The Last Nightingale (4 page)

And so the monster was not talking to him. The only one left was Carolyn, the youngest. An instant later, Shane heard her muffled cries.
Where in God's name was Mr. Nightingale?
What could possibly keep him away for so long? Shane noticed that a strong smell of smoke was drifting into the house. There was fire out there, not far away.

Crashing sounds began in the kitchen. They were harder than anything he'd heard throughout the long ordeal, so despite his terror, Shane dared to peer through the crack just above the door. Through that razor line of sight, he saw Carolyn being whirled about the room in a profane dance with the devil.

Now she was crashing into furniture. Slamming into walls.

Shane caught glimpses of the killer, but never saw enough to gather anything more than that the man was dressed in nondescript workman's clothing and that he seemed to have a small and wiry build. But there was no hint of weakness about him. He moved like an attacking dog. Shane pulled away from the dangerous crack and shrank back against the wall. A wave of delirium washed through him and held him in its power while the attack went on and on.

Daylight crawled by. Twilight fell. Only then, after all that time, did silence fall back over the Nightingale house. Most of the night passed before Shane's awareness drifted back into the moment. He found himself in the growing light of sunrise.

A day and a half had passed, and during all of that time the Nightingale house had been used as the stage for a play more furious and foul than anything an earthquake could do.

"Hello? Hello, inside! Anybody here?”

A man's voice. At the front of the house.

Scraping noises now, just outside the pantry. The demon is visible through the crack over the pantry door, staggering across the room in fear. The demon scrambles to the window and peers outside.

“Shit!"
the demon hisses. Even from inside of the pantry, the demon can be heard while he stumbles to the rear of the house . . . throws open the back door . . . makes his escape out through the yard . . .

And as quickly as that, it was over. The killer was gone.

There was more loud banging at the front door. Then sounds of the door being forced open.

“Hello inside? Police! We're evacuating the area!”

Heavy boots, coming closer, entered the kitchen. A booming male voice called out.

“Sergeant Blackburn! Three bodies here, no sign of life!”

More boots thumped into the kitchen. Now Shane could see the man through the door crack—he was big, strong-faced, with dark hair like Shane's. He and his men were all filthy, covered with streaks of dirt and blackened by smoke. They looked half dead with fatigue. But something else was wrong. The sergeant did not cry out at the sight of the dead women. Shane could see all three cops there in the kitchen, and none of them seemed surprised by what was on the floor in front of them.

Shane still could not make himself cry out. The heavy boots moved on and quickly made their way throughout the house while
the sergeant and his two officers searched the other rooms for any signs of life.

How could these men have no idea what they had just seen? But the sergeant ordered the men out of the house, shouting that the fires were coming, that this house was done for. There were still three more homes on the block to be searched.

The boots stomped away. No one bothered to close the front door.

Silence returned. The smell of smoke was becoming strong, now. Overpowering. The fire was nearly upon the place. It was the awful feeling of choking on smoke that finally roused Shane. His arms were nearly useless and his legs felt full of lead, but somehow the pantry doors opened for him. He rolled out and onto the floor. The change was instant and powerful—as soon as he left his little shelter, the heat coming from the advancing fire was blistering hot.

Without meaning to, Shane glanced over at the three bodies. He quickly turned away, but that one glimpse was enough to show him why the police failed to realize what they were seeing. Mrs. Nightingale was almost completely covered by the dish cupboard. It might have been knocked onto her during the killer's frenzy with her daughter, or perhaps deliberately placed over her later. Only her lower legs protruded; she looked like a casualty of the earthquake.

Amy lay under the overturned kitchen table, mostly concealed by it. The parts of her that could be seen gave no sign of the horrors she had endured. And although little Carolyn was more bruised and bloody than the others, within all the wreckage and chaos she would also be mistaken for an earthquake victim, battered by the violent shaking. These dead could speak nothing of the evil they had seen, certainly not to men hastily conducting a hunt for survivors. And now, with the fires nearly upon the house, Shane realized that he was going to be the only witness. There would soon be nothing left to see.

He closed his eyes against the horror show and crawled out of the kitchen, muscles numb, pulling himself along on all fours until
he reached the front of the house. At the entrance, he grasped the doorsill and hauled himself to his feet. Then he turned to face the daylight world for the first time since the great earthquake had struck the city.

The whole planet seemed to be on fire. Even the sky.

He blinked into a reddening artificial dusk to see a shattered and smoking landscape that stretched in all directions. Brick buildings were nothing but shells. Most of the wooden buildings were ablaze. The streets were full of rubble. And everywhere, refugees stumbled along. Some carried mounds of belongings, others pulled carts by hand. A small few had managed to find draft horses somewhere, and put them to work pulling wagons loaded down with hasty piles. Everyone was retreating before a wall of flame and smoke. He stumbled out into the road and stood among them.

The sun was mostly blocked out by the massive columns of smoke and their message of ruin. He gazed into one giant swirling cloud and for an instant his burning eyes told him that he caught a glimpse of a face, twisted and horrible.

Shane felt something hard and small clutched in his fist and opened his hand to see his watch. He had grabbed it off the hook and carried it with him, with no idea he was doing so.

A hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him, nearly stopping his heart. Before him stood a woman who resembled Mrs. Nightingale so much that a cold rush shot through him. The woman spoke to him in a coarse whisper.

“Are you going through Chinatown?”

“Why?" Shane asked.

But to his surprise, the word "why" didn't fully emerge. It stuck halfway across his lips and hung there like a toothpick that he couldn't spit out. "Whuuh . . . Whuuh . . ." The sensation was so foreign that at first, he forgot to be embarrassed.

The woman ignored him and continued, "Somebody said that there's only one working telegraph left in the whole city! At Post and Montgomery. Chinatown. Do you hear me?”

"Yes," Shane answered.

But "yes" didn't come out, either. All that came out was, ‘Yehhh . . . Yehhh . . ." And this time he felt the distinct sensation of words sticking in his throat.

She went on. "I walked all the way out to Ocean Beach because there was a rumor that the Atlantic cable is still working, but it only goes overseas. My family's in Oklahoma! What are we supposed to do if our families are here in
this
country?”

Shane barely heard her. Why wasn't his mouth working? "Chinatown is just a few blocks that way," he meant to say, instead of "Ch-Chi-Chinatow, tow, town is juhh, juhhh." And by now he was disturbed enough that the woman noticed it on his face.

“Are you all right?" she softly inquired. "Because I could sure be glad for somebody to walk me through Chinatown. You know, in case the Coolies want to get back at us. Now that everything . . ." her voice trailed off. She looked more closely at him, regarding him as less than likely to represent a solution.

“Nnnn-nnnn-no. I—I'm not guh-guh-going tt-tt—”

She spun on her heel and walked off before he could finish the sentence.

His stutter took away any small desire he might have still had for communicating with anyone else. Now he wanted nothing so much as to dissolve into the landscape. When he looked around one more time to get his bearings, he noticed that most people seemed to be migrating generally southeast, toward the open expanse of Golden Gate Park. It was the opposite direction than the woman was traveling in, which seemed reason enough to go that way; some small part of him hoped that if he kept quiet for a while, his speech problem would magically disappear. He fell in step with a loose crowd of wanderers that moved in defeat toward the bay.

To his relief, no one took notice of him. People bumped into him without seeing him, without even slowing down. Everyone stared out of haunted faces through hollow eyes. Their expressions seemed
to confirm what that faceless, solitary demon of the kitchen said over and over while he destroyed the Nightingale family.

This was surely the end.

Shane let himself be swept along with the others, moving away down the street. Even within the chaos all around, he was eager to be gone, just in case Father Nightingale returned to see what Shane had allowed to happen. When he turned for one last look at the house, falling sparks had already set the roof on fire. The place would burn down fast. He was glad for that much. Even if Father Nightingale was still alive, he would never have to see the awful remains of his family.

With that, he realized that of course Mr. Nightingale was dead. No matter what kind of difficulties he might have had with his store, what man would leave his family alone for a day and a half while the shattered city burned to the ground?

It was good that the anonymous crowd could swallow him. He didn't want anyone, not a living soul, to recognize him for what he knew himself to be: He was a contemptible creature. He was a failure as a young man, even as a human being. His rightful place was in the grave.

Just don't look them in the eye.
He learned it so fast that the lesson seemed to arrive complete, a gift of instinct.
Move along quietly, keep it smooth, no jumpy motion. Nobody ever thinks a twelve-year-old is doing anything important. Be invisible.

And in that fashion, Shane Nightingale moved undetected among the living, seized by the overpowering impression of being a dead thing trapped inside of someone else's moving body. It was a mystery to him that no one seemed to notice.

R
ANDALL
B
LACKBURN HAD LOST
all track of time. He guessed that it was pre-sunset on Thursday afternoon. But after nearly a day and a half of fighting the Chinatown fires whenever he wasn't filling temporary graves, he was dangling from the point of collapse. All he knew for certain was that his mission was blessedly close to ending.

There was no longer enough emergency work to justify the extra risk of inmate labor, so he had finally been able to send his exhausted inmate workers off to Army holding pens across the bay in Oakland. He knew that in truth, the battle against the fires was brutally lost, for the most part. In spite of everyone's best efforts, the fire was burning its way all around Portsmouth Square and throughout Chinatown. Nearly everything was laid to waste for many blocks in every direction, or soon would be.

At first, most of the residents had stayed around to fight the fires. Even after all was lost, quite a few remained and took to makeshift shelters erected in the open areas of the Square. It was only when a squad of soldiers showed up to reinforce the police gravediggers that the refugees were finally swept off to less crucial areas.

Blackburn deliberately worked beside two whining underlings, Officers Gibbon and Mummery, trying to control their potential
damage to morale.
They're doing everything wrong, for new recruits with careers to consider,
he thought with disdain. Gibbon and Mummery were nearly ten years junior to Blackburn and should have both had more energy for the task. But they allowed their work to make them sullen, and that was something rare in the lower ranks. Most young cops appreciated that police work was a respectable and secure livelihood, and so they kept their attitudes in line. Such things were especially important for a young family man, as nearly all new cops happened to be. But these two dolts were behaving like men who had gotten their jobs easy, perhaps from relatives or through bribes.

They clearly failed to see any reason to adopt Blackburn's dedication. And there was no practical way to punish them under the circumstances, something that these two had already figured out. It left a bitter taste in Blackburn's mouth that all he could do was to give firm orders, then make sure that they saw him going about each of the jobs himself in the way that it was supposed to be done.

He employed the most careful efforts in handling the remains of victims, but still held to his central order and refused to permit anyone on his squad to quit before all of the bodies that had been pulled from the rubble were safely interred—and protected from the rats—or until all of the park's available ground was filled. There was still open grave space left when the delivery system broke down. It happened somewhere back along the way, no one knew where. With a fraction of the city's officials still living, and with the city's physical resources hardly functional, the remaining workers’ growing fatigue was now causing the work process to decompose faster than the corpses they hoped to save. He lost count after burying fifty.

All of them were planted deep.

Fatigue settled in like fog. It was natural for anyone who had ridden out the Great Earthquake, as it was already being called, to function on fear and adrenaline for the first few hours. Many were too traumatized to sleep at all. But halfway through the second day,
even the healthiest and strongest felt their physical resources depleted. Even simple tasks became confusing.

Blackburn could see that anarchy was snapping at their heels, and he could only hope that the rest of the city's dead were being reduced to ash in the unchecked fires. Protected, at least, from the final indignity of feeding the rats that roamed everywhere, free as cats and dogs. The fires, in the end, were proving to be good for that much. No one could know how many San Franciscans and hapless travelers died in the Great Earthquake and fires, with all trace of their existence wiped away. Human remains joined thousands of abandoned pets and even large draft animals in mass cremation. Thankfully, uncountable swarms of rat populations were converted to ash and bone as well.