Spiral

She wiped it onto the finger of her glove. It must be on his clothes.

She scanned the weeds around her. In a few seconds she saw another little glowing patch. Then another, like bread crumbs.

The trail was almost too easy to follow.

JAKE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS SLOWLY. HE FELT AS THOUGH he’d been beaten with a hammer, every muscle aching and pulsing as he sat up. The room was dark, save for the glowing fungi and a flashing red light near the door.

How long had he been out? He had no idea. He tried to remember what had happened. At first his memories were jumbled, like a jangly, disjointed dream. But after a few seconds his thoughts popped into their proper place. The digging. The cylinder. The struggle.

Dylan.

He jumped to his feet and tried to open the door. He pushed on it hard, looking for a handle but finding none. He threw himself against it. The massive thing didn’t budge an inch.

It must be locked from the outside. He’d never get through it.

He turned to inspect the blinking red light next to the sealed door. A timer. Fifty-four seconds and counting down.

Oh, shit. Jake had been in the 46th Engineer Battalion. They worked with explosives all the time. He recognized the box for what it was: a timer counting down a destruct sequence. Three dots below the numbers told Jake there were three explosives.

He picked up the timer, looking for wires. None. It was wireless, he was sure.

“Damn it!” he yelled, the sound echoing in the sealed bunker. He knew the design-the timer had a fail-safe mechanism so it couldn’t be disarmed once the destruct sequence had begun. Once started, the timer put out a steady signal to the bombs. When the signal terminated, the explosives detonated. If you disabled or destroyed the timing unit, the signal would cease and the bombs would go off immediately.

His only chance was to find the bombs.

The first one was easy, taped into a corner near the door. It was sealed in a plastic shell. There was no way he could disarm it without setting it off.

Jake scanned the place, looking for cover. The only light was from the glowing fungi.

The numbers in the corner counted down.

Forty seconds.

There must be ventilation in these bunkers. Jake scanned the walls, up high. On the back wall, and the end of the chamber, was a HEPA filter unit designed to remove any particulates. He pulled over a table, jumped up, and ripped out the unit. Beyond it was a thin passageway in the concrete, maybe wide enough for him to crawl through, maybe not. At the far end he saw a metal grating-cast iron, he guessed. No way he could get through that in time.

He’d have to let the explosives do it for him.

He tossed the first explosive into the vent, then searched for the others. The second one he found in the back corner of the room. He grabbed it and tossed it into the vent with the first. But where was number three? He checked the timer. Ten seconds left.

Nine, eight…

Damn it, where?

Jake turned over tables, looking everywhere. Then it hit him. She’d want an explosive in the ventilation passageway. An explosion there would create a pressure wave that pushed inward, sealing in the roiling heat and pressure from the other two bombs. The three explosions together would turn the bunker into a high-pressure, high-temperature inferno, incinerating everything inside.

There was only one problem. He hadn’t seen a bomb in the vent passageway.

Five seconds. Four…

Jake ran to the HEPA filter on the floor. He ripped off the back panel.

Three.

Two.

There it was. Jake grabbed it, did a hook shot with the bomb into the vent chamber, and dove behind a table.

DYLAN HEARD THE BLAST AS HE COWERED IN THE CORNER.

His whole body was shaking. He wanted more than anything to cry out, to scream and holler and draw the attention of someone. Anyone. But his mother was tied up and drugged. Jake? He didn’t know about Jake. He prayed that Jake was out there, but he knew that he wasn’t. Jake would be calling his name. The only person who would be searching for him without calling his name would be the woman. Orchid.

There it was again. Footsteps outside.

He looked at the cylinder in his hands. He had to get rid of it. Jake had trusted him. He tried to figure out what Jake would want him to do.

Why hadn’t he thrown it in the bushes? There was nowhere to hide it here. If she found him, she would get it.

Dripping water. He heard dripping water. Where did it go?

He thought of the other bunker. It had a drain in the floor, in the middle of the room. Maybe this one did, too.

He crawled on his hands and knees in the direction he thought was the center of the bunker.

What could he do? Swallow the cylinder? No. If she knew what he’d done, she could… The thought made Dylan shudder. Then how?

Then Dylan realized he didn’t have to keep the cylinder from her. The dangerous stuff was inside. What if he emptied it out? Gave her an empty cylinder? How would she know?

He tried to twist it open, felt the threads give. The rectangle of light at the door to the bunker flickered. Be brave, Dylan, he told himself.

The shadows at the door shifted. Orchid was out there. He rapidly unscrewed the cylinder. Turned it upside down over the grating to dump the contents.

What?

He was pretty sure nothing came out. He took half of it, tapped it on the floor. Nothing.

The other half dinked onto the concrete and rolled away.

Was it empty? Could the cylinder already be empty? Why would Pop-pop hide an empty cylinder?

Surface tension. Pop-pop had taught him how bugs could slide along the surface of the water, held up by surface tension. He also told him how hard it was to get liquids out of small spaces in rocks, for the same reason. He’d demonstrated with a thin little straw, about the same size as the cylinder. You get water inside, you couldn’t get it out by shaking.

There was only one way to get it out. Negative pressure.

Suck it out.

Be brave.

Dylan saw Orchid’s shadow in the doorway. “Don’t move,” she said.

Dylan placed the half-cylinder to his lips and sucked on it. The liquid hit his mouth, salty. He spit it out. Into the drain, spitting and spitting, trying to get it all out.

He was shaking, scared to death. He looked around him. Where was the other half of the cylinder?

WHEN JAKE CAME TO, HE COULDN’T HEAR A THING.

The blast had left him dazed, ears ringing, with a brutal aching in his skull. He tried speaking, but his voice sounded muffled, barely audible.

But he was alive.

He coughed, tried to stand. The air was searing hot, the chamber full of smoke. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t breathe without his lungs burning. He found the ventilation shaft, grabbed it and pulled himself into it, his hands burning from the heat. Unable to breathe, he crawled forward, then pushed out the remnants of the grating and fell out headfirst, dropping ten feet to the earth like a bag of rocks.

The first gulp of air was the sweetest he’d ever tasted.