by Andy Remic
‘In what way?’
‘Ahh, that would be telling. ‘
‘Kade, you fuckwit, what’s on your mind?’
Carter dismissed Kade with a mental surge of anger and, calming himself, leant back against the bar - good solid wood protecting his back - and watched the people around him, a tankard in his fist and a gun in his belt. Fuck Kade, he thought sourly. He was just a bad demon who’d got out of bed on the wrong side and fancied a little bit of shit-stirring as his starter.
Men and women gyrated in parodies of dance, as some Swiss musician massacred a song about the mountains and added GBH boot first to the tune with a happy accordion melody. Carter watched the people and the people ignored him - it was as if he wasn’t there, an invisible player beyond the boundaries of these strangest of rules, this most esoteric of games. It always amused Carter: stay sober (or sober in comparison to those around you) and you could neatly sidestep the alcohol bubble; withdraw from the party sphere and allow yourself time to watch and study and fundamentally learn the mechanics of humankind.
The young German woman with the proud chest sidled along the bar towards him. Carter grabbed his Schwarz-Bier and was about to make a dash, but was too slow in his haste to salvage his drinks. Her talons curled around his bicep and she held him, trapped by manners, imprisoned by etiquette.
‘Yes, love?’
‘Ahh, English. You here to ski, yes?’
Carter looked into her eyes, saw the gleam of alcohol on her lips, eyed the painted decorative nails around his arm and swallowed hard. She was out for the kill.
‘Yes, yes ... well, snowboarding, actually.’
‘Ah, the snowboarding man. Athletic! Can I buy you a drink?’
Carter eyed the three tankards and the huge glass of whisky - the kill-switch in his brain refused to trip. ‘Yes, sure, don’t mind if I do.’ He mentally kicked himself, then caught Natasha staring at him from the dance floor and frowned at her. She gave him a broad wink and he stuck out his tongue.
Carter spent the next fifteen minutes stumbling through a broken conversation - broken because he refused to acknowledge his fluency in German, and thus allowed the poor girl to struggle with her distinctly bad English.
It was when her hand started brushing against his thigh that he made a lame excuse and, finishing his beer, headed across the dance floor and into No Man’s Land.
‘I’m getting a headache.’
Natasha tutted, boogying with Hans and twirling in a pirouette in front of Carter. ‘Do you find me sexually pleasing to the eye, future husband and father of my child?’
‘Yes, yes, but I’ve had enough of this. It’s not my scene. I’m going out for a smoke.’
‘Bad Carter.’
‘Yeah, so shoot me. Every other fucker tries.’
Carter bounced from body to body and finally made the exit. Cold air hit him - crisp and fresh and exhilarating. The sky was partially clouded, but between the puffs of moonlit cotton twinkled stars brighter than crushed diamond. Carter breathed deeply, eyes closed for a moment of ultimate simple pleasure; then he pulled out a cigarette, lit the battered specimen and filled his lungs with a pleasant impurity.
He could hear the thump of the music and a cold wind blew across him, chilling his body after the sweating, heaving, dancing crowd. He enjoyed the cigarette, the beauty of the simple night air around him and the crisp stars above. Enjoyment, he decided, was something without action; without adrenalin; without the defying of death. But then - there was always an intense gratification after shooting a bad man in the face.
Slowly, teasingly, there arose a deep, distant, subsonic rumble.
Carter froze, smoke pluming around his slightly wind-chilled face, eyes narrowed.
The rumble came again, heavier, gravelly and deeply bass. Carter felt a tremor beneath his boots and his hand shot out to steady himself; and then he watched in horror as the hotel in front of him moved, shaking to the tune of suddenly screaming voices, and the whole world seemed to fill with a trembling roaring song as the structure thrashed backwards and forwards. The ground was shifting and flexing beneath him and Carter whirled, forgotten cigarette extinguished in the snow as he sprinted for the entrance to the party ... which spat forth a machine-gun stream of screaming people, faces contorted in horror and fear. With a deep, climactic surge of noise the hotel buckled near its centre and part of the roof disappeared, slipping into darkness. Some of the lights went out in a domino swathe ...
‘Fuck ...’
Carter fought his way violently through the throng of escaping, stampeding people, ‘Nats!’ he screamed as the rumbling continued, some Earth-giant coming awake beneath their very feet. The world was a confusion, a shaking, rumbling, heaving insanity and Carter plunged past flailing, screaming people who struggled against him, kicking and pushing, but he was fighting not to get out but to get in ...
Natasha was dancing with Hans, slapping away his cheeky hands as the first tremor warned her through the soles of her boots. The smile fell from her face as somebody cried out. The ground suddenly roared beneath them, walls shaking, glass smashing from the bar and dropping from people’s quake-slippery fingers. Beer washed across the floor amid broken glass and overturned furniture. As one, the population of the party turned and ran, scrambling and pushing for the exit as—
Natasha blinked.
The floor opened and a jagged metre-wide scar tore towards her. With a yelp, she dragged free a concealed knife and leapt upwards, embedding the knife in a wide beech beam. It held her suspended as Hans hissed in surprise and disappeared into the gaping black cavity—
Warm air drifted up from the yawning crevasse.
Natasha blinked, licking her lips slowly, nervously.
Hans was gone.
Natasha watched, hands sweating in the sudden blast of heat, as a woman slipped, fingers clawing at the flagstone floor, and disappeared into a deep-seeming infinity of darkness. Warm air stinking of sulphur and other chemicals washed upwards over Natasha and she gagged, bile rising from her stomach, and still the rumbling moaned, then started to increase in tempo again as the crevasse - its movement halted briefly for a suspended moment in time - snaked across the ground once more in a bass-screeching zigzag of tearing stone, towards the terrified bar staff who froze like rabbis in the headlight beams of a fast-moving juggernaut...
‘Run!’ screamed Natasha, swinging her legs and leaping to the apparent safety of one crumbling uneven side of this sudden rift. The fracture crashed across the floor and the whole room seemed to tilt, to upend as the massive bar was torn, its woodwork screaming and spitting splinters like spears, whirled around in a vortex of unstoppable Earth energy and then dropped into the chasm, where it wedged tight at an angle.
The rumbling died.
People were still screaming, but this faded as the crowd fled from the chamber. The huge timber bar, stuck at an angle like a toothpick in a giant’s maw, creaked in its undignified entrapment. Below it, in the darkness, Natasha could hear more screaming, one voice hysterical, another sobbing.
‘Nats!’
‘Carter, over here.’
Then Carter was there, his eyes wide at the jagged angular rift across the floor of the chamber, a tear in the fabric of the rock and leading - how deep? He frowned, glancing over the edge. His boots felt slippery against the loose stones.
‘Nats, let’s get the fuck out of here.’
More rumblings came from below the earth; the walls began to shake and the muffled sobbing increased in volume. Then the hysterical screaming suddenly cut short as the noise of impacting flesh bounced from walls of rock.
‘No! Help them!’ Her eyes were wide, pleading.
‘Natasha! Get out of here ...’ But Carter knew that it was no use. She was too good a person to put her own safety first ... her stubbornness was legendary and had led to a million fights. Carter grinned a bad grin: he knew a fucking lousy gig when he saw one, and the crevasse beneath him was definitely a gig to avoid ...
Carter leapt to the edge of the precipice and kicked at the wide timber of the wedged bar; it was stuck, a ten-metre splinter length caught against a jagged fall of rock. Below, about fifteen feet into the chasm and caught on a narrow strip of rocky ledge, he could see two women clinging on for dear life, eyes streaming with tears, their revealing party dresses torn and ragged.
‘Yeah, just like a fucking snowboard,’ he growled, and to the cacophony of rising rumbles, the tearing of rock all around, the shaking walls and the vibrating of roof timbers Carter leapt onto the bar and slid down towards the two desperate women - descending into the darkness with its warm sulphur air currents and bad metal-rock stink.
The women’s tears were flowing freely as he grabbed a hand, slippery with blood, sweat and saliva. His fingers closed around it in an iron grip and he hauled, lifted the woman in his arms and with all his strength threw her towards the top of the ragged vent... She was caught by Natasha’s searching hands and pushed to freedom as another roar shook the room, more glasses smashed, and one of the huge ceiling beams split with a deafening crack, showering down jagged lengths of timber - and then collapsed with a tremendous scream, filling the chamber with clouds of debris and crushed stone, sending a shower of sharp rocks flying against Natasha and blocking out the light...
Dust engulfed Carter and he choked, balanced within the fissure of rock as everything shook around him, making him feel suddenly nauseous. With eyes streaming he steadied himself, traced the sobbing and choking noises and, reaching down, found the second woman’s hand. He lifted her to him and she clung, limpet to rock, face buried in his neck, breasts heaving with panic against his chest. Holding her tight, Carter turned his face away from the dust and closed his ears to the rumbling roar of the world around him. He could feel the bar, perched treacherously and moving as if in rhythm with the shaking earth - he felt it sliding and with a sudden surge of adrenalin and an insane burst of speed and power he sprinted up the incline, boots pushing against the torn handles of beer pumps to propel himself upwards and onwards, somehow miraculously launching himself from the summit to roll, still clasping the woman, to the stone- and -glass-scattered floor. The shards bit into his hands and arms and legs, slicing him open in a dozen places.
‘It’s fucking collapsing!’ screamed Natasha.
Carter watched the bar slide into infinity. He wiped rock dust from his eyes and felt blood flow over his hands and arms. He looked up; the shaking had increased, the whole world was shifting and moving and bucking around them as if in the throes of inebriation, of sex, and he felt pure fear. ‘Get the fuck out - now,’ he said calmly.
They could die in this place.
Hauling himself to his feet, and dragging the hysterical woman along with them, they sprinted for the exit and the steps leading out into the fresh air. Another beam collapsed behind them, a mushroom of dust billowing around the two Spiral operatives and smashing them with stone buckshot from this natural shotgun. Up the steps they raced and burst out gasping into the cold crisp night air—
People were screaming, sobbing, searching for friends who were missing in the huge crowd. A couple of small groups had moved away from the hotel and were staring with wide eyes, dumbstruck at this incredible disaster. A few were trying to help others, less fortunate than themselves, who had been cut by broken glass or battered by heavy falling stones.
Carter could hear helicopters and distant sirens.
He prised the woman’s fingers from their grip on his body, oblivious to her whimpers of thanks. His head turned to one side and he looked up. The screams were muffled by the continuing rumbles and vibrations. The whole hotel was tilted, partly collapsed, a deformed nightmare - and then Natasha was in front of him, her stare locked with his, her face almost unrecognisable through the dust and the grime.
‘You can hear it as well.’
Carter gritted his teeth, stone dust grinding between them. ‘I hear nothing.’
‘You can hear her screaming ... go and help her.’
Carter took hold of Natasha’s face, looked deep into her beautiful eyes. ‘No, Nats - I’m here for you. And our baby ... I’m not part of International fucking Rescue.’
‘She is fucking screaming in there ... she will die. And it will haunt your conscience for ever.’
‘Damn you, Natasha, I have our family to think about now ...’
‘Go,’ pleaded Natasha, ‘I will be OK here ... go and help her.’
Cursing, and rubbing hard at his eyes, Carter looked up at the collapsing hotel. Then he was running, around the side of the swaying building, staring up at smashed windows and tilted sections of stonework, heading towards the buckled main doors. They were wedged in place by off-camber walls that showered pulped masonry from torn stone arteries. Carter’s snow-crusted boot persuaded the doors to open.
The lights - and the hotel power - died.
The hotel was plunged into darkness.
The rumblings of the earthquake had died down a little, and Carter paused. He could still hear the screaming, but it sounded weary now, exhausted, a wail without hope. This fired him on and he ran into the reception area where fallen beams littered his path. He glanced up, could see a little moonlight far above and suddenly a snowflake hit him in the face. More fell through this smashed hole in the centre of the hotel and Carter headed for the stairs. They were twisted like a horribly deformed limb; Carter sprinted up them, boots slipping and outstretched hands groping his way forward. As he reached the landing, there was a terrible groan and the whole mammoth staircase toppled behind him, leaving nothing but a timber-spiked black expanse filled with rising clouds of dust and twisted fists of iron.
The noise subsided slowly.
‘Fucking wonderful.’
‘Are we having fun yet?’ whispered Kade nastily at the back of his mind.
Carter grinned, a malicious lopsided grin, and wondered if he had made the right choice ... hmm, a tough one. Standing in the safety of the snow, or rushing headlong into a collapsing hotel?
He glanced around; without the help of the hotel lights the whole place was a maze of shadows. Carter groped his way along one wall, using the fireman’s trick of pressing the back of his hand against it instead of the palm - if he met a live cable, the shock would jerk his hand away; but if he searched with his palm open then the shock would cause his fingers to spasm and grip the cable, ensuring death by electrocution.
He paused, listening, the cuts on his hands and arms stinging with that glass-grated, flesh-peeled feeling he so detested. ‘Hello?’ he bellowed, and tracked the sobbing by sound.
The rumbling began once more.
Carter cursed vividly.
Gentle at first, the rumbling rose as Carter sprinted along a plush carpeted corridor and towards a door from behind which the sounds had come. The walls were shaking, and Carter’s teeth rattled as he tried the handle - the door was locked. He raised his boot, but the whole hotel seemed to tilt suddenly and he was sent spinning backwards, smashing against the wall and hitting the floor hard, grunting as the staples in his back pulled tight and tore through living flesh. He felt a warm rush of blood flow down his spine as he heaved himself to his feet, blinking dust from his eyes and struggling to stand upright - and he knew ...
Knew that he did not have long.
‘The floor isn’t the right way up,’ advised Kade.
‘I can fucking see that, moron.’
There came a distant, frightening, nauseating crackle. Carter’s nostrils twitched as they detected smoke. The earthquake’s rumbling continued to increase in intensity.
He kicked down the door and waded into the darkness. But then he stopped, confused by the sight that met his gaze. A man lay atop a woman in a broad bed; she was sobbing but he was gyrating in an act of wanton sex. Carter could see the gleam of his broad back and he took in the stockings on the man’s legs and his PVC outfit. Carter’s head tilted to one side as dust trickled down from the destroyed ceiling above. The woman was weeping
and struggling ineffectually.
‘High-class whore,’ came Kade’s unwanted intrusion.
‘You think I’m fucking blind?’ came Carter’s vitriolic reply. Then, out loud, ‘I think you two need to get out of here right now.’ The woman still sobbed, but the man’s hand clamped over her mouth and his wild drunken stare focused on Carter.
‘Fuck off. I get what I pay for.’
Carter palmed his Browning and placed a bullet in the man’s calf, merging pulped muscle and shattered shin with the bed sheets. The man screamed, rolling free and bouncing to the carpet, grabbing at the gush of blood. He stared up through drug-fuelled eyes, his hands stained with his own life. ‘You shot me!’
Carter’s boot hammered the man’s face, and he picked up the limp, moaning woman from the bed. She was naked except for knee-high boots, and she cradled herself to him as the room shook. Carter moved to the window and stared down onto the decorative flagstones. Too high to jump. He moved back, into the corridor. The smell of fire was much stronger now, and without the staircase he would have to find another means of escape. Carter started to jog, near-naked woman in his arms, struggling to keep his footing on the sloping twisted floor. He could hear cries for help from the wounded man behind, bleeding in the room. ‘Find your own fucking way out,’ he thought simply. He reached the end of the corridor and stood staring through a huge bay window made up from lots of small panes but with only a few panels of actual glass remaining.
The rumbling ceased.
‘Thank God,’ Carter whispered in relief.
Rock tore and screamed, and from the window he watched the snaking crevasse appear, sucking snow from the slope directly before him and zigzagging crazily across the gardens towards the hotel. Time should have slowed but it did not, and Carter felt a sense of panic well up madly in his chest. He fought it down.
His mouth was still dry with sudden fear as the world cracked open in front of him, though.
The moaning woman shivered, cold in Carter’s arms, as the mountain breeze stroked her skin. He looked down into her beautiful mascara- and tear-smeared face - her eyes opened slowly, confused, and she stared up at him, her full red lips parted slightly. Carter saw there a reflection of his own fear and a bewilderment about what was happening ...