by JJ Pike
She stumbled back and lost her footing. The oxygen tanks were under her knees. He’d started putting their gear together when they’d reached the beach. She grabbed a mask and twisted the valve, sucking the oxygen down. She held her breath, jammed the mask over his mouth and hauled him to the back of the Jeep. Pointless. The man wasn’t breathing. She tucked her hands under his armpits and locked them around his chest, then pushed off and flipped herself back and forth like a damned seal until they broke the surface.
He was limp and lifeless, but it wasn’t over. The water was cold enough that his brain might be fine. She had to get him to shore and do CPR. The human body can withstand oxygen deprivation under certain conditions, freezing water being one of them. Deep in her heart, Jo knew the lake wasn’t cold enough to give him absolute protection, but first, the bradycardic response might have kicked in, blood vessels constricting and the heart slowing, diverting oxygen to essential organs. Or if that hadn’t happened there was always the second theory, that the body sent cooled blood to the brain once it detected a certain amount of carbon dioxide. The longest anyone had been submerged in cold water and survived, without brain damage, was an incredible 42 minutes. Keep reciting the facts, Jo. The facts are your friend. Don’t succumb to emotion. Stay clinical. You can do it.
She pulled herself out of the water. He was heavy, made heavier by the waterlogged sweatpants. She rolled him on his side to empty the water from his mouth. It was little more than a trickle. She turned him on his back and started chest compressions. It wasn’t like the movies. No mouth-to-mouth, only chest compressions. One hundred per minute or, as her trainer had screamed at them as they pumped on their dummies’ chests, “Go at this with the same rhythm as Stayin’ Alive or Another One Bites the Dust. Whether they live or die depends on which of you sorry nuggets gets to them first. You! Morgan! Keep those elbows locked! You want to go at this a lot harder!”
Jo jammed the heel of her hands down into Michael’s sternum as hard as she could, pumping fast and mouthing the words to the Saturday Night Fever anthem. “Staying alive,” she sang. “Uh, uh, uh, uh…stay alive, you son of a bitch. I’ve got questions I need to ask you.” She felt a rib give under her hands. She didn’t pause. Had to keep on pumping. “Who the heck are you and what are you doing up here?” Eighty-one, eighty-two, eighty-three in fast succession. She held her ear to his mouth. Nothing. Back to compressions. “Come on. Come on.” She was shouting, ignoring the danger, thrusting down with all her might.
He vomited. She rolled him quickly, so he wouldn’t choke to death, then scooped his mouth clean and wiped his face with his t-shirt. Cory’s t-shirt.
She sat back, tears streaming down her face. He’d made it, but Cory had died under her hands.
Rayton coughed, doubling over and grabbing his stomach. “Angus,” he said. “Angus, Angus, Angus.”
Jo leaned in close. “Who’s Angus?”
Rayton opened his eyes. They were glassy. He was still disoriented. “Fluffy Angus.”
It hit her smack in the middle of her brain. It was his mantra. He was re-centering himself, using the name of a childhood pet or stuffed toy to calm himself. He had counter-intelligence training. This was what you did when you were being water boarded. You used your mantra to get you to a “safe” place, mentally. Michael Rayton was CIA. He’d been playing her all along. All those mixed signals she’d been getting were deliberate. He was damned good.
Michael rolled onto his side, pulled his knees up, and pushed himself onto all fours. “You’re FBI, right?”
Chapter Nineteen
Alice concentrated as hard as she could. The roaches were conducting mass evacuations, running over her, up and out through the cracks above her head. If there were rats, they were either elsewhere or drowned. It didn’t bear thinking about what was around her ankles.
None of that mattered, though, because there’d been a tapping sound, she was sure of it. New York’s Bravest couldn’t come soon enough. The water was up to her waist. Alice didn’t want to think about how much water it would take to fill the New York subway system. She was getting ahead of herself. There had to be scores of collapsed tunnels. Didn’t take a genius to work out that blocking one end of a tunnel with the remains of K&P and the other with the detritus from whatever sad building had sat next door to theirs would create a space that could fill up fast. Add overflow from the sewers or the mains and voila, water could fill her little cave in no time.
The New York firefighters’ timing was…not perfect exactly, because she would have welcomed them days earlier, but better late than never. How did the saying go? “Better three hours early than two minutes late.” If the water kept rising at the same rate it had been for the last few hours, then they were bang on time.
She clenched her hand into a fist and knocked on the metal to her left as hard as she could. One, two, three good solid raps. She waited. Three notes came back. Lighter than hers, but distinct. Let a lousy roach make that happen. Her heart soared. She was getting out of there. She would go home and be with her family and make sure they knew what they meant to her. She was being saved for a reason. Dr. Moore never agreed or disagreed with that one, but Alice didn’t care. She’d made it out of that shack so she could rid the world of trash and now she was going to make it out of the subway tunnel so she could live her life.
She pounded on the metal again. All she wanted was to hear that another human being was close by. Back came the answer. It was no nearer, but no time had passed. She should let them be. They had work to do. She’d heard no equipment, but there was every chance the hole she was in was too unstable for heavy machinery. They might have rigged some gear to get a single man down there to grab her and get them both out.
How, though? She’d been jammed in this cleft long enough to know that nothing was going to move without some serious effort. They’d best send their beefiest, most buff firefighter down because anything less would be a disaster.
“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice.
Alice’s heart dropped. No, that was fine. They had to train just as hard as the men. It would all be okay. “Hello. Over here.”
“I knew you were going to be down here.” The voice was closer.
She had to be dreaming. She recognized that voice.
“Alice? Is it you?” It was Barb from the train. Barb with the derringer and the plastic baby in a sling. Barb who never stopped talking. Barb who must have weighed 120 pounds soaking wet.
Alice would have wept if it hadn’t been so funny. Her mind had taken her to some cruel places while she’d been trapped under K&P, but this was without question the strangest place it had taken her.
“I knew you’d make it. You have that spirit. You’re a go-getter. I said to myself, if anyone else is alive down here, it’s going to be Alice. Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you,” said Alice. Might as well play along. It was more realistic than most of her dreams, but then she was in the final stages of dehydration and knew hallucinations took on the quality of reality. “How are you, Barb?”
“I am good. I think I’ve found a way out. I dug my way through the rubble, and the tunnel the other side is in not-bad shape. The train is still there, but it’s a mess. I got that far, then thought, well if I made it maybe she did too, so I came back to look for you and here you are. Though the water makes everything ten times harder.”
Alice resigned herself to the fact that she was fully alert, not having visions. “You should go back, Barb. I’m wedged in here tight.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Barb. “I’m an old hand at this now. I moved a mountain yesterday. I can move another today. Let me have a look at you.” There was some scrambling and rock fall, then Barb panting to her left. “Have your eyes adapted to the dark?”
“No, not really.”
“I practiced before, when I was at my cousin’s.”
Manhattan had collapsed on top of Barb, but she was still chattering away.
“She lost
her vision in one eye because of idiopathic strabismus. Do you know what that means?”
Alice didn’t have to answer. Barb was a self-replenishing talking machine. She needed no inputs to produce outputs.
“It means they don’t know what caused her eyes to point in different directions, but they did. From birth. The brain gets confused if it can’t make the two images into one and sort of ‘shuts off’ information from the wandering eye, sometimes leading to blindness. Not actual real blindness. The eyeball itself is still in working order. It’s just that the brain can’t make sense of the sense data it’s getting, so it doesn’t ‘see.’ Anyway…”
Barb was doing something other than chatting. It wasn’t just that she was huffing between sentences but the sound of rock on rock. That crazy broad was trying to get Alice out of her living tomb.
“…Anyway, her parents and my parents decided we would all be ‘blind’ when we were at their house. I had two eye patches. Like a pirate, except blind in both eyes. You use your ears a lot more when you can’t see what’s in front of you. I asked Santa to give us all echolocation, before I knew he wasn’t real. My mom used to tell me Santa couldn’t meddle in the human body, so I asked Jesus, but he didn’t give me super-bat powers either. Whatever. He has a plan. We don’t know what that plan might be, but He has a plan. We need only trust.”
The water shifted around Alice’s middle as if the tide had turned and was moving away from the shore now. Had she done it? Had Barb pulled the plug on Alice’s watery cave?
“Hang on a sec,” said Barb, “I need to step aside while that goes down the rocky mountain here. You’re lucky, you know. You landed just right. Mind you, so did I. Good thing you made me run when you did because that whole section of tunnel where we were is a heap of rubble. We’d have been human pancakes if we’d stayed there.” She stepped up closer. “Now to move some of these rocks.”
Alice laughed. The woman was certifiable, but in the best way. She was the ultimate New Yorker: self-absorbed, but self-aware. She would, it seemed, go to the ends of the Earth to help her fellow man, but she didn’t want anyone to know she cared so deeply. Alice had met a hundred Barbs during her time in New York. They baffled her, but she was glad of them.
“It took me a whole day to get over that mountain to search this tunnel for you, but it’s not going to take anywhere near that time to get us out of here.”
Why had she come back? What in God’s name would propel her to do that for a stranger?
“What you have to remember is you can only move one rock at a time. You want to move them all or have the magical Mickey Mouse power to get it done with a flick of your wand, but real magic is ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Another rock went skittering into the distance. “Did you know that ladies ‘bloom’ whereas men ‘perspire?’ My dad always used to tell me that. He said I was a little flower and bloomed all the time. I’m blooming right now, I can tell you.”
“Barb?” Alice jumped in the first chance she got. “What’s the plan? What should I do? Tell me how to help.”
“Stay still,” said Barb. “This is highly unstable. I had to surf the pile a couple of times when I took my first rock mountain apart. I’ve scratched up my knees and elbows something fierce. The thing to do is get your Zen on.”
Alice wasn’t sure how much Zen she had left, but it made sense that she should keep still and let this loveable loon work around her. Barb had already worked some magic. Alice wasn’t going to drown any time soon. She might still, if they didn’t get her out, but not at this hour on this day. What day was it? She didn’t have the foggiest. Bill and the kids must be going out of their minds with worry.
“Is there anything you can hang on to?” Barb sounded so matter of fact. It was almost as if she was sane.
“Hang on to?”
“I’ve moved as many rocks as I can from the top of the pile. I’ve felt all around your mountain and the smaller, more manageable rocks are at the bottom. I know you will have thought of this already, because who wouldn’t in these circumstances, but it’s a lot like Jenga.”
Alice had thought that, back when she’d first woken up, but she’d found out that no amount of jostling or stamping could free her up. Her Zen center shifted a little. The doldrums would gather strength if she let them and cloud her vision. Stay positive, Alice. Keep the faith. An ant may move a mountain, grain by grain.
“It’s not likely, but there’s a chance I move one of these rocks and the whole thing comes tumbling down. If that happens, I want to make sure you’re holding on to something.”
“Got it. Holding on,” said Alice. There was nothing to hold on to, but Barb didn’t need to know that. The kid was a champ just for trying.
Barb heaved and grunted, swearing under her breath. “This one’s a biggie. Could be the one.”
It wasn’t, but Barb never gave up hoping. Every rock “could be the one.”
“This is it,” she said for the umpteenth time. “This is the one.”
It was the one. The wall to Alice’s right groaned as it buckled, crashing away from her and taking Barb with it. Alice braced herself, waiting for the rest of the material around her to follow the avalanche, but nothing else gave way. She pulled her left arm out of its rocky sleeve, rubbing her arms and trying to improve her circulation. There was a small “door” to her right where Barb had been excavating. The woman had done it. She’d really truly done it. Alice was free.
She stepped from her prison onto a mess of sheetrock and concrete and pipes. Barb lay at the bottom of the slide, partially covered in detritus. Alice dropped to the ground, her rear end on the ground, her hands outstretched like a penguin, and skittered down to her friend’s side. She checked for a pulse and found one. She started digging. Her arms screamed in pain, but she had to ignore that. Barb had saved her life, she couldn’t let her die now.
The plastic baby had broken Barb’s fall, but it was crushed. Alice wrapped it in its baby sling and put it aside. It had served its purpose.
“Can you walk?” She pulled Barb into a seated position, brushing the dust and grit from her face.
Barb blinked and smiled. “Sure.” She inspected her head. “There’s going to be a big bump back there tomorrow. We’ll be needing some vinegar and brown paper. Do you know that nursery rhyme?”
“We’ll get you to a hospital as soon as we’re out of here. Put your arm around me and we’ll go together.”
Barb put her arm around Alice and let her heave her to her feet. “It works. The vinegar and brown paper. Vinegar has antiseptic properties. It’s kind of a cure all substance, but you have to remember to get the kind that has the ‘motherlode’ as they call it.” Barb stumbled. “Oooooh, I’m not feeling like a bowl of cherries.”
“We’re going to take it slowly because, as you say, this is unstable.”
“Watch out for the water,” said Barb. “You never know what’s under there.”
Alice nodded. They were going to have to be cautious, but steady. In her heart, she was sure as she had ever been that they were going to make it out.
“Where’s my baby?” said Barb.
“We had to leave it behind,” said Alice. “We’ll get you another one.” Alice had her by the wrist and pulled her towards the mountain that led to a tunnel that led to the stopped train which led to a subway exit. She hoped.
“Is my baby okay?” Her voice rose, threatening tears.
“Of course the baby is okay.” It was plastic. It wasn’t okay. But she didn’t need Barb going into fits of hysterics because her fake baby was somewhere back there on top of the rubble.
Barb gripped her stomach and doubled over. “Is she okay?”
Alice felt a chill run up her spine. Barb was concussed and confused. She needed medical attention immediately. “Keep moving, Barb. We need to get out of here.”
The water was up to their calves now. That was an amazing rate of increase.
“They made me have amniocentesis.” Barb was dragging her
feet. “I told them I didn’t want to. I didn’t want anything to harm the baby.”
Alice wanted to wrap her arms around the young woman and listen to her story, but there wasn’t time. “Amnio’s good,” she said. “I had to have one, too.” She avoided the obvious. Because it was obvious now. The sling and the doll and the tall tale about using it to get a seat on the train was only half the story.
“Her name was Julia,” said Barb. “Named after my mother. She was three ounces. Three ounces of pure perfection and love. She had all her ten fingers and all her ten toes and a little button nose that I wanted to kiss right off her face.”
The train was partially buried, but it was still there. They could climb in and have three whole minutes of walking on a real floor, rather than broken rails and fallen masonry and cable.