“Point is, it wouldn’t be there without you. Who found Boston on the twenty-meter band? Who found Toronto? Shit, Joey, you’re the only individual in town who can read a circuit diagram. You know that. So why do a stupid thing like this? Come up here wavin’ a little red pocketknife just because some girl tickled your nuts?”
“You don’t understand,” Joey said, but there was a note of conciliation in it, a hint of regret.
“Maybe,” Kindle said, “if the doctor agrees—and it’s his call, he’s the one who got cut—maybe we can not mention this incident downstairs. Not ruin your reputation for being smart.”
Joey said nothing. Waited, his eyes averted.
Matt said, “I guess I can go along with that.” Joey looked at him expressionlessly.
“Get on downstairs,” Kindle said, “and consider yourself lucky.”
Matt watched him amble down the corridor to the stairwell. The door opened and closed inaudibly, the sound of it buried under the noise of the storm.
Kindle turned to Matt. “Some medical advice from a civilian? You ought to bind that cut.”
He bandaged it quickly and rolled his sleeve down to cover the evidence. “Since you’re here, maybe you can help me carry some pharmaceuticals.”
“Sure enough,” Kindle said. “I brought a flashlight, by the way. Abby mentioned you’d gone up without one.”
“Thanks. And thank you for what you did with Joey.”
“I didn’t do anything except derail him. I’ve been worried he’d do some shit like this. When Joey gets mad… he gets mad all over. You know what I mean?”
“He said he didn’t come up here to kill me. But it might have happened.”
“It’s not just temper. It’s like some old hurt he never paid back. There’s a button in Joey that shouldn’t get pushed.”
“You did a good job turning him around.”
“Yeah, for now, but in the long run…” Kindle looked unhappy. “People are such shits, Matthew.”
“They can be.”
“Joey sure as hell can be. You’re still shaking.”
“It’s been a long night.”
“Damn noise,” Kindle said. They had been shouting to make themselves heard. His voice was raw. “Matthew… a little more friendly advice? You have to watch out for yourself.”
“I think we all do.”
“Sure we do.” Kindle, looking vaguely embarrassed, gathered a carton of pharmaceuticals from the shelf. “So what do you think, are we gonna live through the night?”
The roar of the storm had increased a notch. It sounded like some disaster more tangible than wind: trucks colliding, trains derailing in the dark.
“Probably,” Matt said. “But we should get downstairs and stay there.”
“Come morning,” Kindle said, “there won’t be much left of this town.”
Matt gave Abby some of the sterile cotton, which she wadded into her ears: “It does help. Though it makes conversation difficult. But no one’s talking much anyhow. Matt? Did you hurt your arm?”
The bandage had seeped a little. “Cut myself on some glass. Nothing serious.”
“Get some rest. If you can!”
He promised he would. He medicated Paul Jacopetti, then found a mattress for himself and stretched out on it. Everybody had moved into the hallway where it was quieter. Beth and Joey were three mattresses apart, glaring at each other from time to time. Tom Kindle wadded towels under the stairway door where some rainwater had begun to trickle through. Everyone else was simply waiting.
Waiting for the storm to peak, Matt thought, or for the ceiling to drop. Whichever came first. And because there was nothing to see of the storm, the temptation was to listen to it… try to decipher every rumble that penetrated the basement.
After a time, Abby consulted Tom Kindle, and the two of them managed to tap enough generator power to run a microwave oven—suddenly Abby was distributing cafeteria trays of steaming instant dinner. She’d been right, Matt thought, about the restorative power of hot food. It was an act of defiance: We may be huddled like rats in a hole, but we don’t have to eat like rats.
Dinner ended with a crash that seemed to shake the concrete under their feet.
“Jesus,” Chuck Makepeace said. “We must have lost part of the building.”
Kindle, who was collecting empty trays, said, “Maybe. More likely something hit us. One of those big trees at the west end of the parking lot, maybe.”
Jacopetti, pain-free but still pale, was impressed by the idea. “What would it take to pick up one of those trees and fling it that distance? What’s a tree like that weigh? Eight, nine hundred pounds?”
“I never weighed one,” Kindle said.
“Pick it up like a stick,” Jacopetti marvelled. “Pick it up and throw it!”
Matt checked his watch. Ten forty-five.
Eleven fifteen: Beth Porter said she thought she smelled smoke… maybe coming down through the ventilators? Kindle said he didn’t think it was likely, but for safety’s sake he was going to shut off the generator. “Get those battery lamps going. Eye of the storm should be overhead soon.”
The hallway seemed colder without the overhead light. Maybe it was colder. Hadn’t been that warm to begin with, Matt thought. He helped Abby distribute blankets.
Another huge crash shook the hallway, and another directly after it. Christ, Matt thought, what must it be like out there? He tried to picture an exterior world so transformed that Douglas firs flew through the air like javelins.
At half past eleven there was a new and even louder crash, a rending roar that shook the foundation—the vibration seeming to come from beneath, up through the concrete, through the bedrock.
“Lost part of the building for sure,” Jacopetti said. “Maybe a whole floor.”
“You may be right,” Kindle said. He added into Mart’s ear, as nearly a whisper as conditions permitted, “I hope you didn’t go to too much trouble to cure this man.”
Abby said, “I think I might scream.” She sat down, pale in the lantern light. “Fair warning, people.”
We must be near the eye wall, Matt thought. A wall of wind harder than brick, wind become a substance: solid, deadly.
He thought of that wind sheering at the broken stump of the hospital and prying at what was beneath—rooting for these few human lives like a terrier digging up a nest of field mice.
The foundation shook again. Matt looked at his watch. Perversely, the battery had chosen this moment to die. The display was blank; when he rapped it, the watch said 13:91. “Abby? Do you have the time?”
It was twelve twenty-five when the wind suddenly paused.
The freight-train roar faded gradually.
The air stirred. Dust rose from the floor of the hallway and danced in the lantern light.
“Eye of the storm,” Kindle said. “The building is exhaling”
“My ears popped,” Abby said.
Matt thought of gradients of air pressure steep as a mountain, the engine of the storm.
“Worse,” Bob Ganish said. “My nose is bleeding.”
There was a dreamlike quality to the stillness. Matt had heard that in the eye of a hurricane you could look up and see stars—it was that clear. He tried to imagine Buchanan, or the ruins of Buchanan, enclosed in a perfect rotating column of cloud… the moon shining on a landscape of wet rubble.
Warmth, what remained of it, seemed to drain from the basement. Matt wrapped his blanket around himself and saw others doing likewise.
Abby appeared hypnotized by the calm. “It’ll come again, won’t it? Just as hard. Maybe harder. And all at once. Like a fist. Isn’t that true?”
Kindle moved onto Abby’s mattress and put an arm around her. “True, but then we’re through the worst of it. After that, Abby, it’s only a question of waiting.”