She closed her eyes, willed her heart to slow it’s beat.
Shepard.
She kicked open the door to the fifteenth floor and fell through it.
‘God,’ she whispered, ‘I’m dying.’ She picked herself up and ran along the curving corridor, opening each door she came to and shouting ‘Shepard!’ into the room. Every room was the same; a pie-wedge of carpet, glass wall and abandoned tube steel office furniture.
‘Shepard!’
She could have missed him. She could have been round this corridor a dozen times. Where were all the people? The Sikh had said they were up here, clearing out fifteen. They had moved on. They had moved down. Elevator well. They might still moving stuff into the elevators. Check there. She did and saw the sliding doors close on an elevator-load of civilians laden with cardboard boxes. At the front. Right between the closing doors. Looking right at her.
‘Shepard!’
He recognized her. His eyes widened in surprise. He opened his mouth to speak. He started forward. And the doors sealed in front of him. Gaby wailed and hit the call button with the heel of her hand. The illuminated numbers above the door rapidly diminished, stopped abruptly at eight. Gaby rushed out of the elevator lobby back to the stairs. Fifteen. Fourteen. Easier to go down than up, but not much. There’s a lot of gravity in that central stairwell. Don’t look down between the handrails. Thirteen. Twelve. Turning on to eleven, she saw it out of the window and stopped dead.
The big bat-winged thing came in silent as a secret wish across the smoky skyline of Nairobi. It did not seem natural in the air; it seemed to fight and dodge the air currents, side-slipping and swooping and warping its leather wings. It flew by defiance, and thus Gaby knew, with fundamental certainty, that it was going to hit the tower. It was going to hit the tower two levels below her, on the ninth floor. She knew she could not make it. She stood on the eleventh floor landing and watched the thing swell to fill her vision. Bat wings obliterated the view. She cried out and covered her face. The thing hit the Kenyatta tower like an artillery shell. Gaby reeled toward the big drop at the centre of the stairwell as the building shuddered. She stared into the abyss and threw herself back. Clangings and distant crashings of falling objects rebounding from the stairwell walls came from beneath. Gaby ventured as close as she dared. She could hear a high-pressure hissing; water lines broken, or the doodlebug releasing its spores?
The thing had demolished outer and partition walls and had wedged itself into an office adjoining the stairwell. From tenth to eighth floors the stairs did not exist. Sulphur yellow flowers were already breaking out across the concrete walls; the carpet of the shattered office was bubbling into a stew of pseudo-fungi. Slimy ropes of Chaga stuff hung down the stairwell. Already it would be working on the elevator cables. There was no other way down. She was trapped.
Towering un-ferno.
She thought that was a pretty good joke to think up when you are climbing for your life from voraciously devouring Chaga. Up. It was the only way. The only hope. By twenty-two, her legs were screaming. She stumbled into an office that looked over Parliament Square. The cordon of soldiers were running to their carriers. The convoy of trucks was forming up and moving up. The helicopters had started their engines. She picked up a tube steel chair and smashed the window. No one looked up. She threw the chair out. No one saw it fall.
‘You cannot leave me here!’ she yelled. ‘Shepard, you cannot do this to me!’
He had seen her. He knew she was here. He would be watching to see who came out of the foyer. He would not abandon her. What would he do? He could not come up the tower to rescue her. Helicopter.
She climbed, delirious with exertion and pain. The top. To the top. Top of the world, Pa. Girl Reporter In Skyscraper Rescue Thriller. She could not remember how many floors there were in the Kenyatta Conference Centre.
The stairs ended on her and she opened the door. Sun. Light. Wind. Heat. Altitude. Vertigo. She was in the centre of the central flower at the top of the tower. Steel petals inclined away from her. Don’t look at the edge. Don’t look up. Don’t look down. Then what do you look at?
A helicopter lifted past, close enough for her to feel the down-draught. It turned to the west, toward the airport. Gaby took off her orange press jacket and waved it over her head.
‘See me, you fuckers! It’s me. I’m still here. Come and get me. Come on, Shepard, don’t let me down now.’
Gaby waved her orange jacket and shouted and shouted and shouted.
Florida Storm Warning
62
The crab ran along the tide line, hunting. It scuttled in and out in time to the gentle run and flow of the foam-edged water. Its legs left little pin-point prints in the white sand. The sand was not native to this place. It had been brought, like the rest of the long, narrow peninsula, by truck from another place. It was part of the contract that the builders environmentally enhance the two-mile strip of land-fill trash. Between the white sand and the edge of the grass, you could see the bones of the thing: the cans and the cars and the twenty million black plastic refuse sacks. That was what made it such a good place for the crabs, and the gulls, and the waders in the shallow water between the peninsula and the shore.
Nothing on the tide today. Not even a rotting condom washed up from the resort hotels down the coast. The crab ran up the beach to clamber through the trash line. It was a big bastard; its shell was the size of your hand, and the colour of a hard dick. It wore its fighting claws the way a punch-drunk middleweight gone to fat wore his gloves. The crab gobbled with its feeding mandibles and tasted it. It darted sideways and tugged at something wedged under the creased black belly of a trash sack. A rat had died here and rotted. The crab tore and tore. It tore a leg right off with its battle claws.
The gull had been watching the big crab from a hover twenty feet up, waiting for its moment to swoop and steal. It saw the crab wave the rat leg in its claws. It dived. It crawked in its throat at the crab, flapped its wings, stabbed with its beak. It was bigger, smarter, meaner; all the crab had was a thick shell and dumb obstinacy. It held on. The gull danced after it, pecking. The crab backed all the way up on to the grass. The crab could go as easily backwards as forwards or sideways. The gull did not let up. The crab led the gull across the tough, salt grass. At the edge of the concrete it made its stand. The gull stabbed and weaved. The big crab held up its fighting claws and circled.