Stirred (39 page)

H
e misses her response entirely, his attention drawn to a panel of a flat-screen showing the pair of interlopers who have been wandering around his concrete barrens for the last twenty-four hours.

They’re closing in on the warehouse, on all the action, on Jack.

Luther needs to handle this. Now.

But he can’t leave Jack yet.

Not when one of his favorite circles of hell is coming up.

I
calmed myself down, doing the Lamaze breathing I’d been taught in that one class I took with Phin. It was supposed to be a three-week class, but we’d never gone back, having endured too many questions about my age, including one young chick who asked if the Guinness World Record people had been notified.

It seemed so long ago.

Hell, it seemed like it had happened to someone else, in a different life.

I pushed away thoughts of the past, of Phin, and pressed onward.

Crawling while pregnant was like doing everything else while pregnant: slow and difficult. But I kept moving, shaking off the last few pennies stuck in my clothing.

When I reached the end, I pushed open a grating and edged forward.

Poked my head through.

Peered out.

A bare lightbulb dangled from the ceiling on a cord—the sole source of illumination.

This room was twice the size of the previous one, and I wondered how I was supposed to climb down until I fixed my sights on a series of iron bars which had been driven into the stone walls. Just within reach, they descended ten feet to the floor below.

On one wall I saw a black door with a keypad mounted to the wall beside it.

Standing vertically against the opposing wall—a casket-shaped object that appeared to be constructed of solid iron or steel.

I grabbed the closest iron bar and with considerable effort dragged myself the rest of the way out of the air duct. Then I eased my feet down onto one of the lower bars with an embarrassing grunt that made me thankful no one but a psychopath was privy to hear.

Four steps down and I was standing on a floor that resembled a metal grate.

My clothes were still soaked from the gutter-shower, my bones chilled, but this room felt warmer than the others.

Much warmer in fact.

Or maybe just a killer hot flash coming on.

I walked over and inspected the keypad and the door.

Then turned and crossed to the tomb.

Dark gray metal alloy, smooth, and with no defining characteristic beyond a new plaque, its casket-like shape, and the four-inch slot at head-level—

I startled.

—through which eyes watched me.

“Who’s in there?” I asked, taking a step closer.

The eyes stared into mine, unblinking, and what struck me first was their kindness, followed by a second realization—there was no life in them.

The capillaries in the whites had long since broken up.

These eyes belonged to a dead man.

I backed away to let a little of the overhead light stream in. Through the slot, beneath the eyes, I saw a ruined face. Trails of dried blood running down the cheeks. The white and black of a clerical collar.

Luther had killed a priest.

Locked him in a tomb.

Why?

I noticed a plaque midway up the casket as another hot flash enveloped me. I’d suffered my fair share during pregnancy, but nothing as strong as this, strong enough to instantly pop beads of sweat on my forehead.

I read the plaque under the slot:

CIRCLE 6: HERESY
Can you take the heat?

No accompanying quote. No code.

The hot flash was getting worse, and it wasn’t just in my face—it almost felt like drafts of heat were rising up beneath me.

I moved away from the tomb, fighting the kind of dizziness that precedes a heat stroke.

Steam actually lifting off my windbreaker.

I’d suffered through my fair share of hot flashes since becoming pregnant, but this was ridiculous.

The floor caught my attention.

More specifically, something under the grate.

Concentric circles were becoming visible—at first, just a dimly-glowing brown, but that turned amber, which quickly warmed into dirty orange. It reminded me of the burners on my stove.

And still, the heat continued to intensify, the brunt of it blasting the tomb like an oven—hell, it
was
an oven—fluids sizzling inside and the room filling with the smell of meat beginning to cook.

I rushed to the keypad.

Found it harder to gather my thoughts as the temperature spiked.

Okay, in the last room there was no code on the plaque, but a corresponding police code worked. So what’s the corresponding police code for…intense heat?

Arson?

I wiped sweat out of my eyes and punched in 447.

Red light.

The temperature was rising faster now. I glanced over my shoulder, saw flames licking up at the priest’s face inside the tomb. The smell in the room was beyond offensive—the odor of a human being turning to smoke and ash.

I tried something else.

Code for fire.

I’d been out of the game a while, and it took me a moment to recall, but I got it.

904.

Red light.

All right—scanner 11 codes.

Fire alarm…shit, what was it?

1170?

I gave it a shot.

A third red light blinked at me as I smelled the soles of my shoes beginning to scorch. The scent of burning rubber comingled with roasting BBQ.

Fire report.

1171.

Red light.

“Goddamn it!”

The heating element was turning a stronger orange, and I could feel the warmth in my wet socks, my swollen feet.

I was missing something.

Stumbling out into the middle of the floor, I studied the room once more as smoke poured out of the flaming tomb, filling my nose with a sweet, nauseating acridity.

What the hell was I missing?

I’d already made a close inspection of the tomb, but maybe I’d overlooked something when I’d first entered the room.

Through the smoke, I stared up at the air duct.

There.

I’d completely missed it.

The panel had closed back into place over the duct, and on its surface, I spotted a small circle with a silver perimeter and white interior that contained numbers and dashes.

A clock, perhaps?

No.

Of course—a thermometer.

But I was going to have to climb back up there to get a closer look.

I hurried over to the black iron bars that served as a ladder and reached for one at chest level.

The moment I grasped it, I screamed and withdrew my hands.

The metal was burning hot.

I glanced down at my shoes, where black smoke had begun to rise off the soles.

Any thought I might have had that Luther didn’t want to kill me vanished in the fear of being cooked alive.

I tugged down the sleeves of my windbreaker, and used them as gloves to buffer the palms of my hands from the blistering heat.

Didn’t hesitate, even though I didn’t want to touch the hot metal again.

I began to climb, legs still screaming from muscle strain, but I didn’t have the luxury to pace myself. Even with the windbreaker bearing the brunt of it, the heat was excruciating.

I reached the top rung in a matter of seconds, found it mercifully cooler than the ones close to floor-level. I held the bar with one hand, and leaned over to inspect the thermometer.

The circle was three inches in diameter, and the instrument had been attached to the panel with a magnet. I squinted, eyes burning from sweat and smoke.

It looked like a thermometer that belonged in a laboratory with a temperature range from –60°F to 500°F.

The needle nudged past 120°F as I watched it.

My sense of panic escalated with the temperature. So what did this mean? What did this have to do with giving me a code for the keypad? Would Luther actually let me die in here?

I leaned in closer as the rung I held approached a level of discomfort that would soon force me to let go.

I studied the brand name, the dashes, the numbers, the—

There.

I had to squint to pull it into focus, wondering if it was my imagination, or if that was actually a thin, manmade dash next to the bold line denoting a temperature marking of 375°F.

Was this intentional?

The heat was becoming unbearable.

I swung back over to the ladder and descended back into a heat which crossed the threshold into lethal, feeling certain I couldn’t stand much more than a minute at this temperature.

Flames shot out of the tomb.

The room had grown hazy with yellow smoke.

My shoes sizzled as I stepped down onto the metal grate, and one of my shoelaces which had come loose touched the floor and began to smolder.

I staggered over to the door.

As sweat poured down my face, I reached out for the keypad and punched in 3-7-5.

For a minute, nothing happened.

The heating element in the middle of the room now glowed bright orange, the priest in the tomb engulfed in flames, and the heat reached through my melting shoes, the soles of my feet growing hot, my nostrils burning intensely.

“Come on!”

Green light.

The deadbolt clicked.

The door swung back and a draft of the loveliest cold air I’d ever breathed swept into the room.

I pushed my way through and stumbled out of the sixth circle.

“Wow,” Luther said. “That was hot.”

For a moment, I thought I’d walked into another pitch-black room, but soon my eyes began to function.

“Nice work, Jack. Keep heading forward.”

I smelled rain and heard everywhere the sound of dripping water.

I ventured a step forward. My shoes felt strange, the soles uneven, having melted and re-hardened.

A blister was rising on my right hand from grabbing the burning step.

The taste of the smoke still lingered in my nasal cavity, even after several deep breaths.

It happened all at once—the darkness divulged its contents.

Long conveyer belts.

Robotic arms that hadn’t moved in years.

Giant machines. Drills. Presses. Planers.

Strong whiffs of old grease.

I stood at the far end of an abandoned factory, and through windows above, saw the orange glow of clouds tinting the night sky.

“Now what?” I asked.

There was no response.

I wondered if he was toying with me, or perhaps on the move.

I worked my way alongside a conveyor belt, passing what looked like the exoskeletons of cars. Wheelless, engineless shells rusted beyond recognition.

Halfway through the factory, I stopped, sat down on the forks of a broken-down forklift, and tried to catch my breath.

I cupped my belly in my hands, feeling a tide of tears coming on.

No time for that.

No time to break down and piece myself back together.

My friends needed me.

Even two minutes on my ass stiffened me up quite a bit and got the hamstring tight enough to strum. I limped on through the factory, finally arriving at a pair of double doors, uncertain if I was even heading in the right direction.

I pushed them open anyway.

Oh. Perfect.

Total darkness again.

I stumbled forward, my hands clutching the railing to a staircase, just as my right foot stepped out into nothing.

I followed it down, step by step, my hand gliding along the railing.

Reached the first landing.

Continued on to a second, still descending, losing all sense of direction.

I was on the verge of turning around, when my next step sank two feet into cold water.

T
hey arrived breathless and groaning with pain at the double-doored entrance to the warehouse they’d seen Jack enter fifteen minutes prior.

“A keypad,” Lucy said. “Bet these are locked.”

Donaldson grasped the door with his claw like hands and pulled it open.

“Or not.”

He stared down a well-lit corridor, Donaldson feeling a smile expanding across the wreckage of his face.

“Is that what I think it is?” Lucy asked.

“Oh yeah.”

They stumbled inside, the doors closing after them, and pushed their way through the corpses that dangled from the ceiling.