All Together Dead

And I found, near to him, a dead maid. She’d been crushed.
    I had a smell in my nose that just wouldn’t go away, and I hated it. It was coating my lungs inside, I thought, and I’d spend the rest of my life breathing it in and breathing it out. The odor was composed of burning building materials, scorched bodies, and disintegrating vampires. It was the smell of hatred.
    I saw some things so awful I couldn’t even think about them then.
    Suddenly, I didn’t feel I could search anymore. I had to sit down. I was drawn to a pile created by the chance arrangement of a large pipe and some drywall. I perched on it and wept. Then the whole pile shifted sideways, and I landed on the ground, still weeping.
    I looked into the opening revealed by the shifted debris.
    Bill was crouched inside, half his face burned away. He was wearing the clothes I’d last seen him in the night before. I arched myself over him to keep the sun off, and he said, “Thanks,” through cracked and bloody lips. He kept slipping in and out of his comatose daytime sleep.
    “Jesus God,” I said. “Come help!” I called, and saw two men start toward me with a blanket.
    “I knew you’d find me,” Bill said, or did I imagine that?
    I stayed hunched in the awkward position. There just wasn’t anything near enough to grab that would cover as much of him as I did. The smell was making me gag, but I stayed. He’d lasted this long only because he’d been covered by accident.
    Though one fireman threw up, they covered him and took him away.
    Then I saw another yellow-jacketed figure tear off across the debris field toward the ambulances as fast as anyone could move without breaking a leg. I got the impression of a live brain, and I recognized it at once. I scrambled over piles of rubble, following the signature of the brain of the man I wanted most to find. Quinn and Frannie lay half-buried under a pile of loose rubble. Frannie was unconscious, and she’d been bleeding from the head, but it had dried. Quinn was dazed but coming to full awareness. I could see that fresh water had cut a path in the dust on his face, and I realized the man who’d just dashed away had given Quinn some water to drink and was returning with stretchers for the two.
    He tried to smile at me. I fell to my knees beside him. “We might have to change our plans, babe,” he said. “I may have to take care of Frannie for a week or two. Our mom’s not exactly Florence Nightingale.”
    I tried not to cry, but it was like, once turned to “on,” I couldn’t tell my tear ducts to switch off. I wasn’t sobbing anymore, but I was trickling steadily. Stupid. “You do what you have to do,” I said. “You call me when you can. Okay?” I hated people who said “Okay?” all the time, like they were getting permission, but I couldn’t help that, either. “You’re alive; that’s all that matters.”
    “Thanks to you,” he said. “If you hadn’t called, we’d be dead. Even the fire alarm might not have gotten us out of the room in time.”
    I heard a groan from a few feet away, a breath on the air. Quinn heard it, too. I crawled away from him, pushing aside a large chunk of toilet and sink. There, covered with dust and debris, under several large bits of drywall, lay Andre, completely out of it. A quick glance told me he had several serious injuries. But none of them was bleeding. He would heal them all. Dammit.
    “It’s Andre,” I told Quinn. “Hurt, but alive.” If my voice was grim, I felt grim. There was a nice, long wood splinter right by his leg, and I was so tempted. Andre was a threat to my freedom of will, to everything I enjoyed about my life. But I’d seen so much death that day already.
    I crouched there beside him, hating him, but after all…I knew him. That should have made it easier, but it didn’t.
    I duckwalked out of the little alcove where he lay, scuttled back to Quinn.
    “Those guys are coming back to get us,” he told me, sounding stronger every minute. “You can leave now.”
    “You want me to leave?”
    His eyes were telling me something. I wasn’t reading it.
    “Okay,” I said hesitantly. “I’ll go.”
    “I’ve got help coming,” he said gently. “You could be finding someone else.”
    “All right,” I said, not knowing how to take this, and pushed to my feet. I’d gone maybe two yards when I heard him begin to move. But after a moment of stillness, I kept walking.
    I returned to a big van that had been brought in