Quake by Lou Cadle

Author:Lou Cadle [Cadle, Lou]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cadle-Sparks Books
Published: 2014-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10: Gale

Sunday morning, Gale woke before dawn to the sound of rain, a light but steady patter against the window. He had burrowed under the blanket in the night. Temps had dropped, maybe as much as twenty degrees.

Not good. Not good at all.

He wasn't sleeping outside, but half of his staff was, and so was half the town. Some were bedded down in their own driveways or back yards, their houses too damaged to risk staying inside, but enough of their belongings left intact that they didn't want to abandon them. This rain would ruin some of what hadn't been destroyed by the quake already.

Other citizens were living in the new tent cities. The lowland city parks were unusable for that because of sulfurous fumes. Those parks were also too close to the Mississippi and all the disease and danger it carried. There was a tent city on the high school grounds, two at green spaces on the outskirts of town, and a third, potentially the largest, up beyond the interstate on the highest ground around, outside the city limits on the fallow field of a generous farmer.

Gale crawled out of bed, trying not to disturb Bash and walked down the hall to peer into the guest bedroom. The girls, McKenna and Haruka, lay side by side. He and Bash had become foster parents to these two. He had been worried about taking them in, a worry not about having enough food or about extra responsibility, but about being gay in an anti-marriage-freedom state. And the Japanese girl's parents wouldn't love it, either, he was sure. Japan was a generation behind the U.S. on the gay issue, he had seen firsthand, on a professional trip to an earthquake conference in Kyoto. But Bash had asked, and Gale hadn't been able to say no. Other people were just going to have to suck it up, and admit that keeping these two girls safe and fed was more important than their bigotry.

As he watched, McKenna flopped over in her sleep, as big in her gestures, as aggressive in sleep as she was awake. He liked the girl, but Bash had taken to a father role as easily as he took to breathing. Haruka was more of a cipher, quiet and thoughtful, hard to get to know.

Gale went into the kitchen and used the toilet in the half-bath off the mudroom. It turned out you could flush without power or water, but you didn't do it for everything -- there simply wasn't water to spare. Last night, having heard the forecast for rain, he had set buckets under the downspouts on the house to gather water for just this purpose.

A flashlight set on its end on the kitchen table functioned as a table lamp. He switched it on, sat down and started his to-do list.

Most important was food. He, Bash, and the girls had groceries, the last two bags of the rationed groceries still sitting on the counter, what was left in his trunk and their year-old emergency supplies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.