The Collapse

by E S Richards

  Still he stared on as the man manoeuvred himself out of the window, hovering half in and half out as he tested his weight on the makeshift rope. Len pressed his back into the wall behind him, flinching away from the hordes of people running past as he was unable to tear his eyes away from the man.

  He abseiled down slowly, sliding his feet along the wall of the now tilting building. Len held his breath. Someone else had appeared at the window the man had evacuated —another man, ensuring the rope held firm and didn’t slip. That gave the abseiler more confidence and he started moving quicker, steadily approaching the third floor window where the woman and baby cried.

  Len’s mouth dropped open as the man slowed, resting one foot on the third floor windowsill to take some of his weight. He seemed to be speaking to the woman, although what words they chose to share Len couldn’t guess at. The explanation was soon clear however, as the woman handed her baby over to the man, tucking it tightly in the folds of a zip jacket.

  The baby was going to be saved. Len’s mouth grew dry as he refused to look away from the man, now moving even slower than before with the precious cargo he was holding. He made it down to the second window, still firmly sealed shut to the outside world. Whoever lived there must not have been home, Len thought; they had been lucky.

  As the abseiler passed by the window, a horrible sight caught Len’s eye. Flames were flickering against the end of the rope, the corner of a bed sheet blowing too close to the dangerous red breeze. It caught alight and Len let out a strangled sound in horror.

  Faster than the man could move, the flames started to work their way up the rope, hunting out the kill that lay ahead of them. With the second window closed it was too far for the man to climb, try as he might. But with only one hand for the rope—the other securing the baby—he struggled to make any distance away from the fire.

  Len took an involuntary step forward as he saw the man freeze on the rope. He looked up to the mother in the window, the one who had handed over her child in the hope it would survive the day. There was little hope now. Len inched another step forward as the flames licked at the man’s feet, only seconds away from consuming him now. Then he did what Len could never imagine doing. He let go of the rope, wrapping his arms firmly around the baby and falling backwards onto the sidewalk below.

  Len couldn’t hear the impact of the body hitting the ground over the rest of the noise, but he knew the outcome already. He shrunk back against the wall and swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat, unable to force his eyes back up to the mother in the window.

  Thoughts of Amy and James once more assaulted his head. He couldn’t stand around any longer, he couldn’t help any of these people, but maybe he could help his family. Somehow.

  Picking up his feet again Len continued moving toward his office building. He wasn’t far away, the gridlock traffic of only a few hours earlier keeping him nearby but also feeling like a lifetime ago. The roads were gridlocked in a completely different manner now and he found himself praying for the comfortable irritation of traffic.

  Sweat dripped down his face as he ran, pushing his body to the limit in order to find some shred of solitude. The heat was indescribable, like something Len had never experienced before. He remembered one time he went on holiday to Egypt and thought being there was like being in the depths of hell it was so hot. Now he truly understood what hell was and he was standing right in the middle of it.

  Fighting against tides of people, some running to safety like him, others clutching bloody wounds or trying to save loved ones, Len eventually had his office building in sight. Relief washed over him as he noticed the building holding firm. Cars were crashed around it, but none had come near the actual building.

  The underground parking lot was his destination. With fireproof doors and thick insulation from the ground, Len knew that would be the safest place for him. But first he had to go into the office itself. Although he knew it was probably hopeless, his need to reach his son was too strong to ignore. If he could find just one working phone or computer, some way to get in touch with South Haven. He had to try.

  Tugging open the building doors, the sight inside made Len’s eyes water. The lobby was filled with injured people; some with grotesque burns covering their body, others lying in pools of blood. The receptionist, Juliet, moved amongst the injured, her emergency first aid training coming out in full force.

  But there was little Juliet could do for these people. Len gasped as he saw a young girl, her arm torn clear away from her body. There was no way these people were going to make it, the chaos the explosions had caused already too great to recover from quickly.

  Ashamed of himself, Len moved between the injured, refusing to look any of them in the eyes after the young girl. Some might call him a coward for not staying to help, some might call him selfish and the latter he probably was in some ways.

  But for Len the only people that mattered were his son and ex-wife. A thought grabbed him that every second he spent thinking about a stranger, or trying to help someone who was injured was a second he was kept away from saving them. For the first time since his divorce Len thought of himself as a family man and he was not going to let his family be without him.

  Charging up the stairs to his office on the third floor, Len rushed to his desk, frantically hitting at keys on his computer and picking up the phone to listen for a dial tone. He was not surprised when neither responded, but his heart sunk a little even still.

  He moved around the office trying every screen, every phone. He even pulled open people’s drawers in the hope of finding a working cell or some kind of telecommunications device. Nothing. Moving down to the second floor he repeated the motions, whispering his son’s name under his breath to keep him strong as his search continued to reveal nothing of use.

  On the first floor before Len decided to make his way down to the parking lot he spared a glance from the window. From the slightly higher vantage point he could see further into the city and his breath hitched as he realized how far the destruction had spread.

  Red and orange flames had consumed the city he called home, not even the waters of Lake Michigan enough to hold them back. Buildings crumbled in the distance and vehicles were abandoned and burning in every street.

  The sight of people was even worse and after a minute Len forced himself to look away. Every injury he saw he only imagined it on Amy or James and the thoughts were too much to bear on top of everything else.

  Pushing himself away from the glass windows, Len picked up an abandoned water bottle from a desk and gulped down its contents greedily. He couldn’t decide whether the heat was worse inside or out on the streets and only hoped the underground parking lot would provide him with some relief.

  He stumbled down the stairwell, flinching at the screams that came from the lobby as he passed the door. His legs felt unstable with each step he took, leaning heavily against the banister for support. He was almost down to the parking lot when a huge crash shook the building, the impact forcing Len to crouch down in fear.

  Suddenly a throng of bodies surged into the stairwell from the lobby. Len could feel the heat physically rising as tens of people tried frantically to get downstairs, some explosion or something forcing them in from the streets.

  The others caught up to him quickly and before Len knew it he was being pushed past while others were dragged down to the floor and trampled. With the crowd mentality of fear seeping into Len’s perspective, the building shook again and an alarm started ringing inside.

  Len started pushing himself now. Whatever had happened outside was bad and he needed to get away from it. The door to the parking lot was almost in sight; a few more steps and he was going to make it.

  Chapter 3

  “We’re all going to die down here!”

  “It’s better than being out there!”

  “We’re trapped!”

  “I need to get home!”

  “The world is falling apart!”

 
“Help us!”

  “Help me!”

  Len clasped his hands over his ears in an attempt to block out the screaming. He’d made it down to the underground parking lot in his office building with roughly thirty other people. All of them were complete strangers as far as Len could tell and all of them were inciting more and more panic in one another.

  Len had no idea what had happened outside to make everyone rush to the safety of the underground, although safe was not what he felt right now. Screams of them being trapped and buried alive echoed through the dark room, lit only by a few emergency lights along two walls.

  Whatever it was that had happened, it had to be bad. Really bad. With Chicago already almost in ruins, something to instill this much extra panic made Len even more nervous than before. What if he really was trapped underground? How would he ever get to Amy and James now?

  The underground lot was vast. It held space for almost a hundred cars, although less than twenty remained now. A few of the people down there had started trying to break into the cars that remained, scavenging for supplies or attempting to start the engines.

  “Stop!” Someone suddenly shouted beside Len, rushing forward to the people in the cars. “They might explode!”

  Immediately everyone in the parking lot held their breath. Those who had rushed to the cars jumped out like something had bitten them and scampered back toward the group.

  The uncertainty of what was going to happen gripped everyone as silence rung out underground, seconds passing with people waiting to find out if they had just been doomed.

  After a minute, the man who had told people to stop with the cars spoke again. He was well built, about ten years Len’s junior and had a stern look on his face.

  “We can’t go taking any risks,” his voice was calm and leveled, oozing an air of authority. “Even breaking into these cars could set something off since we don’t know what’s compromised now and what isn’t.”

  “How do we know the fire can’t reach us down here?” A frightened girl who looked to be in her late teens cried out, her makeup already running down her face from crying.

  “We’re underground,” the calm man spoke up again. “This building has fireproof doors plus however many feet of soil and dirt that are packing us in. Even a fire like that can’t find us down here.”

  “Then how do we get out?”

  “We’ll be stuck down here forever!”

  “Calm down everyone, please!” The man’s voice finally rose over the noise, panic threatening to dissolve the group once more. “You can trust me. My name is Rory; I’m a Fire Marshall. That blaze outside will burn for a while, but it won’t spread. Not down here. Our best bet is to stick it out, wait down here as long as we can. The CFD is dispatching groups across the city as we speak. You’ll be back upstairs with your loved ones soon enough.”

  “My loved ones are probably dead!”

  “Mine too!”

  “There’s nothing to go back to!”

  Len watched as Rory sighed and rolled his eyes, accepting that the fear in the group was too fresh to quell just yet. Eventually people stopped screaming and settled down in small groups, some crying, some consoling one another. Everyone stayed away from the vehicles at least, that part of Rory’s speech had held firm.

  Len himself loitered near the stairwell, thoughts of his family keeping him eager to escape as soon as possible. He had no idea what time it was or how long he’d have to stay underground. While twenty minutes ago the thought of the parking lot had been a safety blanket for him, now he wanted nothing more than to be outside.

  Not that he was going to cause a fuss or a panic. There were enough people down here doing that for him. He cast his gaze over a whole group of people. Some old, some young, there were even a couple of children sitting on the ground hugging one another, no adults seeming to take responsibility for them.

  Len’s gaze eventually found Rory, who was leaning against the wall talking in hushed tones to a couple of other men. If Len had any hope of getting out of the lot and to his family, he had to at least know what had happened outside.

  Sucking in a breath for courage he inched along the wall toward where Rory stood, knowing this was no time for the coward in him to take control.

  “… killed hundreds.”

  “More than that by now I’d imagine, probably closer to the thousands?”

  “That blast alone probably accounted for a large chunk. We’re the lucky ones down here.”

  The threads of conversation coming from the three men didn’t fill Len with much confidence, but he bit down on his lip and approached anyway.

  “Err, hi,” he kept his voice fairly low. “I was wondering if you could tell me what happened out there?”

  “You don’t know?” One of the men Rory had been speaking to turned to face Len, a look of shock on his face.

  “No,” Len cleared his throat. “I was already in the building, already making my way down here, when you all came in. I didn’t see anything. Well, aside from everything else that’s already happened out there.”

  Len’s voice trailed off, threating to break if he had to think too closely about the horrors he’d witnessed. Rory stepped forward now, seemingly sizing Len up and deliberating what to tell him. Len didn’t like being treated like a child, especially by someone younger than him, so he made an effort to stand up straighter and raise an eyebrow, prompting Rory for an explanation.

  “A gas line ruptured,” Rory spoke with his calm voice once more. “All the way along the road is my guess. You’re lucky you missed it; everything sparked up. 22nd Street probably doesn’t exist anymore.”

  Len gasped. They were on 22nd Street. How were they still alive if something like that had happened? Sensing the question about to come, Rory continued.

  “Like I said earlier, being underground is actually the safest place to be right now. Although the gas line probably runs right by here, the flames won’t come down here, so we don’t need to worry.”

  “Unless this lot all go into a panic again,” another man gestured to the others in the parking lot with them, running his eyes over the ones who had cried out earlier. “I’m Carter by the way, and this is my brother Theo.”

  “Len,” he nodded to the three men, deciding that it wasn’t the time or the place for formal handshakes. “So what do we do now, just wait?”

  “Nothing else we can do,” Rory replied matter-of-factly. “We go back up there too soon and we all burn to death. It’s best we stay down here while we can and in the morning, I’ll head on up to check the view.”

  Len nodded again in agreement. He’d never really been an alpha male and could already tell he was in the midst of three of them. If Rory thought it was best to stay underground overnight—and the other two agreed with him—Len wasn’t about to go off exploring on his own.

  He hung around the men a few moments longer, being the quiet addition to their conversion before making an excuse to slip away. He’d got the information he needed and something told him it was best to just keep to himself while he was down there.

  Finding a secluded spot to sit down, Len rested his back against the wall and let his eyes close. He wasn’t going to fall asleep, he knew that, but a moment of rest was well overdue. Finally sitting alone, he slowly began to feel all the aches and pains over his body. Luckily he hadn’t been badly injured, just a few bumps and scrapes here and there, but his body still groaned from the physical exertion.

  Thinking on what Rory had said, Len pondered on how close the gas line must be to where they all sat. It made sense about the fire wanting oxygen and them therefore being safe underground, but what worried Len was what the street above would now look like.

  Could everything really be gone? A shiver ran through him as Len realized he had been on the upper floors of the building just minutes before the gas line ruptured. He could’ve died so easily. But then, the same was true of every minute he’d lived since he saw that newscast in O’Riley’s pub.

>   He thought of Janet and whether she would’ve made it to safety. Of Juliet the receptionist who had been just a few feet away from the stairwell door upstairs. Len had already noticed she wasn’t one of the bodies who’d made it downstairs, which meant that she was probably already dead. She and however many other people he worked with and saw on a daily basis. It was crazy how much had changed in a matter of hours.

  Of course, it was the uncertain deaths that frightened Len the most. He tried to stop his mind from imagining all the possibilities of what could have happened to Amy and James. He at least knew they were unlikely to have exploded in a car, Amy giving up driving when she moved to South Haven.