“So why are you staying behind?” he asked as he held the boy’s hand.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Maybe I wanted you to see how seriously I take the job.”
He laughed then, deep and genuine. “You’ve convinced me. But I don’t think I’m the person at the Crane Foundation you need to convince.”
She ignored the reference to Newcombe. “Are we going to die?” she asked instead.
“Yeah … probably. Okay?”
“You’re the boss.”
They waited for the slow IV to drain. Crane spoke softly to the boy as the ground rumbled menacingly beneath them, and as soon as the bag was empty, he ripped it out and tossed it away. “Go! Go!” he yelled.
Lanie strained on the beam. The smell of sulfur was overpowering. There was no panic within her, only professional detachment.
She’d do her job. It’s why she came. She surprised herself with her calm. Amazed herself.
She heard Crane grunting even as she strained on the lever and the ash was choking her, making her gag.
“Got him,” Crane yelled, using his good arm to hoist the slight young man over his shoulder then stagger up in the debris. Lanie released her lever and stumbled with him, the square empty as they slogged through sucking, knee deep mud.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now we … oh my.” Crane was looking up again, his eyes wide with wonderment.
Above them, the summit of Pelee was suffused with a dull red glow that became brighter and brighter as they watched. Total darkness lit up to brilliant daylight. Without warning the glow broke away from the peak and rushed down the mountainside a hundred yards from them. It wasn’t lava, but a red-hot avalanche of rock with a billowy surface. There were boulders and the remnants of trees within the pulsating destruction, huge rocks which stood out as streaks of throbbing red tumbling and throwing off showers of sparks.
The velocity was terrific, the avalanche rushing down the entire mountain and into the sea in seconds, narrowly missing them.
“I’ve heard of this but never seen it,” Crane said low, his voice hushed with awe, and perhaps with exhaustion too, for he still held the young man on his shoulder.
“Is it over?”
“No.”
Just as the crimson glow from the avalanche faded, it was replaced with a monstrous cloud shaping itself against the now visible sky over the landslide’s site. The cloud rose from the path of the avalanche and moved along its course, gaining momentum, as if lighter particles of volcanic material had begun to rise slightly and continue forward as the heavier particles settled to earth.
The cloud was globular, its surface bulging with masses that swelled and multiplied with a terrible energy. Lanie was hypnotized by it, barely feeling Crane’s bad arm pushing at her. The cloud rushed forward, directly toward them, boiling and changing its form every instant. Ground hugging, it billowed at them in surging masses, coruscating with lightning.
“Back inside the wreckage!” he yelled at her over the terrible hot gale force wind that led the cloud. “Now! Move!”
She moved.
They were being pelted with a rain of stones the size of walnuts. The hot roar moved nearer, nearer. Crane knew he had about twenty seconds to figure out how to protect them from two-thousand-degree temperatures that would suck the oxygen right out of their lungs.
The workers had opened a ten-foot clearance cave to rescue the boy, but it was giving in now, collapsing in upon itself. A beam squeaked loudly, creaking, then snapping. He saw it in terrible slow motion as it swung at them, catching Lanie full force on the side of the head, knocking her to her knees. She began weaving from that position, gagging loudly.
“Come on!” He grabbed at her, but his bad arm didn’t have the strength to pull her up. He lay his burden down; the young man shakily got to his own hands and knees and crawled farther into the collapsing darkness of his house.
Crane seized King around the waist and pulled her up his hip, bearing most of her weight. Behind them, outside, the square was brilliant fire. He could hardly breathe. “Salle de bain,” he shouted to the boy. “Tub! Tub!”
“Id,” the boy called weakly and continued to crawl.
“Good,” Crane said, pulling a moaning Lanie with him as he squat-walked through the wreckage, the heat unbearable. “Are you still with me?”
Her head lolled on her shoulders, her eyelashes fluttering, trying to bring back the eyes that wanted to roll up into her skull. “I’m f-fine,” she mumbled weakly. “I just need to … need to … lie down, I—I—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Crane said, dragging her now. “Dan’s going to kill me if this damned volcano doesn’t.”
The boy had crawled behind the stairs to nowhere and pushed weakly at a splintered doorway half squashed by its own frame. Crane, working at sucking air, dropped King and threw himself against the remnants of the door. It gave way with him, and he tumbled into a bathroom that was half caved in from the side facing the mountain but remarkably intact otherwise.
He reached back and pulled the young man in with him. A free-standing bathtub waited majestically in the middle of an ash-covered floor. He scrambled back over the splinters and took Lanie by her collar to drag her into the room. “You stay awake!” he yelled at her as she bumped over broken mortar and wood. “Do you hear me! Don’t go to sleep!”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” she said, her voice raspy. Blood flowed down her neck, soaking her hah* and shirt.
He dragged her to the tub and placed her flat next to it. “Don’t move,” he said, then pulled the boy by the arm and put him close beside her. He lay atop them both and tipped the tub over them, hoping it would hold enough of an air pocket to keep them alive and be strong enough to protect them from falling debris.
The rumbling got louder, all encompassing in the stifling darkness beneath the tub. “Retenir votre respiration,” he told the boy, then to Lanie, “Take a deep breath and hold it.”
They did, to the roar of the cloud washing over them, the rest of the house giving way under the heat and mud, falling in on top of them, screaming as it died, screaming as his parents’ house had.
His body cooked dry, robbing him of fluids. He couldn’t breathe or swallow. He could hear Lanie and the boy gasping for breath. Dammit, Pelee would not take his life or the lives of those with him today! By God, the monster had had enough.
“Easy,” he whispered through parched lips, and he found himself stroking Lanie’s hair in the darkness, the terrible roar a distant storm now. He felt her relax under his hand. “It’s over.”
She groaned loudly. “Then c-could you … get your … knee out of my back. You’re … k-killing me.”
“Sorry,” he said, finally able to draw a strong breath as fresh air rushed through the crack around the bottom of the tub, filling the vacuum created by the cloud. Air meant some sort of passage to the outside. A beginning.
He shoved out with his good hand, the tub budging, but stuck. It was pinned under something heavy. The boy reached up and helped, the two of them straining the tub up far enough for Crane to roll out and clear the ceiling off the thing and roll it away from them.
It was black as a deep cave. Crane touched the sloping underside of the staircase. It had collapsed in an inverted V atop them and had probably saved their lives. Unfortunately, it was now their prison.
They were trapped.
The boy moaned. Crane reached for him as he fell heavily to the littered ground and searched for his carotid artery. There was no pulse.
“No!” Crane screamed, the darkness swallowing his words. “You can’t have him!”
He began administering CPR, knowing instinctively that they’d taken the boy off the fluids too soon and that the strain of the fear had sent his heart over the edge.