She leaned to the side and looked under the table at his running shoes. "Oh, thank God. At least you haven't switched to Doc Martens."
Slapping the two slices of bread back together on the partially eaten sandwich, she tossed it into the foliage.
"That will attract ants," Wilson protested.
"No self-respecting ants are going to eat a hummus and cucumber sandwich. If Zack hadn't run away before, he would have after one bite of that garbage."
She looked innocently around the table and resumed, "Anyway, where were we? Oh, that's right, a plan. Eric, you think that you and Elias should clear out of Aegis, and you probably don't care if you take Wilson and me with you."
"I didn't say…."
She cut him off. "Save it. Whether you do or you don't is irrelevant. The point is, I don't think the two of you were suckered into Aegis only to get rid of you. I mean, isn't a normal part of your everyday job killing people? You know, do a little filing, make some copies, kill Joe Blow, have lunch. If Faulk wanted either or both of you gone, he would just rub you out."
"Rub us out?" Elias barked. "I haven't heard that phrase since I watched an old James Cagney movie."
She waved a hand in his direction dismissively. "Kill, eliminate, take you out, terminate with extreme prejudice, bump you off, send you to sleep with the fishes, snuff, wipe you out, blow you away, extirpate…."
"Extirpate?"
"Exterminate," she continued, ignoring Elias' interruption, "deracinate, whatever! All I'm saying is, why wouldn't he just do that? Wouldn't that be a lot easier than this whole elaborate ruse?"
Still grinning from Tillie's rapid-fire tirade, Elias looked at Stone and said, "She has a point."
Stone looked at Tillie and back at Elias. "And a hell of a vocabulary, too."
"She's right, you know," Wilson interjected.
"Well, then what is the point?" asked Stone. "Why did Faulk want us both here?"
"That's the $64,000 question," Tillie asserted.
All three of the men turned to look at her. Elias was the first to speak. "Did you spend all of your time watching TV Land as you were growing up?"
Grinning mischievously, Tillie answered, "Not important. What is important is why you two were sent here."
Elias started to say something, when Wilson suddenly jumped up, grabbing the ever-present shotgun that was leaning against the wall of the shack. "They're here!" he shouted as he whirled the barrel around to aim it at the wall of fronds and branches.
Elias turned to look and caught a glimpse of beige through the boughs.
KA-BOOM!
He saw a wide area of leaves and branches turned into mulch as Wilson's first shot blasted into the spot where the beige had been.
Cursing the wind for masking the sounds the Zippers would make as they dashed through the bushes, Elias ran through the door of the shack, grabbed the AK-47, and was nearly knocked aside by Tillie, who was also dashing inside. On his way out, he saw the shotgun they had taken from Zack, and grabbed it. Once on the porch, he tossed the shotgun to Stone, who was attempting to spot for Wilson. Before the springs could fully close the door, Tillie burst out with her backpack.
"Keep them in the bushes!" Wilson shouted. "Once they get into the clear, we don't have a chance. Tillie, the net!"
Dropping her pack, Tillie ran to the corner of the porch and yanked down hard on a large wooden lever mounted to the wall near the point where the overhang attached to the shack. Hearing a loud THUNK, Elias saw netting tumble down all the way around the perimeter of the porch roof. The netting completely surrounded them, leaving no openings.
"Close the door!" Tillie barked, and Stone ran to the shack door and slammed it shut.
"We don't want them breaking through into the shack and coming out here from behind us. Bar it!"
For the first time, Stone noticed a drop-down bar clipped into the door frame, and swung it down. It fell neatly into the u-shaped catch on the door.
Through all of this, Elias had not taken his eyes off the perimeter. Since the first quick look at the Zipper, he had not seen any other indication of him or any others. In his peripheral vision, he could tell that Tillie was pulling things out of her pack and, by the sounds he heard, assembling something. He appreciated the fact that the railing around the porch was not a typical open frame, but was solid from approximately thirty-eight inches high down to the porch floor. As he crouched behind it, he was able to determine that it was built using stacked 2x6s, with no gaps. There was enough density to stop bullets fired from most guns.
Tapping the railing, Elias noted to Wilson, "You obviously planned for this."
Wilson, who was about ten feet away from him and also crouched behind the barrier, glanced over and huffed, "It would take a fool not to plan for an attack. With a clear picture emerging as to what Kreitzmann and company were up to, I assumed that at some point we might be under siege."
"Incoming! Three o'clock!" shouted Tillie, simultaneously triggering the launcher she had assembled from her pack.
Elias' eyes snapped to the area to the right of the path, in the direction Tillie had indicated, as he heard the WHOOMP of her launcher. He saw another beige figure, or perhaps the same one as before, at a standstill, struggling to untangle himself from a jumble of ferns. Whatever it was that Tillie had shot slammed into the trunk of a tree right next to the frenzied figure, releasing a white cloud of gas. Elias was not sure how effective the gas would be in this wind, but his question was soon answered as the rapid movements of the beige attacker suddenly slowed.
The moment her first shot had been released, Tillie madly reloaded and, as she saw the effect from her first hit, launched another, which this time slammed directly into the chest of the assailant, briefly enveloping his head and upper torso in white gas. Elias drew a bead on him and was ready to pull the trigger, but Tillie stopped him. "Save your rounds. He's going down."
Sure enough, the beige figure abruptly dropped to the ground.
"Good shooting!" Stone shouted. "How many more do you think there are?"
"When I watched the video of the attack on ZooCity, I only saw a pair of them," Elias answered.
"I think," began Wilson, his voice ominous, "that the frontal attack was merely a diversion."
Elias looked at Wilson, who had turned around to face the shack.
"What is it?"
Wilson held up one hand, indicating that Elias should listen. Within moments, over the din of the constant gale, Elias heard the distinct crackling coming from within the shack.
"They're burning us out," Wilson sighed.
"Oh, no!" gasped Tillie.
"Clearly, while Zipper number one kept us occupied out front, the other made his way to the rear and torched my home."
"They don't need to come at us," Elias warned. "With the shack burning, we'll be running out to them in a couple of minutes."
Wilson looked crestfallen. "I can't believe I didn't anticipate this possibility."
The man looked so sad that Elias, even in the midst of their predicament, wanted to say something to make him feel better, when Tillie, from the far side of the porch, shouted, "What do you expect, Wilson? You are an old fool!"
Elias, startled by her harsh comment, turned and saw that she was grinning at Wilson. Looking back, he noticed that Wilson had snapped out of his remorse and had begun to chuckle.
"You're right, my dear. I am an old fool. But at least I did think of plan B."
"Plan B?" Stone asked, his eyes flitting back and forth between looking at Wilson and watching the bushes and trees around them.
Instead of explaining, Wilson nodded at Tillie, who set her improvised launcher on the deck and scrambled to the corner of the porch. The crackling of the fire on the other side of the wall had escalated to a loud rumbling, and smoke was already streaming from under the door.
Tillie grabbed a long pole with a hook on the end, which was held to the wall with a spring clip. Keeping herself low and out of the line of sig
ht of the Zippers, she twisted around and, using the hook, unlatched a hinged plywood panel mounted to the ceiling of the porch.
Released, the panel swung down and butted perfectly to the top of the railing, enclosing the side of the porch. She slammed down a bolt latch, fastening the two, and rolled the pole to Elias, motioning for him to do the same with the next panel. He looked up and saw that there were panels for each open section, lined up between the support posts. He unhooked the next one and it dropped loudly. Within a moment, it was latched, and he moved on to the third, doing the same.
As he did, he saw that Wilson had begun the same procedure at the other end of the porch and had two panels down, handing off his pole to Stone to drop the third and fourth, the last one longer, as it had to cover the opening in the railing at the steps going down to the grounds. Within less than a minute, they were completely shut in, and Elias could smell the smoke from the fire which was certain to burn through the front wall at any time now.
"Okay," Elias asked, "now that we're trapped, what do we do?"
Standing, Wilson quickly moved to the center of the porch, where the table was, and pushed it roughly to the side as he explained to Elias, "This is an atrium. It is surrounded on all four sides by the structure of Aegis."
"Right."
"Although it doesn't rain with great frequency in this part of the country, when it does, it tends to be a deluge."
As he spoke, Wilson had reached down to the wooden deck and gripped a handle which was flush with the planks. "Where do you think all of the rain that falls into the atrium goes?"
"Soaks in?"
Shaking his head, Wilson replied, "Hardly. There is too much volume of water in too brief a period for a builder to be able to count on that. And you must remember, this entire complex is built on concrete. These atria are nothing but huge planters filled with soil. Below the dirt there is an impervious surface. Therefore, the water would have nowhere to go." With a grunt, he pulled up a section of the deck and indicated, "A storm drain. Every atrium in the place has one."
Elias looked down into the opening and saw a manhole-sized steel collar set into a concrete pad. The collar had at some point held a grate but was now unobstructed.
"I built over the manhole and made the trapdoor my secret back door."
With an ugly crunching sound, the flames burst through a small section of wall.
"We'd better get moving," Stone cautioned, eyeing the flames.
"Yes," agreed Wilson. "Tillie, grab our kit, please."
"You got it."
Tillie kicked a panel in the wall at the opposite end from where the flames were breaking through. The face of the wall, where she had kicked, swung open, and she pulled out a duffel bag and dropped it down the storm drain. She returned for her backpack and launcher while Elias, Wilson, and Stone gathered up their weapons. They all heard a loud crash when something heavy hit one of the latched panels at the perimeter.
"They're trying to get to us. I guess they don't want to wait until we come running out." With that, Tillie dropped down into the opening, catching the top rung of a steel ladder affixed to the side of the riser.
Another crash followed the first, and Elias aimed his rifle at the spot and triggered a short burst from the automatic. Even over the thundering sounds of the wind and the crackling and roaring of the fire as it broke through more of the wall, they all heard the scream come from outside.
"Guess I hit someone."
Tillie was already down into the darkness, and Wilson was just beginning his descent. After Elias' shots, there were no more attempts to batter the panels around them, but the fire was rapidly making the porch an untenable location. As soon as Wilson's head disappeared into the darkness below, Elias slung his rifle over his shoulder and stepped down onto the first rung, following quickly.
As Elias descended, Wilson shouted up to him, "Tell Eric to pull the lid closed behind himself!"
He started to relay the message but was cut off. "I heard."
Far enough down to allow Stone to join him on the ladder, Elias took a second to look down and saw that Tillie was standing on the sandy bottom of the storm drain system and had unpacked an LED lantern from the bag. They all finished their descent, and Wilson turned to Tillie. "You're the one who explored this labyrinth, so lead the way."
Loaded up with her backpack, duffel bag, and the launcher swung over her shoulder, Tillie raised the lantern above her head. "This way."
They all followed. After the melee on the porch, the silence of the storm system was unnerving. Elias noticed that his ears were still ringing, and he assumed that all of the others suffered from the same discomfort. The channel they were traveling was constructed of cast-in-place concrete walls and ceiling. The whorls and textured patterns from the plywood form boards decorated the surfaces, and every eight feet, where the panels had butted together, was a slightly bulging linear ridge of cement. Their path was covered with sand, a result of years of surface erosion carried into the system by torrential rains; Elias did not know if it was obscuring a concrete surface or if the channel had been built with only walls and a lid, left open to the soil beneath.
They had covered several hundred yards, and Elias sensed that they were traveling slightly downhill in what would be the direction of the water flow. Because of the preternatural quiet of the system, Tillie did not need to shout as she warned over her shoulder, "We need to be careful up ahead. No one get ahead of me."
"No problem," Stone replied, breathing heavier from the pace.
"Am I going too fast for you, Eric?" There was a definite tease to her voice.
"No," Stone panted. "I'm fine. More than two months of sitting on my butt got me a little out of shape, that's all. But thanks for asking."
Tillie giggled as they reached what appeared to be the end of the channel. "Here's the deal. This is the retention basin. All of the storm drains from all over Aegis dump into this."
She had stopped and Elias moved up to the front. Their channel had abruptly ended, and he and Tillie were standing on a concrete ledge, which extended approximately eighteen inches from the side walls. Beyond was darkness.
Elias kicked a small rock off the edge and listened as it disappeared into the abyss. Several seconds passed with no sound of impact before Tillie explained, "It's sand down there. You're not going to hear anything hit."
"You've been down there?"
"No. Too far down. Sheer concrete walls all the way to the bottom. No access ladders all the way around."
"How far down is it?"
"About thirty feet or so. Enough to hurt a lot if you fell."
"How do you know what's at the bottom?"
"I was curious and threw a flare down."
"I don't understand," Stone said as he joined them at the opening. "I would have thought that the storm drains would dump all of the water outside Aegis somewhere."
Tillie shook her head. "Remember, this place was built with the idea that no one was supposed to be able to leave. How long would it take the residents to figure out that all they had to do was follow the dry storm drain system to the outside? No, like I said, this is what they call a retention basin. They calculate the maximum amount of runoff that can end up in the system from a one-hundred-year storm, probably add a fifty-percent fudge factor, to be safe, and then basically build a big swimming pool that will hold all of it. The only difference is that this swimming pool has only dirt on the bottom. No concrete. No plaster. Just the soil."
"So when it rains," Wilson chimed in, "all of the drains carry the water to this pit, which is designed to hold it all until it can percolate into the ground."
"Huh!" Stone grunted.
Tillie rolled her eyes and muttered to Elias, "Real bright buddy you've got there."
Elias laughed. "He's a man of few words. So where do we go from here?"
Tillie leaned outward, holding the lantern over the edge. "See. We've got this ledge. It's about a foot and a half wide, and it goes all the way aro
und to all of the other inlets. We need to get to the channel that's two openings this way."
Elias eyed the ledge. "Why that one?"
"That channel takes us to an atrium which is right next to a service closet which…."
"Gets us to your place."
"Right."
"Do you think your little den is safe? If they made a move on Wilson's jungle, they might have gotten wise to you, also."
"Little den? Hey, that's my ‘batcave.' Besides, we won't know if we don't go."
Stone was still staring into the darkness of the retention basin. "How do you know about all of these routes?"
Tillie gave him one of her trademark shrugs and said, "I like to explore and I've had twelve years to do it."
"But don't any of the others know about all of these tunnels and channels?"
"People really don't," she answered in a matter-of-fact tone. "They take things on face value. They are told ‘here's a room,' ‘here's a hallway,' ‘there's the bathroom.' That's all they need. I guess I've always wondered what's behind things and underneath things and above things."
"Given a choice," Wilson joined in the conversation, "Tillie will travel three times the required distance from point A to point B as long as she can use some secret passageway."
"I think I would have been happy living in one of those old castles in Europe – you know, one of the places with all of the hidden doors and passages behind the walls."
Elias was beginning to get spooked listening to the echoes from all of their voices. "We'd better get going. If Kreitzmann is getting more aggressive, I don't think dawdling is a good idea."
"10-4!" Tillie snapped back at him, saluting.
Stifling a laugh at her antics, he simply said, "Lead the way."
Still carrying her homemade sleeping-gas launcher, the duffel bag, and wearing her pack, Tillie casually stepped out onto the ledge and began walking, as if she were strolling on a sidewalk.
"I can carry that bag," Stone offered.
She did not even bother to look back as a single snort came from her. With a sigh of resignation, Elias followed her, carrying his rifle. Despite her example, he crab-walked along the ledge, keeping his back against the concrete wall. Wilson came out next, mimicking Elias' method. Stone came out last, doing the same.
The Aegis Solution Page 24
