Dao is suffocating. There’s dust in his mouth. In his eyes. He takes a swipe at them to clear his vision, and the first thing he sees is that he’s trapped. The bed collapsed on top of him, and he’s breathing into a pocket of air.
He tests his fingers, toes, limbs. Everything is intact but hurts like hell. There’s a bump on his head, and that seems fitting. This is what he gets for going to look for a wayward employee and stumbling on the seemingly free gift of sex. But nothing is free, especially not sex, and his life is the price he might have to pay for it if he doesn’t get his ass into gear.
He flips onto his stomach and crawls toward the air pocket.
He has no idea how long he’s been out, but from his extreme thirst and the weakness he feels, he’s been here for quite some time.
It makes sense. He’s the only resident, and the compound is minimally staffed. That lazy bastard Anto must be gone, so it’s just Dao and Riya, the maid . . .
Who’d been screaming somewhere above his head. It’s the last thing he remembered before being crushed.
There’s a loose beam blocking his way. He grabs it and pushes it with all his might. The pain is unbelievable, but he manages to budge it. Another push. Some more give. He works like this for some time, taking frequent breaks. He’s got no leverage here, only his strength.
Finally, he’s moved it enough to wedge his body through.
He can see a speck of the morning sky. He keeps going, crawling through toward that blue, pushing against the debris in his way. He’s so damn tired. It feels like he’s got nothing left, but then there’s a sound. A cry so loud, so unearthly, it almost shatters his eardrums.
Instinctively, he moves toward it. He can’t stop now. If he stops, it’s over. Part of him wants it to be over. A damn hill fell on top of him, after all, shook loose by an earthquake. And the one before that, and the one before that, too.
The Ring of Fire.
In the Pacific. This archipelago, full of little islands. Rife with volcanos and along fault lines. The meeting point of several tectonic plates and both the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
He’s been in Indonesia for over a year, and it feels like it’s been trying to push him away ever since he got here. Not that he’s wanted to stay. Hell is still hell, no matter how nice the weather is.
There’s that cry again. A woman shouting about a baby. Who brought a baby to a natural disaster?
He breaks free and hoists himself onto the ground. Lays there on his back, stunned. The rising sun warms his face, makes him sweat, even though his hands are cold. He sees someone digging frantically through the rubble close by. It’s the little maid. Riya. She’s shouting at him to help. In English. Which she pretended not to be able to speak.
Women.
She goes over to him and, with a strength he didn’t know she possessed, pulls him to his knees, then to his feet. “My baby,” she says, her eyes wide and pleading. She’s filthy. Her dress is torn in several places, and her hands are bleeding. There’s a nasty cut along her cheek that she touches gingerly with her fingertips. Blood on blood. He feels like retching. She reaches to grab him, but he pulls away from her.
“Please!” she shouts, when he stands still for several seconds, just looking at her.
He snaps out of his daze. “Where?”
She pulls him toward the rubble. “I think here. Please.”
“Call someone,” he tells her. “Get help from the village.”
“Can’t find my phone,” she tells him. “Main line down in the house.”
“Then go get someone.”
“No time! I can’t leave my baby!” She kneels a few feet away. Pulls at the debris with her bare, bloody hands. So he starts to pull, too. Soon, he hears people behind him. Villagers, three men and two women, coming to help on their own. One of them tells him the village is in a bad state and rescue workers haven’t even made it there yet. Other areas were hit harder by the earthquake. Together, they clear the rubble from the landslide, which smashed into the staff house, causing it to collapse on itself.
He fights it, but a wave of heat builds inside him.
It gets so bad that he remembers Ahmići. Another cursed place. He’d been so young himself, barely twenty, when the army had sent him overseas. And that village. Both mosques had been mined, but he didn’t know that at the time. He only saw the one. Then the bodies in the houses, burned. The people burned. Their corpses.
He is pulled back to Bosnia, a place he has tried so hard to erase from his memory. Now he remembers the children most of all. It was why he left the military, those images of massacred children burned into his brain.
Something broken inside him.
Riya speaks to the others in her language. One of the men offers to take over where Dao is working, but he sends the man away with a single look. There’s a baby down here, she’d said. It’s now hitting him.
A child is buried under here.
Dao doesn’t stop. Now his hands are bloody, too. They work in silence, moving chunks of the building away.
Dao is the one who sees it first. The beam, fallen across a crib. Peeking out from under it is a chubby little arm covered in dust.
Riya goes to the child and pulls its little body out. She’s crying, keeling over. Rocking back and forth on her haunches. This is what she was hiding. Why she didn’t want him to go asking after Anto the Invisible. She brought her kid here to this place, even though it was against her work contract to do it. There was a no-child policy in the staff house. Boss’s orders.
She brought her kid here to die.
The child cries. It’s alive. But the knowledge comes too late. Something inside Dao snaps.
He strikes the little maid across the mouth, opening the cut on her face even further.
She stumbles but, in a flash, is up again. One hand holding her child, she hits him back. It takes every single one of the villagers in the compound to pull them off each other, and only then because he’s weak with exhaustion. Riya is screaming, she’s so furious.
Oh, so now when he’s weak she can speak perfect English? Hit him back like this?
In his mind her face blurs . . . she starts to look like Nora Watts.