He found Whetstone in the corner of the cell, his face bleeding so much his white hair was bright red. His arm was broken, maybe his shoulder. Pieces of ceiling had crushed his rib cage.
“Your legs!” Crane screamed against the roar that seemed to go on forever, though he knew only half a minute had passed. “Can you stand?”
“Oh, God … Crane! The pain!”
“Can you use your legs?”
“I … I think so…”
“Then hang on.” Crane threw himself over Stoney, covering the man’s body as more of the ceiling fell in. But the rocking was less, the sound more distant. The first shock had passed.
He struggled to his feet; others did the same. He dragged Stoney while screaming, “Get out! Get out now! There’ll be more shocks.”
Huge holes were gouged through the walls. The prisoners straggled toward the light coming in from outside, Crane’s wristpad was bleeping. He kept hold of Stoney and opened the fiber with his nose. “What?”
“C-Crane?” It was Lanie. “Are you all right?”
“Barely,” he said. “It’s a mess here. I’m trying to get out of the jail now. What’s it look like?”
“All we can see is smoke on the helo views,” she said. “Nothing else. Smoke.”
“It’ll clear. I’ve got to go. I’ll get back with you. Tell Newcombe we cut it a little too close.”
He blanked and kept moving. It was difficult not to trip. Bodies littered the floor.
They made it into the middle of the hallway, jammed with people piling up in front of a hole in the wall. “We’ve got a safe exit,” he called to the crowd. “Nothing to worry about. We’re all decent people. Help one another through. We’re all right. We’ll stay all right.”
Jimmy Earl caught up with him just before he got through the hole, the man still framing CD, still making his “movie.” He helped get through the hole and out with Whetstone.
“Hang in there, you bastard,” Crane said to Whetstone who was moaning. Crane was afraid for his friend, whose breathing was ragged. “I owe you three billion bucks, Stoney. Don’t conk out on me.”
They got onto Poplar, a few cops walking around in a daze, their entire station house, all ten stories of it, collapsing, dust rising from the debris, the air tasting dirty.
Smoke rolled through the area. A haze of smoke, fires and dust burned their eyes. As near as Crane could see, Memphis was gone. The elevated roadways had crumpled like paper, the hospital that had blocked his view on the drive in simply wasn’t there anymore. He couldn’t see the fairgrounds, the smoke was too thick. What was left of the university was burning out of control. The streets, the sidewalks, the lawns had buckled under the Slip, then cracked, opening huge fissures all around them. There were geysers of city water shooting high into the air from broken mains.
An aftershock hit then, everyone going to the ground again as a hydrant exploded and shot a hundred feet into the air.
There was a roaring sound that Crane couldn’t identify. He and Jimmy Earl lay Whetstone gently on the ground and went to investigate.
They carefully picked their way across the broken street, moving toward the west and the impenetrable smoke that blocked their view. They hadn’t walked fifty feet into the smoke, when Crane realized it wasn’t smoke at all, but a fine mist, a spray, like frothy drizzle.
“Oh, my God,” Jimmy Earl said.
They were standing on the bank of the Mississippi River, looking out over a raging torrent that used to be Memphis, Tennessee. The skeletons of dead buildings poked through the raging waters, bodies and homes floating past. Memphis had been a city of a million people. Now it was river bottom. A little farther up-stream, where the fairgrounds had stood, was a sight magnificent in its beautiful, deadly symmetry. A waterfall a hundred feet high now occupied what had been downtown Memphis and as they watched in amazement, the incredible span of the Memphis-Arkansas bridge floated over the edge of the falls to crash, in slow motion, into the river below.
It was beyond imagination—even Crane’s.
Jimmy Earl fell to his knees and began retching into the river. “No time for that now,” Crane said, pulling him up by the collar. “You wanted this and now you’re going to get it all on tape.”
“Time,” he said to his pad, 4:39 coming through the aural.
He dragged Jimmy Earl back to Whetstone, the man pale, but conscious. He hunkered down.
“You’re something, Crane,” Whetstone said weakly. “We walked into a lulu, didn’t we?”
“Save it,” Crane replied. “You’ll need your strength. Dammit, we’ve still got work to do on the globe. The quake hit fifty-eight minutes early.”
“That’s not so bad in f-five billion years.”
“Yeah,” Crane said, preoccupied. He looked up at Jimmy Earl. “Anyone who can still hear me right now, you need to remember two things. Get away from anything that can fall on you and try to administer first aid to those who need it. Worry about your losses later.”
Heedless of the sun, he pulled off his shirt and slid it under Whetstone. “This is going to hurt,” he said, knotting the shirt over the man’s ribs and jerking it tight. Whetstone grimaced.
Crane addressed the cam. “People are going to be in shock. They’re going to be wandering around dazed. Take these people under your wing, protect them.” He yanked on Stoney’s shoulder, slipping the ball joint back into place, and Whetstone sighed with relief.
Screams came from the remaining cell blocks, the ones on the higher levels. Men were hanging out of windows and rents in the walls. “You men!” Crane called to the Zoners who were standing, watching the end of the world. “Grab debris, steel and concrete. Start piling it up securely against the side of the block. Make a platform to bring those people down!”
He pulled off Whetstone’s belt, doubled it over and jammed it into the man’s mouth. Without a word, he jerked hard on the elbow, working the broken bone. Stoney bit down hard on the belt, blanched and passed out.
Jimmy Earl stood before him, recording it all, tears streaming down his face. “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” Crane said softly. “This is important.”
“I-I never t-thought—”
“Not now!” Crane said sternly as he checked the gash on Whetstone’s head.
He stood and moved to a plot of ground wet from the gushing fire hydrant, taking Jimmy Earl with him. He spoke to the camera. “If you have injured people who are bleeding,” he said, “Nature provides her own remedy.”
He dug his hands down into the ground. “Mud,” he said, holding up two handfuls. “Pack the wound in mud.”
He hurried back to Whetstone, demonstrating the mud technique on the injured man, packing his head in it. “This will stop the bleeding. Worry about infection later.”
A huge explosion from the university complex punctuated his sentence, followed by another shock, a strong one that hurled people to the ground.
He pulled the belt out of Stoney’s mouth and ran it around his shoulder to make a sling for the broken arm. Behind him, the Zoners were working quickly to build the tower to get the people out of the top of the rubble of the jail. Everyone was fighting against the darkness of despair.
Jimmy Earl had backed up and was framing the action as men formed a human chain to hand up pieces of debris, the cops pitching in to help. Humanity was happening, petty hatreds and politics crumbling in the face of danger to the family of Man.
There was life; there was hope.
Stoney came around, groaning, then smiled up at Crane. “I’d thank you,” he said, “but you’ll probably find a way to charge me for this.”
“Charge you? Hell, man, I’m saving you money.”
“How’s that?”
“The whole police station’s gone.” Crane smiled. “We don’t have to bail ourselves out.”