Douglas Preston - Gideon's Corpse

The man raised his hands. “Please. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“I know you will. Unlock the door to the accelerator tunnel.”

The man scurried to the back of the room, hastening to obey. Using a magnetic key, he unlocked a small door in the rear wall and opened it. A faint green glow emerged. Beyond the door, a curved, tube-like tunnel stretched ahead, going almost to the vanishing point. To the right was a catwalk. To the left was a complex cylindrical device, stretching on into infinity, covered with wires and tubing, like the stage of some monstrous rocket. A deep humming sound issued from it. It was a small, straight-line accelerator, some two thousand feet long, but Gideon knew the accelerator tunnel connected to much older tunnels, dating back to the Manhattan Project. Where those tunnels went he had no idea—they were blocked off behind locked doors.

And yet they remained his only chance.

Gideon motioned Alida through the door. Then he took the magnetic key from the operator, relieved the second operator of his key, and followed Alida into the tunnel.

The door shut and locked behind them.

Gideon turned to Alida. “I need to know: are you with me or not? Because if you’re not one hundred percent convinced of my innocence, this is as far as you’re going. I can’t risk another Judas moment like that.”

The silence was interrupted by a flurry of pounding on the door, shouts, and the sound of a third alarm.

She stared back at him. “My answer to you is, we’d better start running like hell.”

They sprinted down the metal catwalk paralleling the live particle beam. “You know where we’re going?” Alida cried, her feet pounding along behind him.

“Just follow me.”

Shouts, suddenly loud, echoed down the tunnel behind them. Damn , Gideon thought. He’d hoped it would take them longer to get through the door.

“Stop or we shoot!” came the barked command.

They continued on. The accelerator was throbbing with high energy, and if the pipe got punctured by even a single round…“They’re bluffing,” Gideon said, “they won’t shoot.”

Thwang! The shot ricocheted off the ceiling above their heads, followed quickly by others: Thwang! Thwang!

“Sure, they won’t shoot,” Alida muttered, ducking as she ran.

Gideon could hear feet pounding on the catwalk behind them.

Thwang! Another round glanced off the wall, spraying them with chips.

Gideon stopped, spun around, fired back at them with the stage gun. Their pursuers hit the deck.

They ran on another twenty yards until Gideon found what he was looking for: an ancient metal door set into the cement wall. It was padlocked with an old brass lock.

“Shit!” muttered Alida.

Gideon turned and fired again with the fake gun, sending the guards sprawling to the ground a second time. Then he took out the real .45, pressed the barrel against the lock, and fired. The lock exploded. Gideon threw his weight against the metal door. It groaned but didn’t open.

Alida tensed. “On three.”

They slammed into the door simultaneously, forcing it open with a loud crack, just as more shots clanged off the door. They fell inside, slammed the metal door shut—and suddenly faced pitch blackness.

Alida flicked on her lighter, dimly illuminating a crude, branching tunnel. He grabbed her hand and took one of the tunnels at random, pulling her along at a run. The lighter went out with the movement.

He heard voices, a fresh groan of rusted steel. The metal door was being opened.

Still gripping Alida’s hand, Gideon jogged ahead in the darkness, blind. They must have gone a few hundred yards when his feet tangled up with something on the ground and they fell together. He lay there in the dark, breathing hard, fumbling around until he found her hand again. He could hear voices behind them, echoing down the tunnel, distorted. They were not far. Did they have flashlights?

A lancing beam of yellow answered his question—but the sweep of the beam overhead briefly illuminated another branching tunnel in the nearby wall. As soon as the light passed, Gideon pulled Alida to her feet, and they ducked into the alcove.

Alida briefly flicked on her lighter. It went about twenty feet to a dead end—but at the far end of the cul-de-sac, an old rusted ladder climbed the stone wall. Gideon groped his way forward until he found the ladder, and they began to ascend. The voices behind them were getting louder; excited, aggressive.

Up they climbed, in the darkness. Below, Gideon saw a light flash into the alcove, but they had already climbed high enough to be invisible. They kept going, moving as silently as possible, until they reached the top of the ladder. Another flick of Alida’s lighter revealed a horizontal tunnel, crowded with ancient, rusting equipment, apparently left over from the original Manhattan Project.

Gideon climbed out and helped Alida up, wondering how much of the stuff was still hot.

“Which way?” Alida whispered.

“No idea.” Gideon started down the dark tunnel, moving in what he hoped was an easterly direction, toward White Rock Canyon. There were scraping sounds and voices in the shaft behind them: someone else was now climbing the ladder.

He stumbled over something on the ground. “Let me have the lighter.”

She palmed it to him. He flicked it on and saw rail tracks laid onto the floor of the tunnel. An old handcar, or pump trolley, sat on a nearby siding.

A volley of shots sent them diving to the ground. Flashlight beams lanced up and around them.

“Get on the handcar,” Gideon whispered. “Quickly.”

In a second Alida had leapt onto the cart. Gideon gave it a shove, running it onto the main track and up to speed, then jumped on himself. The pump handle moved up and down with a creaking of metal, rusty and covered with dust but still in working order. Gideon worked the handle to keep it going as more rounds ricocheted through the cavern. The car went squealing along the metal track, gaining speed as it entered a downhill grade.

“Oh, shit,” said Alida.

Gideon stopped pumping—but it made no difference. Faster and faster went the pump, its twin handles flying up and down on their own. The shots and cries began to recede.

“This was a really bad idea,” said Alida, crouching and gripping the wooden sides of the handcar.

The car was now barreling downhill, in utter blackness, heading for only God knew where.

They careened along the track, unable to see anything. A stale cave-wind whistled past Gideon’s head as he crouched in terror, groping for a better handhold, bracing for the inevitable crash.

“A brake!” yelled Alida. “This thing’s got to have a brake!”

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

He flicked on the lighter, and—in the brief spark before it went out—made out an old iron foot pedal on the side of the car, between the sets of wheels. Desperately, he jammed down on it with his foot. There was an earsplitting screech, an explosion of sparks burst around and behind them, and they were thrown forward as the cart decelerated, vibrating wildly, threatening to jump the tracks. He quickly eased up and applied the brake more evenly, slowly increasing the pressure. The cart wailed and groaned and finally came to a shuddering halt.

“Nice work, Casey Jones.”

Gingerly Gideon got off, then flicked the lighter. The tunnel stretched on ahead, making what looked like the beginning of a long curve. Not far ahead, however, a large pile of rocks lay across the tracks, apparently having fallen from the ceiling. The tunnel was blocked across its entire width.

“Jesus,” muttered Alida. “You stopped us just in time.”