Eleven, Twelve ... Dig and delve (Rebekka Franck Book 6) (7 page)

It broke my heart. Thomas and Brian were staring at us. They kept quiet.

“I’m sorry, Afrim. We tried. She’s been in there a long time,” I said, my voice breaking.

“But I saw her fingers move. I did. I swear it’s true. It was right before you came through the wall. I saw her move her middle finger,” Afrim said. “She did. She is alive. She has to be!”

The desperation in his eyes was painful. I felt myself tear up. I couldn’t bear this. It was just too much.

“I’m sorry, kid,” David said. “She’s gone.”

20

T
HE SILENCE WAS DEVASTATING.
No one wanted to speak. Afrim was crying and crawling on top of his mother’s body, pulling himself up on his arms. I looked around and my eyes met Brian’s. They had that
told-you-so
look in them. I hated to admit it, but he was right. It was no use. The people had been buried for too long underground. Many of them had probably died while sliding down, getting hit by debris. Others had suffocated from lack of air. Not all had been as lucky as us to land in pockets with air.

“Moms don’t die!” Afrim yelled, while punching her chest. “Moms are supposed to be forever, remember?”

I kneeled next to him and put my hand on his shoulder. It hurt like crazy to see the little kid like this, and I kept wondering about Julie, William and Tobias. Did they know what had happened? Did they assume I was dead? Was Julie crying like Afrim, screaming her sadness out while Sune tried to comfort her? I wished there was some way I could tell them I was still alive.

What if you never make it out? Who will take care of her? You’re hundreds of meters underground. They’ll never be able to dig you out. You’ll die from lack of oxygen or thirst.

“Afrim…I…”

“Sh,” he said. “I heard something.” He pressed his ear closer to his mother’s chest. Then he looked at me. “Her heart is beating.”

I placed my ear to her chest as well. The boy was right. There was something. A small distant beating.

Could it be? Was this real?

I smiled. “I hear it too!”

Afrim wiped his tears away, then chuckled lightly with relief. “I told you she was alive.”

“I think you’re right!” I said, startled. I had been so sure she was dead. I couldn’t believe this.

David looked like he didn’t believe us. He came closer and kneeled next to us. He felt the pulse on her throat. His eyes grew big and wide.

“Oh, my God. You’re right. It’s weak, but it’s there.” He laughed. “There’s a pulse. I feel it.”

We had to move fast now. I began chest compressions. I pushed down in the center of her chest thirty times, then tilted her head back, held her nose and blew in her mouth. I continued over and over until she started coughing. Then, I turned her to the side to let her cough up what was blocking her breathing. Dirt and blood came out of her mouth and was spat onto the ground.

“Mom!” Afrim said. I could hear fear in his voice.

She coughed again, and more blood came out of her. I could tell it frightened Afrim. Finally, she opened her eyes and mumbled something. Afrim crept close to her. “Mom, you’re going to be alright. I know you will. They all thought you were dead, but I didn’t believe them.”

She spoke to him in Albanian. Afrim laughed and hugged her.

“Mom, Mom. Buster is here too,” he yelled.

Hearing its name, the dog tried to wag its tail. I could tell it hurt. I looked at David, who was tearing up as well. He was trying to hide it, but his blinking eyes gave him away. Brian and Thomas stared at Afrim’s mother, looking baffled and alarmed. I was ecstatic to have proven them wrong. They almost made me lose hope. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I stared at the wall. My eyes locked with David’s. I could tell he thought the same thing as I. If Afrim’s mother was alive in there, then who else might be?

21

T
HEY STARTED DIGGING AGAIN.
It made Thomas Soe nervous. He was scared; no that was putting it too mildly…he was terrified that they were going to pull out the girl and save her like they had done the mother. He was hoping she had been killed in the fall. Or maybe that she had been nothing but a mirage. But, if she wasn’t, then he hoped she would die in the ground along with all the others.

Soon, they seemed to be pulling out one body after another. Most were dead, but some were still alive. Brian was getting more and more upset and started talking about the two of them getting out of there and finding an escape route.

“This place is going to be filled with injured people, along with dead bodies that’ll start to stink in a short while,” he said. “We’ll all get sick if we don’t suffocate from the lack of oxygen first. What do you say the two of us try and find a way out, instead of waiting for death to catch up with us?”

“Where would you go?” Thomas asked, while watching them pull out a body. Thomas stared anxiously until he realized it was a man. He breathed with relief, while Brian babbled on about them leaving. Thomas really didn’t want to leave until he was certain they weren’t going to find that girl anytime soon. He looked at Brian again and imagined himself licking the blood off of his forehead. Thomas shook his head. He had to try and stay focused.

“I don’t know,” Brian said. “Anywhere but here. There must be some way out of this hellhole. The way I see it, the two of them came through this tunnel. It’s pretty solid. I say we follow it till we find some way out.”

“But they came from this direction,” Thomas said. “It’s a dead end, they told us, remember? Let’s stay here.”

The woman named Rebekka Franck blew air into the man’s mouth. She was in distress. He could tell by the frantic movements. It fascinated Thomas. He liked to watch her. He liked the look in her eyes when she was panicking. The man they had saved started coughing. Rebekka smiled in relief. Thomas lost interest in her. He looked at the handsome man named David Busck. He was pulling another person out by the arm. More of the dirt wall came down and landed on them.

“Oh, great,” Brian growled. “They just keep making the cave smaller and putting more people in it. I tell you. They’re going to be the death of us!”

Thomas wasn’t listening any longer. His heartbeat was drowning out everything else as he watched the handsome man pull out the next body and perform CPR. He felt lightheaded. And it was not from the lack of oxygen.

“I say we split. Are you coming?” Brian asked.

Thomas was breathing heavily. He could hardly hear anything anymore. He stared at the girl with the big bruise on her forehead, who the handsome man was trying to revive.

Please be dead. Please don’t start breathing. Please be dead.

“If you’re not coming, I’ll go on my own,” Brian said. “I’m not staying here and dying with all these losers. That’s for sure.”

Thomas held his breath while David pushed on the girl’s chest. She didn’t move. Thomas felt relieved. Maybe she was dead, after all? David blew air into her mouth. Thomas remembered trying to kiss those lips just a few hours ago, forcing her to kiss him. She had expected him to rape her, but he hadn’t. That’s not what he wanted from her. He wanted her to show him affection; he wanted her to love him. He wanted her to tell him she loved him. Then he would kill her.

The girl moved. Thomas froze. As he watched the handsome man breathe life into the girl, he kept thinking about how he had enjoyed looking into her fearful eyes. How he wanted it again, how he wished he could hurt Rikke again.

Cheating lying bitch
.

When the girl coughed and gasped for air, Thomas knew it was time for him to disappear. None of this felt like a daydream anymore. In his dreams, his victims never survived. They never came back to haunt him. He didn’t want to be there when the girl started to tell her story. He turned and looked after Brian who had started to crawl through the tunnel.

“Wait up,” he said. “I’m coming. Wait for me.”

22

I
T STARTED TO
look like a war hospital. Hurt people were lying everywhere in the small cave next to dead bodies. It was a mess. But, nevertheless, we managed to save a lot of people. Afrim’s mother had a cellphone in her pocket with a full battery that we used for light, since Thomas and Brian had taken the lighter with them when they left. David and Afrim helped me identify the many bodies. In the dead-pile were a Mr. Frandsen, a Mrs. Krogh and the remains of the taxi-driver I had been in the car with. As I watched his lifeless body with the missing arm, I couldn’t help think that if we hadn’t stopped…if the two women hadn’t been in the accident that blocked the street, then we wouldn’t have ended up down here. We would have been long gone.

But I couldn’t think like that. It would only drive me crazy.

All I could do was move ahead. Focus on the living and keeping them alive. I was still praying and hoping that they would try to dig us out somehow. There had to be a rescue team up there, trying their best to get us out. All we had to do was wait and hope that we wouldn’t run out of oxygen. It was getting tight already, as we were a lot more people to share the sparse air. I was getting tired and sat down next to Afrim and his mother. There were no more body parts sticking out of the dirt. We had done what we could. We had saved a whole bunch of people. Now we were seventeen, I counted, including Brian and Thomas who had left, but would most definitely be back as soon as they realized the tunnel led to nowhere.

Among the rescued was the school’s librarian, a guy named Lars who also lived on the street at number thirteen, but had been pulled into the ground just after arriving at work at the school. There was a Mr. Bjerrehus, Afrim’s neighbor, he told us. There was a girl who was badly bruised. She told us her name was Malene, but other than that didn’t have strength enough to speak and tell us where she was from, since no one in here seemed to recognize her. We had also saved a guy named Michael West, who told us he was simply walking down the street when the ground caved underneath him. He didn’t know any of the others in the cave either, he said. I wondered what he was doing in the neighborhood at eight o’clock in the morning if he didn’t know anyone. But I didn’t ask. I was too exhausted. Besides Michael West, there was Benjamin, a young teenager and his mother Irene, a Kurt Hansen and his wife Annette and, finally, some guy who told us he was an engineer and that he had tried to tell the authorities for years about the possibility that the neighborhood could sink into the ground due to the erosion of the limestone underneath it. But no one would listen. He had been in the neighborhood this morning to drill samples up from the ground to determine the extent of the erosion when the collapse happened. His name was Kenneth Borges. He was a nice guy with chubby cheeks.

David sat next to me and leaned his head backwards. We stared at the dirt wall in front of us, from where we had pulled out so many bodies. I wondered how many more were still buried further in there.

Big parts of the wall had collapsed and the dirt took up a lot of space in the small cave. I stared into the deep hole that we had dug and wondered how long the big lump hanging free above it would stay in its place. If it came down on us, it would most likely bury most of us. I suddenly wondered if it had all been all in vain…digging out all these people just to get them crushed. Most of them were too weak to be able to move or dig themselves out again.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself with my family again. How badly I missed them now. How badly I regretted having gone away for the weekend. What if I never saw them again?

“So, what do we do now?” David asked. He was getting weary too. We had used all of our strength digging these people out, and now we were running out of air. I looked into the tunnel and wondered where Brian and Thomas had disappeared to. David and I had come in that way, and I knew it was a dead-end. Why hadn’t they come back? Could they have found another way? A way leading out, maybe? They were, after all, mine tunnels. They were connected to something, right? Maybe we had missed something on our way? No, it was impossible. Were they just hiding in the other cave? The one David and I had been in? Just to stay away from us?

“I don’t know,” I sighed.

There was a lot of coughing and moaning among the rescued people. I had no idea how they were supposed to survive, how I should keep them alive. Or even how I was supposed to stay alive down here.

“I guess we wait and pray that they’ll start digging for us soon,” I said with a deep exhale. I felt an urging craving thirst sucking me dry from inside. At this point, I would have done anything for a sip of water.

David leaned back his head and closed his eyes. He went silent. I knew why. We didn’t have to speak to know what the other was thinking.

There was no way they would make it in time.

23

T
HEY HAD BROUGHT
in all the heavy machinery, but hadn’t started using any of it yet. Instead, engineers were discussing how to approach it. Martin Busck stood behind the police blockage, shoulder to shoulder with his wife and all the other spectators and nervous relatives waiting to hear about their loved ones. He felt so frustrated watching them simply debate and not do anything.

“When will they begin to dig?” he asked his wife. “Why aren’t they digging? Can you tell me why?”

“They’re probably just being careful. They’re afraid that more of the ground will collapse,” she said.

“People are down there, for Christ sake. Seconds count right now,” he said. “Don’t they realize that?”

“I’m sure they do, honey.” The baby was fussing in her arms, and she started rocking from side to side.

“I heard they were talking about drilling a hole and sending a robotic camera underground,” Ole Sigumfeldt, who was standing on the other side of Martin, said. He lived further down the street from Martin, yet they didn’t know each other very well. Ole was a salesman for some electronic company and traveled a lot. Often for weeks at a time, leaving his wife alone with the three boys. Martin often felt sorry for the poor woman, who almost constantly had to struggle with those kids. On top of that, she worked full time for some law firm.