Саймон Морден - Degrees of Freedom

He was glad it was them, and not him, even though his own lungs burned like they were filled with acid, every muscle was made of agony, every step an effort too great, every moment a conscious torment. He was alive, and if he got far enough away from ground zero, he’d stay alive.

Not like them. Not like them at all.

They’d reached the far end of Berkeley Square—an oval of dead trees and brown grass—when Petrovitch felt the first signs. His eyes were momentarily filled with white noise, and the computer he was relying on to keep him going stuttered.

He fell, his sudden rigidity tearing him from the grasp of his bearers. As he went down, the shock front traveling through the ground brought it up to meet him. Hard. He was suddenly flying, and an enormous roaring filled his ears.

His vision cleared. He was on his back, facing the way he’d come, and a wave was rolling toward him, made of tarmac and concrete and soil. It lifted the road like it was the surface of the sea, and it lifted the buildings like they were ships catching the tide.

As they rose, they gave out shrieks and screams—but remained more or less intact. As the crest of the wave passed underneath, and the ground started to fall away again, cracks tore through the facades: roofs kept on rising while the masonry below separated out along great fissures that opened up. Glass snapped, brick broke along the ageing mortar, stone broke in two.

The wave hit Petrovitch, and he was airborne again. The building behind him at the head of the square leaned away from him, and then started to collapse in on itself.

A whole train of shocks chewed their way through the streets, and, partially obscured by the pall of pulverized city, a vast black dome of subsurface rock blossomed above the vault. Its skin was marked by flecks of road, of lamp-posts, of concrete and plastic panels and brightly colored carpet.

The great bulge threatened to burst, to spew its fireball out into the air and drag hot contaminated dust with it, where it would be caught by the wind and darken the sky even further. Orange fire glittered through the veil of debris, barely constrained.

It hung there, supported from inside by an incandescent cloud trying to pull free of the ground, perfectly balanced against the hauling back of gravity.

Then it started to sink: the fire held in it began to die, turning from fierce light to glowing ember. As it flattened, it spread, a fresh storm of rolling dust climbing over and around the falling buildings, punching out walls and windows.

By the time it reached Petrovitch, it was a gritty slap in the face, weak and growing weaker. The skyline around him was lost. The air became opaque. The noise of splitting and cracking and crumbling gradually lessened, and finally dropped to a level where shouting and coughing and retching could be heard.

He couldn’t talk. His mouth, dry as the desert, seemed to have set half-open. He could barely see: his eyeballs were scratched and pitted, and he’d run out of tears. He blinked, and it felt as if he was trying to dislodge boulders. His nose and ears were clogged, and his lungs spasmed at his efforts to breathe.

And he had no connection: not just no signal, but no sign of a signal.

There was a man to his left, one of Valentina’s volunteers, who slowly rose up on his hands and knees. There was blood in his mouth, dribbling down the cake-white dust on his skin. His stare was wild and uncomprehending.

Petrovitch found enough spit to loosen his tongue. “ Pizdets. ” He looked up and around, peering through the haze. Shadows played as the air thickened and thinned on the wind.

“Sam? Sam!”

“Here,” he managed to croak, before his throat tightened and he coughed hard enough to break ribs.

Madeleine stumbled toward him, and sat in a heap at his side. Any movement stirred more dust into the air. She put out her hand and rested it over his heart, just to feel the hum of the turbine beneath his skin.

There was blood in his phlegm, and he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Still not dead, then. He circled his finger to encompass all of them, and pointed north. She nodded, and started to bring the others to him, to sit them down and get them to wait.

She found Valentina, whose dark hair had turned white and stiff, her tightly belted jacket hanging open, her blouse missing buttons, cuts to her stomach and her legs, her trousers ragged. Petrovitch put his arm around her shoulders, but she didn’t react.

Madeleine found the other volunteers, with their breaks and lacerations and bruises and punctures. Her impact armor had protected her where mere skin and bone had failed.

She found Tabletop last of all, wandering in the fog, and took her arm and led her back to the rest of the group.

“They did it. They did it,” mumbled Tabletop. She looked at Petrovitch. “They did it.”

“Yeah. They did.” He hawked up more slurry. “We need to get cleaned up. Everyone stay together. No one gets left behind.”

He disentangled himself from Valentina, and used her shoulder to stand. His leg tried to fold under him, and he forced it to straighten. When he looked down, there was something sticking out of his calf. It was too big to be called a splinter—he’d been impaled by a pencil-width shard of wood that was going to cause more damage coming out than it had going in.

His left arm was still numb. He touched it with his right, pinched the skin roughly. Nothing. It seemed to be the least of his problems; at least it didn’t hurt anymore.

He limped away, heading toward the gap between the shrouded mountains of masonry that should have been the road heading toward Oxford Street. The buildings on either side had shed their fronts and exposed their rooms. Chimneys had barged through roofs and fallen through floors.

The destruction gripped him with a cold, studied fury. They’d only just cleaned up after the Jihad and the Outies. The scars of the earlier missile strikes were isolated. This had ripped a crater in the historic center of the city, erasing landmark after landmark, spewing poison into the air he was being forced to breathe and contaminating the ground he walked on.

He slipped and slid on a drift of rubble, climbed to the top, stumbled down the far side. The heavy particles in the cloud surrounding him were falling like rain, and the sky began to brighten. The tops of broken buildings peered down at him, misaligned and jagged. There were cracks in the road, too, where water seeped out as springs and puddled in the gutters. Sewers had failed, bending the road surface down in some places, and in others leaving gaping holes that brimmed with darkness.

They navigated all the hazards in their path, even when post-explosion settling caused something close by to come crashing down. There’d always be a warning noise first, a tremor in the ground. Enough time to back off or run forward, out of the path of the slow tumble of bricks and timber, of stone and steel.

A signal: Petrovitch hooked himself up to the connection, and called for help. “Hey.”

[Your capacity for survival surprises even me. How injured are you?]

“We’re all pretty much hosed. Call it fifteen barely walking wounded. I don’t know how hot we are—we could be dead already.”

[There is a decontamination station being set up at the Marylebone entrance to the Oxford Street mall. Make your way there.]

“Tell me about the damage.”

[From the relays we have lost, buildings have been either completely or partially demolished for a radius of seven hundred and fifty meters from the origin. Some inside have survived, some outside have not. No significant damage has occurred beyond one thousand two hundred meters. Buckingham Palace is in ruins, the Westminster embankment is breached, and the old Parliament is flooding. The temporary bridge at Lambeth has been destroyed.]