Authors: K. W. Jeter
Iris saw the flashlight beam spring on, cutting across the gap and catching first her wildly kicking legs, then darting up to her face, dazzling and blinding her for a moment. 'Hold on,' called Vogel. There was no further point in whispering; the initial shriek of the rebar tearing loose would have penetrated every inch of the jumbled-together ruins, alerting the others to their whereabouts. 'I've got you—'
Holding onto the rubble face with one hand, Vogel leaned out and reached for her. Iris took her hand from the rebar section and grabbed tightly onto Vogel's forearm. Even as he pulled her toward himself, shouts were audible, though made faint and echoingly garbled by the intervening distance and the twists and turns leading down to the remains of the Tyrell private quarters.
With a sudden lurch, more of the tangled rebar came loose from above, instantly dropping Iris another couple of meters. Her grip instinctively tightened on Vogel's arm as she fell; that was enough to pull him off the rubble face. His other arm quickly grabbed around Iris's legs, stopping his own fall. Iris let go of his upward-extended wrist, letting herself be bear-hugged by Vogel around her knees, his head at a level with her stomach.
Not . . . good,' gasped Vogel needlessly. Along with a quantity of loose concrete debris from the rubble face, the flashlight had fallen clattering down the gap beneath them. Its beam shot upward into their eyes, then was extinguished as the lens and bulb shattered against a jagged cement outcropping. 'This could've . . . gone better . .
She didn't bother replying. Her locked-straight arms, bearing both her own and Vogel's weight, were already beginning to ache. As she and Vogel swayed in the darkness, with the section of rebar that she grasped stretching and contracting with a nauseating elasticity, she could hear the others somewhere directly beneath them. That meant that the director Urbenton's crew – if that was who they were; she still had no way of knowing for sure – had reached the Tyrell private quarters, and specifically the crushed end of the rooms from which she and Vogel had ascended. It wouldn't be long before those others came swarming up the gap, through its initial narrow section and then where it opened alongside the rubble face, and found the two of them dangling here.
'I'm not waiting around,' announced Iris. 'Look, here's the deal. I can pull us up at least a little farther. Then you'll be able to grab hold of this bar yourself.' Her arms were beginning to feel as if they were being pulled out of their sockets. 'Then we can both climb up it, separately.'
'Don't know about that.' Vogel looked upward, past Iris's face. 'This thing – this metal stuff – it might not be too securely fastened.' He sounded oddly calm and analytical, given the situation. 'We're getting towards the surface, so a lot of the debris isn't weight-compressed and packed together as tightly as the lower strata. If we start jostling this around with too much body movement, it could come tumbling down real fast.'
'So what do you suggest?' She tried to keep her own irritation, triggered by Vogel's objections, coldly under control.
'Well,' said Vogel, 'the smart thing to do would be for one of us to let go and drop. That way, there'd be less mass and weight dragging on this metal stuff, and the other person would have a better shot of getting out of here.'
'Yeah, right;
that's
a great idea. And the person who lets go either gets killed in the fall, or gets whatever that bunch down below thinks should be corning to him – or her. Are you volunteering?'
'Not really,' admitted Vogel.
'Fine. Then we'll do it my way.' With Vogel's arms wrapped around her legs, Iris reached and grabbed higher on the rebar section, pulling herself up. She had no desire to wait around any longer, until their pursuers caught up with them; she could already hear voices from down below, in the crushed end of the Tyrell private quarters. The knife-like ridges of the rebar cut into her palms and the bent joints of her fingers as she strained to drag herself and Vogel a few inches higher. Another lunging grasp, catching at a twisted angle in the metal, gave her a tight enough hold that she could wedge the horizontally slanting part under one arm; using her back and shoulder muscles, Iris levered herself onto the piece, leaning forward so that it was across her stomach. 'There . . . right in front of you . . Breathless, she gasped the words out. 'Grab it, for Christ's sake . . .'
She felt one of Vogel's arms let go, then a downward pull in the rebar section to which she clung as he transferred his weight to its vertical section. The circulation in her legs started up again, no longer cut off by his vise-like grip.
'You okay?' Vogel called to her.
'Yeah.' Iris nodded, even though she knew the darkness hid any such movement. She didn't bother to ask how he was doing; she didn't care, at least now that her arms no longer felt as if they were being yanked from their sockets by his added weight. 'Let's get going . . .'
Shifting position by grabbing the near-horizontal rebar section in both hands, then drawing up and getting one knee onto it, Iris climbed higher onto the tangled metal. Before she moved again, she felt one of Vogel's hands brush her knee as he grabbed the section above him—
The dark space in which they both hung suspended was suddenly lit up with glaring shafts of light. Iris saw her own and Vogel's elongated shadows leap upward, fracturing across the segments of the tangled skein of rebar to which they clung. The broken shadows danced for a moment, then were frozen into place as the searchlight beams, aimed from just below, found and locked onto the two of them, dazzling and blinding their shocked eyes.
Iris realized immediately what had happened. The sounds and voices she and Vogel had heard coming from the Tyrell private quarters had been only a distraction, to make them think that their pursuers were down there. When in fact a sizable number of the director Urbenton's crew had been silently creeping up the narrow gap and then along the rubble face, closing in on them.
Lifting her shoulder in a vain attempt to shield her eyes, Iris could barely make out the dark shapes behind the overlapping glare of the searchlights. But she could see that they were moving, approaching as rapidly as possible, all stealth discarded.
She didn't bother saying anything to Vogel; he was already in motion as well, scrambling up onto the horizontal rebar section beside her, reaching at the same time as she did for the next piece that could be grabbed and used to pull themselves higher onto the tangled metal. Their parallel motion produced an ear-piercing, grinding shriek from the rebar as its rusted lengths scraped across each other, pulled taut by Iris's and Vogel's weight. The shriek went higher, a chorus bouncing and echoing off the ruins' angles as one of the pursuers grabbed hold of the bottom of the dangling metal and swung himself onto it.
Bad move
. That was all Iris had time to think, before the tangled mass of rebar pulled free from whatever partial anchor it'd had on the outcroppings of broken concrete and twisted steel girders above.
Real bad move
. The additional weight of the pursuer, along with the force of his jump onto the dangling rebar, produced a deafening roar of metal scraping across metal; dime-sized rust flakes swirled and sifted down upon Iris's and Vogel's faces. She found herself falling backward, while still holding on to the tangled rebar.
'Go!'
Vogel's shout cut through the ear-bruising clatter and shriek, snapping her back to full attention. She looked up and strained to focus her sight through the confusing shafts of darkness and crisscrossing searchlight beams, finally managing to discern Vogel above her and scrabbling even higher on the interlaced metal – or at least staying in the same place on top of the hollow mass, as though he were some small animal racing across the surface of a wire-form ball, tumbling down an even wider crevice in the earth.
As precarious as his position was, Vogel was still able, between grabbing and pulling himself onto the next sections of rebar, to look over his shoulder and yell down to Iris. 'Come on!' His sharp-angled face contorted with the effort to make himself heard over the metal's noise. 'Move it!'
Before Iris could react, the breath was knocked out of her by a vertical angle of concrete rubble slamming against her spine and shoulder blades. Pinned by the tangled mass of rebar against one side of the gap in which it had fallen, she managed to free herself part-way by desperately Jawing at the metal sections. She had gotten her upper torso free, but could go no further: the rebar, halted in toppling down the gap, had shifted with the force of her exertions, with a diagonal piece pressing hard against her abdomen. Grimacing with pain, Iris pushed against the metal, feeling its sharp edges slice the shirt beneath her jacket to tattered ribbons and drawing parallel stripes of blood across her flesh.
A hand grabbed her under one shoulder and pulled; she knew without looking that it was Vogel, having come back down a few meters on the tangled rebar, clinging with one hand while reaching for her with the other. Instead of pushing down on the metal section against her gut, she was now able to instinctively push against it without fear of falling; her breath rushed into her lungs as the metal bar retreated a precious inch. She let Vogel drag her upward, until the rebar section was against the front of her hips, too far down for her to push against it anymore. That no longer mattered, though; she could grab onto the sections near Vogel and help drag herself free.
Just as the binding press of the metal flexed and cleared her knees, Iris felt another hand on her body, a tight grasp seizing one ankle from below. She looked down, catching one of the searchlight beams straight into her dazzled eyes, then managing to make out the faceless silhouette of the pursuer who had leapt from the rubble face onto the rebar. The man had reached through the metal sections and caught her; the rough, hollow sphere vibrated dangerously, threatening to dislodge itself from where it had momentarily halted in the ruins' vertical gap, as he locked his fist tighter onto her boot and pulled her toward himself.
She knew she had one shot left. Already free of Vogel's grasp, Iris let her arms go straight, dropping herself back down the mass of rebar. That took the pursuer by surprise; he was even more surprised when she pulled her ankle loose from his grip and, instead of trying to scrabble away from him again, brought the heel of her boot down hard into his face. Even through the overlapping noises of metal scraping against metal and both Vogel's and the rest of the pursuers' shouts, Iris could hear a satisfying crunch of splintering bone; a wet red flower blossomed where the bridge of the man's nose had been, and his eyes defocused as his mouth opened wide in shock and pain. His clutching hands jerked apart, then grabbed onto empty air as he fell away from her.
Not bothering to watch what happened to him, Iris was already scrambling back up alongside Vogel. Even as she reached that point, the tangle of rebar lurched again, twisting and rolling in the dark gap, and bringing both of them around to what was now its uppermost surface. Iris looked down through the center of the hollow shape and saw that the bloodied pursuer had managed to break his fall at the last possible moment, with one hand having grabbed hold of the metal section at the very bottom of the mass.
'It's going.' Vogel, alongside Iris, had also caught sight of what had happened below, then had quickly glanced over to where the rebar's jagged circumference scraped at the vertical sides of the gap. The angle of concrete against which the mass had been jammed tight was beginning to splinter and crumble, a loop of rebar acting like a horizontal chisel-point, driven harder by the struggles of the figure underneath. 'Jump!'
Iris felt a moment of weightlessness, as though gravity itself had been switched off, as she saw the cement outcropping explode into powdery dust and shards, and the rebar fell away beneath her scuffed knees and hands. Her unthinking animal reactions took over; her bootsoles thrust against the last remaining rebar section even as her fingertips stretched toward the rubble face opposite. With nails clawing into the face's crevices, and the toes of her boots kicking to wedge themselves in as well, Iris clung to the unlit surface, teeth gritting as she pressed herself flat against it.
'You're okay,' said Vogel quietly, from some place close to her. The vertical gap in the ruins of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters had gone completely dark again, the searchlight beams lancing from below having been extinguished by the tumbling fall of the rebar mass. 'Get up here.'
Guided by his voice, Iris climbed onto a narrow ledge of broken concrete, relatively flat and level, and crouched there, letting her pulse and breath slow once more. Keeping back from the crumbling edge, she glanced down and saw nothing. The tangled rebar had fallen with enough velocity to knock the pursuers back down toward the Tyrell private quarters; if the rebar had wedged itself in good and tight in the rubble-lined shaft, it would take them a while to find a way around it.
She turned her face upward, and felt something cold and wet upon it. For a second, Iris wondered if she had at some point torn her skin, perhaps a sharp edge of one of the rebar sections across her brow, and hadn't felt it during the chaos and disorientation in the ill-lit ruins. Still kneeling on the ledge, she reached up with one hand and touched her forehead, then drew her fingertips away and rubbed them together. The wetness wasn't sticky enough for it to have been blood, and it didn't taste salty when she put one fingertip to her tongue.
But if it's just water
, thought Iris,
then maybe
. . . 'It's rain,' she said aloud. Now she recognized the taste, only slightly acrid and chemical from its descent through the city's constant atmospheric pollution. Another sensation of damp and cold, seeping in from both the ledge and the surrounding rubble, and the slight noise of drops falling onto the hard surfaces, indicated that the rainwater was trickling all around her and Vogel. 'Look—' Iris fumbled to where his voice had come from, found his arm and pulled him toward her. She stood up, dragging him along with her, and craned her neck to peer beyond the outcropping of jagged cement above them. Through a narrow triangular hole, she could make out a wedge of the flame-lit underbellies of the stormclouds moving across LA's night sky. 'We made it,' said Iris, letting go of Vogel and wiping the rain from her face. 'We're at the top.'