She found herself running
She found herself pounding through the incongruously deserted arrivals hall, a running woman with ten cleaners waltzing polishing machines over the mosaic floor.
She found herself struggling into her colour-of-the-day vest as she hooted her way through the evacuees outside the main gate. She hoped she had not killed anyone as she rammed the zebra-striped Landcruiser toward the open sunflower of the Kenyatta tower.
Two Polish Sokol utility helicopters flanked the entrance to the Centre. White UN trucks were scattered around them. A mobile crane was trying to lift the bronze UNECT
‘Press,’ she said, waving her DF108 in the soldier’s face and pointing to her orange jacket. He politely barred her way. Incredible, that nations gave people like this licence to kill in their name. She emptied a golden stream of Krugerrands out of her purse into her hands. ‘All right. How much?’
Two did it.
She grabbed a civilian loader by the arm, swung her around, sent her armful of document folders spinning across the coloured tiles of the square.
‘Dr Shepard. Where is he?’
The woman frowned. Gaby left her to her scattered files and arrested a tall Sikh with a UNECTA badge pinned to his turban.
‘Dr Shepard. I have to find him.’
‘Fifteenth floor.’
This time, as on that first morning when she had stood awed in this cavernous foyer and felt she was a member of a great invisible communion, no one gave Gaby a second look. She pressed the elevator button, pressed it again, hit it three times as if that would make it come any faster, but all it did was go up and keep going up, so she took the stairs. After five flights she slumped against the window, gasping. The thought of Shepard finishing up there and pressing the elevator button to go down gave her strength for another five. Panting, heart smashing against her ribs, she leaned her forehead against the glass. She could see the imperceptibly curving event horizon of terminum across the northern suburbs. The pillars of the hatching towers, each as tall as the Kenyatta building, receded into the distance like the watch towers of some monstrous rampart. Like Jake before him, Faraway was bound for that. Did it have to take all the men she cared about? Tembo. She had done right by Tembo, in the end. Children made things different, difficult. She saw columns of smoke rise up across the city. Things burning down there. Killings. She thought about the vengeance the Black Simbas had visited on Haran and his posse. She had seen the smoke go up from the Cascade Club when they torched it, but she did not know what had happened to Haran. She hoped he was dead, and that Mombi had survived to make it across the line into the coloured country beyond.
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
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