Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
It was pitch black, the world gone in darkness. Parker couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to pull air in her lungs but something heavy was over her, crushing her and she couldn’t breathe!
Parker coughed. Her lungs were filled with dust, and she had to cough to free them. Coughing hurt. Something incredibly heavy was on top of her and something wet was dripping on her.
Nothing made any sense. Her breaths were shallow, rasping—each inhale a struggle through a throat clogged with grit. The air around her was heavy, claustrophobic, thick with the dry sting of pulverized stone.
And the boulder on her back made it almost impossible to breathe.
Parker tried to take stock. Something was holding her down from her head to her feet, and she couldn’t move.
She tried expanding her lungs against the boulder and…
the boulder moved! It shifted and she could feel a faint rhythmic beat against her back as if the stone had a heart that was beating.
Awareness rushed in and she realized she was buried underground. That last moment blossomed in her mind. Laughing with Nick, and then the dust on the ground suddenly dancing, and then Nick throwing himself over her.
An earthquake. A huge one. They were buried alive inside the Roman villa. The utter darkness was suddenly intolerable, suffocating. She moved her right arm with difficulty down her side to her pants and yes! The outline of her cell. She extracted it with difficulty.
The boulder on top of her was Nick.
“Nick!” Parker cried. “Are you okay?”
There was no answer, only a long, deep groan.
Parker brought the cell up to her face and switched it on.
Light! Her home screen was a photo of the bay at noon, and it was full of light.
She held the cell out and tried to turn her head to see Nick, but she didn’t have any range of movement.
His heavy body covered hers completely and now she saw that he was buried in rubble.
Heavy stones and bricks on his back, as far up as she could see in the dim light.
She switched to flashlight mode and held the cell up to his face, turning as much as she could.
“Jesus,” she whispered.
He was covered in blood. There was an open gash along his hairline that was still dripping blood.
His arm, too, was covered in gashes that were bleeding.
His shoulder was wounded. He’d taken the hit, and she was unharmed.
She was under the weight of his body, but she wasn’t cut or bleeding or even in pain anywhere.
Nick throwing himself over her before she even realized there was an earthquake had saved her life.
And endangered his?
The thought of an injured or—God!—dying Nick was terrifying.
She placed the cell in flashlight mode on the dusty ground and moved her arm slowly until she could grasp his shoulder. She shook him, gently at first, then more strongly. His muscles were so thick she couldn’t move him. When she pulled her hand away, it was covered in blood.
“Nick! Nick! Can you hear me? Oh God, Nick, answer me!”
He groaned but didn’t open his eyes.
“Nick,” she pleaded.
Nick’s eyelids fluttered. His breathing deepened.
“Come back to me. Please.”
She fumbled in her pocket, remembering she had a packet of tissues.
It was hard, one-handed, to extract them but she did, pulling out some tissues, pressing them against the side of his head.
Carefully, because that gash looked really ugly.
The tissue turned red immediately. It took the whole packet, but finally the bleeding slowed to a trickle.
Parker had taken a first aid course a billion years ago but remembered nothing in her panic for Nick.
But stopping bleeding was definitely a good thing. Something she should be doing.
She angled her phone’s light beam so she could see his arm better and winced at the torn flesh.
Another big gash that wasn’t bleeding so badly but she could see a massive bruise on his shoulder, already swelling.
Something had fallen heavily on him. That something would have fallen on her if he hadn’t had such fast reflexes and thrown himself over her.
She panned her flashlight around, heart heavy. They were buried in rubble, heavy blocks of stone and brick and dirt. They were buried at least twenty feet underground, if they were at the street level of the Roman villa. Deeper if they’d fallen into a fissure.
They were buried alive. They might die here in this airless tomb of rubble.
No!
Parker refused to die here. Not now. Not when she’d just met the most fascinating man in the world. Not when she was working on a project of the heart. It wasn’t her time to die and it definitely wasn’t Nick’s.
She tried to shake his shoulder and watched his eyelids flutter. Stretching her arm, she slapped his cheek, over and over.
“Nick! Wake up! Come back to me!”
Finally, his eyes half opened, closed, opened again.
But there was no recognition in his gaze.
Bending herself like a pretzel, Parker held her flashlight up to his face and tried to look into his eyes.
She had a partial view, but it didn’t seem to her that his pupils were different sizes.
Which meant that maybe he wasn’t concussed.
Please.
Terror was like a cloud around her, and she needed Nick with her if she had any hope of holding it together. They needed to figure this out together. How to emerge from who knows how many tons of rubble and somehow find their way to the surface. How not to die here, a million miles from anywhere.
No one was coming for them. No one even knew they were here.
The gatekeeper hadn’t seen them come in and, in any case, would definitely have made a beeline for his home in an earthquake without a second thought.
The gateway wasn’t sophisticated and didn’t register who passed through with the remote control.
The Superintendency had given her permission to spend time at the site, but there had been no discussion of when. They wouldn’t assume she was here and—she admitted to herself—wouldn’t come looking for her.
No one would be looking for her.
This had been a big one. There would be chaos everywhere. Even Aunt Caroline would take a while to wonder where she was, maybe days, because the Consulate definitely took precedence over an honorary niece.
She and Nick had to get out of here under their own steam and Nick had to be conscious because Parker couldn’t drag him. And she wouldn’t leave him.
“Nick!” Parker made her voice sharp. A fall of dust trickled down. Parker lowered her voice. “Nick! Come back!” She pushed against his shoulder, hoping she was avoiding his wound.
Nick’s eyes opened, closed. Opened. He frowned. “Parker?”
“Yes! Thank God.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Nick. You saved me. But you have a head wound and you shoulder is banged up.”
His head lifted slightly, and though she could tell it hurt him, he didn’t make a sound.
“Where are we exactly? Can you tell?”
It hadn’t even occurred to her to try to tell where they were.
The earthquake could have tossed them anywhere.
She directed the flashlight cell along the floor which was mostly broken shards and sand.
A couple of feet away, a section of corrugated steel siding from the above-ground hut had fallen in a way as to provide shelter, like a lean to.
Parker scrabbled with her hand, bringing things close to her face.
She brought a fistful of reddish sand, shards of terracotta and…
yes! Two broken pieces of stucco. Painted bright blue.
“We’re still in the Blue Room where we were having lunch, right up against the wall. But I think it has imploded.” She tried again to expand her ribs to get a full lungful of air. “Nick, we need to move, see if we can find a way out. But I don’t know how because you’ve got rubble on top of you.”
He didn’t answer. She twisted to see his face and panicked. His eyes were closed again. “Nick!”
His eyes popped open, and Parker shone her cell’s light on them, letting out a relieved breath. His pupils still looked to be the same size.
A huge hand landed next to her shoulder, lifting a small cloud of dust. Startled, Parker angled her head to look at his face.
“We have to get out from under this rubble,” Nick said. His face was streaked with blood and what she could see of his face was ashen. He was in great pain but sounded cogent.
He was back.
Parker let out her breath. Trying to figure out a way to save them without Nick’s help, with an unconscious Nick…
well, she couldn’t do it. She’d been close to losing it.
Being in the dark under who knew how much rubble—it was a nightmare, and she was holding on to her sanity by a thread.
But Nick’s matter of fact tone reassured her.
The alternative… Her phone had a seventy-five percent charge, but if she kept it on flashlight mode it wouldn’t last much more than an hour.
She had a recharger, but it was in the vehicle and might as well have been on the dark side of the moon for all the good it did her there.
Who knew if the vehicle had even survived the earthquake?
Parker suffered from mild claustrophobia, and one side effect was fear of the dark. When the phone went out, they would be in utter darkness, buried under tons of rubble, no one coming for them. And if Nick was out cold… She had to stop herself from hyperventilating.
“Nick?” Parker’s voice quavered and she had to stop, breathe deeply. “Nick, what do we do?”
She saw Nick look carefully around and realized it was the first time he consciously took in what had happened. He didn’t change expression, wasn’t panicking, and she felt her own panic subside a little. He met her eyes, and she saw no fear and her panic dissipated a little more.
“This panel has created a void. We need to move into it. We need to get out from the rubble.”