Hang Wire (2 page)

Robert reached down and began to lift.

Robert had been swimming, out at Ocean Beach, when the earthquake struck just after five in the morning. Robert swam every day, had done so for as long as he’d been in San Francisco. Ocean Beach was nice and quiet – slightly too far out from the city itself for there to be anyone around so early. As the sun rose, he had the place to himself. The beach – the
ocean
– was his.

Swimming was important, something he
had
to do. The ocean was a part of him, something he was now and always would be connected with. When he swam, it felt like he was leaving the world, as his feet lifted off the sand, as his ears were filled with the dull and epic sound of the sea. He wasn’t out there in the open ocean, of course, but he knew that all the oceans of the world were connected, one great continuous body of water. Here in San Francisco, as he swam the cold waters of Ocean Beach, he felt connected with his home, so many, many miles out in the Pacific. Out here, swimming, he could open his eyes and look at the green and blue and imagine himself elsewhere.

Then the water churned and bubbled. At first he thought it was a big wave, and that maybe as he floated beneath the surface and dreamed of home he’d drifted, turning himself around without realizing, perhaps going out farther, much farther than he usually did, out to where the seas were rougher, untamed by the city shoreline. Not that it mattered. Robert knew he could swim from here to forever if he wanted, but he had to be careful in case
They
noticed.

When the second surge threw him up to the surface, and the third pulled him down, he knew something was wrong. When he surfaced again he could hear it, a moaning, like a deep wind howling through a canyon a million miles away. It was primal, animalistic, like something wild in pain. As he trod water he turned and turned. The sound was everywhere, everything. It came down from the sky; it rushed in across the surface of the water like a cold wind. Robert felt for a moment that he was the center of the world, and then he looked back at the beach. He was, in fact, much closer than he’d thought. But the beach looked different, rough, as if someone had come and turned the sand over, exposing the darker, wetter material beneath. Beyond, the trees were swaying, left to right, left to right, as though a great godly hand were reaching down and flicking them like springs.

And beyond that rose a pall: pale, too light for smoke, more like a dust storm from Arizona had suddenly arrived, impossibly, over the Golden State.

The deep howling stopped, and for a moment all Robert could hear was the sharp slap of water as the sea began to calm. He trod water a moment longer; then he started to head ashore.

Thunder rolled, the bass so deep Robert could feel it in his chest. He looked up, but the lightening sky was clear. Then came another roll, softer, farther away. Robert paddled around until he was facing the dust cloud again, now stretching nearly across the whole horizon. Dotted along it, lower down, were smaller clouds, these ones black and ominous.

He reached the shore, sinking to his ankles in the disturbed sand, his mind racing as he searched for his clothes. His pants – blue jeans, dotted with rivets like the gold miners favored – were floating in the surf farther along the shoreline. Of his shirt and boots, there was no sign. He jogged over to his jeans and picked them up, squeezing the seawater from the heavy denim, just as the earth moved again, sliding from side to side like a prospector panning for gold. Robert went with the movement, riding it like he used to ride the waves so many years ago, back home.

Then it stopped moving, and the air was still, and Robert realized what had just happened.

It was an earthquake. San Francisco had been struck by an earthquake.

Robert pulled on his jeans, the wet fabric sticky and difficult as he tried to button the fly, and then ran up the beach, toward the street, toward the city.

Robert helped all morning. At first he checked his strength, matching it to those around him (perhaps a little more). But it soon became a problem, requiring far too much concentration when time was so short for the people he was trying to aid. That was more important than rules, than agreements, and perhaps today – just for one day –
They
would turn a blind eye. He wasn’t even sure
They
were still watching, truth be told. They had lost interest, all of them – even his brother, his friends – centuries ago, abandoning those they had once tended, aided, watched from afar. They’d let Robert remain, and that was the last he had heard.

And as he helped shift the debris, nobody noticed. People were too busy trying to cope with their world being destroyed, with their friends, families, business, lives crushed under the collapsing city. One man with long hair, shirtless in jeans, lifting rock and iron and wood like it was paper, he was a hero, but then everyone was a hero today. Robert lifted the rubble like it was nothing, but he was just doing the best he could, like everyone else. And hell, maybe gold mining had been good for him (he was a gold miner, in those jeans, with that hair, wasn’t he?) and had made him big and strong.

It felt good to stretch his power, even just a little. It felt like waking up from a long sleep. Perhaps that wasn’t far from the truth.

Today, San Francisco needed heroes. As he worked, Robert felt a connection, one stronger than he ever had with the people who lived and worked and breathed and loved and ate and slept in the city. He remembered, just for a moment, what it had been like, before the Agreement, before the Retreat. Before
They
had left the world to its own devices.

Today Robert was a hero but today was also dangerous. Not physically, although he had to make sure his own efforts weren’t injuring others as he dug through the remains of the city. But there was another problem.

Robert was surrounded by the dead and the dying. It was everywhere, the air thick with dust and the smell of gas and the smell of something else, something only he could sense. It was death – the smell of life ebbing away, of the energy that animated living things dissipating, evaporating. Energy that filled the earth, that danced over Robert’s skin like lightning. And it felt good. So very,
very
good.

He had to stop, now and again. After freeing children from behind a stuck door, after lifting half a house off an elderly couple (one dead, one alive), he would excuse himself, back off as others moved forward, some slapping him on the back for a job well done and thanks, mister, we can take it from here. Robert would walk backward and close his eyes and breath it in.

Death. So much death. And it was
delicious
. It sated a hunger deep inside, one that Robert thought he had expunged years and years ago. He felt like an addict taking a hit of opium long after the habit had been kicked. It was all still in there, somewhere. He was just waiting for it, had been waiting for it forever. And all he had to do was reach out and embrace the dying city, and he could have his fill of death and decay and terror and horror. Oh, what a wonderful, beautiful day it could be, if only he gave in, if only he let the hunger take over.

Robert blinked as the clouds parted and sun bathed his face. He looked around him, watched the people of the city digging and running, saving lives.

The moment passed. Robert’s hunger was replaced with disgust, self-loathing, and sadness. He had to focus. The city needed him.

The fire. He had spent too much time clearing rubble when the greater danger lay ahead. The fire was growing, and to stop it the army was going to dynamite whole streets, creating a network of firebreaks.

There, the need was greatest.

Robert dusted his hands on his jeans and continued his journey deeper into the city.

It was quiet on Van Ness, the broad avenue that circled the western edge of San Francisco’s downtown. The army had cordoned it off, their trucks arranged at one end. Soldiers were busy running cables, while officers in caps studied plans stretched out over a stack of wooden crates. As Robert watched from the shadowed eaves of a still-intact house, he saw the officers point first at the map and then down the street, and then back again. They were agitated, and Robert could sense their fear. And he could sense… something else.

Something that didn’t belong. Something…
moving
.

He peeled out from the shade, keeping close to the buildings as he looked down the avenue. Ahead a few hundred yards, the road was riven in two, a great canyon opened horizontally from one side of the street to the other. The edges of the ravine were curled and blackened, and from within rose smoke, lazy and brown, thick and tangy with something that made Robert’s nostrils twitch. It was chemical, but nothing quite like anything he had ever smelled before.

And then he saw it. Along the street, radiating out from either side of the canyon, the road
undulated
. Robert stepped out from the building behind him and braced himself, ready to act quick if the aftershock sent more debris crashing down to the street.

No aftershock came. The ground was – for the moment – solid, stable, unmoving. But ahead, the street continued to ripple. Robert could see now the movement was in thin, discrete lines, like there was something alive under the paving, its tentacles stretching out and moving the roadway as they stretched and flexed.

The dynamite trucks started to make more sense. The fire was steadily eating the city, but it didn’t seem to be sweeping in this direction. The dynamite was for something else.

Robert moved in for a closer look.

The soldiers, so busy laying fuses for the explosives, were easy to avoid. Robert skirted clusters of them, and soon found himself at the edge of the smoking fissure that bisected the avenue.

“Help me, please, help me.”

Robert stopped, and ducked down, trying to locate the voice whilst staying out of sight of the soldiers. This side of the street was rubble, nothing but a few isolated walls showing the outlines of where tall buildings had stood. There could be any number of people trapped here, and with the area cordoned off, it seemed the army was prepared to let them die for the greater good.

Robert moved away from the canyon and crept along the side of the street, searching for any movement, any sign of life, within the shattered buildings. There was nothing, so he took a chance and tasted for death, that familiar,
divine
tang on his tongue.

Nothing. The row was empty, the only dead things near a dog and a horse. Robert stopped, and heard movement behind him. He turned, pinpointing the sound from the split in the middle of the road. Retracing his steps, he moved back to the edge and, keeping low to avoid the soldiers at the far end of the street, looked down into the fissure.

There was someone in there. Someone had fallen into the crack and couldn’t get out. It was shallow, only six feet deep, but it wasn’t a clean wound in the city’s fabric. Inside the fissure were jagged shelves and black openings, the bottom buried under crumbling, burned earth.

There was an arm, bare and waving, covered in black ash, reaching out from underneath one of the rocky shelves, the hand scrambling against the crumbling dirt.

Robert jumped into the trench. It wouldn’t take a moment to pull the rock and dirt away and free the person. He’d bring them back to the soldiers, and then they could search for more survivors. He reached down and grabbed the hand.

At his touch, the other person wrapped their fingers around Robert’s hand with enough strength to crack bones. Robert pulled back instinctively, hot, sharp pain coursing up his forearm. He stumbled backward. His bare feet slipped in the dirt, and his back collided with the jagged shelf behind. Robert cried out and slid farther, clawing a fistful of carbonized earth with his free hand as he tried to pull himself back up onto the road. He realized the hand that held his own was cold, freezing.

Another hand grabbed his ankle so hard it felt like his leg was caught in a vice. Robert kicked out blindly with his other foot, and was rewarded when it connected with something soft. The icy grip released his ankle, and Robert tore his broken hand free from the other. Ignoring the pain, he pulled himself over the lip of the fissure. He lay on his chest on the road; ahead, he saw soldiers point in his direction. One of them shouted.

The voice from the trench came again. It was calm, emotionless.

“Help me, please, help me.”

Robert rolled on the road. There, in the trench, a blackened form reached up toward him; the hands grabbed at the air, fingertips straining.

It was a person, wasn’t it? Someone caught in the earthquake, caught in the fire that clearly scorched the earth here. They were injured – dying. All Robert could see were two wet eyes in a face caked entirely in thick black ash.

Some of the dirt below crumbled away, and another hand broke the surface, close to the first figure. This hand too was blackened, grasping, the quiet, calm plea for help coming from under the rubble.

Booted feet pounded the road, getting closer. Robert glanced over his shoulder and saw a group of soldiers running toward him. He looked back along the trench, trying to work out what had happened to these victims of the earthquake. The road had split, parts of the surface collapsing into the trench. There must have been traffic, pedestrians, people out early. They’d been swallowed whole, and then trapped as the road caved in. That may have saved them from the fire, but Robert knew they’d die if he didn’t get them out, and soon.

Then Robert saw it. A small packet, like meat from a butcher’s shop wrapped in brown paper, wedged into the rock just underneath the opposite lip of the trench. The packet was wrapped in string, which trailed off, horizontal to the street. About half a dozen yards farther along was another brown packet, stuck at the same angle in a crack in the earth. More string, and then farther on, another.