Looking at my watch nervously, I tried to calculate whether Charlie could possibly search ten kilometres in forty-nine minutes. After a couple of minutes of brain-pain mental arithmetic, I gave up. Although I wasn’t bad at maths, I wasn’t that good either. I liked to think I had other qualities! I was worried though. It still seemed like a lot of running to me!
My captor distracted me from my thought-stream by kicking something, and I was almost grateful. There was no use in panicking now. Charlie would do whatever she could. In the meantime, I realised that I didn’t have a back-up plan. If, for some reason, Charlie was not able to find the fail-safe or, if Renny couldn’t get his GeekGrid together in time or, if the girls couldn’t patch the signal through the computer centre, we were stuffed! That was a lot of “ifs”. I really needed some feedback from the gang. Then my phone pinged, just once!
Nervously, I looked up towards my captor. He didn’t seem to have noticed it. I hadn’t had time to set the silent ring but luckily I don’t do ringtones! There was no way I could answer right now; I just hoped that whoever it was could wait!
‘Move it!’ came a shout from across the room. Startled, I jumped to attention. Standing, holding the door open with his foot, he waved the gun back and forth. I took this to mean that I was to go through. Just to the left was a sign for the emergency stairs. He lifted the security bar and the light above started flashing. He didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t care. Looking back over his shoulder and seeing the question in my eyes he grinned, ‘All be over by the time they find me…!’ Then he skipped off down the stairs, like a giddy four year old.
After heading down several flights of stairs, he threw open one of the emergency doors. Holding it open, he peeped through, checking up and down the corridor. I guessed that no one was coming, since he shoved me through it a second later. Squeezing my arm, he pushed me along the corridor. He seemed nervous now, his head flicking left to right with every step. We turned a corner. Just ahead of us, a hanging sign read “Atlas – Maintenance shaft”. I tried to guess what he was planning. I couldn’t begin to imagine.
Getting through the access doors to the maintenance shaft was easy. He had some kind of security card. He just inserted it into the slot and the door opened automatically. Once through the doors, he pushed me towards a small hatch in the wall at the far side of the corridor. ‘Turn it!’ he barked, flipping open his laptop. He seemed to be checking the time. ‘He needs to be somewhere!’ I thought. I turned the handle and the hatch’s mechanical lock sprung back. At first, I thought that it was strange to have an old-fashioned mechanical lock. Then I realised that if they had electronic locks and the complex lost power for any reason, the engineers wouldn’t be able to get in.
Slamming his laptop shut with a bang that surprised me, he muttered ‘Get in!’ His hand was in his pocket and he, sort of, waved it at me. ‘Gun!’ I remembered and turned to climb through the hatch. I stepped through onto a small metal ledge, about one foot wide. A waist-height safety bar surrounded it. To my left, I saw a ladder. It was one of those safety ladders with the metal bars every few feet. Looking down I could see a ledge, just like the one I was on, below me. All I could see past that was the ladder descending into the darkness. A shiver went down my spine.
The weird guy poked me and I shuffled nervously to the side. ‘Down,’ he muttered, joining me on the small ledge. Taking a deep breath, I stepped onto the first rung. That went OK. I started climbing down. Strange thoughts were running through my head. I remembered a day on the beach with my dog, both of us just running into and back out of the water. I was quite young then and I remembered the joy of chasing waves. I hadn’t done that in a long time. Suddenly, it was the only thing in the world I wanted to do. I tilted my head to look up at the vile man above me. Was he part of the evil plan to annihilate the world? He had to be! Why else would he have followed Charlie and me? Who did these people think they were? No human being has the right to end the world, no matter what kind of mess we’ve made of it.
We had moved past the lower ledge and were heading into the darkness. I had to slow down, as it was getting harder to see the next rung on the ladder. After a while, I couldn’t see them at all. I had to feel below me for each one. Finally, my foot hit something solid. I sighed with relief as I stood, my two feet now firmly on the floor.