Brad Meltzer - The Zero Game

She flips a switch, and the light turns on. Twenty-four hours ago, she would’ve bobbed her head back and forth, teasing me by shining the light in my face. Now the light shines on her feet as she stares at the floor. The excitement’s long gone. It’s one thing to say you’re going underground; it’s entirely another thing to do it.

“Don’t say it…” she warns as I’m about to open my mouth.

“It’s safer than being-”

“I said don’t say it . I’ll be fine,” she insists. She clenches her teeth and takes a deep breath of the hot, chalky air.

“How do we know which ones are charged?” she asks. Reading my expression, she points to the bookshelves on our right and left. Both are filled with battery packs. “What if one’s a check-in station and one’s a checkout?” she adds, knocking on the red casing of her own battery. “For all we know, this came back ten minutes ago.”

“You think that’s how they-?”

“That’s what they do at laser tag,” she points out.

I give her a long look. I hate myself for bringing her here.

“You keep yours from the left, I’ll take mine from the right,” I say. “Either way, we’ll at least have one that works.”

She nods at the logic as I grab two orange mesh construction vests from a nearby garbage can. “Put this on,” I tell her, tossing one of the vests her way.

“Why?”

“The same reason every bad spy movie has someone sneaking in dressed as a janitor. An orange vest’ll take you anywhere…”

Skeptically examining herself as she tightens the Velcro straps on the side of the vest, she adds, “I look like I should be doing roadwork.”

“Really? I was thinking more crossing guard.”

She laughs at the joke — and from the smile on her face, it looks like it’s exactly what she needed.

“Feeling better?” I ask.

“No,” she says, unable to hide her smirk. “But I’ll get there.”

“I’m sure we will.”

She likes the sound of that.

“So you really think we can pull this off?” she asks.

“Don’t ask me — I’m the one who said you can’t win ’em all.”

“You still feel that way?”

I lift one shoulder and move up the dust-filled hallway.

Viv’s right behind me.

At the far end of the hall, the metal bookshelves are gone, and the basement walls are instead lined with wooden benches that sit end to end for at least a few hundred feet. Based on the photos in the brochure, during the mine’s heyday, miners lined up here every morning, waiting for their ride to work. Back in D.C., we do the same thing on the metro — line up underground and take the subway downtown. The only difference out here is, the subway isn’t a horizontal ride. It’s vertical.

“What’s that noise…?” Viv asks, still standing a few steps behind me.

Straight ahead, the mouth of the hallway opens into a room with a thirty-foot ceiling, and we hear a deafening rumble. The wood benches vibrate slightly, and the lights begin to flicker — but our eyes are glued to the elevator shaft that slices from floor to ceiling through the center of the tall room. Like a vertical freight train, the elevator rockets up through the floor and disappears through the ceiling. Unlike a normal elevator shaft, however, this one is only enclosed on three sides. Sure, there’s a yellow stainless steel door that prevents us from peeking into the shaft and having our heads chopped off, but above the door — in the twenty-foot space before the ceiling starts — we can see straight into the elevator as it flies by.

“You see anyone?” I ask Viv.

“It was only half a second.”

I nod. “I thought it looked empty, though.”

“Definitely empty,” she agrees.

Stepping further into the room, we simultaneously crane our necks up at the elevator shaft. For some reason, there’s water running down the walls. As a result, the wooden walls of the shaft are dark, slick, and slowly corroding. The closer we get, the more we feel the draft of cold air emanating from the open hole. We’re still at basement level, but the way the tunnel curved us around, I’m guessing we’re in another building.

“Think that’s the teepee up there?” Viv asks, pointing with her chin at the sliver of sunlight that creeps through the very top of the shaft.

“I think it has to be — the woman in the motel said that’s where the-”

A dull thud echoes down the shaft from the room above. It’s followed by another… and another. The noise stays steady but never gets louder. Just soft and even — like footsteps. Viv and I both freeze.

“Frannie, it’s Garth — cage is at station,” a man’s voice announces with a flat South Dakota accent. His voice reverberates through the shaft — it’s coming from the room above us.

“Stop cage,” a female voice replies, crackling through an intercom.

There’s a loud shriek of metal that sounds like a storefront’s rolltop gate being thrown open — the steel safety gate on the front of the cage. The footsteps clunk as they enter the cage. “Stop cage,” the man says as the door slides shut with another shriek. “Going to thirteen-two,” he adds. “Lower cage.”

“Thirteen-two,” the woman repeats through the intercom. “Lowering cage.”

A second later, there’s a soft rumble, and the benches behind us again start to vibrate. “Oh, shit…” Viv mutters.

If we can see them, they can see us. As the elevator plummets downward, we both race to opposite sides of the shaft. Viv goes left; I go right. The elevator screeches past us like a freefall ride in an amusement park, but within seconds, the thundering sound is muffled as it fades down the rabbithole. Ducked around the corner, I still don’t move. I just listen — waiting to see how long it takes. It’s a seemingly endless drop. Six Empire State Buildings straight down. And then… deep below us, the metal of the cage whispers slightly, lets out one final gasp, and finally — poof — disappears in the dark silence. The only thing we hear now is the calming swish of the water as it runs down the walls of the shaft.

Above my head, next to the rusted-out yellow door, there’s a short wall with a break-glass-in-emergency fire alarm. Next to the alarm is a phone receiver and a matching rusty keypad. There’s our way in.

I glance back at Viv, who’s got her hands up on her head and a dumbfounded look on her face as she studies the elevator. “Nuh-uh-uh,” she says. “Nuh-uh. No way you’re gettin’ me in that…”

“Viv, you knew we were going down…”

“Not in that rusty old thing, I didn’t. Forget it, Harris — I’m done. Gone. Nn-nnn. Momma don’t let me get on buses that run inta that bad a neighborhood…”

“This isn’t funny.”

“I agree… That’s why I’m keeping my black ass right here.”

“You can’t hide here.”

“I can… I will… I am. You go jump in the well — I’ll be the one up here turning the crank so we can at least get the water bucket back at the end of the day.”

“Where’re you gonna hide up here?”

“Plenty of places. Lots of ’em…” She looks around at the wooden benches… the narrow hallway… even the empty elevator shaft, where there’s nothing but a cascade of running water. The rest of the room is just as bare. There’re some old tires in the corner and an enormous wooden spool of discarded electrical wire in the back.

I cross my arms and stare her down.

“C’mon, Harris, stop.. .”

“We shouldn’t separate, Viv. Trust me on this — I can feel it in my gut: we need to stay together.”

Now she’s the one staring at me. She studies my eyes, then glances over at the intercom. Just behind us, leaning against the wall, is a bright blue sign with white stenciled letters: