Paul McEuen - Spiral

He looked down at the brass cylinder in his hand. Dylan understood. This was the most important task that he’d ever faced. Maybe that he would ever face.

She couldn’t get it. No matter what.

He had to hide.

The big metal door on the bunker to his right was open a few inches. He was drawn to it, a primordial instinct, seek shelter in a cave. He ducked inside, just able to slip through.

It was dark inside, pitch-black. Not like the other one with the glowing Fusarium .

He wanted to pull the door closed behind him, but that would make a noise. Go all the way in . He’d be safe. There was no way she could check them all.

He stepped deeper into the bunker.

The darkness swallowed him.

The bunker was in bad shape, damp and leaky. The smell of mold was strong. He walked with his hands in front until he found the back wall. He moved as far as he could from the strip of moonlight that leaked in through the partially open door.

He crouched down, cold and scared. He listened carefully for any sound, trying not to breathe. All he heard was a steady drip of water. He wanted to go inside himself, to hide far away.

The blackness was absolute. Darker than anyplace he’d ever been.

Otherwise, he would have never noticed them.

On his shirt sleeves were tiny pinpricks of glowing light, slowly pulsing on and off. Bits of glowing fungus were still clinging to his clothes.

ORCHID SCANNED LEFT AND RIGHT, LOOKING FOR ANY SIGN of the boy with her night-vision goggles. She cradled her gloved right hand in her left. The son of a bitch Sterling had broken two of her fingers. She’d kicked him senseless, then had grabbed her backpack and filled it with Connor’s fluorescent fungus, scraping it off the metal trays as fast as she could.

She’d tripped the electronic controller near the main door that activated the self-destruct mechanism, a series of incendiary devices she had placed in strategic positions inside the bunker. She had always planned to destroy Connor’s hideaway. In two minutes, there would be no traces left of anything inside, all of Connor’s work turned to ash. And now Jake Sterling would be ash, too.

She just had to deal with the boy.

He had a head start, and the Seneca Army Depot was a huge damned place. If he decided to hide, she would never find him in time. It would take days to search all the bunkers. And she didn’t have days. She had only minutes. Soon the explosion would go off and this place would be crawling with people. She had to get the cylinder, get back to the FedEx van, and head to the border.

Stick to basics. Keep looking .

Orchid checked up and down the empty road between the bunkers. Which way?

Then she saw something odd. She almost missed it, thought it was a flicker in the noise in her infrared CCDs.

But there it was again. A tiny blinking light. She took off her glasses, and it vanished. It was so faint, she could see it only with the goggles.

She jogged over to investigate. It was a tiny piece of fungus, stuck to a blade of grass. The blinking fungus.

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.