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into the air and of the great low clouds of dust drifting over the city and of the fires in the street grates. She sucked in her breath as the helicopter approached Chinatown, Market Square. All of it blown inward, lone walls left tottering in the dark air. There are people in the streets, she was saying. I can see people in the streets but I can’t tell what they’re doing. They seem to be just standing there. I don’t know. Oh god some of them are crawling out of the buildings.
    He listened, grim. It seemed to him where he sat in his exhaustion that the vault of his skull was floating and a great dizzying absence filled his brainpan and he could not think.
    And now followed a litany of destruction as the reporter postulated on further ruin unseen by the human eye. On ruptured telephone cables and power lines and water pipelines. On leaking gas and imminent explosions. She spoke of streets with little or no damage though these were few and remarkable for it and as the helicopter nosed onward the harbour came into view. She told of the Empress Hotel leaning violently backward but not quite fallen over and she told of the Parliament Buildings undamaged to her eye and of the great crowds gathered on the provincial lawns. The tide in the harbour was strangely low and she spoke of boats keeled over in the shallows and passing now over James Bay she told a tale of such unrivalled ruin and horror that at times her voice did fail her.
    The curb where the old man sat was rubbed smooth like soap and as he leaned back on it he felt it again. A hand on his shoulder. And this time when he turned a woman with a bandage over one ear was crouching over him, her eyes very dark.
    It’s time, she said.
    Under the watery afternoon sun he donned a pair of heavy calfskin gloves given him by a youth and then a man unpeeled a name tag onto his shirt and a fletched rope was tied to his ankle. He was given a headlamp, a hammer, a chisel. Then a slender girl with a soft yellow bruise on her forehead warned hoarsely of the lay of the tunnel and what would be found within.
    Pike’s already in there, she said. You know how this works. Just follow the ropes in. You’ll want to check that lamp. Alright?
    He nodded. He hitched his trousers high and toggled his headlamp.
    Then went in. In through a jagged gash in the rubble. Twisting his hips and torso aslant and ducking his head and sliding his left thigh and forearm in first, into a small cavity of light. A low tunnel no taller than his knees. It sloped downwards and he laid himself out and crept forward following the engineer’s rope, wriggling in filth and finning forth on his elbows like some wormlike beast. The stink of gas was strong and the strewn battery lamps hot in the dirt where he crawled. His safety line dragged at his ankle. The tchink of hammer and mallet in one fist as he went.
    The girl had warned him of a corpse crushed over the hole and he could smell the rot in the tunnel as he neared it. A dead man trapped by a slab above. The corpse was pressed into the ceiling of the tunnel half-visible with his arm dangling there, his fingers curling earthward. The dead hand swollen and hard and hanging putrid before him.
    He flattened himself as he could and crept on.
    The tips of the dead man’s fingers brushed through his hair, brushed his neck. As he passed it the cadaver bloated with gas hissed eerily. His right elbow seeped into something soft and cool and he rolled it squelching out and kept on.
    After a time the tunnel turned sharply and he approached the edge of a vertical drop and he could hear the crunch of digging from below. He eased himself over and peered down and called in.
    Hello, he called. You’re Pike?
    A man drenched in sweat and wearing a thick dark beard glared up out of the darkness. Begrimed and stout and brazen like a coal miner. A lamp pinned at an angle under his boots. He was folded awkwardly over a low girder and he twisted around to