Arch Enemy (34 page)

Z
eta headquarters was dead. That much was clear.

Alex Morgan strained her eyes to see after the lights went out. The afterimage of Praetorian's face remained, and for a few seconds she could see nothing else. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that the odd device that ran on batteries provided a hint of illumination, their glow lost in the expansive War Room. All other equipment was unresponsive.

No one spoke. The faces Alex could make out were somewhere between spooked and defeated.

“Will somebody
do
something?” came the voice of General Strickland.

Bloch stepped in to take charge. “Flashlights first. We can't do anything in the darkness.”

“Got it,” said Lily, standing and walking into the tunnels.

Alex drew her phone and turned on the flashlight function. Karen O'Neal, who also had hers, followed suit.

“Is there any chance we'll get a signal down here?” Alex asked.

“Not one,” said Shepard. “I made sure this place was impregnable. Well . . .” His gaze turned to the big screen, where Praetorian's face had been.

Karen checked her reception anyway, with no luck.

Lily came back in a pool of light, holding a high-powered aluminum-body flashlight in her left hand, three more clutched against her body. Alex's father helped Lily set them down on the table, then turned one on, facing the ceiling. Light dispersed, just enough to see vague features and outlines.

“We need to get out of here,” said Strickland.

“Let me try the elevators,” Lily said, going into the passage under Bloch's office.

“Would anyone hear if we shouted, maybe through a pipe?” asked O'Neal.

“No,” Shepard said. Alex noticed that his attention would turn to his bricked computer every few seconds—she guessed because he was so used to looking at it for answers.

“How long will our air last down here?” Alex asked.

“It'll be at least a week before we run out of oxygen,” said Karen. “Of course, we'll start dying from CO2 poisoning long before then.”

“Great.”

Lily returned in a slow jog. “Elevators are dead, too.”

“Is there any other way out?” said Morgan. “Shepard, you know this place better than anyone else. Can we open the doors to the stairwell?”

“I'll check.” He picked up a flashlight and went down the same passage Lily had come from.

“The world is burning out there and we're trapped in here,” said Strickland.

“Does anyone else smell something funny?” It was O'Neal.

Alex furrowed her brow and sniffed the air. It
was
a funny smell, a whiff so tiny that her brain didn't make the automatic connection to the faint smell of rotten eggs—

“That's gas,” said Bloch.

“Everyone get on higher ground!” said O'Neal.

“Nobody make a spark,” Morgan said.

“Up to my office,” Bloch ordered.

Morgan pushed Alex up first and everyone else followed, filling up the room. The office was spacious, but ten people were still a crowd, even standing against the walls to give each other space. Added to the heat and the anxiety, the constriction was suffocating.

“This buys us time,” Morgan said. “But not much.”

“Is there any chance anything in here sparks?” asked Strickland.

“How is he even doing this?” Alex asked.

“Every system at Zeta is integrated,” said O'Neal. “He might've turned off the pilot light on the water heater.”

Shepard did some mental math. “It wouldn't have reached us yet. Not nearly.”

“He could've turned up the pressure,” said O'Neal, frowning, pupils contracting as she did the math in her head. “That might actually be enough to blow a pipe junction somewhere.”

She took a sheet of paper from a pad on Bloch's desk and jotted some numbers by the light of her phone. “If we assume it to be an ideal gas, assume an atmospheric pressure equal to sea level, which is close enough for a Fermi estimate, and ballpark the total internal volume of Zeta at—”

Alex peeked at the paper. She recognized some of the formulas from high school, but she wouldn't know how to begin to apply them here. She wondered if maybe she should have paid closer attention in chemistry class.

O'Neal seemed to come to a final figure, although Alex could barely make out the numbers in her scrawl. “See?”

“That would give us . . .” Shepard grabbed the pen and ran a few of his own numbers. “We'll take hours to suffocate in here.”

“Suppose that's not what he means to do,” said O'Neal. “Instead, suppose he wants to blow us up. Could he turn on the heater pilot light remotely?”

Shepard's face, drained of color, was all the response they needed. “If he burns up the gas now, he won't get us. He'd wait for the optimal air-to-gas ratio.”

“Ten to one,” said O'Neal. She scrawled on the paper. “That gives us . . . about ten minutes.”

Alex's heart sank.

“We need a plan,” said Bloch.

“Where is the gas coming from?” said Alex. “Maybe we can block it off. Somehow.”

“There's no way,” said Shepard. “There's only one access point to the gas pipes, and that's—the maintenance tunnel! It goes all the way to the garage. Someone might be able to climb up and get out.”

“You think it's possible?” said Bloch.

“It's a tight fit,” said Shepard. “It needs to be someone small.”

“That's me,” said Alex. All eyes went to her father.

“She is the smallest here,” said Strickland.

“Do it,” Shepard said.

Shepard drew her a map, pointing out her path to the tunnel. “Once you're out,” he said, “Circle back in through the main entrance. You'll be able to open the stair door from the outside.”

Bloch opened a drawer and took out a key ring. She drew three keys and put them in Alex's hand. Two were regular cylinder keys. The third was a tubular key, solid and heavy, of a type she'd never seen before. “The first opens the door to the maintenance tunnel. The second opens the trap door to the garage. Use the third to open the door into Zeta.”

She put each in a different pocket of her jeans, memorizing which was which so she wouldn't have to do it under pressure.

“Anyone have a handkerchief or something?” asked O'Neal. “Anything she can hold to her nose.”

Shepard took off his flannel shirt and tossed it to Alex.

“Hold your breath as long as you can,” her father said. “Take shallow breaths if you have to. We're counting on you.”

Alex took a flashlight, pressed the shirt to her nose—it smelled of sweat and Old Spice—and ran.

Her footsteps on the metallic steps echoed in the War Room. She took her last deep breath about halfway down. When she hit ground level, the smell of rotten eggs assaulted her. She had to be careful now. Conserve her breath. Breathing in too much of this air could asphyxiate her. If she lost consciousness, it would be certain death for them all.

She ran across the War Room and into the main hallway of Zeta headquarters, following Shepard's directions to a narrow door just outside the gym.

She pulled out the key from her back pocket—and dropped it. The world swam before her eyes. She couldn't lose consciousness. Not now.

Alex slammed the flashlight against her thigh, still injured from when she'd cut herself out of her cast. Invigorating pain flooded her and brought her back to a keen awareness.

Okay, let's do this.
She shone the light on the floor. She bent down, picked up the key, and inserted it into the slot. It slid in. She unlocked the door and opened it.

The maintenance closet did not deserve the name. It was shallow—maybe twenty inches deep, with two thick pipes running from top to bottom.

She shifted the light up. The closet extended upward some forty, fifty feet. She couldn't help noticing that there wasn't a ladder.

Only one way to do this.

Alex put the flashlight, on and facing up, into her right pocket, so that it lit the passage above. It was a snug fit, but that meant it would stay in place. She ran her left hand over the two keys that were still in her pockets. Then she laid her hand on the pipe on the right—and drew it back. It was hot—more like scalding. This pipe brought down the steam that had been overheating the Zeta Division air.

She grabbed the left pipe with her left hand. It was warm, thanks to its proximity to the heating pipe, but was tolerable to touch.

She kicked off the ground and began her climb, pulling herself up by the pipes. The heat burned her right hand with every second of contact, and she resisted the impulse to draw it away.

Her legs weren't in top shape, but her upper arms were a whole other story. They had carried her up a full eight feet before she knew it. Here, the closet became a narrow vertical tunnel into which she wedged herself. Once in, she braced her back against one wall and her feet against another.

Judging it safe, she took a deep breath. Hardly any smell of gas. She stopped to catch her breath until the heat against her skin became so intense that it impelled her to keep moving.

At first, the burn had felt like nothing more than a bad sunburn. Now it was like holding her hand over a burning match.

Still she climbed.

She couldn't rest. Every second that passed was a second closer to the whole facility blowing up.

She didn't know how long it took to make it to the top. She climbed with such single-mindedness that she only noticed she had reached the top when her left hand, reaching up for the pipe, hit a hard surface above.

The trapdoor to the garage was held shut by a padlock. She braced her feet against the far wall, back against the wall. It held up her weight, and her hands were free to work. Alex reached her left hand into her pocket and pulled out the second key. She transferred it to her right hand.

She had underestimated the extent of her burns. Touching the warm metal was like holding a firebrand. Startled by the pain, she fumbled the key.

It dropped straight down the shaft, hitting the ground below with a faint
ding
.

Thoughts raced through her head. How long would it take her to climb down then back up again? Too long. It would run over the ten minutes she had been allotted by at least two. Plus, she didn't know how long she could clutch this pipe before her skin would start to peel from her hand.

There was one other option.

She ran her fingers through her hair and found what she was looking for.

A bobby pin. One single pin. She'd have one shot at this, just as her father had taught her. Everyone was counting on her. Her father's life depended on it.

She stared at the pin by the indirect light shining from her pocket. Bending it back and forth, she broke it in two, right down the middle. She put one-half in her mouth, holding it between her teeth. The other she inserted about a quarter of an inch into the lock and bent it ninety degrees. That half would be her tension wrench. The other would be her pick. Holding the tension wrench in her mouth, she pushed the pick about a sixteenth of an inch in and bent the tip, just a smidge.

Then she got to work, setting the tension wrench in place first, pulling it to the side. Next she inserted the pick. And a new problem: the only sensation she felt on her right hand was burning. She'd have to do this left-handed.

Push, push, click. One pin in place. Two.

Her right hand trembled and the tension wrench fell—onto her abdomen, held by a fold of her shirt. Focusing on keeping her hand steady, she picked it up and reinserted it into the keyhole.

One. Two. Three. Four. She pulled the tension wrench until the padlock clicked open.

Success!

She maneuvered it out of the hole, letting it drop down the shaft, and pushed the trap door open. Cool air! She pulled herself out and flopped onto the floor of the edge of the parking garage. She laid her right palm down, letting the cold concrete soothe the burn as she panted.

She willed herself to stand and ran toward the door to Zeta Division, on the opposite wall some sixty feet away. She found the tubular slot and inserted the third key in. The lock was tough, but she forced it to turn until she felt the dead bolt slide. She pushed the door open and walked in. Beyond the elevators were winding stairs. She ran down—the descent was much easier than going up—until she came upon another door. She inserted the tubular key into the lock and opened it.

The smell of gas was overpowering.

“Come on!” she shouted into the dark passage, coughing. She drew the flashlight from her pocket and waved it, hoping they would see. “It's open!”

She wasn't about to wait to see if they had heard. She plunged inside, coming face-to-face with the others, led by Peter Conley, at the far end.

“Go!” her father, bringing up the rear, yelled to her, wasting precious oxygen. “Run!”

She did, taking the lead up the stairs, the rest of the group following.

She emerged out into the garage. “Keep running,” her father called out behind her. “Clear the area!”

She ran without looking back.

As she dashed up the ramp to the street, the floor shook so hard she stumbled to her knees. The rumble grew louder and a fireball exploded from the Zeta entrance, broken metal and wood flying in every direction.