Chapter 14 - The Pipe
"Move!" Mark hissed, grabbing Elena's hand in the dark and pulling her toward the flooded Level Four hatch.
He didn't turn on his headlamp. He knew the layout from his frantic run five minutes ago. Carrying Lily against his chest with his right arm, he guided Elena down the narrow rungs of the vertical ladder using his left hand.
Above them, the sharp, suppressed cracks of submachine gun fire punctuated the dark as the tactical team engaged the automated security nodes in the server room. Shouts and radio chatter bounced off the steel walls: Target breached Level Three! Power severed! Deploy night vision!
Mark’s boots hit the concrete floor of Level Four. The water had drained down to their ankles, leaving a thick, slick residue of radioactive silt and industrial lubricants.
He flipped on his headlamp for a split second, shielding the beam with his fingers. At the far end of the chamber, beneath the cleared yellow valve, the circular drainage conduit yawned open like a black throat. It was four feet in diameter, constructed of corrugated steel, sloping sharply downward into the earth.
"Get in," Mark ordered Elena. "Crawl. Don't stop until you see open sky."
Elena looked at the pipe, then at the small, rigid frame of Lily in Mark's arms. Tears were streaming down her face again, washing clean tracks through the soot and plaster dust. "Mark... I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have told you about David. I should have—"
"I don't care right now," Mark snapped, his voice hard as flint. "Get in the damn pipe, Elena! Protect her!"
He pushed her into the mouth of the tube. She scrambled forward on her hands and knees, the sound of her scraping through the corrugated metal echoing inside the conduit.
Mark turned to follow, gently feeding Lily into the opening ahead of him.
"Daddy," Lily whispered, her hand weakly reaching out to touch his cheek. Her skin was cooler now, the burning fever breaking as the distance from the primary server array widened. "The big room is going to sleep."
Mark glanced back over his shoulder.
At the top of the Level Four ladder, three tactical beams converged on the water below. A voice amplified by a gas-mask diaphragm boomed through the chamber: Level Four compromised. Subject located. Initiate quarantine protocol.
Mark shoved Lily forward into Elena’s waiting arms inside the pipe. "Keep crawling! Go!"
Before he could pull his own torso into the corrugated steel tube, a heavy, metallic thump echoed from the ceiling of the drainage room.
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The emergency failsafe.
High-pressure release valves snapped open around the perimeter of the room, and an impenetrable wall of freezing, white nitrogen gas began violently venting from the ceiling nozzles, plunging the temperature in the chamber toward absolute zero in seconds.
