Salt of Gomorrah

by Alex Mersey

  - 10 -

  Beth

  Rubble flew out from beneath her feet. Rough cement scraped at her palms as she scrambled for purchase, dug her toes into a crevice and clawed back the inches she’d slipped.

  “Beth!”

  Her name was a distant echo, called from another world.

  Beth slipped her fingers blindly around a wedge and dragged the piece of debris loose, sent it flying down the mountain, reached again for whatever her fingers could find. The tunnel was pitch black. The lights had gone out some time ago, but she hadn’t seen too good even before, tears blurring her eyes, grief clouding her vision.

  She scraped away smaller bits of brick and cement, tugged at a jagged end, pulled, and brought down a landslide of dust that clogged her throat. She coughed, wiped a hand across her eyes.

  “Beth! Please…” Her sister’s voice croaked, hoarse from hours of screaming, begging, pleading.

  But Alli was alive.

  Safe.

  Alli didn’t need her.

  Beth grabbed onto a slab with both hands, tried to pull. Her arms were so tired, her muscles protesting, but she couldn’t stop now. She was so close. Liam lay right beneath this slab. The Louis Vuitton woman was a breath away. She could hear their hearts beating. Thud. Thud. Thud. In her head. In her chest. Pulsing to the tips of her fingers.

  She tensed and pulled with all her strength. The slab shifted and she lost her footing, went sliding down, her body scraping and bumping every inch of the way. The thought to reach out was there, to stab her toes into the rubble, to grab onto a chunk of cement, but her muscles refused to obey.

  Her landing was soft, too soft.

  Arms folded around her from behind, hugged tight. “It’s okay, Beth.”

  “He was right there.” She struggled weakly. “I have to find them.”

  “I know,” Alli said softly. “But you have to rest a bit first, okay? Then we’ll find Liam together.”

  Beth stopped struggling, closed her eyes, let her sister’s voice flow over her.

  “He’s not going anywhere, Beth. I’ll help you. We’ll save them all, I promise.”

  ∞∞∞

  Beth came awake with a start, jolted from the clutches of a nightmare that left her body aching from head to toe. She blinked, looked around wildly, her gut twisting as the slow realization took hold.

  Not a nightmare.

  It wasn’t exactly light in the tunnel, just a lighter shade of dark. She could just make out the outline of the rubble mountain, the building that had dropped through the stairwell.

  Alli stirred, her hand falling clumsily against Beth’s thigh.

  Beth turned around to look at her sister, still curled up on the benchwall. Everything came rushing back. Clawing at the mound of debris, one hour bleeding into the next, chasing ghosts. Alli crying, begging her to stop. Sliding to the bottom of the heap, crumpled in Alli’s arms, fading into the exhaustion.

  She held her hands up, cuticles torn, nails ripped, skin scraped raw. Her body felt battered and bruised. For what? Ghosts. A part of her had known even as she dug and clawed. Liam was dead. The Louis Vuitton woman was dead. No one could survive a building crushing down on them. She’d known, but she hadn’t been ready to say goodbye.

  She reached out to brush the hair from Alli’s face, whispered, “I’m so, so sorry.”

  For the first time in their lives, Alli had been the strong one. Sixteen years old. Terrified and alone while her big sister lost her mind.

  Never again. Whatever it took, she’d hold her shit together and get Alli home safely.

  Alli stirred again, eyes fluttering open. “Beth?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Beth!” Alli scrambled upright, grabbed her arm.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she promised. “Alli, I’m sorry about losing it. That won’t happen again, okay?”

  Alli looked at her a long moment, lower lip trembling, then she pushed away and jumped to her feet. “Whatever.”

  A smile twitched Beth’s mouth. At least things were getting back to normal. “And, thank you.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Alli muttered. “Just don’t go all batshit crazy on me again.”

  “Never again.” Something caught Beth’s eye as she turned. She took a step toward the rubble, peering up at the top.

  Alli called out nervously, “Beth?”

  “Look.” Beth pointed at the crack of daylight. “I think that’s our way out. We just need to clear a path.”

  “Shouldn’t we try walking to another station?”

  “It could be miles away,” Beth said.

  In truth, she wasn’t sure about the state of the rest of the tunnel. That earthquake—or whatever it had been—hadn’t just collapsed the tunnel. It had torn an entire building apart. Maybe an entire city. Because where were the rescue teams? What was taking so long?

  “Stand back,” she told Alli as she moved to start climbing. “Be ready to jump out the way if anything comes crashing down.”

  “Yeah, right.” Alli joined her, a stubborn tilt to her chin.

  “Fine, but just be careful.”

  “Says the crazy one.”

  “I love you, too, little sis.”

  Alli rolled her eyes and hauled herself up onto a jutting edge.

  They fell into silence and climbed the ruins of the crumbled building. It didn’t take Alli long, a couple of minutes at the most. Beth’s aching muscles slowed her down. The cuts and scraped skin on her hands made her clumsy. She slipped twice and had to claw for purchase with pain screeching to her fingertips. But she bit down on the agony and climbed, not about to draw attention to her foolishness of last night.

  When she saw the solid slab of concrete that blocked their access, her heart sank. It was wedged at an angle through the opening and from their cramped position at the base, they didn’t have the leverage required to flip it.

  Then it hit her. They’d definitely get a signal here. She slung her backpack off one shoulder and dug out her phone.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she groused when it didn’t turn on. “I had a full battery last time I checked.” She glanced at her sister, not particularly hopeful with Alli’s non-stop music habit. “I don’t suppose you have any juice left?”

  Alli sent her a strange look. “You don’t remember?”

  “Remember what?” Beth asked cautiously.

  “My phone went dead last night, Beth. I asked for yours, so I could use the torch app when the lights went off.”

  “And I gave it to you?”

  Alli twisted her head away, looked up into the crack of daylight. “You ignored me.”

  “God, Alli, I’m so—”

  “—stop doing that,” Alli snapped, then less harshly, “You don’t have to keep apologizing. I don’t blame you for any of this. It’s just…” She brought her eyes down and to Beth again, that new vulnerability trembling her lower lip. “I guess I just didn’t realize how bad it was, that you don’t actually remember parts.”

  Neither did I. Beth rubbed her brow, sickened to her stomach at how she’d let Alli down just when her sister needed her most.

  “Alli, listen to me.” She placed a hand to Alli’s arm, tilted her head to look her fully in the eyes. “I’m not going to break on you again. You can count on me. I am going to get you home safely, back to Mom.”

  The sisters looked at each other, sober quiet, then Alli nodded. A weak smile touched her lips. “Mom is going to kill us when she finds out about this.”

  Beth laughed, then she remembered they weren’t home free yet and the moment of humor clotted in her throat. She held her breath to listen hard. Heard nothing. No traffic, no voices, no hum of busy city life, no twittering birds, no yapping dogs, no scuffling of shoes slapping the pavements.

  “What is it?” said Alli.

  Beth hesitated, but keeping her sister ignorant wouldn’t protect her. “It’s quiet up there,” she said. “Too quiet.”

  “We’r
e in the middle of a disaster zone,” Alli said, her voice pitched in doubt. “Maybe they’ve cordoned off the area?”

  “I don’t know, Alli, this is just weird.” She turned her face up to the crack and screamed, “Help! We’re trapped! Hello? Help!”

  Alli joined in, and after a few more screams Beth tapped a finger to her lips for silence so they could listen again.

  Nothing.

  “Someone has to have heard us,” Alli said.

  Beth sucked in a deep breath, trying not to panic. We’re a crack away from daylight. It’s not like we’re buried beneath a ton of rubble. Her thoughts drifted toward Liam, the Louis Vuitton woman, the countless others who’d been on the train with them—she jerked them back. Focus.

  Alli screamed for help again.

  “Wait,” Beth told her. “We have to give them a chance to respond and we don’t want to strain our throats.” She was beginning to suspect they might be down here a long while, but she kept that to herself and instead looked up at the slab of concrete that blocked their escape. “Maybe we can move this thing.”

  She pressed her palms flat to the underside of the slanted slab and pushed with all her might. Alli scrambled a little higher for better leverage and together they pushed again. The slab barely lifted.

  “Keep going,” Beth heaved, pushing past the muscle deep ache in her arms.

  Another fraction of an inch.

  Alli dropped her arms and the slab slammed back.

  “Sorry,” Alli gasped. “I couldn’t—”

  “It’s okay,” Beth said. “My arms were about to collapse on me, too. We’ll try again.”

  They took it in turns, screaming for help and then shoving at the slab. At one point, it lifted a good inch, but they couldn’t hold it and they didn’t manage it again. Their throats became scratchy, their bodies weaker. They had no water, nothing to eat, only time that stretched out and seemed to be acting against them.

  Then Beth heard it. They were taking a break, massaging their muscles, working saliva into their dry throats, and she heard it.

  “Hello…?” A male voice.

  Her heart gave a fierce kick. “Help!” she screamed. “We’re down here! Help!”

  “Paul, over here…”

  This time, Alli heard it, too. She smiled, laughed, her eyes bright with sudden tears. “Hello! Help!”

  A shadow fell across the crack. “You down there?”

  “Yes,” Beth yelped, then louder, “Yes! We’re just below this slab.”

  “Okay, hang tight.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Beth whispered, her throat thick with relief.

  Alli grabbed her hand as they waited, listening to the grunts, watching the shadows crisscross over their sliver of daylight.

  “Christ, this thing is heavier than my grandmother.”

  “You’re obsessed with your damn grandma.”

  “Fuck!”

  The shadows fell away.

  Dread washed over Beth. “Don’t go. Maybe we can help push from below.”

  A pause. “You got any muscle down there?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Men,” he clarified. “You got any men down there?”

  “Oh.” Beth shook her head, although he couldn’t see. “No, it’s just me and my sister, but we can help.”

  Another pause. “Are you in a position to crawl up on your own if we can wedge this thing open?”

  Beth nodded. Again, he couldn’t see her! “Yes,” she said quickly. “We’re cramped here right at the top.”

  More or less the truth. The ledge of the opening was at shoulder height, so they’d have to haul themselves out, but it was perfectly doable.

  Shuffling, scuffing sounds. “Okay, be ready to scramble as soon as the gap’s wide enough, you hear me? I don’t know how long we can hold it.”

  “We’re ready.” Beth crunched low on her knees, folded her hands together and held them out as a step for Alli. “You go first.”

  Alli moved around her, then stopped and turned. “No, you first. I’ll springboard you.”

  “Alli, we don’t have time for this!”

  “Beth,” she snapped right back. “I can get up easily, okay? But I saw you struggling with the climb earlier. Even if they can’t hold the slab, you know I’m here and you’re not going to just leave me behind to rot.” She arched a brow. “Right?”

  The slab started lifting, the gap widening.

  “Right,” Beth conceded, out of time for any more arguing.

  Alli went down, held her hands together for Beth. “Go.”

  Beth reached up to grip the ledge, put one foot on Alli’s hands, and started hauling herself up even before the gap was wide enough. Her arms cramped, but Alli’s boost pushed her over the edge. Moments later she was slithering through the opening, between the two men who lay on their backs, knees bent, feet propping the slab up.

  Beth barely registered the tension straining at their necks, the exertion reddening their faces, before she flipped about and crawled back to the opening. “Alli, come on!”

  Her hands appeared at the edge, forearms, elbows. Beth reached down and grabbed under her arms, scrabbling backward and pulling, hauling Alli up. They squirreled clear and the men slowly eased the slab down.

  “Hey there, I’m Brad,” the man who’d done most of the talking said as he stood and brushed his hands down the seams of his tailored suit pants. He nudged his chin to the side, to his stocky friend with greying hair and a goatee. “That’s Paul.”

  Beth completed the introductions, taking curious note of Brad’s once elegant dark suit, now crumpled and torn in places. “You’re not from the rescue crew, are you?”

  “Rescue crew?” The stocky man, Paul, shouted out a laugh. “What? Did you just crawl out a hole or something?”

  “Don’t be a dipshit,” Brad shot back.

  “Just trying to boost morale with some good old-fashioned humor.”

  Brad cocked a grin at her. “Ignore him.”

  “Well, thanks for the recue,” Beth said, looking around. They were standing in a shallow crater, surrounded by a pathetic scattering of the building that had once stood, mostly mounds of off-white dust. “What hit the building? It looks like an asteroid struck.”

  “Not just the building, but you’ll have to see this with your own eyes.” Brad waved them on and up the gentle slope.

  Beth grabbed Alli’s hand to hold as they tramped. The view that greeted them slammed the breath from Beth’s lungs. She felt Alli’s hand slacken in hers and gripped tighter. Breathed in slow, breathed out slower.

  Manhattan was gone.

  It its place, a foreign, ravaged landscape of dunes and rubble, ridges and dips of bland white sand—dust, ash, the remains of all that had been.

  Her heart raced, blood rushed to pound between her ears, her knees threatened to buckle, but she couldn’t fall apart. She’d made Alli a promise and she intended to keep it. She didn’t care if they’d been transported to a parallel universe, if they’d slipped through time to another millennia, she would stay strong and find a way to get Alli home.

  “What happened?”

  Brad lifted his gaze to the sky.

  Beth looked, but all she saw was clear blue sky. “I don’t understand.”

  He brought his eyes down to her with a slow shake of his head. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  - 11 -

  Sean

  He never expected to sleep, but the next thing, Sean was stirring, creasing his eyes open to broad daylight. His chin had dropped to his chest while he slept and he reached back to rub the stiffness from his neck as he pushed to his feet, searched the skies to the east, west, north and south.

  The mothership was gone.

  Not a single battlecruiser, well, none that he could see.

  What were the chances they’d blazed a trail back to their own universe? Not good. But for now, New York City had reclaimed her skies.

  Lynn and Johnnie were still fast a
sleep, curled up into each other like mother bear and cub. He tread softly around them and made his way down the crumbling slope of the pier.

  Obviously he wasn’t as light-footed as he’d thought.

  He was kicking off his sneakers when Lynn’s voice yelled at him, “Trying to ditch us?”

  “I figured I’d let you sleep a while longer.” Sean glanced up as he removed his socks. “Where’s Johnnie?”

  “Johnnie, say good morning to Sean.”

  The kid popped up from behind Lynn as she went down on her butt to scramble over the boulders. He rubbed sleep out his eyes and brought that hand up to wave.

  Sean gave him a nod, then went back to stripping, pulling the t-shirt over his head, hitching his thumbs into the waistband of his sweatpants.

  “Do you mind?” Lynn muttered.

  “Hey, you invited yourself to this party,” he said, watching her frown ease as he revealed the Lycra running shorts he always wore beneath his sweatpants when jogging.

  “The ship is gone.” She came to stand next to him. “But not gone, gone, right?”

  “Probably not.”

  “How did we not see this coming?” she asked. “I mean, NASA still has a space project. They can put robots on Mars, send satellites into outer space, but they don’t spot a giant ship headed right for us?”

  “Maybe they did. There was that ripple in Orion’s Belt. Maybe they knew more than what they told us. I saw the mothership first appear, materialize from a swirl of clouds. Maybe that defense shield acts like some kind of cloaking device. Maybe their technology is a million times more advanced than ours. I don’t know, Lynn. Does it matter?”

  She took her time digesting that, then sighed noisily. “I guess not.”

  Sean turned from her to look out over the water. “The good news is…” He pointed at the overturned hull, at the rubber dinghy bobbing alongside it. “That’s our ride.”

  “Just waiting there for us.” She capped a hand over her brow against the reflecting glare. “Do you believe in Fate?”

  “I don’t believe in anything I can’t touch or see.” He sent her a grin and carefully worked his way around a jagged boulder to slip into the water.