The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  Ruiz swore quietly and matched her pace. “I guess that’s my answer.”

  When they reached the worship chamber, they paused to listen to the muffled gunfire and the howl of the voices of the sick and mad. Dr. Tang did not want Ruiz to have to kill anyone, but those who were already infected were going to die no matter what they did, and she wanted to live. It felt savagely simple.

  “This way,” she said, leading him into a narrow hall and then up the curving staircase into the wing where Sophie and her senior staff had their quarters and where Walker, Kim, and Dr. Tang herself had been placed.

  As they went up the stairs, Ruiz moved in front again. The lighting had worsened. Half of the bulbs were burned out, and the rest flickered into darkness and then seemed to hesitate before brightening again.

  Something shifted in the shadows at the top of the stairs, and then the lights snapped on and she saw the landing was empty. Nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the light, her father had always told her.

  Dr. Tang had never believed it, not even then.

  At the landing, they paused. Ruiz kept his gaze and his aim pointed along the hallway.

  “Two of the suits are vacuum-sealed, and one is open. They’re all in a bag under my cot,” she said. “But understand something, Ruiz. We can’t leave without the jar, and that means someone has to carry it. I don’t mind doing the carrying, but I’m not doing it without one of those suits. If you feel like holding the jar in your own hands, you’re welcome to my gear.”

  Ruiz gave her a lopsided grin. “I think I’m good.”

  Something laughed in the darkness. The sound moved in the shadows, a wet hiss of amusement, and then it cut off. No more laughter, and no echo.

  Dr. Tang stared at Ruiz, but he ignored her, stepping along the corridor with his gun leading the way. The voice had not echoed, but it did linger in her head, and Dr. Tang had the unsettling certainty that whoever owned that voice had no fear of guns.

  Stop, she told herself.

  She stood and watched Ruiz advance through the flickering light.

  “Who’s there?” he asked. “Sing out now. I wouldn’t want to shoot you by accident.”

  When no one replied, Dr. Tang hurried to follow Ruiz. Better she be close to the man with the gun than left alone at the top of the stairs with unreliable lighting and bulbs dying like ancient stars.

  A bit of information floated up in the back of her mind. Her brows knitted as she forced this puzzle piece into place.

  “It’s Cortez,” she said quietly.

  Ruiz pushed back a curtain and aimed his weapon into the room Walker had been using. He scanned the cave and then backed out, glancing farther along the hall.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Cortez. He’s on staff. Professor Solak left him waiting in her room.”

  “Is he sick?”

  Dr. Tang wiped sweat from beneath her eyes, careful not to shift the mask that still covered the lower half of her face. Sometimes she felt suffocated by it, but she’d be damned if she took it off.

  She pointed at the right doorway. “Be careful.”

  Ruiz first checked the room across the hall from Walker’s and then kept moving, checking a third. Finally, he stood outside the last room on the corridor and aimed his gun at the thick fabric curtain. Beyza’s room.

  Dr. Tang listened for that laughter. She felt the sweat trickling on her face again and the cough that lodged in her chest, ready to burst free. The lights dimmed and buzzed, and a bulb just over the doorway winked out. It felt to her now as if she had begun to suffocate, as if at any moment they might all be buried alive.

  Ruiz nodded to her and gestured to the curtain. Dr. Tang took a deep breath and then yanked it back, and Ruiz stepped into the room, gun barrel shifting back and forth. She narrowed her eyes, tensed up, waiting for violence.

  “Nothing,” Ruiz said. “Whoever this Cortez is, he’s gone.”

  Dr. Tang wondered what had happened to the man, but it was really Beyza’s problem.

  “This room is mine,” she said, pointing to one of the curtains Ruiz had already checked. “Let’s grab those suits and get back to the others.”

  The corridor lights dimmed again. Something whispered in the dark, and when she turned to Ruiz, for just a moment it seemed as if someone stood behind him, as if she were seeing double. The lights flared brightly, and the illusion disappeared—if it had been an illusion.

  “You really think there’s a way out of here?” Ruiz asked, following her into the room and dropping to his knees to help her drag the hazmat suits from beneath the bed.

  Dr. Tang grabbed hold of the binding of Lamar’s journal, which still jutted from her waistband. It had shifted around and nearly fallen out, and she didn’t want to lose it while carrying the suits.

  “I’m sure there is.”

  They might find a new exit, but her confidence came from a darker place. No matter what happened, there would always be a way out. Dr. Tang did not tell Ruiz that their only exit might be through death.

  The man was a soldier. She figured he already knew.

  * * *

  Sophie stared at the crack in the wall. They had found it easily enough, though Beyza said she thought the crack had gotten bigger since the last time she had noticed it. Now they stood in the tunnel that connected the Alexander Room to the stairway down to the column chamber. For some reason this space had always felt cold to Sophie, even that first day when she had crawled through the hole in the wall and discovered the Alexander Room, then gone on to discover the Pandora Room and the jar.

  “You want me to do the honors?” Taejon asked, voice muffled by his filtration mask.

  Sophie glanced down at the sledgehammer in her hands, felt the strain in her biceps. She could swing a goddamn sledgehammer without anyone’s help, had worked to build her core and the muscles in her upper body. For a few seconds, she allowed herself the luxury of being offended by the question, and then she relented. Corporal Taejon hadn’t offered because he didn’t think she was capable.

  Taejon had wanted to lift the burden from her. She was an archaeologist. Her job usually required meticulous work. It called for brushes and shovels and adzes. Hand tools. Archaeologists moved soil, used mattocks to break up dirt and rock, but carefully. A sledgehammer wasn’t a careful tool.

  Sophie lifted the sledge, backed up, gestured for the others to stand clear. Beyza had a pickax, but Sophie hadn’t let her anywhere near the crack except to feel for the draft they all agreed was there.

  “Thank you, Corporal, but just watch our asses. You use your weapon,” she said, listening to the dull crack of intermittent gunfire. “I’ll use mine.”

  She swung the hammer at the crack. Stone chipped away. The tuffeau had hardened, of course, but still it gave way in chunks and clods. Sophie swung the hammer again and again, widening a foot-long section of the crack, breaking away bits of the wall.

  On the fifth strike, she knocked a hole into hollow darkness.

  “Oh, my God,” Beyza said, and Sophie could hear the hope in her voice.

  She bent and felt the draft slipping from that hole. It was big enough to put her fist through, and she let the sledgehammer hang from her left hand as she pushed her right into the hollow.

  “A vent?” Taejon asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. “It’s dark as hell.”

  Beyza nudged her away from the hole. “Let’s not worry how many flashlights we have until we’re sure there’s more back there than a gap. Come on.”

  She swung the pick. Sophie followed it with a blow from the sledge, and then Beyza struck again. Both of them were wheezing behind their masks.

  When they heard a voice, at first Sophie thought it came from the hole, but then they turned and saw Walker hurrying toward them, holding the straps of a backpack that hung heavily over his shoulders.

  “What’s happening up top?” Sophie asked, eyeing that backpack. “You look like you’re ready to go.�
��

  Walker gestured to the hole they had made. “You find us an exit?”

  “Working on it. Too soon to tell.”

  Beyza swung the pick, smashing away another chunk of stone around the widening crack. “I’ve got a good feeling about it,” she said, and then she started to cough, turning away from them.

  Walker stared at Beyza a moment, his expression dark, as if he wanted to dispute her good feeling. Then he seemed to shake it off and turned to Sophie.

  “I’ll be down in the Pandora Room with Kim. Let us know if you find anything.”

  Sophie nearly stopped him—Walker hadn’t answered her question about what was happening topside, and she wondered where Dunlap had gotten off to—but he jogged down the corridor, and then Beyza swung her pick again and a ten-inch square section of the wall gave way. The darkness on the other side felt deep and yawning, and hope again flared within her.

  She swung the sledgehammer and smashed in another big chunk of wall, so that the crack had been almost completely obliterated and replaced by a black void. Bits of rubble tumbled into that darkness, and she could hear an echo.

  “This is promising,” Taejon said.

  Sophie heard a bustling off to her left and turned to see Dr. Tang and Private Ruiz striding down the corridor toward them. Dr. Tang had put on a hazmat suit. Ruiz carried sealed plastic bags that must have been the other two, but if his bitterness about not getting one of those suits for himself remained, it had been overrun by urgency.

  “We ready to go?” Ruiz asked as he rushed up to them.

  “Getting there, I hope,” she replied.

  Beyza had stopped working and turned to Dr. Tang. “Did you talk to Cortez? Is he all right? I need to go and get him. I should have—”

  “He’s not there,” Ruiz interrupted.

  Dr. Tang scorched him with a glance. “We didn’t see him.”

  “He was in my quarters,” Beyza said. “Maybe he’s sick. He could’ve been sleeping, I guess.”

  “No, Professor Solak,” Ruiz said. “That’s what I’m saying. We checked your room, and most of the west wing as well. No sign of Cortez at all.”

  Sophie watched Beyza’s expression go slack. First her friend and colleague had kept this affair with Cortez from her, and now it seemed that Beyza had deeper feelings for Cortez than she’d let on.

  Beyza handed Taejon the pick she’d been wielding and turned to Sophie. “I’m sorry. I need to…”

  “Go,” Sophie told her. “But hurry. If there’s a tunnel through this wall, we’re taking it no matter where it leads.”

  Beyza frowned and cast a dark look at the hole as if she didn’t quite trust it. Then she started back the way Dr. Tang and Ruiz had come.

  “You want me to go with her?” Ruiz asked.

  Sophie handed him her sledgehammer and took the two vacuum-sealed hazmat suits from him. “No. Help us here.”

  As Taejon and Ruiz smashed away at the wall, Martin Jungling walked up. He had no mask at all, not a filtration mask and certainly no hazmat suit. He coughed as he approached, a wet, rough sound in his chest.

  “Christ,” Taejon said. “Place is like Grand Central Station.”

  Martin coughed again.

  “What are you doing up here?” Sophie asked, but gently, with a kindness she would not have afforded him before today.

  Martin took the moment to lean gratefully against the wall. “I want to check on the south wing. If we’re going to leave, we should see if anyone there is still healthy.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not likely, Martin,” Dr. Tang said.

  “But we can’t be sure unless someone goes up there,” Martin argued, stopping to cough again, wheezing in a few breaths to calm himself. “Carson told me I was crazy, but someone has to do it, and I’m already infected. I can’t catch this thing twice. If there’s a chance some of them are healthy enough to leave with us, I’m not abandoning them.”

  “We’re not waiting for you, man,” Ruiz said.

  Martin nodded.

  Sophie put a hand on his arm. Her hazmat suit crinkled loudly. “Be safe, please.”

  As Martin went up the corridor in the same direction Beyza had gone, Sophie noticed Dr. Tang staring at her.

  “What?”

  Dr. Tang shrugged, her own hazmat suit crinkling. “I just can’t believe you let him go, as sick as he is. This will kill him if we can’t get him help soon enough. His mind may unravel. But you just let him—”

  “Don’t you think he knows that?” Sophie asked bitterly. “He wants to feel useful. If he dies, he doesn’t want to just wait around for it to happen. And neither do I.”

  Taejon swung the sledgehammer, and this time a whole section of the wall collapsed, huge chunks of rubble piling up between the corridor and the gaping blackness beyond.

  Ruiz bent and picked up a chunk of rock, then hurled it into the darkness. It struck stone and then skittered and rolled to a stop.

  “I want flashlights,” Sophie said. “We’re going in.”

  * * *

  Dunlap wanted to strangle the fucking guy.

  He had trusted Walker, and the asshole sucker punched him. Lieutenant Cobb had retreated into the entrance with what remained of the coalition troops who had been guarding the Beneath Project, and those were some tough soldiers, men and women who had survived the night thus far and were going to do everything they could to make it through until help arrived. Dunlap had faith in them, but Walker had none.

  Groaning, Dunlap knelt in the tunnel that led from the surface into the atrium. He took deep breaths, trying to clear his thoughts. His fists opened and closed.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  Tasting copper, he spit a wad of phlegm onto the stone floor, then wiped blood from his nose and mouth.

  Then he remembered the explosives. He doubted he had been unconscious for more than a minute or two, but Walker had rattled him. Dunlap figured he had a concussion, which pissed him off even more. His head throbbed with a deep ache, like it went all the way to the center of his brain, and his vision blurred as he leaned on the wall and forced himself to stand.

  Yeah, he had only been out for a couple of minutes, but he had been lying there for longer.

  Unsteady on his feet, he started down into the atrium. If Walker intended to set off explosives in the Pandora Room, Dunlap would stop him.

  And he had no intention of being gentle about it.

  * * *

  The moment Kim saw Walker’s face, she knew he was about to piss her off. She sat on the floor of the column chamber, about ten feet to the left of the entrance to the thirteen steps. There were too many places on this floor where people had been killed in the past twenty-four hours, and many still had smears and stains from the blood of the dying. It chilled her and made her slightly queasy. For a while, she had been able to fight off those feelings by talking to Carson, but now Private Carson had fallen asleep. He lay on the floor on the other side of the entrance to the steps. In the gloom of the poorly lit space, with the generators causing the lights to flicker, the lesions on his skin were so dark they seemed almost black. In that gloom, it was also difficult to make out whether Carson was still breathing, but every minute or two she heard him snort or exhale loudly, and he rustled a bit and turned over once or twice, so she left him to his rest, wondering if he would die.

  Now, though, she barely remembered Carson’s presence.

  Walker stood just at the edge of the illumination. He’d emerged from the darker part of the room, among the columns, wearing a backpack that hung heavy on him, straps digging into his shoulders.

  Kim had seen that backpack before. She held her breath but did not rise to her feet.

  “So here you are,” she said quietly.

  “He alive?” Walker replied, gesturing toward Carson.

  “I think so. Did you see Sophie? Are they having any luck?”

  “Some. They made a hole in the wall, so maybe that’s a start.”

  Wa
lker took a step toward the stairs, almost as if she weren’t there. Almost as if he didn’t think she would try to stop him.

  Kim stood up and walked to meet him. Walker could have picked up his pace, could have held up a hand and brushed her aside and headed down into the Pandora Room without having to face her. She had wanted to fall in love with him, but something had prevented that from happening. Kim cared for him, admired him, even loved him, but as many times as they had made love, she had never felt in love with Walker. She saw it now, looking at him, the hard edge that created the invisible, unspoken distance between them. She understood why his marriage had ended in divorce and why, try as he might, he struggled to be the father he wished he could be. This was a man who knew his life would include ugly choices that the people he loved would never understand, and all his love came weighted with that knowledge. A gulf that could never be bridged.

  “Where are you going?” Kim asked.

  To make sure the jar is ready to move, he would say. Or there would be a different lie, something about Sophie asking him to retrieve a tool. But Kim recognized that backpack, and he must have seen the clarity of knowledge in her eyes, because he stuck to the truth.

  “Things topside have gone pear-shaped. Our guns are way outnumbered. Cobb and the survivors retreated into Derveyî, and they can hold off for a little while, but not for long. The jihadis have to know help is coming. Choppers first, probably, and then troops. I don’t know how it’ll go, but once our help arrives, they are done, so they’re going to do whatever it takes to get into this place and get their hands on that.”

  He pointed down the steps.

  “They’ll do whatever it takes. And so will I.”

  Kim felt sick. She breathed deeply and shifted herself further, interposing herself between Walker and the steps.

  “You’re not thinking clearly,” she said.

  “Don’t make this harder than it is.”

  “Walker, I don’t know exactly what your orders were on this trip, but I’m very sure they did not involve destroying the jar. Your bosses want this thing, and they want it badly. Even more than my bosses do, and that’s saying something.”