Bob Ganish said, “I need some cotton for this nosebleed. I’m a bloody mess here.”
Matt attended to it. In the dim light, the blood on Ganish s shirt looked dark. Shiny rust. He worked mechanically, still thinking about moonlight.
“Oh,” Abby said sadly. “I can hear it… it’s coming back.”
Matt breathed shallowly, listening. She was right. Here it came. That freight-train roar. It was advancing across the water, onto the land, marching uphill to Buchanan General. Impossible not to think of it as a living thing. Vast and ponderous and stupid and malicious. Leviathan.
“Best sit down, Matthew,” Kindle said.
My God, he marvelled. Listen to it come.
The Helper—anchored to the high ground where City Hall recently stood—had witnessed the destruction of the town.
It assembled vision from disparate wavelengths, peering deeply into the storm. It saw what no mortal human could have seen.
It saw the storm advance. It saw the ocean flood the lower reaches of the town; it saw tornadoes dipping from the dark shelf of the clouds.
It stood in the calm center of the eye, seeing what Matt Wheeler had only imagined: moonlight shimmering on splintered tree stumps, loose bricks, battered truck bodies, fractured bridge abutments, fragments of drywall, road tar, torn shingles, torrents of rainwater, while the microscopic shells of Traveller phytoplankton hovered in the still air, a silver mist.
Then the eye wall approached once more from the west, eclipsing the moon—a black horn of wind.
The Helper saw Buchanan General Hospital as the eye wall devoured it.
The storm had already sheered away the hospital’s roof and much of its third floor. This new impact was more than the weakened structure could withstand.
Chunks of concrete whirled upward, trailing rust-red structural rods like severed arteries. Pieces of the hospital joined fragments of other buildings in a stew of airborne debris. Lab coats tangled with tree limbs, bedsheets embraced splintered glass.
There were human beings in the hollow under the ruins of the building. But not even the Helper’s powerful eyes could see into the earth.
The building came down in a noise of wind and destruction so intense that Matt didn’t register it as a sound. He was simply battered by it. It knocked him down.
He saw Abby screaming but he couldn’t hear her.
The others shrank into their mattresses, making themselves small.
The cafeteria ceiling collapsed. Fractured concrete poured through, the remains of the west wall of the building. Matt saw this clearly from the hallway through the open cafeteria doors. The doors were open because the storm wind, rushing through the lapsed ceiling, forced them open.
If we had been in there, Matt thought, if we had stayed in the cafeteria—
A gap had been opened to the tortured sky. The wind penetrated the hallway in a single terrible thrust. Tim Belanger took the brunt of the assault. He had laid out his mattress by the entrance to the cafeteria, a mistake. The wind—heavy with dust, wet, almost tarry—cracked his head against the wall and tossed him aside.
The wind picked up the battery lanterns and threw them down the corridor. Tom Kindle managed to snag one, but the rest winked out as they struck the stairwell door. Kindle waved the single lantern, beckoning with it, shouting something inaudible.
Matt fought his way upwind to Tim Belanger. The City Hall clerk was unconscious. Matt took a breath full of grit and dirty rain and began dragging Belanger away from the cafeteria, toward the faint beacon of Kindle’s lamp.
Breathing was the hard part. Everything would be okay, Matt thought, if only he could extract enough oxygen from the moist sludge that had replaced the air. Every breath filled his mouth with grit and drove a dagger into his lungs. He fell into a rhythm of inhaling, hawking, spitting, exhaling. The dead weight of Belanger became an intolerable burden, and several times Matt considered leaving him behind. It would be the wise thing to do, he decided. Save yourself. Maybe Belanger was already dead. But his hands wouldn’t let go of the injured man’s arm. Traitorous hands.
He bumped into Abby Cushman, who gestured left: a doorway. Matt pulled Belanger over the threshold. Kindle was braced against the wall, holding his lantern into the corridor; he saw Belanger and said, “That’s it! Matthew, help me close this door.”
They wrestled it shut. Kindle hawked and spat a black wad onto the floor. “Grab that two-by-four, we’ll nail this thing shut. Then see how people are doing.” Kindle took a hammer from his carpenter’s belt. He drove nails into the framing of the door while Matt braced the two-by-four and struggled to clear his throat.
This was some kind of furnace or plumbing room, from what Matt could see—concrete floor, exposed pipes, a huge water heater. The air in the room was dense with suspended particles, but it was relatively still. Eventually some of this garbage would settle out; in the meantime—“Any of you having trouble breathing, try wrapping a cloth over your nose and mouth.”
Jacopetti, weakly: “This isn’t the linen cupboard.”
“A hank of shirt or something. For those who feel they need it.”
With the door barred, Matt set about investigating injuries. He took the lantern from Kindle and called Beth to help. Tim Belanger first: the City Hall clerk beginning to recover from a bad blow to the head. His hair was sticky with blood, but the injury didn’t appear to be severe—as far as Matt could tell under these primitive circumstances.
Miriam Flett was having trouble catching her breath, but so were they all. He encouraged her to spit if she needed to: “We’re not being formal tonight, Miriam.”
She managed, “I can see that.” She held a ragged plastic shopping bag clutched in her left hand—the journals.
Jacopetti had suffered some recurrence of his angina, but it wasn’t crippling—“That’s normal, right, Doc? I mean if a fucking building falls on you?”
“I think we’re all doing pretty well.”
“We don’t have blankets,” Abby said mournfully. She coughed, gagged, coughed again. “We don’t have anything.”
“There’s water in that tank at the back,” Kindle said. “I checked this place before the storm. Maintenance guys used to come down here for their breaks. We got a card table around the corner and a coin machine full of candy bars.”
“Do we have any change?” Abby asked.
“No,” Kindle said. “But I got this hammer.”
The wind howled on. But the storm was breaking, Matt thought. That was the basic fact. They had come through the worst, and now the storm was wearing itself out on the heel of the continent. Morning would come in a few hours.
Overhead, the wind still gnawed the raw ruin of the building; but the wind had begun to ease.
Tom Kindle joined Matt, sat down wearily with his arms on his knees. Kindle had been a great strength, but he was starting to show his fatigue. His face was caked with dust; his hair was a gray-black tangle.
“If the hospital’s gone,” Kindle said, “there can’t be much left of Buchanan.”
“I guess not,” Matt said.
“Knowing the sentiments of people, once this storm clears, we’ll probably be heading east.”
“Probably.”
“Pity about the town being gone.”
Was it gone? Matt had avoided the thought. But it must be. What could stand up to the wind? Commercial Street: gone. City Halclass="underline" gone. The marina: washed out to sea.
Dos Aguilas: gone. Old Quarry Park, a wilderness of mud and fallen trees.
And his house, the house where he had raised his daughter, the house where Celeste had died. Gone. But—