Labyrinth

by James Axler

  J.B. didn’t waste precious time arguing. He grabbed hold of the hatch’s wheel and started turning it. When the lock released, he flopped the hatch back on its hinges.

  They held their torches down into the opening, half-expecting to see a torrent.

  Twenty-five feet below, the flat concrete floor was dry.

  But the sound of the water was much louder.

  With Jubilee following, Ryan climbed through the hatch and descended a steel access ladder that was lag-bolted to the wall. The one-eyed man stepped off the bottom of the ladder, set his torch down and helped Jubilee to the ground. Torch in one hand, Astra .380 in the other, he scanned the dark channel. It was square, twenty by twenty, and its floor was pitched. The slope steepened to the right, radically. Somewhere out of sight in that direction, it angled down to meet the turbine blades. The channel hadn’t held water for a very long time. There were no puddles on the floor.

  Ryan couldn’t only hear the water’s roar, he could feel the vibration of it flowing under his feet. It was traveling away from the ville, under the dam, and out the other side.

  The hatch clanged shut above them. J.B. locked it from the inside before he started down the ladder. Wicklaw was already halfway down, moving carefully on his injured foot, which was bleeding again.

  The attack came without a click of warning.

  The demon had to have been crouching just out of sight to the left.

  Ryan caught a glimpse of a shadow, flying through the air, maybe fifteen feet off the ground. It hit Wicklaw hard and low from behind and kept on going. The big man groaned as he was slammed facefirst into the ladder. He dropped his torch. Something else fell away as well, out from under his robe, landing on the floor with a thud, and Wicklaw dropped like a trapdoor had opened under him. He clung to the ladder with his hands, his arms fully outstretched, bearing his entire weight. One leg flailed to find the rungs.

  Ryan blinked. The other leg was gone at the hip.

  Wicklaw threw back his head and screamed. His blood rained down the ladder, rained down on the channel floor.

  Ryan spun Jubilee out of the way and shouted to J.B., “Jump! Jump, now!”

  J.B. didn’t question, didn’t hesitate. He pushed off from the ladder and fell past the mortally wounded pilgrim.

  An instant after he hit the floor, the blur once again passed high overhead, this time from right to left. The second collision knocked Wicklaw from the ladder and sent him spinning through the air. As he did so, a slurry of blood and guts splattered the walls. Practically cut in two by the creature’s leg horns, Wicklaw crashed to his side.

  The demon fell on top of him at once, clicking up a storm, its sides puffing in and out. It opened its mouth impossibly wide, like it had unhinged its jaws, and leaning over his face, began to dry heave. Dry heaves that turned quickly wet. Yellow slime poured out of its throat.

  Wicklaw shrieked, frantically clawing at the air, and kicking with his surviving leg.

  The first gush was just a hint of what was to come. The demon bore down, puffing harder, and puked buckets.

  Wicklaw went rigid, his back arching up from the floor. His face and beard covered in digestive slime, he blew yellow bubbles.

  Ryan and J.B. took aim at the creature’s back, but neither fired. They remembered how many bullets it had taken to stop the last one. Wicklaw was a goner, and this demon was busy.

  Tucking away their blasters, they snatched up Jubilee by the armpits and carried her between them as they ran down the intake channel. The light from their torches faded to gray thirty feet ahead; beyond that was black. The floor continued to tip until the angle was forty-five degrees; if it had been wet, they couldn’t have kept their footing. As it was, it felt like they were half falling into dim oblivion, and never quite reaching it.

  When the sound of the water stopped beneath them, they could hear the echoes of the demon wretching over its kill.

  Ryan had seen some bastard hard things in the hellscape, but the look in Wicklaw’s eyes as the thing vomited acid onto his face was something he hoped he would live long enough to forget.

  “There’s the turbines,” J.B. said.

  The turbine assembly completely filled the channel, blocking their passage. The steel housing was mounted to huge anchor bolts set in the floor, walls, and ceiling. In the middle of the housing, a set of fan blades ten feet across was suspended on a central hub and axle. There was no screen or grate to impede the flow of water across the blades.

  They set Jubilee down in front of the assembly. Then Ryan and J.B. poked their torches in the gaps between the fan blades. Right away, the nature of the problem was clear. The turbine had more than one set of blades, and each turned independently on the same axle. For them to crawl through the turbine, all the gaps would have to be lined up.

  The two men tried to turn the first fan, pulling down on the edges of the blades. It wouldn’t rotate. It wouldn’t even budge. After a hundred years its grease had turned solid and its bearings were frozen.

  Ryan wedged the barrel of the Galil between the lowermost blade and the turbine housing, and leaned all his weight on it. With a groan, the fan cracked free. It still wasn’t easy to turn, but J.B. managed to move the blades far enough so Ryan could slip past.

  Between the first and second sets of blades there was perhaps three feet of space.

  Using the Galil again, Ryan pried the second fan into position and crawled forward to the third, which left enough room for Jubilee and J.B. to enter behind him.

  “Can you move the first blade back?” Ryan said.

  J.B. was already doing just that. He pulled down on the fan, rotating its blades to block the demon’s path.

  For the moment at least, they were enclosed in a steel housing.

  “I don’t think it can get in,” J.B. said.

  “We can’t stay here,” Ryan replied. “The longer we wait, the more of them are going to come. We’ve got to find the end of the channel. See if there’s an opening to the outside.”

  He started attacking the last fan blade with the assault rifle. He bent the steel stock, but got the fan’s frozen bearings to release. He crawled out the far side of the turbine and stood up. The end of the channel wasn’t within the radius of his torch.

  “I’m going check it out,” he told J.B.

  “Here, take the Smith,” the Armorer said, squeezing his arm past the huddled girl. “It’s got more wallop.”

  “No, you keep it.”

  Ryan left the Galil behind as well because he didn’t want the extra weight to slow him down. With the .380 in one hand and the torch in the other, he sprinted away from the turbine. The grade continued downhill and steep. If he had something chasing him on the return trip, he was dead meat.

  The outflow channel went on and on. He passed more demon holes in the walls. Nothing came out after him. He kept on running until he saw another hatch set in the floor. This one didn’t have a wheel on top, and there was no stenciled sign indicating its function. He tried to open it, but couldn’t. It was locked from the other side.

  When he’d gone another fifty feet, he could see the channel’s terminus ahead. It ended in a rusty red square. Not a spec of light showed through. It was like looking at the bottom of a mine shaft.

  Ryan raced up to the floor-to-ceiling barrier. The gate was made of heavy steel, ribbed vertically and horizontally for strength, watertight or nearly so. Its hinges were on the other side, inaccessible. The gate was jammed closed. He tried kicking out one of the unreinforced panels, hoping it had rusted through.

  It hadn’t.

  And there was no budging the gate with any means at hand. It had to have weighed ten tons, easy.

  “Fireblast!” he muttered, giving it another kick for good measure.

  From the channel behind him came the sound of a terrible collision. And a squeal of bending metal. There was a pause. Then it sounded again. Collision. Squeal.

  “Ryan!” J.B. shouted, his cry echoing down the channel. />
  Then the Smith boomed, and kept on booming.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Water poured between the elevator car doors, splashing over and swirling around the sprawled companions. As they pushed up from the floor, holding their weapons high to keep them dry, the elevator bobbed like a cork, tipping from side to side, and as it did so, banging into the shaft walls. Its control cables had gone slack when it hit bottom fifteen feet too soon.

  “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc cried, pointing at the doors. “We are going under!”

  “Hit the up switch!” Mildred shouted, bracing herself against the force of the incoming waterfall.

  As Krysty was closest to the controls, she lunged for the button for floor eighteen. She punched it and kept on punching it.

  The elevator’s motor engaged, then labored mightily, but the car didn’t lift.

  Brown water lapped around their knees, its level rising quickly toward the elevator’s control panel.

  “It won’t go!” Krysty said, still punching the button. “When the water hits the panel, it’s going to short out!”

  Mildred jumped for the trap door in the ceiling, but she couldn’t reach it. “Get the escape hatch, Doc,” she said.

  As the old man pushed the trapdoor up and out of the way, the bottom of the elevator broke free of the water.

  Because of all the weight sloshing around inside it, the car struggled desperately to climb. The water drained out the way it had come in, through the seam between the doors, only much more slowly. It was still emptying when the car stopped at story eighteen. The doors opened and it poured out in a wave, sheeting across the floor.

  Drenched to the waist, the companions stepped out of the car. They wrung the water from their coat tails and sleeves, and dumped quantities of it from their boots.

  “Where water from?” Jak asked.

  “Like Doc said before,” Krysty replied, “the whitecoats diverted the river underground so they could build the redoubt in the canyon floor. At some point the river broke free of its man-made channel and flooded the bottom story. It probably happened on nukeday, when the dam split open.”

  “That’s certainly one explanation,” Mildred said.

  “You would argue something different?” Doc queried.

  “We know the demons escaped to the dam, because that’s where they are, today,” Mildred said. “If the pilgrims’ legends are true, we know when. We don’t know how or why they ended up there. I think it’s possible that Bob and Enid flooded the lab, themselves. That they did it on purpose, after their experimental subjects got loose.”

  “They flooded the entire floor in order to drown the demons?” Krysty said.

  “That would be one way to eliminate the problem without risking their own safety, and the future of the redoubt and their research.”

  “What you are proposing could not have been a spur of the moment reaction to disaster,” Doc said. “In order for the strategy to be effective, the flooding of the floor required an enormous amount of water, transferred in a matter of a few minutes. Otherwise the demons would have simply burrowed up through the concrete to avoid the deluge. And there’s no evidence of their presence in the upper floors of this structure.”

  “So there had to be a system in place,” Mildred said. “A failsafe built in to the lab floor. A last-ditch way to terminate their hellspawn.”

  “Only it failed,” Krysty reminded her.

  “That’s true. The strategy didn’t work. The demons survived the flooding of floor nineteen, and ended up in the dam. The question remains, how did they get there?”

  “Started digging here,” Jak suggested. “Kept digging. Not far dam.”

  “That’s not possible,” Mildred told him. “On Enid’s computer, I saw the chemistry of the enzymes the trannies produce. These creatures were built from the ground up, and they were designed to burrow through redoubt-grade concrete after it had been softened by their natural secretions. Their secretions specifically attack the binding agents in the concrete. They won’t work on the bedrock around here. It’s one of the default controls Bob and Enid included in their design. It effectively cages the demons, limiting their movements and operations to the assigned target areas.”

  “So the only way the demons could have gotten to the dam is through concrete,” Krysty said.

  “Or an easier way…” Mildred said

  “Which is?” Krysty prompted.

  “A tunnel that leads out of floor nineteen and connects the redoubt with the dam.”

  “My dear Mildred, there is no way to verify if what you are suggesting is true,” Doc said. “And even if there was confirmation, such a tunnel is of no use to us. That floor is under fifteen feet of water.”

  “If there was a way to flood floor nineteen in order to save themselves in an emergency,” Mildred said, “there also had to be a way to empty it after the crisis had been averted. These are whitecoats. Thorough, thoughtful people who plan ahead. The development of transgenic bioweapons was the culmination of Bob and Enid’s lifework. This redoubt was the key to their success. Everything they needed was here. Secrecy. Isolation. Technical support. Bottomless funding. They would make sure they didn’t have to abandon the site if something unforeseen like this happened. They would correct their mistake by chilling it, drain the floor, and start over.”

  “We need to go back to that hydro control room,” Krysty said. “If there’s a way to drain the floor, it’s probably there.”

  When they returned to the control station, the illuminated water flow schematic made a lot more sense. They could identify the valve and T-junction symbols that directed the flow of water through various underground channels. The blue-colored lights, either on or off, indicated water’s presence or absence in sections of the system.

  Mildred pointed at the schematic and said, “Water was diverted from the river down through this passage and into the lab floor. The blue lights are lit all along floor nineteen, which probably indicates it’s full of water. But they aren’t blinking, like the ones in the river.”

  “So the trapped water remains static,” Doc said. “There is no current moving, in or out.”

  “The lights continue on from the far end of the lab floor,” Krysty said. “They go under the ville, the fields, even under the lake. It looks like they come up inside the dam.”

  “An underground passage,” Doc said. “Just as Mildred hypothesized. Given its length and endpoint, I think it’s safe to assume it had nothing to do with terminating the laboratory subjects.”

  “I think it’s an emergency escape tunnel for the redoubt’s whitecoats,” Krysty said. “It’s got to be. When there was five hundred feet of water overhead, the only ways in and out of Minotaur were via the mattrans unit or in some kind of underwater wag that took people and supplies to and from the surface. If something went wrong with the transport vehicle, and the mat-trans unit failed, they’d be stuck down here. Bob and Enid wouldn’t leave themselves without a backup.”

  “I think you’re right,” Mildred said. “And it’s easy to see how the demons got to the dam.”

  “Pray do elaborate,” Doc said.

  “Bob and Enid tried to drown their offspring, but they didn’t get all of them. Some made it out of the lab, down the emergency escape tunnel to the dam before the tunnel was flooded.”

  Krysty pointed at the line of unblinking lights between floor nineteen and the dam. “The water in that passage is all that’s keeping the demons where they are.”

  “Yep,” Mildred said. “And to rescue Ryan and J.B., we’re going to have to pull the plug on it. With those stones back in front of the redoubt’s entrance, it’s our only way in.”

  “Because it follows a straight line to the dam, more or less, it appears to be a much shorter route than the roundabout path through the fields Ryan and J.B. were forced to take,” Doc said.

  After a quick survey of the station’s simple control panels, Mildred located the remote switches she needed. Not only
did she have to open the emergency escape passage’s drain valve, which was on the far side of the dam, she had to close the water intake from the river, which kept the channel perpetually topped off. When she activated the water release valve, they heard the roar of rushing water from the floor below.

  “How long are we going to have to wait for the water level to drop?” Krysty said.

  “Better give it ten minutes,” Mildred said.

  Thinking about the danger Ryan and J.B were in, they gave it closer to five.

  This time they braced themselves for the elevator car’s splash landing, and managed to keep their feet. When the doors opened, a wave of brown water poured in, filling the car to the height of their shins. They faced a floor-to-ceiling, barred vanadium steel gate. The gate door had been left ajar, presumably a century ago by fleeing whitecoats.

  The companions sloshed forward, into the still-flooded lab. A few of the recessed ceiling lamps had survived, and they threw pools of light onto the dirty water as it swirled away. The current was running strong toward the far end of the floor. The rips sucked away pieces of paper, styrofoam cups, even chair cushions. The banks of computers were dead; their cracked monitors full of brown water. As were the open desk drawers. The laboratory’s countertops had been swept clean of glassware. A row of slime-streaked, bright yellow biohazard suits with helmets and self-contained breathing systems hung from a row of hooks along one wall. In the back eddies formed by the corners of the desks, clots of unidentifiable, shapeless things, all hairy green, or foamy brown, spun in endless circles.

  Along the join of the walls and ceiling was a greasy black ring, the floor’s high water mark. The lower walls were covered with mold slime, as was every exposed surface.

  “It looks like a giant petri dish,” Mildred remarked as she took it all in.

  “Smells like a giant latrine,” Krysty said.

  They slogged on, toward another barred barrier that divided the lab floor in half. In front of the steel fence, a thick red line had been painted across the ceiling and walls, and presumably also under the water on the floor. A demarcation line. Riveted to the barrier’s open door was a stenciled notice. Warning: Extreme Biohazard. Absolutely No Unprotected Personnel Beyond This Point.