Zero Game (25 page)

50

Y
OU HAVE ANY IDEA
what you’ve done?” the man yells, racing toward us in the orange containment suit.

I want to run, but my legs won’t move. I can’t believe I led us into this—even the smallest amount of radiation could . . .

The man reaches toward the back of his neck, then yanks the radiation hood off his head, tossing it to the ground. “These are supposed to be clean-room conditions—you know how much time and money you just cost us?!” he shouts, raging forward. If I had to guess his accent, I’d go with eastern European, but something’s off. He’s got sunken dark eyes, a black mustache, and silver wire-rimmed glasses. He’s also much thinner than he looked when the hood was on.

“There’s no radiation?” Viv asks.

“How’d you get down here?!” the man shoots back. Ignoring our orange vests, he takes one look at our clothes. Slacks and button-downs. “You’re not even mining people, are you?” Along the wall is an intercom with a telephone receiver. Right next to that is a red button. The man goes right for it. I know an alarm when I see one.

“Harris . . .”

I’m already on it. The man with the mustache dives for the alarm. I grab him by the wrist and shove him back. He’s stronger than I expected. Using my own weight against me, he whips me around, slamming me into the white concrete wall. My head jerks backward, and my helmet hits the wall so hard, I actually see stars. He adds a rabbit punch to my gut, hoping it’ll take the fight out of me. He doesn’t know me at all.

His
head’s exposed;
I’m
wearing an unbreakable mine light. Grabbing him by the shoulders, I ram my head forward, put all my weight behind it, and head-butt him with my helmet. The brim slices him across the bridge of his nose. As he staggers backwards, I look over at Viv.

She stares at me blankly, unclear what to do.

“Get out of here!” I tell her.

“They’ll kill you for this!” the man with the mustache yells.

Holding him tight, I grip his shoulder with one hand and wind up to hit him again. Thrashing wildly, he digs his fingers into my wrist. As I let go, he tries to make a run for it. He’s heading straight toward Viv—but before he gets there, I grab him by the back of his containment suit and yank him as hard as I can. He may not have been the one to kill Matthew and Pasternak, but right now he’s the only punching bag I’ve got. As he stumbles off balance, I give him one last shove—straight for the edge of the crater.

“No . . . !” he screams. “It’ll all—!”

There’s a loud, shattering crash as he clears the ledge and lands on half a dozen of the photomultiplier tubes. Sliding headfirst down the inside of the sphere, he smashes through every tube he hits like a human sled, clearing a path all the way to the bottom. The tubes crack easily, barely slowing him down . . . that is, until he smacks into the thick metal pylon at the base of the sphere. He looks up just in time to hit it face first. He tries to turn, but the pylon collides with his collarbone. There’s a sharp, muted crunch. Bone against metal. As his shoulder hits, his body spins awkwardly around the pylon—but the man doesn’t move. Facedown and unconscious, he’s sprawled across the base of the sphere.

“Time to go!” Viv says, tugging me back toward the entrance.

I look around the rest of the room. Across the sphere, there’re two more submarine doors. They’re both shut.

“Harris, c’mon!” Viv begs, pointing down at the scientist. “The moment he gets up, he’s gonna howl at the moon! We gotta get out of here now!”

Knowing she’s right, I turn around and leap out through the submarine door. Jackrabbiting out of there, we run back through the lab, retracing our steps past the mercury, past the tetrachloroethylene, and past the lab tables and computer servers. Just behind the servers, I notice a small bookshelf filled with black three-ring binders and empty clipboards. From the angle we originally came in, it was easy to miss.

“Harris . . .”

“Just a sec . . .”

I shove the server out of the way and scan the binders as fast as I can. Like the clipboards, they’re all empty. All but one. On the top shelf is a black binder with a printed label that reads:
The Midas Project.
Pulling it off the shelf, I flip to the first page. It’s filled with numbers and dates. All meaningless. But in the top right-hand corner of the page are the words
Arrivals/Neutrino.
As I continue to flip, it’s the same on every page.
Neutrino
.
Neutrino
.
Neutrino.
I have no idea what a neutrino is, but I don’t need a Ph.D. to see the trend.

“Harris, we gotta get out of here . . . !”

I slap the book shut, tuck it under my arm, and follow Viv through the room.

As we reach the first door of the air-lock, I toss the notebook to Viv and grab a fire extinguisher that’s leaning against the wall. If anyone’s waiting for us in the tunnel, we should at least have a weapon.

Viv punches the black button that’s just beside the door, and we wait for the hydraulic hiss. As the doors swing open, we step into the air-lock, facing the next set of doors. Viv again pounds the black button.

“Put your mine light on,” I tell her.

She flips a switch, and the light blinks on. Behind us, the doors to the lab slam shut—but unlike before, the door in front of us doesn’t open. We’re trapped. We give it another second.

“Why aren’t they—?”

There’s another screaming hiss. The doors in front of us slowly wheeze open.

“You think anyone’s out there?” she asks.

I pull the safety pin on the fire extinguisher. “We’ll know in a second.”

But as the doors finally open, there’s nothing there but the long darkness of the black tunnel. It’s not gonna last long. The moment someone finds the guy with the mustache, alarms’ll start ringing. The best thing we can do now is get moving.

“Let’s go . . .” I call out, darting into the tunnel.

“You know where you’re going?”

“To find the cage. Once we get to the top, we’re as good as gone.”

51

S
TANDING IN FRONT
of the empty elevator shaft, Janos narrowed his eyes at the steel cable, waiting for it to start churning. “Did you try to reach your guy down there?” he said into his cell phone.

“I’ve been trying since early this morning—no answer,” Sauls replied.

“Well, then don’t blame me when you don’t get what you want,” Janos said. “You should’ve called in security the moment I said they were headed this way.”

“I told you sixteen times: Those locals down there . . . they may be thrilled to be working again, but they don’t know the extent of all this—we start calling in armed guards, and we might as well shove the microscope straight up our own ass. Believe me, the longer they think it’s a research lab, the better off we’ll all be.”

“I hate to break it to you, but it is a research lab.”

“You know what I mean,” Sauls shot back.

“That still doesn’t mean you should just risk it all for—”

“Listen, don’t tell me how to run my own operation. I hired you because—”

“You hired me because two years ago, a scaly little Taiwanese silk dealer with an Andy Warhol dye job had a surprisingly finer eye for art than you anticipated. Remarkably, just as he rang the inspector to call you out on that poorly forged Pissarro—which you must admit had none of the lushness of the original—that tiny bug of a man suddenly disappeared. Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?” Janos asked.

“Truly,” Sauls replied, surprisingly calm. “And to be clear, the Pissarro was the
original—
it’s the museum that has the fake—not that you or Mr. Lin were ever sharp enough to consider that, am I right?”

Janos didn’t answer.

“Do your job,” Sauls demanded. “Understand? We clear on the mine now? Once the system’s in place and we can clean out all the local trash, this place’ll be locked down tighter than a flea’s dickhole. But in terms of calling in security, y’know what? I already did—and you’re it. Now fix the problem and stop with the damn lecturing. You found their car; you found their tags—it’s just a matter of waiting at the mine.”

Hearing the click in his ear, Janos turned back to the elevator shaft. He was tempted to call the cage and go down into the tunnels himself, but he also knew that if he did, and Harris and Viv got off on a different level, he’d just as easily miss them. For now, Sauls had it right. What goes down must come up. All he had to do was wait.

52

T
HE RUSTED STEEL SAFETY
gate lets out a high-pitched howl as I tug it from the ceiling of the cage and send it pounding to the floor. The metal rollers spin as it crashes into place. We’re on the 4,850 level of the mine, finally settling into the cage that’ll take us the rest of the way to the top. Like before, I ignore the leaky water that drips from above and go straight for the intercom.

“Stop cage,” I announce as I press the goo-covered button. “We’re all clear—going to one-three.”

“One-three,” the operator repeats. The same level we started at.

“Hoist cage,” I say.

“Hoist cage,” she repeats.

There’s a sharp tug from above. The steel cable goes taut, the cage rockets upward, and as we fly toward the surface, my testicles sink down to my ankles.

Across from me, Viv’s eyes and jaw are clamped shut. Not in fear—in pure obstinacy. She lost it once; she’s not letting it happen again. The cage is banging back and forth against the wood shaft, raining even more water against the top of our helmets. Fighting to keep her balance, she leans back against the greasy walls, but the ride feels like we’re surfing the top of a moving elevator. Aside from a quick glance at the oxygen detector—“20.4,” she says—she stays completely silent.

I’m still breathing heavy, but some things can’t wait. Wasting no time, I open the
Midas
Project
notebook.

“Wanna shine that candle over here?” I ask, hoping to take her mind off the ride.

Between the two of us, she’s still got the only light—but right now, it’s staying aimed down at the metal floor. For Viv, until we’re actually out of here, this box isn’t just a moving leaky coffin. It’s a mountain. A mountain to be conquered.

The only good news is, as we rocket up toward the surface, we don’t have far to go. The oxygen numbers continue to rise:
20.5 . . . 20.7 . . .
Fresh air and freedom are only a minute away.

53

T
HE INSTANT THE STEEL
cable started moving, Janos pounced for the nearby phone on the wall.

“Hoist . . .” the female operator answered.

“This cage that’s coming up right now—can you make sure its next stop is at the Ramp?” Janos asked, reading the location from the sign.

“Sure, but why do you—?”

“Listen, we got an emergency up here—just bring the cage as fast as you can.”

“Everyone alright?”

“Did you hear what I—?”

“I got it . . . the Ramp.”

Buttoning his jacket, Janos watched as the water rained down and a cold wind blew from the mouth of the open hole. Shoving his hands in the side pocket of his jean jacket, he felt for the black box and flicked the switch. Thanks to the rumble of the approaching cage, he couldn’t even hear the electrical hum.

Over his shoulder, the wood benches started to rattle. Farther up the tunnel, the fluorescent lights began to flicker. The bullet train was on its way, and from the deafening roar, it wouldn’t be long.

With a final wheeze, the metal vault popped up from the abyss.

Janos dove at the latch on the corroded yellow door. Don’t give them a chance to catch their breath. Grab them and keep them boxed in.

Yanking on the lock, he whipped the door open. A slap of shaft water flicked him in the face. As the door crashed into the wall, Janos’s jaw shifted to the right. He clenched his teeth even tighter.

“Sons of bitches . . .”

Inside the cage, drips of water rained down from the ceiling and slithered down the greasy metal walls. Other than that, the cage was empty.

54

H
URRY . . . RUN . . . !”
I yell at Viv as I shove open the door to the cage and sprint through the wide room that stretches out in front of us. According to the sign on the wall, we’re at level 1-3—the same level we came in on. The only difference is, we used a different shaft to get out. Wasn’t hard to find—all we had to do was follow the spray-painted
Lift
signs. Eight thousand feet later, we’re back on top.

“I still don’t see why we had to take the other shaft,” Viv says, trailing behind me as I dart forward.

“You’ve met Janos once—you really want to go on a second date?”

“But to say he’s waiting for us . . .”

“Look at your watch, Viv. It’s almost noon—that’s plenty of time to catch up to us. And if he’s already within spitting distance, the last thing we need to do is make it easy.”

Like the tunnels down below, the room up here has metal rail tracks running all along the floor. There are at least half a dozen empty man-cars, two mud-soaked Bobcat diggers, a small swarm of three-wheel ATVs, and even a few red toilet wagons. The whole place stinks of gasoline. This is clearly the vehicle entrance, but right now, all I care about is the exit.

Sidestepping between two man-cars, I continue running toward the enormous sliding garage door on the far wall—but as I get there, I spot the chain and the padlock that’s holding it shut. “Locked!” I call back to Viv.

Searching around, I still don’t see a way out. Not even a window.

“There!” Viv yells, pointing to her right, just past all the red wagons.

As I follow behind her, she runs toward a narrow wooden door that looks like a closet. “You sure that’s it?” I call out.

She doesn’t bother to answer.

Moving in closer, I finally see what’s got her so excited—not just the small door, but the sliver of bright light that’s peeking through underneath. After all that time underground, I know daylight when I see it.

I’m two steps behind Viv as she throws the door open. It’s like coming out of a dark movie theater and stepping straight into the sun. The blast of sunlight burns my eyes in the best way possible. The whole world lights up with fall colors—orange and red leaves . . . the baby blue sky—that seem neon when compared with the mud below. Even the air—forget that recycled stuff downstairs; as I head up the dirt road in front of us, the sweet smell of plum bushes fills my nose.

“And on the tenth day, God created candy,” Viv sings, sniffing the air for herself. She stares around to take it all in, but I grab her by the wrist.

“Don’t stop now,” I say, tugging her up the dirt road. “Not until we’re out of here.”

Two hundred yards to our left, above the trees, the triangular outline of the main Homestead building slices toward the sky. It takes me a second to get my bearings, but from what I can tell, we’re on the opposite side of the parking lot from where we first started.

A loud siren bursts through the air. I follow it to a bullhorn up on the metal teepee building. There goes the alarm.

“Don’t run,” Viv says, slowing us down even more.

She’s right about that. On the steps of one of the construction trailers, a stocky man with overalls and a buzz cut glances our way. I slow to a casual walk and nod my mining helmet at him. He nods right back. We may not have the overalls, but with the helmets and orange vests, we’ve at least got part of the costume.

A half-dozen men run toward the main mining entrance. Following the road past the trailers, we head in the opposite direction, letting it lead us back to the parking lot. A quick scan around tells me everything’s just as we left it. Tons of cruddy old pickup trucks, two classic Harleys, and— Wait . . . something’s new . . .

One shiny Ford Explorer.

“Hold on a sec,” I say to Viv, who’s already climbing into our Suburban.

“What’re you doing?”

Without answering, I peek through the side window. There’s a map with a Hertz logo on the passenger seat.

“Harris, let’s go! The alarm . . . !”

“In a minute,” I call back. “I just want to check one thing . . .”