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It was pitch black, the kind of darkness she hadn’t known for years; she couldn’t see her own hands before her face but could hear the quiet drip of water, the tumbling of debris. The air she breathed down her lungs felt like it was black.
The earth beneath her feet vibrated under her again, quickly, knocking her off of her feet, and she heard the further crashing of the structure around her as she shut her eyes tight.
And then it was over again, the ground still beneath her skinned hands. As she opened her eyes, she looked up. Between the fallen lattice of support beams were cracks of light the rich color of egg yolks and the faintest traces of steel gray storm clouds.
It was magical light, the kind she’d only ever seen through stained glass and in between groves of trees in the forest before.
It didn’t belong in the bowels of the earth she’d found herself in.
The building she’d been sleeping against appeared to have fallen into its own basement, the surface too high to reach without help.
She tried pushing against the beams; her shoulders screamed as she pressed against the rebar, and flakes of dust settled into her hair, but nothing budged. She hissed through her teeth as she dropped down from below the beams and into the small pocket she’d become trapped in. The rumbling of the ground had stopped again, for now, but the building she’d been hiding next to had tumbled down; it was there one second and down the next.
She could feel, as she looked around, the sudden uptick in her heart rate. It was the same feeling she’d get when her father would lock her in a closet or in a tight space to make her try and escape; the feeling like she was a caged animal and she’d never be able to walk freely again. This wasn’t a fight; she couldn’t punch her way out of a hole. It was just the ground, rumbling beneath her feet, and the gray stone, cracked along its seams, and the dust spreading in the air, and the distant sound of screams and crackling and the distant crunch of metal.
And then she heard the gasping.
She turned to look in the direction of the sound. It was hard to tell in the bubble she’d found herself in, as the light seemed to only beam in dappled from above, and illuminated only the center of the space. But she caught sight of movement in the shadows. She creeped closer, spotting a splash of red and a dash of bright yellow; it looked like a bag of some kind. She could hear the gasping, which filled the cavernous space. As she moved closer, she could make out the splay of arms on the ground, and the beam of wood across the person’s back, and the heaving of their chest.
She could hear their breath rattling, so she made her first priority removing the wooden beam. It was sitting on top of their spine, at least a person and a half long. She gripped it in her hands and peeled it off the person’s back. There was a sob, and then the person rolled over onto their back, lungs heaving. “Thank you.”
She knew those words; she’d heard them enough times now. She’d never heard them in this city before, though. She bobbed her head in acknowledgment, and started looking the person she’d found over. There was a trickle of blood on her forehead, and a smudge of dust across her face, stark in comparison to her blood red lipstick. She was holding herself as if her right shoulder was tender to lay on. Her legs were both propped up on debris in front of them. There was something wrong with the woman’s chest; it looked like her ribs on her left side were misshapen.
She glanced up through the debris again; the sunset was the same color as the rust on the rebar around them. She screamed, and waited, one beat, two beats, five beats.
No one came on the surface.
She didn’t feel good.
She moved over to the woman, whose chest was still heaving. The woman said something to her, and she couldn’t make it out; it wasn’t a phrase she’d heard before. She looked the woman over, knowing full well she needed to get the woman out of here.
She glanced around the space again, tried to climb up the beams towards the surface to no avail; there was a twenty foot gap between her and the ceiling.
“I can’t-” a wheeze- “breathe.” She didn’t know what all the words meant, but she could see the terror in the woman’s eyes as she moved her hand to press against the deformities on her chest.
She froze, feet away from the woman laying on the ground, whose breaths were getting more and more labored as she watched.
She looked at the woman’s ribs, again, which were off-kilter. She’d done that to people’s chests before, herself. If you nicked a lung that would puncture it, could deflate it. She knew the people who showed up in the flashing trucks with the plus signs on the sides were the ones who could fix it; they’d insert a needle and relieve the pressure and whisk the person off.
She didn’t have a needle.
It was both sides, even the side that wasn’t marred, whose bones weren’t misshapen.
It wasn’t just her ribs.
She stood, rooted to the spot, feeling weightless, as the woman heaved breaths in front of her.
She couldn’t get them out. No one was coming. She couldn’t fix this.
It felt like a weight pressing down on her own chest.
She looked at the woman’s face, awash in terror in the darkness, gray dust covering her face. The woman’s lips were moving and nothing was coming out.
A feeling of desperation flowed through her as she stood rooted to the ground. She looked at the woman, her lips making plaintive wishes that she couldn’t translate, and felt the prickle of goosebumps run up her arms as she thought of the last death she’d been responsible for. The businessman, the frilly pink dress and bows her father had dressed her in, the feeling of the muscles of his neck tearing beneath her small fingernails. His eyes, wide, terrified, pupils blown huge, soundlessly locked with hers and imploring her desperately as he vainly struggled. The light fading from his eyes. The feeling like the world had ended as she looked at the man, the pulse point in his neck stilling, his chest stiffening. The feeling like she wanted to end. The feeling like she wanted to flee.
She stared at the woman and felt that tiny again.
She wasn’t going to be able to save this woman. It felt as awful as killing her with her own hands.
The woman looked at her, eyes imploring, lips hissing something that she couldn’t parse. The words pouring forth from her blood red mouth as though they themselves were a bleeding wound.
She knew, from catching snippets of television, that the words said at the end were important. Everyone out here in the world placed so much emphasis on the words, not their movements. And this woman’s words were here, falling on her untrained ears.
She didn’t have the words, couldn’t summon anything to comfort her. She could see the hummingbird-fast beat of the woman’s pulse in her wrist, in her neck, the wet, animal panic in her eyes as the fear became the only thing she could comprehend. She was looking at her dead in the eyes, imploringly, and neither of them could say anything.
She didn’t have words, her father had kept those from her, but she had movement, and that would have to be enough. Her father had taught her to be a weapon, to be a fighter. But she’d been away from him for half her life, and she had seen enough that she knew, somehow, she could manage to be kind.
She knelt down next to the woman, and grabbed her hummingbird-beat hand in her own skinned one, and gripped it close to her chest. She squeezed it tight and brushed the woman’s hair out of her eyes before laying her hand on the woman’s good shoulder. She clutched the woman’s chilly hand tight, as tight as she could while still being gentle, and ignored the trickle of tears that was making it’s way down her own face. The woman’s eyes were wide and glimmering and there was nothing more she could do but clutch her hand and stroke her hair and hope, hope, that it would be painless. Some of the tension had drained from the woman’s face, and she clutched onto her hand like a vice.
And then, at last, her hand spasmed, and it went limp and fell gently back onto her chest.
She rocked back, away, and took in the ceasing of breath, the eyes glassily looking up at the sky, sightless.
She sat there on her haunches, trembling, for several minutes. She stared at her hands, which were bloody, again, but it was her own blood, not the woman’s, not the businessman's. And she cried.
And at last, finally, she moved over to the woman, and gently closed her eyes, and closed her jaw, and brushed the dust off her face. She looked serene, with her eyes closed and her mouth parted only the slightest.
She was dead.
She laid down on the dusty floor next to the woman, clutched her cold hand in hers, and stared up. She could see the sky, pink and orange and blood-red and gray with smoke above her. She could smell the smoke, somehow wafting down to her in the pit, could hear the sirens, wailing over the din above.
There was no rush to get out now. All the urgency was gone.
She woke to the clink of metal, and bolted up as boots thumped on the ground next to her. He was in a too-thin jacket and had a flashlight whose beam was inadequate in the dark and she squinted as the beam flared into her eyes.
“We’ve someone down here!”
She looked at the woman, desperately, and knelt next to her again, and clasped her stiffening hands together. Then she looked over at the man who had dropped into the space. He beckoned her over with his hand. He had the same shape jaw as her father and the same light hair. She could tell from his posture he didn’t want to hurt her.
She needed out of the dark.
She walked over, and he tied a harness around her, and she was being winched upwards.
She could see the vault of the sky, the stars scattered, so sharp and crisp like she hadn’t seen since she was on her own in the wilderness and would fall asleep in the cold looking up at the sky.
The stars were in the same places.
She could feel it, deep down, calming her trembling as she clung to the rope. Something seismic had happened, and somehow, this city right now was going to be where she stayed, where she could do something other than just run.
The woman was dead. She never could have stopped it.
The old man was dead, and that had been entirely her fault, and that guilt was going to eat her inside out for her entire life.
Something horrible had happened here, she could tell, looking around and seeing the smoke and hearing the blare of car alarms and noting the prominent lack of electric lights in the windows and the skyscraper pancaked across the middle of the street. It was going to take time for her father to track her down in a place like this. She could do something here.
There was a lady at the surface in a bright reflective jacket who started to ask her questions, and she could only look at the woman blankly, unable to parse any of what she was saying. “Poor thing, shock.” She could read the pity in the woman’s abortive hand gestures. The woman winched the man back up, and they both motioned for her to follow. “We’ll bring you back to the staging area that redhead’s running, they’re getting together food down by Central.”
They had helped her. If she went with them, perhaps she could help others too. She looked at them, and looked up at the sky, and followed.