48. Chloe – Alight at the End of the Tunnel

.
Reece and I strapped ourselves into the Chinook and waited for the green light. A stream of updates over the coms kept him informed of their progress, which he translated from code to Chloe after each squawk.

“Alrighty, as soon as we get the okay, this entire section of the hanger is gonna drop down to the planet like an express elevator to hell,” he said.

“Is that a movie quote?”

“Yeah. You ever see this really old movie, Aliens?”

“That’s another quote. Do you get all your answers from movies?”

“It’s boring in my cubicle. I pretty much binge-watched everything this last week.”

He turned the volume on the radio up, listening in for the next report. When nothing but a louder hum came through, he turned it off and on again.

“What the hell?” he said, “I just installed this last night. Hello, Control, you reading me?”

When there was no response, he smacked the radio. When it didn’t improve, he left to check the exterior receiver. A moment after, he ducked back in to call me out.

“Chloe, you need to see this.”

I followed him across the bay to a growing audience around a large screen. They were watching footage from my drone.

“Is this a recording?” I said to the nearest guy.

It was David. He pointed up at the screen. “No, this is live. Look, they got inside the mountain.”

The footage was shaky, mostly ceiling and a little boy’s dripping nostrils, but enough space over his shoulder showed us exactly what was going on.

“Wait, that’s not possible,” I said. “How are we receiving this from under all that rock?”

“Eh, we flew about sixty drones into it, behind them. They’re relaying the signal back through each other to the outside.”

 “But they’ll get squashed by the falling skies.”

“Seems a lot of them did,” Reece said, scrolling through his tablet, “but then the mountain started shooting missiles straight up. It nuked a hole in the ice about the size of a small country and now we have a safe patch of air to fly through.”

“Nukes? Who the hell ordered nuclear missiles?”

“I can answer that,” a familiar voice said from above. Mayor Tellus lowered herself down a handrail, followed by James.

“Mayor T—”

“O’Toole,”

“Oh, sorry,” I said, “Mayor O’Toole.”

“I told you to call me Nina, and I meant O’Toole Construction.”

“The junior rehab program?”

“That was a small division of O’Toole Construction. The main bulk of the company was created to overhaul the remains of military outposts left behind when the island was bought by Kinsley’s foundation. We’ve been outfitting it for years.”

James arched an eyebrow at her, but said nothing.

“But nukes?” I said. “How’d you get ahold of those?”

“Chloe, it was a city full of genius engineers with access to military grade equipment. Pretty easy to convert dismantled missiles, and shipments to a power plant, into what we needed. They might not be war grade, but those missiles only needed to break ice.”

And there it was. Everything fell into place. The reason a city, with no problems with its power supply, wanted a nuclear stockpile, and yet kept it off the island itself. It was why an industry that profited from family excursions and entertainment had such a strong connection to a military past. Reece and David gave her approving grins and nods.

James stretched out a hand. “Well played, Mayor O’Toole, well played.”

She shook it and winked at me. “It was a Dick move. He always thought your plans were unreasonable, so he made contingencies of his own. Look.”

Beyond the sweaty child’s hair, the crowd of survivors hurried down an overlong spiral staircase. The tunnel they were in was reinforced steel, with enough emergency lights to make out the panic on their faces.

“Dick designed the station to be under the mountain, in a series of steel cones pointed upwards. The gaps between each layer is filled with rebar and reinforced concrete. That way, any blast would be dispersed before reaching the base of the mountain. He even placed a series of blast doors along the tunnels.”

“If the entire mountain is filled with steel sheets and girders,” James said, “no wonder the stone didn’t melt. Although, saying that, from what we can tell, natural stone doesn’t melt as much.”

A scream from the screen brought our eyes back to the people. A jet of water sprayed out from overhead, and two young men sprinted down from above and past the others, without stopping.

“Hoof it!” one yelled.

The other scooped an old lady off her feet and kept running, cradling her like a baby. The spray doubled and half the lights blew. The rest flickered and dimmed.

“Now what’s happening?” someone shouted in the dark.

“Snow and ice melting,” the granny-scooper said, “Missiles, banged, made hot air.

“Huh?”

“Lots of water. Gonna flood. Run!”

A burst of water drenched them all and the footage switched to a shot from above, as an undamaged drone flew down to cover their last escape. Water licked their shoes, frothing down the stairs, making traction harder. Then a door came into view around the last turn and the survivors surged forward.

“We see you,” a voice over a tannoy said. “You have to hurry. The upper levels are completely flooded and they’re draining down your path. We’re opening the blast door.”

As the hum of pneumatics invited them in, half the group surged forward. Unfortunately, the other half didn’t and they collided in the strobbing darkness. Everyone tangled with everyone else and they tripped, smashing teeth and elbows and noses and ribs on the edges of the steps as they rolled together down to the last turn.

Granny-scooper looked back at the commotion to see the ball of bodies coming up on him at speed. He pumped his legs harder as a steel door rose at the finish line, and leapt the last dozen steps to roll under it. He cushioned the fall to let the old lady slide with him, and when she didn’t slide all the way through, reached back and yanked her in before the rest of his friends crashed through the gap and into the underground station.

“Seal the door!” the tannoy roared.

Flashlights danced across control panels, blinding the incomers, but the blast door lowered before the water grew too fast to keep out, inadvertently locking out the flying drone. The footage switched back to my one, which lay upside-down somewhere inside, but the entire platform and control booth were in its field of vision. As the survivors groaned and bled in an undignified heap, several friendly arms reached in to right them.

James’s jaw dropped. “There has to be five-hundred people in there.”

A young man, the one who’d warned the others of the oncoming flood, stood and hugged the stranger in the dark. They yelped as ice water seeped into their clothes.

“No time to be thankful,” the tannoy said. “Get away from the blast doors in case they fail.”

A flashlight danced over the door, and sure enough, thin streams of water were shooting through.

“Are we gonna drown?” one woman said. “Don’t tell me we survived everything just to drown here.”

“Relax,” the flashlight holder told her, “any water that gets through there will drain down through the tracks. We’re underground, but not under sea level.”

Back up in space, Nina smirked. “That’s my man, always has to have an answer.”

The water sprayed harder, shooting through microscopic gaps in the seal and across the platform, straight into the tunnel wall on the opposite side of the tracks. Despite the newness of the structure, the beam highlighting it highlighted even newer graffiti.

Platform 9 & ¾!

“I’m Saj, by the way,” the flashlight holder said, “and Chris here says he’s met some of you.”

Granny-scooper nodded at the man named Chris. “O’Toole Construction. We built this place. Weren’t you at the centennial opening?”

The man named Chris nodded sagely. “Yeah. So that’s why you headed here. I wondered who was in our stairwell. You’re lucky we have cameras there. Where’s O’Toole?”

“Eloped with the mayor before all this started.”

Nina scoffed at the screen. “Eloped? We were properly married!”

“George?” a woman in the back called out. “Holden?”

My ears pricked at the name. There was no way…

The granny-scooper exchanged grit teeth and a slow shake of the head with his friend. “Alf, you mind telling them?”

I clenched my fists and bit my lower lip, ignoring the panic on Reece’s face. Was Holden alive? My Holden?

Alf’s shoulders sagged as he addressed the crowd, and though unwittingly, me. “I don’t know how to say this, but George and Holden didn’t make it. They saved us, but they didn’t reach the end.”