He drew the suit from the locker, carefully getting hold of its two halves—top and bottom. It was like pulling clothes out of a hamper in pitch darkness.
Certain he had both components, he pressed them together under his arm and turned back for the stairwell. As he did, his eyes picked out images on the wall of screens. The first thing he saw was that four of the monitors had gone to blue—one for each of the dual cameras inside the two accesses, all of which had been knocked out by the initial explosions. Then he noticed movement in some of the still-active frames. Men were lugging yellow fifty-five gallon drums into the north access, where Dyer had come in. Travis stepped closer and saw boxy attachments stuck to each barrel’s top, wired in with thick red and black cords. He darted his gaze around to find a view of this access—the one that led to the far side of the blast door ten feet away from him.
He saw it: the squared concrete tunnel sticking out of the slope among the redwoods.
There was no one going in.
There was no one anywhere near it.
A second later he found a screen showing the Humvee he and Paige and Bethany had driven up into the trees. It was right where they’d left it, jammed sideways near a trunk. Other Humvees were visible in the frame with it.
There were men crouched on the downhill side of each vehicle.
They were all covering their ears.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Every inch of the sprint felt like too much to ask for. Each vaulting step seemed like it should be the last.
He went back over the lip at the top of the stairs. Jumped with no thought for which tread his foot would land on—the time required for that kind of thinking was also too much to ask for.
It turned out to be the fourth step above the landing. His arch came down right on the drop-off, and only his forward momentum kept him from dumping all his weight onto it and breaking his ankle. He threw his other foot down with more control, rammed it hard and flat onto the steel landing, and brought his forearm up to catch the wall before he shattered his face on it.
The arm took a lot of the blow, but not all. The rest of his body was hurtled against the stone an instant later, the impact wringing the air from his lungs. He sucked it back in and used it to scream for the others to cover their ears, then pivoted toward the next flight and jumped again. He was arcing through the air, aiming for the next landing and clamping his hands over the sides of his head, when it finally happened.
It felt like having a boxcar dropped on him.
The airspace around him seemed to solidify and compress inward in a single, monstrous clap. He saw the stairs beneath him jump and vibrate. Saw the effect race down the shaft, a shockwave trailing a vacuum in its wake. The bass followed, making an eardrum of his whole body. He heard it with his knees and his spine and his fillings.
He kept his feet under him as he plunged ahead toward the landing, and threw both hands forward from his ears to catch the wall. He became aware of the transparency suit falling away below his arm, and had just enough time to notice it’d dropped toward the sidewall, not the open center of the shaft.
Then he hit, and his arms folded, and his forehead slammed against his wrist on the wall and everything went black.
Hands, shaking him by the shoulder, frantic.
“Travis.”
Paige, whispering.
He opened his eyes. The shaft was swirling with gray-white concrete dust. Ten feet above him, a broad rectangular shape stuck out over the top of the shaft.
The green door. Bent and twisted at its edges. Hurled out of its frame into the room, lying with maybe a quarter of its mass over the shaft’s edge.
Travis looked at Paige. Her eyes were wet and her cheeks were smeared. Relief just outweighed fear in her expression.
Travis turned over and sat up. He looked at the flight he’d jumped down past. He got up on his knees and leaned forward and pawed at the landing and the lowest stair treads, and for a terrible few seconds believed the suit’s halves had missed them anyway. Maybe they’d caught the air and gone under the rail—or right between the treads—and slipped down into the depths of the shaft, where a painstaking week wouldn’t be enough to find the damn things.
Then he saw them: misshapen pockets of clear air amid the churning dust, clumped near each other halfway up the flight. He reached up and grabbed both, withdrew to the landing again and looked at Paige and the others.
“I’m going to engage them outside in the open,” Travis said. “That gives me the best advantage, especially with the dust down here.”
He turned and sat on the second step, felt for which half of the suit was the bottom, and began to pull it on. He heard Dyer take a quick breath at the sight of first one leg and then the other vanishing.
“The three of you should find shooting cover in the chamber up top,” Travis said. “Weapons trained on the doorway. It’s like the Thermopylae Pass. Anything comes through that you can see, kill it.”