It seemed like everyone in the restaurant got their phones out and the tiny flashlights on all at once. Anup was already on his feet and had gone to help a woman pinned under a toppled table.
I didn’t help. My head was still swaying. I didn’t get up, didn’t move. I just sat there on the floor of House of Shanghai Taste. I wasn’t sure the floor was staying put the way it ought to. I looked out the restaurant’s full-length windows and saw nothing. Half a dozen car alarms chimed over one another from the blackness. I felt somehow like I was out on the street, watching myself in the restaurant.
“I’m in shock,” I said—and, saying it, came out of it.
Was I injured? I did a quick check of myself. It seemed I was okay. My right elbow ached, but I could move it just fine. I might’ve landed on it when I went flying out of my chair. I pulled out my own phone and shined it around. People around me were hurt. Some were bleeding. I got to my feet.
I went first to an older man whose head was smeared with fresh blood. It was in his eyes and he was blinded by it. Turned out to be a cut to his brow. Those bleed like stink, and look worse than they are. I got him to apply direct pressure to the wound with a napkin.
“Jessie...” It was Anup’s voice, calling from the back of the restaurant. I shined my feeble light and caught him. He was standing in the pass-through behind the counter. “We need you back here. Now.”
I pushed through the broken plates and scattered food, the upturned tables and the chairs that had bounced across the restaurant. When I got to the counter, I heard screaming from the room beyond.
It was the kitchen. A clutch of figures huddled around a cook who was lying on the wet floor, writhing in pain, shrieking in Chinese. Next to him was a cauldron, upended, steam still rising around it.
I took a quick assessment. The cook’s legs and feet were the affected area. His head and upper torso seemed uninjured. I pointed to the closest guy in an apron and demanded, “Was that oil or water in that pot?”
The poor guy didn’t speak English, and just looked back at me in a panic. But another kitchen worker, a teenager, said, “It was boiling water. Landed right on his legs...”
I marched straight over to the dishwashing station and turned on the tap. Water flowed. I squeezed the spray hose. It worked, and the water was good and cool. I turned down the volume till it was a gentle rain, then turned the hose on the cook.
“What’s your name?” I asked the teenager.
“Terrence.”
“What’s his name, Terrence?” I said, sprinkling water over the man’s legs. He was howling in pain and gasping for breath.
“Wen.”
“Okay. You can talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell Wen that we’re going to take off his shoes and socks and pants, and then I’m going to treat his burns. I’m a doctor. Ask Wen if this is okay by him.”
Terrence translated. The cook nodded. He couldn’t speak for screaming, but he nodded.
“Get somebody to find the first aid kit. There must be one somewhere. And get somebody to find me a big pile of clean dish towels.”
Terrence, God bless the kid, started barking orders in Chinese and strong-arming his coworkers. Wen had bitten through his lower lip, and it was bleeding. He might be going into shock. That would be a bad complication. I mimed for one of the workers to take the spray from me and keep it on him.
Somebody came running back with the first aid kit. It was a good one. I donned the gloves that I found in there and prepped the burn cream and gauze. I got Terrence to hand me a scissors, and cut the cook’s trousers off him. The guy with the spray asked Terrence something in Chinese.
“Should he stop?”
“No—tell him to keep it up till I tell him to quit.”
Terrence did. Then I got him to help me remove Wen’s shoes and socks. Wen’s agonized howls got louder. One of his buddies cradled his head and said something soothing. I signaled to the guy with the hose to shut it off.
“Get a couple of these guys to shine their phones on his legs,” I said. I took one of the dish towels off the worker who’d come back with them and started patting down the affected areas, gently. The burns stretched from the middle of his thighs all the way to his toes. I applied a little bit of the burn cream to them, then wrapped both his legs loosely in gauze.
I asked Terrence if anyone had called 911. He said they’d tried, but their cells weren’t working.
“You have a car?” I said.
Terrence pointed to the guy holding the towels. “He does.”
“All right. Listen. Your friend here is going to be okay for now, but you need to carry him carefully out to the car, then drive him to the St. Francis Hospital emergency room. St. Francis Hospital, corner of Bush and Hyde. They’re the best burn ward. Bush and Hyde—you got it?”
“I got it,” said Terrence. Then he said something in Chinese to the guy with the dish towels, who said something to the guy cradling Wen’s head. The three of them lifted him gently and started for the back door.
I slumped onto the floor and peeled off the gloves slicked with burn cream and Wen’s dead skin. I was soaked through from the dishwashing spray. As I pulled myself to my feet, it occurred to me that the only available light in the restaurant kitchen came from the cell phones shuffling out the door with the workers. I felt my way gingerly through the pots and pans littering the wet floor, back to the dining room of the House of Shanghai Taste. Anup was still doing triage on some people.
“Is he okay?” he asked. I told him yes. He brought me to the couple of more serious casualties among the customers. One was a kid, maybe ten, with a broken arm. I sent Anup to the kitchen for a wooden spoon, and splinted it with that and a couple of cloth napkins I secured with oversize surgeon’s knots. Three other people had cuts. The first aid kit contained everything I needed to bandage or patch them up.
One customer, a white woman with piles of beautiful gray hair, was beyond our help. She seemed to be fine, physically—but she was freaking out.
“Earthquake weather! I’ve been saying it since the winds came... Hot and dry, eighty degrees, and it’s nearly Halloween? Earthquake weather!”
Everyone else ignored her.
Balboa Street outside House of Shanghai Taste was transformed and terrifying. First there was the darkness. It was total. I’d never experienced anything like it with pavement underfoot and buildings around me. A car came creeping down the road, its headlights cutting into everything and throwing out shifting shadows, and I could see downed power lines, draped like snakes over parked cars and buildings, lying in ambush on the sidewalk. The car had its windows open and the radio on. A DJ babbled in panic.
“I don’t know if anyone out there can hear me... The lights are out but my board is still lit up here, so, maybe... Um, anyway, I can’t say how bad the damage is, but it must be pretty severe, so everybody out there, um, please stay safe and...”
The car was gone, and we were in the dark again, but Anup had spotted a police car parked outside the block’s biggest coffee house. We made our way to it, holding hands and stepping with care—the bricks from a nearby building had tumbled off their facade and were piled in the street.
The barista had lit up a battery lantern on the counter. I told her I was a doctor and a first responder, and needed their landline if it was working. It wasn’t.
“None of them will be,” said Anup.
I peered into the recesses of the ruined café. “Do you see that cop? Maybe I can use his radio.”
“What for?”
“I need to reach Dr. Howe.”
“That’s what you’re worried about? I figured you were trying to reach Tommy or something! Jessie, this was a goddamn big quake. I’ll bet there’s buildings down, fires breaking out everywhere. And what if that was only the foreshock?”
“I still have to check in with the chief. The OCME has its own emergency generator, and whoever is working the Ops Shop will know what’s going on.”
“Please, Jessie—”
Someone with a bright flashlight was coming through the café. It was the patrol cop, leading a couple of customers out. I joined them and told him who I was, and that I needed to use his radio.
He was skeptical. “Where’s your badge?”
“At my house.”
“You got any official ID?”
“Officer, what do you think I’m trying to pull, here? Will you just take a moment to call dispatch, please, and let me talk to them?”
He thought about it, and decided that he’d better trust me. So he keyed up the dispatcher from his car’s radio and said he had a medical examiner who needed to talk to them.
He handed me the mic. “This is Dr. Jessie Teska, Deputy Chief Medical Examiner, star one-zero-two, call number zero-echo-three.”
“Copy,” said the dispatcher. I heard the clatter of fast fingers on a keyboard, then, “Go ahead, Dr. Teska.”
“I need to know if you’ve logged any activity involving the medical examiner since the earthquake hit.”
The fingers danced on keys again, and the voice came back. “The ME reported at 2115 hours out to a scene after Fire Eight radioed in one known fatality, unknown possible others.”
“What’s the scene?”
“Collapsed road structure.” She told me where.
Boże mój.
I handed the mic back to the cop, shook off the dread, and started down the avenue toward Mahoney Brothers #45, my silly little cable-car house. I hoped to hell it was still standing. I hoped too that nothing had fallen onto my BMW. I was going to need it.
“Jessie—!”
Anup hustled to catch up. We walked right down the middle of the street, staying clear of downed wires and line after line of terracotta roof tiles that had slid off the houses and shattered. I had my sad little cell phone light, but soon found I didn’t need it—the sky was clear, and my eyes adjusted to the light of the crescent moon. The stars overhead looked like the high desert way outside Los Angeles. I could see the Milky Way. I’d never seen the Milky Way under city skies before, not that much of it, anyhow.
“We’ll never forget this,” I said over my shoulder. “Do you realize that? This is an event we will never forget.”
“We’re going home, right? To your house, I mean?”
“No, Anup. I’m going to get my badge and my car keys. Then I have to go to work.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mission Bay. The 280 off-ramp to King Street.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s collapsed.”
Anup made his way in front of me, held out a hand to stop me. “And you want to go there...? A freeway collapse? What could you possibly do to help?”
I sidestepped him. “I don’t know what. That’s exactly why I have to go. They dispatched the van twenty minutes ago, because the fire department confirmed one person dead. There might be more. I have to evaluate the scene so we can marshal resources if this earthquake turns out to be a mass-casualty event...”
“That’s not your job—it’s Dr. Howe’s, he’s the chief. It’s the other end of the city... There are no streetlights, no stoplights—and, apparently, roads are collapsing? It’ll be like Mad Max out there! Please, don’t do this.”
“I have to.” I kept marching down the middle of the avenue. “Without phones, I can’t call Dr. Howe for instructions. I don’t know who is at our office, or if I can even get in there if the power’s down—everything operates on electronic locks in the new building...”
We reached the corner of Cabrillo Street and a sound stopped me. It was a single car, hauling ass down the road. I grabbed Anup’s arm and stepped back. The car blew right through two stop signs and just kept going.
Bad omen. Anup sure thought so.
“Look. Everyone’s in a panic,” he said, putting on the good-cop prosecutor’s voice he seldom attempted with me. “I know you have responsibilities as an emergency worker. I understand, believe me. But let’s stay together and hunker down until it’s safe for you to go to work, okay? At least until the power comes back on...”
“I don’t know when that will be, and already there’s a confirmed death resulting from this event. My crew is down there right now, or heading there—”
“That’s exactly my point! Let them work the scene—that’s their job—and you do your job in the morgue, in the morning.”
We made it to 41st Avenue and turned the corner. Down the end of the block, the tree line of Golden Gate Park swallowed the thin moonlight and loomed like a black wall. Some of my neighbors were out on their stoops, trading rumors. I didn’t want to get pulled into all that, so I made a beeline for my Beemer—which, thank Christ, was parked, intact, outside the gate to number 892, my cable-car cottage.
Something occurred to me when I pulled out the gate key.
“Anup... I’m going down there. I know you don’t want me to. But I have to ask you to do something for me. Will you take care of Bea?”
“All this going on—what we just did in that restaurant—and you’re worried about the dog?”
“I can’t leave her alone—and I... I don’t know for sure when I’ll be able to get back.”
Anup didn’t say anything. He was looking at me in a way I hadn’t seen from him before. I didn’t like it. It was like the time Father Kabaty figured out I’d been skipping Mass at St. Michael’s and lying to my mamusia about it. That was the look. Grave disappointment.
“I’ll do it for Bea’s sake,” Anup said.
Anup wasn’t wrong about the Mad Max chaos on the nighttime streets of San Francisco, with no light and no laws, in the wake of the earthquake. The traffic signals were mostly dead. Some cars were creeping along, others were flying by, weaving all over the road. Complicating this anarchy was the amount of debris in the way. Downed wires were the scariest—I passed a toppled stanchion for an electric Muni bus that was sparking wildly. Hauling ass along the edge of Golden Gate Park, I spotted three or four small fires and one big one glowing in the distance. Red lights and sirens sped toward it. There were plenty of flashing lights, red and blue, here, there, and everywhere.
A couple of radio stations had their own emergency power and were still transmitting. Official estimates put the magnitude at 6.5, the epicenter on the Hayward fault in the Berkeley Hills. They were reporting sizable aftershocks but no tsunami danger, which was a relief. I had to shut off the news updates, though, because it suddenly occurred to me, sometime after I’d passed the edge of the Panhandle, that I wasn’t certain where I was. I’d worked in San Francisco for nearly a year and a half, and had driven to death scenes in most every corner of the city—but without light there seemed to be no landmarks, and I couldn’t read the road signs until I was right on top of them. Every block looked the same, and the last thing I wanted to do was to end up lost.
I started to hit police roadblocks. Red flares, white smoke, nervous cops. One checkpoint on Market Street had a SWAT team in full tactical gear, assault rifles at the ready, backed by an armored personnel carrier. My badge got me through—though the SWAT guys glared like I had no business crossing their lines.
As I got closer to the scene, more and brighter emergency lights flashed up and down the canyons of spanking new housing blocks in Mission Bay. They lit up the condos and the cars parked along Berry Street, and blinked off windows and windshields. I had to stop my Beemer before they blinded me. Countless police vehicles, a couple of ambulances, and half a dozen fire trucks—maybe more—were jumbled at an alley beside the soaring 280 freeway overpass. Two trucks had their ladders extended. I could make out geared-up and helmeted silhouettes clambering the ladders onto the ramp that climbed away from King Street to the freeway.
Used to climb from King Street. I sat in the Beemer and let it sink in that the ramp no longer did. A piece of the viaduct between the surface road and the ladder trucks was missing.
I left the car and jogged across the scene, scanning for the OCME van. Down on the pavement, a pair of paramedics were working on a man covered head to toe in gray dust, one putting an IV line into him, the other ventilating with a bag valve mask. A line of firefighters with pry bars and a hydraulic spreader ran past me and disappeared behind a truck. When I rounded it, I saw where they were going. A section of the viaduct had collapsed into rubble. The broken roadway loomed above, rebar sticking out, pebbles of concrete still falling. The stretch below it was fifty or sixty yards of pancaked pavement crawling with rescue workers.
I found the medical examiner removal van, and, with it, Cameron and Donna. They had one body loaded in the van already, they told me.
“The medics called it—crush injuries with evisceration of major organs,” Cam said.
Donna added, “They think it was someone sleeping on the street—” But my screech cut her off. I’d screeched because there was another earthquake—another rattle, another rumble, and the alleyway under my feet jumped around. It lasted only a second.
“Aftershock,” said Cam. “We’ve had a bunch.”
“That was a pretty good one,” said Donna.
I stared at the pair of them. They were leaning against their van, which was still bouncing on its springs in the middle of an ongoing disaster scene, and they were shooting the shit about earthquakes like earthquakes were the fucking weather.
“Hey,” hollered one of the paramedics who had been trying to revive the downed man. “We’re calling it.”
“That’s our cue,” said Donna, and grabbed a gurney.
Cam pulled out his camera and started taking pictures, documenting what had just become our second case at that death scene. The paramedics peeled off their gloves and packed their gear, preparing for whatever else might come out of the rubble. Police dogs scrambled over it, followed by their handlers. The rescue dogs were working hard, sticking their heads into crevasses, staying focused, moving quickly. One was a beagle and I thought of my own Bea, back at home in Mahoney Brothers #45, worrying by candlelight with Anup.
I made my way to the fire department command vehicle. The captain was there, and filled me in.
“First casualty was DOA, and we’ve got three others, two with multiple blunt trauma and one with minor injuries—”
“The medics just called time of death on one.”
“Okay,” the captain said, and seemed to check off a box in his head. “The other trauma’s on his way to the General Hospital, but the guy with minor injuries won’t leave. He says this was a homeless camp, a big one. He’s got friends under there.”
“The camp was under the viaduct?”
“That’s what he says. PD confirms.”
“The guy on his way to the General—what were the extent of his injuries?”
The fire captain stopped scanning the rescue operation and looked at me. “Multiple blunt trauma, like I said.”
“Yeah, but—are they likely to be fatal?”
“I can’t say, Doctor. I have living people to worry about here.”
“Sorry—I’m just trying to get a handle on what our operation is going to entail...”
A voice on the pile yelled something, and the fire captain turned. The voice yelled again, louder.
“Foot!”
The captain ran, and I followed. The rescue beagle was sitting at attention on the pile. Firefighters and cops started working a bucket brigade, carrying out whatever pieces of concrete they could. Three others got pry bars under a slab and lifted it. Someone shined a light.
In the space under the slab was a human figure crushed to pieces.
The fire captain stood with his crew, opposite. I met his eyes. I steeled myself to face his anger, but it wasn’t there. The fire captain was scared.
I climbed off the pile and made my way to the 2578s, to tell them we had another one. Donna pointed out they only had room for two bodies per removal van, and they only had one of the two vans there.
“We’re allowed to commandeer ambulances in multiple-fatality incidents,” she suggested.
“No way,” I said. “This city is going to need all the ambulances it can get for the living casualties.” I grabbed a pair of work gloves from the van. “I’m staying here to help recover number three. You guys drop numbers one and two in the cooler, then turn around with both vans and come straight back. Okay?”
The 2578s started up the van and flipped on its flashing yellow lights. As I made my way back to the pile, I took in the jarringly beautiful view of downtown San Francisco. A handful of the skyscrapers must’ve managed some kind of backup power, because they had some windows lit. The rest were flickering in reflected emergency lights from the street, the reds and blues melding to purple across the mile or so of darkness that separated us from them.
I pulled on the gloves and joined the bucket brigade hauling chunks of concrete off the spot where the King Street viaduct’s third victim lay buried. We had almost succeeded in clearing access to the body when a commotion rose from another crew near us. Voices called for medics. The two paramedics scrambled over to a scrum of firefighters, and I followed. They were shining their lights into the rubble, shouting, asking if anyone down there could hear them.
In the hole they’d uncovered I could see a pile of at least five people, maybe more. They weren’t moving. They didn’t respond to the shouts.
I stuck by the medics. If there was anything I could do with my medical training to help the living, I would. If they were dead, I would follow my disaster protocol to do what I needed to do with the bodies until I could get them back to the morgue.
The medics climbed into the hole and tried to evaluate the nearest patient. I followed. It was all right. It was going to be okay. My training had prepared me for this and worse. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t nervous. I was ready to do my job.
The rescue dogs started barking, all at once. Then there was a deep thump and a jolt. Another aftershock hit—I braced my arms against the rubble as dust and pebbles fell on my shoulders and a ripple of force went through my legs.
From above I heard something slide. Then I saw shooting stars and my skull exploded in pain and...