“I’ll get to it,” he said listlessly.
JayDee had splotches and streaks of other people’s blood on his shirt and his khaki trousers. The hospital—two apartments with the wall removed between them—was in the lower building and was being staffed by two nurses, one who had worked for a veterinarian in Fort Collins and one who had been a dental assistant when she was a young woman in Boise, Idaho, about thirty years ago. The make-do medical resources consisted of Band-Aids in various sizes, bottles of aspirin and sedatives, antiseptic, some plaster bandages to make casts, some wooden splints, a few surgical instruments such as probes and forceps and some dental tools, and a few bottles of pain-killers like Demerol and Vicodin.
“We need to do another bullet count,” Olivia said. She was trying very hard to keep her voice strong and steady. There were three other people in the room beside Dave and JayDee, all of whom shared some measure of responsibility for keeping track of supplies and the ammo. “Find out what everybody’s got left.”
“I’ve got five clips,” Dave answered. “Thirty-two bullets each. After that, I’m done.” He sat up on the sofa and took his baseball cap off. His face was deeply lined and his eyes dazed. “We can’t take another one like that. There are too many now. If those quakes hadn’t happened…they would’ve gotten in. No way we could’ve turned ’em back.”
“The quakes,” said Carmen Niega, a thin Hispanic woman who’d been a tax attorney in Denver. She had lived here a little less than four months, arriving with a half-dozen other wanderers. “Has anything like that ever happened before?”
“Never,” Olivia said. She looked toward the door, which hung open because it was now impossible to close in the crooked frame. Ethan Gaines was standing on the threshold, peering in. Behind him, the first dank yellow light of dawn had begun to filter through the thick soup of clouds. “You all right?” she asked him.
He nodded, his face wan and rock dust whitening his hair and clothes.
“Told you to get away from there,” she said. She glanced at the doctor. “John, I think he’s in shock. Would you—”
“No, I’m not,” Ethan replied before JayDee could speak. He came into the room, stumbling a little bit because he realized he probably was in shock. “I wanted to tell you. Tell all of you.” He paused, trying to figure out exactly what it was he wanted to say.
“Tell us what?” Dave prompted, the harshness back in his voice because he was dead tired, and he had to go put together a detail to bury people including the headless body of a pretty good guy who used to remember a few jokes and play poker with him and some of the others.
Ethan said, “I think…I caused the earthquakes.” He frowned. “I know I caused them.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then JayDee said quietly, “Ethan, let’s go to the hospital where you can lie down and rest, and I can give you some water and a seda—”
“I said…I caused the quakes,” Ethan repeated.
“Sure you did.” Dave put his cap back on and ran a hand across his bearded chin. “Oh yeah, you did a great job. Ran the Gray Men off, yeah. Also almost destroyed our complex here, but…hey…I don’t mind sleeping in a room that’s about to fall in. If my ceiling doesn’t collapse first. What’s wrong with you, kid? You lost your marbles along with your memory?”
“Stop it, Dave,” Olivia cautioned. She stood up. “Ethan, I want you to go with the doctor. Will you—”
“No, I won’t go.” Ethan came forward into the room with such a deliberate stride and such a determined expression that Carmen Niega, Russ Whitcomb and Joel Shuster backed away to give him room. He passed JayDee and walked up to the edge of Olivia’s desk. In the lamplight his eyes were bright blue and nearly frightening to Olivia in their fierce intensity. “I’m telling you. I knew to touch the rocks in the wall and…I don’t know, exactly…but…I saw what would happen, in my head. It was like I was making a command, and the earth did what I wanted. What I saw. Only…it was stronger than I thought it would be. Does that make any sense?”
“No, Ethan…it doesn’t. It just happened, that’s all. Why it happened at that moment, I don’t know. We were very lucky. But you didn’t cause the quakes. Now, I really do want you to go to the hospital. I want you to be quiet and rest down there, if you can.”
JayDee gave a grunt. It was going to be hard to rest, with all those injured people in there needing attention. Still, he could give the boy a swallow of the precious bottled water and two sleeping pills and that would take care of him for about twelve hours.
“Hey…listen!” Kitt Falkenberg had come to the door. She was about thirty years of age, had dirty blonde hair and a tall, lean physique and had been a star volleyball outside hitter at the University of Colorado. In her voice was the high, breathless strain of both excitement and tension. “I heard it from Tommy Cordell and then I saw it myself! The swimming pool! The quakes cracked it right down the middle. Only…it’s filling up!”
“What?” Dave roused himself to his feet.
“The pool,” Kitt repeated, her green eyes nearly luminous in her dirt-smudged face. “Water’s flooding in…coming up through the crack! Come on, you’ve gotta see it!”
It took them a few minutes to get out of the crooked apartment and down the hill. Olivia was first. JayDee walked at the back of the group alongside Ethan. About forty people had already gathered around the pool. In the yellow light of oncoming dawn Olivia pushed through the throng, with Dave behind her. They saw what Kitt had already seen: the pool had a jagged crack right along its center, from the drain to the shallow end, and water was streaming up from below. A man—Dave and Olivia recognized him as Paul Edson, who in his previous life had been a musician in a jazz band and played a very mean saxophone—was standing in the shallow end, and was leaning over to touch the water as it gurgled up.
“It’s cold,” Paul said. He cupped a handful and tasted it. “My God!” he said. “I think it’s spring water!”
Others entered the pool to also touch and taste the water. Olivia descended the steps and cupped a handful, then put it to her mouth. Her eyes found Dave. She said, nearly as breathlessly as Kitt had spoken, “We’ve been living here with a spring under the swimming pool. All this time. Clean water.” She brought herself back to her leadership role, and she pulled herself up straight and took on the mask again. “Everyone, get bottles or buckets or whatever you can find and fill them! Come on, hurry! Tell everyone else you see to get over here!” She didn’t have to tell anyone twice, and from the strength of the water rising from its underground channel there was really no need to hurry, except to beat the next contaminated rainfall. She thought they needed some kind of covering for the pool, something to keep the rain out, and she looked to Dave again to tell him that but Dave had retreated from the pool’s edge.
He was standing a few feet to Ethan’s right, staring at the boy. It had occurred to Dave that Ethan had said I felt like I needed to come here after Dave had seen him walking the length of the pool. Dave had realized that the crack had followed Ethan’s trail; the pool had broken open directly where the boy had been walking.
Ethan watched, his eyes heavy-lidded, as the water continued to stream in. He felt very tired, drifting toward sleep. Is this what shock feels like? he wondered. He watched the other people moving quickly to go get their bottles and buckets, and then he was aware of Dave McKane standing at his side, staring fixedly at him as if he had never really seen the boy before.