The Project

by Brian Falkner

  “Who farted, dude?” Tommy said. “That’s disgusting.”

  Luke glanced back to see not one, but two police officers silhouetted by the lights in the park beyond the bridge.

  They reached the center of the span, heads bowed against the rain. Here in the middle of the river, the wind was in a fury, hurling blasts of water at them as if trying to sweep them from the bridge.

  Lightning flashed again, right on the riverbank, not three hundred feet downstream. It struck a tree, and there was a crack, followed by a strange creaking noise, audible even above the crashing thunder and the rush of the water, as about half the tree split away and toppled into the river.

  Immediately, flashlights came on along the opposite bank. More police. Two of them, spotlighting the riverbank, searching for the source of the noise.

  “Contact front!” Tommy said, twisting his head toward Luke to be heard.

  Luke looked behind him. They were stuck. They couldn’t go forward and they couldn’t go backward.

  “Well, this was one of your better ideas,” Tommy said.

  “I thought it was your idea,” Luke said.

  He glanced both ways desperately, hoping the officers would head off somewhere. But clearly they were there to stop anybody stupid enough to try crossing the bridge.

  “We’ll have to wait for them to leave,” Luke shouted, the wind swallowing up the words and spitting them upriver.

  Even as he spoke, there was an angry surge, and black water spilled across the concrete base of the bridge, flowing around Luke’s shoes in the darkness.

  “I hope you can swim,” Tommy yelled.

  His words were cut off by another brilliant flash of light, searing their eyeballs. Then two giant hands of thunder shook the sturdy bridge and them with it.

  At that moment, the moon appeared through a hole, a deep tunnel in the clouds. It wasn’t a full moon, and it came and went as dark cloud curtains were drawn again and again across its face, but it still lit them up like actors on a stage.

  “Go away!” Luke shouted at the sky, certain that the police would see them. “Bad moon! Go away!”

  More water surged across the base of the bridge. The river was rising faster now, and as he watched, the bridge beneath their feet disappeared into the river, leaving just the handrail to either side sticking up out of the water.

  Luke grabbed the rail for balance and Tommy did the same. Water gushed up over the tops of Luke’s shoes.

  “We gotta get moving,” Tommy yelled.

  “You think?” Luke shouted back.

  They’d made it only a couple of yards when that bad moon burst back into life. There was a shout from the far bank, and two powerful flashlights illuminated them like prison fugitives.

  There was shouting, too, and although Luke couldn’t make out the words, it was pretty obvious what they wanted.

  He gripped the handrail, fighting to keep his feet against the rush of the water, which now reached up just below his knees.

  Tommy slipped and fell, and if not for Luke’s hand on the neck of his parka, he would have gone under.

  Luke hauled him back up and clutched the handrail with both hands, inching his way forward.

  Then Luke’s footing went. One minute he was standing, and the next minute his knee cracked into the struts of the handrail with a sickening thud, and a jagged spear of pain shot up his leg. He kept hold of the handrail, though, thinking that if it weren’t for that, they’d be a mile downstream by now. He hauled himself back to his feet, his shoes jammed up against the bottom of the handrail by the force of the water.

  Tommy stopped, grasping the railing, unable to move.

  Around them the river was not simply flowing; it was seething and boiling, massive currents pushing their way to the surface.

  “I’m stuck,” Tommy yelled.

  “Hand over hand,” Luke shouted. “Just pull yourself along!”

  Tommy reluctantly took one hand off the rail and replaced it in front of the other. Luke put a hand on his friend’s shoulders to steady him and urged him on.

  They moved what seemed like an inch at a time, but still they moved. The surge of the water seemed to lessen as they neared the far bank.

  The cops waded into the river and extended their hands to help them the last few feet, dragging them out of the water. They didn’t let go until Luke and Tommy were up onto higher, drier ground, away from the river and the bridge approach.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” one of the police officers shouted into Luke’s face.

  “Are you completely insane?” asked the other one.

  “We … we were …,” Tommy stammered, gasping for breath.

  “We got lost,” Luke said.

  “Lost!” It was clear the police officer didn’t believe him. “I want your names and addresses, and I want to know what you were really doing out there.”

  “We were looking for my sister,” Tommy said, and Luke glanced sharply at him. “She’s only six.”

  “Your sister? Where?”

  The alarm on the police officers’ faces was instant.

  “She was behind us,” Tommy said, waving a hand in that general direction.

  The police officers turned their lights back to the river, forgetting about Luke and Tommy, their concentration on the dark, rushing waters that consumed the footbridge.

  The moment the police officers turned, Tommy and Luke ran, sprinting through the rain up the sloping path that led away from the river. There were shouts and footsteps behind them, but Tommy and Luke were smaller and quicker and had a head start. They ducked off the path into the cover of some trees and crouched, watching as heavy boots thundered up the pathway.

  As soon as the cops were past, they cut back down through the trees to the river path and, with water lapping at their feet, ran down the pathway until they reached a covered entrance to one of the university buildings. Out of the rain and away from danger—for the moment, at least. They both collapsed onto a set of concrete stairs that led up to the doorway.

  Tommy whooped with excitement. “You think we lost them?”

  Luke nodded.

  “How’s the leg?”

  “Just a bang. Bit of a gash. I’ve had worse.”

  “You’d better rinse it off real good. That water smelled like seven sorts of sh—”

  “Shoop shoop.” Luke grimaced. “Tasted like it, too.”

  “I told you not to drink the stuff,” Tommy said.

  “What can I say? I was thirsty,” Luke said.

  “We were lucky twice tonight,” Tommy said. He leaned back on the stairs and stretched out his legs. “With the river, then with the cops.”

  “True that.” Luke reached out of the shelter and cupped his hands, collecting some rainwater. He rinsed his mouth and spat it out, trying to clear the acrid taste from his tongue.

  “Shame about the book, though. I was really looking forward to finding it,” Tommy said.

  “Me too.”

  “I mean, if it was up to me, I’d still be heading in there, but with your sore leg …”

  “My leg’s sweet as, bro,” Luke said.

  “And all the water you swallowed and everything?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “I mean, I’d be going for it. But I don’t blame you if you want to just head home,” Tommy said.

  “What for?”

  “You know. Warm bath, hot chocolate, and a nap.”

  “My grandmother likes warm baths, hot chocolates, and naps,” Luke said.

  “You seriously still want to break into the library?”

  “Absolutely. As soon as the floods go down, that book will be locked away in the basement and all the electricity and security cameras and alarms will be turned back on. It’s now or never.”

  “What if we get caught?” Tommy asked.

  “It’s a library,” Luke said. “What are they going to do—tell us to shush? Come on.”

  They made sure the coast was cle
ar, then headed toward the library. The rain was heavy and constant, but Luke didn’t mind because it washed away some of the muck and the stench of the river water.

  “Look at it this way,” Luke said as they walked. “The hard bit is over now.”

  He was wrong about a lot of things that night.

  8. DOG-FACE

  Red lights of fire engines reflected off the wet roads and strobed the walls of the library. There were other colors, too, orange lights of emergency vehicles and the red-blue lights of police cars all intermingling. The rain caught the lights so that it seemed even the air around them was dancing in a crazy circus disco of colors and patterns.

  Police officers, firefighters, and security guards stood around in groups, talking and gesturing at the river, paying no attention to the rain.

  “We’ll never do it,” Tommy said. “We’ll never get in. There are people everywhere.”

  Luke said nothing as he watched the movement of a group of emergency workers inspecting a sandbag levee that had been built across the entrance to the library’s loading dock. Seemingly satisfied, the group moved on, disappearing around the side of the building.

  “The loading dock,” Luke said after a while. “That’s our way in. Easy as, bro.”

  They were crouched among some trees in a small park just across a narrow road from the library’s main entrance. The loading dock was on the other side of the road, nearer to the river. Most of the emergency workers were congregated to their right, over on Madison Street.

  “Just move slowly,” Tommy said. “We’ll be hard to see in these dark raincoats, but movement attracts attention.”

  They advanced carefully toward the river, away from the flashing lights, and crossed the road, skirting along the railway line and heading for the loading dock.

  A long ramp that led down into the underground dock was blocked off with the sandbag wall, but they bypassed it, climbing over the side and onto the ramp.

  Water gushed around Luke’s feet, pouring over the edges of the ramp and flowing down into the loading dock.

  Lights appeared along the narrow road, and they both dived down behind the sandbag wall, flattening their backs against it, not worrying about the water that now flowed all around them.

  A conversation sounded above, indistinct through the rain, and flashlights played down into the cellarlike loading dock.

  Luke held his breath, and after a moment, the lights moved on.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and got to his feet.

  His sneakers skidded on the wet ramp and slid out from under him. He hurtled down the steep ramp into the water as if on a waterslide at an amusement park, emerging, coughing and spluttering, in the slowly filling swimming pool that was the loading dock.

  Luke just had time to call out, “Watch the ramp, it’s slipp—” when Tommy landed right on top of him, pushing him back down under the water.

  Luke came up choking, spraying water out of his nose, grateful that it was clean rainwater they were in, not the scungy stuff that was flowing down the river.

  Tommy popped up next to him and spat out a mouthful of water.

  “Are you okay?” Luke asked.

  “I was already soaking wet,” Tommy said. “Couldn’t get any wetter! At least this stuff doesn’t smell so bad.”

  “I think it’s rainwater,” Luke said. “The drains must be blocked.”

  A wobbly wooden step led up from the loading dock to a concrete platform where there was a door set into the wall. Luke tried the door.

  “It’s locked,” he said.

  “What did you expect? A red carpet and Hawaiian dancing girls?” Tommy asked.

  “Would’ve been nice,” Luke said.

  Tommy opened a waterproof backpack, taking out a small gun-shaped gadget.

  Luke watched in amazement as Tommy inserted the thin probe at the end of the object into the keyhole of the door and squeezed the trigger. He turned the handle and the door opened. Easy as.

  “It’s a lock pick,” Tommy explained. “It’s what locksmiths use to open doors when people have lost their keys. I bought it off the Internet.”

  “Don’t you have to have a license to own one of those?” Luke asked.

  “Yup.”

  “So, do you have a license?”

  “Nope,” Tommy said, and handed Luke another item out of his bag of tricks. A tiny pen-shaped flashlight.

  Luke followed him into the building and pulled the door shut behind them.

  They were back in the corridor that ran beneath the library. If it had been strange and mysterious by day, with the lights on, the corridor was eerie and unsettling in the dark, with just the pencil beams of their flashlights for illumination. Spidery shadows chased each other behind strange objects on the ceilings and the walls, scuttling away from their lights as they played them around the long underground tunnel. Shapes on the walls seemed to reach out toward them as they passed.

  Luke had an uncomfortable feeling that they were not alone down here. Maybe it was the spirits of the thousands of dead authors whose books were buried in these subterranean vaults.

  The overhead conveyor belt system that had been fascinating to him that afternoon now seemed like some infernal engine, a contraption of torture and evil.

  There was a slushing noise as they walked in water that was about two inches deep.

  The walls and the ceiling seemed to be closing in on Luke. He looked at Tommy, who appeared to be enjoying himself in this creepy cave, and tried to shake the feeling off. At least the smell of the river was mostly gone, washed from their clothes by their bath in the loading dock.

  They passed the storage rooms, their doors sheathed in plastic and sandbagged against the coming flood. At the far end of the corridor, they came to a set of double doors that swung open easily and led to the narrow staircase back to the library’s main entrance. They crept to the top of the stairs and looked out through the big glass doors of the entrance.

  More flashing lights intermittently gave the library’s interior a devilish glow. Luke watched for a moment to make sure that nobody was looking in before scurrying across to the main stairs, Tommy behind him.

  “Luke,” Tommy said quietly, and Luke turned to see what the problem was. Even in the low strobing light inside the library, their footprints were clearly visible across the gray carpet of the floor.

  “It’s just water,” Luke said. “It’ll dry before anyone comes in here tomorrow.”

  “You sure?”

  Luke wasn’t but said he was.

  There were books stacked everywhere upstairs, safe from the reach of the floodwaters. They sat in piles, with large handwritten labels giving the unit and shelf number they had been taken from.

  Luke cast his light around. There were books everywhere. It could take all night to find the one they were after. “This is going to take forever,” he said.

  “No, it won’t,” Tommy said. “You said you saw the book just before we were evacuated. That means it will be in one of the last piles. All we have to do is figure out where they finished stacking, and work backward from there.”

  Luke looked around. It seemed that they had started stacking deep in the interior of the library and finished at the entrance.

  “Okay, let’s start at this end,” he said. “I’ll take the left; you take the right.”

  Tommy nodded and moved toward a stack of books.

  Luke dried his hands by rubbing them on the carpet, then began with the nearest pile and scanned the spines. Some of them were blank, which didn’t help, so he moved the books off one by one, stacking them neatly so he could replace them later in the right order.

  He went through five stacks in that manner and was starting to wonder if he had dreamed seeing the book when Tommy asked, “This it?”

  Luke was squatting down. He spun around in excitement, losing his balance and reaching out to steady himself with a hand on the wall.

  It was it.

  It was definitely the book he h
ad seen in the bucket brigade. The picture of the Vitruvian Man leaped out at him from the old gray cloth cover, just as he had remembered it.

  The words above it were brown and faded, so much so that they were almost impossible to read until Tommy shone his flashlight on them.

  Leonardo’s River.

  Luke’s heart seemed to stop for a second. It really was it. The two-million-dollar book. The most boring book in the world.

  Tommy handed it to him, and he ran his fingers over the picture on the cover.

  “That’s the one,” he said.

  There was a sudden loud crash, echoing around over the sound of the rain.

  “What was that?” Tommy asked.

  Luke thought he might have heard footsteps. Somewhere inside the library.

  “Give me your bag,” he said.

  He stashed the book inside Tommy’s waterproof backpack, in among a bunch of gadgets, and sealed the top.

  There were voices now, coming up the stairs from the lower level. He could hear them indistinctly but enough to recognize that the language being spoken wasn’t English.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Tommy.

  They ran as silently as they could into the interior of the library, away from the voices, flicking off their flashlights as they went.

  Luke glanced back as two dark shapes appeared at the top of the stairs. He grabbed Tommy’s coat and pulled him flat against the wall. “Don’t move,” Luke hissed.

  Two men, large and bulky, were silhouetted in scarlet by the lights coming in from outside. Another man appeared behind them, moving more slowly.

  The men all had flashlights, too, but the beams from theirs were an eerie blue.

  “Is there another way out?” Luke whispered.

  “There’s another level above us,” Tommy said. “And stairs at each end of the corridor. We could use the back stairs, go along the top corridor, and sneak down the main stairs behind them.”

  The men were still on the landing, but if they moved farther into the building, Tommy’s plan could work.

  They were shining their strange lights over the piles of books. Then, just like Luke and Tommy, they set to work; however, unlike Luke and Tommy, they just discarded the books into jumbles on the floor, kicking over piles and searching through the debris. It was clear they were looking for something, but Luke couldn’t quite believe they might have been after the same book. Nobody else knew about it.