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- Author: Miles A. Maxwell
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Book online «Loss Of Reason by Miles A. Maxwell (reading list TXT) 📖». Author Miles A. Maxwell
Franklin turned to the ditch and pulled a large coil of blue and red climber’s rope from one of his two blue canvas bags.
Chuck watched Franklin walk quickly along, carefully examining the ditch’s edge. “What are you looking for?”
“An entry point.”
Everon pointed out a small intersecting collapse in the roadway. “What about that?”
“It’s got potential,” Franklin agreed.
“How deep would you guess?” Everon asked.
“Fifty-five, sixty feet. Looks pretty unstable.”
Everon picked up a dusty yellow brick, hauled back and flung it into the unbroken plate glass in one of Bloomingdale’s four brass-framed doors behind them. The window exploded. The door glass to its right was already missing. Now the center bands of polished brass between were clear. “First guy to ever smash a department store window without stealing anything. Can you tie off to that?”
Franklin ran a loop around the door frames, tossing the other end into the pit. The rope uncoiled smoothly, its bulk slamming onto the partially exposed corner of the subway car.
The muffled voices grew louder.
Franklin unzipped one of the duffels. It contained another climbing rope. He uncoiled it too, dropping it into the pit. Then pulled out a shorter ten-foot length. “To tie off the hoist, if say, you were to run back and pull it off the helicopter.”
“I guess I can do that,” Everon answered reluctantly. He ran for the helicopter.
The pavement’s broken edge was jagged. Bloomingdale’s was running a sale on bedding. Franklin grabbed a bunch of lime-green dust-covered pillows from the broken display window next to the doors and made a pile of all but one on the subway’s edge.
“That should keep it from cutting your rope,” Chuck said. “What’s that one for?” he asked as Franklin stuffed the last pillow into his jacket.
“You never know — can you keep these here for me ’til the rope’s set?”
“Sure.” Chuck knelt down and held the pile in place.
From the other canvas bag, Franklin pulled a lightweight rappelling harness sewn together out of three-inch strips of black webbing. He pulled a second harness from his bag and set it aside for Everon. He pulled on a pair of thin, tan leather gloves.
“You always wear gloves when you climb?”
“Rappelling only.”
Franklin clipped in, feeding rope through the brake — a big lever attached to his harness. He leaned back and walked over the edge. The rope paid out and dug into the stack of pillows.
For the first twenty feet, he was able to simply walk backward down the crevasse wall, paying out rope as he went, purposely kicking away chunks of loose debris so they wouldn’t fall on him. The street was made of layers built up over many years — slabs of asphalt on top — beneath that, concrete and rebar.
Farther down were chunks of ancient mortared stone and brick. Pieces of one type of stone or another tumbled away with every step . . .
Back at the helicopter, Everon brought out the portable drill. With an attached socket, he began zipping off the bolts that held the hoist to its supports over the helicopter’s side door . . .
At the cliff’s twenty-five-foot point, Franklin’s feet landed on a wide iron grate — part of the drainage system that protruded from a large block of concrete. He kneeled on the grate’s rusty brown edge, pulled out the last pillow and balled it underneath his rope at the point where it contacted the grate. He swung his chest over, then hung by one arm.
The remaining thirty feet went easily, a smooth vertical rappel, past dark-brown soil mixed with random-colored tile. His feet made a scraping noise as he touched down.
The dull voices echoed up louder now. The banging vibrated into his feet. He couldn’t see but the one shiny metal corner. The train must be at an angle. Its east end buried in dirt and asphalt, probably sloping downward toward Roosevelt Island and the East River.
He unhooked and walked across the exposed silver corner, its ridged metal top — away from his landing point in case any loose rock decided to follow him down.
Up above, Everon returned to the ditch lugging the hoist under his left arm, its wires thrown over his right shoulder. He ran over to an abandoned cab, popped the dented hood and used the portable drill to loosen its battery clamps.
As soon as Everon had the hoist tied off, he explained to Chuck how to operate it.
“Okay?” he asked.
Chuck examined the controls. “Pretty simple. Forward. Reverse. No problem.”
“How’s it look?” Everon called down.
“Feels stable enough,” Franklin yelled up. “Come on.”
“All right.” After laying his rope over another stack of pillows, Everon walked backwards following his brother’s path down the cliff.
Franklin knocked on the metal roof. “Hello?”
Faintly: “We’re here! We’re here!”
“Hold on!” Franklin hollered into the earth.
His path predetermined, it took Everon half the time it had taken Franklin to get down.
“How ’bout there?” Everon pointed at a large boulder along what had to be the train’s high side.
Together they struggled to push the rock off the car, where it picked up speed and rolled down into the side of the ditch.
“We don’t really have time for this shit, you know,” Everon said.
“I know.”
“Temperature’s dropping. The wind could change anytime now, blow the radiation this way.”
Franklin unfolded a two-foot army shovel from his belt. After removing a quick few inches of dirt and rubble, they exposed the top of a wide window. A little more digging, its shape and depth became apparent. It was one of the long horizontal ones, split where the upper half could be opened. Impossible to squeeze through.
Franklin leaned over the silvery steel and squinted to see inside. And jerked.
A dark-haired woman with huge eyes stared back. A trail of blood ran down the right side of her face. Hit by a sense of recognition, Franklin was almost certain he didn’t know her. “We’re trying to find a way in!” he yelled through the glass. “Can you open this?”
“It’s jammed!” There was pain in her face. Her arms were raised overhead in dark sleeves. Hanging from something, he thought.
“How far over is the doorway?”
“The doors won’t open,” she yelled back.
She turned and he heard the muffled sound of words to someone else he couldn’t see. She turned back to face him, “Oh! Yes! Windows —” She looked to Franklin’s left. “Seven or eight feet from the end of the car!”
He leaned back and looked along the top. A gargantuan slab of street asphalt covered that whole end. No way he and Everon could move it.
“Blocked!” He moved a finger to the right in a pointing motion. “That way? Doors over there in the middle, aren’t there?”
“There’s water that way!”
“Can’t be helped.” He pointed, “It’s blocked on this side.”
She looked over, then back to him. “About fifteen feet!”
The Awful Truth
“Why are we doing this?” Everon asked, hands, triceps straining. “She’s not gonna be down there, you know.”
“We don’t know that!” But it was only his own desperation Franklin heard.
Fifteen feet from the first hole, Franklin and Everon struggled to push over a vertical slab of concrete-bonded asphalt the size of a flat panel television.
As the slab began to move, a breath of air fluttered along the ditch, lifted Everon’s wavy blond hair. “That radiation cloud’s coming,” he grunted. The asphalt’s black upper edge went past vertical, rotating as if encased in glue. “Think of a desert storm. Then realize each grain of sand is poison. A poison once inside, your body can’t ever get rid of.” The slab accelerated as gravity took over until it fell, crashing onto the dirt on the other side of the subway.
Dirt flew as they began a new hole. Franklin knew it. They didn’t have to do this. They could stop now. “When she left you at the airport, was she taking a cab — or a train?”
“I left her in a cab.”
More bricks tossed into the ditch. The train was deeper here. As they dug down, yellow, blue, white tiles were part of the mix.
“What was Cynthia planning to do?”
“Go home to her family, watch TV and go to bed.”
They exposed the upper part of a window; its lower edge, buried in the dirt, became visible. Another narrow one they’d overshot. But this one had no horizontal split. Tight, but possible.
As they dug out more dirt and debris, the face of a white-haired old man appeared. “Get back!” Franklin yelled at him.
The face in the window disappeared.
Franklin pulled a small rock hammer from his climbing belt and smacked the glass. It didn’t break. He hauled back. And smacked the hell out of it. The glass shattered with a loud crash.
He felt a faint breeze from the window as he used the hammer’s handle to scrape away shards around the edge. It wouldn’t do to rip his skin open on the way in.
With one hand on the climbing rope, he flipped himself around and slid his legs over. As his chest scraped through, he felt hands lightly grip his feet and guide him inside — moving his feet sideways to where his toes found something hard to stand on.
And something cold, too.
Faces stared back at him in his flashlight beam.
Part of him felt like he’d made a terrible mistake, wasting so much time. Cynthia’s face was not among them.
The group was smaller than he expected, five men and two women, gathered at the high end of the car, standing, sitting, holding onto silver poles. As if to anchor themselves. Cold was leaking into his climbing shoes. Water! Already an inch over the orange plastic seat he stood on.
The odor was strong — salt, and the faint smell of ripe sewage. A swollen male body floated in the water, a man in a soggy dark business suit.
“Are we ever glad to see you, son!” said the man with short white hair Franklin had seen in the window. Blood was smeared across his scalp. He wore an expensive disheveled topcoat and suit. “What happened?” he asked. He bore a calm, kind look on his face. His eyes held wisdom.
Before Franklin could answer, someone else asked, “Where is everybody?” Another voice: “You’re it?” And then they let loose: “The next car’s — We’ve been here — flooded — Are you — for hours — with the — Train crash? — city . . .”
They have a way out now, a voice inside Franklin said. Let these people find their own way off Manhattan. Get to the helicopter. Try again for the top of Cynthia’s building!
But he had to tell them: “The City’s been bombed.”
There were gasps. “I knew it.” “Bombed! What do you mean bombed?” “A bomb!” “Oh my God!” “Bomba! Bomba!”
“What kind of bomb?” one man’s high voice penetrated, a dark damp toupee half off his head. He was nearly screaming. “What kind of bomb could affect us all the way up here if —” the high-pitched sound froze. His eyes went wide.
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