by ES Richards
“Can you see the hook at all on that side?” Luc asked, carefully following the piece of wire that Taggy still held in one hand to the right of the street and searching for the explosives it should’ve been rigged to. “Any idea what we should be looking for?”
Austin shook his head and stepped to the other side of the street and tried to figure out where it would be. Rubble had intentionally been piled up there to disguise the explosives, burying them under rocks and dirt to hide the malicious device. Carefully and slowly, Austin started to move items to one side, placing them on the ground behind him one by one so he could find what they were looking for. It was one thing determining that the tripwire was broken, they also needed to locate the explosives and get them away from the area. If they could repurpose them in the cave then they’d have a bit more firepower to use against the Gov, a fact made even better by the knowledge they would be using their own bombs against them.
The rubble and bricks were stacked in an odd way at the side of the road. It was clear someone had put them there on purpose, but they were balanced in such a precarious way it was almost like they didn’t want them to remain in place. Austin picked up yet another block of cement and turned away to place it on the road when he stumbled forward and an ear-splitting bang erupted behind him. Before he knew what was happening, he was on the ground with his arms over his head. Bits of rock and fragments of brick peppered him from above and then just as he turned to look up, a loud crash erupted and he was plunged into darkness.
“Luc!” Taggy screamed, sprinting away from the explosion and diving on top of her friend, causing the pair of them to skid across the tarmac on the opposite side.
As soon as he felt Taggy’s body on his and processed what was happening, Luc spun her around so he protected her and covered both of their heads with his arms. Debris slammed into his back like bullets, cutting his flesh and causing him to grunt and huff in pain as he tried to remain still, protecting himself and Taggy from the blast. It only lasted for a few seconds at most before it stopped, but when the pair of them finally sat up the air was filled with dust and dirt, stinging their eyes and obstructing their vision.
“Austin!” Luc bellowed out, spluttering as dust went into his lungs. “You okay? Where are you?”
When no response came, Luc looked at Taggy in horror and the two of them both leapt to their feet, rushing across the road to where they’d last seen him. The blast from the explosion was far less than any they’d seen so far – likely due to only part of it being hooked up – but despite that, Austin’s side of the street lay in ruins. The building on the corner had been blown out on the ground floor, with the brickwork above teetering on its support and hanging precariously above their heads. Luc and Taggy looked up as bits fell down on top of them, searching for their friend as the dust gradually cleared.
“Austin!” Luc called out again in desperation. “Can you hear me?”
“Could he have gotten away?” Taggy asked, unable to see any sign of the man they had arrived with. “Or do you think he is…”
They both looked down as Taggy failed to complete her sentence. The ground they were standing on hadn’t been there a minute ago, it wasn’t the pale gray sidewalk, smoothed down from years of stamping feet. It was a course slate piece of rock that had once been attached to the falling building. It was a cave in, and Austin was likely underneath it.
***
When he opened his eyes again, Austin was shrouded in darkness. He breathed in and instantly regretted it, coughing and choking on dust and dirt as it filled his lungs and attacked his throat. Gradually his eyes began to adjust, and he became more aware of where he was trapped. He tried to lift his arms from his head but found he could only shift them a couple of inches before they brushed against cold, hard rock. Peering upwards as best he could, Austin saw the solid surface above his head and turned to see it surrounded him on all sides.
Shuffling backwards on the ground, Austin was able to readjust himself, so he was sitting with his legs tucked up in front of him. Remarkably, he felt completely fine. He quickly assessed each of his body parts and apart from a gash on his right arm, he was entirely unharmed, no broken bones or serious injuries to worry about. But he was trapped. As best he figured, part of the building he’d been standing next to had crumbled down on top of him. The poorly constructed wall of debris he’d been shifting through had been his savior, it’s slightly raised position stopping the sheet of rock which lay above his head from crashing downwards and crushing him beneath it. He was – for the time being – safe.
“Hello!” Austin cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed as loud as he could without choking on the word. “Help! I’m in here. Luc! Taggy! I’m in here.”
He didn’t dare to bang against any of the rock in case it shifted from the force, Austin could tell from the precariousness of the tomb around him that one wrong move could very easily end his life. Closing his eyes and whispering a silent prayer, Austin hugged his arms around his body and shouted again. He didn’t know whether Luc and Taggy could even hear him through the rock, but he called their names and screamed for help until his voice broke and he was forced to stop due to a fit of coughing. Once he was quiet again though, he heard the most wonderous sound.
“Austin! Austin – where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m in here!” Austin called back, tears pricking his eyes as he heard Luc’s voice. “I’m trapped under the rock. I’m okay. I’m just stuck.”
“Hang on,” Luc called back, “I’m going to try and shift it!”
Austin waited a couple of seconds before he heard the grating sound of rock threatening to move. He looked upwards in the dim light and willed the sheet above his head to move, even a fraction of an inch, but nothing happened. The sound of Luc grunting and huffing outside carried through and Austin stayed quiet, watching around him for a gap to freedom.
“Stop! Stop! Luc, stop!”
With a shudder and a crack, a piece of brick that was keeping the large sheet above Austin’s head in place broke and the roof of his tomb dropped by about half an inch. Austin shrank down as quickly as he could and shielded his head once again with his arms, expecting the large piece of rock to suddenly drop on top of him at any second. When he dared to look up again and managed to stop his heart from thumping so loudly in his chest, Austin saw he was still safe from harm.
“What happened?” Luc called from the outside, confused why Austin had begged him to stop. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Austin shouted back. “The sheet is balanced on some other rocks in here,” he explained. “If they break or fall, then I’ll be crushed. I – I don’t think you can move it.”
Letting the words wash over him, Austin processed what he was saying. If there was no way to move the large rock from above his head, then he would be trapped underneath it forever. The issue was, there didn’t seem to be any safe way to move it without endangering him further. Listening carefully, Austin heard Luc and Taggy talking outside, followed by the sound of footsteps and then to his surprise, more rocks being shifted.
“What are you doing?” He called out in panic. “Don’t shift the rocks. It’ll crush me!”
Fear and desperation filled him as Austin stared above his head and waited for the moment when the rock fell down on top of him and ended his life. His heart pounded and his breathing became short and ragged, the dust particles being sucked in and blown out of his lungs as he began to hyperventilate with panic. It was happening again – just like it had when he’d first met Luc and Taggy – he was having a panic attack and there was nothing around to help calm him down.
“Breathe, Austin,” Taggy’s voice spoke to him, closer than it had been earlier. “Look. I’m over here. Open your eyes, it’s okay.”
Slowly, Austin processed what Taggy was saying and edged one of his eyes open. He had snapped automatically into a familiar position of his eyes squeezed shut and his chin pressed down against his chest as he started to pa
nic, but now as he opened them and realized he was still okay, he began to unfurl.
“Over here,” Taggy’s voice came again from one side of him. “Hey.”
Turning over to where the pile of rubble was holding up the sheet ceiling, Austin noticed a clear beam of light that was now streaking through it. Without him noticing, Taggy had managed to wiggle a piece of brick out from the pile – about halfway down – and now she was peering through the hole, a clear gap made to the outside world.
“Hey,” she repeated when Austin acknowledged her face. “Are you okay?”
“I’m stuck,” Austin declared plainly, feeling the need to state the obvious. “I can’t get out of here.”
“We’ll find a way,” Taggy reassured him. “Don’t you worry, we’ll figure something out. Are you hurt?”
Austin shook his head. All he felt was the fear about being trapped in this tomb forever. The tiny hole that Taggy had made was only just wide enough for her to poke two of her fingers through, there was no way it could be widened without risking the larger piece falling on Austin’s head. Readjusting himself inside the accidental chasm, Austin placed his hands over Taggy’s two fingers and took in a deep breath.
“We’ll get you out of there,” Taggy said softly from outside, doing her best to keep Austin as calm as possible. “Just hold on, Austin. It’s going to be okay.”
Chapter 16
Art held his wife in his arms, cradling Jessie as they watched the sun come up over the ocean. The orange light was beautiful, dancing across the surface of the water like paint on a canvas, creating a picture that would be impossible to recreate. Soon it would be time to go and collect their two boys, bringing them into a world that was different to the one they’d said goodbye to the night before. So much had changed in the last several hours and yet, there was still so much left to discover.
Little by little, April had managed to wear down the Lieutenant and his men, gathering snippets of information and piecing them together to tell a story. Finally, the residents of Kauai learned why their island had been attacked in the way it had and with it, they found out more than they could’ve imagined about what had happened to the rest of the world.
It appeared that Trident’s collapse had been more widespread than any of them could’ve guessed. Most of the islanders believed that while things had been bad at first, America would have quickly found a way to right the wrong and restore the power to the country. Their location didn’t put them very high up the list of priorities for the government, but the people of Kauai had been getting along under the assumption that sooner or later they would see a ship on the horizon or a plane in the sky and someone would come to put things back to the way they’d been.
The story that Lieutenant Wong told however didn’t leave any opening for a hero or a savior. There was no hint at things returning to normal in a matter of weeks or months. The way the Chinese soldier spoke, it was like this was going to carry on for years, the destruction not only the United States had suffered, but the rest of the world too, being far beyond the fixing capabilities of any government or nation.
It was actually when Lieutenant Wong and his soldiers were explaining what had happened to the rest of the world that they truly began to sing. They spoke proudly of the countries which had been torn down, the cities that were burnt to ashes and the millions of lives which had been lost. April relayed each message back to the group – and would later relay it to the rest of the island – the Chinese felt no shame for what they had done, they were proud to have caused such a collapse.
Lieutenant Wong showed no remorse when he was reminded of the number of people that had suffered by his government’s ruling. He spoke like a man who had nothing to hide, stating that his actions brought him and his family honor and that he would not repent for his sins. At long last, he finally explained to April why they were in Kauai and eventually everything made sense.
The island had not been chosen at random. The Chinese government had been inspired by the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. All those years ago the attack had been formulated to give the Japanese a base in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a halfway point between their own country and the western shore of the United States. Jessie remembered learning about it in school and had visited museums on Honolulu which commemorated the lives that had been lost in the attack. When April delivered the explanation for why the Chinese were there, it all suddenly made so much sense – the island an important location between two powerful nations.
Art remarked how lucky they were that the attack this time had only come in the form of a ship on the horizon, rather than from bombs up above. But the Chinese had still been deadly in their assault, civilians from Kauai had still died as a result of it, not to mention the millions of others around the world who were nothing more than a passing thought for the Chinese government. Kauai can’t have been the only target, nor the sole reason for everything that had happened, but it was all Lieutenant Wong disclosed before he shut up shop again, barking orders at his soldiers in Chinese not to say another word.
It was almost a full day later before those directly involved in the uprising met again to discuss their next steps. They had needed the day to recover and tell the rest of their fellow islanders what had happened while they’d slept. They’d mourned the lives of those they had lost and they’d made sure that the soldiers were all rounded up and dealt with, before taking a few precious hours to themselves and regrouping. When they did, no one really knew where to begin.
“What should we do with them? We can’t keep them locked in there forever.”
“There’s no one left on the ship now,” Jason spoke up, having been back to the large vessel that day. “There are close to sixty of them in the holding cells, we couldn’t fit any more in if we tried.”
“So, do we just leave them down there? What’s the best course of action here?”
“We can’t do that,” Art shook his head. “It’s inhumane.”
“Did you not hear what they’ve done, Art?” Jason questioned. “For what they’ve done they can rot down there for the rest of their lives, for all I care.”
“They’re not all guilty though, there are children down there too. We can’t stoop to their level. We need to be the better people here; we need to do the right thing.”
“And what’s that? Seriously man, if you’ve got the answer, let us know, because I’m fresh out of ideas here. This whole thing is messed up. I mean – the world is over. If what those soldiers say is true, there’s no help on its way and no light at the end of the tunnel. This is it – this is all that we’ve got.”
“Then we’ve got to make the most of it.” Kitch stood up, silencing the room with his movement and drawing all eyes in his direction. Like a lot of them, he was running on empty. He’d grabbed at most two hours of sleep before this meeting, the day filled with trips back and forth between the island and the ship, bringing people back and locking them away in Kauai’s limited holding cells. The cells on the island were set up as nothing more than a place for drunks to spend the night if they’d had one too many, or to give teenagers who ran away from home a scare before handing them back over to their parents. Any real criminals were shipped off the island to one of the proper prisons nearby, Kauai was not designed for this sort of affair.
But it was happening now and as Kitch looked around the room, he knew the people needed order now more than ever. They were scared. They’d only just overcome one adversary, but instead of finding a light at the end of the tunnel they were met with more disaster and even more potential suffering. Overthrowing the Chinese was not the end of their struggles, but the beginning of something even worse. Kitch knew they could overcome it if they worked together – just like they had in the early days of the collapse – but they needed to all pull their weight and invest in the future. This only worked if everyone was on board.
“Look, this isn’t what any of us wanted,” Kitch spoke, locking eyes with Martha across the room and feelin
g assured as the woman gave him the faintest of nods. “But we can’t change it. We’ve seen what happens when we all band together and we’ve seen what happens when we don’t. If this is what our future is going to be like, then we need to embrace it and do what we can to keep going. Things don’t have to change too much if we don’t want them to, but it’s as much a mental battle as it is a physical one. If we give up – if we let what they’ve done defeat us – then there’s only going to be one winner.”
“Kitch is right,” Martha spoke up. “We know what we need to do to keep this island functioning, personally our future here doesn’t worry me. We’ve got enough fresh water to keep us going and the ocean is never going to run out of food for us – things might seem bad, but once we harness the basics everything else will come.”
“But what about them?” Jason asked, circling the conversation around again. “What are we going to do with them?”
The fate of the Chinese was yet to be decided as everyone looked around the room at one another, waiting for someone else to make a suggestion. Eventually it was Kitch who once more raised his voice.
“There’s only one thing we can do,” he announced, “we give them a second chance.”
“What? You can’t be serious?”
“Kitch, come on. After everything they did to Jamie? Get real.”
“I’ve spoken to Jamie about this,” Kitch continued, silencing the arguments against him. “And he’s made me see things from his point of view. I won’t deny that when I first saw what they’d done to him, all I wanted was revenge, but that isn’t going to fix anything. We’ve already lost so much because of them; we can’t lose our humanity as well.”
“No way, Kitch,” Jason argued. “We can’t just let them go.”
“Jason is right,” April spoke warily, “I don’t think it would be right to just let them walk freely among us. Some of the things I’ve heard them say,” she paused and shivered a little, “It doesn’t bear repeating.”
