"Ahhhhhh! Ohmygoddontdropmedontdropmedontdropme!"
I screamed as the duct I was perched against swung lazily away from the wall, my fingertips going from 'desperately clawing at pipes' to 'frantically waving in empty air in anticipation for my drop onto concrete.
"Peterson!" The voice over the radio barked "Calm down, your pack got caught on the ductwork, just, take a deep breath..."
The duct shifted again, and my center of gravity began drifting away from my feet, tenuously planted on the pipework, and slowly working its way up towards my shoulders, planted flat against a smooth metal plane and being greased by copious amounts of anxiety sweats.
The duct shifted again, and shoulders slid, my back tensed like I'd been struck with a taser, but the weightlessness of freefall never materialized. Instead, whatever had snagged my pack on the way up had arrested my fall on the way down, either in an attempt to restore karmic balance, or to tease me with the sweet relief of death just a little longer.
I opened my eyes to see a wooden dowel slowly creeping its way over the threshold of the duct work and slowly lower towards me.
"Patterson," Allison said "grab my cane and I'll pull you up, try and reach the pipe work as soon as you can."
I couldn't see her face, but the positioning of her headlamp made me think she was laying prone on the duct above.
"Okay," I said, reaching out for the cane.
From beneath, I could hear the safety manager wrangling people out from inside the cooler. Freezer doors started closing, and the words "containment" and "falling debris" started being bandied about in a way that I couldn't help but take personally.
The end of the cane came within what was theoretically the range of my arms, had my shoulders not been tensed together hard enough to crush steel cans. I weekly waved my forearms in the air, it was no use. If I wanted to reach the cane, I was going to have to trust my pack not to fail.
I took a deep breath, kept the cane in my view, and in my mind, counted to three.
I reached out with my right and grabbed the cane.
"Okay," I said, "I think I got it."
Later, Arthur would explain, in a condescending manner that I felt wasn't warranted, that what happened next was the result of several catastrophic failures cascading all together.
“It’s what we in the business refer to as a CMF failure, or a‘Cluster Mother Fucker’ event.”
The duct we were on, or dangling next to, wrapped around the whole unit. Because our end had swung out towards the middle and up, the opposing end had pressed towards the wall and down. The mountings on our side were more than capable of taking a negative load, but the opposing side was now left holding up the entire duct system as well as the two of us on the far side, moving about and exacerbating the stress factor.
Grabbing the cane shifted my weight from a pushing motion to a downward motion, which would have been fine, had my pack not chosen the precise moment to fail.
The duct dropped a half a foot, my feet slipped, releasing the force that'd pushed the duct work away from the wall. The whole apparatus swung forward, and I smacked face first into the piping, just beneath the duct, which slammed into the pipes, bringing them in, and releasing a slow, steady hiss.
I grabbed onto the pipes with my free hand and both legs, still holding onto the cane. I felt a tug upwards on the cane and let go. I screamed as, behind me, the perimeter ducts opposing supports came crashing down, the supports on our side flexed as the whole thing turned ninety degrees and slammed into the wall beneath us.
I looked up. Allison leapt on a pipe just above the duct and had wrapped her entire arm around it. In her free hand, the cane still dangled, just slightly above me, the twisted and mangled duct the only barrier.
"Plan B!" Allison shouted "climb for your life!"
I scrambled up the rest of the pipe work and grabbed onto the cane for balance, then jumped. I leapt up onto the twisted duct for a moment, the floodlights and dust made the scene impenetrable to the eye as a snow storm, save for the large voids of featureless black that marked heavy equipment. In the brief second, I was on top of the duct, I looked for the biggest, darkest void, and leapt for it.
I landed and rolled across what felt like the cover to a large fan, and looked over to Allison as she threw the cane over the pipe and scrambled on top of it. The platform beneath me shifted, and I looked up for another lucky break. I took a running jump and leapt for something with a grate with wide enough openings to climb. My fingers wrapped into the grating, and I thanked my lucky stars. Then, Allison landed on the same component, and the grate popped open. I dropped for a second until the hinges reached their terminus, my fingers screamed in protest, but kept their grip.
Above us, a part of the superstructure collapsed, and a beam dropped, carving through smaller components and sending expensive equipment hurdling to the floor and halting just above and beside us. Allison leapt over and offered her hands. I lifted myself as high as I could to the grate and tried to get a swing going. The grate snapped off its hinges and I dropped.
I screamed out in terror, but in the next moment, I felt a sickening tug at my shoulder, and I swung through the air until I slammed into something sturdy. Eyes closed, I wrapped my aching lambs around it for dear life as the roar of crumbling electrics and the hiss of escaping gas faded until finally the noises started to fade.
"Allison!" Cried the radio "Peterson! Come in!"
"Didn't he say his name was Patterson?" Someone in the background noise said.
"Patterson," Allison said from above me "are you okay?"
I opened my eyes, above me, I could see the rest of the failed girder and the hole it's made in the refrigerator's ceiling, and it's detached from its supports.
"I think so." I said "you?"
Allison paused.
"I think I'll make it, if nothing else, these past few minutes have given me some perspective on life."
"Oh?" I said.
"Yes," she replied, "I now want to live just long enough to slit Arthur's throat."
After an arduous back and forth between us and the ground crew regarding who was at fault, what had just happened, the cost of repairs, and what could be done about the refrigerant leaks that'd been caused by the collapse, (We settled on: Arthur, a complex failure of the support system caused by unaccounted for sheer as opposed to lateral loads, somewhere in the lower hundreds of thousands, and the liberal application of duct tape, respectively)
After taking a moment to blink the dust out of our eyes and apply whatever first aid we could, including putting a cold compress into each of my hands for a prolonged amount of time, we started work on opening the duct access port.
"How do we know these will hold us if the ones in the refrigerator didn't?" I asked.
"I've seen at least one employee climb through these back in the day."
"Seriously?" I said as she opened the access panel.
"Yes, he'd been dating someone in apparel and needed a way of getting from the south tower to the food court without being spotted, so he made a habit of taking the air ducts back and forth each day. Rumor was he kept a skateboard in there to speed up the process until someone complained about the noise."
I waited as she climbed into the tube, then she stuck her head out through the access panel.
"Are you messing with me?" I asked.
"I guess you'll only know if you come along." She said, before disappearing into the pipe.
I sighed, put the cold compresses in my pockets, and climbed up into the air duct.
The air was hot and still, I figured that the collapse of the refrigerator had likely knocked out power to the fans, so we'd be without air current for a while, but it also meant we wouldn't be dealing with the gasses we'd released. Allison crawled a few paces ahead of me as we moved through the tunnel, but within just a few minutes, the heat was becoming too much to navigate in pants and polos.
"I need a moment." Allison finally said. She sat up on her knees, then fell back and stretched her legs. She reached out and rolled up her pant legs to the knees. I opted to do the same, taking off my knee pads and placing them directly over my exposed skin. I removed my polo and was surprised to see just how much blood there was on the back. I reached behind me and felt a bandage under my white t-shirt.
"Did you patch me up earlier?" I asked, but the thought died, and I looked over at Allison's legs. She strapped the kneepad on just above what almost looked like a large bite mark. The flesh was folded in on itself, and the scars from the stitches were still evident.
Allison glanced up at me with a scowl.
"Turn around." She said,
I did as she said as I heard more fabric rustling. After a moment, I could hear her moving again, I took that as my cue to follow. She'd removed her polo, stripping her down to rolled up jeans and a training bra, with her polo wrapped around the scar on her leg.
"I didn't mean to gawk." I offered as we made it to a junction in the duct work. Allison rolled over again and took the polo off, draping it over her shoulders as she leaned against the ductwork walls. I opted to do the same. She looked up at me, then down to the leg.
"Just ask the question, Patterson."
I thought for a moment, then opted to try and salvage what was left of my respectability.
"What did Prendick and Well's mean when they called you 'Doctor Rodriguez'?"
Allison chuckled.
"Sorry," I said, "I just didn't feel right asking about the leg."
"It's fine." She said "Actually, it’s funny you asked about that now."
"Why?"
"Because both questions have the same answer.”
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