“City of Pillars” Chapter 6 now in theatres! Shown in Sense-O-Rama!
April 23rd, 2008
Just like the title says: The long-awaited (since last week) sixth chapter of “City of Pillars” hath been posted on Footnotes to the Human Species.
But some of you may still be skeptical. “Do I really want to read about giant betentacled transdimensional monsters destroying a city? I mean, you’re clearly ripping off Cloverfield, Pegritz—that’s sooooo obvious.” Well, yeah, I am. Unabashedly. But here, why don’t you read this and then tell me what you think:
I don’t know how many times I almost fell. Wainwright wasn’t a real big guy, but he was still wearing most of his gear, and I had him over my right shoulder, so I kept leaning right. Muroni’s jumping down the stairs like he’s a fucking kangaroo and Kelly’s neck-and-neck him. “Wait for me!” I yelled again and again but they didn’t even here. I wasn’t even paying attention to the floor numbers, I was just running, jumping, practically falling down the stairs just like this paramedics we’d seen coming down in Stairwell B who’d said there was something up on 36.
We were outpacing the thing—we were actually getting ahead of it!—and I was, like, We’re gonna make it, we’re gonna outrun the Thing From Another World and then we ran into another unit coming up—I mean, we literally ran into them.
No one could see each other in the smoke. These guys must’ve been coming up the stairwell dragging hoses behind them to put out individual floor fires. Next thing you know there’s a pile-up and I’m falling facefirst down the stairs in a big crush of bodies and screaming and water—somebody had pulled the valve on the hose. I dropped Wainwright. I don’t even know where he went—I just fell. I hit the landing so hard my forehead cracked off the tiles and oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph, the pain blacked me out for a couple of seconds.
And then I came back to myself. I heard men screaming like girls and the guy lying next to me just flew up into the air; those worm-things had bit into him and just yanked him straight up. I looked up and oh, my God, the entire stairwell was…there was a ceiling of thing, and it was reaching down with worms and now these long, jointed bony hooks, picking up men and just stuffing them into itself. My mind went blank then and I got up and I ran; shoving past any body in my way, grabbing men and pushing everyone out of my way, fuckin’ throwing them down the stairs. Another guy beside me screamed and shot up into the air and that was it—no way was I going out like that. That was the point that I lost my mind like Wainwright had. I barely remember what I was doing. Shoved anyone out of my way, just kept going down, stiff-arming my way through that bottleneck in the stairwell like I was Jerome Fucking Bettis.
Chapter 6 is told from the point of view of one Rudy LaCava, an FDNY fireman who runs into some pretty awful things in the North Tower and narrowly misses dying in the collapse…only to discover that the worst is yet to come.
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