Sinister Heights (28 page)

“On the floor, Mr. Thorpe! Stay clear of the door!” Andy's high-pitched voice was muffled by the door.

I lunged, snatched Matthew by one arm, and threw him to the floor. He started screaming. I dived headfirst over the desk, no time to go around it, and mashed both palms on the electronic console, hoping the main power control was among the pressure pads underneath them. I hadn't time to look.

The room went as black as any cave on the dark side of the moon; but not for long. A great concussion flattened the air, followed by another, less loud, but only because the first had deafened me. Orange light blasted the darkness, as bright as the hot steel in the furnace at ground level. The sulfur stink of spent powder ate up all the oxygen in the room. Hornets stung me in several places; I was on my way to the floor, but I couldn't fall fast enough to avoid all the pellets. I struck hard on one shoulder and scrambled toward where I thought Matthew was, to throw myself across him, but I'd lost all sense of direction. A wall stopped me. Under the ringing in my ears I tried to separate the boy's screams from Andy's shouting, in order to orient myself. Crawling, I put a hand down on a mass of leaking meat: Connor Thorpe's smashed face. He'd slid out of his chair and landed on his back. I recoiled, adjusted my course ninety degrees, and this time my hand closed on the automatic. But it didn't happen fast enough.

The room filled with light. Andy had found his way to the main switch. I pivoted on my knees, raising the pistol. I was outgunned. The bore of the shotgun was two inches from my face. It was as big as a water tumbler now.

Something exploded. I flinched—and wondered how I knew I was flinching when my face had been blown away. But this one was louder than the shotgun, loud enough to drown out all the shotguns in the world. Another came hard on it, a reverberating crash that went on twice as long, or that had joined with a third one just behind it. Something pattered on my head and went down under my collar, granulated dust that until a second ago had been plaster in the basement ceiling. I was bleeding in several places under my shirt and it made a grating mud when it mixed with the blood. The shotgun swung away from my face. The world was shaking apart; I wasn't important anymore. Andy turned, staring up toward the source of the explosions.

I shot him in the groin. He gasped and dropped the shotgun. I grabbed for it, mad to have it before he fell on top of it; but just then another blow shook the building and I lost my balance and toppled off my knees just in time to take all of Andy's dead weight across my body.

More explosions then, and with them the rumbling vibration of big motors and heavy wheels rolling through the smashed bricks littering the foundry floor above. Ray Montana's army of eighteen-wheelers had begun its assault on the Stutch plant.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

Matthew had run out of lung power for screaming, and took in his breath in sobs in the little silence between battering blows twenty feet above our heads. At those times the only other sound in the room was the sifting of plaster and old dirt from the ceiling joists. If Thorpe and Andy were breathing, they were being quiet about it, conserving their strength.

The hell with them. I worked my way out from under Andy and crawled around the desk, still gripping Thorpe's automatic. Matthew lay face down where I had flung him, his shoulders working. When I laid a hand on his back he jerked, turned his head my way, and opened his mouth, but nothing came out. It was the same deep shock I'd left Mark Proust in after I'd shot him in the knee. I ran my hand over the boy's body, but couldn't find any place where he was bleeding. Both shotgun blasts had come in at doorknob level.

I got to my feet and took his hand. He rose and tried to climb into my arms, but I told him to stay behind me and take hold of my coat. The leather tightened across my back when he tugged on the tail and I stung in three or four places where lead pellets had lodged beneath my skin. I dragged my sprained, stiff, and shot-up body toward the corridor with the boy hanging on.

I paused at the doorway, holding the automatic, and looked in both directions. Chunks of mustard-colored plaster strung together with horsehair lay on the floor like jigsaw pieces, and one of the recessed ceiling lights had blown out; a fog of smoke was still drifting out of the brass canister. There was no one in the corridor. They were all busy running for cover upstairs. Now I hoisted Matthew onto my left hip, told him to hang on, and headed for the elevator. I was ten feet from it when the building shuddered and eight square feet of plaster, insulation, and pieces of lath dumped onto the floor in front of me, followed by half a ton of coarse sand and red clay. Matthew let out a wail and buried his face in my side. I coughed out a lungful of dust, dragged my sleeve across my eyes, and swung back the way I'd come.

Connor Thorpe looked dead. His nose was all over his face, the lower half of which was all crusted blood, and his skin was gray-green, like his suit. I set Matthew down on his feet and let him cling to my thigh while I bent and slapped Thorpe's cheeks. The little bit of color that came into them after thirty seconds seemed hardly worth it. His eyes opened, all at once without a flutter. He looked right at me.

“Where's the way out?” I asked. “You said you had another way rigged besides the elevator.”

“Go to hell.” It took him two tries to say it. He had to spit out a mouthful of blood and mucus.

I stuck the automatic in his face and eased back the hammer.

“Go to hell,” he said again.

“He's just a little kid, Thorpe.”

“He's a pain in the ass. I told her he would be.”

“Told who?” Another blow shook the building. A section of ceiling bellied in and fell on top of Andy. He didn't stir. “Forget it. Where's the way out?”

“Go to hell.”

I looked at him. I was as numb as a tire. “Tell Iris I'm not a Republican.” My finger tightened on the trigger.

“Who?”

Just then the steel door came free of the wall, frame and all, and hit the floor with a crash. Matthew screamed. I elevated the barrel of the pistol and let the hammer down gently.

The best place for the boss's escape hatch was in the boss's office. There were no traps in the floor or ceiling and the walls were seamless. I told Matthew to stand clear, stuck the automatic in the waistband of my pants, pulled the nearest file cabinet away from the wall. There was nothing behind it except feathery dust and a yellowed file, that had been lost since V-J Day. I moved two more cabinets and found a seam in the wall.

I pulled away the fourth, breaking loose a scab between my shoulder blades and releasing a trickle down my spine, and there was a recessed hand-pull at waist level. When I tugged on it, the entire panel came out of the frame. I leaned it against the cabinets and took a step forward to investigate what lay beyond. A fresh explosion jarred the telephone off the desk. Its bell rang when it struck the linoleum. I hoisted Matthew, pulled out the pistol, and stepped through the hole in the wall.

Beyond the trapezoid of light from the office the place was as black as deep space and filled with the potatoey smell of moist earth. The passage could have gone on forever or stopped ten feet in. Matthew whimpered; I wanted to join in. I groped my way forward, poking the automatic out in front to measure the depth. After a little while I could tell I was heading upward. The packed dirt under my feet graded gently. Another impact from above shook loose a stream of dirt onto my head. I stuck my hand up out of instinct and barked my knuckles against a four-by-four. The passage was shored up like a mineshaft.

Probing farther, I had to stoop to avoid hitting my head. The ceiling slanted at a shallower angle. Finally I had to let Matthew down. He moved behind me and took hold of my coat without having to be told; he was becoming an old pro. When another bang spilled more dirt down inside my collar I picked up the pace. My heart thudded in my ears and in all the places where I hurt. Of all my many nightmares the worst was being buried alive.

We went on for what seemed like miles. I wanted to light a match, but I thought I smelled gas. Ray Montana had said something about submerged gas lines. The racket from above was louder. A bell was clanging; either someone had activated a fire alarm or it had jarred into action all by itself. The sour smell of my own sweat joined with the dank subterranean stench.

I couldn't tell if my eyes were adjusting to the dark or light was coming in from somewhere. I could see my hand holding the pistol and the pale outlines of the timbers against the black earth. The air seemed to be freshening. Maybe my system was learning to get along with less oxygen. Then I saw a sliver of light lying across the path a dozen feet ahead.

When I got to the spot I looked up. The light was coming through a crack in the ceiling that extended from one wall to the other. I reached up with my free hand and felt boards. I pushed. They gave slightly. I told Matthew to stand back, stuck the automatic under my waistband, and pushed with both hands. A wooden hatch of some kind lifted out of a frame and light—or rather the absence of complete dark—hit me full in the face. I eased the hatch over to one side, sliding it against something that was not earth. The breaded edges of six inches of concrete formed a square around me. I took out the gun. It made gripping the concrete difficult, but I didn't know who or what might be waiting for me at ground level. I tightened my grasp and lifted myself high enough to peer over the edge. I looked around a large room with bulky objects studded about, lit only by a night that was not quite as black as the passage I'd come through. What light there was entered by way of a gridded window, with black squares checkering it where missing panes had been replaced with plywood or sheets of tin. It was the abandoned building I'd driven around to park in the employee lot.

Just then a shaft of white light swept across the window, pulling shadows around the room from great inert blocks of iron, decorated with massive flywheels and leather belts hanging in loose coils like lariats. Gears crashed and something as big and heavy as a brontosaurus rumbled on past outside, shaking the floor. Then darkness again. If anyone was in the room, he was hiding behind machinery. The air smelled of rust and rat musk and old oil.

I lowered myself back into the hole and leaned down to whisper in Matthew's ear. “Stay here. I'll come back for you. I need to check the place out.”

“No!” He flung his arms around my neck. A bolt of pure pain shot straight up a tendon.

I laughed. After shotguns and pitched fights and raw terror, whiplash just wasn't in it. I put away the gun, took hold of him, and shifted him around so that he was straddling my back. “Okay, tiger, we go up together.” I reached up and pulled us both out of the hole and into the sweet stale air of dead industry.

CHAPTER
THIRTY

I kept the boy behind me as I probed the shadows of that petrified forest. The floor was a litter of broken pulleys and levers and bolts the size of toadstools, sheared off and rusted to the concrete. Except for a couple of hundred spiders dozing in webs as thick as bridal veils and a bat that took off straight at my head when I startled it from its perch, making me duck and Matthew yell, the place was uninhabited. I stubbed a toe on a fallen gear as big as a manhole cover.

The window was no exit. It was too high to reach and the drop was too steep on the other side. The door was made of oak planks two inches thick, with crossbars at top and bottom. It was locked from the outside. Thorpe would have arranged another way out, but I was tired of poking around in the dark. I found a steam piston-arm cloaked with dust on the floor, about two feet long and as heavy as a sledgehammer, and had Matthew stand clear as I swung it. The socket-end struck one of the planks with a dull clang I felt to the shoulders. The plank moved out an eighth of an inch and sprang back into place. When oak decides not to rot, it turns to iron.

On the fourth swing an eight-inch sliver separated itself grudgingly from the door. I took a breather, then went at it again. At this rate I would have us out in time for Bastille Day.

Light raked the window again. I felt a stinging vibration in the soles of my feet, an angry diesel drumroll rattled the panes in the window, air brakes chuffed as it slowed for the turn. The floor was shaking so hard I could barely keep my balance. I let go of the piston-arm, scooped Matthew off his feet on the run, and crouched with him behind a mammoth generator, Thorpe's ugly black automatic in my hand. It was as good against what was coming as a Popsicle stick.

The same crew that had installed the door had laid the bricks that made up that wall. The impact was as loud as a case of dynamite going off. The floor moved and I had to clap a hand against the generator to keep from falling over. The bricks started about an inch out of their courses, but they held. Mortar dust rained down.

There was a snort on the other side; a comment from a frustrated rhino. Gears groaned, the rumbling and vibration started up again as the thing backed away for another pass. I figured it went back twenty or thirty feet. A pause, then a couple of gunning snorts while the thing pawed the ground. Gears again, and then the high-pitched whine of the second charge. I hung on to Matthew with one hand and the generator with the other, the pistol pinned beneath my palm. Another case of dynamite went off, the wall fell down in a sheet, and the great square-gridded maw of a Freightliner cab came howling through, ten feet high and shedding whole bricks and pieces as if it were spitting them out. The wall, built as they hadn't built them for sixty years, had put a bad scratch in its bumper.

It didn't slow as it kept on coming. I wanted to move, but my feet were sealed to the floor. I might have been rusted down as solidly as the old machinery. I pointed the automatic at the radiator. It could have eaten the entire clip and still been hungry. Matthew was as frozen as I was.