29 Doomsday The elevator motor hummed loudly. With an unnerving amount of creaking and rattling, the open-fronted cage ascended. Although it was difficult to gauge the distance, I calculated that we climbed roughly seventy or eighty feet before coming to a stop at the next level of the . . . installation. I no longer saw any point in referring to that huge subterranean complex as a mine. The Lightning Coal Company evidently extracted.large quantities of coal from other parts of the mountain, though not from here. Here they were engaged in something altogether different, for which their mining operation merely served as camouflage. When Rya and I came out of the elevator, we were at one end of a deserted two-hundred-foot-long tunnel with smooth concrete walls. It was twenty feet wide, twelve feet high at the center. Fluorescent lights were recessed in the rounded ceiling. Warm, dry air wafted from ventilator grilles high in the curved walls, while one-yard-square return vents, near the floor, gently pulled cooler air out of the passageway. Big red fire extinguishers were mounted alongside sets of burnished steel doors that were spaced approximately fifty feet apart on bo th sides of the corridor. What appeared to be intercom units were hung next to the extinguishers. An air of unparalleled efficiency ominous, enigmatic purpose filled the place. I felt a rhythmic throbbing in the stone floor, as if gargantuan machines were laboring at mighty tasks in distant vaults. Directly opposite the elevators, that familiar but nonetheless mysterious symbol was on the wall: a black ceramic rectangle four feet tall and three feet wide was mortared into the concrete; centered in it-a white ceramic circle two feet in diameter; spearing jaggedly through the white circle-a bolt of black lightning. Suddenly, through the symbol I saw that strange, immense, cold, frightening void that I had sensed when I'd first glimpsed a Lightning Coal truck a couple of days ago. An eternal silent nothingness, the depth and power of which I cannot adequately convey. It seemed to draw me as if it were a magnet and I were an iron shaving. I felt as if I would fall into that hideous vacuum, siphoned down and away as if into a whirlpool, and I was forced to avert my eyes and turn from the dark eramic lightning. Rather than follow the tunnel to its end and explore the next horizontal shaft, which might offer nothing more than this one, I went to the first set of steel doors on the left. No knob, no handle. I pushed the white button in the frame, and the halves of the heavy portal instantly slid open with a whoosh of compressed air. Rya and I went through fast, prepared to use the shotgun and the automatic rifle, but the chamber was dark and apparently unoccupied. I fumbled for a switch inside the door, found it, and brought banks of fluorescent lights flickering to life. It was a huge storeroom filled with wooden crates stacked nearly to the ceiling and arranged in orderly rows. Each bore the manufacturer's shipping label, so in a few minutes, quietly prowling the aisles, we established that this place was filled with spare parts for everything from lathes to milling machines to forklifts to transistor radios. Extinguishing lights and closing doors behind us, we went along the tunnel silently from one room to the next. In every chamber we found more caches of supplies: thousands of incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs in stacks of sturdy cardboard cartons; hundreds of crates holding thousands of small boxes that in turn contained millions of screws and nails in every size and weight; hundreds of hammers in all designs, wrenches, socket wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, electric drills, saws, other tools. One cathedral-sized room, paneled in moth-repellent cedar that somewhat took our breath away, contained her upon her of huge bolts of cloth-silk, cotton, wool, linen-spooled on storage racks that towered fifteen feet above our heads. Another vault contained medical supplies and equipment: X-ray machines snug in plastic sheeting; ranks of EKG and EEG monitors, also tightly covered; cases of hypodermic syringes,.bandages, antiseptics, antibiotics, anesthetics; and much more. From that tunnel we entered another like it, equally deserted and well maintained, where additional rooms were filled with more supplies. There were barrels of whole grain-wheat, rice, oats, rye. According to the labels, the contents were freeze-dried and then vacuum-sealed in a nitrogen atmosphere to insure freshness for at least thirty years. Hundreds-no, thousands-of similarly sealed barrels of flour, sugar, powdered eggs, powdered milk, vitamin and mineral tablets, plus smaller drums of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, oregano, and bay leaf, had been provisioned. The vast facility seemed like a Pharaoh's tomb, the very grandest tomb in all the world, fully stocked with everything the king and his servants would require to insure his perfect comfort in the afterlife. Somewhere in hushed chambers as yet unexplored, there must be temple dogs and sacred cats that had been mercifully killed and lovingly wrapped in tanninsoaked bandages to make the journey into death with their royal master, and somewhere treasures of gold and jewels, and somewhere a handmaiden or two preserved for sexual joy in the world to come-and somewhere, of course, the Pharaoh himself, mummified and reposing atop a solid-gold catafalque. We stepped into an immense armory stocked with firearms: sealed crates full of pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns packed in grease, enough weapons to outfit several platoons. I saw no ammunition, but I was quite sure that millions of rounds were stored elsewhere in the facility. And I would have bet there were rooms stocked with deadlier instruments of violence and war. A library, consisting of at least fifty thousand volumes, was housed in the last room off that second tunnel, just before the second junction on that level. This was also deserted. As we moved along the shelves of books I was reminded of the Yontsdown County Library, for the two places were like islands of normality in a sea of infinite strangeness. They shared an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity-albeit an uneasy peace and a fragile tranquillity-and the air had a not unpleasant smell of paper and binding cloth. However, the collection of volumes in this library differed from that in town. Rya noticed that there was no fiction here: gone were Dickens, Dostoyevski, Stevenson, and Poe. I could not find a history section, either: banished were Gibbon, Herodotus, Plutarch. We were likewise unable to spot even a single biography of any famous man or woman; neither could we find poetry nor humor nor travel writings nor theology nor philosophy. Shelf after groaning shelf held dry texts solemnly devoted to algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, geology, biology, physiology, astronomy, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, electronics, agriculture, animal husbandry, soil conservation, engineering, metallurgy, the principles of architecture. . . . With only this library, a quick mind, and occasional assistance from a learned instructor, you could learn to establish and manage a bountiful farm, repair an automobile or even build one from the ground up (or a jet aircraft or a television set), design and erect a bridge or a hydroelectric power plant, construct a blast furnace and foundry and mill for the production of high-grade steel rods and beams, design machinery and 'factories to produce transistors. . . . Here was a library specifically assembled to teach everything needed for the successful maintenance of every physical aspect of modern civilization but which had nothing to teach about important emotional and spiritual values upon which that civilization rested: nothing here of love,.faith, courage, hope, brotherhood, truth, or the meaning of life. Midway through the stacks of books Rya whispered, "Thorough collection." What she meant was "hightening." I echoed, "Thorough," but what I meant was "terrifying." Although we were swiftly arriving at an understanding of the dark purpose to which this entire underground installation was dedicated, neither of us was willing to put that understanding into words. Some primitive tribes, though having a name for the devil, refuse to speak that name in the belief that giving voice to it will instantly call forth the beast. Likewise, Rya and I were reluctant to discuss the goblins' purpose in this elaborate pit, afraid that doing so would somehow transform their hateful intentions into immutable fate. From the second tunnel we cautiously entered a third, where the contents of additional rooms confirmed our worst suspicions. In three immense chambers, under banks of specially designed lights that were surely meant to promote photosynthesis and rapid growth, we discovered large stores of fruit and vegetable seeds. There were big steel tanks holding liquid
fertilizers. Neatly labeled drums were filled with all the chemicals and minerals required for hydroponic farming. Rows of large, shallow troughs, empty now, waited to be filled with water, nutrients, and seedlings, whereupon they would become the hydroponic equivalent of bountiful fields. Considering their enormous stores of freeze-dried vacuum-packed foodstuffs, and considering their plans for chemical farming, and considering that most likely we had seen only a fraction of their agricultural preparations, I felt safe in assuming that they were prepared to feed thousands of their kind for decades if, come Armageddon, they were required to take shelter down here for a long, long time. As we progressed from room to room and from tunnel to tunnel, we frequently saw their sacred symbol: white sky, dark lightning. I had to look away from it, for on each encounter I was ever more forcefully assaulted by clairvoyant images of the cold, silent, and eternal night that it represented. I had the urge to attach a charge of plastique to those ceramic images and blast them-and all they represented-to pieces, to dust; but I did not waste the explosives that way. From time to time we also saw pipes appearing out of holes in the concrete walls, traversing portions of a room or corridor, then disappearing into holes in other walls. Sometimes there was a single pipe, sometimes sheaves of six running parallel to one another, of various diameters. All were white, but symbols were stenciled on them for the benefit of maintenance crews, and each symbol was quite easily translated: water, electrical conduit, communications conduit, steam, gas. These were points of vulnerability in the heart of the fortress. Four times I lifted Rya while she hastily molded a charge of plastique between the pipes and plugged a detonator into it. As with previous charges we'd placed, we did not set the detonator, intending to start it ticking only on our way out. We turned the corner into the fourth tunnel on that level and went only twenty or thirty feet when, im mediately ahead of us, a set of doors whooshed open with a hiss of compressed air, and a goblin stepped out, five or six feet from us. Even as its piggish eyes widened, even as its wet, fleshy nostrils fluttered and as it gasped in surprise, I stepped for ward and swung the, automatic rifle, slammed the barrel across the side of its skull. It dropped hard. As the beast was falling, I reversed my grip on the rifle and brought the heavier butt straight down against the demonic.forehead, which should have shattered but did not. I was going to strike again, hammer its head to bloody pulp, when Rya seized my arm to stop me. The goblin's luminous eyes had dimmed and rolled back in its head, and with that familiar sickening crunch-crackle-snap of bones and with the mucous-wet surging of soft tissues, it had begun to metamorphose into human form, which meant it was either dead or unconscious. Rya eased forward, pushed the button on the door frame. The steel portal hissed shut behind the crumpled form of our adversary. If there were other goblins in the room beyond, they evidently had not seen what had happened to this one on the floor before me, for they did not rush out in its defense or set off an alarm. "Quickly," Rya said. I knew what she meant. This was perhaps the opportunity that we had been hoping for, and we might not get another like it. I stung the rifle over my arm, gripped the goblin by the feet, and dragged it backward into the tunnel we had just left. Rya opened a door, and I hauled our victim into one of the chambers fitted out with equipment for hydroponic farming. I felt for a pulse. "It's alive," I whispered. The creature was cloaked entirely in the pudgy body of a middle-aged man with a bulbous nose and close-set eyes and a wispy mustache, but of course I could see its true nature through that disguise. It was naked, which seemed to be the fashion here in Hades. Its eyelids fluttered. It twitched. Rya produced the hypodermic needle with the syringe full of sodium pentothal that she had prepared earlier. Using a length of elastic tubing of the sort nurses employed in hospitals for the same purpose, Rya tied off the captive's arm, forcing a vein to pop up just above the crook of the elbow. In the brassy light of the imitation suns that hung above the empty hydroponic tanks, our captive's eyes opened, and although they were still dim and unfocused, the beast was coming around fast. "Hurry," I said. Rya squirted a few drops of the drug onto the floor to insure that no air remained in the needle. (We couldn't question the creature if it died of an embolism seconds after injection.) She administered the rest of the dose. Seconds after the drug was administered, our captive went rigid, every joint locking tight, every muscle taut. Its eyes popped open wide. Its lips skinned back from its teeth in a grimace. All of this dismayed me and confirmed my doubts about the effect of pentothal on goblins. Nevertheless I leaned forward, staring into the enemy's eyes-which seemed to peer through me-and I attempted to interrogate it. "Can you hear me?" A hiss that might have been yes. "What is your name?" The goblin gazed unblinkingly and made a gargling, grudging noise through clenched teeth. "What is your name?" I repeated. This time its tongue came untied, and its mouth slipped open, and a meaningless knot of sounds unraveled from it. "What is your name?" I asked. More meaningless sounds. "What is your name?" Again it produced only a queer noise, but I realized this was precisely.the same reply with which it had responded to the question before: not random sound but a multisyllabic word. I sensed that this was its name, not the name by which it was known in the world of ordinary men but that by which it was known in the secret world of its own species. "What is your human name?" I asked. "Tom Tarkenson," it said. "Where do you live?" "Eighth Avenue." "In Yontsdown?" 'Yes. The drug did not sedate their kind quite as it would one of us. However, the pentothal produced this rigid, mesmeric state and appeared to encourage truthful responses far more effectively than it would have done in a human being. A hypnotic glaze clouded the goblin's eyes, whereas. a man would have slept and would have spoken thickly and ramblingly in response to any inquiry put to him-if responding at all. "Where do you work, Tom Tarkenson?" "The Lightning Coal Company." "What is your job there?" "Mine engineer." "But that's not really the work you do." "No." "What work are you really engaged in?" A hesitation. Then: "Planning . "Planning what?" "Planning . . . your death," it said, and for an instant its eyes cleared and focused on mine, but then the trance recaptured it. I shivered. "What is the purpose of this place?" It did not respond. "What is the purpose of this place?" I repeated. It emitted another, longer chain of strange sounds that fell on my ear with no meaning whatsoever but with complex patterns that indicated meaning. I had never imagined that the goblins might have a language of their own, which they used when there was no danger of our kind overhearing them. But that discovery did not surprise me. It was almost certainly a human language that had been spoken in that lost world of the earlier age, before civilization had succumbed to an apocalyptic war. The few human beings who had survived that long-ago Armageddon had reverted to savagery and had forgotten their language along with so much else, but the larger handful of surviving goblins had evidently remembered it and had kept the ancient tongue alive as their own. Given their instinct to eradicate us, it was ironic that they should preserve anything of human origin other than themselves. "What is the purpose of this installation?" I persisted. . . . haven . "Haven from what?" . . . the dark . . . " A haven from the dark?" . . from the dark lightning . Before I could pose the next-and obvious-question, the goblin suddenly drummed its heels against the stone floor, twitched, blinked, hissed. It tried to reach for me with one hand. Though its joints were no longer locked, they were still uncooperative. Its arm fell back to the floor; its fingers trembled spastically, as if electric current was coursing through them. The sodium pentothal was quickly wearing off. Rya had prepared another syringe while I questioned our captive. Now she slipped that needle into a vein and squirted more of the drug into.the beast. In the human body pentothal was relatively quickly metabolized, requiring a slow, steady drip to maintain sedation. Apparently, in spite of the somewhat different response from man and goblin, the duration of the drug's effectiveness was approximately the same in both species. The second dose took hold of the creature almost at once; its eyes clouded again, and its body went rigid. "You say this is a haven?" I inquired. " yes." "A haven from the dark lightning?" "Yes. "Wh
at is the dark lightning?" It emitted an eerie keening, and it shuddered. Something in that disconcerting sound gave the impression of pleasure, as if merely contemplating the dark lightning sent delicious thrills through our captive. I shuddered, too, but with dread. "What is the dark lightning?" I repeated. Staring through me at a vision of unimaginable destruction, the goblin spoke in a voice thick with malevolence, hushed with awe: "The white-white sky is a sky bleached by ten thousand huge explosions, a single blinding flash from horizon to horizon. The dark lightning is the black energy of death, nuclear death, crashing down from the heavens to annihilate mankind. I looked at Rya. She was looking at me. That which we had suspected-and that of which we had dared not speak-was proven true. The Lightning Coal Company was preparing a redoubt in which the goblinkind could take shelter and hope to survive another world-destroying war of the sort they had launched in that forgotten age. To our captive I said, "When will the war occur?" "Perhaps . . . ten years . "Ten years from now?" ". . . perhaps . . . " "Perhaps? You're saying in 1973?" ". . . or twenty years . "Twenty?" or thirty . . ." "When, damn you? When?" Beyond the human eyes, the radiant eyes of the goblin flickered brighter, and in that flickering was an insane hatred and an even more insane hunger. "There is no certain date," it said. "Time . . . time is needed . . . time for the arsenals to be built..... time for the rockets to become more sophisticated..... more accurate. . . . The destructive power must be so tremendous that, when unleashed, it will leave not one spawn of humanity alive. No seed must escape the burning this time. They must be purged . . . the earth scoured clean of them and all they've built . . . clean of them and of all their excrescences. . . . " It laughed deep in its throat, a chilling cackle of pure, dark delight, and its pleasure in the promised Armageddon was so intense that for a moment it overcame the rigidifying grip of the drug. It writhed almost sensuously, twitched, arched its back until only its heels and head were touching the floor, and it spoke rapidly in its ancient tongue. I was stricken by a shiver so unremitting that it seemed as if every fiber of bone and muscle was engaged. My teeth chattered. The goblin's involvement with its religious vision of doomsday became more intense, yet the effects of the drug prevented it from surrendering itself entirely to the passions that it was driven to express. Suddenly, as if a dam of emotion had burst within it, the.creature released a shuddery sigh, "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh," and loosed its bladder. The flood and stench of urine seemed to flush out not only some of the beast's fervor for destruction but some of the pentothal's grip as well. Rya had prepared a third syringe of the sedative. Two em pty vials, two disposable needles, and some plastic wrapping lay on the floor beside her. I held the creature down. She inserted the needle into the twice-punctured vein and started to depress the plunger on the syringe. "Not all at once!" I said, trying not to retch on the acrid stink of urine. "Why?" "We don't want to overdose it, kill it. I've got more questions to ask." "I'll let the stuff out slowly," she said. She squeezed only about one fourth of the dose into our captive, enough to make it go rigid again. She kept the needle in the vein, ready to squirt more dope into the goblin when it showed signs of emerging from its mesmerized state. To the captive I said, "Long ago, in the era that men have forgotten about, in the era during which your species was created, there was another war......... "The War," it said softly, reverently, as if speaking of a most holy event. "The War . . . the War . "In that war," I said, "did your kind build deep shelters like this one?" "No. We died . . . died with the men because we were creations of the men and therefore deserved to die." "Then why build shelters this time?" "Because . . . we failed . . . failed . . . we failed . It blinked and tried to rise up. "Failed . I nodded at Rya. She squeezed a little more of the drug into the beast. "How did you fail?" I asked. . . . failed to wipe out the human race . . . and then . . . after the War . . . there were just too few of us left alive to hunt down all human survivors. But this time . . . oh, this time, when the war is over, when the fires have burned out, when the skies have disgorged all the cold ashes, when the storms of bitter rain and acid snow have faded away, when the radiation has grown tolerable . "Yes?" I urged. "Then," it continued in a whisper that was ripe with the reverent tones of a religious fanatic recounting a miraculous prophecy, "from our havens, hunting parties will go above ground from time to time . . . and they will track down every man and every woman and every child who remains . . . exterminate whatever humans are left. Our hunters will keep searching and killing . . . and killing until their food and water runs out or until residual radiation brings about their own death. We will not fail this time. We'll have enough survivors to keep extermination teams in the field for a hundred years, for two hundred, and when the earth is unquestionably barren, when there's only perfect silence from pole to pole and no smallest hope of human life reborn, we will then eradicate man's only remaining work-ourselves. Then everything will be dark, very dark, and cold and silent, and the perfect purity of Nothingness will reign eternally.".I could no longer pretend to be mystified by the pitiless void that I perceived clairvoyantly when I looked at the symbol of dark lightning. I did indeed understand the awful meaning of it. In that sign I saw the brutal end of all human life, the death of a world, hopelessness, extinction. To the captive I said, "But don't you realize what you're saying? You're telling me that the ultimate purpose of your species is its self-destruction." "Yes. After yours." "But that's senseless." "That's destiny." I said, "Hatred carried to such an extreme is purposeless. It's madness, chaos." "Your madness," it said to me, grinning suddenly. "You built it into us, didn't you? Your chaos: you engineered it." Rya injected more of the drug. The grin faded from the creature's face both on the human and goblin level, but it said, "You . . . your kind . . . you are the unequaled masters of hatred, connoisseurs of destruction . . . emperors of chaos. We are only what you made us. We possess no potential that your kind could not have foreseen. In fact we possess no potential that your kind did not approve. As if I were, in fact, in the bowels of Hell, confronted by a demon that held the future of humanity in its taloned hands and would consider mercy if properly persuaded, I found myself driven to argue the value of the human race. "Not all of us are masters of hatred, as you say. "All," it insisted. "Some of us are good-" "None." "Most of us are good." "Pretense," the demon said with that unshakable confidence that is (so the Bible tells us) a mark of the Evil Ones and is an instrument with which doubt can be implanted in the minds of mortals. I said, "Some of us love." "There is no love," the demon said. "You're wrong. It exists." "It is an illusion." "Some of us love," I insisted. "You lie." "Some of us care." "All lies." "We have courage, and we are capable of self-sacrifice for the sake of others. We love peace and hate war. We heal the sick and morn the dead. We are not monsters, damn you. We nurture children and seek a better world for them." "You're a loathsome breed." "No, we-" "Lies." It hissed, a sound that betrayed the inhuman reality beneath the human disguise. "Lies and self-delusions." Rya said, "Slim, please, there's no point in this. You can't convince them. Not them. What they believe of us is not just an opinion. What they believe about us is coded into their genes. You can't change it. No one can change it." She was right, of course. I sighed. I nodded. "We love," I said stubbornly, though I knew there was no point in arguing. As Rya slowly administered more pentothal, I went on with the.interrogation. I learned there were five levels to this pit in which the goblins hoped to survive doomsday; each level extended only halfway over the one below it, so they formed a sort of staircase through the heart of the mountain. There were, the demon said, sixty-four chambers completed and provisioned, a figure that astonished me but was not unbelievable. They were industrious, a hive society that was unhindered by the determined individuality that was a glorious-if sometimes frustrating-element of the human species. One purpose, one method, one overriding goal. Never a disagreement. No heretics or _splinter factions. No debates. They marched inexorably toward their dream of an eternally silent, barren, darkened earth. According to our captive, they would add at least another hundr
ed chambers to this haven before the day came to send the missiles flying above ground, and many thousands of their kind would trickle in during the months prior to the start of the war, arriving from all over Pennsylvania and from a few other Eastern states. "And there are more nests like Yontsdown," the demon said with relish, "where shelters like this are secretly under construction. " Horrified, I pressed hard to learn where those pits were, but our captive did not know the locations. Their plan was to complete shelters on every continent at the same time that the engines of nuclear destruction reached a level of perfection equivalent to those in the lost age that had ended in the War. Then the goblins would act, pushing the buttons of cataclysm. Listening to this madness, I had broken out in a cold, sour sweat. I unzipped my ski jacket to let in some cooling air, and I smelled the stench of fear and despair rolling off my own body. Remembering the malformed goblin offspring caged in the cellar of the Havendahl house, I inquired about the frequency of birth defects in their broods, and I discovered that our suspicions were correct. The goblins, engineered as sterile creatures, had acquired the ability to reproduce by a freak mutation, but the mutagenic process was continuing, and during the past few decades it seemed to be accelerating; as a result, more and more goblins were born in the condition of those pitiable beasts in the cage, and fickle chance was stealing back the gift of viable reproduction. Indeed the worldwide population of goblins had been declining for a long time. The birthrate of healthy offspring was too low to replace those elders whose incredibly long lives finally ended and those who were killed in accidents or who died at the hands. Of men like me. For this reason, having glimpsed their own certain-if gradual-extinction, they were determined to prepare for and launch the next war before the turn of the century. After that their declining numbers would make it increasingly difficult to patrol the rubble of the post-holocaust world and exterminate the few human survivors living in the ruins. Rya had another vial of pentothai. She held it up, raising her eyebrows inquiringly. I shook my head. There was nothing more to learn. We had learned too much already. She put the vial away. Her hands were shaking. Despair hung about me like a shroud. Rya's pale appearance was a mirror of my feelings. "We love," I told the demon, who began to twitch and flop weakly on the floor. "We love, damn you, we love." Then I drew my knife and slit its throat. There was blood. I took no pleasure from the sight of blood. Grim satisfaction,.perhaps, but no real pleasure. Since the goblin was already in its human state, no metamorphosis was required. The human eyes glazed over with an icing of death, and within the costume of malleable flesh, the potential goblin eyes went dim, then dark. When I rose from the corpse, an alarm sounded, booming off the cold concrete walls: whoop-whoop-whooooop! As in the nightmare. "Slim!" "Oh, shit," I said, and my heart stuttered. Had they found the dead goblin on the lowest le el of the haven in its inadequate grave of shadows? Or had they missed the one whose throat I had just slit and, missing him, grown suspicious? We hurried toward the door. But when we reached it, we heard goblins shouting in that ancient language and running in the tunnel beyond. We knew now that the shelter contained sixty-four rooms on five levels. The enemy had no way of knowing how deeply we had penetrated or where we were, so they were not likely to check this chamber first. We had a few minutes to take evasive action. Not long, but surely a few precious minutes. The siren wailed, and the harsh sound crashed over Rya and me as if it were powerful waves of water. We ran around the perimeter of the room, looking for a place to hide, not sure what we hoped to find, finding nothing until I spotted one of the ventilation system's large intake grilles set in the wall at floor level. It was more than one yard square and was fastened in place not with screws, as I feared, but with a simple pressure clamp. When I pulled on the clamp, the grille swung outward on hinges. The metal-walled passage beyond was one yard square, and the indrawn air coursed along the duct with a soft hollow susurration and an even softer thrumming. Putting my lips to Rya's ear to be heard above the siren, I said, "Take off your backpack and push it ahead of you. Same with the shotgun. Until the sirens cut off, don't worry about how much noise you're making. But when we don't have that cover, we'll have to be a lot more quiet." "It's dark in there. Can we use the flashlights?" "Yeah. But when you see the incoming light from another intake ahead of you, douse the flash. We can't risk the beams being seen through the grille from out in the corridors." She entered the duct ahead of me, squirming along on her belly, pushing the gun and the backpack ahead of her. Because she filled more than half the space, little of the light from her own flash was reflected back past her, and she gradually disappeared into the gloom. I pushed my pack into the duct, nudged it even farther ahead with the barrel of the rifle, then entered on my stomach. I had to wrench myself around painfully to reach behind in that narrow space and pull the vent grille shut with sufficient force to snap the pressure clamp in place. The whoop-whoop-whoooooop of the alarm came through every grille in the intake half of the ventilation system, and it rebounded from the metal walls of the ductwork even more shrilly than it had echoed off the concrete in the room we had just departed. The claustrophobia that I had felt on entering the nineteenth-century mine shafts with Horton Bluett recurred with a vengeance. I was more than half convinced that I would get stuck in there and suffocate. My chest wall was Pinned between my fiercely slamming heart and the cold.metal floor of the duct. I felt a scream building in the back of my throat, but I choked it down. I wanted to turn back, but I went on. There was nothing to do but go on. Certain death lay behind us, and if the likelihood of encountering death ahead was only marginally less certain, I nevertheless was obliged to go forward where the odds were better. We were getting a different view of Hell than that enjoyed by the demons: a rat's view from within the walls.
Dean Koontz - (1985) Page 24
