“Come on,” he pleaded, then pounded the boy’s chest. “Come on!”
He didn’t know how long he’d worked on the boy. He only knew that at some point even Lewis Crane had to give up. His breath was coming in gasps as he fell back atop a pile of masonry. He smelled gas, not knowing if it were real or a memory flashback in the darkness. He felt the heat of flames, but couldn’t see them. Then he cried softly and wished, as he had every day of his life since the Northridge quake, that he’d stayed inside the house with his parents. The peace of death eluded him, but its agony was his constant companion.
“He’s gone, Lanie,” Crane finally whispered into the darkness to no response. He stiffened. “Lanie … Lanie!”
He crawled to her. She was limp. He gathered her to his breast and rocked her gently in their mausoleum of mud and stone. And even as his mind spun into a numbed vortex of falling buildings and bright orange fire, every part of him, rational and irrational, was willing life into the body of Elena King.
Chapter 6
PANGAEA
Newcombe sat before the thirty-by-forty-foot wall screen in the dark lecture hall where Foundation briefings were held on missions. Pictures streamed in from helos hovering above Le Precheur. He saw an ocean of mud, a desert of slime with skeletal signs of civilization poking from its innards. Somewhere, buried beneath the ooze over the crumpled city, were the two most important people in the world to him. He refused to accept their deaths. Refused.
There were lots of people working the site—the Foundation’s people were there out of obligation, the townspeople out of gratitude to the demon saint who’d saved their loved ones. He could see mud-covered workers picking at the wreckage in thirty different places. Damn, it was too loose, too widespread an effort to be truly effective. Those rescuers would never get to Lanie and Crane in time if they kept to that strategy.
“H-hello?”
“Yes, who is this?” Newcombe returned, noting the tension in the man’s voice.
“M-My name is Dr. Ben Crowell and I’d really like to get back to the digging, I—”
“Doctor,” Newcombe said. “We don’t have much time, sir. Were you the last one to see Dr. Crane and Dr. King before the eruption?”
“Yes … I—”
“Have someone put a camera on you, Ben. I want to see … ah, good.”
The grim face of a haggard, filthy man blipped as an insert onto the huge screen.
“You know where they are, Ben?”
“I know where they were, doctor,” Crowell said, “but everything’s shifted. Nothing’s where it was. I can’t seem to get my … bearings. I’m sorry.”
“Calm down,” Newcombe said, his own resolve solid. “Crane’s alive. We’re in contact with him. They still have a little air. We just need to pinpoint them. Are you in the town square?”
“I think so.”
“Did this happen close to the town square?”
“Yes!” the man said, brightening.
Newcombe inserted a detailed satellite photo map in the lower right hand corner of the excavation shot, showing Le Precheur as it was mere days ago. “Have someone give you a monitor … we’re transmitting from this end.”
“Just a moment … I … yes, I see the map.”
“Look at it carefully and draw conclusions.”
He zoomed in on the street leading up to the square, focusing on the masonry houses with the red thatch roofs, French colonial influence.
“This one, this one,” Crowell shouted. “The fifth house from the square on the west side of the street.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“There were stairs going up, but no second floor. Your map only shows one two-story house on the block on that side of the street. It’s got to be the place.”
Newcombe overlaid a ruler on the map. “The square had a flagpole in the center.”
“It’s still there.”
“Due east from the flagpole, 113 feet four inches, is the front door of that house. Measure accurately—okay?—and have everyone dig there … but slowly, carefully, very carefully.”
Crowell darted away and was off-camera for a minute or more, though in audio contact the whole time.
“You’ve got enough diggers there,” Newcombe said brusquely. “I need your attention, Crowell, got to get some more information from you.” Crowell’s tired face popped up again. “Good. Now, tell me, what exactly happened? How was it that the two senior members of the expedition were left behind during an eruption?”
“We were evacuating the city quickly because of the St. Elmo’s Fire. I was giving a patient with crush syndrome an IV, when Crane came rushing in with Dr. King and ordered me and the men on the lever to get down to the docks. Crane took the IV from me and we ran. It was a nightmare, trying to run through the deep mud, getting bogged down in it…”
“Take a deep breath, Ben. Better now?” Crowell wearily shook his head. “Go on,” Newcombe said encouragingly.
Crowell’s expression darkened as he relived his time in hell.
“We … we somehow got down to the docks, lightning, pink lightning, was everywhere. There were fires… rocks were pelting us.” He rubbed his eyes. “Confusion at the ferries, mass chaos with trucks and people shoving. We somehow all got on board, but we couldn’t have been a mile or two from shore when the top blew off the mountain and the damned cloud formed. It came right for us, reaching for us, full of lightning. It roared and flung rocks. I knew we were all dead. Then, it started slowing down. The cloud got kind of pale, then just sailed over us, raining ash. But it started to sort of, well expand … until it filled the sky … except for a sliver of horizon. I’ve never seen anything even remotely like that.”
“Hold it, Ben,” Newcombe said, seeing the diggers making some progress. “Tell them to get optical sensors in there,” he said, Crowell disappearing from the screen for several seconds. He came back frowning.
“They sent me back. Everyone’s afraid to talk to you. Most of the surveillance gear was lost in the … did you call it, eruption? It didn’t seem like—”
“Please, Ben.”
Crowell nodded apologetically. “They’re trying to rig something now.”
“If they can hear me, then they know, they’d better hurry! Come back with my people alive or don’t come back. Now tell me, how much time passed between you leaving Crane and King and the eruption?”
The man opened his eyes wide. “Maybe ten minutes, barely enough time to finish the IV.”
“And what time of day was this?”
The man reached into his pocket, pulled out a watch, and held it close for Newcombe to see. Its face was cracked, the time frozen at 7:26. “I smashed it on a truck getting onto the ferry. Can I go now?”
Four hours. Oxygen was the problem—if they’d survived the mud and fire. “One more thing, Ben. You say there was a staircase in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Thanks. We’re finished.” He blanked Crowell’s insert from the screen, replacing it with a revolving tour of the news feeds on the scene. He let his head fall back on the seat and closed his eyes. They’d find them now, hopefully before the air ran out. Crane stayed with the house, the area under the stairs a decent place to trap oxygen and as good a place as any to be. They were there. He refused to let himself think about anything except the prospect of finding them safe, sound.
“Would you rather be alone?”
Newcombe opened his eyes to see a hologram of Brother Ishmael, ten inches high, floating in the air before him, an angelic glow around the image. “I’m not even going to ask how you did this,” he said.