Darkside (2002), page 46
“Why not go back to the main tunnel—that way, right?” she said, pointing back up toward the main tunnel complex.
“Because it’s flooded to the ceiling by now, remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, frowning, aware now that her brain wasn’t working all that well, either. “Does that mean we go down this tunnel?” She eyed the locked oak door behind them, remembering how the frame of the other one had been shaking. Obviously, down wasn’t what she wanted to do just now.
“I think we have to take a look,” he said. “By now, they have to know something’s happened. All the utilities, all the electric power in Bancroft Hall’s gonna be out. All sorts of shit shorted out. Phone lines dead.”
“I’ll buy that,” she said, leaning against a wall and examining the bruises on her arms. “Except that it’s almost two o’clock in the morning. But what can they do about it? And how can they get to us?”
Good questions, Jim thought. At the least, they’d have to drain the tunnel, and the main route for doing that, the storm drain, was blocked. He wondered which lucky soul would get the honor of going up the storm drain from the river and pulling that blockage loose.
“They’ll realize the storm drain’s blocked. Once they get that opened, the tunnels will drain themselves.” All except these old fort tunnels, he realized—they were one level below the main passageways. From the sound of it, the left-hand tunnel had already caved in, and this one didn’t look too great. He shone the light beam down the tunnel again and saw the same silent cement snowfall. If that bastard goes, he thought, we’re buried. And they might not even know we’re in here.
“Wonderful,” she muttered, as if reading his thoughts. “Powder room it is.”
They walked down the now-slippery brick slope. When they got to the anteroom in front of the magazine, there was at least two feet of water pooled on the floor, glimmering in the light from the flashlight. The magazine doors were identical to those on the other side. Jim sloshed through the water to one of them while Branner held the light on it. He worked the latches and pulled hard. The door resisted but then moved, and, to their astonishment, the anteroom was flooded with white light.
Inside the powder room, the floor was flooded to the same depth as in the anteroom. But that wasn’t what got their attention. The room was lit by four fluorescent light fixtures mounted vertically on the wall beneath the domed ceiling. These lights were on despite the lack of electrical power throughout the rest of the system. There were six lab benches, all filled with various kinds of electronic equipment: video monitors, what looked like PCs without their cases, oscilloscopes, tools, a crude telephone switchboard, several printers, and three large wiring patch panels where wires of every description were jumbled into complex loops. On one side of the room, now almost afloat, was a single mattress, of the kind found in most midshipmen’s rooms. Next to it there was a small refrigerator. A makeshift hanging bar for clothes was rigged on the opposite wall, where there were some civilian clothes, as well as what looked like the vampire costume. A trash can in one corner had pizza boxes and beer cans in about equal numbers.
“Son of a bitch,” Jim murmured as he surveyed Booth’s lair. “I wonder how long he’s been hiding out down here.”
“Two, three years anyway,” Branner said. She walked over to one of the printers. “Check this out—doesn’t this look like an exam?”
Jim went over and examined the printout. “Sure does. Shit, he’s probably been tapping the whole Academy intranet down here. Listening to E-mails, copying admin traffic. Look at that headset—it’s tied to that PBX switchboard.”
“Where’s he getting power for these lights?”
As they looked around, they heard the whine of an inverter. They found a stack of car batteries hooked to the inverter, which was producing the AC power for the lights.
“Pretty slick,” Jim said. “Got his own power supply. This whole place looks like some mad scientist built it. Remember what that kid said about Booth—supernerd with a bad attitude?”
Branner nodded and ran her fingers through her wet hair.
“What pisses me off is that I never came over here,” Jim said. “Everybody agreed that this side of the tunnel complex wouldn’t be useful, because it went nowhere near Bancroft Hall. That damned door wasn’t even locked. Let’s look for the way out before any more of that tunnel caves in.”
There were the same two square holes in the back corners of the domed ceiling at the end of the room. Each one had a small pipe running up into the hole from about two inches above the floor. But this time, there was no ladder.
“Where are we, in relation to the buildings topside?” Branner asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The maps we had were wrong about the other side, and about the Fort Severn layout in general. I never came over on this side because I was looking for a way in and out of Bancroft. We could be anywhere under Lejeune Hall, or even the field house. Or maybe even into the city. Hell, I don’t know.”
They heard some more noises from the tunnel complex outside. Jim went over to the steel magazine door and pulled it shut. It seemed to him that the water was a little bit deeper. Probably leaking around doors, he thought. Then they heard a loud bang from in the right-hand tunnel. They looked at each other, not saying anything. Jim was about to go back to the door for the cross tunnel to see what had happened when they heard what sounded like a small giant banging on that door.
“Cross tunnel just flooded out,” he said. “Damned door didn’t hold.”
He opened the steel door enough to shine the flashlight outside. The hammering sound had subsided into a steady vibration, which was being transmitted by the aging masonry to every joint in the anteroom ceiling. The mist became a fog as more and more of the cement vibrated out of the cracks between the old bricks. He swung the door closed again and reset the latches. They didn’t have much time before the whole thing caved in. He looked up at the ceiling of the magazine itself, but the cement covering it was smooth. Even if the anteroom caved in, this would probably hold. He hoped. He looked over at Branner, who was staring fixedly at that door. The expression on her pale face revealed that she fully understood their situation. The vibrations outside got louder.
Jim pocketed the Maglite and began pulling one of the lab benches over toward the right-hand corner of the room, underneath the closest vent hole. The fluorescent lights flickered and then steadied. He shone the Maglite beam up into the hole. He couldn’t see anything at all, just blackness.
“Try the other one,” he said.
They shoved a second bench under the left-hand hole. This time, he could just make out something way up in the exhaust shaft. The fluorescents flickered again and the pressure in their ears mounted. Branner looked over at the steel doors as they shifted audibly on their tracks.
“The other one had a ladder. He doesn’t just drop into this room. But how the hell we’re going to get up there, I do not—”
There was a crashing roar from outside the steel doors and then a wicked thump as something big hit them from the other side. One of the fluorescents fell off the wall and crashed down onto a bench in a flare of chemical light as a hundred sprays of water began blowing through the cracks around the doors, low at first and then rising fast. As the water began to swirl around their legs, Jim leaped across the room to the low rack where the inverter was mounted above the batteries and got it turned off just as the first of the batteries sputtered beneath it. The lights went out immediately, but they were no longer standing in water with an AC generator going. He sloshed back to where Branner was trying to hold the lab table in position beneath the hole.
“We’ll try to hold our position here,” he shouted above the rush of water as it boiled through the cracks now, flooding the space at the rate of a foot a minute. “The water’ll lift us to the hole.”
Branner’s face was frozen in fear in the glow of the Maglite. “Then what?” she wailed.
“We pray,” he shouted back as the doors, which had been built to resist pressure from inside the magazine, let go with a groan of fracturing metal and the room flooded with dizzying speed. Holding on to the thin pipe at the side of the hole, they rose with the water until their heads were bobbing directly beneath the four-foot opening in the ceiling. Stuffing the Maglite into his trousers pocket, Jim grabbed Branner and turned her around so that he could hug her from behind. The water forced them into the hole, where the air pressure rose immediately as the pocket was compressed by the flood below. Jim felt his right ear and then his left pop painfully, and heard Branner yell in pain as her ears resisted the pressure change. But then they stopped rising as the water pressure and the pressure in their air pocket reached equilibrium. Jim fished out the flashlight and switched it on. The water boiled ominously around their legs as the magazine finally flooded completely. Small bits of debris from Booth’s lab surfaced around their faces. Jim shone the light straight up.
“Anything?” Branner gasped. Jim saw that her eyes were closed. She had said she didn’t like confined places; this must be sheer terror for her, he thought. To his vast relief, the light revealed the bottom rungs of a ten-foot-long ladder. It was not permanently mounted to the shaft wall, but appeared to be hanging from a hook up at the top of the shaft. There was a rope coiled around a pulley at the top of the ladder. Finding the ladder was the good news, he thought. The fact that the bottom rungs were fifteen feet or more above them was the not-so-good news.
“Ladder,” he said. “This is the way he got in here. Now we just have to get to it.”
Branner opened her eyes and looked up. The movement put their faces together. She looked at him and he grinned at her. “This has to be true love,” he said.
She tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite come off. “I’m right on the edge of screaming my head off until this all goes away,” she said, her voice cracking.
“Except that it won’t,” he reminded her, trying to keep it light. The Maglite was beginning to give out, so he switched it off. She immediately asked him to turn it back on, which he did.
“You have no idea how scared I am right now,” she said. “But I do know how to get to that ladder.”
“And the answer is?”
“Chimney climb,” she said. “Move to the side as much as you can, and I’ll use my legs and back to go up the wall.”
He’d seen the technique and understood. “Okay; if you start to fall, let me know, so I can get out of the way.”
She squeezed herself sideways across the square shaft and started the maneuver. “If I start to fall, you’ll know it, not that you’ll have anywhere to go.”
“Just a thought,” he mumbled. “We’ll both go down.”
“What’s this ‘we’ shit?” she said as she started up the wall, wedging her legs against the opposite wall as she slid her backside up the surface. She was already puffing in the hot, humid, compressed air.
“I think that ladder is hanging on a hook,” he said, shining the light past her body. “I guess it’ll hold if you grab it.”
She didn’t answer, putting all her remaining energy into the climb. He kept the light shining past her face and pointed at the bottom of the ladder. He noticed there was a series of hooks, with the lowest visible one right in front of his face. The shaft appeared to be thirty feet high. Booth probably climbed down the ladder, wedging himself like she was doing, and then repositioned the ladder to the next set of hooks.
Jim kept himself afloat by wedging his own legs against the far side wall. The only sounds came from Branner’s exertions as she inched up the wall and the occasional thump and rumble from one of the flooded tunnels outside. He wondered if the cave-ins would show up on the surface. Not until daylight, if then. He looked up again. She was making progress, but it was slow going. The pressure in his ears was so great now that he had a headache, not to mention several points of road rash from being tumbled around in the tunnels. He wondered where Booth was. And how he’d gotten out once he released the flood. There were going to be some red faces when they got out of here. If they got out of here. He had no idea of what was up at the top of the shaft, but that ladder must lead to some kind of escape. You hope, he thought.
He shifted position to see better and to keep the fading Maglite pointed up so Branner could see her objective. Sweat was running into his eyes and he had to blink repeatedly to clear them. He tried to focus on the hook in front of his face, then realized it wasn’t there.
Huh? Where’d it go?
He felt around in the water and found the hook, but it was no longer at face level. It was now at chest level. Which meant—what?
That the water was rising. That he was rising with it. There was obviously enough pressure to force the water column in the shaft to rise all the way to the top. But if the tunnel had collapsed, where was the water coming from? He couldn’t think straight.
Okay, keep it simple. Linear. If she doesn’t make it to the ladder, we’ll just float up to the ladder. And beyond, to the top. That’s the good news. But then we’d better be able to open whatever the access is, because all our air has to be leaking out of the shaft up there for the water to be able to rise behind it. Should he tell Branner? He looked up again, even as he felt the hook touch his stomach.
“How’s it going?”
“About five more feet,” she grunted. “This is harder than it looks.”
“It looks plenty hard,” he said. “Can you see what’s up there?”
“No,” she said. “Focusing on the ladder. How strong are these hooks?”
“They’re pretty big,” he said. He saw that she had stopped to catch her breath. In the silence, her breathing sounded very labored. He hoped like hell she didn’t fall, because there was no way he’d be able to get out of the way, and she was ten feet above him at least. In the dimming light, he could see that she had locked her legs across the shaft and had her whole back pressed against the wall, her hands down at her sides. He couldn’t see her face.
“I have good news and bad news,” he said, finally, when she didn’t move.
“Bad news first,” she said.
“The water is rising.”
“My brain isn’t working in all this mug; what’s that mean?”
“It means that we need to beat it to the top and the outside before it pushes all the air out of this shaft.”
“Wonderful,” she said after a moment. “What’s the good news?”
“I lied. There isn’t any good news.”
“Hate it when you beat around the bush like that.”
“I know.”
She started her climb again, causing a small cascade of droplets to fall around him. He tried to think of something clever to say, but he couldn’t. He felt for the hook. It was below his groin. Think positively, he thought. That air has to be getting out somewhere up there or the water couldn’t rise. Means that the shaft must come out near or on the surface. Has to. Or why would there be a ladder hanging up there?
Unless it had been hanging there for one hundred fifty years.
He banished that thought.
“Got it,” Branner announced from above. “Now what?”
“Climb the ladder,” he said. “Gently.”
“Gently?”
“Just climb it; see what the hell’s at the top. Call for room service.”
“Can you give me more light?”
“That’s it, I’m afraid.”
He heard her change position in the shaft, and then the creak of wood as she very slowly transferred her weight to the ladder. He didn’t look up; doing so hurt the back of his neck. He could feel the hook down around his knees now, and the weight of his Glock in its holster felt like a small brick pressing against the small of his back.
More creaking from above him, and, despite the cramp in his neck, he looked up. He could see Branner’s legs on the ladder as she climbed up into the gloom. The flashlight was really failing now, casting little more than a weak gray beam into the humid mist. But at least the hook appeared to be holding.
“We have a door,” she said at last. He heard a rattle. “A locked door. A locked metal door, in fact.”
He groaned. “Old or new door?” he called up to her.
“I think it’s old. Can’t tell with no light. Feels solid, though. Maybe iron.”
He gauged the distance to the ladder. He was still eight feet or so below the ladder’s lowest rungs. He was too tired and probably too big to do what she had done with that climbing maneuver.
“Is there a handle? Any kind of latches, top or bottom?”
He waited while she felt around the surface of the door. “Nothing,” she said. “Not even a keyhole, at least not that I can find. Nor any hinges.”
“Frame?”
Another moment. “Feels like wood. Ow! Yes, wood. I just got a splinter.”
“What’s above it?”
“Top of the shaft.”
“Brickwork or cement?”
“Feels like both. A veneer of cement over bricks, maybe? Hard to tell.”
He felt for the hook to gauge his progress up the shaft. He couldn’t find it. “Can you tell how the air’s getting out?”
“Wait,” she said. He kept as still as he could while treading water so she could listen. He felt around for the hook again, but it was gone. The bottom of the ladder wasn’t that far away anymore. Water was rising faster.
“I can hear some air moving, but I’m not sure where it’s getting out. Feels like there are hinges at the top of this door, like it’s some kind of flap, not a door? I think the air’s getting out around one of these hinges.”
“Can you stop it? Jam something in the crack?”
“I can try, I guess,” she said, and he heard the rustle of clothing above him, then a ripping sound. He put a finger out in front of his chest and pressed it against the wall facing him, his arm floating as level as he could get it. Almost immediately, his body began to rise above the level of his arm.
“There,” she said. “I ripped a sleeve off my shirt. Stuffed it in the crack. I can’t hear air moving anymore.”
