“What the hell is that!” Janet involuntarily shouted; she was shocked beyond any attempt at control.
“Get out of here!” yelled the guard. “Get to the elevator!”
“No!” bellowed Francois. “We must finish this!”
“To hell with this!” one physicist shouted as he leaped up and ran for the door. And that was all it took for the entire room to erupt to their feet and suddenly everyone was flying toward the guard, who stepped forward, giving them room.
“Hold the elevator for me!” shouted the guard as he quick-changed clips in his rifle. “Don’t leave without me!”
Janet, still frozen, suddenly broke from her trance and was running toward the elevator with Susan in tow. Whatever the Delta team planned to do they better do it quick because whatever was coming up this hall was not going to stop with the Observation Room. It was going to open the ATLAS permanently to let that thing’s entire dimension enter this world and then it was going to kill everyone in this facility.
Before it began with the universe …
***
Amanda found herself staring at the gray granite walls, now visibly shaking.
She had been listening to the sound of battle for minutes and still couldn’t decide who or what was fighting who or what.
One part of the battle was obviously some kind of animal. That much was clear. The other part was human with the expected sounds of explosions and machinegun fire. But there was yet another sound that was growing beneath Amanda’s feet—a sound almost like the thunderous entrance of some otherworldly force—and she mutely turned in place as Isaiah raced up, breathing hard.
“I can’t get the door open to disable the ATLAS!” he gasped and suddenly raised his face, staring into the tunnel. His eyes narrowed, curious and angry, and Amanda followed the direction of his gaze.
In the distance a gigantic black silhouette of a manlike beast was loping toward them on tree-trunk legs, appearing beneath a magenta alarm and then disappearing into a space of darkness before appearing again beneath another magenta alarm and—as it closed in—so did Amanda’s horror.
She clutched Isaiah’s hand but couldn’t speak. Her mouth moved to form words but no words emerged.
Then she screamed.
***
“Hold the door!” Janet shouted.
She was the last in the elevator and slammed her hand against the panel that was already closing. “The guard told us to wait!”
“To hell with him!” someone shouted.
“No!” screamed Janet. “We wait!”
A black shape violently appeared in the elevator door and Janet yelled as she leaped backward into Susan.
“Roy!” Janet cried and violently pushed the others aside to leap out of the elevator, pointing down the corridor. “It’s coming! I don’t know what it is!”
“It’s what you said it’d be!” said Roy, holding the door. He hit the red button to stop the elevator, then glared at the terrified inhabitants. “If any of you touch that button, I swear to god I’ll kill you like a dog.”
He kissed Janet quickly and turned toward the hallway. He pulled open a thick tubular chute slung on the lower half of his rifle and inserted what Janet knew from movies was a hand grenade. Then he slammed it shut and began walking forward before he stopped, staring at the ceiling.
“Janet?” he said.
“Yes?”
Roy pointed to the far side of the elevator.
“Is that one of the vaults?”
“Yeah! They’re some kind of titanium!”
“No need to yell, honey. Calm down. Can you close them?”
With effort, Janet swallowed, trying to calm down. Then she said, “I would have to close all of them at the same time, Roy. They’re built into the facility and they’re all on the same trigger. It’s everything or nothing.”
“How do you close them?”
“I can do it from my terminal in the Observation Room.”
“Let’s go.”
Janet didn’t question him; she never had and never would—she knew that in an instant. And then she was running beside him as they rapidly approached the guard at the Observation Room door. Just as they reached him, he threw down his smoking rifle and turned into them as if to retreat.
“What the—” he began.
“Get out of the way,” Roy muttered and didn’t wait for the guard to obey; Roy threw him against the wall as Janet raced to her terminal and began typing as fast as her hands could move. She slammed every command to initiate a total lockdown and raised her face as a smothered roar emanated from the ceiling and floors and one clang after another echoed in the corridor.
Margaret’s abandoned computer sounded off, “Power level is at one hundred percent … Velocity is at one hundred percent … Power level is at one hundred percent … Velocity is at one hundred percent …”
Janet screamed, “Shut up!”
She didn’t even try to stop herself from rushing forward to bend over Margaret’s desk where she instantly began shutting down power that was feeding the ATLAS chamber and pipeline. “It’s over!” Janet snarled, jaws tightening. “No one’s coming through! No one’s going home!”
She pushed the last button and turned to the power grid and began slamming off every breaker and everything switch marked with a red “Do Not Touch” label or button. It only took her seconds to completely cut power to the collider and then the vibration within the ceiling and floor stopped at once.
Janet lifted a gaze to the door.
Roy was gone.
***
“Run!” shouted Isaiah.
Amanda was already running along the concrete floor of the collision corridor as the shout reverberated across the shell surrounding them. She didn’t look back because she knew that thing was still coming and she didn’t know where she was going but it didn’t matter as long as it wasn’t here.
Maybe it was the adrenaline or maybe Amanda was just in better shape than she had thought before all this began because they ran full-out for at least five minutes before Isaiah, who was in great shape, pulled up breathless.
“There!” he gasped.
A single door stood open, framed in magenta and black; the horribly mangled corpse of a worker laid across the threshold. Obviously, the thing chasing them had already passed this way and not everyone had reached containment quickly enough.
Isaiah shoved Amanda through the door before dragging the body into the chamber and then he was inside, as well, cursing with the strain it took to pull the huge door shut behind them. He spun the circular handle, a handle not unlike those used on submarines, until it stopped. Then Isaiah turned in every direction before he leaped to a wall.
He shouted, “Get back!”
Amanda had already moved as Isaiah kicked a glass enclosure on the wall. He smashed the broken fragments aside with his bare hand and reached into it to haul out a long iron rod and a steel fire ax. In the same split-second he slid the crowbar and steel ax into the door handle and jammed them both against the door jam, sealing it. Even with a quick glance Amanda knew it would take a bulldozer to turn that handle.
The door was struck.
An angry bellow thundered through the steel.
The impression of a human fist violently dented the heavy slab and Isaiah and Amanda stepped back together, watching. Then there was another impact and another image of a fist was smashed into the door, and another, and another, and another until … silence.
An angry roar erupted in the corridor.
Green blood seeped from a small fissure in the door.
Amanda pointed and whispered, “Look!”
Silently stepping forward, Isaiah raised a hand and gently pressed it against one of the impressions smashed into the thick, steel, submarine door. Then he said, “So you do have limits.” Isaiah leaned again
st the panel, head bent as if to catch his breath, as he gasped, “You can’t do anything you want, can you, sport?”
Amanda didn’t know if she took a moment because she needed to pull herself together, or because she was giving Isaiah time to do the same. It didn’t really matter. The only thing that mattered was that they were safe—at least temporarily.
“We gotta keep moving,” Isaiah said quietly as he turned into her and drew her close in his arms. Then he gazed down into her eyes and kissed her. He leaned back before he smiled and nodded.
“I think I’m falling in love with you, too.”
Amanda gaped, “Hey! I thought we were gonna die! People say crazy things when they think they’re gonna—”
“Let’s go.”
Grasping Amanda’s hand, Isaiah led her into the hallway, leaving this impression of a decompression chamber behind them. They emerged into what was an iridescent-colored corridor that appeared to run parallel to the collider; it was as if this entire facility was laid out with circle upon circle; everything ran parallel to another circle like an image of “6” laid atop another slightly off-angled “6.”
“Which way?” asked Amanda finally.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Isaiah and led to the right. “But I’m gonna burn this place down before I leave.”
“We’ll be in big trouble,” said Amanda, linking her fate to his without hesitation until it was said and, even then, without regret. “I’d say we’re already in big trouble. If these guys don’t get us, Interpol is coming after us. Or it’s gonna be the United States or the Soviet Union or God-only-knows.”
“They can sue me,” said Isaiah. “This place is history.”
***
Janet finally found Roy a hundred feet down the corridor leaning against the flat, gray wall. “God!” she gasped and stopped running. “I thought I’d lost you!”
“No,” Roy shook his head tiredly as he lifted a phone. “I had to find a phone. And they have these emergency phones in the wall at set intervals.”
“I know. I’m the one that told you about them.”
“Just saying …”
Janet waited until she heard Tanto’s voice emerge and Roy said instantly, “Abort. I repeat: Abort. Abort. Abort. We have two. I repeat, we have two tangos inside the perimeter. I’ve got the girls but you come to me at the control room. And watch yourself. They’re big and it’ll take heavy ordinance to put one down. Go loud.”
Janet wasn’t sure what Tanto said but Roy hung up and turned to her. “They’re going to come to us. But we can’t stay here. That thing is somewhere on the other side of these doors. Let’s get back to the Observation Room.” He shook his head. “I don’t think that door will hold it long but it’s all we’ve got.”
As they began walking with a strange slowness toward the Observation Room, Janet remarked, “You know we can’t use the elevator now, don’t you? When I put this place into lockdown, it shut down the elevators, too.”
Roy nodded, “Yeah, I figured. That’s standard procedure. But we can’t open this place up, either. Not with these things running around. They might get topside and then the casualties will be totally unacceptable.”
“So what do we do?”
“First we try to locate them.”
“How do you know there’s two of them?”
Roy said grimly, “On my way up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I came up a stairway north of this part of the corridor.” He sighed. “I came over a lot of dead bodies. At least twenty. But that stairway is north of where that second creature was seen. So if it had passed the Observation Room from the north, it wouldn’t have been way down there in that south section of the corridor. It would have been in the room where you work. So I know there’s at least two of them.” He shook his head. “Why can’t we see these sons ‘a bitches on the cameras?”
Janet’s ponytail flew left to right. “All I know is that it doesn’t register. I don’t know why. It might have something to do with how it had to change on a molecular level to have substance in this world … I mean, whatever negative energy is enabling it must have been neutralized on a subatomic level, so there’s a problem reading its light spectrum.”
Roy answered, “Well, we might not be able to see it on camera, but we can see whatever it knocks down, so maybe we can track it like that.” He smoothed back his sweat slick hair. “First thing we have to do is maintain some kind of barrier between us and whatever the hell that thing is so we can figure this out. But, just to be sure, my boys can’t get out through the escape tunnel now, right?”
“No,” Janet denied, “there’s no way out of here until I take us out of lockdown. Until then, every corridor is sealed, every escape tunnel is sealed, every elevator is shut down, all outside power is shut off. Right now we’re on batteries. There’s no way in and no way out. Not for us or that thing.”
“And the collider?”
“It’s shut down, too.”
“Good,” Roy nodded. “At least we don’t have to worry about any more of those things coming through.” He took a moment. “Hell, these two are gonna be hard enough to put down.”
“You think there’s only two of them?”
“I pray to God there’s only two,” Roy said more slowly. “I don’t even know if we’ve got enough ordinance to put these two down.”
“It’s not positively or negatively charged or it would register on camera, and that means it operates in some kind of unknown light spectrum with an unknown energy source,” Janet continued. “But it’s still flesh and bone. And it doesn’t have unlimited strength or it would have just vaporized those guards. You think it’s strong enough to smash down a vault?”
“Whoever planned this place is an idiot,” Roy mumbled.
“What do you mean?”
“These vaults are made of a titanium alloy. But the problem with titanium is that it’s brittle. Titanium can take flat pressure better than steel and it’s half as heavy. But the edges are a lot more easily cracked than something made of steel. That’s why a steel door might hold that thing. But titanium won’t last long if they can splinter it.”
“Could you translate that?” Janet asked.
Roy enunciated more slowly. “When this thing figures out that it can crack this vault by attacking it from the edges, it’ll start smashing down these doors like bowling pins. And that will mean we’re out of time. We’ll either have to kill both of them or bury this place under a billion tons of ice and stone.”
“The bomb?”
“If we have to.”
“Can you blow it from the Observation Room?”
“No. The cement and steel will block the signal. But I can remote detonate it if I can get inside the collider tunnel.”
“Any plan you’ve got is good enough for me,” Janet muttered, and meant it. “Any kind of death would be better than falling into the hands of that thing.”
Roy nodded tiredly, “That ranch is starting to look pretty good right now.”
“Yeah,” Janet raked hair from her face. “I’m in if you still want the company.”
“It’s an open invitation.”
“I accept.”
They walked a while in silence before Roy glanced over his shoulder, waited, then spoke more slowly as if to calm her. “You know, I’ve actually got a pretty nice place. It’s just south of Laredo. Not too far out in the country. Not too close to town. Sort of the perfect distance. I inherited it from my daddy, who inherited it from my granddaddy. They were both ranchers.”
Janet tried to slow down her mind that she was still electrified. “How big?” she smiled wanly. “I’m not gonna shack up with a poor rancher.”
Roy laughed, “It’s about ten thousand acres. But in Texas they call anything less than half a million acres a garden. And it’s got a nice colonial house. It
needs a little fixing up but it’s got style. And it’s solid. And I’ve saved enough to start with maybe a thousand head. Then I’ll just work it and see what happens.”
“I’ve had enough of the CIA, anyway.”
“You can make up your mind just like that?”
“I made up my mind when I realized you’d changed the plans without telling me and you were coming for me before anything bad could happen.” Janet smiled broadly. “I told you I liked cowboys.”
“But not heroes.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I can live with both.”
***
“Good Lord!” Amanda gasped as she turned away from yet another titanium vault that had very solidly cut the corridor in half. She whispered tiredly, “Isaiah? How many of these stupid damn doors do they have in this place?”
“I don’t know,” Isaiah sighed as he returned from the door’s control panel—the first he’d failed to bypass. He grimaced as he drew a deep breath. “All the tunnels are probably like this—a vault every couple hundred yards. But we have one thing going for us.”
“I’d love to hear what that is.”
“Somebody put this place in lockdown. I don’t know who, but I’m grateful. Because, otherwise, we’d be dead.”
“Because you couldn’t stop the collider?”
“I wasn’t even worried about the collider, anymore,” stated Isaiah. “After I saw that thing coming down the corridor, I forgot all about it. Anyway, the collider was shut up tighter than a bank vault. And I honestly don’t know if that’s to protect the collider or the people outside it.” He kicked debris from their path. “My guess is that it’s meant to protect the collider. I don’t think the people that run this place give a damn about what happens to whoever’s close when they turn it on. The only thing they care about is opening that portal. And if they have to kill someone to do it, they’re not gonna shed any tears.”
“I agree,” said Amanda, and noticed she was shuffling. “This thing goes on and on. We’re never gonna get out of here. What do you say we come up with another plan? How about we access an air duct and crawl out like they do in the movies?”
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