Return to Eden (18 page)

Which meant she might
never have completely achieved her goal of restful sleep, not even
for a matter of minutes, but she
was
aware of a rapid rise from the
depths toward the light of awareness.

She
did
know that she emerged with a
jerk from unconsciousness to consciousness, even though she wasn’t
certain what had made her awaken, and it was the ominous, distinct
sound of breaking glass just as she reached the horizon that made
her bolt upright.

Her feet hit the floor beside her bed
before she had even fully assimilated the sound, but her mind was
working furiously with it. Was it close? In her apartment? What had
broken? Who broke it? Was it an intruder? Or did something just
fall? How could anything just fall over, though?

The first ripple of motion that went
through the floor beneath her feet and made her stagger was hardly
discernible. She thought, in fact, that she was still so drunk with
sleep that she’d simply lost her equilibrium
momentarily.

The second vibration left no room for
interpretation. It was so violent it seemed to roll the floor
beneath her feet like the waves of the ocean rolling toward
shore.

She thought she screamed, but she was
never afterwards certain.

The only thing she was completely
certain of was that she’d woken to a life or death situation and
she had to react—quickly—if she wanted to live.

She was surrounded by profound
darkness, however. Not even the glow of her clock illuminated her
surroundings.

The power was out.

And she was unfamiliar with the new
apartment.

She staggered across the room to the
wall where a door to the hallway should have been—would have been
in the old apartment—and ran into solid—shaking—wall instead. She
was too disoriented to think where the damn door was!

And she was terrified.

Florida didn’t have
earthquakes.

They
did
have twenty thousand sinkholes,
however … and counting.

She was going to die if she didn’t find
her way out of the apartment!

That was the last thought that she
recalled when she was able to recall anything at all.

A portion of the outer wall of her
apartment collapsed outward, allowing enough light into the
cave-like room that she was able to see the door and she staggered
toward it, her primitive mind pounding out a litany—out! Out!
Out!

She never reached it. Debris was
raining down around her, something hit her that felt like a car,
and then darkness swallowed her whole and she felt a horrific sense
of falling that never stopped but followed her into
darkness.

She was choking before she reached true
awareness again. It felt as if every orifice was plugged with dirt.
Before full blown panic could set in, though, she went into a
coughing fit that cleared enough of the dust/dirt to allow her to
drag in a little air. Grit filled her eyes when she tried to open
them. Instinctively, she tried to lift her arms to wipe her face
and discovered she couldn’t reach her face.

She was pinned. That was why she felt
like an elephant was sitting on her chest.

She had the apartment building sitting
on top of her—one floor, anyway. If it shifted ….

Terror clawed its way up her throat.
She managed to turn her head and blink until she’d cleared her
vision a little.

She wasn’t sure she’d opened her eyes
at first. It was so dark the darkness almost felt … thick, as if it
had substance, but then the blackness lifted a little after a few
moments and she thought she could see shadowy shapes around
her.

Shock had muffled her brain functions
in much the same way the darkness had limited her vision. Random
thoughts erupted, sputtered, and disappeared, like a television or
radio that was getting a weak signal and only picked up brief
flashes of sounds and images.

Sinkhole
finally formulated in her mind.

She was in one, maybe at the bottom.
Maybe just far enough down to be a smear if the building finished
collapsing on top of her.

The irony of it didn’t escape
her.

She’d been hired as part of the
geological team the state had put together to assess the sinkhole
threat so that they could determine what to do about it … and she
was supposed to report for her first day on the job first thing in
the morning.

She didn’t think she was going to make
it for roll call.

* * * *

Dante’s mind awoke before his body was
released and for many moments he was so focused on struggling with
the panic of being paralyzed, of feeling his mind separate from his
body as if the body didn’t exist, that he was barely aware of the
voice of his overlord in his mind calling him to service. He’d long
since ceased to believe there was anything ‘accidental’ in this
particular form of torture, however, and because he knew they
delighted in tormenting him, he worked hard to deprive them of
their enjoyment, taming his fear before it could reach a detectable
level.

Why have you awakened
me?

To do your job! To serve
the gods and prevent the hum ….

I know the prime
directive,
Dante interrupted!
There is a new threat?

You’re standing in
it,
the overlord responded dryly,
abandoning him as precipitously as he had contacted him in the
first place.

Since he fully released Dante from his
prison at the same moment, however, it was some time before Dante
was aware that he was alone in his mind. The pain was excruciating.
He was so stiff, in fact, that he didn’t think he would have known
he had been released if not for the pain.

How long had he been in stasis, he
wondered, focusing his mind on each part of his body in order to
flex muscle, tendon, and joint as blood began to circulate through
his tissues and veins again?

How long had the bastards punished him
this time?

He pushed that from his mind as he
lowered his arms at last and released his eons old grip on his
sword. It clanged dully as it hit the stone beneath his
feet.

Not that he gave a fuck who might be
alerted to his presence!

In any case he was almost instantly
distracted by the discovery that he seemed to be completely alone.
Where the fuck was he? Where were the humans the gods had so
graciously released him from his prison to watch?

Memories began to flood
his mind even as he stepped off of the
vita
pedestal, stretched his wings
several times, flapped them to fluff the feathers and then finally
folded them against his back.

Water. He remembered abruptly that that
was the last thing he’d been aware of before he was frozen in
stasis because of …. He thrust that thought away before it could
fully form. She was lost to him. He could not bear to think on that
at the moment.

The city had sunk!

The gods had sunk it … as punishment.
They had …. But there were survivors of the cataclysm or he
wouldn’t have been awakened.

He heard it then … a sound so faint in
his mind that he had completely submerged it beneath his own
thoughts.

Where are you?

It was then that he realized it wasn’t
merely that the voice was faint—a clear indication that the owner
was in pain and distress—he didn’t recognize the
language.

And the woman calling out to him didn’t
understand him.

He accessed his
communicator.
Language,
he growled impatiently?

No one acknowledged the request but the
information was streamed to his chip almost
instantaneously.

Where are you?

“
I’m here! Help me! I’m
under the wall … I think the wall fell on me.”

Even as Dante moved toward the sound of
her voice, he discovered he wasn’t the only one that had heard it.
Light from above abruptly illuminated the entire area and Dante
stepped back instinctively, tipping his head to look up.

“
Search and rescue! Hold
on! We’re coming! We’ll get you out!” The direction of the voice
shifted. “There’s somebody alive down there! Give me some
slack!”

Dante moved back into the
shadows to assess the situation. There’d been a cave-in. That much
seemed obvious. There was a hole above and a mountain of debris
from the floor of the cave where they stood to higher ground above
them. His mind grappled with the fact that he was in a cave at all
when his last memory was of being in a city on the
surface
of the Earth! It
had been washed away—or the inhabitants had—by a great ocean wave
hundreds of feet high, but he’d had no notion that it had literally
sunk.

So, had it? Or had enough time passed
that the lost city had become a cave below ground?

He was so infuriated for many moments
by the possibility that the latter was the case that it wasn’t
until his anger began to dissipate that the implications became
clear to him.

The humans were about to
discover something the gods didn’t want them to know.
That
was why he had been
awakened.

Otherwise this would have been his tomb
for eternity!

And just what the fuck do
you think I can do about this
, he roared
into his communicator?
It’s too late to
stop it! You should have thought about it
before
you decided to punish
….

This is
not
our doing! The
humans ….

Contempt flooded Dante’s
mind. He made no attempt to hide it.
You
always blame them. If they’d meant to do this the surface wouldn’t
be crawling with rescue people! And I can’t destroy the evidence,
without creating more of a disaster, which will only bring others!
I repeat, how the hell do you expect me to fix this?

You figure it out. That’s
part of your job, Watcher! And, know this, if you fail again,
they’ll suffer along with you. There will be another cleansing
….

* * * *

Claire had been wavering between fear
and despair, consciousness and unconsciousness for what seemed like
ages but she thought was probably considerably less than an hour
when she heard something that produced a rush of fear/hope driven
adrenaline through her system that made her feel faint and
dizzy—the rustle of what sounded like wings.

She didn’t, in fact, identify the
sound, at first, as the rustle of wings and when she did, she did
her best to dismiss it.

She was in a cave but
surely to god it was too far underground—and cut off—for there to
be anything
living
in it!

Bats came to mind.

And she was trapped and couldn’t fend
the damned things off if they flew at her!

As the panic eased off, though, she
realized that the rustle might have been something else, a shift in
the debris—holy terror!—or someone—alive—who was down in the hole
with her. She struggled to call out, but it took a great effort.
Dirt had scoured her throat and lungs and whatever was pressing
down on her made it impossible to expand her lungs to shout. “I’m
here! Help me! I’m here.”

She twisted her head to search for the
source of the sound.

Which was when she saw … something her
mind simply refused to process.

* * * *

By the time Dominic’s SEAL team
arrived, it was already shaping up to be one of the worst disasters
in the history of Florida if not the U.S. Dominic felt such a rush
of adrenaline when he first caught sight of the hole that he was
dizzy with it for a handful of seconds.

The ground had opened up and swallowed
at least one four story apartment unit, although from what was left
it looked like it might have been three or four. The sun hadn’t
quite broke over the horizon, but, with the aid of the baleful
glare of dozens of emergency floodlights and the churning red and
blue lights of emergency vehicles, he could see what was left of a
roof about fifteen to twenty feet below the surface.

God only knew how far down the damn
hole went!

“
Eighty five footer, I’d
bet money,” one of the other team members, Jones,
commented.

“
I’ll take it. No water.
Can’t be that deep.”

“
Can it,” Dominic growled.
“I don’t want to hear that shit when we hit the ground. It’ll make
the papers and we’ll all be neck deep in shit!”

It wasn’t a lack of empathy that had
inspired the comments. Dominic knew that. They were just trying to
brace themselves for the job ahead of them, but he could see the
news people were all over it already and the one thing they really
excelled at was getting people stirred up.

Him and his team bailed out as soon as
the chopper touched down.

Instantly, chaos surrounded him, seemed
to roll over them like a tsunami. There were people shouting and
screaming and running in every direction despite the efforts of
emergency personnel to evacuate the buildings surrounding the
disaster area in an orderly manner. There were around a dozen
police units and an equal number of fire units plus civilian rescue
personnel.