Mercy (The Last Army Book 1) (3 page)

Many of the students and faculty gathered at the school’s parking lot fell to their knees and prayed. Clusters of survivors from the nearby buildings joined them, while others rushed to unearth those still trapped under the wreckage. Karla crossed herself before mumbling a prayer. I just stared up at the extraordinary solar eclipse with a mix of terror and wonder.

“Who… who’s done what? What’re you talking about?” I asked the janitor, my gaze still fixed on the sky. I couldn’t believe that the Chinese or terrorists could’ve been responsible for the unexplainable tragedy unfolding before us.

“I’m talking about the LHC! You know, the Large Hadron Collider?” The janitor stared at me. “Those European bastards trying to play God, they must’ve… they must’ve… fired up their trillion-dollar toy, and now everything’s gone to hell!”

I chuckled nervously for a second, finding his musings hilarious even in the face of our harrowing circumstances. The impotent tears on his eyes stifled my chuckle pretty quickly, though. He was probably just trying to make sense of things. I couldn’t blame him for that. Looking at the solar eclipse, all I could think of was the Book of Revelation, which I’d read out of curiosity when I was little. I remembered those strange passages of the sun turning to darkness and the moon turning to blood.

It wasn’t until Tom’s head sagged forward as he struggled to maintain consciousness that I remembered there was no time for staring slack jawed at the sky.

“Come on—let’s get him some help,” I said, steadying Tom’s arm across my shoulders.

Karla helped me carry him down the school’s front steps, leaving the janitor cursing the Europeans under his breath.

We walked to the parking lot, where everyone was gathering. The nurse and some teachers treated the injured as best they could with the few medical supplies available. We laid Tom down next to Mr. Robertson, our science teacher, who was helping a girl whose fingers on her left hand had been crushed. The fingers were covered in blood, bits of broken bone poking through ripped skin. Her hand shook, and she looked away from it, weeping. Mr. Robertson obviously had his plate full, but he was one of the few teachers who didn’t have a circle of injured students surrounding him.

Karla, who had some knowledge of first aid, offered to assist in treating Tom and the rest of our wounded classmates. She had wanted to follow in her dad’s footsteps since before I’d known her, going as far as reading Dr. Lagos's impenetrable medical textbooks in her spare time. She even went to specialized summer camps and courses where she learned about first aid and other medical stuff. Given the enthusiasm with which she dissected those innocent little critters in biology, she could become either a surgeon or a serial killer.

I probably would’ve ended up killing someone rather than helping out, so I ran back to the school building, figuring I could help with the evacuation. But any ideas of rushing back inside the crumbling building vanished right away when I looked at the remains of our school.

The third floor had practically caved in, with only a few pillars sticking out from the piles of building refuse and shattered furniture. The building slanted to the right around the second floor, where many of the walls had been knocked down, giving it the appearance of a card castle on the verge of toppling over. A cold shiver ran down my spine when I noticed students still spilling out of the frail school building. They'd been on the third floor, judging by their battered appearance.

I rushed to help them get to safety, unable to take my eyes off the looming structure as I drew closer. My dash didn’t last long. The menacing rumble made by the school gradually turned into a metallic wail, stopping me dead in my tracks. As if in slow motion, the building tipped over little by little, speeding up as the angle at which it slanted increased. By the time the survivors making their way out of there realized what was happening, they could only shriek in terror. The building collapsed around them, burying them under an avalanche of rubble and dust. My ears rang from the thundering crash. I barely had time to shut my eyes before a dense cloud of pulverized concrete swallowed the entire block. Bits of it showered upon me, scraping my skin.

It took a few minutes for the ringing in my ears to finally trail off, replaced by a faint rustling. I ventured to open my eyes.

All that was left of my school, the place I'd gone to week after week for the last few years of my life, was a mound of rubble. Of my schoolmates who hadn't made it out of the building, there was nothing left. At least nothing that wasn’t buried under tons of broken concrete slabs and twisted rebar.

I brushed away the rough coat of concrete clinging to my face and coughed out the mouthful of dust that had made its way into my throat as I took a few timid steps forward, unable to tear my gaze away from the wreckage.

This… this isn’t… oh God… no…

“Becca! Where are you? Becca!”

I barely noticed Karla’s screams as I staggered toward the ruins, vainly expecting my classmates to materialize out of the lingering grey mist. I couldn’t have been more than fifty feet away from the entrance when Karla wrapped her arms around me, holding me in place. She pressed her face against my back and wept.

“We should… we should wait for help to arrive. I’m sure they’ll be here soon,” she said between sobs. A few pillars and wall sections still stuck out menacingly from the mountain of rubble before me, as if the devastated school hadn’t had its fill of its former students.

Karla didn’t let go of me until one of the teachers howled and dropped to her knees. The woman’s long greying curls bounced as she cried into her hands, the layers of fat under her tight blouse shaking as she took frantic gasps for air in between each crying spell. It wasn’t long before her anguish spread across the rest of the teachers and students staring in disbelief at the wreckage that used to be our school. They soon gave voice to their grief, as well.

As we returned to the parking lot, the heart-breaking cries made me feel lightheaded. I didn’t know whether I’d join them or be sick from the despair and anxiety stirring inside me. I kept looking over my shoulder at the ruins of our school, hoping to see any signs of survivors. The sight of the devastated school building made me think not only of my teachers and schoolmates who’d been crushed before my eyes but also of my parents. The modern office building in which they worked should’ve withstood the earthquake, but the smoke pillars rising all over the city were hardly reassuring.

I pulled my phone out of my jeans and cursed silently at it when it refused to flicker to life after I pressed the Unlock button. The useless plastic brick shook in my hand as I stared at my reflection on the touchscreen. I looked like a ghost under the fine dust still plastered on my face, but apart from some small scratches, I was fine.

“Is your phone working?” I asked Karla, turning toward her, my voice dry and weak.

She fished her phone out and cradled it in her hands. Her finger hovered over the Unlock button for a few seconds, and she stared at the device, on the verge of a fresh wave of tears. Those tears spilled out once she finally pressed it.

“Oh God, what’s going on?” She desperately tapped the button a dozen times more. I took her phone and hugged her. Karla’s tears soaked through my shirt.

The crimson solar eclipse hung menacingly above us.

Two hours later, no aid had reached us yet. No firefighters, no police, no ambulances, no one. Not even their sirens could be heard. The school nurse and teachers had assisted the injured students in the parking lot—at least fifty of them—as well as they could, but it was clear that they needed to get to a hospital, and soon.

The girl with the mangled fingers moaned for something for the pain as she hugged her hand against her chest. Tom passed out sometime after the school collapsed. His head, all wrapped up in bloodied bandages, rested on our history teacher’s lap. She stroked his blood-matted hair as she stared into the distance with passive, reddened eyes. Her trembling lower lip betrayed her anxiety.

The students' anguish soon turned to anger. They demanded answers from their distraught teachers, waving their bricked phones and swearing loudly, unable to keep their emotions in check. Along the street, groups of people shambled toward the nearby hospital. A small group of men wearing ties carried a young woman, her arms flopping at her sides with every step they took. The crackling of nearby fires and the rumbling of weakened buildings reached us from all sides, as well as the screams and cries of survivors. An acrid smell of smoke made my nose itch. The wailing sirens of ambulances and fire trucks remained conspicuously absent.

A handful of parents—those who worked within walking distance of the school— showed up and took their children with them. Karla and I weren’t so lucky. Her dad, who worked at the hospital just a few blocks away, must’ve been swamped with injured survivors. Her mom had left a few years ago, and it was anyone’s guess whether she was even in the country when the disaster struck.

I caressed the silver cross hanging around my neck every time someone ran down the street screaming his or her child’s name. I clung to the slim chance that the next parents to show up would be mine, even though I knew I’d be disappointed. Whatever had disabled the phones had also taken out the cars, which were now abandoned by their owners along the road, and the trains probably couldn’t run after the earthquake even if they hadn’t been affected by the blackout. Trekking from the office to my school through the city’s devastated streets would take my parents hours.

If they’re still alive…

I tried to push away the grim thoughts that popped into my head as the minutes kept slipping by. The couple of hundred surviving students sat in their classes on the parking lot’s busted concrete while their teachers carried out a head count. Mr. Jenkins—a short, lean man with thinning black hair—wrote down our names. Ms. Greenlee was still missing—still buried under the pile of rubble that had been our school.

“Are we staying here much longer, Mr. Jenkins?” I asked as he wrote down my name.

“You can only leave with your parents or legal guardian,” he answered, without looking up from his notepad, in a way that made me think I wasn’t the first one to raise the question.

“One of our classmates is hurt really badly. I think he’s gonna need more than a bit of gauze.” I looked back at Tom.

Mr. Jenkins choked up a little and finally looked up from his scribbling. His dark-blue eyes showed no anger at my little outburst.

“I know, but you’re going to have to be patient just a little longer. Everything’s going to be fine.” He smiled without enthusiasm before resuming his name taking.

“Do you know what’s wrong with the phones? I really have to call my parents,” Amy said when Mr. Jenkins approached her clique. She gripped her cellphone like it was the soap at a prison shower.

“Well, I’m not a science teacher, but I guess it must be some sort of solar EMP.” Mr. Jenkins gazed at the solar eclipse.

I nodded in silent agreement. If a nuclear bomb could trigger an EMP, then the sun—basically an enormous nuclear reactor—could trigger one as well, only on a much larger scale.

Principal Wong had organized some of the staff into a search team, but they returned to the parking lot with nothing but scrapes on their hands from stirring the unyielding wreckage. A ring of students formed around them asking for their missing friends. The improvised rescuers shook their heads and sent them away with nothing but empty promises before gathering with the rest of the staff to decide on their next step.

Amy and her friends swapped the batteries on their brand-new iPhones with each other in a futile attempt to make one of them work again. Only the girl I’d rescued from under the bookshelf didn’t participate in the experiment but instead hugged herself and whimpered. Occasionally she’d gaze at Amy—her savior—and thank her once more for saving her life.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m just glad you’re okay.” Amy patted her friend’s hand like a queen showing favor upon one of her subjects. Her gesture brought a wide smile on her friend’s face, reflecting a devotion bordering on religious.

Amy noticed me staring at their little scene and frowned ever so slightly before looking away.

Bitch.

The school staff finally ended their meeting, and the principal climbed on top of a white delivery van parked near the center of the lot to address the few hundred students assembled there. He struggled a little during the climb, but his height and relative youth allowed him to pull the stunt without losing too much face. After straightening his striped blue tie and brushing off his white shirt, Mr. Wong waved his hands to get everyone’s attention.

I turned toward Karla, who was hugging her legs with her face buried between her knees. Looking around, I found most of the students in a similar state of despair, completely oblivious to the world. Only a handful of them caught sight of Mr. Wong and slowly made their way to the white van without bothering to alert their distraught classmates.

“I have an announcement to make, so I’ll need you to gather round!” the principal yelled, but most of the students were too immersed in praying and anxious chatter to notice. Our teachers had to go to each cluster of distressed high schoolers and shepherd them toward the principal’s improvised stage.

“Hey, snap out of it, Lala. I think we’re finally getting out of here,” I said as I shook Karla’s shoulders.

She lifted her face. When I caught sight of her puffy, bloodshot eyes, I felt a slight sting of guilt for being so rough with her. Still, she wiped her face with steady hands and managed to get up from the floor by herself. Her hand felt cold as I pulled her through the crowd gathered by the principal, though.

“I need you to be silent for just a moment and listen. Please,” Mr. Wong said. “I know you’re all scared, but we’ve got to do our best to stay calm. Many of you have voiced your desire to leave, but it’s just not safe for all us to move from here yet. The emergency services are having trouble reaching us, but I assure you that help is on the way.”

I squeezed my fists as he climbed down from the van. I realized proper emergency procedure in case of apocalypse probably wasn’t part of the teacher’s manual, but their shoulder shrug of a plan seemed like having us bury our heads in the sand. The principal must’ve been more afraid of potential lawsuits than of his students bleeding to death in the parking lot, or even of the orange glow of the not-so-distant fires crawling toward us. Evidently, I wasn’t alone in my thinking—the tone of the agitated discussions that followed his announcement wasn’t one of relief.

“What the hell do you mean by, 'Wait for evacuation'?” a stocky boy yelled and pointed at the blood-red solar eclipse above us. “Can’t you see the world’s ending? The city’s burning down; we have to get out of here!”

Mr. Wong raised his hands to quiet the students down. “All of us have to stay at the rally point, so that when the authorities—”

“No one’s coming!” a short-haired girl screamed from the edge of the crowd, squeezing the useless phone in her hands like a magic charm.

“You don’t know that, okay, so shut up, you…” The girl who snapped at her short-haired classmate couldn’t finish her sentence and broke down in hysterical sobs.

A shouting match erupted between those who agreed to wait for help and those who wanted to leave. Although the teachers tried to defuse the situation, sensible arguments soon gave way to streams of insults from both sides. Karla winced as her schoolmates cursed openly in front of the staff, showering each other with four-letter words and questioning each other’s bravery.

“Don’t you care if your friends die? These people need to get to a hospital!” I yelled in the general direction of those too scared to leave the parking lot.

Whatever reply they gave me was drowned out by at least three times as many voices in agreement. Obviously, the vast majority of us wanted to get out of there. Emboldened by the outcome of the shouting match, large groups of students even threatened to walk away without their teachers' consent, although none of them elaborated on where they would actually be walking away
to.

“Everyone shut up!” Principal Wong was back on top of the white van. A tense silence descended upon the startled students. He took several gasps as he straightened his tie and wiped the sweat that drenched his furrowed brow.

“I apologize for that, but we can’t allow ourselves to descend into chaos. Now, it’s true that the fires that have broken out make this place risky. I’ve also spoken to Mrs. Simpson, our school nurse, and she agrees that several members of the student body require urgent medical attention. As such, we have decided to transport them ourselves to our alternate assembly point, St. Anne’s Hospital, just a few blocks east of here.” The crowd threatened to start screaming at each other again after the principal’s speech. Mr. Wong gestured for them to calm down. “No more shouting, please. Remain in your groups while we map out the safest route there.” He climbed off the van.

After a few seconds of murmuring, even those who’d been against the plan quieted down and embraced it, giving in to the wishes of the majority. I was afraid I’d have to pump up Karla's spirits for the coming ordeal, but that was not the case. She had a beaming smile on her face and nodded as she wiped away her tears. I copied her smile, understanding the motive behind her enthusiasm. Her dad was a surgeon at St. Anne’s.

Lucky girl.

Father and daughter would soon be reunited.