The Collapse: Time Bomb

by Penelope Wright

  I tread water for just a couple of seconds to give my arms a quick break. No one can hear me. Nobody is coming to my rescue. If I’m going to get out of here, I’m going to have to climb fifteen stories back to the landing on the twenty-fifth floor to do it. It’s going to be the most important climb of my life.

  I latch on to the support strut again, and I feel around with my feet, discovering crevices in the wall. The booties of my time travel outfit are actually perfect for this. I can curl my toes around the thinnest of edges.

  Feeling a glimmer of hope, I begin to inch up the vertical shaft. My eyes have adjusted to the very dim light, and instead of pitch blackness, I see hazy shapes in shades of the darkest brown, but I’ll take it. The closer I get to the twenty-fifth floor, the better I can see. The elevator shaft was constructed with crisscrossing exposed beams; it wasn’t finished off with sheets of smooth metal. I send a little mental blessing of gratitude toward the long-dead builders and architects of this tower.

  The ambient glow of the twenty-fifth floor now shines like the sun on a Burn Level Zero day. I’m twenty feet away.

  Ten.

  Five.

  My fingertips curl around the lip of the twenty-fifth floor and I find a last toe hold, pushing my torso up a foot. I brace my right elbow on the floor and use my arms to lift my head and shoulders above floor level. My feet dangle in thin air now, my weight is all on my upper chest, but that’s enough. I’ve made it. Wiggling the rest of my body onto the floor will be easy.

  I pull myself forward to waist level and look up just in time to get kicked in the face. “How stupid do you think I am?” Sarah sneers. She stomps on my right shoulder with a heavy black boot. “You think I’d just walk away from this? I’ve passed all my climbs too.”

  She pushes me backward until I’m hanging on by my gloved fingertips, my feet swaying below me, scrabbling but unable to find a toehold. I reach out and try to grab Sarah’s ankle, but she darts sideways and stomps on my other hand. The tips of my fingers graze her boot and my pinkie loops through her shoelace. I lose my grip with my damaged hand, and I slide down a foot, my hand tangled in Sarah’s boot. She’s going to have to let me climb her, or she’s coming with me.

  I can’t see her anymore – my head is below the lip of the floor – but she’s screaming and her leg shakes violently. I have her in a death grip and I am not letting go. She writhes and kicks as I drag her struggling body closer to the edge, inch by inch.

  Suddenly, she becomes as light as a feather, and I have a brief flash of hollow victory as I freefall. I’ll drown her when we hit the bottom and then I’ll try the climb again. I curl myself into a ball and cradle her empty boot against my body.

  I’m still screaming with rage as I hit the water and sink back into its rotting depths.

  Chapter Six

  March 21, 2074

  I bob back up to the surface and I don’t mess around with treading water or yelling for help this time. I swim straight to the side, find a handhold, and I cry.

  I know now that Sarah’s going to wait up there on the twenty-fifth floor until she’s sure I’m dead. I’m keenly aware of how severely I underestimated my father’s wife.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and I choke back my sobs. It’s eerily silent down here once my breathing is calm. I hope Sarah couldn’t hear me crying. I hope she thinks the fall broke me this time. Because there’s one more way out of here, and if I make it, the first thing I’m going to do is haul myself back into Columbia Tower, find her, and kill her. But I have to go down to come back up.

  My arms tremble. I can’t delay. I don’t have much strength left, and it won’t be too many minutes before I slip below the surface, unable to hang on any longer. I take a deep breath and hold it. I use my epiglottis, the leaf-shaped flap of cartilage attached to the back of my tongue, to seal off my throat, then I pull another mouthful of air in, my cheeks puffing out as far as they’ll go. Using my tongue like a kind of shovel, I push the mouthful of air down into my lungs while still holding my original lungful. I repeat that process over and over while I think.

  We’re flooded to the tenth floor. No matter which floor I try to exit, I’ll be swimming blindly in the dark. Inside the building, the closer I am to the surface of the water, the worse the debris field will be, due to surface winds and currents. My best bet is ground level. I know from my trips to the past that Columbia Tower had a wide-open lobby with little furnishings and few barriers to the exterior walls.

  I pack another lungful of air. This process is taking precious time, but I’m going to have to hold my breath for several minutes, so it’s necessary. I’ll have to swim down the elevator shaft until I touch the bottom, then hope the doors are gone or that I can force them open. Even just a few inches will be enough for me to slither through. I’ll swim in one direction until I get some indication that I’m out of the building. Then I’ll float up to the top.

  I’m not the best among my littermates at packing my lungs and holding my breath. Not even close. The longest I’ve ever gone in the practice tank was six minutes and fourteen seconds. Boris holds the record for our litter, at nineteen minutes, two seconds. But I don’t need that much time. I can swim ten stories down then out through the lobby in less than six minutes, I know it. One hundred feet down, maybe five hundred feet across. Totally doable.

  Of course, in the practice tank, I hadn’t been swimming through fifty years of accumulated junk and debris in the pitch dark, but I shove that thought aside just as I shove a final mouthful of air into my lungs. I flip my body and swim headfirst toward the bottom.

  I stroke, pulling hard with my arms and using a forceful frog kick, but it’s still way harder to swim down than it is to swim up. The pressure builds in my ears, so I know I’m definitely getting deeper.

  It’s black as mold down here, and I try to keep my eyes shut, but every once in a while they pop open reflexively, my brain insisting this time I’ll see something, so each time I’m startled again by how black and sightless it is. I brush against a few pieces of flotsam, but miraculously I don’t get snagged on anything.

  I’ve been swimming at least two minutes when my gloved hand brushes the bottom. My lungs aren’t burning yet, but there’s definitely a huge difference between holding my breath in the tank and doing it while swimming in a free dive with my life on the line. I have, at most, four minutes left in me. A little bit of luck now would be more than welcome.

  And unbelievably, I get some. Striking out blindly in the direction I think is most likely to be the elevator door, my left arm reaches forward a couple feet while my right shoulder bumps into an edge. I’ve found the door on my first try, and it’s jammed open at least a foot. I can get through that. I pivot my body to a ‘standing’ position and slip through the crack in the elevator door. Then I swim for all I’m worth in total darkness, using ten powerful strokes to take me straight away from the elevator doors. I swim directly into a wall. A little bit of breath bursts accidentally from my lungs and I curse myself. I can’t afford a mistake like that. I swim slower now, trailing my hand against the wall, and I can tell when I get to a corner of the building because one wall meets another and I pivot ninety degrees to swim and search for an exit along that wall.

  I’m on the first floor, I must be, and from what I know of the building there should be at least one wall that’s mostly doors to the outside. Once I find that, I’ll swim through and then zoom to the surface. My lungs are beginning to complain. It won’t be long before the complaint turns to a burn, and then a desperate and uncontrollable desire to breathe. But I haven’t found the doors yet. My fingers find something that feels like a rubber seal, but it can’t be a seal because it moves a little. It must be a door! I push hard, and it moves even more. I push and swim, but it never seems to stop, and I can’t tell if I’m outside or not. I swear I just went around in a complete circle. Revolving door, my brain supplies. I want to cry. Did I go all the way around in a complete circle? If I exit the door now, am I back i
nside the building? Will I swim twenty feet upward only to hit my head on a cathedral ceiling? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  My lungs have gone from complaining to angry. I don’t have much more time. My eyes open again of their own accord, and this time it’s not a useless exercise. I look back and forth, and yes! The water behind me is the inky black of obsidian, but the water in front of me is a lighter shade of black, like the color of pencil lead. The tiniest bit of light is filtering down from the surface. The exit must be straight ahead. I keep my eyes open now and swim forward directly into a wall of sunken debris piled against the outside of the building. All I can do is try to swim and pick my way through it and do my best to get closer to the surface.

  The water is murky and greenish black, and I know I’m outside and away from the building, but I still can’t see well enough to truly navigate. All I can do is swim the path of least resistance. Though all I want to do is go up, break the surface, and take a breath, sometimes I’m blocked, and I have to swim down again to find my way around or through whatever detritus is obstructing my path. My lungs are screeching at me now. I don’t know anymore how long I’ve been down here. There’s a good chance I’ve broken my personal best, but it’s no cause to celebrate because the water is still the color of seaweed, and I’ve reached an area where I can’t seem to go up, down, or forward due to a debris blockage. I’m backtracking when I’m yanked to a halt. One of the pockets of my jacket has gotten hooked on something, a knob or a spur of metal, I don’t know, but I struggle with it, trying to free myself, but I only seem to become more entangled. I try to unzip my jacket, but the zipper jams halfway. My lungs give a howl of agony, and a blast of breath bursts out of my mouth. That’s it. I’m going to die. I’m out of oxygen, and I’m out of time.

  Time.

  Underwater, in the greenish bracken, my eyes widen. Time. I gave my travel chemicals back to the hairy-armed man when my mission was aborted. But only the departure half. I still have the half meant for my return trip in my vest pocket.

  Desperately trying not to gulp in a deep lungful of seawater, I draw my helmet out of my inner vest pocket and swish it down over my head. I’ll never get it Velcroed to my collar, so I just fasten the side clamps and cinch them down as tightly as I can. I unzip the access panel to my port-a-cath. I won’t be able to peel up my second skin with this glove on. I take it off and let it float away. I peel back the second skin and try not to be completely grossed out knowing the filthy floodwaters are pouring into my open port. I unzip my return hypodermic and flick the protective nub off the tip. Did I plunge a little of the chemicals out just now? I may have. It was calibrated for a sixty-seven year trip. If I wasted some just now, where will I end up? I have no time to stop and worry about it.

  I force the tip of the hypodermic into my seawater flooded port-a-cath. Spots bloom in front of my eyes from lack of oxygen.

  Plunge. I jam my thumb down on the hypodermic, thrusting the chemicals into my bloodstream.

  Withdraw. I whip the needle back out.

  Drop. I open my hand, and the spent hypodermic floats into the abyss.

  Slap. Slap? Confusion is taking over. Oh…right. I reapply my second skin over the open port-a-cath, but it’s too wet and won’t stick.

  Zip. Zip? I don’t know what that means. The spots in front of my eyes grow so large they seem to burst into a shower of black glitter, and I slip into something. Whether it’s death or the void, I do not know.

  Part II

  June 19, 2018

  Thud.

  “What the hell?” a guy’s voice yells. Canvas writhes and flaps as two dirty teenage boys in stained clothing worm out of the collapsed tent.

  A third boy sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk stares at them with round, unfocused eyes. “Holy shit, dude. Some chick just fell out of the sky.”

  “Jesus!” The blond boy from the tent rakes his hand through his already messy, longish hair and stares at the pile of canvas and poles askew on the sidewalk. “Come on, Carlos,” he says, prodding his tall, dark-haired companion. “Help me pull her outta there.”

  The boys wade into the billowing canvas of the collapsed tent. The blond boy reaches in, grasps the girl by the shoulders, flips her over, then jumps back. “Oh, crap, dude.”

  Behind him, Carlos cranes his neck to see. “What?”

  “This isn’t some chick. It’s Lita, Jimmy Squint’s girl.”

  “I thought she went to juvie?”

  “I guess she’s out and crashing our tent. Literally.”

  Carlos steps closer and peers at her. “I don’t know, Dez. I think she’s too short to be Lita.”

  “How can you tell how tall she is when she’s lying down?” Dez leans over her. “Lita? Hey, Lita, it’s Dez. Remember me? Wake up.” The girl’s eyelids flutter. She moans and throws her hands over her face.

  Dez turns to Carlos. “Dude, she’s soaking wet. What is she wearing? That some kind of new juvie jumpsuit? You don’t think she escaped, do you?”

  Carlos shakes his head. “Nah. No telling what she’s gotten up to, though, or what she’s coming down off of.”

  The girl turns her head, retches, and coughs up a gallon of what looks like seawater and puke mixed together, and the boys jump back.

  “Ah, man! The tent. Crap, what the hell, Lita?” Dez yells. He raises his hand as if to slap her upside the head, but Carlos grabs it.

  “Knock it off, dude,” Carlos says. “Let’s get her off the tent, fix the poles, and drag her inside where she can sleep it off.”

  “I’m not bringing that thing in my tent.”

  “What do you think Jimmy Squint’s gonna say when he finds out you left his girl dope-sick and out on the street?”

  Dez glares at Carlos, then his shoulders sag. “You hold her arms. I’ll get her legs.”

  Carlos lifts her easily under her armpits. Dez struggles with her legs. Lurching, they move her off the tent and place her on the sidewalk. “You stay here with her, make sure nobody messes with her. I’ll fix the tent,” Carlos says.

  It only takes him a minute or two to pop the poles back up and get the tent shaped back into a dome. Passersby hurrying between office buildings avert their eyes. One makes a snide remark under his breath about the homeless, and how the sidewalks are for taxpayers, but Carlos and Dez ignore him, and the girl’s too out of it to notice. Her eyes are closed; the only indication she’s alive is the slight flutter of the pulse in her neck.

  Carlos and Dez drag her inside the tent, stuff a couple of wadded-up sweatshirts under her head, and lay a threadbare sleeping bag over her. She clenches and releases her right fist several times, then shivers, rolls onto one side, and lies as still as the dead.

  Chapter Seven

  June 21, 2018

  I peel my eyes open. I’m in a darkened enclosure, but I’m not alone. The air isn’t pitch black. I see the outlines of at least two other people lying curled on either side of me. The ground beneath me is hard. When I wiggle my body, every nerve ending reports sharp pain, but I can barely filter that information through the pounding in my head, which is the worst feeling of all.

  There’s quick movement to my right. “Hey, whozat…what’s going…?” A boy speaks, but he cuts himself off. “Hey, you’re awake,” he says, so quietly I almost can’t hear him over the screaming pain in my head.

  “Drink,” I croak.

  “Yeah, here you go.” He hands me a half full jug.

  I lift my head a couple inches, unscrew the cap, and drink a long sip of the most deliriously delicious water I’ve ever tasted. I glug another swig.

  “Slow down or you might puke again.”

  I sigh and hand him the bottle. “Thanks,” I say, my voice less scratchy than before. I close my eyes and lie back down.

  “You’re welcome,” the boy whispers. “Do you remember me?”

  I open one eye. “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m Carlos. You’re Lita, right?”

  Lita. There’s something fami
liar about that. “Um…” I say. “That sounds kind of right.”

  “Somebody slipped you some bad shit, Lita. Maybe fentanyl? You’ve been asleep for two days. Don’t worry, though. We’ll take care of you until we can hook you back up with Jimmy.”

  “Who’s Jimmy?”

  Carlos waits a couple of beats before responding. “Jimmy. Your boyfriend. He’s, uh…well, you should probably remember who he is before he comes looking for you.”

  I shrug, my shoulders raising the sleeping bag I’m huddled under just a little. “Okay, I’ll try.” I think hard for a couple minutes. “I’m pretty sure I have some other things to do too.”

  “Can one of them be shut the hell up and go back to sleep?” a cranky voice on the other side of me whines.

  Now that I’ve quenched my thirst, I feel like I could sleep for a million years. I don’t respond. I just pull the covers over my head, curl into the fetal position, and pass out again immediately.

  Strange noises wake me up, but it’s not the boys in the tent. The sounds aren’t completely foreign, but they’re hard to identify. Squeals, grinds, metallic clunking sounds, and a steadily growing whirring hum of constant activity draw me out of my sleeping bag, through the canvas flap, and onto the sidewalk.