by K. W. Jeter
'Where we heading?'
'Like I said – I know how his mind operates. Urbenton will figure that we're stupid enough to go running out the way we got in here, and he'll have part of his production crew – the thug part – waiting for us. So we go another way.'
'If there is one,' said Iris.
'Don't worry.' Vogel kept the flashlight aimed ahead of them. 'I know my way around this dump pretty well.'
Beginning to have my doubts, thought Iris. The floor underneath her bootsoles had turned both broken, with the ends of bent steel girders poking through the once-polished planks, and sharply tilted to one side. Enough light bounced back from the flashlight beam hitting the walls to dimly reveal the condition of the ceiling overhead. The weight of the collapsed buildings' rubble had obviously hit this section of Eldon Tyrell's private quarters with enough force to warp the reinforced framework that had protected the other sections, twisting and flattening it like a lab rat's wire cage. Iris and Vogel had to duck beneath the bowed ceiling beams, shouldering aside dangling skeins of dead electrical wiring and data conduits; the stench of charred insulation sheaths was still strong enough to lodge choking in Iris's throat.
The private quarters came to an end at a sheer cliff-face of concrete rubble, bristling with lengths of corroded rebar. Crouching down, with the top of his head barely an inch away from the buckled ceiling, Vogel pointed up. 'We climb,' he said.
'Climb where?' Iris knelt beside him, in the scattered glow from the flashlight. The floor beneath her was now so tilted that she had to dig in her fingernails to keep from sliding into Vogel.
'You're skinny enough,' said Vogel. 'Shouldn't be any problem for you.' He swung the flashlight upward, revealing a narrow gap between the vertical rubble and where the ceiling had been sheared away. 'It's only tight for maybe twenty yards or so, then it opens up. It's easy; plenty of handholds.'
'Easy for me, maybe. But what about you?' Iris was close enough that she could poke the sling across his chest without even unbending her elbow. 'What are you going to do, stay down here and hold them off?'
'The hell with it.' Vogel pulled away the sling, now ragged and dirt-stained, wadded it in his hand and tossed it onto the loose rubble behind them. Flexing his fingers, he stretched out the arm that had been bound to the front of his jumpsuit. 'Thing was giving me a cramp, anyway.'
'Hey –' Iris frowned at the sight. 'You weren't hurt at all!'
'Not physically, no.' A quick smile flashed across Vogel's face. 'But your leaving me there, with those guys – that really cut me to the quick.'
Right, she thought in disgust. When there was time, she'd have to re-think her assumptions about what had gone down at the movie theater where she had managed to lay hold of the owl. If Vogel had been faking any detail about what had happened to him, then the chances were good that a lot of other details were phonies as well. Maybe even the whole set-up – though she had to wonder what the point of that would have been, what Vogel or whoever was behind him would have been trying to accomplish with that kind of elaborate ruse. But for all she knew right now, the moment she had slipped out of the movie theater Vogel and the other men had broken off their mutual gunfire and had stood around, smoking and exchanging small talk.
'You lying sonuvabitch.' Iris spoke the words almost without anger, except for that which she directed toward herself for having fallen for anything Vogel had ever told her. 'You know, instead of scrambling up this chimney-hole, I've got a notion that maybe I should stay right here instead. And have a little talk with whoever it is that's dropping in on us.'
'You don't want to do that.' Vogel emphatically shook his head. 'That's a way bad idea.'
'Yeah? Why?'
'Look, I know you're going through a spasm of distrust at the moment.' Vogel spoke with elaborate patience as he crouched beneath the buckled ceiling, with its dangling loops of wire and cable screening off the rest of what had been the Tyrell private quarters. 'I can understand that. And I can even admit it's somewhat deserved; I haven't been totally upfront with you about everything that's been going on—'
'Or anything.'
'We don't really have time to argue right now.' Vogel held up a mollifying hand, palm outward. 'You can chew my ass raw when we get out of here, okay? What you have to realize is that you are in deep, deep trouble.'
'Been there,' said Iris. 'Done that.'
'Worse this time; I promise you. If Urbenton has gone off-script, there's no telling what could happen to you. You don't want to trust me about that, fine. But look at it this way.' He brought his face close to hers, so that in the dim radiance of the flashlight she could see her own reflection in the dark centers of his eyes. 'As near as you've gotten to what you've been trying to accomplish — getting hold of that owl — it's all been made possible by me. For better or worse.'
'Mostly worse.'
'Regardless,' said Vogel. 'You don't have anyone else to trust, other than yourself — and you can't say that's gone any better. So it's me or nobody.'
'Maybe not.' Iris glanced up at the cramped space's ceiling, then back to Vogel. 'There's always this director guy and his friends who are about ready to drop in on us.'
'Sure. You got that option. I don't have any way of forcing you to get out of here. But just consider.' His voice dropped in pitch and volume. 'What if you guess wrong? About who you want to trust and distrust. If I tell you that it wouldn't be exactly pleasant for you to meet up with Urbenton and his crew, and you don't believe me — it could get real ugly for you if you guess wrong on that one. Let's face it: people haven't been playing softball with you lately.'
That much was true, at least. 'All right,' said Iris. She sighed. 'So I go first? Up the chute, I mean?'
'Right.' Vogel's thin smile appeared again. 'That way I'll know where you are.'
'You're the boss.' She turned and inched forward, cautiously lifting her head into the open space where the broken ceiling ended. As Vogel had promised, the wall of rubble had plenty of jagged crevices that she could dig her fingertips into. The ceiling's edge scraped past her shoulder blades and spine as she kicked the toes of her boots into the crags below and started to climb into the narrow darkness.
Even without the occasional glint from Vogel's flashlight, a fraction of its beam sliding up past her face and hands, she could sense him below, climbing after her. Some of the handholds she found were fractured and crumbling, as though the concrete had been all but disintegrated by the force of the explosions that had collapsed the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Bits of sharp-edged gravel slid under her palms and past her wrists; she took a certain wry satisfaction in imagining them raining down upon Vogel's upturned face.
The gap through which they crawled antlike opened up, after what seemed like a mile of scrabbling effort; Iris felt that the back of her leatherite jacket was no longer scraping along the cliff-face behind her. She could even breathe, taking in a complete lungful of the dust-laden, scorched-smelling air.
Iris suddenly felt something grab her ankle, and realized it was one of Vogel's hands, reaching up to snag her.
'Hold it.' Vogel had switched off the flashlight; his whisper filtered through the darkness to her. 'Don't say anything.'
She listened, and within a fraction of a second heard the same faint but distinct noises that Vogel must have detected. Whoever was burrowing down through the ruins, down to the Tyrell private quarters from which she and Vogel had just fled, the group was evidently within a few meters of their own position. Iris could hear the scraping sounds of smaller bits of rubble being shoved aside, clearing a parallel vertical shaft downward.
The space in which Iris clung to the rubble face was open enough that. Vogel was able to climb partway alongside her. She glanced down and could just discern the sharp angles of his face, close to her elbow.
'They must think we're still down there,' whispered Vogel. 'Urbenton probably didn't wire all of the private quarters; must've figured that there was no need to do the crushed end, wh
ere we got out.'
She realized then that the dim glow by which she made out Vogel's face wasn't from his flashlight, but from the other group's worklights seeping through the network of crevices and fissures between herself and them. Holding her breath, she waited until the bits of stray light were swallowed up by darkness again, and the scraping and scrabbling noises had faded a bit, coming now from a point some meters below.
'We don't have much time.' Iris kept her voice as low as Vogel's had been. 'When they get down there, it won't take 'em long to figure out that we split on them.' She glanced upward along the rubble face, trying to discern any indicator of its remaining height, then looked back down toward Vogel. 'How much farther until we're at the surface?'
'Still a ways to go.' Vogel was completely hidden in the gap's darkness. 'Get moving.'
Without any aid from Vogel's flashlight, Iris was forced to grope around for each new handhold. The sheer face of crumbling cement ended, giving way to a tangle of metal reinforcing rods, knotted and twisted together into a steel rat's nest. She reached up and grasped a curved section of rebar and pulled herself up, bending her knees to bring her bootsoles flat against the concrete rubble.
That was a mistake, she realized immediately, as the concrete broke apart, her boots pushing through a thin layer to a hollow space beyond. Her entire weight tugged forcefully on the rebar section onto which she was holding, arms extended straight above her head. With a shriek of metal grinding across metal, the section stretched loose from the rest of the tangled rebar, dropping Iris several feet down. She dangled for a moment, twisting against the sheer rubble face, as though clinging to an immense elastic band; the unsteady motion, compounded by the surrounding darkness, sickened her to her stomach.
Iris saw the flashlight beam spring on, cutting across the gap and catching first her wildly kicking legs, then darting up to her face, dazzling and blinding her for a moment. 'Hold on,' called Vogel. There was no further point in whispering; the initial shriek of the rebar tearing loose would have penetrated every inch of the jumbled-together ruins, alerting the others to their whereabouts. 'I've got you—'
Holding onto the rubble face with one hand, Vogel leaned out and reached for her. Iris took her hand from the rebar section and grabbed tightly onto Vogel's forearm. Even as he pulled her toward himself, shouts were audible, though made faint and echoingly garbled by the intervening distance and the twists and turns leading down to the remains of the Tyrell private quarters.
With a sudden lurch, more of the tangled rebar came loose from above, instantly dropping Iris another couple of meters. Her grip instinctively tightened on Vogel's arm as she fell; that was enough to pull him off the rubble face. His other arm quickly grabbed around Iris's legs, stopping his own fall. Iris let go of his upward-extended wrist, letting herself be bear-hugged by Vogel around her knees, his head at a level with her stomach.
Not . . . good,' gasped Vogel needlessly. Along with a quantity of loose concrete debris from the rubble face, the flashlight had fallen clattering down the gap beneath them. Its beam shot upward into their eyes, then was extinguished as the lens and bulb shattered against a jagged cement outcropping. 'This could've . . . gone better . .
She didn't bother replying. Her locked-straight arms, bearing both her own and Vogel's weight, were already beginning to ache. As she and Vogel swayed in the darkness, with the section of rebar that she grasped stretching and contracting with a nauseating elasticity, she could hear the others somewhere directly beneath them. That meant that the director Urbenton's crew – if that was who they were; she still had no way of knowing for sure – had reached the Tyrell private quarters, and specifically the crushed end of the rooms from which she and Vogel had ascended. It wouldn't be long before those others came swarming up the gap, through its initial narrow section and then where it opened alongside the rubble face, and found the two of them dangling here.
'I'm not waiting around,' announced Iris. 'Look, here's the deal. I can pull us up at least a little farther. Then you'll be able to grab hold of this bar yourself.' Her arms were beginning to feel as if they were being pulled out of their sockets. 'Then we can both climb up it, separately.'
'Don't know about that.' Vogel looked upward, past Iris's face. 'This thing – this metal stuff – it might not be too securely fastened.' He sounded oddly calm and analytical, given the situation. 'We're getting towards the surface, so a lot of the debris isn't weight-compressed and packed together as tightly as the lower strata. If we start jostling this around with too much body movement, it could come tumbling down real fast.'
'So what do you suggest?' She tried to keep her own irritation, triggered by Vogel's objections, coldly under control.
'Well,' said Vogel, 'the smart thing to do would be for one of us to let go and drop. That way, there'd be less mass and weight dragging on this metal stuff, and the other person would have a better shot of getting out of here.'
'Yeah, right; that's a great idea. And the person who lets go either gets killed in the fall, or gets whatever that bunch down below thinks should be corning to him – or her. Are you volunteering?'
'Not really,' admitted Vogel.
'Fine. Then we'll do it my way.' With Vogel's arms wrapped around her legs, Iris reached and grabbed higher on the rebar section, pulling herself up. She had no desire to wait around any longer, until their pursuers caught up with them; she could already hear voices from down below, in the crushed end of the Tyrell private quarters. The knife-like ridges of the rebar cut into her palms and the bent joints of her fingers as she strained to drag herself and Vogel a few inches higher. Another lunging grasp, catching at a twisted angle in the metal, gave her a tight enough hold that she could wedge the horizontally slanting part under one arm; using her back and shoulder muscles, Iris levered herself onto the piece, leaning forward so that it was across her stomach. 'There . . . right in front of you . . Breathless, she gasped the words out. 'Grab it, for Christ's sake . . .'
She felt one of Vogel's arms let go, then a downward pull in the rebar section to which she clung as he transferred his weight to its vertical section. The circulation in her legs started up again, no longer cut off by his vise-like grip.
'You okay?' Vogel called to her.
'Yeah.' Iris nodded, even though she knew the darkness hid any such movement. She didn't bother to ask how he was doing; she didn't care, at least now that her arms no longer felt as if they were being yanked from their sockets by his added weight. 'Let's get going . . .'
Shifting position by grabbing the near-horizontal rebar section in both hands, then drawing up and getting one knee onto it, Iris climbed higher onto the tangled metal. Before she moved again, she felt one of Vogel's hands brush her knee as he grabbed the section above him—
The dark space in which they both hung suspended was suddenly lit up with glaring shafts of light. Iris saw her own and Vogel's elongated shadows leap upward, fracturing across the segments of the tangled skein of rebar to which they clung. The broken shadows danced for a moment, then were frozen into place as the searchlight beams, aimed from just below, found and locked onto the two of them, dazzling and blinding their shocked eyes.
Iris realized immediately what had happened. The sounds and voices she and Vogel had heard coming from the Tyrell private quarters had been only a distraction, to make them think that their pursuers were down there. When in fact a sizable number of the director Urbenton's crew had been silently creeping up the narrow gap and then along the rubble face, closing in on them.
Lifting her shoulder in a vain attempt to shield her eyes, Iris could barely make out the dark shapes behind the overlapping glare of the searchlights. But she could see that they were moving, approaching as rapidly as possible, all stealth discarded.
She didn't bother saying anything to Vogel; he was already in motion as well, scrambling up onto the horizontal rebar section beside her, reaching at the same time as she did for the next piece that could be grabbed and used to pull themse
lves higher onto the tangled metal. Their parallel motion produced an ear-piercing, grinding shriek from the rebar as its rusted lengths scraped across each other, pulled taut by Iris's and Vogel's weight. The shriek went higher, a chorus bouncing and echoing off the ruins' angles as one of the pursuers grabbed hold of the bottom of the dangling metal and swung himself onto it.
Bad move. That was all Iris had time to think, before the tangled mass of rebar pulled free from whatever partial anchor it'd had on the outcroppings of broken concrete and twisted steel girders above. Real bad move. The additional weight of the pursuer, along with the force of his jump onto the dangling rebar, produced a deafening roar of metal scraping across metal; dime-sized rust flakes swirled and sifted down upon Iris's and Vogel's faces. She found herself falling backward, while still holding on to the tangled rebar.
'Go!'
Vogel's shout cut through the ear-bruising clatter and shriek, snapping her back to full attention. She looked up and strained to focus her sight through the confusing shafts of darkness and crisscrossing searchlight beams, finally managing to discern Vogel above her and scrabbling even higher on the interlaced metal – or at least staying in the same place on top of the hollow mass, as though he were some small animal racing across the surface of a wire-form ball, tumbling down an even wider crevice in the earth.
As precarious as his position was, Vogel was still able, between grabbing and pulling himself onto the next sections of rebar, to look over his shoulder and yell down to Iris. 'Come on!' His sharp-angled face contorted with the effort to make himself heard over the metal's noise. 'Move it!'
Before Iris could react, the breath was knocked out of her by a vertical angle of concrete rubble slamming against her spine and shoulder blades. Pinned by the tangled mass of rebar against one side of the gap in which it had fallen, she managed to free herself part-way by desperately Jawing at the metal sections. She had gotten her upper torso free, but could go no further: the rebar, halted in toppling down the gap, had shifted with the force of her exertions, with a diagonal piece pressing hard against her abdomen. Grimacing with pain, Iris pushed against the metal, feeling its sharp edges slice the shirt beneath her jacket to tattered ribbons and drawing parallel stripes of blood across her flesh.
