Chapter 126 The Exodus
The murder of a skyscraper comes to your teeth.
It began as a deep groan, a shiver which shot up through the soles of my boots when we were racing down the maintenance stairs. It was the scrape of the steel I-beams, as they gave their yield point, of concrete under the pressure of millions of tons of weight, as the powder.
"Move! Move!" With a scream, Ryker leaped over the railing on to the landing on the lower side. "Don't stop for breath! The spine is snapping!"
Against time, we were competing against time. The infection in the lower levels in the living rubble Karn had contrived to make, had consumed the columns that bore the weight. The Spire was not falling upon itself, it was sinking at the knees.
We exploded onto the Garage Level.
It was chaos. But it was organized chaos.
Jaxon was on the hood of an adapted city bus screaming orders at people on a megaphone.
"Column One, load up! Children in the center! Armored units on the flanks! Hoo! fill it up, if it has wheels and an engine!
The garage was full of smoke and engine clatter. Vane had been busy.
The number of vehicles was dozens. The Beast was sitting in the front, with its plow shining with oil. In the background were three city buses that had their windows welded-up with sheet metal and chain fences. The wagons had their sandbags stacked on the roofs of the delivery vehicles, and the buggies were fast-attack--roofless jeeps on which the machine guns were mounted.
"Vane!" Ryker sprinted to the Beast. "Status!"
Vane got out of the driver-hatch. He was dotted with grease and sweat.
We have 90 percent of the population loaded, Vane told, above the noise. The New citizens are in the lead bus with the seeds. The militia are riding shotgun on the trucks. But we have a problem."
"The ramp?" Ryker asked.
The exit tunnel, pointed at by Vane, is missing its main ramp. It had been hollowed in, walled over with throbbing black veins. "The building settled on it. We're sealed in."
Make a door, said Baron, racking his shotgun.
"I tried drilling," Vane said. "It's too thick. We need a shape charge."
We have no time to levy fees! Sato screamed, rushed up with a box of hard drives-the totality of her work. " The ceiling is cracking! Look!"
She pointed up. A web crack was creeping on the roof of the garage made of concrete. Dust rained down.
"Gareth," Ryker said suddenly.
He looked around.
"Where is Gareth?"
Darkly a rasping voice had responded.
Gareth came forward behind a pillar. He looked worse than before. The vines in his neck were stouter, and had a violet light throbbing in them. His skin was the color of ash. But he was bearing a huge, industrial mining laser- a implements which were used to slice diamonds in the deep crust.
"You need a door?" Gareth gasped, and threw the heavy laser on his shoulder. "I can cut one."
It will be too long, thought Vane. It is four feet of reinforced concrete.
Not the wall, Gareth said, and one of his grey fingers was pointing at the far end of the garage. "The fuel tank."
We looked.
The main diesel reservoir of the emergency generators was embedded into the south wall. It was huge, rusted and stuffed.
It will not simply make a hole, I said to myself: but I said to Gareth, IF I puncture that tank, and start the fumes on fire it will not just make a hole. It will shatter all the south wall in the street.
It will murder anybody who stands in its path, Ryker said to himself.
Gareth smiled. It was a hideous manifestation whatever, his teeth stained violet.
I have no intentions of standing, Gareth said. "I'm planting."
He looked at his legs. The vines were boiling through his pants holding him down to the floor.
I cannot go, King, I cannot go, Gareth said to himself. "The Spire... it's part of me now. When I pass out of the broadcast range of the building, I am killed. The Fever won't let me go."
Ryker stepped forward. He touched Gareth on the shoulder.
"You are a Union man," Ryker said. "To the end."
"Union strong," Gareth coughed.
He hefted the laser.
Get into the cars, Gareth said. You have ten seconds to get away at the time I begin to cut, before the vapour ignites. Don't be late."
"Load up!" Ryker roared.
We scrambled into the Beast. Ryker occupied the seat beside the passenger. I cowered in the rear with Sato and Baron.
"All units!" Ryker was crackling on the convoy radio. "Driver, stand by! On my mark!"
Gareth limped towards the fuel tank. He leanted on a pillar. He turned around and looked at us one more time. He nodded.
He pulled the trigger.
ZZZ-ZAP.
A blast of pure white heat flew as the mining laser. It cut the rusted steel of the fuel tank.
Diesel sprayed out. It was started by a laser in an instant.
"GO!" Ryker screamed.
Vane threw on the accelerator.
BOOM.
The physical blow was the explosion. A house-sized fireball exploded on the south wall. The concrete burst broken out into the street by the pure power of the explosion.
Gareth lost his life in the blaze.
"Punch it!" Vane yelled.
The Roar of the Beast cut up the wet concrete with its tires. We went through smoke and fire, bumping over the debris of the wall that had been blown.
We hit the street.
In the background, the buses and the trucks were trailing behind, their engines howling to get purchase.
We were out.
But we weren't safe.
"Look up!" I screamed, with a jerk through the rear slit.
The Spire was tilting.
The last building support had been demolished in the explosion. The gigantic glass needle, a mile in height, started to lean.
It was a deliberate, grand, dreadful fall.
The building had glass skin, and this buckled. The size of cars fell on the plaza in shards. The framework of the steel skeleton moaned--a moan of a dying whale which reverberated throughout the whole city.
"Drive, Vane! Drive!" Baron howled.
The carnival ripped along the avenue of the main, through the rubble of the old world.
Behind us, the Spire fell.
It did not simply fall over, it broke. The shock of its landing on the ground shook the Beast to his suspension like an earthquake. Hundreds of feet in the air a cloud of dust and debris came rolling down the streets, and after us.
"Faster!" Ryker ordered. "Outrun the dust!"
We drove until the engine temperature was redlined. We drove till the cloud of destruction had been seen in the distance.
We had come to the outskirts of the city -the breach in the North Wall where the Titan had broken in days ago.
Ryker indicated the convoy to halt.
The Beast was loitering along the boundary of the Deadlands. The other cars came into view behind us, beaten, burnt, yet there.
We got out.
We stood upon the frozen earth and turned around.
The landscape of the skyline was transformed.
The Spire was gone. Instead, there was a jagged mountain of twisted metal and broken glass. The fall of the ruins caused smoke, which mingled with the violet light of the Rot which was already coming in to take possession of the carcass.
No more, Jaxon said to himself, as his binoculars were lowered. "Everything. The archives. The armory. My apartment."
It was a building, all right, Ryker said. His voice was as rough as it was; yet I could see the suffering in his eyes. "We saved the people."
Not all, I thought of Gareth, and said. Imagining the ones who could not go fast enough to the stairs.
"Where do we go now?" Silas asked. The New Citizen was holding a bag of the Grey seeds. "We can't stay in the open. The radiation... the cold..."
Ryker turned to the North.
He pointed to the sky.
A thin veil of black smoke was cutting between the clouds--the contrail of the wrecked Purist vessel.
"We follow them," Ryker said. "They have a base. They have technology. And they possess the single thing we want.
"A ride off this rock?" Vane asked.
"No," Ryker said. "A future."
He got up on the hood of the Beast so that they all could see him.
"Listen to me!" Ryker shouted. His coat was blown about by the wind.
"The Spire is dead! The Iron Sovereignty is dead! We are not citizens anymore! We are not Wolves or Humans or Mutants!
He drew his Star-Metal sword. It shone in the watery sunshine.
"We are the Exodus! And we are the survivors of the fire! The road ahead is long. It is cold. The dark has monsters in it.
He viewed the land of Karn in the ruins of the North District.
And there are monsters behind us.
He sheathed the sword.
"But we have the Beast. We have the Seed. And we have each other. Mount up! We drive North!"
There was a shout of joy in the convoy. It was not the courtesy of the Council. It was a raw, primal roar.
Back into the cars we climbed.
I sat next to Ryker. He took my hand. His grip was tight.
"You okay?" he asked.
I am homeless, I said, and a tear was running down my cheek. "Again."
Which is home, where the pack is, said Ryker.
Vane gunned the engine.
The convoy jostled onward abandoning the city ruins. The clouds led us into the white emptiness of the Deadlands, with our hunt of the sky.
The Siege was over. The Long Walk had begun.