Walter Williams - The Rift

“Take your time, now,” she told her people. “We’re not in any hurry.”

She’d given one of her two flashlights to the Japanese man, and told him to keep to the rear of the column. Marcy kept the elderly lady right behind her, so that she could keep an eye on her, be certain not to overtax her, and make sure she wasn’t about to drop dead of a coronary.

Marcy came to a landing, peered at the next flight of stairs, decided to call a halt.

“Everyone catch your breath,” she said.

Simply catching one’s breath was hard enough inside the stainless steel shaft. The heat was almost overwhelming.

Everyone clustered onto the landing. Supported by massive crossbraces it was clearly safer than the stairs themselves. “How much farther do we have to go?” a man asked.

“I don’t know,” Marcy said. “I’ve never done this before.”

An aftershock slammed up through all the girders and beams and almost threw Marcy to her knees. She clapped hands over her ears as the metal around her began to shriek as if in pain. Something fell, somewhere, with a loud clang that echoed forever in the curving metal stairwell.

“I can’t take it! I can’t take it!” Marcy heard the words as though they came from far away. She looked up to see a man’s distorted face, eyes so round that his irises stood out as tiny dots in a lake of white. “I want to take the elevator!”

It was the same man who had panicked just before entering the tram. He lurched on the landing, knocking into people bodily, and then he spun about, shoved aside the Japanese man at the tail of the column, and began to run up the metal stair in the direction of the observation deck.

“No!” Marcy shrieked, and lunged after him. She was not going to lose another one. Her shoe caught on a stair riser and she fell face-first on the metal treads, but her outstretched hand caught the panicked man’s pants cuff. Marcy snarled as she clenched her fist around the fabric and pulled. The man was off-balance on the quaking stairway and fell. “Get back here!” Marcy yelled, and climbed up the man’s body, putting all her weight on him as the man thrashed beneath her.

“ I can’t take it! I can’t take it !” the man shouted.

Marcy straddled the panicked man and punched him in the face with her flashlight. “Shut up!” she shouted. He began to scream, a strange, scratchy wailing sound, as inhuman and metallic as the scream of the arch under tension. “Shut up, motherfucker!” Marcy hammered him with the flashlight again, then a third time.

The aftershock faded. The metal shrieking of the arch died away, and the man’s screams faded at the same time. Marcy stared with fury into the panicked man’s bloodstained face.

“I want to go to the elevator,” he said.

“No way, asshole,” Marcy said. “I’m not having another damn deserter.” She grabbed him by his collar and hauled him to his feet, shoved him down the platform. “You walk ahead of me,” she told him. “Now march.”

Ten minutes later they shouldered open a bent metal door and stepped out into the concourse. Marcy gasped in cooler air, took off her hat, wiped sweat from her forehead. She heard moans of relief from her tourists.

The huge underground room was a mess. The glass ticket windows had gone, and the ticket counters leaned at strange angles. Displays had toppled, signs had come down, light fixtures had shattered. The floor was littered with tourist brochures, tickets, guidebooks, maps, and broken glass.

Marcy had never been so glad to see a wreck in her life.

She stepped aside and let her visitors file out of the stairwell. The elderly lady stopped for a moment, fumbled in her pocketbook. “I just wanted to say thank you,” she said.

Marcy stared in surprise as the old lady held out a ten-dollar bill.

“No thanks, ma’am,” she said. “We’re not allowed to take tips.”

Carrying her two flashlights, Marcy found her French party in the middle of the concourse, shouting at each other as usual. The heart attack victim lay on the floor, conscious but showing little interest in his friends. Other casualties lay nearby, maybe thirty of them. Some of them were very bloody, some unconscious. A number were covered in what looked like gray brick dust.

Marcy saw no one in green uniforms, no Park Service people at all. She glanced around her in shock. Could they all have run away? All of them? Had Evan started a panic?

She turned at the sound of shouts and saw two of her colleagues carrying an unconscious woman down the stairs from outside and onto the concourse. Marcy’s head lurched as she saw blood pouring from a wound in the woman’s lower leg. Marcy ran and helped carry the woman to an empty space on the concourse floor.

“Where is everybody?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

“Parking structure collapsed,” one of the park rangers said. He was gasping with the effort of carrying the injured woman. “There are dozens of people in there. We’re trying to dig them out.”

“We’ve got this one,” the other ranger said. “Get out there and see if you can help someone else.”

Marcy cast a last look at the bleeding woman and sprinted for the wide stair. The parking structure adjacent to the Gateway Arch was several stories tall and held hundreds of cars. If it had collapsed, there was no telling how many people were trapped in the rubble.

She ran out into the open and into a hot wind that blew burning cinders across her path. Heat flared on her exposed skin. Her feet slowed as she stared in horror at the wall of fire blazing on the other side of Memorial Drive.

Half the city seemed ablaze, everything from the tallest structures to the smallest heaps of rubble. She held up a hand to shield her face from the heat, and her palm turned hot. Clouds of black smoke curled up between her and the arch, obscuring its gleaming stainless steel skin. Hundreds of people swarmed across the highway toward her, crossing the park as they tried to get away from the fires. Others had collapsed on the grass, exhausted simply by the effort of getting here.

Marcy kept trotting toward the parking structure. Most of the trees that lined the walkways had fallen, and she had to keep zigzagging around fallen trunks and limbs.

She glanced in the other direction, saw another cloud of dense smoke, growing from roots of flame, in East St. Louis. The Casino Queen, the huge riverboat that fed the East St. Louis economy with its gambling income, was lying on its side in the river. Its ornate smokestacks had fallen, and the gingerbread on its balconies was broken. A few people were seen clinging to the part of the boat remaining above the water.

St. Louis’s boats hadn’t fared much better. The excursion boats Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher had been moored for the evening on the landing right under the Gateway Arch. Only Becky Thatcher seemed reasonably intact: Tom Sawyer had sunk at its moorings, and Huck Finn drifted downriver, trailing its mooring cables in the water. All had lost their stacks.

Marcy swerved around a fallen tree and came within sight of the parking structure.

It looked like a crater of the moon. A hideous pit filled with broken concrete and mangled steel.

Smoke burned Marcy’s eyes. She slowed, gasping for breath.

“Evan!” she shouted. “Damn you!” And then, though her feet felt as if they weighed a hundred pounds apiece, she went down into the pit to rescue her visitors.

*

A neighbor girl knocked on the window of the BMW. Charlie looked at her in some surprise. The electric window wouldn’t go down, because he didn’t have the ignition key, so he opened the door.