Thrilled to Death

by James Byron Huggins

  Thor stared down the elevator shaft; the darkness was complete. He picked up an industrial flashlight and angled the beam downward. Heavily greased elevator beams and cables gleamed black in the piercing light. Long, evenly spaced drill lines were visible in the walls.

  Leaning back, Thor slung the rifle around his shoulder, cinching the strap tight to keep it snug against the battle-ax. Then he looped the flashlight strap around his shoulder and neck, hanging the light at his ribs.

  “Where does this shaft end?” he growled. “Does it go to the heart of the cavern?”

  Blankenship stared in horror.

  “Tom!” Thor shouted and Blankenship jumped back. “Where does the elevator shaft end? What is down there?”

  Blankenship wildly shook his head. “There ain’t nothin’ down there, Thor! The elevator shaft ends at the entrance of the cavern, and there’s a steel vault that’s shut down like an anvil! Even if you reach the bottom of the shaft, you’ll be staring at a hundred tons of burn-resistant steel! And there ain’t no other way to enter the cavern!”

  Thor frowned. Wind and white flakes froze over him while blackened, flesh-scented tendrils of smoke drifted up the shaft. “How is it that the smoke finds a way past the vault, escaping the cavern?” he asked.

  Blankenship seemed scared to tell him.

  “Tom!” Thor roared. “How does the smoke escape the cavern?”

  “It’s probably coming through the ventilation shaft!” Blankenship shouted. “It’s a shaft located to the left of the vault!”

  “And is this ventilation shaft wide enough for a man to crawl through?” Thor asked.

  Blankenship stared widely. “Man, I don’t know if you could get through it or not, Thor. I mean, you might be able to. But that thing is pretty tight where it hits the cavern. And there’s a steel rebar-grate over the entrance. It would take a bulldozer to pull that thing out of the wall!”

  Thor stared at the cables and girders. A large, double-sided steel beam descended into the darkness, but everything was coated in thin oil, exceedingly thin, to prevent freezing. Climbing down on the slick-coated steel would be difficult, if not impossible.

  “Do you have enough rope to reach the bottom of the shaft?” Thor rumbled.

  “No, Thor.” Blankenship seemed astonished by the question. “We don’t even have enough rope to go even halfway. We never figured on anything like this.”

  “What about wire?”

  “Wire?”

  “Yes.” Thor turned to him. “A coil of wire! Do you have a coil of wire that will reach a thousand feet?”

  Blankenship gazed over the spot-lit camp. “Well, we’ve got a thousand-foot roll of eight-gauge that’s probably strong enough to hold your weight, Thor. But the elevator shaft is really more like eleven hundred feet. So when you get to the end of the wire you’ll still have another hundred feet or more to climb down. It’s gonna be tough.”

  Thor stared down into the darkness.

  “Get me the wire,” he growled.

  Blankenship stared.

  “Tom!” Thor turned his head with a roar. “Get the wire for me!”

  Instantly Blankenship raised a portable radio, speaking quickly with concise instructions before he looked down again. “It’s on the way, Thor. It’s on the way. It’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  “Good, Tom.” Thor frowned. “Tom, my friend, I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to me closely! It is vital that you and your men and your families abandon this island as quickly as possible! Do you understand? Because what has happened in the cavern may be far worse than you think. Can you contact Iceland on the radio?”

  Blankenship shook his head. “No way, Thor. We’ve already tried that. Those military guys put some kind of jamming on the radio, and the Communications Center was busted up in the big fight. We can’t contact anybody.” He was shaking. “Why would they do that, Thor? What have those guys done down there? You act like you know more about this place than we do!”

  “No, Tom. I only know that my friend and his family are down there.” Thor turned his head, glaring at the docks. “You have two forty-ton cruisers, Tom. Those ships are large enough to easily accommodate all of your families. Is that not true?”

  Blankenship also turned his head to the dock. “Yeah, we could get everybody on the ships. We could even load up all the military guys that were busted up in the brawl.”

  Thor frowned, squinting. “Those boats have probably been mechanically disabled by the military, Tom. But your people are expert mechanics, are they not?”

  “Yeah, we can fix anything. That’s what we do.”

  “Good. Then quickly make those ships seaworthy and take a heading 230 to 330 degrees south-south-east for Iceland. And continue to hail the universal maritime frequency for assistance until you see land. Don’t look back! Don’t come back to this island!” Thor glared ominously into the shaft. “There is death here.”

  Blankenship replied, “Okay, Thor. We can get those boats working in no time. That ain’t gonna be a problem. We’ve already rushed the MPs guarding the warehouse. We’ve got their guns, got everything.” He paused. “We can probably get the boats working in less than an hour. But what are you gonna do?”

  Grim, Thor stared into the darkness.

  “I’m going down into the cavern,” he rumbled.

  Blankenship stepped back. “Thor, come on, man. There ain’t no telling what’s down there! I hate to say it – ” His face twisted in pain, “ – but everybody’s probably dead! And there ain’t nothin’ we can do! Why don’t you come with us? We can fix those boats and get off this island! We’ll be in Iceland in three hours!”

  “Because my friend is down there,” Thor answered somberly. “And I will not leave him.”

  “Well,” Blankenship began, hesitating, “Connor’s a good boss, Thor. And he’s a good man, a real good man. I ain’t never worked for nobody better. But I’m tellin’ you the truth. I wouldn’t go down there for nobody.” He nodded, in pain. “I’m sorry to say it, Thor. But I just wouldn’t do it. ‘Cause if I go down there, I’d die, too.”

  An engine approached and Thor glanced up. It was a front-end loader, forks locked around a pallet bearing a large coil of wire. Quickly they secured the wire to the elevator and pushed the coil into the shaft. It descended, rebounding, uncoiling quickly and easily. Thor moved to the edge, testing the makeshift rope with a tug. It held.

  “Be wise, Tom,” Thor growled, poised at the edge of the chasm. “Repair the boats and be gone. Save your families.”

  “We’ll be gone in an hour, Thor,” Blankenship nodded. “All of us! You can bet your life on it! And we won’t be coming back, either. We’re finished with this place.”

  “Good, Tom. Now gather your families and be gone!”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Blankenship asked, staggering. “There ain’t no tellin’ what’s down there!”

  Thor’s face was grim as he descended over the edge.

  “I know what’s down there,” he growled.

  Was gone.

  ***

  Connor kicked the cover off the ventilation shaft and descended quickly from the crawl space into the power plant. Then Frank came out of the shaft, followed by Barley and four soldiers. Chesterton and the remainder of the platoon had stayed in the Command Cavern, awaiting Leviathan’s renewed attack against the vault.

  Upon gaining his feet Connor raced to the generator. He saw quickly that the Class-A Power Grid Switch for facility lighting had been thrown off, like a normal breaker would throw itself off under a power surge.

  That’s what Connor had figured. He knew that, because of the Lockdown Mode, GEO wasn’t going to let any electrical power flow through the breaker. The computer would automatically reroute power to throw the breaker off again if Connor just threw it back on, so Connor knew that he h
ad to go around the control system, somehow. He had to defeat the supercomputer’s ability to control this electrical junction.

  Connor took out a Leatherman pocket tool and began unscrewing the cover. Behind him, the rest of the soldiers emerged fully from the shaft, moving in the red half-light.

  “Give me some light over here!” He yelled.

  Instantly Barley was beside him, shining a weak regulation-issue Army flashlight as Connor removed the fiberglass box cover, laying it to the side. He knew that inside the box, leading into the switch, the incoming wire would be hot, because it fed power directly from the Norwegian Power cable. And GEO had no ability to interfere with the incoming current. It just had the ability to keep power from flowing through the breaker at this junction.

  Connor studied the situation.

  He had always found it easy to work with electricity, thinking of it in the simplest terms, like water flowing through pipes. Because, like water, electricity would simply flow where it was allowed to flow, incoming or outgoing. It was not a difficult thing to understand.

  Volts of electricity were comparable to the speed of current flowing through a line, the highest volt rating meaning the fastest currents. In this cavern they had used mostly lines of 110, 220, and 440 volts, all of them deadly. But there were much, much more powerful lines used in the facility, including everything from 10,000 to 300,000 volts. Simply looking at a line was never a safe way of determining what amount of voltage it contained. A line of 220 volts was no thicker or more insulated than a line of 10,000 volts. They were both the width of a finger.

  Amps were comparable to the amount of current flowing through a line. Connor often thought of an amperage measurement in terms of larger and larger water pipes, each pipe containing a tremendous amount of water but with the water capable of moving at any speed, from slow to fast. Amperage had nothing to do with the speed of the electrical current, it was simply a measurement of the amount of it. Usually, though, any line rated above 11 amps was considered exceedingly dangerous because it probably carried high velocity, or high voltage, currents. A 1,000-amp line was almost as thick as a man’s wrist.

  Wiping sweat from his eyes with a forearm, Connor concentrated on the box. The incoming current was cut dead at the breaker, where it should be flowing into the rest of the cavern. He studied the feed line; it was a 1,000-amp cable, probably carrying enough power to light up a small town.

  Figures.

  If this didn’t work, he’d be fried.

  Connor grabbed a wooden sawhorse, a relic from when the cavern had been built, and placed it beside the power box, where he could sit when the moment came. Then he placed one hand over his chest and stuck the screwdriver in the box, removing the brackets holding the hot, heavy-amp line. He intended to bypass the breaker, main-lining the light current into the facility.

  “How come you’re putting one hand on your chest?” Barley asked.

  “Always work with one hand,” Connor responded, blinking. “That’s what they taught us in electrical school.”

  Barley seemed nervous. He always seemed nervous when he got around electricity. It was the only sign of fear Connor had ever seen in the muscular man. “Why?” the burly lieutenant asked finally. “Why are you supposed to work with one hand?”

  Gently, Connor pried at the insulated section of the 1,000-amp line, lifting the thick bronze strand from its bracket. He knew that a ton of power was poised at the end of the bare copper.

  “Because there’s less chance of getting electrocuted,” Connor whispered. “If you’re touching the box with both hands, one hand might take the current and the other hand will ground you out. That’s where the current leaves your body and goes into the ground. Electricity is always trying to find a way to reach the ground.”

  Barley didn’t get it. “Well, you’ll still be electrocuted, Connor, if you touch that line because your foot is touching the ground! The current’s gonna come in your hand and go out your foot! It don’t matter none if you’ve got one hand on the box or two hands on it.”

  “Not always, Barley.” Connor lifted a dead intake line, moving it toward the 1,000-amp strand. “A fast current will travel a straight line if it can. And if the current comes in one hand and goes out the other hand, the current goes through your heart. That’s what kills you. But if the current comes in a hand and goes out a foot, then it doesn’t go through your heart. It’ll probably blow your leg off or set you on fire or something, but there’s a good chance you’ll live.”

  Barley pointed. “This line right here?” he pointed. “This line right here will blow your whole leg off?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  Barley stared wide-eyed at the line, and Connor sat back on the wooden sawhorse, grabbing the insulated section of the 1,000-amp line with his bare hand. He jerked hard.

  Barley leaped back. “What are you doing!”

  Connor pulled three feet of line from the box. Then he grabbed the dead intake line and brought the ends close together, but not too close. He knew that a 1,000-amp line could throw an electrical bolt as far as three inches to connect with a grounded source.

  Half-turning, he pointed to a thick plastic roll lying on the ground. It looked like non-adhesive electrical tape, but it was simply a four-inch thick band of plastic. It wouldn’t stick to any surface without tape holding it down. But Connor knew that, in this situation, he wouldn’t need any tape. The residual heat coming off the electrical line would do the job by itself.

  “Give me that roll of plastic,” he said.

  Barley picked up the plastic roll and cautiously handed it to him. Connor leaned forward, grabbing both ends of the wires and slowly pushing them together until the 1,000-amp line was close to the intake line. And even though Connor was expecting it, had even braced himself for it, the shock almost killed him.

  When the ends were four inches apart a bolt of electricity leaped at the speed of light to instantly hit the intake line, liquid fire, deep and pure and blazing green that flashed into a bright white flow, blinding as a welding torch, to burn a path from one exposed wire to the other.

  Connor’s heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t find the strength to catch a breath as a solid and terrifying power charged the atmosphere with static. The skin on his chest tightened at the touch, hair standing all over his body. And although he hadn’t seen it happen, he saw now that the copper endings of the wires had already melted together.

  The overhead lights were glowing.

  Connor sensed that Barley hadn’t moved and was watching with rapt attention. Moving slowly, Connor slid his hands farther away from the exposed copper and pushed, solidifying the weld. The power continued. Then he undid the thick roll of electrical plastic and picked up a small wooden stick. With sweat sliding off face, he cast a glance at Barley.

  “You’d better step back,” he whispered.

  Without shame Barley stepped back.

  With the plastic held lightly on the stick, Connor threw the dangling end over the bare 1,000-amp meld. Instantly the plastic melted, disintegrating to the invisible heat. With infinite caution Connor meticulously turned the plastic on the line, feeling the hairs on his arm and head raise straight up at the immeasurably faint margin of power charging the air and traveling through the plastic strand and stick, the current trying unsuccessfully to connect with the ground through the sawhorse’s wooden legs.

  Heavy beads of perspiration dripped from Connor’s arms, his chin. He used his free hand to carefully wipe sweat from his eyes, focusing with absolute concentration on the bare copper line in front of him.

  In five careful minutes Connor had wrapped the entire roll of non-adhesive plastic around the section, the plastic melting less and less as it turned, coating the wires. Then Connor took a large roll of wide black electrical tape, feeling less and less o
f the current as he wrapped the tape generously around the melted plastic. And finally, after an additional ten minutes of agonizing, patient work, the connecting electrical lines were covered by a large black lump of insulated plastic. No bare wire could be seen.

  Sweat soaked his shirt as Connor leaned back. It dripped from his nose, his chin. His shoulders were cramping badly as he wearily tossed the empty paper core of electrical tape to the side.

  He stood on the ground, turned to Barley.

  “We’re hot.”

  ***

  Hand locked hard on the last foot of wire, Thor swung out from the wall, staring down the shaft. He angled the flashlight downward but it was absorbed by the dark. But he knew, if Blankenship was correct, that there were only a hundred feet remaining.

  Cables and grease-slick steel girders lined the sides and front of the shaft, but Thor knew trying to maintain a solid handhold on any of them would be even more difficult than holding the wall.

  Better, yes, to trust the rock itself, trying for solid holds.

  Reaching out to grasp a narrow sliver of stone, bracing the toes of his boots against the wall, Thor studied with exacting concentration for a secure second handhold. He saw several. Then he moved the flashlight around to his gut, letting the beam hit the wall.

  Rebounding off the wall in the darkness of the shaft, the light beam was transformed into a wild white haze that illuminated all four walls and a space of the shaft above and below. Using it, Thor guessed that he might pick his way down the remaining hundred feet.

  Gathering himself, teeth clenching, Thor released his other hand from the wire and lashed out wildly, slamming against the wall, digging desperately, his fingers finding a narrow hold.

  ***

  “Can you work the vault doors now with GEO?” Connor asked.

  “No,” Frank responded. “GEO isn’t going to do anything that it thinks would place us in danger. And GEO is convinced that shutting all the doors is necessary to protect us.”