The intrepid reporter was out cold, with one leg crooked up on the rear wheel well, and the other stretched out straight. He was using a Channel 3 windbreaker for a pillow.
I didn’t see any point in getting him up, so I didn’t. I opened
the back door as quietly as I could. He didn’t budge, or break his routine of soft snores.
I closed the door behind me and stretched.
Things were quieter outside, in the shelter of the concrete parking garage. Everyone was crowded together there, sure—but with the open air things didn’t seem quite so oppressive. One thing I wasn’t imagining, though—I needed a bathroom.
Inside the hotel there were several large restrooms, but getting into them would be a trick. The elevators were permanently jammed and at least one was serving host to a family of six. The stairs were more promising. I took them down to the valet level and then was pointed to a back way inside the old hotel, underneath the car garage.
One of the huge public restrooms was right around the corner, and it was full, of course. But I waited, because what else was there to do? Find a quiet corner and pee on the floor?
I waited, legs crossed and breath held, until a stall opened up and I could grab it.
The toilet had overflowed and there wasn’t any toilet paper, but it was better than nothing, so I used it and pretended I knew nothing at all about germs or public sanitation. When I was finished, I gave it a flush that only partly took. Then I waited for a turn at the sinks.
People were trying to change baby diapers on the floor, or on the counters; but only a few had diapers to use. Some people were sharing and some were hoarding, and a few women were starting to fight over it. I let their argument be the background din to my time at the sink; I tried not to listen too much or I’d get too mad.
I felt like hell. So did everybody else.
I washed my face and gargled some hot water. I peeled off my shirt and it itched when the wrinkled folds unstuck themselves from my skin. Every last inch of me was pruny, but the shirt was nasty, so I stood there in my bra and washed the shirt with a palm-full of pink industrial soap. Better to be clean and wet than dirty and kind of dry.
If it hadn’t been so crowded, I probably would’ve pulled off my jeans and washed them as well; but there’s a world of difference between hand-washing a T-shirt in a sink and doing half a load of laundry there.
I was hungry, in an idle way. I was thirstier than I was hungry, though. And my head was pounding and my muscles were sore in all kinds of strange places. I felt like I’d slept on a duffle bag full of garden gnomes.
But at least I’d slept.
Out in the hall there was a clock behind the concierge desk that said it was about 8:30 A. M. I’d accrued maybe four or five hours of sleep altogether on top of the one or two I’d stolen in the Choo-Choo with Harry and Malachi.
I reached for my phone, but it was dead. Either the water or the steady battery drain of nervous relatives could have done it, and I was fortunate that it’d held up as long as it had.
I was almost relieved for the honest excuse not to answer it. It was easier to assume that all was well without me—that Harry and Malachi had been transported beyond the ridges, and that Dave and Lu had finally passed out and turned off the television.
In the hotel lobby, surrounded by dozens of interested faces, there were two televisions displaying the local and national news, respectively.
Chattanooga was the word of the day. I watched Channel 3 first. No surprise for the local news to be self-referential, and the station was o
n the top of a hill on the north side of town. No surprise they were still up and running full coverage, even though the anchors were looking haggard and in need of more heavy-duty hair products.
I came in at the middle of Terry Sexton’s warbly-voiced diatribe. “. . . thousands of people displaced, hundreds injured, dozens missing. ”
“Dozens?” I said out loud, and I heard the word bouncing around in the crowd. Everybody knew the toll was higher than that. It had to be.
“Police are having trouble keeping the peace, and looting, rioting, and gang activity is increasing as the hours pass and people are kept away from their homes. Also, we have received some strange reports coming out of the downtown area, down by Ross’s Landing and the aquarium. Shots have been fired and barricades are being established; police are not issuing a statement at this time, but there is compelling video footage available and we’ve been running some of it since last night. Here’s a clip now, taken yesterday evening down at the aquarium fountains. ”
The clip that played was grainy, dark, and shaky—it might’ve come from a camera phone or a digital camera with a film-clip mode. I weaseled my way through the crowd to watch it closer. I had to see. I had to know.
There was a man, like Nick had said. He was tall and black and burned-looking, visible only in partial profile and shadow, illuminated imperfectly by the flashing rotation of a police car’s blue and white lights.
He could have been a refugee, like the rest of us. But I knew better. I could tell from the tittering sobs that leaked from the crowd that others in the crowd did as well.
At the corner of the screen I saw a smaller figure too, about half the size of the man in shadow. Nick said there was a girl, too. This could’ve been a girl. I couldn’t tell. She moved fast, though. They both did. They moved in a jerky way—in a stilted series of lunges—like it had been years since they’d needed to move a body.
You could see it at a glance. They were dead.
And when the tall man’s shape turned forty-five degrees so that his face was almost outlined, there in the light of an aquarium lamp, I knew that they were not ghosts. Not spirits. Not haunts.