Part four - Adam

Adam blinked, everything was black and his head hurt. There was dust everywhere and he was finding it hard to breathe. There was something pressing on his chest; that was the problem. The world was dark and dusty and his head hurt and his chest ached. Where was he exactly? He screwed his eyes up and tried to remember.

The last thing he remembered was the dream he’d just been having, which had been about massive fish nestled in eggs. Hundreds of the things, glued together, the eyes inside staring out at him with some sort of hidden knowledge. The eggs were the children of the thing in the ocean, some sort of nameless God. Adam had the horrible feeling that the things in the eggs meant him harm. The huge Godzilla thing had been there too, he was related to the ocean or something. Adam hadn’t felt as scared of him as he did of the eggs.

Before the dream? What had he been doing? There was somewhere he was supposed to be going wasn’t there? Or some place he was trying to get away from? He tried to turn over to relieve the pressure on his chest and some rubble fell near his nose. Rubble was confusing. Where would he ever be with rubble?

Then it came back to him in a flood; the monster, Gretchen over the road who wasn’t Gretchen, the building falling down. He hadn’t been fast enough to get away. Adam wondered how much of the building had fallen on him. The pressure on his chest was from a beam, it was resting on him.

He tested how much space he had. His right arm was pinned, his left folded underneath his body. He tried to extricate it. It was hard, he was stiff and whatever was on his chest wasn’t letting him move that much. After what felt like half an hour his arm was out from under him. It started prickling all over as the blood flowed back into his veins. He flexed the fingers in and out, the pain was intense. He ground his teeth together and kept flexing. He rubbed it with his other hand and that felt a bit better. He felt around in his trouser pockets and pulled out his cellphone. He unlocked it and the light from the little screen illuminated his surroundings.

Trapped under what had formally been a building seemed to be the sum of things.
‘OK. So, how long til the National Guard come for me?’ Adam asked his phone. ‘Oh right, this is New Zealand, we don’t have a National Guard.’ He tried calling 111 on the phone.
‘This number has been overloaded. We are not able to connect your call at the moment. Please hang up and try again in a little while.’
‘Neato,’ Adam said. ‘Well, I guess it’s just you and me now, phone.’ He wondered for a moment if it was a sane response to being trapped under a building to talk to your phone. It probably wasn’t.
‘But,’ Adam pointed out, to his phone, ‘there’s no one else here.’

That was a nasty thought, when the rumbling of collapsing building had started Adam had been surrounded by people. That red headed guy that he had thought was Gretchen, for example. Or Bonny from the office, not to mention all those hundreds of people.

Adam aimed his cellphone light at the walls of his little rubble cave. There was some space around his head, probably about a metre of space. There was a very close wall of broken concrete on his right hand side, which would probably be why he couldn’t move it. Adam sighed, and then coughed because being trapped under a building it turned out, was quite dusty.

‘Well, what do you reckon, phone?’ Adam asked. ‘How should I get this beam off my chest? Because I’m pretty sure that’s the first thing I need to do before I can get out of here.’

The phone did not respond. He tried calling the first number in his phone book. He got a new message, ‘the network is currently overloaded. Please hang up and try again.’

‘Yep, my plan is to move the beam and then I’ll crawl that way,’ he pointed above his head, ‘and from there I think I should be able to dig my way out. Like in that movie about firemen after 9/11.’ The phone looked at him. ‘OK, so I never actually saw that movie, but I saw the trailer. Don’t judge me.’

The phone told him it had been twenty minutes. It felt more like six weeks. He had put his phone down next to his cheek and was using his left hand to take bits of broken concrete from the right hand side and make a pile under the beam. He had been talking on and off to his phone. ‘It’s a good thing,’ he said, for probably the ninth time, unless it was the nineteenth time, ‘that I am not claustrophobic. Because, heh, if I was? Then I would be freaking out right now.’

The pile was getting high enough now to reach the beam. He was really having to work to wedge the pieces under the beam. When he had spent 3 minutes jamming a shard between the beam and the pile he’d made and it slid out of his hand onto the ground he decided it was enough.

Adam took a deep breath in, pushing his chest out as much as he could. Then he exhaled it all out, concentrating on making himself as thin and as flat as he could. Then he braced his feet against whatever it was they were up against and shoved as hard as possible. He moved a couple of inches.

He had a party with the phone for twenty minutes before he was able to work up his strength again. He tried another call and his phone told him again ‘This number has been overloaded. We are not able to connect your call at the moment. Please hang up and try again in a little while.’
‘Damn straight,’ Adam said.

According to his phone, his one and only friend, it took him three hours to extricate himself from his rubble cave. Getting out from under the beam was a lot easier once he got his backpack off. The digging himself out was hard, and his hands were a shaking, bloody mess when he reached daylight, but he did reach daylight and that was the important thing.

Wellington was a wasteland around him. The street he was on was rubble, a cleared swathe of buildings leading from down by the waterfront to up towards the hills. Adam remembered how he had wanted to go to the hills, to get away from the whatever-it-was in the water. There were strange pools of black water on the footpath, and huge craters where the Godzilla monster had passed through.

Adam checked his phone again. It looked less like his friend now, and more like a cellphone. It wasn’t going to solve his problems. It might have helped to get him out of the cave, but it wasn’t going to help him make sense of today.

Adam took a few steps. His whole body was one massive ache. The sun was harsh, but after the events of the night Adam was incredibly happy to see it. The sun made sense. He took another couple of steps, not sure which way to go. He could go back to the waterfront and see what had happened there, or he could head further into town, follow the Godzilla.

Then he heard something, a noise. A tiny kitten mewing for milk. He spun on the spot, trying to find the source of the noise.

‘Hello?’ he called, as loud as he could, ‘hello?’ The thought of something to talk to, even if it was just a kitten, was very appealing. It was coming from a pile of rubble closer to the far side of the road. Adam made his way over gingerly, there were exposed electrical wires lying on the street. ‘Are you there?’
The sound got louder, it was inside the rubble.

Adam slung his pack down and took out a spare tshirt he’d stuffed inside. He tore it up with his teeth and used the strips to bind up his hands. Then he started digging in the rubble again. It was much less scary to do it from the top down.
‘Hey, there, kitten. I’m digging down to you. Just keep making that noise and I’ll find you, OK?’ The more bits of concrete he moved from the pile and put over on the street, the louder the noise was. It stopped sounding like a kitten after a while and sounded more like a person. Adam kept up his babble, telling the nameless voice about his phone and the things he’d seen yesterday.

Finally he pulled an iron strut aside and found a hand, the hand was grey and dusty and Adam grabbed hold of it.

‘It’s OK. I’ve got you know. Stay still and I’ll dig the rest of you out.’

Adam looked around at the street. More of it was rubble piles than anything else. The crowd last night had been huge. He wondered if there was any way he could travel back in time and just deal with the confused callers who didn’t know what an email address was, or how to find the @ symbol on their keyboard.

He pulled the bits of building off the hand with renewed energy, desperate suddenly to talk to another human being. To try and make sense of what had happened and where it had all gone.

‘Because I only saw the start of it, I think,’ Adam said, ‘for the rest I was under cover, asleep like the princess in Sleeping Beauty. I think there’s something really strange going on, I mean, more strange than what I saw. Because the sky looks kind of strange, like it’s been broken. Like, I think if I look at it too long I will see that big rip in it again and then I might go crazy, so I’d really like your take on it.’

Finally he took the last pieces off the person underneath and helped them out from their rubble cave. They were unrecognisable, covered in grey dust. Adam guessed he looked much the same.

‘OK?’ he asked, keeping a hand on the person’s shoulder as they swayed. The person, Adam decided it was a man, since there was a distinct lack of boobs, coughed and nodded.

He straightened up and Adam passed him his bottle of water. He drank a little and then coughed again, rasped out ‘thanks.’
‘Hey, it’s no problem man,’ Adam said, ‘I’m Adam.’
‘Richard,’ the man said, clasping Adam’s bandaged hand with his own.

Adam turned to look at the street again. There were bound to be other survivors under the wreckage of the high rises. It was going to be a long day.