by Tom Abrahams
Rector tilted his head in the other direction and narrowed his eyes. He pursed his lips and then motioned, craning his neck, toward the elevator on the other side of the lobby.
“You had clearance to come to this floor?” he asked. “To find me and the meteorological lab?”
Clayton nodded earnestly. “Yes. This place is like Fort Knox, am I right?”
Rector’s expression flattened. He tucked his hands into his lab coat pockets and took a step back, away from Clayton. “What’s your name?” he asked.
Clayton fumbled with his DiaTab, thinking of the best possible response. He wasn’t about to give the twitchy scientist his real name. He’d be toast.
“I’m Alan Bean,” he said. “I’m a liaison for Chip Treadgold.”
Rector took another step back, his eyes widening, and tugged at his collar. His eye twitched again and he rubbed it with a knuckle. “Treadgold?” he said. “You work for Treadgold?”
“Yes,” said Clayton, sensing an opening. “He’s not going to like it if I’m delayed. I need to get a message to your lab and one of the technicians there.”
“Which technician?”
“Vihaan Chandra.”
“Huh,” said Rector. “Alan Bean, you said? That name is familiar.”
“It should be,” said Clayton. “People know me.”
Rector nodded. “Okay then, I’ll take you there. Please stay with me, however. You cannot be unattended once we leave the lobby.”
“Understood,” said Clayton, exhaling with relief. “Lead the way.”
Rector led Clayton past the monitors and into a darkened corridor. As they moved through the hallway, lights flickered to illuminate their path. Others in lab coats squeezed past them, scurrying in the opposite direction.
“Here we are,” said Rector. “I’ll bring him out. I can’t have you in the lab no matter who you paint yourself to be, Mr. Bean.”
Clayton stood in the hall and peered past Rector through the open door when the scientist stepped into the lab. He couldn’t see much other than a couple of manned computer terminals.
In the way of the nonstop foot traffic, Clayton stepped out of the walkway and leaned against the wall. So far, so good. He nervously tapped a random rhythm against the wall with his fingers. Several minutes passed and Clayton looked back down the corridor toward where he and Rector had come from. The longer this took, the more vulnerable he was, the more likely it was Rector had figured him out and had led him to a trap. Then the door opened.
Rector poked out his head. “It seems he’s not here,” said the scientist. His left eye twitched. “He’s on his way, though. So wait right there.”
He slipped back into the closed lab and Clayton replayed his conversation with Rector in his mind and it hit him. Rector had his number.
Clayton cursed, pushed himself from the wall, and joined the flow of traffic leading back to the lobby. Within a minute, he was safely back in the tunnel and headed to the stairwell. Sweat formed at his temples and on the back of his neck. He cursed himself again.
“I thought I played the perfect Jedi mind trick on that lab-coated stormtrooper,” he mumbled. “Thought I was clever using the name Alan Bean. Nope. Totally stupid.”
He imitated Rector’s voice. “Yes,” he mimicked, “come with me. I’ll lead you right to your destruction.”
In is haste and arrogance, Clayton had given Rector the name of a legendary NASA astronaut. Alan Bean was on Apollo 12, the fourth man to walk on the moon, and in his later years, he became a painter.
Rector had said, “No matter who you paint yourself to be, Mr. Bean.” He knew it was a lie.
Clayton’s cover was blown. There was no telling where Chandra was. Getting out of the underground hell was going to be near impossible. He cursed again as he turned the corner, opened the stairwell door, and made his way toward the top level, where he’d find the emergency exit.
He was one flight from the top when he heard a door close on a lower level. It echoed up the concrete tube of the well. Clayton stopped, his hand on the cold metal railing, and listened. When the echo of the door dissipated, he could hear steps. More than one person was quickly ascending the stairs.
They were coming for him.
Clayton grabbed the railing and pulled himself upward. He looked over the railing and into the well. He could hear the steps, but he didn’t see his pursuers. Faster he climbed until he reached the top level.
He reached the door and fumbled with his DiaTab, his sweaty hands making it tough to manipulate the screen. He swiped it across the keypad and the door clicked open. He knew the loud hum was a giveaway to the people chasing him, but he had no choice.
He pulled on the door and found himself in another tunnel. Unlike the other floors, this one offered Clayton two choices. He could go right or left. He exhaled and cursed, closing his eyes to imagine the schematic of the train system. He knew this tunnel would lead him parallel to the tracks and ultimately to building five.
He envisioned the layout. It was essentially a pentagonal shape with building one at the top. The building numbers increased clockwise. At the moment, he was in building three. He’d need to move to two, then down to one and five.
He started left. He tried running, but the ache in his injured leg had returned, throbbing when he put weight on it. Nonetheless, he pushed forward as quickly as he could, resisting the temptation to look over his shoulder every couple of steps. He kept reminding himself of the complexity of the tunnel system.
There was no straight line out of the bunkers. He’d successfully found his way from his cell to the emergency exit, which put him in building three. Now he was working his way to the building two stairwell. It would lead him deep underground to level five. At that point, there should be another tunnel leading to buildings one and five. From there, he could access the elevator’s mechanical access and climb his way to the surface. At least, that was still his hope.
“It’s like freaking M.C. Escher designed this place,” he grumbled under his breath. “Up one, down two, over three, down four, up five. Ridiculous. Where are the stairs that have no ending and no beginning? Where are those?”
He kept chugging and had put at least a hundred yards between the entrance door and his position when he heard the echo of the door buzzing. His pursuers were in the tunnel with him.
Clayton checked over his shoulder and saw nothing, but accelerated his pace. Wincing against the now-stinging pain in his leg, he pushed harder against his good leg to propel himself along the corridor, which now curved to the right. He had to be getting close to building two.
A hitch in his side sucked the wind from his lungs and Clayton slowed for a moment. He licked his dry lips and stretched his right arm high above his head, working out the cramp.
He could hear the echoes of footsteps clacking off the concrete as the people giving chase kept moving. Clayton sucked in as deep a breath as he could and started moving again. He stopped when he heard a voice.
“Clayton! It’s me, Vihaan Chandra. Please stop. Please wait for me. Clayton!”
Clayton did stop. He listened to the call twice more before deciding it was the scientist. He recognized the lilt of his voice even with the concrete echo distorting it.
“Who’s with you?” he called back.
“Bert Martin,” said Chandra. His voice was getting louder. “He’s a security expert.”
Clayton started walking toward Chandra. He didn’t say anything at first.
“You there?” Chandra called.
“Yeah,” said Clayton. “Who else?”
Chandra was huffing now. “Nobody.”
Clayton saw their shadows first. They stretched along the concrete wall, cast there by the overhead tunnel lighting. There were only two shadows. Seconds later, the men emerged and approached him. All three of the men struggled for breath.
The man with Chandra smiled at Clayton and offered his hand. “Bert,” he said. “Pleasure.”
Clayton, bent o
ver at his waist, took his hand from his knee and shook Bert’s hand. “Nice to meet you. So you’re a security expert?”
Martin shrugged. “I helped with the design here. I know some backdoors.”
Clayton motioned toward the direction from which he’d come and started walking that way again. The men followed. They walked in silence for fifty yards or so, the only sounds their footsteps and heavy breaths.
“Backdoors,” Clayton said out of nowhere. “That how you found me?”
“Not exactly,” said Martin. “Your DiaTab was turned off. The tracker is disabled.”
“I found a backdoor,” said Clayton.
“Impressive, said Martin. “It’s simple in design but not intuitive. Well done.”
“I try,” said Clayton. “So how did you find me?”
“I told Chandra about the tunnel and stairwell system that leads to building five,” said Martin. “It’s the only way out.”
“For us,” said Chandra. “It’s the only way out for us.”
“Essentially that’s true,” said Martin. “So when I saw you’d accessed the emergency exit key panel using your DiaTab in building four, I knew you had to have figured it out.”
“We didn’t know you’d be coming for me, though,” said Chandra. “That was a surprise.”
“It was probably not the best idea either,” said Martin. “Because now they’re looking for us. They know the two of you are scheming something. You trying to reach Chandra in his lab was a total tip-off.”
Clayton pointed toward a door on the left side of the tunnel and the trio stopped. There was a keypad and Clayton pulled out his DiaTab to access it. Bert stopped him.
“Don’t use that again,” he said. “They’re looking for you. Before, your access was hidden among a thousand alerts. Now they’re zeroing in on it.”
Clayton’s eyes widened. “So they know we’re in this tunnel?”
Bert smirked and held up a device that appeared similar to a DiaTab but was slightly larger. “Not exactly. I erased your last two key swipes and then ghosted them on two different panels. They think you’re somewhere in building four.”
“So nobody knows we’re here?” asked Clayton.
Bert punched a key sequence into the access panel and the door clicked open. “Not at the moment,” he said, ushering Chandra and Clayton through the open door. “But once they figure out I’m not where I’m supposed to be, they’ll put two and two together.”
“Can’t you just shut everything down?” asked Clayton. “Then we have free access and they’ll never track us until we’re about to bolt.”
“Not yet,” Bert replied. “If I do it now, they have an override. It takes about fifteen minutes to reboot the system. I need to wait to shut down the system until we’re almost free.”
Clayton bounded down the stairwell, sliding his hand along the metal railing for balance. He looked at Chandra when he reached the second landing. “Where did you find this guy, and why is he helping us?”
“Chance and pity,” said Chandra.
Bert chuckled nervously. “I’m helping you because this place is not exactly what I was told it would be. They never said it would be a prison. They never told me what their plans were.”
“Thank you,” said Clayton. “Whatever your reason.”
The men descended three more flights. Moving swiftly down the well, they reached the fifth level, where the stairs ended. They couldn’t go any lower.
“What now?” asked Clayton. “Don’t we move to buildings one and then five?”
“That’s the plan,” said Bert. He entered a sequence into a door-side panel and it clicked. “These are default test codes. They activate every coded door. Nobody will have any clue which doors we’ve manually accessed or where we are.”
Clayton swung open the door to move through. “Why are some doors coded and others not?”
Bert shrugged. “A handful of the stairwell and tunnel doors don’t have codes. It’s for ease of movement in emergencies, though all of them are within the secure perimeter of at least one other coded door.”
“So when we reach building five, you’ll shut off the Li-Fi?”
Bert slapped Clayton on the back. “Well done. Exactly. We’ll power off the lights and embedded network. It’ll reset fifteen minutes later.”
Chandra was huffing as the men rounded the tunnel toward building one. He tugged on his pants to pull them up. Clayton slowed and kept even with the scientist, letting Bert take the lead.
“You okay?” he asked Chandra.
“Yeah,” Chandra said breathlessly. “I’ll be fine. I’m out of shape. My wife always told me to take better care of myself.”
“You’ll be okay,” Clayton said. “We’re almost there.”
Chandra huffed and plugged along. He smiled weakly. His face was glistening with sweat in the relative warmth of the fifth level.
Focusing on Chandra distracted Clayton from the pulsing throb in his leg. It was getting worse and it only exacerbated his intensifying headache. He licked his dry lips and smacked his tongue. “We’ve got to get some fluids,” he said. “I’m getting dehydrated. Chandra is sweating out his bodyweight in water. Any ideas, Bert?”
Bert was a good five or six strides ahead. Rather than stopping, he turned and walked backwards as he answered Clayton’s question. “There’s a storage closet near the elevator’s mechanical access,” he said. “If I remember correctly, there’s a sink. We can get water there. We’re ten minutes from it.”
That ten minutes felt like thirty to Clayton. But the sink was there. All three of them quenched their collective thirst. Bert checked his DiaWatch and then tapped and swiped his version of the DiaTab. “All right. The elevator access is monitored. There are cameras and trip alarms. Once I enter a code on this tablet, all of that gets shut down. It also means we’re climbing the elevator access in the dark.”
“Wait, what?” said Clayton.
“We’ve got fifteen minutes to climb the ladder,” said Bert. “Then the system reboots and they’ll see us.”
“Can’t you shut it off again?”
Bert nodded. “Yes, but it has to come back on first and there will be a tracer icon on the security display, identifying where the system was shut down. So in that split second before I can shut it back down, they’ll know where we are.”
“Yeah,” Clayton said. “Let’s give that a go.”
“Are we climbing to the top?” asked Chandra, his voice cracking.
“Yes,” Bert replied.
“And that’s where we’ll find the garage,” said Clayton.
“You know about the garage?” asked Bert. “Of course you do. Yes, the garage.”
“That’s how we get out of here,” said Clayton. “And how I get home.”
Bert’s finger hovered over the tablet. “You ready?” he asked, eyeing both men.
“Ready,” said Chandra.
“Ready,” said Clayton.
Bert typed the sequence and the tunnel instantly snapped into darkness. “Let’s do this.”
CHAPTER 17
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2020, 2:20PM CST
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER
Jackie Shepard turned one last time, the third look back in a dozen steps, to wave goodbye to Betty Brown. They’d had their differences, but there was something final about her departure that filled Jackie with an unexpected melancholy.
She and Clayton had lived across from the Brown family for years. They were as familiar as the twisting, knotted crape myrtles in their front yard or the warped wooden driveway joint that Clayton repeatedly promised to fix but never managed to put atop his list of things to do. There was an odd comfort in the trees and the trip hazard and the neighbors across the street.
“Talk soon,” Jackie said to Betty, more out of habit than a belief she truly would. Chances were they’d never see each other again. Jackie didn’t know why. She couldn’t put her finger on it, she just knew.
“Sounds good,” replied Be
tty, a surprising lilt in her voice. Jackie surmised she too knew they wouldn’t talk soon.
“C’mon, Mom,” said Marie. “We gotta go. I want to get back to the house as fast as we can.”
Jackie sidled up next to her daughter and nudged her. “For someone who didn’t want to leave, you’re in a hurry.”
Marie rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to leave. I think it’s stupid. But if we have to go, I don’t want to linger in no-man’s-land.”
Chris, thumbs tucked under the straps of his backpack, was a couple of steps behind both of them. “No-man’s-land? What’s that mean?”
“It’s like the part where people shouldn’t be,” Marie said over her shoulder. “Like the Wild West.”
Jackie nudged her daughter again, less playfully than before. She shot Marie an arched-brow warning and spoke under her breath. “Don’t frighten your brother. Not cool.”
Chris jogged to catch up with them, his pack bouncing on his back. “Wild West?”
Marie looked at her mother and then at Chris. “I’m just kidding. They wouldn’t let us leave if it was dangerous.”
“Oh,” Chris said, his squeezed expression relaxing. “I was gonna say you had me worried.”
The three of them and Nikki approached the entrance gate. The same guard who’d given them access to JSC was standing outside the guard shack. He was still in uniform, though it looked worse for wear, as did he. His eyes carried the same blank stare as most people wore a week into the apocalypse.
Nikki stepped ahead of Jackie and approached the guard. “You have our guns?”
The guard slid inside the shack, motioning for Nikki to join him. He keyed open a black safe and swung open its door. Without saying anything, he handed Nikki the first of the two weapons they’d reluctantly surrendered when entering the complex.
Nikki took the Glock 17 and eyed the guard. “The mag better be full,” she said. “Ammo is as precious as gold these days.”
“It’s all there,” said the guard.
