“I have no idea how fast it can fly. It’s heavy, and it’s still learning, so I think it’s safe to assume it’s not efficient at long-distance flight. It might take days to get here. But you and I both know we’re going in there, regardless.”
“That’s not exactly reassuring.”
“The less we think about it, the better. C’mon.”
They shut their car doors.
Silas stepped up onto the hood and felt it buckle slightly under his weight. He raised the lug wrench over his head, took aim, then brought it crashing down on the window. The glass shattered. He struck several more blows, bashing the glass inward—then finally raked the metal bar around the perimeter of the frame until all the big pieces were knocked loose.
He reached his hand down and pulled Vidonia up to join him. The hood popped loudly and caved another two inches.
“There goes the deposit,” she said.
Silas pulled his long-sleeved shirt off over his head. He folded the shirt and placed it carefully over the base of the broken window frame.
“Let’s do this.”
He leaned down for a good-luck kiss, and Vidonia’s mouth was warm on his. Her full bottom lip slipped into his mouth. He pulled away slowly.
“Let’s not get killed,” she said.
“Sounds good to me.”
“No, I mean it.”
“You think I don’t?”
“I want us to have more time.”
“We will.”
“Together.”
Silas paused. “We will.”
He leaned his torso through the broken window and felt along the inside wall with his hands for something to grab on to. There was nothing but hard, blank flatness. The window was just high enough to make it awkward. He pushed against the wall and slithered through on his stomach. The pain was both sharp and small, the way bad cuts sometimes are, and he knew his shirt hadn’t been quite thick enough.
He stood and sensed a room around him, though he couldn’t see it.
His fingers explored the pain on his stomach. Wetness there, a gash three inches long between his sternum and belly button. Not
too
bad. He decided he’d live.
“Hand me the flashlight.”
Light bloomed again, and he wielded it like a sword, cutting bright swaths across the room. He was in one of the lower wet labs. Brown liter bottles of hydrochloric acid, xylenes, and acetone sat on the shelving above the long, black, chemical-resistant countertop. A periodic table of elements hung on the wall above two sinks. A trio of centrifuges squatted near the corner. The door to the hall was closed.
He set the flashlight down on the floor and leaned out the window.
“Your turn.”
“What happened to your stomach?”
“Don’t put your weight on the window frame. I’ll pull you through.”
“Are you all right? It’s bleeding.”
“I’m fine. C’mon, I’ll lift you. I’ll try not to get any blood on you.”
“A little late to be worrying about exchanging body fluids now, isn’t it?”
She extended her arms toward him, and he reached past her open hands to her forearms. He gripped her tightly and lifted her off her feet, pulling slowly. When her head was through, he looped one of her arms over his shoulder and placed his hand on her stomach, lifting and guiding her over the glass. Only her shins dragged across the window frame, and without the weight required to gouge through the thick fabric of her slacks. He set her on her feet.
“Thanks,” she said.
He picked up the flashlight and walked to the door. The knob turned with a squeak, and he clicked the flashlight off, opening the door just wide enough to stick his head through. He felt like a burglar. The hall was dark in both directions. He listened. Silence. Accepting that his senses were practically worthless under the present circumstances, he risked the flashlight again, pointing it down the hall. Nothing moved. They were alone.
He stepped into the corridor, leading Vidonia. He’d walked these
halls a thousand times in his years as program head. He knew them like the halls of his own house. But now, as they jogged behind the bouncing beam of the flashlight, Silas was struck by the overpowering unfamiliarity of it all. Darkness changed everything.
They ran on their toes, almost soundless.
They slowed as they neared a corner. They were almost at the lobby now. He eased his eyes around the hard edge—only darkness. He slashed the light across the open expanse and chairs jumped out at him, coffee tables, two enormous potted plants. Large ceiling fans sat idle in the rafters. The hall on the opposite side stood vacant. He motioned to her. They crossed the lobby, walking fast.
“If this comes out okay,” he whispered, “we’re heading to an island.”
“Deal,” she said. Her breathing came louder now, faster. She was in good shape but didn’t have a runner’s sleek build. She had to work harder for the distance.
“I mean it,” he said. “Someplace warm and sunny, where the mail takes two weeks to reach you.”
“Let’s aim for three weeks.”
The light bounced, throwing strange shadows. When they arrived at the landing, Silas took three stairs in a single stride. A hard right turn, and they were almost there.
“They wouldn’t have cleaned out the cage, would they?” Vidonia asked.
“Not without my direction,” Silas said.
He slowed the last fifteen steps, and then they were at the iron bars, breathing.
For a bad moment, he thought it was locked. And without electricity, he knew it would stay locked. But when he shined the light, he saw that only the mechanical bolts were thrown. The third lock had never been engaged after the gladiator was placed into transport. A stroke of blind luck. Silas lifted the double latch, and the door swung inward.
He entered the enclosure, wading into the thick straw, swinging the flashlight like a scythe.
He pointed. “That’s the blood I was talking about. I saw it just as the gladiator was being put into transport.”
Vidonia bent, picking up the loose tangle of straw glued together in red. She pulled the clot apart. “It’s definitely blood, and something else.”
“What kind of something else?”
“I’m not sure. Dried secretions of some sort.”
Silas nodded.
They waded through the arc of light, bent, looking closely into the tumble of shoots and shadows. Even in good lighting, Silas hadn’t been able to find anything. The monocular stab of illumination that Silas now carried was not even within range of what could be considered good lighting. What chance did they have now?
Minutes passed. Silas lifted the heavy wooden logs one by one, carefully checking beneath. They double-checked the piles in the corners. Half an hour later, when Silas recognized that they were going over territory for the second time, he stopped.
“There’s nothing here,” he said.
She straightened, looking at him. “There’s got to be.”
“There isn’t.”
“There’s no place else it could be?”
“No. The gladiator was confined to this room for weeks before the competition. This is where the blood is. Whatever we’re looking for should be here. And it’s just not.”
Silas spun the flashlight around, climbing the wall, raking across the heat vents and bars, and upward to the ceiling. Moonlight filtered in through the electrified wire meshing high above—well, it wasn’t so electrified at the moment. The cool night air was pouring through the gap in the ceiling, and the red wetness that clung to his T-shirt chilled him to the bone. He hunched his shoulders, wishing for a sweater.
The flashlight lanced across the enclosure to the wall again, searching, and finally came to rest on the heat vent.
The grating didn’t look quite right.
Ever so slightly, it tilted to the left.
“I think I found something,” Silas said.
He bounded across the room, plowing the straw into fat horizontal bands around each leg. He had to push the pile to the side with his hands when he got close to the wall. The vent was a dark rectangle just above eye level, a foot tall by two feet wide, covered by a thick steel grating screwed into the wall. Silas reached up, and the grating came away in his hand. The screws were bent, the threads stripped smooth and useless. He tossed it to the hay and stood on tiptoes, shining the light inside. For the first time in his adult life, he wished he was taller. He could see the top of the duct, gray and metallic, for some distance into the wall, but the bottom was below his line of sight.
Silas looked around for something to stand on. The logs were on the far side of the enclosure. It was one thing to roll them aside; it was quite another to pick up a thirty-foot cylinder of wood and haul it twenty-five feet through a lake of straw.
He put the flashlight on the floor, sending light skidding up the wall.
“Could I borrow you for a second?” Silas said.
Vidonia moved to him, and he caught her under the arms, lifting her. She craned her neck.
“I can’t see anything.”
“There’s nothing there?”
“No, the light.”
“Oh.” Silas set her back to the floor, and she picked up the flashlight. He lifted again.
“Silas?”
“Yeah.”
“I see it.”
“You’re sure.”
“Definitely.”
“What does it look like?”
“It’s an egg case.”
“Egg case?”
“Like frogs. It’s a gelatinous mass stuck against the side wall of the duct. It’s completely transparent. I can see the eggs inside.”
“Can you reach it?”
Weight shifted in his arms. Light disappeared. She buried herself in the wall up to her shoulder.
“No,” came the muffled shout.
He eased her out and set her to the floor. “How far back is it?”
“Just out of arm’s reach. You could probably—”
The ceiling thumped loudly above them.
They didn’t move, didn’t breathe.
Silence.
Not yet, not yet
.
A soft creak, another thud, softer, then another, and again, strung together in what could be described only as footfalls on the roof. Running toward the mesh.
Silence.
Silas turned, looking up. He slowly raised the flashlight, not wanting to see what might be there. The moon’s white face smiled down through the mesh. Just the moon and an empty sky. He could see the stars.
Please
. Silas didn’t release his breath. He knew what he’d heard. He stared up through the mesh at the moon for a long moment, willing it to stay.
Please, just a few more minutes
.
A dark face slid across the opening, blotting out the light. Gray eyes glared down, shining in the flashlight.
Silas froze, unable to move.
The dark face opened, and from it issued a voice like none that ever before shaped human words: “I come for the rest of you, Shilash.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
T
he control room of Phoenix Nuclear was awash in flashing red. The warble of a dozen sirens had coalesced into a single continuous note of alarm, drowning out the shouts of the systems analysts as they worked to get the city’s lights on again. The giant screen against the far wall showed their progress. Still thirty million units without power. They were looking at a black hole roughly the size of Arizona. The power went into the system, but it didn’t come out.
“What the hell is going on?” the systems supervisor said. His name was Brian Murphy, and he stood sweating in the sniper roost—the name the console jocks gave the supervising office that overlooked the control room. Brian looked out over the rows of men and women working frantically at their computers. He shook his head. He had a degree from MIT, and until six hours ago had been enjoying the very prime of his career, that ephemeral juxtaposition between the opposing slopes of work experience and educational obsolescence. But now everything had changed. Phoenix was dark for the first time in more than sixteen years.
He wiped a hand across the top of his balding head, and it came away wet. An absentminded flick of his fingers sent the sweat to the carpet as he studied the readouts again. The power source ran clean and strong, and the gauges were all well within their specifications. In
fact, as far as anybody could tell, there was no problem at all with the plant itself. The problem was in the grid.
There were two other men in the room with him: one he answered to, and one who answered to him.
“How long has it been?” he asked.
“Eight hours now,” the technician at his side answered. That was the man who answered to him. The man was short and heavy. He sat at a console, stubby fingers playing occasionally across the buttons and dials.
The man he answered to, Jim Sure, stood in the back. That was his real name, Jim A. Sure. A comforting name for a man running one of the world’s newest experimental power facilities.
Brian had often wondered how a name like that might play into the progress of a career. Were promotions infinitesimally easier to come by? Would a name like that naturally rise to the top of the résumé pile when being considered for the head job at a nuclear plant?
Brian looked at the man critically from the corner of his eye. Things weren’t going well for Jim Sure this day. He peeled another antacid from the plastic wrapper and popped it into his mouth.
But Phoenix Nuclear wasn’t alone in its problems. Several other power stations in California had the same emergency, their juice shunted away down some dark hole.
It was like his nightmare. The one he’d been having more and more often lately, watching helpless as the core’s heat dump failed and the whole assembly degenerated into catastrophic meltdown, blowing the majority of Phoenix to God.
But this was no dream.
On the big screen, the tide began to turn. The engineers finally tracked down where the power was going—a single grid in the technical district outside of San Bernardino.
Now that the hole was found, the engineers began the task of plugging it. But it was not as easy as they’d hoped. The power sluices didn’t respond.
“Dispatch field unies to the area,” Jim Sure said. “Find out what’s there. Shut it down.”
The call was made. The coordinates were given. As the tech put the phone back in its cradle, the supervisor looked up and realized it might have been a moot point. Things now were very quickly turning around on the screen. Power, by the kilowatt second, was beginning to shunt off in its correct directions.