by Scott Powers
Eve experienced all of that in the moment the hot, compressed air lifted her just ahead of the flame and tossed her aside, as gravity grabbed her, yanking her down, down, down, away from the burn. And then the lights went out. Eve plummeted into a private darkness within the sudden darkness of the tunnel.
Max and Jen had already descended the stairs and had been waiting for Eve a few yards down the tunnel. Still, the shockwave that leapt through the doorway knocked them flat. After the initial blast, they both struggled to sit up. Not all was dark. Fires emerged everywhere, even in the tunnel, offering a rippling illumination. Max looked Jen in the eye. She nodded.
“Eve!”Max yelled.
He hadn’t seen where she was at the time of the blast. His back had been turned and he had been knocked forward. He must have rolled ten feet. What happened to Eve?
“Eve!”he yelled again.
He turned and headed back toward the stairs. Flaming debris littered the tunnel floor. The tunnel door was gone. Pipes burst around him, and water gushed from all directions, like a carwash, dousing some of the flames.
Max switched on his flashlight and took inventory, while he looked for Eve.
The stairs were intact, though wrenched from the wall and leaning, and covered with debris. The wall above it had partially collapsed. The ceiling above buckled, ready to go.
And then Max saw her.
Eve lay flat, on the last few stairs, head down, feet up. The door was on top of her, covering most of her, but not all. Her head, right arm, and right leg stuck out. Max was beside her in three steps and pushed the door aside onto its long edge, against the twisted handrail. She stirred. She was alive but unconscious.
The air was thick with smoke and heat. Above them, a sixteen-inch chiller pipe, bent a bit from the buckled ceiling, burst and blew water at them.
Eve’s face was bloody and the water quickly washed some of it away, but not all. Max worried for only a moment there might be a neck or back injury that would make moving her risky, but he ruled out such a concern. He lifted her into his arms. He kicked the door down flat and laid her on it. As he did, she stretched out her legs on her own. Her eyes opened. She tried to sit up, grimacing.
“Eve! Ohthank God!”
He hugged her. Her arms did not hug him back, but they also did not push him away.
“We have to get out of here,”Max said.
Her eyes were clearing and water continued to gush down on her, mostly on her legs. The pipe above them was splitting farther and what had been a hard shower was now a flood. She scooted away from the force of water and looked herself over.
“My foot, my wrist. Shit. Oww. Shit. My ribs,”she said.
Jen was with them now. She wiped Eve’s face.
“That’s not your blood,”Jen said.
“Ziv’s,”she said.
She reached into her pocket and suddenly looked panicked.
“My foil.”
“It’s gone,”Max said.
“No! I got it back. I musta dropped it. I was, Melnwas. He was. He took it. It’s up there with him! We gottafind it.”
Jen checked Eve’s eyes with a flashlight. She was in good hands. Max took his flashlight and headed back to the stairs. The heat blasted intensely from the inferno above. Fire billowed through the door opening. There was no going back inside the warehouse.
Smoke followed the flames into the tunnel and flowed along the ceiling, pooling upside down.
Halfway up the stairs, Max stopped and got down on his knees, searching among the wildly flickering shadows. His flashlight was useless. But there. He saw it. Was that it? He reached for it. The ceiling screeched and as his hand groped and moved, he looked up.
Down below him, Eve was watching though she could not see what Max was doing. What she could see, however, was a slow-motion movement of the wall and ceiling above Max, as if a bulldozer on the other side were pushing the wall over.
“Max! Look out!”Eve screamed.
With a crunching growl, the ceiling collapsed. The wall pulled apart and with a yawing screech, the metal stairwell twisted and collapsed, tumbling Max, ceiling, and wall over the handrail.
CHAPTER 25
SMOKE ON THE WATER
Max was buried in burning debris and a hill of dirt that had come loose from behind the wall and collapsed down toward the tunnel floor and onto him. Just a few feet away, the tunnel floor was flooding, but it did him no good.
The bottom portion of the stair moved only a little, and the door Eve laid upon remained sturdy against the handrail.
Jen left Eve for Max. He too was unconscious. Jen found a pulse and rubbed his temples. His eyes opened.
Jen shoved some dirt off his legs.
Max wasn’t even free yet when he asked,“How’s Eve?”
Jen rocked a piece of metal off his side and over into the water.
“Fine,”Jen said.“Probable concussion, like you. Her right foot might be broken. Her right wrist is sprained and her ribs bruised, but I don’t think they’re broken. I’m more worried about you.”
Before he could answer, there was another crunching sound above them. He pulled himself up by grabbing a nearby length of handrail. They both scrambled back to Eve. Jen grabbed her by one arm and Max by the other. They lifted and pulled.
As they cleared the stairs, more ceiling and wall collapsed, crushing the stairway. Another big pipe burst.
Eve and Max limped along on either side of Jen, leaning on her shoulders. They stumbled and rolled into water.
Eve’s head was clear, and she glanced over at Max. He, too, seemed focused. They found a rhythm, splashing down into the tunnel. They had a long way to go to reach the river, but if they could beat the water and smoke, Eve felt sure they could make it.
*****
Outside somewhere and now many miles away, Ted and Val were locked in a slow-motion escape of their own, a chase involving his van and the sedan that remained behind him, as if the driver was biding his time.
Ted reached the downtown area and watched in his rear-view mirror as the sedan followed. When a traffic signal stopped traffic, he swerved the van into oncoming lanes, gunned through the intersection, and turned left. The sedan followed, then sped around, and got in front of the van. Another turn and they found themselves in the nightlife district Columbus calls the Short North, the sidewalks full of well-dressed partiers and the lanes full of taxi cabs. Decorative wrought iron bridges covered with lights spanned the main street.
There traffic clogged. Ted tried to squeeze through an intersection, but cars and SUVS packed all the lanes ahead, and before he could move, cross traffic pulled in behind him, slowed, and stopped there.
Ted’s van was stuck, stopped in the middle of it all. The sedan was stuck too, a few cars beyond the intersection. Cross traffic began to gridlock. Horns honked.
“Reverse!”Val screamed.
“I can’t, damn it.”
Two men ran from the sedan toward them. If drivers and passengers in the other vehicles, or the pedestrians crowding the sidewalks trying to get into this tavern or that bistro, sensed that anything might be wrong, they would keep it to themselves. They may not have consciously been able to accept the drama unfolding quickly, right in front of them.
The men reached the van, and, despite dozens of witnesses, one of them placed a gun discreetly against Val’s window and shouted.
“Open up!”
Traffic unfolded itself in front of the van just as the men got into the back and slid the door closed.
Ted leaned on his horn, but his signal was lost in the frustration of a dozen other drivers. Several answered with their own horns. The taller man in the back put his gun to Ted’s ear. Ted wanted to buy another minute, but traffic in front was now clear, and the gun pressed urgency into his ear. He put the van in gear and moved it forward. When he cleared the intersection, he saw the sedan maneuver to get behind him.
Ted glanced at Val, who looked terrified in the shotgun seat. The second gun
man, behind her, had his pistol aimed at her seat back. One gunman watched Ted’s driving while the other fumbled with a cell phone, only half-watching the others.
No one saw Val’s right hand in her purse, blindly typing a text message, as she knew she could, as she had done countless times in class.
“Sos they have us in van folosignal,”Val texted. She hit send, to Eve.
Then she activated her phone’s GPS tracker signal.
She had no idea if Eve, Max, and Jen were even okay, let alone if they would get the message or the signal. Or if they were in any position to help.
******
Eve did not get the alert, at least not right away.
They slogged their way through the tunnels, where they would get no cell signal. They followed the flow of water they knew headed toward the lowest point, the river discharge pipe—their escape.
The water rose in the final tunnel, deepening from what were now multiple pipe breaks.
The trio was calf-deep in water as they entered the final tunnel on the way to the river. Eve’s phone at last vibrated.
“Stop,”she demanded.
They did. She plucked the phone from a pocket. It had survived the blast and her fall and looked fine.
“Oh my God! It’s Val! They’ve got them in the van.”
“Come on,”Max said.“We can pick them up on my computer once we get to my car.”
“If we can get to your car,”Eve said.
“We’ll make it,”Max said.
“I’m not worried about getting out of here,”Eve said.“But once we get out, we’ll be a half mile from your car, and we might not be able to get to the parking lot.”
“I’m worried about getting out of here, right now,”Jen said.“This water is rising fast.”
The water already had reached their knees. As the tunnel sloped downward, the water rose more, pooling. Soon it reached their hips.
When it got almost waist deep, Jen stopped them.
“We’re still too far. We’ll never get out this way,”she said.
“Sure we will,”Max argued.
“Pretty soonwe’ll have to swim, maybe the last hundred yards, maybe more, and some of that might be underwater. And neither of you are up to it. You’ve both had concussions. I can’t let you try to hold your breath like that. You’ll never make it.”
“Bullshit.”
“We have to go back,”Jen said.“We have to find another way out.”
“But those other doors are locked, remember?”Eve said.“We tried them on the way up.”
“Building M!”Max said.“Where I came in. The door’s unlocked.”
“Ted and Val are in trouble, now,”Jen said.“Hurry!”
They turned.
Wading up river was a struggle, and with every step, Eve’s foot and Max’s left thigh screamed with pain. As they progressed, the water level dropped and the going got easier, but they encountered another problem. The smoke now reached deep into the tunnel. At first it was an annoying odor. As the water grew shallower, the smoke thickened and fouled their breathing.
Max waved his arm over the scene before them.
"Smoke on the water!" he sang, stumbling. "Fire in the sky! Smoke on the water."
"Not now, Max," Eve commanded.
But he sang louder. "They burned down the gambling house. It died with an awful sound.”
“Shut. Up!”
Max broke into a cough.
They had no idea how much damage Ziv’sexplosion had caused, if Building M was involved, or who’d be at the scene outside. When they reached the connecting tunnel to Building M, they were close enough to the fire that the juncture was illuminated. The smoke thickened enough to reduce all of them to coughing and gagging. Still, when they made the turn, their pace quickened to a splashing run.
The two warehouses were close enough. As promised, the door to Building M at the top of the stairs was unlocked. Beyond, the warehouse was intact, dark, and full of smoke and sound.
They stumbled to freedom.
They heard the blaze outside, along with sirens, shouts, and blasting fire hoses. They left the warehouse, entering a vacant corridor, which opened to an office building. They raced through that building, turned, and entered another. There, they found a fire exit.
Jen shouldered the door open, and she, Eve, and Max stepped outside into a brightly lit night. They came out right where several fire and EMS trucks and battalion chief cars had staged. All their lights were on, as were some portable light standards, connected to generators.
They were more than one hundred yards away from the fire now, appearing to have come out from a completely different direction. Over the rooftops, a huge plume billowed.
A fireman spotted them. Max was limping by himself. Eve was still leaning on Jen. They were soaked. The fireman laid his gear on the pavement and waved them over.
“Go see them,”he said, pointing to an EMS squad nearby.
“We’re fine,”Eve said, avoiding getting too close so he wouldn’t see her burns.
She wanted to walk away, but Max couldn’t resist. He hustled close enough to the fireman to talk to him, irritating Eve, who just wanted to get away as soon as possible.
“Anybody seriously hurt?”Max asked. The fireman looked at him carefully.“No, not yet,”he said.“Come now, let us get a look at you three.”
“I’m a nurse,”Jen said.“They got some scrapes and she’s got an ankle sprain, but they’ll be fine. They fellrunning down stairs.”
Max looked up at the billowing smoke against the night sky. Against the black backdrop, white and grey smoke bloomed like low clouds, and plumes of flame leapt through here and there. The blaze was out of control. What he could see was over the roof of the buildings beside them, so he couldn’t see what was left of the warehouse that exploded. But he judged the entire building must be on fire, and perhaps more than just that building.
Max nodded casually at the fireman.
“What the hell happened?”Max asked.
The fireman shook his head.“I hear a cache of experimental explosives went off. What the hell happened to you?”
“Fire hoses,”Max said.
“Seriously. Let’s have a look at you. That cut on your forehead needs stitches. Go get checked out.”
“I got it. You boys have your hands full,”Jen yelled.“I’ll get them to the hospital.”
Eve finally pulled Max and Jen away from the fireman. Holding his arm, she quickened their pace with their backs to the firemen. They made their way around the corner of the next building. There were even more emergency vehicles there. Police were everywhere, directing traffic and each other. The visitors’ parking lot loomed ahead. If they could just get through, they would be free.
They angled toward the lot, which held fewer than a dozen cars now. If any police were investigating, they’d be intercepted before they reached Max’s car. But chaos ruled the scene, and it didn’t appear as if anyone was investigating anything just now. As the trio looked around, they saw they were not the only people still fleeing the structures.
All the cops were busy enough to let them pass.
As Max, Eve, and Jen reached the parking lot, Jen looked to the road. A half-dozen TV trucks lined the outside of the fence. One of the cops’biggest nightmares was directing traffic along the busy avenue beyond, getting emergency equipment in and other vehicles out. Traffic was stopped everywhere, and police were trying to redirect them into a narrow side street to get them away from the emergency scene. Three vehicles formed in line from the institute’s entrance drive, facing in.
Jen spotted a familiar vehicle among them.
“Holy crap!”Jen said.“Look! It’s Ted’s van!”
CHAPTER 26
SUPERHEROES
One of Ted and Val’s captors was on the phone, speaking Russian, and sounding panicky, while Ted drove the van wherever they told him to, and it appeared they had no destination in mind. They had tried to return to the institute, but it was on
fire and they were turned away.
At this point, the direction was to simply keep driving. However, the gunmen instructed Ted to pull over on a quiet side street. The sedan pulled in ahead of them. The man on the phone went to talk with the sedan driver while the other man kept his gun aimed at Val’s back.
They were in an old neighborhood, parked in front of a couple of dark, century-old houses that were possibly vacant. On the other side of the street was a small, shuttered factory surrounded by a high, rusty fence. A couple blocks down, a crossing avenue appeared lively. Ted and Val could see heavy traffic on both the street and the sidewalk of that avenue.
Val saw an opening in their captors’attention and glanced into her purse. Her phone, set on silent alert, indicated that a text message had come in. She touched the phone and the message from Eve glowed through the purse.
“Got it. We’re safe & OK. Stopped to change clothes but we’re not far behind. Should be there shortly.”
Val was so happy she was afraid her face might give away the good news. But she was completely baffled by Eve’s message.
They changed clothes?
Ahead, the second captor and the driver of the sedan appeared to be finishing their conversation through the sedan window. The captor nodded, looked back at Val and Ted, turned to the driver and said something else, and nodded again.
A loud thump shook the car.
Batman, in full costume and masked, jumped from nowhere onto the hood of the car. Elbows out, hands in his ribs, he took the classic Batman pose.
The man next to the sedan and the driver took a moment to react. Just enough. A costumed Green Lantern raced past the van and tackled him.
As the man behind Val in the van got out, a woman Robin appeared and shoved him into the door. Then she shoved a gun to his side.“Drop your gun,”she ordered.
The Green Lantern, also a woman, had the gun from the man outside the car. The driver of the sedan aimed a gun at her. Batman leapt knees first at the windshield, rocking the car again. Distracted and jostled, the driver turned his weapon toward Batman. Robin fired through the window, shattering it, and the gunman jerked in defense and shot through the roof of the car. She fired again striking him in the hand and sent the gun rattling against the window and then falling to the floorboard.