Godless (13 page)

No, it's completely crazy, irresponsible, dangerous, and immature. I look around at St. Andrew Valley, at all
the houses filled with sleeping, unsuspecting citizens. What would they think if they knew what was going on up here? I imagine John Q. Citizen waking up in the middle of the night and pouring himself a glass of tap water.
Hmm. Tastes like unwashed teenage bodies. Must be having a bad dream
.

I lower myself through the hatch. Cool, moist air surrounds me. The flashlight is on the platform, its beam lighting up the great curved wall of the tank. I point it down and scan the surface until I find Magda's dark head bobbing in the water.

“C'mon, in, Jason!” she shouts.

I swing the beam of the light around, marveling at the size of the tank. It seems bigger on the inside than it does on the outside.

“Hey Kahuna, you coming in or not?” There's Henry, doing a backstroke. Dan is a few yards away, treading water.

People will surprise you. You never know what dumbass thing they're going to do next. I pull off my shoes and toss them up through the hatch. I take off my socks and my T-shirt, but leave my jeans on because I've got holes in my underwear. I hang my legs out over the edge of the platform, take a breath, and push off into space.

Sometimes even I surprise me.

The shock of hitting the cold water sends the breath rushing from my lungs. I kick and dig with my arms,
making for the surface. It can't be more than a second, but it feels like forever before I break through and suck in a fresh lungful of oxygen. But something is wrong. It's black. The blackest black I've ever been in, blacker than closed eyes in bed at night.

I've gone blind.

“Hey!” I shout. “You guys here? I can't see!”

“Of course you can't, you dumb ass!” Henry's voice. “You knocked the flashlight into the water when you jumped.”

“Oh, “I say.

“Where are you guys?” Dan's voice.

“Over here,” Magda says.

“Over where?” I say. The darkness seems to amplify the echoes. I can't tell what direction the voices are coming from.

“That was a really stupid move, your Kahunaness,” says Henry.

“Sorry. Can anybody see anything at all?”

Dan says, “How are we gonna find the ladder?”

“It's right in the middle.”

“Yeah, but where's the middle?”

“It must be close to where you jumped in, Kahunaness.”

Magda, off to my left, says, “I think I see the hatch.”

“Where are you?”

“Over here. Up against the wall.”

“If you swim toward it, you might run into the ladder.”

Dan says, “I'm getting tired.”

“Try floating.”

“I don't float.”

“Magda? Are you swimming toward the hatch?”

“I'm”

Something hits me hard in the eye.

“Ow! Who was that?”

“Sorry!” Magda says. “You were in my way. I can't see the hatch anymore. You can only see it when you're up against the wall, otherwise the platform blocks it.”

I can't see her, but I hear her breathing. I sense her body just a couple of feet away.

Henry says, “If everybody just swims around for awhile, one of us is bound to run into the ladder.”

I say, “I got an idea. We make a human chain. We hold hands and swim across the tank till we hit the ladder.”

“Sounds good to me,” Dan says. He is breathing hard. “Where are you?”

“I'm over here,” says Magda.

“Keep talking.”

“Henry? You coming?”

“Right here.” His voice is surprisingly close.

“Okay. Dan?”

“I can't find you.”

“Keep following my voice.”

The sound of his splashing gets closer, then we hear a squeal from Magda.

“Hey, keep your hands where they belong!”

“Sorry!”

“We all here? Let's grab hands.”

I reach out, touching Magda's shoulder, then sliding my hand down along her arm to her hand. On my other side, Henry is groping at me. We manage to clasp hands. My legs are churning double-time to stay afloat.

“You got hold of Dan over there, Magda?”

“I got him. Now what?”

“Now we start swimming, keeping our hands clasped and our arms stretched out.”

“How do we—
urk
!”

“What the—hey, we all gotta be facing the same way.” Two very confusing minutes later, our human chain is relinked. We start swimming backward, propelled by eight kicking feet. Henry and Dan, on the ends, add some arm action. I figure our chain is almost twenty feet long. The tank is about seventy feet across.

“How do you know we're going the right way?” Dan asks.

“I don't. But if we just keep going till we hit the wall, then we can see the hatch. We swim for the hatch then, we're bound to run into the ladder.”

It's a good plan.

I wonder if it will work.

B
UT IN TIME EVEN THE
C
HUTENGODIANS DID BECOME NEGLECTFUL AND ACROSS THE LAND THE TOWERS OF THE
O
CEAN RUSTED AND GREW WEARY
.

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Three times we reached the smooth
metal wall of the tank, and three times we launched ourselves back toward the center of the tank, only to end up running into the wall again. How could we be missing the ladder? I don't know how long we can keep swimming. I'm getting tired, and Dan is breathing so loud I'm afraid he's going to panic. Then it occurs to me that Henry and I are probably stronger swimmers than Magda and Dan, causing our human chain to swing off to one side.

“Ease up a little, Henry,” I say as we push off the wall for the third time. We kick our way through darkness. What if the chain ladder fell into the water with the flashlight? We would swim blindly until, one by one, we sink into the waters, never to be found until the citizens of St. Andrew Valley complain of a nasty, rotten flavor in their drinking water and—

—something whacks the top of my head, and I hear the rattle of rusty chain. I've found the ladder with my head.

We send Magda up first. She is the lightest, and the least likely to break the rusted ladder. Once she's up, Henry follows, then Dan, then me, the Big Kahuna. The ladder holds up admirably. I emerge from the hatch with a sense of giddy relief. I have survived being devoured by a god. I am Jonah, spat out by the whale.

Around me, the Chutengodians are getting dressed. Magda is talking rapid-fire, spewing out her excitement in the form of words.

“I thought we were gonna be in there till we drowned or something. My god, that was so
crazy
.” She pulls her jeans up over her slim hips. “Henry, you're crazy, you know that? What if that ladder had broken? What if somebody had climbed up and closed the hatch on us?”

Henry, shirtless, is standing on one leg struggling to pull on a cowboy boot. “Who'd do that? Schinner? He's too scared to climb up here.”

I realize that I haven't thought about Shin for one second since we went into the tank.

Dan says, “I wish we'd brought up some sodas or something. I'm thirsty.”

“You just spent half an hour floating around in a million gallons of drinking water!”

“I wasn't thirsty then,” says Dan.

Henry is working on his other boot, hopping up and down on his left foot, tugging at the loops on either side of his right boot.

“Careful,” I say. “It's slippery up here with all this water.”

Just then Henry's heel comes down on a wet spot and his foot skids out from under him and he falls, flat on his back, feet splayed out toward the horizon.

Dan and I both start to laugh, then stifle it as we realize that Henry might be in trouble. He rolls over onto his belly and tries to crawl toward us, but he's too far out on the slope. He slides one knee forward but the movement causes him to slip down another two inches. His fingers scrabble on the steel surface, but there's nothing there to grab. Spread-eagled on his bare belly, he looks up at us with wide, terrified eyes. I think the suction between his belly and the smooth steel of the tank is the only thing holding him.

“Help me,” he says in a small voice.

I shake off the momentary paralysis. “Dan, grab hold of the light post!” I say. Dan grasps the post with both hands, I take hold of Dan's ankle with one hand and, on my belly now, stretch my other hand out to Henry. It's too far.

“I'm coming,” says Magda. I feel her clamber over me; she's holding onto my arm and I'm holding onto her as she stretches her feet toward Henry. He should be able to reach her, but as he lifts his hand to grab for
her ankle he suddenly slides down another foot.

“Grab my ankle, Henry!” Magda shouts, but she can't see how far down he has slid. I watch, helpless, as Henry slowly slides over the horizon, his naked belly squeaking against metal.

“Oh, shit,” I hear him say just before he disappears from sight.

Henry does not scream as he falls. I would have. But Henry falls silently, at least for a second, then we hear a loud
clang
.

Did he hit the ground so quickly? No,
that
sound wouldn't be so loud and close and metallic-sounding. He must've bounced off a leg on his way down. These thoughts tumble through my mind in a fraction of a second. Then comes the scream, but it's not from Henry.

“Henryyyyyy!” Magda shrieks, her voice so high and loud I can feel it all the way to the center of my brain.

“Did he fall?” Dan asks.

“He's gone,” I say.

A wordless, sobbing wail comes from Magda.

I start to pull her back up to safety. She is dead weight. “Come on, Magda. I can't hold you much longer.”

Slowly, Magda crawls back over me, sobbing hysterically. I want to sob hysterically too, but a part of me—the Kahuna part—knows that we have to pull ourselves together before we can afford to fall apart. Magda makes it back to the railing. I am climbing back,
holding onto Dan, when we hear a weird moan.

My first thought is that it's the tower speaking to us. But it's not coming from within the tank, but from outside.

Magda is the first to realize what it is.

She shouts, “Henry!”

Henry's quavering voice slides up over the tank. “I think I busted my leg.”

“Omigod, he's alive!” Magda says. She grabs me, wrapping her arms around my middle and squeezing. “He's
alive
!” Is she hugging me or Henry? I am confused. How could Henry have survived a two-hundred-foot fall? And why can we hear him so clearly?

“He must have landed on the catwalk,” Dan says.

Of course. The catwalk that circles the tank sticks out about three feet, and it's only thirty feet below us. Henry must have been able to slow himself down enough so that he dropped straight down the side of the tank to land on the catwalk.

“Are you all right?” Magda calls out.

“No!”

“We better go help him,” I say. Dan is already headed down the ladder. I grab Henry's backpack and look at Magda. She is smiling joyfully, her eyes wet with tears. “He's
alive
” she says.

“Yeah, he's alive.” I'm alive too, I think. Would she smile that hard for me? “Let's go get him.”

Henry is lying on the catwalk with one leg stretched out in front of him and the other jutting out at an angle
that makes me want to throw up. His thigh is broken. He looks like he has two knees on one leg. His face is white and knotted with pain. He is breathing rapidly, like a dog panting.

“Good one, Henry,” I say.

He stares at me, but does not reply. I look up at the wall of the tank and imagine what it must have been like for him, going over the edge of the planet like that. Was he hoping to hit the catwalk? Did he even remember the catwalk was there? Or did his mind go completely blank with fear?

Magda is bent over him, cradling his head.

Dan says, “We gotta get him down. How are we gonna get him down?”

I look over the railing, down at the ground, and suddenly I am blinded by a brilliant white light. The light plays across the tank, leaving us in momentary darkness, then returns, holding steady.

An amplified voice rings out, “You on the water tower, come on down now.”

Dan says again, “How are we gonna get him down?”

“I think that's going to be somebody else's problem,” I say.

A
ND THERE CAME A TIME WHEN THE
C
HUTENGODIANS ARGUED AMONG THEMSELVES, AND SOME SAID THE WILL OF THE
O
CEAN WAS DEPLETED, AND THAT
H
UMANS DID CONTROL THE WATERWAYS AND THE RAINS
. A
ND THEY DID CALL THEMSELVES THE
P
RAGMATISTS
.

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