by Anne Tibbets
I hedged my bets. “Will you help me?”
Trev didn’t answer. Truth was, we couldn’t answer out loud. We didn’t know who was listening. I was already risking my life by asking, taking a chance that he wouldn’t turn me in. But I knew Trev was smart, and I had a feeling about him. As though he would agree with me if he’d had the freedom to do so.
He seemed to have caught on quickly and nodded. “I don’t know what you’re getting at,” he said with false sincerity. “But I’m not authorized to give you anything of that nature. Just enough ammo and gear to get you inside to retrieve your children. You understand?” Then he walked across the aisle of the storage room and pulled several canisters from the shelf. He came back and without another word, stuffed them into my bag next to the bottle of water.
Marc and Ric shot us looks from across the room. I reached up and touched Trev’s shoulder. I felt him stiffen. “I understand. Just thought I’d ask.”
“I hope you find them,” he said, a bit softer in tone. “I really do.”
I looked into his dark eyes and saw what was unspoken behind them. I squeezed his shoulder and then turned toward Ric, who’d finished getting geared up and watched us carefully.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
I wanted to smile at him, but my muscles wouldn’t move that way.
This had better work.
* * *
Back in the van, we drove out of Flora. I watched through the window as we zoomed along that long stretch of straight road, flanked by forest on either side. The bright safety of Flora City slowly disappeared, and we dipped into the dark bleakness of approaching Auberge. As we neared, I felt my spirit sinking. I could have sworn my insides had seeped through the toes of my boots.
I didn’t want to go back. I would have given almost anything not to. But there was no other choice.
I thought of the girls and tried to pull strength from them. My hands sat in my lap, gripping each other. My wrists ached from pressure. I looked at Ric and he seemed just as bleak.
The dread I felt was strangely similar to when Sonya and I had gone back into the Line. The cold of the metal grates on my bare feet, the smell of the musty conditioned air from the swamp coolers, it had sent me back to hell.
It had dipped me in fire. But I was used to burning back then.
Now, I’d tasted the sweetness of freedom. Not so much in my physical freedom. It was hard to feel that when we were under constant armed guard. But my spirit, my soul, had felt free for the first time, really, in my entire life. I’d thought I’d known what it felt like, but I was wrong before.
To go back to where I was seen as vermin felt like diving headlong into a body of water you knew was too shallow. But we had to jump. I had a plan, but it was no guarantee.
I thought of Adena and Clea again. It had been almost a week since I’d seen them last, and at their age, a week could mean a lot.
Had they even noticed I was gone?
Were they alive?
My insides lurched and I looked back out the tinted window, into the forest. The trees zipped by.
Who knew hell was surrounded by a forest?
Moments passed, and I tried to clear my mind. Thinking of nothing was difficult, but not impossible. I was able to concentrate on the trees for the last few minutes of the ride, focusing on the streaks as they passed the window. Eventually, we reached a point where the trees appeared less dense and then the van stopped in the middle of the road.
Before I could ask, Trev stood and nodded toward the door. “This is your stop.”
Ric and I followed him out and hiked a few meters through the forest. It was late morning now and the sun was just above us, slightly angled. The trees left burned shadows across the ground.
Trev stopped and looked to the forest floor. At first I couldn’t see what he was looking at, but then I noticed a round metal door at his feet—black, sleek and obviously of Floran design, since it was made of that same metal used throughout Flora City.
“There’s a tunnel?” Ric asked.
Trev nodded. “Comes in handy now and then. It’s long, though, and you pop up in a dummy sewage drain in East between two laboratories. It’s not the safest route.”
“If there was a tunnel, why didn’t Sonya bring us out this way?” I asked.
Trev’s face fell. “It had to look like an inside job, remember?”
“Yeah, but if we’d just snuck out, who would have been the wiser? I don’t get it.”
Ric shook his head, his lips curling around his teeth. “It was more than getting us out. Wasn’t it? They wanted a hole in the wall. Nobody outside of Flora is going to know about Sonya, are they? They’ll only hear how the citizens of Auberge bust through the wall and then tried to poison the planet. Then Flora can blow Auberge away, and the rest of the world will thank them for it.”
Trev shrugged, neither confirming nor denying Ric’s statement. “Look, it wasn’t up to me, okay?”
Ric put his hands on his hips.
“Can we come back out this way?” I asked, getting back on track.
“This door doesn’t open from the inside,” Trev said. “Only from out here. There’d be nobody to hear you knocking. You’re going to have to come back out through the hole in the wall.”
“What if the hole is fixed? What if we can’t get back out that way?”
Trev’s face was somber. “Then I recommend you get back in the tunnel and barricade yourselves in. Protect yourselves from the blast.”
“We could roast down there before we’d be rescued,” Ric said.
“Not if someone is here to open the door.”
I nodded, understanding, but Ric looked confused.
Trev wasn’t able to promise he could come before the blast, if we weren’t able to escape. But he’d be able to come afterward. I appreciated him offering, but I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.
I bent down and turned the latch on the metal door. It swung open to the left. There was a ladder on the wall just below it, so I climbed down. “Thanks, Trev.”
“Good luck.”
Ric shook his hand then followed me down the ladder.
Once we were fully underground, Trev saluted and closed the latch behind us.
We were consumed by total darkness.
Chapter Twenty-One
We walked along the tunnel into the belly of Auberge’s East sector. The first thing to strike me was the smell.
There it was; the familiar stench of a home that never was.
Rotting meat. Sewage. Decomposing compost. All manner of disgusting aromas ever conceived or created by man and nature intermingled in the air and saturated the inside of my nose. I tried breathing through my mouth, but then I could taste the stench on my tongue. I put my hand over my mouth to keep from gagging. The smell brought me back.
In an instant.
Just like that, I felt like a former sex slave again. Tainted. Unworthy.
Garbage.
The stink sent my mind whirring back to a time when I’d thought it normal to feel unclean. It saddened me. No wonder the people of Auberge were prone to such depravity. The very air they breathed was corrupted.
“You okay?” Ric asked.
I nodded, unwilling to open my mouth and speak for fear of tasting the air again.
“I see a light ahead. I think it’s the sewage drain in East. We should walk the rest of the way in the dark, just so they don’t catch a glimpse of our flashlights from up top.”
I nodded again and flicked the switch, turning it off and stuffing it into the duffel bag over my shoulder.
Without guidance from the flashlights, it was easy to discern the light at the end of the tunnel. It was faint but grew progressively brighter as we approached.
In
just a few minutes we stood under a drainage cover. Our hands clasped the rod iron ladder and we ascended into hell. Ric shoved his shoulder under the manhole cover and pushed it up, moving it over to the side so he could peek at the land above.
We waited a few moments to make sure the area was clear, then we climbed up, put the cover back in place and slunk behind a shipping container a few meters away. There were several of them, stacked together like building blocks.
They felt hot in the late morning sun.
I blinked at the brightness. Even the air in Auberge looked different. There was a gray tinge to it, a slight off-coloring that made the air visible.
Thick.
Given what Trev had told us, I knew we were in East sector by the laboratories, but what no one in Flora knew was this was just where we needed to be.
The building on our left sat in the middle of a flat open field, surrounded by dead grass and the corpses of trees. It had three large funnels beside it that pointed up and over the main building and into the sky. Each chimney was caked with black soot and toxic residue from centuries of neglect and puffed gray misty clouds into the atmosphere. In front of them was a cube structure comprised of metal tubes, which wrapped around each other and formed a maze of rusted metal. It was impossible to determine where the tubes began or ended. The building itself sat beside the cube of tubes and chimneys, looking weathered. It was large and square, made of equally cut but worn stones. It had elongated windows covered in rusted crisscrossing bars. Dented stone columns ran up and down the building on each corner, and there was a patrol of guards, walking two by two, encircling the structure at regular intervals. Given the smokestacks and the mass amount of power lines that ran off the cube structure of tubes, I guessed it was the electrical power plant. And it was running.
We were quite a distance away, crouched behind the shipping container, yet I could hear the electrical buzz from the factory and low-level hum from the overhead cables that cut across the landscape atop large metal configurations that looked like the skeletons of trees.
“The power is back on,” I whispered.
Ric nodded.
“It didn’t take them long to reboot the system at all.”
He shook his head.
“Not much of an apocalypse.”
“I don’t believe that’s what Sonya had planned anyway,” Ric whispered back. “I think she wanted you and me to think we were starting a revolution. She wanted Minnie and Bubbs and Cat to believe it too. But we were just buying her enough time to get you out. It was you she was after all along.”
I shook my head, as if that would somehow stop him from speaking the truth. But what he said made sense. She’d tricked us. All of us. Minnie and Bubbs, and probably Cat, too, had died believing they were saving the people of Auberge.
But really, what choice did she have but to lie to us? She was fighting to save millions of lives from a bio-toxin. Maybe she’d even saved the rest of the world.
But not Auberge.
Part of me felt sorry for her. It must have been difficult, being the only one who knew the whole truth. She’d never let on. But then another part of me wanted to punch her in the nose for lying to me from the first moment I’d met her.
Turning my attention back to the task at hand, I eyed the other building. This one was on our right and wasn’t as large as the other. Made of red brick-colored stones that had a faint mossy film, there were numerous glass windows covered in horizontal slats of rusted metal. It gave the place a mysterious aura. People milled about the interior and exterior of the building in white lab coats. There were several glass-enclosed stairwells where you could see them moving up and down like rats in a cage.
On the sides of the five-story building, I noticed two elevators, each made of glass and covered in rusted slates. It wasn’t until I saw the elevator dip down, below ground level, that I knew where we needed to go. The only question was how to get inside. The answer peered back at me from the left side of the building.
“Come on,” I said, urging Ric to follow me.
We skulked in the corners, scuttling between storage containers, until we were just a few meters away from a red fire door on the side of the second building.
“You’re sure about this?” Ric whispered.
“Of course not.”
We waited for a break in the pedestrian traffic then bolted across the open field straight for the door. When I grasped the handle and tugged, it remained shut.
Locked.
Ric thought quicker than me. He had his Floran laser rifle in his hands within seconds, and blasted the lock above the door, releasing it in my hand.
The door swung open and a shrill alarm sounded. We zipped inside, closing the door behind us. The alarm stopped.
“It won’t be long before they find that,” Ric said.
“Then we’d better hurry.”
Inside the red door was a long white hallway with clean but dull linoleum floors, open piping and wiring running down the ceiling, and gray metallic doors along the walls. Each office had a small window beside it. At the very end of the hallway was a door marked Stairs. We ran straight for it.
As we passed the windows, I noticed people in lab coats sitting behind metal desks. A couple of them looked up at us as we zoomed by, registering mild to severe concern.
I ran faster.
Through the doorway at the end of the hall was a metal staircase running up and down. Above us, several people in lab coats poked their heads over the railing and watched us as we pounded down the stairs.
A few of them shouted at us. “Hey!”
“Alert security!”
“We’re under attack again!”
A siren blared. The shrill noise echoed off the walls of the glass stairwell and shrieked so loudly the insides of my ears throbbed.
We didn’t slow. With Ric in the lead, we continued barreling down the stairs.
A woman screamed and flattened herself against the wall as we ran by her.
When we reached the very bottom, Ric opened the door and checked inside before we ran through. It was the subbasement.
Massive white metal tubes snaked across the ceiling and walls. Some had valves, some had dials. There was a smattering of control panels inserted inside the walls beside large circular storage rooms. The whole place smelled of must and metal.
We pounded across the cement floor and made our way to the back. Instinct told us the vault would be in the farthest corner of the building from the power plant outside and to the left.
We were correct.
A large circular door with an enormous turn dial sat embedded in the wall. A dusty-looking control panel was beside it.
Ric tapped the control panel and attempted to open the massive vault door automatically, but the siren blared, and my heart pounded in my ears and I knew we didn’t have time for that. I pulled out my laser rifle.
“Get back!”
Ric peered over his shoulder, saw me aiming at the control panels and backpedaled out of the way.
I fired twice. The control panel burst with the strike of the laser and I heard the vault lock release with a sharp crack. I shoved the rifle back into my belt, and Ric and I both ran to the door, cranking the circular lever with every ounce of energy we possessed. When that could no longer be cranked, we pulled at the door to the extent of our power, yanking the thick and massive handle and leaning all the way back.
We grunted with strain. It weighed a ton.
Ric’s face turned red, and I yelled in frustration as we heaved the door slowly open. An inch at a time, the door gave way. It moaned and groaned at the movement, so loudly we could hear it over the shrill of the siren.
When it was ajar enough for us to squeeze through, Ric and I slipped inside and I rummaged inside the duffel bag over my shoulder.
It was pitch-black. I couldn’t find a thing.
Snatching my flashlight, I popped it on to peer inside my bag but nearly cried out at the sight of the room.
Wooden pallets were stacked atop one another. They filled the room completely, wall-to-wall, from floor to ceiling. With only a few feet between each aisle, I moved deeper into the vault, seeing with mounting horror the depths of the storage facility.
There were thousands of missiles.
Thousands.
Inside the wooden pallets stood gray metal canisters on end, shaped like gigantic bullets and painted with green stencils. BIO-TOX 6364
My heart pounded in my throat and my chest heaved at the sight of them.
This room could destroy the world.
Pushing aside my terror, I shone the flashlight into my bag and dug out the hand bombs Trev had pretended not to give me. While Ric kept watch at the door, I moved through the aisles, setting hand bombs in the corners of the vault and one dead center.
I hoped that would be enough. Trev had only given me six.
When at last I was finished, I joined Ric at the door and pulled the last of the hand bombs from my bag.
In the light of the flashlight, I saw his eyes grow sad.
I kissed him on the lips quickly and pulled the pin on the hand bomb. Over the shrieking sirens I screamed, “Go!”
I threw the hand bomb from my grasp, rolling it down the center aisle of the vault, then we darted out the door.
Using our combined body weight, we pushed the vault door with all our might, straining with our legs and torsos. Our feet slipped out from under us as we heaved. The vault was still open a few inches when the first blast sounded. Flames and shrapnel cascaded through the opening, causing both of us to flinch and pull back.
I screamed. Pulling whatever strength I had left, I continued to push and felt the door give way under the pressure of the next blast.
The force of the explosion blew me backward. My feet left the ground. Flying through the air, I caught just a glimpse of Ric’s body as it twisted and took flight.
Fire.
Everywhere.
* * *