"My dear Tillie," Wilson called in a raised voice after some minutes had passed, "I know that you so enjoy showing off, but you are the one with the light."
Tillie stopped and looked back, swinging the lantern around behind herself and seeing the three men about twenty yards back. "You're kidding me, right? Would you like me to install a handrail first before you all come this way?"
Taking a deep breath and forcing himself to ignore the absolute blackness to his right, Elias turned, faced her, and began walking.
"See, I knew you could do it," she teased with the inflection of a mother cheering on her five-year-old who had just made it ten feet on his new bicycle with training wheels.
"Give me the damn duffel bag," he ordered as he caught up to where she was standing.
Without waiting for a reply, he grabbed the rope loop at the top of the bag and swung it off her shoulder and onto his own.
She actually wavered on the ledge for a moment as the counterbalance was abruptly removed. Elias started to reach out to steady her, when she slapped his hand away. "I'm good." Her voice was less even than she had intended it to be.
With his free hand, Elias gripped her arm and softly said, "Tillie, you don't have to prove anything."
He felt her muscles tense and was certain she was going to shake off the contact. Then there was a sudden change. She relaxed and, in the pale white light from the lantern, he saw her smile at him.
"You're right. I don't. That isn't the deal, anyway."
Elias could hear Wilson and Stone catching up, but asked, "What is?"
The smile frozen on her freckled face, Tillie answered, "The deal is…I came here to die, remember? That was the point."
She glanced past him and saw that the two men were right behind Elias. "Can we keep moving now? I promise to keep it slow."
She unceremoniously turned her back to Elias and began walking. He followed, and within a minute or two they arrived at the first of the inlets.
"Anyone want a break?"
"Tillie, don't be a smart aleck," Wilson snorted testily.
"Just trying to be nice."
"You have to try?" Stone commented.
Tillie whirled around to face him and stuck out her tongue, blowing a raspberry in his direction.
"Children, please!" Elias exhorted.
Tillie turned back around and continued her pace on the ledge. The others followed quietly until reaching the next inlet. Entering it, she announced, "The riser isn't far from here."
Within minutes they were standing beneath the round concrete drainpipe. At the top, the steel grate was visible. Tillie grabbed for one of the access rungs; Elias beat her to it and, still toting the duffel bag and rifle, climbed to the top, with her following right behind. There was no rust, but the grit from the sand had packed into the tight space between the grate and the collar. It took three grunting shoves before the lid broke loose, a shower of fine dust and dirt cascading down upon them. He slid it to the side and climbed up another rung, poking his head above the collar.
"This doesn't look good," he barked, once again shouting to be heard over the din of the winds.
"What's wrong?"
Elias did not answer. Instead, he climbed the rest of the way out of the drainpipe, clearing the way for Tillie to follow. When her head cleared the top, she quickly looked around and, seeing what had occurred, muttered to herself, "Good God!"
Wilson, who was the next to come up, heard the exchange but did not inquire. Rather, he hurried the final distance. Pulling himself out of the manhole and flopping onto the powdery soil, he took in the scene with his own eyes.
As Stone crawled out right behind him, Wilson remarked, "It seems that the wind has picked up a bit."
"What do you m…?" Stone stopped in mid-sentence as he also took in what had happened. "This looks like the bottom of a dumpster on a construction site."
The atrium, without the benefit of Wilson's horticultural obsession, coupled with the absence of any caretaking by the other residents, had been nothing but a desiccated sandbox. But now, instead of four walls and a dirt floor, the area was filled with a jumbled pile of broken steel struts, millions of shards of shiny black glass, twisted and mangled aluminum framing, and hundreds of yards of copper wiring.
"What the hell happened?" Tillie gasped, barely audible above the whistling, rampaging wind.
"Those are the solar panels from the roof," Elias answered.
"It looks like some giant just swept them into the atrium with a swipe of his arm."
Wilson twisted around and sat upright, dangling his feet into the storm drain from which the group had emerged. "I'm certain the entire solar collector system up there is…was tied together. The panels would all be interconnected. One weak link, one vulnerable bolt not completely torqued down, would be enough to start a chain reaction. It would violently lift, catching and tearing the adjacent panels as it went. In effect, there would be an avalanche driven by the wind instead of gravity, crashing and ripping more sections as it gathered momentum until it found this atrium, into which it all tumbled."
Elias stood up and slowly turned around, taking in the details of the disaster. As the others rose, Wilson, his voice for the first time conveying something more than his steady academic tone, said, "I believe we might be running out of time."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"We've lost two Accelerants! How is that even possible, Mr. Killeen?"
The young man, still in his twenties, and for the first time in his brief life feeling that he was in over his head, answered, "I'm still not sure, sir. It's a little difficult to piece together exactly what happened."
"A little difficult? Maybe you could provide me with your best guess."
Stinging from the overt sarcasm, the subordinate began talking quickly. "They might have been prepared for the visit. We found unburned remnants of netting on the perimeter of the area where the shack had been."
"We already knew the old man was anticipating us, you fool. That's why he filled his little courtyard with all the vegetation, to slow down our Accelerants!"
"Yes, yes. I know. But it looks as though there were other measures – the netting…defensive barriers…and this."
Killeen stepped carefully over the heaps of debris and still-smoldering wood until he reached the spot where the porch had once stood. Pointing downward, he explained, "They had an escape route."
The other man looked down at the opening to the storm drain and said nothing.
"We didn't discover this until after the fire was out, and even then, not immediately. We had assumed they died in the blaze. The fire caused the roof to collapse, and we were digging through the rubble looking for their bodies when we found it."
The man stared down into the manhole, feeling his blood pressure rise. "You still haven't told me how we lost two Accelerants? Are you telling me Charon is that good?"
"No sir," the younger man replied hastily. "From what we can tell, I think it was a fluke."
"A FLUKE! We lost two subjects, who were both the result of years of the most advanced immersion and training, to a fluke?"
Sucking in a deep breath, Killeen plunged ahead. "I guess that was an unfortunate choice of words, but apparently one of the Accelerants was wounded from gunfire. The doctor said that the wounds wouldn't have been fatal. The other had been knocked unconscious before this happened."
At the end of his sentence, the man had swept his arm around to indicate the overall area surrounding them.
"Evidently, while both Accelerants were down, all of these solar panels crashed into the atrium. With their speed and agility, they probably would have been able to outrun or outmaneuver the metal and glass. But they were both incapacitated before it happened – one from the gunshots, the second from some other cause. They were both crushed to death."
Before the older man could respond, they were joined by a third. "I may have your answer on why the second Accelerant was unconscious at the time."
"That w
ould be appreciated, Doctor."
"After we pulled the heavy steel frame off him…which was the cause of death, by the way…my assistant and I put him on a field stretcher. This area was far too cluttered for us to use our gurney, so we left it outside the atrium, in the corridor. I helped him carry the stretcher to the corridor, and it's a good thing I did."
"Why, Doctor?" the older man inquired, trying to hide the edge in his voice.
Oblivious to his superior's testiness, the doctor resumed, "Out here it was far too windy for me to notice it; however, as soon as we reached the corridor, the smell of Sevoflurane was unmistakable. The front of his tunic reeked of it."
"Sevoflurane?"
"Anesthesia. One of the two compounds we use frequently."
"Anesth…! How could one of our Accelerants be anesthetized out here, in the middle of a mission?"
"Really quite clever, actually. And this would explain a couple of other incidents which had us befuddled in the past."
"Doctor, please…!"
Raising his hands in a gesture intended to calm his superior but having the opposite effect, the doctor began, "The Accelerants have a hyper-metabolism. Their consumption of all things we normally need – water, food, air – is dramatically pumped up, as it were. And when they are in motion, so to speak, their hearts and all of their other muscles demand oxygen at a radically heightened rate."
"I know all of this. They pant like dogs, so what?"
"That same demand for oxygen would make them vulnerable to an anesthetic at levels which would be essentially harmless to us."
"Do you expect me to believe that Elias, or one of his group, managed to sneak up on an Accelerant and held a rag over his mouth until he passed out?"
The doctor shook his head. "That wouldn't be at all necessary. Sevoflurane or Desflurane, either one of them loaded in a dispersal device, such as a tear-gas canister, would knock out an Accelerant, and the people around probably wouldn't even need gas masks."
Killeen looked off into the distance, thinking. "That would also explain how Charon escaped from our lab."
The doctor nodded.
Crossing the short distance from the storm drain to the nearest exit from the atrium proved to be tedious and time-consuming, as the four had to climb over or occasionally move the twisted and shattered solar panels. As they entered the corridor, Elias looked at the ceiling and noted, "I'm surprised the lighting still works. I would have thought that what happened on the roof would have shut down the electrical systems."
"We don't know yet if it has," Wilson cautioned. "Almost all of the daytime lighting in the complex is from solar tubes, rather than electric fixtures. But I doubt that the rooftop calamity shorted out our power. The systems would be isolated and protected by breakers. Anyway, the sun is setting. We'll know soon enough."
"Won't the batteries die without the solar panels feeding them anymore?"
"Yes, eventually. You must remember, Aegis is still not even approaching its design capacity, insofar as population and, therefore, electrical demand. The batteries should last for many days, perhaps even weeks."
"Besides," Tillie added as she walked over to them, "I've got two generators stashed."
"You know, Tillie," Elias remarked, "you are rapidly losing the ability to surprise me."
"Oh, yeah? Well…hey, what's that?"
As Elias jerked around to look in the direction she was staring, she suddenly punched him in the stomach.
"Ooww! What was that for?"
"Just wanted to show you that I could still surprise you. Come on, we'd better clear out of this open corridor and get to my place."
Rubbing his abdomen with both hands, he watched as she grabbed the duffel bag he had taken from her down in the storm system, and tossed it over her shoulder. Carrying only his rifle, he followed her as he heard Wilson softly laughing.
The balance of the journey was uneventful, and they were all soon entering her den. In deference to Tillie's mudroom, they all paused and leaned their weapons and packs against the walls. Elias hung up his windbreaker on one of the decorative hooks, leaving his 9mm in the pocket. Exhausted, they rounded the corner and proceeded to get settled in her main room.
Almost immediately, Stone excused himself, and was gone for several minutes. As he walked back in, Tillie glanced up at him. "Where were you all this time?"
He reached up and shook the back of his shirt collar. "On our trip through the storm sewer, I got sand everywhere – inside my shirt, pants, socks, my…."
"I don't need to know the details," she interrupted. "You didn't shake out your clothes in my environment, did you? If I find sand scattered all over my pretty stuff, I'll make you pick it off one grain at a time."
"No, I didn't," he answered quickly. "I went down the passageway. That's why I was gone so long."
Tillie eyed him suspiciously, but said nothing.
"Now, I'm really confused." Stone's brow furrowed.
"About what, Eric?" Elias asked.
"Before we were attacked at Wilson's, I thought we had concluded that Faulk wants you alive. It didn't look as if that really was the case when they torched Wilson's place with us trapped on the porch."
"Not necessarily," Wilson surmised. "It could have been their plan to smoke us out. It is a rare individual who will remain in a burning building, no matter what might be outside. People have even leapt from twenty-story windows to avoid the experience."
"I think Wilson's right. If he, or whoever we're working against, wanted me dead, I would have died during that first run-in with the Zooks."
Tillie, who was lying on the sofa, with her feet dangling over the back and her arms crossed and covering her face, blurted, "Duh! That's a no-brainer. What I don't get is, if they knew you were coming, why did Kreitzmann buy your act and give you a tour?"
Elias paused and did not answer. Neither Wilson nor Stone offered an explanation, either. Tillie, waiting for a response and getting none, uncovered her face and twisted her head around to look at them. "You mean I'm the only one who has been wondering about that? It's what I'd expect from these two, but Wilson, I'm surprised at you."
"Tillie, there is no reason to be insufferable. I am certain that all of us have wondered the same thing."
"It hadn't occurred to me," Stone said.
"See!"
"Tillie!"
"Okay, okay."
Elias cleared his throat before speaking. "I've been wondering the same thing. Every explanation leads me in a circle. I feel like a dog chasing his tail."
"I have no doubt that we are missing an essential piece to the puzzle," Wilson agreed. "Once we find it, that particular question will be answerable."
Elias looked at him thoughtfully. "You're right. But I'm not sure we have enough time to find that piece. By the way, we've been through quite a bit over the last few hours. How are you holding up?"
Wilson, who had sunk so deeply into an overstuffed chair that his arms, perched on the armrests, were level with his ears, smiled at Elias. "I appreciate your asking. I really do. I've managed to keep myself in fairly good condition over the years…."
"Because I've worked his butt off," Tillie interjected.
"She's right. There are very few things better for an old man than to struggle to keep up with a young friend. To answer your query, Elias, I am fine and looking forward to what may come next."
"Wish I could say the same," he responded.
Stone, who had taken to the bed Elias had awakened in earlier, joined in, "Speaking of what may come next, Elias, do you have any idea what we are going to do?"
"I do. I think we have two issues. We need to find that missing piece to the puzzle Wilson mentioned, and I think that we need to figure a way to get out of here. And, considering that God, nature, or who-knows-what seems to be intent on tearing this place apart, I don't think we have much time to do both."
"Which means we should probably split up," Stone offered.
"That
might be a good idea."
"It's a dumb idea," Tillie huffed.
"Why?"
"If we are going to make it, we need to stick together. In all the movies I ever watched before I came in here, it was always the same. Somebody in the group said, ‘We need to split up,' and as soon as they did, they all died."
"Tillie, this isn't a movie."
"Don't you think I know that, Elias?" As she answered him, she swung her legs around, placing her feet on the floor, and sat up, facing him. "But it doesn't matter. Each one of us has something to offer. You split us up, we all lose. Besides, I can solve one of your two issues."
"Which one?"
"How to get us out of here!"
Elias stared at Tillie, trying to read her eyes. She stared back defiantly.
"Tillie, my dear, you know a way out?" Wilson inquired softly.
She nodded. "I always have, basically since I came into this place."
"Why didn't you ever tell me?"
She turned to look at Wilson. "Why? Did you ever once say you wanted to leave?"
"No. You know that I didn't."
"Then why would I tell you?"
"How did you find it?" Elias asked.
"Not important. I just did. Remember me? I like to explore. I like to crawl through every nook and cranny to see where it goes."
Elias took a deep breath, aware that he was rolling the dice. "I don't believe you."
"WHAT?" She nearly swung up off the sofa as she shouted.
"I don't believe you. I've been in the business my whole life. The reason I'm still alive is that I can tell if someone is feeding me a line of baloney."
She laughed once, derisively. "I don't know about the rest of your life, but the reason you are still alive at this moment is me. If your ability to survive is what you're hanging your hat on, from the little bit I've seen, I'm not impressed."
Wilson began to chastise Tillie, but Elias held up his hand to stop him. "Tillie, this is easy to resolve. If you know a way out, why don't you show me?"
"Why don't you go to hell?"
The Aegis Solution Page 25