Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

The lights flickered. One of them exploded in its housing in the ceiling. Then they failed, and she was in darkness.

Jane was still sliding down the floor, in pitch darkness. It was a childhood nightmare, a mundane world turned monstrous, dragging her down into some pit she couldn’t even see.

Everyone seemed to be screaming now. More explosions from above. A crash, a stink she couldn’t recognize, and she found herself coughing. Christ alone knew what chemicals they kept in here; there had to be a danger of toxic fumes, fire.

She scrabbled at the broken floor; her fingers closed around the lip of a dislodged floor tile, and she hung onto that. The tile ripped her nails, but she wasn’t falling any more.

Somebody came skidding down the floor, and hit her side. The impact was huge, uncontrolled; a thick hand scrabbled at her clothes, trying to get a grip. She knew she couldn’t hold this new weight, and her own.

She should kick this guy away. She knew that’s what she should do.

He didn’t get a hold. He fell away into the dark, sparing her the decision.

Now there was a new series of deep, grinding cracks. Light from below; a throaty explosion of collapsing brickwork, the grind of tearing metal. She risked a look down. The wall beneath her had broken up, and huge chunks of it were falling away, letting in the daylight. Glimpses of the car park, maybe fifty feet below, the cars still parked in their mundane rows.

And, silhouetted before the light, people scattered like dolls, trying not to tumble any further. Marge Case was clinging to the square leg of an analysis table, bolted to the skewed floor. One hand was bloody, and flapped at her side like a broken wing; she was holding on to the table with her other hand, one set of fingers.

The whole building had tipped up, Jane realized. Like that movie. The Poseidon Adventure.

A fat man lost his grip, went rolling down the floor, and fell neatly through one of the holes in the wall. He fell screaming. Jane could see him for a couple of seconds, suspended in the air, still clawing monkey-like for a grip on something, anything, before he fell out of sight.

When he reached the car park there was a meaty punch, a sack of liquid breaking open on an unyielding surface.

“Jane! This way!”

Henry had climbed to the comparative sanctuary of the doorway, with the policewoman and others. Henry was reaching down to her.

She looked up at him, calculating. She could reach a table leg no more than inches from her, push herself up on that, then half-stand on the leg to get to Henry’s hand.

Marge Case was screaming behind her, begging for help, almost incoherently.

Perhaps Jane could reach her. But she might fail. This is ridiculous, she thought. I don’t have time for this. I have to get to Jack.

She thought about the unseen man she’d been prepared to kick away. Not yet, she thought. We haven’t come to that yet.

She turned to Henry. “Help me get to her.”

They formed a chain. Henry braced himself in the doorway and held the policewoman’s hand; she reached down and gripped Jane’s wrist, with surprising strength, Jane got a couple of footholds in the broken tiles, and reached down herself, and caught hold of Marge’s hand. Marge was sobbing, and just hung there.

Within seconds, the weight was too much for Jane.

“Marge, I can’t lift you. You’ll have to climb.”

But Marge seemed frozen, and Jane had to coax her into it, step by step. “Put your foot on that table leg. There. Now push up. Good girl. Okay, grab my waist…”

So Marge climbed to Jane, and Jane climbed to the policewoman, and they all clambered out to the corridor with Henry, where they could rest.

There were others here, lab workers and students, mostly young, looking bewildered. Marge Case was in floods of tears, and was starting to react to the pain of an arm which looked broken. The policewoman got hold of her and started to apply some simple first aid, strapping the arm to the girl’s side.

Henry held Jane, just for a moment.

And all the way through, Jane couldn’t help herself thinking, over and over: I don’t have time for this.

Ted, as a kid, had once got his ribs bruised playing football. He hadn’t been able to get out of bed for three days.

But bed rest wasn’t an option now.

It took him an age, and excruciating pain, just to stand up.

Well, he was able to walk, if he leaned on his little helper. But it felt as if someone was grinding a sharp fist into the centre of his chest, over and over.

“We should wait for mum.”

“No. We have to go before the quakes come back. We’ll find your mum.”

That was true; if they managed to get onto any of the A-roads, there would surely be reception centres; that was police procedure in eventualities like this. It shouldn’t be impossible to find Jane and Mike.

Always assuming he could drive.

Ruth Clark’s house seemed to have taken a still worse beating than his own. It looked as if the roof had simply fallen in, leaving the outer walls standing in broken spikes, delimiting the debris.

We ought to just get in the car, he thought I have to take responsibility for the lad. And I sure as pish can’t do any heavy lifting.

But he couldn’t just leave her.

With Jack’s help, he stumbled up the drive to Ruth’s house. Her front door was a heap of match wood, blocking the hall.

He limped around to one of the intact sections of wall. There was actually a window here, still unbroken, that let into the living room. He couldn’t see anything inside. He surely wasn’t going to be able to climb in there.

There was a soft whimpering, from inside the house. Crying, like a baby’s.

He got Jack to fetch him a towel. Ted wrapped it around his arm, turned away, and smashed open the window. Then, with the towel still in place, he pushed out the remaining shards of glass —

A tan brown blur hurtled out of the window. Tammie. He got a single clear view of the beast, as it looked into his eyes.

Then it dropped to the ground and was gone.

The crying had been the cat, then.

Jack said, “Should we chase Tammie?”

“No. She’ll look after herself.”

“What about Mrs Clark?”

Ted ran over what he’d seen, in his mind, in that brief confrontation.

The cat had blood all around its mouth. It had been chewing something. Eating into it —

“I don’t think Mrs Clark is home, Jack. Come on.”

He leaned on Jack again, and they limped back to the car.

Somewhere, a siren wailed.

The lifts were all out, and there was no light in the corridors. But they were able to push open the doors on the uppermost side of the building, and reach the fire escape. This was a red-painted staircase, bolted to the side of the building; but it was tipped now at maybe thirty or forty degrees to the vertical. Jane had to slither down the stairs and the face of the wall.

The building continued to tilt.

The noise was immense, cracks and grinds from the frame and brickwork as they sought to relieve the impossible tensions on them. Windows popped out of their frames, sometimes intact, sometimes in a shower of shards, glittering in the bright April sun. Once a whole section of wall simply exploded outwards, a few feet from her, a brief fountain of brickwork and concrete.

It took an age to reach the ground. Henry was waiting for her; he grabbed her hand. “Let’s get out of here.” His palm was slick with blood.

They ran out of the car park and into the West Mains Road.

The road was cracked, right down the middle, as if along a neat seam. Jane could see that houses had collapsed, or fallen to pieces. Taller buildings were sometimes intact but were leaning precariously. In one place, water was gushing up from a crack in the pavement.