“No! No! Let me out! No-o-o-o….” Her voice trailed off in a wordless little mewl.
“You’re going to be okay. We’ll get you out of there.” He closed his eyes. “I promise.”
Camilla laughed. It was the worst thing he had ever heard, brittle and horrible, chilling his spine with its hopelessness. Her hand pulled out of his and disappeared inside the hole.
Laying his cheek against the beam, he strained to hear. He could feel the faint vibration of her breathing through the steel, coming fast and shallow.
“I’m really not in a good place right now,” she said.
“Camilla, listen to me. It’s different this time.”
High-pitched keening noises came through his cheek. Juan couldn’t make out any more words. He slapped the beam again and shouted, sending a pulse of pain through his head. “Camilla!”
No response. Just her rapid breathing and those plaintive keens that made the skin on the back of his neck prickle with fear for her. It was not a sound any adult should make. Ever.
He raised his voice again. “Answer me! Please, Camilla. Just say something.”
A long silence followed. When she finally spoke, Juan squeezed his eyes shut and ground his forehead against the beam.
It was the voice of a child. A confused child.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
“It’s me. Juan.”
“Oh. Okay.” She sounded as though she had absolutely no idea who he was.
“Listen to me, Camilla. There’s air flowing in there. I felt it.”
It was why the fires were still burning. Why she could still breathe.
“That means there’s another way out. You have to go and find it.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, but you have to do this for yourself. Go back in there and look for it.”
“Okay.” She sounded dubious, like a child given hopelessly difficult instructions.
His arms and legs felt like lead. She was losing her mind in there, and he couldn’t get to her. He thumped his forehead against the beam in black frustration. He couldn’t even hear her properly.
“Camilla, this is very important,” he said. “Don’t get lost and forget what you’re doing. You have to find the way out.”
“Are you sure?” The baffled incomprehension in her voice was terrifying.
“Yes. You’ll feel the air blowing. Follow it.” He gritted his teeth, thinking hard. She cared about other people more than herself. He could use that.
“Camilla, what about Dmitry? What about Mason? Did they make it?”
A long pause. When she spoke again, relief washed over him. She sounded like herself once more.
“I heard Dmitry at first. I think he was hurt really bad. We need to find him.”
“Let’s get you out, first.”
“Mason ran. He left me.” Her voice broke. “I thought you had, too…”
She shoved her hand through the hole again, and he held her wrist to his cheek, able to hear her better that way.
Her fingers stroked the side of his face, and her arm stiffened. She tentatively touched his ear, then his other ear, softly tracing them, exploring.
“All this blood… Oh god, Juan. Your poor ears.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry about that. Just find the way out. I’ll search for the opening up here.”
“I can’t go back in there.”
“You can. You can do this. You’re brave. You’re a survivor.”
“Promise me. Promise me that if I don’t come out, you’ll come in and get me.”
“I will.” Juan squeezed her hand. “I won’t leave you, Camilla.”
“I believe you.” She squeezed back with surprising strength. Then her hand withdrew, and darkness swallowed her.
He listened to her crawl away.
He would start from the top and see if he could find a way in. He would check on JT and Veronica, too, even though he had seen the cistern dome collapse. If they were still down there, he wasn’t hopeful.
He made his way painfully up the sloping side of the valley and reached the top, where a small section of seawall still stood. He leaned against the end of it, breathing heavily. The collapsed lung made it difficult to exert himself, and he felt faint and feverish. Closing his eyes for a moment, he tried to catch his breath.
A faint alarm tickled the base of his skull.
Too late.
M
ason put away the stun gun and looked down at Juan’s unconscious body with curiosity. How had he survived the explosion?
He noted Juan’s injuries and the blood running from his ears. The explosion had probably ruptured his eardrums. That explained why he had been so easy to catch off guard: he was deaf.
Mason took off his glasses and tossed them aside. There was no longer any reason to wear them—no need for camouflage anymore.
He took out Veronica’s tactical knife, flicked it open, and squatted beside Juan.
Still unconscious, Juan coughed, and pink foam spattered his lips and chin. He didn’t look good at all. Mason figured he was going to die soon anyway. He was probably doing Juan a favor by killing him in his sleep.
Euthanasia.
Mason grinned.
But what was Juan
doing
here? Mason tilted his head, staring at the prone form. Why had he come back instead of saving himself? And why had he tried to disarm the bomb when he must have known it was futile?
Questions Mason didn’t have answers for.
But this hesitation was unlike him. He had to kill Juan to protect himself. With no other living witnesses to what had happened here, he could tell rescuers any story he wanted to. The video Brent had recorded might well have been destroyed in the explosion. But even if it wasn’t, Mason wasn’t too concerned. By the time evidence techs recovered footage of his own fun and games with Heather, he would be in another state—or, better yet, another country.
He shook his head, chuckling.
“…and then there were none.”
He leaned forward to begin cutting.
Then he paused again as a new thought struck him. Reaching into his pocket, he fingered Brent’s phone. The caption next the camera windows had been “Live Transmission.” Twelve days of video: Brent’s monument to his dead son, his public vindication and revenge against Jordan, against
all
survivors—he would have made sure it didn’t die with him. All that video had been transmitted someplace.
Mason was pretty sure he knew where.
Amid the lies, there had always been some truth if you knew where to look for it. Julian had described Vita Brevis’s distribution methods to them all: “
file-sharing sites, video hubs, peer-to-peer networks, dozens of other free high-traffic channels.
”
Mason grinned, picturing a map of the world with Internet connections overlaid on it. All of them were surely lighting up right now with an expanding cascade of messages, tweets, emails, and texts. Some of the senders would be horrified; others fascinated. But all of them would be eager to share what they had stumbled upon. He could almost
see
the video spreading from server to server, phone to phone, tablet to tablet, computer to computer, around the globe.
So this was what it felt like to be famous. With all due respect to Mr. Warhol, Mason suspected they were going to get a lot more than fifteen minutes.
Knife in hand, Mason smiled and reached down to pat Juan’s unconscious head, as if he were petting a dog.
The whole world knows who you are now, señor Antonio y Gabriel. I wonder what they make of you, my friend?
• • •
Twenty minutes later, Mason stood at the top of the hill, at the base of the fallen lighthouse tower. The steam whistle—Año Nuevo’s rebuilt fog signal—had been knocked off its base by the explosion. It lay on its side nearby. Jordan’s seal-head banner had also fallen, but Mason’s chair was still upright by the wreckage of the tower. He brushed off the thick layer of gray dust on the seat and lowered himself onto it, taking the weight off his bad knee.
Night was falling.
Under the darkening sky, Mason looked across the channel toward the mainland.
The whole world knew about him now, too. This wasn’t going to be easy. In a few hours, he would find out how much of a survivor he really was.
C
rawling. Coughing. Crawling. Eyes watering from the smoke. Ducking under the sagging concrete of the low ceiling, crawling across shattered rock.
Camilla’s hands and knees hurt.
A propane tank lay on its side nearby, hissing out a four-foot jet of blue flame. By its light, she looked at her bloody palms.
Last time, they had been bloodier, she remembered. A slick of red had coated her arms all the way up to her shoulders.
She wiped her hands on her jeans and crawled on, searching.
The screams and moans came and went, sometimes very faint, sometimes louder. Many different voices.
Not real… not real…
She squeezed through a narrow gap between concrete and rock. What she was looking for was down here somewhere, she knew. She had to find it.
The cars were back again. She crawled past buckled steel and crushed hubcaps.
Not real… notrealnotrealnotreal…
A draft of cooler air wafted through Camilla’s hair, drying the sweat on her cheeks. She crawled past the mouth of the dark circular opening where the draft came from, and squeezed under a dangling bundle of pipes. The rubble was wet with water underfoot. Raising a hand, she felt a crack in the smooth metal surface of a boiler overhead. She pushed past it.
She had been looking for hours. She couldn’t find it anywhere.
Camilla swept the rough, broken ground with her hands as she crawled, searching, searching, searching.
She had dropped it somewhere down here, days ago, after getting out of the car.
Her little mermaid doll was lost.
She had to find it.
• • •
“Juan,” Camilla whispered. “Where are you, Juan? I’m lost. I don’t even know what’s real anymore. Everyone is dead down here.”
She wiped away the tears from her cheeks and touched Dmitry’s face again.
Dmitry’s cold, dead face.
• • •
Hours later, Camilla squeezed beneath a tumbled ceiling beam. She could see a small clearing in the wreckage beyond. She pushed forward and suddenly froze. Her arms and legs locked, refusing to move any further.
Her family’s blue Volvo lay ahead, crushed under the massive concrete beam. The window frame of the driver’s-side door was folded outward, bent double. Through the opening, she could see the two crumpled dark shapes, unmoving and silent. Dark blood slicked the door, dripping in thick, syrupy streams. Shiny, knotted wet things dangled from the window in purple ropes and sausage loops. More wet lumps lay strewn around the ground nearby, glistening in the firelight—things too awful to think about.
She stared at the bloody, smeary child-size handprints. They were everywhere. She had made them herself a few days ago, pulling at the door, yanking at her unmoving parents, trying to get them out.
Lost, she had circled back to where she started.
There was no way out.
Her arms and legs shook so hard, her teeth chattered. She couldn’t make herself go forward. Couldn’t back up.
“Somebody, please help me!” she shouted. “Mason… Jordan… anybody…
please
!”
The hair on the back of her neck stood up as she heard her own words. She was calling a serial killer and a dead woman for help. A dead woman she barely knew. She closed her eyes, choking in horror, knowing she had lost it completely.
She would never get out.
Something inside her gave way. It felt like wet fabric tearing inside her head.
She looked at the driver’s-side window again.
“Daddy… Mama… please wake up. My legs hurt, Mama… Get out of the car…
Wake up
…
please
…”
Her plaintive cries turned to screams.
• • •
Camilla curled against a wall of buckled metal, tucked into a tight, dark alcove, cocooned in darkness. The fires had burned low and then gone out many hours ago. The blackness around her was absolute. Her head touched the uneven ceiling above her whenever she moved.
But she wasn’t moving anymore. There was no point. She had nowhere to go. The dark, claustrophobic tumble of wreckage stretched to infinity in every direction. This place was the only reality.
Time had no meaning here. The sunlit world above—the world of her dreams and imagination—didn’t really exist. It never had. She had created it in her mind to escape from this place.
But she knew now that there was no escape. There never had been.
Eyes open but unseeing, she put her cheek against the broken ground and curled up tighter.
She made it all go away.
Tuesday: January 1, 2013
B
rent’s body shook with convulsions. His forehead knocked against the rocky ground. He was suspended almost upside down, inclined facedown in darkness.
Another brief period of consciousness. He knew it would be his last unless he was able to redose with fentanyl immediately.
He tried to move his arms. His left was immobilized, but his right came loose, dropping free to hang below of his face. With a trembling hand, he pushed at the rubble beneath him. A broken chain trailed from his wrist.
Fentanyl. In the small med kit. Chest pocket.
Bending his elbow, he fumbled at his chest. His fingers encountered metal pressing into his lower ribs—another mass of old boiler pipes. He was crushed between two sections of machinery, hanging head down, still chained to the wheel. That was a problem. Right now, he had more pressing concerns to worry about, though.
Fighting to stay conscious, he managed to knock the medical kit loose from the chest pocket of his wet suit and heard it spill open on the rocky floor beneath his face. He groped blindly, sending ampoules and syringes skittering and rolling, until his fingers closed on a syringe. Holding it like a dagger, Brent stabbed it into the side of his neck and thumbed the plunger down. Then his hand fell away.
Another wave of convulsions took him. He shuddered, helpless, unable to control his muscles. Bright flashes burst on the insides of his eyelids, erasing all thought.