“Kelly,” Matthew said, eerily calm. “Your face.”

“Yeah, I know,” Kelly replied, the words gurgling. He wiped at it lazily, smearing blood on his hands, then his pants as he rubbed his sticky hands against them. “You too,” he said calmly.

Matthew raised fingertips to his own face, felt spongy wet tissue and tight, pulsing threads of muscle, the hard round edges of bone. Moaning, he ran into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, stared in shock at his face which was no longer a face—the flesh torn away, the pulped tissue seeping droplets into the yellow-stained porcelain of the sink.

“Kelly!” he screamed, terrified, his pulse racing. He looked back toward their room, could see Kelly through the open bathroom door, watched as his friend crawled awkwardly across the shit-brown carpet, one of his legs bent unnaturally so his toes pointed upward, his knee loose, calf and foot dragged behind like dead weight. His collarbone was caved in on one side, his tilting head a gruesome pile of blood and eyes and bone.

“I know, I know...” he said, a guttural laugh coming from somewhere within the gore of his mouth. He sounded exasperated, as if losing his face was the most frustrating part of his morning. “I’m sorry, boy-o,” he said, then collapsed, his jaw working into the carpet. “We’re dead dead dead, man...”

Matthew started for him when the door slammed shut, smacking like a fist into the exposed tissue of his cheek. Matthew felt one of the bones in his face crack and pain surge to his brain. All his senses were screaming that he was damaged, his brain tapping his consciousness, repeating in a steady mantra that something was very wrong... wrong... wrong!

He spun and fell hard to the gray linoleum. He moaned, rolled over, the stained bathroom floor pressing into what remained of his broken face.

Something incredibly heavy landed on top of him, collapsing his lungs, bearing down on his lower spine and the back of his legs. He heard a creaking and raised his eyes toward the door, which had opened a few inches. Matthew prayed it was someone coming to help him help me up please and could only watch in horror as a torn, flayed hand slipped through the narrow opening, stamping smears of red on the wall as it groped for the wall switch.

He started to scream just before the fingers found their target. There was a click...

...and the lights went out.

3

MATTHEW OPENED HIS eyes but could not see. It was black. A thick, rich black pressing against his shock-wide-open eyes, slathering his skin, dampening his hair.

It took him a few moments to place himself, to understand... everything was so fuzzy, his thoughts slow, as if drugged. He was lying on his stomach, his face pressed downward, his cheek mashed against rough concrete. He tried to lift his head, found he could not, so left it where it lay. It felt so damned heavy.

A minute passed. Another. Matthew didn’t move, lying deathly still, trying to piece together what, exactly, had happened to him. He had to think...

He focused his breathing, blinked rapidly, attempted to formulate a clear, sensible idea of where he was.

Then he remembered.

The memories came in a mad rush to the forefront of his mind, freefalling through his rousing consciousness in hot, darting flashes, a lapping wall of flame eating its way to the surface. The horror of it flooded him. The unbelievable, unfathomable realization that he must be lying deep within the collapsed building. The terrible knowledge that above him—on top of him—rested a mountainous heap of bone-crushing weight.

The thought kickstarted a surging panic. A heavy blanket of claustrophobia smothered his brain, his flickering awareness, a defense mechanism built by blind terror. The panic beat against it with tireless, angry fists; a diseased, irate moth with a broken wing, bouncing and bashing against the inside of his skull. Without caution, he tried violently to twist his body free, but realized – in a blinding assault of horror approaching madness – that he was stuck. An object, unimaginably immense, had pinned him down. A fresh wave of terror ignited his nerves aflame and he wanted to scream until his lungs were emptied, lash out at something, anything. But his prone body refused, the synapses in his brain not firing the necessary instructions to his muscles, as if he had been cut off from himself. A dead, crispy butterfly pinned neatly within a boy’s insect collection. He imagined himself inside a frame, hung on a wall like so many other captured insects, awaiting the boy-god’s pleasure.

He gulped in deep breaths and the hysteria began to ebb, the moment of contested interaction between mind and body depleting his strength, allowing Matthew to take a moment to refocus, to calm himself. Stupid! he thought. Do I want to bring the whole building down on my head? He knew he must use greater caution, at least until he had a better handle on his situation.

Fine, fine... I’ll get my shit together. In the meantime, just how bad are we?

He waited for the surge of panic to subside fully. He closely monitored his breathing and kept his body very still, no longer daring to move. As his muscles relaxed and his mind quieted, he recalled a memory from when he was a child. His grandfather, when putting him to bed at night, would shut off the lights, stand by the open door and instruct him softly, his comforting voice so soothing in the dark. “Relax yourself slowly, Matthew. One body part at a time. Start with your toes,” he’d say. “Tell them, very nicely, to go to sleep.”

Matthew, just a small boy, would close his eyes, focus on his toes.

Then he’d think: Go to sleep, toes.

“Good,” his grandfather would say, watching him. “Now, tell your legs. Then your fingers, then your arms, then, finally, your head. Got it?”

Matthew would nod to the shadow by the open door, then, closing his eyes once more, follow the instructions exactly. Goodnight legs, whispering the instructions in his mind. Goodnight fingers... goodnight arms...

He rarely made it to his head.

Matthew decided to use the same technique now in assessing his injuries. Slowly, calmly, he did his best to let the suffocating fear slip away. Then, one-by-one, he began exploring individual areas of his body.

He started with his mouth. He closed his eyes and felt around with his tongue. He winced and inhaled sharply as he slid his gashed tongue slowly up and down, then side to side. The inside was sloshy. But what he thought was saliva, he realized with revulsion, was his own blood. He tried to spit but pain shot through his face, so he simply tilted his head, barely able to tuck his chin to chest, and let it spill out. The blood waterfalled over his lips and down his chin, soaked into the rough carpet of rubble.

Matthew let his jaw to hang open a moment, panting like a dying dog, breathing in the stale, dusty air. When he finally closed it to swallow, he was sickened by the slick of blood and bits of flesh that slid down his throat. Worse yet, with his mouth closed, he discovered he could not breathe through his nose. With effort, he let that thought alone for the moment, still trying to take inventory as slowly, as stolidly, as he possibly could. He wouldn’t panic, not yet. Panic wasn’t an option. He tried to relax, to take hold of the situation. In the meantime, he would just have to breathe through his mouth, although the taste of the air sickened him.

His face, he knew, was badly damaged. He tried to breathe through his nose again and failed. It felt... wrong. He could sense that the bridge wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

Let’s move on, he thought, and reached out with his senses to feel his arms, his hands. His right arm was immobilized, but he thought it was all right. It didn’t seem broken, and he felt no sharp pain, and he could wiggle his fingers all right. But whatever was pressing down on top of him the building the whole fucking building was also pressing down on his shoulder, keeping it immobile. But he could move his hand without pain. He tilted his wrist up and down, twisted it left... then right. All good there. Not so bad, considering, he thought. It’s okay everybody, we’re just a little stuck at the moment.

He tried his left arm next, almost weeping with relief when it moved freely and with ease. He slowly bent his elbow, brought his fingers toward his face. Again, he felt no pain, and he thought it a very good sign, overall, that his arms seemed to be undamaged. The right one, for now, trapped. The other, for now, completely operational.

Feeling more confident, he went back to his face. He gingerly pressed fingers to his nose. He sucked in sharply at the pinch of pain even the gentlest touch caused him. Lightening his touch, he very carefully moved the pad of one finger along the bridge, trying not to panic when he felt the break just below his eye-line. He could feel the swollen knob of gristle, the sharp edge of the broken bone where it shifted at a decided angle. More probing revealed a wide, deep gash running from the break in his nose to just below his left eye. It was sticky to the touch. When he pinched and wiggled the askew tip of his now rather loose nose, it gave sickeningly, moving too easily under his fingers. An internal grating sound of shifting gristle filled his ears when the dislodged pieces rubbed together.

With a deep sigh, he left it alone once more, moved on to his eyes and forehead, pawing at himself like a blind man seeking recognition of a stranger’s face. He found no cuts, no painful spots or anything else terribly out of sorts. He thought it possible that one cheekbone might be broken, but it was too tender and swollen to tell. The skin felt slack under his right eye where it should have felt like a facial bone, and despite the swelling he knew something had been dented permanently. He didn’t want to dwell on it, the thought of his face disfigured not helping his spirits, so he quickly moved probing fingers to his lips.

Praying silently for good news, he pushed two fingers into his mouth.

He immediately felt the jagged, tender edges of two broken teeth along the top left. He felt around some more, touching the tip of each tooth, and was pleased that everything else seemed in its proper place. He next tapped the pad of his swollen tongue and, with some astonishment, realized he’d bitten the end of it completely off. There was a raw stump where the tip had been. He could only assume the missing bit had been swallowed, or spit out, with the rest of the blood that had settled in his mouth while unconscious.

He fought off a bolt of nausea while reliving the meaty stew he had swallowed upon waking. Moving on, he thought, and pulled his fingers from his mouth. He patted the top of his head, then around to the back, and then felt his ears.

Grateful for the knowledge that at least his skull was still in one piece, he allowed his mind to feel out the remaining parts of his body. It was as if he were opening a sealed door in his consciousness, one that had been closed off to protect him from the knowledge of what lay beyond.

He could neither roll his body nor raise his torso in any way, his lower back pressed down by the great weight from above. Beneath him, something bulky and sharp-edged jammed hard into his pelvis and guts. Luckily it had not broken the skin, or any bones that he could tell. The weight on his spine was not severely painful, but it was immense, as if the slightest increase in pressure would snap his body in half, like shears pressing through the middle of a thick twig, leaving it in two.

He shifted his attention from his back and let his mind float down his legs. They were, he thought with a degree of confusion, exposed. He could feel the space around them, and when he gently tapped the toe of one foot where were his shoes he was missing his shoes against something hard he let out a held breath of relief at the welcome surge of feeling that ran through his foot and up his right leg. He tried to do the same with the left, but that leg was bent awkwardly, the ankle wedged into something heavy and twisted, like metal ribbing or, possibly, a piece of the building’s iron framework. But he could feel that trapped foot, which meant, he was pretty sure, that his back was not broken. At least, he thought less optimistically, not severely so.

Okay then, where does that leave me? Broken nose, certainly. Maybe broken cheekbone. Trapped arm, trapped leg. Back hurt, but likely not broken, because I can feel my fucking feet. My insides, though, this pressure in my stomach.

He broke off his thought, let his mind go blank, tried to be positive. He knew he was lucky to be alive.

His assessment complete for now, he tried to think back, to remember the moments prior to the building’s collapse.

Anearthquake, he thought, straining to piece the jostled memories, filled with panic and terror, together. He recalled how the office disappeared in large chunks, slipped away before his eyes as the earth shook. The receptionist, he thought, she was injured, her face...

Matthew didn’t want to think of her, or the fate of the other fifty or so people in that office. Dead, of course. They’re all dead. The whole firm wiped out with a snap of God’s fingers, a swipe of his mighty hand.

Unbidden, the thought sprang to him – with a twinge of instant shame – that he would not be getting the job.

He laughed, shook his head and let a few tears spill from his eyes as he did so, chuckling between gasps while lying down, down, in the deep dark. The laughter turned to coughing, then hacking. Blood spurted up his throat, sour on his tongue.