said Bernie.
The words repeated in Winston’s mind: Your father is still young and alive. How young? Winston tried to come up with a number and couldn’t. What would he look like?
Ultimately, that question was what brought Winston back to himself. He had to know.
He put his left hand out, then tried to shift his right hand, still clutching Little e, up even with it. His balance failed, though, and somehow he ended up falling onto his right side. The world tumbled.
Your father is still young and alive.
Maybe he could crawl on his belly.
Winston closed his eyes and found that having no visual input helped to calm his equilibrium slightly. He rocked from left to right, each time working to slide his elbows and knees forward. His belly scraped over the rocks.
Winston rocked again, tried to move his arms, and found that they refused to obey.
He tried to picture his father’s face from their meal in Tillamook and found that the details had vanished. He worked to dredge up the photo still in his backpack and failed. All he could remember was the man he knew as Mr. A, ancient, withered, and fearful on his bed as Winston left him with angry words. What exactly had he said? That memory was gone, too.
Winston shifted his body as dread and hopelessness overwhelmed him. He rocked, flailed, and worked in the blackness, but he knew that he was going nowhere. It was too late.
He understood how asphyxiation worked. He lay still and waited to die.
Time passed. Winston found himself counting each agonizing pulse of his headache as it pounded through his skull. He remained still, half-curled in a fetal position, and he realized that the sensation of everything spinning was slowly receding. That was good. At least death would bring some relief.
Winston didn’t reply. There was no point. A low hum filled his ears, indicating that even his tinnitus was failing. He felt his face begin to cool, no doubt the result of blood pulling away from his extremities before the end.
He realized that he smelled something. Was it…oil?
Confused but willing to play along at the mention of contacting his parents, Winston complied. A light lay before him, and it wasn’t from Little e. The glow was dim and yellow, and it spilled from a rough hole cut into the floor. The hole was so close that if he were to extend his hand, he could probably touch its edge with his fingertips.
He barely understood, and he now realized that lack of oxygen was scrambling his thinking.
“I made it?” he whispered.
13
Worry in the Warehouse
Winston spent a solid ten minutes with his face resting on the cave floor at the edge of the hole. With each breath, he felt his symptoms slowly, far too slowly, recede. The skull-splitting migraine eventually turned into a low headache. The dizziness gradually vanished. As his thinking cleared, his stomach began to rumble, and in time he sat up to eat a granola bar and take several long drafts from his water bottle, leaving it only a few ounces from empty.
The thought of lying here for that long feeling as he had before made Winston grimace with revulsion.
Winston realized that he didn’t know. The intention had been to rescue Bernie, bring him forward to 2013, and save everyone. But then he had met the younger Bledsoe and Theo, which made him want to find his young parents even more. They were here, within reach, and Winston would be able to stand with them together for the first time in his life. In fact…
Winston was disappointed but not surprised.
A bounce of hope flitted through Winston, like a lone blip on a heart monitor.
Winston kept his next thought to himself. Bernie hadn’t said that meeting his parents had been the cause of things going wrong. They obviously hadn’t caused his one death from falling off that cliff. Beyond that, maybe he could do something different with his parents, something he hadn’t done before, that would yield positive results. Maybe meeting them was exactly what the future needed, and he just hadn’t done it in the right way yet.
Still keeping his right hand locked within Little e, Winston explored the hole in the floor further. It was significantly larger than the previous hole, at least six feet in diameter and twenty feet deep, emerging into a dimly lit area in which Winston could only see what appeared to be the top of several wooden crates. For an instant, he wondered if he’d discovered the gigantic government warehouse depicted at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. That could have been based on Area X, for sure. Unfortunately, he would be blocked from immediately finding out by the iron grate bolted across the bottom of the hole.
Bernie didn’t bother to explain, and Winston gingerly set a foot on the ladder’s second rung. With Little e still on his right hand, he committed his weight to the ladder and tested its strength. It didn’t so much as creak.
Give it up for World War II engineering, he thought. Built to last.
Right.
Winston made it down to the bottom rung, which was still four or five feet from the bottom of the tube. Beyond the iron grating, there looked to be a ten-foot drop onto the crates below.
Winston couldn’t tell if the alien was being snarky, but now wasn’t the time for banter. He pointed Little e at the grating and focused. Almost immediately, he noted a hazy blue line begin to form at one edge of the rock opening. The line traveled away into the warehouse, but at the grating it connected into a tube — no, an electromagnetic coil. Winston understood enough rudiments about locks to guess that when a current was supplied to the coil, it would cause a bar to draw back, releasing the lock’s bolt from the wall. Normally, that current would be triggered by the entry of a code, but in the days before keypad entry, Winston guessed that a security person would have pressed a button to disengage the lock. Sure enough, the wire leading away from the grate went deep into
the warehouse, farther than Winston could see without expending more effort to follow it. He guessed it ended at a security station somewhere and that the guard manning it would never know if someone applied current to the line.
“Here goes nothing,” he whispered, then he pushed a steadily rising amount of energy into the simple mechanism until he heard the lock click. The bolt drew back, and the gate simply dropped on its hinges. It swung away with a screech that reverberated in Winston’s narrow rock tube. He had no idea if the sound would echo throughout the warehouse and bring guards running. Best not to stick around too long and find out.
Winston descended as far as he could, keeping one hand on the second to last run while one leg dangled free above the warehouse. He took one last look up the rock tunnel, wondering if he’d ever have to leave the way he’d come in. Recalling how close he’d come to dying, he nearly formed the thought that no matter what lay ahead, it couldn’t be as bad as what he’d just been through. The words began to form in his mind, and he quickly swept them aside before they could jinx him.
Winston let his other foot fall free. He dangled painfully by his left hand for a second, then let go.
He landed with a loud bang atop a crate, but the side of one foot hit a corner board awkwardly, forcing his leg to turn in. He crumpled and fell to the side, stifling a cry of pain as his shoulder connected with the crate’s edge. Winston tumbled off the crate onto another row of crates below it. He nearly fell from this, as well. His face pointed down at empty air, shoulders and much of his chest slipping off the crate as he faced at least another fifteen-foot drop.
With a heave, Winston threw his body back onto the crates, then lay there, suddenly gasping and wanting to give Bernie a mental butt-chewing for not warning him that he would be landing on a narrow surface stacked atop a gigantic line of warehouse shelving. Still expecting security to arrive at any moment, though, Winston thought his time could be more effectively spent on hiding than complaining.
He carefully returned to the edge of the crates he lay atop and surveyed the room more carefully. The ceiling above him gave hints of the fact that it was hewn from bedrock. Chisel and machining marks dotted along the surface in random scratches, and all of the lighting and electrical wires ran in long, exposed lines, tacked into the rock rather than being recessed. The floor was smooth, gray cement, and the iron shelving that Winston lay atop, itself at least ten feet high and a hundred feet long, was one of at least a dozen such shelves filling the cavernous space. Winston’s hopes were somewhat dashed, though. Although he lay a top a series of wooden crates, this was not representative of the entire warehouse. He wouldn’t find the lost ark in here.
The warehouse was filled with all manner of machinery, barrels, filing cabinets, tools, stacked furniture, and a thousand other odds and ends that seemed thrown in at random. Sure enough, a tall ladder sat propped against the far wall, but that did no good to Winston in his present position. There was nothing for it but to gingerly hang over the edge and drop to the ground with another loud smack.
Winston stifled a groan as pain shot up his leg. He had to catch himself from falling, grabbing a nearby barrel for support. As he straightened, he heard a man’s voice in the distance and froze. The voice was too distant to be clear, but he sensed no urgency in it. Looking about, Winston realized he would have no problem finding a hiding place here, but that wouldn’t do him much good if reinforcements arrived.
The man came into view. He wore a short-sleeved, white-collared shirt with black slacks and black shoes. He entered through the far doorway, head bowed over a clipboard held before him. Winston did the first thing that came to mind: panic and hide. Beside him, on the bottom shelf of the racks from which he’d just jumped, stood several galvanized barrels as tall as his chest. These weren’t stacked particularly closely, and he lunged between two of them, already in a crouch.
From the shadows under the shelving, Winston saw the man glance up from his clipboard, perhaps having heard Winston’s movement. His head turned from side to side. He double-checked his clipboard, took a few steps down the aisle to his left, then paused. Winston hoped he would keep going and disappear deeper into the warehouse, but fate wasn’t that kind. The man returned to the middle of the aisle where he’d started. Even though he gazed off to his right, his footsteps continued straight toward Winston.
Winston glanced all about himself, realizing too late that he probably would have been perfectly safe had he stayed high and out of sight above the crates. As it was, there were too many gaps between the barrels. If the man paid any attention at all, he would spot Winston in a heartbeat. Perhaps having Raiders of the Lost Ark in mind inspired his next thought.
Despite his worry about being discovered, Winston blinked with disbelief and put a hand on the nearest barrel.
The question took Winston by surprise, but before he could think to answer, the man with the clipboard approached close enough for Winston to make out the scuff marks on his black leather shoes. Winston tried to hunch deeper into the shadows, but there wasn’t much coverage. He should have pulled his black hood over his head to hide his white hair. He could still muster a blast from Little e to silence the man if they made eye contact, but he didn’t want to hurt anyone. The man was tall and stooped, with thick-rimmed glasses that slid down his beak of a nose.
“Tango beta one-five-nine-five,” he muttered to himself. “Tango beta…” He surveyed the shelving’s contents to each side of Winston, including on the rack above, and seemed to find that he was in the right place. “One…five…”
The man paused only a few paces away from Winston, head turned back over his right shoulder as he read labels. “Seven three…seven eight…”
As soon as the man looked down, he would see Winston. He had to.
Winston tightened his grip on Little e and prepared to strike.
“Hi, Donnie!”
A woman stood in the warehouse doorway at the far end of the aisle. At this distance, and with her partially backlit, Winston couldn’t make out many details. But he didn’t have to. He would recognize that voice anywhere, in any time.
***
Amanda wore a calf-length dress, dark and short-sleeved, with white stripes and strangely large white lapels. Her hair fell in broad waves onto her shoulders and rose into large curls atop her head. As she strode into the warehouse, shoulders and hips slowly swaying, lipstick in dark red contrast against a pale, fine-featured face, Winston found himself suddenly remembering that phot
o of Joan Leslie hung in his father’s retirement home bedroom. Yes, now Winston could see the similarity. She was strikingly beautiful.
The man with the clipboard turned to face her, and Winston noticed his arms slowly fall to his sides, forgotten.
“Hi, Am— I mean, Miss Dabrowski.”
The lips broadened into a bewitching smile. “Donnie, you can call me Amanda like everybody else.”
“Am-Amanda,” he stuttered, then cleared his throat. “Can I help you?”
“Maybe.” She continued toward them, pace unhurried. “Do you remember two or three days ago finding a box of I-44 containers for bio-chem?”
Donnie straightened, head tilting back as he thought. “I think so. Mr. Abernathy signed for them, right?”
Amanda stopped before the man, eyes sparkling and mouth pulling from a smile into a half-frown of concern. “He says he did, but the box isn’t in his lab.”
“Oh, no,” said Donnie, “it wouldn’t be. I dropped them off to him in Lab Seven.”
Amanda’s frown deepened. “You know, I looked all around there, but maybe I missed it.” She set a hand gently on his arm. “Would you mind being a dear and helping me look? If you’re not too busy, of course.”
Winston saw the clipboard slip a couple of inches through Donnie’s fingers. He barely caught it in time.
“No, that—” he started. “Sure. I’d love to. I mean—”
“Thank you, Donnie.” She squeezed his arm and turned with him back toward the warehouse entrance. “I really appreciate it.”
In the second it took her eyes to pass over Winston, she saw him. Amanda carefully kept her features unchanged, but Winston discerned the curiosity and lack of recognition in them. Then she was on her way, guiding Donnie out and leaving Winston alone for the moment.
Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh Page 9