The Downside

by Mike Cooper

  A rustle of movement went through the throng of demonstrators. Some loud talking, not quite shouting, though Kayo couldn’t make out the words. The police straightened their lines, readied their shields, displayed their weapons.

  “Something happening,” the school-bus driver said unnecessarily.

  “No shit.” Kayo thought he could see the tension build, an almost tangible force in the air. “You might want to saddle up, huh? Start the engine, know what I’m saying?”

  “Uh-huh.” The driver nodded, threw his own cigarette into the snow, and climbed into the bus.

  Kayo caught up to Millz, who’d been trying to make time with a girl with dreadlocks and a bright green coat. She saw him coming and skittered away.

  “It’s about to happen,” Kayo said. “Maybe we leave soon.”

  Millz shrugged. “Ask me, it’s fucking been time to get the fuck out of here.”

  “Not quite.”

  They drifted closer to the protesters.

  “—ought to be here any minute,” a tall, bearded man was saying. He had a phone in one hand, glove off so he could operate the screen. “Coming from over there.”

  “What are we going to do?” People around him began to move.

  “Go tell Channel Three to get their camera out!”

  “Where’s Laney?”

  “Come on.”

  The police line shifted to form an arc that blocked the demonstrators from going any farther into the yard, toward the rails. Kayo finally started to get nervous.

  “Don’t like this,” muttered Millz.

  “Yeah, okay, maybe we—”

  Sean skidded to a halt, scanning the scene before them.

  They were halfway along the perimeter road, paralleling the yard’s exterior fence. Warehouses stood blankly behind the opposite side of the street. The parking lot and dispatch tower were two hundred yards to the right, demonstrators starting to move in the swirling snow, leaving the lot and headed their way. Police followed. A lightbar strobed the scene.

  To the left, a locomotive’s painfully bright headlamp glared, growing in size and intensity. The horn blew, a long, painfully loud blast. The train materialized from the snow against a backdrop of endless railcars in the yard behind. It was traveling on the track closest to the fence, ten feet from the boundary.

  Ten feet from the protesters, who’d begun to assemble themselves along the fence, pressed against the chain link. Many were shouting.

  The train wasn’t moving fast, not even close to the yard’s twelve-mph limit, but it was suddenly upon them, the enormous mining claw looming overhead.

  Much bigger than a double-stack. David wondered how they had fit it through the tunnels.

  “What are they doing?” he said aloud. Some of the demonstrators had begun climbing the barrier. “There’s razor wire on top.”

  “Don’t know.” Sean pulled the handbrake and opened his door. “But we need to—”

  CRAAAAASH!

  The locomotive abruptly stopped, like it had run into a wall. An impossibly thick, heavy wall. Banging shattered the snowfall as all the cars behind slammed into one another. Sparks flared. The flatcars jackknifed, loads suddenly free, bogies and four-inch beam iron collapsing like balsa. Metal screamed and tore.

  “Holy shit!” David saw a coupler break. The excavator arm rose up, impossibly high as its car buckled into the air.

  The front locomotive toppled, smashed in its rear by the second. Everything in slow motion, but clearly going over. Screaming and yelling from the demonstrators, now scrambling away from the fence.

  The loco’s headlight beam dazzled the snow on the ground before it, then turned up, blinding David as it swept over their vehicle. The SD70 collapsed in a thunderous roar, smashing through the fence and onto its side.

  Something struck Sean’s windshield and shattered it—a chunk of metal, flung from the juggernaut as it struck the earth. Cars wrenched along behind, the huge excavator arm next to topple, falling almost on top of the second locomotive. The enormous claw flattened the fence and its cutting teeth gouged the roadway, cutting deeply into the asphalt. Flames exploded as diesel and hydraulic fluid sprayed from crumpled engines.

  Sirens. Two police vehicles tore out of the parking lot toward them.

  David swung out of the car, almost falling as his knee collapsed in pain but pulling himself upright. Shouting was audible over crashing and banging. People fled past him, running as fast as they could from the blast and tumbling wreckage.

  “What the fuck happened?” he yelled, but he received no answer.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Inside the vault, it sounded like an air raid. A distant rumble, growing louder, then an enormous crash, a shock wave rolling from the tunnel. Jake screamed. Dust flew out the opening, and he followed a moment later, dropping to the vault’s floor like he’d been kicked.

  The lights flickered, once, twice. They came back on full, then went out completely.

  Emergency lighting snapped on. Battery-powered LEDs hung in corners, next to the cameras. The vault’s interior turned black and white in their inadequate beams.

  “Nicola? Corman?” Finn clicked his mic switch. Nothing. The repeater was dead, and their signal couldn’t penetrate the walls and earth.

  “I’m okay.” Jake, groggy, being helped up by Asher. “I’m fine.”

  Finn pulled himself up to the tunnel entrance and peered down it. Jake’s headlamp was on the pipe floor, still shining. He squinted, trying to see through the pinging cloud of dust.

  “Shit.” He dropped to the floor. “The tunnel collapsed.”

  “What?”

  “Completely filled with dirt and rock.”

  “Collapsed?” Jake, still dazed.

  “From what?” Asher let Jake go. “It sounds like we’re being fucking bombed.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can we dig it out?”

  “I don’t know.” Finn tried to think. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re trapped!”

  They stared at one another.

  Nicola saw the train wreck as it happened, through her spotting scope. Despite the distance, she had perhaps the best perspective of any observer: from above, at some remove, and with more knowledge than anyone of exactly what was happening.

  “Corman?”

  “Yeah.” At least his radio connection still worked. “What—?”

  “Big train just collapsed the tunnel pipe, right outside the vault.”

  “Collapsed—”

  It took all of Nicola’s self-control to keep her voice steady. “Disaster zone. Protesters everywhere, police moving in.” She hit a switch again, futilely. “I’ve lost radio contact.”

  A moment while Corman took that in.

  “Police,” he said.

  “You can go out the back. Is the truck loaded?”

  “Half. Two-thirds, maybe.”

  “They won’t bother you.” She looked through the scope again. “Everyone’s focused on the wreck. There’s a crowd around the locomotive—they must be trying to get the engineers out.”

  “What about Finn?”

  “Working on that.” Nicola dropped to her chair and pulled the keyboard toward her. “I can see them on the monitor. I just don’t have sound or radio.”

  “I don’t—” He stopped.

  “Nothing you can do.” She pulled up the Stormwall feeds, checked her access again. “Just get the truck out of there.”

  “Time?”

  “What?” She looked up at nothing, then figured out what Corman meant. “Yes. Five, ten minutes. After that, they’ll start paying attention again.”

  A moment. “I’m going to finish loading.”

  “You sure?�
�

  “Yeah.” Nicola heard it in his voice: Like her, he knew how to focus.

  “Five minutes, max.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Nicola went back to her screens. First: Were the Stormwall monitors still seeing the dummy feed, all normal in the vault? Yes. Lots of traffic on the monitor circuits, but it was all messaging and VOIP. No one had triggered an alarm.

  Rapidly, she called up the vault’s maintenance panel. Stormwall had remote access not just to the cameras but to the fire alarms, HVAC, and electrical as well. Especially in case of a fire, someone needed to be able to shut down circuits that might contribute sparks and power to a blaze.

  Nicola hadn’t spent much time studying the maintenance controls, but they weren’t hard to figure out. She opened a dialog box, scrolled through a matrix of options, and moused over a command.

  Then she hesitated.

  On the screen, she could see Finn and Asher helping Jake off the floor. Finn had already looked into the tunnel, then turned his back to it, which she took as confirmation that it was impassable. Now they stood, looking around, clearly not sure what to do.

  Nicola clicked her mouse.

  The vault’s emergency lights went off.

  David wanted to help extricate the engineers, but more than enough younger, fitter officers were available. Instead, he policed the crowd. Most of the demonstrators had sensibly run the other way, but a few came closer, and he shooed them back.

  The lead SD70 was on its side, the second nearly so. The rails had buckled underneath them, derailing both locomotives, and momentum had pushed them over. A pair of policemen wrenched open the cab door, lifting it up like a tank hatch. One disappeared inside.

  Flames were rising in the engine area, and the excavator claw, thirty feet in the air, hung over them like imminent death. David called to Sean, and they began pushing people farther away.

  “Is the engineer okay?”

  “What?”

  They could barely hear each other. Groaning and hissing and creaking from the wrecked train, wind whipping snow everywhere, and more and more vehicles arriving, including the first of the yard’s fire engines. Sirens wound down, but more rose in the distance. David could smell diesel and oil.

  “Was it sabotage?” Sean shouted.

  “Don’t know.” David shook his head. “See how the ground collapsed there? It looks more like, I don’t know, a culvert or something.”

  “An explosion could have done that.”

  “Maybe.” David didn’t think so, but he wasn’t an expert. Not much call for the bomb squad in railroad security.

  “Hard to believe it wasn’t some black-bloc anarchist.”

  “Maybe. I hate to admit it, but Boggs may have been right about the protesters.” The two engineers limped away, arms over the shoulders of their rescuers. They must have been worried about the possibility of fire, because normal protocol would have called for backboards. “Must be a hundred million dollars of equipment damage. I hope Boggs kept the insurance up to date.”

  “I don’t feel like asking him.”

  “No kidding.” David looked at the chaos around him. “What else might go wrong now?”

  “Hey, Corman?” Nicola said into her mic.

  “I’m not done loading the truck yet.”

  “No, that’s fine, I know it’s going to take a few minutes.”

  “What?”

  “Does Finn know Morse code?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  It wasn’t until the lights went out that Finn had his first moment of real fear. Until then, reacting to the explosion, whatever the hell that was, and the tunnel collapse—it was all moving too fast. He was just trying to keep up, no time to worry.

  But in the pitch black, a wave of bad memories returned. Trapped inside thick concrete walls, no escape. Prison.

  The only sound was scraping as Jake moved, then a clang when one of them knocked something to the floor. Ventilation had been whispering in the background the whole time, but Finn hadn’t noticed it until it was gone.

  The silence was almost as oppressive as the darkness.

  Finn stayed in one place, trying to remember what was around him. He didn’t want to whack his head or his knees.

  “Uh, Finn?” Jake said.

  “You all right?”

  “Sure. But, you know—”

  “Fuck this.” Asher’s contribution.

  And then the lights came back on. Still just the emergency floods, but it seemed like daylight after the absolute blackness.

  “Well, that’s better—” Asher started, and the lights went out. “Ah, motherfucker.”

  And switched on again, then off—then on for a few seconds longer.

  The blinking continued for a minute before Finn got it.

  “What the fuck are you laughing about?” Asher sounded aggrieved.

  Finn looked around for a camera and waved at it. The lights blinked once.

  “Hi, Nicola,” he said, and then to Jake, “Can you find a pen? And a big sheet of paper?”

  Emily was doing fine until the train blew up.

  She leaned forward, head inches from the monitor, as if she could extract more details from the news video that way. But, of course, it only dissolved into meaningless pixels. “What the fuck are they doing?” she said out loud, almost groaning.

  Channel Three in one window, Twitter in another, Instagram in a third. The incident had already been hashtagged: #trainbombing. A local news crew had been on the scene, bored, waiting for something to happen. Well, something sure as hell had happened.

  Finn, Finn, where are you?

  For distraction, she glanced at the trading screen. Up another 2 percent, just while she’d looked away.

  Whatever else was going on, she was getting incredible prices.

  Corman shoved the last tray of ingots into the Kei truck’s cargo area and stepped back. The load was messy and not that big, a pile of loose metal bricks and some trays on top, the entire heap less than three feet high. But it was massively heavy. The truck sagged close to the ground, wheel wells scraping the top of the tires.

  He pushed the door closed, gently. So overloaded, the truck felt fragile to him.

  “Nicola,” he said into his mic.

  “Yes.”

  “Going now.”

  “Let me talk you out, okay?” She’d spot for him, watching through the scope, to keep an eye out for police vehicles or unusual activity that might suggest a problem. “Just until you’re through. After that, the view is blocked.”

  Corman gingerly fit himself into the driver’s seat. Normally, the truck would have sunk several inches from his weight, but it was already at the suspension’s full extent. He closed the door, hoping the reinforcements they’d welded into the chassis would hold.

  The bay door was already open, all lights extinguished.

  “Ready,” he said.

  “Give Finn a minute.” They waited. “Hey, Corman?”

  “What?”

  “You did a good job today.”

  He didn’t know quite what to make of that. “You, too.”

  A few more seconds passed. “All right,” Nicola said.

  “They ready?”

  “Coming out in thirty seconds,” she said. “You’re all leaving together.”

  “One more time,” Finn said. “We’re plain old Stormwall security. There’s a fire alarm, we have to get out of the vault before the halon is released. Someone tries to stop us, we just keep moving.” He looked at Asher. “Be polite.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  To Jake: “You okay?”

  “No problem.” But Jake’s face was pale, and he rested little weight on his right leg. The fall had injured his ankle. Not a break or a sprain—he would have needed a crutch—but bad enough. Th
ey wouldn’t be able to run—if it came to that.

  “We only have to get out of the building,” Finn said. “And another hundred yards. There will be police and demonstrators and emergency crews everywhere. We’ll blend in, and then we’ll disappear.”

  “Are you sure Nicola can pull this off?”

  Command presence. “Absolutely.”

  He took one more look around. Emptied racks, broken carts, holes in the walls, debris strewn everywhere.

  “Another satisfied customer,” he said, then looked up at the camera. “You all ready?”

  Jake and Asher moved close to the exit door. Finn glanced at them, then did a double take.

  “What the fuck! Asher!”

  “What?”

  “Put those down!”

  Asher had two gold ingots in each hand, trying unsuccessfully to conceal them at his side. “Come on,” he said. “They’re worth thousands of dollars! Each!”

  “Do you want to go straight back to jail? We’re about as suspicious as possible, running out of the vault, sirens everywhere, like some fucking jailbreak. If you’re carrying those bars, they won’t even ask questions, they’ll just shoot you on sight.”

  “But there aren’t any pockets in these fucking uniforms!”

  “And now you know why.” Finn glared at him. “Put them down or stay here.”

  Grudgingly, with an almost physical manifestation of pain, Asher laid the four gold bars on a cart.

  “You’re making me cry,” he said.

  Finn shook his head. “All set?”

  He looked up at the nearest camera and raised his hand, fist closed.

  After a moment, the lights blinked. Finn made one last check, then counted it out, raising his fingers one at a time:

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  A klaxon pierced the air. The lights went out again. And Finn shoved through the door, shouting “Fire!” as loudly as he could.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Kayo kind of stutter-stepped at first, starting to follow the crowd when the train finally appeared, then backing off and looking at the battalion of riot police. It felt like every single one of those blank gleaming helmets was turned his way. He had no idea which way to go.