Richard returns the hard way
Richard's eyes flew open before he was fully conscious, and when he really came to all he could see was deep, flat, featureless darkness. There was no sound either, just a silence so complete that he gasped out loud and was relieved to hear his own voice.
The fact that he could gasp took away a little of his terror and told him his worst fears had probably not happened. But all, certainly, had not gone well. He could breathe though, his chest moving up and down easily. He decided to just go with that for a minute, breathing in and out and letting his pounding heart slow down.
Once it did he tried to raise his right hand to his head to feel for cuts or bleeding, but when he couldn't move that arm even a fraction of an inch he got a bad thrill again. His left arm flew up in a panic. In fact his whole left side jumped, reaching instinctively toward the arm he could not move and he realized he had nearly full range of movement on his left. He could lift his head. It also didn't feel like anything was broken or crushed, and all of this good news in a matter of a second was such a relief it brought a sting of tears to his eyes.
He knew he had more reason than ever to be glad he was mortal again. Forever would be a very long time to spend trapped, if that were what he was. He thought he'd better start to try to find out.
There was a lighter in his right hand pants pocket, a tool for lighting torches on the island. He tried to reach around for it, but it was inconveniently buried at the bottom of the pocket, under a compass and half of a Dharma granola bar that was still in its wrapper. Several minutes of struggling to get the left hand into the opposite pocket or to push the lighter up and out onto the floor got him a pulled muscle in his side and a fresh layer of sweat, but no closer to illumination. He realized he'd better think about another approach before he exhausted himself.
He lay there and could smell that the air around him was mostly dry and dank, with the tiniest traces of freshness - outdoor air seeping in. But it wasn't strong enough to constitute a breeze. He knew where he should be, but feared he was yards from there at best—and at worst, who knew where. He was most definitely in an abandoned space, somewhere no one had been in awhile. And from the lack of light, there was more darkness beyond wherever that fresh air was coming in. He tried to smell a hint of anything in the air that might tell him something but came up with only a vague, musty dampness.
He touched the ground to his left, and felt what seemed to be polished stone or smooth flooring, definitely not dirt. He twisted to his right again, and found that side of him was on a grating or drain with long metal bars widely spaced, at least several inches apart. His right arm was hanging straight down through one of the gaps, either fallen or propelled through it on his less-than-graceful arrival. His heart raced again as he realized he couldn't move that arm or hand because he could not feel them, and he wondered suddenly how long he'd been stuck here, how long he had been pinned.
Richard unbuttoned his shirt, and started pulling it off his left shoulder and then shirking it off his left arm bit-by-bit, relieved that his sleeves were rolled up and not buttoned down. Still, getting his left arm loose took several painful minutes, each jolt through his left arm, shoulder and neck telling him that he'd landed hard. That done, he started dragging the dark blue fabric up and behind his head, twisting and pulling to try to get it around and over the top of him.
His left hand banged into something hard and sharp as he swung it around, and he realized the metal grating he was laying on was not in one piece but was broken and twisted to the point of curling in wrong directions: At least the portion to his north-east was that badly damaged. That's when he heard the sighing sound. It was the creaking, hollow sound that a broken, barely balanced metal structure would make just before it collapsed.
Richard tried inching very slowly to his left, and the creaking and sighing turned into a symphony of wobbling, swaying metal. He felt a sickening motion down and to the right as whatever the structure was that was holding half of his body started to fall. From the pain in his right hip and knee joints, he realized he was starting to fall too. In an instant, he exhaled hard and rolled to his left, pulling on the shirt, yelling in fear and praying he wasn't about to collapse into – what?
He twisted so much that he found himself on his stomach, his right arm and its slowly returning circulation making their presence known with a burning that shot from his shoulder through his fingertips. He still couldn't move his right hand, and he lay there hoping that would be temporary. He felt the cold stone on his face and wanted to just take some comfort in the coolness- but then he realized he didn't know what else might crumple around him.
He rolled left and onto his back again, and began to sit up. Almost immediately, his head hit something - solid metal from the sound it made, with a dull clonk so loud he guessed he'd have a nasty bruise on the forehead to show for it. He fell back, swearing out loudly in several languages from pain and complete frustration, his left hand over his throbbing forehead.
At least he had a general idea where he was now. He expected he was in a crawl space, part of a ventilation system that snaked under the floors and around the outer walls of the Dharma hatches on the island. There were ten hatches, several of which the 815'ers had found in their time there: The Flame, the Pearl, the Orchid… and in the middle of the nine sat one hatch the 815'ers never did find, the one represented by a big question mark at dead center of the iridescent blast door map John Locke had spotted three years earlier. That's where Richard suspected he was now, actually hoped he was - since that hatch represented by the question mark is what he had been aiming for.
It dawned on him lying there that it was some kind of a small miracle that John Locke hadn't thought to go charging straight toward that symbol, the one thing that clearly sat the very center of Radzinsky's map with lines connecting it to every other station. Locke had seen enough of the blast door map to draw it from memory, and yet he never, apparently, set out to find the question mark. Thank God for small favors, Richard thought.
If he was in the crawl space, then there should be several places at which the metal floor above his head would be interrupted by more bars above him, ventilation points where, if he was lucky, he could break through and up into the station if they weren't bolted down hard, and if the portion he was resting on wasn't so broken that it fell into nothingness.
The crawl spaces, he knew, sat just a couple of feet below the floor level of each hatch and the metal grating that extended beyond them and around the outside of the hatch went all the way up to the island above and then down 60 feet or more beneath the hatch floors. It allowed for drainage, and forced ventilation when needed. But this one, it felt to him, was pretty much blown apart. Had the explosion during the incident done it? The hatches closer to the Swan where known to have suffered some damage in the Incident, and that, in part, led to their disrepair, but nothing like this kind of brokenness had been found. If the blast had done this much, what would he find inside if he could get there?
But not getting there wasn't an option. If he fell into the gap created by the crumpled metal, who knew what he might fall on? And even if he survived that, Richard expected he'd still never get out, at least not alone. There was next to no chance anyone else was going to enter the Weather Vane anytime soon.
He lay there for one more minute and smelled the air again, trying to gauge where the hint of freshness was coming from. To his south, he decided, and started digging in his heels a couple of feet ahead, pulling himself yard by yard through the crawl space and making sure to feel first if the ground below him felt firm before he inched forward.
He pounded on the first grate he saw above his head with the heel of his left hand, but it was bolted down tight. He kept moving. It was the same with the second one he dragged himself to twenty minutes later. But then came the third, and when he reached up and banged and pushed on the bars he heard a squeaking that signaled a weakness in the connection of grate to flooring that made him cry out with relief. Sixteen sharp pushes upward, and it gave way.
Richard dragged himself up the couple of feet into what he was now very sure was the Weather Vane station, though he still could not see it or exactly what conditions he might be lifting himself into. For a few minutes he stayed there on the floor, somewhere between consciousness and a strange, jumpy, uneasy dream in which he was sitting in his first home having dinner with Isabella. They had just argued about something, but he couldn't remember what.
Then he was awake again and she was gone. He pulled himself up to sitting, and started pushing the contents of his pocket out onto the floor. His right arm was picking and burning in a way that gave him hope for its future, but it wasn't much use to him yet, and it was a slow process. The shirt he'd used as a sling to pull his arm from the vent got in his way, and he leaned far to his left until the fabric fell and he could slide it back on with a grimace. He broke out in exhausted laughter when he realized he'd unconsciously taken the time to button it up and fix the sleeves with his good left hand, laughing at the wasted investment of time and energy when he was still sitting in the dark.
He felt around on the floor, and his fingers found the lighter. Then the Dharma station was dimly illuminated for him – the huge, circular space with a ceiling fifteen feet high in the air, a bank of computers and a work area that stretched most of the way around, a kitchen, bathroom and bunk space to his left and his right, not terribly different from the setup of the Swan but with many more computers, machines that were visibly much more modern than anything in any of the other hatches. It looked good, no visible signs of damage inside.
He stood and found that the room swam and went a little grey on him when he did. He made it to the fuse boxes and threw on the power to the hatch, then went to the kitchen sink and threw on the cold tap. It took nearly three minutes before the water ran clear, and he drank for what felt like minutes more before heading for the bunks.
He wondered as he fell asleep what he'd find when he woke up and left the hatch. He prayed he hadn't just made the worst possible mess of everything. If he hadn't, then a few hours of sleep wouldn't matter. If he had, then nothing much, he knew, would really help.