Beyond the ever increasing roar of sound that made it nearly impossible to hear her own thoughts, though, she was surrounded by profound darkness, lost in it and confused. Not even the glow of her clock illuminated her surroundings.
The power was out.
And she was unfamiliar with the new apartment.
She staggered across the bedroom to the wall where a door to the hallway should have been—would have been in the old apartment—and ran into solid—shaking—wall instead. She was too disoriented to think where the damn door was!
And she was terrified.
Florida didn’t have earthquakes.
They did have twenty thousand sinkholes, however … and counting.
She was going to die if she didn’t find her way out of the apartment!
That was the last thought that she recalled when she was able to recall anything at all.
A portion of the outer wall of her apartment collapsed outward, allowing enough light into the cave-like room that she was able to see the door and she staggered toward it, her primitive mind pounding out a litany—out! Out! Out!
She never reached it. Debris was raining down around her, something hit her that felt like a car, and then darkness swallowed her whole and she felt a horrific sense of falling that never stopped but followed her into darkness.
She was choking before she reached true awareness again. It felt as if every orifice was plugged with dirt. Before full blown panic could set in, though, she went into a coughing fit that cleared enough of the dust/dirt to allow her to drag in a little air. Grit filled her eyes when she tried to open them. Instinctively, she tried to lift her arms to wipe her face and discovered she couldn’t reach her face.
She was pinned. That was why she felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest.
She had the apartment building sitting on top of her—one floor, anyway. If it shifted ….
Terror clawed its way up her throat. She struggled with it for several moments and finally managed to turn her head and blink until she’d cleared her vision a little. The movement, even so little, helped to beat back the panic of being confined.
She wasn’t sure she’d opened her eyes at first when she had. It was so dark the darkness almost felt … thick, as if it had substance, but then the blackness lifted a little after a few moments and she thought she could see shadowy shapes around her.
Shock had muffled her brain functions in much the same way the darkness had limited her vision. Random thoughts erupted, sputtered, and disappeared, like a television or radio that was getting a weak signal and only picked up brief flashes of sounds and images.
Sinkhole finally formulated in her mind.
She was in one, maybe at the bottom. Maybe just far enough down to be a smear if the building finished collapsing on top of her.
The irony of it didn’t escape her.
She’d been hired as part of the geological team the state had put together to assess the sinkhole threat so that they could determine what to do about it … and she was supposed to report for her first day on the job first thing in the morning.
She didn’t think she was going to make it to roll call.
She shook that thought, trying to focus on listening for some sound that might mean help was coming, trying to save her energy for survival.
She had been wavering between fear and despair, consciousness and unconsciousness for what seemed like ages but she thought couldn’t possibly have been very many hours 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 hole/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 to force much more than a whisper out. 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.”
When no one responded, she twisted her head to search for the source of the sound.
Which was when she saw … something her mind simply refused to process—and it was looking directly at her!
* * * *
Dante’s mind awoke before his body was released and for many moments he was so focused on struggling with the panic of being paralyzed, of feeling his mind separate from his body as if the body didn’t exist, that he was barely aware of the voice of his overlord in his mind calling him to service. He’d long since ceased to believe there was anything ‘accidental’ in this particular form of torture, however, and because he knew they delighted in tormenting him, he worked hard to deprive them of their enjoyment, taming his fear before it could reach a detectable level.
Why have you awakened me?
To do your job! To serve the gods and prevent the hum ….
I know the prime directive, Dante interrupted, ignoring the provocation of the comment regarding whom he served—which was certainly not the gods! There is a new threat?
You’re standing in it, the overlord responded dryly, abandoning him as precipitously as he had contacted him in the first place.
Since he fully released Dante from his prison at the same moment, however, it was some time before Dante was aware that he was alone in his mind. The pain was excruciating, every muscle on fire with the slightest movement. He was so stiff, in fact, that he didn’t think he would have known he had been released if not for the pain.
How long had he been in stasis, he wondered, focusing his mind on each part of his body in order to flex muscle, tendon, and joint as blood began to flood through his tissues and veins again?
How long had the bastards punished him this time?
He pushed that from his mind as he lowered his arms at last and released his eon’s old grip on his sword. It clanged dully as it hit the stone beneath his feet.
Not that he gave a fuck who might be alerted to his presence! Humans were certainly of no threat to him.
In any case he was almost instantly distracted by the discovery that he seemed to be completely alone. A profound, deathly quiet engulfed him. Where the fuck was he? Where were the humans the gods had so graciously released him from his prison to watch?
Memories began to flood his mind even as he stepped off of the vita pedestal, stretched his wings several times, flapped them to fluff the feathers and then finally folded them against his back.
Water. He remembered abruptly that that was the last thing he’d been aware of before he was completely frozen in stasis because of ‘his predilection for human females’ as the overlords put it. He thrust that thought away before it could fully form. Nahla and his sons were lost to him, had been lost long, long ago. He could not think on that at the moment, could not afford to allow himself the weakness of grief. He would have to deal with the pain of remembrance later—when he could avoid it no longer.
The city had sunk, he recalled finally, beneath the waves of the sea.
The gods had sunk it … as punishment. They had cleansed …. But there were survivors of the cataclysm or he wouldn’t have been awakened.
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.
Anger flooded him abruptly. They expected t
he impossible! He accessed his communicator. Language, he growled impatiently?
No one acknowledged the request but the information was streamed to the chip implanted in his brain almost instantaneously.
And almost as quickly, his senses filled with her, expanded until he felt he knew her perhaps even better than she knew herself. She was alone, afraid, and vulnerable, and because she was all of those things, she had let down her guard completely, opened herself to a touch far more intimate than that of the physical world. She filled his mind with all the things dearest to her, all of her regrets, all of her hopes and dreams because she felt her mortality and feared she was looking at losing all that had ever meant anything to her.
He was torn between discomfort for both of them that he had looked at a part of herself she would never have willingly shared—akin to having walked in on a complete stranger who was naked—and a flood of empathy so potent it almost seemed as if it welded their souls together.
He had not thought he could feel that outside of the mating bond.
It was almost as devastating a discovery as waking in a cave, thousands of years beyond the most terrible loss one could experience, and he forced it to the dimmest recesses of his mind and locked it away.
Where are you?
“I’m here! Help me! I’m under the wall … I think a 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! I’m coming! I’m going to get you out!” The direction of the voice shifted. Although the figure dangling above him was nothing more than a shadow, Dante knew that the change in the direction the sound was projected indicated that the man was talking to others on the cliff above him. “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 he stood to higher ground above, the ‘cliff’ where he could discern, when he focused, that there were hundreds of other humans. 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 ….
They were always threatening that, the fucking bastards! But he knew they didn’t dare go that far again without the sanction of the assembly and that it was doubtful they would agree to it when the last cleansing had nearly wiped out the species. The humans were a protected species and retribution against them would be swift and thorough if the gods wiped them out. In any case, the fucking bastards had slain the only humans that meant anything to him! Why should he care if the overlords brought annihilation down upon themselves by wiping out the rest?
He almost thought it would be worth it to be rid of the overlords—the gods—forever more!
Almost.
The problem was that although he had cared for some far more than others, he’d discovered long ago that he could not simply ignore the needs of any of the children of man. He could not convince himself that he did not care what became of them because that was a lie he only told himself when the gods threatened their existence to control him.
* * * *
By the time Dominic’s SEAL team arrived, the collapse 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 more than one. 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!
“Over two hundred, I’d bet money,” one of the other team members, Jones, commented.
“I’ll take it. Less than two hundred. No water that I can see. 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.
He and his team bailed out as soon as the chopper touched down.
Instantly, chaos surrounded him, seemed to roll over them like a tsunami and engulf them as if it was a tangible thing. 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.
And of course the media people had begun circling like a flock of vultures that’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—or more tenants had moved in than he knew about,” 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 grid search ….”
“Nobody’s going down there until we’ve had time to assess the risks! We’re waiting on the engineers.”
&nbs
p; Dominic gaped at the man in outrage. “There’s people down there that need help, man! And I’m guessing they might not be able to wait.”
“Maybe. We don’t know if there are any survivors. And it ain’t going to help to add search and rescue workers to the list of fatalities! We don’t want another 9/11 here!”
“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 down 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 maw. 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 put.
Exiles Page 16
