Mark Alpert - Extinction

Layla took a step backward. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You want to shoot the boys?”

“I can make sure it’s painless.”

She took another step backward, then another. She retreated all the way to the other side of the room, trying to get as far away from Wen as possible. No, she thought. This was a nightmare. This was worse than anything Supreme Harmony could do to them. The horror of it filled the whole room, permeating the darkness. She glanced at the corner where the boys huddled and saw the light from the LEDs reflected on their newly shaved heads. Then she lowered her own head and clamped her hands over her bare scalp. No, no, no! There has to be another way! She frantically looked for some kind of escape, turning this way and that, but the horror was all around her. It was in the silent racks of servers and the deep rumble of the air conditioner and the ceaseless whirring of the radiator fan, which was on the floor by Layla’s feet and making such a maniacal racket that she had to cover her ears to stop herself from screaming.

Then she heard an even louder noise, so loud it went right through the hands clamped over her ears. The Modules had broken through the first locked door and rushed into the outer room where the computer terminals and screens were. They immediately started working on the door to the inner room, which reverberated with their pounding.

But instead of terrifying Layla, the noise cleared her head. She looked down at the radiator, a boxy machine about four feet wide and three feet high. The annoying fan was blowing cold air through the mesh of pipes that held the warm water from the server racks. And behind the radiator, a thick accordion hose funneled the heated outflow air to a vent in the wall. Belatedly, Layla saw the thermodynamic principle she should’ve grasped as soon as she stepped into this freezing room. To remove all the excess heat from the server racks, the cooling system needed a larger-than-normal duct for venting the warm air out of the lab.

Bending over, she gripped the plastic pleats of the accordion hose, which was thicker than a python. “ Wen! ” she shouted. “Come over here and help me!”

Without asking any questions, he put down his gun and grabbed the oversized hose. Layla counted, “One, two, three,” and on “three” they tore the end of it off the wall, exposing a square vent about eighteen inches wide.

Luckily, there was no grate over the vent. Layla poked her head into the opening and saw a horizontal air duct with metal walls. It was so dark she couldn’t see very far inside, but she confirmed by touch that at least the first few feet were navigable. The duct wasn’t big enough for a full-size adult, but the kids might have a chance to squirm through.

Layla stood up straight and turned to Wen. “Tell the boys to get in there and start crawling. I don’t know how long this air duct is, but I’m sure it goes outside the lab complex. Sooner or later they’ll reach the outlet. There’ll probably be a grate at the end of the duct, but maybe they can kick it loose. Then they can run the hell away from this place.”

Wen nodded in agreement, a look of enormous relief on his face. Striding to the schoolboys, he crouched beside them and gave orders in Mandarin. He smiled as he told the boys what to do, and when he was finished, he playfully slapped them on the back.

The nine-year-old entered the duct first, lowering his head to crawl into the vent. The older boy followed, scuttling on his elbows and knees. As they disappeared, Layla heard the scraping, grating noises again, coming from behind her. The Modules had applied their tools to the inner door and were gradually prying it out of its frame.

Wen turned to her and Layla saw that his gun was back in his right hand. But in his left hand, unexpectedly, was a pair of cheap running shoes. They were his shoes, she realized. He’d taken them off.

“Here, you’ll need these,” he said, thrusting the shoes at her. “And don’t forget your gun. I have two pistols and that should be enough.”

“Wait, what are you—”

“You have to go with the boys,” he said firmly, pointing at the vent. “You’re not much bigger than they are, so you’ll fit inside the duct. Just take off your jacket and push it in front of you.”

“But what about you? I can’t leave you here!”

He shook his head. “I’m too big. I’ll get stuck.”

“You have to try! If I can make it, then you—”

“No!” he shouted. His voice echoed against the walls. “The most important thing is the safety of the children. You have to help them escape. And I have to stay here and stop the Modules from following you.” He removed his second pistol from the back of his pants. “If I take cover behind the computers, I can keep them pinned down for a while. Maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty. That should be enough to give you a head start.”

Wen looked at her intently. Layla opened her mouth to continue arguing with him, but his expression stopped her. It wasn’t an angry look. It was more like the look she used to see on her father’s face when he asked her to do something important, like visiting her grandmother in the nursing home or standing up for the national anthem. Wen was reminding her that she had a responsibility. She had to live up to it. She couldn’t turn away.

Layla took off the down jacket and put on Wen’s shoes. She didn’t say goodbye. She just couldn’t do it. But just before she climbed into the vent she looked over her shoulder. The last thing she saw was Wen’s bare feet, which glowed for a moment in the room’s feeble light as he took cover behind the server racks.

That image stayed in her mind as she crawled through the duct, pushing the jacket with her left hand and holding the gun in her right. She didn’t know why she kept thinking about it. She should be remembering Wen’s face, the smooth handsome face she’d kissed. But, instead, she saw his feet, which seemed to float in the pitch-black darkness in front of her.

And then she heard the gunfire start in the inner room, booming so loudly that it made the air duct quiver, and Layla could think of nothing except scrambling forward.

The road into Yichang was broad and new, with three lanes in each direction, and fortunately it was downhill all the way. The slope allowed the three-wheeled truck to build up speed despite its small engine. Soon it was flying down Fazhan Avenue at eighty miles per hour, rushing past the factories and warehouses on the city’s outskirts.

Jim glanced at Kirsten, who’d slipped back into her bloodstained blouse. Luckily, she was a superb driver, and now she was pulling out all the stops. About two miles past the checkpoint they came to an intersection where a dozen slow-moving cars blocked all three lanes. Jim yelled, “Watch it!” but Kirsten didn’t slow down. Instead, she swerved into one of the oncoming lanes and whipped around the traffic. They needed to haul ass until they reached downtown Yichang; once they got there, they could ditch the truck in one of the alleys near the riverfront and find a hiding place where they could hole up until nightfall. But the downtown was still five miles away, and Jim could hear sirens in the distance.

After another minute they saw police cars up ahead. Four black-and-white cruisers rolled into the next intersection, about a quarter mile in front of them, and stopped in the middle of the road. The cops spaced the cars evenly, one in front of the other, so that they blocked all the traffic lanes, both inbound and outbound. There was nothing to do except turn around, but when Jim looked over his shoulder he saw four more patrol cars behind them. “Shit!” he yelled. “We’re trapped!”