The Last Nightingale (5 page)

But rats were always the first to run and the last to get caught. If he and his men failed to go deep enough, the rats would be at the fresh graves the next day. And yet he was nearly delirious with exhaustion. If only his bosses would let him get some sleep. He had managed to snag a few catnaps here and there, but with waves of uncontrolled flames rampaging through the city and raining hot embers, there was never time for anything more.

Only when the last of the bodies were taken care of did he manage to spend a couple of hours sound asleep, facedown under the nearest tree, before some lieutenant shook him awake and ordered him to form up a detail. He was to lead a top-speed, house-to-house search for survivors in those neighborhoods that stood in the path of the advancing flames. He and his crew would have to keep themselves moving just ahead of the firewall, in a final pass through the standing homes before the firestorms consumed them.

His stomach was already twisted with hunger; his bones ached. He wondered how the two soft recruits were going to take to another difficult assignment. But he was pleasantly surprised to see Gibbons and Mummery actually perk up a bit under the challenge. The necessity of it was plain, even to them.

Unfortunately, there weren't many victories there. Most of what
he saw within the masses of tilting wreckage was an endless repetition of mangled bodies, long dead. A small few were still alive, but trapped beyond saving in the few moments before the flames found them. Most of the living victims wanted to be left alone to tug at their restraints. But three of them, strangers trapped together, all begged to be shot, just as the young man had done on the first morning. He took a deep breath and obliged every one of the three in the same way that his father taught him to dispatch game— shoot quick, take them by surprise if you can, and show mercy by getting it right the first time.

Before another hour passed, Blackburn realized that he was at that strange house where he and his men had heard the woman's terrible screams during their long march to the square. He sent his men in, but decided to join them and check for clues about the source of the screams.

It turned out that there was nothing there, only more of the endless dead, beaten by the quake. He got his men out of there with scant minutes to spare. There wasn't even time to examine the bodies. His team had done all that they could, and it was no longer possible to keep ahead of the fires. He sent them back to Portsmouth Square to get some rest.

He doubted that there was anyplace else for him to go back to; his apartment building stood within the previous day's burn area. At the moment, he felt more upset about not knowing where to go to get some uninterrupted rest than over the loss of his home. As far as his apartment was concerned, there wasn't much to lose. The place itself had merely been somewhere to store clothing and to sleep between stretches of overtime. The only possessions that held any grip on his affection pertained to his work, and those were still safe inside his sergeant-sized police locker in the more fortunate part of the station.

Despite his efforts, he realized that the earthquake had taken a much smaller toll on him than the majority of the people he was paid to protect. Something about that felt right to him, since he
lived in such simplicity and diverted nearly all of his energy to his career. But there were days, now that he was over thirty, when he found that the world had little patience for a single man, a widower (how he hated the word) who had been alone for nearly ten years without ever coming close to remarrying. Society in general tended to dismiss him as a confirmed bachelor and a social standoff. In his bleakest moments of reflection, Blackburn found that the idea of close friendship between men, or of romances with women, somehow seemed more like the performance of an exotic play than something he might actually find in daily life. But now with the fires continuing to eat up the city, he couldn't let go of the desire to rush home and try to retrieve something, anything, and join the treasure hunters sifting the rubble for their own belongings.

The lieutenant was not a fool and could judge how close to cracking from exhaustion all of his men were, so he ordered Blackburn and a few of the others to crawl into the nearby police command tent. They were advised to get a few hours of rest but then stay put until needed. The lieutenant reminded him that there was no point in trying to go home, anyway. Everything was gone.

Blackburn was too drained to argue, especially now with the chance to sleep. He found himself lying on a blanket pad in the police tent without remembering how he got there. The instant he closed his eyes, he fell into a deep slumber filled with sensations of physical torment and images of disaster. As awful as these things were, they barely raised his pulse. There was nothing in the realm of nightmares that hadn't already been exceeded in the waking world.

Shane Nightingale stayed with the same crowd of refugees that he had joined in front of his house, even after they turned northward and trailed along in front of the dynamited mansions on Van Ness Avenue. Within an hour, maybe two, his band of wanderers made it all the way up to the boat docks at the top end of the city. Their
journey over the rubbled streets and through the smoky air was made in silence, mostly broken by nothing but the scuffing of the relentless footsteps. If anyone spoke at all, it was almost always in a whisper.

Shane understood that. A sense of shame tends to keep anybody quiet. After the last three days of his ordeal, his own sense of shame was so strong that it attuned him to the same sort of things in others. He could see the signs of it all over them. To him, the crowd of wanderers resembled children who have just been severely scolded. Back at St. Adrian's, the other boys in his dormitory used to look like that after they had all been subjected to severe whippings, convinced by the friars that they had deserved it.

After all, everyone in San Francisco was aware that their town had a reputation for providing easy access to sins of every stripe. Throughout the seaport city, even people who never partook of the temptations offered by the sin trades nevertheless benefited from the money that sin brought to the local economy. The city's prosperity was related in countless ways to the infamous solicitations and brothels of the Barbary Coast's dark corners and to the hidden dens of Chinatown.

These wanderers around Shane had all been among the lucky citizens living off of the surplus prosperity boosted by such things, up until that very morning when all of them bore witness to the destruction of their world. Even as the impromptu band searched for ways to get out of the city and escape the relentless firestorms, it seemed apparent to Shane that all of them were wondering just how much personal stock they held in the city's collective guilt.

And how can this city's guilt be doubted?
Look at what had befallen them—it stretched out in all directions. For all he knew, for all that any of them could know, the entire planet was being shaken to pieces and burned to ashes, and there was nothing to do but watch. What difference would it make, if they ran in one direction or another?

He overheard a couple of new arrivals to the shuffling crowd. They were telling others that there was something of a refugee camp up and running, nearby in Golden Gate Park. The messengers claimed that a few church groups had formed soup lines there.

Hardly anybody turned to head for the park, though.

Shane understood. Nobody wanted to set up residence in a refugee camp; it would be a place full of victims. The emanations in such a place are strong, like the fouled air inside a damp hospital. No one had any desire to stay in smoke-stained tents among others who could only remind them of their broken condition. What they all wanted, as if thinking it with a single brain, was to escape the crumbling city.

The crowd passed squads of military men posted in front of certain mansions to fend off looters. The mansions seemed cruel and arrogant, amid the destruction. It was hard not to hate whoever lived in such places; some of these guards were looting the homes themselves. Shane just looked away and said nothing, so ashamed over his failure to stop the Nightingale murders that he couldn't feel superior to anybody. Twice, he and a few of the other young men found themselves pulled from the crowd by Army unit commanders and conscripted to help move rubble off of stranded victims. It was not necessary to talk in order to do the work, and he liked the feeling of being good for something. Still, every time they released him, he ran ahead to catch up with his shambling group of familiar strangers.

The crowd reached the marina at around three in the morning. There was no one to help them. Any sort of seaworthy vessel had already sailed out. Rumors spread about a couple of ferries that would come and take anyone across the bay who could afford to pay profiteers’ rates. A few of the refugees decided to wait for that uncertain rescue, but the rest of them began to drift. Within a couple of miles, they came to the Pacific shoreline at the western edge of the Presidio Military Reservation. The soldiers on duty there
didn't look happy to see the crowd. They ordered them all away, saying that every vessel had already been conscripted to help float soldiers in from nearby Fort Baker on Horseshoe Bay.

The crowd had no choice but to cooperate—the soldiers raised their rifles and announced that Mayor Schmitz and Commanding General Funston had declared the city under full martial law. Any citizen who disobeyed a soldier's orders was to be shot. No prisoners would be taken because there was no place to put them.

Nobody made any strong objections. Everyone moved on. They kept up their slow pace until sometime around four
A.M.,
when they came to the flats of Ocean Beach. Predictably, everything resembling a boat had already disappeared from there, too. People began circulating the same rumor that Shane had heard before: something about an intact telegraph cable in the area. Some of them wanted to send messages out, but Shane couldn't picture sending a message to anybody. He wondered what could possibly be said about any of this, even if there was someone to hear it.

A small group peeled off to search for the rumored telegraph station while Shane and the others walked away. This place had been their last hope of finding a boat, a ferry, even a raft to get them away from fires that appeared poised to burn all the way out to both horizons. Now there was nothing else to do but begin a walk of many miles, all of the way off the San Francisco peninsula. Most of the group were poised to go.

Just when Shane had decided to make the long hike with them, half a dozen mounted soldiers rode up at full speed. They reined in long enough to call out for able-bodied help. One of them spotted Shane, who found himself yanked up onto the horse and plopped down behind the saddle before he could object. The soldiers all wheeled their mounts and headed directly back toward the center of the city.

He was drafted onto a cleanup crew in the Mission District, the oldest part of the city. His particular group was sent off to the famous old Mission Dolores to do brick and stonework. At that mo-
ment, the prospect of labor seemed like good news to him—he had no idea of where to go anyway. As long as he worked hard, nobody seemed to care that he didn't want to talk, so it seemed that the Mission Dolores work crew could be a good place to lose himself for a while. He knew a little about the Mission, having learned from the friars back at the orphanage. It was the oldest Christian church in the city, dating back to the 1700s. He had even seen pictures of the Mission in a history book at the Nightingale house. As soon as his crew arrived, he recognized the famous lines of the Mission walls. It felt good to be in a place that seemed familiar, even if the feeling only came from someone else's photographs.

One of the soldiers told Shane that there was a list of sites inside the city that were to be restored right away. The list was written by a so-called "Committee of Fifty," made up of the town's most prominent citizens. This Mission Dolores was right near the top ofthat list.

The news got better. The "Committee" apparently realized that good labor depended upon a good food supply, and so a bread and soup line was in full swing outside the Mission doorway. The aromas reminded Shane that he hadn't eaten since the night before the earthquake. Suddenly it was all he could do to stay on his feet long enough to get through the line. He ate until he became sick out on the street, then he went back through and ate a second time.

By the time the sun was all the way up, Shane was full and the food was staying down. The hours began melting by while he worked in a hand-to-hand brick line, helping to carry away fallen bits of the newer church that had been built next to the old Mission. He tried to give the appearance of confidence by doing an impression of a man who knows how to work. Even when he smashed his fingers, he didn't allow himself any more reaction than to gasp at the pain. The second time it happened, when he couldn't keep the tears from rolling, he managed to wipe them off with his shoulders while he kept on working. He was almost certain that no one spotted him.

The task got him all the way to lunchtime before the work ran out. He took another helping of bread and soup, and had just enough time to choke it down before being drafted into another small crew. They were to reset the gravestones around the Mission's old cemetery, a small plot of land that was packed full with San Francisco's earliest settlers. It was relatively easy work, so the crew alternated their graveyard labor with spells of firefighter duty within the surrounding neighborhood. When the flames came and burned through, Shane saw that there wasn't much to be accomplished against the fires. Somebody said there was a rumor about hoses that were going to pump ocean water all the way up from the pier, but there weren't any to be seen.

It seemed to Shane that they were all only there to witness the destruction. There was no way to do battle with it, other than helping to pull trapped people out of the fire's way, or by helping to move important belongings. The thick adobe walls of the Mission and its clay-shingled roof were easy enough to save from the fires, however, and while the city founders’ gravesites had taken some damage, the cemetery struck Shane as basically unscathed and beautifully peaceful. He immediately understood why the "Committee of Fifty" included this place on their list.