Chapter 39
The Catholic church on Pine Street had always been the largest in Tuckerton; its stone fa?ade and stained-glass windows were a landmark on Charlotte’s route.
Its main hall had become a medical bay; the pews had been removed, replaced by rows of cots beneath ceilings that had heard a century of prayers and now heard people trying not to die.
A doctor with salt-and-pepper hair listened to Charlotte’s lungs through a stethoscope and didn’t try to hide his concern.
“You have a significant pulmonary infection,” he said. “The gas causes chemical burns to the respiratory tract. Those burns become infected; the infection leads to pneumonia, and without antibiotics and oxygen… You’re on antibiotics?”
“Since yesterday.”
“They may not be enough. The damage is advanced. Rest. Fluids. If your fever spikes or the coughing produces more blood, come back immediately. We have very limited resources, but respiratory cases are a priority.”
“My family,” Charlotte said. “I’m looking for?—”
“I know. You’ve been asking at every station. Word gets around in a town this size, even now. I haven’t seen them. I’ve treated over a hundred patients in the last three days. I haven’t seen anyone matching those descriptions or names.”
Charlotte thanked him and moved through the church, checking each cot and each face.
The injured were mostly elderly or children, those the gas had hit hardest. She saw blistered skin, oxygen masks fashioned from aquarium tubing and plastic bags, and the gray pallor of people whose lungs were losing the battle.
None of them were Sophia, Liam, or Evelyn.
Her next stop was the high school auditorium.
The makeshift morgue occupied the stage, and bodies lay in rows on tarps with sheets covering what could be covered.
A woman in gloves and a face mask moved between them with a clipboard, making notes in the careful handwriting that had replaced digital records.
The smell wasn’t decomposition but something chemical.
“I’m looking for my family,” Charlotte said.
The woman didn’t ask her to leave. Instead, she led Charlotte through the rows, lifting sheets at each stop, revealing faces that were sometimes intact and sometimes not.
Charlotte looked at each one. She made herself look.
When the woman reached the end of the last row, she lowered the clipboard and shook her head.
“They’re not here,” she said.
“Thank you,” Charlotte said.
She walked out into sunlight that felt obscene after the auditorium’s dimness.
She found a search party near the town hall, volunteers with clipboards and maps marking grids they had covered and grids they had not.
A woman in a sheriff’s department jacket coordinated with the authority of someone who had stepped into leadership because someone had to.
“We’re missing forty-seven people from the eastern sector,” she was saying. “The plane crash accounts for twelve confirmed. The gas took most of the rest. We’ve cleared about sixty percent of the residential areas. The commercial district is next.”
“I’m looking for my family,” Charlotte said. “Sophia Meyers, sixteen. Liam and Evelyn Davis.”
The woman checked her map. “Davis. Maple Street, east end.”
“Yes.”
“That area is inaccessible. The crash site is still hot, and the gas concentration is high. We’ve got reports of the yellow haze settling into low-lying areas and staying there.
The firefighters who went in yesterday came out with blistered lungs.
Two of them didn’t make it back to the aid station. ”
“The gas is still active?” Charlotte asked.
“It behaves differently than anything in the manual. It’s heavier than air, it pools in valleys and basements, and it doesn’t break down the way conventional agents should.
Some of the older responders are calling it persistent.
It stays where it lands until something disperses it, and we don’t have the equipment to do that. ”
Charlotte looked at the map on the woman’s clipboard. The eastern section of Tuckerton, her neighborhood and the streets she had delivered to for twelve years, was shaded in red pencil.
“Nobody goes in there without a hazmat suit and a functioning gas mask,” the woman said. “We don’t have, either. The military was supposed to bring supplies, but communications are… You know how communications are.”
Charlotte had watched her phone die on Crestview Street while the gas poured through the vents of her mail truck.
She had breathed it and lived, which made her either lucky or already dead on a timeline she couldn’t see.
She joined the search party for two hours.
They moved through neighborhoods west of the contamination zone, checking houses, calling out names, and sometimes finding survivors, and sometimes not.
Charlotte helped where she could; her uniform earned a degree of trust that her appearance might not have.
People recognized her, the mail carrier who knew every street.
They told her their stories in fragments, none of which contained Sophia, Liam, or Evelyn.
By mid-afternoon, her strength was failing.
The antibiotics hadn’t caught up to the infection, and her cough had developed a rattling quality that marked the border of something irreversible.
She sat on a curb with her head in her hands and felt the weight of the day settle into her bones.
Entire sections of the city remained inaccessible.
The crater where her house had stood was inside the contamination zone, unreachable without equipment she didn’t have.
If her family had survived the impact, she knew they would have emerged.
They would be in a shelter, on a list, or in someone’s memory. The absence was its own answer.
Charlotte knew it the way she knew her route and the sound of Sophia’s voice.
Knowing didn’t make it easier to accept.
It made it harder. She pushed herself upright and kept walking.
The sun was lower, the light taking on the amber quality of late afternoon, and somewhere east of where she stood, the yellow haze hung over streets she couldn’t reach, a crater she couldn’t search, and answers she might never find.