“You’re going to cut through the wall?” Shade asked.
“There’s a steel plate. It’ll be like a light saber cutting out a door.”
“You know what I never understood?”
“What?”
“Why waste all that time trying to melt through a heavily reinforced metal door? Why didn’t the Jedi just cut through another section of the wall?”
“Because…George Lucas.”
Winston had intended to try burning through the steel plate, but he realized that Shade’s idea was probably better. He’d already seen the device blow out large chunks of concrete. The challenge now was to control the energy and heat the concrete until it became brittle. Then it would only take a small burst to remove bits of material away from the plate’s edges.
He was probably going too slowly. The water level continued to rise below them. It wrapped around Shade’s waist and lapped at Winston’s ankles. Its touch made him even more nervous, and he felt his chest starting to burn from his shallow breathing. The sharp stench of overheated cement burned in his nose, and every so often he would flinch and bite down on a cry of pain as a sizzling bit of concrete popped away from the wall and bounced off his exposed skin.
Winston exhausted his first energy marble and went through another. He was well into a third before only a couple lumps of concrete were left holding the plate in place.
“I’m almost through!” Winston called over the water’s roar.
Shade’s face was turned down, and he was doing his best to hold his body away from the falling debris. “OK, just take your time! I can’t feel my feet, but no worries!”
Then several things happened, and Winston couldn’t tell where to focus his attention.
A loud clank sounded right over their heads, followed immediately by the steel hatch opening. Light filled the tunnel.
In his surprise, Winston let off an excessive blast of energy that removed the last chunk of concrete holding the metal plate in place. Several bits of glowing debris peppered Winston’s face and neck, feeling like a shotgun blast. He cried out in pain.
The metal plate, finally free of its frame after almost forty years, tilted forward, overbalanced, and tumbled free. It fell end over end through the air, then bounced off of Shade’s shoulder.
Shade’s face contorted in pain, and he began to cry out. Perhaps the blow numbed his arm, because he lost his grasp on the rung and slumped to the side and fell back. His upper body vanished into the water with a surprisingly small splash, and the roiling current swept him away.
“Shade!” Winston screamed after him.
Near his head, Winston heard a scraping. He looked up and saw a hand clasped around an old-fashioned, red coffee can set into the little niche previously covered by the plate. The hand pulled the can free.
Winston’s first impulse was to grab for it, but he had one arm still locked around the ladder. His other hand grasped Little e.
The hand lifted the can into the light. Winston squinted, his eyes working to adapt. He could see a man on his knees above the opening staring down at Winston. In his other hand, he held what seemed to be a heavily modified portable metal detector.
It was Agent Smith.
“Winston Chase,” the man said, apparently sharing Winston’s surprise. He eyed the can in his hand. “Is this…?”
“Please give it to me,” Winston said. He glanced down into the tunnel. “Please! I have to find my friend!”
Smith appeared perplexed. “Something’s not right with this investigation. I…I don’t think you’re a terrorist.”
“Of course I’m not a terrorist!”
Saying that made what he did next even harder. Winston quickly brought Little e up from his side, squeezing the crossbar as he moved. The tips blossomed with brilliant blue-white arcs. Before the agent could do more than lift his eyebrows in confusion, Winston pointed the device at the man’s face and said, “I need that. Now.”
Squinting and staring at the wavering rods, Smith was plainly afraid, but after a second of hesitation he said, “I can’t. You have to come with me. I can help you.”
But who was helping Shade?
The only way Winston could get the can was to shoot the agent. Perhaps he could just stun him. Winston couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t be sure.
Then he remembered his father…and understood.
“Do not give that to Bledsoe,” he said through gritted teeth.
“What?” Smith asked. “Why?”
Winston took a last deep breath, let go of the ladder, and stepped off into the all-consuming black.
24
Tunnel Torrent
Devlin Bledsoe finally abandoned his car in a loading zone near the intersection of Second and Pine Street. Horns blared all around him. Drivers stood outside their vehicles alternately encouraging and berating others up ahead to rush through the jets of fire hydrant water gushing into the streets. No one wanted to risk damaging his or her car, though, so nobody moved. Bledsoe had never seen anything like it happen before. Every hydrant in the area gushed its own little geyser. His inner little boy relished the mischief.
Firemen carrying wrenches three feet long stood back to study their work. Some of them smiled at the chaos they’d caused. Police officers roamed the sidewalks, trying to keep tempers down. One of these, a middle-aged man clearly going soft in the middle but made burly with bulletproof body armor under his uniform, saw Bledsoe walking away from his car and called after him.
“Sir! Hold on there!”
Bledsoe flashed his badge with barely a glance at the cop. He had more pressing matters to tend to than a parking violation.
He walked quickly down Pine toward the river, then turned left up Naito Parkway, admiring the view of the Willamette River off to his right, deep green and sparkling in the sun. Dappled shadows covered the broad sidewalk from overhanging trees just starting their ruby turn into autumn. The rising and falling shush of distant traffic mixed with people unpacking their bagged meals bought from nearby food carts, and the air smelled remarkably clean.
The squat concrete building loomed before him, rimmed by a black iron gate and perched over the river like an old military battery, completely out of place on the waterfront’s tranquil beauty. The structure might have been designed by gigantic kids making their first sandcastle with two-story tall, square buckets, all function and no grace. Bledsoe took one more peek down at the river and the small, angled docks that jutted from the building’s lowest level out over the water.
“All right, open it up,” said Bledsoe into his radio.
“On it,” rumbled Agent Lynch. “Just a sec.”
Bledsoe glanced impatiently at the long, black, iron gate on its roller track. His eyes wandered up the building’s face until he read the words “MUNICIPAL SEWAGE PUMPING PLANT 1952 AD” high above him.
Beside him, a faint buzz ended in a click, and the iron gate slid smoothly apart.
“Sir,” said Lynch over the radio. “Ms. Maryland here would like to shut the gate behind you, pursuant to city code four-nine-something-something-something.”
“Fine. Any progress from Smith with that scanner?”
“Not yet, sir. I should hear from him shortly.”
“Let me know.”
Bledsoe stepped through the gate and quickly walked around the pump building. As he heard the lock snap closed behind him, he became aware of the sound of rushing water coming from the river below. That was good. Like any large river in calm weather, the Willamette appeared placid, almost motionless. The sound had to be street drainage tumbling from its outlet.
He stepped past small piles of traffic cones, life vests, and ropes as he made his way about the building. Bledsoe found what he wanted on the opposite side of the building: another iron fence, smaller and thinner than the one facing the street, overlooking the river. A gate within the fence led to a steel stairway that zigzagged down to the water. A concrete wall ran from the river surface to street level, and attached
to this at the water level was a pair of short wooden docks, overlapping to form a triangle. The wall formed the triangle’s base, and in the middle of this hunched a circular opening from which jetted a churning, white-whipped torrent of water.
A fountain spewed from the tunnel’s mouth, a ferocious force as tall as Bledsoe. He could see the rusty top of the cover grate that disappeared into the blasting water and assumed that the galvanized wheel set into the wall above the left dock must open the tunnel gate.
The temperature down here among the spray and shadows must have been twenty degrees cooler than on the street. It was invigorating, and Bledsoe found himself considering how quickly life could change. Forty-eight hours ago, he’d been stuck in his lab, running the same old experiments, working year after year on a backup plan in case this day never came.
But here he was. Finally, he’d found Claude, or what was left of him, and stuck him in a cage where he belonged. His brat would join him soon, and then he would find Amanda. Between the three of them, Bledsoe would recover and reconstruct the Alpha Machine. And then…
He inhaled deeply. Then I will make the world as it should have been, Bledsoe thought as he sat on the dock and faced the rush of water carrying his future to him.
***
Winston’s backpack felt like some five hundred–pound anchor strapped to his body, trying to drag him under the roiling current. In the darkness, pushed and thrown by the water, it was almost impossible to tell which way was up. He occasionally collided with a wall, and from that he had a second or two to tell which direction to push his feet. The water always sucked him under again, and panic enveloped and squeezed him like a giant’s fist. Sometimes, his feet struck the floor, and he could jump to the surface. That left him just enough time to grab a chestful of air before the weight of his pack and sodden clothes pulled him down again.
This seemed to go on for miles. Winston’s running endurance was one thing, but he’d never done anything like this before. Every muscle screamed like it was on fire. His lungs ached terribly, and he felt utterly disoriented. The only thing that kept him from completely succumbing to his terror was the knowledge that Shade was in here somewhere. He had to find his friend, no matter what. Winston didn’t know how long he’d been down here, getting thrown about and battered, but he figured it had to be at least two or three minutes, and if Shade had been knocked unconscious somehow, then he would have drowned for sure.
The thought was more than Winston could bear.
“Shade!” he screamed into the darkness so loudly that he thought he felt something rip in his throat.
Gravity and a swirling, greedy death sucked his body downward again, but in the split second before his head went under, Winston thought he heard a voice.
It could have been an echo. He fought back the exhaustion, found the floor of the tunnel, and pushed to the surface.
“Shade, can you hear me?” he yelled.
“Yes!”
Loud, clear, and no mistake. Coming from the darkness up ahead.
Winston let out a gasp of relief, then he went under again. A wall scraped past his left arm, spinning him. Dizziness was a tangible thing. It was like the world outside Winston’s head spun one way and everything inside his head turned the opposite direction. He felt his body slip to horizontal, feet first, and he pinwheeled his arms, trying to pull his strangely weighted torso back over his legs. Instead, he folded into an L shape, feet pointing his way downstream, head sinking farther under the surface. If he couldn’t get himself righted, he would drown sitting on his butt.
Suddenly, Winston’s feet slammed into a wall. He had enough time to get his palms in front of his face, then the slimy brick surface rammed into his hands as his knees buckled. His body continued forward a bit as the water pounded into his back. A moment later, the pressure on him grew even greater as Winston felt the left side of his body pinned against the brickwork.
Something landed on top of his head and patted his hair. Winston instinctively grabbed for it. He found a wrist with one hand and a forearm with the other. Shade slowly pulled him upward until Winston’s head broke the surface.
He gasped for breath.
“I’ve got you!” said Shade.
“Let go! You’re pulling my hair!”
“Oh.”
Shade released him. Winston could stand on his feet as long as he followed Shade’s example and kept one hand pressed to the roof to keep him in place. In their corner, water struck the wall and bounced back, essentially canceling out one current with another and leaving them in a small pocket of relative calm.
“Do you have a flashlight?” Shade asked.
“No.”
“You OK?”
“Yeah.” Winston forced himself to slow his breathing. He was shaking all over. “You?”
“All right. It doesn’t hurt that much.”
“I saw that thing hit you.”
“Shoulder. It was like a karate chop to the nerve or something, and I couldn’t move my hand for a minute.” Then Shade remembered. “The doughnut! Did you get it?”
“No. That FBI guy took it and said I’d have to go with him.”
“So, you came after me instead?”
Winston said nothing as Shade realized what must have happened.
“You gave up the Alpha Machine to jump in the water by yourself and try to save me — and you can barely swim? Are you stupid?”
“Well, I—”
Winston started to get upset at Shade’s lack of understanding, but then Shade’s arms were wrapped around him in a great bear hug.
“Thanks, man,” said Shade. “You’re the best.”
Winston had no intention of releasing the ceiling yet, but he did use the hand still grasping Little e to pat Shade awkwardly on the backpack. “Thanks.” He eased himself from Shade’s embrace. “Now, how do we get out of here?”
Winston felt Shade take a step away from the wall.
“The water is draining somewhere,” said Shade. “I bet if we keep bobbing along, we’ll end up getting spit out into the river. If the tunnel was going to fill up, it would’ve done it already.”
That made sense, but Winston didn’t know if he could take bobbing along in the darkness anymore, head constantly ducking underwater, feet slipping, just waiting for some accident to break his neck and send him to a watery death. They had both lost their flashlights. That left only one option.
“Hold on,” he said. “If I don’t have light, I’m going to freak out and kill someone down here. Probably myself.”
Light was energy, and the device seemed to be able to manifest any other energy-related thought he fed into it. Why not serve as a torch?
He held up Little e, careful to make sure it was above the water and close to the ceiling, and imagined the rod tips blazing with light. He felt the tips begin to uncoil. Then he quickly scrubbed the thought from his head. What was he trying to do, electrify the entire Portland underground? He concentrated on creating a soft glow, squeezing his grip slightly while pushing with the back of his mind. In the space above them, the rods bent and wavered. The metal’s edges glimmered a faint blue, their outlines slowly forming from the surrounding nothingness.
Winston pushed more energy out to Little e, and it flared into brilliance, as if Winston had cranked a chandelier dimmer from low to maximum. They both squinted against the light as the slimy black walls and mold-crusted brickwork of the tunnel roof appeared around them. Winston saw that they were indeed standing in a little eye of calm only a few feet wide. Beyond it, the current raced, folding over onto itself where it collided with the walls, gurgling and churning as it pushed into the darkness beyond Little e’s glow.
Shade’s smiling face winced as Winston glanced at the long but shallow gash on his left shoulder that still oozed blood into his sweatshirt. He’d seen Shade run off the field with much worse, laughing and bleeding everywhere.
The thought buzzed through Winston’s mind for at least the thousandth time in their
friendship: If Shade wasn’t nervous about their situation, if he was bobbing here in total darkness under the streets of Portland with bleeding injuries and a fearless smile, why should Winston worry? Worry was only going to leave him stuck in this little eddy, getting colder and colder.
“YOLO,” he said quietly with a smile.
Shade clapped him on the shoulder. “YOLO. You only live once, buddy.”
“Well…you might,” Winston said. “I can jump off buildings, so who knows?”
“And!” Shade nodded toward Little e. “You’re good at not drowning or electrocuting yourself.”
“So far.”
“You got a plan?”
Winston remembered the agent tucking the coffee can under his arm, torpedoing Winston’s hopes and his father’s decades of planning.
“Let’s start with staying alive and take it from there.”
“I like it.” Shade held out his right arm. Winston seized it with his left so that they tightly gripped each other’s wrists.
Without another word, they walked into the rushing stream. The water embraced them, pushing harder and harder at their backs, and they began taking long, loping hops. It was easier with Little e’s light. When Winston’s head ducked under the surface, Shade was there to help keep him upright.
The tunnel zipped by in a blur. Winston thought they might be accelerating, but it might have been the effect of his own fatigue. They kept battling to stay vertical and hold their faces above the waterline while the current buffeted them this way and that. A couple of times, Winston nearly lost his grip on Shade’s arm, but Shade dug in, fingers closed in a steely circle around the wrist bones just below Winston’s hand. He was going to have some wicked bruising, and it hurt like crazy when Shade’s fingers dug in like that, but he much preferred the pain, which would fade quickly, to the thought of being alone again down here. He’d thrown away the world for his friend, and in that moment, locked together, spilling madly toward an unknown but quite possibly deadly end, Winston knew he’d made the right choice.
Winston Chase and the Alpha Machine Page 26