Like all lifers, they could sense fear instantly, and they took pleasure in heightening it. Some yelled obscenities, others rattled their bars with enamel drinking mugs, others still just wailed a constant ear-piercing 'Ahhhhhhhhh!'
Juliet bolted through the nightmare, grim-faced and determined.
She saw a gently-sloping ramp off to her right — fenced off by a big barred gate. The ramp seemed to lead up to the next level. She made for it.
'Hey, baby! You wanna go for a spin…on top of my flagpole!'
The President stared wide-eyed at the chaos all around him. Prisoners in blue denim uniforms, unshaven and crazed, leaned out from their cages, trying to grab him.
'Hey, old man. I bet you got a nice soft marshmallow ass…'
'Come on,' Juliet yanked the President away from the voices.
They came to the barred gate.
As one would expect on a cell block, its lock was thick and strong. They couldn't shoot through it.
'Curtis,' Juliet said crisply. 'Lock.'
Special Agent Curtis slid to his knees in front of the gate and pulled a high-tech-looking lock picking device from his coat pocket.
As Curtis unfolded his lock-picker, Janson scanned the area around them.
There was movement and noise everywhere. Arms flailed out of cell doors. Snarling faces tried to squeeze through the bars. And the shouting, the constant shouting.
'Ahhhhhhhh!'
None of the prisoners seemed to recognize the President.
They all just seemed to enjoy making noise, inciting fear…
Then abruptly, there came a loud boom from somewhere behind them.
Juliet spun, pistol up.
She was met by the sight of a Marine, his full dress uniform completely saturated, charging toward her with a Remington pump-action shotgun raised.
Behind the first man were three more Marines, also soaked to the skin.
The lead Marine lowered his shotgun when he saw Juliet and the President.
'It's okay! It's okay!' Book II said, coming closer, lowering the shotgun he had pilfered from the arms cabinet in the anteroom. 'It's us!'
Calvin Reeves stepped forward, spoke seriously. 'What's happened down here?'
Juliet said, 'We've lost six people already, and those Air Force bastards are in the next room, right on our asses.'
Behind her, Special Agent Curtis inserted his lock picker into the gate's lock, pressed a button.
Zzzzzzzzz!
The lock-picking device emitted a shrill dentist-drill like buzz. The lock clicked loudly and the gate swung open.
'What's your plan from here, Agent Janson?' Calvin asked.
'To be where the bad guys aren't,' Juliet said. 'First of all, by going up this ramp. Let's move.'
Special Agents Curtis and Ramondo headed up the ramp first, followed by Calvin. Juliet pushed the President after them. Love Machine and Elvis went next. Book II fell into step beside Juliet, covering the rear.
Just as they were about to head up the ramp, however, they both heard a voice above the din.
'…Not a prisoner — a scientist! — know this facility — can help you!'
Juliet and Book II spun.
It took them a second to locate the owner of the voice.
Three cells down from the ramp, in the cell closest to the animal cage room.
The owner of the voice was standing up against the bars of his cell — which in the surrounding chaos had only made him look just like all the other prisoners.
But upon closer inspection, he looked considerably different from the others. He wasn't wearing a blue denim inmate uniform. Rather, he wore a white lab coat over shirtsleeves and a loosened tie.
Nor did he look deranged or menacing. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was short, with glasses and thinning blond hair that looked like it had been combed every day of his life.
Juliet and Book came to his cell.
'Who are you?' Juliet shouted above the din.
'My name is Herbert Franklin!' he replied quickly. 'I'm a doctor, an immunologist! Until this morning, I was working on the vaccine! But then the Air Force people locked me in here!'
'You know this facility?' Book II yelled. Beside him, Juliet stole a glance at the heavy door leading back to the animal cage room. It was banging from the other side.
'Yes!' the man named Franklin said.
'What do you think?' Book II asked Juliet.
She pondered it for a moment.
Then she shouted up the ramp: 'Curtis! Quickly! Get back here! I got another lock I need opened!'
Two minutes later, they were all heading up the ramp, now with a new member added to their group.
As they raced up the sloping walkway, however, making for the next floor, none of them noticed the layer of expanding water that lapped up against the bottom of the ramp.
When Schofield's runaway AWACS plane had crashed down onto it, the massive aircraft elevator platform had been parked on Level 4 — at the spot where the President's entourage had left it nearly an hour earlier.
Now, the crumpled remains of the Boeing 707 lay sprawled across the width of the elevator platform.
Gnarled pieces of metal lay everywhere. A couple of tires had been thrown clear with the impact. The plane itself lay pointed downwards, tilted over on its side, its nose dented sharply inwards, its left-hand wing broken in half, crushed beneath the plane's tremendous weight. Miraculously, the AWACS plane's thirty-foot flying-saucer-like rotodome had survived the fall completely intact.
Shane Schofield stepped out of the wreck of the plane, followed by Gant, Mother and Brainiac. They jumped over the debris as they ran for the giant steel door that led to Level 4.
A smaller door set into the base of the gigantic door opened easily.
No sooner had they opened it than Schofield raised his gun and fired. The shot smashed into a wall-mounted security camera, blasting it to oblivion in a shower of sparks.
'No cameras,' he said as he walked. 'That's how they're following us.'
The four of them made their way up a short upwardly sloping corridor. A squat solid-looking door loomed at the end of it.
Mother spun the flywheel on it and the big door swung open.
Schofield stepped through the doorway first, his nickel plated pistol leading the way.
He emerged inside a laboratory of some sort. Supercomputers lined the walls, their lights blinking. Keyboard terminals and data screens and clear-plastic experiment boxes occupied the remaining bench space.
Otherwise, the lab was deserted…
Blam!
Gunshot.
Blam!
Another.
It was Gant, exterminating a couple of security cameras.
Schofield continued to scan the wide room.
The most dominant feature of the laboratory was a line of slanted glass windows that lay directly opposite the entrance.
He stepped up to the observation windows and peered out through them — and found himself looking out over a wide, high ceilinged room, in the center of which stood a gigantic glass cube.
The cube was freestanding, occupying the center of the hall-like room, but without touching its ceiling or walls.
The wall on the far side of the cube — a wall which divided this level in two — didn't quite reach the ceiling.
