EVERYTHING WAS MUCH LOUDER, AS IF THE STORM WAS SOMEWHERE inside the building instead of outside it. Every crack of lightning made him jump. The amnesiac dashed across the atrium, straight for the main hall on the other side. The bag was exactly where he had said it would be, a small lump on the floor surrounded by puddles. He jumped on it like prey and hugged it to him. The rain had found its way through the attic and was pooling menacingly in the room. That’s not good, he thought. If it was getting in there, it would start finding its way in elsewhere. If it succeeded in too many places, it might tear the place apart, right on top of them.
As if the hurricane had read his mind, the entire building groaned. The amnesiac ducked, then uncovered his head. It had held, he sighed. But it hadn’t.
If he’d still had both eyes, he might have noticed the roof beam being battered loose by the wind as it shuddered and finally gave way. Its wild swing as it fell might have fluttered in his peripheral vision. But on that side everything was muted, like a music system with half the speakers unplugged. He saw nothing—only heard the whine of the wood as it splintered, after the jagged edge of the beam was already halfway through its downward arc. With two eyes, he would have ducked or scrambled out of the way. Instead, he turned into it, to see what the sound had been.
For an instant, there was no pain. Only a flash of white, all encompassing, the way water hits everywhere when one slaps through its surface after a dive gone bad. The amnesiac sank into the white as it curled all the way around, sinking deeper. Then there was pain.
His face was on fire. Everything was gray, then red, then dark, a kind of dark he couldn’t blink away. The fire had spread into his cheek, into his eye socket, up through the fractured cracks of his brow bone. He realized he was screaming. He tried to get up—away from the fiery pain—but he couldn’t understand which way was up. He pushed harder into the floor—or was it a wall? He couldn’t tell if the air his hands swiped through was beside or above him. He was on stone again, he realized dimly, not flooded grass. It meant he’d been knocked several feet backward, out of the atrium and back deeper into the main hall.
“The bag,” he wailed. “Where’s the bag?” The darkness deepened, boring into his brain, agony. There was nothing then, no color, no gradient of light, no registry of movement. His vision was obliterated.
More cracking threatened overhead. The roof was caving further. The amnesiac found his way to his knees and scrambled aimlessly, swinging his arms in wide circles, delirious from pain. Where was the bag? Where was the fucking bag? Had it stayed in the courtyard? Had it flown from his hands in the fall, even deeper into the main room? His fingers hit chunks of concrete, splintered wood, splashed into freezing puddles. “Where’s the bag?” he cried again. The voice that came out terrified him. Just beside his knee, a boom shattered the stone floor as another rafter gave way. “Gajarajan!” He flung his head back and forth, even though he couldn’t see anything out of whatever was left of his remaining eye. This is how I die, he realized. Crumbles of cement powdered the top of his head, another beam groaned. He couldn’t stop. “Gajarajan! Gajarajan!”
Wet leather slammed into the ruin of his face. The amnesiac howled, but his hands moved on their own, grabbing the straps, pulling it to him even in his mindless agony. To his surprise, he felt another pair of hands on the other side of it—because someone else had found the bag and shoved it at him.
“Get up now!” the person attached to the hands was screaming. “Get up now get up now GET UP NOW!” And then those hands threw him in a stumbling roll as the floor where he had just been crouched exploded.
“Gajarajan—” the amnesiac cried. The hands were on him again.
“You are the last person I know in this world, and I’ll be damned if you die on me, too! Get up now!” the voice shouted, hysterical.
“Dr. Avanthikar—” It was her, somehow she was here, she had left the basement, she had found the bag, she had grabbed it and pushed him out of the way. “Dr. Avanthikar!”
“The roof is caving in!” She shook him. “We’re going to die if we don’t get back downstairs right now!”
He couldn’t pry his hands away from the bag. He felt her grab a fistful of his shirt and take off, dragging him behind her. Freezing rain stung them through the opened sky. The amnesiac stumbled after her, trying not to catch his feet on the rubble he could no longer see as they ran. Around them, he heard the walls start to moan, faltering against the wind now that the ceiling was no longer there to help them resist. Grass, mud. The murderous rain.
“Don’t stop!” she cried.
Behind, he heard the walls begin to fall, inch by inch, chasing them like a rolling concrete wave.