by ES Richards
“They can’t be trusted, I’ll give you that,” Kitch nodded. “But we have to give them a chance. Little by little, in time, we should try and question them again and give some of the civilians a chance to be integrated into our society. Not all of them are guilty and even the ones that are deserve a chance at redemption.”
“Dennis, care to cut in here?” Jason changed his tact, turning to his reliable friend and ally, the man unusually quiet considering the discussion they were having. “You can’t be on board with this, seriously? We can’t just let them get away with what they’ve done. With what they’ve done to Jamie!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dennis murmured under his breath, his voice barely loud enough for everyone to hear. They stopped talking among themselves though, turning and listening, waiting for him to continue.
“What do you mean?” Jason asked again after a moment, Dennis falling silent again instead of carrying on. “What doesn’t matter?”
“Any of this,” Dennis looked up and shrugged. “There’s no way we can get over this. They’re just going to keep coming.”
The room paused at the words, a dozen pairs of eyes narrowing as they looked at Dennis. Eventually, the man continued to speak.
“It’s what he said,” Dennis explained, “the boy. When we locked them away on the ship, he turned to me and he said we hadn’t stopped anything. He said there were more of them, waiting in the ocean, biding their time. He said we’d taken down one ship, but ten more would come in its place. He said it was only the beginning, that Kauai was going to fall and there was nothing we could do about it. He said they’d be here within the week.”
Chapter 17
“Dante, there you are! We’ve got to go, come on.”
“Huh, what?” Dante looked up from some papers he was reading about the supply of medicine that was kept inside the cave. He was quite impressed by the store they had, though it was a bittersweet feeling to find drugs which he believed could have helped his mother in her time of need. “Why?”
“Haven’t you heard?” Samuel asked, taking a step closer. He had rather hoped someone might have told Dante already, the thought of dropping another bombshell on the poor man not something he wanted to do. But Dante needed to know what had happened. “It’s Austin,” Samuel explained, “he’s had an accident at one of the roadblocks. One of the bombs…”
Dante didn’t hear the rest of whatever Samuel was about to say. In a flash, Dante saw his husband’s face and tried to imagine life without him. He couldn’t. Years of memories tumbled through his head in under a second, their life together flashing before him and leaving Dante with one overwhelming feeling: he wasn’t ready for it to end.
“What happened? Is he alive? Where is he?”
“He’s alive,” Samuel nodded as Dante questioned him. “Not too far from here. Come on – we’ve got a car.”
The two of them rushed through the cave and out toward where a car waited for them, Walter and Lin already in the front seats. Dante barely even looked at them as he tumbled into the back, his mind fixated on his husband and what had happened to him. Samuel had explained in bits as they’d jogged through the cave, parts of his explanation sticking out and lodging themselves in Dante’s head.
A bomb had gone off at one of the zones and Austin was trapped. That was about as much as Dante had been able to take in; his husband was trapped, but alive. It was only as they were pulling away from the cave that Bowie popped into Dante’s head. Would they be back to collect him at the end of the school day? What would he tell his son if they couldn’t get Austin out from the rubble he was trapped beneath? Would they ever be a proper family again? Dante had already lost so much to this new and heartless world; he couldn’t stand to lose anything else. They’d get Austin out somehow, there was no way Dante was leaving without him.
***
Peering out of the tiny hole in the brickwork, Austin looked up at the buildings he could see, craning his neck in search of the blue sky above them. No matter how much he stretched in that direction, all he could see was the gray exterior of the buildings, the life of the city beyond that out of his reach.
Nearly an hour had passed since he became entombed under the rock. Luc and Taggy had tried their best, but the little hole Taggy had made was still the only way out that Austin had. And unless he shrunk down to a fraction of his size, there was no way he was getting out of it.
If he pressed his ear against the hole, Austin could just about hear the discussions going on about how they were going to rescue him. Luc had high-tailed it back to the cave to gather tools and recruit some more helpers, the small group of them assessing the situation and trying to come up with a way to save Austin. It was terrifying. Every time they tried something and it didn’t work, Austin was petrified that the slate of rock above his head was going to come crashing down and squash him underneath it.
He’d played the moment out in his head over and over. The worst thing that he could imagine happening, was the slate coming down and crushing his body, but leaving him still alive and aware of what was happening. Whenever he had imagined death before, Austin always imagined losing his mind would be the worst way to go, but now he realized that would be a blessing. Now that he was faced with the problem, he could see nothing more painful than being mentally aware of all the suffering and yet being able to do nothing to combat it. If the slate did fall, Austin almost wanted it to crush his skull – at least then he wouldn’t be forced to live with the knowledge of what he could’ve been.
“How you doing, Austin? You hanging in there?”
“All good,” he called back to Taggy, the woman checking up on him often as the conversations carried out outside. His words meant nothing of course, but what more could he say to her? The truth of what was going through his head didn’t bear repeating, Austin knew his negative thoughts weren’t going to help anyone.
“Someone just arriving to see you now, I think,” Taggy called out again. She wasn’t as close to the hole as she’d been previously, Austin peering out once more to see if his limited scenery had changed. There was nothing new there, but as Austin heard a car door slam and then feet race over in his direction, he knew who Taggy was referring to.
“Where is he? Where is – oh god. Under there? You can’t be serious. Austin? Austin!”
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Austin was already reassuring his husband by the time Dante found the little hole into his cave, collapsing into a heap on the ground beside it and pressing his face up against the opening. “Back off a little,” Austin half-chuckled, “you’re blocking all the light.”
“Oh right,” Dante apologized. “Sorry, is that better? Hey.”
Finally, Dante was able to position himself in a place where Austin could see him and he could just about see his husband, the smallest beam of light finding its way into his tomb and illuminating one side of his face. Austin tried to stop himself from sobbing as he saw Dante’s face again, the emotions boiling up in him and creating a lump in his throat.
“Hey,” he said back, his voice cracking and giving his fear away immediately. “You came.”
“Of course, I came,” Dante gushed back, sliding one of his fingers through the crack in the brickwork so that he could touch his husband. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” Austin nodded back, though the movement went unseen by Dante. “No injuries,” he confirmed. “I just want to get out of here.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Dante replied confidently. “Samuel, Walter and Lin are here now too. They’ll help think of something.”
Austin nodded again, grateful that Lin had arrived. She was an intelligent woman and from her experience in the fire department, she knew a thing or two about rescuing people from dangerous situations. As things went, Austin knew he was probably surrounded by the best people in the business for dealing with a problem like this, he only hoped they could figure it out before too many more hours passed. The thought of spending the night tr
apped under the rubble alone was more terrifying than he was able to even process.
“I’m sorry,” Dante whispered to him, distracting Austin from his harrowing thoughts. “About earlier – I didn’t mean what I said.”
“It’s okay,” Austin replied, “we don’t have to talk about that now.”
“I know,” Dante said, “but I want to. I want you to know that I’m in this with you, one hundred percent. I know I haven’t been the best husband recently. But I don’t want you to think I’m giving up on this, on us. We’re going to figure this all out, Austin. And if that means I need to sign up to some cult or whatever the hell we’re living in now, then so be it. I’ll do whatever it takes to make our family work. Always.”
“I think you better stop calling it a cult in that case,” Austin replied with a chuckle. “These are good people. We could do well with them.”
“If they manage to get you out of this mess then I’ll do whatever they want me to,” Dante admitted. “Seriously though,” he said with a straight face again. “I mean it – I want us to be a family again and I’m going to do everything I can to make that happen. Whatever this is,” he opened his arms and shrugged, referring to the wider issues going on across the city, “we’re in it now and we’ve got to come out the other end. I’m sorry I didn’t see that before, but now I do.”
“Okay,” Austin smiled, hooking his index finger around Dante’s as it was poked back through the little hole again. “That’s a deal. We’ll make it through this together. We’ll be a family again.”
“I love you, Austin,” Dante said seriously. “I love you more than anything in the world.”
“I love you too. And I’ll love you even more if you can get me out of here. What’s going on? Do they have a plan yet?”
“How’s he holding up in there?” Lin asked Dante right on cue. “Do you mind if I speak to him a second?”
Dante nodded, climbing to his feet and stepping to one side to allow Lin a line of sight through the hole to Austin. While they had been talking, the rest of them had been planning and Dante now noticed the tools and equipment they had filled the street with. It wasn’t his area of expertise, but he now harbored the strongest tool of them all: hope. Dante was determined to continue his life with his family, and he knew that the first step to achieving his future, was to believe that it was possible.
“This is a bit of a situation, isn’t it,” Lin cracked a smile as she saw Austin. “Never took you for much of a hermit.”
Austin laughed, more out of kindness than amusement, though he appreciated that Lin was trying to keep the situation breezy. “Please tell me you’ve got a plan, Lin,” he asked her. “I’d like to read my boy a bedtime story tonight.”
“I’ll do my best to get you there,” Lin nodded, her tone of voice changed from friendly to professional. The firefighter in her was emerging and Austin was more than happy to see it. “We’re going to set up a couple of jacks on either side and lift this slate up above you, that sound okay?”
“Will it work?”
“It should,” Lin nodded, “provided we get our timing right.”
“And what if you don’t?” Austin asked nervously, unsure if he wanted to hear the answer.
“We will,” Lin declared. She had been in enough situations like this to know you didn’t go tempting fate. It was best to reassure the person in danger and have everyone believing the rescue was going to be a success, all the while preparing for the potential disaster internally. Lin knew the dangers that could happen if they didn’t operate the jacks in complete unison. If they lifted one side too high then the slate could crack and break on top of Austin, or the rocks and rubble on the other parts they weren’t lifting might cave in on top of him. There were any number of ways that the operation could go wrong, but there was also a way that it could work and that was what Lin chose to focus on.
“There might be a bit of debris and dust that comes down on you,” Lin explained to Austin, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a paper mask. “Here,” she stuffed it through the hole, “put this on so you don’t inhale too much of it. But if it gets too much, if – at any point – you want us to stop, just shout, okay? The aim here is to get you out in one piece, so you’ve got to talk to us. If you feel unsafe or in danger, we need to know. Okay?”
“Okay,” Austin replied, unable to think of anything else to say as he put the mask on. “Got it.”
“You’ll be out in no time,” Lin said confidently before walking away. “You’ll see.”
“I’ve got to go baby,” Dante appeared again quickly, though Lin was calling him away from the area so they could set up the jacks. “You’ll be okay. I promise. I love you.”
“I love you too,” Austin whispered as Dante disappeared as well, pulled away so that Lin and her team could carry out the job.
Even though they were doing everything they could to save him, as Austin leaned back against the bricks in his small tomb he felt completely and utterly terrified of what was about to happen. He could feel his heart hammering, beating so hard and so fast it overpowered the sound of people talking and moving around outside. The thumping filled his eardrums and Austin squeezed his eyes shut, fighting against what he knew was coming: another panic attack.
“Not now,” he whispered. “Not now.”
He tried to think about something else – anything else that distracted him from the jacks being set up outside. The sound of them grating against the rock was like nails on a chalkboard, the scraping echoing throughout his tiny little cave and filling Austin with dread. With his eyes closed and his legs pulled up as close to his chest as he could manage, his body forming the smallest shape possible, Austin did everything he could to slow his breathing and calm his frightened mind.
He thought of his husband and son, remembering vacations they’d shared in recent years, teaching Bowie to swim and waking up early to watch the sunrise. He wanted to see a sunrise again and it was the image of that – the warm colors of red and orange and yellow, the calm and quiet that captured the air no matter where you saw it – that kept Austin focused as his rescue carried on outside. He pictured the sunrise and felt the warmth from the sun radiating on his face as he imagined it, a feeling of comfort and peace, a feeling of safety.
A sharp gust of wind broke his trance, knocking Austin back from the sunrise and into reality. The jacks were working and inch by inch, the slate of rock above his head was being lifted up. The gap between it and the brickwork wall it had rested on grew larger and larger until a pair of hands reached through for him, beckoning Austin back out into the world and back into the arms of his loved ones.
Chapter 18
“That was pretty incredible what you did today,” Samuel praised Lin a couple of hours later. Everyone was finally back at the cave and enjoying a bit of rest after another intense day. “Have you done things like that before?”
“It’s kind of part of the job,” Lin shrugged in response. “It’s just what I’m trained for.”
“You don’t like talking about yourself much, do you?” Samuel questioned with a little chuckle. “You should be proud.”
“I am,” Lin replied matter-of-factly, “I just,” she paused and then looked back at Samuel with a smile. “Yeah, I guess you’re right, I don’t talk about this sort of stuff often. Back at the station, it was just part of everyone’s day. You wake up in the morning and know you’re going to do what you can to help people. Before long, you stop seeing it as something you deserve praise for.”
“Well, I still think it’s pretty special,” Samuel said. “All of this sort of makes me wish I’d done something more with my career while I had a chance.”
“You did though,” Lin pointed out. “Everyone saw that news bulletin. You maybe did the most important thing of all.”
“At the end, sure. But that was only sixty seconds of my career and to be honest, it wasn’t anything like what I’ve spent the rest of it doing. I’ve always enjoyed marketing, you know?
But looking back on it now, I wonder whether it was really worth it – whether what I was doing ever benefitted anyone.”
“What sort of things did it involve? You’ll have to forgive me, I don’t know very much about the corporate world.”
“I don’t blame you,” Samuel smiled, “I doubt it’s very interesting to someone not involved. I won’t bore you with the specifics.”
“No, go on,” Lin urged him. “I want to know.”
“Alright,” Samuel said, “well I guess it starts with getting up and putting on a suit and tie each morning…”
Launching into a recount of what a day in his working life had been like before Trident’s collapse, Samuel opened up to Lin and shared details about his past. He found her incredibly easy to talk to, their dialogue flowing naturally without any awkward pauses or silences. Samuel often found himself getting tongue-tied in conversations, but with Lin none of that came to light. He felt comfortable with her.
The longer they talked, the more Lin’s hard exterior began to fade away. She wasn’t normally an open woman. There were moments from her past that she’d learned harsh lessons from, her harsh exterior built up as a result of them. But with Samuel, those betrayals and hurtful memories were forgotten – she found herself smiling again, even laughing. And as the hours passed by into the night, she never once grew bored of his company.
“I do wonder what it’s like out there,” Samuel mused, conversation moving onto the topic of his sister and her family in Hawaii. “Do you think all of this madness will have reached that far? I imagine their power will have been turned off just like everywhere else, but in a much smaller community do you think things will have devolved as much?”
“I doubt it,” Lin shook her head. “There are plenty more people here to stir the pot and try to run things their own way. If I had to guess, I’d say the smaller the group, the better they’ll be getting along with one another.”