Adam Baker - Terminus

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.’

‘One thing at a time. We’ve got to reach you first.’

Another gunshot crack. A fresh puff of rock dust fogged the water.