Fast

by Shane M Brown

Vanessa’s stomach dropped away. It was a worse feeling than when she had dropped from the windshield. She rocketed down the shaft on the end of the winch.

  #

  Bora watched the tray-back slide on squealing tires into the elevator shaft.

  Slowing, he turned his own vehicle to face the shaft. The tilting tray-back was just twenty meters away.

  With a metallic thunk, the rear tray caught the top of the elevator entrance, halting the truck from tilting fully through the entrance and plunging down the shaft.

  That was no accident.

  As the tray-back wedged into the shaft, Bora watched suspiciously. When the lights had come back on, he’d been tracking the tray-back by its vibrations across the pedestrian loop. He’d sensed the driver steering towards the shaft. He knew that skidding into the elevator shaft had been deliberate. It only looked accidental when the lights came back on.

  Two dead gunmen lay between the elevator and the scorpion truck. The scorpion truck was empty, the Marines gone.

  Those two are also in the shaft. They reached the elevator entrance in the dark. They must be climbing down the service ladder.

  No matter how chaotic the circumstances, the Marines always seemed to find something to exploit. But chaos was Bora’s specialty.

  Within seconds, three gunmen clambered up the back of the tilted truck, looking for a clear line of fire. They assumed the Marines were trapped inside.

  Trapped? Not likely. They’ll already be on the move.

  Bora roared his truck’s engine and dropped the clutch. The truck sprang forward, straight towards the elevator shaft.

  ‘Move,’ he yelled ahead, sounding his horn.

  Gunmen scattered from his path. The A-frame rammed into the tray-back’s exposed undercarriage. The suspended tray-back crumpled fully into the shaft. The impact pinned the tray-back vertical for a second, then it dropped away.

  Bora saw the tray-back disappear before his eyes. It was grinding straight down the elevator shaft.

  #

  The winch controls nearly tore Coleman’s fingers off.

  The winch assembly wrenched in his grasp with incomprehensible violence. If he’d had a better grip, or if he’d been in a different position in relation to the winch, the force passing through the tray-back would have snapped his wrists like dry kindling.

  But this was worse.

  His hands slipped right off the controls. He lunged out in freefall, praying he could snatch one of the dangling safety belts.

  He was too slow. The safety belt slid through the fingers on his left hand. In a split-second he was falling.

  The winch cable.

  As Coleman’s weight left the winch, the controls had slipped out of ‘Free play’ mode. He remembered Vanessa on the end of the winch cable.

  The cable jerked to an instant halt. The unexpected stop was too much for her.

  The winch hook tore from her grasp.

  Coleman saw her hands blossom away from the hook. Both of them fell straight down the shaft.

  ‘King – heads up!’

  Forest’s voice came up the shaft. Coleman glimpsed King lunge from the service ladder and snatch Vanessa’s wrist.

  At that exact moment, Coleman saw the swinging winch hook. His only chance was the hook.

  As the hook swung into Coleman’s path, he grabbed it with every ounce of strength left in his arms.

  The jarring pain was excruciating. It felt like his arms almost tore from his shoulders. His knees banged into the shaft wall. His fingers came within a fraction of slipping off the hook, but he managed to hold on.

  King let out a roar of pain. He had just plucked Vanessa from freefall with one hand. His second hand barely held the service ladder by his fingertips.

  Coleman struggled to keep his grip on the hook. We’re both alive!

  Then the truck fell.

  Still clinging to the hook, Coleman felt himself plummeting again.

  The truck was falling down the shaft! It would tear King and Vanessa off the wall and pulverize them all against the top of the carriage!

  Coleman fell straight past where Vanessa dangled.

  The truck screeched down the shaft in a snarl of zipping sparks and crumbling cement.

  Gripping the falling hook, Coleman looked up, watching the horrendous sight of the tray-back careening down the shaft. Then he struck something very yielding.

  It was Forest.

  Both men crumpled onto the top of the carriage. Forest had used his body as a cushion. Coleman landed on his side and looked straight up the shaft. The truck had reached King.

  Six inches from King’s head, the tray-back’s fender bit into the cement wall. The truck jerked to a halt.

  King looked up into the tones of steel just inches from his forehead. Cement dust trickled down over his cheek.

  Coleman marveled at two incredible facts. The first was that the truck had stopped. The second was that in the face of several tones of crushing steel, King hadn’t dropped Vanessa.

  ‘Hurry,’ yelled Coleman. ‘Don’t stop. It’s going to fall.’

  Coleman scanned Forest for new injuries. He looked okay. Forest had fallen onto the tray-back’s ejected windshield. Coleman waved at the carriage underfoot.

  ‘Into the lift, Forest. Get those carriage doors open.’

  Forest jerked aside the windshield. The truck groaned and slid down the wall another inch. Its wild descent had only been temporarily averted. Any second it would come crashing down the last ten meters and crush all four of them. Cement chips tinkled down onto the carriage and windshield.

  Vanessa found her grip on the service ladder.

  ‘Slide down the ladder,’ Coleman yelled.

  She wrapped her shoes around the ladder and slid down fireman style. The moment she reached the lift, Coleman pushed her through the carriage ceiling. ‘Get in there. Go.’

  King came sliding down the ladder. He crossed the carriage and dropped straight through the open hatch.

  While King dropped into the carriage, Coleman checked the truck. As his eyes looked up, the truck started coming down.

  He dove into the carriage and hit the floor beside King. Vanessa was trying to stand while Forest worked on the lift controls.

  ‘Everyone down!’ yelled Coleman from the floor. ‘It’s coming!’

  Forest glanced up, saw the truck through the ceiling, and dove at Vanessa. Forest and Vanessa were still falling when the truck hit the carriage.

  The cataclysmic impact stunned Coleman senseless. The fluorescent lights crashed out of the ceiling. Aluminum ceiling tiles rained down like sharp square missiles. The carriage ceiling buckled inwards. The entire carriage crumpled. Neither the carriage brakes nor the cables stood a chance. Coleman had no idea if the cables snapped or were torn completely from the carriage, but it had the same effect.

  The half-crushed carriage plummeted down the shaft.

  Coleman just had time to note where everyone lay before they crashed into the basement.

  The impact felt like a car-wreck from behind. Coleman braced himself for the truck to come through the ceiling. Nothing happened. The elevator was pitch dark. He heard groaning and the clink of pieces of falling glass. And what was that? Running water? Coleman found his flashlight. ‘Everyone intact? Vanessa, are you OK?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ groaned Vanessa.

  ‘Where’s the truck?’ King moaned in the darkness.

  ‘What’s this water?’ groaned Forest.

  One question at a time. Coleman shone his flashlight up through the hatch. The truck hung ten feet up the shaft, wedged again.

  ‘We need to get out of here very carefully,’ he said. ‘The truck’s suspended about ten feet up.’

  ‘Captain, the lift’s filling with water,’ hissed Forest urgently. Forest lay closest to the lift doors.

  Coleman angled the flashlight down. Water poured into the carriage.

  Something about it made sense. Their impact had felt cushioned.

&nbs
p; ‘Why have we landed in water?’ asked King.

  Coleman remembered Vanessa mentioning the flooding basement level. ‘It doesn’t matter. Forest, can you open those doors?’

  ‘I think Vanessa’s out cold,’ said Forest.

  ‘No, I’m alright,’ she said groggily. ‘I’m just dizzy. Something hit me in the head.’

  Without standing, Forest’s hands moved quickly over the bottom of the door. ‘They’re warped shut. But the outer doors should be intact. The carriage might be compacted down enough for us to squeeze through the outer door.’

  ‘Do it,’ said Coleman, checking the truck again as he helped Vanessa stand. ‘But move very carefully.’

  King boosted Forest through the gaping aperture of the mangled ceiling. Coleman heard the ceiling groan as Forest moved. Then there came a click. A bar of light appeared inside the shaft.

  ‘Got it,’ reported Forest. ‘We can get through.’

  ‘Go, Vanessa. Up and over.’

  King boosted her up. Coleman followed. A few seconds later King wriggled through the narrow gap between the top of the crumpled carriage and the outer lift doors.

  He dropped down into hip-deep water.

  The suspended truck hadn’t moved an inch during their maneuver across the crumpled carriage.

  It must be wedged in tight. Coleman helped King down into the flooded corridor.

  Only when they were all safely out did Coleman turn in the waist-deep water and examined his surroundings. His eyes panned around the strange corridor, taking in the unexpected details.

  ‘Where on earth are we?’

  #

  Cairns peered down the shaft after the fallen tray-back and the Marines.

  The truck was wedged about twenty feet from the bottom. He unconsciously touched the device strapped to his forearm.

  They’re not dead. They’re in the basement. That’s the worst possible place they could have gone.

  Bora finished reversing the A-frame and then climbed down to join Cairns.

  ‘Crushed?’ asked Bora, nodding towards the shaft.

  ‘Look for yourself,’ spat Cairns.

  Bora knelt at the shaft’s edge and looked down at the truck. ‘It’s wedged in the shaft. They might be able to climb into the basement.’

  Cairns was ahead of Bora’s thinking. ‘Tell me something I don’t know. Now take this force down the western stairwell.

  Cairns checked his watch. We don’t have much time. At best, we have a dozen gunmen still up and fighting. It will have to be enough.

  Cairns activated his radio. ‘I want everybody to rendezvous in the east and west stairwell immediately. And I mean everybody! Abandon all key locations. I want teams ready to storm the basement in two minutes.’

  Cairns barked at Bora, ‘We’ll take two forces down to the basement and pinch the Marines between us. You take the west stairwell. I’ll take the east.’

  Gould’s voice crackled over Cairns’s earpiece.

  ‘You can’t be serious?’ objected Gould. ‘We need to leave!’

  ‘I’m deadly serious,’ replied Cairns, not hiding the loathing in his voice.

  Gould sounded hysterical. ‘Cairns, we need to pull out. You can’t go down to the basement. My instruments show the basement is flooding.’

  ‘So? We knew that would happen. That was the plan from the start.’

  ‘Yes, but you didn’t plan to go back down there. Carnivorous plants are endemic to swamplands. You think these things are bad on dry land? You should see them in the water. That’s their natural hunting grounds.’

  Cairns had a few tricks up his sleeve yet. ‘Well, we’re about to find out then, aren’t we, Gould.’

  Gould was blunt in his assessment of Cairn’s plan. ‘Anyone who goes down there isn’t coming back.’

  Cairns inhaled deeply. His hatred of Gould grew with every breath. ‘You’d better hope that isn’t true, Dr Gould. Because you’re coming with me.’

  Chapter 12

  Coleman hadn’t expected to find himself in a corridor hewn from solid rock.

  ‘This is the basement.’ Vanessa critically eyed the ripples spreading over the water’s surface from their bodies.

  The basement? thought Coleman. All the visible infrastructure - electricity, data, plumbing, fire sprinklers - ran through pipe work bolted into the rocky ceiling. This is just a fitted out cave system.

  ‘Everyone stand still,’ warned Vanessa abruptly.

  Third Unit came to alert attention, scanning the water.

  ‘Water carries vibrations further than air,’ she explained. ‘We need to get out of the water, right now.’

  Forest tilted his weapon towards the water around his legs. ‘Can the creatures swim?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me. In a flooded corridor like this, we might not even see them until they’re on us.’

  Coleman touched one wall. ‘Is the entire basement like this, Vanessa?’

  It took her a moment to understand what he meant. ‘Oh, the walls and ceiling? Yes. These corridors were originally exploratory tunnels from before the mine hit the aquifer. Our basement facilities are nested in these tunnels. Under our feet is steel plating, and then under that are more submerged tunnels. Normally the water level should be about a meter below our feet.’

  Coleman doubted the scientists had overlooked the risk of flooding. ‘I assume there are several areas above the high tide mark. Is there anywhere we can check if the message got out?’

  ‘There is,’ she confirmed. ‘The diving arena will still be above water. The control room has computer access. That’s where all the tunnels join in the middle of the basement.’ She touched the tablet on her belt. ‘Plus I can upload this information to a faster computer. It will tell us more about what we are dealing with.’

  Coleman tried to calculate their chances of moving safely through the flooded tunnels to the diving control room.

  What choice do we have?

  ‘We have to risk moving through the water,’ he said. ‘Something distracted the creatures away from the habitation level earlier. Hopefully the creatures are still distracted. We need to hurry though.’

  Vanessa began wading down the corridor. ‘Okay, it’s this way.’

  Coleman followed. The water dragged against his fatigues.

  Pushing on ahead, Vanessa reached where the tunnel joined a four-way intersection. A directory sign hung from the ceiling.

  Central Diving Labs

  Hydroponics

  Hyperbarics

  North Exit

  Vanessa began to wade under the sign. Coleman grabbed her arm.

  Everyone stopped and looked around.

  It was a strange sensation. It took a moment for Coleman’s senses to interpret what he was feeling. A deep rumbling emanated through the water.

  ‘Can everyone feel that?’

  Coleman looked back to Forest and King. They both nodded.

  ‘I feel it now,’ confirmed Vanessa, turning slowly with her hands under the water. ‘It’s coming from every direction. But we have nothing down here that could be causing a vibration like this.’

  King said, ‘It’s like an outboard engine in the distance.’

  ‘It must be distracting the creatures,’ reasoned Coleman. ‘Or there would have been more up on the pedestrian loop with all those vehicles.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ agreed Vanessa. ‘Too few showed up. This will be keeping them away from the Evac Center and David, whatever it is.’

  ‘So they’re all down here with us!’ realized Forest suddenly.

  ‘Let’s pick up the speed,’ urged Coleman. ‘These vibrations should blanket our movements.’

  The four powered through the water, ignoring everything but thrusting one leg in front of the other. All were laboring for breath when Coleman spotted a large glass partition ahead. The partition blocked the corridor.

  The partition proved to be part of a glass wall, one edge of a series of offices,
and as they drew closer it became evident the offices were like those on the engineering level. The top half of every wall was glass. With the flood waters covering the bottom half, the impression beyond was of a grid of half-filled, square fish tanks full of floating office equipment.

  Coleman tried to see beyond the maze of flooded glass offices. ‘What is this place, Vanessa? None of this is on my plans.’

  She waded to the glass. ‘Your plans don’t include the cave systems. We’ve been building into the caves for as long as we’ve been working here, reclaiming the basement gradually. We started with the diving arena.’

  ‘That’s on the plan,’ confirmed Coleman.

  Vanessa continued, ‘Surrounding the diving arena there’s a series of wet labs and experimental zones. That’s all raised and air-tight. It should be dry. Surrounding those are the technical labs, computer rooms and office space. It’s a big area, about one-quarter of the basement. The rest is flooded passageways and rock strata.’

  ‘I can’t see any movement,’ remarked King, scanning the flooded offices. ‘Are we cutting through?’

  ‘It’s the direct route,’ confirmed Vanessa.

  She found a handle and pushed open a sliding door. Third Unit followed single file, the Marines all scanning in different directions.

  Coleman knew this was a dangerous location. The water made movement slow, and the glass walls provided no visual cover. A grid of cross-corridors intersected the offices. Most rooms had only one or two furniture items - bookcases or storage cupboards - rising high enough to offer visual cover.

  ‘Why are there so many offices?’ Forest asked. ‘It’s like a warren.’

  ‘It’s a high maintenance facility,’ explained Vanessa. ‘We’re isolated. We can’t just hire contractors for every problem. We need a big technical staff. Even the cleaners need somewhere to store their equipment.’

  She waded into the first intersection. Three ring-bind folders floated in her path. She pushed them aside. The folders were the start of a floating layer of office debris that covered the water surface down every corridor, in every direction. After a few more feet, she pushed aside two bobbing chairs, a pink sneaker, and then, tensing, a woman’s body floating face down. The corpse wore the matching pink sneaker.