by Dan Rabarts
CHAPTER 20
- Pandora -
With Cerberus in tow, Penny dashes out of the building into the street. She turns back to look at the façade. From the front, the medical centre appears the same, only the upstairs windows are illuminated. But inside, Penny has seen the fire, licking its lips, ready to make a meal out of everything.
Including Matiu if he doesn’t hurry up.
Penny pulls out her phone, strips off her gloves, and punches the number for emergency services. The hollow voice of an automated operator begins her standard spiel. Penny wants to scream with frustration. It’s an emergency, for God’s sake. But she follows the woman’s instructions to the letter: pushing 3 for fire, giving her current address, and providing informed consent for the emergency services to use her GPS location. Hoping that in a back room somewhere a real person is monitoring tonight’s emergency calls, Penny hangs up. Stuffs the used gloves in her satchel.
Now there’s nothing to do but wait.
And wait.
A couple of late-night walkers stop to see what’s going on while Penny and Cerberus pace back and forth in front of the building. The Labrador is beside himself. The smell of fire has him in a near frenzy. He tugs at the leash until it becomes a tourniquet around Penny’s wrist. Penny is grateful for the pain. It gives her something else to think about. Still no sign of Matiu. How long has it been since she left him at the rear of the building? Penny has lost track of time. Could it be a minute? Two? How old is this building anyway? When was it built? Just a hundred years ago, firefighters had around seventeen minutes to evacuate a structure before a fire took hold. These days, it can take less than three. Three minutes! Penny bites her thumb nail.
More bystanders gather.
Come on, Matiu. Get your arse out of there.
Upstairs, a window pops, raining glass on the street. Penny pulls Cerberus away from the shards, and, crouching, plunges her hands into the fur at the Lab’s neck, the gesture as much to ground herself as to soothe the dog. Above them, a tell-tale orange glow flickers in the empty window frame.
“Matiu, come on.”
Fuck!
He’s taking too long. Frantic, Penny pulls off her satchel, rummaging inside for a safety mask and goggles. They’ll have to do.
“Here, take my dog, will you?” she yells, pushing Cerberus’ lead and her satchel at a bystander. She stoops to give Cerberus a reassuring pat. “Wait here, boy.”
The man’s eyes widen. “What, no! You can’t go in there. Didn’t you see that window? That place is on fire. You want to get yourself killed?”
But Penny waves him off. “My brother’s in there,” she says.
“Oh shit.” The man takes a step backwards, his face pale. “You hear that?” he says to his companion. “There’s someone in there.”
“Tell the fire service!” Penny shouts over her shoulder as she runs across the road. Then she takes a couple of deep breaths and enters the building.
For the moment, the reception rooms remain untouched, Buchanan’s face smiling from the magazine on the counter. Penny isn’t fooled. The fire will be lurking behind doors, behind walls, gathering force, ready to ambush her. She slides the goggles over her eyes, and the mask down over her nose. Neither will save her. They’re not designed to protect a wearer from clouds of toxic gas, but that’s OK. All she needs is enough time to find Matiu and get him the hell out.
She drops to her hands and knees and crawls forward, the heat increasing as she moves into the building’s interior. Turning her head, she scans the room to her left. A table and chairs. A water dispenser. A corner sofa. Staff room, by the looks of it. No Matiu. Penny crawls on. The room on the right is an examination room, the counter covered in boxes of medical equipment—cotton balls and tongue depressors—the centre floor-space taken up by a gurney which is half-obscured by a privacy curtain. When the fire reaches here, that curtain will go up in seconds. Not to mention the cotton balls. Penny hurries forward, keeping low, slithering on her elbows like a reptile. She chances a quick look up. Overhead black smoke billows. Flames lick at the ceiling. Deep orange flames, like candied peel.
Shit, that’s bad. When carbon particles combust, they emit light, their colour indicating the temperature of the flame. She forgets what temperature deep orange represents exactly. Somewhere around 2000°C. Fucking hot anyway. The floor above her is probably already ablaze. It could come down at any second.
Damn it, Matiu. Where the hell are you?
Finally, she sees him, a hump on the floor in front of her, his black leather jacket almost camouflaging him in the swirling smoke. He’s exactly where she left him, on the sill of the office. Only, when she’d left, he’d been vertical. And alone. There’s another form beyond him. In white. Someone else. Buchanan? Penny hasn’t got time to check. Like a couple of chess pawns, both men have been bowled sideways, overcome by smoke. Penny’s feeling pretty woozy herself. There isn’t much time. She gets to her feet, and keeping her head as low as she can, grabs her brother by his armpits and slides him along the polished lino into the corridor.
Jesus, Matiu.
Still alive, at least. But she can’t stop there. Abandoning Matiu, and coughing on fumes, she runs back into the office, into the flames, yanking the second man clear by the shoulders of his lab coat. Then she slams the door, trapping the fire in the office, and hopefully buying precious seconds. Except, even with those seconds, it’s futile. There’s no way Penny can pull both men out of the building. On his own, Matiu is nearly twice her weight. Who knows what the other man might weigh? She simply isn’t strong enough, and there isn’t time to come back a second time.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, her lips barely moving as she grabs Matiu by the hands and tugs him towards the front, her sandals slipping on the lino. Maybe the fire service will arrive in time to save the other man. Matiu is her baby brother.
Her muscles screaming, she pulls Matiu past the examination room, her head spinning from the smoke.
Wait. The gurney!
Immediately, she dismisses the idea. There’s no time. But she dives into the room anyway, crawling along the floor and almost crying with relief when she reaches it. The gurney has a hydraulic mechanism. Battery powered. She palpates for the switch. The apparatus whirs. Penny pulls her hands out of the way as the stretcher lowers until it is only a hand high. More luck. It’s a bariatric stretcher—wider than normal. Quickly, Penny pushes it into the hall alongside her brother, accidentally running over Matiu’s hand in her haste.
Sorry.
Now, the ceiling ripples with flame. It’s an ocean of ripples. Dripping fiery sparks. Penny rolls Matiu bodily onto the gurney. The other man?
She can’t. There’s no time.
But her body has a mind of its own. She finds herself standing up and running crouched in the direction of the office and the second man. Fighting nausea, she slides him along the lino until he lies lengthwise beside the gurney. Her lungs are on fire now, her eyes watering, her muscles shrieking from an overdose of lactic acid.
Just a few seconds more. Is. All. I. Need.
Penny claws at the man, trying to lift him onto the trolley. He’s too heavy. Even at floor level, she can’t roll him on top of Matiu from this side.
Think, Penny, think!
Her head spinning, she moves to the other side of the gurney and, leaning over, she slips the gurney’s safety strap through his belt-loop. Then, pulling on the strap, she hauls him up by his jeans, turning him towards her, her sandals wedged under the trolley. She grunts with effort. Her legs burn. Lungs burn. Eyes burn. Everything burns. Finally, she gets him on the gurney, his body slumped over Matiu’s. Penny feels her legs crumple. She miscalculated. Took too long. Breathed in too much smoke. She slides to the floor.
Suddenly, there’s a face in hers. Pushing at her mask.
Cerberus. Thank God.
With a surge of adrenalin, Penny gropes for the dog’s collar and finds his lead. She loops it over the front crossbar of the gurney and snaps the catch closed. Then, she slaps him on the flank. Hard.
Go.
The words don’t come. She has no saliva. Penny crawls then, dragging herself out of the building as the ceiling falls around her.
CHAPTER 21
- Matiu -
Matiu coughs, the world rushing back in a choking haze as fresh air floods his lungs. He’s moving, bouncing and jostling somehow. In the distance, sirens echo around the walls, the streets. He’s outside. Cracking his eyes open, he sees the footpath clattering by underneath him, flickers of red dancing across his periphery. There’s a weight on his shoulders, and he tries to shift it by flexing his arms, but they’re pinned underneath him. The weight moves, slides, and he pushes against it.
It’s a body. There’s a body on his back. He swallows a sudden urge to vomit, and rolls over. With an awkward sliding tangle of limbs, Matiu, lying on what appears to be a gurney, twists over, and the body which was on his back slips. The man’s face is a mask of blood, his eyes gone, leaving only bloody holes raked with scratches staring into nothing.
The gurney slows and stops. Matiu pushes himself away, sending the dead man—he has to be dead, right?—sliding to the street, and then collapses to the footpath himself. Cerberus barks. Coughing, Matiu scratches the dog behind the ear and drags himself over to look at the body, presumably Buchanan, sprawled on the road. His lungs still burn and every movement is an effort, but he has to see. One of the doctor’s hands is coated with drying blood, the other jammed into his pocket, his lab coat smeared with red. Gingerly, and quite sure he doesn’t even want to know what the man has put into his pocket, Matiu reaches out and extracts the bloody limb from where it’s hidden. His breath catches at the sight of a surgical scalpel, gripped death-like in the man’s fingers. Something clings to the blade, white, viscous. In a moment of pure, horrific clarity, Matiu can see that shape of the blade where it has scored the flesh of the man’s face, the lines where the steel has slashed his skin, cut out his eyes. His gorge rises. Something else tumbles from the pocket, yet Matiu can see nothing but the bloody blade gleaming in the firelight. His gaze fixes on the blood that covers Buchanan’s fingers, and he knows, without knowing how, that Buchanan did this to himself. What did he see, that he felt the urge to take out his own eyes?
Cerberus barks again, pulling him back to the moment. It’s a data sliver that fell from Buchanan’s pocket. Quickly swiping the sliver and pocketing it, Matiu backs away from the body.
Cerberus is still barking, and Matiu looks around. The clinic is an inferno, with people gathering on the street as the sirens draw closer. Then someone is hauling him to his feet, a stranger, but he’s pointing back at the building. “Hey, pal! Your lady friend, she went in after you!”
Penny!
Matiu stands and staggers towards the fire as sirens swell around him and the walls swim with strobing red lights. She’s collapsed on the footpath just outside the building, overcome by smoke. He skids to his knees, the heat of the fire searing him. He hooks her under the armpit and hauls her to her feet. She’s light, so dreadfully light, like she’s made of air and smoke and dreams, nightmares. Then he’s stumbling away from the fire, her feet dragging, his lungs burning. Shapes appear in the smoke around him, faceless silver ghosts. In what feels like painful slow motion, Matiu carries Penny away from the burning building.
Maybe it’s a gas line, or a tank of medical oxygen, Matiu doesn’t know. But the explosion that rips through the night and sends a great demon of flame billowing into the sky pounds through his spine, knocking the strength from his oxygen-starved legs. He goes down, loses his grip on Penny, and the road leaps up to slap him across the face. Swimming seconds of blurred darkness, confusion. Then there are more silver-garbed soldiers all around, and the air is full of wet mist and arcing jets of water, and someone is asking him questions he can’t answer, and he just wants to collapse and throw up and sleep forever.
What happened to Penny? He was holding her, just here, a second ago, where is she? Where’s his sister? He might be asking that out loud, he’s not sure. He can hear the words, but he has no idea if they’re coming from him, or merely echoing inside his skull. There’s a mask on his face, a blanket of some kind around his shoulders, and someone’s shining a light in his eyes.
Again with the questions.
“Mate, is there anyone else inside?”
He shakes his head. “Don’t…know,” he croaks. “Just us, the doctor, I think.”
Then he’s being wheeled somewhere, away from the noise, the heat, the lights that roar across his vision like so many swarming taniwha with their eyes torn out by their own claws, like blind raging tentacles, hungering for sight and air from a darker place. He closes his eyes and wishes he could sink into that place, tear out his eyes and never return.
- Pandora -
Yellow light oscillates. Sirens scream. Penny lies on her back on the pavement, looking at the sky. She blinks. No orange flames licking upwards. No billows of grey smoke. The air is cool. She’s outside. She inhales deeply, filling her lungs. Auckland’s atmospheric pollution quotient may be heinous, but as far as she’s concerned the city’s air has never tasted sweeter. She stifles a sob.
They made it.
Testing her limbs, she shifts to a sitting position, a surge of nausea threatening to overwhelm her. She sees stars.
Jeepers. She’s tempted to lie straight back down again. Everywhere hurts. She struggles to breathe.
“Here, let me help you get off the road,” someone—a paramedic?—says, giving her an arm. He helps her to a nearby bollard.
“Wait here,” the man says when she’s propped up like a dolly. “I need to get you an oxygen mask.” He lopes away into the flash of lights.
Her safety goggles are long gone, but Penny pulls the mask down around her neck. It dangles from the elastic, the white filter now black with soot and ash. Licking her lips— wishing now that she’d asked the paramedic to find her some water—she surveys the damage. The medical centre has fallen in on itself, the explosion that gutted the interior causing its steel girders to twist and collapse inwards. Shredded blinds flutter at the shattered windows, and steam sizzles as water hits the fire-licked beams. Silver-clad fire service personnel, like ancient astronauts, move—in slow motion, it seems to Penny—to deal with the fire still cackling and spitting, while here and there uniformed police calm the bystanders.
She’s lost track of Matiu, but just minutes ago he’d been upright beside her, dragging her away from the building, before the place went up, the blastwave sending them barrelling forward, and Penny landing on her fanny in the middle of the road. He’ll be around somewhere. Maybe giving the paramedics a talking to. She should probably check.
But then she sees the mangled gurney. Flung farther along the street in the blast, it’s lying on its side. Underneath it, Cerberus is struggling to free himself, his front paws scrabbling, his haunches pinned beneath the stretcher.
“Cerberus,” she calls, unable to manage much more than a whisper. “Hang on. I’m coming.” Using the bollard to support her weight, Penny gets up, waits a few seconds for the dizziness to subside, and stumbles over to the dog. Still unsteady, she sits down on her bottom on the asphalt and unclips the lead from Cerberus’ collar. Then she lifts the side of the trolley, creating a space for the dog to escape. Entangled in the straps, Cerberus kicks his hind legs a couple of times, then clambers out from under it, immediately hurling himself at Penny, pushing her backwards and licking her face.
Flat out on the ground again, Penny lifts her chin, dropping her head onto the road to avoid his doggy kiss.
“Hey! Yes, I’m OK,” she says, her voice gravelly. “We’re fine. Good boy. Down
now. Good boy, Cerberus.”
Penny lies there and indulges the dog a moment, playfully rubbing his back and flopping his ears. God knows he deserves it. He may have evaded the bystander she’d left him with, but he saved Matiu’s life, hauling that gurney out of the building. Suddenly, she remembers the other man. Was it Buchanan? Did he survive? Penny had been too preoccupied getting them out. Whoever the man was, he’d been unconscious. Hardly surprising since he’d been exposed to the smoke for longer than either Penny or Matiu. Although, now her lungs have had a chance to recover, she should get up off the road and go and find out.
“Cerberus, that’s enough. Hop off me now.” She pushes gently at the dog, who steps to one side. “Good boy,” she says again.
Turning and kneeling, she unravels Cerberus’ lead from the gurney. He’s managed to get it completely twisted up. She’s just refastened it to his collar when she glimpses the silver sedan roll out of the service lane behind what’s left of the medical centre. The driver can’t resist a quick rubberneck backwards at the devastation.
Sandi Kerr.
Arriving or leaving?
Penny narrows her eyes. She’d put her money on the woman just leaving now. It’s too much of a coincidence that they should see her earlier at the warehouse and, now, here at Buchanan’s surgery. Did she have something to do with starting the fire? She couldn’t have got here before Penny and Matiu, but plenty of lowlifes in this city would be willing to send a building up in flames for the right money. Perhaps she’s passing by to verify that what had been ordered had been done?
