Michael Walsh - Early Warning

“Mama?” A voice out of the bleak, endless darkness, soft but not weak. It was Emma. She was alive.

“Where’s your brother?” Hope asked. “Rory? RORY?”

For a moment, silence. Then-

“I’m over here, Mama. I’m okay.”

“Can you walk? Can you move?” Even in asking, Hope realized that she herself could not move. Gingerly, she tested her legs. They seemed to function, but they could not get herself up off the ground. Something was pinning her to the floor.

Hope tried to stay calm. Losing it now would help neither her nor the children. She tried to collect herself. Tried to think.

How could this be happening to her, again? What she had gone through in Edwardsville was nothing put up against what her children had gone through. What Jack had gone through…

She felt herself starting to break down. No: stop. Crying wouldn’t bring Jack back, wouldn’t erase what had happened. Jack was gone, and yet she was still here, and so were Emma and Rory. That was the way he would have wanted it, she was sure. No, she knew. That was the kind of man he was.

So why was she thinking of Danny?

Hope had often read of characters in the chick lit novels she sometimes glanced at, when Janey Eagleton slipped them to her, because she would never buy that kind of trash when Jack was alive, the kind of women that would forget their man the minute they met Fabio, or whatever name he was going by in this particular incarnation, how they would be literally swept off their feet, caught up in his strong arms, smothered by his kisses, their bodies thrilling to his harsh touch and his soft caresses, driving them crazy with the combination of tenderness and violence, sending their minds into paroxysms of confusion, torn between modern shibboleths and ancient passions and with everyone, author and reader, and character alike, knowing which side of the equations they were all about to come down upon in politically incorrect unison.

“Mom?” It was Rory. He had been brave before, not just once but many times, and now her young hero had come to her rescue once more.

The air was filling with smoke from what Hope knew was a raging fire below. They had to get out of here, and fast, or they would suffocate. But she couldn’t let on. She had to stay calm. If only she could get free…

“It’s okay, Mom,” Rory was saying. “I can handle it, I think.” She felt something move, something scraping across her legs, an awful weight being shifted, rearranged but not lifted.

“Try again, Rory.”

“Emma! Help me.”

In dread, Hope waited for Emma’s assent. Please, God, let her be able to move. Otherwise, they were all lost…

“I’m here, Rory,” said Emma. “I’m right beside you. Come on-push.”

Hope bit down hard as the heavy weight slid across her legs. Something warm and sticky ran down her calves. She could feel the fabric of her skirt rend, her flesh tear-but it was worth it to finally get that awful weight off her limbs.

No matter the pain, she managed to stand. “What was it?” she asked.

“The popcorn machine, Mom,” replied Rory. “Now let’s get outta here. I think the whole place is about to blow.”

At the moment, the building shifted on its foundations. The tilt was noticeable. They were at least ten stories in the air and while that was nowhere near the height of the World Trade Center as it collapsed, she had no wish to experience even one-tenth of the terror those poor souls felt as the Port Authority’s underpinnings failed them, and they were sped on their journey to heaven by a sudden, irrevocable plunge toward hell.

“Fire escape,” she managed to breathe. The air was getting heavier now. In a couple of minutes, they would have to crawl along the floor, searching for the outside exits.

“But where is it, Mama?” cried Emma.

She had no idea.

“Try your phone,” shouted Rory. “Get a map.”

Hope had no idea how to do what her son was suggesting. She could barely make him out in outline as she handed the instrument over. “You find it.”

Rory slid his fingers over the display. You no longer need to punch keys: now everything was touch-screen, the lighter touch the better. No need to hit anything anymore, no keyboards to pound. No longer even any need for the clicks that IBM once electronically tethered to its keyboards, just so the typists could have some sort of audible feedback. The digital world had replaced the analog, cause and effect were now irretrievably disconnected. It was a metaphor for the brave new world of nothing they were entering: a world in which everything mattered, and nothing caused it.

“Nothing, Ma. We’re shut down.”

“Then let’s get out of here. Any way we can.”

There was a great groan as the building shifted again, this time distinctly listing to one side. Hope didn’t know much about architecture, but she knew enough about the groans she was hearing to understand that the structure was in great distress, and was soon about to give up the unequal struggle. The building was going down, and the only question was whether they were going to go down with it.

“Come on!” shouted Rory, grabbing his sister’s hand. Hope would just have to fend for herself, but that was her generational role; she had done her duty to the species, to the culture, to the country. Now it was up to her children to survive, live on, fight on.

And then the floor fell out from beneath them.

It could have been worse. They could have plummeted four, five, six stories down as the huge structure collapsed upon itself. Instead, they dropped only a few feet, although the creaking of the structural steel continued to resonate throughout the theater complex.

“Mom-what’s happening?” screamed Emma. Hope knew her girl was the weak link. They had spent so many hours with the shrinks back home, making sure that she would be okay, no matter what, not that they or anyone could have foreseen this, but even so, Hope always knew that Emma would be the first to break should anything ever happen again, and now here it was, happening again, and so soon thereafter, and there was nothing she could do about it except reach for her baby and hold her and, if necessary, die trying to protect her.

“Come on, Emma-come to Mama!” she shouted She reached…reached…reached.

The AMC Theaters groaned, shifted, settled. Whatever had caused the explosion had happened on the ground floor, and it was only a matter of time before the entire building entropically headed to the source of the derangement. The scream of the wounded metal was terrifying, but to the Gardner family, it was as from a distance, a call to death that they would not heed.

Hope reached in the dark-and realized that reaching in the dark was all she had ever done. At the moment she had determined to do something about the Edwardsville hostage situation, she had begun to grope her way toward her ultimate goal. When she had crawled across the frozen blacktop on her hands and knees, she began to see it more clearly. When she had come up and fallen into the arms of that horrible man, when she was so close to her children, could practically hear them calling out to her, when she realized that she could only save one, that somebody would have to help her, when that somebody turned out to be her husband, Jack, and when he died…

Somebody else had to save them, then-Danny…

And in death there was life. In death for both of them there was life. And in death they had found each other, amid blood and misery and grief and loss. Oprah would have wept, but her audience would have understood-you took love where you found it, and damn the circumstances, the only principle of life was, after all, life itself, and no amount of death, or death cults, or people who loved death more than they loved life could defeat life itself.