The Adventure of the Flooded Room
Room C-7 would have been located at five o’clock had the large, circular hall been the face of some gargantuan timepiece. It was also the last room into which the stampeding survivors of the attack on the central office had fled after finding all other labs already locked by their swifter companions who had taken the same southerly direction to escape Cummings’ wrath. There were a dozen people inside the room, which was connected by an irradiation chamber in its rear to lab C-8. (The room’s availability—not this connection to another laboratory—was the reason the panicked men and women had fled into it; at that point, none of the refugees could see any advantage to the rear exit.) The majority of the people were the older, more out-of-shape, and in general slower representatives of the press and the Institute staff, which explained why they had been forced to run so far from the central office before reaching safety. Self-preservation has a way of negating the more altruistic sentiments in people.
Room C-7 was located just a few yards from the site upon which William Pembroke had met death through his own device.
The two youngest people in the lab were Meg Talley and Nick Grundel, both of whom had been overwhelmed by the hysterical crowd while trying to hold off Cummings in the central office trap. Like the rest, the two thought that all that was left of the awful night were the hours to be spent closed away from the prowling evil in the corridor.
In spite of the fact that it would have been difficult for them to have been heard beyond the confines of the room even if they had decided to scream in unison, the voices of those who chose to talk where kept low and private. Cummings’ aura was so pervasive that, even when he wasn’t in their midst, the heavy pall of menace cast an ugly effect on them all.
Four men and one woman were sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, smoking and exchanging experiences … gruesome experiences, true, but surprisingly events which had nothing to do with the horror that they had undergone during the past hours.
“I was one of the first reporters allowed into the prison after it was retaken,” said a heavily-built, graying man whose smooth brown pipe lent an odd air of respectability to the night. “I saw things that I was completely unprepared to see even following my wartime reporting, killings of the most inhumanly brutal nature. At least Cummings is instinctive, animalistic … while I was at the prison, they brought out a man who had been a snitch before the riot; the prisoners had used a blowtorch on his head until the heat blew out the back of his skull. He was still alive.”
“Good god,” Meg whispered to Nick, who was standing next to her by the locked door. “Why are they going through with that grotesque … contest? Why are they trying to top each other? That man was in a prison riot, the lady was the only survivor of an airline crash, that other man saw his entire backup crew killed by a shell in Vietnam … what are they trying to prove? Isn’t what’s going on tonight terrible enough?”
Grundel closed his eyes and smiled a kind of half-sad smile. “They’re reminding themselves,” he answered. “They’re going back to the worst times in their lives, maybe magnifying them some, and remembering that they survived those riots and crashes and wars. If they’re lucky, they might convince themselves that they’ll survive this, too.”
“You don’t sound so sure, yourself,” she observed.
He rapped his knuckles against the hard door. “I have seen the light and placed my faith in the god of steel. Let Wildman Cummings gnaw his teeth to bloody stumps on this, and I’ll laugh at his hangover tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Meg repeated. She glanced at her watch. It was two-eleven.
Grundel’s faith lasted another ten minutes, until Jeremy Melchior came on the intercom with the chilling announcement that the door to lab C-4 was giving in under a furious attack by the madman. The room hushed to a silence disturbed only by the sounds of a dozen people scrambling around the wall speaker. Low moans of agitation and fear began to escape into the air as Melchior reported the failures of all of the methods of defense which were submitted to him from other areas of the building. When the final words from room C-4 were spoken, open sobbing by at least three people replaced the tense quiet of a few moments before.
“That’s it,” Nick said, shaking his head slowly. “If he can get through to us, he will, and, my god, we’ve still got three and a half or four hours to wait.”
“Maybe he won’t come here,” a slender man said hopefully. “There are a lot of other people in this building, too many for him to kill everybody tonight!”
Grundel looked at the man and sneered, “That’s right, maybe he’ll get so full of the other poor bastards that he won’t have room for dessert.”
“Well, what do you want to happen?” the other man demanded. Damn it, I don’t want to die!”
Nick didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he turned his back on the man and walked away, a fairly eloquent statement in itself. Meg left the demoralized group around the speaker and joined him near the rear of the big lab, a room that was larger by half than most of the others in the building. It was crowded with tables and equipment.
“It doesn’t look good, does it?” she asked primarily to hear a spoken voice.
“It looks shitty,” he answered. “I was worried, but I was beginning to believe we could wait it out in here, but now … it’s pretty clear that nothing is going to stop that monster. A lot of people are dead, and a lot more will be before it’s over.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.”
“I’ll bet it surprises you that I’m concerned about anything other than my own hide, doesn’t it?”
“No.”
“Thanks,” he said. In an almost startling display, he reached out and draped his right arm around her shoulders to draw her close to him. “You know, if I were half as brilliant as I’ve always claimed to be, I would leap into the middle of those chemicals and whip up a recipe that would eat Cummings’ flesh from his skeleton and save us all.”
“You’re too much like me,” Meg sighed. “Right now, deep inside my mind, there’s an insistent little voice screaming that it’s all my fault because I didn’t convince the powers that be to lock Cummings in a solid diamond cell, instead of that ridiculous iron bed.”
“You can’t hold yourself responsible for any of this,” he said. Once, he might have laughed and agreed with her. “They were warned—we all were—and, besides, since he broke into C-4, I have to wonder whether there’s any kind of cage that would hold him. Jesus, if he finishes with everyone inside the building in time, he might even break out and take on the rest of the world.”
“Nick, don’t,” she said wearily. “Don’t make it any worse.”
Worse? he asked himself. How in the hell could this get a single degree worse than it already was?
The Man was trapped in a continual state of ecstasy that was so unbelievably powerful that it neared agony. With every drop of blood and every scrap of flesh that rolled down his throat to be converted instantly to more strength and rage, the second life within him commanded that he seek and devour ever more victims to feed his burgeoning appetite. The pure, vibrant reward that was given to him for the performance of these activities was a form of pleasure so far beyond anything carnal or spiritual that he was thrown into actual physical convulsions at regular intervals. It was almost too much for the Man to accept, but he realized that he could never again live without it.
When he had savaged the two creatures inhabiting the first room into which he had forced a way, he staggered down the hall in the all-encompassing grip of pleasure until he stopped before number C-7. The letters above the door made no sense or impression on him; all that mattered was the knowledge imparted to him by some strange faculty, telling him that there were more living bodies inside, more rich blood to be had just beyond the steel doors.
With a shoulder that broke under the massive pressures put upon it, yet healed before the next blow, the Man slammed against the metal panel that separated him from his prey.
The first sound of something striking the outer door, though muffled, was loud enough to alert everyone inside the room and bring a communal gasp of realization from them. There was no doubting the agency behind that blow or the ones which followed swiftly after it.
“Nick, we’ve got to do something!” Meg whispered urgently. “I’m not ready … I’m not going to die here, tonight! We’ve got to stop him somehow!”
“We’ll have a few minutes before he can get through both doors,” Grundel responded, while he scanned the chemicals and other potential weapons available to them. “If we can come up with something really corrosive—”
“Look! Look!” She grasped his shoulder and spun him around to face the very back of the lab. “There’s another door!”
“I’ll be damned … shut up! Don’t let anyone hear you!” He pulled her even further away from the others in the room.
“What’s the matter? We’ve got to get out of here!” she said.
“We will, but not yet! We don’t want to start something we can’t handle!” The pounding was continuing on the outer door, and already nearly half of the trapped people were showing recurrences of the blind hysteria that had saved them, once, from Cummings but which just as easily could prove fatal in this circumstance. “We can’t just run from one room to the next! That tall, black guy up there, near the door: he’s part of the security force, isn’t he?”
“That’s the same uniform,” Meg agreed.
With a quickness that was indistinguishable from the nervousness of the others, Grundel ran to the front of the room and urged the man in the uniform to return to the rear with him. No one took much notice of them, because the object of their rapt attention had begun to bend in the first of the two doors protecting them.
“Listen, fella, there’s not much time—” Nick began.
“Langrum,” interrupted the guard, “My name’s Arthur Langrum.”
“Okay, Langrum!” Grundel snapped. “The point is: you know this place, right? Where does that door lead to?”
Langrum’s face broke into a wide smile. “I’ll be! It’s a connecting chamber! There’s a way out of here!”
“Shh! Don’t alert everybody before we’re ready, man!” Nick said quickly. “What kind of room is on the other side?”
“I don’t know! We don’t go into each office on our rounds, you know.”
“Hell, I was hoping that … never mind; it will have another door opening into the hall, won’t it?”
“Of course.”
“Good. We can lure Cummings into this lab, and then we’ll charge through into the next room, shut those doors, and escape while he tries to batter his way through to us.”
“Providing he doesn’t have enough of his human intellect left to go out the way he’s coming in now and cut us down in the hall,” Meg pointed out.
“My number one morale officer,” Nick said, hooking a thumb at her. “I don’t think that thing has enough brains left to blow his nose, and, besides, it’s the only plan we have.”
“And what happens then?” Meg demanded. “Do we play musical offices while Cummings runs us from lab to lab? Nick, we have to stop him! We can’t let him go on like this until morning, or, my lord, he may kill fifty or sixty more people! And if we’re unlucky enough to run into a lab with no rear exit, we’ll probably be among those fifty or sixty!”
Grundel weathered the assault and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m open to all suggestions,” he said.
“We’ve got to get help from outside, big weapons to blow him apart or unbreakable chain nets to catch him in!”
“You can’t get out of here,” Langrum told them. “It’s a sealed box.”
“Wait a minute,” Nick whispered, primarily to himself. “In the central office an hour ago, there was this noise, an explosion … and somebody said it was probably other people trying to blast their way through an emergency exit of some kind. Where is it?”
“Just a few yards down the corridor,” answered the guard. “It would never have been unlocked during a general quarantine, but if explosives were used against it, it could have been breached!”
“If somebody else got through, why hasn’t help come already?” Meg asked.
The idea was now possessing Grundel, and his grin was a savage one. “Maybe they were killed in the blast. That’s our target, then, the emergency exit! Once we have Cummings inside the lab, we’ll make a run for it; that should give us enough time to find another hole to hide in, even if we can’t get through.”
“Well, I can’t say I like the chances of its success,” Meg observed, “but it is a plan.”
The rear doors opened easily to admit them to a room that appeared to be more of a storage area than a laboratory. As soon as the avenue of escape was spotted by the desperate people in the first lab, Nick’s prophecy materialized. In fact, it was all that he, Meg, and Langrum could do just to keep the nine men and women from rushing into the corridor and alerting Cummings to the escape route. It was nearly impossible to believe that these same people had covered wars, sieges, and all manner of dangerous assignments; the hold that Cummings had upon them was incredible.
Once everybody had been calmed and quieted—relatively speaking—Grundel set up the team that was going to sucker the werewolf: Langrum at the door to the front irradiation chamber in the second room, along with his pack of nervous reporters and scientists, and Meg at the (closed) inner door of the rear chamber. Of course, someone had to stay in the first room to make sure that the monster didn’t lose interest in the assault, and that task fell to Nick himself.
He stood alone in C-7 and listened as Gerald Cummings finally overcame the heroic resistance of the outer door to the irradiation chamber and rushed in to attack the remaining barrier. Nick drew in a breath that was ice cold in spite of the fact that the Institute’s temperature was computer-controlled for human comfort when he saw the initial dents in the steel curtain. What a tireless engine of destruction the man had become!
“Don’t wait too long, Nick!” screamed Meg from the other room.
“Mama, I hope that your thick-headed son hasn’t served up his own ass this time,” he said to himself. Then, picking up a folded metal chair on the way, he walked toward the front of lab C-7.
The impressions he received while standing only a few feet from the creature were even more awe-inspiring than those he had felt during the actual transformation (even though he had believed that nothing could ever top that moment). He watched as the heavy metal door punched inward with every collision with the beast’s shoulder, as if a motor-driven battering ram were being employed to break into the room, and he was forced to wonder if thoughts of escaping this situation were anything other than momentary fantasies.
But, he had a job to do. Grundel grasped the chair in both hands. “Hey, Cummings!” he shouted. “You in there, furball?”
The deep, rumbling, animalistic grunts that had accompanied the regular collisions with the door stopped, as if the creature were confused.
“What’s the matter, you stupid sucker? Did I scare you?” Saying this, Grundel swung the chair into the door with all of the terrified fury that he possessed. It caused a wild clanging noise.
And Cummings responded. His roars exploded out of the chamber, his rage fanned by the insolence of this weak thing that taunted him, and his attack on the inner door doubled in frequency and power. Nick continued to whack the chair into the door for several moments, in spite of the fact that both of his wrists were being jarred so violently that they felt as if they were breaking. When he saw the first parting of the lip of the door from its sealing cushion in the doorframe, Nick knew that his job was complete: Cummings wouldn’t be turning back to the corridor as long as he had the strength to breathe.
Nick half-ran to the connecting chamber in the rear of the lab and set himself just inside the first door so that he could crane his neck around the corner and check the werewolf’s progress.
“Now, Nick?” Meg called from C-8.
“Wait ’til I call you!” he answered. “And, for god’s sake, hit the right switch!”
Cummings was inside C-7 within a minute. The edge of the door bent back with an agonizing cry, and his rabid, wild-eyed face squeezed through the ten-inch opening.
“Jesus God!” Grundel gasped.
The brown-furred head was followed by an equally heavily covered neck, like some figure of paste being forced through a hole that distorted its shape; when the shoulders and chest hit the opening, the ropy arms were turned to the effort of enlarging the gap, a task that took less than half a minute. The monster’s visible features seemed almost to glow with the frenzied determination to reach and destroy any living thing inside the room, and completely ignored the long trenches of flesh and hair that were being gouged in him by the jagged metal.
I don’t know if I can do this, Grundel told himself, but he did it anyway by leaping out of the irradiation chamber and throwing beakers, vials, everything that he could find in the direction of the half-entered beast. He scored a number of direct hits. “Come on, bastard, come and get me!” he screamed. The creature hurled his boiling cries of fury at the temporarily out of reach man.
Nick almost waited too long. While he presented himself as open bait for the werewolf, Cummings squirmed through the small opening with a flip of his powerful legs and leaped a dozen feet into the lab. Then he began to cover the remaining interval with loping strides that moved far more swiftly then Grundel would have thought to be possible. The young man suddenly found his own feet carrying him back into the irradiation chamber even as his eyes and mind were transfixed by the nightmare that was closing on him.
He slammed into the single door that separated him from C-8, shouting, “Let me in!,” fell through into the other room when Meg responded, and hit the floor still yelling as the door closed behind him. Cummings was no more than a breath behind him, but that was just enough time for the door to slide closed once again.
“Close the other door!” he ordered, but Meg had anticipated the command, and the second steel curtain slipped shut to trap Cummings inside the box-like chamber.
Nick scrambled to his feet. “That won’t hold him for long, so we’d better get on the move!” He waved a signal to Langrum, who opened the irradiation chamber leading into the corridor, and the flood outward was triggered.
“Let’s go,” Nick said to Meg, but before joining her in the sprint for the hallway, he turned and pounded both fists against the door for one last taunt that would stimulate the monster into pursuing them in this direction rather than turning on his heel and breaking into C-7 where he could more easily escape through the already breached chamber.
Once everyone had reached the corridor, Langrum closed the doors to C-8. Without waiting for Grundel’s orders, the unarmed security guard broke into a run that led the group toward the emergency exit. On his shoulders he carried a pair of peculiar portable lights—lights consisting of floodlamp bulbs hooked to plastic casings that contained dry cell batteries the size of those found in automobiles. He had grabbed up these giants in the second room because he knew that the hall lights would still be off. As he ran, he switched on one and sprayed the brilliance of it ahead of him.
Meg figured that they had, at most, seven or eight minutes before Cummings worked himself out of the cage which they had closed about him, so she was very relieved when Langrum stopped the procession after less than a minute of travel. She was less happy to see what awaited them when she approached the guard at the doorway, however.
The sliding metal door leading into this room was twisted totally off of its track so that a wide gap had been opened to them by the force of the explosion inside. When Langrum aimed the floodlight into what had been a storage room over the basement that led to the exit, the full extent of the damage seemed to leap out at her.
“What a damned mess,” Langrum marveled. “It looks like somebody set off twenty sticks of TNT in there.”
The floor of the room had collapsed and dropped the thirty feet into the basement, causing it to resemble an Arctic crevasse. Everything that had once been contained on the upper level was deposited at the bottom of the “V” formed by the broken floor. This meant that the basement itself was practically bisected by the debris from above. Langrum carefully paced his way along the narrow ledge which remained of the floor against the inside wall, looking for the staircase that had descended into the basement, but all that remained was a hole far above an abruptly visible pool of rushing water.
“Where’s the flood coming from?” Grundel asked. He had edged up next to Langrum and Meg. The floodlight was powerful enough to illuminate the ruins of the basement and the glittering waves nearly as well as the original fluorescent bulbs would have.
“Water main was ruptured by the bomb,” Langrum replied. “I don’t know if we can get through all of that trash to reach the exit or not; it’s located at the far end of the basement, and that’s maybe sixty feet on the other side of the caved-in floor.”
“Well, we can’t stay up here, either,” Grundel countered. “Cummings will be loose again pretty soon. Let’s go down and scout it.”
“Hold on, man,” Langrum said, placing a restraining hand on his chest. “A lot of electrical wiring ran through that basement, and if the automatic shutoffs didn’t kill the power after the explosion, that water is as hot as Hades with electricity.”
After stopping to pick up a piece of broken pipe at his feet, Langrum tossed the shaft into the shattered stairwell. The pipe dropped quickly through the cone of light and hit the water with a noise that told them that its depth already could be measured in feet. But there was no ominous crackling of a live current.
“I don’t know much about electricity,” Langrum said, “but it seems to me that there should have been an arc or something when the metal touched the water; if it was charged, I mean.”
“That’s safe enough for me,” Grundel said. He turned back into the darkness and make his way to where the rest waited apprehensively.
Moving quickly while Nick guided the others along the perilously narrow ledge, Langrum and Meg unreeled a heavy fire hose from its cavity in what had been the wall of the storage room and dropped it into the basement, checking to be certain that it was strong enough to hold the weight of an adult after being unhooked from the water outlet and tied about the reel. They could have edged their way onto the collapsed flooring and slid down the rough surface of broken tile and sub-flooring materials, but it would have been a largely uncontrolled descent terminating in a dangerous well of floating debris. Because the security guard wasn’t sure that the two huge floodlights were securely insulated against leaks (plus the fact that the cold water could have cracked the hot bulbs), these devices were fixed to overhanging pipes by their strong shoulder straps; switched on; their combined illumination raised the level of light on that side of the fallen floor to a near daylight degree.
“Who tries it first?” asked Meg as the twelve poised on the lip of the stairwell.
“It was my plan, so I guess I—” Grundel started.
Langrum interrupted him, “No, son, this is my job.” Without waiting for argument (which Nick wasn’t intending to raise, anyway), the tall man wrapped his legs about the thick hose and slowly lowered himself toward the water, occasionally bouncing from the wall as he went.
When Langrum’s boots closed the gap above the water to bare inches, everyone held their breaths, including the guard himself. He tentatively dipped one toe into it and the fear of electrocution departed.
“It’s okay,” he called up, “no charge.” Then he dropped both feet to search for the bottom. When he finally stood on the floor, the agitated water from the burst pipe reached almost to his waist. “But it’s as cold as liquid ice! Next man!”
The “next man” was a woman, as Meg followed his lead, a little more agilely than he. Nick stayed on the ledge to aid—and rush—the others down the hose. In spite of the danger of the moment and their helplessness in case of an attack by Cummings, Nick noticed a melody lilting from somewhere nearby and into his ears. He glanced about in the dim light provided by the reflections from the waves below and found a wall speaker that somehow had escaped destruction by the awful blast that had wrecked practically everything about it. Easy listening conquers all, he thought with a grim smile.
When he slipped down the improvised rope like a half-awake fireman and joined the others, Grundel discovered that Langrum had been on the money in describing the temperature of the water that covered everything up to his waist; it was freezing and sucked the warmth right out of his bones. His breath stalled a moment before duplicating the chilled groans of those who had preceded him.
“Damn, let’s get moving,” he said. “This is about to stop my heart.”
Langrum took the lead, slogging through the resistance toward the point, some twenty feet ahead, where the remains of the floor had dropped through this room’s ceiling to almost completely block the way. The guard had seen and heard the pained reactions of the people behind him when they lowered themselves into the icy water, and since most were around fifty (and one baldheaded little guy looked to be over sixty), he wanted to get them out of this as quickly as possible, before Grundel’s crack about stopping hearts became an ugly reality.
Reaching the point where the fallen floor slanted sharply above his head and pointed into the water like an arrowhead, he withdrew the third piece of equipment he had snatched from the quickly abandoned C-8 lab, a high-powered but thoroughly waterproof flashlight, from an inside coat pocket and turned to face them. “Wait here for just a moment while I duck below and find a way through this mess,” he directed.
Though he had become inured to the cold below his belt-line, the splash of iciness over his chest, back, and neck, and head was another shock on top of all he had gone through that night, and he almost lost the chestful of air he had taken before going under. The light filtering down from the floodlamps was still strong, even below the surface, but he quickly switched on the flashlight while he searched through the odd mixture of concrete slabs, wooden joists, and tile sheets that blocked his way. It was not a total barrier, of course, and he soon discovered that the wall on the left side of the room had withstood the fall of damaged material well enough to create a decent-sized tunnel past this half of the upper floor and into the well between it and the corresponding fall some ten feet farther on. The hole was under water, but it was large enough so that he had no difficulty in slipping through it.
To give his lungs some relief, Langrum surfaced in the basin formed by the two portions of floor and grabbed a couple of breaths. He knew that the exit door was still a number of yards away beyond the second half of the floor and other obstructions, but he flashed the light about the basin out of curiosity. This enclosed area was a pool clogged with everything that had been stored above prior to the explosion: boxes, bedding, electronic equipment of all description, and at least one human body.
While he played the beam across the collection of newly formed rubbish, Langrum picked out part of a leg, a hand, and what might have been a head bobbing in the flotsam, but whether it was the sad remains of only one person, he couldn’t say. It was also hard to decide if the unfortunate person had been caught in his own bomb blast or had met his fate at Cummings’ hands. Langrum was distinctly surprised at the lack of emotion the mutilated body triggered in him; he figured that he had retreated into some kind of protective but not incapacitating shock during some previous view of Hell during the night.
The rough opening leading past the second blockade was where he had expected to find it, practically on a straight line with the first tunnel. He crawled through this gap swiftly, literally going to his hands and knees beneath the water, and stood on the other side to survey what lay ahead of them. Though there was some floating garbage even here and a number of cables that had been strung along the ceiling were dangling like jungle lianas, as his flashlight lanced through the nearly complete darkness he could see no problems in reaching the wide, heavy door in the back of the room.
“We can make it through,” he told the rest after retracing his path and rising from the depths before them.
“Did you try the door?” Grundel asked quickly.
“No. If it had opened, the flush-current might have caught you by surprise and hurt somebody.” Langrum glanced up at the dark hole of the stairwell behind the hanging lights. “Besides, it’s best if we all get on the other side of this floor and out of sight in case the monster happens by. I’ll go first with the flashlight to show you the way, and when we’re all in the spot between the floors, we can move under the second part into the rear of the basement. You, bearded guy, you bring up the end of the train to make sure everyone follows and makes it under the debris okay.”
“Typecast again,” Nick sighed.
Each of the others had to undergo the trauma of the cold water in their faces that Langrum had experienced, but though they shivered and grumbled aloud on the other side of the fallen floor, what awaited them in the corridor was more than enough reason to force them to continue. Grundel had never cared for underwater gymnastics, and the few seconds he was required to hold his breath while negotiating the tunnel were more than he would have liked to have spent with a liquid of any sort separating him from free air.
“Jeeze, I can now appreciate the theory of hypothermia,” he said as he popped up into the well with the eleven who had gone before him.
“One more dip to take,” Langrum told him as he counted heads. He now thought of this expedition to escape the building as his to lead and protect, so he kept the flashlight directed away from the grisly evidence of the blast which floated only a few feet from them. There was no reason for them to be subjected to that. “Going through this opening means you’ll have to get down even lower, no higher than a yard from the floor, and the passage is rougher, with stuff hanging down, so watch your heads.”
“Just do something quickly, please!” said a woman. “My fingers are turning blue!”
Langrum could see that her lips were rapidly darkening, too, but he didn’t say anything about it. “Line up and get a grip on the person ahead of you.”
The second leg of the trip did take longer and was more painful than the first, but they all made it up on the other side without suffering any serious problems. Standing there in the Stygian blackness with only the beam of the flashlight to pierce the gloom, Meg was struck by the eeriness of the situation; it was a living moment from the thousands of horror films she had watched, and, for just an instant, her mind seemed to leave her freezing form and draw back and up to a point of observation much like that of some Olympian goddess so that she could look down on this strange little play. But then the security guard began moving toward the possible exit, and she was snatched back to the “now”, driving her numbed legs through the water.
Sixty feet through waist-high, freezing water seemed a lot farther than sixty feet on warm, dry land. By the time they reached the rear wall of the long room, Langrum was worried about a number of these out of shape reporters, especially the little guy who seemed to be the oldest of the group. He was puffing fast and regularly, almost spastically, and massaging both sides of his neck. A woman next to the man noticed the frantic respiration and, with Langrum shining the light at the top of a large metal boiler which stood above the tide, she helped him to climb atop it. He fell as limply as a doll and continued to breathe in barely controlled gasps.
“Everybody climb on something anchored to the floor to get to a place where you can keep yourselves from being pulled along with the water if the door opens,” Langrum told them. “It’s possible that the automatic lock has been disengaged from the central office, which means it’ll open when I hit the panic switch; we’ll let the flood drain off before we make our way out through the tunnel. Get ready!”
Langrum gripped an undamaged electric conduit running up the wall near the door with his left hand while he swung the light in a wide arc to show his followers to other places of protection. When he was satisfied that all was ready, he handed the torch to Meg Talley, who was sitting on a tall, wooden box close by. She spotted the wall switch for him, and he reached out to flip it with a fast motion while he set himself against the effects of the expected rapid release of water.
Nothing happened.
Meg kept the light on the big, chrome-colored switch, so Langrum hit it again, moving it from off to on and back. There was still no response. He waggled the switch several times in frustration but elicited no action from the huge, impenetrable steel door.
“Damn,” hissed Grundel. “Damn, damn, damn!”
“It’s still locked,” Langrum said needlessly. “We’ll never get out this way.”
“Then let’s go back to one of the labs!” urged the woman who had spoken in the basin between the blocking walls of wreckage. “At least we won’t freeze to death!”
“A dead rose is a dead rose is a dead rose,” Nick muttered.
“You’re right; back into the water.” At Langrum’s order, the men and women resumed their lamenting but lowered themselves into the inky darkness. Since the single flashlight could hardly provide adequate illumination for the spread-out company and the guard’s habit of swinging the beam from side to side to create a wave of light was more disorienting than helpful, they carefully stepped away from the rear wall toward the barriers which separated them from the hallway. Langrum solved the problem of their blind wandering by moving even further in the direction they had just come and then shining the light up on his own face. “Link up behind me,” he said.
They were keenly disappointed that their possible escape route had died without a struggle, but they still made the return trip even faster than the first, because Grundel’s off-handed remark concerning hypothermia was not too far off the mark. By the time they clustered around the dangling fire hose beneath the bright double lamps, most were shivering uncontrollably and the water had risen to their chests.
Langrum worked his way up the hose and onto the ledge without too much difficulty, and he was followed by a bulky male reporter whose weight appeared to threaten its tensile strength. But the next woman in the line spoke for many of those remaining when she said loudly, “I can’t climb it.”
“Ma’am,” said Langrum with official patience, “we have to climb up so that we can move to another room—”
“Young man, don’t lecture me! I’m too cold and too tired to even begin to work my way up there! And none of your cajoling will warm or strengthen me a single degree!”
Nick moved to the woman’s side and called up to Langrum, “Can you two lift her? I’m going to make a sling out of the hose!”
The guard briefly consulted with the man with him and replied, “Okay, put her in it!”
Arranging the knotted loop was next to impossible with his cold-numbed fingers, but when Meg and another man added their aid, a satisfactory sling that didn’t seem inclined to slip was fashioned before long. With Langrum and the big reporter supplying the muscle, the woman was drawn smoothly up and onto the ledge.
The next five people chose the same method of ascent—understandable due to the chill and stiffness that was affecting them all—but Meg and a representative of Adventure Magazine saw what the effort was taking out of those above and proved themselves to be equal to the climb. That left only Nick standing in rushing water that now was nearly covering his chest.
“Step on it, kid,” Langrum advised him. “I’m sure Cummings has gotten out by now. Will you need our help?”
“Don’t worry about me,” he replied, hooking his right foot in the loop and beginning the ascent.
“Wait!” came a sudden cry from behind Langrum. “We’ve got to go back!”
“What the hell is going on?” Grundel demanded.
“Ma’am, ma’am, you’ve got to stay quiet, or you’ll give away our position!” the guard snapped.
“But we’re missing one!” the woman continued in a too-loud voice. “Bobbit, Larry Bobbit is still back there somewhere!”
Langrum made a quick but thorough count and, including Grundel, came up with only eleven people.
“Damn, she’s right, somebody’s missing,” he admitted. “Bobbit’s the little bald man who looks a hundred years old, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he’s sixty-eight, and he’s covered every major story from—”
“I thought he was having a heart attack back there by the exit. Aw, hell, hurry up, boy, so I can go after him,” Langrum said.
Nick took a long breath. “Listen, I’m down here already, so toss me the flashlight, and I’ll go back.”
The guard agreed, reluctantly, and dropped the light to him. “He was on the boiler to the left of the door the last I saw of him, and he’s probably still there.” Under his breath, he added, “If he’s not dead already.”
Grundel began the slow walk toward the collapsed portions of the upper floor, calling behind him, “Take the rest into an office; there should be plenty of them around here. But get back in time to help me pull the codger up there.”
The difficult progress helped to keep blood flowing through his numb body, if nothing else. Each time Nick ducked below the surface to wriggle under the obstructions, the little waves seemed to lap noticeably further above his head, and this inspired a growing panic in his stomach. He had been a conscientious objector in all situations remotely akin to danger throughout his life, so what in the name of the few remaining sane deities had inspired him to volunteer for this chickencrap duty? Was it that he felt safer in this imminent risk of drowning than he would have upstairs where another confrontation with the monster presented itself? Probably.
Broken cables slapped his face like cold anacondas, but he hardly noticed them in his rush to find Bobbit and get the hell into some warm and (at least temporarily) safe room on the main floor. The missing man was where Langrum’s memory had left him, lying quietly atop a steel boiler. The flashlight showed Nick that his eyes were closed, his chest hardly moving, and thick, dark blood was welling from one corner of his slackly open mouth.
“Hey, can you hear me?” Nick asked, poking the man with a finger.
Bobbit’s reply was a faint croak, “Leave me alone.”
“No, man, we’ve got to get out of here. Can you walk?”
“My chest … just go away ….”
“Now listen, this whole basement is going to be flooded up to the ceiling in a couple of hours, so come on!” Nick reached up and pulled the slight body into his arms. Luckily, Bobbit weighed little more than a hundred pounds, so the younger man was able to support him with the aid of the buoying effect of the water. Bobbit gasped when the icy cold soaked again through his damp clothing.
“Sorry, old fella, but it’s going to get even worse than that before we make it back to the fire hose.”
He started off with the flashlight glowing shakily from beneath Bobbit’s legs.
On the other side of the fallen debris, Meg and the security guard waited for him to appear. Langrum had taken one of the shoulder-strap floodlamps and led the rest to a nearby lab, without seeing any sign of Cummings other than the ruined doors of C-8. Despite Langrum’s commands and threats, however, Meg had remained at the flooded room. Now the two of them stood on the ledge that ended at the shattered stairwell, just behind the lone floodlight, and stared at the rippling surface of the water.
“He shouldn’t be taking so long,” Langrum stated. “Either the old man is alive and he would have brought him out by now, or he’s found him dead, in which case the kid should still have shown up.”
“Maybe the man’s unable to walk, have you thought of that?” Meg asked tensely. “I think I should go back there and help him.” She made a move toward the hose, but Langrum stopped her.
“Give it a couple of more minutes,” the guard said. “We didn’t see anything of the monster in the hall, and, besides, if anybody goes down there, it should be me.” He paused for a moment. “You know, if we had any brains, we’d get our tails out of here right now.”
“Then go!” Meg answered. “I’m not asking you to stay! I’ll get them up here by myself!”
Langrum smiled. “I’ve never claimed to be a genius.”
Fate would not allow them even these few moments of tense rest. While they waited for some indications that Grundel was on his way back to join them, the rising water stealthily slipped over the top of a steel structure that was packed with pipes that had escaped damage during the explosion; the sudden intrusion of extremely cold liquid against superheated metal resulted in a new eruption that rocked the pair away from the edge of the stairwell and spewed a heavy, white cloud of vapor throughout the room below them.
“What’s happening?” Meg shouted.
“Steam pipes!” Langrum yelled in response. “I’m going down!”
“No, wait, look!” She pointed through the jetting fog to the area where they had expected to see Nick appear. A tiny, bouncing globe of light was drawing nearer to them. Then the agitated water seemed to swell upward, as if disgorging a massive bubble. What appeared was the almost surrealistic image of Nicolas Grundel carrying a strangling little man in his upraised arms and barely able to keep him above the surface.
“Nick, Nick, over here!” Meg screamed to guide him through the thick, hot mist.
The young man didn’t reply to her call, but he did move stolidly in the correct direction. With surprising speed, he attached Bobbit to the rescue hose.
“Hurry, get him up!” Meg urged Langrum, while she pulled frantically at the hose with him. “It must be broiling down there!”
When they dragged Bobbit onto the ledge with them, he was gasping hungrily for breath and his skin was darkening to an ugly shade that seemed all the darker in the gloom. But he was alive. Meg tossed the line down to Grundel, and the bearded man struggled up to join them in a matter of seconds.
“Good work, man! We didn’t know if you could make it through that steam!” Langrum told him happily.
“Baked Alaska,” Nick answered, “burnt on the outside and frozen in the center.” He was gasping as heavily as Bobbit. “Better get that old sucker to a doctor before he checks out on us.”
Langrum easily stood with Bobbit in his arms. “Sure, but you two are coming with me.”
Nick feebly waved a hand at him. “No, go ahead. I’ll be along in a minute, after I get myself together.”
“I’ll stay with him,” Meg said.
“The hell you will,” grunted Nick. He fixed her with a hard stare. “Don’t you wait for me!”
“Shut up, Nicolas,” she replied, grinning.
Langrum walked into the hall shaking his head.
Grundel slowly regained control of his lungs and then climbed to his knees to begin a long fit of coughing. When this finally passed, he sighed thickly and said to Meg, who had been holding him by the shoulders, “I’ve got the idea.”
“What idea?”
“The one to stop Cummings.”
“So? What is it?”
He stumbled to his feet. “The same way that Kenneth Tobey took care of James Arness.”
“The Thing,” she said, countering his abruptly tossed challenge in their private game. “But our monster isn’t an eight foot carrot.”
“It’ll still work. We lure him down here, into the water, and then toss in a hot electrical cable. I don’t care how resilient or invulnerable he is, if we keep feeding the juice to him, he’ll fry into scraps of bacon sooner or later.”
“Yes, certainly, that’s a tremendous idea, Young Mister Edison,” she said, steering the unsteady man about n the direction of the corridor. “All that we need is the bait and the cable, but I’m sure—”
The dark bolt came out of the air at them like a winged denizen fresh from Hell. There was no time for so much as a scream before the figure struck them together and they were tumbling through nothing toward the mist and the ocean. Meg shot through the steam, but her passage was not swift enough to save her from a flash of heat strong enough to sear her skin. The plunge into the water beneath the steam destroyed any sensation of a burn, however, and the next endless instants of her life were filled with the frantic struggle to get her feet on the floor and her head in the air. When this was accomplished, she still had difficulty breathing due to the painful combination of the sweeping steam and the water that was now just below her nose. She was forced to do a hopping type of dance on her toes just to stay above the surface.
She found Nick quickly—he had landed only a few feet from her—and because he was about an inch shorter than she, his acrobatics to keep his nose in the air were even more urgent and strenuous. The third presence in the flooded basement was a dozen feet nearer the collapsed floor than either of them, and the sudden introduction into their strange element was apparently more than his feral mind could adapt to.
Cummings screamed in choking defiance and thrashed at the water about him with the strength and speed of a machine used to create turbulence in film studio pools, but the fact that he was seven inches taller than either of them allowed him to stand above the threat of drowning once his instincts overrode his fury. Then he noticed the two of them in the water along with him.
“The hose … Meg, get … to the hose!” Grundel shouted.
“Come on!” she cried.
They were given a few moments of grace while Cummings tried to discover why the long, powerful strides that had carried him with such ease on the dry flooring above had lost their efficiency in this strange medium. He recovered soon, too soon for them, and it became all too obvious that neither of his victims would reach the hose before he closed the distance that separated them from him.
Nick was several feet behind Meg, and she was legitimately stunned when the man motioned to her to keep going, stopped where he stood, and turned to face the approaching beast. “Yah! Come on, you creep, you crazy freak! Here I am, Cummings, yah, yah!” he screamed as he moved to one side through the steam to draw the werewolf away from her.
“Nick, stop it, you idiot!” Meg shrieked. “He’ll kill you!”
“Get up the goddamned rope, goddamn it! I’ve got something that will stop him!”
“What are you talking about?”
Grundel had no time to answer, because Cummings leaped completely clear of the water and soared toward him. Nick had been digging for the mysterious weapon (which he had hoped that he would never be close enough to the monster to utilize) in his pants pocket when Cummings jumped at him, so all that he could do in self-defense was to duck under the surface and hope that the attack overshot him, which it did.
Nick was plunged totally beneath the water by his evasive action, and the slick-soled shoes that he wore lost their purchase on the concrete floor. This meant that he was forced to swim for a distance, unable to withdraw the object from his pocket, and when he recovered his equilibrium enough to look around, he saw that Cummings, too, had regained control of himself and was charging him with no lessening of the wild rage of before.
“Holy crap!” Nick shouted, swallowing water even as he frantically worked to pull the weapon from his pocket.
Meg had reached the fire hose by then, and she was trying with all of her emotional might to force herself up that line to safety. But the sounds of the struggle behind her and Nick’s cries seized control of her body and turned her back to the horror; she searched for some piece of debris with which to arm herself for a counter-attack against the werewolf.
Cummings leaped a second time, and Grundel dodged a bit too slowly. Cummings landed on him with an impact that drove the both of them deeply below the surface of the water, near the floor of the basement. Nick struggled madly, kicking out with his feet and clawing at the hairy face, but the creature’s strength was beyond his ability to resist. Hands like closing vises were crushing his throat, shutting off the life from his heart. Water filled the cavities of his head, and even his vision was obscured by a cloud of dark mistiness that burst from somewhere down around his chest, where Cummings’ hideous face dived between his flailing arms to rip open the clothing and flesh …
Then the small weapon was in his right fist, clear of his pocket. He thrust it at the hulking figure above him with every ounce of his fading strength. Something close to an explosion followed. Cummings released him—literally hurling Nick’s body from him so powerfully that he skimmed through the water—and launched himself fully into the steam above. Water and agony gushed from the creature’s lungs. He jerked as if beaten from within by the blades of an engine and continued to do so even after splashing down again, so that the water roiled and foamed crazily.
Somehow, Nick drifted to the surface and sucked in welcome air to replace that which seemed to be seeping from his bloody chest. Meg was suddenly at his side to drag him in the direction of the hose. His right hand still clutched the little silver crucifix that he had borrowed from a more believing acquaintance as a hedge against his own skepticism, and the sharply filed bottom portion, which he had used like a knife to stab Cummings in the ribs, cut into his palm. Still, his disbelief at being snatched back from the verge of death wouldn’t allow him to feel any pain. Meg was pulling him to safety with all of the speed which could be generated by her pumping feet.
A dark form slipped silently beneath them. With a great roar that began as a vomiting of bubbles below the surface, a terrible apparition burst up before them the way that the sea serpents inhabiting the nightmares of ancient sailors must have leaped from the depths. There was no time for action as Cummings, recovered now from the attack with the sacred metal, knocked the woman away with a motion of his rock-hard arm and resumed his savaging of Grundel. Nick first realized that he was screaming when he heard the sounds.
The young man’s mind reeled. Death was on him again, the world was filled by steam, water, and the awful embodiment of terror that was trying now to rip him apart. Somehow, he wrenched his left arm from the bloody jaws of that thing while desperately swinging his right hand down on the back of his attacker with just enough force to drive the crucifix through the skin and into the rolls of muscle underneath. And this time he left the silver object embedded there.
Once again, he was thrown away from the beast like a detested toy. He flew over the surface of the water and slammed into the wall next to where the broken pipes were blowing steam. Though half-unconscious, he still saw through the fog as Cummings, with wild cries that ranged from those of a rabid animal to screams identical to those of a tortured human being, thrashed about in the water while trying to grasp the silver shaft that was eating into his flesh. The torment caused the monster to ignore the two people who were looking on in fascinated terror. He carried through with the eerie, twisting dance until he accidentally blundered against the dangling fire hose; this triggered a reaction in the creature, and he clutched the hose and climbed from the water as swiftly as if he were trying to escape the pain by running away from it.
Cummings slashed at his back with one hand and gnashed his jaws in agony all the way up, but he couldn’t reach the crucifix. The black and slightly steaming wound leaked a long, viscous flow of bluish substance that dropped heavily from his fur to plop into the water. Upon reaching the ledge above, the beast ran into the darkness of the hallway. His screams could be heard for minutes as they receded into the distance.
Nick tried to smile at Meg, but he passed out, instead.
When he came to, he was being dragged upward on a slanting, rough surface and someone was holding him tightly to her chest with one arm. His head was lying across her shoulder. He felt like a child being carried to bed. “Where … ?” he moaned.
“Shh,” Meg’s voice whispered to him. There was no light to see her by. “You’re safe now, we’re between the floors.”
She was carrying him out of the basement, pulling him and herself up the practically insurmountable slope of shattered building material! “I’ll be damned,” he said weakly.
“Probably,” she whispered, “but not just yet.”
A terrible thought jabbed through the cottony layer of shock that was insulating Nick from the pain. “Meg, Meg,” he said with as much urgency as he could summon, “don’t get any of my blood on you! Don’t let my blood get on you!”
“Take it easy,” she answered in a tone made short by exertion. “Everything’s going to be okay, now. Cummings is dying.”
“No. But that’s the way … the silver, tell them about the silver and its molecular antipathy to his disease … because he’s not dead yet, not from that …”
“I’ll tell them.”
“Chemistry labs … hell, there must be plenty of silver.”
“Rest, Nicky.”
“Meg? One more thing …”
“Yes. What is it?”
He paused, both because he was running out of strength again and for the dramatic effect it created. Finally, he sighed and whispered, “Tell me … who played the title role of The Queen of Outer Space?”
“Zsa Zsa Gabor, now will you please shut up?” There were tears drawn from many differing emotions in her voice.
Finally got you on one, Nick thought. Before he faded out again, he heard the gentle strains of music from the darkness above, but it was no Heavenly choir, or even its hellish counterpart. It was the FM radio station, and the song was a memory from 1972 by Danny O’Keefe: “Goodtime Charlie’s Got the Blues.”
How appropriate.