Balancing The Scales - Part 16
by MMB
Jarod blinked in surprise when the cell phone that he'd left in his trouser pocket started chirping at him, and he had to dig his way through several layers to get to it. "What?"
"We've heard from Sam," Sydney announced without preamble. "He's in a hospital in Dover with a concussion and God knows what else he wouldn't tell us."
"Did he know anything..."
"Nothing specific, but that's why I wanted to call you. He says that Miss Parker got a call telling her that Raines had been shot, and she had expressed her intention on going down to the morgue and making sure he was dead." Sydney's voice held just the faintest note of hope. "I thought I should pass that along, in case it would help..."
Jarod nodded and resumed his slow examination of the rubble he was working his way over. "If she's not..." he started, then couldn't finish phrasing things in those terms, for either of their sakes. "I've been simming things out since I got here, Syd - and the search and rescue is now looking for the stairwell access to check for anybody down below." He paused. "What about Broots? Any word about him?"
Sydney blinked. He hadn't thought of Broots for a while, being so completely overwhelmed with the thought of his adopted daughter... He glanced at his unofficial granddaughter, standing in the kitchen door listening to the exchange with a half-defeated air about her, and he felt incredibly guilty for having forgotten that she was waiting for word on her father too. It wasn't just him... "Listen! I just thought of it... I called Broots this morning, asking him to head down to the Sim Lab to fetch some files for me. Good Lord, maybe they're BOTH..."
"Sydney, don't." Jarod's voice in Sydney's ear sounded tired and discouraged. "You have no idea of the mess here. The thought that they both might be below is encouraging, but don't let it get your hopes up too high."
"Jarod..." The Pretender could hear the sudden concern in the psychiatrist's voice. "How are you doing?"
"I'm beat," he admitted. "Let me get back to work, and I'll call you the moment I hear or know anything." He smiled at his former mentor, even though he knew the older man couldn't see him, buoyed by the concern in his voice. "Hang in there, Syd - and tell Deb and Davy to hang in too. We'll find them. And thanks for the word on Sam. That helps." It had - knowing that at least one of the three had survived had been a needed relief, giving him new impetus to continue searching for the others.
"Take care, Jarod," Sydney told him quietly, "and good luck!" then disconnected.
Then the Pretender blinked again as the huge halogen lights that had been set up around the perimeter of the debris field flared on and brought the illumination of the destruction back up to rival that of mid-day. He worked and stuffed his cell phone back into his trouser pocket and retrieved his pickaxe from where he'd put it to give himself a free hand. Then he turned off the flashlight he'd been using to look into darker shadowy recesses between tumbled steel girders and precariously tipped cement slabs and boulders, looking for a deeper hole behind them that would finally indicate the deep shaft of the emergency stairwell.
It HAD to be here somewhere! The blueprint had been very specific...
"Hey! I've got something over here!" a voice called out from a few meters away and brought Jarod's head up like a shot.
He quickly made his way over to where the other fireman stood, shining his light down into yet another crevasse - only this one didn't seem to have a bottom. Jarod listened... "QUIET!!" he bellowed suddenly, holding his hand up so that the rest of the rescue team would know that he was listening within the rubble for sounds of life.
There it was, the sound of a rustle of voices a few meters below him.
"WE'VE FOUND IT!" the first fireman now bellowed in his turn, and immediately the entire rescue team began swarming toward the site.
"Careful!" Jarod warned, "This stuff could be as unstable as hell. We don't want our movements up here to bring all this down on top of them..." Then he removed his oxygen mask, stuck his head into the darkness of the crevasse and yelled, "Can you hear me down there?"
They could hear him alright - and from the sounds of the cheering filtering up through the tumbled rubble covering the stairwell, there were plenty of survivors down there to do the hearing.
Maybe even the ones HE was looking for!
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"Listen!" Tyler said, crooking his finger at Miss Parker to draw her over to the door to the stairwell, where she too could hear the sounds of cheering from high above them. "See?" he asked in an 'I-told-you-so' tone, "we're going to be OK - thanks to you!"
Miss Parker looked at her erstwhile assistant and felt the warmth of his smile of faith and complete loyalty warm her straight through to her soul. "OK, people," she turned back to yet another gathered knot of confused and frightened staff. "Do you hear that?" She pointed out the door, and the rustle of noise just within the sublevel died so that the sounds of the cheering above could be heard clearly. "That's everybody we've been able to find from the levels above you. Evidently they've heard something and know that we're all on our way to be rescued."
"Well, I'll be damned," a tired voice came from the middle of the knot.
The knot started to press forward, but Miss Parker put her fingers in her lips and shot out another shrill whistle, then held her hand up again. "Look, there's no rush, folks. There's going to be some time before they get the rubble cleared from the top of the stairs. So I want you each to grab a buddy and head up the stairs by two's. Don't push, don't rush. We don't need accidents and people falling down and breaking their necks this close to rescue. When you can't go any farther because you've run into the back end of the folks who came before you, I want you all to just pick a step and have a seat to wait until rescue comes - and be kind and share the step with your buddy."
"Where will you be?" another voice barked from the back of the group.
"Down on the next level, telling those people the same thing I'm telling you right now, and then the one after that," she answered firmly. "You folks here don't need me holding your hand to walk up the stairs, but those folks down there need to know that help is on its way and how to find it. OK, by two's now..."
"You take care, Miss Parker," one nameless woman told her after reaching out and patting her hand, "we'll see you topside."
"You're on," Miss Parker smiled at her as she passed.
The good wish had recalled to her mind a moment of respite when she'd sat with her back against the stairwell wall, trying to imagine either 'Daddy' or Mr. Raines doing what she was doing right now in seeing to her staff's welfare. After some deliberation, she couldn't imagine either of them putting themselves out in any way for anyone but themselves. Now, sixteen levels down, she was realizing that all of her staff - from office workers to morgue assistants to lab technicians - had come to the same conclusion about their previous bosses long ago.
She was winning their loyalty and cooperation now because she was treating them like people and going out of her way to help them - and that would become the hidden silver lining in the hard work she was doing. If she and everyone down here survived this nightmare of a day, she'd have gone a long way toward mending the morale problem that had always crippled the Centre in many ways. And perhaps THAT in turn would help make her readjustments to the direction the work at the facility was aimed in after be a simple matter of asking people more likely to listen to her. But it had taken her this long to figure this out. In the back of her mind, where she had felt so little for so long, a most ephemeral touch of a long-gone mother's love told her of the pride and approval for her actions that would have been hers for what she was doing.
She pulled the door to SL-16 closed behind Tyler and took her turn leading the way down the stairs to the next level. From his vantage point behind her, Tyler could tell that the cheering from above had brought her dedication back full-strength to what she was trying to do. She was motivated again by more than obligation now - she had hope again. Even her movements going down the stairs were more energetic. She had needed that little boost, and he was proud of his small role in seeing that she got it.
Miss Parker pushed the door to SL-17 open and stepped inside. This sublevel she had long ago come to regard as Sydney's lair - and for many years it had been her semi-efficient refuge from her so-called 'twin' and 'father' while at work. The sliding pair of glass doors across the way from the elevator, down the corridor some distance away, was the entrance to his Sim Lab - the place where Sydney had spent nearly his entire professional life and Jarod his childhood and a good portion of his adult life.
She found herself feeling a perverse sense of gratitude that Sydney was laid up at home and not down here at work, regardless of the circumstances. Those emergency stairs were a long, hard climb - even for her - and Syd wasn't a young man anymore. She stifled a painful stab of loneliness for her surrogate father and wished she could somehow tell him that she was alright. No doubt, knowing him, he was worried sick about her. She wouldn't have minded Jarod being here, though... No! She wouldn't think of him right now. She couldn't afford the distraction.
She walked down past the Sim Lab door to yet again issue her piercing whistle to attract the attention of anybody wandering the corridors of this sublevel. With Sydney home, the Sim Lab would have been locked up tight and psych-techs normally assisting him with his research would have been reassigned to other psychiatrists or psychologists on the level for the day. There was no reason to poke a head in just to find the place abandoned. She'd spent enough of her life in that huge room already. She turned on her low heel and headed down one leg of corridors while Tyler waited halfway down the other, nearer to the stairwell entrance, just as they had on the other levels.
There was no time to waste. She still had nine more levels to clear, counting this one.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Broots heard the whistle and roused again. He knew better than to struggle against the weight of the file cabinet now - twice he'd tried to move, and twice he'd nearly blacked out from the pain. He was cold - whether from shock or blood loss he had no way of knowing at the moment. And he was now very aware that he had no feeling in his legs. He would definitely be needing help if he was going to get out of this in one piece.
"Help me!" he called again in his diminished tone, worried that behind the closed door of Syd's office and the closed door of the Sim Lab, his voice wouldn't carry worth a damn. He would have to try something else - something that would make noise and hopefully attract somebody's attention without wearing him out in the process or making him pass out again.
He raised his head carefully - moving too much played with the muscles of his back and ended up driving spikes of pain through his lower spine - and saw the handle of Sydney's briefcase just beyond the reach of his hand. If he could just grab it, maybe he could pound it against the file cabinet loudly enough...
Slowly he stretched out his hand - and the handle was only an inch away. He clenched his teeth and stretched farther, feeling those red-hot spikes of agony explode across his entire lower back, and at last put enough pressure on the handle that he could tuck the fingers around it and pull the briefcase towards him.
The exertion was nearly more than he could handle, and it took him a minute of laying there and breathing hard, waiting for the spikes of agony to die down to the level of mere excruciating pain, before he was ready to try anything else. The briefcase was awkward to handle, open and laying face downward on the floor. Broots suffered through several more attacks of agony in his lower back in the process of righting the briefcase and then closing it so that it would be a little easier to handle. The task of then dragging the heavy case down the length of his upper body with one hand to where it was close enough to the cabinet to strike the metal side was difficult enough to make beads of sweat break out on his upper lip.
He banged the case against the metal side wall of the file cabinet and yelled, "Help me, please!" as loudly as he could. Once was about he could do at a time, however, and he felt his head grow lighter still with the expenditure of energy accomplishing both at the same time cost. His vision was growing cloudy, as if a film were covering his eyes. He gave one last mammoth effort, banged the briefcase against the file cabinet again hard and yelled.
And then passed out cold again.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Jarod felt as if he were ready to jump out of his skin and tear into the tumble of steel and concrete with his bare hands to get the channel cleared. The work of actually clearing the debris had to proceed very slowly and carefully, he knew, to prevent any of the rubble from falling further down the stairwell and harming any of the many people patiently waiting below. It was just that, this time, it was HIS loved ones possible somewhere down in that pit. Suddenly the patience with which he had always approached jobs like this back in his days of active Pretending had evaporated.
Daylight had long since faded now, and the area had that brilliant blue hue of halogen that caught and reflected the clouds of dust kicked up by man and machine. The night air was filled with the growl of the engines of the backhoes being used from a distance to pull heavy beams and blocks out of the way, the whine of diamond-bladed saws cutting through and blocks too massive to move easily, and the hiss of blow torches slicing through thick ribbons of steel I-beams. All that effort was involved in the deconstruction of the approximately twenty feet of rubble that had tumbled down the stairwell. On the very edge of the clearing, media trucks had set up their vigils, kept back from interfering with the rescuers by a patient contingent of constables from Dover.
Captain Talmann had already tried to pull him from duty twice, telling him that he'd done more than his share as an out-of-state volunteer, only to be reassured that Jarod would rather be nowhere else. Surrendering to the idea that this Californian wouldn't quit until he was bone tired or hauled off the site under police escort, Talmann had ordered the Pretender back to the relief tent for a full meal and an hour's rest before starting up again. Jarod sat at the gathered picnic tables staring into his food, barely able to move utensils from plate to mouth.
His hands and back ached from the physical exertion of being one of the human ants helping to remove tons of debris too small to merit a backhoe. He had, at one point that afternoon, regretted giving up his membership at the fitness gym a year earlier - the slippage in muscle tone hadn't done him any favors this day. He reached for the Styrofoam cup of strong, black coffee and downed the bottom half of the luke-warm brew in a gulp. Knowing that he needed at least some protein and nourishment to help him get through what promised to be a very long night, he stuffed the other half of his hotdog into his face and then rose to take his plate and implements to the trash.
He couldn't stay away anymore. He had to be there. He had to be ready to go down into the depths of Hell - hopefully to resurrect two people who were very important to him. He debated calling Sydney, letting the family at the house know that work was proceeding on opening the stairwell, then decided against it. That would constitute raising hopes - unreasonably.
They still didn't know if Miss Parker and Broots were down there.
Besides, with the media coverage, the odds stood at between eighty and ninety percent that they knew already anyway.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"Grandpa, would you mind very much if I turned on the TV to see..." Debbie stood at the foot of Sydney's day-bed in the den twisting her hands together. "Maybe there's been some word about survivors..."
Sydney roused from his light dozing and took a good look at his granddaughter's face. He slowly sat up and moved his legs out of the way, then motioned for her to sit next to him and held out the remote to her. "Of course not. It's been a while since any of us has checked." He was worried about her - her face was pale and she had been very quiet and withdrawn - and he was glad when she sat down next to him because then he could put an arm around her and hold her close. "How are you, cheri?"
She just shook her head, blue eyes tragic, then pointed the remote at the black box on the shelf across the room and turned up the volume. She tried to listen to the reporter recite numbers of wounded that had been taken to area hospitals and tell of the first grim discoveries of bodies that had been buried in the rubble, but at the mention of dead, the tears had started to flow all over again.
Just as she closed her eyes and turned off the remote, she felt her grandfather's lips against her forehead and his other coming around to surround her and hold her tightly. With a sob, she turned into him and buried her face on his shoulder. He shushed into her ear softly but let her cry herself out again, knowing she needed the release. When she tried to pull back in embarrassment and withdraw again, as she'd been doing all afternoon, he merely held on this time. "It's OK, cheri. It's OK to be scared and sad - and to need to cry on somebody's shoulder. I've got you. It's OK..."
"Oh, Grandpa! What am I going to do if..." she sobbed and let herself be drawn closer again. Kevin hadn't been able to answer her, and she genuinely was at a complete loss.
"It will be hard, but you will go back to living eventually," he told her softly. "You'll go to school and go on to become a doctor, just as you've always intended..."
"No," she shook her head against him. The idea of moving away without her father to come home to was just too painful to contemplate. "I..."
"Yes," he hushed at her, "maybe not right away, but later on, when it doesn't hurt quite so bad anymore..."
The arms around her tightened again as her sobs began anew. "It's OK," he shushed at her from time to time, "I've got you now. You'll be OK."
And in the pit of his stomach, the dread that he and Jarod would be the only ones left to try to hold their little family together in the end began to grow, and he swallowed back tears of his own. Like Debbie, he didn't know how he was going to go on without Miss Parker and Broots. All he knew was that right now he had to stay strong for all of them. Kevin couldn't handle three complete basket cases - that young man was only barely managing not to be a basket case himself! And despite what he'd told Kevin earlier, it didn't look like the bad times were going to be ending anytime soon.
For the first time in many years, Sydney found himself praying to a God that he only barely believed in anymore to give them all a miracle.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
The shout went up from the opposite side of the debris field from the rescue efforts at the stairwell: "We've got a live one over here! Bring a litter!"
The hands that were slowly sifting through the rubble began to move faster in that spot, and soon the very pained and very aware face and right arm of an elderly black gentleman had been uncovered. It had been a miracle of the dynamics of falling debris that he'd ended up partially protected by the cement slam of the floor above him.
"Hang on, mister. We'll have you out as soon as possible," came the encouragement,
Otamo Ngawe blinked as the next piece of cement carefully pried aside allowed the brilliance of the tall artificial lights begin to shine on his face. He closed his eyes and began a long prayer to his ancestors, thanking them for preserving his life after all.
With any luck, a similar fate had been Tanaka's. He certainly hoped so - that arrogant young crime boss deserved what Ngawe would make sure was waiting for him. But regardless of whether Tanaka had survived or no, the Yakuza would never threaten the Triumverate again - he'd see to that, personally!
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Miss Parker watched the last of the people from SL-21 begin their two-by-two climb up the long and steep staircase to what she hoped would be their freedom. She'd been reviewing the level usage of these bottommost nether-regions of the Centre. SL-27, to the best of her knowledge, had never been rebuilt after Sydney's bombing attempt years ago and was abandoned. SL-26 was the physical archive for the mountain of paperwork the Centre generated. At best, there would be only a few people on that level. SL-25 was the residence level for many of the seriously mentally ill patients the Centre had cared for over the years - evacuating the schizophrenic and paranoid wasn't something she was looking forward to organizing, but even those people deserved a chance at survival. SL-24 was the infamous and euphemistically titled 'Renewal Wing'. There would be a full contingent of doctors and nurses on duty there - as well as any number of patients receiving treatment there. SL-23...
"You OK, Miss Parker?" Tyler asked quietly. He'd seen the pensive mood slowly come back over his boss, and he now knew her enough to begin to worry and want to work to derail the process if needed.
She started as if surprised at being addressed directly. "Oh, yeah. Sorry, Tyler - I was just reviewing what these last few levels were about and who we'd be working with. Things are going to get a bit dicey from here." She ran her fingers through her now-tangled hair and pulled it out of her face. "You don't spook easily, do you?"
"No, ma'am," the feisty morgue attendant who had attached himself at her elbow answered firmly with his broad Southern accent. "Not much surprises me anymore."
"Don't be too sure of that," she replied with an ominous tone. "The Centre has always been a bit like a city unto itself - and there were some parts of it that simply weren't all that safe to walk through. That's why those parts were put so far down underground."
"Hoo-boy," Tyler breathed, catching some of her apprehension. "What kind of stuff are we talking about here?"
"Psych patients - some of whom are very dangerous - for one..."
"How much further do we need to go until we get to those folks?" he asked, definitely feeling uneasy now.
"The next two levels are still mostly labs and offices. SL-24 is the Renewal Wing." She saw him shiver. "Ah. I see you've heard of that..."
"Just rumors," he hastened to amend.
"More than just rumors," she shook her head. "Trust me. I've been there, both as a visitor and a patient often enough - there was a time, not all that long ago, when ending up there was NOT a positive event in life."
"You survived," he pointed out in self-defense.
"I had help," she pointed out equally fervently. "At first it was because my 'Daddy' was Chairman. Then because... well, I think this last time it was just dumb luck."
"Then the psych patients are on SL-25?"
"The psych patients are on SL-25."
"What's below that?"
She shook her head. "Dead paper vault - data archives - and then one level that's been completely abandoned. I suppose we COULD put SL-25 off until last..."
Tyler met her gaze with one similar to it. She could tell he wasn't going to be enjoying these last few levels at all any more now than she was. "I think I like the sound of putting that one off until last, for what it's worth."
Miss Parker nodded. "OK, 'Tyler-ma'am'. Let's finish this."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Jarod was dead on his feet. It was midnight, and he'd been working more or less steadily since dusk hauling debris. But the sound of clapping from the center of the excavation site drew his attention and then energized him. For there, emerging from the tumble of concrete and steel, was first one and then another and another in white lab coats and casual work dress, filing up the now cleared stairwell in an organized manner. Most had tight hold on a fellow rescuee that they simply refused to let go of, all were crying or struggling with controlling their emotions at the sight of what was left of their place of employment.
The Pretender quietly moved to the side and waited until the first pair of evacuees had walked slowly closer. Then he moved up next to them and asked in a soft but frantic voice, "Have either of you seen Miss Parker?"
The dark eyes of the man took in the desperation in the face of the fireman and turned and pointed back where he'd come from. "She's in there - she went back down to tell the others to wait on the stairs."
Jarod grabbed the man's arm in excitement. "You saw her? She's OK?"
His partner, a younger woman with tumbled dark locks, patted Jarod's arm. "She was fine the last time WE saw her - but that was hours ago. We know she must have been fine for quite a while after that, though, because another bunch of people would come up the stairs the same way she'd sent us."
"Thank you!" Jarod shook hands with both of them vigorously, finally letting himself begin to hold the tiniest spark of hope. "Thank you!" He moved off to a more secluded corner of the disaster site and pulled his hat from his face and wept. He was tired, exhausted, but he'd finally had a piece of news that he could communicate home. With difficulty, he swallowed back his emotions and fumbled through his layers of protective clothing for the cell phone in his pocket.
"This is Sydney."
Jarod frowned. His old mentor's voice sounded downright ragged now - easily as tired and defeated as he himself had been at his worst moment. "Syd. It's me."
"Jarod." He heard Sydney give a half-hearted attempt to sound enthusiastic. "How are you?"
"We've broken through to the people in the stairwell..."
"What... people in the stairwell?" The psychiatrist sounded shocked.
The Pretender shook his head. He didn't want to explain a whole evening's effort, just get to the good news. "I talked to some of them once they had the way cleared for them to finally come the rest of the way up the stairs. She's OK, Syd. They saw her and talked to her, and she's OK. She's been going down, level by level, organizing the staff and getting them up the stairs so they could be rescued."
"Oh thank God..." Sydney managed, and then disintegrated into tears. Jarod could hear fumbling on the phone on the other end, and then Debbie's voice came on the line.
"Uncle Jarod?"
"Hi Deb. You take care of your Grandpa, OK? If Miss Parker is down there, then maybe.."
"You haven't heard anything about Daddy yet, have you?" Jarod swallowed hard - Deb sounded in as bad shape as Sydney. The waiting had been just as hard, if not harder, on those far from the scene of activity than he'd thought.
"No, Deb, not yet. But now that the way is open, maybe he'll be one of the ones coming up the stairs." Jarod tried to put a supportive smile into his voice for her - she needed it. "I'll call when I have more news, but right now I want to get over there and see if I can find..."
"Find my Daddy, Jarod, please..." she pleaded, her voice breaking.
"I will if I can, Deb. I promise." He disconnected the call so that she and Sydney could begin to comfort one another, and then headed toward the circle of men surrounding the entrance to the stairwell. There would be a rescue team entering that pit as soon as the rest of the staff Miss Parker had organized had been removed.
He intended to be on that team.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Kevin had heard the phone ring from upstairs, where he was finally putting an exhausted Davy to bed in his room. Both he and the boy bolted to the door and dashed down the stairs, only to be met by the sight of both Sydney and Debbie weeping in each other's arms. Davy broke into tears too and ran to huddle with the pair, and Kevin hovered just a few feet away, not exactly sure what to do.
Sydney felt Davy land against Debbie's back and finally worked hard to swallow back the tendency to sob. He knew what was being assumed, and that he had to defuse that fear and grief quickly in his grandson. "That was your Daddy, Davy. He's talked to some people who say they've seen your mother - she's OK." He closed his eyes and felt the weight of the world drop away from his shoulders. "She's OK," he insisted on saying again as if having trouble believing it.
Davy looked up, wiping his tears away with the back of a hand, suddenly much less sad. "Is she coming home now?" the boy wanted to know.
Sydney shook his head. "She's still deep down inside the Centre, Davy. She's making sure that everybody gets out safely first. When she's finished, she'll be coming home."
"What about Deb's Dad?" Kevin asked seeing that Debbie hadn't started to recover from her crying yet.
Sydney's tear-filled eyes met the young man's, and he shook his head. "Nothing yet." He tightened his arms around his granddaughter and shushed into her ear. "If Miss Parker can be OK, then all we have to do is be a little more patient, and we'll hear that your Dad's OK too, Deb. Hang on, cheri, ma petite fleur..." He began murmuring softly at her in French.
"Come on, Davy. Maybe now you can sleep better," Kevin said, taking the small boy by the shoulders and pulling him away from Debbie so that he could lift him up into his arms.
Davy wrapped his arms around the young man's neck tightly. "I want my Mom," the boy whimpered softly as Kevin carried him back up the stairs.
"I know you do, Davy. Your Dad's doing the best he can to bring her back to you," the young Pretender soothed. He deposited the boy back on the bed and pulled the blankets back into place. "You sleep now. We'll see what's up in the morning, OK?" He moved back to the doorway and reached for the overhead light.
"You're coming back, aren't you?" Davy asked suddenly.
"I'll be just down with your Grandpa and Debbie," Kevin promised gently. "You go to sleep." He switched off the light and pulled the bedroom door closed until it was just ajar enough to let some of the hallway light trickle into the dark bedroom like a night light. With a sigh, he went into Sydney's room and reached for the bottle of pain medications on the nightstand. The old man had been holding him off from giving him any medicine again all afternoon. Maybe now he'd let him give him some relief from his wounds again, now that he'd had some potentially good news.
He could only wish that he had something he could give Deb to help her handle HER pain.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
By the time the last pair of the long line of Centre staff had emerged from the pit that was the stairwell that led down into the subterranean complex, Jarod was beyond impressed with the work Miss Parker had done. Nearly two hundred people had been told to climb those stairs by a woman they'd never met before and/or learned to fear or loathe, nearly two hundred people who, to a man, were now quietly waiting over near the triage tent - waiting for their boss to finally emerge. Most had taken advantage of offers of cell phones to communicate with worried family members, telling them that they would be sticking around until Miss Parker arrived before they left for home. They owed it to her. She'd come for them - saved them.
And yet, in the midst of his quiet admiration, a nugget of worry was steadily growing. Broots had NOT been among the pairs of staff who had slowly trudged up those long stairs to fresh air. He had questioned several of the people he could still recognize as having worked with Sydney during his tenure there years ago, and while one remembered seeing Broots down on SL-17, she didn't remember where he was going or whether he had left before the blast.
And Miss Parker herself hadn't emerged yet either.
With the knot of emergency workers still hovering over the opening to the stairwell, Jarod knew there was little chance he would be able to just slip in and start down on his own, private, search and rescue mission. And he was very aware the Captain Talmann would nix any suggestion that he be part of a retrieval party, inasmuch as the man had tried to sideline him to rest several times over already.
There were as yet no staff to emerge that had worked on SL-25, while the five people assigned to the data archive one level below had emerged just a few minutes before. Then again, he remembered from studying the arrangement of sublevels to plan an escape for Angelo that SL-25 was the Centre's psycho ward. Some of the patients housed there would no doubt be difficult to deal with in a rescue attempt. Maybe that was the holdup...
He would wait a little longer - but only a LITTLE longer. And while he waited, he needed to come up with some kind of story that would make his trip down into that pit justifiable to other rescue workers.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"You're kidding!" Miss Parker gaped.
Dr. Stevens, his glasses in his hands and grey hair buzz-cut to military standards, shook his head. "No, ma'am, I'm not. The patients we're housing down here are in no way capable of climbing 25 floors under their own power without a serious problem for either the patient or their attendant somewhere along the line. Most of our mildly to moderately ill patients were transferred to other facilities years ago as a cost-cutting measure. What we have now is a population of six diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia - all of whom have violent breaks and/or tendencies."
Miss Parker frowned. Somehow, Raines had managed this little twist of financial wizardry as well. While searching the data for incriminating evidence of malfeasance by Raines, Lyle & company, the transfer of over twenty mental patients to other places had gone completely undocumented. She had opened the doors to SL-25 expecting to find almost twenty staff and nearly thirty patients, and found a skeleton crew of six caring for only six patients. And yet payroll had continued to spit out paychecks for twenty.
She blinked, and then refocused her attention on what the psychiatrist was telling her...
"To transport these patients would frankly require an elevator or something damned close to it, Miss Parker, because I could only guarantee the safety of everyone involved if they are sedated, put in strait jackets and secured to a gurney."
Tyler remembered Miss Parker's earlier question to him - whether he 'spooked' easily - and now decided that he was 'spooked' enough on this sublevel to be more than willing to make tracks fast, even with the 'spook' factor significantly reduced. But, in keeping with his boss' intents in all other places, he felt it his place to ask, "And you won't leave these people unattended - even knowing that there is considerable danger in not evacuating yourselves?"
Stevens shook his head firmly. "If, as you say, the obstruction to the stairwell has been removed, then it should be only a matter of time before the manpower and resources come available to make certain compromises in the methodology of evacuating both staff and patients. Until that time, however, I see no other alternative than to stay on duty."
Miss Parker held her hand over her mouth as she thought quickly. She appreciated the man's intentions, but didn't want to leave any more people trapped down in the underground facility than absolutely necessary. She lifted her hand from her mouth, a forefinger lifted in emphasis. "Alright, Doctor, then tell me this: are all of these dangerous people under lock and key?"
"Of course," Dr. Steven blinked at the simplistic nature of the question. "We naturally would NEVER let them just roam around..."
"In that case," she cut him off abruptly, "how many staff are absolutely essential to maintain security to your standards, with the dangerous element safely housed behind metal doors and heavy locks? In other words, if you had to pare down the number of your assistants to the bare necessity, how many would you need to ride herd on six mentally ill people?"
That stopped the man. Her question had ended up being anything BUT simplistic. He shifted his weight to one foot and reached up to run his hand over his bristled scalp thoughtfully. "Provided all the patients could be secured and sedated ahead of time, I suppose I could handle all of them myself in a pinch..."
"Good." Miss Parker nodded - that was what she figured. "Then I want you to summon your existing staff and get those preparations underway immediately. Sedate your patients - truss them up in strait jackets, do whatever else you feel you need to do ahead of time, while you have the help. The fact is that I DON'T know how much longer this trap is going to stay open, and I for one would like to get the hell out of here before it begins to collapse. I'm sure your orderlies and nurses would like that as well."
"What about..."
"Once we reach the surface, we'll notify the rescue authorities about the situation down here and have them send you down the kind of resources you need to move these patients safely. But since YOU are the one who is so determined not to budge them until precautions are taken, and YOU are the one responsible if anything should happen to them while awaiting those resources coming your way, YOU will be the one to stay down here and wait with your patients." She gazed at the psychiatrist evenly, unflinchingly. "That seems only fair to me. Do you agree?"
Dr. Stevens could see that he had finally met with a tough supervisor who would not be either bullied or fed bullshit. She was as straight-forward and demanding as any boss, but obviously concerned that the welfare of all of his people be considered equally. Not to mention, she'd come all the way down those stairs herself to face off with him - something no other Chairman had attempted in the time he'd been in charge of this department. Her compromise was about as fair a shake for everyone concerned as he had ever heard.
Miss Parker could see in the psychiatrist's face the moment that he'd decided to do things her way. He turned away and went over to the nurse's station to confer with the three orderlies and two nurses who were his entire staff. Within moment, the nurses were back in their locked office, preparing hypodermics, while the orderlies were sorting through strait jackets.
She pulled Tyler back toward the stairwell access door. "OK, Tyler. Time for you to go..."
"No, ma'am." The morgue assistant shook his head firmly. "Not until you come with me."
"Tyler, I'm telling you..."
"Ma'am, you can't make me leave. I've been with you this far; I'm not going up until you're my partner going up the stairs again. So forget it."
Miss Parker studied her constant companion in the red of the emergency lights. She could see that he was easily as tired as she was. But his eyes - hell, she didn't even remember what color they were, only that they looked dark in the red glow - were clearly communicating that he was adamant in his refusal to budge. OK, she thought to herself, asking hadn't worked, nor had ordering him. What about... "Please, Tyler..."
"With all due respect, Miss Parker, please don't play me. I signed onto your little expedition for the duration - and with a pretty fair idea of what I was getting myself into to boot." He smiled at her. "Besides, I wouldn't be all that far ahead of you, even if I did leave now - unless you intended to stay down here with Dr. Stevens until..."
She shook her head in frustration. "God you're stubborn!"
He smiled wider. "Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am."
She sighed, balled up a fist and slugged him very gently in the shoulder. "Thanks, Tyler. OK... Since you're determined to stick around with me, what do you say we go see if we can give Dr. Stevens and his people a hand so we can get started up those stairs sometime before the sun burns out?"
"Yes, ma'am!"
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Ngawe had managed so far to maintain his dignity while awaiting the last of the heavy cement to be lifted. The firemen had kept him company, kept him talking about the most trivial and mundane things to keep him from worrying about his situation. He'd even been very carefully given a sip of water to ease the dryness in his mouth as the dust from the surrounding work thickened.
But when the backhoe began its slow retreat, and the steel cable tightened and finally began to lift the slab that still completely covered the elderly African's lower body, he couldn't stop the scream of agony that erupted from his lips. The fire chief directed the backhoe to continue as beads of sweat and agony began to cover a face that was incredibly pale beneath its dark pigmentation. Ngawe managed one more moan of pure agony before the darkness of unconsciousness swallowed him whole.
Rescuers moved in immediately to extricate the elderly man's body from where it had lain, bent and bleeding, beneath tons of concrete. A pressure suit was quickly put on him and inflated to prevent any more unnecessary bleeding, and then the basket with the head of the Triumverate was lifted and carried between two firemen to a waiting ambulance.
"We won't have to worry much about this poor bastard, though," came the comment of a tired rescuer, looking down at the face of Tommy Tanaka, whose body had evidently cushioned that of the elderly man they had just rescued alive. The Yakuza boss' dark eyes were open and staring, the amount of blood that had trickled from his crushed left temple making a dark path across the beam he lay on and then over the edge into further darkness.
"Give it a rest, Jackson," the fire chief barked tiredly to the disrespectful rescuer. "Get him out of there. If there's one alive in this area, there may be more."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Tyler was now beyond pooped, beyond tired to virtually ready to drop - and the stairs ahead of him seemed endless as they twisted back and forth, two flights per level. And at long last, the incredible stamina of Miss Parker was starting to wane too. Neither of them was moving very fast up the stairs anymore, and the nurses and orderlies had taken a one-flight lead on them already.
"You going to make it?" Miss Parker puffed at him after taking a very quick glance at his face. She pulled on him and brought them both to a stop leaning against the stairwell wall. "Tyler?"
The young morgue attendant nodded at her while trying to catch his breath. "These damned stairs were a helluva lot easier on the way down," he finally managed in a wry tone. "How are you doing, ma'am?"
She leaned her head back against the cool wall of the stairwell. "Just swell. Having the time of my life. Aren't you?" Her tone was brittle - her fatigue was showing.
"Now that you mention it," the Southerner drawled out in a heavy mimicry of his own accent, bringing her attention back to him immediately, "I think I must have been crazy. If I wanted to climb things, Mount Everest at least gives a person a feeling of accomplishment..."
"You'll feel like you DID climb Everest tomorrow, you know..." she reminded him, bending over at the waist and stretching out a bit. "I'll never be able to look another StairMaster in the face again."
That did it. Tyler started chuckling, and she joined him in a much-needed laugh. Finally she looked at him, wiping the tears of merriment and near hysteria from her face. "Ready, Sir Hillary?"
"After you, Lobsang," he gestured magnanimously toward the ascending stairs.
"Somehow I think I got the relative hierarchy of the names mixed," she mused aloud with a trailing chuckle, tucking her hand into his again.
"Don't bother me none," came the slow exaggerated Southern drawl. He moved to her left, near the handrail.
"I wonder why..." she chuckled at him again. "Enjoy it while you can, Sir Hillary. You become just plain 'Tyler-ma'am' again the moment we get out of this hell-hole."
He just shook his head at her and joined her in her low chuckling and once more began putting one foot ahead of and slightly higher than the next. They had a LONG way to go yet.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Jarod roused himself when he heard another round of applause, and then another small knot of four people one by one climbed those last few step into the world again. They were wearing the lab coats he would have expected of the staff from SL-25 - but there were only four of them, and Miss Parker wasn't one of them.
After all this time, he felt his heart hit the very bottom of his rubber-soled boot. Something must have happened, he reasoned, and began looking around at the amount of attention being given to the hole out of which all those people had clambered, wondering what kind of story or diversion he could cobble at a moment's notice to justify...
Wait! From within the darkness of the hole came movement, and then another white-coated individual emerged into the halogen-blue glare. That individual stared around him for a long moment, then reached back into the darkness and brought forth...
"Parker!" Jarod whispered soundlessly, feeling the weight of the world drop from his shoulders. He wasn't the only one who saw the emergence. Only now did he notice again the incredibly large group of staff that had patiently remained on-site, waiting for their literal savior to make her appearance. He heard a couple of whistles, a shout, and then the entire mob of two hundred souls was rushing towards the pair of people walking very tiredly away from the debris field after staring at the devastation themselves for a while, just as the rest had.
There was no way Jarod was going to make his way through the mob of Centre workers to her side immediately. They had surrounded her completely and were moving her steadily toward the triage tent. Finally someone whispered in Tyler's ear, and he whispered into Miss Parker's ear, and Jarod watched from a distance as this young, unnamed individual gave her a helping hand up so that she could climb atop a picnic table. Immediately the crowd of Centre employees broke into rowdy applause that lasted until Miss Parker put up her hands - and then it died quickly.
"I take it you all made it up here OK?" she asked rhetorically, and got another short ovation.
"Took you long enough to join us," a voice came from somewhere. "What didja do, take a side trip on the way up?"
"Yeah, well, twenty-seven floors is a helluva climb, especially when you just finished climbing all that way DOWN," she retorted with a smile. "OK. Listen up, people. As you can see," she gestured over their heads to the pile of rubble that had been their place of employment, "you may have a bit of trouble getting to work in the morning..."
Jarod leaned himself against the bumper of a fire truck and watched her working her people - encouraging them, bantering with them, letting them know that they still mattered to the Centre, to her. Sydney should see this, he suddenly wished. She WAS magnificent! This was what she'd been training for all those years, and this was where she belonged.
"I want you all to take the next day off - most of you will be stiff and sore from your climb, and some of you need to have your bumps and bruises seen to. However, I have an assignment for all of you. As you can see," she gestured back towards the rubble again, "we are without our normal data retrieval system. So, before you leave here, I want a roster sheet passed, and I want all of your names, addresses and phone numbers. And then, when you get home, I want each of you, if you can, to find one past pay stub. You will each be receiving one thousand dollars hazard pay for what you just went through - and you will be pulling your regular forty-hour paycheck until we figure out just what we're going to be doing."
That brought a vigorous accolade and applause from the group, and Jarod smiled. He knew exactly where she intended to get the money for that - another of Raines' personal accounts would soon be liquidated. He nodded, finding it a very fitting use of the money.
"You each WILL be called and interviewed," she was continuing. "Needless to say, the Centre is now in the midst of massive reorganization..." She had to pause at the outbreak of laughter. "Some of the projects you were working on will not be continued. We will not be laying anybody off, however." That one got more cheering. "Thank you all for your cooperation down in the trenches..." she quipped and got herself some chuckles for her effort. "I'll be seeing or talking to each and every one of you in the near future."
Jarod watched her accept a helping hand down from her bully platform from the young man who had emerged from the stairwell with her, and then move through the congratulating crowd in the direction of the fire and rescue chief. She spoke to him in very vehement terms, gesturing at the entrance and then downward, and the Pretender saw a very concerned look come over the man's face just before he headed off in the direction of a knot of rescuers at a trot.
Finally she was approachable, just talking with what looked like was her new personal sweeper. Jarod straightened from his post against the fire truck and walked quickly towards her. As he did, he took off the protective hat and oxygen mask, tossing them to the ground as he drew close. "Parker..." he called finally.
Her head swiveled until she had found the source of the call, and then she abandoned her companion and ran the last few feet to throw her arms around his neck. "Jarod!" she whispered and leaned heavily into his arms and pressed her lips to his.
Jarod kissed her back, tears rolling down his face. Then he was pressing kisses on every part of her face. "Parker..." he repeated, so thankful to have her back again that he could think of nothing else to say at the moment.
"I'm OK," she finally reassured him after kissing him hard and thoroughly one more time and then pushing away. She reached out a hand to her young companion. "Jarod, meet Tyler. Tyler, this is Jarod - I spoke to you of him..."
"I remember," the young morgue assistant told her and held out a hand.
"Tyler took care of me while I was down there," she explained quickly. "He helped keep me motivated, and wouldn't let me do anything stupid."
"Then I owe you a lot," Jarod said, taking the young man's hand firmly in his.
"It was my pleasure," the Southerner said evenly. "It just wouldn't have been right to let a lady do all that without a hand."
Miss Parker put a hand on the young man's shoulder. "You be sure to sign that roster before you take off for home - because you're going to be one of the first people I call. You said you wanted something 'challenging', if I remember..."
"Yes, ma'am," he nodded, a slow smile building on his tired face.
"Then pack up your white lab coat for good, 'Tyler-ma'am'. Something 'challenging' will definitely be coming your way - as soon as I sleep the clock around at least once and am able to move again afterwards." She patted his shoulder and then pushed him toward the fireman now standing over a table at which a line of Centre employees was passing slowly and signing out. "Go on, now. I'm safely delivered."
Tyler gave the man Miss Parker had greeted so warmly an assessing look, and then nodded. "Take care of yourself, Lobsang," he quipped and then turned.
"Lobsang?!" Jarod asked with his eyebrows flying high on his forehead, only to look over and find Miss Parker chuckling softly.
"Inside joke. You'd have had to have been there," she explained apologetically, then put her arms around his waist and leaned heavily. "Take me home, Jarod. I'm so tired..."
"Parker..." Jarod held her close for a moment, and then his hands on her shoulders pushed her away again. "When you were down on SL-17, did you go into the Sim Lab?"
"Of course not! With Syd home, the place was locked up," she answered tiredly. "Why the hell would I have done that?" Jarod dropped his head in tired realization, a move that chilled Miss Parker through to the soul. "Why?" she asked in a small voice.
"Because Syd sent Broots down there for some files," the Pretender explained in a voice filled with horror, "and one of the people from SL-17 I talked to here said she'd seen him down there, but hadn't seen him leave."
"Oh my God!" she said, and then Jarod had to catch her as her knees gave out. "I didn't think... I didn't know... Oh my God! ... Broots!!"
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"What the hell were you boys doin' out here at this hour of the..." Officer Donaldson of the Blue Cove PD shook his head at the two teenagers who were standing quivering in front of him.
"We was just lookin' - you know, to see what we could see..." the taller, obviously older boy interrupted. "We come through the bushes over there," he pointed, "and that's where we found 'im."
"Found what?" the officer frowned.
"Not what, who," the second boy ventured with short-lived bravery. "Scared the shit out of us - and that's why we come lookin' for YOU."
Donaldson turned a skeptical eye on the boys. "Are you SURE you want to pull my leg like that, fellas? Don't none of us have time to..."
"C'mon, if you don't believe us," the younger boy grabbed the officer by the hand and began dragging him along the edge of the lawn that was the property line of the Centre. The officer gave a deep sigh and then pulled the boy back. "At least let me see where you're taking me," he ordered and turned his powerful flashlight to the brush ahead. It didn't take too many steps until he could see the bottoms of a pair of boots through the brush.
The three moved closer, and the officer shone the beam of light down into the face of the body laying there. "Is this who you were talking about?" Donaldson demanded, noting the small bullet hole in the side of the stocky man's head and the small black plastic device that had fallen not far from the man's right hand.
"Shit, no! There's another one," the older boy said, his face pale with the surging nausea of seeing the damage the bullet had done as it had exited the other side of the man's skull.
"WHAT?!" Donaldson reached for his shoulder and the walkie-talkie clipped there. "This is Donaldson. We're going to be needing a coroner on the north-west edge of the Centre property line. We've got two more bodies, and they weren't in no explosion..."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"So you're saying that you're fairly sure that there's at least one man still trapped in there - not counting the crazies at the bottom - and you want to lead a rescue team down to where you THINK he is?" Captain Talmann wasn't angry at the Californian, but he wasn't thrilled at the news.
"That's about it," Jarod nodded. He tipped his head back a bit and downed the coffee that he'd grabbed just before coming to look for the engine captain. "Look, I know where to go directly - your men wouldn't know - and having me along would save time."
"You're talking about walking down seventeen floors - thirty-four flights of stairs - and then back out again, possibly carrying an injured man?" The captain shook his head. "After all you've already done today?"
"I'll let the others do the heavy lifting," Jarod promised. "I've had medical training, and I know the way. If the man is injured badly, time is of the essence, and sending back up for a trained EMT would waste time."
"Alright! Alright!" Captain Talmann threw his hands up in defeat. "God knows that I have no authority over you, since you're an out-of-state volunteer who's put in his fair share of labor on our behalf already. But by God," and now he got directly in Jarod's face, "if you fall apart on my men down there, don't expect them to waste time or energy rescuing YOU!"
"Understood, Cap!" Jarod perched his retrieved hat back on his head. "Listen, do me a favor. I need to make sure Miss Parker gets where she needs to go. She's exhausted and needs to rest..."
The fire captain's eyebrows soared. "You know the boss lady of this place?" he asked, clearly impressed.
"I grew up in this place," Jarod said truthfully. "My foster father works for this place. My best friend used to work for this place. I know it better than some who just walked out of it."
"I believe you," the captain said. "Where does the lady live?"
Jarod quickly recited Sydney's address. "Her family is waiting for her there."
"You go after your friend," Talmann said with a nod and finishing writing the address down in his notebook, "and I'll see to it your lady-friend gets home safely."
"Thanks, Cap," Jarod said gratefully, then turned and walked over to Miss Parker. "Look. I'm going down after Broots - IF he's down there. I just talked to the Captain over there, and he's going to see that you get yourself taken home to Sydney's. Everybody's waiting for you there."
"I need to stay..." she began, only to have Jarod shake his head firmly and put a finger on her lips to stop the words. He leaned and kissed her very gently.
"Go home, Parker. Rest. Both Davy and Sydney need to know you're OK - I haven't had a chance to tell them yet. And..." he paused, knowing he was asking a lot, "you can tell Debbie I'm going in after her Dad..."
"God, Jarod!" she burst out in emotional pain, "how can I tell her that I walked right by and never even thought to..."
He grabbed her by the neck and pulled her to him. "Tell her the truth - you had no way of knowing, and had no reason to suspect that he'd be there. If you'd have known, you wouldn't have left him - you know it, and she does too if she thinks about it a little. This is NOT your fault, do you understand?"
"Just find him, Jarod," Miss Parker whispered brokenly, then stretched up to kiss his sooty cheek.
"I'll be home as soon as I know, one way or the other. OK?"
She nodded, and then watched him walk off to join the pair of firemen assigned to enter the pit that was the Centre's underground facility with him. A tear of fear and frustration rolled slowly down her cheek, and she tipped her head back with her eyes closed against the harsh halogen light until a gentle hand landed on her shoulder.
"Miss? I've been asked to take you home?"
The fireman watched the woman slowly pull herself back together again and finally nod, then she trudged silently at his side to the edge of the clearing and the police car that had been loaned him for his shuttle duties. She settled into the passenger seat with a soft sigh and leaned her head back against the head rest, eyes closed.
He didn't ask - he really didn't want to know. He just started the motor and pulled the car gently down the drive, leaving the rubble and flashing lights and sounds of rescue far behind.
Feedback, please: mbumpus_99@hotmail.com
by MMB
Jarod blinked in surprise when the cell phone that he'd left in his trouser pocket started chirping at him, and he had to dig his way through several layers to get to it. "What?"
"We've heard from Sam," Sydney announced without preamble. "He's in a hospital in Dover with a concussion and God knows what else he wouldn't tell us."
"Did he know anything..."
"Nothing specific, but that's why I wanted to call you. He says that Miss Parker got a call telling her that Raines had been shot, and she had expressed her intention on going down to the morgue and making sure he was dead." Sydney's voice held just the faintest note of hope. "I thought I should pass that along, in case it would help..."
Jarod nodded and resumed his slow examination of the rubble he was working his way over. "If she's not..." he started, then couldn't finish phrasing things in those terms, for either of their sakes. "I've been simming things out since I got here, Syd - and the search and rescue is now looking for the stairwell access to check for anybody down below." He paused. "What about Broots? Any word about him?"
Sydney blinked. He hadn't thought of Broots for a while, being so completely overwhelmed with the thought of his adopted daughter... He glanced at his unofficial granddaughter, standing in the kitchen door listening to the exchange with a half-defeated air about her, and he felt incredibly guilty for having forgotten that she was waiting for word on her father too. It wasn't just him... "Listen! I just thought of it... I called Broots this morning, asking him to head down to the Sim Lab to fetch some files for me. Good Lord, maybe they're BOTH..."
"Sydney, don't." Jarod's voice in Sydney's ear sounded tired and discouraged. "You have no idea of the mess here. The thought that they both might be below is encouraging, but don't let it get your hopes up too high."
"Jarod..." The Pretender could hear the sudden concern in the psychiatrist's voice. "How are you doing?"
"I'm beat," he admitted. "Let me get back to work, and I'll call you the moment I hear or know anything." He smiled at his former mentor, even though he knew the older man couldn't see him, buoyed by the concern in his voice. "Hang in there, Syd - and tell Deb and Davy to hang in too. We'll find them. And thanks for the word on Sam. That helps." It had - knowing that at least one of the three had survived had been a needed relief, giving him new impetus to continue searching for the others.
"Take care, Jarod," Sydney told him quietly, "and good luck!" then disconnected.
Then the Pretender blinked again as the huge halogen lights that had been set up around the perimeter of the debris field flared on and brought the illumination of the destruction back up to rival that of mid-day. He worked and stuffed his cell phone back into his trouser pocket and retrieved his pickaxe from where he'd put it to give himself a free hand. Then he turned off the flashlight he'd been using to look into darker shadowy recesses between tumbled steel girders and precariously tipped cement slabs and boulders, looking for a deeper hole behind them that would finally indicate the deep shaft of the emergency stairwell.
It HAD to be here somewhere! The blueprint had been very specific...
"Hey! I've got something over here!" a voice called out from a few meters away and brought Jarod's head up like a shot.
He quickly made his way over to where the other fireman stood, shining his light down into yet another crevasse - only this one didn't seem to have a bottom. Jarod listened... "QUIET!!" he bellowed suddenly, holding his hand up so that the rest of the rescue team would know that he was listening within the rubble for sounds of life.
There it was, the sound of a rustle of voices a few meters below him.
"WE'VE FOUND IT!" the first fireman now bellowed in his turn, and immediately the entire rescue team began swarming toward the site.
"Careful!" Jarod warned, "This stuff could be as unstable as hell. We don't want our movements up here to bring all this down on top of them..." Then he removed his oxygen mask, stuck his head into the darkness of the crevasse and yelled, "Can you hear me down there?"
They could hear him alright - and from the sounds of the cheering filtering up through the tumbled rubble covering the stairwell, there were plenty of survivors down there to do the hearing.
Maybe even the ones HE was looking for!
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"Listen!" Tyler said, crooking his finger at Miss Parker to draw her over to the door to the stairwell, where she too could hear the sounds of cheering from high above them. "See?" he asked in an 'I-told-you-so' tone, "we're going to be OK - thanks to you!"
Miss Parker looked at her erstwhile assistant and felt the warmth of his smile of faith and complete loyalty warm her straight through to her soul. "OK, people," she turned back to yet another gathered knot of confused and frightened staff. "Do you hear that?" She pointed out the door, and the rustle of noise just within the sublevel died so that the sounds of the cheering above could be heard clearly. "That's everybody we've been able to find from the levels above you. Evidently they've heard something and know that we're all on our way to be rescued."
"Well, I'll be damned," a tired voice came from the middle of the knot.
The knot started to press forward, but Miss Parker put her fingers in her lips and shot out another shrill whistle, then held her hand up again. "Look, there's no rush, folks. There's going to be some time before they get the rubble cleared from the top of the stairs. So I want you each to grab a buddy and head up the stairs by two's. Don't push, don't rush. We don't need accidents and people falling down and breaking their necks this close to rescue. When you can't go any farther because you've run into the back end of the folks who came before you, I want you all to just pick a step and have a seat to wait until rescue comes - and be kind and share the step with your buddy."
"Where will you be?" another voice barked from the back of the group.
"Down on the next level, telling those people the same thing I'm telling you right now, and then the one after that," she answered firmly. "You folks here don't need me holding your hand to walk up the stairs, but those folks down there need to know that help is on its way and how to find it. OK, by two's now..."
"You take care, Miss Parker," one nameless woman told her after reaching out and patting her hand, "we'll see you topside."
"You're on," Miss Parker smiled at her as she passed.
The good wish had recalled to her mind a moment of respite when she'd sat with her back against the stairwell wall, trying to imagine either 'Daddy' or Mr. Raines doing what she was doing right now in seeing to her staff's welfare. After some deliberation, she couldn't imagine either of them putting themselves out in any way for anyone but themselves. Now, sixteen levels down, she was realizing that all of her staff - from office workers to morgue assistants to lab technicians - had come to the same conclusion about their previous bosses long ago.
She was winning their loyalty and cooperation now because she was treating them like people and going out of her way to help them - and that would become the hidden silver lining in the hard work she was doing. If she and everyone down here survived this nightmare of a day, she'd have gone a long way toward mending the morale problem that had always crippled the Centre in many ways. And perhaps THAT in turn would help make her readjustments to the direction the work at the facility was aimed in after be a simple matter of asking people more likely to listen to her. But it had taken her this long to figure this out. In the back of her mind, where she had felt so little for so long, a most ephemeral touch of a long-gone mother's love told her of the pride and approval for her actions that would have been hers for what she was doing.
She pulled the door to SL-16 closed behind Tyler and took her turn leading the way down the stairs to the next level. From his vantage point behind her, Tyler could tell that the cheering from above had brought her dedication back full-strength to what she was trying to do. She was motivated again by more than obligation now - she had hope again. Even her movements going down the stairs were more energetic. She had needed that little boost, and he was proud of his small role in seeing that she got it.
Miss Parker pushed the door to SL-17 open and stepped inside. This sublevel she had long ago come to regard as Sydney's lair - and for many years it had been her semi-efficient refuge from her so-called 'twin' and 'father' while at work. The sliding pair of glass doors across the way from the elevator, down the corridor some distance away, was the entrance to his Sim Lab - the place where Sydney had spent nearly his entire professional life and Jarod his childhood and a good portion of his adult life.
She found herself feeling a perverse sense of gratitude that Sydney was laid up at home and not down here at work, regardless of the circumstances. Those emergency stairs were a long, hard climb - even for her - and Syd wasn't a young man anymore. She stifled a painful stab of loneliness for her surrogate father and wished she could somehow tell him that she was alright. No doubt, knowing him, he was worried sick about her. She wouldn't have minded Jarod being here, though... No! She wouldn't think of him right now. She couldn't afford the distraction.
She walked down past the Sim Lab door to yet again issue her piercing whistle to attract the attention of anybody wandering the corridors of this sublevel. With Sydney home, the Sim Lab would have been locked up tight and psych-techs normally assisting him with his research would have been reassigned to other psychiatrists or psychologists on the level for the day. There was no reason to poke a head in just to find the place abandoned. She'd spent enough of her life in that huge room already. She turned on her low heel and headed down one leg of corridors while Tyler waited halfway down the other, nearer to the stairwell entrance, just as they had on the other levels.
There was no time to waste. She still had nine more levels to clear, counting this one.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Broots heard the whistle and roused again. He knew better than to struggle against the weight of the file cabinet now - twice he'd tried to move, and twice he'd nearly blacked out from the pain. He was cold - whether from shock or blood loss he had no way of knowing at the moment. And he was now very aware that he had no feeling in his legs. He would definitely be needing help if he was going to get out of this in one piece.
"Help me!" he called again in his diminished tone, worried that behind the closed door of Syd's office and the closed door of the Sim Lab, his voice wouldn't carry worth a damn. He would have to try something else - something that would make noise and hopefully attract somebody's attention without wearing him out in the process or making him pass out again.
He raised his head carefully - moving too much played with the muscles of his back and ended up driving spikes of pain through his lower spine - and saw the handle of Sydney's briefcase just beyond the reach of his hand. If he could just grab it, maybe he could pound it against the file cabinet loudly enough...
Slowly he stretched out his hand - and the handle was only an inch away. He clenched his teeth and stretched farther, feeling those red-hot spikes of agony explode across his entire lower back, and at last put enough pressure on the handle that he could tuck the fingers around it and pull the briefcase towards him.
The exertion was nearly more than he could handle, and it took him a minute of laying there and breathing hard, waiting for the spikes of agony to die down to the level of mere excruciating pain, before he was ready to try anything else. The briefcase was awkward to handle, open and laying face downward on the floor. Broots suffered through several more attacks of agony in his lower back in the process of righting the briefcase and then closing it so that it would be a little easier to handle. The task of then dragging the heavy case down the length of his upper body with one hand to where it was close enough to the cabinet to strike the metal side was difficult enough to make beads of sweat break out on his upper lip.
He banged the case against the metal side wall of the file cabinet and yelled, "Help me, please!" as loudly as he could. Once was about he could do at a time, however, and he felt his head grow lighter still with the expenditure of energy accomplishing both at the same time cost. His vision was growing cloudy, as if a film were covering his eyes. He gave one last mammoth effort, banged the briefcase against the file cabinet again hard and yelled.
And then passed out cold again.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Jarod felt as if he were ready to jump out of his skin and tear into the tumble of steel and concrete with his bare hands to get the channel cleared. The work of actually clearing the debris had to proceed very slowly and carefully, he knew, to prevent any of the rubble from falling further down the stairwell and harming any of the many people patiently waiting below. It was just that, this time, it was HIS loved ones possible somewhere down in that pit. Suddenly the patience with which he had always approached jobs like this back in his days of active Pretending had evaporated.
Daylight had long since faded now, and the area had that brilliant blue hue of halogen that caught and reflected the clouds of dust kicked up by man and machine. The night air was filled with the growl of the engines of the backhoes being used from a distance to pull heavy beams and blocks out of the way, the whine of diamond-bladed saws cutting through and blocks too massive to move easily, and the hiss of blow torches slicing through thick ribbons of steel I-beams. All that effort was involved in the deconstruction of the approximately twenty feet of rubble that had tumbled down the stairwell. On the very edge of the clearing, media trucks had set up their vigils, kept back from interfering with the rescuers by a patient contingent of constables from Dover.
Captain Talmann had already tried to pull him from duty twice, telling him that he'd done more than his share as an out-of-state volunteer, only to be reassured that Jarod would rather be nowhere else. Surrendering to the idea that this Californian wouldn't quit until he was bone tired or hauled off the site under police escort, Talmann had ordered the Pretender back to the relief tent for a full meal and an hour's rest before starting up again. Jarod sat at the gathered picnic tables staring into his food, barely able to move utensils from plate to mouth.
His hands and back ached from the physical exertion of being one of the human ants helping to remove tons of debris too small to merit a backhoe. He had, at one point that afternoon, regretted giving up his membership at the fitness gym a year earlier - the slippage in muscle tone hadn't done him any favors this day. He reached for the Styrofoam cup of strong, black coffee and downed the bottom half of the luke-warm brew in a gulp. Knowing that he needed at least some protein and nourishment to help him get through what promised to be a very long night, he stuffed the other half of his hotdog into his face and then rose to take his plate and implements to the trash.
He couldn't stay away anymore. He had to be there. He had to be ready to go down into the depths of Hell - hopefully to resurrect two people who were very important to him. He debated calling Sydney, letting the family at the house know that work was proceeding on opening the stairwell, then decided against it. That would constitute raising hopes - unreasonably.
They still didn't know if Miss Parker and Broots were down there.
Besides, with the media coverage, the odds stood at between eighty and ninety percent that they knew already anyway.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"Grandpa, would you mind very much if I turned on the TV to see..." Debbie stood at the foot of Sydney's day-bed in the den twisting her hands together. "Maybe there's been some word about survivors..."
Sydney roused from his light dozing and took a good look at his granddaughter's face. He slowly sat up and moved his legs out of the way, then motioned for her to sit next to him and held out the remote to her. "Of course not. It's been a while since any of us has checked." He was worried about her - her face was pale and she had been very quiet and withdrawn - and he was glad when she sat down next to him because then he could put an arm around her and hold her close. "How are you, cheri?"
She just shook her head, blue eyes tragic, then pointed the remote at the black box on the shelf across the room and turned up the volume. She tried to listen to the reporter recite numbers of wounded that had been taken to area hospitals and tell of the first grim discoveries of bodies that had been buried in the rubble, but at the mention of dead, the tears had started to flow all over again.
Just as she closed her eyes and turned off the remote, she felt her grandfather's lips against her forehead and his other coming around to surround her and hold her tightly. With a sob, she turned into him and buried her face on his shoulder. He shushed into her ear softly but let her cry herself out again, knowing she needed the release. When she tried to pull back in embarrassment and withdraw again, as she'd been doing all afternoon, he merely held on this time. "It's OK, cheri. It's OK to be scared and sad - and to need to cry on somebody's shoulder. I've got you. It's OK..."
"Oh, Grandpa! What am I going to do if..." she sobbed and let herself be drawn closer again. Kevin hadn't been able to answer her, and she genuinely was at a complete loss.
"It will be hard, but you will go back to living eventually," he told her softly. "You'll go to school and go on to become a doctor, just as you've always intended..."
"No," she shook her head against him. The idea of moving away without her father to come home to was just too painful to contemplate. "I..."
"Yes," he hushed at her, "maybe not right away, but later on, when it doesn't hurt quite so bad anymore..."
The arms around her tightened again as her sobs began anew. "It's OK," he shushed at her from time to time, "I've got you now. You'll be OK."
And in the pit of his stomach, the dread that he and Jarod would be the only ones left to try to hold their little family together in the end began to grow, and he swallowed back tears of his own. Like Debbie, he didn't know how he was going to go on without Miss Parker and Broots. All he knew was that right now he had to stay strong for all of them. Kevin couldn't handle three complete basket cases - that young man was only barely managing not to be a basket case himself! And despite what he'd told Kevin earlier, it didn't look like the bad times were going to be ending anytime soon.
For the first time in many years, Sydney found himself praying to a God that he only barely believed in anymore to give them all a miracle.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
The shout went up from the opposite side of the debris field from the rescue efforts at the stairwell: "We've got a live one over here! Bring a litter!"
The hands that were slowly sifting through the rubble began to move faster in that spot, and soon the very pained and very aware face and right arm of an elderly black gentleman had been uncovered. It had been a miracle of the dynamics of falling debris that he'd ended up partially protected by the cement slam of the floor above him.
"Hang on, mister. We'll have you out as soon as possible," came the encouragement,
Otamo Ngawe blinked as the next piece of cement carefully pried aside allowed the brilliance of the tall artificial lights begin to shine on his face. He closed his eyes and began a long prayer to his ancestors, thanking them for preserving his life after all.
With any luck, a similar fate had been Tanaka's. He certainly hoped so - that arrogant young crime boss deserved what Ngawe would make sure was waiting for him. But regardless of whether Tanaka had survived or no, the Yakuza would never threaten the Triumverate again - he'd see to that, personally!
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Miss Parker watched the last of the people from SL-21 begin their two-by-two climb up the long and steep staircase to what she hoped would be their freedom. She'd been reviewing the level usage of these bottommost nether-regions of the Centre. SL-27, to the best of her knowledge, had never been rebuilt after Sydney's bombing attempt years ago and was abandoned. SL-26 was the physical archive for the mountain of paperwork the Centre generated. At best, there would be only a few people on that level. SL-25 was the residence level for many of the seriously mentally ill patients the Centre had cared for over the years - evacuating the schizophrenic and paranoid wasn't something she was looking forward to organizing, but even those people deserved a chance at survival. SL-24 was the infamous and euphemistically titled 'Renewal Wing'. There would be a full contingent of doctors and nurses on duty there - as well as any number of patients receiving treatment there. SL-23...
"You OK, Miss Parker?" Tyler asked quietly. He'd seen the pensive mood slowly come back over his boss, and he now knew her enough to begin to worry and want to work to derail the process if needed.
She started as if surprised at being addressed directly. "Oh, yeah. Sorry, Tyler - I was just reviewing what these last few levels were about and who we'd be working with. Things are going to get a bit dicey from here." She ran her fingers through her now-tangled hair and pulled it out of her face. "You don't spook easily, do you?"
"No, ma'am," the feisty morgue attendant who had attached himself at her elbow answered firmly with his broad Southern accent. "Not much surprises me anymore."
"Don't be too sure of that," she replied with an ominous tone. "The Centre has always been a bit like a city unto itself - and there were some parts of it that simply weren't all that safe to walk through. That's why those parts were put so far down underground."
"Hoo-boy," Tyler breathed, catching some of her apprehension. "What kind of stuff are we talking about here?"
"Psych patients - some of whom are very dangerous - for one..."
"How much further do we need to go until we get to those folks?" he asked, definitely feeling uneasy now.
"The next two levels are still mostly labs and offices. SL-24 is the Renewal Wing." She saw him shiver. "Ah. I see you've heard of that..."
"Just rumors," he hastened to amend.
"More than just rumors," she shook her head. "Trust me. I've been there, both as a visitor and a patient often enough - there was a time, not all that long ago, when ending up there was NOT a positive event in life."
"You survived," he pointed out in self-defense.
"I had help," she pointed out equally fervently. "At first it was because my 'Daddy' was Chairman. Then because... well, I think this last time it was just dumb luck."
"Then the psych patients are on SL-25?"
"The psych patients are on SL-25."
"What's below that?"
She shook her head. "Dead paper vault - data archives - and then one level that's been completely abandoned. I suppose we COULD put SL-25 off until last..."
Tyler met her gaze with one similar to it. She could tell he wasn't going to be enjoying these last few levels at all any more now than she was. "I think I like the sound of putting that one off until last, for what it's worth."
Miss Parker nodded. "OK, 'Tyler-ma'am'. Let's finish this."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Jarod was dead on his feet. It was midnight, and he'd been working more or less steadily since dusk hauling debris. But the sound of clapping from the center of the excavation site drew his attention and then energized him. For there, emerging from the tumble of concrete and steel, was first one and then another and another in white lab coats and casual work dress, filing up the now cleared stairwell in an organized manner. Most had tight hold on a fellow rescuee that they simply refused to let go of, all were crying or struggling with controlling their emotions at the sight of what was left of their place of employment.
The Pretender quietly moved to the side and waited until the first pair of evacuees had walked slowly closer. Then he moved up next to them and asked in a soft but frantic voice, "Have either of you seen Miss Parker?"
The dark eyes of the man took in the desperation in the face of the fireman and turned and pointed back where he'd come from. "She's in there - she went back down to tell the others to wait on the stairs."
Jarod grabbed the man's arm in excitement. "You saw her? She's OK?"
His partner, a younger woman with tumbled dark locks, patted Jarod's arm. "She was fine the last time WE saw her - but that was hours ago. We know she must have been fine for quite a while after that, though, because another bunch of people would come up the stairs the same way she'd sent us."
"Thank you!" Jarod shook hands with both of them vigorously, finally letting himself begin to hold the tiniest spark of hope. "Thank you!" He moved off to a more secluded corner of the disaster site and pulled his hat from his face and wept. He was tired, exhausted, but he'd finally had a piece of news that he could communicate home. With difficulty, he swallowed back his emotions and fumbled through his layers of protective clothing for the cell phone in his pocket.
"This is Sydney."
Jarod frowned. His old mentor's voice sounded downright ragged now - easily as tired and defeated as he himself had been at his worst moment. "Syd. It's me."
"Jarod." He heard Sydney give a half-hearted attempt to sound enthusiastic. "How are you?"
"We've broken through to the people in the stairwell..."
"What... people in the stairwell?" The psychiatrist sounded shocked.
The Pretender shook his head. He didn't want to explain a whole evening's effort, just get to the good news. "I talked to some of them once they had the way cleared for them to finally come the rest of the way up the stairs. She's OK, Syd. They saw her and talked to her, and she's OK. She's been going down, level by level, organizing the staff and getting them up the stairs so they could be rescued."
"Oh thank God..." Sydney managed, and then disintegrated into tears. Jarod could hear fumbling on the phone on the other end, and then Debbie's voice came on the line.
"Uncle Jarod?"
"Hi Deb. You take care of your Grandpa, OK? If Miss Parker is down there, then maybe.."
"You haven't heard anything about Daddy yet, have you?" Jarod swallowed hard - Deb sounded in as bad shape as Sydney. The waiting had been just as hard, if not harder, on those far from the scene of activity than he'd thought.
"No, Deb, not yet. But now that the way is open, maybe he'll be one of the ones coming up the stairs." Jarod tried to put a supportive smile into his voice for her - she needed it. "I'll call when I have more news, but right now I want to get over there and see if I can find..."
"Find my Daddy, Jarod, please..." she pleaded, her voice breaking.
"I will if I can, Deb. I promise." He disconnected the call so that she and Sydney could begin to comfort one another, and then headed toward the circle of men surrounding the entrance to the stairwell. There would be a rescue team entering that pit as soon as the rest of the staff Miss Parker had organized had been removed.
He intended to be on that team.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Kevin had heard the phone ring from upstairs, where he was finally putting an exhausted Davy to bed in his room. Both he and the boy bolted to the door and dashed down the stairs, only to be met by the sight of both Sydney and Debbie weeping in each other's arms. Davy broke into tears too and ran to huddle with the pair, and Kevin hovered just a few feet away, not exactly sure what to do.
Sydney felt Davy land against Debbie's back and finally worked hard to swallow back the tendency to sob. He knew what was being assumed, and that he had to defuse that fear and grief quickly in his grandson. "That was your Daddy, Davy. He's talked to some people who say they've seen your mother - she's OK." He closed his eyes and felt the weight of the world drop away from his shoulders. "She's OK," he insisted on saying again as if having trouble believing it.
Davy looked up, wiping his tears away with the back of a hand, suddenly much less sad. "Is she coming home now?" the boy wanted to know.
Sydney shook his head. "She's still deep down inside the Centre, Davy. She's making sure that everybody gets out safely first. When she's finished, she'll be coming home."
"What about Deb's Dad?" Kevin asked seeing that Debbie hadn't started to recover from her crying yet.
Sydney's tear-filled eyes met the young man's, and he shook his head. "Nothing yet." He tightened his arms around his granddaughter and shushed into her ear. "If Miss Parker can be OK, then all we have to do is be a little more patient, and we'll hear that your Dad's OK too, Deb. Hang on, cheri, ma petite fleur..." He began murmuring softly at her in French.
"Come on, Davy. Maybe now you can sleep better," Kevin said, taking the small boy by the shoulders and pulling him away from Debbie so that he could lift him up into his arms.
Davy wrapped his arms around the young man's neck tightly. "I want my Mom," the boy whimpered softly as Kevin carried him back up the stairs.
"I know you do, Davy. Your Dad's doing the best he can to bring her back to you," the young Pretender soothed. He deposited the boy back on the bed and pulled the blankets back into place. "You sleep now. We'll see what's up in the morning, OK?" He moved back to the doorway and reached for the overhead light.
"You're coming back, aren't you?" Davy asked suddenly.
"I'll be just down with your Grandpa and Debbie," Kevin promised gently. "You go to sleep." He switched off the light and pulled the bedroom door closed until it was just ajar enough to let some of the hallway light trickle into the dark bedroom like a night light. With a sigh, he went into Sydney's room and reached for the bottle of pain medications on the nightstand. The old man had been holding him off from giving him any medicine again all afternoon. Maybe now he'd let him give him some relief from his wounds again, now that he'd had some potentially good news.
He could only wish that he had something he could give Deb to help her handle HER pain.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
By the time the last pair of the long line of Centre staff had emerged from the pit that was the stairwell that led down into the subterranean complex, Jarod was beyond impressed with the work Miss Parker had done. Nearly two hundred people had been told to climb those stairs by a woman they'd never met before and/or learned to fear or loathe, nearly two hundred people who, to a man, were now quietly waiting over near the triage tent - waiting for their boss to finally emerge. Most had taken advantage of offers of cell phones to communicate with worried family members, telling them that they would be sticking around until Miss Parker arrived before they left for home. They owed it to her. She'd come for them - saved them.
And yet, in the midst of his quiet admiration, a nugget of worry was steadily growing. Broots had NOT been among the pairs of staff who had slowly trudged up those long stairs to fresh air. He had questioned several of the people he could still recognize as having worked with Sydney during his tenure there years ago, and while one remembered seeing Broots down on SL-17, she didn't remember where he was going or whether he had left before the blast.
And Miss Parker herself hadn't emerged yet either.
With the knot of emergency workers still hovering over the opening to the stairwell, Jarod knew there was little chance he would be able to just slip in and start down on his own, private, search and rescue mission. And he was very aware the Captain Talmann would nix any suggestion that he be part of a retrieval party, inasmuch as the man had tried to sideline him to rest several times over already.
There were as yet no staff to emerge that had worked on SL-25, while the five people assigned to the data archive one level below had emerged just a few minutes before. Then again, he remembered from studying the arrangement of sublevels to plan an escape for Angelo that SL-25 was the Centre's psycho ward. Some of the patients housed there would no doubt be difficult to deal with in a rescue attempt. Maybe that was the holdup...
He would wait a little longer - but only a LITTLE longer. And while he waited, he needed to come up with some kind of story that would make his trip down into that pit justifiable to other rescue workers.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"You're kidding!" Miss Parker gaped.
Dr. Stevens, his glasses in his hands and grey hair buzz-cut to military standards, shook his head. "No, ma'am, I'm not. The patients we're housing down here are in no way capable of climbing 25 floors under their own power without a serious problem for either the patient or their attendant somewhere along the line. Most of our mildly to moderately ill patients were transferred to other facilities years ago as a cost-cutting measure. What we have now is a population of six diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia - all of whom have violent breaks and/or tendencies."
Miss Parker frowned. Somehow, Raines had managed this little twist of financial wizardry as well. While searching the data for incriminating evidence of malfeasance by Raines, Lyle & company, the transfer of over twenty mental patients to other places had gone completely undocumented. She had opened the doors to SL-25 expecting to find almost twenty staff and nearly thirty patients, and found a skeleton crew of six caring for only six patients. And yet payroll had continued to spit out paychecks for twenty.
She blinked, and then refocused her attention on what the psychiatrist was telling her...
"To transport these patients would frankly require an elevator or something damned close to it, Miss Parker, because I could only guarantee the safety of everyone involved if they are sedated, put in strait jackets and secured to a gurney."
Tyler remembered Miss Parker's earlier question to him - whether he 'spooked' easily - and now decided that he was 'spooked' enough on this sublevel to be more than willing to make tracks fast, even with the 'spook' factor significantly reduced. But, in keeping with his boss' intents in all other places, he felt it his place to ask, "And you won't leave these people unattended - even knowing that there is considerable danger in not evacuating yourselves?"
Stevens shook his head firmly. "If, as you say, the obstruction to the stairwell has been removed, then it should be only a matter of time before the manpower and resources come available to make certain compromises in the methodology of evacuating both staff and patients. Until that time, however, I see no other alternative than to stay on duty."
Miss Parker held her hand over her mouth as she thought quickly. She appreciated the man's intentions, but didn't want to leave any more people trapped down in the underground facility than absolutely necessary. She lifted her hand from her mouth, a forefinger lifted in emphasis. "Alright, Doctor, then tell me this: are all of these dangerous people under lock and key?"
"Of course," Dr. Steven blinked at the simplistic nature of the question. "We naturally would NEVER let them just roam around..."
"In that case," she cut him off abruptly, "how many staff are absolutely essential to maintain security to your standards, with the dangerous element safely housed behind metal doors and heavy locks? In other words, if you had to pare down the number of your assistants to the bare necessity, how many would you need to ride herd on six mentally ill people?"
That stopped the man. Her question had ended up being anything BUT simplistic. He shifted his weight to one foot and reached up to run his hand over his bristled scalp thoughtfully. "Provided all the patients could be secured and sedated ahead of time, I suppose I could handle all of them myself in a pinch..."
"Good." Miss Parker nodded - that was what she figured. "Then I want you to summon your existing staff and get those preparations underway immediately. Sedate your patients - truss them up in strait jackets, do whatever else you feel you need to do ahead of time, while you have the help. The fact is that I DON'T know how much longer this trap is going to stay open, and I for one would like to get the hell out of here before it begins to collapse. I'm sure your orderlies and nurses would like that as well."
"What about..."
"Once we reach the surface, we'll notify the rescue authorities about the situation down here and have them send you down the kind of resources you need to move these patients safely. But since YOU are the one who is so determined not to budge them until precautions are taken, and YOU are the one responsible if anything should happen to them while awaiting those resources coming your way, YOU will be the one to stay down here and wait with your patients." She gazed at the psychiatrist evenly, unflinchingly. "That seems only fair to me. Do you agree?"
Dr. Stevens could see that he had finally met with a tough supervisor who would not be either bullied or fed bullshit. She was as straight-forward and demanding as any boss, but obviously concerned that the welfare of all of his people be considered equally. Not to mention, she'd come all the way down those stairs herself to face off with him - something no other Chairman had attempted in the time he'd been in charge of this department. Her compromise was about as fair a shake for everyone concerned as he had ever heard.
Miss Parker could see in the psychiatrist's face the moment that he'd decided to do things her way. He turned away and went over to the nurse's station to confer with the three orderlies and two nurses who were his entire staff. Within moment, the nurses were back in their locked office, preparing hypodermics, while the orderlies were sorting through strait jackets.
She pulled Tyler back toward the stairwell access door. "OK, Tyler. Time for you to go..."
"No, ma'am." The morgue assistant shook his head firmly. "Not until you come with me."
"Tyler, I'm telling you..."
"Ma'am, you can't make me leave. I've been with you this far; I'm not going up until you're my partner going up the stairs again. So forget it."
Miss Parker studied her constant companion in the red of the emergency lights. She could see that he was easily as tired as she was. But his eyes - hell, she didn't even remember what color they were, only that they looked dark in the red glow - were clearly communicating that he was adamant in his refusal to budge. OK, she thought to herself, asking hadn't worked, nor had ordering him. What about... "Please, Tyler..."
"With all due respect, Miss Parker, please don't play me. I signed onto your little expedition for the duration - and with a pretty fair idea of what I was getting myself into to boot." He smiled at her. "Besides, I wouldn't be all that far ahead of you, even if I did leave now - unless you intended to stay down here with Dr. Stevens until..."
She shook her head in frustration. "God you're stubborn!"
He smiled wider. "Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am."
She sighed, balled up a fist and slugged him very gently in the shoulder. "Thanks, Tyler. OK... Since you're determined to stick around with me, what do you say we go see if we can give Dr. Stevens and his people a hand so we can get started up those stairs sometime before the sun burns out?"
"Yes, ma'am!"
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Ngawe had managed so far to maintain his dignity while awaiting the last of the heavy cement to be lifted. The firemen had kept him company, kept him talking about the most trivial and mundane things to keep him from worrying about his situation. He'd even been very carefully given a sip of water to ease the dryness in his mouth as the dust from the surrounding work thickened.
But when the backhoe began its slow retreat, and the steel cable tightened and finally began to lift the slab that still completely covered the elderly African's lower body, he couldn't stop the scream of agony that erupted from his lips. The fire chief directed the backhoe to continue as beads of sweat and agony began to cover a face that was incredibly pale beneath its dark pigmentation. Ngawe managed one more moan of pure agony before the darkness of unconsciousness swallowed him whole.
Rescuers moved in immediately to extricate the elderly man's body from where it had lain, bent and bleeding, beneath tons of concrete. A pressure suit was quickly put on him and inflated to prevent any more unnecessary bleeding, and then the basket with the head of the Triumverate was lifted and carried between two firemen to a waiting ambulance.
"We won't have to worry much about this poor bastard, though," came the comment of a tired rescuer, looking down at the face of Tommy Tanaka, whose body had evidently cushioned that of the elderly man they had just rescued alive. The Yakuza boss' dark eyes were open and staring, the amount of blood that had trickled from his crushed left temple making a dark path across the beam he lay on and then over the edge into further darkness.
"Give it a rest, Jackson," the fire chief barked tiredly to the disrespectful rescuer. "Get him out of there. If there's one alive in this area, there may be more."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Tyler was now beyond pooped, beyond tired to virtually ready to drop - and the stairs ahead of him seemed endless as they twisted back and forth, two flights per level. And at long last, the incredible stamina of Miss Parker was starting to wane too. Neither of them was moving very fast up the stairs anymore, and the nurses and orderlies had taken a one-flight lead on them already.
"You going to make it?" Miss Parker puffed at him after taking a very quick glance at his face. She pulled on him and brought them both to a stop leaning against the stairwell wall. "Tyler?"
The young morgue attendant nodded at her while trying to catch his breath. "These damned stairs were a helluva lot easier on the way down," he finally managed in a wry tone. "How are you doing, ma'am?"
She leaned her head back against the cool wall of the stairwell. "Just swell. Having the time of my life. Aren't you?" Her tone was brittle - her fatigue was showing.
"Now that you mention it," the Southerner drawled out in a heavy mimicry of his own accent, bringing her attention back to him immediately, "I think I must have been crazy. If I wanted to climb things, Mount Everest at least gives a person a feeling of accomplishment..."
"You'll feel like you DID climb Everest tomorrow, you know..." she reminded him, bending over at the waist and stretching out a bit. "I'll never be able to look another StairMaster in the face again."
That did it. Tyler started chuckling, and she joined him in a much-needed laugh. Finally she looked at him, wiping the tears of merriment and near hysteria from her face. "Ready, Sir Hillary?"
"After you, Lobsang," he gestured magnanimously toward the ascending stairs.
"Somehow I think I got the relative hierarchy of the names mixed," she mused aloud with a trailing chuckle, tucking her hand into his again.
"Don't bother me none," came the slow exaggerated Southern drawl. He moved to her left, near the handrail.
"I wonder why..." she chuckled at him again. "Enjoy it while you can, Sir Hillary. You become just plain 'Tyler-ma'am' again the moment we get out of this hell-hole."
He just shook his head at her and joined her in her low chuckling and once more began putting one foot ahead of and slightly higher than the next. They had a LONG way to go yet.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Jarod roused himself when he heard another round of applause, and then another small knot of four people one by one climbed those last few step into the world again. They were wearing the lab coats he would have expected of the staff from SL-25 - but there were only four of them, and Miss Parker wasn't one of them.
After all this time, he felt his heart hit the very bottom of his rubber-soled boot. Something must have happened, he reasoned, and began looking around at the amount of attention being given to the hole out of which all those people had clambered, wondering what kind of story or diversion he could cobble at a moment's notice to justify...
Wait! From within the darkness of the hole came movement, and then another white-coated individual emerged into the halogen-blue glare. That individual stared around him for a long moment, then reached back into the darkness and brought forth...
"Parker!" Jarod whispered soundlessly, feeling the weight of the world drop from his shoulders. He wasn't the only one who saw the emergence. Only now did he notice again the incredibly large group of staff that had patiently remained on-site, waiting for their literal savior to make her appearance. He heard a couple of whistles, a shout, and then the entire mob of two hundred souls was rushing towards the pair of people walking very tiredly away from the debris field after staring at the devastation themselves for a while, just as the rest had.
There was no way Jarod was going to make his way through the mob of Centre workers to her side immediately. They had surrounded her completely and were moving her steadily toward the triage tent. Finally someone whispered in Tyler's ear, and he whispered into Miss Parker's ear, and Jarod watched from a distance as this young, unnamed individual gave her a helping hand up so that she could climb atop a picnic table. Immediately the crowd of Centre employees broke into rowdy applause that lasted until Miss Parker put up her hands - and then it died quickly.
"I take it you all made it up here OK?" she asked rhetorically, and got another short ovation.
"Took you long enough to join us," a voice came from somewhere. "What didja do, take a side trip on the way up?"
"Yeah, well, twenty-seven floors is a helluva climb, especially when you just finished climbing all that way DOWN," she retorted with a smile. "OK. Listen up, people. As you can see," she gestured over their heads to the pile of rubble that had been their place of employment, "you may have a bit of trouble getting to work in the morning..."
Jarod leaned himself against the bumper of a fire truck and watched her working her people - encouraging them, bantering with them, letting them know that they still mattered to the Centre, to her. Sydney should see this, he suddenly wished. She WAS magnificent! This was what she'd been training for all those years, and this was where she belonged.
"I want you all to take the next day off - most of you will be stiff and sore from your climb, and some of you need to have your bumps and bruises seen to. However, I have an assignment for all of you. As you can see," she gestured back towards the rubble again, "we are without our normal data retrieval system. So, before you leave here, I want a roster sheet passed, and I want all of your names, addresses and phone numbers. And then, when you get home, I want each of you, if you can, to find one past pay stub. You will each be receiving one thousand dollars hazard pay for what you just went through - and you will be pulling your regular forty-hour paycheck until we figure out just what we're going to be doing."
That brought a vigorous accolade and applause from the group, and Jarod smiled. He knew exactly where she intended to get the money for that - another of Raines' personal accounts would soon be liquidated. He nodded, finding it a very fitting use of the money.
"You each WILL be called and interviewed," she was continuing. "Needless to say, the Centre is now in the midst of massive reorganization..." She had to pause at the outbreak of laughter. "Some of the projects you were working on will not be continued. We will not be laying anybody off, however." That one got more cheering. "Thank you all for your cooperation down in the trenches..." she quipped and got herself some chuckles for her effort. "I'll be seeing or talking to each and every one of you in the near future."
Jarod watched her accept a helping hand down from her bully platform from the young man who had emerged from the stairwell with her, and then move through the congratulating crowd in the direction of the fire and rescue chief. She spoke to him in very vehement terms, gesturing at the entrance and then downward, and the Pretender saw a very concerned look come over the man's face just before he headed off in the direction of a knot of rescuers at a trot.
Finally she was approachable, just talking with what looked like was her new personal sweeper. Jarod straightened from his post against the fire truck and walked quickly towards her. As he did, he took off the protective hat and oxygen mask, tossing them to the ground as he drew close. "Parker..." he called finally.
Her head swiveled until she had found the source of the call, and then she abandoned her companion and ran the last few feet to throw her arms around his neck. "Jarod!" she whispered and leaned heavily into his arms and pressed her lips to his.
Jarod kissed her back, tears rolling down his face. Then he was pressing kisses on every part of her face. "Parker..." he repeated, so thankful to have her back again that he could think of nothing else to say at the moment.
"I'm OK," she finally reassured him after kissing him hard and thoroughly one more time and then pushing away. She reached out a hand to her young companion. "Jarod, meet Tyler. Tyler, this is Jarod - I spoke to you of him..."
"I remember," the young morgue assistant told her and held out a hand.
"Tyler took care of me while I was down there," she explained quickly. "He helped keep me motivated, and wouldn't let me do anything stupid."
"Then I owe you a lot," Jarod said, taking the young man's hand firmly in his.
"It was my pleasure," the Southerner said evenly. "It just wouldn't have been right to let a lady do all that without a hand."
Miss Parker put a hand on the young man's shoulder. "You be sure to sign that roster before you take off for home - because you're going to be one of the first people I call. You said you wanted something 'challenging', if I remember..."
"Yes, ma'am," he nodded, a slow smile building on his tired face.
"Then pack up your white lab coat for good, 'Tyler-ma'am'. Something 'challenging' will definitely be coming your way - as soon as I sleep the clock around at least once and am able to move again afterwards." She patted his shoulder and then pushed him toward the fireman now standing over a table at which a line of Centre employees was passing slowly and signing out. "Go on, now. I'm safely delivered."
Tyler gave the man Miss Parker had greeted so warmly an assessing look, and then nodded. "Take care of yourself, Lobsang," he quipped and then turned.
"Lobsang?!" Jarod asked with his eyebrows flying high on his forehead, only to look over and find Miss Parker chuckling softly.
"Inside joke. You'd have had to have been there," she explained apologetically, then put her arms around his waist and leaned heavily. "Take me home, Jarod. I'm so tired..."
"Parker..." Jarod held her close for a moment, and then his hands on her shoulders pushed her away again. "When you were down on SL-17, did you go into the Sim Lab?"
"Of course not! With Syd home, the place was locked up," she answered tiredly. "Why the hell would I have done that?" Jarod dropped his head in tired realization, a move that chilled Miss Parker through to the soul. "Why?" she asked in a small voice.
"Because Syd sent Broots down there for some files," the Pretender explained in a voice filled with horror, "and one of the people from SL-17 I talked to here said she'd seen him down there, but hadn't seen him leave."
"Oh my God!" she said, and then Jarod had to catch her as her knees gave out. "I didn't think... I didn't know... Oh my God! ... Broots!!"
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"What the hell were you boys doin' out here at this hour of the..." Officer Donaldson of the Blue Cove PD shook his head at the two teenagers who were standing quivering in front of him.
"We was just lookin' - you know, to see what we could see..." the taller, obviously older boy interrupted. "We come through the bushes over there," he pointed, "and that's where we found 'im."
"Found what?" the officer frowned.
"Not what, who," the second boy ventured with short-lived bravery. "Scared the shit out of us - and that's why we come lookin' for YOU."
Donaldson turned a skeptical eye on the boys. "Are you SURE you want to pull my leg like that, fellas? Don't none of us have time to..."
"C'mon, if you don't believe us," the younger boy grabbed the officer by the hand and began dragging him along the edge of the lawn that was the property line of the Centre. The officer gave a deep sigh and then pulled the boy back. "At least let me see where you're taking me," he ordered and turned his powerful flashlight to the brush ahead. It didn't take too many steps until he could see the bottoms of a pair of boots through the brush.
The three moved closer, and the officer shone the beam of light down into the face of the body laying there. "Is this who you were talking about?" Donaldson demanded, noting the small bullet hole in the side of the stocky man's head and the small black plastic device that had fallen not far from the man's right hand.
"Shit, no! There's another one," the older boy said, his face pale with the surging nausea of seeing the damage the bullet had done as it had exited the other side of the man's skull.
"WHAT?!" Donaldson reached for his shoulder and the walkie-talkie clipped there. "This is Donaldson. We're going to be needing a coroner on the north-west edge of the Centre property line. We've got two more bodies, and they weren't in no explosion..."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"So you're saying that you're fairly sure that there's at least one man still trapped in there - not counting the crazies at the bottom - and you want to lead a rescue team down to where you THINK he is?" Captain Talmann wasn't angry at the Californian, but he wasn't thrilled at the news.
"That's about it," Jarod nodded. He tipped his head back a bit and downed the coffee that he'd grabbed just before coming to look for the engine captain. "Look, I know where to go directly - your men wouldn't know - and having me along would save time."
"You're talking about walking down seventeen floors - thirty-four flights of stairs - and then back out again, possibly carrying an injured man?" The captain shook his head. "After all you've already done today?"
"I'll let the others do the heavy lifting," Jarod promised. "I've had medical training, and I know the way. If the man is injured badly, time is of the essence, and sending back up for a trained EMT would waste time."
"Alright! Alright!" Captain Talmann threw his hands up in defeat. "God knows that I have no authority over you, since you're an out-of-state volunteer who's put in his fair share of labor on our behalf already. But by God," and now he got directly in Jarod's face, "if you fall apart on my men down there, don't expect them to waste time or energy rescuing YOU!"
"Understood, Cap!" Jarod perched his retrieved hat back on his head. "Listen, do me a favor. I need to make sure Miss Parker gets where she needs to go. She's exhausted and needs to rest..."
The fire captain's eyebrows soared. "You know the boss lady of this place?" he asked, clearly impressed.
"I grew up in this place," Jarod said truthfully. "My foster father works for this place. My best friend used to work for this place. I know it better than some who just walked out of it."
"I believe you," the captain said. "Where does the lady live?"
Jarod quickly recited Sydney's address. "Her family is waiting for her there."
"You go after your friend," Talmann said with a nod and finishing writing the address down in his notebook, "and I'll see to it your lady-friend gets home safely."
"Thanks, Cap," Jarod said gratefully, then turned and walked over to Miss Parker. "Look. I'm going down after Broots - IF he's down there. I just talked to the Captain over there, and he's going to see that you get yourself taken home to Sydney's. Everybody's waiting for you there."
"I need to stay..." she began, only to have Jarod shake his head firmly and put a finger on her lips to stop the words. He leaned and kissed her very gently.
"Go home, Parker. Rest. Both Davy and Sydney need to know you're OK - I haven't had a chance to tell them yet. And..." he paused, knowing he was asking a lot, "you can tell Debbie I'm going in after her Dad..."
"God, Jarod!" she burst out in emotional pain, "how can I tell her that I walked right by and never even thought to..."
He grabbed her by the neck and pulled her to him. "Tell her the truth - you had no way of knowing, and had no reason to suspect that he'd be there. If you'd have known, you wouldn't have left him - you know it, and she does too if she thinks about it a little. This is NOT your fault, do you understand?"
"Just find him, Jarod," Miss Parker whispered brokenly, then stretched up to kiss his sooty cheek.
"I'll be home as soon as I know, one way or the other. OK?"
She nodded, and then watched him walk off to join the pair of firemen assigned to enter the pit that was the Centre's underground facility with him. A tear of fear and frustration rolled slowly down her cheek, and she tipped her head back with her eyes closed against the harsh halogen light until a gentle hand landed on her shoulder.
"Miss? I've been asked to take you home?"
The fireman watched the woman slowly pull herself back together again and finally nod, then she trudged silently at his side to the edge of the clearing and the police car that had been loaned him for his shuttle duties. She settled into the passenger seat with a soft sigh and leaned her head back against the head rest, eyes closed.
He didn't ask - he really didn't want to know. He just started the motor and pulled the car gently down the drive, leaving the rubble and flashing lights and sounds of rescue far behind.
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