Guinea Pig

by Curtis, Greg

  Suddenly the power cut out leaving the only light they had was coming from the distant windows in the double doors leading to the reception area. It wasn't enough. People fell down, and where he could he tried to help them up and get them running again. But he couldn't. Not all of them anyway. Not when there were people behind him, running, pushing him along. Not when he was still half carrying one woman. It was a stampede and he was caught in the middle of it, just as frightened as they were. In the end he was only human.

  More people fell as the building shook, tossed brutally against the walls, and he knew they wouldn't be getting up again. He only hoped they weren't trampled in the panic. But he knew they would be. And he could do nothing for them.

  Then, just as he finally reached the doors, the woman still with him, there was an explosion somewhere behind them. A huge blast that made everything that had gone before seem like a mere rehearsal.

  Something picked him up – it picked all of them up – and then blew them screaming through the double doors, across the fifty foot wide reception room, and into the far wall.

  Will hit it hard. Very hard. His shoulder and his ribs seemed to take the worst of it, but they weren't alone. Things hurt all over as he tried to make sense of what had happened. There was blood in his mouth, and more blood all around. And the ground was still shaking with thunder. But there was also light. Lots of glorious light coming from the huge panoramic windows that were the front of the building. Just then Will decided he liked light. He liked it a lot.

  Somehow he crawled his way back to his feet, not even remembering when he'd fallen to the floor, and then tried to help a few of those lying around him up as well. He had to. Some of them weren't getting up and there was blood everywhere. More were lying around, covered in rubble and dust, moaning. Some weren't making any noise at all. Others were doing the same as he was as they realised that safety lay outside in the light. A few were already ahead of them in the parking lot and running for all they were worth. He desperately wanted to join them. But he had to help the others. Will looked around for the white haired woman but couldn't find her anywhere. Between the dust and the rubble covering everyone and everything he could barely make out anyone at all. He'd lost her somewhere in the explosion. All he could do was hope that she was somewhere ahead of him.

  One by one they started running for the door ways or the windows, dragging anyone they could with them if they couldn't stand and soon salvation was just within in reach. Which was good because what was behind them was death.

  It wasn't just the ceiling tiles that were coming down he realised; the roof was coming down with them. The whole building was collapsing behind them. And there were people inside it.

  Will hoisted a barely conscious man he'd grabbed up to the sill of the window and then pushed him through to where others were already waiting to grab him. As for the old woman who he'd been trying to help in the corridor, he looked for her once more. But she was nowhere. He couldn't see her summer dress or her long white hair anywhere. He'd lost her. He didn't know where the others were from his test either. They could be anywhere. All he could do as he helped hoist another man through the window, was hope that they were somewhere ahead of him.

  He turned to grab at the next body when somebody smashed into him at a sprint, tackled him like a rugby player and knocked him right out of the window himself to come crashing down to the grass. And then, before he even knew what was happening he was lying on the grass trying to breathe while more people were trying to pull him to his feet. Whoever had hit him had knocked the wind right out of him. The funny thing was that he could have sworn it was the old woman. He was sure he had seen a flash of long white hair and a flowing floral dress.

  A second later he knew that whoever it was that person had just saved his life. There was another massive explosion, the sound of concrete and steel torturing itself as it was being torn apart, and then behind him the building collapsed. The entire building.

  Even as he knelt there on the grass, doubled over, choking and trying to breathe, he watched the clinic vanish in front of him. The huge two story structure of concrete and glass simply buckled in the middle as though someone had tightened a belt too tightly, and then turned into a pile of rubble which was swallowed whole by the ground. The building was disappearing, falling into the Earth, and in its place a gigantic crater was starting to form.

  How could that be?

  For the longest time Will knelt there, gasping for breath and trying to understand what had happened, what was still happening in front of him, and failing. It simply didn't make sense. None of it. Huge two story concrete and steel buildings didn't just fall into the ground. And the ground didn't just swallow them up. Not like this. It was like a disaster movie, complete with special effects. But this was real.

  He watched it, the crater growing larger and larger just in front of him, the sides steeper and steeper, and the piles of rubble that had once been the clinic sliding down its sides, heading for the bottom.

  There didn’t seem to be a bottom though. Just an endless chasm leading down into the depths of the Earth. And in amongst the remnants of the building he could see people still trying to escape. Some were desperately hanging on to the sides of the crater, their fingers clawing the dirt as they held on for their lives, their faces filled with terror. But as the crater deepened and the sides grew steeper everyone knew they were doomed. They did too. He could see it in their eyes, hear it in their cries. And slowly, one by one, he watched them as they slid down that dirt slope into the disappearing mound of rubble at the bottom, screaming all the way. And the edge of the crater was only a few feet in front of him.

  If that old woman, if it was truly her, hadn't tackled him and sent him flying out the window he realised, he would be somewhere down there as well. Sliding down to his doom if he wasn't already dead. He would be down there being crushed in the rubble.

  It took a long time before he could stand again. Before his brain had once more come on line and he could control his feet. And he knew he wasn't alone. All around him others were trying to process what had happened. They were standing around the edge of the newly formed crater and staring in horror. A few were talking while others cried out in shock and horror, trying to deny what they could see happening right in front of them. Some were crying. But most were silent. They didn't know what to say.

  He was still staring when he finally heard the sounds of sirens behind him. When the paramedics started moving among them, looking for people who needed their help. And when someone finally put a hand on his shoulder and told him to come with them to remove a piece of pipe that he suddenly discovered was sticking out of his shoulder, he didn't want to go. He couldn't leave. He couldn't stop staring at that hole in the ground. He couldn’t stop thinking about the people who had suddenly lost their lives. Who had fallen into that darkness beneath the Earth.

  But they insisted.

  Chapter Two.

  He was flying and he was falling at the same time. Will didn't understand that. But it was what was happening and he couldn't deny it. In fact that knowledge, the fear and the exhilaration were overpowering him. Making it almost impossible to think of anything else. But not impossible to be aware of anything else.

  And he was aware of so much more.

  There were others there with him. He couldn't see them – exactly. He didn't understand them any more than he understood anything else in the world. But he knew they were there and he knew they were calling to him. Some were in darkness. A terrible darkness that frightened him though he couldn't have said why. He could hear them somewhere beneath him. Some were frightened, some were tormented and most were confused – blinded by the darkness. And all of them were calling up to him as he flew above. Begging him for help.

  At the same time others were above him, calling. Asking him to join them in the glorious sunlight. And somehow he knew that he loved those who were calling him up to them as if they were family. To go to the aid of the ones below wa
s to turn his back on those he loved. He couldn't do that. But at the same time while he felt terrible sorrow for the ones calling him down, if he went to their aid he knew he would be abandoning those he loved. He couldn't do that either. They all needed him and yet he could not go to them all.

  Nor could he stay where he was.

  He had to choose. Who to go to. To go up or down. To fly towards one or the other without knowing how to fly, or if he was even flying. And he couldn't choose. There was no choice possible. But he knew that if he didn't choose he would fall. And above all else he didn't want to fall. Not into that gaping maw. That darkness in the Earth. Something about it frightened him in a way that nothing else could.

  It was then that Will woke up, a scream on his lips that he barely managed to hold back, and found himself covered in sweat. And instantly he knew that he'd been asleep and that what he had just seen was the remnants of a dream. A nightmare. It was the same dream he'd had three times already that night – make that – Will checked the clock – in the last hour.

  Strangely the clock was saying that it was barely six in the morning and he'd only managed to crawl into bed an hour before. His bed at least, in his own flat. He was grateful for that. It was more comfortable than a hospital bed he guessed, and familiar. After the previous day he valued things that were safe and familiar. Though that wasn't why he was there. The doctor's had kicked him out of the ER as they dealt with the rush of other more serious patients.

  One hour and four repeats already of the same nightmare. There was no doubt that his subconscious was having a hard time dealing with the events of the previous day. Especially when he knew that the gaping maw in his dream was the same crater that he had seen swallowing up the clinic. And he guessed that the people screaming out from below were the ones he had seen clinging to the crater's wall – before they had slid down to their deaths. That sight had really done a number on him.

  Should he get up? He wanted to, even though it was still dark. Actually, he didn't want to get up. It was just that he didn't want to go back to sleep and have that dream again. But he was also dog tired! Exhausted in a way that he had never been before. Even as the fear and panic was leaving him his body was already trying to call him back to the land of sleep.

  In the end his body won.

  Chapter Three.

  The banging on the wall woke Will from sleep far too early. The clock said eight o'clock but his body told him it was still the middle of the night. Probably because he hadn't managed to sleep peacefully until a few hours before. And before that the events of the day had kept him on edge as at any moment he kept expecting the ground to open up beneath him and swallow him whole. So instead of answering his flatmate Will grabbed a pillow and covered his head with it. His flatmate would go away in time.

  “Get up you ass!”

  He wasn't going away. In fact Mark seemed determined to annoy him even more as he yelled at him from the lounge and thumped on the wall even harder than before. He was prone to doing that, and Will knew from long experience that he was relentless. But why this morning? Usually he annoyed him because there was something he had to do. The shopping or to drive someone to college and so on. This time though Will couldn't think of anything that was particularly pressing. After all, he'd been expecting to be in the clinic now. He'd been expecting to have five free days with no distractions. He'd cleared his schedule for it. And it wasn't as if he had a girlfriend to distract him any more.

  “What?!” He yelled at the wall knowing his flatmate would hear him and hopefully stop banging. And maybe then he could go back to sleep.

  “Visitors!”

  “Crap!”

  Visitors? He didn't need visitors just then. He didn't want them. And he didn't normally have them either. If he wanted to be with his friends he went to their flats. It was easier that way. But he guessed that he had to see them whoever they were. Either that or Mark would start banging down the wall again. He wasn't a quiet person.

  “Coming!”

  Will rolled out of bed and crawled to his feet, something he had to do because the bed was so old and battered that the folding legs had failed and in desperation he'd cut them off. It was better than having them collapse on him in the middle of the night as they sometimes had. But it also meant his bed was only about eight inches off the ground, which meant in turn that it was a long way to have to go to climb to his feet. Especially when he was injured and bandaged up like a mummy.

  The strange thing was that as he braced himself for the pain – his shoulder and especially his ribs had started hurting like a bastard during the previous afternoon – it didn't come. In fact they felt almost normal. Maybe he hadn't been as badly injured as he'd thought. Though he was still bandaged up so tightly that he could barely move – or breathe. In fact the emergency doctors had initially wanted to keep him in the hospital overnight. The only reason they hadn't was because there were so many others more badly injured than him. So they'd given him a few stitches, taped him up, supplied him with a script for painkillers and antibiotics, and told him to go see his family doctor.

  Still, the fact that it didn't hurt was a good thing he decided as he struggled into a robe and then went out to meet his visitors. After everything that had happened it was a very good thing.

  In the sitting room – in a modern American home it would have been called the great room but nothing about their flat was great – he discovered he had a pair of police officers visiting him, and that didn't seem like such a good thing. In fact the sight the sight of them briefly made him nervous – as if he had done something wrong.

  “Officers?” He had two police officers standing there in their blues, guns holstered to their sides, and hats on. He wondered if it was important that they had their hats on. His mother had always said it was bad luck to wear a hat inside a house.

  “Mr. Simons.” The woman greeted him and from the fact that she was the one to speak he guessed she was the one in charge.

  “Yes?”

  “We're here to ask you about yesterday.”

  That Will had fairly much worked out for himself. Why else would they be there? The only thing he didn't understand was why the police were interviewing him. Surely it was some sort of emergency thing, not a crime? Someone had mentioned sink holes the previous day. So surely it should have been the fire service if it was anyone? Or FEMA maybe. Someone had mentioned them the previous day as well. The news had said they were around, doing something. But locked up as he had been in a waiting room with dozens of other injured people, many of them worse off than him, he hadn't paid it a lot of attention.

  “Go for it.”

  “You were an in-patient at the Fairview Institute and Clinic?”

  “Nearly. I was about to become one, but I hadn't been admitted. I was taking part in a drug trial. I was still in one of the downstairs clinic rooms receiving the drug. But they barely got half way through the procedure before everything fell apart. I never got to my room.”

  Which reminded him: His computer and his clothes had all been at the clinic waiting for him. He supposed they were now buried somewhere at the bottom of the Earth.

  “What room were you in? And who was with you?”

  The moment she asked the question he understood what they were doing and why it was the police who were in his flat talking to him. This wasn't a criminal investigation. They weren't looking for wrong doing. It was a census. They wanted to know how many had got out and how many had died. Morbidity and mortality. It was all about the numbers, which made sense. After all there was no one left to rescue any more. There were no criminals to round up. There were only the reports to write.

  “317. I was there doing a test, and there was Doctor Millen and a nurse and a technician there with us. I don't know their names. But the nurse was in her twenties, swarthy skin and with long dark hair and quite pretty. The technician was probably in his thirties, a white guy with a pony tail. All I really saw of him was his back. But we all made it out of the
room. After that in the corridor I don't know. We were running and things were falling and then the lights went out and there was an explosion and things got confused. But they were ahead of me.”

  “317? On the ground floor right in the middle of the building?” The woman seemed surprised for some reason.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you're very lucky to be alive. That was right in the middle of the sink hole. Most of those who survived were in the reception area or near the outer edges of the building.”

  That Will could understand. There had been a lot of people running to make it to safety, and that corridor had seemed endless in his memories. Especially after the lights had failed. But he didn't want to think about that. Every time his thoughts went back there he kept seeing the people falling in that corridor as they ran. The people desperately clinging to the side of the crater before they slid to their deaths. The people he had failed.

  “Do you know how many were hurt or killed?”

  The news reports the previous night and even through to the early hours of the morning, had been unclear. Most openly admitted that they didn't know, but had given estimates that ranged widely from anywhere between twenty to two hundred. Even larger numbers were thought to have been injured. The problem was that the officials didn't actually know how many had survived let alone how many had been in the building at the time. Which he assumed was why the police were speaking with him.