Breaking Point (Article 5 #2)(83)

Nobody was going to come.

Nobody was left alive.

Everyone had died in the earthquake, or whatever it was. I didn’t even know how long I’d been down here.

After a while I became still, too scared to move. The seconds passed, one by one. I tried to count them, anything to quiet the scalding horror. When I passed one hundred, I stopped, realizing that I’d begun the countdown to the end.

I was going to die here.

I wasn’t even going to get to tell Chase good-bye.

I tried to hold on to what I could in my last moments. His rough, strong fingers intertwined with mine. His mouth tightening to hold back angry words, and the way his shoulders hunched when he’d gone too long without sleep. I knew the exact angle in which I had to lift my chin in order to kiss him, and what his laugh sounded like, and how a nightmare could make him, of all people, feel small.

I held his memories. Of when he’d gotten all As on his seventh-grade report card, and when he’d gotten grounded for fighting Jackson Pruitt in the sixth grade. Of how he fit into his family. Of how he fit into mine.

When I was gone, who would remember who he really was?

Stop, I told myself. I’ve lived through rehabilitation. I’ve escaped an MM base. I’ve survived a fire.

I am not dead yet.

“Help!” I whispered. And then my whispers turned louder, and louder, and my cry for help became his name. I shouted it twenty times. Thirty. All the while, I resumed my attack on that unmovable board.

My voice grew hoarse. My throat was on fire, closing with each frantic second. I would have sold my soul for some water.

I am not dead yet.

I summoned every fiber of strength in my entire body. I called upon every bit of determination within me. And I pushed.

The board tilted above me, and dust rained down on my face. I coughed and squeezed my eyes closed. My good arm had succeeded in dislodging the barrier. Now that I had enough room to move I added my knee. Every muscle in my abdominals and back contracted. Whispered screams of exertion belted through my locked jaw.

And then I heard something.

I held my breath, fighting off the sudden burst of faintness.

“… think someone’s down there!”

A frenzied state of urgency took me, and as the light filtered in from the window I’d loosened, I fought like an animal. Every thought cleared from my head. I had to get out of here now.

I shimmied out before my rescuer pulled the board all the way off of me. Sweating and exhausted, I stared into the face of a green-eyed ghost. Not a ghost. His flawless skin was covered with white concrete dust.

Not you, I thought. Anyone but you.

Tucker shined a flashlight into my face. I wasn’t ready for the brightness. It burned straight through to my brain.

“Help me up!” My mouth moved, but no sound came out.

“She’s alive!” he shouted to someone behind him.

I shoved to my knees and jerked up too quickly, stars exploding in my vision. Tucker grasped my waist for support.

My legs wobbled, but could still support my weight. There didn’t appear to be any real damage to them, but the bruises must have gone straight through; they throbbed to the marrow. My wrist was another story. It was contorted to the side, and nearly made me vomit to look at. Had it not been so numb, I was sure it would have been killing me.

“That table saved your life,” Tucker said. “Good thinking getting under it.”

There was an absent, distant feel to him. The kind Chase sometimes got when he’d been left alone too long with his thoughts.

I glanced down to where he pointed. The table from the supply room had been tossed aside. The legs were broken on one end: where my ankles had been trapped. I shuddered; not allowing myself to consider what might have happened should the opposite legs—those on either side of my head—have collapsed.

Our half of the room was still standing, but the cave-in had taken out most of the opposite wall. All that remained was a landslide of rock, some pieces bigger than my body.

The exit was wiped out.

A dozen people were close, assisting the injured or shoveling away the debris. Crying voices. Moaning. A scream. I didn’t know why they weren’t running.

“Chase,” I demanded. Please let him be alive.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

I spun, coming face-to-face with the boy with almond eyes from the supply room. He held a canteen, and taken by a force beyond my control, I snatched it from his hands.

I tried to drink only a little, but it soothed my aching throat, and I couldn’t stop. Soon more than half the canteen was gone. He didn’t seem to care that I gasped and sputtered, or that half the water dribbled down my shirt.

I grabbed his shoulder with my good hand and pulled myself close to his ear.

“Chase Jennings,” I whispered. “He came with me from Knoxville.”

The boy blinked.

“I haven’t seen him in the last hour, but he lived through the blast.”

Alive. But my stomach stayed knotted. I’d been down in that hole for more than an hour. Because of a blast. Had we been bombed?

“Where is he?” I mouthed.

“Sick bay.” He pointed in the direction of the airfield.

I shoved by him, still unsteady on my feet. I half walked, half ran through the gravel, tripping only once and then catching myself. I peered into every face, but no raven hair. No wolf eyes. My head was throbbing, and the lights from the hand-cranked lanterns and flashlights left comet trails across my vision.