The Filter Trap

by Lorentz, A. L.

  “Come loose?” Susan asked incredulously. “This is an 80,000 pound vault! My cousin went into a vault in Oklahoma and came out of a tornado without a scratch, don’t worry.”

  “This is no tornado.”

  Five seconds.

  A deep baritone crunch vibrated into the narrow column as the ground shook.

  “Nor a nor’easter,” Natalie added.

  “Jesus!” Susan shouted.

  “Choe-song-ham-ni-da, ddal,” Dr. Cho moaned.

  Natalie hugged her father as fear overtook them.

  Deafening noise reverberated in the metal vault as water pushed it down, lifting all the inhabitants momentarily off their feet. The vault twisted and rolled, battering them about the deposit boxes and each other. Susan vomited, Natalie fainted, and Dr. Cho used all his strength to hold his daughter tight with one hand while holding onto a deposit box handle with the other.

  A shriek popped the vault onto one end and tossed everyone to the back. Thrashing outside continued, but the weight of the vault kept it in place after the initial wave’s energy moved past.

  Susan shook. “Good, at least we’re up-ended so we can open the door and get out. I’m sorry for the mess, I just ate before the sirens started.”

  “Does this vault have an air fan?” Kam asked.

  “What? Look, I’m sorry for the smell, but—”

  “No, I mean are we sealed in? Is this vault watertight?”

  “Yes, I believe so, why?”

  “We’re a hundred feet under water. Not to mention a million tons of steel and concrete.”

  Dr. Cho fanned Natalie back to consciousness. “We will suffocate!” he screamed at Kam. “You brought us here to die.”

  “How much air do we have?” Susan asked.

  “What’s the volume of this vault?” Kam asked, squeezing his eyes for a moment urging the last beer-fuzz to vacate so he could put his brain to work.

  “About 500 square feet including the boxes.”

  “So about 200 for us,” said Natalie.

  Kam knew the average human lung capacity was north of half a liter, 2% of a cubic foot. 200 cubic feet was about 6,000 liters, or 12,000 breaths. There were four of them, so 3,000 breaths each. Kam monitored his breathing for a few seconds and counted.

  “If we can slow our breathing down we might have an hour,” he lied.

  “We had a movie like this in Korea,” said Dr. Cho. “Half hour before we start killing each other.”

  “The less people breathing it, the more air left,” Susan, the smallest of them, worried.

  “Susan, right?” Kam asked rhetorically. “My name is Kam, and this is Natalie.” He touched her on the shoulder. “That’s her dad, Dr. Cho. Maybe if we all become friends we won’t be thinking about killing each other.”

  Susan eyed Dr. Cho. “I call all my friends by their first name.”

  “Dr. Kyung-Soo Cho,” he stated proudly.

  “Okay, how about ‘Doc,’ then? I’m glad we have one in here. You haven’t forgotten everything in your retirement yet, have you?”

  Natalie pointed at Kam. “We have two doctors, though neither are the kind you’d like, I’m afraid. My father finished his PhD in mechanical engineering in the seventies and started an audio chip company in the eighties. We make most of the radio signal chips in Asia. You were right about his retirement though. Since then he’s spent his time, and a lot of mine too, giving to charities and universities that support his interests. One of which is linguistics, which happens to be Dr. Douglass’ specialty.”

  Susan pointed at the old man. “So you’re good at spending money.” She raised her eyebrow at Kam. “And you’re just really good at . . . talking it out of him? How did you know all about breathing and how much water is over our heads and all that?”

  “My studies involve multiple disciplines. The way you breathe informs how you speak. How you speak can either inform or be informed by the development of language over time. A true linguist studies much more than just talking.”

  “He’s too humble,” Natalie said. “Dr. Douglass is the country’s—perhaps the world’s—most accomplished linguist. His groundbreaking work is why my father has donated hundreds of millions to MIT.”

  “Hundreds?” Susan gasped, finally noticing the tailoring of Dr. Cho’s frayed jacket, his Rolex, and other details that silently alluded to wealth. “And you, the daughter, are just along for the ride?”

  “Natalie is humbler than I am,” Kam interrupted. “She’s the one that created and holds the patents on most of the chips currently in use.”

  “Great, how about one of you Korean super-engineers fix this damn cell phone for me so we can call someone to get us out of here?” Susan turned to Kam. “And then you can tell me how to talk the 911 operator into rescuing us.”

  “It’s not really that simple,” Natalie cautioned. “Your phone’s signal can’t penetrate steel this thick.”

  “And even if it could, I’m not sure it would have anything to connect to,” Kam clarified.

  Something big thudded into the vault outside, shifting it again. They all grasped for the deposit box handles to steady themselves. When the vault came to rest Natalie stood up and raised her hand. “It’s wet.”

  Kam moved over to investigate. The lowest point in the vault, a gap in the deposit boxes at the corner, took on water. “Our oxygen is going to be displaced by water before carbon dioxide at this rate.”

  “So let’s get out of here,” said Susan.

  Collisions on the exterior rattled.

  “Doesn’t sound great out there, either,” Natalie said.

  “You’re up, professor,” Dr. Cho goaded Kam. “Stuck in an 80,000 pound box taking on water and buried under rubble. The last problem you’ll ever solve if you can’t figure it out. I’ve invested nearly a quarter-billion dollars of my fortune in your brain. Now I’m betting my life.”

  Chapter 2

  “It’s been an hour,” Dr. Cho reminded them. “What will we do when air runs out, meditate?”

  “There’s already three feet of water in here, you’re welcome to lay down and take a nap,” Susan snipped.

  “Part of me hoped we’d be rescued,” Kam cautiously began. “Surely Susan’s bank manager knows the protocol, and would expect she’s in here.”

  “That’s fine, but my boss lives downtown. If he’s alive, I doubt he has any way to tell anyone, not that I’d be his first concern anyway.”

  Kam touched his jaw. “Then we only have one dangerous option. Can you all swim and hold your breath?”

  Dr. Cho’s overconfident frustration died. He slowly shook his head side to side.

  “I’ll pull you, Appa.”

  “Only if he won’t weigh you down,” Kam cautioned Natalie. “This will be harder than you think.”

  “I thought the pressure would seal the door closed, anyway.”

  “That’s why we have to wait for it to equalize.”

  “You mean wait for us to drown,” Susan gasped.

  “We’re up to our elbows in water seeping in through that air vent already. Soon it’ll be up to our necks, and after that we’ll float up to the door when the water gets higher. When the water stops coming in, the pressure will be equalized and the door mechanism, assuming it still works, can open. We just swim to safety.”

  “That’s a mighty big just,” said Susan. “How do you propose we stay alive till then with no oxygen? I know it’s been an hour and this water isn’t halfway to the top. We’ll suffocate on carbon dioxide before the pressure equalizes.”

  Kam turned red. “I may have been a bit conservative with my air estimates earlier.”

  Natalie realized why. “You had us breathe shallow for an hour, saving the air.”

  “Insurance,” Kam said. “Buying time in case the rescue never came. However, we’ll also need air to swim to the top if the vault is trapped under water. For all we know we could have rolled to the bottom of the Charles. Can we open these deposit boxes?”

/>   Susan pulled out a jangly key ring. “I’ve got the master key.”

  “Good. We can cup the air by turning these upside down now and have a few breaths after the door opens.”

  “So we just sit and wait and hold our breath?”

  “You got a better idea?” asked Dr. Cho.

  Susan tried her mobile phone again in vain, smashing it against the steel wall when it refused to connect.

  The sound echoed off the metal walls a second time, settling into a rhythmic pattern.

  “That came from outside!”

  Chapter 3

  “Holy shit, sir!”

  Profanity and sweat poured from the young private in equal measure.

  “If I may, this is a fucking lost cause.” She pushed her slippery helmet back up above her brow. “We should turn back, look for survivors downtown. Nobody was even here, it’s Christmas break.”

  “Stow that trepidation bullshit, Private Silversun!”

  The corporal turned to the pilot door and knocked hard. He winced as the punishment on his knuckles enflamed his arthritis. “I’ve seen plenty worse than this in my time. Be glad you’re not getting shot at.”

  “Sir?” the pilot responded to the knock.

  “How far are the coordinates? I thought we’d be inland by now.”

  One of the two pilots turned his head and shouted over rotor noise. “We are inland, sir. Everything south of the Charles River is flooded. We’ll be there soon.”

  “Sir, are you seeing this?” asked Silversun. “How can anything be alive down there? Just look.”

  “I was in Haiti and Thailand for tsunami cleanup. This is nothing. They made everything out of wood over there, but America builds with steel. Boston will hold up, have faith.”

  “Pardon me, sir, but have you looked down yet?”

  The corporal leaned towards the open side of the Huey Venom, with one hand on the retrofitted rescue winch. “Of course I—oh.”

  Boston and its waterways formed a congruous mash of muddy water, oil, and rubble. Here and there floated small caches of Bostonians that slept and died together when the wave hit. The Sun had yet to fully illuminate the vanished city and the corporal struggled to hide his fear of what daylight would show.

  “Dios,” the corporal uttered and stood up straight, looking across the dim horizon and wondering if he could remember the Spanish Catholic prayers his grandmother made him repeat four decades ago. Pointless. If anybody in Boston remembered them, it didn’t help them last night.

  “Okay!” yelled the pilot. “We’re where MIT—well—where MIT used to be.”

  “Sir?” asked the private. “How are we supposed to find this guy, anyway? I went on a few evacs in Ramadi, but they were nothing like this.”

  Instead of answering, the corporal looked through the pilot door and asked, “Are we over the GPS yet?”

  “We lost GPS last night when the satellites went down. Conventional navigation shows we’ve been hovering over the spot this past minute.”

  The corporal took a folded printout from his pocket, uncrumpled it, and read it to Private Silversun. “ . . . ‘School of Architecture’ . . . oh boy.”

  He looked down again, not seeing anything that looked like the ten story building in the picture.

  The corporal banged on the cockpit glass again. “I think you boys got the wrong spot, there’s nothin’ down there.”

  The other pilot yelled, “Are you familiar with Boston, sir?”

  “Not especially.”

  “I grew up in Southie. Do you see the blocky tower to our left, roughly one mile away?”

  “So what?”

  “That’s Prudential Tower, sir. Or was, anyway. Prudential's across the river from MIT. Compass and distance readings put us right over MIT, over the Stata Center.”

  The corporal picked up his binoculars. Recognizing the Boston skyline would be a tough sell now even for a local. The remnants of a few tall towers beaten by the waves stood with windows blown out and interiors stripped. Between them a row of empty shoe boxes used as piñatas cowered in high water. More concrete landmarks, two mangled steel skeletons illuminated only by the sporadic plumes of natural gas fires, rose many hundreds of feet above the flood.

  “Corporal Minor, on our right is Prospect Hill at roughly one and a half miles. Mission Hill to the left is roughly two miles. Please verify and confirm we’ve reached our destination, sir.”

  “Alright, I believe you, goddammit!” I just didn’t want to. “I hope this asshole isn’t as important as the brass thinks, cuz all that’s left down there is cold meat.”

  Minor and the private both craned their necks out of the Huey. Heaps of concrete pushed aside a puree of trees, dirt, and uprooted steel bathing in water darker than a cloudy night sky in the country. The flooding brought rubble and debris south of the former campus into the Charles River, looking more like the Amazon: wide, dirty, and fast.

  Every few minutes another structure failed and released bodies to the current, bobbing to the top like marshmallows in hot chocolate.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Silversun asked after moving to the other side of the helicopter.

  Minor leaned out behind her.

  “That shiny thing, sir, like a giant silver dollar. Do you see it?”

  Minor let out a laugh. “There’s the bow on our Christmas gift. I hope our professor is as smart as you, Silversun.” He turned to the pilots again and knocked on the glass, pointing at where he wanted them to go. “Take us in closer, over there, we got a big present to open!” Ain’t nowhere else to look anyway unless they bring us some scuba gear.

  “Oh, if I were a betting man,” said Minor, uncrumpling the rest of the short dossier in his hand. He studied the highlights again, then put it back in his pocket. The water rippled as they lowered closer. Gently falling snow blew back up at them. He shook his head. “Ever put a dog in the washing machine?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “It’s more dangerous when the dog survives. Opening that vault’s gonna be tricky, and even worse if we have to pull anybody out alive. Time for you to earn a few more medals, kid.”

  Silversun, already strapping into the harness, asked, “What am I supposed to do when I get down there?”

  “Ain’t you ever robbed a bank before?”

  Amanda Silversun’s eyes sparkled and Minor’s narrowed. She hadn’t thought of that, and he shouldn’t have suggested it.

  “You are not to touch any money you find, Private. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said while making final adjustments to the winch harness. “I meant how do I get in?”

  “Let’s hope they left the door unlocked.”

  Private Silversun stepped out onto the tiny platform and signaled. Minor yelled over his shoulders at the pilots. “Keep ‘er as steady as ya got!”

  She reached the water and motioned for slack before floating over to the big metal circle. Private Silversun tugged hard on the spokes of the giant wheel but they didn’t budge. She took her carbine up out over her shoulders and brandished it like a club, whacking the butt of the rifle on the edge of the big steel door five times to no effect. She paused and did it again.

  A clomping noise started from inside and the massive door swung open into the air, its lip just above the surface of the water. The private maneuvered around to the opening to see what Minor already could from seventy feet above. “Imagine the payout on those odds,” he said, listening to the ecstatic shouts of jubilation fight rotor noise.

  “Christmas miracle!” a pilot shouted.

  “We’re not out of danger yet,” Minor cautioned.

  Below the helicopter four wet heads flashed big smiles at their rescuers even as water started pouring in over the lip of the opening. The pressure equalization that would have saved them if they made a break for it became a liability. Buoyancy evaporated and the full weight of the vault sank into the soft sediment underneath.

  Three of the four faces turned sou
r when the fourth disappeared.

  “Appa!” Natalie cried, before the vault pulled all of them back under.

  Private Silversun dove over the edge of the vault, already underwater. Kam, the strongest swimmer, deftly pushed through the opening. From there he turned to help the private lift the others up and out.

  Kam grabbed Susan’s wrists and pulled her out just in time as the vault tipped sideways and the door started to close under its own weight. The private hooked her line to the door and signaled the chopper to lift it open as it, too, slipped under the water.

  “It’s too heavy!” Minor grabbed a megaphone. “Huey’s weren’t made for hauling, that thing is ten times our load weight even under water. You’ve only got a few seconds before I have to cut the line or we burn the engine.”

  Silversun gave a thumbs up, meeting Kam’s eyes.

  Kam took a deep breath.

  “Just ten seconds.”

  “Sir, don’t!”

  Kam dove into the fully submerged vault, despite the private’s warning. With the Sun just peeking over the horizon, the water remained too dense with debris to see anything outside the vault. Inside it felt like swimming under frozen quicksand, made all the more relevant by the knowledge that as Kam swam deeper the vault kept sinking.

  Bodies tussled in the dark. A grip eluded Kam until he heard a burbled deep shout.

  “Tashni Gojam!”

  A body collided with Kam. He grabbed the small frame, steadied his legs against the vault wall and pushed the limp body toward the surface. He looked up after it, but saw nothing and felt disoriented as the vault opening slipped past and knocked him sideways.

  He heard the private and Susan’s muffled voices vibrate in the thick water, telling him the body must have reached the surface and which way it was. He oriented himself the other way.

  The exertion tapped most of his energy, but he knew it was more air than the other vault rider had. Without taking another breath he swam back down through the opening, but his hands couldn’t feel another body, arm, or finger anywhere. His head reeled under the increasing pressure. More frantic yelling came from above, but he couldn’t process its meaning in a place this cold and alien.