Cavern under Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
Beck and Carrack ran.
Everything in Matt Carrack’s body hurt. His legs and back were sore from the parachute crash, and now his lungs were ready to burst as Beck led the way through a system of narrow tunnels she had discovered at the far end of the cavern, which she had informed him led back up to the Labs-Central rail tunnel where they had blown up the bio door. He had the black nylon backpack with the welded shut bomb in it. He was wearing it as he ran, as if he wasn’t carrying something that could destroy several square miles of everything if it ignited the natural gasses around them.
Beck slowed and passed the single working rebreather mask back to him. He pressed the facemask hard against his head and cleared the mask by exhaling strongly. He didn’t want to suck in a huge lungful of the radon gas. Once the faceplate was cleared, he greedily sucked in some fresh oxygen from the portable unit. Then he took another huge lungful of air and passed the mask back to Beck. He was probably giving her the mask more often than he should but he was worried about her, because she’d already breathed some of the gas before she realized her own mask had been damaged.
They had moved over underground vines and worked their way past boulders large and small, occasionally setting off a burst of sizzling white light from the LED grenade to ward off the salamanders in the chamber behind them as they ran. Then Beck had led him into the twisting confines of tiny crevices and tunnels that required him to stoop or sometimes crawl.
He had set the countdown timer on his forest green Suunto wristwatch before placing the bomb into the pack and slinging it over his shoulder. He checked it now. They had less than ten minutes left. Beck passed him the mask again as she bounded ahead, leaping over small rocks and scrabbling over the larger ones. He repeated the procedure with the mask and after his first few breaths shouted at her through the faceplate.
“Ten minutes! How much further?”
Without taking the mask back, she answered him. “We’re almost there. We won’t need the mask anymore.”
Carrack ripped the mask off his face and took in a lungful of the air. It was stale and smelled bad, like deep caves tended to, but it was breathable—his heaving lungs didn’t cough it out. He handed her the mask back anyway, and she took it from him. “We’re here,” she said.
The beam of her LED spotlight on her tactical vest illuminated a wall up ahead and hole in the center of it, just large enough for them to squeeze through. He took the backpack off and passed it to her after she had scampered through. Then he leaped through headfirst and rolled on the concrete floor on the other side.
They were in the tunnel.
Beck was already running toward the distant end of the rail line. He could see the ruined bio door from the beam of her LED. He got up and sprinted after her. She was fast, but he was way faster and with far longer legs. He caught up to her as she flung the backpack across the surface of the train platform. She scrambled onto the platform and he leapt up onto it ahead of her, leaning down and snatching the strap of the pack off the ground as he ran.
“Where?” she asked. She was out of breath as she staggered behind him across the platform.
“Up,” he replied as he raced down the corridor at the far end of the platform to a stairwell. He passed the first one up because it was still under construction from the Hydra incident. He spotted something in the stairwell that provided inspiration. “I’ve got an idea.”
He reached the next staircase—this one intact—and started taking the stairs up, two at a time.
“I’m so glad you have a plan, White One. I was beginning to think we were winging it.”
“Five minutes. And let’s make it Matt. I’m sick of this White One crap.” He tugged on the stair railing as he pivoted his body around the landing, launching up the next flight of steps.
“Fair enough. I’m Anna.”
She must have been getting her second wind, because Carrack noticed she was catching up with him on the stairs. “If we make it out of this alive, I’m gonna need a drink.”
“If we make it out of here without getting our asses blown off, we’re getting ripped. Drinks are on me.”
“Screw that,” Carrack said between breaths. “Drinks are on Deep Blue—for like a year.”
She laughed and vaulted a few more steps until she was now ahead of him.
“Have you noticed that the lights are back on?”
As she rounded the next landing on the laboratory level, he heard her voice cry out to him.