“The road is likely to be a mess. It might take two of us to get through—can you drive me in the Cherokee?”
“Sure.”
She looked at her watch, passed a hand over her forehead. It was just after five-thirty, and the quake had lasted more than ten minutes. My God, she thought, the quake hit during rush hour. Millions of people caught on the roads, on or beneath bridges and overpasses as they fell… And with all the rivers in spring flood, too.
“Go start the Jeep,” she said. “Put the chainsaw in it. I’m going to chaise—put on my BDUs.” Damned, she thought, if she was going to confront a major national emergency in torn pantyhose. The earthquake must have gone on at least ten minutes.
Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch still stood above the Mississippi. If the old man had still been alive, Marcy Douglas would have kissed him.
One of the Frenchmen had suffered a heart attack. Everyone else had been so preoccupied during the quake that no one had noticed him until after the arch shivered to the quake’s final tremor. The Frenchman was pale and glabrous and his lips were turning blue. Marcy’s colleague Evan was giving him CPR. The victim’s friends milled around loudly explaining the situation to each other in French. Hot prairie wind blasted through broken windows, and only partially cleared away the smell of vomit. Several people had come down with motion sickness, including one little boy who had thrown up what looked like an entire bucket of popcorn. The arch did not normally move much—it would sway less than an inch even in the highest wind—but things were obviously different when bedrock was jumping around.
Marcy crawled to the station from which she controlled the tram, and used the telephone to call Richards, her superior, down on the ground level.
“We need to get paramedics up here,” she said. “We’ve got a medical emergency.”
“Good luck,” Richards said. His speech was fast and breathy, as if he’d just run several miles. “There must be hundreds of casualties in town. The ambulance crews will have plenty of people to treat without climbing the Gateway Arch.”
“What should we do?”
“Get your casualty down here. Our generators have kicked in—the trams’ll work. Then get everyone else down to ground level as soon as you can.”
“Can you send some people up to—”
“No. I’m not sending anyone up there!”
“But—”
“Besides, you can’t believe how many people we’ve got hurt down here.” Marcy replaced the phone receiver, gripped the console, and carefully steered herself to her feet. A powerful wind blew through the shattered windows, flooding the observation deck with heat and dust. She walked with care—it felt as if she were stepping on pillows, expecting the floor to leap at any instant—to where the Frenchman was lying in the midst of a group.
“How’s he doing?” she asked Evan.
Evan was in his late twenties, a white guy who had lived in Missouri all his life. “He’s breathing all right,” he said. “I think he’ll be okay if we can get the parameds here.”
“Richards wants us to get him down on the trams,” Marcy said. “He doesn’t think the parameds will get here for some time.”
Evan pushed his glasses back on his nose. “That’s gonna be tough,” he said. “Can they send us somebody beefy to help carry—”
“Richards says no.” She looked up in alarm. “Stay away from the windows, please!” One of the children was bellying up to one of the shattered windows. He pointed out into the air. “Busch Stadium fell down!” he said.
Marcy pulled him back from the broken window, but she couldn’t quite resist looking out herself. The view made her heart lurch.
Busch Stadium hadn’t fallen down, exactly, but the roof had collapsed, and the rest was clearly damaged. City Hall looked as if a giant had gone over it with a hammer. Some of the older buildings—brick office buildings and hotels—had collapsed to rubble. There didn’t seem to be a single intact window in the entire city.
Above the shattered cityscape, a few thin columns of smoke were beginning to corkscrew into the sky. As the strong wind batted at her face Marcy thought about her apartment, the comfortable old brownstone she’d felt lucky to find and be able to afford. It was brick, and she wondered if all her belongings were now buried under piles of rubble.
She was lucky, she thought. She was lucky she was working the swing shift, lucky to be in the most solid structure in all Missouri.
“Marcy,” Evan reminded. “We’re in a hurry.”
Marcy walked to Evan’s station controlling the north tramway and thumbed on the microphone. She took on a breath.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “we’re sorry about the delay. We have a visitor who has fallen ill, so we ask you will be patient while he is loaded aboard a tram. After he has been sent to ground level, we will start regular boarding, and we’ll get you all to the surface as quickly as possible.” Evan recruited one of the other Frenchmen to link arms beneath the sick man, forming support beneath his back and knees in a two-man carry. Marcy was relieved that she hadn’t been requested to support half the man’s weight on her skinny frame, but wondered if she should be insulted that she hadn’t even been asked.
The casualty was carried gingerly down the stairs until an aftershock slammed the arch. The French rescuer lost his grip, and the invalid spilled to the metal stairs. His friends clustered around and began shouting at each other in French.
“I don’t fucking believe this,” Evan muttered. Marcy shoved her way through the crowd and tried to restore order. Evan and his partner lifted the victim again, shuffled him to the first tram, then laid him inside. Evan, the other Frenchman, and one of the women—the victim’s wife, possibly—got into the tram car with him.
Marcy closed the tram doors and heard the rumble recede as the little train began its long trip to the ground.
“Excuse me?” The speaker was the young Japanese man. He was shy, and his voice was so low that Marcy could barely hear him above the blast of wind. “We are going down elevators?”
“Yes,” Marcy said.
“Is not safe on elevators,” the man said. “Is earthquake.” A number of the visitors had clustered around to listen to this exchange. “That’s right,” one man said. “We could get stranded.”
“The Gateway Arch has its own emergency power supply,” Marcy said. “I’ve been up here during two power failures in the city, and the emergency power cut in both times, and the people in the trams never even noticed.”
“Is earthquake,” the Japanese man insisted. “Must take stairs.”
“There are over a thousand stairs,” Marcy said. “We’re twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. It’s a long way down.” The man seemed unconvinced, and Marcy wondered if she was at all urging the right thing. There were earthquakes in Japan all the time, and maybe the Japanese man knew what he was talking about.
She summoned as much authority as she could, squared her shoulders, looked at everyone from under the brim of her Smokey Bear hat. “It’s much safer on the trams,” she said, and hoped her voice was steady.
The phone buzzed. She picked it up, heard Evan’s voice.
“We’ve got him down. I’m sending the tram back up.”
“Good. I’m going to need your help to—”
“No way, Marcy. I’m gone.”
Surprise took Marcy by the throat. “What—?” she managed.
“I’ve got a pregnant wife and two small kids in Florissant. That’s my priority. I’ve got to be with them.”
“Evan,” Marcy said. “This is an emergency. We’ve got to get these people to the ground. You can’t leave.”