Fast (58 page)

            King came sliding down the ladder. He crossed the carriage and dropped straight through the open hatch.

            While King dropped into the carriage, Coleman checked the truck. As his eyes looked up, the truck started coming down.

            He dove into the carriage and hit the floor beside King. Vanessa was trying to stand while Forest worked on the lift controls.

            ‘Everyone down!’ yelled Coleman from the floor. ‘It’s coming!’

            Forest glanced up, saw the truck through the ceiling, and dove at Vanessa. Forest and Vanessa were still falling when the truck hit the carriage.

            The cataclysmic impact stunned Coleman senseless. The fluorescent lights crashed out of the ceiling. Aluminum ceiling tiles rained down like sharp square missiles. The carriage ceiling buckled inwards. The entire carriage crumpled. Neither the carriage brakes nor the cables stood a chance. Coleman had no idea if the cables snapped or were torn completely from the carriage, but it had the same effect.

            The half-crushed carriage plummeted down the shaft.

            Coleman just had time to note where everyone lay before they crashed into the basement.

            The impact felt like a car-wreck from behind. Coleman braced himself for the truck to come through the ceiling. Nothing happened. The elevator was pitch dark. He heard groaning and the clink of pieces of falling glass. And what was that? Running water? Coleman found his flashlight. ‘Everyone intact? Vanessa, are you OK?’

            ‘I don’t know,’ groaned Vanessa.

            ‘Where’s the truck?’ King moaned in the darkness.

            ‘What’s this water?’ groaned Forest.

            One question at a time.
Coleman shone his flashlight up through the hatch. The truck hung ten feet up the shaft, wedged again.

            ‘We need to get out of here very carefully,’ he said. ‘The truck’s suspended about ten feet up.’

            ‘Captain, the lift’s filling with water,’ hissed Forest urgently. Forest lay closest to the lift doors.

            Coleman angled the flashlight down. Water poured into the carriage.

            Something about it made sense. Their impact had felt cushioned.

            ‘Why have we landed in water?’ asked King.

            Coleman remembered Vanessa mentioning the flooding basement level. ‘It doesn’t matter. Forest, can you open those doors?’

            ‘I think Vanessa’s out cold,’ said Forest.

            ‘No, I’m alright,’ she said groggily. ‘I’m just dizzy. Something hit me in the head.’

            Without standing, Forest’s hands moved quickly over the bottom of the door. ‘They’re warped shut. But the outer doors should be intact. The carriage might be compacted down enough for us to squeeze through the outer door.’

            ‘Do it,’ said Coleman, checking the truck again as he helped Vanessa stand. ‘But move very carefully.’

            King boosted Forest through the gaping aperture of the mangled ceiling. Coleman heard the ceiling groan as Forest moved. Then there came a
click.
A bar of light appeared inside the shaft.

            ‘Got it,’ reported Forest. ‘We can get through.’

            ‘Go, Vanessa. Up and over.’

            King boosted her up. Coleman followed. A few seconds later King wriggled through the narrow gap between the top of the crumpled carriage and the outer lift doors.

            He dropped down into hip-deep water.

            The suspended truck hadn’t moved an inch during their maneuver across the crumpled carriage.

           
It must be wedged in tight
. Coleman helped King down into the flooded corridor.

            Only when they were all safely out did Coleman turn in the waist-deep water and examined his surroundings. His eyes panned around the strange corridor, taking in the unexpected details.

            ‘Where on earth are we?’

#

Cairns peered down the shaft after the fallen tray-back and the Marines.

            The truck was wedged about twenty feet from the bottom. He unconsciously touched the device strapped to his forearm.

            They’re not dead. They’re in the basement. That’s the worst possible place they could have gone.

            Bora finished reversing the A-frame and then climbed down to join Cairns.

            ‘Crushed?’ asked Bora, nodding towards the shaft.

            ‘Look for yourself,’ spat Cairns.

            Bora knelt at the shaft’s edge and looked down at the truck. ‘It’s wedged in the shaft. They might be able to climb into the basement.’

            Cairns was ahead of Bora’s thinking. ‘Tell me something I don’t know. Now take this force down the western stairwell.

            Cairns checked his watch.
We don’t have much time. At best, we have a dozen gunmen still up and fighting. It will have to be enough.

            Cairns activated his radio. ‘I want everybody to rendezvous in the east and west stairwell immediately. And I mean everybody! Abandon all key locations. I want teams ready to storm the basement in two minutes.’

            Cairns barked at Bora, ‘We’ll take two forces down to the basement and pinch the Marines between us. You take the west stairwell. I’ll take the east.’

            Gould’s voice crackled over Cairns’s earpiece.

            ‘You can’t be serious?’ objected Gould. ‘We need to leave!’

            ‘I’m deadly serious,’ replied Cairns, not hiding the loathing in his voice.

            Gould sounded hysterical. ‘Cairns, we need to pull out. You can’t go down to the basement. My instruments show the basement is flooding.’

            ‘So? We knew that would happen. That was the plan from the start.’

            ‘Yes, but you didn’t plan to go back
down
there. Carnivorous plants are endemic to swamplands. You think these things are bad on dry land? You should see them in the water. That’s their natural hunting grounds.’

            Cairns had a few tricks up his sleeve yet. ‘Well, we’re about to find out then, aren’t we, Gould.’

            Gould was blunt in his assessment of Cairn’s plan. ‘Anyone who goes down there isn’t coming back.’

Coleman hadn’t expected to find himself in a corridor hewn from solid rock.

            ‘This is the basement.’ Vanessa critically eyed the ripples spreading over the water’s surface from their bodies.

            The basement?
thought Coleman
.
All the visible infrastructure - electricity, data, plumbing, fire sprinklers - ran through pipe work bolted into the rocky ceiling.
This is just a fitted out cave system
.

            ‘Everyone stand still,’ warned Vanessa abruptly.

            Third Unit came to alert attention, scanning the water.

            ‘Water carries vibrations further than air,’ she explained. ‘We need to get out of the water, right now.’

            Forest tilted his weapon towards the water around his legs. ‘Can the creatures swim?’

            She thought for a moment. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me. In a flooded corridor like this, we might not even see them until they’re on us.’

            Coleman touched one wall. ‘Is the entire basement like this, Vanessa?’

            It took her a moment to understand what he meant. ‘Oh, the walls and ceiling? Yes. These corridors were originally exploratory tunnels from before the mine hit the aquifer. Our basement facilities are nested in these tunnels. Under our feet is steel plating, and then under that are more submerged tunnels. Normally the water level should be about a meter below our feet.’

            Coleman doubted the scientists had overlooked the risk of flooding. ‘I assume there are several areas above the high tide mark. Is there anywhere we can check if the message got out?’

            ‘There is,’ she confirmed. ‘The diving arena will still be above water. The control room has computer access. That’s where all the tunnels join in the middle of the basement.’ She touched the tablet on her belt. ‘Plus I can upload this information to a faster computer. It will tell us more about what we are dealing with.’

            Coleman tried to calculate their chances of moving safely through the flooded tunnels to the diving control room.

            What choice do we have?

            ‘We have to risk moving through the water,’ he said. ‘Something distracted the creatures away from the habitation level earlier. Hopefully the creatures are still distracted. We need to hurry though.’

            Vanessa began wading down the corridor. ‘Okay, it’s this way.’

            Coleman followed. The water dragged against his fatigues.

            Pushing on ahead, Vanessa reached where the tunnel joined a four-way intersection. A directory sign hung from the ceiling.

Central Diving Labs

Hydroponics

Hyperbarics

North Exit

Vanessa began to wade under the sign. Coleman grabbed her arm.

            Everyone stopped and looked around.

            It was a strange sensation. It took a moment for Coleman’s senses to interpret what he was feeling. A deep rumbling emanated through the water.

            ‘Can everyone feel that?’

            Coleman looked back to Forest and King. They both nodded.

            ‘I feel it now,’ confirmed Vanessa, turning slowly with her hands under the water. ‘It’s coming from every direction. But we have nothing down here that could be causing a vibration like this.’

            King said, ‘It’s like an outboard engine in the distance.’

            ‘It must be distracting the creatures,’ reasoned Coleman. ‘Or there would have been more up on the pedestrian loop with all those vehicles.’

            ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ agreed Vanessa. ‘Too few showed up. This will be keeping them away from the Evac Center and David, whatever it is.’

            ‘So they’re all down here with us!’ realized Forest suddenly.

            ‘Let’s pick up the speed,’ urged Coleman. ‘These vibrations should blanket our movements.’

            The four powered through the water, ignoring everything but thrusting one leg in front of the other. All were laboring for breath when Coleman spotted a large glass partition ahead. The partition blocked the corridor.