“Come on!” He grabbed at her, but his bad arm didn’t have the strength to pull her up. He lay his burden down; the young man shakily got to his own hands and knees and crawled farther into the collapsing darkness of his house.
Crane seized King around the waist and pulled her up his hip, bearing most of her weight. Behind them, outside, the square was brilliant fire. He could hardly breathe. “Salle de bain,” he shouted to the boy. “Tub! Tub!”
“Ici,” the boy called weakly and continued to crawl.
“Good,” Crane said, pulling a moaning Lanie with him as he squat-walked through the wreckage, the heat unbearable. “Are you still with me?”
Her head lolled on her shoulders, her eyelashes fluttering, trying to bring back the eyes that wanted to roll up into her skull. “I’m f-fine,” she mumbled weakly. “I just need to… need to… lie down, I—I—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Crane said, dragging her now. “Dan’s going to kill me if this damned volcano doesn’t.”
The boy had crawled behind the stairs to nowhere and pushed weakly at a splintered doorway half squashed by its own frame. Crane, working at sucking air, dropped King and threw himself against the remnants of the door. It gave way with him, and he tumbled into a bathroom that was half caved in from the side facing the mountain but remarkably intact otherwise.
He reached back and pulled the young man in with him. A freestanding bathtub waited majestically in the middle of an ash-covered floor. He scrambled back over the splinters and took Lanie by her collar to drag her into the room. “You stay awake!” he yelled at her as she bumped over broken mortar and wood. “Do you hear me! Don’t go to sleep!”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” she said, her voice raspy. Blood flowed down her neck, soaking her hair and shirt.
He dragged her to the tub and placed her flat next to it. “Don’t move,” he said, then pulled the boy by the arm and put him close beside her. He lay atop them both and tipped the tub over them, hoping it would hold enough of an air pocket to keep them alive and be strong enough to protect them from falling debris.
The rumbling got louder, all-encompassing in the stifling darkness beneath the tub. “Retenir votre respiration,” he told the boy, then to Lanie, “Take a deep breath and hold it.”
They did, to the roar of the cloud washing over them, the rest of the house giving way under the heat and mud, falling in on top of them, screaming as it died, screaming as his parents’ house had.
His body cooked dry, robbing him of fluids. He couldn’t breathe or swallow. He could hear Lanie and the boy gasping for breath. Dammit, Pelee would not take his life or the lives of those with him today! By God, the monster had had enough.
“Easy,” he whispered through parched lips, and he found himself stroking Lanie’s hair in the darkness, the terrible roar a distant storm now. He felt her relax under his hand. “It’s over.”
She groaned loudly. “Then c-could you… get your… knee out of my back. You’re… k-killing me.”
“Sorry,” he said, finally able to draw a strong breath as fresh air rushed through the crack around the bottom of the tub, filling the vacuum created by the cloud. Air meant some sort of passage to the outside. A beginning.
He shoved out with his good hand, the tub budging, but stuck. It was pinned under something heavy. The boy reached up and helped, the two of them straining the tub up far enough for Crane to roll out and clear the ceiling off the thing and roll it away from them.
It was black as a deep cave. Crane touched the sloping underside of the staircase. It had collapsed in an inverted V atop them and had probably saved their lives. Unfortunately, it was now their prison.
They were trapped.
The boy moaned. Crane reached for him as he fell heavily to the littered ground and searched for his carotid artery. There was no pulse.
“No!” Crane screamed, the darkness swallowing his words. “You can’t have him!”
He began administering CPR, knowing instinctively that they’d taken the boy off the fluids too soon and that the strain of the fear had sent his heart over the edge.
“Come on,” he pleaded, then pounded the boy’s chest. “Come on!”
He didn’t know how long he’d worked on the boy. He only knew that at some point even Lewis Crane had to give up. His breath was coming in gasps as he fell back atop a pile of masonry. He smelled gas, not knowing if it were real or a memory flashback in the darkness. He felt the heat of flames, but couldn’t see them. Then he cried softly and wished, as he had every day of his life since the Northridge quake, that he’d stayed inside the house with his parents. The peace of death eluded him, but its agony was his constant companion.
“He’s gone, Lanie,” Crane finally whispered into the darkness to no response. He stiffened. “Lanie… Lanie!”
He crawled to her. She was limp. He gathered her to his breast and rocked her gently in their mausoleum of mud and stone. And even as his mind spun into a numbed vortex of falling buildings and bright orange fire, every part of him, rational and irrational, was willing life into the body of Elena King.
Chapter 6: Pangaea
THE FOUNDATION
21 JUNE 2024, 11:15 A.M.
Newcombe sat before the thirty-by-forty-foot wall screen in the dark lecture hall where Foundation briefings were held on missions. Pictures streamed in from helos hovering above Le Precheur. He saw an ocean of mud, a desert of slime with skeletal signs of civilization poking from its innards. Somewhere, buried beneath the ooze over the crumpled city, were the two most important people in the world to him. He refused to accept their deaths. Refused.
There were lots of people working the site—the Foundation’s people were there out of obligation, the townspeople out of gratitude to the demon saint who’d saved their loved ones. He could see mud-covered workers picking at the wreckage in thirty different places. Damn, it was too loose, too widespread an effort to be truly effective. Those rescuers would never get to Lanie and Crane in time if they kept to that strategy.
“H-hello?”
“Yes, who is this?” Newcombe returned, noting the tension in the man’s voice.
“M-My name is Dr. Ben Crowell and I’d really like to get back to the digging, I—”
“Doctor,” Newcombe said. “We don’t have much time, sir. Were you the last one to see Dr. Crane and Dr. King before the eruption?”
“Yes… I—”
“Have someone put a camera on you, Ben. I want to see… ah, good.”
The grim face of a haggard, filthy man blipped as an insert onto the huge screen.
“You know where they are, Ben?”
“I know where they were, doctor,” Crowell said, “but everything’s shifted. Nothing’s where it was. I can’t seem to get my… bearings. I’m sorry.”
“Calm down,” Newcombe said, his own resolve solid. “Crane’s alive. We’re in contact with him. They still have a little air. We just need to pinpoint them. Are you in the town square?”
“I think so.”
“Did this happen close to the town square?”
“Yes!” the man said, brightening.
Newcombe inserted a detailed satellite photo map in the lower right-hand corner of the excavation shot, showing Le Precheur as it was mere days ago. “Have someone give you a monitor… we’re transmitting from this end.”
“Just a moment… I… yes, I see the map.”
“Look at it carefully and draw conclusions.”
He zoomed in on the street leading up to the square, focusing on the masonry houses with the red thatch roofs, French colonial influence.
“This one, this one,” Crowell shouted. “The fifth house from the square on the west side of the street.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“There were stairs going up, but no second floor. Your map only shows one two-story house on the block on that side of the street. It’s got to be the place.”
Newcombe overlaid a ruler on the map. “The square had a flagpole
in the center.”
“It’s still there.”
“Due east from the flagpole, 113 feet four inches, is the front door of that house. Measure accurately—okay?—and have everyone dig there… but slowly, carefully, very carefully.”
Crowell darted away and was off-camera for a minute or more, though in audio contact the whole time.
“You’ve got enough diggers there,” Newcombe said brusquely. “I need your attention, Crowell, got to get some more information from you.” Crowell’s tired face popped up again. “Good. Now, tell me, what exactly happened? How was it that the two senior members of the expedition were left behind during an eruption?”
“We were evacuating the city quickly because of the St. Elmo’s Fire. I was giving a patient with crush syndrome an IV, when Crane came rushing in with Dr. King and ordered me and the men on the lever to get down to the docks. Crane took the IV from me and we ran. It was a nightmare, trying to run through the deep mud, getting bogged down in it….”
“Take a deep breath, Ben. Better now?” Crowell wearily shook his head. “Go on,” Newcombe said encouragingly.
Crowell’s expression darkened as he relived his time in hell. “We… we somehow got down to the docks, lightning, pink lightning, was everywhere. There were fires… rocks were pelting us.” He rubbed his eyes. “Confusion at the ferries, mass chaos with trucks and people shoving. We somehow all got on board, but we couldn’t have been a mile or two from shore when the top blew off the mountain and the damned cloud formed. It came right for us, reaching for us, full of lightning. It roared and flung rocks. I knew we were all dead. Then, it started slowing down. The cloud got kind of pale, then just sailed over us, raining ash. But it started to sort of, well expand… until it filled the sky… except for a sliver of horizon. I’ve never seen anything even remotely like that.”
“Hold it, Ben,” Newcombe said, seeing the diggers making some progress. “Tell them to get optical sensors in there,” he said, Crowell disappearing from the screen for several seconds. He came back frowning.
“They sent me back. Everyone’s afraid to talk to you. Most of the surveillance gear was lost in the… did you call it, eruption? It didn’t seem like—”
“Please, Ben.”
Crowell nodded apologetically. “They’re trying to rig something now.”
“If they can hear me, then they know, they’d better hurry! Come back with my people alive or don’t come back. Now tell me, how much time passed between you leaving Crane and King and the eruption?”
The man opened his eyes wide. “Maybe ten minutes, barely enough time to finish the IV.”
“And what time of day was this?”
The man reached into his pocket, pulled out a watch, and held it close for Newcombe to see. Its face was cracked, the time frozen at 7:26. “I smashed it on a truck getting onto the ferry. Can I go now?”
Four hours. Oxygen was the problem—if they’d survived the mud and fire. “One more thing, Ben. You say there was a staircase in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Thanks. We’re finished.” He blanked Crowell’s insert from the screen, replacing it with a revolving tour of the news feeds on the scene. He let his head fall back on the seat and closed his eyes. They’d find them now, hopefully before the air ran out. Crane stayed with the house, the area under the stairs a decent place to trap oxygen and as good a place as any to be. They were there. He refused to let himself think about anything except the prospect of finding them safe, sound.
“Would you rather be alone?”
Newcombe opened his eyes to see a hologram of Brother Ishmael, ten inches high, floating in the air before him, an angelic glow around the image. “I’m not even going to ask how you did this,” he said.
The image looked sheepish. “I planted a homer on your hand back at the boat. It’s that thing that looks like a pimple on your left thumb. Pull it off and I’m gone.”
Newcombe looked at the thumb, noted the device, left it alone. “Have you seen what’s happening?” he asked.
The image nodded. “I thought maybe you could use some support, Brother. Crane’s foolishness has put your woman in danger.”
“Foolishness,” Newcombe repeated. “They dug forty-two living people out of that mud. I’d call that courageous, Brother Ishmael.”
“It takes courage just to live,” Ishmael replied. “I’m not here to argue with you, only to wait with you… to grieve with you if it comes to that.”
“Let’s not worry about the grief yet.”
“Indeed. Are you involved in the S and R mission?”
“In a small way,” Newcombe said, looking past the holo to the diggers.
“What happened on Martinique? They haven’t been able to explain that cloud or anything else on the news—”
“They’ll figure it out eventually,” Newcombe said, angry that no one had taken charge of the surveillance gear on site. A good optical sensor could save them hours. Burt Hill would have seen to the equipment. Damn Crane for not taking him. He looked again at Brother Ishmael. “This kind of eruption happens from time to time. The French call it nuée ardente, ‘glowing cloud.’ A hundred and twenty years of refinement has settled the term at ‘glowing avalanche.’ It’s happened on Pelee before.”
“What is it?”
“A kind of lateral eruption with just enough force to blow the top layer of crater scum straight down the mountain. It acts as a heavy liquid, a mixture of gas, steam, and solid particles. As the heavier particles settle, the gas and steam are free to continue onward, only the smaller particles holding the cloud earthbound. As those are dispersed, the cloud ascends.”
“What’s the thing they’re bringing to the dig now?” Ishmael asked.
Newcombe looked at the screen, his insides tightening up for the big one. An optical sensor. Now they’d see.
Crane and Lanie sat side by side in their muddy tomb, leaning back against the tub that saved their lives. The boy whose name they hadn’t learned lay beside them in the darkness.
It was completely black. Crane had no idea of how much mud separated them from the outside. What air they had, he feared, was dissipating quickly. It was foul and musty.
He tapped his wristpad. “Dan… you there?”
“I’m here, Crane.” There was relief and happiness in Newcombe’s voice. “I think we’ve isolated your location. We’re coming at it with an optical sensor.”
“Get an air tube in here.”
“Okay. Let me talk to Lanie.”
“She’s indisposed,” Crane said, tapping off and sagging against the tub. Beside him, Lanie slid in and out of consciousness. She’d had a nasty cut on the temple; he’d stopped the bleeding by applying mud. He’d torn off the sleeve of his shirt and tied it tightly around her wound, loosening it every few minutes, then retightening. He’d gone through medical school for the field knowledge, never carrying it any further than on-site emergency treatment. Lanie needed a real doctor.
She moaned, regaining consciousness, just as she had fifteen times already. She had the damnedest type of concussion, one with trauma to the deep section of the frontal lobes involving recent memory. She could not capture and hold on to a new thought. Every time she became conscious, the experience was brand new to her. Crane prepared to start with her again at Square One. He heard her sudden intake of breath, knew she was reacting to the darkness and the pain, and quickly put a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t panic,” he said low, soothing.
“Crane?”
“Take it easy. You’ve had a blow to the head. Try and relax.”
“Where the hell are we?”
“Trapped,” he said, “in the debris of a house… under a mudslide. In Martinique. They’re coming to rescue us.”
“You’re kidding? Martinique? Is Dan all right?”
“He’s fine… though a little worried. He’s back in California.”
“He is? Why don’t I remember?”
“It’s no
rmal,” he said calmly, patting her shoulder again. “Don’t worry about it.”
“What happened to me?”
“A blow to the head.”
“Really? And Dan?”
“He’s all right. He’s not here.”
“We’re not in California, are we?”
“No.” If the circumstances weren’t so grim, he knew he’d find it difficult to keep himself from laughing.
“I’m fine now.”
“I know.”
“Where are we?”
“Martinique.”
“Really? And Dan’s not here, right?”
“Right.”
“We got trapped here, but we’re going to get rescued.”
“That, dear lady, is my sincerest hope.”
She grunted. “I’m fine. Really okay now. My head feels like hell, though. I think there’s some dorph somewhere… I never travel without—”
“I’ve got it,” he said. “You’ve already had some, but if you want some more….”
“Only one,” she said, holding out her hand. He retrieved the dorph from his work shirt pocket and gave her a tablet. They’d repeated this particular scenario six times.
“You take one,” she said, swallowing the pill.
“You know I don’t take dorph.”
“How come? Ow! That hurts.”
“Don’t touch your head.” He drew his legs up. “You know, it just occurred to me I can tell you anything, because you won’t remember it.”
“I’ll remember.” She laughed. “I told you I’m fine. I simply need to know… is Dan all right?”
“He’s fine. He’s back in California.”
“Did I take a dorphtab?”
“Yes,” he said, the most wicked, thrilling sense of freedom stealing through him: no surveillance and perhaps a ton of mud for soundproofing insulation; a listener who would immediately forget what he said. If this were to be his last conversation, he’d make it a winner. “I was about to tell you why I don’t take dorph.”