Earl Emerson - Cape Disappointment

Vertical Burn Into the Inferno
Pyro
The Smoke Room
Firetrap
Primal Threat

THE THOMAS BLACK MYSTERIES

The Rainy City
Poverty Bay
Nervous Laughter
Fat Tuesday
Deviant Behavior
Yellow Dog Party
The Portland Laugher
The Vanishing Smile
The Million-Dollar Tattoo
Deception Pass
Catfish Caf

WHAT I REMEMBERED MOST was the janitor's plastic helmet bouncing between the open rafters like a Ping-Pong ball, that and chunks of metal whirring past my ears. I should have dodged the shrapnel, but all I did was stand and watch the flotsam fall out of the rafters and land all around me. Fortunately, the gym had emptied out minutes earlier, or the explosion would have killed several hundred people instead of a handful of unfortunates.

Pieces of the podium and stage, scraps from the bleachers, and even parts of the bomb itself had flown outward in all directions. Some of it bounced off the walls, some struck bystanders like myself, and the rest dropped out of the rafters like forgotten props in a school play. Most of the janitor, who'd been virtually on top of the blast, landed thirty feet from me. We were told the explosion, although executed with a relatively unsophisticated device, had blown out all the high windows in the gym and spewed glass onto roofs a block away.

I remember an amazing amount of dust in the air. Nearly all the inside lighting had been shattered by flying debris or obscured by clouds of dust. I remember the relative quiet immediately afterward, too. I was dazed. I couldn't have told you what planet I was on, much less the name of the school gymnasium. Or what I was doing besides bleeding. What they don't tell you about a bombing is that the event itself is probably the least memorable chapter in the book, that 99.9 percent of the story concerns the aftermath.

I found myself standing against a wall, unable to move. With each inhalation, my abdomen throbbed. When I looked down, I found a long metal rod jutting out of my belly, nailing me to the wall, twelve inches of it protruding from my shirt like one of those fake arrows Steve Martin used to wear on his head.

As the bomb went off, hundreds of metal chairs were thrown across the room, knocking people down like bowling pins and piling debris and bodies some living, some not at the end of the gym. Across the room a woman whose sweater and shoes were blown off was on her knees, blood dribbling down her face. I was close enough to the center of the blast that I must have had other injuries, lots of them, but the spike protruding from my belly was all I could think about.

Whether or not I was going to die against the wall was anybody's guess.

You read about bombings every day in Baghdad, or Tel Aviv, or Pakistan, or some other place you've never been and if you're intelligent and engaged and empathetic, you wonder what it might be like to be involved in one of those attacks, or to have a loved one involved, but the truth is that for most of us, our eyes glaze over before we flip the page or turn the channel, for bombings simply do not happen in the United States. At least, not anywhere nearby.

Some people walked around in a daze, including several bloodied individuals in front of me, but I stood like a guard at the palace, knowing there was nothing else I could do.

I didn't recall hearing any noise when the bomb went off. All I knew was that one second I was talking on my cellphone and the next I was nailed to the wall. Oddly, it didn't hurt as much as one might suppose, though that might be what all people in my circumstances told themselves, knowing they had no choice but to brave it.

I'D BEEN WALKING across the gymnasium near the west bleachers trying to improve my reception at the moment the blast erupted. If it hadn't been for the call, I would have been even closer than the unfortunate janitor. The bleachers around the sides of the gym had been pulled out to help seat the crowd, which had turned out to be meager. In those days, that was all Maddox could draw, a hundred or so of the faithful and some of the law-and-order crowd after all, he was an ex-police officer. I'd listened to the speech from the wings, and after it was over and the main body of the crowd filed out, had gone back inside for reasons it took some time to recall. Had I suspected a bomb? It certainly would have been part of my job assignment to watch for any suspicious activity. If so, why hadn't I discovered it before the speech, when it might have done some good? And, if I had suspected, what tipped me off? I couldn't remember.

In the weeks after the explosion, as the ATF investigation progressed, people would learn that the bomb had been placed directly under the podium. They would speculate that had Maddox, the speaker for the evening, been on the podium when it went off, he would have been blown into parts so small the medical examiner never would have been able to reconstruct him. As it was, nobody was vaporized, although the janitor came close. Later, I saw his picture in Newsweek among the photos of the dead. He was young, twenty-three, and lived at home with his parents. He had a girlfriend and one child with her whom he'd been doing his best to support. His life had hardly begun. Even weeks later, it was hard to fathom the enormity of the tragedy for his relatives and those of the others who died.

As the dust settled I began to feel more physical symptoms. My left eye was swollen, my vision blurry, and the fingers of my right hand were not functioning properly. My back hurt like hell. After a while, I realized I could barely hear anything just a constant, low-level background ringing in my ears. I was too dazed to pick up on it just then, but there was the distinctive smell of recently detonated explosives, the iron tang of blood, and the smell of human entrails, as well as the overpowering odor of construction dust. Inexplicably, the worst part during those minutes after the blast was the lack of human voices. I could see people's mouths moving but could hear no words. Nearby a man on his back had been impaled by two wooden shards. There were maybe twelve or fifteen people within sight of my position, some prone, some on their hands and knees, one couple clinging to each other and weaving around like drunks in an alley.

For some idiotic reason the same reason you always do inane things that count for nothing during an emergency I glanced around for my cellphone. It was on the floor next to a woman lying in a pile of twisted, metal chairs. I wanted to ask her to slide the phone over to me, but my vocal cords wouldn't respond. Even if she could slide it over, I wouldn't have been able to pick it up, nailed to the wall as I was. You'd think I would have had more important things to do than yak on my phone, but I suddenly became obsessed with finishing that last call, even though I couldn't remember who I'd been speaking to. As I stared at the woman next to my cellphone, it occurred to me that she hadn't moved an inch, that she wasn't breathing. Ma'am, I said. Ma'am, are you okay?