Chapter Seven - Hell on Earth
I don't remember falling asleep, but I must have. More likely I concussed myself. I had swerved to avoid a piece of falling debris, and in so doing I had driven Mr. Carson's precious Silver Ghost into a wall.
Eliza shook me awake. On any other day, I would have been overjoyed that her radiant eyes were the first things I saw upon waking. But today it filled me with sadness, because it meant she was here with me in this terrifying peril.
Still groggy, I took note of my surroundings. By some contrivance I have yet to understand, a great deal of Eliza's red carmine lip makeup had rubbed off on my clothes and face while I was asleep. No doubt the paper tube in her handbag had fallen out during the crash. As a result, I looked much more badly injured than I was, although the apparent bloodstains were all vaguely reminiscent of human lips.
I probed at the car door and by some miracle it opened. Even thought it was still the dead of night, the sky above me had taken on the dark red pallor of a sunset. It nearly matched the deep carmine on my shirt and face.
It didn't take long to find the cause of the strange luminescence. That tidy little fire at Mr. Stanton's shop, which had seemed so dreadful to me a moment ago, was now just one small part of a raging inferno. The fire, which would not have had much difficulty spreading, even in ideal conditions, was helped along on its way by the massive earthquake.
Up and downs Hayes Street for what seemed like miles, I could see nothing but a red and yellow blaze. And this was not the only fire in San Francisco that night. The quake must have knocked over every lantern and broken every gas lamp in the city. What few buildings had not crumbled in the initial onslaught were now on fire.
No doubt the fire patrols were hard at work all across the city, but this task was insurmountable. I gazed around me and beheld not San Francisco in the state of California, but rather a state of hell on Earth. I later learned that Chief Sullivan of the fire department died that night, hardly surprising.
It's also worth noting that crumbling and ablaze are not mutually exclusive states for a building, especially an older building. Mr. Carson's holdings were almost exclusively older buildings, to the extent to which a building in San Francisco in 1906 could be considered 'old.'
I shuddered to think of my employer's assets literally going "up in smoke." This led me to think of my employer himself, an even more troubling prospect. No matter what kind of man Mr. Carson had been in his youth, he was undoubtedly old and frail now. I couldn't even be certain he had survived the initial earthquake, and his house was so full of glass and lamps and lanterns that after such a seismic event it could very well be a death trap.
I imagined Mr. Carson's great mansion collapsing down around him. Burying him in a deluge of excess and luxury. Burying him and all his wonderful money. That's when I knew I had to do something.
To her credit, Eliza was not especially hysterical. At least, she was not any more hysterical than was reasonable at a time like this. There was pandemonium in the streets. In the immediate vicinity alone, I caught sight of seven bodies lodged within the rubble, two of them children.
"What about grandfather?" was all she said, but she said it more than once. I couldn't answer her question because I didn't have an answer. The odds were good that he was already dead, but I couldn't give up on him before I even looked, at least, not while Eliza was watching.
This was a dark and troubling time, perhaps the single most dreadful experience of my entire life. But it was also a great opportunity. Every man longs for a chance to prove his bravery in front of the woman he loved. I resolved then and there that I would brave the inferno, the crumbling buildings, and the raging mob in order to rescue Miss Eliza's grandfather. But damned is I was going to do it on foot.
The only reason the mob had not turned on Eliza and I, with our fine looking clothes and our apparent wealth, was that they were, for the moment, too preoccupied with their own survival. In a few moments, the majority of them would escape immediate danger, some through death. But those who remained alive would realize that society could not punish them for crimes committed in such an atmosphere, what survived of San Francisco would be theirs for the taking.
Miss Eliza, a pretty girl in expensive clothes, was exactly the sort of unattainable treasure a man might seek on a night like this. I know that, had I not been the one charged with her protection, I would most certainly have cast an eye to her in that regard.
With Eliza's help I managed to drag the Silver Ghost into the street. I was ashamed to ask a woman for help with physical labor, but I was still groggy from my injuries, and it was a necessity of survival. To gain better footing, Miss Eliza had to remove the very expensive, and very impractical shoes that Mr. Carson had bought for her.
The Bunkhouse boys and Mr. Stanton were the two farthest things from my mind at that moment. All the problems of the past few weeks seemed to suddenly shrink in significance. I began to think of Lou and the boys at the Mission St. Antoine, not to mention the friends and companions of my childhood. I'd lay good odds that most of them were dead, and that thought sat in the back of my mind and felt like knot tied twice over in the pit of my stomach.
Not two hours ago Ms. Eliza and I had been watching Carmen at the Grand Opera House. For one brief shining moment, I had been in high society. Now, as if God had crafted a grand punishment for my impertinence, I found myself in a city of endless flames.
It was to the same God who crafted that punishment that I said a silent prayer as I ignited the Silver Ghost. Automobiles were tough, built from the hardest metals, made to withstand impacts. Even if the Silver Ghost was not nearly so aesthetically pleasing as it had been before, it was not ridiculous to expect it to still run.
At first, the engine did not ignite. I cursed, out loud. Miss Eliza heard me. She seemed appropriately shocked, and I was appropriately shamed. No doubt I had revealed myself as the coarse person I was, but perhaps that had been my appeal to young Miss Eliza all along.
A second attempt at restarting the Silver Ghost was equally fruitless. I felt like a fool, standing in front of my auto and turning a tiny crank while the world burned around me. Off in the distance, I heard an explosion, then another. It was unmistakably the sound of dynamite. When a building was too far-gone, the fire department would often destroy it utterly, reasoning that stable pile of bricks was preferable to an unstable tenement. The frequency of the explosions alarmed me. Perhaps tomorrow a good portion of the city would be naught but dust and echoes.
The last explosion I head was softer than the rest. It took me a moment to realize that it was the engine on the Silver Ghost bursting back to life. I did a brief sign of the cross, although I was not too familiar with the gesture and probably did it wrong, and I offered God my undying thanks.
Presently, I climbed back into the driver's compartment of the Silver Ghost, that crown jewel of the Rolls Royce Motor Company, and was surprised to fine Miss Eliza sitting next to me.
She claimed that she was far too frightened to sit alone in the passenger compartment. I certainly wasn't going to complain. In a brief second we were off and away, winding through the crowds and the fire and the crumbling debris. The city was barely recognizable, but I knew that I had to find my way back to Mr. Carson's house. It might already have been too late, but I had to try.