Whispers Under Ground

when help arrives,’ I said to Reynolds. ‘Not while you’re tooled up.’
    She nodded. It was just as well she hadn’t pulled it out in front of a CCTV camera. I glanced down the platform to where Kumar was talking into the Help Point and I must have loosened my grip or something – because that’s when the bastard tried to throw me off. In my defence, I don’t think the normal human arm is supposed to bend that way, certainly not twist up in some weird angle and smash its elbow in my chin.
    My head cracked back and I lost my hold on his right arm.
    I heard a woman scream and Reynolds yell, ‘Freeze!’
    A glance told me that, despite everything, she’d stepped back and drawn her pistol.
    Training, I learnt later, specifies that you never let your weapon get close enough to the perp to get snatched. I was also informed that the biggest fear an American law Enforcement Officer lives with is the prospect of dying with their weapon still in its holster.
    The guy underneath me didn’t seem impressed. He reared up and then slapped the ground with the palm of his free hand. I got a flash of fresh loam and ozone and the cement floor of the platform cratered under his hand with a loud bang. I actually saw the start of the concussion wave in the dust around the crater and then it knocked me, Reynolds and half a dozen members of the public sprawling. We were lucky the train was still in the station or somebody would have gone onto the tracks.
    Not me, though, because I still had a grip on the fucker’s arm. Because that’s how I’m trained. I pulled on it hard to try and keep him off balance and drag myself up to my feet. But he dug his fingers into the ground and twisted.
    A crack the width of a finger shot across the platform and up the nearest wall. Ceramic tiles splintered with a noise like teeth breaking and then the floor lurched and dipped as if a giant had put his foot on one side and pressed down. The cement cracked open and I felt my stomach jump as the ground I was lying on dropped a good metre. And me with it. I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think – fuck me he’s an Earthbender – before falling into the black.
    For a long moment I thought I was still unconscious but the long stripe of pain on my thigh changed my mind. Once I noticed that pain, all its friends queued up to say hello, including a particularly worrying throbbing patch on the back of my head. I tried to reach up to touch it with my hand, only to find that I literally didn’t have enough elbow room to bend my arm. And that, as they say, is when the claustrophobia really starts.
    I didn’t call for help because I was fairly certain that once I started screaming I probably wouldn’t stop for quite a long time.
    The ground had opened up and I’d fallen into it. Which meant there might not be too much rubble above me. I thought it might even be possible to dig myself out, or at the very least make myself some more breathing room.
    So I yelled for help and, just as I suspected, it turned into a scream.
    Dust fell into my mouth – cutting me off. I spat it out and weirdly that calmed me down.
    I listened for a while in the hope that all that noise had attracted some attention. Consciously keeping my breathing slow, I tried to think of everything I knew about being buried alive that might be relevant.
    Thrashing around is not helpful, hyperventilation is not your friend, and it’s possible to become disorientated in the darkness. There were documented cases of survivors digging themselves deeper into the ground when they thought they were going up. There’s a happy thought.
    However, I did have a major advantage over run-of-the-mill victims – I could do magic.
    I made myself a little werelight, floated it over my stomach and had a look around. With a visual reference re-established, my inner ear informed me that I was lying, feet down, at something like a forty-five-degree angle – so at least I was pointing in the right direction.
    Five centimetres in front of my face was a concrete wall, the imprint of the wooden forms it had set in clearly visible on its surface. The clearance narrowed towards my feet reaching a bottleneck over my knees. I gently moved my feet around – I had more room there.
    Hard up against my left was a wall of what looked like compressed earth and to my right was a space blocked by a portcullis made of rebar that, had it been half a metre closer, would have neatly bisected