Fast (59 page)

            The partition proved to be part of a glass wall, one edge of a series of offices, and as they drew closer it became evident the offices were like those on the engineering level. The top half of every wall was glass. With the flood waters covering the bottom half, the impression beyond was of a grid of half-filled, square fish tanks full of floating office equipment.

            Coleman tried to see beyond the maze of flooded glass offices. ‘What is this place, Vanessa? None of this is on my plans.’

            She waded to the glass. ‘Your plans don’t include the cave systems. We’ve been building into the caves for as long as we’ve been working here, reclaiming the basement gradually. We started with the diving arena.’

            ‘That’s on the plan,’ confirmed Coleman.

            Vanessa continued, ‘Surrounding the diving arena there’s a series of wet labs and experimental zones. That’s all raised and air-tight. It should be dry. Surrounding those are the technical labs, computer rooms and office space. It’s a big area, about one-quarter of the basement. The rest is flooded passageways and rock strata.’

            ‘I can’t see any movement,’ remarked King, scanning the flooded offices. ‘Are we cutting through?’

            ‘It’s the direct route,’ confirmed Vanessa.

            She found a handle and pushed open a sliding door. Third Unit followed single file, the Marines all scanning in different directions.

            Coleman knew this was a dangerous location. The water made movement slow, and the glass walls provided no visual cover. A grid of cross-corridors intersected the offices. Most rooms had only one or two furniture items - bookcases or storage cupboards - rising high enough to offer visual cover.

            ‘Why are there so many offices?’ Forest asked. ‘It’s like a warren.’

            ‘It’s a high maintenance facility,’ explained Vanessa. ‘We’re isolated. We can’t just hire contractors for every problem. We need a big technical staff. Even the cleaners need somewhere to store their equipment.’

            She waded into the first intersection. Three ring-bind folders floated in her path. She pushed them aside. The folders were the start of a floating layer of office debris that covered the water surface down every corridor, in every direction. After a few more feet, she pushed aside two bobbing chairs, a pink sneaker, and then, tensing, a woman’s body floating face down. The corpse wore the matching pink sneaker.

            ‘Let me go first,’ said Coleman, realizing Vanessa was just leading them in a straight line towards the center of the level. ‘Let me have a couple of meters head-start, just in case we’re not alone.’

            Stopping at the next intersection, Coleman tracked the small ripples caused by his passage down the corridor. The intersection resembled the lee in a polluted river where all the rubbish accumulated. Ahead, bobbing office paraphernalia half choked the corridor. Left and right must have led to hard copy archives. The water was covered in white paper printouts. All the paper would soon sink into wet mash, but for now it formed an undulating white carpet. Except in those places where the human shape of a limb or torso floated.

            There could be anything underneath the surface.

            He pushed steadily through the paper and floating obstacles like a human icebreaker. Glass crunched under his boots.

            ‘All the bodies are grouped together,’ observed Vanessa.

            It was a pattern of carnage that Coleman had already deciphered, but thought best to leave unmentioned.

            She persisted. ‘Am I imagining it, or are all the bodies together?’

            There were a few bodies in the corridors, but most of the dead were grouped together in closely adjacent rooms. They had passed two such places before Coleman deciphered the pattern. She was right, but she hadn’t yet realized why most of the basement casualties had occurred in concentrated areas.

            ‘The Captain knows,’ prompted Forest from behind Vanessa.

            ‘Do you?’ she asked.

            Coleman turned, shot a disapproving glance at Forest, and then said to Vanessa, ‘You really want to know?’

            ‘Yes. Of course.’

            ‘Okay.’ Coleman explained as they pushed on through the debris. ‘These glass walls let the staff see the creatures coming. So they fled into the corridors, streaming towards the exits. But the creatures were already blocking the exits and moving
inwards
. When the staff found their exits blocked, they backtracked and tried different routes. This place would have been like a maze with carnage at every intersection. Whenever the staff encountered creatures, the people who survived tried to backtrack. This meant they ended up running in groups. It’s a natural instinct. The bigger the group, the more vibrations they made, and the more creatures would have been racing towards them. At some point the surviving groups ran out of places to run, so they retreated into the nearest offices and tried to barricade the doors with the furniture.’

            Coleman pointed into a room full of floating bodies and shredded furniture. The glass walls on three sides of the room had collapsed inwards from the force of the creatures trying to get in. Every piece of furniture was shredded. ‘At the end, those rooms were completely packed with a swarming, fighting mass of people and creatures.’

            From the rear, Forest said, ‘That’s pretty much the same way we met you, Vanessa. Except you were running on your own.’

            Vanessa didn’t comment as she took in the gruesome explanation.

            Reaching the end of the littered corridor, Coleman added quietly, ‘Cairns and Gould ensured there was no escape. I doubt a single person left the basement alive.’

            At the end of the corridor, a short flight of stairs joined a small landing. The water lapped just below the landing.

            Coleman felt for the step with his boot toe. He pushed aside the floating debris and climbed from the water. The others hurried after, none wanting to spend a moment longer than necessary in the water.

            The landing served a steel hatch, exactly like a submarine hatch, right down to the wheel handle and black rubber seals. Stenciled in big yellow letters were the words
Diving Arena
.

            The hatch stood ajar; Coleman moved to where he could peer through.

            Looks clear.

            ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s dry, at least.’

            ‘The control room’s just beyond the diving labs,’ said Vanessa. ‘We’re almost there.’

            Coleman found the next two hatches wide open, and that by ‘diving labs’, Vanessa meant another network of even tighter rooms and passageways. The area gave a sense of moving through a large rectangular submarine. Stenciled signs directed to lunch rooms and amenities. All the hatches looked like the first.

            ‘These facilities encircle the diving arena,’ Vanessa commented. ‘Three corridors loop around the arena, with about a dozen cross corridors.’

            ‘Like a spider’s web,’ observed King.

‘Exactly.’ She reached the end of the corridor. ‘It’s not all for diving. Some areas are hydroponics. It’s easy to get disoriented. We’re in the middle now.’

            She pushed open the last hatch.

            Beyond the hatch lay an incredible room.

            Thirty meters across, the chamber was dominated by a large rectangular pool. A strip of floor some four meters wide surrounded the pool. The control room – like a long VIP spectators’ box protected behind a plexiglass splash barrier - was located across the pool on Coleman’s left. A single sliding door in the plexiglass provided entry.

            Coleman approached the pool. A submersible diving platform hung over the water. He studied the platform and then the flood-lit water. The blue-green water looked startlingly clear.
There’s no bottom. This isn’t a pool. This is a hole into the underground aquifer!

            Coleman pointed into the pool. ‘How
deep
is this?’

            Vanessa paused on her way to the control room. ‘One hundred and sixty-three meters. We’ve already had two accidents down there.’

            Coleman drew back from the edge. Various-sized dive suits hung from the walls. Piles of diving gear were slung over trolleys or packed loosely into orange plastic containers. Nearby, a small mobile air-compressor rested near a trolley loaded with scuba tanks awaiting refill.

            Scuba diving under the desert? Amazing.

            Across the pool to Coleman’s right stood a hatch with more yellow stenciling. This one read
Hyperbaric Chamber
. The arena’s third exit was in the far wall, behind the submersible platform.

            Three exits. A hatch in every wall except the control room.

            A yellow electric forklift was parked near the far hatch. Custom-made for the diving arena, the forklift looked the right size for maneuvering around the pool. Above the pool, a system of rails and a motorized gantry crisscrossed the ceiling. The hook and chain gantry was currently retracted.

            ‘Underwater cameras,’ pointed out Forest.

Two big screens in opposite corners of the room showed continuous underwater video feeds.

            Vanessa touched Coleman’s arm and nodded towards the control room. ‘We should find some answers in there.’

            The control room appeared undisturbed. A continuous workstation of computer consoles and microphones overlooked the pool. It didn’t appear any divers had been underwater when the evacuation sounded. Two half-finished mugs of coffee sat abandoned on the long workstation.

            Coleman signaled Forest and King to watch the three entrances into the arena. ‘Work quickly, Vanessa. I don’t want to get caught in here.’ There was no back door to the control room. The sliding door in the splash barrier offered the only exit.

            She unclipped her tablet. ‘I should be able to track anyone approaching the arena through the basement. We have video surveillance on this level.’

            Coleman pointed out the abandoned coffees. ‘That explains how these two staff got out so quickly. They would have spotted the creatures on the cameras. Can you bring up the feeds?’

            Vanessa finished connecting her tablet to the system. After a fast glance to ensure her data was uploading, she side-stepped to the next computer and tapped the mouse. The computer system was just operating in stand-by mode. In a second the screen was tiled with twelve live video feeds from around the basement.

            ‘They’re all operating perfectly,’ she said. ‘They’re wireless.’

            ‘That puts us in a much better position,’ observed Coleman, indicating for Forest to come over and monitor the camera feeds.

            Forest sat before the computer. He pointed out one video tile. ‘What is that?’

            He double-clicked the feed to full-screen mode.

            The screen came alive with action. The entire camera feed filled with a thrashing maelstrom of creatures clambering over two large freight containers. The area below the camera appeared flooded like the rest of the basement. Only the top half of the containers showed above the water.

            ‘That’s the storage area under the freight lift,’ answered Vanessa immediately.

            ‘Why are the creatures attacking those containers?’ asked Coleman. The entire area churned with white water as the creatures assaulted the containers.