Earthquake (3 page)

The boy jumped down from the wagon.
“Are you all right?”

Dai Yue was silent. She understood his words and she could have answered him, but her voice seemed like a jagged thing, caught low in her throat.

“Are you hurt? I—”

The boy's words were interrupted by an eerie, rolling roar that seemed to come from the very earth itself.

Brendan turned from the Chinese girl. He faced the low rumbling that seemed to roll in from the sea, roaring up Market Street, a groaning that sounded like Hell had been set loose. Without thinking, Brendan reached for his St. Christopher medal and held it so tightly it dug into his palms.

The cobblestones beneath Brendan's feet slammed impossibly to one side, then back. The mare reared, her eyes ringed with white. Brendan grabbed the Chinese girl and dragged her out of the way, stumbling, pulling her down with him as he fell. The mare struck at the ground, then lunged forward. She galloped past, taking a mad, zigzagging course down Market. The wagon narrowly missed
an automobile. The driver shook his fist at Brendan.

The street was heaving up and down, as though the earth had somehow become water, rocked by violent waves. Brendan heard screams from the Palace Hotel; the windows were shattering, a deadly rain of glass falling onto the broken cobblestones. Brendan fought to stand, but the ground moved beneath his feet and he fell again. The Chinese girl sat motionless. Her eyes flickered from one building to the next, her lips moving in a whisper Brendan knew he would not understand even if he could hear her over the demonic roaring of the earth.

The groaning roar went on as Brendan faced westward down Market Street. The Call Building shivered and swayed, writhing against the sky. Bricks exploded from their mortar and Brendan watched one fall, then disappear against the dark building. Dozens of reporters and copyboys shoved their way into the street. Brendan thought he recognized Cal Richmond. He was staggering, both hands pressed to his head. Blood darkened his light hair.

“Help me! Help me!” A woman ran toward them. She wore only her nightclothes. Her bare feet were cut and bleeding. There were long scratches across
her face. Her eyes were wild and she lurched, trying to keep her balance on the heaving ground. She scowled at Brendan, then went on.

Brendan heard a clatter of bricks striking the cobblestones close by. He tried to stand up, struggling against a mysterious weight. He looked down, horror-stricken, only to realize that the Chinese girl had taken hold of his hand. Her eyes were blank with fear, her hand a claw, clutching his own.

“Get up,” he shouted at her. “The buildings are going to fall!”

She only stared, not even blinking. The ground beneath them shivered, the waves coming closer together. A party of nightgowned women fled past. Brendan squinted, confused for a second. They all seemed to be wearing red shoes. Their bare feet were bleeding, every one of them cut badly on the carpet of shattered glass from nine stories of broken windows.

“Get up,” Brendan screamed again, jerking the Chinese girl upward, staggering back as he dragged her to her feet. Her face was pale in the early dawn light. Brendan heard a sharp hissing sound from above. He looked up. Eerie blue-green sparks arced and spat. The electric lines had broken. A chorus of
shrill, high-pitched shrieking made Brendan lower his eyes to look across the street again.

People were pouring out of the Palace Hotel now. A milling crowd of half-dressed men and women clogged the sidewalk and spilled into the street. A small dog stood stiff-legged, barking frantically at them as though they had somehow caused its world to go crazy. The Chinese girl shrank against Brendan.

Then, without warning, as abruptly as it had begun shaking, the ground became still. The crowd in front of the Palace stopped. Screams faded. People stood rigidly, as if afraid that any motion, any sound, would be dangerous. Overhead, the blue sparks cracked like distant gunfire.

Brendan looked into the Chinese girl's frightened eyes. “Are you all right?”

She opened her mouth as if to answer, but in that instant another convulsion slammed through the layers of soil and rock beneath the city. The Chinese girl tightened her grip on Brendan's hand. Together, they managed to keep their feet this time as the buildings quivered, then resumed their deadly swaying dance. The steel beams that formed the skeletons of the brick buildings were shrieking as the ground writhed.

Brendan stumbled against the girl. She pointed, her eyes glazed with fear. He followed her gesture and blinked, trying to clear his vision. Dust was billowing between the buildings and at first he could not believe his eyes.

The cable car tracks were twisting, arching themselves into loops and curves. As Brendan watched, the ground along the tracks began to split apart. The Chinese girl stared at it.

Brendan tried to move, tried to run, but he could not. He stood riveted as the crack in the earth widened, like a seam splitting. It raced toward them and the girl froze. Brendan fought the heaving motion of the ground, pulling her backward.

A sudden sideways jolt knocked them both down again. Brendan scrabbled away, weak with fear, whispering frantic prayers to the Virgin Mary. Without thought or intent, he dragged the Chinese girl with him, his grip on her hand tightening as his panic rose.

The crack lengthened like a snake crawling toward them. The girl managed to gain her feet, pulling him upright, jerking him into a clumsy retreat through the hellish roar of falling brick and collapsing steel.

A cold, piercing pain just above Brendan's
right eye made him stumble, but the girl kept him on his feet, kept him running. They wove through the crowd, assaulted by moans, prayers, and shouts of fury. One man shook his bloody fist at the sky, accusing God. Beside him another man knelt, weeping and begging someone to show him how to pray.

Brendan followed the girl around a pile of bricks and shattered wood. A second later he was sliding, running across a spilled load of oranges. He saw the wagon, tilted, one wheel broken. The driver lay sideways on the bench, his forehead bloody, his eyes closed. One of the horses had fallen. It looked dead. Its harness mate stood breathing hard, trapped in the tangled leather.

The Chinese girl yanked at Brendan's hand and he realized he had stopped. In that instant, the world became still again. The insane motion of the street quieted and the crowds hushed. Dust hung in the air, smudging the rising sun with yellow and orange.

Brendan let go of the girl's hand and turned in a slow circle. His thoughts were too loud, hammering against his skull. The silence in the street seemed to swell, pressing against the buildings, flowing upward
with the dust that drifted skyward, enveloping the city. It rang in Brendan's ears, immense.

Brendan shook his head and rubbed one hand over his face. The stickiness of his own blood startled him. He stared at his fingers, amazed at the glaring red.

Dai Yue stood still, feeling as if the sudden silence had taken them all in its arms. The ground was no longer moving, had stopped its terrible shaking, but she was afraid to take a step, afraid she would rouse Day Leong again. The Earth Dragon had already shown his rage.

The sound of bricks striking the cobblestones made her spin around. She saw two more fall, hit the street, bound up once, then roll to a standstill. A tiny murmur ran through the motionless crowd, then the silence closed in once more. The dust was thick. It was hard to take a deep breath.

Dai Yue glanced at the Fon Kwei boy. His already pale face was an ugly white, streaked with blood running from a cut on his temple. Dai Yue looked down at her tunic. It was old, a castoff from a neighbor's daughter, mended and faded. She pulled at the hem, her thumbs close together on the cloth, until she managed to start a tiny tear. She ripped a strip
from around the hem. With the cloth dangling from her hand, she faced the Fon Kwei boy.

“Are you all right?” he asked her when he saw her looking at him.

Stupid,
Dai Yue thought. He was bleeding, but he asked, yet again, if she was hurt. The Fon Kwei had no brains, no matter what her cousin had said about the teachers at St. Mary's Mission School.

“You hurt,” Dai Yue managed.

His face lit instantly. “You speak English!”

She lowered her eyes, almost blushing at his earnest foolishness. He was looking at her as if she were a horse or a dog that had suddenly acquired human speech. All doubts were gone. Fon Kwei were idiots. “Not too much,” she answered modestly. She lifted the strip of her tunic, gesturing at his wound.

“I'm bleeding pretty hard,” the boy said, nodding.

Dai Yue motioned for him to sit down. She bandaged him as well as she could, tucking under the end of the cloth strip. As she worked, her fingers began to tremble. She kept glancing up at the buildings, imagining for a split second that she could see them move.

“Look at this.” The Fon Kwei boy held out his hands. “I'm shaking.”

Dai Yue clasped and unclasped her own hands. “I, too.”

The Fon Kwei boy looked around, his eyes searching. A second later Dai Yue realized what had made him turn. Somewhere, someone was crying. The crowd had begun to move again, aimless, dreamlike.

The sea of Fon Kwei faces made Dai Yue uneasy. None of them seemed to notice her, but Dai Yue knew it was only a matter of time before someone did. Chinese men rarely ventured out of Chinatown unless they worked for Fon Kwei families. Chinese girls of good families were never seen in public like this.

Involuntarily, Dai Yue looked down at her clothes. Her slippers were soiled, dirt clinging to the heavy black cloth. Her trousers and tunic were filthy, smudged with blood. It was his, Dai Yue realized. Fon Kwei blood.

Dai Yue's thoughts spun in a circle and made her dizzy. Had the boys who had beaten her cousin to death been spattered with his blood? Had they washed it off or worn it with pride? She shivered with hatred.

“Are you all right?” the Fon Kwei boy asked again.

“No,” Dai Yue snapped at him.

“Are you hurt?”

Dai Yue glared at him.

“What's your name?”

Dai Yue hesitated. She had never given her name to a Fon Kwei—not even the policemen who sometimes came into her uncle's pharmacy to ask questions about opium or some mysterious poison they had found. Dai Yue's uncle knew every mushroom, every snake's venom, every bitter herb that could cause illness or death—many of these things, in tiny doses, acted as cures.

The Fon Kwei boy was studying her face. “My name is Brendan O'Connor.”

Dai Yue looked at him sidelong. What did she care about his name? “I go,” she began, then stopped, searching for the right word. “I go . . . home.”

His face changed. “I'll go with you.”

Dai Yue looked aside. “No. I go alone.”

The boy reached for her hand. Before she could react, he had taken it and was looking into her eyes. “You can't. It's too dangerous.” He gestured, taking in the stunned crowds, the broken glass, the piles of brick and wood in the street.

Dai Yue stepped back, pulling her hand free from his. “You go home now?”

The boy shook his head. “The only place I need to go is to St. Mary's. You know it?”

Dai Yue nodded. “The Fon Kwei church?” The words felt awkward and misshapen in her mouth.

The boy looked puzzled. “What's your name?” he repeated.

“Li Dai Yue. Dai Yue,” she repeated, just as the earth shook beneath them once more.

The throng of people around them froze in place. Women screamed and one of the men who had been praying began to curse. Dai Yue felt the coldest fear of her life grip at her heart. Was the Earth Dragon going to destroy the whole world? The boy reached for her hand and she gave it to him. Together they stood waiting, holding their breath, until the tremor ceased.

“I hate this,” the boy whispered. He clutched at a silver chain around his neck.

Dai Yue had seen the silver coin that hung from it. It meant something to the Fon Kwei boy, that much was very clear. His lips moved a little. Prayer?

A shower of bricks and chunks of broken mortar
fell into the crowd. A woman howled in pain. “I want to go home,” Dai Yue said, without meaning to.

Somehow, in the noisy confusion, the boy heard her. He began walking away from the rising sun, leading her through the broken glass, the people who wandered in blind, terrified circles.

At first, Brendan walked slowly. His legs felt different, longer, as though his light, confused thoughts were a mile above his feet. The bandage Dai Yue had wrapped around his wound was tight. He could feel his pulse pushing at the cloth.

There was a strange odor in the air, something that lay beneath the smells of dust and powdered mortar. The heavy silence was now broken with screams and pleas for help on all sides. The voices seemed to drift into Brendan's ears, then out again. He could make no sense of anything. It felt as though there were a pane of glass between himself and the world. A quick pressure on his hand reminded him that Dai Yue was walking with him through the nightmarish street.

The crowd thickened as they passed the Call Building. Brendan glanced at Dai Yue. Her eyes were full of fear, skittering across the faces closest to them.

“Hey, look out, boy!”

Brendan found himself facing a tall, dark-haired man. “I'm sorry, sir.”

“You should be. You. . . .”

Brendan watched the man's eyes shift from him to Dai Yue. He felt her hand tighten on his.

“What's this girl doing here? She belong to you?”

Brendan glanced at Dai Yue. Her eyes were empty, bottomless. Brendan couldn't tell if she had understood the man.

“I asked you a question, boy.”

Brendan hesitated. So many Chinese girls were slaves, were forced into prostitution. The man was still staring at Dai Yue. Her eyes were downcast and her face was unreadable. But Brendan felt her tighten her hand on his once more, and she was trembling again.