At Koobmeej’s direction, a dozen brawny prisoners stacked up three tables, and while some of them held the tables steady, a tall man climbed up and swung a metal folding chair against a skylight. The chair broke. The skylight didn’t.
“Well built, dammit,” Roger said. “Look at the sides of the building. Sheet-metal siding, sure, but iron bars inside. This was never a barn. Always a prison.” He didn’t seem inclined to consider talking less, and Irene didn’t have the ambition to ask him to shut up.
They tried another chair against the nearly flat metal roof, but the roof didn’t budge, even at seams alongside the skylights.
Irene choked back nausea. A few people were holding their chests in pain. A tough way to die.
The team trying to get fresh air moved the tables again, this time under the peak in the roof and at a different seam in the construction. One chair broke, and the man swinging it fell and was caught by others. Another man climbed up and continued to hammer rhythmically.
Irene thought of a song with that rhythm and drifted off into sort of a dream, waking with a start at a wrong note. A weird dream.
The man on the table seemed to have made a big dent.
“Cease activity immediately,” a voice said over a loudspeaker, a guard, probably a robot by the way it repeated the warning in the exact same tones. Then gunfire boomed outside, and the man on the table fell. He was caught by the work team, and although his shoulder streamed with blood, he gave a high-five sign.
The guard had shot through the wall. A sparkle of light shone in the wall where the bullet had entered, and another in the roof where the bullet exited.
“Not enough for fresh air,” Roger said.
“Where’s the surveillance?” Koobmeej called. “Look for something small that’s a camera, maybe hidden.”
Irene could do that. She stood up and suddenly swayed, dizzy. She held on tight to the back of her chair and waited until she felt steady, then examined the corner of the barn used for the quarantine area. She spotted a tiny box tucked up against a strut and recognized it as an off-the-shelf camera.
Three other boxes were spotted in other parts of the barn, and people started throwing things at them. Irene looked around for something.
“Hey, take my boot,” Roger called. He’d pulled it off and held it out. “Steel toes. Work boots.”
It was heavy and bulky, and she tested it in her hands. It would be hard to aim, but with its weight, it could be destructive. She threw it and almost hit the camera. Suddenly bullets flew in through the side of the building. She dropped to the ground like everyone else, and she lay still for a minute. They should have expected the robots to shoot.
“Those bullets flew way too high,” Roger said from where he lay under a table. “If those damn robots wanted to kill people, they’d’ve aimed low. They’re obeying orders, and I bet the orders say to keep us inside, not to kill us. So we die nice and slow of bad air.” He grunted, a sound as ugly as an expletive.
Irene got up slowly, rage rising as she did. They were being tortured to death. She retrieved the boot and, with the strength of red-hot anger, threw it again. Its heel hit the camera with a satisfying thump, and the camera dangled from a wire. She dropped to the ground and waited for bullets. None came. She stood up and threw the boot again. The camera fell this time, and she dropped to the ground again. Another burst of gunfire pierced the walls.
Did she hear a mammoth trumpet? No, that was just her oxygen-starved imagination. Nimkii to the rescue! He could follow the trail of her scent and trash and crumbs up the county trunk road to Berry Farm. A nice idea. But the centaurs would shoot him.
One by one, the cameras were destroyed, and after a wait, the team resumed banging on the roof. Irene watched, lying on the ground. Bits of metal fell as the chair broke apart. A man pushed a leg into the roof like a pry bar and pulled down, and a line of light shone through. The roof was open! A little, at least. She took a breath and couldn’t notice a difference.
The team worked even faster. The man swung from the chair-leg pry bar like an acrobat, and another man hung on to his ankles for extra weight. The crack widened and sunshine poured through—and air. She caught a whiff of it now, cool and fresh.
The hole grew. How big would be big enough? A breeze passed over her, and she breathed in as much as she could—and she heard a trumpet. Definitely. Nimkii was out there!
She climbed to her feet and staggered through a dizzy spell to the stack of tables. She had to warn Nimkii to get away.
“Let me climb up there. Hear that? It’s the mammoth. My mammoth. He’s out there.” She got a blank look. She explained again. “That mammoth at that farm, you know it? I work there.”
“Okay then,” a woman said. “Let me help you climb up. Hey, Aaron. Let her out. She’s the mammoth girl.”
“Easy does it,” the man told her as he knelt to let her sit on his shoulders. She poked her head through the narrow opening, avoiding the sharp metal edges. The air smelled sweet, sweet, sweet.
Nimkii stood on the road, trunk raised and jerking. She couldn’t see any centaurs or people, but she was at a bad angle for looking around.
“Nimkii!”
He spotted her and started rushing toward her.
“Nimkii, go away!” She grabbed an edge of the metal, scraping her palm, and put her foot on the man’s shoulder. He pushed the backs of her thighs to help her climb out.
One of the centaurs stood near the front entrance to the barn.
Nimkii kept walking forward.
