Chapter 46 - The Flooding Arteries
The tempered glass shattered with a sound like a rifle shot.
Bright blue sparks exploded from the scanning housing, illuminating the chamber in violent, stuttering flashes. A high-pitched, warbling alarm tore through the air, drowning out the hum of the cooling units and the distant roar of the river.
*CRITICAL SYSTEM FAULT: BIOMETRIC TERMINAL DESTROYED.*
*PRIMARY OVERRIDE REJECTED.*
*COMMENCING CONTAINMENT FLOOD IN T-MINUS 04:00.*
"No!" Nicholas Prime’s scream ripped through the speakers, distorted by feedback as the circuit boards began to fry. Behind him on the screen, the life-support pod containing Arthur Sterling erupted in a cascade of red emergency strobes. The cardiac monitor’s steady hum dissolved into a flat, continuous electronic shriek. The old man’s eyes beneath the oxygen mask fluttered wildly, his skeletal hands clawing at the interior glass of the pressurized tube as the nitrogen level dropped.
"What have you done?!" Elena shrieked, lunging forward from the wall, her revolver coming up.
Julian didn't hesitate. Despite his broken ribs, despite the exhaustion that had hollowed his cheeks, he threw his entire body weight into Elena, tackling her against the iron deck.
The revolver fired. The bullet ricocheted off the reinforced ceiling with a deafening *ping*, burying itself in the main hydraulic conduit above our heads.
A thick jet of hydraulic fluid hissed into the room, spraying across the monitors. The screen showing Zurich flickered, distorted into vertical lines of static, and died. Nicholas Prime’s face vanished into blackness.
On the floor, Elena fought with the feral ferocity of a cornered animal. She clawed at Julian’s eyes, her manicured nails raking bloody furrows across his cheek. "You fool!" she screamed, her voice cracking into madness. "You've killed us all! The bulkheads are closing! The river will take the entire substructure!"
Julian pinned her wrists against the grating, his face inches from hers, blood dripping from his chin onto her cheek. "Then we drown clean, mother," he growled.
"Julian! The door!" I yelled.
Across the chamber, the massive hydraulic bulkhead door that led to the maintenance tunnels had begun to descend. The steel slab, six inches of solid armor plate, groaned as the automated pulleys lowered it toward the deck. It was already halfway down, the gap narrowing to less than three feet.
Julian grabbed the revolver from Elena’s slackened grip and shoved himself up from the floor. He caught my wrist with an iron grip. "Run!"
"What about her?" I pointed at Elena, who was scrambling to her knees, her designer clothes soaked in hydraulic oil and rust-colored river water that was already beginning to seep up through the floor grates.
"She chose Arthur thirty years ago!" Julian shouted over the deafening blare of the sirens. "Move!"
We dove under the descending bulkhead. Julian went first, sliding on his side through the wet slime of the threshold, then reaching back to grab both my arms, yanking me through just as the bottom edge of the door smashed into the concrete with a bone-jarring *THUD* that shook the floor beneath us.
A mechanical hiss sealed the compartment behind us.
Through the reinforced observation slit in the iron door, I saw Elena. She stood in three inches of rising water, her wet hair plastered across her face, her eyes wide and blank as she stared through the thick glass at the man she had raised as a shadow.
She didn't scream. She didn't curse.
She simply raised one hand, pressed her palm against the glass, and mouthed three words before the interior emergency valves opened, unleashing a torrent of black, churning water that swallowed the observation window in a wall of foam:
*He has Sarah.*
The cold water slammed against the glass, obscuring her forever.
My heart stopped. The world around me went dead silent, the blaring sirens fading into a distant, muffled roar.
*He has Sarah.*
"Clara," Julian was pulling me by the elbow, dragging me backward through the rising current in the tunnel. "Clara, we have to climb! The surge valves are opening from the main canal! If we don't hit the third-level access ladder in sixty seconds, the back-draft will suck us into the intake turbines!"
"She said Sarah," I choked out, stumbling through the knee-deep black water that was rushing through the maintenance corridor like an underground rapid. "Julian... my sister... my sister died five years ago in the hospital!"
"We don't know what they did!" Julian shouted back, his voice raw with terror and exertion as he dragged me toward an iron maintenance ladder bolted into the curved brick wall of the old tunnel. "We don't know what Arthur kept! We don't know what Nicholas took!"
The water hit our waists, frigid and violent, carrying the dead chill of Lake Michigan in late November. The current dragged at my legs, threatening to sweep me off my feet into the darkness of the subterranean culverts.
Julian shoved me upward onto the iron rungs. "Climb! Don't look down, Clara! Climb!"
I grabbed the frozen steel. My fingers were numb, my wedding dress—now nothing more than a ragged, filthy shroud of wet silk—clinging to my limbs like lead weights.
Behind us, the tunnel became an open sewer of roaring white water. The iron bulkhead groaned under the hydraulic pressure of millions of gallons of water forcing their way through the sealed chambers below.
Rung by rung, we ascended into the vertical darkness.
Above us, forty feet up, a circular slice of grey light signaled an escape: a maintenance manhole leading to the service alleys behind the old Chicago Post Office.
And as I climbed, my fingers brushing against the cold iron, the question Elena had planted in my chest burned like white phosphorus:
May you like
If my husband was Nicholas Prime, and the man climbing below me was Julian...
Whose ring was I carrying in my pocket?
