Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [158]
I pulled myself away and led PA away without saying another word to GF. PA and I did not speak about what we had seen, merely went on through the disorder until we came near to his home.
His neighborhood was aflame. We stood staring, as if we had never seen such a thing before, and gaped at the firemen struggling to coax a trickle out of the hoses. Then PA saw a friend of his, and pounced on him, demanding where the residents had gone.
“To the docks,” the man replied, and we set off again, circling around until we found the refugees of my friend's neighborhood, thousands of them milling about with their meager possessions.
PA turned to me and told me that he could find them from here, that I had to leave and see to my own family. I refused to go until we had some news of his wife and son, but it was not until nightfall that we found a man who had seen them settled into a tent in the nearby Army base. This time PA was adamant: He would not have me accompany him, but told me that he would find them, and send word to me that they were well. He turned his back and walked off, and reluctantly I went my own way.
His family, I will add here, was unharmed, and although his house burned to the ground, his wife and son had managed to rescue the things they valued most, and guarded them throughout the flight and to their new canvas abode.
I reached home very late that night, to find my family missing. But a neighbor, taking his turn walking guard up and down the sidewalks, directed me to the park, where the Army had provided tents. My family was happy to see me, and I slept that night under canvas for the first time in many years, too tired for the nightmares to reach me.
I didn't tell my wife about seeing GF, not then anyway. She was friends with GF's wife, primarily because we had children the same age, but GF himself was a sore point with her, and I didn't want to go into it then and there. In truth, I did not think there was anything to go into.
Friday I spent with the rescue crews, although by the end of the day, the tacit agreement was that we would retrieve whatever bodies we might without risking our own life and limb. The fires would take care of the others.
We fought hard, and all that day and into the night the explosions continued in the determination to create a fire-break the flames could not breach. Van Ness was most peculiar—a flat and smoking wasteland on one side while appearing grotesquely near normal on the other. We staggered off to our rough beds that night knowing we had done all we could.
And won. Saturday morning the news came that no new fires had broken out, in spite of instances of the clumsy use of black powder that set off the very fires it had been meant to prevent. We held our breath lest the wind come up and fan the embers, but it did not. By Saturday afternoon we began to think that the worst was over. Now it was a matter of reconciling ourselves to the Aegean stables—we who in three short days had already come to loathe the feel of a shovel.
We would be a long, long time bent over picking up bricks.
Abruptly I realized that I was no longer a boy of twenty, able to spend all day in physical labor—my back ached, my hands were ripped raw, I had cuts and burns at a dozen places on my arms and legs, and I couldn't breathe without coughing up black. I took to my bed, cuddling my two small children to me with the pleasure of life itself, while my wife read to us from some nonsense child's book.
The children fell asleep, and I was not far from it when my wife, seeing my eyes beginning to close, told me that she was going to our house before the sun set to retrieve some waterproof garments, as the sky looked threatening. I could not of course allow her to go alone, so I forced my blistered feet back into their boots while my wife asked the neighboring tent