Left or right? James had to guess. He could make out vague shapes in the distance, but those could have been hallucinations. He took three breaths from the teen, then made a decision—the fire stairwell would be against an outer wall of the lobby. Okay, he’d lead them to the left and hope it wasn’t a dead end.
It wasn’t. Left was right. He realized with a start that he shouldn’t be thinking word games now. That was dangerous.
But they were at the door. It had a wide emergency bar, the kind that pushed to open. For a moment, James felt fear. Without leverage, how could he push it?
Hu was already there, he batted the door with the heavy case he was holding. It bumped open enough for James to wedge his shoulder in. He pushed it further open, revealing only darkness.
James let go of the case he was dragging and entered the stairwell. He grabbed a railing and turned around slowly, looking to see if it was safe. Above, far above, did something glimmer? The surface?
It looked doable.
He gestured, a slow-motion wave.
Hu and the others pushed their way in. James shared three breaths and considered their circumstances. The stairwell was a silent column of dark water, but it was clearer water. They could actually see something. Their headlight beams penetrated for several yards. There wasn’t a lot of debris here, and nowhere near as much mud and murk. The water must have filtered in instead of flooding, rising at its own rate.
James looked back. Hu had dropped his case to push the door closed. His own abandoned suitcase—the teen was pulling at its zipper, curious to see what was inside. James swam over and touched the boy’s shoulder. The boy looked to him and he waggled his finger no. We’re not grave robbers. Out of the water, the boy’s gesture would have been a puzzled shrug, but he let go of the zipper.
Here inside the stairwell, with the fire door closed behind them, they should be safe from any rough currents. Even better, if all the fire doors above were closed, then this column of water would be a convenient chimney. They could ascend at their safest rate. Maybe… If the building hadn’t been weakened, if it didn’t collapse around them.
The dive computer was still beeping in annoyance. It said the water’s surface was less than a hundred feet above them. It wanted to know how much air they had—but James couldn’t tell it, he didn’t know.
The surface might be reachable. If their air held out. If hypothermia didn’t get them first.
If a second wave didn’t arrive and destroy everything the first wave had already weakened.
James calculated in his head; it was still hard to focus down here, but the math wasn’t impossible. One floor every five minutes. Maybe two—? No, they didn’t have enough air. They had to get as high as they could as fast as they could. They might manage an extra ten or twenty minutes of decompression nearer the surface. Maybe they could make it.
He took his three breaths, passed the regulator back, and pointed upward.
The light at the end of the tunnel was still a hundred feet above them, and it was still invisible.
It is not a good idea to laugh underwater.
You could drown.
But as James did the math in his head, as he computed the safest rate of ascent through the stairwell measured against his estimate of the amount of air they had left, he ended up reminding himself—
Sloan’s teddy….
For a few dangerous seconds, he splurted bubbles. The more he tried to stop himself from laughing, the funnier it got. Hu looked at him, curious, then worried. James finally somehow managed to control himself. He held up a hand, then grabbed his board and wrote on it. “I’m fine. I’ll tell you later.”
Three breaths and he pointed upward. A single flight of stairs. Then another. Thirty feet. Sloan’s teddy indeed.
Five minutes max, then they bobbed up a flight of stairs. Except the dive computer on his wrist beeped to let him know that they were still ascending anyway, even as they waited. The waters were receding and somewhere, the chimney must be leaking. Not good. If it leaked too fast and too much. If they “ascended” too rapidly, they were in serious trouble.
James had had the bends. Twice. Once was bad planning, once was stupidity—not his, the diver he’d had to rescue—but either way, it was not something he wanted to do a third time. Rashes, joint pain, headaches, even paralysis. But the bends are survivable—most of the time. Symptoms of decompression sickness can show up in the first hour, almost certainly in the first six hours, and if not in the first twenty-four hours, then probably not at all.
But if it was a choice between the bends and death?
Another joke occurred to him. “Death? Good choice. But first, Oompah!” He had to suppress a giggle. And then he wondered, what the fuck? Am I getting giddy? Nitrogen narcosis was playing at the edge of his brain.
Three breaths from Hu, then three breaths from the boy. He was going to have to start watching himself. All these people were depending on him. It was time. He pointed. Up the next flight of stairs. And the next. And the next.
The higher they rose, the brighter the stairwell, the brighter the promise above. The water here wasn’t as murky as it was below, but now there was debris floating in their way—a lot of paper, and a large rubber trash can, someone’s jacket, and when James looked up, he thought he saw a body caught under a railing.
He checked his goddamn beeping dive computer and frowned. There was nothing he could do. Maybe they should wait an extra two minutes here? He took three breaths from Hu, three from the boy, gestured for them to wait and swam halfway up to look.
Yes, a body. A woman, stocky, possibly in her fifties, hard to tell. Her hair floated like a cloud around her head, but her dress had floated up revealing thick legs and pale underpants, they had become translucent, revealing her nakedness before his light—one last embarrassment. The tsunami had not only taken her life, it had taken her dignity as well.
James came back down again, grabbed another six breaths, then gestured for the others to follow him—but he waved his hand down past his eyes to show Julia and her mother to close theirs. Up the stairwell, and James tried to push the woman’s body into a corner while the others rose past. Her name badge identified her as Mrs. Hayes. She was entitled to this much consideration—he didn’t want the others to invade her privacy. Poor Mrs. Hayes.
Another flight up, another rubber trash can. And here was the cause of the decreasing pressure. The fire door was jammed open by another body, this one a janitor in a dark uniform. James could feel the current here—the water was being sucked away. Outside the broken tower, the current must have become too strong to resist. James felt himself being pulled—it was strong enough to be a challenge.
He pulled on the fire door, pushing it open enough for the poor man’s body to be sucked through and away. He let go and the current pushed the door shut again, cutting off the water’s escape.
He was surprised that he’d been able to pull the door open at all. The force of the water was less than he’d expected. This was both good news and bad news.
They were closer to the surface—but they were also more at risk of decompression sickness. He swam back down to the others. Three breaths from Hu, three breaths from the boy, and three more breaths from Hu. They were going to have to wait here ten minutes at least. Maybe more.
And they were already on their last tanks. He didn’t remember when they had switched over, but apparently he had done so at some point going up the chimney of the stairwell. Maybe at the bottom, before they started up? Not a good sign that he didn’t remember. He studied the dials on the last two tanks.