Phil wandered near Crider's desk to look at the scattering of black and white pictures on the floor. In the middle photo, a young black woman with a severe white t-shirt stood in the brutal center of twisted grey, strewn white, and torn black. The only recognizable objects were the wooden beams propped one on another in odd angles. The woman saw the camera, not just the camera but the lens, not just the lens but the thousands who would be looking through that lens, once her photo came out. Then she spread her arms to display the boundless tear in the world, and screamed, since that was all she could do just then. At far left, a white man's thick sleeve, hovered in striped, unstained assurance, proffering a hand with short fingers. The color of his thumbnail matched the woman's teeth and shirt.
In another photo, nearby, Phil spotted the same woman holding up the near end of a stretcher improvised of cardboard laid over beams, twisting her neck to watch her step. Four National Guardsmen held beams. On the stretcher lay a wad of white linen with ankles protruding. Another of the stretcher bearers intently watched his own wrists and wore the shirt sleeves Phil saw in the first photo.
On first glance at another photo, Phil thought he saw a wrecked car hovering over a cave made not of rock but of brick halves. Apparently, at Sparks Auto Center, the mechanics left some sort of Pontiac on the lift when they hid. The roof came down. The brick walls became a powder. The car's strength supported a surprising amount of roof.
Phil recognized part of Walnut Street in another cluttered, glossy rectangle. The Second Baptist Church roof had developed large pores and the white of the shingles on the near building, blurred into the sky, so that the holes the tornado ripped near the apex resembled a row of black ragged birds. The windows harbored structureless shadows. Two figures walked below, toward the right-tending chaos of limbs and boards and power lines. The slim blonde girl followed a wide male in dark long sleeves and a white cap. There was a walkie-talkie clipped to his back pocket. Several other figures walked in paths perpendicular with that of the couple, all looking downward, ignoring the obscenity of the stripped tree confronting them all.
In other pictures, hundreds of frail, white-haired people waited in wheelchairs outside the nursing room, whose roof had been peeled like an orange rind. A man in overalls stood on the vast expanse of his crushed business, pointing down and smiling wryly. About a dozen men and women bent down, pulling at pieces of the cataclysm that threatened to obscure them all from view. One girl in glasses crouched precariously on a length of wood. She was wearing very daring shorts. A man who was bent beside her, helping another man up onto the pile, or possibly down, wore sandals. In the background, it appeared an army was marching past, armed with crude spears, and the great heap of a former house blocked the view of everything but the weapons they carried.
Unable to take anymore, Phil went into the breakroom to resume his talk with Harold, but Harold was back in the printing room with Al, who'd just gotten here and looked most unhappy to have been recalled this time of night. Phil went back there and leaned against a 600-pound spool of newsprint. He watched them adjust settings in several corners of the massive press.
"Well, Phil, are we close to the end?" Harold asked him while replacing a drum of blue ink.
"Think so," Phil said.
"Must be. Since Crider ain't stuck on your ass like a mole. You may have to have a surgeon's help if you ever quit," Harold said. Al laughed.
"You guys know what this damn place is, dontcha?" Harold asked rhetorically. "It's like that scene early in that movie Dances With Wolves. Costner gets sent to the most remote outpost of the U.S. Army, and the Civil War's on, you know. So everybody any good's at the front. The guy in charge is a basket-case. You remember he wets his pants right there in his office?"
"That's what this place is?" Al asked. "Huh?"
"Yeah, it's the last outpost. Romer Media's smallest paper. They don't give a damn what goes on here. So you get Crider, you get Vickie Lou, you get the kind of crap we put up with."