The crowd shuffled through the rain-lashed street, squeezed between the hulks of burned out cars.
They filed past Zuccotti Park and headed east down Liberty towards Fenwick Station.
29
Nariko drifted in black silence. Twin helmet lights shafted through swirling sediment. Bone-chilling cold. She kicked against the velvet dark with a series of muscular leg strokes.
Cloke and Tombes swam behind her. Lights danced in the dark. They carried a stretcher between them. A fibreglass backboard loaded with equipment.
She reached a wall of rubble. She gripped the tumbled blocks and manoeuvred hand over hand. She clipped a karabiner to the rivet hole of a girder and spooled safety line.
She sank to the tunnel floor.
Her helmet lamps lit the buckled yellow hull of the school bus sitting on the track-bed, part-buried beneath masonry.
She inspected the bus.
‘The rubble has shifted. I think the roof is starting to fold.’
‘We can’t abort, Captain,’ said Cloke. ‘We have to press on.’
‘I’m heading inside. You guys stay here.’
She pulled herself through the windshield
The driver. Hands fused to the wheel. The corpse leaned right, like he was taking a hard corner.
She used the dash and driver’s seat to haul herself inside.
She touched down in the passenger compartment. A double row of seats. The bus listed forty-five degrees. She gripped a seatback to keep her balance.
‘Tombes? You got the breaching gear?’
‘Right behind you, Cap.’
Nariko glanced around at buckled window pillars, the bulging, ridged metal of the roof.
‘Let’s hurry it up, guys. This thing could implode any moment.’
Light shafting through the vacant windshield. Twin helmet beams. Tombes floated into view.
‘Here.’
He leaned into the bus. He shouldered the dead driver further aside, and passed Nariko a black cylinder lashed with webbing.
Nariko hugged the cylinder under her arm and manoeuvred down the centre aisle in a series of slow lunar strides. She spooled braided paracord tether behind her. She tied the line to the rear seat frame.
‘Need a hand, boss?’
‘Hang back. Place is a death trap. Less time we spend in here, the better.’
She rested the steel cylinder on the back seat of the bus. She unwound hose, checked regulator pressure and unsheathed the cutting head: a red pistol grip tipped with an exothermic heat rod.
She positioned herself in front of the rear door, braced her legs, and pulled the trigger. The unit vented a jet of high-pressure oxygen/hydrogen, and simultaneously popped an igniter spark.
An incandescent flame, hot as the sun. Water surrounding the exothermic head fizzed and boiled. Nariko felt spreading convection warmth through the trilaminate of her suit.
She pressed the cutting head to the door panel. Steel turned angry red and began to sweat. The burn hole widened and dripped metal. Steel tears fell and scattered like ball bearings.
‘How’s it going?’ asked Cloke.
‘Good. An easy cut.’
‘We’ve been submerged nine minutes.’
‘Just shut up and let me work, all right?’
The cutting head burned at ten thousand Fahrenheit. She could feel the steel of her helmet radiate heat like a hot plate. She cooked in her suit. She shook her head, blinked to clear perspiration from her eyes. She licked sweat from her upper lip.
She completed the cut. She shut off the plasma torch and took a step back into cooler waters.
A vein of super-hot metal glowed red like neon. She kicked the door. It fell open.
‘That’s it. I’m through.’
She stood in the rear doorway and surveyed the debris beyond.
A crevice between two massive chunks of concrete.
‘It’s a tight traverse, but we can make it to the other side.’
She returned to the front of the bus. Tombes fed her the spinal injury backboard piled with equipment. She laid the plasma cylinder alongside EMT kit and lashed it down with nylon rope.
They wrestled the stretcher down the aisle towards the rear door.
Cloke crouched on the hood of the bus. He looked through the windshield into the dark interior. He watched the dancing helmet lights of Nariko and Tombes as they struggled to manoeuvre the bier to the rear door.
He looked up. Rubble and girders. A precarious Jenga-stack. A massive tonnage of stone piled above the bus roof.
‘This stuff could collapse on our heads any moment,’ said Nariko, wind-rush of exertion captured by the helmet mike. ‘If this were a standard street rescue, I would tell my guys to hold back. At least until we got proper structural support.’
Cloke psyched himself to enter the buckled hull of the bus. He gripped the tether line and pulled himself past the dead driver. His helmet lights briefly illuminated empty sockets and a yellow-tooth grin.
He called to Tombes at the rear of the bus:
‘How’s it looking? A clear route?’
‘Looks that way.’
Cloke’s left foot snagged. He squirmed. He tried to shake free. He was stuck fast.
He turned and looked back. The bus driver had twisted in his seat and sunk teeth into the fabric of his drysuit. He could feel the tight vice-pressure of teeth grinding into his suit lining, trying to break flesh.
Cloke screamed.
‘What’s up?’ shouted Nariko. ‘What’s going on?’ She grabbed seat backs and hauled herself towards the front of the bus. ‘Cloke. What’s going on?’
Cloke kicked at the cadaver’s eyeless face. He balled a fist and pounded the creature’s skull. Water pressure slowed his arm, softened every movement like he was battling monsters in a helpless fever-dream.
Rising panic. He thrashed and flailed. He lost a flipper. His helmet and gas pack slammed into the roof as he tried to wrench lose.
‘Keep still.’
Nariko pushed past him. She gripped the back of the driver’s seat for support. She pulled the Glock from her weight belt.
She clubbed the creature with the butt, hammered its forehead and temple until the driver’s teeth reflexively parted and released the fabric of Cloke’s suit.
Nariko deactivated the safety with a gloved thumb.
The skeletal driver strained against the seat belt, snapped and lunged.
Nariko jammed the gun between gaping jaws, twisted the barrel deep into the creature’s throat and pulled the trigger. Muffled thump. A slow-blossoming burst of brain tissue and skull fragments. The bullet streaked out the windshield into darkness, fast-decelerating trajectory delineated by a plume of gas bubbles shimmering like globules of mercury.
The dead thing slumped, head flung back, and was still.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Nariko. ‘Are you bitten? Did it puncture your suit?’
She turned Cloke’s helmet to face her. He was sweating, eyes wide with fear.
‘Get it together. Control your breathing.’
He nodded.
‘Focus. Be calm and focus.’
‘I’m okay,’ he said. Each panting exhalation roared over the open radio channel.
She checked the leg of his dive suit. Deep gouges in the trilaminate fabric, but no tears.