Someone was coughing. It took a minute before I realized that it was me. My throat felt like it was on fire, and my chest was tight and heavy, like I'd just breathed in a lot of bad shit.
I opened my eyes, and it didn't make a damn bit of difference. That was right, concrete thundering down around me. I closed me eyes, so I could at least pretend it was just a game of me being blind as a bat, and felt around with my hands. Enough space to sit up. Enough space to stretch out under the lip of the platform. Maybe half a meter from side to side. I was buried alive.
Panic rose up immediately, trying to overwhelm me. I'm not a big fan of enclosed spaces. With a curse, I slammed my fist into one of the concrete shards. It bruised my knuckles and split one of them open, but the pain gave me something to hold on to.
"Calm the fuck down, asshole," I muttered. I made myself take a deep breath, and then another. I was blind, but I still had other senses. I could still hear. I settled down and listened, trying to ignore the pounding of my heart, sounding loud in my ears.
I got a dull roar, the sounds of a firestorm. The dim sound of klaxon fire alarms.
This was good. It meant the layer of concrete burying me wasn't too deep, if I
could still hear. And it also meant the concrete was saving my ass right now,
keeping me from getting cooked.
Damnit, I just had to hope that Wufei had gotten out. Wufei was many things, but fire-proof was not one of them.
I took my time, feeling out my concrete prison, finding all the cracks in the rocks, pushing here and there. When one shove got me a lump of concrete on the foot for my trouble, I decided to let it be for a minute. I was getting air. I could survive until the fire died down and someone wandered my way.
Right on cue, the roaring over my head subsided. I stopped, barely even breathing,
and listened with all my might. Footsteps. The murmur of voices. The thin sound
of a kid crying. These were all good signs. And then I heard another murmur of
sound, its tone familiar. Maybe I was just lying to myself so I'd feel better, but
it sounded like Wufei.
I experimentally shoved at the concrete above me again. There was a shower of dust that got in my eyes, making me say some really foul words. When I'd finally teared up enough to see again, there was a tiny crack overhead. It let in a thin bit of light, and a waft of dubiously fresh air that smelled like dust, burnt flesh and hair, and overheated rock.
"Wufei?" I called. I had to hope those voices were the good guys, and they were looking for me, lead by Wufei. I shoved at the concrete again, smart enough to close my eyes this time. I was rewarded by the crack getting a bit wider, though from the way the rubble was grinding together, I wouldn't get it to move from that angle again. I half stood, back pressed against the underside of the platform, and put my ear to the crack.
"...suggest you come with us," an unfamiliar voice said. It had a strange accent, and hissed at the sibilants. For lack of anything better, I mentally labled the guy 'Hisser.'
"I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you," Wufei said. Good boy, Wu. Never go with strangers that offer you candy.
"My compatriot is too polite; don't think that you have a choice," said a second voice, also male. I decided to mentally call him 'Bob' since he didn't really have any other defining characteristics.
"Be that as it may, I still will not go with you," Wufei said.
"You are hardly in a position to fight us," Bob said. "Surely you'd prefer to reach your destination in one piece?"
"The master said he only had to be alive..." Hisser commented. "Didn't say uninjured." There was the sound of movement. What the hell... why wasn't Wufei running? He couldn't be that far from the exit. "What is this he has behind him?" Hisser asked, his voice a sickening little sing-song. "A child... how sweet and tender..."
"Don't even think about it," Wufei said, his voice cold.
"Oh, but I already have," Hisser replied. "Come here, little one, I promise that it will feel like a dream..."
Things got confusing then; I couldn't really tell what was happening just by listening. But I heard the sounds of struggle, and fighting. The child started crying, the sound becoming more frantic with each passing second. I could imagine Hisser perhaps trying to lure the kid away, and Wufei holding him back. I knew how that worked.
Experimentally, I shoved at different areas of the rubble pile, dislodging cascade of dusk that made me cough and wheeze. I cracked my head on the rubble and the edge of the platform several times, but I didn't care. I needed to get out, needed to help Wufei. And the fucking concrete wouldn't budge.
"NEVER!" Wufei shouted.
I'd been trying to keep sort of quiet while I was a sitting duck, but that was a bit much. There was so much defiance and fear in that one shouted word. "WUFEI!" I just about screamed. I didn't know if he'd even hear me.
Then the screaming began.
I couldn't help myself at that point. I could tell that it was Wufei screaming, and considering the ungodly pain tolerance he had...it just didn't bear thinking about. As I continued to batter away ineffectually at the concrete, tears ran freely down my cheeks, mixing with the dust that was everywhere in my little prison. I couldn't take the sound of my best friend on the stinking planet howling in agony. "WUFEI!" I screamed again. I doubt that anyone could have heard me over it all.
And then came something that I will never forget, not if I live a million years. There was a roar of primal rage that sent me to my knees, covering my ears and cowering like a frightened child. Wind shrieked past the crack in the rubble, filling my little prison with flying dust and an unearthly chill. There was more screaming, but this time, it wasn't Wufei--the voices belonged to Hisser and Bob, and the sounds they made could only be compared what I'd heard earlier, when Treize had begun rending the hapless messenger limb from limb.
It went on and on, until I swore it would never stop.
I couldn't say when the sounds stopped. The sensory overload left a dull roaring in my ears that faded only slowly, until I could finally hear the high, thin wail of terror that had to belong to the little boy. "Oh God, no..." I renewed my attack on the rubble. Blood was running thickly from my hands, cut open on the jagged edges of the concrete. With a barely suppressed scream of my own, threw myself against the rubble again, and this time it moved just a little. The crack widened enough for me to get my hand out. I didn't even pause to think. I tore frantically at the crack, trying to widen it more. "Wufei, you idiot! You God-be-damned IDIOT!"
"Who are you calling an idiot, Maxwell?"
I stopped my frantic digging for a moment, and shoved my face against the crack. I could see out with one eye. And I just about fell over with relief at the sight of Wufei. There was a fleur-de-lies shaped burn marring his chest above his left nipple, but otherwise, he appeared unharmed. It should be noted that he was also suffering from a complete lack of clothing. Naked or not, I'd never been happier to see him in my life.
Wufei slid picked his way carefully down the rubble that lay over the tracks, pausing for a moment to sit on one of the large concrete blocks. He was panting like he'd just run a marathon.
"What the hell did you do, Wufei?" I demanded. "Are you okay?"
"I'll live, Duo... I'm just very tired, suddenly." Wufei shook his head. "I believe that I'm uninjured."
"What happened?" I asked again.
Wufei put his face in his hands. His fingers were clutching at stray wisps of hair. "I...don't remember," he ground out.
"What do you mean, you don't remember?" I shook my head. Wufei of all people - he had a mind like a fucking steel trap.
"I mean I don't remember!" Wufei's voice rose to a pained shout. "I remember fighting the first... I remember the other pinning me, and them burning me, but nothing else." He shook his head, his shoulders beginning to tremble, "I don't remember any more. I can't!"
"Okay... okay, Wu, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. But right now, I need a hand. I can't get all this shit moved on my own. Can you help me out?" I swallowed down the five million questions and anger and worry, doing my best to keep my voice calm and soothing.
Wufei took a deep breath and then nodded.
"Okay. Good. Let's get going..." It took a lot longer than I wanted to think about to get a space big enough for me to wiggle out of cleared. All the while, I had visions of new vampires creeping up on us, ready to jump Wufei again and do God knew what to him. Wufei barely had the strength to stand, but between the two of us, we managed to shove enough rubble out of the way. I wiggled through the crack the minute it was big enough for my shoulders, leaving plenty of shreds of clothing and skin behind.
"This is too fucked up," I said, trying to shake some of the dust out of my hair while serruptitiously checking Wufei out for wounds I might have missed with the limited view. Nope, nothing. I untucked the rathe abused shirt and unbuttoned it, handing it over to him. It was better than nothing, even dirty and full of holes, and thankfully long enough to cover the important bits.
Wufei let out a bitter laugh before I continued, "Let's go find the other guys. We should get to the Oz base. We know who Treize wants now, so we can serve him up on a fucking silver platter, and that'll take care of half our problems, right?"
"I don't care where we go any longer, Duo," Wufei said, "as long as we leave here, now."
"No problem. I'm not exactly attached to this... what's left of this station either." I looped Wufei's arm over my shoulders and we slowly picked our way up the rubble heap, onto the platform.
Right into a room of carnage.
I'd been expecting burnt wreckage, cracked stones, corpses halfway to being cremated. What I wasn't ready for was the fact that everything was covered with a fine red mist, turning the entire room a dark, dirty red. Someone had liquefied Hisser and Bob and sprayed them across every available surface.
I felt breakfast, lunch, and dinner all high tailing it for the escape hatch, but managed to control myself. Wufei made a heaving sound that I wasn't particularly enamored of. "Chew it down, Wu. We don't have any more clothes."
Movement caught my eye, drawing me right toward the little boy I'd hear, who was curled up in a ball against a pile of rubble. He was alive and didn't have any obvious injuries, but he was also covered with gore like everything else in the room. I settled Wufei down on a pile of rubble temporarily and then knelt in front of the kid, trying to think of anything to say. I finally settled on "Yo."
He looked up at me, sudden intelligence flooding into his eyes. It wasn't the look of a kid, that was for sure, but I knew all too well that blood ages a person. "Are they gone?" he whispered.
It says a lot about how fucked up a kid's gotten when he doesn't even notice that there are little bits of someone's brain in his hair.
I nodded. "It's okay now," I said. "But we need to leave." Sudden terror flooded into his eyes, so I continued quickly. "There should be a police station somewhere nearby, right? The police will help get you back to your parents."
He calmed down with that. "Okay," he whispered.
I stood, getting ready to pick him up. Suddenly, his eyes widened as he
looked behind me, and he let out a shriek of pure fear. I whipped around,
only to come face to face, not to mention gun barrel to chest, with a very
confused Wufei. By the time we got ourselves sorted out, the kid was gone,
fled up the cracked and warped stairs to the street. He was nowhere in sight when
we picked our way through the mess after him and made it to street level. I could
only hope that he'd gotten himself to safety.
I looked toward the east. There was an odd orange glow on the horizon. It made something deep inside me, that animal part of my brain, very nervous. I dug around in my pockets until I came up with the radio. It was covered with grey dust like everything else, and the LCD was cracked, but it still seemed to work. "Zero-two to anyone listening on this frequency. Come in," I said.
There was a long enough pause that for a moment, I felt frozen with fear. Had they gotten the other guys? Then came a short crackle of static, and, "Zero-one to zero-two. What is your location?"
I would have fallen over with the relief of it all if I hadn't needed to hold Wufei up. "Zero-one, we're at clusterfuck ground zero, but rumors of our death have been greatly overexaggerated. You boys mind swinging by to collect us?" I glanced to the east again. "I think there's a party going on that we need to crash."