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The pitch-black darkness paralysed Wiri for longer than he could estimate. His brain worried too much about the why of his situation before he could distract it with the pressing matter of his survival.
“What would Logan do?” he asked himself, his whisper returning to him as though someone else asked the question. He imagined his uncle doing the mathematical calculations required to give him freedom to work. It pushed the notion of his inevitable death into the future and allowed him to breathe with more ease.
Wiri sat back on his bottom and grasped his knees to his chest. “Think, think!” he urged himself. The dead silence helped to settle him as he cast through half-forgotten biology lessons from school. “The average person breathes eleven thousand litres of air a day,” he recited. “This is a twenty-five thousand litre tank. I have time.” He relaxed his fingers and his legs stretched out in front of him. “I have time,” he repeated. “Someone will miss me before then.”
He reached his fingers above him, knowing the ladder was up there somewhere and not wanting to bang his head. When he didn’t find it, he rose to his feet and squatted, still grabbing the air above him. His fingers contacted the rough metal, and he gave a sigh of relief. A cough ratcheted from his chest and he fumbled to replace the mask, setting it back over his nose and mouth. “Two things,” he whispered to himself, raising his own spirits by charting his successes as he completed them. “Found the ladder. Still got my mask.”
Keeping hold of the ladder, he eased himself to a standing position, following the angle to its highest point. He nudged it with his shoulder and tried to push it away from the wall. It resisted. The metal prongs ground against the concrete. The force of the fall had driven it into the side of the tank and wedged it across the space from one side to the other. When his feet tripped over the safety rope, he loosened the harness and slipped himself out of it to give him more flexibility. It fell to the floor with a clank of the carabiner clips.
Wiri kept one hand on the ladder and reached the other to his back pocket. The empty flap of fabric condemned him for leaving his phone on the surface with his lunch. He released a sigh and pressed his forehead against the metal ladder, feeling the cold leach through his skin. “Think,” he urged himself. “Panic doesn’t help.” His uncle’s familiar words returned to coach him, Logan’s hatred of fuss discouraging his children from becoming hysterical in his presence. “Torch,” he breathed. “Find the torch.”
Replaying the scene as the ladder fell meant revisiting why Vaughan would want to seal him into the tank. Wiri tried to do the first without dwelling on the latter. He imagined himself emerging into the daylight to the sound of Vaughan’s rumble of laughter. Shaking his head, he realised it didn’t fit with what he’d already learned of the serious man. It wasn’t his style. And anyway, shortening the ladder meant it wasn’t long enough to reach the top of the tunnel.
Wiri flapped his hand in the darkness and planned how he would find the torch. Replaying the scene told him it had skittered to the right of the manhole. His escape route had taken him to the left, but following the ladder to its junction with the wall put him as far away from the shaft as he could get. Wiri raised his right hand and mapped out the landmarks. “The inspection lid is near the eastern edge,” he said. The echo-voice repeated it back to him. “That means the torch went south. I’m standing in the west.” He let go of the ladder and dropped to his hands and knees. “I’m going this way.”
Wiri’s wristwatch still showed the time but wouldn’t connect with his phone from inside the heavy concrete structure. His wrist grew weak from flicking his hand to activate the screen and utilise the faint glow made by the display. Twenty minutes passed as he performed a fingertip search of the half of the tank bisected by the ladder. He found the trowel first, jamming the handle in his back pocket to save him from banging his knees against the sharp metal edge of the blade. His breath caught in his chest as his fingers brushed the plastic case of the torch and he paused before trying the switch.
Pushing himself back onto his heels, he prepared himself for the genuine possibility that it no longer worked. His thumb traversed the case until it rested over the button. “Now,” he said to himself, willing it to burst to life and illuminate his situation. The bulb flared a faint yellow light indicative of failing batteries. Wiri had watched Vaughan replace them before they started and tutted as he inspected the broken glass in the torch’s face. The various mirrors had shattered with the impact and the floor glittered as he shone the weak light on the space where he’d found it.
Wiri turned onto his knees and crawled one-handed, moving away from the broken shards and keeping the torch clutched in the fingers of his right hand. His reasoning diverged into two trains of thought. The first wanted to conserve the torch light, while the other warned it might not start again if he extinguished it. He trusted the latter and kept it shining.
The addition of light helped him to free the upper part of the ladder from the wall. It required a decent upward shove to release it, though it removed a layer of concrete in the process. Wiri shook his head at the two long grooves, deciding he no longer cared.
Desperate to rest but unable to risk wasting the torchlight, Wiri pushed the ladder as upright as he could manage. He walked it by keeping it leaned against his body. Using his feet to push each of the metal legs in turn like a father dancing with a child, he made slow progress. The ladder’s ragged joins skinned his fingers as he gripped the torch and rungs. He paused at intervals to shine the light towards the ceiling and estimate his distance. At last, he stared up at the underside of the concrete lid above his head. The thought drifted across his mind that he might not be able to push it off the opening, but he dismissed it and tamped down the resulting fear. “I have to get there first,” he told himself.
The impossibility of escape made itself known when the ladder failed to reach the ceiling. Vaughan had shortened it to pass through the hole and enable Wiri to lean it up against the interior walls. The design of the ladder meant he’d had to withdraw it from the tank and lay it down on the ground to alter the safety catches. Wiri didn’t have enough room on the floor of the tank to repeat the exercise.
He used the fading torchlight to estimate the distance between the edge of the tank and the start of the inspection tunnel. Nearer on the eastern side, it presented him with the possibility of reaching from the ladder to the lip of the tunnel leading to the surface. Wiri shook his head. He’d have nothing to hold on to and no way of clambering as far as the lid, even if he could move it by himself.
Several attempts later, he’d extended the ladder by two rungs while standing at the lowest point possible while reaching above his head and pushing. But he needed to go further and the ladder already touched the point of the wall’s junction with the roof. The apex of the ceiling meant he still needed more height to reach the manhole, but he’d been unable to fix the catches again properly and it weakened the ladder’s integrity. Disaster struck as he stood on the fifth rung with the top of the ladder protruding into the inspection tunnel. He tilted it too far backwards, his hands busy shoving the top half of the ladder towards the ceiling and praying the catches caught to give him an extra thirty centimetres of height.
The whole thing tipped backwards, missing the bottom lip of the tunnel and pitching Wiri onto his back on the floor. The ladder wedged itself again between the sides of the tank, the top edge too high for him to push free a second time. Pain blossomed from the base of his spine and travelled through his neck to his skull as a thudding ache. He lay for a moment in the dust, not wanting to move in case he’d done something serious. His stomach roiled with nausea, but when he didn’t vomit, he sensed it felt different from the time he broke both his arms falling from a horse. Phoenix had fed him scrambled egg from a teaspoon, laughing as the yellow yolk tumbled onto his shirt. “More serious or less?” he asked himself, unable to provide an answer.
The nausea passed, and he hoped it was shock and not a broken bone. “I’m good,” he whispered, his words echoing in the empty cavern. “I’ve never known anyone break their ass.”
Wiri pushed himself to a sitting position next to the feet of the ladder. Pain flared and he eased himself onto his side. He used the torch to inspect two of his fingers. He’d trapped them in the mechanism as he tried to manoeuvre the body of the ladder past the catches, the action causing the overbalance. The index finger of his left hand still moved under pressure, but a flap of skin protruded from the middle one.
“Don’t give up,” he told himself, “Not yet.” The addition of the second sentence suggested there may come a time when he needed to contemplate it. “Not yet,” he repeated. He angled his wrist until the screen activated, showing he’d used up another half an hour. The length of time surprised him. His battle with the ladder seemed to have taken hours, exhausting him until he had little energy left in reserve. The watch vibrated and Wiri closed his eyes, imagining it had notified himself of another hour passed. When it did it again, hope burgeoned in his heart.
He spun the dial to the left, willing it to connect to his phone above ground in the back of the truck. A message flashed on the screen.
‘Are you two coming for lunch soon?’
Leilah! Leilah knew what they were doing. If they didn’t return, she would question it.
“She already is,” Wiri breathed. “She’s texted Vaughan, and he hasn’t replied.”
He used the watch settings to type ‘help’ into a message. He didn’t risk elaborating, in case the tenuous connection with his phone ended as abruptly as it began.
It took two attempts to press the tiny icon, which allowed the message to send. Blood streaked the screen and caused Wiri’s fingers to miss the mark. He held his breath as a miniature egg timer in the centre of the face spun and spun as the watch tried to connect with his phone.
It spun for long enough for the back light on the face to wink out and take Wiri’s hope with it. When his phone vibrated again, he stared at the message on the screen.
‘Unable to send. Check signal!’
“That’s that then.” He leaned against the wall beside the ladder and closed his eyes, letting his head drop back against the rough surface. The foetid air infiltrated his mask by degrees, sneaking into his nose and mouth and giving him a taste of how death might feel.
