‘Don’t nod off while I’m in there,’ she said. ‘I know what you old guys are like.’ She turned away from his glare, smiling as she entered the small room. The tool belt was heavy around her waist, and she held the gun in her right hand, pointing the way.
She swept the torch’s beam around the room. It was as she remembered it – it seemed to have been left untouched by what had happened. She gave the distribution boards a cursory glance and saw no immediate problems. The space was narrow, and she had to turn sidelong to squeeze past the boards and into the narrow passageway beyond.
The walls here were bare concrete, lined with cables and wire ducts, old routes marked out by pocked holes. Her belt scraped one wall, and a shower of grit and dust fell softly to the metal gangway. She shone the torch down into darkness.
‘Okay in there?’ Jonah called. His voice was muffled, even though he was only about twelve feet away.
‘Yeah. Nearly there.’
She shone the torch along the gangway and moved on. When she reached the end it split and curved left and right around the outer extremes of the core-containment wall. A deep darkness dropped below to where the core’s base was cast into rock. It was to the left that she hoped the problem lay.
She spotted them from several feet away. At first she thought it was a pile of old clothing, perhaps left there by the maintenance crews. But then she saw that the dim shape was more than a heap of discarded clothes.
‘Anything?’ Jonah called, and she could barely hear him. The gap she had crossed swallowed his voice.
‘Won’t be long,’ she said, and, as her own voice echoed away above and below, shadows around the shape moved.
But it was only the shifting torchlight. Holly stepped forward and saw two people who’d been fried by the massive electrical current that had passed through them both. One – she thought it was a man – was holding a long metal pole. The other corpse was beyond identification, and it had its arms wrapped around its burned chest, face buried against its stomach. Clothes had burned. Flesh and hair had burned as well, and she wondered how the fire had not spread further.
One had been attacking, one defending. The final defence had been suicide.
Though the power was out, Holly still stayed a couple of steps away, examining the mess of scorched flesh and material and trying to see where one body ended and the other began. It was grotesque. She felt sick and unsettled, shining her torch across motionless bodies.
She stamped her foot and made some noise. No movement. The brain could be destroyed in more ways than one, but she still had to be careful.
Undoing her tool belt, she took out a telescopic wooden pointer and started nudging at the bodies. The pointer sank in and she cringed in disgust – the disturbance seemed to release the smell. It rose around her and she tried breathing through her mouth, but then she could taste the greasy reality of death.
Gotta get this done as quickly as possible. She fixed a voltmeter to the end of the pointer and started testing the bodies and the equipment they had melted into for any signs of power. There were none.
Holly got to work.
She had to scrape cooked flesh away from the damaged control panel. Some of it crumbled away and that was fine, but some was still moist. It stank. She gagged in the confined space, determined not to vomit because that would only add to the reek. She tried not to identify what she was seeing, but sometimes the fingernails were obvious, and she had to crack a jawbone to prise teeth from around a thick cable.
She worked at the damage, and every now and then she heard Jonah calling her name. ‘Almost done,’ she said several times, and she lost track of time as she worked. The toolkit carried some spares, but in other areas she had to steal fittings from boards and equipment which she knew were non-essential. Six feet from here was a TV and audio distribution panel, and she didn’t think that she and Jonah would be watching reruns of Lost again any time soon.