The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (42 page)
Read The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) Online
Authors: Erik Hanberg
“I saw a door,” Shaw said. “In the side of the tunnel.”
He let Annalise support his shoulder, and together the two of them hobbled a few feet down the tunnel. Shaw stopped them in front of a gray panel. In the dim light, it was nearly impossible to distinguish from the wall, but Shaw had seen it move.
“There’s got to be a way to open it,” he said.
“Taveena!” Annalise shouted. “We found a door!”
Shaw felt the curved walls around the panel, searching for a button or a control panel. He heard footfalls hurrying closer in the tunnel. “It’s me!” Taveena called. She slowed down when she saw the two of them.
Shaw found a box mounted at shoulder height to the left of the sliding door. He looked more closely and saw two buttons.
He pushed the top one, and the door slid open to reveal a long well-lit hallway, with concrete walls and concrete floors.
“Let’s go,” Taveena said.
“We have to bring Yang,” Shaw said, stopping her.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No bloodshed if we can avoid it. Erling wasn’t willing to kill him. We can’t leave him here to die in the cold.”
“Who’s going to carry him, you?”
“We just have to get him out of the main tunnel,” Annalise cut in. She left Shaw balanced against the wall and went to Yang. “Help me, Taveena. The faster we get him out of here, the faster we can all get moving.”
Taveena didn’t move.
“I’m not leaving without doing this,” Annalise said.
Taveena swore and went to Yang. Together they lifted his shoulders and dragged him over the lower lip of the door and into the concrete hallway. Shaw hopped on one foot after them.
He made sure the door closed firmly behind them, and then followed the sleeping face of Yang as the two women pulled him farther from the cold tunnel. Every fifty feet or so, they passed doors and alcoves. Some with stairs leading up, some numbered and named in both French and English.
“This is probably far enough,” Annalise said. She and Taveena tucked Yang into an alcove below a set of stairs. Shaw watched them, praying that Yang would be all right. He was afraid of saying anything overly sentimental in front of Taveena.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Up.”
They went farther down the hallway, and turned right at a junction with another hallway, Taveena insistent that it would lead them away from the Lattice command center. Shaw, who normally prided himself on his sense of direction found that with the underwater swim, the curve of the LHC tunnel, and now the long hallway, he wasn’t sure of any direction anymore.
Taveena found a staircase. It didn’t look any different than any of those they’d already passed, but they had to try somewhere.
They made slow progress, each step a hardship for Shaw, who had to be supported by someone else to make the climb. Taveena and Annalise took turns shouldering his weight. Shaw focused on the count of stairs. When he passed seven hundred steps, he started to think about how to tell Taveena and Annalise to go on without him.
It turned out to be only sixty more steps.
The trio came to a door. No window in it, no sign. Not even a crack of light under it to tell what might lie on the other side. Armed guards? Freedom?
They stood, contemplating it, not sure who should make the first move.
“I’m not going back down those steps,” Shaw said. He hopped forward on the landing, and looked back at Taveena and Annalise.
“On three.”
He counted it out, and they burst through the door, pushing their way into … an empty vestibule. There was another door that led back into the building, and on the other side … a glass door which revealed an alley streetscape on the other side.
They were back in the world.
Not caring if the door was alarmed or not, Taveena and Annalise helped Shaw through it.
It was still morning in Geneva, and they felt the coolness of an alpine autumn on them. They could see a thin strip of blue skies above them, the alley blocking out the rest of the light.
Picking a direction at random—even Taveena had been disoriented by the hundreds of back and forths in the staircase—they emerged on a quiet street, bordered by a park.
Shaw took a deep breath, feeling like a free man who had just stepped out of jail. He was free to go wherever he wanted. No one using the Lattice could track him now. He was free to call Ellie, as soon as he could find an available public call box. Did any exist anymore that didn’t rely on the Lattice to operate?
No one was around, and the women carried Shaw across the street and into the trees of the park. Mostly hidden from view, they found a bench and laid Shaw down.
“We need to get him to a doctor,” Annalise said.
“In time,” Taveena said. “Just let me … let me enjoy this for a second.”
Annalise stared at her, her mouth agape. “Enjoy this? Are you kidding? We’ve got to get out of here. The whole city is looking for us!”
“But they’re not using the Lattice to do it. And that is a
very
wonderful thing.” Taveena closed her eyes and inhaled the fresh park air.
From his position on the bench, Shaw looked around and wondered why they hadn’t seen anyone yet. Was everyone in hiding? And if so, what were they hiding from? The spheres he’d sent into Lake Geneva? He wasn’t sure, but he estimated that they were some distance from the lakefront where so much had gone down. So if it wasn’t that, what was it?
“Can we keep moving?” he asked, the pain in his knee was feeling worse and worse.
Annalise and Taveena got him up under their shoulders and continued through the park, trying to put some distance between themselves and the exit they’d used.
As they neared the other side of the park, Shaw began to hear a siren, bleating its distress. It got louder and louder as they approached until it was overbearing.
Emerging onto the streetscape, Shaw was amazed at how different it was from the quiet street on the other side of the park. This was an arterial. It was crowded with cars, but none of them were moving, and all were sitting empty, abandoned by their passengers.
The siren was coming from a police car that had crashed into a storefront across the street. It was up on two wheels, balanced precariously on a display case that had been in its way when it must have plowed through the front window. The car’s red and blue lights were flashing around and around inside the tiny space.
Of course the cars didn’t work—the self-driving technology used the Lattice for navigation. Shaw looked up into the sky. No air traffic either. It was the same with the shuttles and the slingshots.
He looked down the street to his right, and only a few hundred feet away he saw what was almost certainly a body, falling out the door of a smashed car.
To his left, an overturned car was ablaze, its battery creating a blue-green flame. In the distance, he thought he caught a fleeting glimpse of someone running, but then the figure was gone a second later.
Overturned cars, bodies on the street, wailing sirens and a city afraid to open its doors. Was it the same everywhere else? … Just what had happened to the world while he’d been down in that tunnel?
His sense of freedom fell dead on the sidewalk, and Shaw was overcome by guilt. Guilt … and dread for what was waiting for him in this new world.
“My God,” he whispered, “what have we done?”
THE END
The Iron Harvest
, Book II of The Lattice Trilogy, will be available January 26, 2016.
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Thank you! — Erik
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NON-FICTION
For Small (and Very Small) Nonprofits
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As usual, there are so many people to thank for helping make this book what it is: Mary Holste, Joy Skuggeld, Nick Leider, Marguerite Giguere, Mary Lloyd, Andrew Fry, Dan Voelpel, Alicia Lawver, Brent Hartinger, Joe Kreuser, Chandler O’Leary, Doug Mackey, Nancy Wick, and many many more.
I would also like to recommend Kevin Kelly’s 2010 book
What Technology Wants
, a fascinating look at the history and evolution of technology. Many of the themes explored in The Lead Cloak were deeply influenced by his writing.
I also would like to thank the readers who have taken the time to email me about one of my books. This book took more than two years from the time I started to the time I finished it, and it was your encouragement and feedback that helped keep me writing. Thank you!
Erik Hanberg lives in Tacoma, Washington, with his wife Mary and daughter Hannah. In addition to writing, he was elected to the Metro Parks Board of Tacoma in 2011.
Find him at
ErikHanberg.com
or on Twitter:
@erikhanberg
.