Faultland by Suzy Vitello

Author:Suzy Vitello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC070000 - FICTION / Disaster, FIC045020 - FICTION / Family Life / Siblings, FIC019000 - FICTION / Literary, FIC028000 - FICTION / Science Fiction / General, FIC048000 - FICTION / Urban
Publisher: Ooligan Press
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

5:47 p.m., Providence Park

They call it a reunion node. A place where family members can find one another and hunker down on cots and scratchy blankets until temporary housing is made available for people whose homes have been destroyed. Olivia finds herself at this node, formerly known as Providence Park. The soccer stadium is nestled snugly at the base of the West Hills, twenty or so blocks from Pioneer Courthouse Square. Thanks to recently engineered improvements, the stadium has weathered the quake nearly unscathed-though the last couple of aftershocks have loosened another chunk of the hillside above it, and the newly renovated Lincoln High School, a block away, is now littered with some of Portland’s most expensive real estate.

Thank God the kids had all been evacuated before the slide. Were the students of Overhill Elementary as fortunate? Olivia, now calmed by several hundred milligrams of Gabapentin, refuses to accept any other outcome. Her daughter is fine. God or whoever wouldn’t kill both Christopher and Melanie. No way. That old adage about God never handing a person more than they could take? Well, Olivia would for damn sure not be able to handle more than one loved one’s demise.

Several white tent structures have popped up on the pitch. Modest cots dot the turf inside the tents, and Olivia is assigned one that hugs the canvas. There is nowhere else to go. She’d been told that Melanie is likely corralled with other Overhill students in a vacant store in the West Hills. “You can’t walk up there until daylight,” an emergency node manager had informed her. “There’s a curfew in effect.”

Olivia sits on her designated cot, her feet blistered, face aching, eyes watering, the skin on her upper arms blossoming with a weird allergic reaction. She tosses the respirator to the ground and rubs her face.

The ridges and indents from the mask, when she runs her fingers over them, feel like the contours of a rubber bathmat; she imagines she looks like a circus sideshow freak. Earlier, she’d cajoled a volunteer out of a gallon of water so she could rinse the sticky dye from her scalp. She’d made the mistake of consulting the small mirror given her along with a comb, toothbrush and miniature tube of Crest, to find her hair was now the color of an orangutan’s butt. To think, forty-eight hours ago, she’d planned on a photo shoot for an online dating website.

The vapid stupidity of what she’d been wrapped up in only yesterday morning makes her want to vomit.

Christopher is dead.

They’d given her the sedative after she sobbed hysterically for several hours. The nightmare of losing Christopher, of not knowing the status of her daughter, was more than she could take. Of being tied to the unknown-no recourse, curfew in effect. She hadn’t been able to stop shaking. Beth Ann had wrangled the Gabapentin and gave it to Olivia, probably more than she should have taken. Without it, though, her heart would likely have leapt out of her skin.

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