He heard it then … a sound so faint in his mind that he had completely submerged it beneath his own thoughts.
Where are you?
It was then that he realized it wasn’t merely that the voice was faint—a clear indication that the owner was in pain and distress—he didn’t recognize the language.
And the woman calling out to him didn’t understand him.
He accessed his communicator. Language, he growled impatiently?
No one acknowledged the request but the information was streamed to his chip almost instantaneously.
Where are you?
“I’m here! Help me! I’m under the wall … I think the wall fell on me.”
Even as Dante moved toward the sound of her voice, he discovered he wasn’t the only one that had heard it. Light from above abruptly illuminated the entire area and Dante stepped back instinctively, tipping his head to look up.
“Search and rescue! Hold on! We’re coming! We’ll get you out!” The direction of the voice shifted. “There’s somebody alive down there! Give me some slack!”
Dante moved back into the shadows to assess the situation. There’d been a cave-in. That much seemed obvious. There was a hole above and a mountain of debris from the floor of the cave where they stood to higher ground above them. His mind grappled with the fact that he was in a cave at all when his last memory was of being in a city on the surface of the Earth! It had been washed away—or the inhabitants had—by a great ocean wave hundreds of feet high, but he’d had no notion that it had literally sunk.
So, had it? Or had enough time passed that the lost city had become a cave below ground?
He was so infuriated for many moments by the possibility that the latter was the case that it wasn’t until his anger began to dissipate that the implications became clear to him.
The humans were about to discover something the gods didn’t want them to know. That was why he had been awakened.
Otherwise this would have been his tomb for eternity!
And just what the fuck do you think I can do about this, he roared into his communicator? It’s too late to stop it! You should have thought about it before you decided to punish ….
This is not our doing! The humans ….
Contempt flooded Dante’s mind. He made no attempt to hide it. You always blame them. If they’d meant to do this the surface wouldn’t be crawling with rescue people! And I can’t destroy the evidence, without creating more of a disaster, which will only bring others! I repeat, how the hell do you expect me to fix this?
You figure it out. That’s part of your job, Watcher! And, know this, if you fail again, they’ll suffer along with you. There will be another cleansing ….
* * * *
Claire had been wavering between fear and despair, consciousness and unconsciousness for what seemed like ages but she thought was probably considerably less than an hour when she heard something that produced a rush of fear/hope driven adrenaline through her system that made her feel faint and dizzy—the rustle of what sounded like wings.
She didn’t, in fact, identify the sound, at first, as the rustle of wings and when she did, she did her best to dismiss it.
She was in a cave but surely to god it was too far underground—and cut off—for there to be anything living in it!
Bats came to mind.
And she was trapped and couldn’t fend the damned things off if they flew at her!
As the panic eased off, though, she realized that the rustle might have been something else, a shift in the debris—holy terror!—or someone—alive—who was down in the hole with her. She struggled to call out, but it took a great effort. Dirt had scoured her throat and lungs and whatever was pressing down on her made it impossible to expand her lungs to shout. “I’m here! Help me! I’m here.”
She twisted her head to search for the source of the sound.
Which was when she saw … something her mind simply refused to process.
* * * *
By the time Dominic’s SEAL team arrived, it was already shaping up to be one of the worst disasters in the history of Florida if not the U.S. Dominic felt such a rush of adrenaline when he first caught sight of the hole that he was dizzy with it for a handful of seconds.
The ground had opened up and swallowed at least one four story apartment unit, although from what was left it looked like it might have been three or four. The sun hadn’t quite broke over the horizon, but, with the aid of the baleful glare of dozens of emergency floodlights and the churning red and blue lights of emergency vehicles, he could see what was left of a roof about fifteen to twenty feet below the surface.
God only knew how far down the damn hole went!
“Eighty five footer, I’d bet money,” one of the other team members, Jones, commented.
“I’ll take it. No water. Can’t be that deep.”
“Can it,” Dominic growled. “I don’t want to hear that shit when we hit the ground. It’ll make the papers and we’ll all be neck deep in shit!”
It wasn’t a lack of empathy that had inspired the comments. Dominic knew that. They were just trying to brace themselves for the job ahead of them, but he could see the news people were all over it already and the one thing they really excelled at was getting people stirred up.
Him and his team bailed out as soon as the chopper touched down.
Instantly, chaos surrounded him, seemed to roll over them like a tsunami. There were people shouting and screaming and running in every direction despite the efforts of emergency personnel to evacuate the buildings surrounding the disaster area in an orderly manner. There were around a dozen police units and an equal number of fire units plus civilian rescue personnel.
News people had begun circling like a flock of vultures who’d caught the scent of blood, adding to the noise and general chaos.
“Lieutenant Dominic DiCarlo. Me and my team were sent to help. We got any idea how many people might be down there, chief?” he asked the fire and rescue marshal as soon as he reached him and gained his attention.
“Possibly as many as twenty,” Marshal Thompson responded.
Surprise flickered through Dominic and he responded before he’d thought it through. “Only twenty?”
“That ain’t bad enough?” one of the other rescuers growled, having sized up the SEAL team and apparently decided they’d come to grab the ‘glory’.
Anger flickered through Dominic. “It’s a four story building—minimum of forty units, I’m thinking! You’re sure there aren’t more people down there?”
“Forty Eight—each. Three units down there. Luckily, this was new construction—not completely finished, in point of fact. According to the owner they hadn’t leased but about half of the units and, of those, only a handful of tenants had moved in. So, they’re thinking a maximum of two dozen people could be down there.”
“Think … not know? Unless somebody was entertaining guests,” Dominic pointed out. “Well, let’s get to it, then. I’ll go in first, have a look around. If it looks doable, me and my team will set up a search ….”
“Nobody’s going down there until we’ve had time to assess the risks!”
Dominic gaped at the man in outrage. “There’s people down there that need help. And I’m guessing they might not be able to wait.”
“Maybe. We don’t know if there are any survivors.”
“And if there are, they won’t be survivors long ….”
A man shoved his way into the group. “One of our people is down there.”
The group of men stared blankly at the newcomer. “Who’s ‘our’?” the fire marshal demanded.
“FSGD--State … geological division. Dr. Claire Collins. Any chance she survived?” he asked.
“We don’t know if anybody survived … yet. I was about to go down,” Dominic responded.
“Like hell!” Marshal Thompson growled. “I already told you we’re trying to assess the risk. This is my jurisdiction ….”
“So I’ll go d
own and assess the fucking risk!” Dominic barked at him. “That’s what I’m here for! That’s what I’m trained for!”
“I think we need to get a handle on crowd control,” the newcomer muttered. “If the ground is unstable we’re liable to have a much larger disaster on our hands.”
“To say nothing of the fact that we can’t hear ourselves think over the noise let alone anybody that’s injured and trying to call out for help!” Dominic agreed.
It was a lucky break to Dominic’s mind. The state man redirected the fire marshal’s attention and while they were focused on rounding up enough personnel to push the civilians back, he and his men headed over to the hole to assess the situation.
“Looks like that spot over there is going to be our best bet, Lieutenant,” Jones said, pointing.
Dominic felt his belly clench as he studied the black mouth yawning like some kind of giant monster. Most of the debris had slid down from the side where they were standing, though, creating a small, slope sided underground mountain … that was like a mine field. “Yeah. Jones, you and Diaz go find something to tie on to that seems likely to stay.
Jones and Diaz exchanged a look. Several building were lying in a heap at their feet. It was anybody’s guess what, if anything, would follow them down. How were they supposed to figure out what would make a safe anchor?
Dominic had no trouble interpreting the look. He’d considered the dilemma himself. “Use that fire engine over there. Hopefully it won’t end up on top of me,” he muttered as they headed off to secure lines to lower him down.
They bluffed their way through the interference they ran into along the way and inside of fifteen minutes after he’d landed, Dominic was dangling at the end of a safety line over a hole that looked like the Grand Canyon. The sun had risen in the meantime and a wedge of light was inching its way downward over the mountain of debris, but the bottom could have been a thousand miles down. It was pitch black. As soon as he’d been lowered enough that the racquet created by the crowd at ground level began to fade, he began to shout, identifying himself as a rescuer and hoping he would get a response from at least a few of the people known to be trapped in the debris.
To his relief, he heard someone—actually several—almost immediately.
Extracting survivors was rather like the old game of pickup sticks. You had to extract each survivor with exquisite care not to disturb the pile or it would shift and make it impossible to extract other survivors. The first task, though, was to locate as many as possible and see to their immediate needs while they figured out how to pull them out of the wreckage intact.
It was near noon—about six hours after the collapse—when Dominic finally made it down to the level where Claire was trapped. He didn’t think he would’ve found her then except she was babbling a little incoherently.
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