A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [70]
There was pain in his face as well. He ran his hand along his cheek and discovered that tiny slivers of glass were imbedded from his cheekbone to his jawbone. One by one, he picked them out by feel. He examined the interior of his ear for any glass fragments as well, but he found none. Holding on to a diagonal beam, Innes reached over the blasted flooring and flipped the leather apron off the hook.
Now that Innes was standing, he could see, through the partially destroyed wall across from him, an astonishing sight. Seawater was advancing across a devastated landscape. It was as though the ocean meant to conquer the city. He watched as the water rolled over the city and then subsided.
In the sky, he saw a zeppelin, which turned out to be, upon closer inspection, a thermal cloud, curly in shape and giving off flashes of light. He heard a groan from below. Louise, for all her hysteria, had been right. Halifax had been shelled by the Germans.
Innes surveyed the ruins of the attic he was in, searching for a way down onto the street. It was simply a matter of time before that curved wall collapsed and with it the rest of the building. Fear, which Innes had not felt until now, motivated him to begin climbing down through the wreckage. His entire body began to tremble.
He found a stairway intact, though it had been ripped from the wall and now hung at such an angle that Innes had to descend almost vertically. He held on to the banister with his good arm. He must get directly to hospital, he thought as he felt the blood running down his back—less copiously than before, but still there wasn’t enough pressure on the wound.
He searched the bottom floor of the building, a maze of broken objects and chunks of plaster. He tried to find the person who had screamed. He lifted beams and bits of furniture. He called out several times.
When he had no response, he decided to leave the building, reaching the street through what remained of a window, its glass completely missing. He stepped out into a city as still as death.
This couldn’t have been the Germans, Innes thought. The damage was too vast, too uniform. The street on which the Fraser house had once stood simply no longer existed. For as far as Innes could see in any direction, houses had been leveled or partially destroyed, their roofs blown off, their walls buckled. From the sky, a shower of ash and debris was falling. Telephone poles tilted at angles. A cloud of smoke rose high over the city.
Forty feet from where he stood, Innes saw a woman pinned under a beam. He made his way with bare feet over scrap metal and glass and wood to the spot where the woman lay. Her face was bloodied, the only color in an ashy landscape. There were splinters of glass protruding from her eyes. He bent to take her pulse, but there was none. The beam had crushed her chest.
A young girl of about ten years walked around the corner from an overturned carriage. She was naked but for a cotton slip. Her face and arms were dirty, her blond hair singed.
“Where’s your mum?” Innes asked, standing and walking toward her.
The girl simply stared straight ahead with no expression. Innes wondered if she could see. He waved his fingers in front of her eyes, and she blinked. “Take my hand,” he said, reaching for her when she did not respond. “We have to find some clothes for you.”
Innes, shivering now, knew that he must find a length of fabric to secure the pressure bandage to his wound. When he and the young girl had gone a few steps, he remembered the dead woman under the beam.
“Stay here,” he said to the girl. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
Innes quickly retraced his steps to the body and tore lengths of cloth from the woman’s skirt and underslip. He removed her shoes and socks.
Already he was looting the dead.
He returned to the girl and handed her the shoes and socks and told her to put them on. Still she