Third Interlude Gwen, Under the Shadow #6
Gwen saw them, then. The body bags had been stacked neatly in the back of a dump truck, parked beyond the lights, well to
one side of the lot.
“Do you have a hotel room yet?” Erin asked her. “I’ve got only one bed in mine, but I’m little, and it’s a queen. There’s
room in it for you. Wait’ll I tell Arthur who I have in the sack with me. He’ll be so jealous.”
Gwen had to laugh again. It felt good to laugh—even with the smoke from smoldering chemicals burning the back of her throat.
“Just remember you’re a woman of God,” Gwen said. “I expect you to leave space for Jesus between us at all times.”
Erin put her head to Gwen’s shoulder and they laughed together, and when Gwen wiped her eyes, she could pretend it was the
chemical smoke.
10.
They found no one alive for the next two days, but on the third, Gwen heard someone banging a pipe.
Gwen was toiling in Zone Four, although no one called it that. On site, it was commonly referred to as the Swamp. It was under
the eastern wing, the one part of the prison that still stood, raggedly torn open to show that dollhouse cross-section. There
were pits amid the rubble, filled with chilly water and slicked with oils. The air fumed with the cloying odor of chemicals.
She was passing rocks up out of a depression when she paused and cocked her head. She thought she had heard a sound, a distant
clank-clank of steel striking steel. Her first thought was that a workman had to be hammering on something nearby. She looked up at Julius,
standing at the rim of the crater, his face dirty, the lenses of his spectacles filmed with ash.
“You hear that?” Gwen asked.
“Hear what?” Julius asked her.
The clanking tailed off. For a while—almost a minute—she heard nothing. Then it started again. A construction worker began
to run a jackhammer fifty yards away, the heavy machine gun sound of it drowning out everything else.
“Hey!” Gwen shouted at Julius suddenly. “Get that meathead to knock it off! Now!”
Julius twitched in surprise but leapt into unsteady action, hurrying off in the direction of the deafening roar.
Gwen stretched out on the tumble of rocks and dusty rebar, putting her ear first to one dark cavity and then another. The
jackhammer abruptly cut out. A ringing silence rushed into the stillness.
She listened with all the attention she had. Yes. There. She moved her ear to another dark cavity, so small she could have only slid two fingers into it. The sound was louder, a
desultory, hopeless clank, clank.
“I got a clank here!” she cried. She looked around wildly, saw Ben Hammermill sitting on the edge of the depression, staring
at her as if she was out of her mind. “There’s someone down there! Get a dog! Get a live dog over here!”
There were two kinds of dogs working the disaster scene, live dogs and dead dogs. In fact, both kinds of dogs were very much
alive. But “dead dogs” responded to corpses, while “live dogs” liked to find someone still sucking oxygen. Ben clambered to
his feet—gangly, long-limbed, dusky, and ethnically uncertain Ben—and loped away.
Gwen put her mouth to the hole where she could best hear the clanking and screamed, “I hear you! We hear you! We’re coming! Help is coming!”
But the clanking went on, slowly, wearily, and Gwen doubted she had been heard. There were three clanks, a pause, and three
more.
Gwen cast her gaze around, found a piece of stone, and began to bash it against a spear of dusty rebar. She banged it three
times—waited—and banged three times again.
For the space of a breath there was no sound at all.
Then, from a long way off, Gwen heard steel on steel, two clanks.
She responded in kind, banging stone against rebar, two blows.
A moment later, from somewhere twenty, thirty feet down, Gwen heard a flurry of excited banging: she pictured the steel leg of a chair striking the steel pipe of a bedframe.
She wanted to laugh. She wanted to jump into the air, jump like a child full of sugar giving their mattress a workout.
When she looked around, she saw Ben and Julius had returned with almost a dozen men in tow.
Among them was a French boy, olive complexioned and handsome, with a dog—lean and powerful and as colorless as ash.
It looked for all the world like the ghost of a German shepherd.
It bounded into the depression, past Gwen, stuck its wet nose into the little hole where she had been listening .
. . and after one intent moment of study, it began to bark.
11.
Gwen was still there just before midnight when they heard the survivor’s voice for the first time.
They worked under the spotlights and they worked by hand. Bringing in a loader, even a small one, would be too much weight
on the shifting debris and could crush whoever was down there. They labored on beneath the looming, gutted face of the east
wing. Steel braces had been brought in to support the walls, but now and then something would fall anyway. Once a cinder block
dropped with a crash and people over twenty feet away jumped for cover. It made Gwen dizzy to look at the ruin looming above
her. It seemed at any moment it might pancake down on top of them.
“’Ello!” called the French boy, suddenly. He was on his knees in the declivity and he bent forward, ass in the air, to listen
to the pile of rubble beneath him. His dog was wandering the rocks above, duty done, but the kid had stuck around to work.
He had flown all the way from Paris, where he worked in rescue services, to assist with the effort at Black Cricket. A whole
team of boys with dogs had come from Europe. “’Ello? I ’ear your voice! Can you ’ear my voice?”
“I’m here! I’m down here!”
Gwen lowered herself to her knees next to the French boy and placed her mouth close to one of the gaps in the rubble.
“We’re coming, darlin’! We’re coming! What’s your name?”
“I’m cold!”
“Oh, darlin’. I know it. We’re coming as fast as we can.”
“I’m in water, it’s cold!”
“What’s your name?”
“Arthur!” she cried, and a dreadful chill spread in Gwen’s chest. Arthur’s in the hole, she thought. Arthur’s down in the hole and I’ll never get him out. The girl shouted again: “Wendy Arthur! Cell C-13.”
“Wendy,” Gwen said, willing herself to bring her thoughts back to here, to now. “I’m Gwen Underfoot. We’re going to get you out. What can you tell me about your situation?”
“It sucks!”
Gwen laughed. So did the French kid.
“I know it, but what else can you tell me?”
“I’m in water. It’s cold!”
“How high is the water?” She was yelling herself hoarse, but when someone held a megaphone to her, she waved it away. You
couldn’t use a megaphone to project a voice through rubble, all you’d do was create a blast of distorted sound.
“My, uh, belly button. It smells bad. I keep getting dizzy. I keep going in and out.”
“Wendy, I don’t want you to drown. You need to keep your head high. Can you make sure if you need to rest, you don’t go under?”
“Yes! My bed frame is on its side and I’ve got one arm through the rail. Even if I fade out, I can’t slide any lower.”
“Good. What else can you tell me?”
“I’m under, uh, a wall. It’s on my leg. I think my leg is messed up real bad, Gwen.”
“Don’t you worry about your leg. You’re alive and we’re going to get you out. Wendy?”
But it was a while before Wendy could reply. Gwen thought she needed a cry before she could go on. Gwen thought the leg was
likely very bad indeed.
Despair was as dangerous as the water and the fumes. She wanted Wendy to think about daylight and tomorrow, not darkness and fumes and amputation.
“Wendy! Wendy, girl. Do you have any family?”
“Ah. Ah. My mom?”
“Okay, great. What’s her name, darlin’? We can get her here.”
“No!” Wendy cried, a little hysterically. “I hate that bitch! Please! No!”
Gwen laughed again. “Okay, scratch that. Anyone else?”
“I have a little boy. He’s only three.”
Gwen rested her head against the stones.
“Don’t bring him either, Gwen,” Wendy Arthur said.
“No, love,” Gwen said. “Of course not.”
“He doesn’t know me anyway. I don’t want him to know me. He lives with my ex and his girlfriend. She’s better for him than
I ever coulda been.”
“Don’t you believe it, Wendy. You’re going to climb out of there and see your son, you hear me?” Gwen thought a moment, then
said, “Are you religious, Wendy?”
“I’m trying to be.”
“Would you like someone to pray with you?”
“Yes, please.”
“Okay,” Gwen said. “I know just who.”
When she looked around for the French boy he was already on the move, jogging off to find Erin Oakes.
12.
They worked their way down another eight feet before they hit a big slab of cement.
They dug for the edges but couldn’t find them.
A rivulet of stinking, polluted water trickled across it from somewhere.
Who knew where it was coming from. A little after five in the morning Mark Ruffner, field marshal for the Green Mountain Search and Rescue services and head of operations, said they were going to have to cut.
Ruffner was a sinewy little man, with a black mustache and black decisive eyes, and Gwen both liked and trusted him. His voice
was purposefully quiet—it forced people to listen carefully. He was the best kind of authority figure, the sort who had no
desire to throw his weight around, who attended to the people who served him with interest and focus. There was a team from
the governor’s office that wanted to have a press conference about finding a survivor, but Ruffner had shut them down.
“The work you guys have done these last few days is extraordinary, and a survivor is a big feel-good story,” the press secretary
from the governor’s office told him. “I don’t see what’s wrong with giving yourself a little pat on the back, Mark.”
“I need both hands free for shifting rock,” he told her, “but thanks. When we got something to celebrate, I’ll be there with
a party hat on, but she’s still down there.”