by Keith Taylor
It felt like every drop of blood was rushing from his head to his legs as he tumbled. A ringing filled his ears, and he saw his vision narrow to a tunnel. His mind felt like it was stuffed full of cotton wool, and after just a few seconds of spinning it became even more difficult to think clearly. Any moment now, he knew, he’d pass out, and once he was gone he knew he’d never come back. The approaching ground didn’t have the patience to wait.
Once again he tried to flip the switch in his mind, trying desperately to bring himself under control and get a grip on the chaos. He tried to step out of himself, picturing himself back in the plane where Warren had given him his instructions. It had only been a moment ago, but it might as well have been a year. Nothing but a few confused fragments were coming through, and he knew that any moment now it would be too late to arrest his fall. The blur was now more green than blue, and the horizon seemed to spread around him like a blanket waiting to wrap around him. The ground was coming up fast.
Come on, Jack. Remember what he told you.
Come on, Jack!
Jack.
Jumping jacks!
His arms and legs moved of their own volition, splaying out as wide as he could reach, and in just a few seconds he could feel his chaotic tumble begin to slow. The wind tried to push his limbs in towards his body but he fought against it with all his strength, and the blur of color finally resolved back to blue and green.
The dizziness and disorientation faded, and eventually he came to a stop, facing down and arms splayed out, supported on a bed of roaring air, the ground so terrifyingly close that he was certain he only had seconds before impact.
Without a thought to his stability he reached for the ripcord and tugged hard. It threw him off balance, back towards a spin, but the chute pulling out from his pack didn’t allow him to flip over again. It tugged at his back, holding him in place as the guide lines whipped from the backpack and dragged out his canopy.
With a deafening roar and a jarring, bone rattling yank the chute blossomed out above him, slowing his fall so violently he felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. The straps of the harness dug into his sides and clenched close to his stomach, forcing out what little air remained with an agonizing gasp. It felt like his ribs were ground to powder, but the relief of arresting his fall more than outweighed the pain.
Now the ground was no longer speeding towards him with murderous intent. The rushing air died down to a soft gust, and the ice cold terror that had gripped him just a moment ago drifted away. Now he just felt… elated. Ecstatic. He’d stared death in the face, and death – somehow, bafflingly, against all odds – had blinked first.
Jack let out a triumphant cry, yelling defiantly at a world that had already tried and failed to kill him several times since sunrise. His heart was pounding in his chest, this time not with fear but pure adrenaline. He felt as if he could take on anything that was thrown at him, and as he looked down at the approaching ground even that held no fear. After all he’d been through already, setting down to earth would be a piece of cake.
Though… huh. Now he took a closer look he did seem to be coming down a little faster than he expected. Was this normal? He'd always imagined the final few moments of a skydive as a gentle, leisurely drift to the ground, like dandelion pollen carried on the breeze, but it seemed as if there was a lot more down than sideways going on.
That's when he noticed the sound, a loud flapping from above, like a sail being tossed back and forth in high winds. He peered up at the canopy above him, and it only took a glance to see the problem.
It was torn. On the right side was a foot long rip in the fabric, and even as he watched the force of the air passing through it widened the tear.
Jack looked back down at the ground speeding towards him, and he began to pray.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
GOODBYE SAN FRANCISCO
THE CORVETTE WAS running rough, skipping a couple of cylinders as it ticked over, but Karen didn’t care. Limping was as good as running. It didn’t have to get them across the country. Just across the bridge would be more than enough. She backed away slowly from the gate, allowing it to swing open.
She still didn’t want to panic Emily, or Ramos for that matter, but something in her gut told her that whatever was about to happen had already been set in motion. She felt like she was standing on a beach while over the horizon a tsunami rushed unseen towards the land, invisible but unstoppable.
She hit the gas and sent the ailing Corvette limping forward, creeping through the gate and onto the steep ramp at little more than walking pace. The engine protested, threatening to cut out completely a few dozen yards from the top, but eventually the road leveled out and the coughing engine seemed to breathe a little easier.
The bridge ahead was empty, save for a forest of traffic cones, plastic barriers and the occasional piece of heavy plant parked by the side of the road. It was a straight shot to Oakland, without another car in sight, but as the bridge broke out over open water and the wailing air raid siren finally began to fade other sounds took its place. Karen could hear them even over the sound of the whining engine.
Honking. Shouting. Swearing. Screaming.
Through the open windows she could hear the people beneath them, trapped on the crowded lower deck of the bridge. The sounds drifted in and out, an eerie echoing edge to the wailing voices, but it sounded like there were thousands of people down there, all of them desperately trying to run as the traffic crawled.
They were stuck. The bridge was more than four miles long, and the traffic moved at a crawl across the bay at the best of times. A single crash, a single breakdown, and the whole thing would grind to a halt. It sounded like nobody was going anywhere down there.
Karen almost felt guilty for having the upper deck all to herself. She wished she could go back and tell everyone waiting down at street level to follow them up top. There were miles of open road up here, but there was no time for pity. The siren may have faded, but she knew that back in the city it was still wailing as urgently as ever. She knew it warned of a threat that was still approaching, and she knew there were miles to go before they reached the safety of Oakland.
She glanced nervously at her speedometer. The Corvette was complaining, protesting at the speed, but she nudged it up to 60, and then 65. She tried to ignore the wheezing engine, the high pitched squeal from one of the front tires and the array of warning lights fighting for her attention on the dash. She knew the car was on its last legs, moments from death. She just prayed that it would hold together long enough to reach land.
“Watch out for the cones!” Ramos warned with alarm as Karen gunned the car through a barrier and onto a patch of rough road that had been stripped down to the concrete base. The car began to judder and bounce, sending shocks through the seat and up to her ribs. “Slow down!”
She ignored the warning. She knew she couldn’t afford to ease off the gas. Her survival instincts were screaming at her to plant her foot to the floor and push the car to its limit, so she clenched her teeth and ignored the pain as the car sent every bump and seam straight to her bruised chest.
A hundred yards up ahead the concrete ended and the road returned to asphalt, and Karen almost screamed in agony as the Corvette jumped up the lip at the edge. It knocked the wind out of her, and she started to see spots in her vision, but she didn’t have time to worry about the pain. She felt the car lose traction, the wheel pulling wildly to the left even as she fought to hold it straight. Finally common sense overruled her survival instincts, and she eased off the gas a little.
“Damn it, I think we have a flat,” she gasped, breathless from the pain. From the front left of the car there was a loud juddering and the steering felt soft and spongy, but she kept her foot on the gas anyway. They were moving more slowly now, around 50, but at least they were still moving in the right direction.
Now they were approaching the halfway point, where the bridge was split by the island in the mi
ddle of the bay. Up ahead was the wide, cave-like entrance to the Yerba Buena tunnel, and beyond that the home straight, the final span before they reached Oakland. If they could just—
The flash came without warning.
In an instant the upper deck of the bridge was bathed in an impossibly bright light, as if a new sun had appeared fully formed in the sky. Karen was blinded, her senses overwhelmed by the agonizing glare, and she instinctively slammed on the brakes. The Corvette skidded to a halt, the engine cutting out as it stopped, and Karen twisted over her seat to look back at the city.
“Don’t look at it!” Ramos yelled, grabbing her head and pulling her towards him. He clutched on tight, his fingers digging in like claws as he tried to shield Karen and Emily from the horror behind them.
The shockwave reached them a moment later, a painful pulse of pressure that blew out the rear window and shook the car back and forth on its suspension, and the roar of the blast arrived soon after, a deafening rumble that didn’t drop a single decibel when Karen clamped her hands over her ears. It wasn’t so much a sound as a physical force.
Now the bridge itself began to shake and tremble. For a second Karen felt as if she was being crushed down into her seat by invisible hands, and then lifted out of it. She opened her eyes for a moment, daring a glance out the windshield, and as soon as she saw what was happening she closed them tight again, trying to block out the world and all the fear it brought.
The bridge was rippling, wildly bucking up and down like an ocean swell. The upper decked rolled, a wave passing down its length deep enough to make earthmovers vanish in its troughs, and so violent that it threw them into the air on its peaks.
Karen’s stomach flipped a somersault as she felt the Corvette lift up again, leaving the ground entirely at the peak of the wave. She couldn’t tell how high they were thrown, but they all screamed with fear as the car crashed back down to the asphalt. As the next wave arrived the car began to roll forward, surfing on the asphalt wave, clattering against the steel guard rail and scraping along it with a screech.
“Mommy, I’m scared!” Emily whimpered, grabbing her mother’s hand, and Karen pulled her close and held her tight. Despite her fear she forced her eyes open, and she froze with terror as she saw the water below the car, over the edge of the bucking asphalt, the roadway contorted into an impossible Escheresque vision.
The road was behind and above, vanishing over a crest that didn’t belong and shouldn’t be possible, and beneath her it reached its trough before curving steeply up to the next peak, the concrete and asphalt made fluid by unimaginable forces. It seemed as if the Corvette would be flipped, tossed from the bridge on nothing more than a whim of gravity, a slight twitch this way or that that would hurl the car into the bay far below.
Now the roar of the blast was so loud it felt like a physical assault, a solid wall violently buffeting them. Karen’s ears popped with a sudden change in pressure. She could feel the heat on her neck, like the blast of scorched air that rushed from a thousand open stove doors, and it was only when she realized that the windows were open that she noticed the wind. It was a violent gale, constant and unbroken, the hot breath of a dying city rushing out over the bay.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of terror, the bridge began to settle and the cataclysmic roar dropped from intolerable to merely excruciating. It was no longer an assault on Karen’s ears, but a deep rumble that seemed to shake her to her bones, and as it began to die away further other noises flooded back.
From the lower deck of the bridge came screams and cries, the survivors cowering in their vehicles as the vast mushroom cloud bloomed over the city behind them. The screams filtered up to them unbroken, overlapping, as one took a breath and another took up the cry. It sent a shiver down Karen’s spine, but then another sound overtook the screams, and this one reached into her heart and squeezed.
It was the sound of tortured steel.
“Whoa, where are you going?” Ramos protested and tried to pull her back as she pushed open the door and climbed out of the car, but Karen shrugged him off. The bridge was still rocking, the deck moving in a slow, shallow wave about a hundred yards from peak to peak, but she felt steady enough to stand as long as she kept hold of the car.
Now her attention wasn’t on the undulating asphalt, nor even on the immense, glowing mushroom cloud that towered over what remained of San Francisco, but on the thick arcs of steel cable hanging between the towers of the suspension bridge.
They were vibrating, like guitar strings strummed under tension.
Back in the direction of the city she could see that the blast had reached all the way to the shore. The fireball had engulfed the first few hundred yards of the bridge, and somewhere back there, deep within the boiling cloud of debris thrown into the air, the anchor points of the suspension cables had been battered by the full force of a nuclear blast.
It was that energy that had sent the bridge rocking, and the way the bridge was still moving told Karen that it was only a matter of time before gravity took its toll. It felt as if the bridge was still standing only by force of habit.
Only a few moments passed before her fears were confirmed. A mile or so to the west the first vertical cable snapped with a sound like a whip crack, and she watched in horror as the thick steel rope fell a hundred yards to the deck below. As it landed with a crash two more cables snapped beside it, and as they hit the ground she felt a rumble beneath her feet. It felt like an earthquake, but the tremor was over almost as soon as it began, and when the ground settled the blood froze in her veins as she saw what looked like a puff of smoke rise from the deck where the cables landed.
The entire section of deck was gone, vanished. The upper deck had collapsed into the lower, and as the people trapped on the deck beneath her began to notice what had happened their screams only grew louder.
Karen climbed back into the car, struggling to keep her face a picture of calm. She gripped the key and turned.
Nothing happened. Silence.
“What is it?” Ramos asked. “What’s going on?”
Karen ignored him, turning the key again as she heard another whip crack far behind her. Another cable had snapped. This time the starter motor stirred, and she pumped the gas desperately.
“Karen, what the hell’s happening?” Ramos demanded.
The engine finally wheezed back to life, and Karen slammed her foot to the floor. The Corvette limped forward to the sound of yet more cables tumbling to the deck, and now Ramos didn’t need an answer. Through the rear window it was impossible to miss what was happening.
Karen caught a glance in the rear view as the car crept forward. In the distance the mushroom cloud blocked out the sun, but right now the aftermath of the nuclear explosion was nothing but a curiosity, because at the foot of the cloud the Oakland Bay Bridge was collapsing piece by piece into the bay. As each new cable snapped another section of the bridge broke away, plunging to the frothing water below, carrying with it hundreds of people at a time.
And the collapse was gaining on them.
΅
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
STOP, DROP AND ROLL
JACK WAS FALLING quickly towards a patch of forest, and in a moment of panic he realized he wouldn't clear it before the treetops met his feet. If he didn’t do something to change course he was going to crash into them at speed, and from this distance it looked like it’d be a painful landing.
He looked up at his torn chute, panic gripping his heart. From the webbing attached to his shoulders what looked like dozens of kite strings stretched up to the canopy, all of them bound together a few feet above his head before they splayed out, and beside them he noticed a cord on either side, each ending in bright yellow handles.
He had no idea what he was doing, but he figured that if he had to come down fast, anything would be better than crashing into the trees. With a mumbled prayer he reached up for one of the handles and gave it an experimental tug. One side of the chute dippe
d, and immediately he felt his legs swing out from under him as the canopy started to swoop to the left. His stomach flipped and he felt a wave of nausea pass through him, but it was nothing compared to the relief of watching the trees drift aside.
He pulled harder on the same handle and the ragged chute cinched in even further, turning him sharply away from the forest. Now he released the handle, and as the chute regained its shape and he straightened up he noticed with a sigh of relief that he’d easily clear the forest. Now it looked like he’d touch down in the middle of the broad green pasture beside them.
It was difficult to judge from the air but the turn seemed to have sent him from jogging pace to a sprint, and now the ground was just a few moments away he was struggling to remember what Warren had told him about the landing. Was he supposed to keep his feet apart or together? Chin down? Arms… did he say anything about arms?
There was no time. The ground was just a few yards beneath his feet now, whipping past at what seemed from his vantage point like highway speeds. The grass beneath him was just a blur.
In the last few seconds he seemed to accelerate even more, and when his feet touched the ground he was immediately swept off them as the canopy continued on. He fell to his knees, trying to grab at the ground to stop himself, but it was no use. The billowing chute was caught by the wind and he was dragged forward on his front, scraping painfully against rocks hidden in the tall grass.
He had no idea how he was supposed to stop himself. The way Warren had described it he figured he'd roll to a gentle halt and pull in the lines holding the chute, but Jack couldn’t even reach up to grab them before another rock slammed into him or another gust of wind dragged him twenty more yards along the ground. Warren hadn’t even told him how to unclip the damned harness. He was a passenger, at the mercy of a wind that showed no signs of letting up.