Things Fall Down

by Keith Taylor

  It sounded like the pull cord of a chainsaw. Jack had grown up with the sound of his dad angrily fighting with the motor of his old gas powered Dolmar every weekend through the fall. The sound was unmistakable. What kind of backwoods horror movie have I stumbled into? he thought, half expecting a lunatic to come tearing around the corner of the station at any moment.

  And then another sound followed the last, this one much less terrifying.

  “Oh, for the love of Mike, would you please just start?! Honest to goodness, what the heck’s wrong with this thing?”

  It was a woman’s voice, and she sounded far from crazy. Frustrated, but not crazy.

  Jack crouched down by Warren’s unconscious body, awkwardly shifting him to what looked like a more comfortable position. He pressed his fingers against his throat, checking his pulse. “Hang in there, buddy, I’m gonna go get help.”

  Warren’s eyes fluttered open for a moment, the first time Jack had seen him do anything but sleep since he'd first passed out. He muttered something, his lips moving almost silently, but no real words came out. He was delirious, his face a deathly white.

  “I’ll be right back. Just sit tight.” He looked over to Boomer and gave her a scratch behind the ear. “Stay with him, buddy.”

  Jack reluctantly left Warren behind and made his way around the front of the building, glancing through the open door into the darkness, but the store seemed to be empty. The lights were off inside, and in what little light made it through the window he could only see the faint outline of the counter.

  “Hello? Anyone here?”

  The tearing sound came again, much closer this time, and Jack realized it was coming from the other side of the building, somewhere near the back. He stepped out of the store and made his way carefully along the front wall, and when he rounded the corner he saw a middle-aged, red-faced, red-haired woman hunched over a rusting generator, shaking out the soreness in her hands as the starter cord swung by her waist.

  Jack coughed politely. “Umm… Hello?”

  The woman jumped, letting out a yelp of surprise, and then just as quickly she burst into a fit of nervous, embarrassed laughter.

  “Oh, Lord, you scared the daylights out of me!” She held her hand over her chest and smiled. “Sorry, sorry, I just thought I had the place to myself. Haven’t seen a soul all night. Don’t mind me, I’m just a little flustered.” She curled her lip and blew her frizzy hair back from her forehead, hoisting herself up from the generator. “Sorry, darling, I’m afraid there’s no gas right now. Darned power’s on the fritz.”

  Jack stared at her open-mouthed, certain he was missing some kind of joke, but there wasn’t a hint of deceit or guile in her face. She really didn’t know.

  “You haven’t, ummm…” He stopped himself. He was about to explain everything to her, from the warnings on the news to the blast in the sky above, but then he remembered Warren. He realized he couldn’t spare the time to bring this woman up to speed, nor wait for her to absorb what had happened.

  “I don’t need gas,” he said, pointing back towards the station forecourt. “I need help. I have a friend out there, and we… ummm… we had a skydiving accident. He’s in bad shape.”

  The woman shot him a quizzical look as she grabbed her flashlight from the generator and played it across him, taking in his muddy jacket with one arm torn from the shoulder.

  “You had a skydiving accident?” She pointed at his clothes. “In a suit and tie?”

  “I’m a doctor,” Jack replied quickly, hoping she wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t answered her question. “Do you have a first aid kit here? My friend’s losing a lot of blood and I need to stitch the wound.”

  The woman narrowed her eyes and pondered the question for a moment, sucking her teeth. “I have Tylenol. Probably a few sticking plasters. Never really had much call for anything else.” She shot him a sympathetic smile, and then her eyes lit up. “Oh, wait! Yeah, I have one of those, umm, sewing things. You know, those little sewing kits like you get in fancy hotels. Would that work?”

  Jack smiled, relieved. “Yeah, I think I can make that work. Thank you.”

  “Just wait here, I’ll go fetch it.” She wiped her hands on her plaid shirt and made for a side door to the little building, vanishing into the dim room beyond.

  “Oh,” Jack called after her, “and if you have any liquor or something that could help me sterilize the wound, that’d be great.”

  “No worries, darling,” she called from inside. “I think I have something in the back. I’ll be just two seconds.”

  Jack leaned against the wall, closed his eyes and finally felt his aching, knotted muscles begin to relax. He’d been on edge since the moment he’d spoken to Ramos hours earlier, his heart racing a mile a minute, but for the first time since Seattle he finally felt like he was standing on solid ground.

  This was a situation he could control. He could clean and stitch a wound in his sleep. It wasn’t much, but he figured that maybe if he could fix Warren maybe he could start to get a grip on things. Maybe he could stop feeling like he was running just a couple of steps ahead of disaster, trying his best not to stumble. Maybe he could actually get out ahead of this, and take back some kind of control over the—

  “OK, don’t move a God damned muscle.”

  Jack’s eyes snapped open, and at first his mind couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing.

  The woman was standing in the side doorway. The cheerful smile was gone, and her voice had turned hard and threatening.

  In her hands, the steel glinting in the moonlight, she held a shotgun, and it was pointed at his chest.

  ΅

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  DEAD AIR

  BENEATH THE GLOWING green sign the steel door opened onto a stark concrete staircase, illuminated by emergency lighting that made the walls glow blood red. The staircase led both up and down, and without hesitation Ramos began to head down. “Close that door behind you,” he ordered, taking Emily by the hand. “We have to create as many barriers as we can.”

  Ramos continued down the stairs, and he’d made it to the next level before he suddenly stopped and slapped his forehead, turning back to Karen. “What the hell am I thinking?” He muttered to himself. “Damn it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  Emily looked up at him, peering through the lab coat still draped over her head. “You’re not stupid. Doctors are clever, right, mom?”

  Karen nodded at Emily, smiling. “That’s right, pumpkin. Doc, what’s up?”

  Ramos tugged the lab coat from Emily’s head and dropped it to the ground. “Our clothes! Christ knows how much radiation they absorbed up there. We have to get rid of them.” He was already unbuttoning his collar when he saw Karen’s expression. “I don’t like it any more than you, but there’s no choice. Look.” He pointed to Karen’s shoulder, and when she looked down she was horrified to see flakes of ash clinging to her scrubs.

  “Oh, Jesus!” she yelled, trying to brush it away, but it only smeared on her fingers.

  “It’s too late to just clean it off,” Ramos told her, pulling his shirt over his head, still buttoned. “Anything the ash touched is already contaminated.” He kicked off his shoes as Karen tugged her top over her head. “We can’t take any chances. It’s not pretty, but we have to strip to our underwear.”

  He unbuckled his belt and dropped his pants, revealing a pair of gray underpants with worn elastic straining over his round paunch. He blushed, trying to suck in his gut without success. “I’ve got a feeling I won’t remember this as my most heroic moment.”

  Despite herself Karen couldn’t help but let out a nervous laugh. “Nor mine,” she admitted, shrugging off her trousers, pulling her phone from the pocket and tucking it beneath her bra. “After two kids I‘m not exactly in the running for a swimwear catalog” She kicked her pile of clothes to the corner of the stairwell, then dropped to her knees to help Emily undress. “It’s OK, honey, we’ll find you something else to wear as soon
as we can.”

  It was only when Emily was down to her Winnie the Pooh underwear that Karen froze, staring at her daughter. She drew back in horror. “Doc! She’s got it in her hair!” She backed away and shook out her own hair, and she was mortified to see ash fall like dandruff to the ground. “What do we do?”

  Ramos ruffled his own thinning hair, pulling his hand away to find gray ash smeared across his fingers. “OK… OK, let’s not panic. We… ummm, we need to find someplace to wash this off as best we can. Soap and water, lots of soap and water.” He tried to calm Karen as she paced back and forth in the cramped stairwell. “It’s OK, I think we probably caught it soon enough. We… we just have to move quick. Come on.”

  Ramos left behind the irradiated clothes piled in the stairwell and continued down, his stomach jiggling as he hopped down the steps two at a time in bare feet. Karen followed, Emily’s hand in hers, until they finally reached an identical door two flights below. Ramos paused at it for a moment, as if unsure whether to open it, but then he turned away and continued down once again.

  “What’s through there?” Karen asked.

  Ramos stopped to catch his breath. “That’s our way out. The lower deck of the bridge.”

  Karen stopped in her tracks. “OK, so why are we still heading down? That’s where we want to go, right? We need to get to the mainland.”

  “It’s another two miles to Oakland. We’d never make it that far. Even now it’s…” He shook his head. “Well, it’s touch and go whether we got out of it in time. And besides,” he paused for a moment, as if wondering how much information to give Karen without scaring her, “we want as few people with us as possible. There may be people still out there. We don’t want them following us.”

  Karen had no idea what he meant. Why would it matter if other people followed them? Surely he wasn’t worried they’d be radioactive, right? “Why—” she began, but Ramos cut her off, preempting the question.

  “Food and water,” he said, continuing down the staircase. “We left ours behind in the car, remember? We might be stuck here a while, and I’m guessing this place doesn’t have a 7-Eleven.”

  They descended two more flights before the staircase came to an end at a hallway that ran a couple dozen yards before ending at another door, this one marked with a sign.

  Oakland Bay Bridge Authority Control Room. Unauthorized Entry Prohibited. Beside the door a red box was mounted to the wall, a fire extinguisher and ax behind the dusty glass.

  Ramos pushed open the door and headed inside, where a small, cramped office glowed blue with the lights of a bank of monitors that covered one wall. Each of them played live images of the bridge and tunnel above. A little more than half were blank, hissing with static, but the rest showed either the empty upper deck or the packed lower deck. Karen didn’t give them much notice, but there were people moving on many of the screens.

  At the wall opposite the monitors there were two more doors, each of them labeled. The first was obviously a bathroom, and the second read Break Room.

  “Oh, thank God,” Ramos sighed, making straight for the bathroom. “Come on, we have to get cleaned up.”

  He rushed through the door, and by the time Karen caught up he was already at the washbasin, dunking his head beneath the hot tap and scrubbing at his hair with hand soap squeezed from a dispenser. He backed away, his head frothing with suds. “Don’t miss a spot. Cover every inch, and scrub like your life depends on it, because it does.”

  Karen washed Emily first, ignoring her squeals of discomfort as the hot water scalded her scalp. The water ran gray down the drain, and Emily’s long hair clumped and knotted with so much ash and dust it looked like she’d dipped her head in an ashtray. Only when her daughter’s head was almost invisible beneath a cloud of foam did Karen dip her own head beneath the stream.

  Ramos blinked stinging suds from his eyes as he grabbed a bucket from the corner, tossed a dirty mop aside and filled it from the faucet. He tipped it over his head, carefully positioning himself over the toilet so the suds washed down the drain, rather than splashed across the floor. He rinsed thee times before he was finally satisfied, and then he helped Karen and Emily clean themselves off.

  “Umm,” he muttered, embarrassed. “You should probably wash your underwear too. You know, better safe than sorry” He jerked his thumb back towards the control room. “I’ll give you some privacy.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” Karen replied, already unhooking her bra as Ramos hurried out of the room. He looked embarrassed, but Karen had too much on her mind to feel self conscious about nudity right now.

  It was a half hour before Karen was finally satisfied that Emily was clean, and by then the water gushing from the faucet ran ice cold. Both Karen and Emily shivered in soaking wet underwear, skipping from foot to foot on the bare tile floor, and they were thankful when they stepped back into the control room to find that it was a few degrees warmer in the carpeted room.

  Ramos barely noticed them enter. He was standing before a control panel on the wall beside the security monitors, peering at the dozens of blinking lights and switches that adorned it. His chin was buried in his palm as he studied the panel.

  “What’s up?” Karen asked, searching for something she could use as a towel. “Is there a problem?”

  Ramos scratched his chin, deep in thought, and pointed to one of the monitors on the wall. “Uh huh. That.”

  Karen looked at the image on the monitor, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It was a view of the lower deck of the tunnel, one of about a dozen still playing on the wall, but as far as she could tell there was nothing going on. There were maybe a few dozen cars in shot, but no people. It looked abandoned.

  “Help me out, doc. What’s the problem? I don’t see anything but cars.”

  Ramos shook his head. “No, not the cars. That.” He reached over and tapped the screen, and finally Karen saw it. At the top of the shot, close to the tunnel roof, was the bottom half of what looked like an enormous air conditioning unit. Three circular gratings were visible, and behind each one a large fan slowly turned.

  “That’s the ventilation system. They use them to stop the pollution from the vehicles from building up in the tunnel.”

  “And it’s a problem because…?” Karen still couldn’t see what he was getting at.

  Ramos pointed to the ceiling of the office. It was made of dozens of plasterboard tiles on a steel frame, but in place of two of the tiles were air vents. Now Karen finally began to understand.

  “We’re getting air from outside?”

  Ramos nodded. “Can’t you smell that exhaust?” Karen sniffed, and for the first time she noticed the smell. It wasn’t strong, but now she’d noticed it it was obvious. “Cheap ass government contractors working to a budget. They didn’t give this place a dedicated air supply. This whole place must be on the same system.”

  He sighed, staring at the control panel. “They probably added a few filters in the ducts to keep the worst of it out of here, but they won’t do squat against radiation. If those fans keep spinning we’re living on borrowed time.”

  “OK, so what’s the hold up? Shut them down.”

  Ramos let out a bitter, frustrated laugh. “That’s the problem. There doesn’t seem to be any way to shut them down from here.”

  “But there has to be a switch somewhere, right? Surely there’s… I don’t know, some kind of instruction manual somewhere around here?”

  Ramos shook his head. “I’m not so sure. These things aren’t designed to ever shut down. There are failsafes on top of failsafes, because if you lose ventilation in a tunnel you end up with a lot of sick or dead drivers, and enough lawsuits to run until the end of time. These aren’t the kind of fans you could accidentally shut down by nudging a switch with your elbow.”

  Karen stared at the control panel, hoping to prove him wrong. She knew it was a silly thought, but she hoped against hope that there really would be an obvious off switch Ramos had missed, staring him righ
t in the face. “Let’s see… LD lighting…. UD lighting… CR lighting…”

  Ramos cut her off. “Forget that. This whole section just controls the lights.” He waved at the top half of the panel, and then pointed at the bottom. “And this has something to do with the PA system and radio comms with the mainland. There’s nothing here that has anything to do with the ventilation. Nothing!”

  “What about the computer?” Karen turned to a desktop on a table in front of the security monitors. She looked around the desk for a mouse or trackpad, but there was nothing there. There wasn’t even a keyboard, just a joystick mounted to the desk, like she used to have with her old Amiga back in the Eighties.

  Ramos shook his head. “ They wouldn’t control something like this by computer. It’s too big a security risk. Ventilation will all be manually controlled, hard wired, not on something that could be hijacked over a network.” He waved dismissively at the desk. “Besides, that’s not a real computer. It’s just some kind of interface for the camera system.”

  On the screen in front of Karen was a grid of several dozen small icons, each of them marked in sequence. CC Feed 1, CC Feed 2… She tapped the joystick to one side and one of the icons flashed up in red. CC Feed 17. She nudged it again and 16 flashed red, then 15.

  Curious, she pushed a black trigger at the top of the joystick, and now the icon flashed green. “Huh,” she muttered to herself, moving the joystick once again, but this time the icon remained green. She figured nothing had happened, but then she noticed the image on one of the wall monitors panning to the left. “Hey, I can control the cameras.”

  Emily rushed over to the desk. “Oh, cool. Can I play with it?” she asked, reaching up to grab the joystick.

  “Just a second, pumpkin.” Karen pushed her hand away and took hold of the joystick again, clicking the trigger and highlighting screen 23. This was the screen Ramos had pointed out to her, and as she panned the camera up the fans came fully into view. They were each enormous, at least a few yards across, lazily spinning a full revolution every five seconds or so.