She gripped his arm and checked his wrist screen. An amber oxygen depletion warning.
‘Hey. Breathe slow. You’re burning too much air.’
‘How the hell was that thing still alive? How long had it been submerged?’
‘The virus never quits. Come on. Get it together. We have to get out of here.’
Cloke replaced his right flipper and tightened straps. He swam towards the back of the bus using seatbacks for guidance, gas tanks scraping the roof.
He helped Tombes lift the equipment bier and manoeuvre it towards the jagged burn hole in the rear bulkhead.
Lupe took a last look at the dead driver. She leaned close. Her helmet lamps lit his shattered face. His head was thrown back, mouth open in a grotesque yawn. Wisps of blood curled from between his teeth and out his nostrils like cigarette fumes. Eye sockets bristled with metallic splinters.
The roof began to collapse.
The rasp of shifting concrete, the grind of abrading cement. Roof panels creased and bulged. Torsion and metal shriek.
The cab began to crumple and cave. Pillars started to bend and fold. The remaining side windows frosted and shattered with a muffled crunch. Serpentine clouds of silt curled through the vacant frames and began to fill the passenger compartment. Visibility dropped like the bus was filling with smoke.
‘Fucking move,’ shouted Nariko, voice deafening loud inside her helmet.
She lunged for the guide line. Her gauntlets scrabbled at the fine, nylon rope. Too insubstantial. Too smooth. The cord danced between her fingers, like a wisp of gossamer.
She caught the line, twisted for grip, and began to haul herself hand-over-hand.
The three divers scrambled down the centre aisle, grabbed seatbacks, kicked up a silt-storm. The buckling hull closed around them like the piston-walls of a compactor. The roof kinked and crumpled, pressed lower as the steel frame of the bus folded in a series of sudden capitulations. They could hear the torque of stressed metal, deep howls and moans, like whale song.
Cloke and Tombes struggled to haul equipment from the rear of the bus. A narrow crevice. Their headlamps danced as they shifted and contorted, tried to wrestle equipment in the confined space.
Crack and grind. Titanic blocks of masonry shifted and settled. The water around them began to fill with a swirling blizzard of stone dust.
‘Go,’ yelled Cloke, shouting to be heard over the rubble-roar that filled their helmets. Tombes continued to tug at the stretcher. ‘Forget the gear. Just go.’
‘We need this shit.’
Cloke seized the grab-handle on the back of his tank frame and pulled.
‘Move. Just fucking move.’
They abandoned the equipment and struggled to kick clear of cascading debris.
Cloke alone, disoriented, spinning in sub-aquatic darkness.
He tumbled through space, no sense of up or down. His wrist screen flashed an amber warning: elevated oxygen consumption.
Stop struggling, he told himself. Be still. Be calm.
He slowly spun to a halt. He sank and gently hit bottom, kicking up a silt-plume.
Occluded vision. He reached up and tried to clear his visor. A jagged crack running the width of the Lexan. A blot of blood on the glass. Ear-whine concussion.
His helmet lights lit a tennis shoe lying on the tunnel floor. Grey with dirt, been there years. He stared at the shoe, tried to regain his balance, willed his head to stop spinning.
He fumbled the radio clipped to his weight belt. He checked the jack was still plugged to his helmet.
‘Nariko. Captain. Come in, over.’
No reply.
‘Captain. Captain, can you hear me? Sound off, if you can hear my voice.’
Nothing.
‘Tombes. What is your status, over?’
No response.
‘Tombes. Captain. Guys. Speak to me. Sound off.’
Something tendrillar coiling round his feet. He grabbed it. A loose length of safety line. He pulled hand over hand. The end was frayed and torn.
He peered into a fog of swirling rock dust. He slowly turned around, tried to figure north from south, tried to locate the rockfall.
‘Captain. Tombes. Come on, guys. Where are you? Talk to me. Tell me you’re alive.’
30
Cloke surfaced. He broke through a crust of floating garbage. He gripped a ledge in the tunnel wall for support.
He wiped water droplets from his visor with a gloved hand. He studied the cracked Lexan, anxious to see if irradiated flood water were leaking into his helmet.
Twin lamps lit the tunnel walls. He looked around. Crumbling brickwork arched overhead. Old gang graffiti. DEF CON MUTHAFUKAS. A flaking portrait of Malcolm X.
Tombes surfaced beside him.
‘Where the hell is the Captain? Did she get out?’
‘She was right behind us,’ said Cloke. ‘Right at my back.’
They looked around at the bobbing scrim of garbage, expecting Nariko to break surface any moment.
Tombes:
‘Captain, do you copy, over?’
No reply.
‘Captain, can you hear me?’
No response.
‘Shit.’
Tombes resubmerged.
Cloke checked his wrist gauge. They had been in the water twenty-nine minutes.
He ducked beneath the surface and followed Tombes as he kicked for the rockfall.
Sediment broiled like smoke. Their headlamps lit curling vortices of stone dust.
They floated side by side. Particulates settled. The water around them slowly cleared.
The bus had been buried by an avalanche of rubble.
‘Captain?’ called Cloke. ‘Cap? Can you hear me?’
Tombes settled flippered feet on the tunnel floor and began to dig. He clawed at the rubble, grabbed fist-sized lumps of cement and hurled them aside. Cloke joined him. Grind of stone on stone.
‘Did her suit have some kind of locator? Some kind of beacon?’
‘Look for bubbles,’ said Tombes. ‘She may have a ruptured tank.’
Cloke lifted a paving slab aside and exposed a coil of rope.
‘I’ve found the gear.’
They excavated their equipment. Trauma packs. Clothes and boots sealed in polythene. The plasma arc. They dragged the stretcher clear.
They kept digging.
‘Nariko? Captain? Are you alive? Can you hear my voice?’
‘Sound off, Cap,’ called Tombes. ‘Where the hell are you?’
Nariko lay in darkness. A minute of slow-spinning who-am-I/where-am-I. Then she remembered Fenwick Street, the dive, the bus.
She lazily raised a hand. She touched stone. A wall of concrete close on every side.
No sound but her own irregular breath, and the click of the oxygen solenoid injecting fresh gas into the micro-environment of her suit.
She coughed. She shook her head, tried to clear her thoughts. One of her dead helmet lights blinked to life and glowed weak orange. The beam lit concrete inches from her face.
She tried to move. She was pinned tight. She lay on her back, entombed in rubble, trapped in a pocket little bigger than a coffin.
She was numb below the waist.
For a brief moment she succumbed to claustrophobia. She clawed at her helmet. Head encased in a steel bubble, held rigid by foam pads, vision restricted by the hex-bolt porthole inches from her face.