A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [71]
Innes guessed that the girl would not be able to assist him in tying up his wound. He lowered the leather apron, undid the rag wool yarn, wadded up the material from the dead woman’s underslip, and pressed it against his wound. Using his one free arm and his teeth, he wound the cloth from the skirt around the bandage. He tied it across his chest as tightly as his strength would allow and then put the leather apron back on. He brought the child to her feet.
“Come on then,” he said, taking her hand again.
Innes and the girl headed up the hill, Innes guessing that the blast would have lost power and momentum as it had moved upward.
The devastation was beyond anything Innes had ever imagined. There were fires everywhere, the city covered with a black oily soot. Power lines were down, automobiles were overturned, and a church steeple lay in the center of what had once been a road.
Innes saw headless corpses, survivors staggering naked. He saw a chair with a dead child still sitting in it, a woman kneeling on a sidewalk praying. He saw a man clawing frantically at the wreckage of a house and stopped to help, but the fire inside was too fierce, and he had to back away. Above him, a white sun began to appear through the soot and ash.
Everywhere Innes looked, faces were blackened, hair was singed, bodies had burned to bone. Innes stepped over a radiator, a piece of crockery, an arm attached to a hand. Signs of the once placid domestic life of the city—a bit of knitting, an intact chair, a Christmas wreath, a fan of papers—were strewn over the streets. Innes hoped the girl beside him would not retain the images now forming on her retina. He stopped once to treat a serious cut on a woman’s neck by making a bandage from her skirt. He told her to follow him. In a sight that unnerved Innes, a man sat with his back against a dead horse, cradling an infant in his arms. From the loll of the child’s head, it was clear to Innes that the child had perished.
Others moved up the hill in tandem with Innes. The Citadel, a fort on a hill, seemed to be the goal. Innes passed a barrel with a ship’s insignia, a man with a missing foot, a house completely flattened. He saw dozens of animals—cats, dogs, cows—some dead, some still alive but bloody. After a time, he spotted an intact building—a house? a shop?—with two men in the doorway. They would help him, Innes thought. At the very least, they would know the direction to the nearest hospital.
As he approached the building, a middle-aged woman came from within and took the child from him. “What’s your name, love?” the woman asked. The girl did not respond. Without a word to Innes, the woman carried the child into the building. Above the blown-out windows of the shop, a sign read DRUGGIST.
Innes entered the building. Along one wall, bodies were already lined up as if in a morgue—some disfigured, others with glass protruding from their faces. Many were partially naked. An entire city, Innes thought, had been called to the windows by the spectacle of the fire and then in an instant killed or wounded.
“I’m a doctor,” he told the first person he encountered. “I need a better bandage for my wound and some clothes and shoes, and then I can help.”
Clothes and shoes were found for Innes. He suspected they had come from the dead, but he didn’t ask. The middle-aged woman washed out Innes’s wound with alcohol and applied a pressure dressing. “Your daughter is being cared for,” she said.
“She’s not my daughter,” Innes said. “I found her alone in the street.”
“She won’t speak.”
“She’s in shock,” Innes explained.
A long counter on which the chemist had once mixed his potions was now in use as a kind of gurney. Innes learned that the chemist had been making sutures and applying dressings.