P Deutermann - Darkside

He felt rather than saw Branner jump over both of them as she ran in the direction of the St. John’s doors. The blasting noise was getting even louder, if that was possible, and then he felt a billowing wet heat enveloping them both.

Steam. Shit! There’d been two of them, and the other one, probably the guy they were after, had opened a steam-line drain valve as he took off back the way they had come in. The girl began to struggle again, but this time it was different. She wasn’t fighting him as much as fighting to breathe, and he realized he’d laid his entire weight on her. Being careful to keep his grip, he rolled off her back and yelled at her to keep still, that she was under arrest, but it was pointless in the shattering noise. As he raised his head, he realized he wasn’t able to breathe, not at all. His first inhalation brought a hot, wet gulp of oxygen-free water vapor, and he bent his head down immediately to get some air. This was dangerous. The tunnel was quickly filling with steam. This wasn’t a drain valve, but one of the main lines. Steam would soon displace all the oxygen. They couldn’t stay here. He wondered where Branner was, then decided he had to get himself and his prisoner the hell out of there, or at least behind a fire door. The nearest one was back in the branch tunnel leading to Mahan Hall, so he began dragging the girl toward the junction.

But which way was the junction? In his struggles with the girl, he had lost his bearings. Now he no longer knew which way led to the branch intersection. What little light there had been was being swallowed up in the billowing steam, and his attempts to breathe were bringing in increasingly less oxygen. If he chose wrong, there were no more doors for at least three hundred feet. He felt the girl start to cough and choke in his grip, and he forced her head down to the deck plates, where there was still some air.

The deck plates. There was a channel under the deck plates. Hot steam would rise. There might be air in the channel. Keeping one hand on the girl, he clawed at the edge of the deck plate nearest his hand until he got under an edge. He heaved against it and it moved, but the girl’s body was holding it down. He rolled her off of it and tried again. She had stopped struggling and was now down flat on the concrete floor. With one enormous heave, he got the deck plate up and out of its brackets. He pushed the girl down into the trenchlike channel, which was two feet deep and the same distance across, a notch running beneath the tunnel floor where water could accumulate in the event of a major leak, allowing repair crews time to get it stopped. On the bottom of the channel was the top of the main sewage line. He dropped in after her and landed partially on her and into a few inches of ice-cold water. Above him, the steam noise was louder and the temperature was rising fast. He could see nothing but a glow in the billowing mist above the floor. He pulled the plate over them as best he could, and the noise subsided a little.

“Stay down,” he yelled into the white blur that was the girl’s face, and she got flatter, no longer resisting. He fumbled in his belt for the small, spare Maglite and snapped it on. Where the hell is Branner? he wondered. She doesn’t know these tunnels. The channel ran in a straight line in both directions until it disappeared from sight. It smelled faintly of sewer gas and salt water. He felt water starting to drip down from the edges of the deck plate. Hot water. Steam’s condensing up there on the cold walls, he thought. He wondered how long it would be before the water started rising in the channel. But there was nowhere else to go. Above them, all the air and oxygen had been displaced by steam, and even at atmospheric pressure, the ambient temperature would be at least 150 degrees, enough to sear lung tissue. They would just have to wait until the steam plant’s operators detected the pressure drop, realized they had a leak, and shut down the main steam-supply line to Bancroft Hall. He took as deep a breath as he could stand, then settled lower into the water at the bottom of the channel to wait it out.

After what seemed like ages, the noise began to subside above their heads. He looked at his watch. It had been more like ten, maybe fifteen minutes since the whole thing started. He waited for the roaring noise to reduce itself to a medium blast, and then he jammed his fingers up between the edge of the plate and the lip of the trench. He raised his hand. The air was still hot and wet. When he thought he could make himself heard, he told the girl that they had shut off the steam but that they’d have to wait until there was air up there. She made a noise, and he shone the light in her face. All that white pancake makeup had begun to run off her face, and he was looking at a young and very scared college kid. Not all the moisture streaming down her cheeks was from the steam.

After another five minutes, all the noise had stopped and he pushed the plate out of its channel and sat up in the trench. The water was another inch or so deeper in the channel and running in a visible current around his hips. The air above them was still full of mist, but it was no longer hot and he could breathe. The girl was still flattened down in the bottom of the channel, her black clothes looking like an ink spill. He hoisted himself to sit on the edge of the channel, set the flashlight down on the floor, and lifted her up to a sitting position. He could hear the sounds of a maintenance crew in the distance. He wondered where the hell Branner was, and if she’d caught the bastard who’d done this.

“Did I tell you that you were under arrest?” he asked the girl. She nodded emphatically and started to cry again.

He saw lights coming down the tunnel from the direction of Bancroft Hall, then heard someone coming from the other direction.

“Hall?” Branner called. “You still down here?”

“Here,” he yelled back. “You catch him?”

A flashlight stabbed through the swirling cloud of condensing steam and then Branner stepped out of the mist. She appeared none the worse for wear. “Saw him, but he slammed a steel door shut, and I didn’t have a key. Then all that steam came and I had to run for it. Found another tunnel behind a door and hid out.”

“Well, I managed to hold on to this one,” he said, pointing at the bedraggled Goth.

“She’ll do,” Branner said, crouching down to stare at the frightened girl. Branner had a wolfish look on her face. “She’ll do.”

The girl began to cry in earnest as the maintenance crew showed up to ask what the hell was going on.

It was 1:00 A.M. on Sunday when Branner and Jim got the girl to the NCIS offices. Once out of the tunnel, her defiance had resurfaced and she had refused to say anything to either of them. She was carrying no identification, only a small wallet containing eleven dollars, a condom, and a used movie ticket. Branner had taken her in the bathroom and made her remove all the Goth makeup from her face. While Jim waited outside, she searched her for weapons or other contraband, discovering a nasty little two-inch knife in a flat sheath in the girl’s stocking. She also had had a small leather pouch attached to her belt. It was decorated with odd symbols and contained some minute bits of vegetable material, from which Branner had obtained a positive test for cannabis. She’d then locked the girl in the interview room and told her to wait there.

“So we have her for simple possession,” she was telling Jim while she made some fresh coffee before talking to the girl. “I can big-deal that up to possession of narcotics on a federal reservation-you know, for scare factor.”

“But actually-”

“Yeah, actually, it’s peanuts. The knife was concealed, but not long enough for full weapons status. Anyway, I want to know who that guy was I chased into the city tunnels. I’m assuming that he was probably our vampire mugger.”