False Horizon - Alex Archer [98]
“Annja!”
She turned back and saw Mike waving her on. Tuk screamed for her to jump.
Annja saw the fissure growing wider and she knew she would have one chance to make the jump.
As the fissure spread, Annja dug deep and felt her heart thundering in her chest as the last bits of her adrenaline gave her a sudden turbo boost of power. She leaped through the air as the floor fell away, finally reaching out for the doorway.
Her hands found the doorjamb of stone and she felt the floor give way beneath her. She found herself dangling in open space as the stone fell into a seething mass of angry greens and yellows a hundred feet below.
All of the nuclear waste that had been stored in the facility was churning like a boiling cesspool of hell.
Annja felt her grip slipping.
She had no more strength anywhere in her body.
And just as she was about to lose it all—just as she was about to topple backward and fall into the swirling nuclear mists—she felt two hands clutch her and pull her through the doorway.
She fell into Tuk and Mike and they dragged her toward the staircase.
More explosions thundered around them as they clambered up the stairs toward the trapdoor.
Mike made it through the trapdoor first. Annja felt herself lifted up and then Tuk’s face appeared behind her.
“Quickly, Tuk, shut the door,” Mike said.
Annja managed to pull herself clear and then she heard Tuk slamming the stone trapdoor behind them.
Cold winds pounded them as the cave itself started to crumble.
“It’s not safe here!” Mike said. “The whole mountain is going to give way.”
“Outside!” yelled Tuk. “We’ve got to get outside!”
Mike and Tuk eased Annja through the opening in the cave and then followed her out. Blinding sunlight greeted her and the numbing cold bit at every pore of her body. Annja felt pain like she’d never experienced before in her life. Every fiber of her soul seemed like it was on fire.
She bled and sweated and froze as the mountain rumbled around her like an angry volcano.
“This way!”
Mike pointed down the slope toward the crash site of the plane. Tuk helped Annja up. “We’ve got to keep going!”
Annja shook her head. “I can’t.”
“You must! Don’t give up on me now, Annja Creed!”
Mike came back and tried to scoop Annja up in his arms. He took two steps forward and then fell into the snow. It was too deep and he was still too weak himself to carry Annja.
“You’ve got to walk! We’ll help you!”
Miniavalanches started breaking loose from the ice sheets and tons of snow and ice started rocketing down from the peak toward them. “Run!”
Annja felt like her legs were lead but she pushed herself further than she ever had before. She had to get down the slope.
Tuk ran along beside her, his legs still pumping like mad pistons.
Mike’s big arms tried to lift Annja along when he could and the three of them kept stumbling along.
“Look out!”
A snow boulder rumbled past them, barely missing them all by mere inches. They kept trying to run through the waist-deep snows back toward the plane.
Annja wanted to tell Tuk to use his cell phone, but if she did he would have stopped and that would have been the end of them all. They had to keep moving. They had to make it back down the mountain.
And then Annja heard an incredible sound amid the thundering rumbles and cracks of rocks tumbling loose from their millennia-old perches.
A helicopter.
At first she thought she was imagining it, but then she saw the chopper appear overhead, its rotors beating the sky around it.
“It’s Garin!” shouted Tuk. “He’s found us!”
Annja tried to smile, but only took two more steps toward the helicopter before she tumbled and fell facefirst into the white snow.
37
A gray, cloying mist surrounded Annja as she floated with no sense of time or space. She could feel her strength returning slowly, and yet a big part of her had no desire to relinquish the peace she felt in this strange limbo