10
Hermit Crabs
"Why are we in a snowglobe?"
They were trying to keep up and out of the water that had pooled beneath them when the bubble – a clear sheet of smart tarp – had curved up around their bodies after they hit the water. Little bits of algae and birdshit floated on its surface. Javier lurched against her as the bubble sank downward suddenly. The light faded, and the world went green, and she watched the surface rising upward as they dropped further and further away.
The wreckage of buildings loomed large in their vision. Cars, their bodies crushed or flipped or sandwiched together, streaked by as the bubble journeyed downward. Traffic signs, now coated thickly with barnacles, bristled horizontally from the lumpy layers of cement and asphalt that bumped up against the bubble's surface. A hermit crab scrabbled across the bubble briefly. It lived inside a child's shoe.
"There are bodies down here, right?" Javier's voice was hoarse.
Amy instantly felt colder, and somehow more alone. "I think so. The responders probably couldn't find everyone. They were probably too busy trying to help the people who survived the quake."
"I don't know how my failsafe deals with corpses." He shut his eyes tight. "Must be nice, being able to see everything without frying."
An old net ghosted up under them. As they passed over it, Amy saw the spotted flippers of what was probably once a seal. The rest had been picked away in chunks. Ribs glowed under the remaining shreds of bobbing flesh. They looked remarkably human. She imagined that both species looked the same in their final moments as they writhed and struggled for air and shrieked for help that never came. "Yeah. Lucky me. I get to see all the ugly stuff."
"Hey, who're you calling ugly?"
Amy flicked Javier in the ear. She picked a cigarette butt out of his hair. When her hand came away, Javier's eyes had opened. "What if you see something bad?" Amy asked.
His eyes searched her face. "I won't."
Amy smiled. Javier smiled back. His face seemed more expressive, lately. He had learned how to reach and hold the moment between a blank, lost face and a full-powered smile – that calm that lived in the eyes and at the corners of the mouth. Amy would have said as much, but she suspected that would have ruined things. She knew what he meant. She could read his face, now.
The expression vanished, though, as something skimmed the bottom of the bubble. It sounded rough, and it felt prickly. Javier shut his eyes again. "Shit."
"It's OK." Something like fingers scraped the bubble. They dragged across its surface as though testing its strength. "It's OK. It's OK–"
"It's probably that goddamn tentacle monster that eats the container ships–"
"It's a forest, Javier." She tried not to let her relief sound so palpable. She shook him a little. "Open your eyes. There are trees down here."
"Trees?"
He sat up. The trees surrounded them, now. They grew up straight and tall from the crooked remains of streets and bricks and steel, and they reached up for the surface like dark, thin ghosts striving to touch something that still lived. Their branches brushed the bubble softly. "Evergreens," Javier said.
"They must have slid down here when the quake happened," Amy said. "I mean, the root system would travel with them, right? During a landslide?"
"Yeah, totally." Javier sat on his knees. "They just kept growing, I guess."
A striped eel oozed its way out from between two boughs, then darted back inside as they passed. More neighbour fish poked their heads out, or swam alongside the bubble, or bumped into it, as the bubble's speed increased. Now they drew nearer to a source of light. Although turning around inside the bubble was noisy, wet, and difficult, they rearranged their limbs and peered down through the clear surface. They were being drawn swiftly down to a cluster of derelict shipping containers with museum logos on them. A retracting tether pulled the bubble toward a seam in the topmost container – an airlock, Amy guessed.
Her suspicions were confirmed when the bubble snugged up to the seam and popped through. A needle pierced the bubble's membrane, and it began deflating. Amy hurried through, and Javier followed. They splashed down into a dark container so thick with rust and algae Amy could almost taste the oxidation. A strange, high humming filled it, like a hundred propellers spinning all at once. Phosphorescent tape glowed up through the floor: "EXIT."
"You're kidding me," Javier said.
"I think it's a hatch." Amy knelt down in the water. She felt around blindly. Her fingers landed on a metal ring roughly the size of her hand. She yanked. Water poured through the rough trap door and brighter light greeted her. There was even a ladder, the kind found on old swimming pools. She threw the door back the rest of the way and began descending the ladder. Halfway down, she stood on her toes to look at Javier. "I'm sorry. I take you to all the worst places."