happy to let you use it.”

“You
can
and
will
give me one minute to call my father!” Lucy demanded.  “One minute is all I need.  He can hire his own helicopter to get us out of here.  His name is Joshua Zeem, he owns the Zeemercise company - which I am sure you have heard of…”

“Mom!” gasped Dakota, mortified.

“I don’t care if your father is the freaking
President
!  This phone is for organizing supply intake and medical evacuations.  Why don’t you have Dakota give you a tour of our facility, starting with the orphan care room and the infirmaries?  That might give you some perspective.” 

“Wait!” Lucy cried as he stalked away.  “He can pay you anything…”

“Mom!” shouted Dakota.

Colonel McCoy turned slowly.  His face was twitching with disgust when he said, “I have a hotel full of people who have lost their loved ones; I have traumatized children who will most likely never see their parents again; I have injured people with bones sticking through their flesh and we are out of pain medication…”

“But I have pain medicine!” interrupted Lucy.  “In my backpack!  I have OxyContin we took away from one of the girls we were traveling with!”