Terminus (16 page)

Rising panic. He thrashed and flailed. He lost a flipper. His helmet and gas pack slammed into the roof as he tried to wrench lose.

‘Keep still.’

Nariko pushed past him. She gripped the back of the driver’s seat for support. She pulled the Glock from her weight belt.

She clubbed the creature with the butt, hammered its forehead and temple until the driver’s teeth reflexively parted and released the fabric of Cloke’s suit.

Nariko deactivated the safety with a gloved thumb.

The skeletal driver strained against the seat belt, snapped and lunged.

Nariko jammed the gun between gaping jaws, twisted the barrel deep into the creature’s throat and pulled the trigger. Muffled thump. A slow-blossoming burst of brain tissue and skull fragments. The bullet streaked out the windshield into darkness, fast-decelerating trajectory delineated by a plume of gas bubbles shimmering like globules of mercury.

The dead thing slumped, head flung back, and was still.

‘Are you all right?’
asked Nariko.
‘Are you bitten? Did it puncture your suit?’

She turned Cloke’s helmet to face her. He was sweating, eyes wide with fear.

‘Get it together. Control your breathing.’

He nodded.

‘Focus. Be calm and focus.’

‘I’m okay,’
he said. Each panting exhalation roared over the open radio channel.

She checked the leg of his dive suit. Deep gouges in the trilaminate fabric, but no tears.

She gripped his arm and checked his wrist screen. An amber oxygen depletion warning.

‘Hey. Breathe slow. You’re burning too much air.’

‘How the hell was that thing still alive? How long had it been submerged?’

‘The virus never quits. Come on. Get it together. We have to get out of here.’

Cloke replaced his right flipper and tightened straps. He swam towards the back of the bus using seatbacks for guidance, gas tanks scraping the roof.

He helped Tombes lift the equipment bier and manoeuvre it towards the jagged burn hole in the rear bulkhead.

Lupe took a last look at the dead driver. She leaned close. Her helmet lamps lit his shattered face. His head was thrown back, mouth open in a grotesque yawn. Wisps of blood curled from between his teeth and out his nostrils like cigarette fumes. Eye sockets bristled with metallic splinters.

The roof began to collapse.

The rasp of shifting concrete, the grind of abrading cement. Roof panels creased and bulged. Torsion and metal shriek.

The cab began to crumple and cave. Pillars started to bend and fold. The remaining side windows frosted and shattered with a muffled crunch. Serpentine clouds of silt curled through the vacant frames and began to fill the passenger compartment. Visibility dropped like the bus was filling with smoke.

‘Fucking move,’
shouted Nariko, voice deafening loud inside her helmet.

She lunged for the guide line. Her gauntlets scrabbled at the fine, nylon rope. Too insubstantial. Too smooth. The cord danced between her fingers, like a wisp of gossamer.

She caught the line, twisted for grip, and began to haul herself hand-over-hand.

The three divers scrambled down the centre aisle, grabbed seatbacks, kicked up a silt-storm. The buckling hull closed around them like the piston-walls of a compactor. The roof kinked and crumpled, pressed lower as the steel frame of the bus folded in a series of sudden capitulations. They could hear the torque of stressed metal, deep howls and moans, like whale song.

Cloke and Tombes struggled to haul equipment from the rear of the bus. A narrow crevice. Their headlamps danced as they shifted and contorted, tried to wrestle equipment in the confined space.

Crack and grind. Titanic blocks of masonry shifted and settled. The water around them began to fill with a swirling blizzard of stone dust.

‘Go,’
yelled Cloke, shouting to be heard over the rubble-roar that filled their helmets. Tombes continued to tug at the stretcher.
‘Forget the gear. Just go.’

‘We need this shit.’

Cloke seized the grab-handle on the back of his tank frame and pulled.

‘Move. Just fucking move.’

They abandoned the equipment and struggled to kick clear of cascading debris.

Cloke alone, disoriented, spinning in sub-aquatic darkness.

He tumbled through space, no sense of up or down. His wrist screen flashed an amber warning: elevated oxygen consumption.

Stop struggling, he told himself. Be still. Be calm.

He slowly spun to a halt. He sank and gently hit bottom, kicking up a silt-plume.

Occluded vision. He reached up and tried to clear his visor. A jagged crack running the width of the Lexan. A blot of blood on the glass. Ear-whine concussion.

His helmet lights lit a tennis shoe lying on the tunnel floor. Grey with dirt, been there years. He stared at the shoe, tried to regain his balance, willed his head to stop spinning.

He fumbled the radio clipped to his weight belt. He checked the jack was still plugged to his helmet.

‘Nariko. Captain. Come in, over.’

No reply.

‘Captain. Captain, can you hear me? Sound off, if you can hear my voice.’

Nothing.

‘Tombes. What is your status, over?’

No response.

‘Tombes. Captain. Guys. Speak to me. Sound off.’

Something tendrillar coiling round his feet. He grabbed it. A loose length of safety line. He pulled hand over hand. The end was frayed and torn.

He peered into a fog of swirling rock dust. He slowly turned around, tried to figure north from south, tried to locate the rockfall.

‘Captain. Tombes. Come on, guys. Where are you? Talk to me. Tell me you’re alive.’

Cloke surfaced. He broke through a crust of floating garbage. He gripped a ledge in the tunnel wall for support.

He wiped water droplets from his visor with a gloved hand. He studied the cracked Lexan, anxious to see if irradiated flood water were leaking into his helmet.

Twin lamps lit the tunnel walls. He looked around. Crumbling brickwork arched overhead. Old gang graffiti. DEF CON MUTHAFUKAS. A flaking portrait of Malcolm X.

Tombes surfaced beside him.

‘Where the hell is the Captain? Did she get out?’

‘She was right behind us,’
said Cloke.
‘Right at my back.’

They looked around at the bobbing scrim of garbage, expecting Nariko to break surface any moment.

Tombes:

‘Captain, do you copy, over?’

No reply.

‘Captain, can you hear me?’

No response.

‘Shit.’

Tombes resubmerged.

Cloke checked his wrist gauge. They had been in the water twenty-nine minutes.

He ducked beneath the surface and followed Tombes as he kicked for the rockfall.

Sediment broiled like smoke. Their headlamps lit curling vortices of stone dust.

They floated side by side. Particulates settled. The water around them slowly cleared.

The bus had been buried by an avalanche of rubble.

‘Captain?’
called Cloke.
‘Cap? Can you hear me?’

Tombes settled flippered feet on the tunnel floor and began to dig. He clawed at the rubble, grabbed fist-sized lumps of cement and hurled them aside. Cloke joined him. Grind of stone on stone.

‘Did her suit have some kind of locator? Some kind of beacon?’

‘Look for bubbles,’
said Tombes.
‘She may have a ruptured tank.’

Cloke lifted a paving slab aside and exposed a coil of rope.

‘I’ve found the gear.’

They excavated their equipment. Trauma packs. Clothes and boots sealed in polythene. The plasma arc. They dragged the stretcher clear.

They kept digging.

‘Nariko? Captain? Are you alive? Can you hear my voice?’

‘Sound off, Cap,’
called Tombes.
‘Where the hell are you?’

Nariko lay in darkness. A minute of slow-spinning who-am- I/where-am-I. Then she remembered Fenwick Street, the dive, the bus.

She lazily raised a hand. She touched stone. A wall of concrete close on every side.

No sound but her own irregular breath, and the click of the oxygen solenoid injecting fresh gas into the micro-environment of her suit.

She coughed. She shook her head, tried to clear her thoughts. One of her dead helmet lights blinked to life and glowed weak orange. The beam lit concrete inches from her face.

She tried to move. She was pinned tight. She lay on her back, entombed in rubble, trapped in a pocket little bigger than a coffin.

She was numb below the waist.

For a brief moment she succumbed to claustrophobia. She clawed at her helmet. Head encased in a steel bubble, held rigid by foam pads, vision restricted by the hex-bolt porthole inches from her face.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .’

She thrashed. She punched ferro-concrete boulders hemming her on all sides. She struggled to lift her head. The helmet butted cement. Harsh abrasion; metal on stone.

‘Hey.’
Deafened by her own cry for help. Hot, stale breath filled the helmet.
‘Hey, I’m here. I’m right here.’
A tone of shrill hysteria creeping into her voice.
‘Someone. Hey. Help.’

Feedback from her earpiece. Cloke’s voice:

‘. . . ome on . . . me . . . your head . . . alive . . . hear my voi . . .’

She reached down to the Motorola clipped to her weight belt. She checked the jack and upped volume.

‘Hey. I’m here. I’m right here.’

Nariko fumbled the shoulder harness of her back-tanks and flipped the release latches. She struggled to lift her head and look down at her feet.

The bus had been crushed by subsiding rubble. Nariko was halfway out of the rear door when the vehicle compacted flat. She was pinned in an envelope of yellow metal. Her lower body, her groin and legs, compressed into a space eight inches high. Wisps of blood in the water.

‘Tombes? You out there? Cloke? Can you hear me?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, we hear you. Are you all right?’

‘I’m stuck. I’m trapped.’

‘Have you got any room for manoeuvre? Any room to crawl?’

‘No.’

‘Are you injured?’

‘Think I broke my back.’

‘Lie still, all right?’

‘I hurt my head. I don’t feel so good.’

‘Keep talking. Recite a poem or something.’

‘I can’t think. My head is fuzzy.’

‘Do the alphabet. Count backwards from a hundred. Just stay awake, okay? Stay with me. Don’t close your eyes. We’re coming for you.’

Cloke and Tombes hauled rubble aside. They hefted chunks of cement. They levered a NO THRU TRAFFIC sign loose and threw it clear. They rolled a Con Edison manhole lid. They extracted a baby stroller, did it quick, did it with the periphery of their vision so they wouldn’t have to see if it were occupied.

They burrowed beneath a massive slab bristling with rebar.

A cacophony of cracks and grinds as debris shifted around them. A steady cascade of stone dust and trickling grit.

Cloke held back. Tombes kept digging.

‘Jesus,’
said Cloke, surveying the mountainous rubble pile.
‘We need major lifting gear. Some kind of Hurst tool. A bunch of them. We’ll never shift this stuff.’

Tombes pointed to the radio clipped to his belt and made a zip-mouth gesture. Open channel. Nariko listening to every word.

Tombes dug towards Nariko’s helmet lights. He wormed between slabs. His helmet and air tank scraped rock.

‘Don’t rip your suit,’
said Cloke.

Tombes ignored him.

‘How you doing, Boss?’

‘Not so great,’
said Nariko.

‘You need an air line?’

‘I can’t feel my legs. I think they might be gone.’

‘They’re probably broken. You’ll feel them big time once the shock wears off.’

‘I honestly think they’re gone.’

‘We’re almost there, all right? I’m a couple of feet away. So just relax. I’m going to unfuck this, okay? The torch will rip that bus apart like paper. You’ll be out of there in a couple of minutes.’

A thick girder blocked his path.

‘I can see you, Captain. I can almost reach you. But there’s a bar, some kind of steel beam. Got to cut the damned thing. This could take a few minutes. Can you hold on?’

‘There’s blood in the water.’

‘How much?’

‘I don’t know. Some. Don’t think it’s arterial.’

‘Are you in pain? Do you need a shot? If we passed you a hypodermic, taped it to a pole or something, could you use it? Self-administer?’

She didn’t reply.

He squirmed deeper into the narrow space. He turned to Cloke.

‘Give me the plasma gear.’

Cloke passed the webbed cylinder.

Tombes struggled to manoeuvre in the confined space.

Stone-crack. Grinding concrete. Tumbling debris. Swirling rock dust fogged the water.

Tombes froze, waited for the tremor to pass.

‘Work fast,’
said Cloke.

‘I am.’

‘Work faster.’

Boulders shifted and settled. The hull of the bus groaned and compressed an inch further. White pain shot through Nariko’s spine. She screamed. She gripped the slab above her head and strained to lift the impossible tonnage from her body.

‘Hold on, Boss. Just rest easy. Almost there.’

Nariko lay still. She tried to breathe steady. Muffled roar of the cutting flame. The water around her began to cook. The tight sarcophagus space was lit fluttering white.

‘I think I’m pretty messed up.’

‘Just chill, boss. Cutting through this thing like butter.’

‘Whole lower body seems pretty trashed. I think this bus is the only thing holding my guts together. I’ll bleed out the moment you lift me.’