by JJ Pike
She turned on her heel and went to the Family Room. She didn’t look over her shoulder or invite Rayton to follow her. Act like the boss and most people fall in line. She heard his footfall on the linoleum. For whatever reasons, he felt the need to stick around. He wasn’t a runner. That might be good and it might not. He probably had his own directives. Whatever, she had him where she wanted him. Now all she had to do was get him to spill.
Chapter Seven
The shakes started in Alice’s midriff and spread quickly. How was it that your brain grabbed onto those things you expressly told it not to think about? #notdead had totally backfired and all she could think about were the million ways she was already dead. Without Bill to rescue her from herself, she’d be in nightmare land if she didn’t do something to divert the murky thoughts that curled around her brain, threatening to strangle her.
Something skittered across her leg. If the rats came at her from below, she’d be toast. And jam. A smile flicked across her face. Too late. Midge wouldn’t like the joke if her mommy was the jam. #dontbejam. Not as catchy as #notdead. Her kids would approve though. It showed she was trying.
She squeezed her eyes shut and imagined all the survivors she’d ever read about. She was obsessed. How did they do it? What was their secret? What was it about them that made the difference? How was it one person made it, when 30 didn’t? What did they have in common? It wasn’t luck because luck had already abandoned them: Shackleton and his men, traversing the Antarctic; the Robertson Family who were lost at sea for 16 days after killer whales attacked their boat; Aron Ralston who cut his hand off in order to escape a rock fall; the Donner Party. No, not a good example. She didn’t need to think about eating your loved ones and neighbors in the Sierra Nevada. There were some modes of survival that weren’t to be borne. Better to be dead than eat your friends and colleagues, right?
“How about Juliane Koepcke, who survived the disintegration of LANSA Flight 508 after it had been struck by lightning?” Paul, her first born, to the rescue. He loved stories about heroism and pushing yourself to the absolute limit, she loved survival epics, so their obsessions overlapped. Kind of him to pop into her mind and save her from her darkest imaginings. “Think about Juliane falling through the air, strapped to her seat. Think about three kilometers of free-fall in a 1970’s airplane seat, with only a broken collar bone at the end of it. Think about her trekking through the rain forest and floating downstream and surviving because her papa had taught her survival techniques.”
Good. Good. The tremors were slowing.
“Make a list,” Dr. Moore counseled. “These are things you’ve rehearsed. They’re known. They’ll help center and calm you. Repeat the list until you sense that your mind has ceased cycling. Keep it simple. Keep it real. You want practical, actionable steps that will get you back on track.”
It was easy enough to choose what to concentrate on when she was freaking out. She already had the survival techniques her papa had drilled into her brain memorized. They’d been ready for anything. #alwaysattheready.
1) Anticipate potential disasters. Even when things are going well, prepare for the worst.
Too late. She’d been in charge of bringing MELT into the world, but during the lead up to its release all her “disastrous outcome” scenarios were centered around MELT not working, or the competition getting their solutions to market before K&P, or MELT fizzling out and failing to deliver on its promise.
Never once had she imagined MELT working too well. Or MELT being sabotaged. Or MELT destroying Manhattan, her life slipping away with the city she loved. She’d never managed to look at the thumb drive Professor Baxter had given her, though she had a strong suspicion that she knew who the saboteur was. Michael Rayton, her colleague of many years, had never sat easy with her. She knew him a little from their college days, but that wasn’t the worst of him. He wasn’t right. She couldn’t put her finger on it. She had the impression that he “watched” too much. She cast her mind back over the last year and found him “looking” when he ought to have been working, smiling when there was nothing to smile about, asking questions when those questions weren’t his to ask. She couldn’t prove it. Yet. But if she ever got out, she’d spend the rest of her days bringing him to justice. All she had to do now was be #notdead. Though how she was going to survive was still a mystery. She was trapped in concrete with nothing but rats.
Petra fired up again in her memory banks. “Stinkin Thinkin, Mom. The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t always a train coming to get you. You’ve got to think positive to get out of this one.”
She turned her thoughts back to Papa and his training. So, she’d failed to anticipate this outcome and was already mired in a tragedy. What would he counsel next?
2) Run away from the building before it falls down.
Too late. Next.
3) Remember the exclusion zone around your bed or car or desk. You’ve got coverage, because #physics.
Or was it #geometry? In any case, her papa had drawn diagrams to show her where to duck and cover and why it was better to crouch low close to something solid rather than something soft, even if that wasn’t intuitive. “You want something that will survive the weight of falling debris,” he said. “Your mattress feels good, but it is nowhere near as useful as your desk. Remember, Alicia, that you want something sturdy.” The world had already fallen on top of her and she was already in the wrong place. Too late, too late, too late. She was always too late. Too late to save her parents. Too late to save her sister. Too late to save K&P. And now, too late to save herself.
The pile shifted again. So what? So it moved. Think positive. Turn that frown upside down. Look at your surroundings and make the best of whatever you’ve got. How else was she going to get out? She couldn’t very well scoop tons of concrete with her bare hands and dig her way to freedom. What was her superpower? What was the one thing no one would ever think of doing? How was she going to be the one who survived, rather than the multitude who perished?
She was going to play the odds. That’s what all the survivors had in common. They bucked the odds and went for broke. She had to do the thing no one expected her to do.
Alice stomped her foot. Too light. She had to mean it. All in. That’s what Papa would want her to do. Roll the dice and gamble it all. “Even when you have children of your own, Papa?”
“Especially then, mija preciosa.” He had stroked his daughter’s hair and let her sit in his lap and ask him all the questions in the world.
Bill was like him. He gave the children the time they craved. Of the two of them, he was the better parent. That was the main reason he was at home and she was in the city. The children relied on him, completely. He was their rock. She was their…what? What was she to her children? She was an example of what could be done, against the odds. That would have to be enough.
She brought her leg up as much as she could. She had little room, but Jenga was fickle that way. You didn’t need TNT or a wrecking ball or the ability to flex your leg at the knee and kick with all your might. You only needed the rickety little tower of wooden bricks to be unsteady. Take enough out below and it would topple. She kicked.
Nothing.
She kicked again, this time harder.
Still nothing.
She wriggled her arms and kicked her legs and screamed in frustration.
Like that was going to amount to a hill of beans. “Come on, Mom. You can do it.”
She wanted to show her children what could be done. Didn’t matter that her world had imploded or that her boss had died in this very building or that her company had released a toxic compound that wrought havoc. She was going to bend a million tons of concrete to her will, one stomp at a time.
She braced her stinging back against the rock and reeled herself in tight, every muscle tensed. Then she thrust her arms and legs and head out towards the edges of her prison, demanding that they fall.
A rock far below skittered, bouncing off the walls and
landing with a splash. Not good.
Escape plans: good.
Water: bad.
Too late. The collapse had begun.
This is how the world ends, Alice thought, not with a whimper, but a bang. What had started with a single rock falling down, down, down and splashing into the sewage below had snowballed into a violent cascade of sheetrock and pipes and concrete slabs, all of them slipping and sliding just feet from her head, then crashing into the dark. The puzzle of it was that she remained static.
She gripped what she could with her fingertips, even though she knew she didn’t have the upper-body strength to hold her own bodyweight if her makeshift floor gave way. She’d have to slide with the crud around her and hope for a soft landing. She laughed. There weren’t going to be any soft landings. What she needed was for nothing to land on top of her.
The screech of metal ripping leapfrogged the hateful sound of nails on a chalkboard for “noises I never want to hear again in my lifetime.” There was no way of telling what made the earsplitting sound. It could have been a million things. She was mushed into the earth alongside twisted train tracks and buckled duct work and copper pipes. Any one of those, screeching down the ravine and twisting into a new manic pretzel that defied physics, could have made the noise. Didn’t matter. What mattered was they hadn’t taken her with them.
She waited, her body tensed against the uneven walls that held her in place as the collapse of her world continued. With every new assault to her senses, she readied herself for the inevitable. Her section would collapse and her descent would begin. She prayed she’d be delivered but if that wasn’t on the cards, she wanted to be dispatched quickly. No lingering and wasting away for her. If Death was coming for her, let Him come. She wasn’t afraid.
She’d faced evil. Looked it straight in the face. Lived to see another day. An accident in Midtown West was nothing compared to what she’d seen. Even an accident of monumental proportions like this one was a cake walk.
“Really, Mom. This is your idea of a cake walk? Because I have to tell you, it doesn’t look like that from where I’m standing.” Paul was universally kind and thoughtful, every word weighed carefully before it left his lips. If he was worried, there was probably something to worry about.
“Well, it’s a ‘cake walk’ in one sense at least,” she told her treasured son. “Buildings aren’t wicked, even when they implode around you. Train tracks aren’t devilish. Sheetrock isn’t ethically compromised. Pipes aren’t corrupt or iniquitous or morally bankrupt. That is the purview of one species: man.”
Her tormentor’s face was always the same: soft and smiling, inviting her to come down from the tree. “The dogs are gone,” he’d said. “It’s safe now.”
She’d been asleep, but incredibly hadn’t fallen from her perch. She’d stayed lashed to her branch with her cardigan, dreaming of beating her little sister Valentina at hopscotch as the sun set. Her mom had called them in for dinner and they stuffed themselves with rellenitos de platano, the plantains perfectly sweet and the bean paste delicious and filling. Mama rolled them in cinnamon and sugar, making the girls lick their fingers and beg for more.
“Eyes as big as your belly,” she would say, but serve up another delectable dessert.
Papa picked her up under one arm and Valentina under the other and charged around the house, making airplane noises as they squealed and protested, all the while hoping he’d carry on forever.
Alice blinked and squinted, willing the dream to end because she knew what came next, but she was stuck in the past.
The man waved her down from the tree a second time. “Really, it’s safe.”
Alice unknotted her cardigan’s arms and let her legs fall over the sides of the branch. She hadn’t seen another human since she’d fled her home. Only the dogs. The man peering up at her looked friendly enough, but she had never seen him before and she’d seen everyone who lived in their village. He was a stranger. What did Papa say about strangers? “You welcome them. Give them the best food. Offer them the best bed. They could be angels in disguise.” What if those strangers were devils instead? What if they killed your mama and papa where they stood? What were you supposed to do then?
Her stomach rumbled. The sun had crested the mountain already. It was time for breakfast. Even if the man was from nearby Santa Catarina Barahona or San Lorenzo El Cubo, he probably had a wife, who made a spicy kak’ik, like Mama, or chiles rellenos which they had on Fridays and which were her favorite. Her stomach rumbled again, louder this time. That was how she’d been caught. By hunger. If she’d held out and refused to come down from her tree, he’d have gone away.
Alice knew the score. She didn’t need those images on replay. The man didn’t have a wife and there was no food and it took her a month or more to plot her escape and her time in the tree was nothing to what came next. She closed her eyes, banishing those images to the fire. The pictures from her childhood burned up, turned to dust, but were carried back to her in sparks and spirals of smoke that wound about her nostrils and dug their way back into her brain. They had infected her, these moving pictures. Made her mad for a while. She could not get them to halt, nor pause. They repeated until Bill made them stop. He always knew what to say, what to do, how to calm her. She needed him now. She screamed his name into the void. It came back a hundred times. But there was no Bill. Only the emptiness.
She jerked back to her present. While she’d spiraled into the past, the collapse that was going on around her had skidded to a stop. The avalanche had subsided and Alice was where she’d started. Death, it seemed, was busy with other people.
There was a newly made crater to her right, delivering fresh gusts of sickly-sweet air into her private slice of hell. She hadn’t moved, but she wasn’t done trying. She kicked her right foot out with the determination of a donkey. She imagined the bad man’s face below her foot and kicked again. He hadn’t taken her down. She couldn’t let Manhattan succeed where he had failed.
She hadn’t moved, but the world around her had. Net positive. She was lodged tight in a Swiss cheese tomb. Aggie would like that. Heck, Aggie would eat her way out if her prison were made of cheese. No time to think about the children. Must think about escape. There was a brand-spanking new air pocket to her right. That meant there were other air pockets.
Alice was suddenly giddy with the possibilities. Her prison wasn’t static. She’d made that pocket to her right. She could make another. The question was how? How to make more space open up around her without succumbing to a panic attack or getting mashed in the process? She needed to do what she had drilled into her children: treat everything as data. Rule nothing out. Data, data, data.
So, what did she know? She was buried in rubble with no light source. The air quality had changed. There were new smells on the wind. Her arms weren’t pinned as tightly as they had been before. Things were looking up.
She’d gotten used to being in the dark, but that didn’t mean she could see much. She needed to breathe, to smell, to allow her other senses to tabulate her surroundings.
She turned her head slowly to the left. Had anything opened up on that side? There was a pungent, metallic odor wafting towards her. With it, the warm smell of newly turned earth and a smidge of sewage. There’d be train tracks that way, careening into the fetid waters that had been let loose into the tunnels. Nothing had changed on that side or, if it had, not by much.
She turned her head back to the right. Distinctly different. Smoke. From a fire. But fire in the distance, not fire up close. Electrical, perhaps. Or industrial. Not campfire, that much was certain. She wiggled her right arm. Nothing around it moved, but she had at least two inches wiggle room, where before she’d had none. She pulled her arm towards her, gently, gingerly, careful not to scratch herself up. Her shoulder bunched up towards her cheek before she ran out of the ability to maneuver. Even that little movement felt good.
She pressed down into the rock with the heel of her hand. It was smooth to the touc
h. She flattened her hand and ran her fingers back and forth, eager to collect as much information about her surroundings as she could. Was it drywall? Brick? Ceiling tile? Crown molding? Was it small enough for her to dislodge? Where were its edges? She needed to think strategically now. She’d done this before, felt around in the dark, dislodging material, waiting for her moment.
She felt a flick of a whisker down by her ankles. Damned rats. They made her mind want to crawl out of her brain and disappear up through the ventilation shaft to her right.
“Data. Mom, that’s crucial data.” Paul was right. By pulling her focus away from the thing that was most important to her, she’d allowed something to bubble to the surface. The air to her right was fresh. The burning smell had come to her on a wind. There was a way out. If she could dig her way from her cell to the next one over, she’d be a step closer to freedom.
Think, Alice. Think about where you are, geographically. No, not geographically. That would come later, when she was back on the surface. Now she needed to think in terms of structure and layout.
