Neal Stephenson - Reamde

She knotted the bag shut. It had become so heavy that she had to carry it slung over her shoulder, Santa Claus style. She turned her back to the vacant windows and began walking across the office to fetch her purse from the desk. She would walk calmly down the stairs and make her way on foot to the waterfront, where she would splurge by hiring a water taxi to take her across to Gulangyu. Halfway there, she would drop the sack overboard. Once she got to her apartment she would pack her bag, make a coded phone call announcing that she was blowing town, then proceed to the airport and grab the next flight capable of getting her out of the country.

As she rehearsed this plan in her mind, she was bewildered by the sudden awareness that she was crumpled against the wall of the office with the breath knocked out of her. Her view of the windows was sideways—no, it was upside down. Then the view disappeared altogether as a roiling cloud of gray dust hurled itself in through the shredded tarps and expanded to fill every corner of the room, including her open mouth.

She tried to spit, but her mouth was dry. The dust had penetrated all the way down her throat, and this made her esophagus go into spasms that only ended when she retched. An instinct to get away from the pool of sick forced her up onto hands and knees. This small movement sent electric knitting needles down all her limbs and made her so dizzy that she became sick again.

She had to get out.

She tottered back against the wall of the office, knees still bent under her.

Her eye fell on the garbage bag, which had come to rest next to her. She grabbed the knot she’d tied in it. Then she gathered her feet under her and pushed herself up, leaning against the wall. With her free hand she groped to the side until she had found the door. Or rather the doorway, since the door had been blown open.

Where was her purse? She looked back into the office, but it was just a gray murk with indistinct shapes in it. Everything had been rearranged. Much of the ceiling had collapsed.

The vacant windows, denuded of their tarps, formed four large hazy gray rectangles across the opposite wall.

A shadow appeared in one of them: the silhouette of a man. He vaulted in over the windowsill, performed a shoulder roll, and alighted on the office floor in a low crouch. In the same movements he unslung a Kalashnikov from his shoulder and brought it up ready to fire.

Ready to fire at her . For he had taken dead aim at her face. She knew this because her eyes locked with his through the weapon’s iron sights. His were blue.

He had shouted something. Through her confusion and fear and the ringing in her ears it took her a few moments to place it: “ Ne dvigaites’! ” which in Russia was a rudely familiar way of saying “Don’t move!” Realizing his mistake, he then added, in English: “Freeze!”

“ Ne streliaite! ” she said, a bit more formally: “Don’t shoot!”

The two of them remained frozen thus for a count of three. Then the Russian exhaled and lowered the weapon’s barrel until it was pointed at the floor.

Olivia spun through the vacant doorway and ran.

THE STREET OUTSIDE Yuxia’s van got very bright and then just as quickly got very dark and then it was clobbered by what sounded and felt like the entire contents of the apartment building.

As soon as Yuxia could see more than arm’s length beyond the windshield—which took a few seconds—she floored the gas pedal. The van jumped forward less than a meter and stopped hard.

There was a loud noise from behind her. She turned around to see that half of a cast-concrete window lintel had fallen through the vehicle’s sheet-metal roof like a knife thrust through a sheet of aluminum foil and come to rest on the crushed remains of the middle seat. Dust and sand and gravel were raining into the gap in the van’s roof.

She gunned the engine again and again and heard the rear wheels spinning uselessly on the street. Something was chocked under the front wheels.

MARLON’S TENDENCY TO get fascinated by things and for fascination to then override the normal human instinct of self-preservation had been getting him in trouble since the age when he was old enough to crawl to an electrical socket and shove something into it. Having seen the big white man shoot the younger white man in the stairwell and the black man follow him down into the cellar, Marlon could not fail to follow them down one more level and see how it all turned out. Descending to the alley and dropping to his knees before the window well, he’d been able to peer in and see everything that played out there: the burly white man trying to help the handcuffed black girl and getting pistol-whipped for his trouble, some sort of confrontation between the white killer and the black girl, the decisive intervention of the black stalker, and then the departure of the two blacks, handcuffed together. The girl had looked Marlon in the eye on the way out, and he had been terrified for a moment that she would call out to him and alert the black man to his presence and that Marlon would thus become the next victim, but it hadn’t happened.

They had left the young white man unconscious or dead on the cellar floor. Marlon was tempted to leave the matter at that and simply get out of there.

But, though the details were incredibly confusing, he had the strong idea that he and his mates had all just escaped death because of action taken by someone to warn them by switching the power to their flat on and off. The obvious candidates, since they were down in the room with the fuse box, were the black girl and the big white man. Now it seemed as though they were being made to suffer for what they had done. He felt bad that he was unable to help the black girl, owing to her being handcuffed to an armed killer—and not just any killer, but a killer who had killed another killer—which, in the video-game-based metric that Marlon used for keeping score in the world, conferred an elite status—but the white guy was just lying there all by himself, unguarded, and Marlon had the idea that he could get into the cellar through the building’s back entrance and see if the guy was okay.

Normally the back door was, of course, locked. But today someone had left it hanging wide open.

Marlon was just stepping through it when the building exploded. And though his first instinct was to run outside and get away from it, he was glad that he didn’t. A huge amount of the structure collapsed into the basement and caused a piston of dust to shoot up the corridor right toward his face. He spun away from it and took it in his back, facing out into the back alley, and there he saw perhaps a thousand loose pieces of brickwork rain down from above. Any one of them, had it struck him on the top of the head, would have killed him. But the doorway—according to seismic lore, the strongest part of a building—held above him and protected him.

THE MAN CALLING himself Mr. Jones was quite clearly making it up as he went along. Just as clearly, he was comfortable doing so. He did not appear to be aware that the cellar had an exit on the back alley and so, pulling Zula along with him, he went up one flight of stairs to the ground-floor landing. As they approached it he reached across his body with his free hand and clamped this over Zula’s eyes and did not let her see again until they were in a corridor. Zula knew why and didn’t fight it.

From there he made for the building’s main entrance in the front. After a couple of turns in narrow corridors, they reached a place where Zula could look straight down a hallway, across what she took to be the lobby, and out the front doors to the street. Parked squarely in front of those doors was the van. At first Zula could not see Yuxia in the driver’s-side window, but then she noticed movement and realized that Yuxia had leaned over to pull the passenger-side door closed. Then Yuxia sat up behind the wheel again, shifted the van into gear, and turned to look toward the building. Zula enjoyed a moment of hope that Yuxia might see into the corridor and catch Zula’s eye. But this would have been very difficult because the interior of the building would have seemed very dark to anyone looking at it from outside. And not only dark but crowded, since tenants, spooked by the gun battle, were getting out of the place as fast as they could.