Prometheus road, p.26
Prometheus Road, page 26
There was something about the lilt in her voice that reminded Tom of home. The elevator shook, yanking Tom’s thoughts back to the present.
“We should go,” Frida said, rising to her feet with one hand on the rail to steady her. “Sounds like Rose tried to restart the elevator, but it wouldn’t move.”
“Has it been ten minutes already?”
Without answering, Frida popped the surprised Helix into her backpack, then put one foot up on the handrail and launched herself through the ceiling hatch in one graceful movement. Her performance made him feel clumsy. He stood on the handrail and awkwardly lifted himself through the hatch, thinking how nice her legs had looked on her way up.
The top of the elevator was a crowded space of gears, cables, and electrical hardware. Frida put her hand on Tom’s head when he came close to hitting it against the spider line that was almost invisible in the dim light. As he watched, Frida demonstrated that the line was securely looped around an elevator pulley. Gritting his teeth, Tom’s gaze followed the two lines down past the side of the elevator, through the narrow gap between the elevator and the shaft wall, and on down into the darkness. A faint light glowed at the bottom of the shaft. He didn’t bother to look up, worried that his fear of heights might make him dizzy enough to fall. He already felt light-headed at the prospect of climbing down the shaft.
“Ready when you are,” Lebowski yelled.
Tom looked at Frida. “Ready for what?”
Frida quickly clamped a light harness to the line and held it as Tom stepped through the straps. She lifted the harness up his legs and secured it around his waist, handing him a brake that dangled from the line. “If you have a problem, open and close the brake to let yourself down the line in short drops. Otherwise, just hang on while Rose and Lebowski lower you down the shaft.”
“Where will you be?”
“I’ll come down next.”
The line tightened as Lebowski and Rose took up the slack. Trying hard to control his breathing, Tom knelt, then slid over the edge of the roof into the gap between the elevator and the wall. It was a tight fit, but he scraped his way down the wall as they lowered him. With one last look up at Frida, who smiled and waved at him, he commenced his journey down the shaft, keeping his eyes straight ahead on the smooth rock of the shaft wall. He had expected more of a machine oil smell in the air, but detected only the odor of damp rock. The descent itself was simple. As Frida had said, all Tom had to do was hang on and avoid bumping against the walls as he dropped down the shaft in a lazy spiral. He was glad he couldn’t see his surroundings clearly as he listened to the rapid beat of his heart. Tom was startled when a pair of hands grabbed his legs for a gentle touchdown on the floor. He thanked Rose and stepped out of the harness as Lebowski released one end of the spider line and grabbed the other.
“All set!” Frida yelled. Her voice echoed down the shaft.
Tom helped Lebowski with the spider line, and Frida soon joined them. Helix’s head poked out of the backpack so he could keep an eye on things. Frida hugged Tom when he helped her out of the harness, then darted away to join Rose at the entrance to a horizontal shaft that was 250 feet long and drilled out of the gray rock, lit by bright overhead lights every ten feet. Leaving the spider line behind, Tom and Lebowski joined them in the tunnel and started walking. No one seemed in the mood to talk as they kept their eyes on their objective at the far end of the tunnel where the Nevada wing of the power house held eight huge generators.
Tom began to wonder why there weren’t any automatic defenses to slow their progress when his question was answered. A thick white fog began to stream out of ceiling and wall vents all the way down the tunnel.
“Back! Go back!” Lebowski yelled. When Rose and Frida were too slow to react, Lebowski stepped forward and grabbed their arms to pull them along.
Frida pulled her arm free. “I can’t! I have to set the explosives!”
The fog was already obscuring their vision.
“One way or the other, let’s go!” Rose snapped.
The fog grew more dense, and Tom felt it wrapping around him like a blanket. The air thickened, making it hard to breathe. He wanted to run back to the elevator shaft, but he wouldn’t leave the rest of them behind. Helix whimpered in Frida’s backpack.
Finally, they began to run back toward the elevator shaft, but it was as if they were running in mud. The fog slowed them down, then stopped them completely as it hardened into a soft foam.
“It’s shock foam!” Lebowski sounded like he was yelling under a blanket. “Wrap your arms around your face for breathing room!” He gasped for more air. “Tom! Stronghold!”
Tom couldn’t move his legs. He got his arms around his face moments before the foam congealed around his upper body, trapping him completely. He tried to twist or turn his body, but the foam gently held him locked in place, as strong as steel, leaving him unable to do anything except breathe and think. He wanted to scream, but he was afraid that the foam would find its way into his mouth to swarm down his throat and suffocate him. If the foam hadn’t been supporting him, he might have fallen, because his muscles and joints felt weak. Charged by adrenaline, his heart thumped rapidly as if it were trying to beat its way out of his chest. Blinking, he saw only his forearms and the solid white foam that held them against his face, leaving only a small pocket of air to sustain his life for a few minutes. The foam felt warm against his sweaty body, pressing firmly against his damp clothes, but he also felt a chill that penetrated to his bones, making him shake. He had to clench his teeth to keep them from chattering. Control. He had to gain control of himself. If he had little air left in his breathing space, he had to conserve it by breathing more slowly. He didn’t know why the Dominion didn’t just put in defenses that would instantly kill intruders, but he assumed it was part of their philosophy to kill only as a last resort. This foam was probably an automated defense, and Telemachus was confident enough that it would work that he didn’t need to intervene. On the other hand, maybe it was just part of the Dominion’s plan to set an example and kill them slowly through suffocation.
Tom closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying not to think about his imminent death in this foamy trap.
He remembered he had a way out. Magnus had been trapped in the rehab facility, but he protected himself by walking the Road. Dead Man had also warned Tom that he’d have to relax and journey to the Road in difficult situations, and that was why he’d wanted Tom to learn how to meditate. This certainly qualified as a difficult situation. He wished he’d spent more time meditating. Tom focused on slowing his heart rate, turning his thoughts inward, calming his mind, seeking the way out that he’d traveled before. He tensed his muscles as best he could, then allowed them to relax, sagging into the supporting foam. His eyes rolled back, and he felt a sense of falling through space, drifting on a dark sea, floating like a feather down a bottomless elevator shaft. He thought about Stronghold, and the Road, allowing the images and ideas of those places to drift through his consciousness without concentrating too hard on either place.
Then that odd muscle twitched deep inside his brain. He was free.
ENERGYflowed up through Tom’s legs from the glassy surface of the Road. He was surrounded by a glittering desert of white sand mixed with shiny crystals. Far away on the horizon, he saw the gentle curve of the rainbow bridge rising into the ruby sky. In front of him, two pieces of the sky marked another gate—two columns of clear blood ruby with an enormous oval lens of rose-colored glass floating between them. Beyond the lens, its outlines wavy through the thick glass, stood a two-story white house of the type he’d seen in books, a Victorian from the nineteenth century, its windows framed with open black shutters to admit the light. The house felt like an illusion in this place of heightened reality. Tom reached out to touch the oval lens, and it pinged as if he’d tapped a crystal water glass. When he looked around the ruby columns, he saw only an empty white desert, devoid of vegetation. Was the house simply an image trapped in the glass lens?
He knew, somehow, that this was the Stronghold gate. From here, he could leave the Road and enter the virtual world of the Dominion without all the hardware he’d used in Sandoval’s missile silo. Essentially, this was the back door, and Tom was the special key that could unlock it. But how? And why did it look like a house?
He placed his palm flat against the lens. It felt cool and resonated with a subtle vibration when his skin touched its surface. When he rubbed his hand across the glass, the vibration caused a ringing tone, but nothing else happened. The house—and the gravel path that led up to its front porch—did not move, change color, or disappear.
Tom felt anxious as he remembered that his body was trapped in a foam cage deep beneath the earth, slowly suffocating along with Helix and his friends. Although he didn’t know how much time he had, he knew he had a deadline. Time moved more slowly on the Prometheus Road, but he didn’t know what the time difference was like in the Stronghold environment, if he could even get that far. He slapped his palm against the glass, and it rang like a bell, but no one answered the door. He tried to remember anything Magnus or Dead Man might have said that could help him now, but nothing seemed relevant.
He had to create his path. He focused his attention on the lens, and on the house beyond it. His feet crunched on gravel.
He blinked, adjusting his gaze to the massive scale of the house in front of him. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the rose lens and the Road beyond it. Beyond the edges of the gravel path, and the outline of the enormous white house, there lay only blackness. His vertigo returned, and he quickly scurried up the gravel path to the front porch, feeling more secure once he’d reached the front door of the house. He had the sense that the house was another kind of bridge, creating a connection between the Stronghold world and the Road.
The porch ended at the sides of the house. Anxious about his friends, his urgency propelled him forward. He opened the front door and entered.
The smell of sulfur, or something like it, assailed his nose. The wide entry led to a dim hallway straight ahead, a broad staircase that swept up to the second floor beneath a crystal chandelier, and three doors to other rooms. He saw no furniture or other signs of occupancy.
He heard a scuttling movement in the dimly lighted hallway, like the noise a giant crab might make while running and clacking its claws together. He sensed that something evil was moving toward him in the shadows, something with dead eyes and a desire to kill him.
Tom tried the first doorknob. It was locked.
The scuttling sound came closer, sliding across the hardwood floor with a heavy tread. The other doors seemed to be on the far side of the thing in the shadows, so he darted up the staircase, hoping it couldn’t climb after him. But the pounding on the steps told him he was wrong, and it seemed even more anxious to get him.
Passing under another chandelier, Tom entered a long, carpeted hallway that ran the length of the house. Mirrors and faded old paintings dotted the walls between closed doors made of polished mahogany. The ceiling seemed unusually high, admitting a weak illumination through skylights that looked out on a pitch-black sky. The brass doorknobs had an odd glow about them, as if they functioned as night-lights in the dark hallway.
Tom ran straight ahead, his feet thumping against the carpet, not wanting to look back to see even the silhouette of the shadowy thing that was chasing him. He didn’t bother with the doors nearby, afraid that the thing would get him before he could open them—he ran straight to the door at the end of the hallway, which was larger than all the rest. Ornately carved images of monstrous figures swirled and danced across the surface of the mahogany door, scribed into the wood by the hands of a master carpenter possessed by demons. The brass doorknob looked like the head of a rattlesnake, and Tom doubted that any of this was standard décor for a Victorian home, unless it had been owned by Jack the Ripper or some equally famous murderer of legend.
He turned the rattlesnake knob, and the door creaked as he flung it open. The scuttling noise was rapidly bearing down on him. Without any further thought, he lunged through the doorway and slammed the door, holding the inner knob in his hand so that it wouldn’t turn while he tried to figure out how to lock it in the darkness. A reddish light glowed through the gap beneath the door as a heavy weight slammed into the other side. Pressing his shoulder into the carved wood and bracing his feet, he fumbled for a latch or some other kind of lock, but he couldn’t find one. The doorknob twisted in his hand, and he gripped it harder to keep it from turning farther. Then he found a small bolt lock and slid it home into the doorframe. He knew it wouldn’t last long under the punishing weight that slammed repeatedly against the door, but at least it was the concept of a lock, and the idea gave him some comfort. He wished his eyes would hurry up and adjust to the darkness. The room didn’t appear to have any windows, and he didn’t know if there were any lights. He felt around for a switch beside the door, but there was nothing except a smooth wall. Was there any furniture he could move in front of the door to brace it? The door rattled again under a heavy impact. He suspected that his weight pushing against the door was doing more than the lock was to hold back the angry creature on the other side, so he hesitated to move farther into the room.
He blinked into the featureless blackness, listening to the sound of his pounding heart and the grunting noise on the other side of the door. Then he heard something slide across the floor. A chill raced up his spine as he realized that something was in the room with him. He heard a snort.
Tom looked higher, aware now that the sound came from a point across the room above the level of his head.
Two fiery eyes, about eight inches apart, studied him as if he were an annoying bug. Flaming with pure hatred, the demonic eyes slowly began to move toward him through the inky blackness. The door thumped again, and the hinges creaked under the strain, weakening under the impacts. Tom tried to think of anything else that he might mistake for a pair of fiery eyes, but these were definitely eyes, and they were definitely moving toward him in a pitch-black room where he had no place to run. With a hiss, the eyes suddenly lunged toward his face.
Tom threw himself to one side, hoping he wouldn’t knock himself unconscious on some unseen piece of furniture. But he didn’t land on anything that could be called furniture; he landed on something with a foul odor that squished when he hit it. He tasted the coppery flavor of blood in his mouth, then realized that he wasn’t bleeding—it was blood that had shot into his mouth when he landed on the squishy thing. Tom rolled away in horror, spitting out used blood, when he saw the fiery eyes about three feet away from his face. The thing’s hot breath smelled like burnt meat. He screamed and scrabbled backward, hitting his head against a wall as his hands slipped on the oozing lump on the floor. A knife, or something else that was long and pointed, slammed into the side of his face, piercing one cheek and exiting through the other. A burning sensation erupted in his mouth, and now he tasted his own blood. He twisted his head away, yanking his face free of the blade, or claw, or tusk, or whatever it was, and ducked sideways, desperate to get away, clambering over the stinking carcass on the floor. Something thumped into his back, then he hit his head again on a shelf protruding from the wall. He heard two heavy footsteps behind him and hurled himself sideways again as a heavy object smashed into the floor where he’d stopped. The thing with the eyes let out an angry hiss. Tom tried to ignore the pain in his face and the blood running down his neck to soak his shirt, knowing that if he made another wrong move, it would be his last.
His eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness. He wanted to see the thing and get some sense of what it was, but he also knew that it might tip him over into madness to see the nightmare that was trying to kill him. He couldn’t think with all the adrenaline racing through his system telling him to run, even when there wasn’t anyplace that he could go. And he couldn’t fight what he couldn’t see. The door splintered and exploded open, bathing the room in the light from the hallway and the red glow of a crablike creature with heavy claws and multiple legs. Four eyes on stalks rotated toward him. Before Tom could turn his attention to his closest opponent, he heard a whistling above his head and rolled. One heartbeat later, a heavy, clawed foot smashed into the wood floor beside him. His foot dragged against cloth, and a gray light flashed above his head. A window. He had kicked the thick drapes that covered a broad window on the back wall of the room. The creature with the fiery eyes, an entity of the darkness, bellowed with anger and pain.
The crab launched itself into the room.
Without any further thought, Tom threw himself at the window.
The glass exploded under the weight of his body, ripping into his skin, tearing his clothes, and he briefly wondered if he was going to fall to his death or plunge into a bottomless dark pit. He grunted as his shoulders struck a steeply angled roof. He splayed his arms and legs in an attempt to stop his momentum, but the wood shingles cracked and splintered under his hands, shredding the skin of his fingers as he continued to slide toward the edge.
He heard an angry roar above him as the roof fell away, and he hurtled through the air. By chance, he hit with his feet first, showering gravel off the path as he landed, absorbing the impact in his legs as he rolled to a bloody stop. He rolled over on his back, gasping for air, happy not to be dead, thrilled to see that his pursuers had not followed him through the window. Tom was at the back of the Victorian house. A directionless gray light filled the sky, the narrow gravel path leading away from it, and the small concrete structure at the end of the path. Beyond the edges of the walking path, there appeared to be nothing at all, only the gray of a fog that wasn’t a fog. Tom coughed, choking on the blood in his mouth. He rolled on his side and spit out as much as he could, wondering how he could stop the flow. He gingerly touched the ragged skin of his torn cheeks, then decided he knew enough about his wounds. As his breathing and heart rate settled to a slower pace, it occurred to him that he might be able to make an adjustment to the reality of his body. His shape had shifted into different forms already along the path to the Road, and he had been able to fly, so it seemed reasonable to guess that he might be able to repair himself.
