Quake by Andy Remic

warned her through the soles of her boots. The smile fell from her face as somebody cried out. The ground suddenly roared beneath them, walls shaking, glass smashing from the bar and dropping from people’s quake-slippery fingers. Beer washed across the floor amid broken glass and overturned furniture. As one, the population of the party turned and ran, scrambling and pushing for the exit as—
    Natasha blinked.
    The floor opened and a jagged metre-wide scar tore towards her. With a yelp, she dragged free a concealed knife and leapt upwards, embedding the knife in a wide beech beam. It held her suspended as Hans hissed in surprise and disappeared into the gaping black cavity—
    Warm air drifted up from the yawning crevasse.
    Natasha blinked, licking her lips slowly, nervously.
    Hans was gone.
    Natasha watched, hands sweating in the sudden blast of heat, as a woman slipped, fingers clawing at the flagstone floor, and disappeared into a deep-seeming infinity of darkness. Warm air stinking of sulphur and other chemicals washed upwards over Natasha and she gagged, bile rising from her stomach, and still the rumbling moaned, then started to increase in tempo again as the crevasse - its movement halted briefly for a suspended moment in time - snaked across the ground once more in a bass-screeching zigzag of tearing stone, towards the terrified bar staff who froze like rabbis in the headlight beams of a fast-moving juggernaut...
    ‘Run!’ screamed Natasha, swinging her legs and leaping to the apparent safety of one crumbling uneven side of this sudden rift. The fracture crashed across the floor and the whole room seemed to tilt, to upend as the massive bar was torn, its woodwork screaming and spitting splinters like spears, whirled around in a vortex of unstoppable Earth energy and then dropped into the chasm, where it wedged tight at an angle.
    The rumbling died.
    People were still screaming, but this faded as the crowd fled from the chamber. The huge timber bar, stuck at an angle like a toothpick in a giant’s maw, creaked in its undignified entrapment. Below it, in the darkness, Natasha could hear more screaming, one voice hysterical, another sobbing.
    ‘Nats!’
    ‘Carter, over here.’
    Then Carter was there, his eyes wide at the jagged angular rift across the floor of the chamber, a tear in the fabric of the rock and leading - how deep? He frowned, glancing over the edge. His boots felt slippery against the loose stones.
    ‘Nats, let’s get the fuck out of here.’
    More rumblings came from below the earth; the walls began to shake and the muffled sobbing increased in volume. Then the hysterical screaming suddenly cut short as the noise of impacting flesh bounced from walls of rock.
    ‘No! Help them!’ Her eyes were wide, pleading.
    ‘Natasha! Get out of here ...’ But Carter knew that it was no use. She was too good a person to put her own safety first ... her stubbornness was legendary and had led to a million fights. Carter grinned a bad grin: he knew a fucking lousy gig when he saw one, and the crevasse beneath him was definitely a gig to avoid ...
    Carter leapt to the edge of the precipice and kicked at the wide timber of the wedged bar; it was stuck, a ten-metre splinter length caught against a jagged fall of rock. Below, about fifteen feet into the chasm and caught on a narrow strip of rocky ledge, he could see two women clinging on for dear life, eyes streaming with tears, their revealing party dresses torn and ragged.
    ‘Yeah, just like a fucking snowboard,’ he growled, and to the cacophony of rising rumbles, the tearing of rock all around, the shaking walls and the vibrating of roof timbers Carter leapt onto the bar and slid down towards the two desperate women - descending into the darkness with its warm sulphur air currents and bad metal-rock stink.
    The women’s tears were flowing freely as he grabbed a hand, slippery with blood, sweat and saliva. His fingers closed around it in an iron grip and he