I am sitting here with this cheap beer, and my hands still look like they belong to a vibrating washing machine. You see this scar on my palm? The one that looks like a jagged lightning bolt? That is not from a cool bar fight. That is from a piece of rusty air vent that nearly took my hand off while the city above me was turning into a giant blender. I used to be the guy who signed the papers for those skyscrapers. Now, I am just the guy who crawls under them to find copper wire and old batteries to sell for a sandwich.
The big shake hit at noon. It did not just wiggle the floor: it turned the world into a salt shaker. I was down in the guts of District Four, looking for some scrap, when the ceiling decided it wanted to be the floor. My daughter, Elena, was three miles away in the safe zone. Or at least, they call it a safe zone. But I knew something those fancy guys in suits did not. I knew how the cooling vents for the main core were built. I was the one who messed up the math five years ago. I got fired, sure. But I kept the real blueprints. The ones that showed the flaw.
The core was going to blow. If it did, District Four would be a hole in the dirt, and Elena would be gone. My chest felt like someone was standing on it. It was that cold, sharp fear that makes your spit taste like pennies. I had sixty minutes. My watch was cracked, but the little red numbers were still screaming at me. Fifty nine minutes. I had to get to the core and pull the manual vent release, or we were all just dust.
I started crawling. The vents are narrow, metal coffins. They smell like wet pennies and old farts. Every time the ground moved, the metal would groan. It sounded like a big animal dying. I had to squeeze my shoulders through gaps that were not meant for a grown man. My shirt caught on a bolt, and I heard it rip. I did not care about the shirt. I cared about the skin I left behind on that bolt. It stung, a hot, wet heat on my side, but I just kept pushing.
I think I have a problem with small spaces. I never told anyone that. It is my secret shame. Being trapped in a tube while the whole city is grinding its teeth above you is a special kind of hell. My heart was hitting my ribs so hard I thought it might break a bone. I kept seeing Elena’s face. She has this little gap between her front teeth. She thinks it is ugly, but I think it is the best thing in the world. I kept thinking: if I stop, that gap disappears forever.
The heat started to rise. That meant the core was already cooking. The air turned into soup. It was hard to swallow. My lungs felt like they were filled with wet sand. I reached the first junction and saw the red light. The automated defense systems were waking up. Since the shake, the computers thought everyone was an intruder. I heard the mechanical click of a turret. It was a small, mean sound.
I froze. My nose was inches from a laser tripwire. It was a thin, red line of light that looked like a paper cut in the dark. If I touched it, the walls would turn me into a colander. I had to move like a cat. I am not a cat. I am a guy who eats too many donuts and has bad knees. I held my breath until my head started to throb. I moved my right leg, inch by inch. My joints popped. It sounded like a gunshot in that quiet tube. I waited. The turret did not fire.
Forty minutes left.
I found the main shaft. It was a straight drop down, a hundred feet of darkness. The ladder was missing half its rungs. I had to climb down the cooling pipes. They were hot. Not enough to melt my skin off, but enough to make me want to scream. I bit my lip so hard I felt the blood run down my chin. It was salty and warm. I kept telling myself: just one more grip, Victor. Just one more.
Halfway down, the city shook again. It was a massive, deep growl from the earth. The pipe I was holding onto buckled. I slipped. My fingers screamed as they slid over the hot metal. I caught a bracket with my left hand. My shoulder made a sound like a dry branch breaking. I hung there, swinging over a dark pit that smelled like electricity and oil. I wanted to cry. I really did. I wanted to just let go and let the dark take me. It would be so easy to just stop being tired.
But then I felt the little hair tie on my wrist. It was a pink, stretchy thing Elena gave me for good luck. I am a fifty year old man wearing a pink hair tie. I looked at it in the dim red light. I pulled myself up. I used my teeth to help grip the sleeve of my jacket to get more leverage. My shoulder was a ball of white hot fire, but I did not stop.
I reached the bottom with twenty minutes to spare. The core room was a nightmare. The big glass walls were cracked. The reactor was humming, but it was a wrong sound. It was too high, like a scream you can only feel in your teeth. The floor was covered in broken glass and some kind of green slime. The cooling vent lever was on the far side, behind the main security gate.
The gate was locked. The power was out, so my keycard was just a piece of plastic. I looked at the clock. Fifteen minutes. I felt a cold sweat wash over me. I was so close. I could hear the automated systems hum. The turrets were tracking me now. A red dot appeared on my chest. It danced over my heart.
I did not have a gun. I did not have a bomb. I had a heavy pipe wrench I found in the vent. I looked at the red dot. I thought about the bridge I built that fell down. I thought about the people I let down. I was not going to let Elena down. I started to run.
I did not run like a hero in a movie. I ran like a scared animal. I zig zagged. The turret opened up. The sound was like a hammer hitting a tin roof. Bullets chewed up the floor behind me. A piece of stone caught me in the calf. I fell, sliding across the glass. It sliced into my arms and chest. I felt like I was being eaten by a thousand tiny mouths.
I reached the lever. The red dot was on my forehead now. I could see the camera lens of the turret shifting, locking in. I grabbed the lever with both hands. It was stuck. Of course it was stuck. Everything I ever built was broken. I screamed. It was a loud, ugly sound. I put every bit of my weight into it. I thought about the floor above me. I thought about the weight of the whole city. I thought about Elena’s gap tooth.
The lever moved.
A loud hiss of steam filled the room. It was deafening. The high scream of the reactor started to drop. The red dot on my forehead flickered and went out. The lights dimmed to a soft, tired blue. The district was not going to blow.
I slumped against the wall. I looked at my hands. They were a mess of blood and grease. My side was stinging, and I could feel the glass still stuck in my skin. I checked my watch. One minute left. I started to laugh. It was a shaky, pathetic laugh that turned into a cough. I sat there in the dark, listening to the city groan.
I am still a scavenger. I am still the guy who messed up. But I am sitting here drinking this beer, and I know that somewhere in this broken city, a girl with a gap in her teeth is breathing. That is enough for me. My hands are still shaking, though. I do not think they will ever stop. You ever feel like the world is just too heavy to hold up? I do. Every single day. But you just keep crawling through the vents anyway. What else are you going to do?